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:-Sanguelac--Sanguelac--the arrow--the arrow!--Away!
Tennyson is also an eminently all-intelligible poet. Those whom he puzzles or confounds must be a flock with an incalculable liability to go wide of any road--"down all manner of streets," as the desperate drover cries in the anecdote. But what are streets, however various, to the ways of error that a great flock will take in open country--minutely, individually wrong, ****** mistakes upon hardly perceptible occasions, or none--"minute fortuitous variations in any possible direction," as used to be said in exposition of the Darwinian theory? A vast outlying public, like that of Tennyson, may make you as many blunders as it has heads; but the accurate clear poet proved his meaning to all accurate perceptions. Where he hesitates, his is the sincere pause of process and uncertainty. It has been said that Tennyson, midway between the student of material science and the mystic, wrote and thought according to an age that wavered, with him, between the two minds, and that men have now taken one way or the other. Is this indeed true, and are men so divided and so sure? Or have they not rather already turned, in numbers, back to the parting, or meeting, of eternal roads? The religious question that arises upon experience of death has never been asked with more sincerity and attention than by him. If "In Memoriam" represents the mind of yesterday it represents no less the mind of to-morrow. It is true that pessimism and insurrection in their ignobler forms--nay, in the ignoblest form of a fashion--have, or had but yesterday, the control of the popular pen. Trivial pessimism or trivial optimism, it matters little which prevails.
For those who follow the one habit to-day would have followed the other in a past generation. Fleeting as they are, it cannot be within their competence to neglect or reject the philosophy of "In Memoriam." To the dainty stanzas of that poem, it is true, no great struggle of reasoning was to be committed, nor would any such dispute be judiciously entrusted to the rhymes of a song of sorrow.
Tennyson here proposes, rather than closes with, the ultimate question of our destiny. The conflict, for which he proves himself strong enough, is in that magnificent poem of a thinker, "Lucretius." But so far as "In Memoriam" attempts, weighs, falters, and confides, it is true to the experience of human anguish and intellect.