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TENNYSON: A LECTURE 
 
TENNYSON 
 
 
 AN INAUGURAL LECTURE 
 
 GIVEN IN THE ARTS THEATRE OF UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, 
 LIVERPOOL, NOVEMBER i, 1901 
 
 BY 
 
 OLIVER ELTON, M.A. 
 
 KING ALFRED PROFESSOR CF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 PRINTED AT THE REQUEST OF THE FACULTY OF ARTS 
 
 AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS OF LIVERPOOL 
 
 1901 
 

 No. 30. December, 1901. 500 
 
TENNYSON 
 
 TENNYSON, of whose life we have all read, leaves a strong 
 impression of natural force, to which his poetry bears 
 less perfect witness. He lived in a time and a land 
 needing the resistance of any artist who would not wish to resign 
 his title and become afraid. He was a figure in our stable, 
 immemorial, dignified English society : he was ever in a deep 
 harmony with its ruling caste ; a way of life which makes more 
 surely for practice and high civic uses than for unimpeded 
 poetry, and more for the contentment and accomplishment of 
 the intelligence than for its free and daring, or even its dis- 
 interested, play. The last half century of his life was a phase 
 of high formative value in English thought, but is already 
 stamped in intellectual history with something of what the 
 Germans call Halbheit; and this Tennyson expresses. He 
 expresses the fluid theorizing which is also found in men so 
 different as Maurice and Jowett, with their liberalism in one 
 case frank and in the other canny, which hfelped to dissolve the 
 passing order of ideas, while shrinking from perfect faith in 
 speculation. Their work served education well. Thoroughly 
 English figures, answerable for who shall say how many well- 
 trained minds that were in turn to train others, they help, on 
 retrospect, to intensify that sense of Halbheit, of which Tenny- 
 son, who stands near their group, remains the exponent to a 
 far larger audience than theirs. Their battles were fought less 
 on final principles than on the frontier-ground of this or that 
 article of subscription, or in the effort to adjust new lights with 
 doctrine, so that many minor heresies by which society was 
 much stirred have now become options. The effect of this 
 peculiar spirit on poetic art was marked and disastrous, especially 
 with men of high faculty like Tennyson : and the same might 
 
TENNYSON 
 
 be said, with a diiFerence, of Browning. They gave a wonderful 
 gathering of early spring flowers ; and then, like Proserpine, 
 they retired into a land of unseizable shadows, for a longer night 
 than hers, and with briefer reappearances. They ceased to be 
 true to art. They fell into the national vice, which claims also 
 the transient parts of Milton and Wordsworth, of producing 
 something which is neither pure art nor pure thinking. High 
 of purpose, they busied themselves with moral and religious 
 ideas, which they sometimes had not the force to put strictly, 
 and sometimes not the gift to shape poetically. What is to 
 become of La Saisiaz, or of ' Who loves not knowledge ' (/« 
 Memoriam, cxiv) ? They served up those ideas, under forms 
 and shows of art, yet inartistically, so that, the work makes 
 straight for oblivion and drags down the ideas with it. This, 
 in reference to Tennyson^ is the main seeming paradox of my 
 address,- so far as I am led to speak against him ; or rather 
 against his public. It is a course which can give no offence, 
 for no individual is ever a member of the public 
 
 ' Das Publicum will wie Frauenzimmer behandelt sein ; man soil ihnen 
 durchaus nichts sagen als was sie horen mochten.' — Goethe. 
 
 So firm a nature was not readily subdued to its surroundings. 
 Tennyson turned now and then, though seldom powerfully, 
 against the world he lived in. He withdrew in part, and 
 watched the still surface, nothing more ! of English society, with 
 its beautiful and graceful persons, as he might have watched the 
 lilies in a pond ; and he sometimes made believe that they lived 
 in the day of King Arthur ; a pretence which gives most of 
 what life is yet retained in those faint unrealized allegories, the 
 Idylls of the King, with their thin strange morality. He once 
 made a poem, his best, the frustrate masterpiece of Maud, 
 which his own public and the official press were shy of accept- 
 ing. But history shows that a life like his of orderly happiness 
 is not the soil for every kind of poetry. Think of poor Verlaine, 
 
TENNYSON 
 
 whose touch moves us thrice as often as Tennyson's, sinking 
 from hospital to hospital, and shattered by nature with a 
 recklessness she often reserves for her rarest lyrical instruments ! 
 The wonder is that Tennyson did so much. Me held with a 
 single mind to what he thought was his business. Despite his 
 monarchical place in the public eye, he easily remained a man 
 amid many temptations to become a personage. Many a 
 writer of equal gift might have needed a sharper experience to 
 make him do what Tennyson did. Some early struggles ; a 
 long waiting for the admirable wife, who was his companion for 
 forty years, and outlived him ; one chief loss, his other constant 
 companion, which finally difRised itself through his intellect 
 and fancy, and found ease in intricate expression, somewhat after 
 an old Italian manner ; much chafing, in default of worse things, 
 over press notices, often at first of the rowdy, half-lettered kind 
 ruling in our earlier Scotch journalism ; such, in the main, we 
 are told, were Tennyson's trials, in a life otherwise outwardly 
 like that of some absorbed landscape painter or lapidary ; any 
 curious, delicate, and strange elements, and any wilder ones, 
 coming out, as best they might under such conditions, into his 
 work. 
 
