CHAPTER XI.

ENOCH ARDEN AND THE SEA-POETRY.

ENOCH ARDEN is one of a series of narrative poems by Tennyson, which have to do with ordinary human life in a simple and quiet manner. Some, like Enoch Arden, deal with the whole lifestory of a few persons. Some, like Aylmer's Field and The Gardener's Daughter, tell the story of events in the midst of human life which lead to the misery or happiness of those involved in them. Some, like The Brook or Love and Duty, tell the events of a day in which lovers are reconciled, or part for ever; and some, like Sea Dreams, tell of a sudden crisis coming on the life of men and women and making a erisis in the life of their soul. There are others, like The Sisters, but they may all be grouped as narrative poems written in blank verse, and we may call them idylls of daily life.

They stand apart by their form from the lyric poems which treat of the same human matters, but which naturally confine themselves to moments of life made intense by the passions. Their blank verse is of a special kind. It has a natural freedom and simplicity which is not permissible in heroic blank verse such as the poet used in the Idylls of the King or in the classical poems. Tennyson,

who knew his art, is exceedingly strict about this difference. The blank verse of Enoch Arden is quite distinct, for example, from that used in The Passing of Arthur. A great deal might be said on this matter, but it belongs to a minuter criticism than is aimed at here, and, after all, his readers can hear the difference for themselves, if they possess an ear for poetry. If they do not, no explanation will do them any good.

This narrative poem of simple life is different from that class of poems of which Tennyson may be said to have been the inventor-short dialogues or narration of dialogues in blank verse between three or four well-bred persons on topics of social interest, such as Audley Court, Walking to the Mail, or The Golden Year-sometimes delightful, sometimes too pedestrian, half-serious, half-humorous things, but the humour coarse-grained; slowly-moving clouds of conversation touched here and there with the crimson of love. These things were wholly his own, and new; but the narrative poem of daily life among the poor, like Enoch Arden, was not new. We have it in the tales of Crabbe, and very plainly in that class of Wordsworth's poems of which Michael is the best representative. After Wordsworth, none of the greater poets took up this special subject or used its form of poetry. It is not made by Walter Scott, by Byron, Shelley or Keats. Tennyson, who had a great deal of Wordsworth's simplicity and ruggedness, and also his power of seeing the deep things of human nature in the common life of man, saw the capabilities of this kind of subject, restored it to poetry, and enlarged its range and its variety in a way of which Wordsworth had no conception.

He invented at least half a dozen new forms of it, but the form of which I now write is that in which Enoch Arden is written. It resembles that which Wordsworth used in Michael, but Tennyson began this class of poetry with Dora.

Dora seems absolutely simple, but it is not really so simple as Michael. It is, perhaps, a little too elaborately simple. When I say that Wordsworth's poems of this type are more simple than Dora, I mean that the style Wordsworth uses is more in harmony with the homespun matter. The style of Michael does not draw attention to itself and away from the subject. The style of Dora, in relation to its subject, is concise to a faultso concise that it forces us to think of it as much as of the story. We are driven, in perhaps too critical a mood, to say: "The man who wrote this was not so full of the emotion of his tale as not to consider, somewhat too much, how briefly, with justice to poetry, he could put it. So far, he was losing emotion, and so far he has caused us, by compelling us to think of his conciseness, to lose emotion also."

Moreover, this extreme brevity of representation is quite unlike the way in which life is conducted by the class of which he writes. The men and women of this class live a delayed life. When their doings and sayings are so condensely given as they are in Dora, we are taken out of their atmosphere. Passion, it is true, at its height is brief, but the whole of life is not spent in passion; and there ought in poems of this kind to be something which should draw the movement out, and fill up the time between the outbursts of strong emotion. The slowness in such

lives of the ebb and flow of circumstance ought to be impressed upon us. Even in the rapid rush of the Iliad, and even in heroic life, Homer takes care that there should be some delay. Though the similes he uses are so connected with the main movement by their fitness to the things they illustrate that swiftness is not lost, yet they also give us the sense that there is time to spare. They enable us to linger a little, even in the full tide of battle, as life lingers. Wordsworth hums along in Michael, as Michael himself and his wife hummed slowly on in life. And though the lover of conciseness, when he reads Michael, becomes somewhat indignant with Wordsworth, and though the poet himself seems sometimes dull, yet the story is deliberately told in this way by the artist in order that we may be kept in the mental climate of the shepherd-class of which he writes. Nor, indeed, at the end does he fail in the impression he wants to give. Michael remains a far more impressive thing than Dora. Wordsworth moves more closely in the life of which he speaks, and has lost himself in it, more than Tennyson. The question of style does not occur to him. The style of Michael is formed by the subject itself. I think that Tennyson felt something of what I have said, for it is plain that Enoch Arden is written in quite a different manner from Dora. It is concise, of course; Tennyson was always concise; but Enoch Arden is not over-concise. The action of the piece, and the movement of the feelings of the persons in it, are delayed. There is repetition, there is enough talking over events to make us understand that years and years pass by. The atmosphere of a remote seaside hamlet, and

of its life from day to day, is fully preserved and
felt. We do not think, as we do when we read
Dora, of the style at all. It has come; it is exactly
right; it has grown naturally out of the artist's
profound feeling of his subject. Moreover, the
verse is plain in sound, and takes pains to be
like the talk of daily common life. It never rises
into the heroic march save twice, once in the
description of the tropic isle by day and night;
and again, when Enoch looks in at the window and
sees his home in which he has no share. Even
the similes (in which a poet is allowed to soar a
little) are restrained into simplicity. The things
used in illustration belong to the same level of life
to which the rest of the poem belongs.
I quote
two of them to show what I mean. Annie, wrapt
in sorrow for Enoch's going, does not know of what
he speaks:

Heard and not heard him; as the village girl,
Who sets her pitcher underneath the spring,
Musing on him who used to fill it for her,

Hears and not hears, and lets it overflow.

That is one-a rustic picture and a rustic heart fixed in four lines; and this is another-born out of a sailor's life, and fitted in grave simplicity to the mighty relief of death:

For sure no gladlier does the stranded wreck
See thro' the gray skirts of a lifting squall
The boat that bears the hope of life approach
To save the life despair'd of, than he saw

Death dawning on him, and the close of all.

Such is the atmosphere.

There is not much of natural description in the