Part 2 — TENNYSON: ARTIST AND MORALIST. [59]

TENNYSON: ARTIST AND MORALIST. [59]

No English voice in the world of letters wakes the pulses of our age to the thrill of joy which greeted Childe Harold and Rob Roy. Those monarchs of the popular heart left no successors; or if their mantle hung for a moment on the shoulders of another, it is now buried in the grave of Dickens. We have yet several novelists. We have many poets. But none has obtained universal appreciation; to none has been awarded with general consent the palm of paramount renown. Yet it will not be questioned that few living writers command a larger following, are remembered with more affection, and heard with greater eagerness than the author of “In Memoriam.”

There are few studies more delightful than the growth of a poet’s mind. In the case of Tennyson we witness the whole process of development. We have seen him in his timid beginnings and in his brilliant prime. More than forty years have passed since a slender volume of poems introduced a young graduate of Cambridge to the English-reading world. The modest offering fell upon a time which had garnered larger and riper fruit. There were giants in those days. Byron indeed was dead, but his fame, although it had passed its zenith, still shone the brightest in the firmament. Shelley had preceded him, but the reputation of that sweet singer and genuine artist was growing, and has not ceased to grow. The lovers of Campbell had not surrendered their faith that the Pleasures of Hope and the story of Gertrude of Wyoming were but a prelude to loftier strains. From the grave of Adonaïs men’s eyes had turned with regret and wonder to the bold outline of Hyperion and the rich shadows of St. Agnes’ Eve. Coleridge was a wreck, but the finger of his Ancient Mariner pointed many a thoughtful gaze toward the untravelled country which fringes the visible world. The master-hand that had swept the chords of Scottish minstrelsy had not yet lost all its original vigor. And Wordsworth’s voice gave loud and clear the signal of poetic reform, and all who were ready to desert the out-worn moulds of classic thought and classic imagery had begun to close around his banner.

Into that circle of splendid names no youthful aspirant could win admittance without a challenge. More fortunate, however, than Keats, Tennyson secured through university friendships some indulgence from the reviews. A few were eager to crown him. It is now acknowledged that their unwinnowed praise discovered less of the judge than of the partisan. The conservative temper of Wilson was provoked by the cordial welcome accorded the new-comer in certain quarters to assume an attitude of repression that was, to say the least, ungenerous. A measured severity might have been amply justified. This first venture was indeed superior to those Hours of Idleness which had drawn the sneer of the Edinburgh Review. But he would have been a bold prophet who in 1830 from “Claribel” and the “Mermaid” would have foretold the “Idylls of the King.”

Tennyson ripened slowly. His next volume was published two years later. It was enriched with the “Lady of Shalott,” the “Lotus-Eaters,” and the “Palace of Art,” but many of the poems were disfigured by his earlier mannerisms, and some discovered an affected mysticism and a hankering after novel expression that was not indicative of health or strength. The poet, too, had betrayed a sensitiveness to criticism that augured ill for the discipline of his powers. It was still an open question whether the great gifts which he unquestionably possessed would be burnished by patient labor, or after some idle brandishings rust in satisfied repose. Nor would he have been the first for whom victory too early and lightly won has twined the poppy with her laurel. A silence of ten years followed, and it seemed probable that another name must be added to those of Campbell and Coleridge on the roll of splendid disappointments.

But during this long interval he had not been idle. He had thought and he had suffered. He had learned much and discarded much. On a sudden, his treasury was opened, and the fruits of energy and discipline fell in glistening showers at the feet of a public which had almost forgotten him. The “Morte d’Arthur,” “Dora,” “Love and Duty,” “Ulysses,” “Locksley Hall,” appealed in divers tones to a charmed and astonished audience. By one sweep, and with no feeble hand, he had planted his standard in many and widely different fields. The bright forecast of his college friends was justified. He had sprung at a bound into the front rank of living poets.

We pass over the “Princess,” which added little to his reputation, and reach 1850, a cardinal point in his career. In that year it is just to say that “Lycidas” and “Adonaïs” were eclipsed by “In Memoriam.” This remarkable work, at once the noblest monody and most impressive of heart histories, interpreted the author’s life and consolidated his fame. “Maud” came next, and, morbid, incoherent, structureless as it is, would have severely tried a credit less firmly rooted. “Maud” indeed seems to owe its origin rather to the blind impulse of crude intemperate youth, or the promptings of some delirious fever, than the deliberate, healthful movement of the poet’s higher faculties. It marks the single break in the progress of his mind.

