The point of attack chosen by most of Tennyson’s detractors is the Idylls of the King. Detraction is ultimately a very inconsiderable force in the world, being exposed readily enough by the minds that know anything of the thing against which it is directed, and being of no consequence either way in its action on minds that know nothing of it. People who really read Tennyson can readily enough rebut the unthinking and often envious charges that are made against him, while it does not matter what effect these may have upon the people who do not read him at all. There is, nevertheless, in the evolution of a poet’s reputation the necessary sifting from time to time of the evidence and a revaluation of the old judgments. The reaction against Tennyson that set in, as with all poets, for a period after his death, discovered many faults in his work which clearly enough were faults, but it has allowed these far too great an importance in the general estimate of his poetry.

The common opinion, even the common critical opinion of some authority, that has been expressed in recent years about the Idylls of the King is a striking instance of this lack of balance and generosity. In the first place, we have been told over and over again that Tennyson emasculated Malory, that the new poet’s Arthur was a Victorian gentleman reflecting the stiff glories and virtues of the Prince Consort’s train, not the fiery warrior with a vigorous paganism shining through his Christian professions that lives in the pages of the old chronicler, and that the ladies of the Idylls have become stultified by the proprieties of a later court than Guinevere’s. Setting aside the sneer implied by the use of the figure of Victorian gentility, a sneer that really bears far less examination than its agents may suppose, the charge is a true one, but it is difficult to see why it should be held to be very damaging to Tennyson. It may be readily allowed that his world, his sense of character, and his ideals of conduct, were not precisely, or even approximately, those of Malory, but I am not aware that he ever claimed that they were, or that in using the figures of Arthurian legend he was not as entirely justified in making his own interpretation as Malory had been in his own time in making his. Nothing is sillier in criticism than to come to an artist’s presentation of a legendary, a romantic, or even an historical figure with an already fixed idea of what that presentation should be. The evidence about these things in almost every case leaves the way open to a dozen conclusions, any one of which may carry conviction so long as the artist is capable of creative singleness of heart. We are really impertinent if we demand that Tennyson should make of Arthur and Enid and Geraint and Lancelot and Guinevere and Merlin and Vivien something that squares with our anterior impressions gathered from Malory. All we are justified in demanding is that Tennyson shall give them life which would convince us of its reality had we never heard of them before. If it be argued that in that case Tennyson might just as well have invented a personnel of his own, the answer is that the poet since the beginning has always, and justly, felt himself to be at liberty to draw upon the common stock of legend and history so that he may profit by the appeal made by a familiar setting and invest his creation with the elemental vitality that comes from association. When the Greek audiences went to see a new tragedy by one of their masters they knew beforehand that they would be shown a dramatis personæ with whose existence they were already familiar, and so the poet started off with the advantage of having an audience that took it for granted that the people of his play were really alive. But the gain carried with it for him no obligations, or, at least, none that he would not as a matter of course instinctively fulfil. That is to say, provided he did not positively turn the accepted tradition inside out he was not only allowed to make what new reading of it he liked, but he was actually expected by his audience to do this. And so it was with Tennyson in his Idylls. Had he made Arthur a lecherous bandit, or Enid a nagging vixen, or Lancelot a saintly anchorite, or Guinevere an evil light-of-love, then we could have complained with justice that he should have found other names for his creations. But he did none of these things. In their central nature the figures of his Idylls retain the essential characteristics that had belonged to them from the legends of the old days, and it is only in his modifications of these, often, it may be readily admitted, emphatic in character, that Tennyson reflected his own instincts and the spirit of his age.

To acknowledge the fitness of those modifications is as much the obligation of fair criticism as it is not to overstate them. It is true that every now and again we get a line or a phrase touched by the fashion of the moment that now seems a little grotesque to us, in the same way that at our particular range of time the bonnets and antimacassars of our grandmothers seem a little grotesque.[18] But in themselves these touches are not really odd, but only twigs, as it were, that have lost their sap in the larger spread of timber, as will happen in every permanent body of poetry. When we read that Geraint withheld punishment from the dwarf through “pure nobility of temperament,” that he was “a little vext at losing at the hunt,” when we hear that Vivien in her dissembling put on the appearance of “a virtuous gentlewoman deeply wrong’d” we may be amused for a moment. But the then current idiom of chivalry was not really any more absurd than the more ancient one of false traitors and perfect knights and fair damsels, and, in any case, we lose our sense of proportion if on the strength of it we make a commotion about Tennyson’s intellectual provincialism. These things, when they are all of them accounted for in his work, amount to the merest accident of an occasional gesture in the whole general bearing of the man, and in some kind, if not precisely in that kind, they can be matched in every poet. With more claim to attention than these trivialities are lines something of the same kind but of a deeper purport, such as those when Merlin speaks of the king as

