A STUDY OF TENNYSON.* MR. TAINSH does not belong to

the numerous class of critics who love to detect " motes in sunbeams." He brings a quite sufficiently large share of reverence to his work, but like many another zealous disciple, he aspires too eagerly to the office of interpreter. We were about to say he had strong sympathy with Tennyson, but sympathy implies insight, which he certainly possesses in a very limited degree,—enough, perhaps, to save him from the charge of ' murdering to dissect,' but utterly insufficient to render him of service to the careful student of Tennyson's writings. To those who have not made a deep study of Tennyson, Mr. Tainsh's book will afford pleasant reading, and, perhaps, guide the atten- tion to much which might otherwise have been passed by ; as, for example, when he observes that Tennyson " has the true dramatic power dashed with a tendency to analysis," we know that he has put into the reader's hand a key for the lack of which many have not read Tennyson aright, and which it is possible he may use to much more purpose than Mr. Tainsh himself has done. For example, there can be no doubt that the personal sympathy of the poet is so strongly with the contempt expressed in the fifty-first verse of the " Palace of Art :"—

" In filthy sloughs they roll a prurient

They graze and wallow, breed and sleep: And oft some brainless devil enters in, And drives them to the deep ;"

that the effect of the preceding verse, in which the soul is giving expression to the thought which of all others the poet holds to be falsest, loses much of its power.

" 0 godlike isolation ! which art mine, I can but count thee perfect gain,"

is the keynote of the despairing cry which follows,—.

" 'Back on herself her serpent pride had curled. No voice,' she shrieked in that lone hall,

No voice breaks thro' the stillness of this world,— One deep, deep silence all.' "

And the fifty-first verse, though uttered by the same soul, is really but the sad perplexed minor in which the poet himself suggests the surface truth which fed the false conclusion.

Mr. Tainsh observes, " It cannot be denied that one tendency of civilization is to produce such a character as is here idealized," but in making that remark, we think he has missed one special point in the character portrayed. He says, " With nature and the giants of mankind he seeks to dwell." Now we demur to this utterly. The soul here described knows nothing of nature save through art. The love of nature, like the love of God, kills contempt. Nature, " which counts nothing that she meets with base," would at least teach the impossibility of speaking of " isolation " as an attri- bute of Him who is the central source of harmony :—

* A Study of Tennyson. By Edward Campbell Tainah. London: Chapman & Hall.

" My soul leaps up when I behold A rainbow in the sky ; So was it when my life began ; So is it now I am a man ; So be it when I shall grow old, Or let me die."

To such a one the whole universe is filled with voices, to him the emmet seems to have a " large heart in small room," and the very spider that lives in a ditch to be surrounded with an atmosphere mud cannot touch. It is true Tennyson says elsewhere of man :—

" As thro' the frame which binds him in His isolation grows defined."

But this, often so true of man, is so in proportion to his inability to touch others with and draw them into intimacy with his highest or inmost self,—surely no godlike faculty this, though often the plague of the most godlike men. But none knew better than Tennyson that intimacy with nature would remedy, not create this evil, and we think he has made this most manifest to the careful student, who, throughout this poem, will trace the absence of nature everywhere ; he has done this with the apparent carelessness which uses the highest art to conceal art. Nature is everywhere spoken of freely enough, but it is Nature in stone, not Nature

"Whose living motion lent A pulse of hope to discontent."

Mr. Tainsh says Tennyson cannot help interpreting his characters. This is absolutely true, and that which in feebler hands would have been a defect, in his has become a great spiritual power, having all the force of the subtlest mental analysis ; but when Mr. Tainsh observes that, unlike Shakespeare, Tennyson never quite leaves his own personality behind, we are inclined to think this only superficially true. There may be (and Mr. Tainsh would be the first to admit this) the highest dramatic power in exhibiting cha- racter from inside, but when Hamlet soliloquizes, we inquire of Shakespeare, not that he comes before us in the least, but that all revelation carries thought instinctively back to the revealer. And on this subject we have one of the weakest paragraphs in the book :— " I may venture a remark here upon the poem A Character.' It is, I conceive, the weakest of the portraits; and it is so because the poet has no point of sympathy with the character he has drawn, Tennyson has drawn sinful men and women with a masterly hand (as Lancelot and Guinevere); but, in all that he has so drawn, there are touches of nobility that make them not altogether unlovable. When- ever he attempts a character that he wholly dislikes, he fails, as I think. The brother in Maud,' the parents in Aylmer's Field,' the curate in Edwin Morris,' and the hypocrite in Sea Dreams' are examples of this. He cannot stand outside such characters, and look at them with a mere artist's eye ; his moral repulsion shows through his work and makes the drawing coarse. One does not love him the less for this ; but, as far as artistic power is concerned, it is a defect. Shakespeare was not thus, nor is any great pure objective poet ; but then objective poets do not gain the strong personal love of their readers."