Not a few of Tennyson’s admirers had always affirmed the “Morte d’Arthur” to be the strongest of his works. That fragment was published in 1842, but it was not until 1859 that four kindred poems were drawn from that Arthurian romance which had early haunted his fancy and has chiefly employed the energies of his riper years. The “Idylls of the King” have had several successors, and the “Last Tournament” completes the cycle.

An effort has lately been made in certain quarters to depreciate Tennyson. We do not object to comparisons if they are fruitful in suggestion, and are instituted in a candid spirit. But perhaps analysis affords the surer test. We ourselves hold Tennyson to be the first of living English poets, and incline to rank him above Byron and beside Wordsworth. In the course of an attempt to indicate his place in literature, we shall quote wherever quotations may sustain or illustrate our ideas. We shall draw mainly from those works which exhibit a writer at his best. The height of mountain ranges is gauged by their loftiest peaks, and the merit of a public benefactor by his virtues, not his shortcomings. A poet is a public benefactor. Not his failures, but his masterpiece, should supply the materials of an honest judgment.

I.

Vision, in the old Roman conception, was the distinguishing faculty of the poet. And indeed vates, not poeta, marks the fundamental condition of his art. The seer precedes the maker. It is not indispensable that he should see more than other men, but he will see more clearly. His perceptions are acute and nimble; his sensations are intense. The retina and ear-drum deliver with peculiar speed and precision their messages to his brain. His glance tracks the eagle in his circles, and numbers the hues of the western sky. He catches the whisper of fainting winds, and spells the cadence of the rippling stream. To him all outlines are sharp and crisp, every tint is vivid, every tone is clear. Senses exquisitely organized are the first essential of the poet.

Sensations are fraught with countless degrees of pleasure, with infinite shades of pain. Those objects whose ideas awaken a feeling of delight we call beautiful. To register the beautiful is an instinct of the poet. With a nice reference to the pleasure imparted, he discriminates forms, divides the chromatic scale, graduates the gamut of sound. In a word, his æsthetic judgment is wakeful and unerring. But the keenest joys of the mind are not begotten by beauty pure and simple. There is a fuller and sweeter satisfaction than that derived from kaleidoscope combinations of color, arabesques without significance, and fantasias without text or theme. Wherever design emerges, the notion of fitness is born. The Greek found it in the human body. We can trace it in the flower and the star. When we contemplate those things of which design may be predicated, there is blended with the feeling of pleasure a perception of inward adaptation. The idea of perfection is married to the idea of beauty. The ideal is their offspring. Upon it the æsthetic judgment unaided dares not pronounce. The complex faculty, whose province is the ideal, is taste. It is the second requisite of the poet.

Most persons of culture and refinement have taste in some degree. They are no strangers to the pure delight evoked by a smiling landscape. In the human form they enjoy the beauty of outline and proportion, and recognize the nice adjustment of structure to a central aim. But their joys are transient. The flower fades; sunset yields to moonlight; autumn touches with her pencil the canvas of the spring; one graceful attitude melts into another; emotions course across the countenance like winds over standing wheat. The poet comes. His mission is to chain the fleeting, to fix the evanescent, to reproduce the past. He brings you a rose with the bloom on it; calls up the buried friend; stays the sinking sun on the edge of his western bed. His life is a long revolt against the law of change. Nor is he confined to imitation. His sphere transcends realities. He may play with nature, if he will not violate her. His memory is not a store-house only, but a crucible as well, where the phenomena of sense lie fused in a glowing golden mass. Through his brain float airy shapes surpassing and yet suggesting the grace of earthly forms; ideals strange and fantastic, yet bound by subtle ties of relationship to types of the actual world. His fancy is ever in labor. Incessant gestation, incessant parturition, engage her energies. Reproduction, creation, is a law of the poet’s being. It is this which vindicates his right to the noble name of maker.

