We remember to have heard a very skilful painter of still life describe how the composition, the light and shade, and arrangement of one of his pictures, was taken from a great old picture of a scriptural scene. Instead of men and women, the story and the action of the original, our friend had only things inanimate to group upon his canvass, but he kept the arrangement, the sunshine and the shadow, the same. One can suppose that some such artistic whim had seized upon Mr Tennyson. In the wantonness of conscious power, he has been looking about him for some feat to do—when, lo! the crash of a travelling orchestra smote upon the ears of the poet. Are there German bands in the Isle of Wight? or was it the sublimer music of some provincial opera which woke the Laureate’s soul to this deed of high emprise? Yes, Maud is an overture done into words; beginning with a jar and thunder—all the breath of all the players drawn out in lengthened suspiration upon the noisy notes; then bits of humaner interlude—soft flute-voices—here and there a momentary silvery trumpet-note, or the tinkle of a harp, and then a concluding crash of all the instruments, a tumult of noises fast and furious, an assault upon our ears and our patience, only endurable because we see the end. Such is this poem—which indeed it is sad to call a poem, especially in those hard days. We mean no disparagement to Mr Tennyson’s powers. It is perhaps only when we compare this with other poems of the day that we see how prettily managed is the thread of the story, and how these morsels of verse carry us through every scene as clear as if every scene was a picture; but a man who knows only too consciously that a whole nation of people acknowledge him as their best singer—a man who also doubtless must have noted how the good public, those common people who take their ill names so tenderly, hurry his books into sixth and tenth editions, a fact which ought somewhat to counterbalance the cheating yard-wand—and one, moreover, so thoroughly acquainted with the gravity and passion of this time, and how it has been startled into a humbler estimate of itself by the fiery touch of war,—that such a man, at such an hour, should send forth this piece of trifling as his contribution to the courage and heartening of his country, is as near an insult to the audience he addresses as anything which is not personal can be.
Mr Tennyson, however, has insight and perception to keep him from the strand on which his imitators—the smaller people who endeavour to compete with him in poetry, and triumphantly excel him in extravagance—go ashore. He knows that a poet’s hero ought not to be a poet—that a man’s genius was given him, if not for the glory of God, its best aim, yet, at worst, for the glory of some other man, and not for the pitiful delight of self-laudation, meanest of human follies. A great book is a great thing, and a great poem is the most immortal of great books; yet, notwithstanding, one cannot help a smile at the “Have you read my book?” of Mr Smith’s Life Drama, or the
“O thou first last work! my early planned,
Long meditate, and slowly-written epic,”
of Mr Dobell! The poet’s glory is to celebrate other achievements than his own. His inspiration is the generous flush of sympathy which triumphs in another’s triumph: “Arms and the man I sing;” and so it becomes him to throw his heart into his subject, and leave his own reputation with a noble indifference to the coming ages, who will take care of that. But it is a perilous day for poetry when poets magnify their office through page after page of lengthy argument—not to say, besides, that it is very unjust to us, who are not poets but common people, and cannot be expected to follow into these recondite regions the soaring wing of genius. The greater can comprehend the less, but not the less the greater. He can descend to us in our working-day cares, but it is not to be expected that many of us can ascend to him in that sublime retirement of his among the visions and the shadows. To take Balder, for instance: marvellously few of us, even at our vainest, think either kings or gods of ourselves; ordinary human nature, spite of its prides and pretensions, is seldom without a consciousness at its heart of its own littleness and poverty; and when we hear a man declaring his sublime superiority, we are puzzled, and pause, and smile, and try to make it out a burlesque or an irony. If he says it in sport, we can understand him, for Firmilian is out of sight a more comprehensible person than his prototype; but if our hero is in earnest, we shake our perplexed heads and let him go by—we know him not. There may be such a person—far be it from us to limit the creative faculty; but how does anybody suppose that we—
“Creatures not too wise nor good
For human nature’s daily food,”
can be able to comprehend a being who makes no secret of his own intense superiority, his elevation over our heads? Again, we say, the greater comprehends the less, and not the less the greater. We can enter into the trials and the delights of ordinary men like ourselves; but, alas! we are not able to enter into those pleasures and poetic pains “which only poets know.” And the poet knows we cannot appreciate him—nay, glories in our wonder as we gape after him in his erratic progress—showers upon us assurances that we cannot understand, and laughs at our vain fancy if we venture humbly to suppose that we might; but in the name of everything reasonable, we crave to know, this being the case, why this infatuated singer publishes his poem? “Have you read my book?” says Walter, in the Life Drama; and being answered, “I have:” “It is enough,” says the satisfied poet,—
“The Book was only written for two souls,
And they are thine and mine.”