Hearts of Controversy(争论的中心)

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Hearts of Controversy

SOME THOUGHTS OF A

READER OF TENNYSON

Fifty years after Tennyson's birth he was saluted a great poet by that

unanimous acclamation which includes mere clamour. Fifty further years,

and his centenary was marked by a new detraction. It is sometimes

difficult to distinguish the obscure but not unmajestic law of change from

the sorry custom of reaction. Change hastes not and rests not, reaction

beats to and fro, flickering about the moving mind of the world.

Reaction--the paltry precipitancy of the multitude--rather than the novelty

of change, has brought about a ferment and corruption of opinion on

Tennyson's poetry. It may be said that opinion is the same now as it was

in the middle of the nineteenth century--the same, but turned. All that

was not worth having of admiration then has soured into detraction now.

It is of no more significance, acrid, than it was, sweet. What the herding

of opinion gave yesterday it is able to take away to-day, that and no more.

But besides the common favour-disfavour of the day, there is the

tendency of educated opinion, once disposed to accept the whole of

Tennyson's poetry as though he could not be "parted from himself," and

now disposed to reject the whole, on the same plea. But if ever there was

a poet who needed to be thus "parted"--the word is his own--it is he who

wrote both narrowly for his time and liberally for all time, and who--this is

the more important character of his poetry--had both a style and a manner:

a masterly style, a magical style, a too dainty manner, nearly a trick; a

noble landscape and in it figures something ready-made. He is a subject

for our alternatives of feeling, nay, our conflicts, as is hardly another poet.

We may deeply admire and wonder, and, in another line or hemistich,

grow indifferent or slightly averse. He sheds the luminous suns of

dreams upon men & women who would do well with footlights; waters

their way with rushing streams of Paradise and cataracts from visionary

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hills; laps them in divine darkness; leads them into those touching

landscapes, "the lovely that are not beloved;" long grey fields, cool

sombre summers, and meadows thronged with unnoticeable flowers;

speeds his carpet knight--or is that hardly a just name for one whose sword

"smites" so well?--upon a carpet of authentic wild flowers; pushes his

rovers, in costume, from off blossoming shores, on the keels of old

romance. The style and the manner, I have said, run side by side. If we

may take one poet's too violent phrase, and consider poets to be "damned

to poetry," why, then, Tennyson is condemned by a couple of sentences,

"to run concurrently." We have the style and the manner locked together

at times in a single stanza, locked and yet not mingled. There should be no

danger for the more judicious reader lest impatience at the peculiar

Tennyson trick should involve the great Tennyson style in a sweep of

protest. Yet the danger has in fact proved real within the present and

recent years, and seems about to threaten still more among the less

judicious. But it will not long prevail. The vigorous little nation of

lovers of poetry, alive one by one within the vague multitude of the nation

of England, cannot remain finally insensible to what is at once majestic

and magical in Tennyson. For those are not qualities they neglect in their

other masters. How, valuing singleness of heart in the sixteenth century,

splendour in the seventeenth, composure in the eighteenth; how, with a

spiritual ear for the note--commonly called Celtic, albeit it is the most

English thing in the world--the wild wood note of the remoter song; how,

with the educated sense of style, the liberal sense of ease; how, in a word,

fostering Letters and loving Nature, shall that choice nation within

England long disregard these virtues in the nineteenth-century master?

How disregard him, for more than the few years of reaction, for the

insignificant reasons of his bygone taste, his insipid courtliness, his

prettiness, or what not? It is no dishonour to Tennyson, for it is a

dishonour to our education, to disparage a poet who wrote but the two--

had he written no more of their kind--lines of "The Passing of Arthur," of

which, before I quote them, I will permit myself the personal

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remembrance of a great contemporary author's opinion. Mr. Meredith,

speaking to me of the high-water mark of English style in poetry and prose,

cited those lines as topmost in poetry:-

On one side lay the ocean, and on one Lay a great water, and the

moon was full.