 As we read the Memoir, we are aware of quite other elements 
 than these, serving surely as excellent practical shelter to them ; 
 of many oaken outworks and defences of character, which make 
 the better part of the Englishman. Tennyson appears in the 
 dealings of life as a sane, strong-witted, sardonic companion, 
 with plenty of gaiety and sagacity. He was the comrade of 
 Carlyle, who has drawn him : 
 
 ' A fine large-featured, dim-eyed, bronze-coloured, shaggy-headed man is 
 Alfred, dusty, smoky, free, and easy ; who swims outwardly and inwardly 
 with great composure in an inarticulate element of tranquil chaos and 
 tobacco-smoke ; great now and then when he does emerge ; a most 
 restful, brotherly, solid-hearted man.' 
 
 The picture might be that of a Red Indian chieftain, sitting wisely 
 
TENNYSON 
 
 through the silent hours of the calumet. His few personal faults 
 were such as might beseem a chieftain. For the utterance of 
 Carlyle's Tennyson, we hiad best look to Tennyson's prose, in 
 his talk, maxim, and correspondence. That, certainly, is ever 
 entirely natural, masculine, and well-cut. He uttered, declared 
 his friend Fitzgerald, no adoring critic, * by far the finest prose 
 sayings of anyone.' The best of them concern the literature that 
 came home to Tennyson ; but there is greatness in others that 
 are on record. 
 
 * I thank you for your kind congratulations about the peerage ; but being now 
 in my 75 th year, and having lost almost all my youthful contemporaries, I 
 see myself, as it were, in an extra page of Holbein's Dance of Death, and 
 standing before the mouth of an open sepulchre where the. Queen hands 
 me a coronet, and the skeleton takes it away, and points me downward 
 into the darkness.' 
 
 We come there on a temper and an intellect of large design more 
 clearly than in many of his metrical works. Like Ben Jonson, 
 he is a prose writer, who is barely saved to us. He might hard- 
 ly have liked the comparison, for he has worded perfectly the 
 dissatisfaction that Jonson leaves in us, while we admire his 
 immense voracious faculty and animation. Tennyson is re- 
 ported to have said, ' I cannot read him. I feel as if I were 
 moving in a wide sea of glue.' So, in reading The Lord of Bur- 
 leigh^ or In the Children's Hospital^ we might feel like those who 
 mock their thirst with distilled water, lacking the race and 
 iron and sparkle of the spring. But he was a born critic of all 
 the audible part of poetry, in which he excels, and in which it 
 were no small thing to say that his chief excellence lies ; for the 
 power of verbal fulness and harmony, in such a measure as he 
 has it, presupposes, and alone can make articulate, many another 
 quality of the soul. He said of Mr. Swinburne, that he is 'a 
 reed through which all things grow into music ' ; of Browning, 
 that ' he has plenty of music in him, but cannot get it out. He 
 seldom attempts the marriage of sense with sound, although he 
 
TENNYSON 
 
 shews a spontaneous felicity in the adaptation of words to ideas 
 and feelings.' 
 
 ' The adaptation of words to ideas and feelings ' : the conson- 
 ance, that is, of expression with some delicate mood of scenery 
 or of reverie ; and the promise of the subtle or regal utterance 
 of these moods in sound — such qualities, together with others 
 more widely captivating, struck on the sensitive readers between 
 the years 1830 and 1840, who, like similar readers now, were 
 busy waiting for the new poet, and asking themselves whether 
 they had him. There was something, it might be felt, in the 
 face of England, some play of her current mood and temper, 
 as yet unrecorded ; something which Byron and Shelley, the 
 exiles, had been too alien or too impatient to express, and 
 missed by Wordsworth, so impervious in his hill-bound hermit- 
 age to contemporary thought. To these readers, the volumes 
 of 1830 and 1832, with C/ariM znd The Lady of Shalott 2xA 
 The Dream of Fair Women, might have come like this hope of 
 theirs made articulate, as * the buzzings of the honied hours.' 
 I must quote what Tennyson afterwards nobly said of Keats : 
 ' There is something of the innermost soul of poetry in almost 
 everything he ever wrote.' Well, we hear from a critic of that 
 day that 
 
 ' Since the death of John Keats, the last lineal descendant of Apollo, our 
 English region of Parnassus has been domineered over by kings of 
 shreds and patches. But, if I mistake not, the true heir is found.' 
 
 The writer is Arthur Hallam, and he continues, quoting Shaks- 
 pere : 
 
 ' The mantle and jewel about the neck ! The letters whose character is 
 known ! The majesty of the creature in resemblance of its father, the 
 affection of nobleness and many other evidences, proclaim him, with all 
 certainty, to be the king's son.' 
 
