Take a few
typical instances. Coleridge lost the poetical gift altogether when he
left his youth behind; Wordsworth wrote all his best poetry in a few
early years; Milton lost his pure lyric gift. But the most salient
instance of all is Tennyson; in the two earliest volumes there is a
perfectly novel charm, a grace, a daring which he lost in later life.
He became solemn, mannerised, conscious of responsibility. Sometimes,
as in some of the lyrics of _Maud_, he had a flash of the old spirit.
But compare the _Idylls of the King_, for all their dignity and lavish
art, their sweet cadences, their mellifluous flow, with the early
fragment in the same manner, the _Morte d'Arthur_, and you become aware
that some exquisite haunted quality has slipped away from the later
work which made the _Morte d'Arthur_ one of the most perfect poems of
the century. The _Morte d'Arthur_ is seen, the _Idylls_ are laboriously
imagined. The _Idylls_, again, are full of an everyday morality--the
praise of civic virtues, the evolution of types--and how tiresome they
thus become! but in the _Morte d'Arthur_ there is only a prophetic
mysticism, which is all the more noble because it is so remote from
common things.
With Browning it is the same in a certain degree; there is a charm
about _Pauline_, for all its immaturity, which creates an
irrepressible, uncalculating mood of undefined longing, utterly absent
from his latest work.
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