food which the intellect provides for her cravings, and yet also of her fastidious rejection of more heavenly nutriment, Mr. Arnold will be read and remembered by every generation in which faith continues to be daunted by reason, and reason to seek, not without pangs of inexplicable compunction, to call in question the transcendental certainties of faith; in a word, he will be read and remembered, as I said in my opening sentence, as the poet who, more than any other of his day, has embodied in his verse "the sweetness, the gravity, the strength, the beauty, and the languor of death."

VIII

TENNYSON

LORD TENNYSON was an artist even before he was a poet; in other words, the eye for beauty, grace, and harmony of effect was even more emphatically one of his original gifts than the voice for poetical utterance itself. This probably it is which makes his very earliest pieces appear so full of effort, and sometimes even so full of affectation. They were elaborate attempts to embody what he saw, before the natural voice of the poet had come to him. Coleridge remarks, in his "Table Talk," that Tennyson had begun to write poetry before he knew what metre was. The remark applied, of course, only to his very earliest publication; and of that it was, I think, true, odd as it now reads in relation to one of the greatest masters of metre, both simple and sonorous, that the English language has ever known. It is interesting as showing how laborious and full of effort his early verse sounded to one of the finest judges of English verse, and so confirming the suspicion that this great poet's vision of beauty had ripened earlier than his poetic faculty for shaping that vision into words. I think it is possible to trace not only a pre-poetic period in his art-the period of the Orianas, Owls, Mermans, etc.-a period

?

in which the poem on "Recollections of the Arabian Nights" seems to me the only one of real interest, and that is a poem expressive of the luxurious sense of a gorgeous inward picture-gallery-but to date the period at which the soul was "infused into his poetry, and the brilliant external pictures became the dwelling - places of germinating poetic thoughts creating their own music. The Roman Catholics have, I believe, a doctrine that at a certain stage in the growth of the embryo body the soul is "infused" into it, and from that stage it shapes and moulds all the structures of the body with a view to their subserviency to a moral and spiritual growth. Apply that analogy to Tennyson's poems, and the period before 1832 is the period before his vivid pictures had a soul in them, and consequently before they had a music of their own. He himself has told us very finely in one of his newer poems, when describing the building of Arthur's great capital, which, like Ilium, was rumoured to have been built to a divine music,how the highest works of the human spirit are created:

"For an ye heard a music, like enow

They are building still, seeing the city is built

To music, therefore never built at all,
And therefore built for ever."

Tennyson's

There was no such music in earliest verses, but he himself has all but told us when the period in which his productiveness was due more to the "lust of the eye" than to any true poetic gift, ceased. Curiously enough, the first poem where there is any trace of those musings on the legends of the Round Table to which he has

directed so much of his maturest genius, is also a confession that the poet was sick of the magic mirror of fancy and its picture-shadows, and was turning away from them to the poetry of human life. "The Lady of Shalott," the first poem of those published in the autumn of 1832-the same sad year which laid the foundation of Tennyson's most perfect, if not his greatest poem, "In Memoriam "-has for its real subject the emptiness of the life of fancy, however rich and brilliant, the utter satiety which compels any true imaginative nature to break through the spell which entrances it in an unreal world or visionary joys. The Lady of Shalott-a variation on Elaine-gazing in her magic mirror, sees a faithful picture of all that passes by her solitary isle, and copies it in the web she weaves :—

"There she weaves by night and day

A magic web with colours gay.
She has heard a whisper say,

A curse is on her if she stay

To look down to Camelot.

She knows not what the curse may be,

And so she weaveth steadily,

And little other care hath she,

The Lady of Shalott."

The curse, of course, is that she shall be involved in mortal passions, and suffer the fate of mortals, if she looks away from the shadow to the reality. Nevertheless, the time comes when she braves the

curse:

"But in her web she still delights

To weave the mirror's magic sights,
For often through the silent nights
A funeral, with plumes and lights,

And music, went to Camelot :

Or when the moon was overhead,
Came two young lovers lately wed:
'I am half sick of shadows,' said
The Lady of Shalott."

And probably it was the vision of a "funeral," at least as much as that other vision which made the fairy Lady of Shalott more than half sick of shadows, that first led the author of this beautiful little poem into his true poetic work.

But even after the embryo period is past, even when Tennyson's poems are uniformly moulded by an "infused" soul, one not unfrequently notices the excess of the faculty of vision over the governing conception which moulds the vision, so that I think he is almost always most successful when his poem begins in a thought or a feeling rather than from a picture or a narrative, for then the thought or feeling dominates and controls his otherwise too lavish fancy. "Ulysses" and "Tithonus" are far superior to "Enone," exquisite as the pictorial workmanship of "Enone" is; 66 The Palace of Art" is finer than "The Dream of Fair Women"; "the Death of Lucretius," painful as the subject is, than "Enoch Arden" or "Aylmer's Field"; and, for the same reason, "In Memoriam" is perhaps an even more perfect whole than the poem of greatest scope, and in some respects the noblest of his imaginative efforts, the great Arthurian epic which he completed so much later. Whenever Tennyson's pictorial fancy has had it in any degree in its power to run away with the guiding and controlling mind, the richness of the workmanship has to some extent overgrown the spiritual principle of his poems.

I suppose it is in some respects this lavish strength of what may be called the bodily element