mran Vfll RnVHl IHhH9t3 96 991 ■■ 1 h:fr-S ■H ■ ■ n 4m& H ■H .I'-,-'.' HI ■ ■■■£■ Ml KhS WJMMJUI 3fsS B^S ■■ I BH iImsh *r-) . - tffl loH |HH mMb BH I um| ■B ■bH E&H ■ ra t^9l H KflBHHH Mi 5838 BB M IK-HHK IHI [BflHL ■Mb H HHBjBjBJE UH EM (■MMMIMai THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE Ex Libris h ISAAC FOOT TENNYSON, RUSKIN, MILL OTHER LITERARY ESTIMATES Tennyson, Ruskin, Mill AND OTHER LITERARY ESTIMATES BY FREDERIC HARRISON SLotltlOtt MACMILLAN AND CO. Limited NEW YORK : THE MACMILLAN COMPANY I899 Edinburgh : T. and A. Constable, Printers to Her Majesty NOTE This volume was planned, and in great part written, several years ago, as a series of systematic estimates of some leading influences on the thought of our time. The study of Tennyson, the first of these chapters, has awaited the re-issue of his principal poems in a popular form. Most of the other studies have appeared in the Nineteenth Century ; that on Lamb and Keats in the Contemporary Review ; those on Gibbon in the Forum of New York. The author has to express to the Editors and Proprietors of these Reviews his grateful thanks for the courtesy which enables him to use them. CONTENTS CHAP. I. Tennyson, ' In Memoriam,' . Theology, .... 'The Idylls of the King,' 'The Princess' and 'Maud,' Lyrics and Idylls, . Romances and Odes, Metrical System and Dramas Place in English Poetry, II. Ruskin as Master of Prose, III. Ruskin as Prophet (a Dialogue), IV. Ruskin's Eightieth Birthday, . V. Matthew Arnold, The Poet, .... The Critic, The Philosopher and Theologian VI. John Addington Symonds, Critical and Descriptive Essays, Italian Literature and Art, Poems and Translations, Philosophical and Religious Spec ulations, vii PAGE I 5 9 16 23 26 3i 36 43 5i 77 105 in "3 123 129 135 139 146 151 154 Vlll CONTENTS CHAP. VII. VIII. IX. X. XI. XII. XIII. XIV. On English Prose, The Book-Trotter -. A Dialogue, Lamb and Keats, The New Memoirs of Gibbon, . The New Letters of Gibbon, . The Historical Method of Froude, Froude — As Writer, As Historian, . The Historical Method of Freeman, Historical Philosophy, . Historical Method, . Use of Original Authorities, History of the Norman Conquest, John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, Utilitarianism, . The Subjection of Women, Philosophy and Positivism, PAGE 159 178 186 199 217 235 238 247 257 259 262 265 277 285 291 303 307 3i8 CHAPTER I TENNYSON ONCE only in the history of our literature in verse, and once in prose, has there been seen a royal suzerainty, maintained over an entire epoch by a single writer, to be compared to that by which Alfred Tennyson has dominated Victorian poetry. The supremacy held by Alexander Pope over his immediate contemporaries and that held by Samuel Johnson over his, were as great and far more autocratic. But in the half-century that has passed since Tennyson became Poet Laureate, his authority over poetic form has been paramount, as his superiority to all poets of the time is above question or doubt. His flower, to adopt his words of proud humility, has truly 'worn a crown of light.' Most writers of verse can raise the flowers now. They sow it far and wide by every town and tower. All have the seed from Alfred Tennyson. But the cynic who should call it a weed would be flayed alive, as was Marsyas by Apollo. The people, the critics, the poets with one voice continue to cry, ' Splendid is the flower ! ' And so say we all. This royal prerogative enjoyed by Alfred Tennyson, in death as in life, has had some inconveniences, in- herent in all royalties. It has placed him not only, as they say in French academies, hors concours — above competition, above criticism, above discussion — but A 2 TENNYSON almost above free judgment and honest understanding of his fine qualities and his true place in English poetry. No loyal subject would presume to noise abroad a true and impartial estimate of the character and endow- ments of a reigning sovereign. And so, it has seemed to us all unmannerly, in the nineteenth century, to discuss the poems of Tennyson with the cool freedom that will certainly be applied to them in the next and succeeding centuries. He has never been judged as we judge Byron, Shelley, Keats, or Wordsworth. Since he won his just place as the poet of the Victorian era, he has not been treated as mere poet, or citizen of the immortal Republic of Letters. He has been, like ' Mr. Pope ' or ' The Doctor,' invested with a conventional autocracy, and is spoken of in the language of homage, under pain of some form of lese-majeste. It is far too early to anticipate the judgment of our successors on the place of Tennyson in English poetry. It is not too early to speak of him with freedom and honest admiration, disdaining any spurious loyalty and the whispered humbleness which royal personages expect. To continue this still would be false homage to our glorious literature and to one of the finest poets who adorn its roll. As Homer was for all Greece the poet, so for the second half of the nineteenth century Tennyson has been 'the Poet' — his devotees spoke of him as 'the Bard' — holding a place quite analogous to that of Hugo in France; for he and Victor both 'darkened the wreaths of all who claimed to be their peers' in England as in France. No one denies that in England, as in France, there were men of genius who have written admirable verse. Vixere fortes cum Agamem- none. All men of sense feel the original genius of TENNYSON 3 Robert Browning, his unique gift, his subtle power. All men of taste feel the magic of Swinburne's luscious music, his thrill of passion and scorn. One need not go through the list of the sixty-two so-called ' minor poets,' — ' some are pretty enough, and some are poor indeed ! ' Yes ! but the cool judgment brings us back to this, that though one or two men in these fifty years past have given us poems of resplendent genius, and some scores have written verses of extreme felicity and grace, and many hundreds of men and women have composed pieces 'pretty enough,' the prevalent per- fume is always that of the Tennysonian flower ; the lyre, whoever strikes it, gives forth the Tennysonian love-note of its own motion — a /3dp/3iro<; Se xopSals epcora povvov duel — and Alfred Tennyson holds an in- disputable laureate crown as completely as ever did Victor Hugo in France. The crown has been won, partly by the fact that Tennyson embalmed in exquisite verses the current tastes, creeds, hopes, and