 Nay, with the book of ten years later, containing Ulysses and 
 Break, break, break, he might have felt in presence of such 
 
TENNYSON 
 
 a freshness of tint and purity of temper — not yet hardened into 
 the versified expression of opinion about purity — as reminded 
 him of the youth of Milton. Tne poetic youth of Keats and 
 that of Milton, I must say in passing, are subjects which have 
 never yet been duly treated, and, therefore, I would hope, await 
 the hand of my predecessor, Mr. Raleigh, who has already 
 shown his power to speak of both poets. But such a remini- 
 scence those older readers may well have felt, for we feel it 
 still : 
 
 'and though 
 We are not now that strength which in old days 
 Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are ; 
 One equal temper of heroic hearts 
 Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will 
 To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.' 
 
 Such new gifts, a new and strange manner of rendering natural 
 beauty, a bright abundance of experiment, and a noble bent of 
 expression, led another judicious reviewer, Monckton Milncs, 
 later Lord Houghton, to declare : 
 
 ' It rests with Mr. Tennyson to prove that he can place himself at the 
 head of all these his contemporaries. His command of diction is com- 
 plete, and his sense of the harmonies [of words]. He has only to show 
 that he has substance, what Goethe called Staff, worthy of his media.' 
 
 The next forty years saw Tennyson's unceasing efforts to shew 
 that he had substance. In poems like V Allegro or The Lotos- 
 Eaters we do not resent the lack of any matter which can be put 
 into intellectual statement ; the poems vanish, when we try to 
 make such a statement of them, into a residuum of dust. That 
 is only to say that they do not betray great experience of life 
 passed through the re-creative process of expression, which may 
 have been what Goethe meant. At the same time a profound 
 life circulates through them, which is the life of rhytfim, of a 
 musical mood. We are aware of a surprising instrument of 
 melody fitted to memorize dream, or picture, or delicate and 
 
 10 
 
TENNYSON 
 
 passing phases of pensive feeling. Tennyson tried to fit this 
 instrument to countless other things. Besides four ambitious 
 works, Maud and The Princess, In Memoriam and the Idylls, he 
 has left a mass of verse more widely accepted than that of any 
 modern English poet except Byron. I wish to take the best, 
 and there is much that it would not be fair to treat at length. 
 There are his plays, which often have the virtues of his un- 
 dramatic verse. One of them, The Cup, shows a true power of 
 romantic invention springing up in old age, while another, The 
 Promise of May, is so weak intellectually that it ought not to be 
 republished by Lord Tennyson's friends. Many of his other 
 pieces trust to their pathos and to the appeal they make to the 
 simpler emotions. Saving for a few lyrics, I think that Tenny- 
 son must lose his hold as a poet of the simple emotions ; for 
 his true skill is to elaborate emotions not simple at all. The 
 pathos oi Dora or of Elaine is not much more to be trusted than 
 that of The May Queen, which is to be trusted very little and 
 holds out one of the surest warning-signals of easy sentiment, 
 namely, a certain sickliness of sound and metre. 
 
 Tennyson has a curious, a noble, and a various invention in metre, 
 and his use of it would ask for a long discourse. Boadicea, and 
 the Lines to the Rev. F. D. Maurice, and the Lines to Virgil, and 
 much else, shew how seriously and skilfully he set himself to 
 administer this his province of sound. He paid the deepest 
 attention to his blank verse, and is usually called one of its 
 supreme masters. Lucretius, for instance, takes our breath away, 
 not only by its superlative admired rhetoric and tesselations, 
 but by its metrical craft, until we think of Lucretius himself 
 and his hexameter. But Tennyson's blank verse is so far from 
 infallible, that if its glories are melody and fulness, its fault is 
 slothfulneSs. It is dominated by monotony, despite the endless 
 ripples and modulations. Indeed, Tennyson's method is to charge 
 and clog his line, whatever its measure, with little intricacies of 
 
 II 
 
TENNYSON 
 
 sound, and this nearly always makes it slow. Sometimes, again, 
 he allows a metre which is naturally strong to tumble continually 
 into a weaker one, as in Locksley Hall. Compare the efFect of 
 the following lines, where the real and powerful scheme of eight 
 beats in ' falling ' or ' trochaic ' rhythm is heard : 
 
 ' Ddep in | yonder | shfning | orient, | where my | life be- | gan to | 
 beit.' 
 
 ' Rift the I hills, and | roll the | wdters, | flash the | Ifghtnings, I weigh 
 the I Sun.' 
 
 And then listen to these, where the cantering or shambling efFect 
 is heard, and where the scheme is or tends to be a four-heat 
 one in 'rising rhythm,' the feet being either 'anapaests ' or of 
 the four-syllabled type here exemplified : — 
 
 ' In this hostel, | I remember, | I repent it | o'er his gr^ve.' | 
 ' But the jingling | of the guinea.' | 
 
 This difference will be audible enough even to those who may 
 not care for the technical language. 
 
