served, as poetic chronicler of the mental life of his time, and as the interpreter of that spirit of intellectual hesitation which was characteristic of his contemporaries and leads to eclecticism in matters of faith, Tennyson will be remembered. And he will be remembered, although the greatness of his work must be looked for elsewhere than in its scope or imaginative power. The large comprehensiveness, the wide-eyed vision that takes in the spectacle of human life in its vast whole and in the complexity of its parts, this did not belong to him, nor did he share in all the joys and sorrows of mankind. ... To the color-school of English poetry, to the lineage of the poets of romance, Tennyson belonged. He did not care to draw in outline, to impress by the naked grandeur of conception. From the first, like Keats, he held that poetry should surprise by a fine excess, by a richness and profusion of beauties, that it should be a veritable cloth of gold. From the first he was for such accessories as should lead the senses captive, and enthrall the reader with infinite vistas of delight. Yet his is not the bewildering charm of Spenser's fairyland, the luxuriant undergrowth of beauty in enchanted forests. Rather it is the ordered beauty of a noble English garden, of the English landscape that he loved so well. It was said by Wordsworth of Tennyson : 'He is not much in sympathy with what I should myself most value in my attempts-viz., the spirituality with which I have endeavored to view the material universe, and the moral relations under which I have wished to exhibit its most ordinary appearances.' It is true that Tennyson was not much in sympathy with such attempts. Few poets indeed have kept with Nature a closer companionship; her sights and sounds were his most familiar friends. To this close companionship we owe the skilful appropriateness of his backgrounds, and the delicate accuracy of their form and color. Tennyson observed, and observed narrowly; observed indeed with something akin to the trained scientific eye. There is no need to adduce from his poetry passages to prove how loving and how close an eye he kept upon the world around him. . . . But for all this Wordsworth was right. Tennyson did not, in the same degree as Wordsworth, 'see into the life of things,' and when the elder poet's imagination would have kindled into the flame of unquenchable poesy, Tennyson remained a draughtsman and a colorist, but the draughtsman and colorist who is perhaps the greatest of English idyllic poets. . . . You will seek in vain in Tennyson for the larger elements, the far horizons of thought, the wide and gracious spaces, the unimagined depths, the austere yet tranquilizing sadness, the severe unbroken calm, the magnanimities of the greatest poetry. You will seek in vain for the presence of the higher imagination. The popular verdict will not have it so. It will affirm that none of the qualities of the highest poetry are absent from Tennyson's But for those acquainted, however slightly, with the literature of the world's past, passage after passage will rise to mind, passage after passage beside which there is nothing of Tennyson's to be placed. verse. III. TENNYSON'S LETTER ON THE PRINCESS. [This letter,' the most important and interesting ever written by Tennyson in connection with his poetry,' was written to Mr. S. E. Dawson, after the appearance of his excellent Study.] DEAR SIR: ALDWORTH, Haslemere, I thank you for your able and thoughtful essay on The Princess. You have seen, amongst other things, that if women ever were to play such freaks, the burlesque and the tragic might go hand in hand. I may tell you that the songs were not an afterthought. Before the first edition came out I deliberated with myself whether I should put songs in between the separate divisions of the poem; again, I thought, the poem will explain itself; but the public did not see that the child, as you say, was the heroine of the piece, and at last I conquered my laziness and inserted them. You would be still more certain that the child was the true heroine if, instead of the first song as it now stands, As thro' the land at eve we went, I had printed the first song which I wrote, The losing of the child.' The child is sitting on the bank of a river, and playing with flowers; a flood comes down; a dam has been broken through; the child is borne down by the flood; the whole village distracted; after a time the flood has subsided; the child is thrown safe and sound again upon the bank, and all the women are in raptures. I quite forget the words of the ballad, but I think I may have it somewhere. Your explanatory notes are very much to the purpose, and I do not object to your finding parallelisms. They must always recur. A man (a Chinese scholar) some time ago wrote to me, saying that in an unknown, untranslated Chinese poem there were two