Upon the whole, Mr. Tennyson excels in a certain underlying vein of exquisitely refined humor. And when his subject admits of it, he is unrivalled. His is the poetry of humor. We would name as examples “The Northern Farmer” and the satirical poem, “Locksley Hall,” perhaps the most vigorous of all his productions; and, of his longer poems, The Princess. It is for this reason we think he is more likely to excel, as a dramatist, in comedy than in tragedy.
If our readers would estimate the full force of our remarks, we would invite them to read the works of any of the principal of our earlier lyrical poets, as, for example, Collins. We name him because he too excels in that melody of versification for which Mr. Tennyson is so distinguished. At times, as in his “Sonnet on Evening,” he surpasses the Laureate in that respect, although for sustained and unfailing rhythmical melody the latter bears away the palm from him, and perhaps from every other rival. But in profound sympathy with nature, in the fidelity of his creations, in the echoes of the beautiful which he provokes within the soul of the reader, the Poet-Laureate must yield to the Demy of Magdalen. Like Shakspere, he peopled inanimate nature with a fairy world, and amongst elves and genii and other dainty spirits he abandoned himself to that power of impersonation which is almost an attribute of a true poet.
Our space does not admit of illustrative quotations, but we would refer the reader inclined to institute the comparison suggested to the elegy over Fidele, in the play of Cymbeline, and to his Eclogues.
Mr. Tennyson’s poetry has beauties of its own peculiar kind of so remarkable and striking a description that we might have hesitated to take any exceptions whatsoever to his poetical genius. But his new poem, his first effort in dramatic poetry, seems to us to set all doubt at rest. It convinces us that, for whatever reasons, of the highest flights of poetic inspiration Mr. Tennyson is incapable. We are convinced that he lacks that which constitutes a great poet. However beautiful his poetry, we feel that it wants something which, however keenly we may be sensible of it, it is not easy either to analyze or explain.
For what is the inspiration of poetry but the echoes of the beautiful within the soul of man? The universe of things is the visible word of God. It is his essential beauty projected by an energy of creative love—the quickening spirit opening his wings over chaos—into an objective existence, on which its generator looked with complacency as “very good,” and which he generated in order that his creature, whom he had made in his own image, might, with himself, rejoice in its contemplation. He did not, at first, endow him with the power of beholding himself “face to face,” but only his reflex. We have the right to believe that, whilst in union with his Maker, he read at a glance the meaning of the word, he felt instantaneously the beauty of the image. His nature, into which no discord had as yet been introduced, uncondemned to the judgment of painful toil, did not acquire charity and knowledge by long and laborious processes, disciplinary and ratiocinative, but by intuition. Incapable as yet of the Beatific Vision, he comprehended the whole of the divine beauty as revealed in creation, and the comprehension itself was a transport of love. He saw, and knew, and loved, and the three were one simultaneous energy of the sonship of his nature. But, as now, “the greatest of these was charity.” It was the result and sum and end of the sight and knowledge. It was the feeling they inevitably and unremittingly occasioned. To speak as we can only speak in our actual condition, it was as those thuds of loving admiration with which our hearts throb when we look upon some surpassing embodiment of innocent and modest female loveliness. When the mind, jealous of pre-eminence, led captive, so to speak, the heart in revolt against the revealed law, the human being was no longer in union with himself, a war of impulses and of energies was set up within him, the image of God was defaced, his perception of created beauty became more and more obscure as he went further away from his original abode of innocence, until, finally, it was all but lost. The emotion, if we may describe it as such, which it was of its nature to suggest, could not perish, for it is imperishable. But it had lost its true object, and surveyed knowledge in a form more or less degraded.
Now out of this very faint and rapid sketch of a psychological theory which would require a volume for its development, we hope to be able to convey some idea, however vague, of the nature of the poetic spirit.
It is certain that the remains of the divine image have not since been alike and equal in all the individuals of the race. It may be asserted, on the contrary, that there are no two human microcosms in which the elements of the confusion introduced into them by the original infidelity exist in the same proportion. Those in whom the intelligence is the quickest to see, and the mind, heart, and soul to love in unison, the image of divine beauty revealed in creation—those, that is, in whom the divine image remains the most pronouncedly—are the truest poets.
When this echo of the soul to the beautiful does not go beyond the physical creation, the inspirations of love express themselves in lyric or idyllic poetry. The poet imitates the divine Creator in reproducing, even creating, images of his lower creation so faithful and suggestive that they who look upon them experience similar sensations and emotions to those provoked within them by the divine creation itself, nay, not unseldom, even profounder ones. He reveals the beautiful in similar images to those in which The Beautiful revealed himself to his creature; he is thus himself a ποιητὴς, or creator, and his work is a ποίησις, or creation. When his forms derive their inspiration only from the inferior creation, they are exclusively some form of idyls or lyrics. But when, soaring above the grosser medium of the merely material universe, and poising himself on wings tremulous with reverent joy at the confines of the invisible, his soul echoes the music of the beautiful issuing from that invisible creation; and that imitative energy which is of its essence, inspired by these reawakening inspirations, calls into being psychical individualities with their precise bodily expression and proper destinies—that is to say, with all the causes and results, ebb and flow, action and reaction, in human affairs, of every volition and energy, he reproduces the highest energy of the divine creative power, he evokes into sensible existence whole multitudes of fresh creatures made in the image of God, and, what is even yet more sublime, he evokes into equally sensible being the particular providence which overrules each and all—the one difference between the two creations being that one is original, the other imitative; one imaginary—that is, merely sensible; the other, not only sensible, but real also, and essential. Yet are the accidents of the former produced occasionally with such extraordinary fidelity that they have sometimes, as in the creations of Shakspere, for example, the same effect upon those who become acquainted with them as if they were in truth the latter.
Who that has ever studied the creations of that immortal dramatist has not them all, from high to low, treasured within his inner being as vividly as any other of his absent acquaintances, whom he has met in society, to whom he has been formally introduced, with whom he has eaten, drank, laughed, wept, walked, and conversed? Has not that remarkable genius transgressed even the imitative faculty—imitative, that is, of all the original creative energy that is known—produced original creations, and peopled the preter- rather than supernatural with beings which have no known existence, but whom nevertheless he surrounds with a distinct verisimilitude which ensures them easy admission into our minds and hearts, which presents them to our senses as concrete beings with as much positiveness, and even as clearly defined individuality, as if they were solid creatures of flesh and bone, and which makes us feel that if such beings did really exist, they would be none other than precisely those he has represented?