poetical garden that there is nothing lawless, irregular, or extravagant about them, no trace of licence, of moody bitterness, of discontent with the society into which the poet finds himself born, no conventional satire or flippancy. For him, as for Schiller, life is earnest, but not cruel, horrible, or contemptible. The conception he has formed of his mission as a poet is not more sublime than sincere. The poet in a golden clime was born,

With golden stars above:

Dower'd with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn,

The love of love.

It is his to sow the world broad-cast with seeds of truth, winging them and heading them with the flame of his burning words.

Thus truth was multiplied on truth, the world

Like one great garden show'd,

And thro' the wreaths of floating dark upcurl'd,

Rare sunrise flow'd.

And Freedom rear'd in that august sunrise

Her beautiful bold brow,

When rites and forms before his burning eyes

Melted like snow.

It can be said of Tennyson that he has never been false to the noble ideal which he set before himself in this poem.

The ballad of Oriana, and the lines entitled The Deserted House, occupy an important place in the tiny volume of 1830. They attest a massiveness of power, a breadth of imaginative handling, which the verbal richness, the almost too florid ornamentation, of several of the poems, would not lead us to expect. There is no fanciful word-painting, no elaborate laying on of tint after tint, in these pieces. Their supreme human interest swallows up all other interests. Imagination, merely painting, by a few broad sweeps of the brush, a stage suited to the occurrences described, dwells on the human action and passion alone. "The long dun wolds are ribbed with snow, and loud the Norland whirlwinds blow;" yes; but we think only of the lover who has slain

The Deserted House.

207

his Oriana, and of the woe in his heart that seeks relief in the companionship of winter and of tempest. The five stanzas in which a dead body is compared to a deserted house are stern and true as the most severe of the sonnets of Milton.

All within is dark as night:
In the windows is no light:

And no murmur at the door,
So frequent on its hinge before.

Close the door, the shutters close,

Or through the windows we shall see

The nakedness and vacancy

Of the dark deserted house.

I may mention that Wilson, in his review, does full justice to Oriana and The Deserted House. The former he pronounces "perhaps the most beautiful" in the volume; and of the latter he says:-"Every word tells, and the short whole is most pathetic in its completeness-let us say perfection-like some old Scottish air sung by maiden at her wheel or shepherd in the wilderness." The reader would do well to compare Tennyson's wonderful lines with Shakespeare's description of the death of Cardinal Beaufort in the Second Part of Henry VI. "Close up his eyes, and draw the curtain close," are Shakespeare's final words.

I

CHAPTER II.

M. TAINE ON TENNYSON AND ALFRED DE

MUSSET.

SAID that the first poetical efforts of Tennyson were characterised by an absence of extravagance, moody bitterness, discontent with existing social arrangements, and all kinds of lawlessness or irregularity. Neither of licentiousness nor of satiric fury do we find a trace. We have exquisite perception of beauty, impassioned love of beauty, resolute trust or at least sustaining hope that beauty, unaided by ruder spells, will prove strong enough to attract an audience fit though few. Meaner allurements are proudly rejected. "There is a strange earnestness," says Arthur Hallam, in his valuable review of his friend's poems, "in his worship of beauty." Not only do these poems display no vulgar smartness, but no fun, no humour, no caricature. A Greek severity of style is everywhere apparent; a reverence as of one for whom song has in very truth the sacredness of worship. And even if we decide that, in the work of Tennyson as a whole, there is too much of rule and measure, too marked an absence of humour, too little of the wild witching graces of freedom, we are, I think, safe in regarding the classic purity, the chastened enthusiasm, in one word, the moderation, of his first poems, as a good omen. The earnestness noted by Hallam was the best proof of capacity to take pains, the

Earnestness of Art.

209

best guarantee of staying power. A similar spirit was strong in young Milton, strong also in Keats. Not only colossal genius, but concentrated and intense effort, are attested by Endymion, Lamia, Hyperion. I have been deeply impressed, in studying the early drawings of Turner, with the witness they bear that, for him also, the ministry of beauty had in it something of the earnestness of worship. It is not only that they show invincible patience, untiring pains, but that there is in them an instinctive shrinking from all exaggeration, from all sensational emphasis, from all tendency to jest. An imperious consciousness seems to warn him, as it warned the great Greek sculptors, that the slightest indulgence in caricature unfits the eye and the hand for their highest achievement-namely, to strike, in obedience to the sovereign imagination, the line of art. There is a gravity, a pure and solemn graciousness, in all Turner's early work, which only his superlative sense of beauty and love for light prevent from becoming formal. These are not the only instances that might be adduced to prove that a religious earnestness of application, and a reverent regard for purity and truth, have generally characterised the early period of those who have done great things either in painting or in poetry.

"The early period;" yes, but has not Tennyson carried too much into manhood the moral fastidiousness, as well as the patient elaboration, of his first manner? M. Taine answers the question, not formally, indeed, yet explicitly enough, in the affirmative; and devotes fourteen or fifteen pages of his clever, but, I must be permitted to say, rather shallow essay on Tennyson, to a demonstration that he is the magnus Apollo of respectable mediocrity. M. Taine is too skilful a literary artist to give us a regular argument upon the subject. He adopts the more entertaining but equally effective method of setting before us a picture of that particular aspect of English society of which Tennyson's

poetry is, he holds, at once the outcome and the mirror, contrasting it with a corresponding picture of French society, of which Alfred de Musset's poetry is the reflection, and leaving us to decide for ourselves, or rather suggesting very clearly that we ought to agree with him in deciding, that Alfred de Musset's is the greater and the manlier. M. Taine is one of the liveliest of companions, and though it is wholly impossible for me to quote so long a passage, I shall need no apology for placing, in a brief summary, the main features of his description of the country and people whose favourite poet is Tennyson, and of the country and people whose favourite poet is Alfred de Musset, before my readers. He begins with England.

On

Landing at Dover or Newhaven, you take rail and survey the country through which you are rapidly whirled. all hands there are gentlemen's mansions, on the sides of lakes, on the shores of bays, on the banks of rivers, on every point where the hill-side offers a picturesque view. In these houses live the men who constitute the great world of England; London is for them but a place of business (rendezvous d'affaires); in the country they live, amuse themselves, receive their friends. The mansion is pretty and well-arranged; the lawn, soft as velvet, is rolled every morning. Here a huge rhododendron blooms like a bouquet, murmuring with bees; there honeysuckles and roses hang in clusters and festoons; elms, yew-trees, oaks show in the background their masses of foliage and their strength of stem. If we walk into the meadows, we see great oxen couched upon the rich grass, and sheep whose snowy wool suggests that they have just come from the washing. Entering the house, we note the careful commodiousness, we experience a studious anticipation of our least wants. All is correct, trim, highly finished; you fancy that the objects have had prizes at an Industrial Exhibition, or at least honourable mention. A fastidious cleanliness, as