 But the sound warns us most surely in the high-uplifted Riz- 
 pabs and Despairs, which make a furious attack upon our feel- 
 ings, and handle very solemn matters by the method of invective, 
 Tennyson in a mass of his writings uses a strain of hollow fierce 
 diction for denunciation or appeal. It was an error ; in all this 
 kind of work he is far inferior to Dr. Johnson, who wrote the 
 Vanity of Human Wishes. And if that condemnation holds good, 
 how much of Tennyson falls under it ! There is the shriek 
 of Aylmer's Field; the shriek in Locksley Hall: Sixty years after, 
 against Celtic Demos, French novels, and the future of science : 
 
 • Chaos, Cosmos ! Cosmos, Chaos ! Who can tell how all will end f 
 Read the world's wide annals, you, and take their wisdom for your friend.' 
 
 There is, in the sanctimonious kind, the oration of the pedagogue 
 Arthur to his Queen. There is the other oration in which the 
 Prince expounds his own magnanimity to the Princess Ida. 
 
 12 
 
TENNYSON 
 
 It is a speech to which the whole of The Princess leads up, 
 for that curious piece of playful and petty carving, ' laborious 
 orient ivory,' is not allowed, unhappily, to lead to nothing. Thus 
 he speaks to his promised bride : — 
 
 ' The new day comes, the light 
 Dearer for night, as dearer thou for faults 
 Lived over ; lift thine eyes .... 
 Look up, and let thy nature strike on mine, 
 Like yonder morning on the blind half-world ; 
 Approach, and fear not.' 
 
 That does not shew the possession of what Goethe meant by 
 substance. What a degeneration from the frank, youthful, un- 
 doctrinal cry in the earlier, the real Locksley Hall, the only poem 
 where Tennyson shews felicity in expressing anger : 
 
 ' Drug thy memories, lest thou learn it, lest thy heart be put to proof 
 In the dead unhappy night, and when the rain is on the roof.' 
 
 Tennyson has gone down with thousands as a great remedial 
 thinker ; but from the first there were signs and omens, as in 
 The Palace of Art, that this was an illusion. That poem is 
 admirably decorated ; but it preaches the strangest piece of 
 feithlessness which is possible in an artist, namely, lack of faith 
 in beauty. Such is the necessary danger in a puritan country, 
 but a poet should go about to escape it. No words are better 
 than those of one of the clearest-witted among the older critics — a 
 man, let us remember, much occupied with the idea of moral 
 nobility in poetry. John Sterling, the disciple of Goethe and 
 friend of Carlyle, thus wrote : — 
 
 ' The ivriter's doctrine seems to be that the soul, while by its own energy 
 surrounding itself with the most beautiful and expressive images that the 
 history of mankind has produced, and sympathizing wholly with the 
 world's best thoughts, is perpetrating some prodigious moral offence, for 
 which it is bound to repent in sackcloth and ashes.' 
 
 But instead of piecemeal attack, let me cast about a little and 
 
TENNYSON 
 
 confess the broader reasons, as I find them, of Tennyson's in- 
 aptitude for the position his admirers, who take him so seriously, 
 give him. What if he, the widest-known retailer of ideas in 
 English verse, was all the while in a backwater where only the 
 fainter wash of the larger currents reached him ? And what, 
 then, are those currents of thought, I do not say as abstractly 
 shown in pure philosophy, but as expressed in literary art ? 
 What forms of art bring us nearest to them ? The last question 
 may be answered soonest. It is idle, perhaps, to try and rate the 
 new literature now being made, or rather weltering ; idle, not 
 merely because it is so close to us, but because that familiar cry 
 for the new writer, the new poet, who has not come, is only 
 a recognition that all great mental forces are dark until we 
 see them in a sufficient individual, nay, do not even fully exist 
 until he appears, and that until then we had best not be esti- 
 mating forces at all. But if we look back at the work of the 
 living veterans, not in England only, we begin to doubt whether 
 the last half-century will be primarily remembered in the history 
 of letters for its verse. Its truest and deepest vein runs through 
 fiction. We must use the ttrra fiction, through the poverty of 
 our language, not only for the novel but for the drama, which 
 describes actual life and is now usually though not always written 
 in prose. The time of Shakspere sent its main literary energy into 
 drama ; the time of Pope sent its main energy into rhyming or 
 other combat. The recent age sent its main energy into fiction. 
 I am the last to forget the school of impassioned artists in verse 
 and colour who found their centre in Dante Gabriel Rossetti. 
 But they triumphed by partly shutting away the outer life of 
 their time, as it was their business to do. It is chiefly in fiction 
 that we seem to find two opposing currents which have yet to 
 measure their strength fairly. One is pessimism, which found 
 brilliant form and system in Schopenhauer, and has since pene- 
 trated the modern view of life like an acid. Who has not felt 
 it in the portrayal of the Russian world by Tolstoi, both before 
 
