III
The poems of 1842 naturally divide themselves into seven groups:—
(i.) Studies in Fancy.
Claribel.
Lilian.
Isabel.
Madeline.
A Spirit Haunts.
Recollections of the Arabian Nights.
Adeline.
The Dying Swan.
A Dream of Fair Women.
The Sea-Fairies.
The Deserted House.
Love and Death.
The Merman.
The Mermaid.
The Lady of Shalott.
Eleanore.
Margaret.
The Death of the Old Year.
St. Agnes.
Sir Galahad.
The Day Dream.
Will Waterproof’s Monologue.
Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere.
The Talking Oak.
The Poet’s Song.
(ii.) Studies of Passion.
Mariana.
Mariana in the South.
Oriana.
Fatima.
The Sisters.
Locksley Hall.
Edward Gray.
(iii.) Psychological Studies.
A Character.
The Poet.
The Poet’s Mind.
The Two Voices.
The Palace of Art.
The Vision of Sin.
St. Simeon Stylites.
(iv.) Idylls.
(a.) Classical.
Œnone.
The Lotos Eaters.
Ulysses.
(b.) English.
The Miller’s Daughter.
The May Queen.
Morte d’Arthur.
The Gardener’s Daughter.
Dora.
Audley Court.
Walking to the Mail.
Edwin Morris.
The Golden Year.
(v.) Ballads.
Oriana.
Lady Clara Vere de Vere.
Edward Gray.
Lady Clare.
The Lord of Burleigh.
The Beggar Maid.
(vi.) Autobiographical.
Ode to Memory.
Sonnet to J. M. K.
To—— with the Palace of Art.
To J.S.
Amphion.
To E. L. on his Travels in Greece.
To—— after reading a Life and Letters.
“Come not when I am Dead.”
A Farewell.
“Move Eastward, Happy Earth.”
“Break, Break, Break.”
(vii.) Political Group.
“You ask me.”
“Of old sat Freedom.”
“Love thou thy Land.”
The Goose.
In surveying these poems two things must strike every one— their very wide range and their very fragmentary character. There is scarcely any side of life on which they do not touch, scarcely any phase of passion and emotion to which they do not give exquisite expression. Take the love poems: compare Fatima with Isabel, The Miller’s Daughter with Locksley Hall, The Gardener’s Daughter with Madeline, or Mariana with Cleopatra in the Dream of Fair Women. When did love find purer and nobler expression than in Love and Duty? When has sorrow found utterance more perfect than in the verses To J.S., or the passion for the past than in Break, Break, Break, or revenge and jealousy than in The Sisters? In The Two Voices, The Palace of Art and The Vision of Sin we are in another sphere. They are appeals to the soul of man on subjects of momentous concern to him. And each is a masterpiece. What is proper to philosophy and what is proper to poetry have never perhaps been so happily blended. They have all the sensuous charm of Keats, but the prose of Hume could not have presented the truths which they are designed to convey with more lucidity and precision. In that superb fragment the Morte d’Arthur we have many of the noblest attributes of Epic poetry. ënone is the perfection of the classical idyll, The Gardener’s Daughter and the idylls that follow it of the romantic. Sir Galahad and St. Agnes are in the vein of Keats and Coleridge, but Keats and Coleridge have produced nothing more exquisite and nothing so ethereal. The Lotos Eaters is perhaps the most purely delicious poem ever written, the ne plus ultra of sensuous loveliness, and yet the poet who gave us that has given us also the political poems, poems as trenchant and austerely dignified in style as they are pregnant with practical wisdom. There is the same versatility displayed in the trifles.
But all is fragmentary. No thread strings these jewels. They form a collection of gems unset and unarranged. Without any system or any definite scope they have nothing of that unity in diversity which is so perceptible in the lyrics and minor poems of Goethe and Wordsworth. Capricious as the gyrations of a sea-gull seem the poet’s moods and movements. We have now the reveries of a love-sick maiden, now the picture of a soul wrestling with despair and death; here a study from rural life, or a study in character, there a sermon on politics, or a descent into the depths of psychological truth, or a sketch from nature. But nothing could be more concentrated than the power employed to shape each fragment into form. What Pope says of the Æneid may be applied with very literal truth to these poems:—
Finish’d the whole, and laboured every part
With patient touches of unwearied art.