“Stainless gentleman” has a certain poetic flatness to our ears which it had not for Tennyson and his readers. To-day it is not supposed to be good form to speak about a man being a gentleman at all, and democracy no longer encourages us to think about a man being a gentleman at all. We are all now (at least we all may be) nature’s gentlemen, and much may be said for the doctrine. Tennyson was part of a society where the aristocratic distinction was not merely a reality in fact, but one acknowledged intellectually, and the more we see of the world the less certain can we be that any one stage in social development is demonstrably better than another. “Change is the law of life on earth,” says Mr. Gosse, and each generation may suppose that the change is for the better, though one may to-day, for example, meet very liberal-minded and generous people who can make out a very good case for a return to feudalism. But we can cut the argument short by saying that when Tennyson (or Merlin) spoke of Arthur as being a “stainless gentleman” he was being neither a prig nor a sycophant. He might sing that

but there was also room in his scheme of things for the specific distinction that saved

from being merely tautological. And if it comes to that, Tennyson here was nearer than some of his critics to the spirit of Malory. It is well enough to be of our time in matters of social faith and use the world as we find it. To be doctrinaire in politics is mostly to be futile, but habits of expediency which are bred by trying to make the best of social schemes at the moment should be dropped when we turn to the criticism of poetry.

If we dismiss these petty difficulties of manner, we shall find that in their main construction the Idylls present a life which is very unlike that which is suggested by their detractors. The anæmic and Gilbertian curates and schoolmarms who are supposed to people the poems in a pleasant Sunday afternoon atmosphere have no being at all when we come to examine the poems themselves. Taking Tennyson by himself, without reference to Malory or any other source, we may surmise that the men of the poems, the very Galahad and Lancelot and Bedivere and Geraint of Tennyson’s creation, that is to say, would have displayed a decision of character and a strength of arm that would shake some of the long-eared critics out of their complacency and perhaps afford them a little wholesome exercise. And if any one thinks that he could behave by any but the strict rules of chivalry in the presence of Tennyson’s Guinevere there is something amiss with his schooling. If no better evidence can be advanced for Victorian effeminacy and prudery and coxcombry than the Idylls of the King the charge must go by the board. Finally, in this respect we need hardly defend Tennyson because he sometimes chooses to point a moral as well as to adorn a tale, as when in the middle of the Enid story he breaks off with

This practice has always been and will always remain a prerogative of poetry and it is not purism but frivolity of intellect that objects to it.

The actual poetic achievement of the Idylls is very great. That as a group they have no architectural unity is true, but they have never professed such unity. As separate stories they are graphically, and often very poignantly told, with innumerable touches of great felicity. They are pervaded by Tennyson’s descriptive gift and yet it is always closely woven into the imaginative texture and hardly ever indulged (as it was often by even so great a poet as Swinburne, for example) for its own sake. When Geraint comes to the town of the sparrow-hawk where

the fortress is not merely an effective piece of decoration in the poem but part of its essential life, just as in the shoal

and when Geraint rides

the image is hardly less at the centre of things than Shelley’s superb “blue thistles bloomed in cities,” of which it is inevitably, but finely, reminiscent. Geraint’s splendid challenge to Edyrn’s labourers, beginning “A hundred pips eat up your sparrow-hawk,” Yniol’s beautiful iteration of the refrain in Enid’s song, “Our hoard is little but our hearts are great,” Lancelot’s discovery to Lavaine on their approach to Camelot, “Hear, but hold my name Hidden, you ride with Lancelot of the Lake,” are but casual instances of the abounding poetic energy that informs the poems. Nor are there wanting yet greater triumphs of the imagination, things at the very heart of poetic mastery. Geraint’s self-imposed penance never to ask Enid the significance of the accusation which he supposed he had heard her make against herself is a master-stroke of vision of which the dramatic genius of Shakespeare himself might have been proud, while I know of no moment in all English poetry more surging with the tides of tragic and heroic beauty than that in which the great Arthurian epic comes to its close, with the throwing of Excalibur back into the Cornish water.