sympathies of the larger part of the reading public in our age, but mainly it was won by the supreme perfection of his form. In early life he formed a poetic style of his own, of quite faultless precision — musical, simple, and lucid. And in sixty years of poetic fecundity, his style may have gained in energy, but not in precision. It was never careless, never uncouth, never (or rarely) obscure. Every line was polished with the same unerring ear and the same infallible taste. In some sixty thousand lines it is rare to find a really false rhyme, a truly bungling verse, a crude confusion of epithets, or a vile cacophony — such ragged stuff as Byron flung off on almost every other page, such redundancies as Shelley or Keats would pour forth in some hour of delirious rapture, such rank 4 TENNYSON commonplace as too often offend us in Wordsworth, even when he is not droning of malice prepense. Verses so uniformly harmonious as those of Tennyson, with their witchery of words, yet so clear, so pure, so tender, so redolent of what is beautiful in nature, in man, in woman — all this won over the entire public that cares for poetry, and truly deserved to win it. Even now full justice has hardly been done to Tennyson's supremacy in form ; or rather, the general reader, much as he loves his poems, is not quite aware of the infallible mastery of language they possess. In the whole range of English poetry, Milton alone can be held to show an equal or even greater uniformity of polish. Perfection and continuity of polish are certainly not the same thing as the highest poetry, but they are the note of the consummate artist. English poetry, for all its splendid achievements, is not remarkable for uniform perfection of form, as compared with the best poetry of Greece, of Rome, and of Italy. Shakespeare himself (or perhaps it is his editors, his printers, or his pseudonyms) will at times break out into rant, and he is inordinately prone to indulge in conceits and quips. Nearly all our poets have their bad days — become care- less, reckless, or prosy ; lose complete self-control ; or commit some error of taste, be it in haste, in passion, or some morbid condition of the creative fancy. Gray always writes like the scholar and critic that he was, and Pope always writes with the neatness of a French ' wit' But neither can uniformly avoid the common- place, and thus they cannot claim the crown of absolute poetic form. Milton, if we can forgive the prolixity of his old age, never descends in his eagle's flight from the lofty perfection of form. And more than all other poets, Tennyson, if he never soars to such heights as TENNYSON 5 Milton, maintains this wonderful equality of measured beat. 'IN MEMORIAM' This unfaltering truth of form reaches its zenith in In Memoriam, which must always remain one of the triumphs of English poetry. It would be difficult to name any other poem of such length (some three thousand lines) where the rhythm, phrasing, and articulation are so entirely faultless, so exquisitely clear, melodious, and sure. Subtle arguments of philo- sophy and problems of faith are treated with a grace equal to the ease and the lucidity of the expression. There is not a poor rhyme, not a forced phrase, not a loose or harsh line in the whole series. The rhymes, the assonances, the winged epithets are often of astonishing brilliancy, and yet they seem to flow unbidden from some native well-spring of poetic speech. Such ease, certainty, and harmony of tone imply con- summate mastery of the poet's instrument ; for not a stanza or a line looks as if it had cost the poet any labour at all, and yet every stanza and line looks as if no labour of his could ever make it more perfect. This is indeed a quality only to be found in our best poems, of which Milton has given us the immortal type. And though In Memoriam is far from being such glorious poetry as Lycidas, it shares with Lycidas itself con- summate mastery of its own form of poetic language. One of the main feats of this mastery of form is the extraordinarily beautiful and appropriate metre in which this poem is cast. Tennyson must be considered to have founded the typical metre for this meditative and elegiac lyric. Even if it had been occasionally used before in the seventeenth century, Tennyson gave 6 TENNYSON it the development and perfection it has for us. It has become the natural mode for this reflective and mournful poetry ; it is superior, no doubt, to the metre of Milton's 11 Penseroso, or that of Marvell's Thoughts in a Garden, Byron's Elegy on Thyrza, or Coleridge's Genevieve. The ease, force, and music of this quatrain in Tennyson's hands are wonderful — the ease equalling the force, the music equalling the ease. As in all meditative poems on a single theme, we find stanzas which we could well spare. But the pieces which are best known and have become household words, especially the first ten elegies with the famous Intro- duction, are masterpieces of exquisite versification, several of them may stand beside some of the happiest stanzas in our poetry. I always think of the opening stanza in No. ii. — ' Old Yew, which graspest at the stones That name the under-lying dead, Thy fibres net the dreamless head ; Thy roots are wrapt about the bones.' — as being a miracle of poignant music and simple power. And what descriptive rhythm there is in the subtle alliterations and harmonies of the stanza — ' But, for the unquiet heart and brain, A use in measured language lies ; The sad mechanic exercise, Like dull narcotics, numbing pain.' What pathos and reticence in the last lines of No. vi. — ' To her, perpetual maidenhood, And unto me, no second friend.' And the tender address to the ship bearing his friend's body home in No. x. TENNYSON 7 English poetry again has few stanzas which for calm beauty can compare with — ' 'Tis well ; 'tis something ; we may stand Where he in English earth is laid, And from his ashes may be made The violet of his native land.' (xviii.) And the famous stanzas — 'When Lazarus left his charnel-cave.' (xxxi.) ' Oh yet we trust that somehow good.' (liv.) and the other stanzas of this philosophic debate. Or again the stanzas — ' I past beside the reverend walls In which of old I wore the gown.' (Ixxxvii.) ' You say, but with no touch of scorn.' (xcvi.) ' Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky.' (cvi.) These are the household words — almost to us to-day the commonplaces of