Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson | Page 7

they do not give exquisite expression. Take the love poems: compare 'Fatima' with 'Isabel', 'The Miller's Daughter' with 'Locksley Hall', 'The Gardener's Daughter' with 'Madeline', or 'Mariana' with Cleopatra in the 'Dream of Fair Women'. When did love find purer and nobler expression than in 'Love and Duty?' When has sorrow found utterance more perfect than in the verses 'To J. S '., or the passion for the past than in 'Break, Break, Break', or revenge and jealousy than in 'The Sisters?' In 'The Two Voices', 'The Palace of Art' and 'The Vision of Sin' we are in another sphere. They are appeals to the soul of man on subjects of momentous concern to him. And each is a masterpiece. What is proper to philosophy and what is proper to poetry have never perhaps been so happily blended. They have all the sensuous charm of Keats, but the prose of Hume could not have presented the truths which they are designed to convey with more lucidity and precision. In that superb fragment the 'Morte d'Arthur' we have many of the noblest attributes of Epic poetry. '‘none' is the perfection of the classical idyll, 'The Gardener's Daughter' and the idylls that follow it of the romantic. 'Sir Galahad' and 'St. Agnes' are in the vein of Keats and Coleridge, but Keats and Coleridge have produced nothing more exquisite and nothing so ethereal. 'The Lotos* Eaters' is perhaps the most purely delicious poem ever written, the 'ne plus ultra' of sensuous loveliness, and yet the poet who gave us that has given us also the political poems, poems as trenchant and austerely dignified in style as they are pregnant with practical wisdom. There is the same versatility displayed in the trifles.
But all is fragmentary. No thread strings these jewels. They form a collection of gems unset and unarranged. Without any system or any definite scope they have nothing of that unity in diversity which is so perceptible in the lyrics and minor poems of Goethe and Wordsworth. Capricious as the gyrations of a sea-gull seem the poet's moods and movements. We have now the reveries of a love-sick maiden, now the picture of a soul wrestling with despair and death; here a study from rural life, or a study in character, there a sermon on politics, or a descent into the depths of psychological truth, or a sketch from nature. But nothing could be more concentrated than the power employed to shape each fragment into form. What Pope says of the 'Aeneid' may be applied with very literal truth to these poems:--
Finish'd the whole, and laboured every part?With patient touches of unwearied art.
In the poems of 1842 we have the secret of Tennyson's eminence as a poet as well as the secret of his limitations. He appears to have been constitutionally deficient in what the Greeks called 'architektoniké', combination and disposition on a large scale. The measure of his power as a constructive artist is given us in the poem in which the English idylls may be said to culminate, namely, 'Enoch Arden'. 'In Memoriam' and the 'Idylls of the King' have a sort of spiritual unity, but they are a series of fragments tacked rather than fused together. It is the same with 'Maud', and it is the same with 'The Princess'. His poems have always a tendency to resolve themselves into a series of cameos: it is only the short poems which have organic unity. A gift of felicitous and musical expression which is absolutely marvellous; an instinctive sympathy with what is best and most elevated in the sphere of ordinary life, of ordinary thought and sentiment, of ordinary activity with consummate representative power; a most rare faculty of seizing and fixing in very perfect form what is commonly so inexpressible because so impalpable and evanescent in emotion and expression; a power of catching and rendering the charm of nature with a fidelity and vividness which resemble magic; and lastly, unrivalled skill in choosing, repolishing and remounting the gems which are our common inheritance from the past: these are the gifts which will secure permanence for his work as long as the English language lasts.
In his power of crystallising commonplaces he stands next to Pope, in subtle felicity of expression beside Virgil. And, when he says of Virgil that we find in his diction "all the grace of all the muses often flowering in one lonely word," he says what is literally true of his own work. As a master of style his place is in the first rank among English classical poets. But his style is the perfection of art. His diction, like the diction of Milton and Gray, resembles mosaic work. With a touch here and a touch there, now from memory, now from unconscious assimilation, inlaying here