The sensations provoked by his poetry resemble those of one who has sauntered through a museum of precious stones of rare workmanship and purest water. Our æsthetic taste has been pleased by the glitter and the color and the brilliance, but our mind and heart have not been deeply moved. His poems are ablaze with detached thoughts of lofty meaning, and of a multitude of others whose meaning is not obvious, all alike expressed in vivid imagery, in the purest phraseology, and in rare melody of rhythm. But they are confused and cabalistic. He seems to be always laboring to be incomprehensible. He calls it “the riddling of the bards.” And he succeeds. The problem of the Sphinx, the emblematic warning sent by the Scythians to their Persian invader, the mute counsel sent by the Samian to the Corinthian tyrant, a Delphic oracle, all were clear and easy by comparison with Mr. Tennyson’s lyrics, alike in detached passages and in entire poems. None of woman born can fathom the meaning of the _Idylls of the King_.
This defect alone is fatal to poetry. So keenly did Spenser feel it that although the meaning of his allegory, _The Faerie Queene_, is obvious enough to any ordinary intelligence, he is careful to explain it in full in a letter dedicated to Sir Walter Raleigh.
Mr. Tennyson, on the contrary, involves himself in the thickest mystery he can contrive, and expects his worshippers to take it for inspiration. Take the following, for example, from “The Coming of Arthur”:
“Rain, rain, and sun, a rainbow in the sky! A young man will be wiser by-and-by, An old man’s wit may wander e’er he die.
“Rain, rain, and sun, a rainbow on the lea! And truth is this to me, and that to thee And truth, or clothed or naked, let it be.
“Rain, sun, and rain! and the free blossom blows, Sun, rain, and sun! and where is he who knows? From the great deep to the great deep he goes.”
These are, no doubt, “riddling triplets,” as he himself calls them. The riddling of Shakspere’s fools, even the wanderings from the night of distraught Ophelia’s brain, are light itself by the side of them. We may well echo his invocation of “Sun, rain, and sun! and where is he who knows?” Whatever inspiration may be evident here, it is not that of the beautiful. And yet even this has snatches of meaning which many passages we might adduce have not; as the following, from “Gareth and Lynette”: