And flashes into false and true,
And mingles all without a plan.”
It is the excellence of In Memoriam that it is a succession of poems—that the thread of connection runs loosely—now and then drops, and as unexpectedly comes to light again—that the sequence of these fancies knows no logic, and that they come in the strain as they come to the heart.
At the same time it is equally true that all this is done of set purpose and intention—that the act with which, glimpse by glimpse, the whole tearful chronicle is made visible, is a calm deliberate act, and not a voice out of the present passion of a heartbreaking grief. The poet has chosen the theme—it is not the theme which urges with an overpowering impulse the utterance of the poet.
And so it is with all Mr Tennyson’s verses, for—no disparagement to his poetic power—verses we must call them. It is true he is now and then moved by some sudden exclamation, and shouts it out with an unexpected force which startles his readers, for the moment, into a more eager sympathy—but for the most part this poet holds his verse in perfect subordination, and is never overcome or led away by it. His poetry is made, it is not born. When he can round a sentence into a stanza, the effect, of its kind, is perfect; but the very form of his favourite measure, the rhythm of In Memoriam, is against any real outburst of involuntary song; for the verse which falls so sweetly when it contains all that belongs to it within its perfect crystal round, like a dewdrop, makes only a most blurred and unshapely strain when it has to eke out its sense with another and another stanza. When the necessities of his subject force him to this, the poet labours like a man threading together a succession of fish-ponds in hopes of making a river. Of themselves these silvery globes are perfect, but there is no current in them, and, work as you will, they can never flow and glow into a living stream. Yes, our Laureate unhappily is always far too much “master of his subject;” would that his subject now and then could but master him!
If it should happen, by any chance, that Mr Tennyson shared in Wordsworth’s solemn conceit, and designed to make a Gothic cathedral out of his works and life, we marvel much what place in it could be given to The Princess, that prettiest of poetic extravagances. Not a Lady-chapel, though it is of a college of ladies that the story treats—not a delicate shrine, all wrought in lilies and graces of foliage, like the shrine of some sweet maiden-saint. No; the Marys, the Catherines, and the Margarets, symbolised an entirely different fashion of womankind; yet have we the greatest kindness for Ida in her girlish heroics, sincerest of all fictions—in her grand words, and her pride, her inconstant subjects, and her own self-betraying heart. For our own part, we are so entirely weary of symbols, that we do not pause to inquire whether The Princess means anything more than it professes to mean. To us it is only a pleasant picture of the phantasies of youth.
The sweet and daring folly of girlish heroics and extravagance has not done half so much service to the poet and story-teller as has the corresponding stage in the development of man. Yet there is more innocence in it, and perhaps in its full bloom its pretensions are even more sublime. The delicate temerity which dares everything, yet at its very climax starts away in a little sudden access of fear—the glorious young stoic, who could endure a martyrdom, yet has very hard ado to keep from crying when you lose her favourite book or break her favourite flower—the wild enthusiast dreamer, scorning all authorities, who yet could not sleep o’ nights if she had transgressed by ever so little the sweet obedience of home,—there is a charm about this folly almost more delightful than the magic of the bolder youth, with all its bright vagaries; and it is this which makes our tenderness for the Princess Ida and all her “girl graduates in their golden hair.”
Strange enough, however, this phase of youthfulness does not seem to have struck any woman-poet. We have heroines pensive and heroines sublime, heroines serious and heroines merry, but very few specimens of that high fantastical which embraces all these, and into which most men, and doubtless most women, on their way to soberer life, have the luck to fall. Mrs Browning is too sad, too serious, too conscious of the special pangs and calamities which press heaviest on her sisterhood, to take note of any happier peculiarity. Nor is this special eye to feminine troubles confined to Mrs Browning: a weeping and a melancholy band are the poetesses of all generations. “Woman is the lesser man,” says the Laureate; but only woman is the sadder man—the victim set apart on a platform of injury—the wronged and slighted being whose lot it is to waste her sweetness on hearts unkind and ungrateful, say all the ladies. “Her lot is on you.” The mature woman has no better thought, when she looks over the bright girl-heads, bent in their morning prayer; and wherever we have a female singer, there stands woman, deject and pensive, betrayed, forsaken, unbeloved, weeping immeasurable tears. Is a woman, then, the only creature in God’s universe whom He leaves without compensation? Out upon the thought! but there ought to be some Ida bold enough to proclaim the woman’s special happinesses—the exuberant girl-delights—the maiden meditation, fancy free—the glory of motherhood—the blessings as entirely her own as are the griefs. Bertha in the Lane is a most moving story, sweetly told; but ye are not always weeping, O gentlest sisterhood! and where are your songs of joy?
