Who that has ever studied the creations of that immortal dramatist has not them all, from high to low, treasured within his inner being as vividly as any other of his absent acquaintances, whom he has met in society, to whom he has been formally introduced, with whom he has eaten, drank, laughed, wept, walked, and conversed? Has not that remarkable genius transgressed even the imitative faculty--imitative, that is, of all the original creative energy that is known--produced original creations, and peopled the preter- rather than supernatural with beings which have no known existence, but whom nevertheless he surrounds with a distinct verisimilitude which ensures them easy admission into our minds and hearts, which presents them to our senses as concrete beings with as much positiveness, and even as clearly defined individuality, as if they were solid creatures of flesh and bone, and which makes us feel that if such beings did really exist, they would be none other than precisely those he has represented?
Of such sort, we take it, is the highest, or dramatic, poetry. And of it there is a manifest deficiency in this work, which its author terms, indeed, a drama, but which is in fact a tragedy.
Mr. Tennyson has not enough of the divine afflatus to write tragedy. If he has not sufficient love of the beautiful in inanimate nature for his soul to echo to it, and his heart to throb with the sense of it, with the rapidity of an intuition, so as to make unattainable to him the highest excellence in lyric poetry, how much more out of his reach must be a first rank in the tragic drama; where, if anywhere, an intuition of the beautiful amounting to an inspiration is demanded in that supreme creation of God which, as the consummation of his “work” and word, he has embodied in his own substance! In that profound and intuitive perception of the workings of man’s inner being, of the passions, emotions, feelings, appetites, their action and reaction, ebb and flow; of the struggle of the two natures, its infinite variety and play of life, under all conceivable conditions and vicissitudes, with much more than can be detailed here included in these, Mr. Tennyson is strikingly deficient.