XII

TENNYSON, RUSKIN, CARLYLE

There were three great men of the nineteenth century of whom we know more than we know of most men, Carlyle, Ruskin, and Tennyson, in whose lives fear was a prominent element.

Tennyson has suffered no loss of fame, but he has suffered of late a certain loss of influence, which was bound to come, if simply from the tremendous domination which his writings exercised in his lifetime.  He was undoubtedly one of the first word-artists who ever lived and wrote, but he was a great deal more than that; he was a great mystic, a man whose mind moved in a shining cloud of inspiration.  He had the constitution and the temperament of a big Lincolnshire yeoman, with that simple rusticity that is said to have characterised Vergil.  But his spirit dwelt apart, revolving dim and profound thoughts, brooding over mysteries; if he is lightly said to be Early Victorian, it is not because he was typical of his age, but because he contributed so much to make it what it was.  While Browning lived an eager personal life, full of observation, zest, and passion, Tennyson abode in more impersonal thoughts.  In the dawn of science, when there was a danger of life becoming over-materialised, contented with the first steps of swiftly apprehended knowledge, and with solutions which were no solutions at all, but only the perception of laws, Tennyson was the man of all others who saw that science had a deeply poetical side, and could enforce rather than destroy the religious spirit; he saw that a knowledge of processes was not the same thing as an explanation of impulses, and that while it was a little more clear in the light of science what was actually happening in the world, men were no nearer the perception of why it happened so, or why it happened at all.  Tennyson saw clearly the wonders of astronomy and geology, and discerned that the laws of nature were nothing more than the habits, so to speak, of a power that was incredibly dim and vast, a power which held within itself the secrets of motion and rest, of death and life.  Thus he claimed for his disciples not only the average thoughtful men, but the very best and finest minds of his generation who wished to link the past and the present together, and not to break with the old sanctities.

Tennyson’s art suffered from the consciousness of his enormous responsibility, and where he failed was from his dread of unpopularity, or his fear of alienating the ordinary man.  Browning was interested in ethical problems; his robust and fortunate temperament allowed him to bridge over with a sort of buoyant healthiness the gaps of his philosophy.  But Tennyson’s ethical failure lay in his desire to improve the occasion, and to rule out all impulses that had not a social and civic value.  In the later “Idylls” he did his best to represent the prig trailing clouds of glory, and to discourage lawlessness in every form; but he was more familiar with the darker and grosser sides of life than he allowed to appear in his verse, which suffers from an almost prudish delicacy, which is more akin to respectability than to moral courage.