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ESSAYS.

TENNYSON.*

[Oct. 1855.]

THERE are two instincts of the poetic nature, two faculties of the imagination, either of which possessed in a high degree is calculated to secure for its possessor a more than common immediateness of popularity. The poet who can enter deeply into, and vividly reproduce, the characteristic elements in the thought and sentiment of his own time, has a hold on it by virtue of sympathy, and of that mysterious hankering after outward expression, which makes all men delight in having their thoughts spoken, and their feelings interpreted for them with a completeness they could never hope themselves to attain. He again has a not less binding claim, based upon their gratitude, who can transport them from the cankering cares of daily life, the perplexities and confusions of their philosophies, the weariness of their haunting thoughts, to some entirely new field of existence, to some place of rest, some clear-walled city by the sea, where they can draw a serene air, undimmed by the clouds and smoke which infest their ordinary existence.

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* Maud, and other Poems. By Alfred Tennyson, D.C.L., Poet Laureate.

These are the two broad conditions of immediate acceptance. Those who, like Shelley, have a world of their own, crossing and mingling in perplexed lines with the world by which they are surrounded, must, for the most part, wait for that to pass entirely away before they can attain to a just appreciation.

Tennyson belongs to the first class. His is a mind in exact harmony with the times in which he lives. Such minds spring up every generation or so in the history of a national literature. It is not always easy to trace their antecedents, and yet it is they who lead down the regular line of poetical development. The whole race of poets might be classed in two divisions, according to their unison with, or independence of, the age in which they flourish. The one form a set of successional links in a chain, they are the legitimate children of the times which produced them, they are elder sons, they have the family estate from generation to generation, they are members of society, and fathers of families; they have a numerous offspring; small poets of the same order spring about them like suckers from a tree; they are welded into the social order. The others may be men of not inferior genius; but they stand apart, like barren younger brothers; they are solitary; it is themselves they express, and no more; they may have occasional imitators, but they are neither the founders of schools, nor in them does any school find its culmination; they do not "look before and after." They are connected with their own times, of course, but only at single points. The first are waves, part and parcel of the great river of life rolling with it to the sea; the others are inlets, where the water whirls round while the main current rushes past. The one set are the hierarchs of the Established Catholic Church of poesy, the others are leaders among the Dissenters. To take a few familiar examples; Chaucer, Beaumont and Fletcher, Cowley, Pope, Byron, are of the legitimate line; Spenser, Ben Jonson, Milton, Swift,

Crabbe, are irregulars, and never has the contrast been more marked than in our own day, between Tennyson and Wordsworth.

Tennyson is the most modern of poets, that is, of great poets, and in the broad and permanent aspects of what constitutes us modern. Lesser poets may represent more vividly the transient phases, the accidents of the passing time; but it is Tennyson who gives us back the true characteristics in small as well as in great matters. His air is modern. He dispenses with the old formalities thought necessary to poetry. He has cast the ancient costume. His dress is to the old forms what a wideawake and easy morning coat is to a wig and claret velvet suit, or the high hat and tight pantaloons of the Regency. He has the free insouciant demeanour characteristic of modern society; but of English society,-never American. His Muse, if she met you and liked you, would drop the Mr. from your name after ten minutes' conversation. She would cut the "right honourable" off her addresses to peers, and ignore the existence of the monosyllable, "sir." Tennyson goes to his object without preface and circumstantial delay. He does not think it necessary to tell you he is going to say a thing before he says it. You must find out his "Standpunkt" for yourself. And the publishing details are in accordance with this stage of development. His books are undefaced with introductions or annotations; he cuts down a dedication to the very shortest limits, and deems the kind. and courteous reader an extinct animal. In what may be called colloquial poetry he stands alone for ease and harmony, though leaning sometimes to affectation and mannerism of expression. This sort of style is abundant all through Mr. Tennyson's first volume, in such poems as "Dora," "Audley Court," " Edwin Morris, ""Edwin Morris," "Walking to the Mail;" nowhere so easy and so harmonious as in "Will Waterproof's Lyrical Monologue," and nowhere so graceful as in the charming poem of the "Talking Oak.”

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Whatever we may have to say on Mr. Tennyson's Maud," he is still master of this art, as will be seen by the following extract from one of the poems in his new volume.

"So Lawrence Aylmer, seated on a stile
In the long hedge, and rolling in his mind
Old waifs of rhyme, and bowing o'er the brook
A tonsured head in middle age forlorn,

Mused, and was mute. On a sudden a low breath
Of tender air made tremble in the hedge
The fragil bindweed-bells and bryony rings;
And he looked up. There stood a maiden near,
Waiting to pass. In much amaze he stared
On eyes a bashful azure, and on hair

In gloss and hue the chestnut, when the shell
Divides threefold to show the fruit within :
Then, wondering, asked her, 'Are you from the farm?"
'Yes,' answered she. 'Pray stay a little: pardon me,
What do they call you?' 'Katie.' 'That were strange.
What surname?' Willows.' 'No!' 'That is my name.'
'Indeed!' and here he look'd so self perplext,
That Katie laughed, and laughing blushed, till he
Laugh'd also, but as one before he wakes,
Who feels a glimmering strangeness in his dream.
Then looking at her; Too happy, fresh, and fair,
Too fresh and fair in our sad world's best bloom,
To be the ghost of one who bore your name
About these meadows, twenty years ago."

'Have you not heard?' said Katie,' we came back.
We bought the farm we tenanted before.
Am I so like her? so they said on board.
Sir, if you knew her in her English days,

My mother, as it seems you did, the days
That most she loves to talk of, come with me.
My brother James is in the harvest-field:
But she-you will be welcome-O, come in!""

And Tennyson does more than excel in colloquial poetry. His style throughout is new, entirely different from any thing the world has seen before, and exactly adapted to the day. Wordsworth insisted on an every-day

poetic vocabulary. Tennyson introduced a modern poetic phraseology.

Nor is his matter less impregnated with the dominant feelings of his time. He sympathises with the modern bent of thought. He is touched with the triumphant, somewhat boastful temper of an age of physical discovery. He exults in endless development. He tells us that

"The thoughts of men are widen'd with the process of the suns.

In this century men really have won new ground in one direction. They have enlarged the play of thought in the domain of science, and a fresh and rapid advance has given a forward attitude to our hopes and our philosophy. Tennyson is deeply tinged with this feeling. He loves to look onward over vast prospects of future time, and to imagine the heavenly order growing more clear and perfect. He leans upon the future; the "eternal process, moving on ;" he would fain

"Take wings of foresight; lighten through
The secular abyss to come."

Moreover he subdues the results to his uses; he has made science subservient to poetry, and is perhaps the only man who has done so. Not his, the "Lives of the Steam-Engine" or the "Chemical Affinities in Verse;" but his genius has boldly availed itself of new scientific ideas, just as they became sufficiently familiar to make them adequate illustrations and expressions of his meaning. Take as a single instance the fifty-fourth poem in the "In Memoriam," familiar to all from its beauty, and the fifty-fifth, of which we quote enough to show how he is pursuing the idea through a suggestion derived from , geological discovery.

"The wish, that of the living whole

No life may fail beyond the grave;
Derives it not from what we have
The likest God within the soul?

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