So let us begin the year resolved to do our duty as citizens, fearlessly and honestly, striving to show our neighbors that social morality is a real religion in itself, by which men can order their lives and purify their hearts. Let us seek to be gentler as fathers, husbands, comrades, or masters; more dutiful as sons and daughters, learners or helpers; more diligent as workers, students, or teachers; more loving and self-denying as men and as women everywhere. Let us think less about calling on Humanity and more about being humane. Let us talk less about religion, and try more fully to live religion. We have sufficiently explained our principles in words. Let us manifest them in act. I do not know that more is to be gained by the further preaching of our creed much less by external profession of our own conviction. The world will be ours, the day that men see that Positivism in fact enables men to live a more pure and social life, that it fills us with a desire for all useful knowledge, stimulates us to help one another and bear with one another, makes our homes the brighter, our children the better, our lives the nobler by its presence; and that on the foundation of order, and in the spirit of love, and with progress before us as our aim, we can live for others, live openly before all men. Fortnightly Review.
THE POETRY OF TENNYSON
BY RODEN NOEL
It is perhaps difficult for men of middle age to estimate Tennyson aright. For we who love poetry were brought up, as it were, at his feet, and he cast the magic of his fascination over our youth. We have gone away, we have travelled in other lands, absorbed in other preoccupations, often revolving problems different from those concerning which we took counsel with him; and we hear new voices, claiming authority, who aver that our old master has been superseded, that he has no message for a new generation, that his voice is no longer a talisman of power. Then we return to the country of our early love, and what shall our report be? Each one must answer for himself; but my report will be entirely loyal to those early and dear impressions. I am of those who believe that Tennyson has still a message for the world. Men become impatient with hearing Aristides so often called just, but is that the fault of Aristides? They are impatient also with a reputation, which necessarily is what all great reputations must so largely be the empty echo of living voices from blank walls. Now again not the people, but certain critics call it but a weed. Yet how strange these fashions in poetry are! I well remember Lord Broughton, Byrons friend, expressing to me, when I was a boy, his astonishment that the bust of Tennyson by Woolner should have been thought worthy of a place near that of Lord Byron in Trinity College, Cambridge. Lord Byron was a great poet; but Mr. Tennyson, though he had written pretty verses, and so on. For one thing, the men of that generation deemed Tennyson terribly obscure. In Memoriam, it was held, nobody could possibly understand. The poet, being original, had to make his own public. Men nurtured on Scott and Byron could not understand him. Now we hear no more of his obscurity. Moreover, he spoke as the mouthpiece of his own time. Doubts, aspirations, visions unfamiliar to the aging, breathed melodiously through him. Again, how contemptuously do Broad-church psychologists like George Macdonald, and writers for the Spectator, as well as literary persons belonging to what I may term the finikin school, on the other hand, now talk of our equally great poet Byron. How detestable must the North be, if the South be so admirable! But while Tennyson spoke to me in youth, Byron spoke to me in boyhood, and I still love both.
Whatever may have to be discounted from the popularity of Tennyson on account of fashion and a well-known name, or on account of his harmony with the (more or less provincial) ideas of the large majority of Englishmen, his popularity is a fact of real benefit to the public, and highly creditable to them at the same time. The establishment of his name in popular favor is but very partially accounted for by the circumstance that, when he won his spurs, he was among younger singers the only serious champion in the field, since, if I mistake not, he was at one time a less popular poet than Mr. Robert Montgomery. Vox populi is not always vox Dei, but it may be so accidentally, and then the people reap benefit from their happy blunder. The great poet who won the laurel before Tennyson has never been popular at all, and Tennyson is the only true English poet who has pleased the public since Byron, Walter Scott, Tom Moore, and Mrs. Hemans. But he had to conquer their suffrages, for his utterance, whatever he may have owed to Keats, was original, and his substance the outcome of an opulent and profound personality. These were serious obstacles to success, for he neither went deep into the general heart like Burns, nor appealed to superficial sentiments in easy language like Scott, Moore, and Byron. In his earliest volume indeed there was a preponderance of manner over matter; it was characterized by a certain dainty prettiness of style, that scarcely gave promise of the high spiritual vision and rich complexity of human insight to which he has since attained, though it did manifest a delicate feeling for nature in association with human moods, an extraordinarily subtle sensibility of all senses, and a luscious pictorial power. Not Endymion had been more luxuriant. All was steeped in golden languors. There were faults in plenty, and of course the critics, faithful to the instincts of their kind, were jubilant to nose them. To adapt Coleridges funny verses, not the Church of St. Geryon, nor the legendary Rhine, but the stinks and stenches of Kölntown do such offal-feeders love to enumerate, and distinguish. But the poet in his verses on Musty Christopher gave one of these people a Roland for his Oliver. Stuart Mill, as Mr. Mathews, in his lately published and very instructive lecture on Tennyson, points out, was the one critic in a million who remembered Popes precept,
Be thou the first true merit to befriend,
His praise is lost who waits till all commend.
