Hearts of Controversy

								

But that he might have answered, in drama, to a stronger stimulus, a
sharper spur, than his time administered, may be guessed from a few
passages of "Queen Mary," and from the dramatic terror of the arrow in
"Harold."  The line has appeared in prophetic fragments in earlier
scenes, and at the moment of doom it is the outcry of unquestionable
tragedy:-



   Sanguelac--Sanguelac--the arrow--the arrow!--Away!
Tennyson is also an eminently all-intelligible poet.  Those whom he
puzzles or confounds must be a flock with an incalculable liability to go
wide of any road--"down all manner of streets," as the desperate drover
cries in the anecdote.  But what are streets, however various, to the
ways of error that a great flock will take in open country--minutely,
individually wrong, making mistakes upon hardly perceptible occasions, or
none--"minute fortuitous variations in any possible direction," as used
to be said in exposition of the Darwinian theory?  A vast outlying
public, like that of Tennyson, may make you as many blunders as it has
heads; but the accurate clear poet proved his meaning to all accurate
perceptions.  Where he hesitates, his is the sincere pause of process and
uncertainty.  It has been said that Tennyson, midway between the student
of material science and the mystic, wrote and thought according to an age
that wavered, with him, between the two minds, and that men have now
taken one way or the other.  Is this indeed true, and are men so divided
and so sure?  Or have they not rather already turned, in numbers, back to
the parting, or meeting, of eternal roads?  The religious question that
arises upon experience of death has never been asked with more sincerity
and attention than by him.  If "In Memoriam" represents the mind of
yesterday it represents no less the mind of to-morrow.  It is true that
pessimism and insurrection in their ignobler forms--nay, in the ignoblest
form of a fashion--have, or had but yesterday, the control of the popular
pen.  Trivial pessimism or trivial optimism, it matters little which
prevails.  For those who follow the one habit to-day would have followed
the other in a past generation.  Fleeting as they are, it cannot be
within their competence to neglect or reject the philosophy of "In
Memoriam."  To the dainty stanzas of that poem, it is true, no great
struggle of reasoning was to be committed, nor would any such dispute be
judiciously entrusted to the rhymes of a song of sorrow.  Tennyson here
proposes, rather than closes with, the ultimate question of our destiny.
The conflict, for which he proves himself strong enough, is in that
magnificent poem of a thinker, "Lucretius."  But so far as "In Memoriam"
attempts, weighs, falters, and confides, it is true to the experience of
human anguish and intellect.
I say intellect advisedly.  Not for him such blunders of thought as
Coleridge's in "The Ancient Mariner" or Wordsworth's in "Hartleap Well."
Coleridge names the sun, moon, and stars as when, in a dream, the