THE TENNYSON CENTENARY. Ten years have passed since I made bold to claim for Tennyson a special rank of his own among our English poets: one without rival during the long Victorian era, and during the amazing period of his creative work, which was prolonged for sixty years. It is twenty years since he published the last of these fascinating volumes, and we may now judge his place in the glorious roll of our island singers free from the glamor of his melody, without favor, partisanship, or fear of offence. Again I make bold to insist that Tennyson still reigns in our hearts as alone the peer of Byron, Shelley, Keats, and Wordsworth. No others since Wordsworth's death in 1850, since his long silence for many previous years. can pretend to stand beside these four in the first half of the nineteenth century; and, in the second half of the century, Tennyson alone is of their rank. To-day, in this centenary of his birth, I wish to consider two questions: What is Tennyson's place in relation to these four earlier poets? What is his place in the roll of all our poets since Chaucer? Sound judgment insists that poets, like all writers (except perhaps the moral philosophers), have to be judged by their successes, not by their failures-by their splendid triumphs rather than by any calculable average or sum total of their product. All our poets (except Milton and Gray) published poetry that we can well do without, and, with the exception of Milton, for I will not disown Paradise Regained, they have all left poems which are sadly inferior to their own best. This, alas is true even of Chaucer and of Spenser-nay, even of Shakespeare himself; at least, of some plays which bear his name. As to Byron, Shelley, Keats and Wordsworth (not to speak of Dryden or of Pope and their schools and imitators; to say nothing of Cowper and Crabbe, their imitators and their schools), they have all left us poems which have truly irritating defects. Byron, who, with all his sins, was our greatest poetic force since Milton, was the worst offender against the form of poetry, with his incurable habit of breaking out into ragged doggerel and conventional rhetoric. Shelley, again, who is conspicuously free from these crimes, too often becomes so vague, transcendental, and impalpable that one must be an esoteric illuminist to absorb the rays from so distant a star. Matthew Arnold for once quite broke his divining rod of criticism when he called Shelley an "ineffectual angel." But we do feel sometimes that Shelley was a truant angel who had lost his way, or rather was lost to human ken in the far-off empyrean. Nor had Shelley, with all his radiant light, the Titanic fire of Byron. Poor Keats died prematurely before he had brought to full ripeness his matchless gifts, and they still unearth and reissue stuff of his which were raw experiments, or which should never meet the public eyes. Then dear old Wordsworth, who in his best hour could wing his way beside Milton himself, would drone on for days and months together in insufferable commonplace. Yet, for all their misfires, Byron, Shelley, Keats, and Wordsworth were glorious poets. In judging poetry we must not weigh it by the ton as if it were a cartload of bricks; nor must failures be allowed to detract from successes. We must take account of nothing but the best. Now, it is the peculiar distinction of Tennyson that, in spite of his immense product, as great as that of Byron or of Wordsworth, he is never ragged, obscure, raw, or tiresome. His consummate taste and refined ear saved him from ever sinking into vulgarity, commonplace, or a cloudland of melodious words, which were the favorite sins of Byron, of Wordsworth, of Shelley, and of Keats. We might even say more than this, if we could only blot out some Primrose League catches and the monstrous sixteen-syllable lines of his decline. But for these we might say that Tennyson shares with Milton the high privilege of never committing himself to verses which have no trace of poetic form. Of all our poets Milton alone can be said never to have published lines unworthy of a poet-lines having neither melody, distinction, nor grace. We may say this of Shelley, if we grant that a poet may be cryptic or cloying at his own sweet will. In all this Tennyson ranks with Milton and Shelley, who alone of poets never It is a stumble into uncouth prose. to have produced great distinction some 60,000 lines all of which have been polished with uniform judgment. In our This is a rare distinction, but its value must not be overstated. estimate of poetry we must avoid the reckoning up blunders such as examiners score with blue pencil and use to If subtract marks. we did, loosetongued, hot-headed Byron would be We have left at the bottom of the list. to take into