Views and Reviews Part 9

TENNYSON'S DRAMA

I. A review of _Queen Mary_. _A Drama._ By Alfred Tennyson. Boston: J. R. Osgood. 1875. Originally published in _The Galaxy_, September, 1875.

_Queen Mary_ was produced at the Lyceum Theatre, London, in 1876.

Mr. Irving playing the part of Philip II. It was Tennyson's wish that he should appear as Cardinal Pole, but in the acting version that character was eliminated. The part of Philip has been immortalized by Whistler's celebrated painting of Irving in that role. ED.

II. A review of _Harold_. _A Drama._ By Alfred Tennyson. London.

1877. Originally published in _The Nation_, January 18, 1877.

TENNYSON'S DRAMA

I. QUEEN MARY

A new poem by Mr. Tennyson is certain to be largely criticised, and if the new poem is a drama, the performance must be a great event for criticism as well as for poetry. Great surprise, great hopes, and great fears had been called into being by the announcement that the author of so many finely musical lyrics and finished, chiselled specimens of narrative verse, had tempted fortune in the perilous field of the drama.

Few poets seemed less dramatic than Tennyson, even in his most dramatic attempts--in "Maud," in "Enoch Arden," or in certain of the _Idyls of the King_. He had never used the dramatic form, even by s.n.a.t.c.hes; and though no critic was qualified to affirm that he had no slumbering ambition in that direction, it seemed likely that a poet who had apparently pa.s.sed the meridian of his power had nothing absolutely new to show us. On the other hand, if he had for years been keeping a gift in reserve, and suffering it to ripen and mellow in some deep corner of his genius, while shallower tendencies waxed and waned above it, it was not unjust to expect that the consummate fruit would prove magnificent.

On the whole, we think that doubt was uppermost in the minds of those persons who to a lively appreciation of the author of "Maud" added a vivid conception of the exigencies of the drama. But at last _Queen Mary_ appeared, and conjecture was able to merge itself in knowledge.

There was a momentary interval, during which we all read, among the cable telegrams in the newspapers, that the London _Times_ affirmed the new drama to contain more "true fire" than anything since Shakespeare had laid down the pen. This gave an edge to our impatience; for "fire,"

true or false, was not what the Laureate's admirers had hitherto claimed for him. In a day or two, however, most people had the work in their hands.

Every one, it seems to us, has been justified--those who hoped (that is, expected), those who feared, and those who were mainly surprised. _Queen Mary_ is both better and less good than was to have been supposed, and both in its merits and its defects it is extremely singular. It is the least Tennysonian of all the author's productions; and we may say that he has not so much refuted as evaded the charge that he is not a dramatic poet. To produce his drama he has had to cease to be himself.

Even if _Queen Mary_, as a drama, had many more than its actual faults, this fact alone--this extraordinary defeasance by the poet of his familiar ident.i.ty--would make it a remarkable work.

We know of few similar phenomena in the history of literature--few such examples of rupture with a consecrated past. Poets in their prime have groped and experimented, tried this and that, and finally made a great success in a very different vein from that in which they had found their early successes. But the writers in prose or in verse are few who, after a lifetime spent in elaborating and perfecting a certain definite and extremely characteristic manner, have at Mr. Tennyson's age suddenly dismissed it from use and stood forth clad from head to foot in a disguise without a flaw. We are sure that the other great English poet--the author of "The Ring and the Book,"--would be quite incapable of any such feat. The more's the pity, as many of his readers will say!

_Queen Mary_ is upward of three hundred pages long; and yet in all these three hundred pages there is hardly a trace of the Tennyson we know. Of course the reader is on the watch for reminders of the writer he has greatly loved; and of course, vivid signs being absent, he finds a certain eloquence in the slightest intimations. When he reads that

----"that same tide Which, coming with our coming, seemed to smile And sparkle like our fortune as thou saidest, Ran sunless down and moaned against the piers,"

he seems for a moment to detect the peculiar note and rhythm of "Enoch Arden" or "The Princess." Just preceding these, indeed, is a line which seems Tennysonian because it is in a poem by Tennyson:

"Last night I climbed into the gate-house, Brett, And scared the gray old porter and his wife."

In such touches as these the Tennysonian note is faintly struck; but if the poem were unsigned, they would not do much toward pointing out the author. On the other hand, the fine pa.s.sages in _Queen Mary_ are conspicuously deficient in those peculiar cadences--that exquisite perfume of diction--which every young poet of the day has had his hour of imitating. We may give as an example Pole's striking denial of the charge that the Church of Rome has ever known trepidation:

"What, my Lord!

The Church on Petra's rock? Never! I have seen A pine in Italy that cast its shadow Athwart a cataract; firm stood the pine-- The cataract shook the shadow. To my mind The cataract typed the headlong plunge and fall Of heresy to the pit: the pine was Rome.

You see, my Lords, It was the shadow of the Church that trembled."