Mr. Tainsh has done much of his work well, but this criti- cism argues an extremely limited range both of thought and experience on the writer's part. In the first place, weakness and coarseness are the reverse of synonymes, and neither term is ap- plicable. To say Tennyson fails in drawing a character he wholly dislikes is a piece of criticism altogether beneath notice. In what group does Vivien stand? But in the instances quoted, more especially in " A Character," Tennyson has given some of his finest and strongest touches. We could fancy him never more con- tented with his work than when he drew the inimitable sketch of the man who "Stood aloof from other minds, In impotence of fancied power."

And Mr. Tainsh makes his want of insight most manifest when endeavouring to exhibit it most. We confess we think that except in the hands of a very great critic (which he assuredly is not) there is something amounting to a literary impertinence in publishing, as in chapter vii. he has done, a prose version of "The Two Voices." We opened this chapter with a feeling of annoyance akin to that which we have often experienced when looking at "Parables explained" or "Truths made easy," but our irritation reached its climax when we found this passage :—

" 'Bat thou,' said haat miss'd thy mark,

Who sought'st to wreck my mortal ark, By making all the horizon dark.

" Whatever crazy sorrow saith, No life that breathes with human breath, Has ever truly long'd for death.

" "Tis life, whereof our nerves are scant, Oh ! life, not death, for which we pant,—

More life, and fuller, that we want.' " Thus rendered :—

" Man.—Yes ; but you have missed your mark, and have not tricked me into death by one-sided falsehoods. No living being ever truly longed for death. It is more life that we want, not death."

After this, our readers will not be surprised that Mr. Tainsh can speak of "The Two Voices" as "full of luscious poetry." Nothing could be so utterly slipshod and unmeaning as the application of this epithet to a poem wherein every metaphor is restrained to its severest meaning, and the spirit itself is exhibited as shivering in the nakedness of unresolved doubt.

Some of the criticism on the lesser poems is very good, and on Annie in " Enoch Arden " we think Mr. Tainsh reads her as Tennyson meant her to be read, as " in no way an ideal character." " Her long hesitation about marrying Philip is as much fear as fidelity. It was through her suggestion, half or wholly uncon- scious, it may be, that he first spoke of it to her,—

" I thought not of it, but I know not why—

Their voices make me feel so solitary,"

is the language not of the desolation of faithful love, but of the longing for some new interest and sympathy." But even here we think he is utterly mistaken in believing that Tennyson introduces a kind of " mechanical supernaturalism " into such passages as where it is said of Enoch on Annie's wedding day,—

" Though faintly, merrily, far and far away, He heard the pealing of his parish bells."

Or that more exquisite passage in " Aylmer's Field," beginning,— "Star to star vibrates light, may soul to soul

Strike through a finer element of her own?

So, from afar, touch as at once ? or why That night, that moment when she named his name, Did the keen shriek, Yes, love, yes, Edith, yes !' " &c.

On these passages we have the remark, " This element of mechani- cal supernaturalism tends to give the thoughtful student an impression of unreality, and, therefore, weakness, in the structure of the story ; while, on the other hand, it pleases those whose standards of judgment have been formed by lower masters." Per- haps Mr. Tainsh thinks Milton guilty of a like weakness in that famous passage,—

" Whatever draws me on, Or sympathy, or some co-natural force, Powerful at greatest distance to unite With secret amity things of like kind, By secretost conveyance."

In " Aylmer's Field," though appreciating much, Mr. Tainsh has missed many of the finest points, as, for instance, that sketch of Edith, which artists must have failed for want of power rather than of will to translate for us into more tangible form,

"Edith, whose pensive beauty, perfect else, But subject to the season or the mood, Shone like a mystic star between the less And greater glory, varying to and fro, We know not wherefore ; bounteously made, And yet so finely that a troublous touch Thinn'd, or would seem to thin, her in a day, Or joyous to dilate as towards the light."