Tennyson. And the public is so far right that these, it may be hackneyed, lines are in grace, simplicity, and music amongst the best masterpieces of English lyric. A question still remains. With all the charm and pathos of these stanzas, with all that unfailing work- manship surpassed perhaps by Milton alone, does In Memoriam, even in form, reach the topmost empyrean of lyric to which one or two of our poets have risen. Memory echoes back to our ear a passionate couplet, it may be, of Shakespeare's Sonnets, a dazzling gem from Lycidas, another from Shelley's Ode to the West Wind, another from Wordsworth's Ode on Immortality. Listen to this — ' Yet in these thoughts myself almost despairing Haply I think on thee — and then my state, Like to the lark at break of day arising From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate.' 8 TENNYSON Here is lyrical passion in all its delirium ! — ' To me, fair Friend, you never can be old.' ' But thy eternal summer shall not fade.' ' When to the sessions of sweet silent thought, I summon up remembrance of things past.' All this rings in our ears like the memory of Beethoven's A delaida, sung by the great tenor e robusto. Or again, we think of Milton's Nativity — ' The trumpet spake not to the armed throng ; And kings sat still with awful eye.' or we recall Lycidas — ' He must not float upon his watery bier Unwept, and welter to the parching wind, Without the meed of some melodious tear.' Does In Memoriam, with all its 'curious felicity' of phrase, its perfect chiselling, its stately music in the minor key — does it touch the rapture and the magic of these unforgotten chords of supreme poetry ? For my own part, I cannot feel that it does, even in such exquisite stanzas as those cited above. I think again of Shelley's West Wind — ■ ' O thou Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low, Each like a corpse within its grave, until Thine azure sister of the spring shall blow Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth.' Here is the Muse of Hellas who inspired the eVea irrepoevra of Pindar and of Sappho. And again I think of Wordsworth's Ode — ' There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, The earth, and every common sight, To me did seem Apparelled in celestial light, The glory and the freshness of a dream.' TENNYSON 9 and so on down to — ' To me the meanest flower that blows can give Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.' It is true that the stanzas of In Memoriam are more ingenious, more delicately chiselled, more subtle in art, than these Wordsworthian truisms ; but they do not altogether rouse one with such a ring ; they do not ravish the soul and stamp the memory so deeply ; they are not quite so spontaneous, so unaffected, so inimit- able ; and therefore I feel that they fail to mount into the topmost air of poetic rapture. But saying this, we do not diminish the laureate's crown. In Memoriam must long remain one of our noblest poems, along with Gray's Elegy, also a little academic — a poem, it must be allowed, too long and in places rather too obvious, if not trivial. In Memoriam will stand along with Coleridge's Ode to Love, Keats' Ode to Autumn, Marvell's Odes and Elegies — superior perhaps to all of these as it is, but still wanting in that amplest breath of the Delphic God. Indeed, with all its art, melody, and charm, we see from time to time in In Memoriam a little too visibly 'the sad mechanic exercise/ which is the inevitable result of too rigid and prolonged devotion to the uses of ' measured language.' To Chaucer, to Shakespeare, to Spenser — nay, to Shelley and Burns, to Byron and Keats, poetry never could be for an hour a mechanic exercise. They all, like Shelley's Skylark, would pour their ' full heart in profuse strains of unpremeditated art.' THEOLOGY So far we have been considering the lyrical form of In Memoriam — a form which, if never quite reaching 10 TENNYSON in rapture the supreme bursts of lyric, is after Milton's the most faultlessly chiselled verse in our language. We pass to its substance : and we will say at once that in conception it is not equal to its form. Yet in con- ception it is a noble poem. The account of its origin and its long and gradual construction in detached elegies extending over sixteen years, as explained in Hallam Tennyson's valuable Memoir, fully disposes of the adverse criticisms that were once passed on the scheme of the poem. The sudden death of Arthur Hallam, and his wonderful promise, gifts, influence and so forth, form the occasion, the overture, the motive of In Memoriam ; but these things do not at all form the main substance of the whole. The early death of Edward King was the occasion of Lycidas ; but we do not hold Milton literally bound to his belief that his young friend had left no peer on earth. Nor do we take every phrase in Shakespeare's Sonnets or Byron's Childe Harold &s absolute autobiography and not poetry. As the poet himself tells us, In Memoriam is a Divina Commedia, a meditative poem, wherein thoughts on death, man's destiny, future life, and the purposes of the Creator, gradually lead up to Faith in His good- ness, and a sober sense of happiness in Resignation and Love. This makes it a real Divina Commedia — a bona- fide effort to ' assert eternal Providence and justify the ways of God to men.' But then In Memoriam is a Divine Comedy, or a Paradise Lost, longo intervallo. Putting aside the fact that Tennyson is not a Dante or a Milton, and that his graceful elegies do not pretend to vie with the mighty imagination of these immortal visions, can it be said that either the theology or the philosophy of In Memoriam are new, original, with an independent force and depth of their own ? Surely TENNYSON II not. They are exquisitely graceful re-statements of the current theology of the broad-Churchman of the school of F. D. Maurice and Jowett — a combination of Maurice's somewhat illogical piety with Jowett's philosophy of mystification. As the Darwinian and evolutionary theories discussed are not the original discoveries of the poet in natural science, so the theological and metaphysical problems are not original contributions to theology or philosophy. They are an admirably tuneful versification of ideas current in the religious and learned world. Opinions on the poetical value of Tennyson's theo- logy as a poet may be formed by any serious mind, apart from private convictions on the theology