MR. WAUGH'S STUDY OF TENNYSON.*

WE are glad to understand that this book is no consequence of the Laureate's death, but the result of careful preparation and study beforehand. Indeed, it is clear upon the face of it that it was written as the result of thoughtful and apprecia- tive observation ; and however much we may disagree at times from Mr. Waugh's views and verdicts, he has his reasons to feel and give for all of them. If too much has already been said and written about Lord Tennyson, it is the inevitable fashion of the day, and his lofty place among the poets neither is nor will be any more affected by it than was Wordsworth's by the negligence and want of notice which, after the contrary fashion of that time, ensued upon his loss. It matters as little as his peerage, one way or the other. His never-failing study and conscientiousness, his sympathy both with the progress of -Science and the fixedness of faith, are the great and leading characteristics agreed upon and noted by all, in their bearing upon his strong and enduring vitality, his fidelity to his poetic mission, and his rich, sonorous, and direct method of poetic .speech.

We must confess ourselves directly at issue with Mr. Waugh on the main conclusion which he draws as to the genius of Tennyson having worked steadily onwards and upwards till it found its truest and best groove, at the last, in the drama. That the poet was at his greatest as a dramatist appears to us a pure paradox. It is as easy as it may be partially true, and as it is certainly very idle to refute, to say that "the English drama of the day is constructed upon an uniform scaffold, and the fashion of its building cannot be altered with impunity," and that "technical construction is 'before all things expected." If that be so, and that Tennyson -" has always refused to frame his work to the orthodox pattern," it appears to us that neither the poet nor those who love him best, can wonder at his want of success upon the 'stage. It would be less than justice to Mr. Irving not to say that he did the best that could be done both for Queen Mary and The Cup, and the latter especially will linger in the playgoer's memory as a very beautiful thing. In most re- spects, moreover, it conformed to the standards more than Mr. Waugh would admit, and probably owed its measure of public favour more to that than to anything. For, in one word, The Cup " moves." And with all respect both to the established criticisms, on the one band, and established com- plaints on the other, the great essential of an acted play is movement. The very word " drama " means something to be .done. Movement sums up all,—construction, method, and * Alfred, Lord Tennyson : a Study of his Life arid Work. By Arthur Waugh, B.A., oxen. Lonasa : W. Heinemann. 1592.

the rest. From start to finish, Shakespeare's great acting plays are movement. We are plunged in medias res with the

Ghost in Hamlet, the brawls in Romeo and Juliet and Othello, the " evictions " in Lear. And, if we except The Cup, the lack of movement is everywhere in the Tennysonian drama. For ourselves, we cannot but feel it even of the characters in his plays, as well as of the scenes, They are full of fine thoughts in noble words ; but as human beings, some-

how they stand still. In truth, as sometimes happens, Tennyson's best plays are not in play form, and his worst are. Dora and Enoch Arden, the first of which was very gracefully dramatised by Charles Reade, are both good plays in little, while The Promise of May is as impossible as it proved to be. Nor do we ourselves much care that a poet of the Tennysonian stamp should face the rough ordeal of the footlight public. The Queensberry incident jars even in the telling. And it is curiously illustrative of the gap between the worlds on the two sides of the lights, that Mr. Waugh selects as an instance of the inadequacy of criticism where Tennyson's plays are concerned, a passage not from those of the usual dailies and weeklies, but from the business organ of the theatrical profession, the Era.

From the deeper, or, at all events, difficult point of view— that of human characterisation—again, we cannot agree with our author that the poet's strength is the dramatic. They are shadows, and not realities, the Harolds and the Philips, as they move before us,—in words and narrative beautiful exceedingly, but not flesh-and-blood people moved by flesh-

and-blood instincts, and enacting flesh-and-blood things. The pure and superhuman Arthur of the " Idylls " is a type very much of the Tennysonian method as of the Tennysonian stan- dard. Recognising in that noble series of poems the fact that

we are dealing with a purely ideal and imaginary time, we still feel a little as if contemplating humanity from afar off, not in date only, but in construction. The spirit of the age seems to us more human and more alive when it moves before us in Scott's noble ballad-poem, the "Bridal of Triermain." There are real men and women, with actions and metre alike defective at times, but more true to us somehow from a dramatic standpoint than the beautiful abstractions of Tenny- son's incomparable verse. Considered as an epic, which Mr.