In the poems of 1842 we have the secret of Tennyson’s eminence as a poet as well as the secret of his limitations. He appears to have been constitutionally deficient in what the Greeks called architektoniké, combination and disposition on a large scale. The measure of his power as a constructive artist is given us in the poem in which the English idylls may be said to culminate, namely, Enoch Arden. In Memoriam and the Idylls of the King have a sort of spiritual unity, but they are a series of fragments tacked rather than fused together. It is the same with Maud, and it is the same with The Princess. His poems have always a tendency to resolve themselves into a series of cameos: it is only the short poems which have organic unity. A gift of felicitous and musical expression which is absolutely marvellous; an instinctive sympathy with what is best and most elevated in the sphere of ordinary life, of ordinary thought and sentiment, of ordinary activity with consummate representative power; a most rare faculty of seizing and fixing in very perfect form what is commonly so inexpressible because so impalpable and evanescent in emotion and expression; a power of catching and rendering the charm of nature with a fidelity and vividness which resemble magic; and lastly, unrivalled skill in choosing, repolishing and remounting the gems which are our common inheritance from the past: these are the gifts which will secure permanence for his work as long as the English language lasts.
In his power of crystallising commonplaces he stands next to Pope, in subtle felicity of expression beside Virgil. And, when he says of Virgil that we find in his diction “all the grace of all the muses often flowering in one lonely word,” he says what is literally true of his own work. As a master of style his place is in the first rank among English classical poets. But his style is the perfection of art. His diction, like the diction of Milton and Gray, resembles mosaic work. With a touch here and a touch there, now from memory, now from unconscious assimilation, inlaying here an epithet and there a phrase, adding, subtracting, heightening, modifying, substituting one metaphor for another, developing what is latent in the suggestive imagery of a predecessor, laying under contribution the most intimate familiarity with what is best in the literature of the ancient and modern world, the unwearied artist toils patiently on till his precious mosaic work is without a flaw. All the resources of rhetoric are employed to give distinction to his style and every figure in rhetoric finds expression in his diction: Hypallage as in
The pillard dusk
Of sounding sycamores.
—Audley Court.
Paronomasia as in
The seawind sang
Shrill, chill with flakes of foam.
—Morte d’Arthur.
Oxymoron as
Behold them unbeheld, unheard
Hear all.
—Œnone.
Hyperbaton as in
The dew-impearled winds of dawn.
—Ode to Memory.
Metonymy as in
The bright death quiver’d at the victim’s throat.
—Dream of Fair Women.
or in
For some three careless moans
The summer pilot of an empty heart.
—Gardener’s Daughter.
No poet since Milton has employed what is known as Onomatopoeia with so much effect. Not to go farther than the poems of 1842, we have in the Morte d’Arthur:—
So all day long the noise of battle rolled
Among the mountains by the winter sea;
or
Dry clashed his harness in the icy caves
And barren chasms, and all to left and right
The bare black cliff clang’d round him, as he bas’d
His feet on juts of slippery crag that rang
Sharp-smitten with the dint of armed heels—
or the exquisite
I heard the water lapping on the crag,
And the long ripple washing in the reeds.
So in The Dying Swan,
And the wavy swell of the soughing reeds.
See too the whole of Oriana and the description of the dance at the beginning of The Vision of Sin.
Assonance, alliteration, the revival or adoption of obsolete and provincial words, the transplantation of phrases and idioms from the Greek and Latin languages, the employment of common words in uncommon senses, all are pressed into the service of adding distinction to his diction. His diction blends the two extremes of simplicity and artificiality, but with such fine tact that this strange combination has seldom the effect of incongruity. Longinus has remarked that “as the fainter lustre of the stars is put out of sight by the all-encompassing rays of the sun, so when sublimity sheds its light round the sophistries of rhetoric they become invisible”.2 What Longinus says of “sublimity” is equally true of sincerity and truthfulness in combination with exquisitely harmonious expression. We have an illustration in Gray’s Elegy. Nothing could be more artificial than the style, but what poem in the world appeals more directly to the heart and to the eye? It is one thing to call art to the assistance of art, it is quite another thing to call art to the assistance of nature. And this is what both Gray and Tennyson do, and this is why their artificiality, so far from shocking us, “passes in music out of sight”. But this cannot be said of Tennyson without reserve. At times his strained endeavours to give distinction to his style by putting common things in an uncommon way led him into intolerable affectation. Thus we have “the knightly growth that fringed his lips” for a moustache, “azure pillars of the hearth” for ascending smoke, “ambrosial orbs” for apples, “frayed magnificence” for a shabby dress, “the secular abyss to come” for future ages, “the sinless years that breathed beneath the Syrian blue” for the life of Christ, “up went the hush’d amaze of hand and eye” for a gesture of surprise, and the like. One of the worst instances is in In Memoriam, where what is appropriate to the simple sentiment finds, as it should do, corresponding simplicity of expression in the first couplet, to collapse into the falsetto of strained artificiality in the second:—
To rest beneath the clover sod
That takes the sunshine and the rains,
Or where the kneeling hamlet drains
The chalice of the grapes of God.
An illustration of the same thing, almost as offensive, is in Enoch Arden, where, in an otherwise studiously simple diction, Enoch’s wares as a fisherman become
Enoch’s ocean spoil
In ocean-smelling osier.
But these peculiarities are less common in the earlier poems than in the later: it was a vicious habit which grew on him.
But, if exception may sometimes be taken to his diction, no exception can be taken to his rhythm. No English poet since Milton, Tennyson’s only superior in this respect, had a finer ear or a more consummate mastery over all the resources of rhythmical expression. What colours are to a painter rhythm is, in description, to the poet, and few have rivalled, none have excelled Tennyson in this. Take the following:—
And ghastly thro’ the drizzling rain
On the bald street strikes the blank day.
—In Memoriam.
See particularly In Memoriam, cvii., the lines beginning “Fiercely flies,” to “darken on the rolling brine”: the description of the island in Enoch Arden; but specification is needless, it applies to all his descriptive poetry. It is marvellous that he can produce such effects by such simple means: a mere enumeration of particulars will often do it, as here:—
No gray old grange or lonely fold,
Or low morass and whispering reed,
Or simple style from mead to mead,
Or sheep walk up the windy wold.
—In Memoriam, c.
Or here:—
The meal sacks on the whitened floor,
The dark round of the dripping wheel,
The very air about the door
Made misty with the floating meal.
—The Miller’s Daughter.
His blank verse is best described by negatives. It has not the endless variety, the elasticity and freedom of Shakespeare’s, it has not the massiveness and majesty of Milton’s, it has not the austere grandeur of Wordsworth’s at its best, it has not the wavy swell, “the linked sweetness long drawn out” of Shelley’s, but its distinguishing feature is, if we may use the expression, its importunate beauty. What Coleridge said of Claudian’s style may be applied to it: “Every line, nay every word stops, looks full in your face and asks and begs for praise”. is earlier blank verse is less elaborate and seemingly more spontaneous and easy than his later.3 But it is in his lyric verse that his rhythm is seen in its greatest perfection. No English lyrics have more magic or more haunting beauty, more of that which charms at once and charms for ever.
In his description of nature he is incomparable. Take the following from The Dying Swan:—
Some blue peaks in the distance rose,
And white against the cold-white sky,
Shone out their crowning snows.
One willow over the river wept,
And shook the wave as the wind did sigh;
Above in the wind was the swallow,
Chasing itself at its own wild will,
or the opening scene in Œnone and in The Lotos Eaters, or the meadow scene in The Gardener’s Daughter, or the conclusion of Audley Court, or the forest scene in the Dream of Fair Women, or this stanza in Mariana in the South:—
There all in spaces rosy-bright
Large Hesper glitter’d on her tears,
And deepening through the silent spheres,
Heaven over Heaven rose the night.
