FullReads

We are apt to judge a poet too exclusively by his imagery. Tennyson is hardly a great master of imagery. He has more imagination than imagery. He sees the thing, with so luminous a mind’s eye, that it is sufficient to him; he needs not to see it more beautifully by a similitude. “A clear-walled city” is enough; “meadows” are enough–indeed Tennyson reigns for ever over all meadows; “the happy birds that change their sky”; “Bright Phosphor, fresher for the night”; “Twilight and evening bell”; “the stillness of the central sea”; “that friend of mine who lives in God”; “the solitary morning”; “Four grey walls and four grey towers”; “Watched by weeping queens”; these are enough, illustrious, and needing not illustration.

If we do not see Tennyson to be the lonely, the first, the one that he is, this is because of the throng of his following, though a number that are of that throng hardly know, or else would deny, their flocking. But he added to our literature not only in the way of cumulation, but by the advent of his single genius. He is one of the few fountain-head poets of the world. The new landscape which was his–the lovely unbeloved–is, it need hardly be said, the matter of his poetry and not its inspiration. It may have seemed to some readers that it is the novelty, in poetry, of this homely unscenic scenery–this Lincolnshire quality–that accounts for Tennyson’s freshness of vision. But it is not so. Tennyson is fresh also in scenic scenery; he is fresh with the things that others have outworn; mountains, desert islands, castles, elves, what you will that is conventional. Where are there more divinely poetic lines than those, which will never be wearied with quotation, beginning, “A splendour falls”? What castle walls have stood in such a light of old romance, where in all poetry is there a sound wilder than that of those faint “horns of elfland”? Here is the remoteness, the beyond, the light delirium, not of disease but of more rapturous and delicate health, the closer secret of poetry. This most English of modern poets has been taunted with his mere gardens. He loved, indeed, the “lazy lilies,” of the exquisite garden of “The Gardener’s Daughter,” but he betook his ecstatic English spirit also far afield and overseas; to the winter places of his familiar nightingale:-

When first the liquid note beloved of men
Comes flying over many a windy wave;

to the lotus-eaters’ shore; to the outland landscapes of “The Palace of Art”–the “clear-walled city by the sea,” the “pillared town,” the “full- fed river”; to the “pencilled valleys” of Monte Rosa; to the “vale in Ida”; to that tremendous upland in the “Vision of Sin”:-

At last I heard a voice upon the slope
Cry to the summit, Is there any hope?
To which an answer pealed from that high land,
But in a tongue no man could understand.

The Cleopatra of “The Dream of Fair Women” is but a ready-made Cleopatra, but when in the shades of her forest she remembers the sun of the world, she leaves the page of Tennyson’s poorest manner and becomes one with Shakespeare’s queen:-

We drank the Libyan sun to sleep.

Nay, there is never a passage of manner but a great passage of style rebukes our dislike and recalls our heart again. The dramas, less than the lyrics, and even less than the “Idylls,” are matter for the true Tennysonian. Their action is, at its liveliest rather vivacious than vital, and the sentiment, whether in “Becket” or in “Harold,” is not only modern, it is fixed within Tennyson’s own peculiar score or so of years. But that he might have answered, in drama, to a stronger stimulus, a sharper spur, than his time administered, may be guessed from a few passages of “Queen Mary,” and from the dramatic terror of the arrow in “Harold.” The line has appeared in prophetic fragments in earlier scenes, and at the moment of doom it is the outcry of unquestionable tragedy:-