Waugh rightly views as essentually the nature of the "Idylls," moving, as he says they do, from a definite starting-point to a clear and distinct goal, to which the isolated stories move in a connected and progressive narrative, there is, we think, no doubt that the "Idylls of the King "will be finally regarded as the poet's most complete and enduring achievement.

The cause and the incidents of Tennyson's prosperous life are fully and sympathetically told in the book before us,' side by side with the course and progress of his work. Never had man more completely the advantage of knowing what he meant to do, and doing it. It is very interesting, from this point of view, to read of his comments upon other poets,—con- temporary or not whether to be regarded as rivals or no. They are free from all ill-nature, but mainly directed to the one standard quantity and quality. Wordsworth would have been much greater if be had written much less ; Shelley's lyre needed care and pruning ; Swinburne had made of him- self a pipe for the music of words ; and Browning should

have taken infinitely more pains to be understanded of men, Two things Tennyson considered as alone surviving to bear a poet's name down the stream of time,—clearness of expres-

sion and polish of workmanship. And to conciseness and elaboration together he vowed himself from the first.

"Wanted, a poet," was almost as true when in 1842 Tenny- son burst into fame, as it is now when Rumour can fix upon no Laureate absolutely fit to succeed him :—

"The time was ripe," writes Mr. Waugh, "for a literature that should fuse together the characteristics of the last two epochs, should temper Shelley with Wordsworth, and dilute Byron with Rogers. It wanted a poetry, too, which, while it worked the old elements into combination, should take to itself the spirit and sentiment of the moment. The hour was an hour of struggle, of contest between doubt and faith, an hour of religious controversy and scepticism. But the prevailing note was faith, faith rising like a phoenix out of the ashes of doubt, and soaring heavenward. This was the spirit of the hour it was also the spirit of Tenny- son's poetry. It is interesting to notice how the field, was clearing for him. In 1822 Wordsworth issued the 4. Ecclesiastical Sonnets,' but after that date Yarrow Revisited,' in 1835, was his only im- portant publication. In 1834 Coleridge died, after nine years' silence, and Crabbe, the minute photographer of portry, hact been dead two years. Samuel Rogers's last great work, Italy, was pub-

lished in 1828, and Southey was devoting himself exclusively to prose at the time of Tennyson's appearance. The same was true of Thomas Campbell, and also of Moore, who, in 1842, had pub- lished no poetry for nearly twenty years. Sir Walter Scott had died in 1832, and two slighter but extremely popular writers, Mrs. Hemans and Letitia Elizabeth Landon (` L. E. L.'), in 1835 and 1832 respectively."

Barring our old friend the phoenix, this is an interesting passage. The new poet was to be "mercilessly psycho- logical" in order to succeed. In 1833 appeared "Pauline," in 1844 the "Drama of Exile," in 1842 the two-volume collection of Tennyson's poems. "Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, and Alfred Tennyson were the voices of the new era, and the clearest and most direct utterance was that of Tennyson. The age recognised him first as its prophet ; and as soon as it knew him, it welcomed him." The recognition, however, seems to have been an uncertain affair, if the famous Laureateship is to be taken as a test. In 1850, "In Memoriam" was pub- lished, and Wordsworth died, But it appears that Samuel Rogers and Barry Cornwall were both approached, and inti- mated unwillingness to accept, before Tennyson was named ; and that, while Browning and Mackay were mentioned, Leigh Hunt felt disappointed at being passed over. It was pretty and apposite of the Alltemeum to suggest, in Mrs. Browning, a woman-laureate for a woman's reign. But in this case, the reign of woman was celebrated in another happy fashion, by the marriage of the poet in this the year of his Laureateship. The story of the engagement and marriage is told as in- terestingly as that of his youth and friendships; and it is curious to learn that the first result was to make him withdraw into himself more than ever. "He never writes," said his friend Fitzgerald, "nor, indeed, cares a halfpenny about one." But critical friends did not regard the work of this time with favour. Fitzgerald thought "In Memoriam" gave the sense of "being evolved by a poetic machine of the highest order;" and he was only one of the many who believed that Tennyson's youthful work was in the end to prove his best. The public, however, agreed that "The Princess" and two volumes of collested verse were enough to prove his title to the Laureate crown, and in 1851 Tennyson made his first appearance at Court in Rogers's Court-dress, borrowed for the occasion, and put on at Rogers's house. It seems that Wordsworth had borrowed the same suit, and dressed in it at the same plasse,—a curious double illustration of the "poetic temperament." To "dress Laureates, though thou be none," would have been an appropriate motto for Rogers.

