Poetry of the very highest order, coupled with much affectation, much defective writing, many wilful blunders, renders Alfred Tennyson a very worthy and a very difficult subject for the critic. The extreme diversity and unequal merit of his compositions, make it a very perplexing business to form any general estimate of his writings. The conclusion the critic comes to at one moment he discards the next. He finds it impossible to satisfy himself, nor can ever quite determine in what measure praise and censure should be mixed. At one time he is so thoroughly charmed, so completely delighted with the poet's verse, that he is disposed to extol his author to the skies; he is as little inclined to any captious and disparaging criticism as lovers are, when they look, however closely, into the fair face which has enchanted them. At other times, the page before him will call up nothing but vexation and annoyance. Even the gleams of genuine poetry, amongst the confusion and elaborate triviality that afflict him, will only add to his displeasure. A heap of rubbish never looks so vile, or so disagreeable, as when a fresh flower is seen thrown upon it. Were Tennyson to be estimated by some half-dozen of his best pieces, he would be the compeer of Coleridge and of Wordsworth—if by a like number of his worst performances, he would be raised very little above that nameless and unnumbered crowd of dilettanti versifiers, whose utmost ambition seems to be to see themselves in print, and then, as quickly as possible, to disappear—
"One moment black, then gone for ever."
This diversity of merit is not to be accounted for by the diverse nature of the subject-matter which the poet has at different times treated; for Mr Tennyson has given us the happiest specimens of the most different styles of composition, employed on a singular variety of topics. He has been grave and graceful, playful and even broadly comic, with complete success. As a finished portraiture of a peculiar state of mind—conceived with philosophic truth, and embellished with all the fascinating associations which it is the province of poetry to call around us—nothing could surpass the poem of the Lotos Eaters. For playfulness, and tender, amorous fancy—warm, but not too warm—spiritual, but not too spiritual—we shall go far before we find a rival to the Talking Oak, or to the Day Dream: what better ballad can heart desire than the Lord of Burleigh? And how well does a natural indignation speak out in the clear ringing verse of Lady Clara Vere de Vere! Specimens of the richly comic, as we have hinted, may here and there be found: we have one in our eye which we shall seek an opportunity for quoting. In harmonising metaphysic thought with poetic imagery and expression, he does not always succeed; on the contrary, some of his saddest failures arise from the abortive attempt; yet there are some admirable passages even of this description of writing.
It is not, therefore, the difference of style aimed at, or subject-matter adopted, which determines whether Tennyson shall be successful or not. Perhaps it will be said that the marked inequality in his compositions is sufficiently accounted for by the simple fact, that some were written at an earlier age than others; that some are the productions of his youth, and others of his maturity—that, in short, it is a mere question of dates. There is indeed a very striking difference between those poems which commence the volume, and bear the date of 1830, and the other and greater number, which bear the date of 1832: the difference is so great, that we question whether, upon the whole, the fame of Mr Tennyson would not have been advanced by the omission altogether from his collected works of this first portion of his poems; for though much beauty would be lost, far more blemish would be got rid of. Still, however, as the same inequality pursues us in his later writings, and is evident even in his last production—The Princess—there remains something more to be explained than can be quite accounted for by the mere comparison of dates. This something more we find explained in a bad school of taste, under the influence of which Mr Tennyson commenced his poetic authorship. Above this influence he often rises, but he has never quite liberated himself from it. To this source we trace the affectations of many kinds which deface his writings—affectation of a super-refinement of meaning, ending in mere obscurity, or in sheer nonsense; affectation of antique simplicity ending in the most jejune triviality; experimental metres putting the ear to torture; or an utter disregard of all metre, of all the harmonies of verse, together with an incessant toil after originality of phrase; as if no new idea could be expressed unless each separate word bore also an aspect of novelty.
At the time when Tennyson commenced his career, poetry and poets were in a somewhat singular position. Never had there been so great a thirst for poetry—never had there existed so large a reading public with so decided a predilection for this species of literature; and rarely, if ever, has there arisen—at once the cause and effect of this public taste—so noble a band of contemporary poets as those who were just then retiring from the stage. The success which attended metrical composition was quite intoxicating. Poems, now gradually waning from the sight of all mankind, were rapturously welcomed as masterpieces. It seemed that the poet might dare anything. Meanwhile, the novelty to which he was emboldened was rendered urgent and necessary; for, in addition to the old rivals of times long past, there was this band of poets, whose echoes were still ringing in the theatre, to be competed with. Was it any wonder that at such an epoch we should have Keats writing his Endymion, or Tennyson elaborating his incomprehensible ode To Memory, or inditing his foolish songs To the Owl, or torturing himself to unite old balladry with modern sentiment in his Lady of Shalott, for ever rhyming with that detested town of Camelot; or that he should have been stringing together fulsome, self-adulatory nonsense about The Poet and the Poet's Mind—or, in short, committing any conceivable extravagance in violation of sense, metre, and the English language? The young poet of this time was evidently carried off his feet. He had drank so deep of those springs about Parnassus, that he had lost his footing on the solid ground. It did not follow that he and his compeers always soared above us because they could no longer walk on a level with us. Men, in a dream, think they are flying when they are only falling. They reeled much, these intellectual revellers. It is true that sober men discountenanced them, rebuked them, reminded them that liberty was not license, nor imagination another name for insanity; but there was still a considerable crowd of indiscriminate admirers to cheer and encourage them in their wildest freaks.
