The Quarterly Review

HERE is ever something ungracious in speaking to the disparagement of those to whom we have owed benefits, material or spiritual. And of all men we should least like to say a word against those who have affected us by the purity and beauty of what they have said or written, because such men appear to have reached the root of all excellence—a perfection that within its limits is irreproachable. This irreproachable perfection, the enforced expression of feelings common to all mankind, must belong to every true poet; and in respect of it all poets, as the painter Blake said, are equal; it is their inalienable essence, and they can claim the acknowledgment of it at our hands, just as the poorest men, by virtue of their humanity, may claim from us a courtesy equal to that which we extend to the greatest. Nevertheless, it would be absurd to deny the diversity of faculties which exists among poets as among all other men; and as no good purpose would be served by affirming that a blind man could see, so neither would it be profitable to ascribe to a poet a width of experience and a strength of understanding greater than that which he really possesses.

And it is even very necessary that we should ascertain, and take trouble to ascertain, what excellences an influential writer possesses, and in what he fails; what kind of commodity (so to speak) he deals in, and what it would be vain to expect from him. We recognise this necessity in matters of daily life; we do not go to our physician to advise us on points of law. But in the subtler matters of thought and feeling men are less discriminating, and confound together very diverse qualities. There is, indeed, a limit even here to the error which it is possible for men to commit; it demands a very enthusiastic disciple to ascribe poetic imagination to Mr. Mill, and none save Mr. Ruskin himself has assigned to Mr. Ruskin the palm for logical stringency. But confusion is perpetually made between qualities in certain respects akin, but yet sufficiently distinct. Logical power is confounded Vol. 128.-No. 255.

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with speculative ability; the faculty of the orator with the faculty of the poet; the philosophical analysis of character with the dramatic exhibition of it. And the office of the critic is to prevent these confusions-to show what each writer has, and what he has not.

To come to the point. What are the commodities that Mr. Tennyson deals in? Of which of them has he the largest stock, and which, on the other hand, does he exhibit only casually and by accident? What has he seen? what does he know? Above all, what has Mr. Tennyson to give us which no other writer can give us, and which constitutes his originality? and how far has his present volume altered our estimate of him in these respects? These are the questions which we must answer. Into the general subject of his merits and his defects we have entered so recently* that it is only necessary to mention briefly our views respecting them; but a new volume will always supply new points of illustration, and moreover present topics for discussion peculiar to itself.

There are two things which must principally strike every reader of Mr. Tennyson, two things which, together, make him remarkable; the one absolutely novel, the other not, indeed, novel, but precious from its rarity; namely, his minute, various, and careful appreciation of external nature in aspects that had hitherto been overlooked, and the combined purity and intensity of his personal affection. If we were to call these two qualities the kernel of his poems, we might be misapprehended; for certainly we do not call his other qualities husk, nor do we wish to sever any qualities out of the whole production, as if they were capable of being picked out and surveyed separately. But just as in a landscape there may be some bend of a river or curve of a hill which in itself would be nothing, but which yet is the central point of the whole scene, and that which renders it unique; and just as in a symphony there may be some cadence which, played simply, would arouse but a moderate enthusiasm, but yet in connection with the other notes is recognised as the key to the whole, and as making the whole a work of original beauty; so in a poet there will be characteristics not separable, but yet distinguishable from the rest, and distinguishable as the reason of his remaining in our minds. And so it is with Mr. Tennyson. If we ask what there is in the stuff and quality of his mind, and consequently in the substance of his writings (of his style, a matter of secondary, though still great importance,

* See Quarterly Review,' vol. cxxvi. p. 328, foll., Art. Modern English Poets.'

we say nothing as yet), that is solid and original, what it is that makes him deserving of being remembered as a master, and not a mere scholar of the poetic. art, it must be answered, the minuteness of his knowledge of external natural beauty, and the purity and depth of his affections. His science and his philosophy are ornaments to his writings which we are sometimes well pleased to see there, though generally we could still better have dispensed with them. But he is no master of these things; in them he is, for the most part, the reflector of other minds; they act as the subordinate features in the landscape, as the accompaniment in the symphony. Yet it must be added that the purity of his mind gives him a quality never found except in pure minds, and one very essential for a philosopher; namely, that feeling for the infinite, that faith in the eternity of the spirit, which, despised as it is by some who think themselves scientific, is yet not lightly to be held indifferent to the moral nature of man.

But, to conclude our general sketch, there is one quality which some people have fancied they have seen in Mr. Tennyson, which is unquestionably not to be found in him; and that is, the clear knowledge of men, of individual character. He is no dramatist. Let us at once mention the single exception. The two Northern Farmers' are genuine flashes of the dramatic spirit; they add to our knowledge. Putting these aside, what Mr. Tennyson knows of men is capable of being put into a very few lines. He knows that, of human beings, some fall in love, and others are consequently fallen in love with; he knows much of the signs, circumstances, and accompaniments of the same. He has heard, by report, that men sometimes fight; and again, as in the case of Ulysses and Enoch Arden, that they sometimes have adventurous experiences apart from fighting. He knows, and has felt, that man has a spiritual nature; but not, equally, the diversity of the modes in which this spiritual nature shows itself in different men. He has heard that there are political and social questions in the world; and he at times handles them in a candid spirit, but with no great success. Of the great phenomena of mankind-the diversity of functions, tempers, lineaments, expressions, actions - he has only the ordinary knowledge of an educated man. This is no great stock for any one to set up with as a dramatist; and when, as in the Idylls and Enoch Arden' and his present volume, Mr. Tennyson leaves the intense feeling of his lyrics, he has only one string left to his bow, namely, external description; the graceful and gracefully told stories have only one nervous centre, so to speak, one source of vital strength; and this seldom rises to such

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The Quarterly Review, Volume 128