The power of visualisation here is tremendous. The lines are charged with a mystery that has in it nothing that is inexact or nebulous, and we see not an enchanted pool of a romantic wonderland, but an actual water by the rockbound Cornish coast, the heart of a country where was played out the immortal drama of England’s legendary chivalry. Here is the beauty that transcends the beauty of pathos, the beauty of trembling and poignant vision such as we find in some great chorus of Euripides. By the evidence of such things, which are not seldom within Tennyson’s reach, it is a very lean and jealous humour of criticism that can deny him a place among even the greatest.

A more debatable element in Tennyson’s work may also be illustrated from the Idylls. When Arthur takes his last leave of Guinevere at the Almesbury convent he follows a touching recital of the founding and the character of the Round Table with an uncompromising indictment of Guinevere’s sin. He announced separation as the only possible course to be taken in spite of his professions of indestructible love, and the assurance in which, perhaps, may be found just a grain of comfort for the detractors, “Lo! I forgive thee, as Eternal God forgives.” Guinevere accepts the impeachment and its consequences and in turn renounces her allegiance to Lancelot, not only in her life but in her heart, and the crux of the argument may be given in this passage from the king’s parting charge—

This is a long instance to set out but it will serve, not only for the immediate purpose of discussion, but as a text for more general consideration of a prevalent attitude in Victorian poetry of which Tennyson was the chief exemplar. When every allowance has been made for dramatic detachment, we cannot but suppose that the passage quoted embodies a belief to which Tennyson himself would have subscribed, and it is difficult to get away from the feeling that there is something radically unsound in it. Every spectator of Othello must have felt the impulse to leap on to the stage and cry upon Othello to come to his senses and realise that even if he cannot see that he is being fooled by a villain he should at least sit down and have the matter out with Desdemona. By his end Othello becomes a noble and heroic figure, but, even allowing that he discovers in the action what seem to him to be sufficient grounds for the cruellest of his suspicions, we can never feel in the body itself of the play that his jealousy is anything but contemptible. Had Shakespeare’s method been different, and had he concealed the truth from us as he does from Othello, or had our opinion inclined towards Desdemona’s guilt until the final revelation, we could still not but have felt that she was tolerable company at least compared with her termagant and demoniac husband. But Shakespeare saw that Othello was an immensely attractive figure as an expression of life, without for a moment insisting that he was an admirable figure on the less elementary and yet in a sense lower plane of conduct. That is to say, Shakespeare could worship the nature in Othello as he could worship all vivid life, and he could present the moral limitations of that nature with the deepest sympathy, even without any implication of blame, but he was never in danger of confusing them with moral virtues. So far as there is any deliberate doctrine to be found in Shakespeare’s art, indeed, the jealousy of Othello, even though it had been proved to be as well founded as he himself supposed, is shown to have been as disastrous in its tragic destruction of character as the blood-guilty ambition of Macbeth or the drunken passion of Antony. But Tennyson, although he was vitally interested in life, and honest enough in his acceptance of the processes of life so far as he could interpret them, had also certain abstract moral points of view which he was apt to impose upon those processes in the course of creation. In this there is a difference between the artistic purposes of the two poets, a difference that had really been slowly asserting itself in English poetry from the end of the Shakespearean era until Tennyson’s time. It is a difference that on the whole must definitely mark the later poetry as less unadulterated in its creative aims than the earlier, and it is a difference, further, that has led to grave misconceptions in the modern practice of the art.[19] It may be worth while to analyse this difference a little more closely.

