SOME THOUGHTS OF A
READER OF TENNYSON
Fifty years after Tennyson\'s birth he was saluted a great poet by that
unanimous acclamation which includes mere clamour. Fifty further years,
and his centenary was marked by a new detraction. It is sometimes
difficult to distinguish the obscure but not unmajestic law of change from
the sorry custom of reaction. Change hastes not and rests not, reaction
beats to and fro, flickering about the moving mind of the world.
Reaction--the paltry precipitancy of the multitude--rather than the novelty
of change, has brought about a ferment and corruption of opinion on
Tennyson\'s poetry. It may be said that opinion is the same now as it was
in the middle of the nineteenth century--the same, but turned. All that
was not worth having of admiration then has soured into detraction now.
It is of no more significance, acrid, than it was, sweet. What the herding
of opinion gave yesterday it is able to take away to-day, that and no more.
But besides the common favour-disfavour of the day, there is the
tendency of educated opinion, once disposed to accept the whole of
Tennyson\'s poetry as though he could not be "parted from himself," and
now disposed to reject the whole, on the same plea. But if ever there was
a poet who needed to be thus "parted"--the word is his own--it is he who
wrote both narrowly for his time and liberally for all time, and who--this is
the more important character of his poetry--had both a style and a manner:
a masterly style, a magical style, a too dainty manner, nearly a trick; a
noble landscape and in it figures something ready-made. He is a subject
for our alternatives of feeling, nay, our conflicts, as is hardly another poet.