A single line, nay, a single word, and a scene is by magic before us, as here where the sea is looked down upon from an immense height:—
The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls.
—The Eagle.
Or here of a ship at sea, in the distance:—
And on through zones of light and shadow
Glimmer away to the lonely deep.
—To the Rev. F. D. Maurice.
Or here of waters falling high up on mountains:—
Their thousand wreaths of dangling water-smoke.
—The Princess.
Or of a water-fall seen at a distance:—
And like a downward smoke the slender stream
Along the cliff to fall and pause and fall did seem.
Or here again:—
We left the dying ebb that faintly lipp’d
The flat red granite.
Or here of a wave:—
Like a wave in the wild North Sea
Green glimmering toward the summit bears with all
Its stormy crests that smoke against the skies
Down on a bark.
—Elaine.
That beech will gather brown,
This maple burn itself away.
—In Memoriam.
The wide-wing’d sunset of the misty marsh.
—Last Tournament.
But illustrations would be endless. Nothing seems to escape him in Nature. Take the following:—
Like a purple beech among the greens
Looks out of place.
—Edwin Morris.
Or
Delays as the tender ash delays To clothe herself, when all the woods are green.
—The Princess.
As black as ash-buds in the front of March.
—The Gardener’s Daughter.
A gusty April morn
That puff’d the swaying branches into smoke.
—Holy Grail.
So with flowers, trees, birds and insects:—
The fox-glove clusters dappled bells.
—The Two Voices.
The sunflower:—
Rays round with flame its disk of seed.
—In Memoriam.
The dog-rose:—
Tufts of rosy-tinted snow.
—Two Voices.
A million emeralds break from the ruby-budded lime.
—Maud.
In gloss and hue the chestnut, when the shell
Divides threefold to show the fruit within.
—The Brook.
Or of a chrysalis:—
And flash’d as those
Dull-coated things, that making slide apart
Their dusk wing cases, all beneath there burns
A Jewell’d harness, ere they pass and fly.
—Gareth and Lynette.
So again:—
Wan-sallow, as the plant that feeds itself,
Root-bitten by white lichen.
—Id.
And again:—
All the silvery gossamers
That twinkle into green and gold.
—In Memoriam.
His epithets are in themselves a study: “the dewy-tassell’d wood,” “the tender-pencill’d shadow,” “crimson-circl’d star,” the “hoary clematis,” “creamy spray,” “dry-tongued laurels”. But whatever he describes is described with the same felicitous vividness. How magical is this in the verses to Edward Lear:—
Naiads oar’d
A glimmering shoulder under gloom
Of cavern pillars.
Or this:—
She lock’d her lips: she left me where I stood:
“Glory to God,” she sang, and past afar,
Thridding the sombre boskage of the wood,
Toward the morning-star.
—A Dream of Fair Women.
But if in the world of Nature nothing escaped his sensitive and sympathetic observation,—and indeed it might be said of him as truly as of Shelley’s Alastor
Every sight
And sound from the vast earth and ambient air
Sent to his heart its choicest impulses,
—he had studied the world of books with not less sympathy and attention. In the sense of a profound and extensive acquaintance with all that is best in ancient and modern poetry, and in an extraordinarily wide knowledge of general literature, of philosophy and theology, of geography and travel, and of various branches of natural science, he is one of the most erudite of English poets. With the poetry of the Greek and Latin classics he was, like Milton and Gray, thoroughly saturated. Its influence penetrates his work, now in indirect reminiscence, now in direct imitation, now inspiring, now modifying, now moulding. He tells us in The Daisy how when at Como “the rich Virgilian rustic measure of Lari Maxume” haunted him all day, and in a later fragment how, as he rowed from Desenzano to Sirmio, Catullus was with him. And they and their brethren, from Homer to Theocritus, from Lucretius to Claudian, always were with him. I have illustrated so fully in the notes and elsewhere4 the influence of the Greek and Roman classics on the poems of 1842 that it is not necessary to go into detail here. But a few examples of the various ways in which they affected Tennyson’s work generally may be given. Sometimes he transfers a happy epithet or expression in literal translation, as in:—
On either shining shoulder laid a hand, which is Homer’s epithet for the shoulder—
ἀνὰ φαιδίμῳ ὤμῳ
—Od., xi., 128.
