‘Finest Verbalism’

Most critics of Tennyson come sooner or later (and better sooner than later) to the matter of Tennysonian language, the extraordinarily sumptuous, sheerly mellifluous noise of it: his early critics called it his ‘luxuriance’; and many then, and since, have regarded it mistrustfully. Matthew Arnold, much taken but not taken in, discerned the luxuriance most clearly:

Such lines (Arnold goes on to give more) exemplify a poetic disposition towards the ‘heightened and elaborate’, which Arnold considered a far lesser thing than chaste Homer's ‘natural thoughts in natural words’. Walter Bagehot also thought Tennyson's art unnaturally ‘ornate’, similarly evasive of the actual fact: ‘Nothing is described as it is, everything has about it an atmosphere of something else.’ R. H. Horne too saw, or rather heard, ‘a poetical dialect’, the sheer sound of which was somehow its own self-enchanting end – ‘Nay, he will write you a poem with nothing in it except music, and as if its music were everything, it shall charm your soul’ (CH 285, 155). No wonder perhaps that by 1930, in Seven Types of Ambiguity, William Empson should appear so bored by Tennyson's ‘simple and laborious cult of onomatopoeia’, and no more drawn to the idea, equally Tennysonian, ‘that sounds are valuable in themselves’. Some years later, he nicely exemplified the sort of problem to which that idea might give rise by quoting Tennyson's line ‘Far-folded mists, and gleaming halls of morn’ – where ‘halls’ (as Empson thought) had a disastrous and inadvertent cosiness, making you think of the men playing billiards in the entrance hall of the big house: ‘The word is only there for the vowel sound and the line feels mouldy.’