Read Ebook: The Catholic World Vol. 22 October 1875 to March 1876 A Monthly Magazine of General Literature and Science by Various

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Young Catholic's Illustrated Table Book, etc., 430.

THE CATHOLIC WORLD.

MR. TENNYSON'S QUEEN MARY.

Mr. Tennyson has achieved a great reputation as a lyric poet. He urges now a higher claim. In the sunset of a not inglorious life, when we should have expected his lute to warble with waning melodies and less impassioned strains, he lays it aside as too feeble for his maturer inspirations, and, as though renewed with the fire of a second youth, he draws to his bosom a nobler instrument, and awakes the echoes of sublimer chords. He has grown weary of the lyric

"hoerentem multa cum laude coronam,"

and with some confidence claims the dramatic bays. Nay, he even invites a comparison with Shakspere. True to the temper of the times, his prestige follows him in so hazardous a competition, the accustomed wreaths are showered upon him with unreflecting haste, and the facile representatives of the most incapable of critics--public opinion--have already offered him that homage as a dramatist which had already been too lavishly offered to his idyllic muse.

It is an ungrateful task to go against the popular current, and it is an ungracious one to object to crowns which the multitude have decreed. But there is no help for it, unless we would stoop to that criticism of prestige which is so characteristic of the age, and would follow in the wake of the literary rabble, criticising the works by the author, instead of the author by his works.

Mr. Tennyson, on the contrary, involves himself in the thickest mystery he can contrive, and expects his worshippers to take it for inspiration. Take the following, for example, from "The Coming of Arthur":

"Rain, rain, and sun, a rainbow in the sky! A young man will be wiser by-and-by, An old man's wit may wander e'er he die.

"Rain, rain, and sun, a rainbow on the lea! And truth is this to me, and that to thee And truth, or clothed or naked, let it be.

"Rain, sun, and rain! and the free blossom blows, Sun, rain, and sun! and where is he who knows? From the great deep to the great deep he goes."

These are, no doubt, "riddling triplets," as he himself calls them. The riddling of Shakspere's fools, even the wanderings from the night of distraught Ophelia's brain, are light itself by the side of them. We may well echo his invocation of "Sun, rain, and sun! and where is he who knows?" Whatever inspiration may be evident here, it is not that of the beautiful. And yet even this has snatches of meaning which many passages we might adduce have not; as the following, from "Gareth and Lynette":

"Know ye not, then, the riddling of the bards? Confusion, and illusion, and relation. Elusion, and occasion, and evasion?"

It is almost a pity that the bard did not complete his "riddling" while he was about it. Another couplet:

Diffusion, and ablution, and abrasion. Ablution, expectation, botheration,

would have rendered still more impenetrable the bardic mystery.

There is no resemblance in this studied concealment of meaning, if meaning there be, to that

"Sacred madness of the bards When God makes music through them,"

of which he sings. It is more like the melodious confusion of the AEolian harp. Even if the poet have a definite meaning in his own mind, if he so express it that I cannot even guess it, to me it is nonsense; and nonsense, however melodious, although it may enchant my sense, cannot move my heart. Here and there, however, our poet sings snatches of real poetry, as Sir Bedivere's answer to his king in "The Coming of Arthur":

"I heard the water lapping on the craig And the long ripple washing in the reeds."

If our readers would estimate the full force of our remarks, we would invite them to read the works of any of the principal of our earlier lyrical poets, as, for example, Collins. We name him because he too excels in that melody of versification for which Mr. Tennyson is so distinguished. At times, as in his "Sonnet on Evening," he surpasses the Laureate in that respect, although for sustained and unfailing rhythmical melody the latter bears away the palm from him, and perhaps from every other rival. But in profound sympathy with nature, in the fidelity of his creations, in the echoes of the beautiful which he provokes within the soul of the reader, the Poet-Laureate must yield to the Demy of Magdalen. Like Shakspere, he peopled inanimate nature with a fairy world, and amongst elves and genii and other dainty spirits he abandoned himself to that power of impersonation which is almost an attribute of a true poet.

Mr. Tennyson's poetry has beauties of its own peculiar kind of so remarkable and striking a description that we might have hesitated to take any exceptions whatsoever to his poetical genius. But his new poem, his first effort in dramatic poetry, seems to us to set all doubt at rest. It convinces us that, for whatever reasons, of the highest flights of poetic inspiration Mr. Tennyson is incapable. We are convinced that he lacks that which constitutes a great poet. However beautiful his poetry, we feel that it wants something which, however keenly we may be sensible of it, it is not easy either to analyze or explain.

