The Works of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Poet Laureate. Edition, Macmillan, 1884. Collected 1 Recollections of the Arabian Nights, st. 1. Collected Edition, Ibid. 20 The Charge of the Light Brigade. 21 Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington, st. 6. Ibid. 22 In Memoriam, 122. Ibid. 23 Ibid., 54 and 55. Ibid. 24 Ibid., 91 and 93. Ibid. 25 Life of Lord Tennyson by his Son, vol. i, pp. 124-5. 26 The Poet. Collected Edition. 27 The Flowers (The Princess and Other Poems). Ibid. UNCLASSED INSPIRATION always is unexpected; a surprise, I should suppose, to the poet, as it is to his readers. The unexpectedness, as he and they suddenly find themselves on wings borne aloft into the empyrean of fancy, is a chief virtue of great verse. At the same time, we have a positive right to look for it in accepted poets, in the elect. Inspiration is their prerogative, and the privilege of their public. Elsewhere the element of chance comes in. The possibility of inspiration belongs to all bodies of poetry, ancient and modern, but rather specially, I should say, to English. When we open a volume with which, old or new, we have had no previous acquaintance, we never can be sure that we shall not light upon, not indeed an inspired poet, but an inspired poem. Inspiration is like the wind; it bloweth where it listeth. A Church truth, it has been laid down, must be able to assert for itself that it is' quod semper, quod ab omnibus, quod ubique, creditum est'. Much the same in the way of inspiration is required of a claimant to the laurel of poet. He is not obliged to prove that all he has written has been inspired. Very few, if any, could abide such a test; certainly not Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron; not Shakespeare himself. The necessity is that the singer from time to time has been. For the waifs and strays the condition is reversed. Their readers have to feel that, however it may have been with the poet, inspiration is in the poetry. That strange quality which separates true poetry from all else has to be, and is, in it. We cannot define it; we can only explain it by its effects. It has, we know, at its birth, moved, perhaps transformed, the author. We feel that, for the moment, it has transformed us. No credentials are wanted, no illustrious name. Suddenly the words catch fire, and our souls with them. The sense of mastery, of transport, of a kind of magic, is always the same. The occasion, the circumstances, the paternity and affinities of the visitant, when we try to account for its presence, differ as widely as Spenser from Pope, or Wordsworth from Byron. Sometimes the poet had constantly been in the author of such verse, but asleep, torpid. A shock had awakened him; it spent its force; and he sank back into lethargy or repose. Sometimes the piece represents the springtide of modest powers, a spasm of concentration of their essence, unintelligible to their owner. The writer's dominant impulse may have been other altogether than the curiosity of fancy. It may have been worldly ambition, or the enthusiasm of piety. A lever, a courser, has been sought to accomplish the craving of the ruling passion, and for the instrument verse has been requisitioned. Pure imagination's rival, rhetoric itself, will ever and anon force open in its flood a sealed well of pathos, heartache. Straightway we feel ourselves rapt from chill admiration into happy sympathy. Sometimes it is all an accident. A vision, a ghost, has stumbled upon a stranger lodged in the haunted room. Sometimes it simply has been that inspiration has been wandering after its manner in search of a home. Looking about for rest to the soles of its feet, it has taken refuge with no better than a versifier. Poetry, from the time of its Elizabethan revival for some three-quarters of a century onwards, was in the air. A larger life had opened for Englishmen, freedom of soul, new ambitions, an expanse of art, learning, luxury. They had grown into lords to fit a larger world. A language for such a period was wanting; and many, scarcely comprehending the change in their utterance, found themselves poets. They sang because they could not help it, and were inclined to be ashamed of the impulse. It seldom occurred to them to claim property in their strains. Never, though they might court popular favour from the stage, did it enter their minds to adopt minstrelsy as their vocation. In such a period one who, had he chosen to abandon other pursuits, could conceivably have qualified as a poet professed, for future generations, might write occasional verse comparable with that by recognized masters of the craft. The Lie, commonly, though not universally, attributed to Ralegh, is a succession of lightning flashes: Say to the Court, it glows And shines like rotten wood; What's good, and doth no good; If Church and Court reply, Then give them both the lie.1 No contemporary eulogy on Sidney surpasses his epitaph: Of fortune's gifts for wealth that still shall dure; His sonnet, Methought I saw the grave where Laura lay, worthily introduced the Faerie Queene. His appeal in the Pilgrimage from his persecutors to Heaven is inspired, if ever verse was: Blood must be my body's balmer; No other balm will there be given; Travelleth towards the land of heaven; Over the silver mountains, Where spring the nectar fountains ; The bowl of bliss; And drink mine everlasting fill Then by that happy blissful day, To quench their thirst At those clear wells Where sweetness dwells. From thence to heaven's bribeless hall Against our souls black verdicts give, Christ pleads His death, and then we live.3 For sweet courtliness, if not for scientific accuracy, almost as much might be said of Wotton's address to the hapless Winter Queen : VOL. II You meaner beauties of the night, That poorly satisfy our eyes More by your number than your light, By your pure purple mantles known As if the spring were all your own; Ꮓ |