“Know ye not, then, the riddling of the bards? Confusion, and illusion, and relation. Elusion, and occasion, and evasion?”
It is almost a pity that the bard did not complete his “riddling” while he was about it. Another couplet:
Diffusion, and ablution, and abrasion. Ablution, expectation, botheration,
would have rendered still more impenetrable the bardic mystery.
There is no resemblance in this studied concealment of meaning, if meaning there be, to that
“Sacred madness of the bards When God makes music through them,”
of which he sings. It is more like the melodious confusion of the Æolian harp. Even if the poet have a definite meaning in his own mind, if he so express it that I cannot even guess it, to me it is nonsense; and nonsense, however melodious, although it may enchant my sense, cannot move my heart. Here and there, however, our poet sings snatches of real poetry, as Sir Bedivere’s answer to his king in “The Coming of Arthur”:
“I heard the water lapping on the craig And the long ripple washing in the reeds.”
Upon the whole, Mr. Tennyson excels in a certain underlying vein of exquisitely refined humor. And when his subject admits of it, he is unrivalled. His is the poetry of humor. We would name as examples “The Northern Farmer” and the satirical poem, “Locksley Hall,” perhaps the most vigorous of all his productions; and, of his longer poems, _The Princess_. It is for this reason we think he is more likely to excel, as a dramatist, in comedy than in tragedy.
If our readers would estimate the full force of our remarks, we would invite them to read the works of any of the principal of our earlier lyrical poets, as, for example, Collins. We name him because he too excels in that melody of versification for which Mr. Tennyson is so distinguished. At times, as in his “Sonnet on Evening,” he surpasses the Laureate in that respect, although for sustained and unfailing rhythmical melody the latter bears away the palm from him, and perhaps from every other rival. But in profound sympathy with nature, in the fidelity of his creations, in the echoes of the beautiful which he provokes within the soul of the reader, the Poet-Laureate must yield to the Demy of Magdalen. Like Shakspere, he peopled inanimate nature with a fairy world, and amongst elves and genii and other dainty spirits he abandoned himself to that power of impersonation which is almost an attribute of a true poet.