conflict between a distrustful intellect and a ripening intuition (perhaps we should say, a more extended revelation) has found the fullest expression it has yet received from art. It was written at a time and under the influences which give to the struggle between the seen and the unseen its most momentous character;-the time when the wound is fresh-when a familiar life has newly passed through the dividing-gate, and draws the whole heart after it-when the affections throng the highest towers of the imagination, and stretch their vain and weeping hands into the void-when the very absolute necessity we feel for the things of faith seems to make us doubtful, and "Like Paul with beasts, we fight with death" Not only are these the influences under which the "In Memoriam" was commenced; such a loss forms the subject-matter of the poems of which it consists. They portray, as all the world knows, the feelings excited by the loss of the author's most intimate and endeared friend, the remarkable and highly-gifted Arthur Hallam, a man who died young, with little or nothing palpable achieved, yet whose brief life was not without a deep and permanent usefulness in the influences he exerted on the minds and characters of his associates. Few men have had so singular and so permanent an epitaph. It is not a direct glorification of the dead, still less is it a separate poem, graced with remote illusions. It is the very cry of grief versified; its brief successional stanzas body forth the fancies, the passing moods, the yearnings, the regrets, the questionings, the consolations that suggest themselves at such a time. They strike with a terrible reality to the experience of every heart. The publication at all of such a work must suggest many trains of thought which it scarcely comes within the scope of public criticism to pursue; that hesitation and difficulty which all truthfulminded men feel connected with self-utterances must have been more than usually operative here. The feeling itself has found its expression: "I sometimes hold it half a sin To put in words the grief I feel: But, for the unquiet heart and brain, Like dull narcotics, numbing pain. In words, like weeds, I'll wrap me o'er, The deeper passion of grief finds no such utterance, we know. No man can both feel and speak it, for it is its very essence to be speechless. Servants of the dead may mourn, the children cannot. 66 The lesser griefs that may be said, That breathe a thousand tender vows, Who speak their feeling as it is, And weep the fullness from the mind: My lighter moods are like to these, And tears that at their fountain freeze; For by the hearth the children sit Cold in that atmosphere of Death, And scarce endure to draw the breath, Or like to noiseless phantoms flit." It is in these poems that Tennyson's wealth of thought and power of insight in the direction we are occupied with is chiefly apparent. We must read them more than once or twice, to carry away an adequate impression of their real value and beauty. They are obscure enough to demand our attentive perusal, but rich enough to repay it. They are brief, inconsequent, disconnected. Their author has called them "wild and wandering cries," not entirely without justice. They are not poems, but utterances. Sometimes the meaning has to be laboriously disinterred; sometimes the words convey two meanings, and leave little or no clue to which was intended. In general, however, the sense will yield itself to a little patience. This no doubt is not what poetry should be; but there is gold to repay the seeker in the scattered thoughts that lie buried, and the surface is sown with beauty with a lavish hand. Still the want of clearness of expression and of completeness in form are prominent and much to be regretted. To make great thoughts familiar is one of the highest prerogatives of genius. No man enjoys it in greater fullness than Tennyson, and he should not lightly sacrifice it to the temptations of indolence and affectation. It is the later poems which are at once the most thoughtful and the most open to the charge of obscurity. The first part of the book is occupied with the simple expression of the milder moods of feeling, or of those passing fancies which soften the intervals of a deeper anguish. They have often a tender calm about them which has given to the verses a finish and harmony that the others do not possess. “Fair ship, that from the Italian shore With my lost Arthur's loved remains, So draw him home to those that mourn Ruffle thy mirror'd mast, and lead All night no ruder air perplex Thy sliding keel, till Phosphor, bright Sphere all your lights around, above ; My Arthur, whom I shall not see Till all my widow'd race be run; These verses are familiar to the memory of thousands; and it is to these, and such as these, which soothe with pitiful fancy the less overwhelming experiences of grief, that we think the popularity of the "In Memoriam" is mainly to be attributed. It is not easy to believe that the more recondite poems which it contains-at once profounder, nobler, and more difficult-can ever engage a very wide circle of readers. These are not poems which men of various tempers shall be happy to find they have taken up by accident, and feel loth again to lay down. To those who have not passed through the fire, they speak but half their meaning; to those who have, they recall too vividly the past experiences. The imagination seeks an excitement in art, but one remote from the painful experiences of actual life; the backward paths of bitter memory are but too familiar to her. The things we have really suffered are no poetry for us; they are the things from which we seek a refuge in poetry. The questionings, the cries of "In Memoriam" touch us too close-they wring us. The spiritual world is too real for us; we fly to the material "The floods, the fields, the mountains, The shapes of sky and plain." Nature is our solace; and we fall back on Wordsworth with that sort of quiet confidence with which the entrance of the calm, gentle, self-reliant physician inspires the fevered sufferer. We ask rest,-"passionless calm, and silence unreproved." Tennyson can do the same thing for us, but in rather a different way. He can remove us to a sphere so remote from our own, and reproduce it so vividly, with all its effect of diversity, that complete change of scene has the same healing power as rest. The worn and the weary turn to the " Morte d'Arthur," or the "Enone," or to those wonderful efforts of genius, the "Ulysses" and the "Lotos-eaters." Moreover there are times in the "In Memoriam" itself when he rises above the hungry questionings and sad confusions of grief, and grasps the true sources of its consolations with so prevailing a force as will bind him to many as the interpreter of their truest ultimate sources of dependence. Throughout he does "trust the larger hope," "faintly it may be; yet the spirit of the whole work, summed up in the fine Introduction, is one of faith; and if the questions be more numerous than the answers, we can only ask, how can it be otherwise? His own estimate of the functions within his power is not overstrained. "If these brief lays of Sorrow born, Were taken to be such as closed Grave doubts and answers here proposed, Her care is not to part and prove : She takes, when harsher moods remit, And makes it vassal unto love : And hence, indeed, she sports with words, Nor dare she trust a larger lay, But rather loosens from the lip Their wings in tears, and skim away." |