It was the red cock shouting to the light,
exactly the
ἕος ἐβόησεν ἀλέκτωρ
(Until the cock shouted).
—Batrachomyomachia, 192.
And all in passion utter’d a dry shriek,
which is the sicca vox of the Roman poets. So in The Lotos Eaters:—
His voice was thin as voices from the grave, which is Theocritus’ voice of Hylas from his watery grave:—
ἀραιὰ δ’ Ἱκετο φωνά
So in The Princess, sect. i.:—
And cook’d his spleen, which is a phrase from the Greek, as in Homer, Il., iv., 513:—
ἐπι νηυσὶ χόλον θυμαλγέα πέσσει
(At the ships he cooks his heart-grieving spleen).
Again in The Princess, sect. iv.:—
Laugh’d with alien lips, which is Homer’s (Od., 69-70)—
διδ’ ἤδη γναθμοῖσι γελῴων ἀλλοτρίοισι
So in Edwin Morris—
All perfect, finished to the finger nail, which is a phrase transferred from Latin through the Greek; cf., Horace, Sat., i., v., 32:—
Ad unguem
Factus homo
(A man fashioned to the finger nail).
“The brute earth,” In Memoriam, cxxvii., which is Horace’s
Bruta tellus.
—Odes, i., xxxiv., 9.
So again:—
A bevy of roses apple-cheek’d in The Island, which is Theocritus’ μαλοπάρῃος. The line in the Morte d’Arthur,
This way and that, dividing the swift mind, is an almost literal translation of Virgil’s Æn., iv., 285:—
Atque animum nunc huc celerem nunc dividit illuc
(And this way and that he divides his swift mind).
Another way in which they affect him is where, without direct imitation, they colour passages and poems as in Œnone, The Lotos Eaters, Tithonus, Tiresias, The Death of Œnone, Demeter and Persephone, the passage beginning “From the woods” in The Gardener’s Daughter, which is a parody of Theocritus, Id., vii., 139 seq., while the Cyclops’ invocation to Galatea in Theocritus, Id., xi., 29-79, was plainly the model for the idyll, “Come down, O Maid,” in the seventh section of The Princess, just as the tournament in the same poem recalls closely the epic of Homer and Virgil. Tennyson had a wonderful way of transfusing, as it were, the essence of some beautiful passage in a Greek or Roman poet into English. A striking illustration of this would be the influence of reminiscences of Virgil’s fourth Æneid on the idyll of Elaine and Guinevere. Compare, for instance, the following: he is describing the love-wasted Elaine, as she sits brooding in the lonely evening, with the shadow of the wished-for death falling on her:—
But when they left her to herself again,
Death, like a friend’s voice from a distant field,
Approaching through the darkness, call’d; the owls
Wailing had power upon her, and she mix’d
Her fancies with the sallow-rifted glooms
Of evening and the moanings of the wind.
How exactly does this recall, in a manner to be felt rather than exactly defined, a passage equally exquisite and equally pathetic in Virgil’s picture of Dido, where, with the shadow of her death also falling upon her, she seems to hear the phantom voice of her dead husband, and “mixes her fancies” with the glooms of night and the owl’s funereal wail:—
Hinc exaudiri voces et verba vocantis
Visa viri, nox quum terras obscura teneret;
Solaque culminibus ferali carmine bubo
Sæpe queri, et longas in fletum ducere voces.
—Æn., iv., 460.)
(From it she thought she clearly heard a voice, even the accents of her husband calling her when night was wrapping the earth with darkness; and on the roof the lonely owl in funereal strains kept oft complaining, drawing out into a wail its protracted notes.)