itself. Auguste Comte expressed unbounded admiration for the Divine Comedy and the Paradise Lost, as he did for Thomas a Kempis and Bossuet. So every one of fair mind would rejoice to recognise intellectual grasp, fused by poetic imagination, in: Tennyson's In Me- moriam, if he could find in it central ideas treated with native power and new insight. A materialist of feeling can enter heartily into the profound power of Job, of the City of God, of the Pilgrim's Progress, of Bossuet's Universal History, little as he believes any dogmas they contain. But does In Memoriam teach anything, or transfigure any idea which was not about that time common form with F. D. Maurice, with Jowett, C. Kingsley, F. Robertson, Stopford Brooke, Mr. Ruskin and the Duke of Argyll, Bishops Westcott and Boyd Carpenter? It is true that Tennyson clothes with exquisite form, and presents almost as so much original thought, the ideas which in 1850 were floating about in the mental atmosphere of Oxford and Cam- bridge men ; he had common ground with the liberal 12 TENNYSON clergy of that date ; and also he was in touch with many general ideas of Herschel, Owen, Huxley, Darwin, and Tyndall. He embodied these discussions, theories, and pious hopes of broad-Churchmen in lovely phrases ; but he has in no sense added to them, nor did he give them new power. He did nothing to make a Theodicee of his own, as Dante did of the Catholic creed, and as Milton did of the Puritan creed. Nothing of the kind. In Memoriam, with all its devotional mysticism, con- tains no solid thought that we do not find in F. Robertson's Sermons, in Jowett's Essays, in Dr. Mar- tineau's philosophy, and we may now add, in Arthur Balfour's Philosophic Doubts and Foundations of Belief. (Heaven save the mark !) — ' Our little systems have their day.' ' We have but faith : we cannot know.' and much to that effect. Well, but we need to know a little more ; and Tennyson only again, for the thousandth time, re-echoes most musically our sense of ignorance. For a century, ten thousand pulpits have been echoing the same cry, as have hundreds of beautiful essays full of pious hopes, and vague moan- ings about something ' behind the veil.' Popes, Caliphs, martyrs, mystics, Bunyan, Swedenborg, and many more have their ideas about what we shall find ' behind the veil.' But we get no further. Together with In Memoriam — what was indeed the prelude, almost the first rough sketch of In Memoriam, equal to it in metrical skill and also in meditative power — we must take the Two Voices. It might well be urged that the Two Voices, in the astonishing art with which its most exacting stanza is managed, in TENNYSON 1 3 the mastery in which a subtle argument is embodied in terse poetic form, in its richness of metaphysical suggestion, forms the greatest triumph of Tennyson's profounder poems. Our language has few finer ex- amples of argumentative verse. But has the argument the stamp of original genius, of new and pregnant thought? Surely not. The ideas are those which have been worked out in a hundred sermons and essays by able men who, feeling the force of many unsolved problems of metaphysics and of science, still would find aesthetic, moral, and psychological grounds for ' faintly trusting the larger hope.' Nor can it be denied that throughout this poem, as throughout In Memoriam — as in all the metaphysical poems — there runs the undertone of scepticism, of absence at any rate of entire mental assurance and solid belief, as distinct from hope — 'A hidden hope, the voice replied.' ' To feel, although no tongue can prove.' ' Believing, where we cannot prove.' ' We have but faith ; we cannot know.' ' An infant crying in the night, And with no language but a cry.' ' Behind the veil, behind the veil.' ' There lives more faith in honest doubt, Believe me, than in half the creeds ! ' No one can deny that all this is exquisitely beautiful ; that these eternal problems have never been clad in such inimitable grace. Nor do we doubt that they embody a train of thought very rife in the cultured intellect of our time. But the train of thought is essentially that with which ordinary English readers had been made familiar by F. D. Maurice, Professor 14 TENNYSON Jowett, Dr. Martineau, Ecce Homo, Hypatia, and now by Arthur Balfour, Mr. Drummond, and many valiant companies of Septan Contra Diabolum. The argument in substance is, that as Science is still unable to explain the Universe, and as Metaphysics still nurse their abysmal problems, we should faintly trust the larger hope. Orthodox Churchmen say this larger hope is to be found in the Anglican Prayer Book ; orthodox Methodists say it is only to be read in the Bible ; Catholics say it is in the living voice of the Church ; broad-Churchmen find it in various beautiful and somewhat nebulous visions ; but of all believers in the Gospel, they hold to it most ' faintly ' and with the largest mixture of perplexity and hesitation. No form of the ' larger hope ' admits more readily of poetic expression than does this. And Tennyson, in many thousand lines, has given it a shape supremely typical of nineteenth-century culture. But he caught up, he did not create, the ideas; and his most melodious transfiguration of this half-sceptical piety does not give him any title as philosophic genius, nor as the living inspiration on the higher problems of our age. He gave it a voice, he did not give it a faith. In later years the polemical tone of mind rather grew on him, and he wrote several pieces, the sub- stantial argument of which did not rise above the level of the popular sermons, essays, and novels which con- fute modern philosophy and science. Pamphleteering, even in defence of the Christian verities — much less in advocacy of the 'hidden hope' or 'honest doubt' — is seldom poetry, and the manifest inferiority of these later pieces is proof that the poet was on a wrong scent. Such queer things as that called Despair, with its elephantine lines of sixteen syllables, belong to TENNYSON 1 5 the large group of theological burlesques whereof the Mighty Atom presents the most absurd type. Another such piece is the oddity called Vastness, with its twenty-syllable lines, in the manner of Walt Whitman, but hardly so rhythmical as his Leaves of Grass. Lovers of Tennyson's poetry can only regret these contro- versial pieces which betray a rather shallow irritability of religious spirit, and form a blot on his otherwise