It is clearly a mistake to suppose that moral judgment did not come within Shakespeare’s scheme. Every one of his plays from the dark and terrible pity of Lear to the light and gracious revelry of Twelfth Night is charged with moral judgment, but it is a judgment that is strictly complementary to the action of the characters within the play, and as organically a concern of the poet’s creative function in the play as are the characters and action themselves. In other words, the moral judgment becomes inevitably a part of life itself, and is an altogether profounder thing than a merely abstract moral point of view. And this, indeed, is one of the chief glories of Shakespeare’s art, as of the whole poetry of his age, that it is intensely concerned with life, with its moral consequences, but it is hardly at all concerned with moral points of view that are not directly the consequence of life as it grows at the poet’s bidding. That is why we feel that Shakespeare loved Macbeth, whose moral conduct he must have condemned, no less than Rosalind, whose conduct he as certainly sanctioned. Both were a part of the life to which he brought the constant homage of genius, and although that genius could not but award disaster to one and happy honour to the other, there was no prefixed moral rule to be applied with a consequent alienation of affection in the one case and establishment of it in the other before the final reckoning was made. So soon after Shakespeare as Milton the difference begins to show itself. The explicit purpose of Paradise Lost, a purpose happily not too constantly kept in mind, is “to justify the ways of God to men,” and with this implication that a standard has to be set up from the first whereby a man can be shown to be morally at fault and wilfully to have disobeyed rules laid down for his guidance, the abstract moral point of view is beginning to assert itself, and although Milton’s art is sublime enough to make the disability of little account in the result, there is something less universal in the creative mood. Shakespeare gives us life, moulded to a temperament, it is true, but untrammelled by any other control, while Milton gives us life, still moulded to a temperament, but also beyond that tested in some measure by a morality that is intellectually fixed, and in seeking to justify the ways of God—God being only another word for that morality—Milton inevitably fails to justify humanity as Shakespeare so triumphantly does. In imagination, and fertility, and rhetorical invention, and constructive grandeur, and even in passionate realisation, Milton cannot be placed below Shakespeare himself, but in understanding he is below him, and this because he did not come to life with a mind so open. By the time we have come from Milton to Pope the difference is emphasised. Shakespeare created, and his creations carried their own doom with them. Milton created, and his creations then had to be judged by a morality that was held outside the terms of their own being, as it were, and the integrity of the art was a little less exact in consequence. But the morality was one in which Milton did passionately believe; he would have gone to the stake for it, as many brave men did go to the stake. Pope, too, had a moral belief by which the creations of his poetry had to be judged, but there would have been no going to the stake for Pope in its defence. The intellectual passion of Milton had become an intellectual attitude in Pope, and, since men make far more fuss about their attitudes than their passions, Pope allowed his belief far more undisciplined play in his poetry than Milton had done. Milton moralised like the prophets of old, but Pope moralised like a modern schoolman. This is not to say that Pope in the process did not often achieve very good poetry, and he sometimes touched truth more profoundly, perhaps, than he knew. But when he tells us “whatever is is right” we are sure that he is making an extremely effective verse while we are not so sure that he is speaking out of his heart and not merely playing up to the philosophic exercises of Bolingbroke.

With Wordsworth the difference persists, but it has shifted its centre. His moral sincerity is no more in doubt than Milton’s, and, indeed, his artistic control of moral judgment may be said to approach Shakespeare’s more nearly than does Milton’s. Between Shakespeare and Wordsworth, however, there still remains a great difference. Wordsworth, although subject to abstract moral convictions much more clearly than Shakespeare, is yet as unwilling as the great dramatist to impose them on his creations after the event, but the difference lies in the fact that with Wordsworth the whole substance of his creation is far more limited in range than Shakespeare’s, and precisely because it is from the first conditioned largely by the moral conviction. That is to say that, without any deliberate manipulating of his art, Wordsworth by instinct brought into his poetry only the kind of creations that were not by their actual conduct, but in their essential character, in keeping with his own moral nature. The creative impulse led Shakespeare no one could tell from hour to hour in what direction, and it was never hampered in its movement by the poet’s own moral point of view. Milton’s impulse, also, could range far, but the issue, whatever it might be, had to be tested by the same laws in the end. With Pope, the administration of the laws had become a more or less arbitrary ceremony, very self-important as such ceremonies are, and too often divorced from the figures of any creative impulse at all. But with Wordsworth the impulse never worked happily outside the influence of the moral nature by which its creations were ultimately to be tried. And so, leaving Pope out of the reckoning, since in these high matters, memorable poet as he was, he was of altogether smaller stature, we may say that in the fitness of the exercise of moral judgment Wordsworth stands with Shakespeare, but that, his creation being governed largely by a moral character already defined, instead of developing its own moral influences as it grows, it is infinitely less various and complex than Shakespeare’s, while Milton approaches Shakespeare more nearly in range, but is less impressive than either in his adjustment of poetic to moral values.

