Reverting, however, to the question of Tennysons ability to fathom the darker recesses of our nature, what shall be said of the Vision of Sin? For myself I can only avow that, whenever I read it, I feel as if some horrible gray fungus of the grave were growing over my heart, and over all the world around me. As for passion, I know few more profoundly passionate poems than Love and Duty. It paints with glowing concentrated power the conflict of duty with yearning passionate love, stronger than death. The Sisters, and Fatima, too, are fiercely passionate, as also is Maud. I should be surprised to hear that a lover could read Maud, and not feel the spring and mid-noon of passionate affection in it to the very core of him, so profoundly felt and gloriously expressed is it by the poet. Much of its power, again, is derived from that peculiarly Tennysonian ability to make Nature herself reflect, redouble, and interpret the human feeling. That is the power also of such supreme lyrics as Break, break! and In the Valley of Cauterets; of such chaste and consummate rendering of a noble womans self-sacrifice as Godiva, wherein shameless gargoyles stare, but the still air scarcely breathes for fear; and likewise of Come into the garden, Maud, an invocation that palpitates with rapture of young love, in which the sweet choir of flowers bear their part, and sing antiphony. The same feeling pervades the delicious passage commencing, Is that enchanted moon? and Go not, happy day. All this may be what Mr. Ruskin condemns as pathetic fallacy, but it is inevitable and right. For in our life doth nature live, ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud. The same Divine Spirit pervades man and nature; she, like ourselves, has her transient moods, as well as her tranquil immovable deeps. In her, too, is a passing as well as an eternal, while we apprehend either according to our own capacity, together with the emotional bias that dominates us at the moment. The vital and permanent in us holds the vital and permanent in her, while the temporary in us mirrors the transitory in her. I cannot think indeed that the more troubled and jarring moods of disharmony and fury are touched with quite the same degree of mastery in Maud as are the sunnier and happier. Tennyson hitherto had basked by preference in the brighter regions of his art, and the turbid Byronic vein appeared rather unexpectedly in him. The tame, sleek, daintily-feeding gourmêts of criticism yelped indeed their displeasure at these hysterics, as they termed the Sturm und Drang elements that appeared in Maud, especially since the poet dared appropriately to body these forth in somewhat harsh, abrupt language, and irregular metres. Such elements, in truth, hardly seemed so congenial to him as to Byron or Hugo. Yet they were welcome, as proving that our chief poet was not altogether irresponsive to the terrible social problems around him, to the corruptions, and ever-festering vices of the body politic, to the doubt, denial, and grim symptoms of upheaval at his very doors. For on the whole some of us had felt that the Poet-Laureate was almost too well contented with the general framework of things, with the prescriptive rights of long-unchallenged rule, and hoar comfortable custom, especially in England, as though these were in very deed divine, and no subterranean thunder were ever heard, even in this favored isle, threatening Church and State, and the very fabric of society. But the temper of his class and time spoke through him. Did not all men rejoice greatly when Prince Albert opened the Exhibition of 1851; when Cobden and the Manchester school won the battle of free-trade; when steam-engines and the electric telegraph were invented; when Wordsworths glorious time came, and the Revised Code passed into law; when science first told her enchanting fairy tales? Yet the Millennium tarries, and there is an exceeding bitter cry.
But in Maud, as indeed before in that fine sonorous chaunt, Locksley Hall, and later in Aylmers Field, the poets emphasis of appreciation is certainly reserved for the heroes, men who have inherited a strain of gloom, or ancestral disharmony moral and physical, within whom the morbific social humors break forth inevitably into plague-spots; the injustice and irony of circumstance lash them into revolt, wrath, and madness. Mr. R. H. Hutton, a critic who often writes with ability, but who seems to find a little difficulty in stepping outside the circle of his perhaps rather rigid misconceptions and predilections, makes the surely somewhat strange remark that Maud was written to reprobate hysterics. But I fear nay, I hope and believe that we cannot credit the poet with any such virtuous or didactic intention in the present instance, though of course the pregnant lines beginning Of old sat Freedom on the heights, the royal verses, the recent play so forcibly objected to by Lord Queensberry, together with various allusions to the red fool-fury of the Seine, and blind hysterics of the Celt, do indicate a very Conservative and law-abiding attitude. But other lines prove that after all what he mostly deprecates is the falsehood of extremes, the blind and hasty plunge into measures of mere destruction; for he praises the statesmen who take occasion by the hand, and make the bounds of freedom wider yet, and even gracefully anticipates the golden year.
The same principle on which I have throughout insisted as the key to most of Tennysons best poetry is the key also to the moving tale Enoch Arden, where the tropical island around the solitary shipwrecked mariner is gorgeously depicted, the picture being as full-Venetian, and resplendent in color, as those of the Day-Dream and Arabian Nights. But the conclusion of the tale is profoundly moving and pathetic, and relates a noble act of self-renouncement. Parts of Aylmers Field, too, are powerful.
And now we come to the Idylls, around which no little critical controversy has raged. It has been charged against them that they are more picturesque, scenic, and daintily-wrought than human in their interest. But though assuredly the poets love for the picturesque is in this noble epic for epic the Idylls in their completed state may be accounted amply indulged, I think it is seldom to the detriment of the human interest, and the remark I made about one of them, the Morte dArthur, really applies to all. The Arthur cycle is not historical, as Harold or Queen Mary is, where the style is often simple almost to baldness; the whole of it belongs to the reign of myth, legend, fairy story, and parable. Ornament, image, and picture are as much appropriate here as in Spensers Fairy Queen, of which indeed Tennysons poem often reminds me. But the light that never was on sea or land, the consecration and the poets dream, are a new revelation, made peculiarly in modern poetry, of true spiritual insight. And this not only throws fresh illuminating light into nature, but deepens also and enlarges our comprehension of man. If nature be known for a symbol and embodiment of the souls life, by means of their analogies in nature the human heart and mind may be more profoundly understood; while human emotions win a double clearness, or an added sorrow, from their fellowship and association with outward scenes. Nature can only be fathomed through her consanguinity with our own desires, aspirations, and fears, while these again become defined and articulate by means of her related appearances. A poet, then, who is sensitive to such analogies confers a two-fold benefit upon us.
And now we come to the Idylls, around which no little critical controversy has raged. It has been charged against them that they are more picturesque, scenic, and daintily-wrought than human in their interest. But though assuredly the poets love for the picturesque is in this noble epic for epic the Idylls in their completed state may be accounted amply indulged, I think it is seldom to the detriment of the human interest, and the remark I made about one of them, the Morte dArthur, really applies to all. The Arthur cycle is not historical, as Harold or Queen Mary is, where the style is often simple almost to baldness; the whole of it belongs to the reign of myth, legend, fairy story, and parable. Ornament, image, and picture are as much appropriate here as in Spensers Fairy Queen, of which indeed Tennysons poem often reminds me. But the light that never was on sea or land, the consecration and the poets dream, are a new revelation, made peculiarly in modern poetry, of true spiritual insight. And this not only throws fresh illuminating light into nature, but deepens also and enlarges our comprehension of man. If nature be known for a symbol and embodiment of the souls life, by means of their analogies in nature the human heart and mind may be more profoundly understood; while human emotions win a double clearness, or an added sorrow, from their fellowship and association with outward scenes. Nature can only be fathomed through her consanguinity with our own desires, aspirations, and fears, while these again become defined and articulate by means of her related appearances. A poet, then, who is sensitive to such analogies confers a two-fold benefit upon us.