true poetic judgment. But though Tennyson did at last deviate into utterly unpoetical sermonising, though his great meditative poems followed, rather than created, the current ideas of his time, he amply deserved the immense influence he possessed over the higher religious world. It may be needful now to remind his less reasonable admirers that the poetic expression of current ideas does not fulfil the highest function of the poet. Burns distinctly created the deep enthusiasm of all true Scots for their race in all types of its simple manliness. Wordsworth created the passion of modern Englishmen for com- munion with Nature. Byron filled Europe with sym- pathy for historic Rome and Greece. We cannot claim for Tennyson any such creative influence over men. He did for the religious thought of English Christians in far grander verse, as it was a far nobler type of religious thought, what Young did in his Night Thoughts for the religious thought of the last century. From the philosophic point of view, In Memoriam is a kind of glorified Cliristian Year. It has made Tennyson the idol of the Anglican clergyman — the world in which he was born and the world in which his whole life was ideally past — the idol of all cultured youth and of all aesthetic women. It is an honourable post to fill. He was in all things a true and illus- 16 TENNYSON trious poet. Only, his devotees must remember that he does not reach the rank of Shakespeare, of Milton, of Chaucer, of Spenser — nay, it may be doubted if his ultimate place in our literature will at all overtop that of Burns, Wordsworth, Byron, or Shelley ; men who, with all their defects and all their limitations, did, by original ideas fresh from their own spirit and not at all adapted from contemporary thinkers, give a new impulse to the mind of their age. 'THE IDYLLS' Hitherto we have considered Tennyson's religious and philosophical pieces (especially In Mcmoriam, the most perfect of his poems), because his claim to rank as the supreme poet of the nineteenth century must rest on this if on anything. That he is the supreme poet of the Victorian era is too clear for question. The chief poems after In Memoriam are the Idylls of the King, occupying more than one-fourth of the entire collection of Poems ; The Princess, filling about one- twelfth of the collected Works ; and Maud, not half The Princess in length. The Idylls of the King are the best known and most read of the larger poems, and in some points of view are the most important of all Tennyson's works, inasmuch as they are far the largest, and covered in execution nearly forty years of the poet's life. The twelve books, of over 11,000 lines, are in form an epic ; they display nearly all the poet's great qualities in turn, except the didactic and the purely lyrical. They are a wonderful monument of sustained and chastened fancy, of noble ideals, and of delicious music. A volume would not suffice to dilate on all the TENNYSON 17 beauties of the Idylls, the romantic halo of chivalry, the glow of colour, the sonorous clang of the battle scenes, the tender pathos of the love scenes, the tragedy of the catastrophe, the final threnody, when ' on the mere the wailing died away.' A volume would not suffice to expatiate on all these graces ; and for every lover of poetry, for every reader of taste, such a volume, or even such an essay, is wholly needless. A far more difficult task is to class these fascinat- ing poems. To what order of poetry do they belong ; do they fulfil all their aim ; are they an unqualified success? Clearly the Idylls do not form a real epic. There is too much pure fancy, too much sentiment, too much of the drawing-room and the lecture-hall — in a word, it is nearer to a modern romance than to an antique epic. It is poetry, exquisite poetry, but no more an epic than Shelley's Revolt of Islam is an epic, or than his Hellas is a tragedy. The words in which Shelley describes his purpose in the Revolt of Islam curiously fit the Idylls of the King. ' I have sought to enlist the harmony of metrical language, the ethereal combinations of the fancy, the rapid and subtle transi- tions of human passion, all those elements which essentially compose a poem, in the cause of a liberal and comprehensive morality.' That is a perfectly- legitimate motive of a poem. And in a certain degree this is what Tennyson has done in his Idylls, making his plot infinitely more real, more intelligible, and more interesting than that of Shelley s Islam. In choosing as his theme a well-known romance, adapting and developing a very grand old prose-poem, Tennyson obtained the great advantage of incidents living, thrilling, and even familiar, and thus avoiding the cloudy symbolism of Shelley's scheme, which makes B 1 8 . TENNYSON Islam a closed book to the ordinary public. But then Tennyson fell on the other horn of the dilemma, which was the risk of travestying the old romance, so that it became more or less incongruous, unnatural, and im- possible. Lovers of exquisite verse and of romantic chivalry, who know nothing either of historic chivalry or of the mediaeval romances, do not feel the incon- gruity ; and they form the great majority of the Tennysonian public. But from the point of view of actual history and the real Arthurian myth, the filling the old bottle of Malory with the new wine of Alfred Tennyson is an inevitable danger. Lancelot of the Lake is transformed into a sort of Sir Charles Grandison in plate armour ; King Arthur becomes a courtier's portrait of the late Prince Consort. Elaine is a new Virginie without her ' Paul,' and Queen Guinevere is a magnificent ' grande dame' of Versailles, with a secret. It is all too much of a pageant or 'revival ' in mediaeval character, and suggests reminiscences of the Eglinton Tournament and the stage Shakespeare. We all feel the wonderful skill with which the local colour is maintained, the glamour of antique setting, the tone of mingled chivalry and barbaric rage in the warriors of the Dragon and of the White Horse. But this very realism of painting increases the incongruity of the whole. These Berserker blood-feasts, these eternal jousts and pageants, these murderous con- spiracies and feuds, will not assimilate with the Grand Monarque courtliness of King Arthur, the Quixotic heroisms and sublimated amours of Lancelot, the un- earthly passion of the love-lorn maid of Astolat. If the whole poem were cast in a purely ideal world, we