We find, then, that Shakespeare was profoundly interested in an immense range of life and not at all in moral points of view, that Milton was interested in a range of life still immense though less variously peopled, and also passionately interested in moral points of view, and that Wordsworth was as vitally concerned with a range of life far more limited, the very nature of which, however, absolved him from the necessity of consciously applying a moral point of view which had already been allowed for by his art. In considering Tennyson’s position in this matter we have to remember first that he was one of the very few great English poets that have come to a very wide popularity in their own time. Shakespeare was popular, so far as the records of the theatre of his day tell us anything, but he was popular because he told a good dramatic story on the stage and satisfied the needs of theatre audiences. The moral grandeur with which he invested his plays would in its absence no doubt have left them far less powerful in their contemporary appeal, but it was not by this grandeur that primarily he achieved his popularity. Milton was not popular in his own lifetime at all, and Wordsworth, although he secured general fame before his death, was never a voice for which the multitude waited. Dryden and Pope had great reputations in their time, but it was rather among an exclusive and small literary society than among the masses. Byron caught the general ear by his gift of pure romantic narrative, but he and Scott in their time were satisfying the demand for good stories, which has since produced the immense crop of modern fiction. But Tennyson was in a different case from all of these. Here was a poet who was impressing, as no other poet in England had ever done before, his moral and philosophic views upon all sorts and conditions of men, and this without using the great circulating medium of the theatre or beguiling with a tale. The time was not one of any deeper intellectual or spiritual life than any other, but one in which that life was more diverse in its interests. Whether the educational and scientific and industrial developments that were going forward have been for good or bad in the welfare of the community may be doubted, but there is no question that they were stimulating the average mentality of the country to a fresh activity. Religious and philosophic speculation, the adjustment of scientific discovery to faith, the economics of the new order, and the precise significance of the growing Imperial idea, these and other questions were the daily concern of the man in the street, and disputation was the common practice of nearly every hearthside. Perplexity followed on perplexity, and they were perplexities not only of private spiritual experience, but of public passion also. And upon these Tennyson’s judgment was awaited with an unparalleled eagerness. Apart from the interest in his poetic genius, in the shaping power with which his art embodied his experience, there was a far-reaching concern with the actual nature of his conclusions. The poet was a prophet in the land, with an authority that he had not known since the old bardic days. Queues would form at the bookshops at the early hours of the morning on days when a new volume by him was to be published. And this touching faith in a poet’s word was not held only by the simple-minded and bewildered generality who wanted readymade solutions for their problems. It was shared by working men and the great leaders of science, by shrewd and liberal scholars and by unlettered adolescents, by the country squire and the stump orator, by Calvinistic churchmen and free-thinkers, by poets and the new Utilitarians, by the Queen and the village pump, in short by all sorts and conditions of men. When we remember how representative an audience it was to which Tennyson spoke we need hardly do more than this to realise that the charge that has sometimes been made against him of intellectual shallowness or charlatanry is a very ill-considered one. A religious or intellectual impostor may catch the easy ear of a credulous public for a moment, pack revival halls, or become a best seller, but a following that included Jowett and Huxley and Rossetti and FitzGerald and Francis Palgrave and Butler of Trinity, Gladstone and Disraeli, General Gordon and J. R. Green, George Eliot and Stopford Brooke and Thackeray and Tindall, not only as exceptional but as representative figures, was neither easy nor credulous, and when the last word of caricature about Tennyson and his mantle has been said the fact remains that in direct doctrine, as apart from the subtler processes of poetry, he had an influence upon the finest minds of his age which can hardly be exaggerated. He was an acknowledged as well as an unacknowledged legislator.