Keen senses, a just taste, creative force, compose the common dowry of artists. But art is threefold—plastic, pictorial, poetic. To each species belongs a peculiar medium in which memories are embalmed and fancies embodied. The media are solids, colors, words. In language lie certain powers and certain limitations. The poet divines them. He produces a speaking picture, but he remembers that much of a picture cannot be spoken. He demonstrates that much also may be told that cannot be painted. On his canvas vivacity and intensity do duty for light and shade. Elaboration, suggestion, silence, are the elements of his perspective. He borrows from sculpture the significance of isolation, and the incisive lesson of the group. Images, metaphors, similes, are the poet’s graving-tools. He learns their latent capacities and their inherent flaws. He secures subtle effects by climax, antithesis, evolution. He plays the chemist with ideas, and presents them in every stage of development, now vaporous, now congealed. He weighs words, detects their finer applications, and fathoms the deeper meanings which are coiled about their roots. And, finally, he masters the mechanism of speech, the organic structure of sentences, the joints and vertebræ of his native tongue. One step remains, to seize the principles of metre, the secrets of rhythm and cæsura, the march and music of verse. His panoply is finished. He is a poet.

Let us apply some of these tests to Tennyson. And, first, his power of simple imitation. At first sight this seems no lofty triumph of the poet’s art. And yet how much it implies! To translate substance into the unsubstantial. To portray the visible and tangible in that which has neither color nor dimension. Above all, to transfuse through the spirit of man the spirit of nature. It behooves him who would compass this to purge the heart of emotion, abjure self-consciousness, and forget, like the Pythian priestess, his own identity. He is not to steep his landscape in sentiment of his own, nor ascribe to it a fictitious sympathy with human moods and passions. The outward beauty he contemplates must traverse his mental atmosphere, untinctured, unrefracted, like white light. We must catch in his work the soul of the scene, a spirit rising from it like an exhalation, not drenching it with alien dews. We find a happy instance of right treatment in this cool upland valley from “Œnone”:

Beside this place the rank luxuriance of a tropic island where “Enoch Arden,” shipwrecked, waited for a sail:

Of pure imitative art Scott and Wordsworth are the great modern masters. Yet we shall all acknowledge that the passages quoted exhibit a rare excellence. It would be hard to match in Theocritus the breezy freshness of the “Brook.” As we listen, we lose ourselves, and seem to penetrate the joyous heart of nature. We too are in Arcadia. It is the morning of the world, and the infant god of some slender streamlet hums his naïve song to Pan, who lies along the sward:

We have dwelt at length on the sincerity with which Tennyson interprets nature. It is the stamp of the true poet. The dilettante, however cunning, cannot counterfeit it. He cannot keep himself out of the picture, but invests it with his own sentiment, and tricks it out in the whims and caprices of the hour. It is otherwise with Wordsworth. That high-priest of nature enters her presence reverently, with humble and candid heart. He puts off the vanities and weaknesses of man on the verge of her holy ground. From his lips her lessons fall with a simple earnestness, like oracles from the mouth of a child. Her truths he incarnates, but does not presume to clothe.

While it is false art to attribute to nature a conscious sympathy with man, it is true that she at times discovers an unconscious harmony with his moods. Our emotions are deepened by the accord. The happy are the happier for sunshine. The sad are saddest in the night and the rain. To aim at this mystic unison, to strike one note from feeling and from circumstance, is legitimate and delightful. Let us contrast an example of such treatment with the less truthful method to which we have referred. We ought always to study a theory in some felicitous expression of it, and therefore we take these graceful lines from Dr. Holmes. The stars and flowers touched by the woes of fallen man have conspired to watch and warn him. The flowers cannot bear the sight of human misery.

At the first glance this moves, and pleases; because the emotion of the moment veils the extravagant hyperbole. The writer is an artist, and makes us see, as it were, through tears. But the lines do not grow upon us like the truly beautiful. As we read them a second time, there comes over us a feeling of annoyance, almost of pain, that the flowers should be misinterpreted, the stars misconstrued. We tremble before nature’s shocks and storms, and cannot afford to darken her brightest bloom or trouble her sweet serenity. Look now at this figure of “Mariana,” weeping, forsaken, “in the moated grange!” There is no pathetic prelude, no preliminary appeal to human sympathies. A neglected garden and a lonely house. A reach of level waste, colorless, silent, cold. The desolation is contagious, and just as the heart is sinking into a state of depression and despair, the moan of the stricken girl falls quivering on the ear.

