In connection with “Morte d’Arthur,” I may draw attention again to Lord Tennyson’s singular skill in producing a rhythmical response to the sense.
“The great brand
Made lightnings in the splendor of the moon,
And flashing round and round, and whirled in an arch.”
Here the anapest instead of the iambic in the last place happily imitates the sword Excalibur’s own gyration in the air. Then what admirable wisdom does the legend, opening out into parable, disclose toward the end! When Sir Bedevere laments the passing away of the Round Table, and Arthur’s noble peerage, gone down in doubt, distrust, treachery, and blood, after that last great battle in the West, when, amid the death-white mist, “confusion fell even upon Arthur,” and “friend slew friend, now knowing whom he slew,” how grandly comes the answer of Arthur from the mystic barge, that bears him from the visible world to “some far island valley of Avilion,” “The old order changeth, yielding place to new, and God fulfils Himself in many ways, Lest one good custom should corrupt the world!” The new commencement of this poem, called in the idyls “The Passing of Arthur,” is well worthy of the conclusion. How weirdly expressive is that last battle in the mist of those hours of spiritual perplexity, which overcloud even strongest natures and firmest faith, overshadowing whole communities, when we know not friend from foe, the holiest hope seems doomed to disappointment, all the great aim and work of life have failed; even loyalty to the highest is no more; the fair polity built laboriously by some god-like spirit dissolves, and “all his realm reels back into the beast;” while men “falling down in death” look up to heaven only to find cloud, and the great-voiced ocean, as it were Destiny without love and without mind, with voice of days of old and days to be, shakes the world, wastes the narrow kingdom, yea, beats upon the faces of our dead! The world-sorrow pierces here through the strain of a poet usually calm and contented. Yet “Arthur shall come again, aye, twice as fair;” for the spirit of man is young immortally.
Who, moreover, has moulded for us phrases of more transcendent dignity, of more felicitous grace and import, phrases, epithets, and lines that have already become memorable household words? More magnificent expression I cannot conceive than that of such poems as “Lucretius,” “Tithonus,” “Ulysses.” These all for versification, language, luminous picture, harmony of structure have never been surpassed. What pregnant brevity, weight, and majesty of expression in the lines where Lucretius characterizes the death of his namesake Lucretia, ending “and from it sprang the commonwealth, which breaks, as I am breaking now!” What masterly power in poetically embodying a materialistic philosophy, congenial to modern science, yet in absolute dramatic keeping with the actual thought of the Roman poet! And at the same time, what tremendous grasp of the terrible conflict of passion with reason, two natures in one, significant for all epochs! In “Tithonus” and “Ulysses” we find embodiments in high-born verse and illustrious phrase of ideal moods, adventurous peril-affronting Enterprise contemptuously tolerant of tame household virtues in “Ulysses,” and the bane of a burdensome immortality, become incapable even of love, in “Tithonus.” Any personification more exquisite than that of Aurora in the latter were inconceivable.
M. Taine, in his Litterature Anglaise, represents Tennyson as an idyllic poet (a charming one), comfortably settled among his rhododendrons on an English lawn, and viewing the world through the somewhat insular medium of a prosperous, domestic and virtuous member of the English comfortable classes, as also of a man of letters who has fully succeeded. Again, either M. Taine, M. Scherer, or some other writer in the Revue des deux Mondes, pictures him, like his own Lady of Shalott, viewing life not as it really is, but reflected in the magic mirror of his own recluse fantasy. Now, whatever measure of truth there may formerly have been in such conceptions, they have assuredly now proved quite one-sided and inadequate. We have only to remember “Maud,” the stormier poems of the “Idylls,” “Lucretius,” “Rizpah,” the “Vision of Sin.” The recent poem “Rizpah” perhaps marks the high-water mark of the Laureate’s genius, and proves henceforward beyond all dispute his wide range, his command over the deeper-toned and stormier themes of human music, as well as over the gentler and more serene. It proves also that the venerable master’s hand has not lost its cunning, rather that he has been even growing until now, having become more profoundly sympathetic with the world of action, and the common growth of human sorrows. “Rizpah” is certainly one of the strongest, most intensely felt, and graphically realized dramatic poems in the language; its pathos is almost overwhelming. There is nothing more tragic in Œdipus, Antigone, or Lear. And what a strong Saxon homespun language has the veteran poet found for these terrible lamentations of half-demented agony, “My Baby! the bones that had sucked me, the bones that had laughed and had cried, Theirs! O no! They are mine not theirs – they had moved in my side.” Then the heart-gripping phrase breaking forth ever and anon in the imaginative metaphorical utterance of wild emotion, to which the sons and daughters of the people are often moved, eloquent beyond all eloquence, white-hot from the heart! “Dust to dust low down! let us hide! but they set him so high, that all the ships of the world could stare at him passing by.” In this last book of ballads the style bears the same relation to the earlier and daintier that the style of “Samson Agonistes” bears to that of “Comus.” “The Revenge” is equally masculine, simple, and sinewy in appropriate strength of expression, a most spirited rendering of a heroic naval action – worthy of a place, as is also the grand ode on the death of Wellington, beside the war odes of Campbell, the “Agincourt” of Drayton, and the “Rule Britannia” of Thomson. The irregular metre of the “Ballad of the Fleet” is most remarkable as a vehicle of the sense, resonant with din of battle, full-voiced with rising and bursting storm toward the close, like the equally spirited concluding scenes of “Harold,” that depict the battle of Senlac. The dramatic characterizations in “Harold” and “Queen Mary” are excellent – Mary, Harold, the Conqueror, the Confessor, Pole, Edith, Stigand, and other subordinate sketches, being striking and successful portraits; while “Harold” is full also of incident and action – a really memorable modern play; but the main motive of “Queen Mary” fails in tragic dignity and interest, though there is about it a certain grim subdued pathos, as of still life, and there are some notable scenes. Tennyson is admirably dramatic in the portrayal of individual moods, of men or women in certain given situations. His plays are fine, and of real historic interest, but not nearly so remarkable as the dramatic poems I have named, as the earlier “St. Simeon Stylites,” “Ulysses,” “Tithonus,” or as the “Northern Farmer,” “Cobblers,” and “Village Wife,” among his later works. These last are perfectly marvellous in their fidelity and humorous photographic realism. That the poet of “Œnone,” “The Lotus-eaters,” and the Arthur cycle should have done these also is wonderful. The humor of them is delightful, and the rough homely diction perfect. One wishes indeed that the “dramatic fragments” collected by Lamb, like gold-dust out of the rather dreary sand-expanse of Elizabethan playwrights, were so little fragmentary as these. Tennyson’s short dramatic poems are quintessential; in a brief glimpse he contrives to reveal the whole man or woman. You would know the old “Northern Farmer,” with his reproach to “God Amoighty” for not “letting him aloan,” and the odious farmer of the new style, with his “Proputty! Proputty!” wherever you met them. But “Dora,” the “Grand-mother,” “Lady Clare,” “Edward Gray,” “Lord of Burleigh,” had long since proved that Tennyson had more than one style at command; that he was master not only of a flamboyant, a Corinthian, but also of a sweet, simple, limpid English, worthy of Goldsmith or Cowper at their best.
Reverting, however, to the question of Tennyson’s ability to fathom the darker recesses of our nature, what shall be said of the “Vision of Sin?” For myself I can only avow that, whenever I read it, I feel as if some horrible gray fungus of the grave were growing over my heart, and over all the world around me.