This does not often happen to a poet, and, while we may be glad that now and again the old office of poetry in the daily counsels of the people should be renewed, it is well that in the general run of things this should be so. Nothing is more likely to turn a poet’s head than to be accepted as an oracle, and it must be allowed that it turned Tennyson’s head a little. His was too fine a nature for the effects to be very serious, and Mr. Nicolson is inclined to overstate the case when he talks of Tennyson’s acumen in trimming his sails to every fresh wind. The truth is that the business of poetry and of ordered philosophy are distinct things, and while many of us think that in the end poetry has the more persuasive voice of the two, as she certainly has the more charming, it is not very good for her to be nattered into the belief that she can use both at will. And Tennyson was so flattered. The moral judgment, the function of which in Shakespeare’s art, and Milton’s and Wordsworth’s, we have discussed, became with Tennyson as independent a preoccupation as it had been with Pope, but with Tennyson it was at once much more serious and much more sincere and less witty in nature, and, in its divorcement from poetry, much more dangerous in consequence of this. This is by no means to say that Tennyson’s moral pieces are never good poetry or that they are not very often durably convincing in their morality, but it is to say that he would often impose upon his poetry a moral judgment that was not a passionate one like Milton’s or a sententiously dialectical one like Pope’s, but an almost official one held with all the solemnity of official responsibility, and gathered as much from the abstract public opinion to which he in turn ministered as from his own brooding conviction. To say that Tennyson was dishonest in this is to say something that should not be said about so rare a poet and so single-hearted a man. It is not even as though the moral judgment to which he committed himself was ever one of which he could not quite sincerely say that he approved, and in further extenuation it must be remembered that, after all the talk about the waste tissue in Tennyson’s work which came from his concern in this way with ephemeral moods and institutions, there is on actual examination very little of his poetry which makes wholly unprofitable reading to-day. But the trouble so far as it went was, it may be, that Tennyson was tempted into confusing moral opinions about particular things with a presiding moral judgment and to introduce these into a poetical context where they had no proper place. Milton’s moral nature could assert itself over and above his poetical creation, and in so far as that was so he could be said to indulge a moral point of view in a way that made his sense of artistic fitness a little less fine than Shakespeare’s. But Tennyson went beyond this, and not only allowed moral points of view sometimes to become the chief concern of poetry, in the manner of Pope, though Tennyson did it far more impressively, but he was also capable of allowing the pressure of moral points of view to lower the passion of his poetic creation in a way that Milton never did.

So it is that that passage at the end of Guinevere is fundamentally a betrayal of the very beautiful poetic life into which it intrudes. The moral point of view expressed is not only not inevitably Arthur’s, that is to say, not an organic part of the poetry, it is not even a moral judgment pronounced by the poet upon his creation at the bidding of a vast natural impetus such as directed Milton in his judgments. Plainly the passage is introduced because Tennyson remembers that these views about conjugal fidelity are likely on the whole to be well received by the great audience that is waiting for him. That they would, in fact, be so received, that they were in keeping with responsible opinion in the fabric of society, and that they are, however successfully they may sometimes be challenged, a comfortable doctrine in the expediency of our modern life with much to be said for it, that they are, in short, moral views of some considerable authority, are not sufficient excuses for Tennyson’s misapplication of them. The point is that, in a passage such as that given, Tennyson was accepting a rule-of-thumb morality from the social currency and not only passing it off as a moral judgment welling up from the deeps of poetic creation, but deceiving himself into the belief that it was this. It was, in effect, very much the sort of thing that Pope had done, only Pope’s shrewd common sense kept him nearer to the fundamentals of moral doctrine and saved him from the false evangelical fervours that Tennyson was apt to catch from the public congregations above which he was so popular a figure. A congregation is, in fact, always a dangerous venue for a poet, since even a congregation of Jowetts and FitzGeralds cannot be wholly clear of the demoralising atmosphere of the revivalist meeting. It comes to this, that when Tennyson wrote that passage, although no doubt in argument he would have hotly defended the position advanced, he did not believe what he was saying with the full force of poetic conviction, and in consequence he marred a poem in which, for the rest, is an idyllic tenderness, set against an heroic background with perfect imaginative mastery. And the chief defect in Tennyson’s poetry as a whole may be found to be of this nature. The flaws in In Memoriam, for example, one of the noblest elegiac poems in the language, nearly all have this common origin. The defect is very nearly the sum of the charge to be made again Tennyson’s poetry, and it leaves the great body of his achievement but very little impoverished in character.