 14 
 
TENNYSON 
 
 and after he found the remedy which now contents him ? The 
 living novelist of Western England, to whom his style promises 
 such safety, shows us his discouragement alike with what nature 
 has made of man, and what men have made of one another. 
 There are other voices abroad, in Italy and elsewhere, from 
 Leopardi and the early romantic writers downwards, which utter 
 the same tones, sometimes in lyric, like the author of the Poems 
 and Ballads o{ 1866, but oftener in fable or fiction. Before 
 such an energy, such an analysis, the complacencies of Tennyson 
 and his world wither ; his Whig complacency, which is so 
 immovable in spite of a few tirades against marrying for money, 
 over the social arrangements ; his British complacency over what 
 he calls ' the Saxo-Norman race, which breeds, methinks, the 
 noblest men ' ; and his complacency over sham-chivalrous 
 morality, with its nominal adoration and secret patronage of 
 women. Once or twice, in Maud, he is faintly attacked by the 
 true malady. It has to be met by some sharper cure than 
 can be given by him or by his thinking, which no one sensitive 
 to these influences can take seriously. 
 
 Some help is forthcoming in fiction. The literature of hope, 
 of faith in the known life of man, and of a hard-won optimism, 
 has veteran and trained commanders beside whom Tennyson 
 is only like an amateur aristocrat permitted to accompany 
 outlying portions of a campaign. Scarred and gaunt, sometimes 
 harsh of style, a little overwhelming to the men of intellectual 
 diplomacy and compromise, unscared, strong-headed, they stand, 
 with most of their work ready for judgment, reaping a few long- 
 grudged honours for which they cannot care. It would take 
 long to draw out the lines of connexion which study reveals 
 between minds so divergent as those which created the poem of 
 Brand, the epic story of La DSdcle, and The Ordeal of Richard 
 Feverel. But their united thought and aspiration spans the 
 same quarter of the heavens. The courageous irony and 
 
 15 
 
TENNYSON 
 
 deep-mining thought of Dr. Ibsen, and M. Zola's noble trust 
 in human concert and the franker community of the future, are 
 allied with one another and with the spirit of their English 
 compeer or superior. And each furnishes something of his 
 own ; for Mr. George Meredith is distinguished by a hopeful- 
 ness which arises, as with Goethe, out of severe experience, and 
 by a spiritual energy in the representation of mortal love, which 
 hardly belongs to the Gallic genius, with its invaluable faith in 
 gaiety, in fraternity, in happiness, and in reason. If I am to 
 find in one word the chief bond between these minds, with their 
 different ways of work, I should name the great business of 
 our time, science — ^yes, science ! But it is not the crude trans- 
 ference of physical images or theories to matters of life and 
 character that is meant. The spirit of science is seen in the 
 region of art by a particular temper, by openness of vision, by 
 the determination to exhibit reality and to hope for just so much 
 as may be expected, by the bold use of such hypotheses as can 
 be brought to book, and by the steady temper that has 
 
 ' power to fright 
 The spirits of the shady night.' 
 
 This is the central current in the literature of our time. I 
 
 must not follow it further, for it is a digression from my theme 
 
 of Tennyson. 
 
 But I am faced now by a famous saying, to the effect that 
 true criticism deals not with a man's failures and erroneous 
 experiments, but with what he has achieved, and I wish to 
 name three or four things which I suppose Tennyson to have 
 achieved. 
 
 Poetry, though not perhaps the widest kind, can easily live 
 without any distinct intellectual or moral drift ; but no poetry 
 can live unless it is rooted in that nobler animal part of man, 
 honoured by Milton under the term ' sensuous,' on pain of being 
 
 16 
 
TENNYSON 
 
 blind and deaf and without motion. This is why the poetry we 
 call didactic, that is of mere precept cut off from images, is apt 
 to be a diseased kind. Tennyson — and this is his primary excel- 
 lence — is never cut ofF from images, and they often revive our 
 interest when his ideas are deadening it. "Works still continue 
 to be written on his landscape, and on the outfit of nice and 
 alert senses with which he watched and listened. He was much 
 alone with the inarticulate world ; and his mind was always like 
 a perfectly true lens, or enchanted crystal, in which everything is 
 carefully mirrored in small, yet with a prismatic strangeness and 
 variableness. Some of his earlier verses we call romantic, mean- 
 ing that they are in the direct line between La Belle Dame sans 
 Merci and The Blessed Damozel. Such a poem is Mariana in 
 the Moated Grange, which prefigures many of the qualities and 
 the rare peculiar turn of words, which we think of as Rossetti's; 
 a connexion with a younger and bolder school, which becomes 
 familiar enough to those who know the pictures by Millais and 
 Hunt in the volume containing 'The Lady of Shalott, Mariana 
 is truly an intense poem, to use a word it is time to recover 
 from hands that are more playful than capable. Its minute 
 flashing pictures and its slow returning metre foreshew, as 
 has often been said, something of In Memoriam. 
 
 ' About a stone-cast from the wall 
 
 A sluice with blacken'd waters slept, 
 And o'er it, many, round and small, 
 
 The cluster'd marish-mosses crept. 
 Hard by a poplar shook alway, 
 
 All silver-green with gnarled bark ; 
 
 For leagues no other tree did mark 
 The level waste, the rounding gray.' 
 
