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

BYRON AND TENNYSON.

To justify to his own judgment the opinion
he may have formed of a favourite poem or
picture is the critic's greatest delight, and the
purest motive of criticism. And when the 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 straggle 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 eyer MociAted disappvaltulent and orrow,

yet it is not the only passion of the human
heart, nor the only sorrow which afflicts the
soul. The soul has higher aspirations than
earthly love ever dreams of ; has conflicts and
wrestlings ; has hours of darkness and of light
—the aptest and the noblest theme for a poet
with a spiritual eye to show forth to the grosser
vision of the world. None, indeed, can dispute
the occasional grandeur of Byron's verse ; its
force and flow; its voluptuous passion; its
gleams of light as of a spirit which had erred
from its course; but, at the same time, we must
confess that, besides its intellectual poVerty and
its narrow unsympathetic character, Byron's
poetry, when it aims at passion, not seldom
sinks into mere bathos ; he too often and too
freely indulges in the grand and gloomy, until
at times his language more than borders on
the bombastic. is imagination did not seize
upon what was highest and noblest in the spirit
of the age, or even what was most charac-
teristic or nearest to its heart, but upon what
was diseased, and it revelled in the profa-
nation of the highest prerogatives of poetry.
We are not speaking of Byron's character
as a man—perhaps as much sinned against
as sinning—but of the character of his poetry,
and who shall say that there is not a blight
upon it? The poet, like a tiger in his narrow
cage, walks to and fro in an unwholesome
frenzy. We watch with pain the monotony of
is movements ; we listen with impatience to
his perpetual wail, though every now and then
we are startled into admiration at the noble
rage of the magnificent and tortured beast.
If Tennyson is no Titan of Homeric force,
neither is lie a mere polisher of beautiful peb-
bles in a crystal stream. The exquisite finisk'
and crystal clearness of his melodious verse
are but the outward and fitting expression of
his pure and delicate imagination. With the
loftiness of Wordsworth's imagination he com-
bines a more varied play of fancy. Like Words-
worth, he is familiar with nature in all its
moods. Byron delighted with what was grand,
or awful, or desolate in nature. Tennyson
shows a far deeper familiarity with its hidden
and subtle ways and its remoter influences.
It is this deeper communing which gives such
an inexpressible charm and beauty to so much
of Tennyson's poetry. His passionate yearn-
ings are for something higher and better than
the world, in spite of his intense sympathy
with its eager and onward life, can give him.
fie loves " knowledge," and is proud of the
progress of his age, but he longs for " wisdom."
" Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers."

This is the complaint of the earliest and
most passionate of his poems, " Locksley
Hall," and in one of his latest and most pro-
found, the same idea recurs. If Byron's ima-
gination was of the " earth earthy," Tenny-
son's, did he know Heaven, did he see, that is
to say, the great supernatural world with the
eye of faith as Dante did, or as, in our own day,
the author of the " Dream of Gerontius," his
imagination might have risen in a nobler and
higher flight than any he has yet compassed.
—TVestininster Gazette.

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- • • ...... March 11

The total receipts of wheat in Great Britain from
the United States last year were 4,188,013 cwt., as
compared with 1,177,618 in 1865, and 635,239 in 1866.
By a grand effort at the close of the year, the United
States nearly brought up its wheat deliveries to
Great Britain in 1867 to a level with those made
by Prussia; but they were still immensely below tho
supplies of wheat received from Russia. The annexed
statement shows the deliveries of wheat made by the
United States to Great Britain during the ten years
ending 1867 inclusive :-1858, 2,576,791 cwt.; 1859,
159,926 cwt. ; 1860, 6,497,335 cwt. ; 1861, 10,866,891
cwt. ; 1862, 16,140,670 cwt. ; 1863, 8,704,401 cwt ; 1864,
7,895,915 cwt.; 1865, 1,117,618 cwt.; and 1867, 4,188,913
cwt. The diminution in 1865 and 1866 is attribuiablo to
the exhausting effects of the conflict between the North
and the South.

Churchmen in England will be interested in learn-
ing the result of the latest statistics of the Church in the
United States. There are now 34 dioceses, 41 bishops (" as-
sistant bishops" being appointed in too many sees), 2,550
priests and deacons, 2,370 parishes, 178,102 communicants,
19,897 Sunday-school teachers, 180,152 Sunday scholars.
These statistics aro exclusive of the diocese of California,
and Kansas and of missionary jurisdiction.
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