He was nobly stirred as a poet
by a poet's death--like Mr Swinburne by the death of Charles
Baudelaire; but neither Shelley nor Mr Swinburne was lamenting
dimidium animae suae, or mourning for a friend
"Dear as the mother to the son,
More than my brothers are to me."
The passion of In Memoriam is personal, is acute, is life-long, and
thus it differs from the other elegies. Moreover, it celebrates a
noble object, and thus is unlike the ambiguous affection, real or
dramatic, which informs the sonnets of Shakespeare. So the poem
stands alone, cloistered; not fiery with indignation, not breaking
into actual prophecy, like Shelley's Adonais; not capable, by reason
even of its meditative metre, of the organ music of Lycidas. Yet it
is not to be reckoned inferior to these because its aim and plan are
other than theirs.
It is far from my purpose to "class" Tennyson, or to dispute about
his relative greatness when compared with Wordsworth or Byron,
Coleridge, Shelley, or Burns. He rated one song of Lovelace above
all his lyrics, and, in fact, could no more have written the
Cavalier's To Althea from Prison than Lovelace could have written the
Morte d'Arthur. "It is not reasonable, it is not fair," says Mr
Harrison, after comparing In Memoriam with Lycidas, "to compare
Tennyson with Milton," and it is not reasonable to compare Tennyson
with any poet whatever. Criticism is not the construction of a class
list.
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