reject the Mother's Ghost-on account, perhaps, of some want of finish, which in fact enhances the intensity!— Not a whisper stirs the gloom, It will be the dawning soon. All the house is fast in sleep, Sisters, I could almost weep! In that cradle sleeps my child, I will print an airy kiss; See, she dreameth happy dreams, One of us my child will be.25 Of all the capacities, bestowed and acquired, the crowning result was a poet, and nothing but a poet, with no ambition but that. The aspiration was lofty, as was Tennyson's whole conception of a poet's rank and duties. While unknown to the world, he had magnified his vocation. It was the poet's inheritance, he boasted, to 'see through life and death, through good and ill', nay, 'through his own soul'; to be Wisdom's chosen interpreter: No sword Of wrath her right arm whirl'd, But one poor poet's scroll, and with His word She shook the world.26 His practice, within the limits of human strength, was in accordance. He desired to embody modern society's network of doubts in a marshalled legion of living and lived riddles, with the solutions, or attempts at them, appended. He could not pass a contemporary problem by without adventuring an answer. More than one coeval at home, and across the Atlantic, had, as I have shown, the same craving. His special advantage was the possession, over and above gifts he shared with others, of the secret of irresistible melody. When once the strangeness of his method was surmounted, that acted like a spell upon Anglo-Saxon intelligence. Long before the end he had steeped the realm of English verse in an atmosphere all his own. Except from within one tent in the wilderness, no lyre sounded which had not been tuned or retuned in unison with his. Under the stress of the unchallenged absoluteness of his ultimate supremacy, an effort is needed to recall that he had to fight for his throne; that he himself had often despaired, complaining that Once in a golden hour I cast to earth a seed. The people said, a weed.27 Have I overpraised? I do not mean, in view of the very possible hint that I ought first to have considered what my eulogies were worth. To that taunt I know I have been exposing myself throughout my seventy-two comments. But, without regard to my title to an opinion at all, is the panegyric here out of just proportion to the claims of other poets? At any rate I have never concealed from myself my theme's deficiencies. I perceive that the liquid sweetness is too invariable. The ear pines for a little harshness, a sense of open air; for an occasional unintentionally broken-backed line. The mellifluous style tempts to verboseness, particularly in the Idylls; in the rest, as well as those of The King, where, indeed, it is more excusable. At times it laboriously embalms a fly in amber. Too many knotty questions are lightly propounded. There is a propensity to mistake sitting upon the puzzles of existence for their investigation, if not for their settlement. Not rarely the art by which Gray in the Elegy produced the effect of entire simplicity fails Tennyson. Though very seldom, even his taste is now and then at fault. In brief, his theology, moral philosophy, science, and skill in the construction of a plot, are those of a poet, not of a Bishop Butler, a Darwin, or a Wilkie Collins. He sings darkling, not soaring. There is the feminine note in his music. He is not quite the magician or prophet some of his disciples proclaimed him. Scrutinized closely his art betrays flaws which the delicate finish had covered-and his Muse is the more adorable for them all! Within its proper boundaries his sovereignty is in no hostile rivalry with that of his reigning predecessors. On the contrary, loyal admirers may freely admit that the ancient enthronements were a condition of his. Without Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Wordsworth and Coleridge, Shelley and Keats, without Dryden and Pope too, Cowper, and Byron, he would not have been that he was. From them all he learnt to choose the good, and, as profitably, to refuse the evil. His poetic soul, could its elements be analysed, would render glad account of the bountiful proportion of their essence it owes to its forerunners. Yet he remains himself a distinct and gracious being. The lyrics in The Princess and in Maud, with all their Elizabethan daintiness, are as self-evidently his in their fire and feeling as are the wit and wisdom of his Northern Farmers' proverbial philosophy. It was, as I have already intimated, a glory and a blessing for the nineteenth century that, just when the peal of inspiration which struck up at its opening, seemed to have rung all conceivable changes of poetic thought and feeling, he arose to demonstrate that, given the man, the possible variations had in nowise been exhausted. So may it be so will it be-in the future as in the past, though, had the sun of great British singers actually been extinguished with Alfred Tennyson, its setting would not have dishonoured its dawn! The Works of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Poet Laureate. Collected Edition, Macmillan, 1884. Also, Works: Six vols. H. S. King. 1877 1 Recollections of the Arabian Nights, st. 1. 2 The Dying Swan. 3 The Lotos-Eaters, Choric Song, st. 5. The Sleeping Palace, st. 1, and The Departure. 5 A Dream of Fair Women, stanzas 22, 32, 51-62. • The Lady of Shalott, Part II, st. 4. 7 Sir Galahad, st. 4. 8 St. Agnes' Eve, st 3. 9 Oenone. 10 Mariana in the South, st. 1. 11 The Two Voices, stanzas 20, 24. 12 The Palace of Art, stanzas 22, 24. 13 The Vision of Sin, st. 3. 14 Break, break, break. 15 In the Garden at Swainston. 16 The Princess: A Medley, 6. Song, Prelude to Bk. IV st. 2; and Song, Prelude to Bk. VI, stanzas 1, 4. 17 Ibid., 4, vv. 21–5. 18 Maud: A Monodrama. V, stanzas 1 and 3. 19 A Welcome to Alexandra. 20 The Charge of the Light Brigade. 21 Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington, st. 6. 22 In Memoriam, 122, st. 5. 23 Ibid., 54, st. 5, and 55, stanzas 4-5. 24 Ibid., 91, stanzas 1-4, and 93, stanzas 1-4. 25 Life of Lord Tennyson by his Son, vol. i, pp. 124-5. 26 The Poet, st. 14. 27 The Flower (The Princess and Other Poems). UNCLASSED INSPIRATION always is unexpected in verse; a surprise, I should suppose, to the writer, as it is to his readers. The unexpectedness, as he and they suddenly find themselves on wings borne aloft into the empyrean of fancy, is a chief virtue of the entire department of literature. At the same time, we have a positive right to look for it somewhere in accepted poets, in the elect. Inspiration is a necessary for them, as it is treasure-trove for their public. In casual reading of unclassed verse the element of chance comes in. The possibility of inspiration belongs to all' unclassed' verse, ancient and modern, but rather specially, I should say, to English. When we open a volume with which, old or new, we have had no previous acquaintance, we never can be sure that we shall not light upon, not indeed an inspired poet, but an inspired poem. Inspiration is like the wind; it bloweth where it listeth. A Church truth, it has been laid down, must be able to assert for itself that it is 'quod semper, quod ab omnibus, quod ubique, creditum est'. Much the same in the way of inspiration is required of a candidate for the title of poet. He is not obliged to prove that all he has written has been inspired. Very few, if any, could abide such a test; certainly not Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron; not Shakespeare himself. The necessity is that the singer from time to time has been. For work unclassed, or by the unclassed, the condition is reversed. Its readers have to feel that, however it may have been with the poet, inspiration is in the poetry. That strange quality which separates true poetry from all else has to be, and is, in it. We cannot define it; we can only explain it by its effects. It has, we |