Here is no taint of manner, no pretty posture or habit, but the

simplicity of poetry and the simplicity of Nature, something on the yonder

side of imagery. It is to be noted that this noble passage is from

Tennyson's generally weakest kind of work--blank verse; and should thus

be a sign that the laxity of so many parts of the "Idylls" and other blank

verse poems was a quite unnecessary fault. Lax this form of poetry

undoubtedly is with Tennyson. His blank verse is often too easy; it

cannot be said to fly, for the paradoxical reason that it has no weight; it

slips by, without halting or tripping indeed, but also without the friction of

the movement of vitality. This quality, which is so near to a fault, this

quality of ease, has come to be disregarded in our day. That Horace

Walpole overpraised this virtue is not good reason that we should hold it

for a vice. Yet we do more than undervalue it; and several of our authors,

in prose and poetry, seem to find much merit in the manifest difficulty;

they will not have a key to turn, though closely and tightly, in oiled wards;

let the reluctant iron catch and grind, or they would even prefer to pick

you the lock.

But though we may think it time that the quality once over-prized

should be restored to a more proportionate honour, our great poet

Tennyson shows us that of all merits ease is, unexpectedly enough, the

most dangerous. It is not only, with him, that the wards are oiled, it is

also that the key turns loosely. This is true of much of the beautiful

"Idylls," but not of their best passages, nor of such magnificent heroic

verse as that of the close of "A Vision of Sin," or of "Lucretius." As to

the question of ease, we cannot have a better maxim than Coventry

Patmore's saying that poetry "should confess, but not suffer from, its

difficulties." And we could hardly find a more curious example of the

Hearts of Controversy

present love of verse that not only confesses but brags of difficulties, and

not only suffers from them but cries out under the suffering, and shows us

the grimace of the pain of it, than I have lighted upon in the critical article

of a recent quarterly. Reviewing the book of a "poet" who manifestly has

an insuperable difficulty in hacking his work into ten-syllable blocks, and

keeping at the same time any show of respect for the national grammar,

the critic gravely invites his reader to "note" the phrase "neath cliffs"

(apparently for "beneath the cliffs") as "characteristic." Shall the reader

indeed "note" such a matter? Truly he has other things to do. This is by

the way. Tennyson is always an artist, and the finish of his work is one

of the principal notes of his versification. How this finish comports with

the excessive ease of his prosody remains his own peculiar secret. Ease,

in him, does not mean that he has any unhandsome slovenly ways. On

the contrary, he resembles rather the warrior with the pouncet box. It is

the man of "neath cliffs" who will not be at the trouble of making a place

for so much as a definite article. Tennyson certainly WORKED, and the

exceeding ease of his blank verse comes perhaps of this little paradox--

that he makes somewhat too much show of the hiding of his art.

In the first place the poet with the great welcome style and the little

unwelcome manner, Tennyson is, in the second place, the modern poet

who withstood France. (That is, of course, modern France--France since

the Renaissance. From medieval Provence there is not an English poet

who does not own inheritance.) It was some time about the date of the

Restoration that modern France began to be modish in England. A ruffle

at the Court of Charles, a couplet in the ear of Pope, a tour de phrase from

Mme. de Sevigne much to the taste of Walpole, later the good example of

French painting-- rich interest paid for the loan of our Constable's

initiative--later still a scattering of French taste, French critical business,

over all the shallow places of our literature--these have all been phases of

a national vanity of ours, an eager and anxious fluttering or jostling to be

foremost and French. Matthew Arnold's essay on criticism fostered this

anxiety, and yet I find in this work of his a lack of easy French knowledge,

Hearts of Controversy

such as his misunderstanding of the word brutalite, which means no more,

or little more, than roughness. Matthew Arnold, by the way, knew so little

of the French character as to be altogether ignorant of French

provincialism, French practical sense, and French "convenience."

"Convenience" is his dearest word of contempt, "practical sense" his next

dearest, and he throws them a score of times in the teeth of the English.