could accept it as pure fantasy. But it is not quite an ideal world. Therein lies the difficulty. The scene, TENNYSON 19 though not of course historic, has certain historic sug- gestions and characters. It is a world far more real than that of Spenser's Faery Queen, or Malory's Morte Darthur, or Coleridge's Cliristabel. So far as concerns the scene, and the external surroundings, the costumes and the landscapes, we feel these to be a plausible field for a chivalric romance — full of fancy and of poetry, no doubt, but still plausible, intelligible, and coherent. Various episodes, combats, and actions take place upon this scene, of a kind consistent with it, and poetically natural to romances of chivalry. Whole books read almost like incidents we might find in Joinville or Froissart done into exquisite poetry. But then, in the midst of so much realism, the knights, from Arthur downwards, talk and act in ways with which we are familiar in modern ethical and psychological novels ; but which are as impossible in real mediaeval knights as a Bengal tiger or a Polar bear would be in a drawing-room. The women, from the Queen to Elaine and Enid, behave, not like dames and damsels of mediaeval romance, but with the spiritual delicacy and all the soul-bewildering casuistry we study and enjoy in Hypatia, Romola, Middhmarch, or Helbeck of Bannisdale. The Idylls of the King are an amalgam of mediaeval romance and analytical novel. Both mediaeval romance and analytical novel may be made full of interest and power. But the attempt to fuse them into one poem is beyond the art of any imagination. A still greater difficulty beset the poet in his Arthurian epic, in the fact that he does not invent his plot and his characters as Milton, Spenser, and Shelley do in their dream-worlds ; but he has simply modernised and bowdlerised a noble old epic which needs no 20 TENNYSON decoration from us. Malory's Morte Darthur is a grand poem itself; consistent as a whole, intelligible, and natural as a mediaeval romance. Crammed with wild incident, as is Malory's epic — with witchcraft, magic and miracle, blood and battle, lust and rape, villainy and treason — knights and dames behave accordingly. They love, fight, slay, rob, joust, and do deeds of ' derring-do,' and of true love, legal or illegal, like hot-blooded men and women in fierce times, before an idea had arisen in the world of ' reverencing con- science,' of ' leading sweet lives,' of ' keeping down the base in man,' 'teaching high thought,' with 'amiable words and courtliness,' and so forth. Malory's original Morte Darthur is plausible as a mediaeval romance, with all its devilry and angelry, its infinite transforma- tion scenes and supernaturalisms, its fierce loves and hates, its blood and crime, and with all its fantastic ideals of ' Honour ' and of ' Love.' But in Tennyson's Idylls of the King, the devils and most of the angels disappear, the supernaturalism shrinks to a few inci- dents ; there is a good deal of fighting, but the knights are almost too polite to kill each other ; if the ladies do commit faux pas, their artifices and compunctions are those of the novel or the stage. And so the whole fierce, lusty epic gets emasculated into a moral lesson, as if it were to be performed in a drawing-room by an academy of young ladies. No one could complain of using the elements of a poem, as Shelley says, ' in the cause of a liberal and comprehensive morality.' But the lovers of Malory do complain of having his rough-hewn romance modernised and bowdlerised into an incongruous medley. It is not fair to the old romancer, and the result is an herma- phrodite kind of work, in spite of all the winning TENNYSON 21 gracefulness which is the peculiarity of such decadent art. The Nibelungen Epic presents to us a mass of tragic horror which suits the fierce war-song it is, and the mythical age in which it is cast. But we should not care to have Siegfried transmuted into a model prince with serious ideas about the social question, Chrimhild and Brunhild become stately royal ladies with a past, and Hagen and Folker exchanging moral sentiments over the corpse of King Gunther. Mr. Pope translated the Iliad into Queen Anne heroics, but happily he did not attempt a paraphrase of it in the manner of the Rape of the Lock. The Idylls of the King are a delicious series of poetic tableaux ; and would be pure poetry, if we could forget the incon- gruity of making belted knights with fairy mothers talking modern morality — noble and musical as the morality is— and if we could forget the fierce clang of battle, and all the rude and unholy adventures that Malory rehearsed once for all in his inimitable mother- tongue. So far it seemed necessary to face the weaker side of the Idylls of the King, because in the conspiracy of silence into which Tennyson's just fame has hypnotised the critics, it is bare honesty to admit defects. And the frank statement of these is forced upon judicious lovers of the laureate's work by the extravagant tone of some of his admirers. Gushing curates and aesthetic young ladies have been heard to talk as if the Idylls of the King formed a far grander poem than Spenser's Faery Queen, or Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, nay, stood on a level with the Paradise Lost. But when the incongruity of his plan and the anomalies of his char- acters are once frankly admitted, we can all join in acclaiming the splendour of the execution of Tenny- 22 TENNYSON son's largest poem. Elaine, Guinevere, and the Passing of Arthur, in particular, contain poetry as exquisite in picture, in music, in pathos, as any in our language. The speeches of Arthur, of Lancelot, of Pelleas, and of many more, are truly noble, eloquent, and epic in themselves, if we forget for a moment the acts and the other conditions of these heroes in the rest of the poem. The final parting of Arthur and Guinevere, undoubtedly the most dramatic and heroic scene Tennyson ever painted, is a grand conception, if de- tached from the Round Table story, and if treated simply as a modern (or undated) episode between false wife and magnanimous husband in his agony of shame, wrath, and sorrow. If the poet had been bidden by some royal task- master to perform the unnatural task of converting episodes from the Arthurian cycle into poems fit for the young person of modern culture, it could not have been accomplished with more consummate beauty and faultless delicacy. And