Bound by gold chains about the feet of God.”
It was the Catholic instinct breaking through the wall of prejudice and false teaching which, in centuries of separation from the truth, have grown up around the English heart, that gave voice to this beautiful conception. Many are the instances where non-Catholic poets have leaped up to truths of this kind which the whole force of their training and education ran counter to. It is, as it were, the flash of inspiration coming on them in spite of themselves and issuing in music. The divinity of their art has lifted them above all prejudice into the sun-bright heaven. Thus Byron sings to the Blessed Virgin in strains that a saint might envy. Unfortunately, the instances are many also where men lifted up on the heights of inspiration, or by the deep yearnings of their own soul, have, as it were, glanced into heaven and seen the face of Truth, only to fall back again to their lower level, dazed and blinded by the very glimpse that was revealed to them. And we find them deny with their own lips and actions what their greater selves had announced.
It is not our purpose to enter into an elaborate criticism of Tennyson. That task has been done time and again, and by pens infinitely better fitted for it than ours. We are only taking touches here and there to bring out the poet in his truest colors, in his best and his worst lights, in order to add point to the main purport of this article, which is to show that Tennyson has mistaken himself and his powers in the rôle which he has thought fit to assume in his later years. In his earlier dreams he is full of high thoughts and large aspirations. “My faith is large in Time, and that which shapes it to some perfect end,” he tells us. He looks forward longingly to “the golden year.” He is possessed with the spirit of Christian purity, and gives constant expression to it, notably in “St. Agnes” and “Sir Galahad.” In “The Two Voices” he argues down atheism. He lays bare the grinning savagery of a wasted intellect and debauched life, only to punish it with the power of a man who knows what virtue is and feels it in his soul. He sometimes catches those inarticulate murmurs of the heart which breathe in feelings rather than in words, where feeling is too deep for words, and they well out in song, as in the
“Break, break, break,
On thy cold gray stones, O sea!”
while in the “In Memoriam” the poet, stricken to the heart, has given voice to that sorrow, and the effect it has on our life, which most of us have felt when some bright intelligence has been taken from our side, whose young years were blossoming fair with promise of a great and good future.
In all this he is excellent, perhaps unsurpassed; in all that is sad, or sweet, or picturesque, or naïvely joyous our hearts are with him. He stands alone in his dainty pictures of scenery, of women, of certain men. He touches the commonplaces of the time with a magic pencil. He beguiled the hard and stubborn Saxon, which yielded reluctantly even to the greatest masters of English verse, into a music it had never known before. He built up fairy castles, and galleries and cities of old time, and peopled them with a fair array of Arthurs and Launcelots, of Guineveres and Elaines, of Merlins and Gawains, whose very names were music, and whose deeds were just such as befitted scenes of witchery. He is, moreover, a man of marked personality and nationality in his writings. He is an Englishman and nothing else. He does not care to be anything else or more; for he can see nothing greater. All his scenery is English; his characters are English; his thoughts, feelings, and aspirations English. Byron’s corsairs and giaours and Childe Harolds would fight as fiercely, frown as darkly, sin as deeply, in any civilized language as in English—in warmer languages even better, perhaps; Shakspere’s profound observations and reading of character would have reached the world through any other channel as surely as, perhaps more readily than, through the English; some would doubt whether Milton ever wrote English at all. But all Tennyson is English or nothing. His dawns, his gloamings, his sunrises, his sunsets, his landscapes, his fens, his fogs, his smoke, his moonlight and moonlight effects, his winds, his birds, his flowers, his reeds and rushes, his trees, his brooklets, his seas, his cliffs, his coloring, his ruins, his graveyards, his walks and rides, his love of good cheer, his hums of great cities, his profound respect for the respectable, are all English. He has the sturdy English common sense and no small share, as will be seen, of English prejudice; and, though he feels something of the movements of the outer world, he has all the English narrowness of vision. So that, while his works will probably never become a part of any other literature than the English—for they would not be understood elsewhere—they have won their way into the English heart for their very homeliness, if for no higher reason. So long as this English poet was content to sing to us, we were content to listen, were his lay sad or gay. He had been singing all our life, and we were not weary of his music, even though the music was all pitched in much the same key. We never tire of a familiar voice that we love. But when we would be roused and wrought up by some martial strain, by some great event, by one of those movements that catch the heart of a people and sway it and hold it captive, by the “thoughts that breathe and words that burn,” Tennyson fails. Surely, for such an Englishman as he, the death of the Duke of Wellington ought to have proved an inspiring theme. It is true that as the years went on, and the memory of Waterloo faded, and the hero of Waterloo moved about and took his part in civic affairs, people (and people are ever ready to weary of their gods, if their gods are too near them and live too long) began to clip and cut down the gigantic proportions of the Iron Duke’s colossal figure. Indeed, before he died it is safe to say that half England regarded England’s hero as rather an ordinary sort of person and a worthy but extremely fortunate soldier. Still, death generally brings back the liveliest memories of deeds that are, or are thought to be, great and good, and a true poet’s song who believed all of Wellington that Tennyson’s poem expresses might well have been tipped with fire when Wellington died. Yet Tennyson’s funeral ode is poor, tame; where not tame, forced; and, like all such compositions, indefinitely strung out. All his readers know the opening:
“Bury the Great Duke
With an empire’s lamentation,
Let us bury the Great Duke,