“hœrentem multa cum laude coronam,”
and with some confidence claims the dramatic bays. Nay, he even invites a comparison with Shakspere. True to the temper of the times, his prestige follows him in so hazardous a competition, the accustomed wreaths are showered upon him with unreflecting haste, and the facile representatives of the most incapable of critics—public opinion—have already offered him that homage as a dramatist which had already been too lavishly offered to his idyllic muse.
It is an ungrateful task to go against the popular current, and it is an ungracious one to object to crowns which the multitude have decreed. But there is no help for it, unless we would stoop to that criticism of prestige which is so characteristic of the age, and would follow in the wake of the literary rabble, criticising the works by the author, instead of the author by his works.
We may as well say, at once, that we have never felt it in our power to acknowledge the poetical supremacy of the English poet-laureate.[2] It has always appeared to us that there is, in his poetry, a lack of inspiration. To borrow a too familiar but expressive metaphor, the coin is highly burnished, glitters brightly, and has the current stamp, but one misses the ring of the genuine metal. He sits patiently on the tripod, dealing forth phrases as musical as Anacreon’s numbers, and as polished as those of a Greek sophist, spiced with a refined humor, which has a special charm of its own. But his soul does not kindle at the sacred fire. We miss the divine frenzy. A passionateness of love of the beautiful does not appear to be the quickening inspiration of his creations. All alike show signs of extreme care and preparation. We do not forget the counsel of Horace. But that only refers to a distant revision of creations which an unchecked genius may have produced under the divine influence. Whereas, Mr. Tennyson’s poetry bears evidence of infinite toil in production. All his thoughts, ideas, and images, down to words and phrases, are too evidently, instead of the happy inspirations of genius, the labored workmanship of a polished, refined, and fastidious mind. They something resemble the tout ensemble of a petit maître who has succeeded in conveying to his dress an appearance of such consummate simplicity and unexceptionable taste that every one notices the result of hours before the mirror. His diction is pure and polished, his phrases simple and nervous, and the English language owes him much for what he has done towards neutralizing the injury inflicted on it by the gaudy phraseology of the “correct” poets, and the antithetical sesquipedalianism of such prose writers as Johnson and Gibbon, and for preserving it in its pure and nervous simplicity. But his soul is dull to the poetic meanings of nature. His natural scenery is rather descriptive than a creation, much as artists, of whom there are not a few, who reproduce with consummate skill of imitation objects in detail, and bestow infinite care upon color, shade, perspective, grouping, and all the other technical details of a picture, whilst comparatively indifferent to the subject, which ought to be the poetic meaning of creations of genius. And what are they but only fruitful manifestations of the love of the beautiful, and echoes of its creative word, not the mere manipulations of an artificer? Mr. Tennyson’s descriptions of nature owe their vividness to the brilliance of word-painting and a certain refined delicacy of touch; sometimes, even, and indeed very often, to a certain quaint humor which is inconsistent with the highest art—it is not a passionate love which regards the object beloved from a ridiculous point of view—as when he describes the willows living adown the banks of a streamlet as “shock-headed pollards poussetting down the stream.”
The sensations provoked by his poetry resemble those of one who has sauntered through a museum of precious stones of rare workmanship and purest water. Our æsthetic taste has been pleased by the glitter and the color and the brilliance, but our mind and heart have not been deeply moved. His poems are ablaze with detached thoughts of lofty meaning, and of a multitude of others whose meaning is not obvious, all alike expressed in vivid imagery, in the purest phraseology, and in rare melody of rhythm. But they are confused and cabalistic. He seems to be always laboring to be incomprehensible. He calls it “the riddling of the bards.” And he succeeds. The problem of the Sphinx, the emblematic warning sent by the Scythians to their Persian invader, the mute counsel sent by the Samian to the Corinthian tyrant, a Delphic oracle, all were clear and easy by comparison with Mr. Tennyson’s lyrics, alike in detached passages and in entire poems. None of woman born can fathom the meaning of the Idylls of the King.
This defect alone is fatal to poetry. So keenly did Spenser feel it that although the meaning of his allegory, The Faerie Queene, is obvious enough to any ordinary intelligence, he is careful to explain it in full in a letter dedicated to Sir Walter Raleigh.
Mr. Tennyson, on the contrary, involves himself in the thickest mystery he can contrive, and expects his worshippers to take it for inspiration. Take the following, for example, from “The Coming of Arthur”:
“Rain, rain, and sun, a rainbow in the sky!
A young man will be wiser by-and-by,
An old man’s wit may wander e’er he die.