ALFRED TENNYSON'S POEMS.

N essay upon a poet's writings may take one of two

to an analysis of

writings with a view to discover the source of their power over the sympathies of men, or it may treat of the place the poet occupies in the literature of his time and country. The latter plan requires not only more knowledge and greater power of comprehensive survey on the part of the writer, but readers who are thoroughly acquainted both with the poet under review and all those with whom he is brought into comparison. This volume might doubtless find a sufficient number of readers thus qualified, among the class to which it is particularly addressed; and a comparison of Mr. Tennyson's genius and productions with those of Byron, Shelley, Scott, Keats, and Wordsworth, would have abundant interest if it were executed with ability and judgment. The motives which, in spite of these reasons, have induced a preference for the former and easier plan, are twofold. In the first place, the writer has no confidence in his own ability for a philosophical estimate of the essential characteristics of the poetry of the first and second quarters of the present century; he fears running into vague generalities and dogmatical assertions, where there is not space for testing his opinions by quotation and analysis of detail and construction. In the second place, his own experience leads him to think that analytical criticism of Mr. Tennyson's poems is likely to be interesting and serviceable to a large class of readers, though, of course, it can have little charm for persons who by talent and study are better qualified than he is to write such a criticism themselves. It has often happened to him to meet with persons of unquestioned talent and good taste, who profess themselves unable to understand why Mr. Tennyson is placed so high among poets as his admirers are inclined to place him; who say they find him obscure and affected,-the writer for a class rather than for a people. The object of this paper is to show that we, who do

admire him, have a reason for our faith; that we are not actuated by blind preference for the man who echoes merely our own class feelings and opinions in forms that suit our particular tastes and modes of thought,-but that Mr. Tennyson is a poet of large compass, of profound insight, of finished skill. We find him possessing the clearest insight into our modern life, one who discerns its rich poetical resources, who tells us what we are and may be; how we can live free, joyous, and harmonious lives; what grand elements of thought, feeling, and action lie round us; what a field there is for the various activities fermenting within us. We do not call him a Shakspeare, or even a Chaucer; but what Shakspeare and Chaucer did for the ages they lived in, Mr. Tennyson is doing for our age, after his measure. He is showing it to us as an age in which an Englishman may live a man's life, and be neither a mere man of business, nor a mere man of pleasure, but may find in his affections, studies, business, and relaxations scope for his spiritual faculties.

The main difficulty of the task has lain in the fact that the poems of Mr. Tennyson are never repetitions, in the great variety both of form and matter they exhibit. It has been impossible to do without special mention of a great number of poems, and the result is necessarily somewhat fragmentary and discursive. It turns out rather a commentary than an essay; but its object will be answered, and the expectations of the writer amply satisfied, if it helps only a few persons to enjoy Tennyson more than they have hitherto done, and to understand better the ground of the claim that is made for him of belonging to the great poets. Little more has been attempted with the three longest poems, The Princess, In Memoriam, and Maud, than to place the reader in the true point of view, and examine certain prejudices against them which have obtained currency among us. Indeed, that was all that was absolutely necessary, as the hostile opinions have seldom been expressed unaccompanied by admiration of the beauties of detail in which these poems abound.

Mr. Tennyson published his first volume of poems in 1830,* when he was an under-graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge. It must always possess considerable interest for those who read and admire his maturer productions; but, with few exceptions, the poems it contains owe their main attraction to the fact that they are the earliest efforts of one who has gained a position of which they afforded no certain promise. Many of

* There is, we believe, an earlier volume of poems published by Alfred and Charles Tennyson, but we have never seen a copy; and the volume of 1830 is sufficiently juvenile for a starting-point.

them are exquisitely musical-great command of the resources of metre is manifest-and a richness of phraseology everywhere abounds. But substantial interest they certainly want, because they present no phenomena of nature or of human life with force and distinctness, tell no story, express no passion or clear thought, depict no person, thing, or scene that the mind can recognise for a reality. They are as far as possible from what might be expected of one who describes the poet as Dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn, The love of love,

and assigns to him the ministry of WISDOM, of whom he writes

No sword

Of wrath her right arm hurled,

But one poor poet's scroll, and with his word

She shook the world.

