Till we were left to fight for truth alone.
Britons, guard your own.”
And this is the gentle Tennyson! But we forbear from comment other than the verses themselves suggest, and turn at last to our more immediate object.
Whatever fault may be found here and there with Tennyson, one thing is certain: his renown was great and his fame established chiefly by his earlier and better works and by the peculiar characteristics which we have attempted to point out. The poet, however, seems not to have been satisfied. He was weary of the graceful path by which he ambled gently up to fame, and would seek by a new and rugged road a higher place than he already occupied in that temple where are gathered the mighty men who have wrought with the pen monuments more enduring than marble. In an evil hour he tempted fate, and fate gave him a severe warning. Weary of the minstrel's lute which had charmed the world, he would be what the poets of old were thought to be—a vates, an inspired prophet-and his vaticination was Queen Mary.
As that drama has been dealt with in these pages by another pen, we shall not touch on it here more than to say that never were the minds of Tennyson’s countrymen better prepared to receive and applaud a work intended, as this plainly was, to be an outcry against Rome and a picture of one of the fierce struggles between England and Rome. Mr. Gladstone had prepared the way and set all the world warring on “Vaticanism.” Tennyson could not have chosen a better time for the publication of his drama, and, were it a work of power and passion, it could not have failed to catch the heart of the people. Never, on the other hand, could he have chosen a better time for a higher duty: that of, in the words of his great master, still in his right hand carrying gentle peace “to silence envious tongues.” If the drama failed, it failed in the face of every incentive to success.
Fail it did. It was plain, even to friendly critics, that the author of Queen Mary was not a dramatist, and so it was hinted generally in the mildest possible terms. What was the reason of the failure?
We have shown, we believe sufficiently, that Tennyson failed wherever he attempted to yoke the passions. His hand was too weak to curb them. His genius is reflective, introspective, descriptive. It has not the flash, the white heat of inspiration. It is always Tennyson who is singing, talking to, arguing with us, describing for us. He is a person, not a voice—a very pleasing, scholarly, refined, and in the main right-minded person—but he is for ever giving utterance to his own peculiar thoughts in his own peculiar style. The highest form of poetry, as of oratory, is not this. It is that undefinable and truest expression of feeling, of hope, of agony, of despair, of wrath, of courage, of any of the passions that lie dormant in the human breast, which at once elicits a responsive echo from the heart of humanity, so that we do not say, How sweet, how tender, how strong is this man, but, How true to nature is this thought! Thus it is that the greatest poets are the voices of all the world; their works the inheritance of all the world. In their highest heights they belong to humanity, and to no nation.
The dramatic we believe to be the highest form of poetry, because it alone attempts to portray life itself, life in action; it is not a description, however magnificently done, of life. There lies between it and all other forms of poetry the difference that exists between the painting of a hero and the hero himself. The one is the man, thinking, living, moving, breathing, speaking his thoughts, doing his deeds; the other after all is only an image, more or less vivid, of him on canvas. It may catch the color of the eye, the expression of the countenance, the texture of the dress, the shape, the form; but at the very best it is a picture, no more, infinitely removed from the reality.
If this be a right conception of the difference between dramatic and all other kinds of poetry—and it seems to us to be, although it might need more elaboration to impress it upon the reader’s mind—it will be plain that the dramatic poet needs nothing short of the highest inspiration in order to make him catch the very breathings of men’s souls and throw them into living forms, as truly as the master actor loses his own personality and lets it sink or become absorbed utterly in the various characters he portrays. No mere change of costume will effect the metamorphosis needed to impress the spectator with the reality of the change in character. In the same way no clipping of a poem into acts and scenes, and no allotting of certain lines to certain different names, will convert a descriptive poem into a drama. All the world will at once detect the fraud or the inherent defect.
A not uncommon phase of an exasperated mind is to refuse to recognize failure. Tennyson tried again, rather hastily, and in the same direction, with the satisfactory result of making a more disastrous failure than before. The blunder of Queen Mary has been emphasized in Harold. The first named may have left some minds in doubt whether or not its author could construct a drama; the production of the second has effectually set all such doubts at rest. The critics who in the first instance were kind are in the second cruel. We have rarely seen a more general and resolutely contemptuous dealing with the pretensions of any writer at all than in the treatment which Harold has received at the hands of critics of every shade of opinion, English as well as American.