account the sum of the truly fine things given us by the poet, the amount, variety, and range of the fine things, the permanent harvest of beauty, power, and insight contained in them, of a kind which is independent of place, time, or fashion. in weighing it in this measure we have to admit that uniform grace and polish do not constitute in themselves a claim to the highest rank of poetry. If so, Gray would stand next after Milton. In the Day of Judgment, they tell us, And gross offences may be forgiven for the sake of transcendent merits, which will outweigh a long life of decorous virtue such has needs no expiation. For this reason the polished perfection of Tennyson's vast product could not raise him to a rank above that of Byron, Shelley, Keats, and Wordsworth, and almost to a par with Milton, unless his best work were greater than their best. In the heyday of his popularity with æsthetic graduates of both sexes, and with the hot zealots of Church and State, this perfection of polish was thought to raise him to a trio with Shakespeare and Milton. And he himself, perhaps, would not have very stoutly resented such homage. But the time is past for such ephemeral adulation. Tennyson will hold rank with the best poets of the nineteenth century; but he is certainly not in any class above them. Turn first to Byron. Byron's best lovers ruefully admit that he had a tempestuous way of throwing off his thoughts roughcast-that he always wrote at a white heat, and too often left his first drafts uncorrected; that he sometimes descended to rant, jingle, and ribaldry. It is a grievous faultand grievously has Byron answered it. His whole immense output was made not in sixty but in little more than fifteen years. For four or five years he poured out poems at the scandalous rate of some hundreds of lines each day. This is no sort of excuse for a poet's indifference to poetic form. And if he had never done justice to his gifts, it would be decisive against Byron's claim to be a great poet. But it is not so. He often did do justice to his genius, in form as well as in thought. Many parts of Childe Harold, of Don Juan, of Manfred, of the lyrics. even of the early romances, are as full of metrical charm as of noble imagination. If we were to sacrifice twothirds of his hasty work, we should still have a rich volume of fine poetry. In his hours of true inspiration Byron proved himself to be a master of poetic form, in pure lyrics, in lyrical drama, in romantic, picturesque, passionate, and satiric verse. But his claim to high poetic rank lies in the imaginative power of the man. Those who will not admit him to be a poet at all, admit the magnetism of his personal force. He had that rare creative genius which belongs to those who have stirred whole ages and diverse races. There is a curious French phrase which hits off this quality: "he had fire in his belly." With all his ribaldry and pose, Byron had flashes of that fire which burned in King David, in Eschylus, in Dante, and in Milton. He had the power which created new epochs in Greece, in Italy, which still, after nearly a hundred years, continues to resound in France, in Germany, in Scandinavia, in Russia, and in America. He literally created Greece as a nation; and he must be counted as one of the founders of Italian independence. Manfred has in it a sort of Dantesque vision of Man and Destiny, which lifts it above any similar English poem of the nineteenth century, and places it beside Faust, as Goethe so justly and generously felt. Tens of thousands of cultivated men and women in Europe and in America delight in Byron, while they never heard of Keats and never read a line of Wordsworth; and some fastidious critics tell us that is because Byron is "obvious." Byron is obvious in the sense of not being obscure; indeed, Horace or Pope is not more perfectly intelligible and direct. But it is not poetic mastery to be able to construct enigmas in verse; and it is one of the fads of our time to vaunt the industrious interpretation of metrical cryptograms. Byron, after nearly a hundred years, is known throughout the civilized world. He is even a national poet both in Italy and in Greece. He has spoken to the hearts as well as to the imagination of whole races: he strikes light and heat out of everything he touches: he moves the thought and warms the spirit as only an original genius can. It is affectation to tell us that the man who does this is not a poet because he flung off a good deal of scrambling stuff which he ought to have burnt. It is an ancient jest that Childe Harold is only Baedeker in rhyme, and that the Greek lyrics are artificial heroics. Why, half the sense of mysterious antiquity and poetic color which the nineteenth century felt for Italy-all the passion it