Alfred Tennyson | Page 9

of his Idylls. For example, in Mariana we first note
what may be called his perfection and accomplishment. The very few
alterations made later are verbal. The moated grange of Mariana in
Measure for Measure, and her mood of desertion and despair, are
elaborated by a precision of truth and with a perfection of harmony
worthy of Shakespeare himself, and minutely studied from the natural
scenes in which the poet was born. If these verses alone survived out of
the wreck of Victorian literature, they would demonstrate the greatness
of the author as clearly as do the fragments of Sappho. Isabel (a study
of the poet's mother) is almost as remarkable in its stately dignity;
while Recollections of the Arabian Nights attest the power of refined
luxury in romantic description, and herald the unmatched beauty of The
Lotos-Eaters. The Poet, again, is a picture of that which Tennyson
himself was to fulfil; and Oriana is a revival of romance, and of the
ballad, not limited to the ballad form as in its prototype, Helen of
Kirkconnell. Curious and exquisite experiment in metre is indicated in
the Leonine Elegiacs, in Claribel, and several other poems. Qualities
which were not for long to find public expression, speculative powers
brooding, in various moods, on ultimate and insoluble questions, were
attested by The Mystic, and Supposed Confessions of a Second-rate
Sensitive Mind not in Unity with Itself, an unlucky title of a remarkable
performance. "In this, the most agitated of all his poems, we find the
soul urging onward
'Thro' utter dark a full-sail'd skiff, Unpiloted i' the echoing dance Of
reboant whirlwinds;'
and to the question, 'Why not believe, then?' we have as answer a
simile of the sea, which cannot slumber like a mountain tarn, or
'Draw down into his vexed pools All that blue heaven which hues and

paves'
the tranquil inland mere." {3}
The poet longs for the faith of his infant days and of his mother -
"Thy mild deep eyes upraised, that knew The beauty and repose of faith,
And the clear spirit shining thro'."
That faith is already shaken, and the long struggle for belief has already
begun.
Tennyson, according to Matthew Arnold, was not un esprit puissant.
Other and younger critics, who have attained to a cock-certain mood of
negation, are apt to blame him because, in fact, he did not finally agree
with their opinions. If a man is necessarily a weakling or a hypocrite
because, after trying all things, he is not an atheist or a materialist, then
the reproach of insincerity or of feebleness of mind must rest upon
Tennyson. But it is manifest that, almost in boyhood, he had already
faced the ideas which, to one of his character, almost meant despair: he
had not kept his eyes closed. To his extremely self-satisfied accusers
we might answer, in lines from this earliest volume (The Mystic):-
"Ye scorn him with an undiscerning scorn; Ye cannot read the marvel
in his eye, The still serene abstraction."
He would behold
"One shadow in the midst of a great light, One reflex from eternity on
time, One mighty countenance of perfect calm, Awful with most
invariable eyes."
His mystic of these boyish years -
"Often lying broad awake, and yet Remaining from the body, and apart
In intellect and power and will, hath heard Time flowing in the middle
of the night, And all things creeping to a day of doom."
In this poem, never republished by the author, is an attempt to express

an experience which in later years he more than once endeavoured to
set forth in articulate speech, an experience which was destined to
colour his finial speculations on ultimate problems of God and of the
soul. We shall later have to discuss the opinion of an eminent critic, Mr
Frederic Harrison, that Tennyson's ideas, theological, evolutionary, and
generally speculative, "followed, rather than created, the current ideas
of his time." "The train of thought" (in In Memoriam), writes Mr
Harrison, "is essentially that with which ordinary English readers had
been made familiar by F. D. Maurice, Professor Jowett, Dr Martineau,
Ecce Homo, Hypatia." Of these influences only Maurice, and Maurice
only orally, could have reached the author of The Mystic and the
Supposed Confessions. Ecce Homo, Hypatia, Mr Jowett, were all in the
bosom of the future when In Memoriam was written. Now, The Mystic
and the Supposed Confessions are prior to In Memoriam, earlier than
1830. Yet they already contain the chief speculative tendencies of In
Memoriam; the growing doubts caused by evolutionary ideas (then
familiar to Tennyson, though not to "ordinary English readers"), the
longing for a return to childlike faith, and the mystical experiences
which helped Tennyson to recover a faith that abode with him. In these
things he was original. Even