For what is the inspiration of poetry but the echoes of the beautiful within the soul of man? The universe of things is the visible word of God. It is his essential beauty projected by an energy of creative love--the quickening spirit opening his wings over chaos--into an objective existence, on which its generator looked with complacency as "very good," and which he generated in order that his creature, whom he had made in his own image, might, with himself, rejoice in its contemplation. He did not, at first, endow him with the power of beholding himself "face to face," but only his reflex. We have the right to believe that, whilst in union with his Maker, he read at a glance the meaning of the word, he felt instantaneously the beauty of the image. His nature, into which no discord had as yet been introduced, uncondemned to the judgment of painful toil, did not acquire charity and knowledge by long and laborious processes, disciplinary and ratiocinative, but by intuition. Incapable as yet of the Beatific Vision, he comprehended the whole of the divine beauty as revealed in creation, and the comprehension itself was a transport of love. He saw, and knew, and loved, and the three were one simultaneous energy of the sonship of his nature. But, as now, "the greatest of these was charity." It was the result and sum and end of the sight and knowledge. It was the feeling they inevitably and unremittingly occasioned. To speak as we can only speak in our actual condition, it was as those thuds of loving admiration with which our hearts throb when we look upon some surpassing embodiment of innocent and modest female loveliness. When the mind, jealous of pre-eminence, led captive, so to speak, the heart in revolt against the revealed law, the human being was no longer in union with himself, a war of impulses and of energies was set up within him, the image of God was defaced, his perception of created beauty became more and more obscure as he went further away from his original abode of innocence, until, finally, it was all but lost. The emotion, if we may describe it as such, which it was of its nature to suggest, could not perish, for it is imperishable. But it had lost its true object, and surveyed knowledge in a form more or less degraded.

Now out of this very faint and rapid sketch of a psychological theory which would require a volume for its development, we hope to be able to convey some idea, however vague, of the nature of the poetic spirit.

It is certain that the remains of the divine image have not since been alike and equal in all the individuals of the race. It may be asserted, on the contrary, that there are no two human microcosms in which the elements of the confusion introduced into them by the original infidelity exist in the same proportion. Those in whom the intelligence is the quickest to see, and the mind, heart, and soul to love in unison, the image of divine beauty revealed in creation--those, that is, in whom the divine image remains the most pronouncedly--are the truest poets.

Who that has ever studied the creations of that immortal dramatist has not them all, from high to low, treasured within his inner being as vividly as any other of his absent acquaintances, whom he has met in society, to whom he has been formally introduced, with whom he has eaten, drank, laughed, wept, walked, and conversed? Has not that remarkable genius transgressed even the imitative faculty--imitative, that is, of all the original creative energy that is known--produced original creations, and peopled the preter- rather than supernatural with beings which have no known existence, but whom nevertheless he surrounds with a distinct verisimilitude which ensures them easy admission into our minds and hearts, which presents them to our senses as concrete beings with as much positiveness, and even as clearly defined individuality, as if they were solid creatures of flesh and bone, and which makes us feel that if such beings did really exist, they would be none other than precisely those he has represented?

Of such sort, we take it, is the highest, or dramatic, poetry. And of it there is a manifest deficiency in this work, which its author terms, indeed, a drama, but which is in fact a tragedy.

Mr. Tennyson has not enough of the divine afflatus to write tragedy. If he has not sufficient love of the beautiful in inanimate nature for his soul to echo to it, and his heart to throb with the sense of it, with the rapidity of an intuition, so as to make unattainable to him the highest excellence in lyric poetry, how much more out of his reach must be a first rank in the tragic drama; where, if anywhere, an intuition of the beautiful amounting to an inspiration is demanded in that supreme creation of God which, as the consummation of his "work" and word, he has embodied in his own substance! In that profound and intuitive perception of the workings of man's inner being, of the passions, emotions, feelings, appetites, their action and reaction, ebb and flow; of the struggle of the two natures, its infinite variety and play of life, under all conceivable conditions and vicissitudes, with much more than can be detailed here included in these, Mr. Tennyson is strikingly deficient.

In the tragedies of Shakspere, as in all his dramas, the distinct personality of every one of the characters, high and low, is impressed upon us with vivid distinctness. But the principal personages in the tragedies dilate before us in heroic proportions as the portentous struggle progresses. Whether it be King Lear, or King John, or King Richard, or Othello, or Lady Macbeth, or Lady Constance, or the widowed Princess of Wales, or Ophelia, or whoever else, we look on with bated breath, as did the spectators of the boat-race with which AEneas celebrated the suicide of his regal paramour, and we come away at its close a prey to the storm of emotions which the magic art of the island sorcerer has conjured up within us.

For all that, Mr. Tennyson's cockneys and rustics are not his most ineffective portraiture. We experience a slight sensation of their having been lugged in, perhaps because of the inevitable comparison with Shakspere they provoke, and we feel them to be too modern; but the poet's sense of humor here serves him in good stead, and although, in this respect, immeasurably below Shakspere, he gives a kind of raciness to his plebeians which saves them from being an absolute failure.