We are very far from saying that Tennyson is everywhere free from the pathetic fallacy. But his sins of the kind occur chiefly in some vein of sportive apologue, like the “Talking Oak,” or in the mouth of Maud’s morbid lover, half distraught by temper and wholly crazed by crime. And, indeed, if any could be pardoned for beholding in all things one image, it would be, no doubt, the lover. In the old myth, love guided the hand of art; but Pygmalion was a sculptor, not a landscape painter.

The portrayal of the human form is one of the painter’s triumphs, as it is the sole province of plastic art. Poetry, for the most part, evades a description of personal beauty, and is content with a suggestion. Yet there are two or three etchings in the “Palace of Art” which seem to us not unworthy of a place in that gallery of Philostratus which a poet’s hand repeopled:

These are mere outlines. But Tennyson has drawn one figure with almost pictorial finish and force. It is Aphrodite revealing herself to Paris on Mount Ida:

This is genuine painting. There is form and color in it, and, withal, the spirit of beauty bathing the whole, untainted by the faintest suggestion of wanton love.

In the temple of outward nature poetry is only the acolyte of painting. But one shrine is more exclusively her own. She is mistress of the heart. Over that ocean no other wing sustains continuous flight. There are waves of impulse which canvas cannot reflect, and currents of emotion untraced by the limner’s skill. There are dainty joys and fears that mock his grasp, and gust of passion that confound his cunning. Pictorial art must read the soul in the face, and the face is at best a clouded mirror. From the poet we hide nothing. The growth of character, the drift of habit, the pressure of inherited tendencies, springs of motive, stings of appetite—he discerns and deciphers all. But he must not speak in riddles: he is bound to make his meaning clear. He owes a duty to the humblest. They look to him to lend thought a form, shadow a substance; to explain the strange by the familiar, and flood the whole with the mellow flight of fancy. The poet is, in a certain sense, what Sidney would make him, the right popular philosopher. On the success of Tennyson in this field there is some difference of opinion. The fervor of his sympathies within a certain range and the delicacy of his intuitions are unquestioned. His style is allowed to be rich in color, and often fraught with incisive force. Let us glance at some passages which depict the finer shades of feeling, or are conspicuous for felicitous expression. We will then look at the charges, so often brought against Tennyson, of obscurity and a want of dramatic power.

It is a fact of common experience that quite opposite emotions, wrought to intensity, reach a state of fusion. They move, as it were, in converging lines, and their vanishing point is pain; or rather, they have what physicists would call a common dew-point. Thus we hear of the luxury of sorrow and of love’s sweet smart. Coleridge has touched this psychic truth with extreme tenderness in “Genevieve.” He shows us the young girl rapt in a troubled wonder before the strange feeling that storms her gentle breast. Her heart flutters like a snared bird:

So in one of Tennyson’s “Idylls,” the eyes of the happy Enid are suffused with tears. It is hardly possible to read the lines without loving human nature:

Most persons have known those transient attachments which are born of “accident, blind contact, and the strong necessity of loving.” In the “Gardener’s Daughter” some one alludes in this playful fashion to the dethroned darling of his salad days:

Few who have read the new “Maid’s Tragedy” have forgotten “Elaine.” There is no sweeter face in story. We trace a master’s hand in the passage where a passionate sympathy holds her from her sleep, and the deep lines of Lancelot’s countenance are mirrored in her white soul:

Lancelot is always gracious to her, and grateful for her tender care, but he is moody and absent, and instinct tells her that his love can never be hers. She bears home a heavy heart:

One more. A song of Tristram’s, rife with the graceful gayety that masks and half-redeems a faithless heart. It might have been made by Ronsard, and sung by Bussy d’Amboise. The husband of “Isolt of Brittany” and the lover of “Isolt of Britain” gives the rationale of broken vows:

The admirers of Byron and the poets of the Georgian era find Tennyson obscure. By obscurity they ought to mean a darkness born of confusion, the cloud of fallacy, the vagueness of incoherence. Crude thoughts, unfledged fancies, halting metaphors, are obscure. Poetasters are commonly dark, and it would be easy to show that Byron himself in his best work, the fourth canto of Childe Harold, is sometimes guilty of obscurity. And it must be admitted that some poems of Tennyson’s youth, and likewise “Maud,” are open to this objection. But if, as we believe, the charge is pointed at “In Memoriam,” “Love and Duty,” or the “Palace of Art,” then we deny its force. It may be that they who find enigmas in Paradise Lost and “In Memoriam” mistake the source of their difficulties. We incline to depreciate what we fail to comprehend. We forget that deep waters are not necessarily turbid; that novelty is not obscurity. As we climb a mountain, we gain new views of the valley beneath, yet the novel landscape may be no less vivid than the old. There is, indeed, a dulness of the ear that detects no clue to the myriad threads of harmony. There is a myoptic disease which sees nothing but indistinctness beyond its narrow horizon. In such cases the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are mystified.