But it is when he approaches "In Memoriam " that Mr. Tainsh fails most completely. Though one of the most interesting and in many respects beautiful chapters in the book, it is weak in rela- tion to its immediate subject, really, we are compelled to think, through want of a little more industry on the writer's part, rather than from failure in intellectual capacity. " The power of reverence," he tells us, and with considerable truth, is " the measure of the life of the soul ;" this power he certainly does not want: He has insight enough into the genius of the whole to see much of its beauty and to feel its power ; it is in analysis he fails. This strength in generalization and weakness in detail is apparent throughout the book, but comes out most fully in the verbal commentary on " In Memoriam," which fills chapter ix. Mr. Tainsh tells us, that as minds differ, what is perfectly clear to one may fail to strike another, and for this reason he feels it right to make this commentary full, but that at the same time he has marked the passages which have seemed to himself obscure, in the hope that by publishing his needs he might create a chance of getting them supplied. We are bound to observe that the latter part of his intention is the most obvious in the commentary. We select a few instances ; in the first verse of the dedication,

beginning-

" Strong Son of God," &c.

Mr. Tainsh observes, "Probably Christ, but there are passages below that look more like an address to the impersonal love of God." Surely the fourth verse might have settled that question,—

"Thou seemest human and divine, The highest holiest manhood Thou."

Again, " Canto iii., 2, 3, 4. The general drift of these lines is manifest. The exact force of the expressions used I do not see." We think a very little reflection might have revealed the exquisite beauty of delineating sorrow, " Priestess in the vaults of Death," as seeing all things through the distorting mist of unshed tears:-

"' The stars,' she whispers, ' blindly run ; A web is woven across the sky.' "

Of the perfect metaphor in canto 24 : 4 :—

" Or that the past will always win

A glory from its being far ; And orb into the perfect star We saw not, when we moved therein,"

—a thought as absolutely consistent with the facts of our mental as of our bodily vision, being as scientifically accurate as any demon- strable proposition, we have this remark :—" I cannot but think this rather far fetched as a metaphor, seeing that it does not lie within the present experience of man to see, as a distant star or planet, a body he has once lived upon." In canto 42, we think he altogether misses the sense of the passage through not seeing the force of the word " figured." If he had ever marked the exquisite tracery on leaves void of pulp, "bare of the body," he would have understood the

" So that still garden of the souls In many a figured leaf enrols,"

—and,—

" And silent traces of the past Be all the colour of the flower,"

more clearly than at present. So again in canto 49, in the verse beginning-

" I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope, And gather dust and chaff,"

Mr. Tainsh observes, "There is an antithesis of thought here, that is not clearly brought out. It is thus:—' I fall upon the great altar stairs that slope up to God, and stretch lame hands of faith, but because they are lame hands, I do but grope and gather dust and chaff, " &c. Now a man with his eyes open in the light does not gather chaff for grain, because his hands are lame. Mr. Tallish.

does not perceive that " grope" must refer to the fact that the soul is working in the dark, kneeling

" Upon the groat world's altar stairs,

That slope through darkness up to God."

The same class of difficulty occurs to him when reading the fifty- fifth canto in the verse,

" Man, her last work, who seemed so fair, Such splendid purpose in his eyes,— Who roll'd the psalm to wintry skies, Who built him Panes of fruitless prayer."

He observes, "I cannot but think wintry and fruitless discordant with the thought of the canto." " They must be discordant because they endorse the apparent teaching of nature," which the rest of the canto is against, but we think if any one would take the trouble to look for a moment from the poet's stand-point, he would see, on the contrary, how essential the words are to the climax, how in strict harmony with the thought of the whole, though like all Tennyson's writing, indeed, like all the writing of the deepest thinkers, slightly elliptical, the silence suggesting more than the speech : the higher the spirit of man has reached the more impa- tient he becomes of explanatory words. It is always difficult to realize that other minds may not grasp a thought which comes intuitively to our own.

If we seem to have been hypercritical in noticing the many- points wherein Mr. Tainsh fails so signally, it is because we yet believe him, on the whole, worthy of patient criticism, because when all deductions are made we can still commend his little

work to many to whom the writings of our great poet are a sealed book. They would do well to read much that Mr. Tainsh has written, imbibe his spirit, and avail themselves of his suggestions, though they would do better to drink for themselves at the fountain-head, and find out with a little painstaking if Tennyson be not far more lucid than his commentators.

"Bs near me when the sensuous frame Is racked with pangs that conquer dust,

Mr. Tainsh " does not see the force " of

" And Time a maniac scattering dust, And Life a fury slinging flame."

Here, again, the failure of imaginative power comes in. But paraphrases would be worse than useless to any one who cannot instinctively realize the truth and power of these images. In canto 54,