If Mr Tennyson intends the hysterical folly of Maud for a companion picture to this one, he is indeed elevating the woman to a higher pedestal than even Ida dreamed of; for the youth is a miserable conception in comparison with this sunbright girl. In the beginning of the last reign of poets—when men, disturbed by the great rustle of the coming wings, endeavoured to find out wherein the magic consisted, to which they could not choose but yield—we remember to have seen many clever speculations on the nature of poetry “One said it was the moon—another said nay”; and it was very hard to understand the unreasonable potency of this enchantment—which, indeed, clever people, unwilling to yield to an influence which they cannot measure, are perpetually accounting for by rules and principles of art. “It has always been our opinion,” says Lord Jeffrey, “that the very essence of poetry, apart from the pathos, the wit, or the brilliant description which may be embodied in it, but may exist equally in prose, consists in the fine perception and vivid expression of that subtle and mysterious analogy which exists between the physical and the moral world—which makes outward things and qualities the natural types and emblems of inward gifts and emotions, and leads us to ascribe life and sentiment to everything that interests us in the aspects of external nature.” Lord Jeffrey is a good authority, though sometimes this troublesome poetry put even the accomplished critic out of his reckoning; but we are sadly afraid that this deliverance of his, or at least the idea it contains, has had some share in the present insanity of all our poets in regard to Nature. Mr Tennyson may have a private reason of his own for making such a miserable grumbler as his last hero. Mr Dobell may hold himself justified, in the heights of self-complacence, and for the benefit of art, for his atrocious Balder, a criminal, by all poetic laws, for prosiness interminable, worse than murder; but we would crave to know what right these gentlemen may have to seize upon our genial nature, and craze her healthful looks and voices to their hysterical and ghastly fancy? We are content, if he uses his own materials, that the Laureate should dabble his hollow with blood to his heart’s content; but we will not consent, for a hundred laureates, to make the free heather of our hills, the kindly blossom sacred to home and to liberty, an image of disgust and horror. After all, this is a very poor trick and a contemptible—at its best much like that which Mr Ruskin denounces as the most ignoble thing in painting, the excitement of mind which comes from a successful deception, the consciousness that the thing we look at is not what it appears to be. When we feel Nature sympathising with us, it is well; but it is not well when we force her to echo our own mad fancies, of themselves forced and unreal enough. The “frantic rain,” the “shuddering dark,” the “maddened beach”—alas, poor poets! is force of expression not to be found by better means than by this juggle of misplaced adjectives? How widely different was the “sea change into something rich and strange” of the sweeter imagination and the greater heart!
But it is doubtless a very perturbed atmosphere in which we find ourselves when we come face to face with the last new arrival in the land of poesy, the unfortunate young gentleman whose hard fate it is to love Maud, and to shoot her brother. He has no name, this ill-fated youth; but doubtless Balder is reckoned in his roll of cousinships, and so is Mr Alexander Smith. There are three of them, ladies and gentlemen, and they are an amiable trio. Strangely as their garb and intentions are altered, there is a lingering reminiscence about them of a certain Childe Harold who once set the world aflame. Like him they are troubled with a weight of woe and misfortune mysteriously beyond the conception of common men; but unlike him—and the difference is characteristic—these unhappy lads are solemnly bent on “improving their minds,” in spite of their misery. For our own part, we are much disposed, in the first instance, to set down Maud as one of the greatest impertinences ever perpetrated by a poet; but we confess, after an hour’s trial of Balder, and the ceaseless singing of that wife of his, which of itself certainly was almost enough to drive a sober man crazy, and ought to be received as an extenuating circumstance, we return in a kinder spirit to the nameless young gentleman who wrote the Laureate’s poem. After all, he is only an idle boy, scorning other people, as idle boys are not unwont to scorn their neighbours in the world; he does not think himself a divinity; he has not a manuscript at hand to draw forth and gaze upon with delighted eyes; he is not—let us be grateful—a poet. His history is all pure playing with the reader, a wanton waste of our attention and the singer’s powers; but, after all, there is something of the breath of life in it, when we compare it with the solemn foolery of its much-pretending contemporaries, the lauds of the self-worshipping man, or the rhapsodies of the self-admiring youth.