The Sun.
London, England, 1868-03-11 00:00:00

BYRON AND TENNYSOIV.

To justify to his own judgment the opinion
lie may have formed of a faVourite poem or
picture is the critic's greatest delight, and the
purest motive of oritieizsm. Arai IVlll li tliu de-
light of a first impression, or of an early pre-
dilection is confirmed by critical study, when
the poem which fascinated youthful fancy satis-
fies maturer judgment, it goes far to show that
the poet fulfills the conditions of a classic
author. From some such a feeling it is that
we desire to justify to ourselves the predi-
lection which we have always felt for Tenny-
son over Byron. Not that either Tennyson or
Byron is a poet of the highest order. Theirs
is not the creative genius which peoples an
ideal world with beings that live in our minds
and haunt our memories. Byron's characters
are simply reproductions of particular phases
of his own mind ; they do not live and breathe
like the heroes of Homer ; they do not speak
and suffer visibly ; theirs is not the rage of
Achilles, not the jealousy of Medea, not the
passionate agony of Antigone. We cannot
picture Byron's characters apart from Byron.
In them we see only his own passions inten-
sified by a fervid, if not fevered, imagination.
We carry away with us nothing but Byron
under various phases, often unnatural, often
distorted, and now and then surrounded with
something like the blue lights of the stage.
Neither he nor Tennyson could create a Bea-
trice for us to follow with reverential love to
the very gates of heaven, and feel so absorbed
in her presence as to forget even the awful
nearness of God. Don Juan is no Lear, or
Othello, or Faust with Satanic suggestions and
cold, cynical hate, but merely Byron, with a
glowing imagination debauched, hovering be-
tween the sublime and the degraded.
His nearest approach to creative power is
his Satan in " Cain." But it is not fair to
judge Byron by a comparison with an order of
poets to which he does not belong. He, like
Tennyson, is a subjective poet; and, like Ten-
nyson, he fails in dramatic creative power—
the highest and noblest natural gift which
God has given to the mind of man. The praise
which Mr. Gladstone has lately lavished on
Scott, if high, is not altogether extravagant;
certainly, in the best of his novels, Scott has
displayed far higher creative power than Byron
in any of his poems.
His posterity is now passing a far different
judgment on Byron from that of his contem-
poraries ; we are being liberated at last from
the Byronic rage, and it is no longer a literary
heresy to name Tennyson in the same breath
with Byron. They who , were bred up under
the influence of the Byronic school or hold to
the traditions prevalent in their youth, still
steadily refuse to see in Tennyson a purity
of imagination and a grandeur of thought never
found in the poetry of Byron. Tennyson is
many-sided, and has a poet's eye for every
simple thing that is beautiful in nature, or ap-
peals by sympathy or remote allusion to the
heart of man. In him there is a wider sym-
pathy than in Byron, both with nature in its
more hidden ways and with man in his aspi-
rations after higher things, in the yearning
of his soul in the midst of the twilight
or eclipse of faith for light and knowledge.
He is of the age both in its scepticism and in
its unformulated desire for a nobler life. In
the " Two Voices," and in the " in Memoriam"
—the most plaintive and touching poem in our
language—Tennyson
gives voice to the yearn-
ings and pictures the struggle of the better
spirit of the age both against its own weak-
ness and incredulity, and against the strain
put upon it by the unbelief which is seeking
for supremacy over the mind, not of England
only, but of Christendom. Tennyson, in this,
too, infinitely superior in poetic breadth to
Byron, expresses in his poems the universal
heart as well as the individual. He speaks, and
we hear the voice of the age ; he tells us what
his fellow-men in their secret hearts feel, or
hope, or suffer, or doubt.
Byron's intellectual narrowness soon op-
presses and wearies the mind. He is for ever
harping on one string, and though love is the
deepest of the human passions, and with love
are ever usooiated disappointment and sorrow,
_