Similar passages, though not so striking, would be the picture of Pindar’s Elysium in Tiresias, the sentiment pervading The Lotos Eaters transferred so faithfully from the Greek poets, the scenery in Œnone so crowded with details from Homer, Theocritus and Callimachus. Sometimes we find similes suggested by the classical poets, but enriched by touches from original observation, as here in The Princess:—
As one that climbs a peak to gaze
O’er land and main, and sees a great black cloud
Drag inward from the deeps, a wall of night
Blot out the slope of sea from verge to shore.
...
And quenching lake by lake and tarn by tarn
Expunge the world,
which was plainly suggested by Homer, iv., 275:—
ὡς δ’ ὅτ’ ἀπὸ σκοπιῆς εἴδε νέφος αἰπολος ἀνήρ
ἐρχόμενον κατὰ πόντον ὑπὸ Ζεφύροιο ἰωῆς
τῷ δε τ’ ἄνευθεν ἐόντι, μελάντερον ἠΰτε πίσσα,
φαίνετ’ ἰὸν κατὰ πόντον, ἄγει δέ τε λαῖλαπα πολλὴν.
(As when a goat-herd from some hill-peak sees a cloud coming across the deep with the blast of the west wind behind it; and to him, being as he is afar, it seems blacker, even as pitch, as it goes along the deep, bringing with it a great whirlwind.)
So again the fine simile in Elaine, beginning
Bare as a wild wave in the wide North Sea, is at least modelled on the simile in Iliad, xv., 381-4, with reminiscences of the same similes in Iliad, xv., 624, and Iliad, iv., 42-56. The simile in the first section of the Princess,
As when a field of corn
Bows all its ears before the roaring East,
reminds us of Homer’s
ὡς δ’ ὅτε κινήση Ζέφυρος βαθυλήϊον, ἐλθὼν
λάβρος, ἐπαιγίζων, ἐπὶ τ’ ἠμύει ἀσταχύεσσιν.
(As when the west wind tosses a deep cornfield rushing down with furious blast, and it bows with all its ears.)
Nothing could be more happy than such an adaptation as the following—
Ever fail’d to draw
The quiet night into her blood,
from Virgil, Æn., iv., 530:—
Neque unquam Solvitur in somnos oculisve aut pectore noctem
Accipit.
(And she never relaxes into sleep, or receives the night in eyes or bosom),
or than the following (in Enid) from Theocritus:—
Arms on which the standing muscle sloped,
As slopes a wild brook o’er a little stone,
Running too vehemently to break upon it.
ἐν δὲ μύες στερεοῖσι βραχίοσιν ἄκρον ὑπ’ ὦμον
ἔστασαν, ἠύτε πέτροι ὀλοίτροχοι οὕς τε κυλίνδον
χειμάῤῥους ποταμὸς μεγάλαις περιέξεσε δίναις.
—Idyll, xxii., 48 seq.
(And the muscles on his brawny arms close under the shoulder stood out like boulders which the wintry torrent has rolled and worn smooth with the mighty eddies.)
But there was another use to which Tennyson applied his accurate and intimate acquaintance with the classics. It lay in developing what was suggested by them, in unfolding, so to speak, what was furled in their imagery. Nothing is more striking in ancient classical poetry than its pregnant condensation. It often expresses in an epithet what might be expanded into a detailed picture, or calls up in a single phrase a whole scene or a whole position. Where in Merlin and Vivian Tennyson described
The blind wave feeling round his long sea hall
In silence,
he was merely unfolding to its full Homer’s κῦμα κωφόν—“dumb wave”; just as the best of all comments on Horace’s expression, “Vultus nimium lubricus aspici,” Odes, I., xix., 8, is given us in Tennyson’s picture of the Oread in Lucretius:—
How the sun delights
To glance and shift about her slippery sides.
Or take again this passage in the Agamemnon, 404-5, describing Menelaus pining in his desolate palace for the lost Helen:—
πόθῳ δ’ ὑπερποντίας
φάσμα δόξει δόμων ἀνάσσειν
(And in his yearning love for her who is over the sea a phantom will seem to reign over his palace.)