Strange is the irony of the truth. For he bestows those withering words

on the nation that has the fifty religions, and attributes "ideas"--as the

antithesis of "convenience" and "practical sense"--to the nation that has

the fifty sauces. And not for a moment does he suspect himself of this

blunder, so manifest as to be disconcerting to his reader. One seems to

hear an incurably English accent in all this, which indeed is reported, by

his acquaintance, of Matthew Arnold's actual speaking of French. It is

certain that he has not the interest of familiarity with the language, but

only the interest of strangeness. Now, while we meet the effect of the

French coat in our seventeenth century, of the French light verse in our

earlier eighteenth century, and of French philosophy in our later, of the

French revolution in our Wordsworth, of the French painting in our

nineteenth-century studios, of French fiction--and the dregs are still

running--in our libraries, of French poetry in our Swinburne, of French

criticism in our Arnold, Tennyson shows the effect of nothing French

whatever. Not the Elizabethans, not Shakespeare, not Jeremy Taylor, not

Milton, not Shelley were (in their art, not in their matter) more insular in

their time. France, by the way, has more than appreciated the homage of

Tennyson's contemporaries; Victor Hugo avers, in Les Miserables, that our

people imitate his people in all things, and in particular he rouses in us a

delighted laughter of surprise by asserting that the London street-boy

imitates the Parisian street-boy. There is, in fact, something of a street-

boy in some of our late more literary mimicries.

We are apt to judge a poet too exclusively by his imagery. Tennyson

is hardly a great master of imagery. He has more imagination than

imagery. He sees the thing, with so luminous a mind's eye, that it is

Hearts of Controversy

sufficient to him; he needs not to see it more beautifully by a similitude.

"A clear-walled city" is enough; "meadows" are enough-- indeed

Tennyson reigns for ever over all meadows; "the happy birds that change

their sky"; "Bright Phosphor, fresher for the night"; "Twilight and evening

bell"; "the stillness of the central sea"; "that friend of mine who lives in

God"; "the solitary morning"; "Four grey walls and four grey towers";

"Watched by weeping queens"; these are enough, illustrious, and needing

not illustration.

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;

Hearts of Controversy

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, making 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

Hearts of Controversy

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.

I say intellect advisedly. Not for him such blunders of thought as

Coleridge's in "The Ancient Mariner" or Wordsworth's in "Hartleap Well."

Coleridge names the sun, moon, and stars as when, in a dream, the

sleeping imagination is threatened with some significant illness. We see

them in his great poem as apparitions. Coleridge's senses are infinitely

and transcendently spiritual. But a candid reader must be permitted to

think the mere story silly. The wedding-guest might rise the morrow

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morn a sadder but he assuredly did not rise a wiser man.

As for Wordsworth, the most beautiful stanzas of "Hartleap Well" are

fatally rebuked by the truths of Nature. He shows us the ruins of an

aspen wood, a blighted hollow, a dreary place, forlorn because an innocent

stag, hunted, had there broken his heart in a leap from the rocks above;

grass would not grow there.

This beast not unobserved by Nature fell, His death was mourned by

sympathy divine.

And the signs of that sympathy are cruelly asserted by the poet to be

these woodland ruins--cruelly, because the daily sight of the world

blossoming over the agonies of beast and bird is made less tolerable to us

by such a fiction.

The Being that is in the clouds and air . . . Maintains a deep and

reverential care For the unoffending creature whom He loves.

The poet offers us as a proof of that "reverential care," the visible

alteration of Nature at the scene of suffering--an alteration we have to

dispense with every day we pass in the woods. We are tempted to ask

whether Wordsworth himself believed in a sympathy he asks us--on such

grounds!--to believe in? Did he think his faith to be worthy of no more

than a fictitious sign and a false proof?

Nowhere in the whole of Tennyson's thought is there such an attack

upon our reason and our heart. He is more serious than the solemn

Wordsworth.

IN MEMORIAM, with all else that Tennyson wrote, tutors, with here

and there a subtle word, this nature-loving nation to perceive land, light,

sky, and ocean, as he perceived. To this we return, upon this we dwell.

He has been to us, firstly, the poet of two geniuses--a small and an

immense; secondly, the modern poet who answered in the negative that

most significant modern question, French or not French? But he was,

before the outset of all our study of him, of all our love of him, the poet of

landscape, and this he is more dearly than pen can describe him. This

eternal character of his is keen in the verse that is winged to meet a

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HeartsofControversy1HeartsofControversyHeartsofControversy2SOMETHOUGHTSOFAREADEROFTENNYSONFiftyyearsafterTennyson'sbirthhewassalutedagreatpoetbythatunanimousacclamationwhichincludesmereclamour.Fiftyfurtheryears,andhiscentenarywasmarkedbyanewdetraction.Itissometimesdifficulttodistinguishtheobscurebut...

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