We have said that the poet owes a duty to the humblest. That duty is fulfilled when he has conjured his fancies into visible shapes, and given truth a concrete form. He is not called upon to find eyes for the blind, or learning for the ignorant. It is enough if at his banquet there is food for all stomachs. The poet owes a duty not to the humble only.

There are, for example, two methods by which poetry may illuminate history. It may invest personal character with the truth and vigor of life, and portray detached scenes in correct and brilliant colors. Or it may reveal to the imagination by exact and felicitous metaphor the sequence of events, the march of knowledge, the drift of opinion, and the “long result of time.” Thus Lucan poetized a narrative, Lucretius thinks in imagery. We recall no better illustration of the former treatment than the fine stanza from Childe Harold:

The anecdote is a noble one, and has gained nobility in the telling. But anecdotes after all are not the marrow of history. Something may be learned from Montesquieu as well as from Marmontel. Two lines from “Locksley Hall” exhibit the other method of interpreting history. The lines aim at nothing less than at once to condense and illumine the most pregnant epoch of modern times, the eighteenth century. This looks certainly like a preposterous abuse of that definition assigned to the drama, “an abstract and brief chronicle of the time.” Let us recall for a moment the period of Louis Quinze. The feudal system has fallen. The flowers are withered, the chains remain. The nobles have become courtiers, municipal privilege has perished, the peasant is a slave. Dishonor on the throne, bankruptcy in the treasury, the poor starving, the rich corrupt. Oppression tightening his grasp, and knowledge learning to realize the woe and to divine the remedy. On one side, despair that has begun to think of vengeance; on the other, blind arrogance that does not dream of retribution. And now, is not the whole story told with almost terrible simplicity in the compass of these lines?

It may be said that Byron was well-read in history; but he held that only romantic characters and striking facts were fit subjects of poetic treatment. That is not our opinion. We believe Byron gave the best he had. Moreover, it is not true that poetry may borrow nothing from history but personal traits and isolated events. That narrow view of the poet’s province was corrected for English literature by the Paradise Regained. Poetry is no mendicant, to be put off with the stale scraps and shallow gossip of the servants’ hall. Her seat is at the high table, beside the masters of the house.

Tennyson, we are told, has no dramatic power. It is true that he has written no drama. Does it follow that he is wanting in dramatic power?

Derivation often tells us more of words than of men. A drama is something done, not told or sung; neither narrative nor ode, but something done. First, then, we must have doers; or, if you please, actors. Our actors must prove themselves alive, they must be impelled to move. The impelling force is incident. But detached scenes illustrative of character do not make a drama, incident is not plot. The action which develops character must at the same time tend toward a certain end, the catastrophe of the piece. A drama, then, in the strictest sense is this: a development of character in situations which excite to action in a particular direction.

Where the evolution of plot is subordinate to the portrayal of character, the drama is loose and inorganic, like many of Shakespeare’s plays. Where the elaboration of personal traits is merged in the accomplishment of the event, the drama leans toward the epic, like a tragedy of Æschylus. Perfect equimarch in the development of character and plot stamps the ideal drama. Dramatic power in this sense is one of the rarest of human gifts, and perhaps has been exerted nowhere but in the plays of Sophocles. The phrase has, in English criticism, a much narrower meaning, and points simply to the exhibition of character by action.

We acknowledge that those poems of Tennyson which preceded the “Idylls of the King” gave little evidence of dramatic talent. Like the works of Byron, they are for the most part lyrical, reflective. In them the “beings of the mind” are rather analyzed than animated. The poet interprets them. They do not speak for themselves. Even dramatic insight, which is another thing than dramatic power, seems at times to be wanting. Thus his “Ulysses” is a modern soul grappling with the framework of Homeric times. “Margaret,” “Madeleine,” “Isabel,” are lovely dreams, not lovely women. In the “Princess,” if anywhere, we should look for the development of character. But as the persons of the tale pass across the stage, we incline to suspect with the prince that they are but shadows, “and all the mind is clouded with a doubt.” Indeed, little Lillia, whose burst of pretty petulance suggests the theme, is by far the most lifelike figure.

