________________________________________________
Title: Tennyson
Author: William Ernest Henley [
More Titles by Henley]
St. Agnes' Eve.
In Keats's St. Agnes' Eve nothing is white but the heroine. It is winter, and 'bitter chill'; the hare 'limps trembling through the frozen grass; the owl is a-cold for all his feathers; the beadsman's fingers are numb, his breath is frosted; and at an instant of special and peculiar romance
'The frost-wind blows
Like Love's alarum, pattering the sharp sleet
Against the window-panes.'
But there is no snow. The picture is pure colour: it blushes with blood of queens and kings; it glows with 'splendid dyes,' like the 'tiger-moth's deep-damasked wings'--with 'rose bloom,' and warm gules,' and 'soft amethyst'; it is loud with music and luxurious with 'spiced dainties,' with lucent syrops tinct with cinnamon,' with 'manna and dates,' the fruitage of Fez and 'cedared Lebanon' and 'silken Samarcand.' Now, the Laureate's St. Agnes' Eve is an ecstasy of colourless perfection. The snows sparkle on the convent roof; the 'first snowdrop' vies with St. Agnes' virgin bosom; the moon shines an 'argent round' in the 'frosty skies'; and in a transport of purity the lady prays:
'Break up thy heavens, O Lord! and far,
Through all the starlight keen,
Draw me thy bride, a glittering star,
In raiment white and clean.'
It is all coldly, miraculously stainless: as somebody has said, 'la vraie Symphonie en Blanc Majeur.'
Indian Summer.
And at four-score the poet of St. Agnes' Eve is still our greatest since the Wordsworth of certain sonnets and the two immortal odes: is still the one Englishman of whom it can be stated and believed that Elisha is not less than Elijah. His verse is far less smooth and less lustrous than in the well-filed times of In Memoriam and the Arthurian idylls. But it is also far more plangent and affecting; it shows a larger and more liberal mastery of form and therewith a finer, stronger, saner sentiment of material; in its display of breadth and freedom in union with particularity, of suggestiveness with precision, of swiftness of handling with completeness of effect, it reminds you of the later magic of Rembrandt and the looser and richer, the less artful-seeming but more ample and sumptuous, of the styles of Shakespeare. And the matter is worthy of the manner. Everywhere are greatness and a high imagination moving at ease in the gold armour of an heroic style. There are passages in Demeter and Persephone that will vie with the best in Lucretius; Miriam is worth a wilderness of Aylmer's Fields; Owd Roa is one of the best of the studies in dialect; in Happy there are stanzas that recall the passion of Rizpah; nothing in modern English so thrills and vibrates with the prophetic inspiration, the fury of the seer, as Vastness; the verses To Mary Boyle--(in the same stanza as Musset's le Mie Prigioni)--are marked by such a natural grace of form and such a winning 'affectionateness,' to coin a word, of intention and accomplishment as Lord Tennyson has never surpassed nor very often equalled. In Vastness the insight into essentials, the command of primordial matter, the capacity of vital suggestion, are gloriously in evidence from the first line to the last. Here is no touch of ingenuity, no trace of 'originality,' no single sign of cleverness; the rhymes are merely inevitable--there is no visible transformation of metaphor in deference to their suggestions; nothing is antic, peculiar, superfluous; but here in epic unity and completeness, here is a sublimation of experience expressed by means of a sublimation of style. It is unique in English, and for all that one can see it is like to remain unique this good while yet. The impression you take is one of singular loftiness of purpose and a rare nobility of mind. Looking upon life and time and the spirit of man from the heights of his eighty years, it has been given to the Master Poet to behold much that is hid to them in the plain or on the slopes beneath him, and beholding it to frame and utter a message so lofty in style and in significance so potent that it sounds as of this world indeed but from the confines of experience, the farthest kingdoms of mortality.
His Mastership.
It is to note, too, that the Laureate of to-day deals with language in a way that to the Tennyson of the beginning was--unhappily--impossible. In those early years he neither would nor could have been responsible for the magnificent and convincing rhythms of Vastness, the austere yet passionate shapeliness of Happy, the effects of vigour and variety realised in Parnassus. For in those early years he was rather Benvenuto than Michelangelo, he was more of a jeweller than a sculptor, the phrase was too much to him, the inspiration of the incorrect too little. All that is changed, and for the best. Most interesting is it to the artist to remark how impatient--(as the Milton of the Agonistes was)--of rhyme and how confident in rhythm is the whilome poet of Oriana and The Lotus-Eaters and The Vision of Sin; and how this impatience and this confidence are revealed not merely in a piece of mysticism naked yet unashamed as The Gleam--(whose movement with its constancy in double endings and avoidance of triplets is perhaps a little tame)--but also in what should have been a popular piece: the ode, to wit, On the Jubilee of Queen Victoria. In eld, indeed, the craftsman inclines to play with his material: he is conscious of mastery; he is in the full enjoyment of his own; he indulges in experiments which to him are as a crown of glory and to them that come after him--to the noodles that would walk in his ways without first preparing themselves by prayer and study and a life of abnegation--are only the devil in disguise. The Rembrandt of The Syndics, the Shakespeare of The Tempest and Lear--what are these but pits for the feet of the Young Ass? and what else will be the Tennyson of Vastness and The Gleam? 'Lord,' quoth Dickens years ago in respect of the Idylls or of Maud, 'what a pleasure it is to come across a man that can write!' He also was an artist in words; and what he said then he would say now with greater emphasis and more assurance. From the first Lord Tennyson has been an exemplar; and now in these new utterances, his supremacy is completely revealed. There is no fear now that 'All will grow the flower, For all have got the seed'; for then it was a mannerism that people took and imitated, and now--! Now it is art; it is the greater Shakespeare, the consummate Rembrandt, the unique Velasquez; and they may rise to it that can.
[The end]
William Ernest Henley's essay: Tennyson
________________________________________________
GO TO TOP OF SCREEN