felt for the Alps-was due to Byron, who did for the English and for Americans what Goethe did for Germans and Madame de Staël and Rousseau did for the French. As to love of the sea, no verse has ever done so much as Byron's. Greek patriotism is literally the creation of Byron, for to every Hellene Byron is what Burns is to every Scot. This power of Byron to fuse his ideas into whole races places him as the first in rank, as he is the first in time, of the poets of the nineteenth century. In this palpable historic force, neither Shelley, nor Keats, nor Wordsworth approach Byron. Their reputation is strictly English: Byron's is European. They are read only by the cultivated, Byron by all. Now, we cannot assign to Tennyson either the European vogue or the universal popularity which for nearly a hundred years Byron has possessed. We must not be misled by Swinburne's spasmodic reviling of Byron. His mouthing in praise of Marlowe and in abuse of Byron is a type of that ill-balanced partisan criticism which does so much harm. Never trust a poet to judge a poet, nor a painter to judge a picture. They have loves and hates of their own manner or pet fancy. Now, Morley's estimate of Byron is far more broad and just. Swinburne had an exquisite sense of melody, albeit of a somewhat languorous and monotonous note. Indeed, he often indulged in what schoolboys call "nonsense verses"-Latin lines which would scan but meant nothing. Our age is too prone to value the grace and music of mere words rather than thought, passion, and vision. It is a sign of a pedant's affectation to take Swinburne to be a greater poet than Byron. And for the same reason we must not allow Tennyson's exquisite form to blind us to the mass, the variety, the electric shock of Byron's thunder-peal. When we weigh Byron in this scale taking account of his mass, variety, and fire, and, above all his power over men of different race and language-it is impossible to place Tennyson above him. Tennyson is purely, permanently English-nor do Scotland, Wales, Ireland, much less the Alps, the Apennines, Rome, Venice, Athens, the Atlantic, or the Egean, ever wring from him a cry of love and joy. Can we suppose that a century hence Englishmen will chant their Tennyson as Scots chant Burns, or as Italians and Greeks still worship Byron? Byron, Shelley, and Keats lived in worlds of antique mystery and passion, of broadly European nature, of the manifold humanity common to all men of any tongue who care for imaginative work. Tennyson's "measured language" and "sad mechanic exercise," however beautiful and enchanting, belong exclusively to English homes, rectories, colleges, and cathedral closes-are eminently local, insular, and academic. No, it is only in the Fellows' common-room and in country parsonages that Tennyson is still held to be the typical poet of the nineteenth century. Nor can any true lover of poetry rank Tennyson above Shelley. For, in the first place, Shelley has a polish of form at least equal to that of Tennyson, if we allow for the accidents of Shelley's text. And the true lover of poetry finds in Prometheus, in Hellas, in the West Wind, in the Skylark a melodious thrill such as not only Tennyson never sounded, but no English poet save Shakespeare and Milton alone. It is true that there is a great deal of Shelley which is too subtle and too ethereal for "the general," and perhaps will ever remain the privilege of the cultured few, and for the most part of English race. If Shelley has no small measure of Byron's human and social enthusiasm, of his passion for the splendor and majesty of Nature, of that trumpet-note of humanity, of that vision of a regenerate future, which in Byron redeem his many sins against true taste. Shelley did not impose his personality upon his age as did Byron, he was undoubtedly a far more consummate master of his poetic instrument. And in this he must be counted as even superior to Tennyson; whilst it would be difficult to produce any important addition to English poetry in the veteran Victorian poet which we could not match in the earlier Georgian poet, cut off in his prime. To rank Tennyson above Shelley would be to rank him also above Byron. And yet, with all his faultless metrical resources, Tennyson wants the intellectual force of Byron and the intellectual distinction of Shelley. The case is different with Keats; for Keats himself is only a promise, and his small volume of poems is itself but a fragment. We must never forget that what we prize of Keats was written before he was twenty-four-at an age before Milton had written Lycidas or Shakespeare had written Venus and Adonis. As I said once, Keats was "an unformed, untrained, neuropathic youth of genius whose whole achievement came earlier in life than that of |