But the judgment passed upon living poets is at best provisional, and subject to reversal on appeal. The writer of pastorals will perhaps produce an Æneid in his riper years; “L’Allegro” and “Lycidas” may be succeeded by an epic. In the cluster of poems which embodies the Arthurian legends, there is much discrimination of character. The courtly flippancy of “Gawain” is distinguished from Tristram’s joyous levity. “Etarre” is vicious, “Vivien” is base. “Enid” is not a gentler being than “Elaine,” yet her meekness is finely contrasted with the latter’s emotional nature. In “Lancelot” we have a noble spirit in the toils of a great crime. In “Arthur,” the perfect equipose of character, illumined by a sublime resolve.

Nor are the foremost persons of the poems mere portraits. They are actors as well. They approach for the most part unheralded. Their temper and motives are self-betrayed, or hinted with a wise reserve. Their personal traits are evoked by incident or emphasized in dialogue. Here certainly is dramatic power of a certain kind. Not the highest which creates a drama—is it high enough for an epic? We incline to doubt. At least, it has produced none. We cannot allow that the “Idylls” which are grouped around the figure of the king constitute an epic poem.

The epic—we speak of the Æneid—is distinguished from the drama by this, that the development of character is subordinate to the evolution of plot, the actors are merged in the action. And as the drama may lean toward the epic, so the epic may lean toward history. That the poet unites in his own person the functions of scene-painter, machinist, and chorēgus, is only a difference of form.

Now, it is not so much grasp of character as nexus of plot that we miss in the “Idylls.” Scott’s Rokeby is an epic, yet Bertram Risingham is not more lifelike than “Lancelot.” But in Rokeby the story grows; one event generates another, the catastrophe is inevitable. Episodes are admitted in the epic, but they must be natural growths, or at least successful grafts. For example, “Elaine” and “Guinevere” stand in true organic relation, but “Enid” and “Vivien” have nothing in common with the rest of the cycle but their social atmosphere and casual reference to familiar names. In the poet’s mind, no doubt, the old Arthurian romances have been fused into a kind of unity. They present to him a coherent picture; discover a central thought. It is the soul at war with flesh, aspiration foiled by appetite, the eagle stung by the serpent. But he has conveyed the idea by short and random strokes. We catch only glimpses of it, and are not permitted to watch the progressive development. In the “Idylls of the King” there is the matter of an epic, but not the form. We should prefer to place them in a class apart, which might include the Faerie Queen.

On the range, finish, and accuracy of Tennyson’s diction, we need not dwell. But no view of a poet’s artistic powers would be complete without a glance at his command of melody and rhythm. For sweetness and clearness of tone, the choral hymn in the “Lotus-Eaters,” and the “Bugle” and “Cradle” songs which beguile entr’actes in the “Princess” are excelled by few English lyrics. In grasp of rhythm Tennyson yields to no recent poet, except Shelley. There is a striking instance of rhythmic effect in the “Palace of Sin.” A strain of music floats in upon the ear, deepens, swells, and at length bursts forth in an orchestral symphony.

Most of Tennyson’s later poems have been written in unrhymed pentameter, and his management of the verse suggests a comparison with his master. In dignity of movement, Milton has never been equalled by any English poet. It seems that no line but his could express the lost archangel, or embody that vision of imperial Rome where sonorous names load as with cloth of gold the march of the stately iambics. Yet nothing could stoop more awkwardly to the quiet talk and joys of the married pair in Eden. While Tennyson’s blank verse falls short of his model in majesty and serried force, we must allow it to be more flexible. We cannot imagine the little novice using the Miltonic line. Her gentle thoughts would have been drowned in the mighty current, whereas Tennyson’s tripping vocables deliver with easy grace her artless prattle.

We can only allude to those experiments in metre which amuse the leisure of an artist, although one of them deserves attention. It is an ode to Milton:

Let the reader compare these lines with some familiar model of Alcaics like “Vides ut altâ,” and then ask himself whether quantity has hitherto had fair play in English verse.

II.

