Of such sort, we take it, is the highest, or dramatic, poetry. And of it there is a manifest deficiency in this work, which its author terms, indeed, a drama, but which is in fact a tragedy.
Mr. Tennyson has not enough of the divine afflatus to write tragedy. If he has not sufficient love of the beautiful in inanimate nature for his soul to echo to it, and his heart to throb with the sense of it, with the rapidity of an intuition, so as to make unattainable to him the highest excellence in lyric poetry, how much more out of his reach must be a first rank in the tragic drama; where, if anywhere, an intuition of the beautiful amounting to an inspiration is demanded in that supreme creation of God which, as the consummation of his “work” and word, he has embodied in his own substance! In that profound and intuitive perception of the workings of man’s inner being, of the passions, emotions, feelings, appetites, their action and reaction, ebb and flow; of the struggle of the two natures, its infinite variety and play of life, under all conceivable conditions and vicissitudes, with much more than can be detailed here included in these, Mr. Tennyson is strikingly deficient.
In the tragedies of Shakspere, as in all his dramas, the distinct personality of every one of the characters, high and low, is impressed upon us with vivid distinctness. But the principal personages in the tragedies dilate before us in heroic proportions as the portentous struggle progresses. Whether it be King Lear, or King John, or King Richard, or Othello, or Lady Macbeth, or Lady Constance, or the widowed Princess of Wales, or Ophelia, or whoever else, we look on with bated breath, as did the spectators of the boat-race with which Æneas celebrated the suicide of his regal paramour, and we come away at its close a prey to the storm of emotions which the magic art of the island sorcerer has conjured up within us.
But the drama, or tragedy, as we prefer to call it, we read with but languid interest. The psychical struggle is neither very obvious nor very critical, there is no very striking revelation of the sublime beauty or tragic overthrow of human nature, and although the canvas is crowded with figures, not one of them impresses any very distinct image of his or her individuality on our mind and heart. Instead of, as Shakspere’s creations, retaining every one of them as a distinct and intimate acquaintance, whom we may summon into our company at will, we rise from the perusal of Queen Mary without having received any very definite impression of any, even the principal, personages, and we forget all about them almost as soon as we have read the play.
This vital defect in a drama the author has rendered doubly fatal through his having carried his imitation of Shakspere to the extent of adopting his simplicity of plot. Shakspere could afford to do this. The inspired verisimilitude of the struggle of the two natures in every one of his human creations, the profoundness of his development of the innermost working of the human microcosm, often by a few master-touches, surround every one of his dramatis personæ with all the rapt suspense and sustained interest of a plot. Every one of his characters is, as it were, a plot in itself. But it is quite certain that Mr. Tennyson—and it is no depreciation of him—has not this power. He has, therefore, every right to call to his aid the interest of an elaborate plot, which itself would also, we think, cause him to develop more vividly his characters. It is in this the late Lord Lytton, whose poetical pretensions are very much below Mr. Tennyson’s, achieved whatever success he had as a dramatist. Mr. Tennyson has not to depend on this solely, as was very nearly the case with Lord Lytton, but it would contribute very much to a higher success. The great dramatist he is unwise enough so avowedly to imitate peoples the simplest plot with a whole world of stirring destinies. He moves his quickening wand, and lo! as by the master-will of a creator, appear a Hamlet or a Malvolio, a Lady Macbeth or a Goneril or Miranda, an Ariel or a Caliban, contribute their precise share to the history, which would not have been complete without them, and then disappear from the scene, but never from our memory. A magic word or two has smitten them into it, and they live for aye in our mind and heart. His heroes and his heroines he clothes with such a majesty of poetry that we watch anxiously with bated breath their every gesture, word, or look; we cannot bear their absence, until, entranced into their destiny, and half unconscious, we watch them disappear in the catastrophe, our ears are blank, all voices mute, the brilliant theatre is the chamber of death, and they who, to us, were but now living flesh and blood, in whose destinies our innermost soul was rapt, have passed away, amidst a tempest of emotions, and are no more.
But Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, either of the two great classic epics, or any striking historic passage in even so ungraphic a writer as Lingard, is more dramatic than this drama. The feeble plot gives birth to feebler impersonations. They come and go without making any deep impression upon us, or seizing our attention by any striking originality. Their features are indistinct, their actions insignificant. They are bloodless and colorless. They are ghosts, things of air, whom a feeble incantation has summoned from their slumber, who mutter a few laborious Spartanisms in a renewed life in which they seem to have no concern, and vanish without provoking a regret, nor even an emotion. We observe in them such an absence of verisimilitude, so marked a want of truth to nature, as very much to weaken, when it does not entirely destroy, the dramatic illusion. Nowhere is this more observable than where he intends most manifestly a rivalry of Shakspere. Shakspere not unseldom introduces the multitude into his poetic history. But when he does so, it seizes our interest as forcibly as his more important personages. With a few rapid touches he dashes in a few typical individuals, who reveal to us vividly what the whole kind of thing is of which they are prominent units. They are the mob of the very time and place to which they belong. Whether at Rome in the time of Julius Cæsar, or at Mantua or Verona in the Middle Ages, or in England during the time of the Tudors, we feel that they act and speak just as then and there they might have said and done. Every one, too, has his or her distinct individuality. And such a verisimilitude have they that even an occasional anachronism, such as, in Troilus and Cressida, making a Trojan servant talk of being in the state of grace, does not dispel the charm. But Mr. Tennyson’s mob-types have no more striking features to seize our interest than his more exalted creations, whilst his anachronisms are of a kind which send all verisimilitude to the winds. Joan and Tib, and the four or five citizens, have nothing in them for which they should be singled out of the very ordinary condition of life to which they belong. And we are tempted to sneer when we hear an Elizabethan mob talking like Hampshire or Yorkshire peasants of the present day.
For all that, Mr. Tennyson’s cockneys and rustics are not his most ineffective portraiture. We experience a slight sensation of their having been lugged in, perhaps because of the inevitable comparison with Shakspere they provoke, and we feel them to be too modern; but the poet’s sense of humor here serves him in good stead, and although, in this respect, immeasurably below Shakspere, he gives a kind of raciness to his plebeians which saves them from being an absolute failure.
It is, however, in the principal personages of the drama that we most miss the Promethean fire, and pre-eminently in the hero, if Cranmer is intended for such a dignity, and the heroine. Amongst these, the most lifelike are Courtenay and Sir Thomas Wyatt; because, in their creation, the peculiar vein of quaint irony and exceedingly refined humor, which is Mr. Tennyson’s most eminent distinction, comes to his aid. For the rest, up to the heroine herself and the canting and recanting Cranmer, they are colorless and bloodless. We scarcely know one from the other. And we do not care to. Noailles and Renard are but poor specimens of diplomatists. Their sovereigns, were the time the present, might pick up a dozen such any day in Wall Street. If the poet could embody no greater conception of two such men as Bonner and Gardiner than a couple of vulgar, self-seeking, blood-thirsty knaves, he should have dispensed altogether with their presence. He should have given to them some elevation, whatever history may say about it. A drama is a poem, not a history; and the poet may take the names of historic personages and, within certain limits, fit to them creations of his own. In Cardinal Pole he had an opportunity for a noble ideal. But all we have is an amiable dummy, an old gentleman, as ordinary and ineffective as the rest.
Facts have been so distorted by the influence which for so long had sole possession of literature, that there is plenty of room for taking great liberties with history. Mr. Tennyson has slightly availed himself of this, but in the wrong direction. Shakspere himself could not have made a saint of Cranmer. For poetry, there was nothing for it but to make him a more splendid sinner. To retain all his littlenesses and to array them in seductive virtues, is to present us with some such figure as the dusky chieftains decked in gaudy tinsel that solicit our admiration in front of the tobacconists’ shops. To attempt to give heroic proportions to a man whose profession of faith followed subserviently his self-interest until no hope remained, and then place in the hands of the burning criminal the palm of martyrdom, is to invite the love within us of the beautiful and the true to echo to a psychical impossibility, and that without an element of greatness.
Yet had the front figure of the history been a noble conception grandly executed all this might have been condoned. One might well have looked at them as a few rough accessories to heighten by their contrast the beauty of the central form. There was place for a splendid creation. No more favorable material for a tragic heroine exists than Mary Tudor—with the single exception of that other Mary who fell beneath the Puritans like a lily before the scythe of the destroyer. Around her history and person circle all the elements of the tenderest pathos, which is of the very essence of tragedy. That Shakspere did not use them is a proof he thought so. For “the fair vestal throned in the west” would have resented such a creation as his quickening genius would have called to life. A queen of noble nature gradually swept away by a resistless current of untoward circumstances, is a history capable of the sublimity of a Greek catastrophe, with the added pathos of Christian suffering. But who have we here? A silly woman, devoutly pious, and endowed with a conspicuous share of the family courage. But she is so weak that her piety has the appearance of superstition, and her fits of courage lose their royalty and fail to rescue her from contempt. Unattractive in person, she falls desperately in love with a man much younger than herself, and her woman’s love, ordinarily so quick to detect coldness in a lover, is blind to the grossest neglect; and yet not so blind but that a few words scrawled on a rag of paper, dropped in her way, could open her eyes on the spot. The tenderness of her love and the importunity of cruel-minded men, transform her almost suddenly from a gentle-natured woman to an unrelenting human tigress. And she, who would not allow the law to take its course on her most dangerous enemies, can exclaim of her sister Elizabeth,