whole lines of mine, almost word for word. Why not? Are not human eyes all over the world looking at the same objects, and must there not consequently be coincidences of thought and impressions and expressions? It is scarcely possible for any one to say or write anything in this late time of the world to which, in the rest of the literature of the world, a parallel could not somewhere be found. But when you say that this passage or that was suggested by Wordsworth or Shelley or another, I demur, and more, I wholly disagree. There was a period in my life when, as an artist-Turner, for instance takes rough sketches of landskip, etc.. in order to work them eventually into some great picture, so I was in the habit of chronicling, in four or five words or more, whatever might strike me as picturesque in nature. never put these down, and many and many a line has gone away on the north wind, but some remain, e.g.: A full sea glazed with muffled moonlight.1 I Suggestion: The sea one night at Torquay, when Torquay was the most lovely sea-village in England, tho' now a smoky town. The sky was covered with thin vapor, and the moon was behind it. A great black cloud Drag inward from the deep.2 Suggestion: A coming storm seen from the top of Snowdon. [1 Princess I. 244.] [2 Princess VII. 21-22, not quite accurately.] In the Idylls of the King: with all Its stormy crests that smote against the skies.1 Suggestion: A storm which came upon us in the middle of the North Sea. As the water-lily starts and slides.2 Suggestion: Water-lilies in my own pond, seen on a gusty day with my own eyes. They did start and slide in the sudden puffs of wind, till caught and stayed by the tether of their own stalks quite as true as Wordsworth's simile, and more in detail. A wild wind shook Follow, follow, thou shalt win. Suggestion: I was walking in the New Forest. A wind did arise, and Shake the songs, the whispers, and the shrieks Of the wild wood together.3 The wind, I believe, was a west wind, but, because I wished the Prince to go south, I turned the wind to the south, and naturally the wind said, 'Follow.' I believe the resemblance which you note is just a chance one. Shelley's lines are not familiar to me, tho', of course, if they occur in the Prometheus, I must have read them. I could multiply instances, but I will not bore you; and far indeed am I from asserting that books, as well as nature, are not, and ought not to be, suggestive to the poet. I am sure that I myself, and many others, find a peculiar charm in those passages of such great masters as Virgil or Milton where they adopt the creation of a bygone poet, and reclothe it, more or less, according to their own fancy. But there is, I fear, a prosaic set growing up among us, editors of booklets, bookworms, index-hunters, or men of great memories and no imagination, who impute them [1 Lancelot and Elaine 483, with 'smote' for 'smoke.'] [2 Princess IV. 236.] [ Princess I. 96-99, not quite accurately.] selves to the poet, and so believe that he, too, has no imagination, but is for ever poking his nose between the pages of some old volume in order to see what he can appropriate. They will not allow one to say Ring the bells,' without finding that we have taken it from Sir P. Sydney - or even to use such a simple expression as the ocean 'roars' without finding out the precise verse in Homer or Horace from which we have plagiarized it (fact !). I have known an old fish-wife, who had lost two sons at sea, clench her fist at the advancing tide on a stormy day and cry out : 'Ay ! roar, do! how I hates to see thee show thy white teeth!' Now if I had adopted her exclamation and put it into the mouth of some old woman in one of my poems, I dare say the critics would have thought it original enough, but would most likely have advised me to go to Nature for my old women, and not to my own imagination; and indeed it is a strong figure. Here is another little anecdote about suggestion. When I was about twenty or twenty-one I went on a tour to the Pyrenees. Lying among these mountains before a waterfall that comes down one thousand or twelve hundred feet, I sketched it (according to my custom then) in these words: Slow-dropping veils of thinnest lawn.1 When I printed this a critic informed me that 'lawn' was the material used in theatres to imitate a waterfall, and graciously added: Mr. T. should not go to the boards of a theatre, but to Nature herself, for his suggestions.' And I had gone to Nature herself. I think it is a moot point whether, if I had known how that effect was produced on the stage, I should have ventured to publish the line. I find that I have written, quite contrary to my custom, a letter, when I had merely intended to thank you for your interesting commentary. Thanking you again for it, I beg you to believe me Very faithfully yours, A. TENNYSON. [1 The Lotos-Eaters 11.] |