Daily globe. [volume] (St. Paul, Minn.) 1878-1884, 1882-11-18
Tennyson's Latest Failure.

TennysOn's Latest Failure.
Brooklyn Eagle.
Ambition and gray hairs are not in har
mony. The hoary head is the crown Of
glory, not the signal of attack. The ulti
mate laurel becomes it better than the
shining locks of youth. When, therefore
! we see hero who has already taken his
seat among the immortals, bidding fare
we'll to repose and putting on his harness
in untried fields, we feel q presentiment o.
failure and pang of regret. The pleas
ures Of old age are retrospective to the
normal mind, and Cicero enjoyed them in
fancy though his life and his body like
wise were cut short before he could add
the sum of his experiences. It would be
well for Alfred Tennysen had he observed
at the close of his illustrious life that un-
usual discretion he exhibited at its be- in
ming and confined to obscurity the later
poems which have flowed fitfully from his
hating pen, as for many years he con-
cealed the ma or theme of his early ''Gol-
den Supper" The fires of Imagination
and genius have burned themselves to an
ember, and what we recognize in him now
adays is but the flicker of the dying flame.
He has lapsed into iteration. Virgil. like
Milton, is a name to resound for ages when
he has to say something about him.
But while the world of letters will gladly
spare criticism of Mr.. Tennyson's postum
nous poems, for such indeed they are, and
| failing to condemn, will but feebly and
compassionately applaud, the outer world
OF Phlllsua has no computations. The IA
tuity of age was never more sadly illus
trated than by the laureate's appeal from
the induigent judgment'of his cultus to the
Caesar of popular arbitration. He has won
imperishable renown by his philosophy no
less than the music of his numbers; he
should have been content. But he has not
escaped the maiady which seems to inlet
most writer's early i'll youth, the yearning
to write a successful drama. This painful
| disorder has at least one characteristic IL
common with eruptive fevers, that age only
assures increased virulence Of the attack
| Alfred Tennyson has written several plays,
each one less actable than its predecessor.
''Queen Mary" by dint of much carpenter
| work by theatrical mechanic managed to
obtain wide hearing. Harold was a
failure. Its successor was mildly ignored.
All Henry Irving's gnarled and crooked
|
full blank verse dramatic studies. Fatuous
again, the laureate seemed to think that
| failure lay in the only redeeming quality
| they 70 sessed. He summary exercised
| it III his latest experiment. He wrote a
| dismal story of perfdy and rung in prose,
| and called it the promise of May" Sad,
humiliating fustian it proved 20 be on Sat-
urday night, as the cable shows. The cul-
fin, re in, cho
Caesar i'll the gallery laughed himself
hoarse over the woes of the unchaste hero
inc, and croaked its contempt for the roae's
mock philosophy in tones of exhaustion
that could not be stimulated with the raci {.
est inconsequence and absurdity. The
premier of England and the laureate's
daughter in the box doubtless felt grief
enough to escape infection by. the
sounding mirth, but they were exceptions
to the rule, unless the dispatches are mis-
construed.
Two elements we're surely at work to
produce this prodigious humiliation of a
| great poet. One is the choice of theme;
the other the incapacity of the writer to
work with dramatic tools. The story of
| the promise of May" is quite as revolt
ing as anything that Sardou or Feuillet or
gentlemen of their school have offered to
the people of Paris or New York. The
| poet thought in dealing with heroic charac-
tiers he had aimed too high. He lowered
his point and lowered it too far. What art
| Or delicacy of treatment can give beauty to
the undoing of virtue? Yet the protago-
mist of the ''Promise of May" carries po-
! tential ruin into every nook and corner of
the scene. Virtue is but negative in this
| curious compound, and even unnatural vice
is proclaimed as motive mistaken by its
exemplar as partial restitution for
wrong. It is beastly theme, no less, and
the world, recovering from its first shock
of establishment, may feel grateful that the
muses. withheld their benediction from its
enlargement.
But generalizing upon Tennyson's dra-
matte effects and cheerfully forgetting this
wonderful relaxation of idealism, it is
plain that the poet does not possess the es-
sential dramatic quality of construction.
Lay beside all his so-called dramatic works
any authentic edition of the play of all
plays, Macbeth" Observe this one essen
tial point: Shakespeare never describes
the objective; he projects it before the au-
ditor. True, the murder of Duncan is not
enacted in view of the audience, and that
after it Macbeth pours out his horror of
the ''silver skin laced with the golden
blood"-a rather forced and second rate
metaphor. by the way-but this is not de-
scription of the murder; this is a revala-
ton of state of mind. Then the knock
ing at the door; that transcendant touch
of the almighty hand of genius tells in
the echoes through the hall the awful story
which Mr.. Tennyson would have described
with great accuracy and fidelity. In ''Har-
old'' the final combat which precipitates
the catastrophe is spoken; in Macbeth
the crime stained monarch meets his doom
at the hands of his predestined execution
er before the very eyes. In 'Queen Mary
the entry of Lady Jane Grey into London
an essentially dramatic constituent, is re.
lated with here and there salient point
put into an epigram. Banquo shakes his
CORY locks before the audience just as tine
Ghost in Hamlet" speaks the prologue OF
the action. Macbeth describes the dagge,
he sees before him, because it is subject
i've creation, a vision of blood produced
not by objective reality of presence
through the senses, but by immateriai in
fuences upon the consciousness. The
dagger was in the mind, not in the air, anG
its existence demanded announcement
But it will be seen that the rule of the dra-
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