in this connection it is signifi- cant that the better judgment gives the chief crown of poetry in the whole collection to the original Morte d' Arthur, beginning — ' So all day long the noise of battle rolled,' and ending — ' And on the mere the wailing died away.' These noble lines, the most perfect in form and the simplest in conception of the Idylls, were written in early youth, and are an amazing triumph of precocious art. In them we have an ideal of mystical kinghood and a world of pure fancy, wonder, and weird myth, undisturbed by any incongruous tale of Arthur's blind- ness and Guinevere's falseness. One used to hear it TENNYSON 23 said at Oxford in the fifties, that if the Morte cT Arthur of the early Poems was ever completed, it would be the grandest epic in our language. Alas ! this was not to be fulfilled. It still remains the only fragment of real epic in the Idylls ; the only fragment, because simple, unalloyed with incongruous plot, untainted with modern romance, without ethical or psychological subtleties and graces. 'THE PRINCESS* AND 'MAUD' As In Memoriam is certainly the most perfect of Tennyson's longer poems, and as the Idylls of the King form the most important part of his work, by the scale, variety, and elaboration of the whole series, so we must count The Princess and Maud as his most characteristic and typical achievements. The Princess was published in 1847, when the poet was thirty-eight ; Maud in 1855, when he was forty-six. In The Princess Tennyson chose a subject in which all his genius found full play, which was entirely within all his resources. It was far lighter in design, much better fitted for his wonderful gifts of sweetness and grace, than the wild legends of the Arthurian cycle. It was no epic — not even an ' epyll,' or cross, we may say, between the epic and idyll. It was, as it was entitled, a ' Medley.' It was a fantastic idyllic romance, with a gentle undertone of moral purpose, not without a great deal of modern ' sentiment,' and some graceful and ladylike banter. Here was a subject which was curiously in. harmony with the poet's temperament and exquisite refinement. He was not called upon to build up an epic, or even an episode in an epic — a thing for which he had (possibly knew that he had) no real mission. But the fantastic 24 TENNYSON romance, cast in an undefined ideal world, and inter- fused with an ethical evangel — an idyll of chivalry told to a bevy of young ladies in a drawing-room, with an eye to their moral improvement — here was a field in which Tennyson had no superior or equal. It may not have been the highest field of a great poet's aspiration, but, in its own line, the poem is a bewitching success. The result is a piece of unbounded popularity, the charms of which satisfy the most scrupulous criticism as completely as they enthral the whole reading public. Maud is, in some ways, the most original of all Tennyson's conceptions. It is the first of those he chose for reading to his friends. It contains the most complex and subtle plot of any of the pieces which he constructed for himself. As an elaborate psychological analysis, he never produced anything on such a scale. The method of its composition — from the catastrophe back to the origin — as it is explained in the Memoir, is very singular and characteristic. The poem certainly contains the poet's most subtle insight into the human heart and brain. It contains also some of his most stirring eloquence, his fiercest passion, and undoubtedly much of his most entrancing melodies. The contrast between the dark mysteries of its opening — ' the dreadful hollow,' ' dabbled with blood-red heath,' ' the ghastly pit,' 'the red-ribbed ledges drip with a silent horror of blood ' — and then the passing to the ' Birds in the high Hall-garden,' ' go not, happy day,' and so on to the miraculous music of ' Come into the garden, Maud ' — this contrast is profoundly impressive. But with all the originality of Maud as a psycho- logic study, and all its luscious music, it is not a complete success. We must agree with Ruskin's complaint, amidst all his admiration, that he did not TENNYSON 25 quite like the 'sad story' and the 'wild kind of versifi- cation.' The story is more than sad : it is painful, it is ghastly, without being quite tragic. It is never pleasant to hear one recounting the phases of his own mania. And the wildly Bacchantic prosody of the strophes, though often beautiful, and always skilful, produces the effect of a pot pourri in a poem of such length — some 1500 lines. But there is a more serious criticism to be made. The story is a psychologic romance, more fit for prose than for verse. In poetry it is rather too analytic, complex, and introspective for entire enjoyment and ready comprehension. And the romance itself is gruesome and somewhat revolting, as a basis for so much fancy and such delicate melodies. It is slightly incongruous, as if the story of Eugene Aram were set to music for the flute. Subtle mysteries of crime and lunacy are endurable in an analytic novel, but do not tell well or even intelligibly in dulcet lyrics. Tensof thousandsof men andwomen imaginethemselves to love Maud as a poem, with very faint understanding of its mysterious plot and its morbid psychology. Tennyson hardly ever wrote without a moral purpose of some kind. But his attempt to weave into a ghastly story of crime, avarice, and insanity a fervid hymn to the moral value of national War, was, to say the least, a little irrelevant. It may have been right to denounce the Manchester school of politicians and to glorify the Crimean War as an Ethical Crusade in defence of the ' higher life,' but it prevented many worthy people from doing justice to the beauties of the poem." They would have thought it poisonous rant to preach, that the only way to cure the sin and fraud of great cities was to embark in a big war, were it not that they found this remarkable evangel of the nineteenth 26 TENNYSON century after Christ put into the mouth of a some- what crazy ' degenerate,' with memories of a blurred and bloody past. LYRICS AND IDYLLS It is a far happier task to turn to the more distinctly lyrical work of Tennyson — that whereon his permanent fame must abide. From the early Claribel to the final Crossing the Bar, separated by some sixty years of production, Tennyson's pure lyrics stand in the front rank of English lyrical achievement. It is needless to dilate on what