Page images
PDF
EPUB

chooses for the vehicles of his emotion are radically opposed. Byron describes himself in the epic, and makes his characters soliloquise of himself in the drama; he would never have dramatised his self-consciousness in a lyric form as Tennyson does in Locksley Hall and Maud. What Byron was in his attitude towards society at the beginning, that he remained to the end, rebellious, irreconcilable, scornful, satiric; the lyric and satiric impulse, disclosed in Hours of Idleness, exhibits itself, only with matured power, in Don Juan. Tennyson, on the contrary, seems to be always advancing in endeavour towards some point of art in which his mind may attain repose and unity; he seeks to merge his own self-consciousness in the larger consciousness of society, and in proportion as he approaches to this external point of contemplation, he leaves behind him the fluid lyric impulse of his youth, seeking to imprison his ideas in the visible and abiding forms peculiar to the arts of painting and sculpture. Of these self-conscious movements of his imagination he gives us in his poems many interesting autobiographical glimpses. How suggestive, for example, are the following lines from In Memoriamwritten with reference to the remark of a woman that "doubt is devil-born "-when read in connection with the interjections of "the second-rate mind not at unity with itself"-" O damned vacillating state!" "O

I know not one indeed I knew

In many a subtle question versed,
Who touch'd a jarring lyre at first,

But ever strove to make it true:

Perplext in faith, but pure in deeds,
At last he beat his music out.

There lives more faith in honest doubt,
Believe me, than in half the creeds.

And so again, in illustration of the sensitiveness with which the poet's self-consciousness shrinks or expands with the self-consciousness of society, it is interesting to contrast the conclusion of Locksley Hall with the conclusion of Maud. The jilted

lover in the former cries:

Comes a vapour from the margin, blackening over heath and holt,

Cramming all the blast before it, in its breast a thunderbolt.

Let it fall on Locksley Hall, with rain or hail, or fire or snow; For the mighty wind arises, roaring seaward, and I go.

But the semi-madman of Maud gets rid of his "old hysterical mock-disease" thus:

And I stood on a giant deck and mix'd my
With a loyal people shouting a battle cry,

Till I saw the dreary phantom arise and fly

breath

Far into the North, and battle, and seas of death.

Let it flame or fade, and the war roll down like a wind,
We have proved we have hearts in a cause, we are noble still,
And myself have awaked, as it seems, to the better mind;
It is better to fight for the good than to rail at the ill;
I have felt with my native land, I am one with my kind,
I embrace the purpose of God, and the doom assign'd.

But whether the poet's haunting self-consciousness finds relief in this manner, or whether, as in Locksley Hall Sixty Years After, it relapses into something of the "old hysterical mock-disease," the artistic

resolve to arrest the transitory feeling in a perfect and abiding ideal form remains. How intimately this poetic impulse is associated with the centrifugal movement of the individual apart from society is

shown by a very fine passage in The Palace of Art:

No nightingale delighteth to prolong
Her low preamble all alone,

More than my soul to hear her echo'd song
Throb thro' the ribbed stone;

Singing and murmuring in her feastful mirth,
Joying to feel herself alive,

Lord over Nature, Lord of the visible earth,
Lord of the senses five;

Communing with herself: "All these are mine,
And let the world have peace or wars,

'Tis one to me."

"I take possession of man's mind and deed.
I care not what the sects may brawl.
I sit as God holding no form of creed,
But contemplating all."

Almost inevitably an imagination thus affected seeks to develop in the art of poetry those elements which are most akin to the plastic arts and to music. Among the English poets Tennyson is the greatest word-painter. Whatever form of poetry he attempts -and he has attempted all-this tendency is stamped upon it, and success attends him in proportion as the form is capable of being used for sculpturesque, or pictorial, or musical, purposes. The genius of painting inspires to perfection the monologues and lyrical idylls-Tithonus, Ulysses, Mariana in the Moated

Grange, and the like-which form the bulk of Tennyson's earlier work. It attains its meridian in In Memoriam, where, joined with the penetrating force of intense self-analysis, it succeeds in giving dignity of form to the most familiar objects and associations. What other poet has ever written thus of a picnic? Nor less it pleased in livelier moods,

Beyond the bounding hill to stray,
And break the livelong summer day

With banquet in the distant woods;

Whereat we glanced from theme to theme,
Discuss'd the books to love or hate,
Or touch'd the changes of the state,
Or threaded some Socratic dream;

But if I praised the busy town,

He loved to rail against it still,
For "ground in yonder social mill

We rub each other's angles down,

"And merge," he said, "in form and gloss
The picturesque of man and man."
We talk'd the stream beneath us ran,
The wine-flask lying couch'd in moss,

Or cool'd within the glooming wave ;
And last, returning from afar,
Before the crimson-circled star

Had fall'n into her father's grave,

And brushing ankle-deep in flowers,

We heard behind the woodbine veil
The milk that bubbled in the pail,
And buzzings of the honied hours.

Analogous to this power of word-painting in Tennyson is the delight in novel metrical experiments for the purpose of embodying moods of self-consciousness, as in

Maud; memories of travel, as in The Daisy; impressions of character, as in The Northern Farmer; or the movement of ancient rhythms, as in his imitation of Latin Alcaics and his translation of the The Battle of Brunanburh. Rare, indeed, is the skill with which he arrests the fugitive impression; but it is to be observed that his musical and pictorial methods only avail him so long as he confines himself to the lyrical sphere. When his ambition carries him to the composition of dramatic or epic verse, self-consciousness destroys the ideal illusion, and fails to conceal the labours of his art. Tennyson is even less dramatic than Byron. Marino Faliero and Cain at least raise the idea of the poet's energetic and typical personality, but Queen Mary, and Harold, and Becket imitate no universal idea. The same is true of Tennyson's epical efforts, The Idylls of the King, for example. In my opinion the poet was ill-inspired in his attempt to make that beautiful and suggestive tour de force, the Morte d'Arthur of the early poems, the foundation of an epic without unity, in which the actions and characters of knights are employed merely to decorate the transient phases of modern self-consciousness. Still more inappropriate are these pictorial and metrical effects, when applied to heighten and dignify the familiar incidents of life. Take, for example, the manner in which the poet, in Aylmer's Field, narrates the discovery by Sir Aylmer, in a tree, of the clandestine correspondence between Leolin Averill and Edith Aylmer :

« PreviousContinue »