One tendency, gathered from these times, seems, all along and throughout his whole progress, to have beset our author—the reluctance to subside for a moment to the easy natural level of cultivated minds. He has a morbid horror of commonplace. He will be grotesque, if you will; absurd, infantine—anything but truly simple: when he girds himself for serious effort, he would give you the very essence of poetry, and nothing else. This wish to have it all blossoms, no stem or leaves, has perhaps been one cause why he has written no long work. It is a tendency which is, in some measure, honourable to him. Though it has assisted in betraying him into the errors we have already noticed, it must be allowed that we are never in danger of being wearied with the monotony of commonplace.
It may be worth while to consider for a moment this characteristic—the wish to seize upon the essence, and the essence only, of poetry.
In our high intellectual industry, there goes on a certain division and subdivision of labour analogous to that which marks the progress of our commercial and manufacturing industry. The first men of genius were historians, poets, philosophers, all in one. If they wrote verse, they found a place in it for whatever could in any manner interest their contemporaries, whether it was matter of knowledge, or matter of passion. The theology of a people, and the agriculture of a people—chaos and night, and how to sow the fields—the progeny of gods, and the breeding of bulls—were alike materials for the poem. A Hesiod or a Gower chant all they know—science, or religion, or morality. The first epic is the first history. But the narrative here becomes too engrossing to admit of large admixtures of didactic matter. This is relegated to some other form of composition, and handed over to some other master of the art. The dramatic form carries on this division still further. The representation of the narrative relieves the poem of its historic character, and a dialogue which is to accompany action becomes necessarily devoted to the passions of life, or such strains of reflection as result from, and harmonise with, those passions. The lyric minstrel seizes upon these eliminated elements of passion and reflection, and adds thereto a greater liberty of imagination. At length comes that mere intellectual luxury Of imaginative thought—that gathering in of beauty and emotion from all sources—that subtle blending of a thousand pleasing allusions and flitting images—exquisite for their own sake, and constituting what is considered as pre-eminently the poetical description of natural scenery, or the poetical delineation of human feeling.
But it is possible that this intellectual division of labour may be carried too far. This luxury of imaginative thought may be found supporting itself on the slenderest base imaginable of either incident or reflection, may be almost divorced from those first natural sources of interest which affect all mankind. Now, although this may be the most poetical element of the poem—though this subtle play of imagination may constitute, more than anything else, the difference between poetry and prose, it does not follow that a good poem can be constructed wholly of such materials. It does not even follow that, in a good poem, this is really the most essential part; for that which constitutes the specific distinction between prose and poetry may not be an ingredient so important as others which both prose and poetry have in common. It is the hilt, and its peculiar formation, which more particularly distinguishes the sword from any other cutting instrument; but the blade—the faculty of cutting which it shares in common with the most domestic knife—is, after all, the most important part, the most requisite property of the sword. A peculiar play of imagination is pre-eminently poetic, but thought, reflection, the genuine passions of man—these must still constitute the greater elements of the composition, whether it be prose or poem.
If, therefore, we carry this division of labour too far, we shall be in danger of carving elegant and elaborate hilts that have no blades, or but a sham one. We ask no one to write didactic or philosophic poems—we should entreat of them to abstain; we call on no man to describe again the culture of the sugarcane, (though it bids fair to become amongst us one of the lost arts,) or the breeding of sheep, in numerous verse; we hope no one will again fall into that singular error of imagining that the "art of poetry" must be a peculiarly appropriate subject for a poem, and the very topic that the spirit of a poetic reader was thirsting for. Art of poetry! what poetic nutriment will you extract from that? As well think to dine a man upon the art of cookery! It is quite right that what is best said in prose should be confined to prose; but neither must we divorce substantial thought, the broad passions of mankind, or a deep reflection, from the poetic form. This would be to build nothing but steeples, and minarets, and all the filigree of architecture. We should have pillars and porticoes enough, but not a temple of any kind to enter into.