in the tinier of the two volumes. I closed it, and opened
the other. The lines that met my glance were these:-
I see the wealthy miller yet,

His double chin, his portly size,
And who that knew him could forget
The busy wrinkles round his eyes?
The slow wise smile that, round about
His dusty forehead drily curl'd,
Seemed half-within and half-without,
And full of dealings with the world?

In yonder chair I see him sit,

Three fingers round the old silver cup—
I see his gray eyes twinkle yet

At his own jest

I liked this still better than Lilian-a good deal better; the old miller planted his chair in my memory forthwith, and has sat there ever since. Thirty years have gone by, and the fountain of genuine, refined, serenely intense enjoyment then opened to me, is not yet exhausted. My life has been happier, greatly happier, than if I had not known Tennyson's poetry. There are many poets who have moved me more, and some whose works appear to me more wonderful, but I am not sure that there is any poet whatever who has produced in me so keen and deep a feeling of pleasure.

Of course I cannot be quite sure that my experience on this point has been general; but if I may take my own experience as an indication of the nature of Tennyson's influence generally, I should say that he is pre-eminently distinguished by the quality of charm. The element of sweetness pervades his poetry; sweetness too subtle to define, sweetness never permitted to cloy the reader, sweetness cunningly allied with, or relieved by, what the poet himself calls "the bitter of the sweet," but which, nevertheless, some critics have declared to be akin to weakness, and to have fitted him to be the poet of women rather than of men. For my own part, I accept the ancient

A Master of Charm.

197

canon of criticism-that poetry ought to be not only beautiful, but sweet (Non satis est pulchra esse poemata; dulcia sunto); and I think that it is in the exceeding beauty of Tennyson's that one chief secret of its sweetness lies.

It was in 1830 that his first thin volume appeared. Scott still lived, but his genius was in the sere and yellow leaf, and the works on which his poetical reputation rests had been long since produced. It is worth noting that Tennyson, in his boyhood, was insatiably fond of the poetry of Scott. No two poets could be more strongly contrasted in their habits of work, Scott being one of the most rapid and spontaneous, Tennyson one of the most elaborate of writers; and yet I fancy that Tennyson caught from Scott more than from any other of his poetical teachers the magical art-for magical it is in the sense of being entirely incommunicable by formal instruction-of fascinating his readers. Regarded as a poetical creator in connection not only with his poems, but his novels, Scott must be pronounced one of the greatest masters of charm that ever lived. He modestly claimed only one power, that of knowing how to "interest" readers; and while his faculties continued unimpaired he certainly did possess this power in a degree unexampled in recent times. It would be nearer the truth than such generalisations often are, to say that Tennyson has combined a studious elaboration, reminding us of Keats, with a warmth and depth of human feeling and a power of interesting readers comparable to Scott's.

The moment was not inauspicious for the appearance of a new poet. The fashions of thought and feeling which had prevailed during the last years of the war and the first years of the peace had begun to change. Byronism, still powerful with the multitude, was ironically smiled at in cultivated circles. Political excitement had succeeded to the fierce passions of martial conflict; industry was in the enthusiasm of youth renewed after long decrepitude;

the genius of mechanism, already laying down here and there an iron line between town and town, made infinite promises and awakened infinite hopes. Carlyle and Macaulay had announced themselves in prose essays more fervid and more richly ornamented than most of the poetry of the waning generation, and almost as melodious. "Many influences," as I have said elsewhere, "were working towards undefined issues:" more aspiring and earnest thought, more searching culture, bolder speculation, more exacting taste, and deeper reflectiveness were replacing the somewhat shallow and showy modes of the Regency.