Yet it is only natural that the mediocrities, who for a moment keep the door of Fame, should scrutinize with somewhat jaundiced eye the credentials of new aspirants, since every entry adds fresh bitterness to their own exclusion.
But really it is well for us, the poets elect lovers, to remember that he once had faults, however few he may now retain; for the perverse generation who dance not when the poet pipes to them, nor mourn when he weeps, have turned upon Tennyson with the cry that he is all fault who has no fault at all they would have us regard him as a kind of Andrea del Sarto, a blameless artistic monster, a poet of unimpeachable technical skill, but keeping a certain dead level of moderate merit. It is as well to be reminded that this at all events is false. The dawn of his young art was beautiful; but the artist had all the generous faults of youthful genius excess, vision confused with gorgeous color and predominant sense, too palpable artifice of diction, indistinctness of articulation in the outline, intricately-woven cross-lights flooding the canvas, defect of living interest; while Coleridge said that he began to write poetry without an ear for metre. Neither Adeline, Madeline, nor Eleanore are living portraits, though Eleanore is gorgeously painted. The Ode to Memory has isolated images of rare beauty, but it is kaleidoscopic in effect; the fancy is playing with loose foam-wreaths, rather than the imagination taking things by the heart. But our great poet has gone beyond these. He has himself rejected twenty-six out of the fifty-eight poems published in his first volume; while some of those even in the second have been altogether rewritten. Such defects are eminently present in the lately republished poem written in youth, The Lovers Tale, though this too has been altered. As a storehouse of fine imagery, metaphor, and deftly moulded phrase, of blank verse also whose sonorous rhythm must surely be a fabric of adult architecture, the piece can hardly be surpassed; but the tale as tale lingers and lapses, overweighted with the too gorgeous trappings under which it so laboriously moves. And such expression as the following, though not un-Shakspearian, is hardly quarried from the soundest material in Shakspeare for, after all, Shakspeare was a euphuist now and then
Yet Mariana had the virtue, which the poet has displayed so pre-eminently since, of concentration. Every subtle touch enhances the effect he intends to produce, that of the desolation of the deserted woman, whose hope is nearly extinguished; Nature hammering a fresh nail into her coffin with every innocent aspect or movement. Beautiful too are Love and Death and The Poets Mind; while in The Poet we have the oft-quoted line: Dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn, the love of love.
Mr. G. Brimley was the first, I believe, to point out the distinctive peculiarity of Lord Tennysons treatment of landscape. It is treated by him dramatically; that is to say, the details of it are selected so as to be interpretative of the particular mood or emotion he wishes to represent. Thus in the two Marianas, they are painted with the minute distinctness appropriate to the morbid and sickening observation of the lonely woman, whose attention is distracted by no cares, pleasures, or satisfied affections. That is a pregnant remark, a key to unlock a good deal of Tennysons work with. Byron and Shelley, though they are carried out of themselves in contemplating Nature, do not, I think, often take her as interpreter of moods alien to their own. In Wordsworths Excursion, it is true, Margarets lonely grief is thus delineated though the neglect of her garden and the surroundings of her cottage; yet this is not so characteristic a note of his nature-poetry. In the Millers Daughter and the Gardeners Daughter the lovers would be little indeed without the associated scene so germane to the incidents narrated, both as congenial setting of the picture for a spectator, and as vitally fused with the emotion of the lovers; while never was more lovely landscape-painting of the gentle order than in the Gardeners Daughter. Lessing, who says that poetry ought never to be pictorial, would, I suppose, much object to Tennysons; but to me, I confess, this mellow, lucid, luminous word-painting of his is entirely delightful. It refutes the criticism that words cannot convey a picture by perfectly conveying it. Solvitur ambulando; the Gardeners Daughter standing by her rose-bush, a sight to make an old man young, remaining in our vision to confound all crabbed pedants with pet theories.