Tennyson's poetic disregard of personal appearance in costume is often amusingly recurred to, down to the undergraduate's "chaffing" question on his taking his degree, whether his mother had called "Alfred dear" early. Indeed, Mr. Waugh's book is full of very pleasant and hermless personal gossip, which serves appropriately to set-off the criticisms and extracts upon which the more serious part of it depends.

From Lord Russell to Mr. Gladstone, he seems to have been the study and the wonder of Ministers, aid deliciously characteristic is his criticism to the former on Venice, when he had just returned from the fairy city, and was expected to have much to say that was artistic and in- spiring. He declined to regard it as anything but a place where he could get no English tobacco for love or money ; and when Ike dines with Mr. Gladstone, we find that hours and all else are to give way to the eccentricities and the demands of the poetical digestion.

Mr. Waugh follows with the care of a faithful watcher the sequence of Tennyson's poems, and the changes from the romantic and chivalrous to the pictures of every-day life, of which "Enoch Arden" is the most conspicuous example, with close fidelity. But is not such close observation a little far- fetched in dealing with the works of so true and many-sided a poet P It is surely more likely to be true that as far as his esoice of subjects went, he wrote and selected much as the rased seized him. He is a man who has dealt with everything, —the historical drama, the epic of chivalry, the quiet blank- verse of English daily life, the patriotic ballad, and the lyric, above all, in all its fascinating phases,—the lyric in which, to us at least, he remains most at home, most masterly, most unapproachable. Though in his musical blank.verse he can deal alike with the most classical, the most homely, and the most romantic theme, it is in the more enthralling music of the lyric that his rings find for us their largest expanse and their widest horizon. It is true that we have a personal preference for the lyric form which influences us in our judgment of others as well as of Tennyson. It is possibly because the less sustained effort of writing makes the less sustained demand upon the attention, and that, therefore, the beauty of the thing, striking home in a moment, makes the deeper and more permanent mark upon the mind. Possibly it is because we love the beauty of the lyric form before that of other frameworks ; but certainly we are at one with the world in the feeling which makes the lyrics of Shelley, for instance, more part and parcel of our- selves than any of his more ambitious writing. Even of Shake- speare something of this may with truth be said, while Milton stands almost alone in the fame of his longer works. The pre-eminence of Tennyson's lyrical name seems to us espe- cially true. His workmanship is without a flaw, his inspira- tion unfailingly beautiful; and even in his latest play, the twice-told tale of Bobin Hood, where the blank-verse and the story seemed to falter a little, the songs stood out as clearly and characteristically and as beauteously as before.

For the rest, while finding nothing very new to be said about works which have been part of us for years, familiar as household words more than, perhaps, the works of any other contemporary writer can at any time quite equally have been —in itself no mean assurance of a literary immortality—we like to read the old story over again. We like to be reminded of the anger which "Maud" excited in the critical mind,—of the electrical excitement over the Balaclava Charge, to this day a popular theme for recitation,—to linger again over "In Memoriam," the very apotheosis of pure friendship in poetic shape,—to be lulled again by the word-music of "The Lobos- Eaters,"—to speculate upon the true drift of the poet's deep but informal creed,—to watch his variance with the varying spirit of the age,—to dream over the pageants of Arthur's dreamy Court,—to savour the quaint humours which here and there supply such effective relief to the grave poet's strain,—to relish and revive the memories which surround the well-known figure,--and to sympathise under the blow which has, in the fullness of years, recorded " finis " over the work and lyre of Tennyson.