It is, however, in the principal personages of the drama that we most miss the Promethean fire, and pre-eminently in the hero, if Cranmer is intended for such a dignity, and the heroine. Amongst these, the most lifelike are Courtenay and Sir Thomas Wyatt; because, in their creation, the peculiar vein of quaint irony and exceedingly refined humor, which is Mr. Tennyson's most eminent distinction, comes to his aid. For the rest, up to the heroine herself and the canting and recanting Cranmer, they are colorless and bloodless. We scarcely know one from the other. And we do not care to. Noailles and Renard are but poor specimens of diplomatists. Their sovereigns, were the time the present, might pick up a dozen such any day in Wall Street. If the poet could embody no greater conception of two such men as Bonner and Gardiner than a couple of vulgar, self-seeking, blood-thirsty knaves, he should have dispensed altogether with their presence. He should have given to them some elevation, whatever history may say about it. A drama is a poem, not a history; and the poet may take the names of historic personages and, within certain limits, fit to them creations of his own. In Cardinal Pole he had an opportunity for a noble ideal. But all we have is an amiable dummy, an old gentleman, as ordinary and ineffective as the rest.

Facts have been so distorted by the influence which for so long had sole possession of literature, that there is plenty of room for taking great liberties with history. Mr. Tennyson has slightly availed himself of this, but in the wrong direction. Shakspere himself could not have made a saint of Cranmer. For poetry, there was nothing for it but to make him a more splendid sinner. To retain all his littlenesses and to array them in seductive virtues, is to present us with some such figure as the dusky chieftains decked in gaudy tinsel that solicit our admiration in front of the tobacconists' shops. To attempt to give heroic proportions to a man whose profession of faith followed subserviently his self-interest until no hope remained, and then place in the hands of the burning criminal the palm of martyrdom, is to invite the love within us of the beautiful and the true to echo to a psychical impossibility, and that without an element of greatness.

Yet had the front figure of the history been a noble conception grandly executed all this might have been condoned. One might well have looked at them as a few rough accessories to heighten by their contrast the beauty of the central form. There was place for a splendid creation. No more favorable material for a tragic heroine exists than Mary Tudor--with the single exception of that other Mary who fell beneath the Puritans like a lily before the scythe of the destroyer. Around her history and person circle all the elements of the tenderest pathos, which is of the very essence of tragedy. That Shakspere did not use them is a proof he thought so. For "the fair vestal throned in the west" would have resented such a creation as his quickening genius would have called to life. A queen of noble nature gradually swept away by a resistless current of untoward circumstances, is a history capable of the sublimity of a Greek catastrophe, with the added pathos of Christian suffering. But who have we here? A silly woman, devoutly pious, and endowed with a conspicuous share of the family courage. But she is so weak that her piety has the appearance of superstition, and her fits of courage lose their royalty and fail to rescue her from contempt. Unattractive in person, she falls desperately in love with a man much younger than herself, and her woman's love, ordinarily so quick to detect coldness in a lover, is blind to the grossest neglect; and yet not so blind but that a few words scrawled on a rag of paper, dropped in her way, could open her eyes on the spot. The tenderness of her love and the importunity of cruel-minded men, transform her almost suddenly from a gentle-natured woman to an unrelenting human tigress. And she, who would not allow the law to take its course on her most dangerous enemies, can exclaim of her sister Elizabeth,

Afterwards of Guilford Dudley, the Duke of Suffolk, and Lady Jane Grey--

"They shall die."

And again of her sister--

"She shall die. My foes are at my feet, and Philip king."

"Yet I know well Your people ... Will brook nor Pope nor Spaniard here to play The tyrant, or in commonwealth or church";

and again, with questionable taste:

whilst Elizabeth is made to vulgarize it beyond hope of redemption into a mere petty ebullition of splenetic womanly vanity:

"Then, Queen indeed! No foreign prince or priest Should fill my throne, myself upon the steps."

But for one single effort of the highest poetic flight we look in vain.

But what has more surprised us than the lack of the poetic inspiration in this drama is the occasional want of correct taste in a writer of such exceeding polish as Mr. Tennyson. Such a speech as

"And God hath blest or cursed me with a nose-- Your boots are from the horses,"

should not have been put in the mouth of a lady, still less a lady of the rank of Elizabeth, and that the less when she appeals to our sympathies from a kind of honorable imprisonment.

Lady Magdalen Dacres may have beat King Philip with a staff for insulting her, and have remained a lady, but we do not want to be told, in the midst of dramatic pathos,

"But by God's providence a good stout staff Lay near me; and you know me strong of arm; I do believe I lamed his Majesty's."

Is our poet, again, so barren of invention that he could find no other way of portraying Philip's indifference to his Queen than the following:

Whatever may be the character he may have wished to depict in Philip, we expect a Spanish king to be a gentleman. And such an ending of a scene susceptible of the tenderest pathos, where the heroine and another of the principal personages of the drama are in presence, argues a wonderful dulness of perception of the beautiful.

Worse than all, however, is his treatment of Cardinal Pole.

"Tanta est erga te mentis integritas, regina serenissima."

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