This reads like Tennyson doing his best not to be Tennyson, and very fairly succeeding. Well as he succeeds, however, and admirably skilful and clever as is his attempt throughout to play tricks with his old habits of language, and prove that he was not the slave but the master of the cla.s.sic Tennysonian rhythm, I think that few readers can fail to ask themselves whether the new gift is of equal value with the old. The question will perhaps set them to fingering over the nearest volume of the poet at hand, to refresh their memory of his ancient magic. It has rendered the present writer this service, and he feels as if it were a considerable one. Every great poet has something that he does supremely well, and when you come upon Tennyson at his best you feel that you are dealing with poetry at its highest. One of the best pa.s.sages in _Queen Mary_--the only one, it seems to me, very sensibly warmed by the "fire"

commemorated by the London _Times_--is the pa.s.sionate monologue of Mary when she feels what she supposes to be the intimations of maternity:

"He hath awaked, he hath awaked!

He stirs within the darkness!

Oh Philip, husband! how thy love to mine Will cling more close, and those bleak manners thaw, That make me shamed and tongue-tied in my love.

The second Prince of Peace-- The great unborn defender of the Faith, Who will avenge me of mine enemies-- He comes, and my star rises.

The stormy Wyatts and Northumberlands And proud ambitions of Elizabeth, And all her fiercest partisans, are pale Before my star!

His sceptre shall go forth from Ind to Ind!

His sword shall hew the heretic peoples down!

His faith shall clothe the world that will be his, Like universal air and suns.h.i.+ne! Open, Ye everlasting gates! The King is here!-- My star, my son!"

That is very fine, and its broken verses and uneven movement have great felicity and suggestiveness. But their magic is as nothing, surely, to the magic of such a pa.s.sage as this:

"Yet hold me not for ever in thine East; How can my nature longer mix with thine?

Coldly thy rosy shadows bathe me, cold Are all thy lights, and cold my wrinkled feet Upon thy glimmering thresholds, where the stream Floats up from those dim fields about the homes Of happy men that have the power to die, And gra.s.sy barrows of the happier dead.

Release me and restore me to the ground; Thou seest all things, thou wilt see my grave; Thou wilt renew thy beauty morn by morn; I, earth in earth, forget these empty courts, And thee returning on thy silver wheels."

In these beautiful lines from "t.i.thonus" there is a purity of tone, an inspiration, a something sublime and exquisite, which is easily within the compa.s.s of Mr. Tennyson's usual manner at its highest, but which is not easily achieved by any really dramatic verse. It is poised and stationary, like a bird whose wings have borne him high, but the beauty of whose movement is less in great ethereal sweeps and circles than in the way he hangs motionless in the blue air, with only a vague tremor of his pinions. Even if the idea with Tennyson were more largely dramatic than it usually is, the immobility, as we must call it, of his phrase would always defeat the dramatic intention. When he wishes to represent movement, the phrase always seems to me to pause and slowly pivot upon itself, or at most to move backward. I do not know whether the reader recognizes the peculiarity to which I allude; one has only to open Tennyson almost at random to find an example of it:

"For once when Arthur, walking all alone, Vext at a rumour rife about the Queen, Had met her, Vivien being greeted fair, Would fain have wrought upon his cloudy mood With reverent eyes mock-loyal, shaken voice, And fluttered adoration."

That perhaps is a subtle ill.u.s.tration; the allusion to Teolin's dog in "Aylmer's Field" is a franker one:

----"his old Newfoundlands, when they ran To lose him at the stables; for he rose, Two-footed, at the limit of his chain, Roaring to make a third."

What these pictures present is not the action itself, but the poet's complex perception of it; it seems hardly more vivid and genuine than the sustained posturings of brilliant _tableaux vivants_. With the poets who are natural chroniclers of movement, the words fall into their places as with some throw of the dice, which fortune should always favour. With Scott and Byron they leap into the verse _a pieds joints_, and shake it with their coming; with Tennyson they arrive slowly and settle cautiously into their att.i.tudes, after having well scanned the locality. In consequence they are generally exquisite, and make exquisite combinations; but the result is intellectual poetry and not pa.s.sionate--poetry which, if the term is not too pedantic, one may qualify as static poetry. Any scene of violence represented by Tennyson is always singularly limited and compressed; it is reduced to a few elements--refined to a single statuesque episode. There are, for example, several descriptions of tournaments and combats in the _Idyls of the King_. They are all most beautiful, but they are all curiously delicate. One gets no sense of the din and shock of battle; one seems to be looking at a bas relief of two contesting knights in chiselled silver, on a priceless piece of plate. They belong to the same family as that charming description, in Hawthorne's _Marble Faun_, of the sylvan dance of Donatello and Miriam in the Borghese gardens. Hawthorne talks of the freedom and frankness of their mirth and revelry; what we seem to see is a solemn frieze in stone along the base of a monument. These are the natural fruits of geniuses who are of the brooding rather than the impulsive order. I do not mean to say that here and there Tennyson does not give us a couplet in which motion seems reflected without being made to tarry. I open "Enoch Arden" at hazard, and I read of Enoch's s.h.i.+p that

----"at first indeed Thro' many a fair sea-circle, day by day, Scarce rocking, her full-busted figure-head Stared o'er the ripple feathering from her bows."

