CHAPTER XVIII THE LANDSCAPE OF ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON RESERVING Some short notice of Alfred Tennyson's general position as poet for the close, let us begin at once with the landscape of his youthful work, and attempt the curious and interesting task of tracing its gradual development through sixty years and more. We have the first instance in Claribel, that lovely song in which the natural details of a wild wood are subordinated to the Melody which the poet truly names it— Where Claribel low-lieth The breezes pause and die, Letting the rose-leaves fall: Thick-leaved, ambrosial, With an ancient melody Of an inward agony, Where Claribel low-lieth. If a little mannered, yet through its fullness of diction and resolution of every image into music, the poet's mature art is partially foreshadowed, as in the curious experiment named Leonine Elegiacs which follows, his varied metrical power and invention are youthfully prefigured— Winds creep; dews fall chilly: in her first sleep earth breathes stilly: Over the pools in the burn water-gnats murmur and mourn. Sadly the far kine loweth : the glimmering water outfloweth : Twin peaks shadow'd with pine slope to the dark hyaline. was Such poems as these come from what in his own phrase -In my morn of youth The unsunn'd freshness of my strength; but greater power and art presently appear in the Mariana of the Grange. The details here are as numerous and as clearly delineated as in some early Italian or Flemish panel, yet all coloured by the human passion of the subject— With blackest moss the flower-plots About a stone-cast from the wall A sluice with blacken'd waters slept, All silver-green with gnarléd bark : All day within the dreamy house, The doors upon their hinges creak'd ; We may smile now at the pompous jocosity with which a review of the period set forth these lines for the reader's scorn. Yet it should be remembered that the style was then a wholly new thing in English art, and that he who thus comes forward must force his way if he wishes others to find it. Indeed, Tennyson's skill was not yet certain; the Oriental picture which follows is so overwhelmed and overdone with luscious sweetness, splendour on splendour, that not one half, but one-tenth, one might say, would be more than the whole.1 Nor was he quite master of his lovely instrument in the most complete topographical landscape which he left-the picture of his own home presented in the Ode to Memory, which, as a whole, is somewhat too dithyrambic. Thus the poet invokes her Thou wert not nursed by the waterfall A pillar of white light upon the wall Of purple cliffs, aloof descried : Come from the woods that belt the gray hill-side, The seven elms, the poplars four That stand beside my father's door, And chiefly from the brook that loves To purl o'er matted cress and ribbed sand, The filter'd tribute of the rough woodland, Pour round mine ears the livelong bleat When the first matin-song hath waken'd loud What time the amber morn Forth gushes from beneath a low-hung cloud. Or, again, treating his descriptive power as really the work of "that great artist, Memory"— Ever retiring thou dost gaze On the prime labour of thine early days: 1 M. Taine, a painstaking critic, somewhere about 1864, when engaged upon his review of English literature, remarked to me that Tennyson lived in great luxury during his youth. So far from this, I assured him that for several years he had gone through real poverty, and asked on what grounds M. Taine had formed his opinion. He answered: Upon his early poems, especially the Recollections of the Arabian Nights.—Such is subjective criticism! Whether the high field on the bushless Pike, Or even a sand-built ridge Of heaped hills that mound the sea, Overblown with murmurs harsh, Or even a lowly cottage whence we see Stretch'd wide and wild the waste enormous marsh, Where from the frequent bridge, Like emblems of infinity, The trenchéd waters run from sky to sky. The trenched waters run from sky to sky. Here we have already Tennyson's power of fixing a scene, characteristic of the Lincolnshire marshland, in a few perfect words—in the absolutely right and only words, -a power in which he is, I think, unsurpassed, rarely rivalled. And then presently in the Song A Spirit haunts, . . . and in that of the Dying Swan, the poet more definitely appears to fulfil himself. these must be left to the reader's remembrance. But Coleridge has told us, and no better authority could be found, that "there is no profession on earth which requires an "attention so early, so long, or so unintermitting, as that of "poetry." In this spirit, from 1833 to 1840, Tennyson was slowly but unfalteringly perfecting his art and forming himself. His character and his verse, like the star, "without resting, yet " without haste," advanced together. Henceforth we often find that gift of flashing the landscape before us in a word or two which I have just noticed-those felicities of language which, again, "seem to be almost things instead of words." 2 Willows whiten, aspens quiver, Little breezes dusk and shiver Thro' the wave that runs for ever. This I take from one of Tennyson's earliest Arthurian sketches, The Lady of Shalott. Then who has put a perfect picture into more perfect word than that An English home-gray twilight pour'd On dewy pastures, dewy trees, 1 Biographia Literaria, ch. ii. 2 J. H. Card. Newman. Softer than sleep-all things in order stored, Or, again, speaking of the sea as watched from a lofty precipice, how he pounces as it were upon the one right word— The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls. And here for a moment let us compare a far later and wider vignette describing, also from a height, that of his own house, Aldworth The view Long-known and loved by me, With one gray glimpse of sea. In this vividly picturesque style we may name the winter snow scene in the Saint Agnes Eve, or the glimpses of Nature in the Gardener's Daughter, although here the early elaborateness, the something too musk-rosy, perhaps, has not wholly disappeared. If we now take one or two longer examples; how in the second Mariana has Tennyson set before us the landscape of South and North with a seeming effortless lucidity!— Nor bird would sing, nor lamb would bleat, Nor any cloud would cross the vault, But day increased from heat to heat, On stony drought and steaming salt ; Till now at noon she slept again, And seem'd knee-deep in mountain grass, And heard her native breezes pass, And runlets babbling down the glen.1 A wider sweep, a more brilliantly coloured effect belongs to the oriental landscape framed in Locksley Hall Larger constellations burning, mellow moons and happy skies, 1 Compare Dante's little streams that flow down quoted in chap. vii. |