Hearts of Controversy

								

"Watched by weeping queens"; these are enough, illustrious, and needing
not illustration.
If we do not see Tennyson to be the lonely, the first, the one that he
is, this is because of the throng of his following, though a number that
are of that throng hardly know, or else would deny, their flocking.  But
he added to our literature not only in the way of cumulation, but by the
advent of his single genius.  He is one of the few fountain-head poets of
the world.  The new landscape which was his--the lovely unbeloved--is, it
need hardly be said, the matter of his poetry and not its inspiration.  It
may have seemed to some readers that it is the novelty, in poetry, of
this homely unscenic scenery--this Lincolnshire quality--that accounts
for Tennyson's freshness of vision.  But it is not so.  Tennyson is fresh
also in scenic scenery; he is fresh with the things that others have
outworn; mountains, desert islands, castles, elves, what you will that is
conventional.  Where are there more divinely poetic lines than those,
which will never be wearied with quotation, beginning, "A splendour
falls"?  What castle walls have stood in such a light of old romance,
where in all poetry is there a sound wilder than that of those faint
"horns of elfland"?  Here is the remoteness, the beyond, the light
delirium, not of disease but of more rapturous and delicate health, the
closer secret of poetry.  This most English of modern poets has been
taunted with his mere gardens.  He loved, indeed, the "lazy lilies," of
the exquisite garden of "The Gardener's Daughter," but he betook his
ecstatic English spirit also far afield and overseas; to the winter
places of his familiar nightingale:-



   When first the liquid note beloved of men

   Comes flying over many a windy wave;
to the lotus-eaters' shore; to the outland landscapes of "The Palace of
Art"--the "clear-walled city by the sea," the "pillared town," the "full-
fed river"; to the "pencilled valleys" of Monte Rosa; to the "vale in
Ida"; to that tremendous upland in the "Vision of Sin":-



   At last I heard a voice upon the slope

   Cry to the summit, Is there any hope?

   To which an answer pealed from that high land,

   But in a tongue no man could understand.
The Cleopatra of "The Dream of Fair Women" is but a ready-made Cleopatra,
but when in the shades of her forest she remembers the sun of the world,
she leaves the page of Tennyson's poorest manner and becomes one with
Shakespeare's queen:-



   We drank the Libyan sun to sleep.
Nay, there is never a passage of manner but a great passage of style
rebukes our dislike and recalls our heart again.  The dramas, less than
the lyrics, and even less than the "Idylls," are matter for the true
Tennysonian.  Their action is, at its liveliest rather vivacious than
vital, and the sentiment, whether in "Becket" or in "Harold," is not only
modern, it is fixed within Tennyson's own peculiar score or so of years.