I turn the page and read of

"The myriad shriek of wheeling ocean fowl, The league-long roller thundering on the reef, The moving whisper of huge trees that branched And blossomed in the zenith";

of

"The sunrise broken into scarlet shafts Among the palms and ferns and precipices; The blaze upon the waters to the east; The blaze upon his island overhead; The blaze upon the waters to the west; Then the great stars that globed themselves in Heaven, The hollower-bellowing Ocean, and again The scarlet shafts of sunrise."

These lines represent movement on the grand natural scale--taking place in that measured, majestic fas.h.i.+on which, at any given moment, seems identical with permanence. One is almost ashamed to quote Tennyson; one can hardly lay one's hand on a pa.s.sage that does not form part of the common stock of reference and recitation. Pa.s.sages of the more impulsive and spontaneous kind will of course chiefly be found in his lyrics and rhymed verses (though rhyme would at first seem but another check upon his freedom); and pa.s.sages of the kind to which I have been calling attention, chiefly in his narrative poems, in the _Idyls_ generally, and especially in the later ones, while the words strike one as having been pondered and collated with an almost miserly care.

But a man has always the qualities of his defects, and if Tennyson is what I have called a static poet, he at least represents repose and stillness and the fixedness of things, with a splendour that no poet has surpa.s.sed. We all of this generation have lived in such intimacy with him, and made him so much part of our regular intellectual meat and drink, that it requires a certain effort to hold him off at the proper distance for scanning him. We need to cease mechanically murmuring his lines, so that we may hear them speak for themselves.

Few persons who have grown up within the last forty years but have pa.s.sed through the regular Tennysonian phase; happy few who have paid it a merely pa.s.sive tribute, and not been moved to commit their emotions to philosophic verse, in the metre of "In Memoriam"! The phase has lasted longer with some persons than with others; but it will not be denied that with the generation at large it has visibly declined. The young persons of twenty now read Tennyson (though, as we imagine, with a fervour less intense than that which prevailed twenty years ago); but the young persons of thirty read Browning and Dante Rossetti, and Omar Kheyam--and are also sometimes heard to complain that poetry is dead and that there is nothing nowadays to read.

We have heard Tennyson called "dainty" so often, we have seen so many allusions to the "Tennysonian trick," we have been so struck, in a certain way, with M. Taine's remarkable portrait of the poet, in contrast to that of Alfred de Musset, that every one who has anything of a notion of keeping abreast of what is called the "culture of the time"

is rather shy of making an explicit, or even a serious profession of admiration for his earlier idol. It has long been the fas.h.i.+on to praise Byron, if one praises him at all, with an apologetic smile; and Tennyson has been, I think, in a measure, tacitly cla.s.sed with the author of "Childe Harold" as a poet whom one thinks most of while one's taste is immature.

This is natural enough, I suppose, and the taste of the day must travel to its opportunity's end. But I do not believe that Byron has pa.s.sed, by any means, and I do not think that Tennyson has been proved to be a secondary or a tertiary poet. If he is not in the front rank, it is hard to see what it is that const.i.tutes exquisite quality. There are poets of a larger compa.s.s; he has not the pa.s.sion of Sh.e.l.ley nor the transcendent meditation of Wordsworth; but his inspiration, in its own current, is surely as pure as theirs. He depicts the a.s.sured beauties of life, the things that civilisation has gained and permeated, and he does it with an ineffable delicacy of imagination. Only once, as it seems to me (at the close of "Maud"), has he struck the note of irrepressible emotion, and appeared to say the thing that must be said at the moment, at any cost. For the rest, his verse is the verse of leisure, of luxury, of contemplation, of a faculty that circ.u.mstances have helped to become fastidious; but this leaves it a wide province--a province that it fills with a sovereign splendour.

When a poet is such an artist as Tennyson, such an unfaltering, consummate master, it is no shame to surrender one's self to his spell.

Reading him over here and there, as I have been doing, I have received an extraordinary impression of talent--talent ripened and refined, and pa.s.sed, with a hundred incantations, through the crucible of taste. The reader is in thoroughly good company, and if the language is to a certain extent that of a coterie, the coterie can offer convincing evidence of its right to be exclusive. Its own tone is exquisite; listen to it, and you will desire nothing more.

Tennyson's various _Idyls_ have been in some degree discredited by insincere imitations, and in some degree, perhaps, by an inevitable lapse of sympathy on the part of some people from what appears their falsetto pitch. That King Arthur, in the great ones of the series, is rather a prig, and that he couldn't have been all the poet represents him without being a good deal of a hypocrite; that the poet himself is too monotonously unctuous, and that in relating the misdeeds of Launcelot and Guinevere he seems, like the lady in the play in "Hamlet,"