We have dwelt at length on the sincerity with which Tennyson interprets nature. It is the stamp of the true poet. The dilettante, however cunning, cannot counterfeit it. He cannot keep himself out of the picture, but invests it with his own sentiment, and tricks it out in the whims and caprices of the hour. It is otherwise with Wordsworth. That high-priest of nature enters her presence reverently, with humble and candid heart. He puts off the vanities and weaknesses of man on the verge of her holy ground. From his lips her lessons fall with a simple earnestness, like oracles from the mouth of a child. Her truths he incarnates, but does not presume to clothe.
While it is false art to attribute to nature a conscious sympathy with man, it is true that she at times discovers an unconscious harmony with his moods. Our emotions are deepened by the accord. The happy are the happier for sunshine. The sad are saddest in the night and the rain. To aim at this mystic unison, to strike one note from feeling and from circumstance, is legitimate and delightful. Let us contrast an example of such treatment with the less truthful method to which we have referred. We ought always to study a theory in some felicitous expression of it, and therefore we take these graceful lines from Dr. Holmes. The stars and flowers touched by the woes of fallen man have conspired to watch and warn him. The flowers cannot bear the sight of human misery.
“Alas! each hour of daylight tells
A tale of shame so crushing,
That some turn white as sea-bleached shells,
And some are always blushing.
“But when the patient stars look down
On all their light discovers,
The traitor’s smile, the murderer’s frown,
The lips of lying lovers,
“They try to shut their saddening eyes,
And in the vain endeavor
We see them twinkling in the skies,
And so they wink for ever.”
At the first glance this moves, and pleases; because the emotion of the moment veils the extravagant hyperbole. The writer is an artist, and makes us see, as it were, through tears. But the lines do not grow upon us like the truly beautiful. As we read them a second time, there comes over us a feeling of annoyance, almost of pain, that the flowers should be misinterpreted, the stars misconstrued. We tremble before nature’s shocks and storms, and cannot afford to darken her brightest bloom or trouble her sweet serenity. Look now at this figure of “Mariana,” weeping, forsaken, “in the moated grange!” There is no pathetic prelude, no preliminary appeal to human sympathies. A neglected garden and a lonely house. A reach of level waste, colorless, silent, cold. The desolation is contagious, and just as the heart is sinking into a state of depression and despair, the moan of the stricken girl falls quivering on the ear.
“With blackest moss the flower-plots
Were thickly crusted, one and all;
The rusted nails fell from the knots
That held the peach to the garden wall.
The broken sheds looked sad and strange:
Unlifted was the clinking latch:
Weeded and worn the ancient thatch
Upon the lonely moated grange.
She only said, ‘My life is dreary!
He cometh not!’ she said;
She said, ‘I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!’”
We are very far from saying that Tennyson is everywhere free from the pathetic fallacy. But his sins of the kind occur chiefly in some vein of sportive apologue, like the “Talking Oak,” or in the mouth of Maud’s morbid lover, half distraught by temper and wholly crazed by crime. And, indeed, if any could be pardoned for beholding in all things one image, it would be, no doubt, the lover. In the old myth, love guided the hand of art; but Pygmalion was a sculptor, not a landscape painter.
The portrayal of the human form is one of the painter’s triumphs, as it is the sole province of plastic art. Poetry, for the most part, evades a description of personal beauty, and is content with a suggestion. Yet there are two or three etchings in the “Palace of Art” which seem to us not unworthy of a place in that gallery of Philostratus which a poet’s hand repeopled:
“Or sweet Europa’s mantle blew unclasped,
From off her shoulder backward borne;
From one hand drooped a crocus, one hand grasped
The mild bull’s golden horn.