What are the lines in Guinevere but an expansion of what is latent but unfolded in the pregnant suggestiveness of the Greek poet:—
And in thy bowers of Camelot or of Usk
Thy shadow still would glide from room to room,
And I should evermore be vex’d with thee
In hanging robe or vacant ornament,
Or ghostly foot-fall echoing on the stair—
with a reminiscence also perhaps of Constance’s speech in King John, III., iv.
It need hardly be said that these particular passages, and possibly some of the others, may be mere coincidences, but they illustrate what numberless other passages which could be cited prove that Tennyson’s careful and meditative study of the Greek and Roman poets enabled him to enrich his work by these felicitous adaptations.
He used those poets as his master Virgil used his Greek predecessors, and what the elder Seneca said of Ovid, who had appropriated a line from Virgil, might exactly be applied to Tennyson: “Fecisse quod in multis aliis versibus Virgilius fecerat, non surripiendi caus, sed palam imitandi, hoc animo ut vellet agnosci”.5
He had plainly studied with equal attention the chief Italian poets, especially Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto and Tasso. On a passage in Dante he founded his Ulysses, and imitations of that master are frequent throughout his poems. In Memoriam, both in its general scheme as well as in numberless particular passages, closely recalls Petrarch; and Ariosto and Tasso have each influenced his work. In the poetry of his own country nothing seems to have escaped him, either in the masters or the minor poets.6 To apply the term plagiarism to Tennyson’s use of his predecessors would be as absurd as to resolve some noble fabric into its stones and bricks, and confounding the one with the other to taunt the architect with appropriating an honour which belongs to the quarry and the potter. Tennyson’s method was exactly the method of two of the greatest poets in the world, Virgil and Milton, of the poet who stands second to Virgil in Roman poetry, Horace, of one of the most illustrious of our own minor poets, Gray.
An artist more fastidious than Tennyson never existed. As scrupulous a purist in language as Cicero, Chesterfield and Macaulay in prose, as Virgil, Milton, and Leopardi in verse, his care extended to the nicest minutiæ of word-forms. Thus “ancle” is always spelt with a “c” when it stands alone, with a “k” when used in compounds; thus he spelt “Idylls” with one “l” in the short poems, with two “l’s” in the epic poems; thus the employment of “through” or “thro’,” of “bad” or “bade,” and the retention or suppression of “e” in past participles are always carefully studied. He took immense pains to avoid the clash of “s” with “s,” and to secure the predominance of open vowels when rhythm rendered them appropriate. Like the Greek painter with his partridge, he thought nothing of sacrificing good things if, in any way, they interfered with unity and symmetry, and thus, his son tells us, many stanzas, in themselves of exquisite beauty, have been lost to us.
Notes
2 De Sublimitate, xvii.
3 Tennyson’s blank verse in the Idylls of the King (excepting in the Morte d’Arthur and in the grander passages), is obviously modelled in rhythm on that of Shakespeare’s earlier style seen to perfection in King John. Compare the following lines with the rhythm say of Elaine or Guinevere;—
But now will canker sorrow eat my bud,
And chase the native beauty from his cheek,
And he will look as hollow as a ghost;
As dim and meagre as an ague’s fit:
And so he’ll die; and, rising so again,
When I shall meet him in the court of heaven
I shall not know him: therefore never, never
Must I behold my pretty Arthur more.
—King John, III., iv.
4 Illustrations of Tennyson.
5 Seneca, third Suasoria.
6 For fuller illustrations of all this, and for the influence of the ancient classics on Tennyson, I may perhaps venture to refer the reader to my Illustrations of Tennyson. And may I here take the opportunity of pointing out that nothing could have been farther from my intention in that book than what has so often been most unfairly attributed to it, namely, an attempt to show that a charge of plagiarism might be justly urged against Tennyson. No honest critic, who had even cursorily inspected the book, could so utterly misrepresent its purpose.