every one has admired — man, woman, and child ; scholar, simple, critic, or general public. Nor has the praise and delight in this exquisite music been excessive or mistaken. It is a field where the student of Sappho and Catullus join hands with the girl in the schoolroom in unbounded admiration. The marvel is that these songs, with their luscious melody, their ^Eolic chiselling of phrase, their simple completeness, were the work of so young a poet, came forth full-fledged from the egg. That such pieces as Mariana, Oriana, Fatima, the Merman and Mermaid, should be thrown off by an unknown youth is amazing. That such a genius for melody should have been retained to the age of eighty, and produce in old age songs like The Throstle and Early Spring, is almost more amazing. The wealth as well as the beauty of Tennyson's lyrical productions places him in the fore- most rank of our lyrists — strong as our literature has been for many centuries in that form of poetry. The unanimous voice of the public has been right in fastening on the best of these lyrics, so that they have become household words, as familiar as those of Milton TENNYSON 2J or Burns. The Miller s Daughter, The Lotos-Eaters, Break, break, break, the Dream of Fair Women, Locksley Hall, The Light Brigade, The Revenge are equally popular, and in various modes deserve their immense vogue. Above all others are the songs in The Brook, in The Princess, and in Aland. Of them all, no doubt, the songs in The Princess are the most bewitching : 'The splendour falls on castle walls' — 'Tears, idle tears ' — ' O swallow, swallow ' — ' Now sleeps the crimson petal' — and lastly, 'Come down, O maid,' with its miraculous couplet, 'The moan of doves' — assuredly the most felicitous bit of imitative music in modern poetry, perhaps even in all English poetry. Even whilst under the spell of these siren chants, we must not suffer ourselves to be drawn into any false raptures. The lyrics, with all their charm, hardly rise to the Olympian radiance of a lyric by Sappho or Sophocles. They do not move us like Lycidas or Shakespeare's Songs ; no ! nor like such ballads as the Twa Corbies or the Land d the Leal, fo/m Anderson, O Waly Waly, or Fair Helen. They have not that audible ring that we hear in Shelley's Skylark, and several others of Shelley's best lyrics. Nor have they that inexplicable pathos of Lovelace's Althea, and some Scottish songs of Burns and Scott. The music of Tennyson's loveliest songs is somewhat languorous. It is— 1 Music that gentlier on the spirit lies, Than tir'd eyelids upon tir'd eyes.' Exquisite, exquisite ! but a little cloying — the true moan of melancholy lotos-eaters ! In all these songs we faint under the dulcet sounds of harp and flute, but we miss the trumpet and bassoon. We miss the lilt of Scots Wha Hae, of A man 's a man for d that, 28 TENNYSON the passion of Duncan Gray, the indescribable enthral- ment of the A ncient Mariner. No one thinks of putting Tennyson's place in poetry below that of Burns, Scott, or Coleridge. But even in his happiest lyrics, there is some want of the clarion note that they from time to time could sound. We do not altogether hear Tennyson shout forth these verses : we rather see him piecing them together, with consummate art, but without that ungovernable tempest of feeling which marks the highest lyric, so that speech seems to fail the poet, and he bursts into unrestrainable song. Tennyson's lyrics are all exqui- sitely melodious and marvellously worked. But the very melody and the work somewhat lessen our sense of their spontaneous inspiration. And of all forms of poetry, lyric most needs the sense of being inspired song, inevitable outpouring of heart. The essence of lyric is feeling — passion, the thrill of joy, anguish, or strife. No one can dispute the feeling of Tennyson's lyrics ; but it is usually clothed in such subtle graces of fancy, in such artful cadences, in such enamelled colouring, that it strikes the imagination more than the heart. We feel this even in such an exquisite ballad as Edward Gray ; which, with all its pathos, is somewhat too pretty, too artful, too modern. The songs are not quite simple, and the expression of feeling must be simple. Burns's songs are in verbal refinement mere peasant's catches as compared with Tennyson's subtle modulations. But they have the thrill which rings through and through us. We hear them sung, even as we do in such immortal songs as ' Take, Oh ! take those lips away,' or ' Come away, come away, Death ! ' In Moliere's Misanthrope, Alceste justly prefers 'J'aime mieux ma mie, O gai ! ' to the most TENNYSON 29 ingenious sonnet. That is the supreme charm of Shakespeare's songs — ' Full fathom five thy Father lies ! ' ' Tell me where is Fancy bred ! ' — a child can follow this ; might even utter it. No words could be more natural and easy. And this ring from the heart's chords is in Burns's songs, from ' O, my Luve is like a red, red rose' down to the tipsy fun of 'The Deil cam fiddling through the town.' Scott, who is only a very fine poet in a few songs, has this incommunicable canta- bile, which Shelley often, Byron and Wordsworth and Keats once or twice, have touched. Tennyson's lyrics, as we all feel, have exquisite music ; but it is the music of recitation, of memory, of thought, rather than of song. They are too luscious, too brocaded to be sung. But if they miss this thrill which forces forth the voice, they gain in poetic colour, in complex har- mony, in translucence. Thousands of lovers of The Princess linger over the melting cadences of the songs therein — ' Tears, idle tears,' ' O swallow, swallow,' ' Now sleeps the crimson petal,' ' Come down, O maid ' — without knowing that these lovely lines are composed in heroic blank verse — the same metre as Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes. They wring us like the Cujus animam of Rossini's Stabat Mater. But, like that wonderful dirge, they are a little too languorous — have too much morbidezza for great art. But if the songs, with all their ' linked sweetness long drawn out,' with all that ' melting voice through mazes running,' speak to us with the mind rather than the voice, Tennyson has appropriated a form of lyric poem which is peculiarly his own, and in which he is supreme. This is the real idyll of which CEnone is the type The Idylls of the King are not true idylls. Edmund Lushington wished to call them epylls, or little epics. 3