What has art to do with morals? With what propriety shall a poet play the moralist? His purpose is distinct, his method is radically different, is his object ever identical? We know that it is not always so. In the face of outward nature the truthful artist is forbidden to read humanity. Hardly is Wordsworth suffered to discover here divinity. The Greek sculptor sought beauty, not goodness, in the daughters of men, and the lines that grew beneath his fingers breathe the harmony of grace, not the harmony of character. Does the application of these rigorous principles bound the sphere of genuine art? Do the good and the beautiful nowhere cohere and interfuse? They may—in the ideal. For what is beauty in things which disclose design but the reflex of perfection? And what is goodness but the perfection of the heart? In the scheme of ethics, vice is ugliness, error a discord, and weakness disproportion, character means equipoise, and virtue expresses harmony. But how shall art or ethics discern a moral symmetry, and crown a spiritual perfection, without a right conception of man’s nature, of his place and purpose, his relation to the universe and to God? So far as he portrays the heart, the poet must be a moralist. Within this domain the truest art will utter the purest morals.

It is a blessed law by which he who aims to please is constrained to edify. For reason is a disinherited prince, and the estate is too often squandered before he comes to his own. Pride rears the head against precept. The imagination flutters and beats her bars, until experience has clipped her wings. The ideal republic could ill afford to dispense with poets, for there is no lesson like the modest lesson of a lovely life. To our gaze perhaps the influence seems wholly lost, and yet may be only latent. This is sure, that virtue has still a foothold in the heart that keeps an altar to the beautiful. We know how many seeds of goodness, what germs of aspiration, are flung broadcast by the poet’s hand. Who will say that his random sowings may not stir in a genial hour, strike root in the depths of motive, and blossom in act and life? No thoughtful mind has failed to recognize the insight of Sidney’s words in his Defence of Poesy: “For even those hard-hearted evil men who think virtue a school name, and know no other good but indulgere genio, yet will be content to be delighted, which is all the good-fellow poet seems to promise, and so steal to see the form of goodness, which, seen, they cannot but love ere themselves be aware, as if they had taken a medicine of cherries.”

The ethical standard is sensitive to the influence of climate and of race. The Italian and the German recognize the same virtues, but write them in different scales referred to a national key-note. The growth of knowledge and the expansion of sympathy determine a deeper change. From the age of Pericles to the age of Napoleon, the ideal of character has undergone alterations which have penetrated the essence and affected the type. Of certain virtues which fired the heart of an Athenian, we have kept nothing but the names, and we have canonized others of which he had no conception. The attitude of the individual man toward nature and society is constantly shifting under the pressure of ideas. The wave of inquiry which rose in civic revolution has swept in widening circles over the whole surface of opinion, and now dashes on the primal verities which declare the origin and destiny of man. The mind is active, but the heart of the age is perplexed and sad. She ponders painfully the riddle of the painful earth. She is lost in the great forest, the new paths are uncertain, the old to her seem overgrown. She is troubled with a vague unrest, beset with dark misgivings, by results she loathes to accept, doubts which she longs to silence, and hopes she dare not forego. Her mood is too grave and earnest for blithe and heedless carol. She cannot pause to hear the idle singer of an empty day. The music which holds her ear must be attuned to serious sympathy, must echo her own self-questionings, and breathe her aspirations. She puts aside from her lip the cup of distilled water, and turns to the mineral spring that savors of the rugged earth.

De Musset is not more essentially a child of the age than Tennyson. Both inherited in rare perfection the exquisite sensibility and high tension of the nervous system which are developed by modern life. In both the violence of emotion is succeeded by prolonged depression. Their joy is often rapture, and their sorrow anguish, but the prevailing tone is a dreamy languor that betrays fatigue. Their intellects were plunged in the same bath of learning, and tempered in the furnace of the time. They unite in regretting the trustful past, and complain that they were born too late into a sick and decrepit world. They pace together the shore of life, and gaze with wistful eyes over the expanse of ocean. But here the parallel ends. Their roads diverge in youth. Each obeys a different impulse, and learns a different lesson. The one hears a growing harmony in the voices of science, and perceives an increasing purpose in the movement of mankind. The other bows the head in stupor before the howling storm. Tennyson has a kindly glance and a cheery word for his fellow-men, they are his brothers, his co-workers, ever reaping something new. De Musset loads the heart with a sense of utter misery, and paralyzes the will by the infusion of his self-contempt. He is half-indignant that his spirit should be still haunted by a sublime aspiration, and confesses almost with a groan:

“Une immense espérance a traversé la terre.”[60]

It is in another mood that Tennyson hails the promise which he sees in the aspiration of the soul:

There are few words more painful to read than the prayer in “L’Espoir en Dieu.” The passionate queries are wrung from a breaking heart. We offer a rude but passably close translation of two stanzas. The poet demands:

Compare the rooted faith and serene calm of the poem to “In Memoriam:”

Much, no doubt, of the peculiar spirit that pervades the work of either poet may be traced to the social atmosphere in which he moved. Much also is only to be explained by the history of his life. Behind the “In Memoriam,” an unselfish and ennobling sorrow weeps and prays above a cherished grave. “In Rolla,” remorse sobs bitterly amid the ruins of a wasted life. The song has betrayed the singer. The one is the laureate of hope: the other, a prophet of despair. Tennyson is a night-worn pilgrim whose kindling eye has caught the glimmer of a lovely dawn; De Musset, a tired swimmer whose drowning cry leaps toward us from the gates of death. The poetry of De Musset is a convex lens which draws to a fiery focus the doubts and longings of the time; Tennyson’s, a stained rose-window, that subdues the flaring sunlight to a mild and tender radiance.

While man’s moral nature is developed and determined by his attitude toward society and his Maker, it is also profoundly affected by his attitude toward women. The relative position of woman has been rather raised than lowered by the movement of modern thought. Much has been deciphered by speculation, and much dissected by science, but the deep significance of the female character remains intact. In the fine atmosphere which nourished the musings of Richter, two earthly forms move freely, the maiden and the wife. In the long process of comparative anatomy, the beautiful first reveals itself in the sweet instinct that binds a mother to her offspring. Then first does the fire of Prometheus fairly catch the clay. The noblest instinct and the noblest aspiration have one element in common—the abnegation of self. Perhaps the one is but a reflex of the other. It is certain that the highest art has done the fullest justice to women. Let us measure Byron and Tennyson by this standard. To Byron, woman was an exquisite instrument which responds in perfect tune to the master-touch of passion. To Tennyson, she is an embodied spirit, who inspires and tempers man while she seems to obey his impulse. It is a shallow criticism which would excuse Byron’s low conception by an unfortunate experience. If personal experience be narrow, why not look beyond it? If the feet stumble in the mire, the eyes may still be lifted. The fact is, an irresistible instinct compels a genuine artist to discern and to preach the truth. His life may prove a rebel, but his work will pay tribute to Cæsar.

The author of “Godiva,” of “Enid” and “Elaine” is eminently the poet of woman. It is especially worthy of remark that he should have maintained a distinct and lofty ideal throughout the Arthurian cycle. In the mediæval myths, the lineaments of the female character were sometimes clouded by the admixture of masculine traits. Through the Carlovingian romance that lives in Ariosto’s verse, there roves an unsexed and warlike virgin, whom the poet means us to admire; at whom we smile in secret. Tennyson has read woman’s nature with an insight too fine and delicate to place her in so false an attitude. There is no Bradamant in the “Idylls of the King.”

The unswerving justice of true genius finds consummate expression in the treatment of “Guinevere.” The wrong-doing of imperial beauty was a dangerous theme, and we may guess how it would have been handled by the author of “Parasina.” In the original legend the queen commanded sympathy, but she is now positively degraded by her preference for a meaner soul. It is Arthur’s doom, and no merit of hers, that he loves her still. There is little likelihood that a modern Francesca will borrow impulse or pretext from her story. It is amusing to find the lovers of Haidee and Gulnare scandalized by “Vivien.” If ever a vile nature was scorched and shrivelled by the flame of an honest wrath, that poem affords the spectacle. In wily Vivien, vice is neither condoned nor glozed, but simply stripped and gibbeted. The pure air which breathes throughout the “Idylls” is condensed in the lines of “Guinevere,” which declare the great purpose of the king. We may say with assurance that no other English poet, except Wordsworth, would have written them.

Tennyson has spoken words of comfort to many English hearts, and inspired with a noble purpose many English lives. His spirit has crossed the seas. To him and Wordsworth the youth of America owe much that they will not speedily forget. Other benefactors may receive some form of recompense, but how shall we repay a poet? It is not praise, but thanks we would offer Alfred Tennyson. Rare artist, and high teacher, sweet voice, pure heart, there are many who admire, and not a few who love him.