A Hero and Some Other Folks

by William A. Quayle

A dramatist needs the touching of living hands and sound of living human voices, the uproar of the human sea; for is he not poet of street and court and market-place and holiday? But there is a poetry which needs these accessories as little as a lover needs a throng to keep him company. Tennyson's poetry was such. We are not to conceive him as Lord Tennyson and inhabitant of the House of Lords. He did not belong there save as a recognition of splendid ability. If we are to get a clew to his genius, he must always be conceived as a recluse, who truly heard the world's words, but at a dim remove. There is remoteness in his poetry. The long ago was the day whose sunlight flooded his path. The illustrious Greek era and the Mediaeval Age were fields where his hosts mustered for battle. Consider how little of Tennyson's noblest poetry belongs to his own era. "The May Queen;" "Locksley Hall," and its complement, "Sixty Years After;" "In a Hospital Ward;" "The Grandmother;" his patriotic effusions; "Maud;" and "In Memoriam," sum up the modern contributions; nor is all of this impregnated with a genuinely modern spirit. "Enoch Arden" might have belonged to a lustrum of centuries ago, and "The May Queen" to remote decades. He writes in the nineteenth century, rarely of it, though, as is inevitable, he colors his thoughts of long-ago yesterdays with the colors of to-day. He is not strictly a contemporaneous poet. "Dora," "The Gardener's Daughter," and others of the sort, have no time ear-marks. "The Princess" discusses a living problem, but from the artistic background of a knightly era. "Locksley Hall," earlier and later, "Maud" and "In Memoriam" are about the only genuinely contemporaneous poems. My suggestion is, Tennyson hugs the shadows of yesterdays; nor need we go far to find the philosophy of this seizure of the past. Romance gathers in twilights. It is hard to persuade ourselves that those heroisms which make souls mighty as the gods, belong to here and now. Imagination fixes this golden age in what Tennyson would call "the underworld" of time. Greek mythology was the essential poetry of nature, and mediaevalism the essential poetry of manhood. Nothing, as appears to me, was more accurate and in keeping with Tennysonian genius than this choosing Greek antiquity and mediaevalism as the theater for his poetry; for he was the chief romance poet since Edmund Spenser. Spenser and Tennyson are the poets laureate of chivalry. What Spenser did in his age, that Tennyson did in his. So recall the chronological location of Tennyson's poetry. "Tithonus," "Oenone," "Ulysses," "Tiresias," "Amphion," "The Hesperides," "The Merman," "Demeter and Persephone." Do we not seem rather reading titles from some classic poet than from a poet of the nineteenth century?

The historical trilogy belongs to the mediaeval centuries; "Harold," "à Becket," and "Queen Mary" are of yesterday. Tennyson reached backward, as a child reaches over toward its mother. "Boadicea" belongs to a still earlier age of English history; and certainly "The Idyls of the King" "Sir Galahad," "St. Simeon Stylites," "St. Agnes," "The Mystic," "Merlin and the Gleam," belong to the romantic, half-hidden era of history and of thought. "Sir John Oldcastle" and "Columbus" belong to the visible historic era, while in his wonderful "Rizpah" the poet has knit the present to dim centuries of the remotest past; and the tragic "Lucretius" takes us once more into the classic period. To the purely romantic belong "Recollections of the Arabian Nights," "The Lotos-Eaters," "The Talking Oak," "A Dream of Fair Women," and "Godiva." Now subtract these poems and their kin from the bulk of Tennyson's poetry, and the remainder will appear comparatively small. Certainly we may affirm with safety that Tennyson was poet of the past.

You can get the poetry of the Alhambra only by moonlight; and to a mind so wholly poetic as Tennyson's it seemed possible to get the poetry of conduct only by seeing it in the moonlight of departed years. To-day is matter-of-fact in dress and design; mediaevalism was fanciful, picturesque, romantic. Chivalry was the poetry of the Christ in civilization; and the knight warring to recover the tomb of God was the poem among soldiers, and in entire consonance with his nature, Tennyson's poetic genius flits back into the poetic days, as I have seen birds flit back into a forest. In Tennyson's poetry two things are clear. They are mediaeval in location; they are modern in temper. Their geography is yesterday, their spirit is to-day; and so we have the questions and thoughts of our era as themes for Tennyson's voice and lute. His treatment is ancient: his theme is recent. He has given diagnosis and alleviation of present sickness, but hides face and voice behind morion and shield.

Tennyson celebrates the return to nature. This return "The Poet's
Song" voices:

"The rain had fallen, the Poet arose;
He passed by the town and out of the street;
A light wind blew from the gates of the sun,
And waves of shadow went over the wheat,
And he sat him down in a lonely place,
And chanted a melody loud and sweet,
That made the wild-swan pause in her cloud,
And the lark drop down at his feet.

The swallow stopt as he hunted the bee,
The snake slipt under a spray;
The wild hawk stood with the down on his beak,
And stared, with his foot on the prey;
And the nightingale thought, 'I have sung many songs,
But never a one so gay;
For he sings of what the world will be
When the years have died away.'"

Away from palaces to solitude; out of cities to hedgerows and the woods and wild-flowers,—there is the secret of perennial poetry. And Tennyson is the climax of this dissent from Pope and Dryden as elaborated in Goldsmith, Cowper, Burns, Thomson, and Wordsworth. The best of this wine was reserved for the last of the feast; for Tennyson appears to me the greatest of the nature poets. And this return to nature, as the phrase goes, means taking this earth as a whole, which we are to do more and still more. Thomson's poetry was not pastoral poetry at its best; seeing inanimate nature is not in itself sufficient theme for poetry, lacking passion, depth, power. Sunrise, and flowing stream, and tossing seas are valuable as associates of the soul and helping it to self-understanding. Tennyson took both men and nature into his interpretation of nature. His voice it is, saying,

"O would that my tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me!"

The sea helps the soul's lack by supplying words and music. Tennyson never was at his best in a National Ode, unless one speaks from the elocutionary standpoint, because such tasks lack the poetical essential of spontaneity, and because, too, the themes seem to carry him outside of his nature-mood. Art in our century has gone out of doors. Scenery has never had lovers as now; and participative in this mood is Tennyson. He lives under the sky. He loved to be alone; and nature is loneliness as well as loveliness. Nor is his love of nature a passing passion, but is passionate, intense, endearing. He never outgrew it. "Balin and Balan" is as beautiful with nature-similes as were "Enid" and "Oenone." In Tennyson we have the odors of the country and the sea and the dewy night. He is laureate of the stars. Nature is not introduced, but his poems seem set in nature as daisies in a meadow. He was no city poet. Of the poet Blake, James Thomson writes:

"He came to the desert of London town
Gray miles long.
He wandered up, he wandered down,
Singing a quiet hymn."