In his second volume, indeed, the poets art was well mastered, for here we find the Lotos-eaters, Œnone, The Palace of Art, A Dream of Fair Women, the tender May-Queen, and the Lady of Shalott. Perhaps the first four of these are among the very finest works of Tennyson. In the mouth of the love-lorn nymph Œnone he places the complaint concerning Paris into which there enters so much delightful picture of the scenery around Mount Ida, and of those fair immortals who came to be judged by the beardless apple-arbiter. How deliciously flows the verse! though probably it flows still more entrancingly in the Lotos-eaters, wandering there like clouds of fragrant incense, or some slow heavy honey, or a rare amber unguent poured out. How wonderfully harmonious with the dream-mood of the dreamers are phrase, image, and measure! But we need not quote the lovely choric song wherein occur the lines
Music that gentlier on the spirit lies
Than tired eyelids upon tired eyes,
so entirely restful and happy in their simplicity. If Art would always blossom so, she might be forgiven if she blossomed only for her own sake; yet this controversy regarding Art for Art need hardly have arisen, since Art may certainly bloom for her own sake, if only she consent to assimilate in her blooming, and so exhale for her votaries, in due proportion, all elements essential to Nature, and Humanity: for in the highest artist all faculties are transfigured into one supreme organ; while among forms her form is the most consummate, among fruits her fruit offers the most satisfying refreshment. What a delicately true picture have we here
And like a downward smoke, the slender stream
Along the cliff to fall, and pause and fall did seem,
where we feel also the poets remarkable faculty of making word and rhythm an echo and auxiliary of the sense. Not only have we the three cæsuras respectively after fall, and pause and fall, but the length, and soft amplitude of the vowel sounds with liquid consonants aid in the realization of the picture, reminding of Miltons beautiful From morn to noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve, a summers day. The same faculty is notable in the rippling lilt of the charming little Brook song, and indeed everywhere. In the Dream of Fair Women we have a series of cabinet portraits, presenting a situation of human interest with a few animating touches, but still chiefly through suggestive surroundings. There occurs the magnificent phrase of Cleopatra: We drank the Lybian sun to sleep, and lit lamps which outburned Canopus. The force of expression could be carried no further than throughout this poem, and by expression of course I do not mean pretty words, or power-words for there own sweet sake, for these, expressing nothing, whatever else they may be, are not expression; but I mean the forcible or felicitous presentment of thought, image, feeling, or incident, through pregnant and beautiful language in harmony with them; though the subtle and indirect suggestion of language is unquestionably an element to be taken into account by poetry. The Palace of Art is perhaps equal to the former poem for lucid splendor of description, in this instance pointing a moral, allegorizing a truth. Scornful pride, intellectual arrogance, selfish absorption in æsthetic enjoyment, is imaged forth in this vision of the queens world-reflecting palace, and its various treasures the end being a sense of unendurable isolation, engendering madness, but at last repentance, and reconcilement with the scouted commonalty of mankind.
The dominant note of Tennysons poetry is assuredly the delineation of human moods modulated by Nature, and through a system of Nature-symbolism. Thus, in Elaine, when Lancelot has sent a courtier to the queen, asking her to grant him audience, that he may present the diamonds won for her in tourney, she receives the messenger with unmoved dignity; but he, bending low and reverently before her, saw with a sidelong eye
The shadow of some piece of pointed lace
In the queens shadow vibrate on the walls,
And parted, laughing in his courtly heart.
The Morte dArthur affords a striking instance of this peculiarly Tennysonian method. That is another of the very finest pieces. Such poetry may suggest labor, but not more than does the poetry of Virgil or Milton. Every word is the right word, and each in the right place. Sir H. Taylor indeed warns poets against wanting to make every word beautiful. And yet here it must be owned that the result of such an effort is successful, so delicate has become the artistic tact of this poet in his maturity.1 For, good expression being the happy adaptation of language to meaning, it follows that sometimes good expression will be perfectly simple, even ordinary in character, and sometimes it will be ornate, elaborate, dignified. He who can thus vary his language is the best verbal artist, and Tennyson can thus vary it. In this poem, the Morte dArthur, too, we have deep-chested music. Except in some of Wordsworth and Shelley, or in the magnificent Hyperion of Keats, we have had no such stately, sonorous organ-music in English verse since Milton as in this poem, or in Tithonus, Ulysses, Lucretius, and Guinevere. From the majestic overture,