Such was the time when Alfred Tennyson, a Cambridge man of twenty-one, offered to the world through the medium of Mr. Moxon, his slender volume of poems. In 1832 a second appeared. The great public paid slight attention to either, but their share of critical notice was much above the average obtained in similar cases. One critic, writing in the powerful Westminster Review, hailed the young author as a man of original and mighty genius, who had the mallet hand of the great Elizabethans, and promised higher things in English literature than recent years had seen. The Westminster Review was the organ of philosophical Radicalism, and Tennyson came from the Liberal University, Cambridge; both the poet and the reviewer, therefore, were likely to be viewed askance by Professor Wilson, who, under the name of Christopher North, did the critical bludgeoning in that giant's castle of old Toryism, Blackwood's Magazine. There were one or two feeble poems in the first little volume, and some lines in other pieces which showed a trace of that namby-pambyism, that childishness, that tinkle-tinkle of pretty, meaningless words, into which, at those rare moments when, like Homer, he nods, Tennyson lapses. Wilson quoted with scorn the weakest lines he could find, pronounced Tennyson an "ingenious lad," declared that one sample was "drivel,"

Professor Wilson's Review.

199

another " more dismal drivel," a third "more dismal drivel even than that,” and savagely belaboured the Westminster panegyrist. It is interesting, however, to observe that, towards the end of his article, Wilson betrays strong misgivings as to the justice of his censure. He confesses that "he may have exaggerated Mr. Tennyson's not unfrequent silliness," but is sure that he has "not exaggerated his strength," and says that the extracts are better than anything else in his article. He gives the young poet very sound advice, telling him to get rid of affectation, to distrust verbal conceits and mere polish or brilliancy of diction, to court simplicity in thought and expression, to have more faith in great common truths, in home-bred feeling and pathos welling from the heart, than in superfine æsthetic sensibilities.

When we turn to the poems which Wilson had before him, those exclusively of the first volume,—we are constrained to say that, though few, they were so original and excellent, that an experienced critic like Wilson might have spoken more enthusiastically about them. They bear curiously vivid marks of the Lincolnshire birth-land of the poet. In fact, knowing that Lincolnshire is one of the most flat and prosaic counties in England, a region of vast plains, interminable water-courses, with only a few trees of the willow and poplar kind, we seem, as we read these early verses of Tennyson's, to be actually transported to the scene. Already he has become Dantesque, if not in sternness of mood, at least in minuteness of delineation; he trusts nothing to random strokes, to sounding epithets; he sees the landscape and details its features. Not content with telling us that the lonely moated grange stood among gloomy meadows, with bats flitting about its weathered gables, he localises it for us by minute specific touches.

About a stone-cast from the wall

A sluice with blackened waters slept,
And o'er it many, round and small,
The clustered marish-mosses crept.

Hard by a poplar shook alway,

All silver-green with gnarled bark :
For leagues no other tree did mark
The level waste, the rounding gray.

Scenery like this has not much on which the eye of the boy-poet can rest enraptured; but what there is of beauty in it, or in the sky above it, will be dearly prized, exactly observed, accurately remembered. Accordingly we find that, as a landscape word-painter, Tennyson is intensely true. A painter might perfectly rely upon his statement of facts, and lay fearlessly on the canvas the "little clouds sun-fringed" which float in his skies. This last epithet is quite exquisite in its accuracy, as you may satisfy yourself by noting, any summer day, how the little clouds, delicate pearl-blue in the middle, are lit with white fringes all round the edge, where the sun changes their vapour into snow. This rightness of local colour has distinguished Tennyson from first to last, and in respect of it a place has been claimed for him beside the very greatest poets.

Perhaps, compared with the great old masters,
His range of landscape may not be much;

But who, out of all their starry number,

Can beat our Alfred in truth of touch?

We have the sounds even, of the Lincolnshire landscape, as they reach the desolate Mariana in the night.

From the dark fen the oxen's low

Came to her.

He tells us in his Ode to Memory-for that poem is unmistakeably autobiographic-that it was not upon "flaunting vines" that the eye of his memory opened, nor upon a waterfall sounding and shining for ever, a pillar of white light seen against purple cliffs, but on a more prosaic scene. Yet it is very dear to him, and he invokes memory to bring its quaint pictures back.

Come from the woods that belt the gray hill-side,

The seven elms, the poplars four

That stand beside my father's door,