So far from shaking the world, they are incapable of raising emotions in a solitary heart; so far from being instruments of wisdom, they scarcely reach the altitudes of ordinary sense. Take the first poem of the series, for example, Claribel. It is not quite certain what the precise feeling of the melody is, -whether it expresses a grief that, finding no consolation in its memories or hopes, is deepened by the sweet sights and sounds of the quiet churchyard; or a grief that finds in these a soothing influence. Taking, however, the latter as the more probable theory, though no poem ought to admit of such a doubt, how singularly this treatment of the subject eliminates all that is most striking and affecting in it. If we mourn the early removal of one who was dear and lovely in her life, and whose memory lends a softening charm to the spot where her body. lies, it is on her gentle and affectionate nature, on her grace and beauty, that the mind loves to linger in visiting her grave; it is these that make the place interesting, the recollection of these that consoles us who are deprived of her sweet presence. Or if the mind takes a loftier flight, it looks away from the past, and from the grave, to that bright world of spirits, in which the beauty and excellence that were so soon blighted here reach their consummate flower, and bloom through eternity in the still garden of souls. But Mr. Tennyson says nothing of all this; his memory of the dead forms only a medium through which the living sights and sounds of nature round the grave are harmonized in tone with his own sadness, while the stillness and sweetness of the scene soothe his sorrow into a calm repose; the quiet beauty of the churchyard blends with the image of the lost one, and he thinks of her hereafter in unutterable peace, amid the songs of birds, the

Claribel-Dramatic Landscape.

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voice of the solemn oak-tree, the slow regular changes from morn to noon, from noon to midnight. This is to treat human life from its least impressive point of view,-to feel its sorrows and consolations in their least substantial and abiding power. It is, however, a real point of view; and both sorrow and consolation will sometimes assume this form spontaneously, though seldom so completely to the exclusion of more direct and powerful considerations, as in the poem of Claribel.

The poems inscribed with the names of women would furnish other examples of this perverse, unreal treatment of subjects capable of interesting the sympathies. There is in none of them any presentation of those distinct traits by which we recognise human beings, no action or speech, no description of mind, person, or history, but a series of epithets and similes which convey nothing, because we have not the image of the thing which they are intended to illustrate. Other poems are uninteresting from their subjects, such as The Merman and Mermaid, The Sea Fairies, The Kraken, The Dying Swan, &c. No music of verse, no pictorial power, will enable a reader to care for such creatures of the fancy; otherwise, both music and pictorial power are there. How clear the painting is here:

:

Slow sailed the weary mariners, and saw

Between the green brink and the running foam,
White limbs unrobed in a crystal air,

Sweet faces, rounded arms, and bosoms prest

To little harps of gold.

How musical and vivid

There would be neither moon nor star,

But the wave would make music above us afar;
Low thunder and light, in the magic might,
Neither moon nor star.

Though such subjects would seem wilfully chosen to avoid reality and human interest, they show throughout great power of painting scenery, and of associating it with the feelings of animated beings; and are in fact pictures of peculiar character, in which the objects grouped and the qualities attributed to them, are viewed through the medium of the beings associated with the scene. Thus they become dramatically descriptive, and display the germ of a principle of landscape painting which Mr. Tennyson has in his later poems brought to great perfection, and largely employed. The principle consists in a combination of landscape and figures in which the landscape is not merely background to the figures, or the figures animated objects in the landscape, but the two are dynamically related, so that the landscape is described as seen and felt by

the persons of the scene, under the influence of some emotion which selects objects congenial to its own moods, and modifies their generic appearances,-if the word generic may be used to express the appearance objects present to a mind in its ordinary, unexcited state. And thus we get a landscape which is at once ideal and real—a collection of actual images of external nature, grouped and coloured by a dominant idea; and the whole composition derives from this principle a harmony and a force of expression which, whether the principal aim be landscape painting or the delineation of human emotion, produce that dramatic unity demanded in works of art. Employed as the principle is in this early volume upon scenery that is strange, and upon emotions that are not human, it yet shows its power of producing a picture, throughout harmoniously conceived, and evidences a capacity for concentration that only needs substantially interesting material to work

upon.

The poem which, better than any other in the first series, exhibits the power of concentrating the imagination upon the subject, to the exclusion of an extraneous and discordant train of thought, and at the same time furnishes an admirable instance of dramatic landscape-painting, or passion reflecting itself on landscape, is Mariana. As the physiologists tell us that the organs of the higher animals are found in an undeveloped state in those of lower type, we may look upon this poem as a foreshadowing of a kind of poetry that, in the later volumes, will be found in full perfection. In Mariana, the landscape details are presented with the minute distinctness with which they would strike upon the morbid sensibility of a woman abandoned to lonely misery, whose attention is distracted by no cares, pleasures, or satisfied affections. To the painter in search of the picturesque, or a happy observer seeing the sunny side of everything, or a utilitarian looking for the productive resources of the scene, the whole aspect of the fen-scenery would be totally different. But selected, grouped, and qualified by epithets, as the natural objects of the landscape are in the poem, they tell of the years of pain and weariness associated with them in the mind of the wretched Mariana, and produce an intense impression of hopeless suffering, which no other treatment of the single figure could have produced. The minute enumeration of detail would be a fault in a mere landscape-artist, whose object was to describe a natural scene. It is an excellence here, because no other means could so forcibly mark the isolation, the morbid sensitiveness, and the mind vacant of all but misery; because used thus, it becomes eminently dramatic,—the landscape expresses