 The verse plays the same tune on us a& the scene itself, or as the 
 few lines in Measure for Measure by which Shakspere magi- 
 cally isolates the original Mariana v/ithin her moat from the 
 world of Vienna. Tennyson's way of wording landscape has 
 its history. At first it has the playful or intimate fancy which 
 
 17 
 
TENNYSON 
 
 a child might own or recognize ; the four-handed mole is heard 
 scraping in the darkness, the sudden laughters of the jay (or the 
 ' scritches,' for the poet wavered delicately between the words) ring 
 in the damp holts, the bearded meteor trails light in the heavens. 
 Later, nature becomes the truest occupation of his art, and the 
 chosen sphere of his felicity in style. Of the waves tumbling 
 about the bows of a steamer, he said at once, * they are swift, 
 glittering deeps, sharp like the back fin of a fish ; * ' and so,' adds 
 the reporter, 'they were.* The critics wrongly said he was in- 
 accurate ; he was always right, and his landscapes are often built 
 up indoors out of notes taken without, after the way of some 
 painters, 
 
 ' Lying among the [Pyrenees] 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. 
 
 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.' 
 
 All this shews much study, but it was not the fatal study of 
 words apart from sound or images, and we have the sense that 
 it was not a painfiil, active kind of labour. At his best Tenny- 
 son seems to have waited for his expression to come to him ; 
 to have brooded before a scene with its orchestra of sounds, 
 in a kind of intense passiveness — closely akin to that mood of 
 mystical withdrawal, which he often describes — ^until the thing 
 seen became greatly different from what it was at any other 
 moment or to any other man, and, late or soon, the words 
 arose which still fix for us, as though seen by summer lightning, 
 its haunting principle. 
 
 ' To-night the winds begin to rise 
 
 And roar from yonder dropping day : 
 The last red leaf is whirled away, 
 The rooks are blown about the skies. 
 
 i8 
 
TENNYSON 
 
 The forest crack 'd, the waters curl'd, 
 
 The cattle huddled on the lea ; 
 
 And wildly dash'd on tower and tree 
 The sunbeam strikes along the world.' 
 
 That is almost poetry striving to go over into the art of Claude. 
 It may be that Tennyson is best in homelike and pensive English 
 places, for there he can play a little, and the element of play is 
 present in almost all his dealings with words at any time, to his 
 pleasure and his peril. 
 
 ' By night we linger'd on the lawn. 
 For underfoot the herb was dry ; 
 And genial warmth ; and o'er the sky 
 The silvery veil of summer drawn. 
 
 And bats went round in fragrant skies, 
 And wheel'd or lit the filmy shapes 
 That haunt the dusk, with ermine capes 
 
 And woolly breasts and beaded eyes. 
 
 While now we sing old songs that peal'd 
 From knoll to knoll, where, couch'd at ease. 
 The white kine glimmer'd, and the trees 
 
 Laid their dark arms about the field.' 
 
 And if what we perceive there is nature dreaming happily, or 
 breathing in her sleep, rather than her wilder or more oppressive 
 music, which Mr. Thomas Hardy has written down, yet the 
 poet's full compensation comes in his lyric, which is nearly al- 
 ways touched by scenery and thus wins much of its worth. 
 The cold grey stones, the happy autumn fields, the sound and 
 foam in Crossing the Bar, give a support and local habitation 
 to the feeling in that handful of unassailable songs which place 
 Tennyson, for several instants, near Shakspere. For in poems 
 like Come not when I am dead and Break, break, break, those 
 unconscious elemental powers which Tennyson habitually 
 educates away into elaboration, or strives to conjure back by 
 mannered simplicity, gain free flight, and play as if without his 
 free will, so that in a few words he says everything, instead of 
 
 19 
 
TENNYSON 
 
 spending long misguided toil in saying far less than that. We 
 would sacrifice much for more like the four lines out of which 
 Maud was originally built : — 
 
 ' Oh, that 'twere possible 
 
 After long grief and pain 
 To find the arms of my true love 
 Round me once again.' 
 
 These lyrics might be soliloquies cried suddenly in the open 
 air, and they give the actual fugitive essence or virtue of the 
 South of England, with the perfumed exhalations of its earth 
 and its plaintive or happy melancholy. 
 
 It is natural, secondly, that Tennyson should, with this endow- 
 ment, show himself a master in representing feeling which is 
 difficult and shadowy, and often morbid and remote ; and the 
 more fully he lets himself go in this direction, the better he is. 
 He is much less surely at home in moral and religious ideas than 
 in this bottomless and shifting region. In Maud he visits it 
 oftenest, and shows that he has received the freedom of the city 
 of dreams and the keys of the house of distraction, where all 
 men sojourn in sleep, and where abides the truest reality of many 
 prose-bound lives. The half-obliterated language of those places 
 is only recalled by the words of poets like De Quincey. And, in 
 his degree, Tennyson also does his best with words when he 
 has to express something not of necessity tragic, but elusive, 
 unstrung, or visionary ; and this is a very high excellence, for 
 he can measure these moods with the same sort of precision 
 as the features of a daylight landscape. Mariana, once 
 more, is wholly a record of such subtle waking misery, in its 
 essence the same as that familiar antinomy of dreams, where 
 some penance, at once impossible and necessary, set by the un- 
 known taskmasters of sleep, lengthens out before the mind and 
 crushes it : — 
 
 * The sparrow's chirrup on the roof, 
 
 The slow clock ticking, and the sound 
 
 20 
 
TENNYSON 
 
 Which to the wooing wind aloof 
 The poplar made, did all confound 
 Her sense ; but most she loathed the hour 
 
 When the thick-moted sunbeam lay 
 
 Athwart the chambers, and the day 
 Was sloping towards his western bower. 
 
 Then said she, " I am very dreary, 
 He will not come," she said ; 
 
 She wept, " I am aweary, aweary. 
 Oh God, that I were dead ! " ' 
 
 Elsewhere there is the resolution of vague into connected 
 dreams : — - 
 
 ' All those sharp fancies, by down lapsing-thought 
 Stream'd onward, lost their edges, and did creep, 
 Roll'd on each other, rounded, smooth'd, and brought 
 Into the gulfs of sleep.' 
 
 Or there are the nightmares of the fiend-haunted religious 
 fanatic on his pillar : — 
 
 ' Abaddon and Asmodeus caught at me ; 
 I smote them with the cross ; they swarmed again. 
 In bed like monstrous apes they crushed my chest ; 
 They flapped my light out as I read ; I saw 
 Their faces grow between me and my book. 
 With colt-like whinny and with hoggish whine 
 They burst my prayer.' 
 
 The third number of Maud illustrates all the gifts of Tennyson 
 for which I have thus far pleaded he should claim remembrance ; 
 his occasional power of prolonged and concerted music, used 
 for the rendering of nature, of fevered feeling, and of dream. 
 If we cry ' What rhetoric ! ' the truth is that rhetoric is here 
 right. It is the rhetoric of the overwrought heart whose energy 
 overflows into the restless fancy. The speaker goes out into 
 the night after the slight passed upon him by his mistress : — 
 
 ' Cold and clear-cut face, why come you so cruelly meek, 
 Breaking a slumber in which all spleenful folly was drown'd. 
 Pale with the golden beam of an eyelash dead on the cheek, 
 
 21 
 
TENNYSON 
 
 Passionless, pale, cold face, star-sweet on a gloom profound ; 
 Woman-like, taking revenge too deep for a transient wrong 
 Done but in thought to your beauty, and ever as pale as before 
 Growing and fading and growing upon me without a sound. 
 Luminous, gemlike, ghostlike, deathlike, half the night long 
 Growing and fading and growing, till I could bear it no more. 
 But arose, and all by myself in my own dark garden ground, 
 Listening now to the tide in its broad-flung shipwrecking roar, 
 Now to the scream of a madden'd beach dragg'd down by the wave, 
 Walk'd in a wintry wind by a ghastly glimmer, and found 
 The shining daffodil dead, and Orion low in his grave.' 
 
 This and the songs in Maud shew Tennyson's fullness of hectic 
 or languid feeling, which links him to poets of the tribe of 
 Spenser, Coleridge, and Keats, in so far as he wisely yields to 
 it ; a poetical voluptuousness of which The Lotos-Eaters and 
 Fatima are the best examples, but of which he may have become 
 ashamed, feeling himself called away to express more abstract 
 things. 
 
 Part of the same comment applies to In Memoriam. This is one 
 of the hardest poems in the modern Englisl^ language ; it is 
 set with small thorns for the interpreter ; and it calls for no 
 intelligence less fine and serious, and for no scholarship less 
 nicely-dividing, than have been bestowed on it by Professor 
 Bradley — a stranger may be permitted to say thus much — in 
 the book he has founded on the discourses once delivered 
 here. It is hard through its compressed intricacy of style, rather 
 than for any display of the sterner speculative power for 
 which the subject calls, and which^ other writers have shown 
 in urging a like conclusion. And it is hardly in the Tlnglish, 
 or the German, or the Celtic temper. But an Italian might 
 more willingly listen to Tennyson's methodized grief, which 
 is presented in a way suggesting Petrarch's. The sense of loss, 
 so far from having ' no language but a cry ' — which is a mis- 
 description of the poem — ^becomes a straining prisoner of the 
 
 22 
 
TENNYSON 
 
 discursive fancy, and the stuff of sorrow is beaten out into a 
 thousand curious filaments. It is well if feeling, on these terms, 
 does not shrink into an occasion for talking about feeling, and 
 if none of the poignancy is spun away in the care for finish. 
 To intrude on the private audience of In Memoriam, to whom 
 the ever-brightening course of the poet's plea commends itself, 
 and who find in it the history of their own consolation, would 
 mean an excursion through the very windings of the argument, 
 on a certain side so sceptical. It appeals to those who do not 
 lean on such hopes of Immortality and reunion as are offered 
 by the common reasonings, but find the truth of those hopes 
 pledged by the invincible assurance either of the heart or of mys- 
 tical revelation. Its power, however, over others is won by the 
 perfection of some of its single poems in point of sound, by its 
 grey pageantry of dreams and memories, and its adjustment of 
 scenery to lyric mood, although these things are chequered by 
 an odd rhetoric and by a great fallibility In style. It Is distin- 
 guished by Its special excellences from the other studious elegies 
 like Milton's or Dryden's. It Is never safer, possibly, than in 
 passages like the following, which show why I bring it, pro- 
 fanely as some may suppose, under the chapter of Tennyson's 
 triumphs in strange psychology : — 
 
 ' I cannot see the features right 
 
 When on the gloom I strive to paint 
 The face I know ; the hues are faint 
 And mix with hollow masks of night. 
 
 Cloud-towers by ghostly masons wrought ; 
 
 A gulf that ever shuts and gapes ; 
 
 A hand that points, and palled shapes 
 In shadowy thoroughfares of thought. 
 
 And crowds that stream from yawning doors 
 
 And shoals of pucfcer'd faces drive ; 
 
 Dark bulks that tumble half-alive 
 And lazy lengths on boundless shores ; 
 
TENNYSON 
 
 Till all at once beyond the will 
 
 I hear a wizard music roll ; 
 
 And through a lattice in the soul 
 Looks thy fair face and makes it still.' 
 
 Lastly, Tennyson, like Gray and Landor, is a poet of the 
 classical Renaissance, and this is another of his great titles. The 
 Lotos-Eaters, Titbonus, and Ulysses, are what we call Hellenics, 
 although Ulysses is full of Dante and The Lotos-Eaters of Spenser. 
 Such a following of older poets implies a distinct gain of origin- 
 ality. This may be said of the whole mass of echoes, imitations, 
 and noble or gracious reminiscences, which scholars have sought 
 and found in Tennyson's works. In his Hellenics, Tennyson 
 starts with an immense advantage which he is always forfeiting 
 elsewhere. I mean that his aim is pure beauty, that he has not 
 one eye on his application, that he is not writing what can be 
 quoted at congresses, and that he is throwing himself on his real 
 gift and his real temperament. We find a mixture of ancient 
 feeling with his own, and we find the same gifts as in the best 
 of his other work. The dissolved melancholy, the wail of a 
 shadowy soul in an indistinct other world, with its faint cry as 
 of a bat or a bird, its longing to finish, its faint clinging to life, 
 all receive expression in the slow labouring movement of the 
 verse, which penetrates even the heroic Ulysses : — 
 
 ' The long day wanes ; tht slow moon climbs ; the deep 
 Moans round with many voices.' , 
 
 The essence of all such antique or half-antique feeling is gathered 
 into the Lines to Virgil, who of all old poets is commonly felt to 
 give us most of it. Those lines show the heart of Tennyson 
 as a poetic artist, just as the lyrics give us the best of his land- 
 scape, and Maud the best of his human insight : — 
 
 ' Light among the vanish'd ages, star that gildest yet this phantom shore. 
 Golden branch amid the shadows, kings and realms that pass to rise no 
 more ; 
 
 24 
 
TENNYSON 
 
 Now thy Forum roars no longer, fallen every purple Caesar's dome. 
 Tho' thine ocean-roll of rhythm resound for ever of Imperial Rome ; 
 
 Now the Rome of slaves hath perish'd, and the Rome of freemen holds 
 
 her place, 
 I, from out the Northern island, sunder'd once from all the human race, 
 
 I salute thee, Mantovano, I that loved thee since my day began, 
 Wielder of the stateliest measure ever moulded by the lips of man.' 
 
 I have wished to speak broadly of Tennyson, leaving out lesser 
 counts on either side of the reckoning. In trying to put aside 
 his superabounding glory, which forms a gross refracting medium, 
 we only follow in his own path. He was full of an honourable 
 apathy to the flattery of the English-reading world, and to 
 literary fame, which wilted away to something inconsiderable 
 in view of the ' next glacial epoch.' The far future, as he simply 
 said, was his home always ; and he was unlike some of the 
 slighter Elizabethans, who were sure of poetical eternity, and 
 are lucky if they receive a limited reprint from a learned society. 
 But if, as I come to think, he is not a great remedial thinker 
 and leaves no great imaginative whole, and if his ruling con- 
 ceptions are vanishing Into a past of shadows and his style 
 fluctuates in worth with his matter, then the collection of 
 ruined palaces and pleasances which we call his works must 
 seem to us a kind of rich man's Folly. And it is not said 
 altogether as a slight. In vain, perhaps, the surprising ambition 
 of the mausoleum, in vain the top-heavy allegories which load 
 the ceilings. What we turn to, what we wish to save, are the 
 little outlying kiosques and summer-houses, a scrap here and 
 there of dignified if mannered statuary, a few fountains of fresh 
 water, a plaintive corner of garden landscape, and a thousand 
 happy gleams of colour on the fast-wearing frescoes. 
 
 25 
 
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 Tennyson; an inaugural lecture given in t 
 
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