The Cleopatra of "The Dream of Fair Women" is but a ready-made Cleopatra,
but when in the shades of her forest she remembers the sun of the world,
she leaves the page of Tennyson's poorest manner and becomes one with
Shakespeare's queen:-
We drank the Libyan sun to sleep.
Nay, there is never a passage of manner but a great passage of style
rebukes our dislike and recalls our heart again. The dramas, less than
the lyrics, and even less than the "Idylls," are matter for the true
Tennysonian. Their action is, at its liveliest rather vivacious than
vital, and the sentiment, whether in "Becket" or in "Harold," is not only
modern, it is fixed within Tennyson's own peculiar score or so of years.
But that he might have answered, in drama, to a stronger stimulus, a
sharper spur, than his time administered, may be guessed from a few
passages of "Queen Mary," and from the dramatic terror of the arrow in
"Harold." The line has appeared in prophetic fragments in earlier
scenes, and at the moment of doom it is the outcry of unquestionable
tragedy:-
Sanguelac--Sanguelac--the arrow--the arrow!--Away!
Tennyson is also an eminently all-intelligible poet. Those whom he
puzzles or confounds must be a flock with an incalculable liability to go
wide of any road--"down all manner of streets," as the desperate drover
cries in the anecdote. But what are streets, however various, to the
ways of error that a great flock will take in open country--minutely,
individually wrong, making mistakes upon hardly perceptible occasions, or
none--"minute fortuitous variations in any possible direction," as used
to be said in exposition of the Darwinian theory? A vast outlying
public, like that of Tennyson, may make you as many blunders as it has
heads; but the accurate clear poet proved his meaning to all accurate
perceptions.
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