“Or else flush’d Ganymede, his rosy thigh
Half buried in the eagle’s down,
Sole as a flying star shot through the sky
Above the pillared town.”
These are mere outlines. But Tennyson has drawn one figure with almost pictorial finish and force. It is Aphrodite revealing herself to Paris on Mount Ida:
“Idalian Aphrodite, beautiful,
Fresh as the foam, new bath’d in Paphian wells,
With rosy, slender fingers, backward drew
From her warm brows and bosom her deep hair
Ambrosial, golden round her lucid throat
And shoulder: from the violets her light foot
Shone rosy white, and o’er her rounded form,
Between the shadows of the vine-bunches,
Floated the glowing sunlight as she moved.”
This is genuine painting. There is form and color in it, and, withal, the spirit of beauty bathing the whole, untainted by the faintest suggestion of wanton love.
In the temple of outward nature poetry is only the acolyte of painting. But one shrine is more exclusively her own. She is mistress of the heart. Over that ocean no other wing sustains continuous flight. There are waves of impulse which canvas cannot reflect, and currents of emotion untraced by the limner’s skill. There are dainty joys and fears that mock his grasp, and gust of passion that confound his cunning. Pictorial art must read the soul in the face, and the face is at best a clouded mirror. From the poet we hide nothing. The growth of character, the drift of habit, the pressure of inherited tendencies, springs of motive, stings of appetite—he discerns and deciphers all. But he must not speak in riddles: he is bound to make his meaning clear. He owes a duty to the humblest. They look to him to lend thought a form, shadow a substance; to explain the strange by the familiar, and flood the whole with the mellow flight of fancy. The poet is, in a certain sense, what Sidney would make him, the right popular philosopher. On the success of Tennyson in this field there is some difference of opinion. The fervor of his sympathies within a certain range and the delicacy of his intuitions are unquestioned. His style is allowed to be rich in color, and often fraught with incisive force. Let us glance at some passages which depict the finer shades of feeling, or are conspicuous for felicitous expression. We will then look at the charges, so often brought against Tennyson, of obscurity and a want of dramatic power.
It is a fact of common experience that quite opposite emotions, wrought to intensity, reach a state of fusion. They move, as it were, in converging lines, and their vanishing point is pain; or rather, they have what physicists would call a common dew-point. Thus we hear of the luxury of sorrow and of love’s sweet smart. Coleridge has touched this psychic truth with extreme tenderness in “Genevieve.” He shows us the young girl rapt in a troubled wonder before the strange feeling that storms her gentle breast. Her heart flutters like a snared bird:
“Her bosom heaved, she stept aside;
As conscious of my look she stept:
Then suddenly, with timorous eye,
She fled to me and wept.”
So in one of Tennyson’s “Idylls,” the eyes of the happy Enid are suffused with tears. It is hardly possible to read the lines without loving human nature:
“He turned his face,
And kissed her climbing; and she cast her arms
About him, and at once they rode away.
And never yet, since high in Paradise,
O’er the four rivers the first roses blew,
Came purer pleasure unto mortal kind
Than lived through her who in that perilous hour
Put hand to hand beneath her husband’s heart
And felt him hers again. She did not weep,
But o’er her meek eyes came a happy mist,
Like that which kept the heart of Eden green.”
Most persons have known those transient attachments which are born of “accident, blind contact, and the strong necessity of loving.” In the “Gardener’s Daughter” some one alludes in this playful fashion to the dethroned darling of his salad days: