Alfred Tennyson Part 16

In 1884, after this voyage, with its royal functions and celebrations at Copenhagen, a peerage was offered to the poet. He "did not want to alter his plain Mr," and he must have known that, whether he accepted or refused, the chorus of blame would be louder than that of applause. Scott had desired "such grinning honour as Sir Walter hath"; the t.i.tle went well with the old name, and pleased his love of old times. Tennyson had been blamed "by literary men" for thrice evading a baronetcy, and he did not think that a peerage would make smooth the lives of his descendants. But he concluded, "Why should I be selfish and not suffer an honour (as Gladstone says) to be done to literature in my name?" Politically, he thought that the Upper House, while it lasts, partly supplied the place of the American "referendum." He voted in July 1884 for the extension of the franchise, and in November stated his views to Mr Gladstone in verse.

In prose he wrote to Mr Gladstone, "I have a strong conviction that the more simple the dealings of men with men, as well as of man with man, are--the better," a sentiment which, perhaps, did not always prevail with his friend. The poet's reflections on the horror of Gordon's death are not recorded. He introduced the idea of the Gordon Home for Boys, and later supported it by a letter, "Have we forgotten Gordon?" to the Daily Telegraph. They who cannot forget Gordon must always be grateful to Tennyson for providing this opportunity of honouring the greatest of an ill.u.s.trious clan, and of helping, in their degree, a scheme which was dear to the heroic leader.

The poet, very naturally, was most averse to personal appearance in public matters. Mankind is so fashioned that the advice of a poet is always regarded as unpractical, and is even apt to injure the cause which he advocates. Happily there cannot be two opinions about the right way of honouring Gordon. Tennyson's poem, The Fleet, was also in harmony with the general sentiment.

In the last month of 1884 Becket was published. The theme of Fair Rosamund had appealed to the poet in youth, and he had written part of a lyric which he judiciously left unpublished. It is given in his Biography. In 1877 he had visited Canterbury, and had traced the steps of Becket to his place of slaughter in the Cathedral. The poem was printed in 1879, but not published till seven years later. In 1879 Sir Henry Irving had thought the play too costly to be produced with more than a succes d'estime; but in 1891 he put it on the stage, where it proved the most successful of modern poetic dramas. As published it is, obviously, far too long for public performance. It is not easy to understand why dramatic poets always make their works so much too long. The drama seems, by its very nature, to have a limit almost as distinct as the limit of the sonnet. It is easy to calculate how long a play for the stage ought to be, and we might think that a poet would find the natural limit serviceable to his art, for it inculcates selection, conciseness, and concentration.

But despite these advantages of the natural form of the drama, modern poets, at least, constantly overflow their banks. The author ruit profusus, and the manager has to reduce the piece to feasible proportions, such as it ought to have a.s.sumed from the first.

Becket has been highly praised by Sir Henry Irving himself, for its "moments of pa.s.sion and pathos, . . . which, when they exist, atone to an audience for the endurance of long acts." But why should the audience have such long acts to endure? The reader, one fears, is apt to use his privilege of skipping. The long speeches of Walter Map and the immense period of Margery tempt the student to exercise his agility. A "chronicle play" has the privilege of wandering, but Becket wanders too far and too long. The political details of the quarrel between Church and State, with its domestic and international complexities, are apt to fatigue the attention. Inevitable and insoluble as the situation was, neither protagonist is entirely sympathetic, whether in the play or in history. The struggle in Becket between his love of the king and his duty to the Church (or what he takes to be his duty) is n.o.bly presented, and is truly dramatic, while there is grotesque and terrible relief in the banquet of the Beggars. In the scene of the a.s.sa.s.sination the poet "never stoops his wing," and there are pa.s.sages of tender pathos between Henry and Rosamund, while Becket's keen memories of his early days, just before his death, are moving.

"Becket. I once was out with Henry in the days When Henry loved me, and we came upon A wild-fowl sitting on her nest, so still I reach'd my hand and touch'd; she did not stir; The snow had frozen round her, and she sat Stone-dead upon a heap of ice-cold eggs.

Look! how this love, this mother, runs thro' all The world G.o.d made--even the beast--the bird!

John of Salisbury. Ay, still a lover of the beast and bird?

But these arm'd men--will you not hide yourself?

Perchance the fierce De Brocs from Saltwood Castle, To a.s.sail our Holy Mother lest she brood Too long o'er this hard egg, the world, and send Her whole heart's heat into it, till it break Into young angels. Pray you, hide yourself.

Becket. There was a little fair-hair'd Norman maid Lived in my mother's house: if Rosamund is The world's rose, as her name imports her--she Was the world's lily.

John of Salisbury. Ay, and what of her?

Becket. She died of leprosy."

But the part of Rosamund, her innocent ignorance especially, is not very readily intelligible, not quite persuasive, and there is almost a touch of the burlesque in her unexpected appearance as a monk. To weave that old and famous story of love into the terribly complex political intrigue was a task almost too great. The character of Eleanor is perhaps more successfully drawn in the Prologue than in the scene where she offers the choice of the dagger or the bowl, and is interrupted, in a startlingly unexpected manner, by the Archbishop himself. The opportunities for scenic effects are magnificent throughout, and must have contributed greatly to the success on the stage. Still one cannot but regard the published Becket as rather the marble from which the statue may be hewn than as the statue itself. There are fine scenes, powerful and masterly drawing of character in Henry, Eleanor, and Becket, but there is a want of concentration, due, perhaps, to the long period of time covered by the action. So, at least, it seems to a reader who has admitted his sense of incompetency in the dramatic region. The acuteness of the poet's power of historical intuition was attested by Mr J. R. Green and Mr Bryce. "One cannot imagine," said Mr Bryce, "a more vivid, a more perfectly faithful picture than it gives both of Henry and Thomas." Tennyson's portraits of these two "go beyond and perfect history." The poet's sympathy ought, perhaps, to have been, if not with the false and ruffianly Henry, at least with Henry's side of the question. For Tennyson had made Harold leave

"To England My legacy of war against the Pope From child to child, from Pope to Pope, from age to age, Till the sea wash her level with her sh.o.r.es, Or till the Pope be Christ's."

CHAPTER IX.--LAST YEARS.

The end of 1884 saw the publication of Tiresias and other Poems, dedicated to "My good friend, Robert Browning," and opening with the beautiful verses to one who never was Mr Browning's friend, Edward FitzGerald. The volume is rich in the best examples of Tennyson's later work. Tiresias, the monologue of the aged seer, blinded by excess of light when he beheld Athene unveiled, and under the curse of Ca.s.sandra, is worthy of the author who, in youth, wrote OEnone and Ulysses. Possibly the verses reflect Tennyson's own sense of public indifference to the voice of the poet and the seer. But they are of much earlier date than the year of publication:-

"For when the crowd would roar For blood, for war, whose issue was their doom, To cast wise words among the mult.i.tude Was flinging fruit to lions; nor, in hours Of civil outbreak, when I knew the twain Would each waste each, and bring on both the yoke Of stronger states, was mine the voice to curb The madness of our cities and their kings.

Who ever turn'd upon his heel to hear My warning that the tyranny of one Was prelude to the tyranny of all?

My counsel that the tyranny of all Led backward to the tyranny of one?

This power hath work'd no good to aught that lives."

The conclusion was a favourite with the author, and his blank verse never reached a higher strain:-

"But for me, I would that I were gather'd to my rest, And mingled with the famous kings of old, On whom about their ocean-islets flash The faces of the G.o.ds--the wise man's word, Here trampled by the populace underfoot, There crown'd with worship--and these eyes will find The men I knew, and watch the chariot whirl About the goal again, and hunters race The shadowy lion, and the warrior-kings, In height and prowess more than human, strive Again for glory, while the golden lyre Is ever sounding in heroic ears Heroic hymns, and every way the vales Wind, clouded with the grateful incense-fume Of those who mix all odour to the G.o.ds On one far height in one far-shining fire."

Then follows the pathetic piece on FitzGerald's death, and the prayer, not unfulfilled -

"That, when I from hence Shall fade with him into the unknown, My close of earth's experience May prove as peaceful as his own."

The Ancient Sage, with its lyric interludes, is one of Tennyson's meditations on the mystery of the world and of existence. Like the poet himself, the Sage finds a gleam of light and hope in his own subjective experiences of some unspeakable condition, already recorded in In Memoriam. The topic was one on which he seems to have spoken to his friends with freedom:-

"And more, my son! for more than once when I Sat all alone, revolving in myself The word that is the symbol of myself, The mortal limit of the Self was loosed, And past into the Nameless, as a cloud Melts into Heaven. I touch'd my limbs, the limbs Were strange not mine--and yet no shade of doubt, But utter clearness, and thro' loss of Self The gain of such large life as match'd with ours Were Sun to spark--unshadowable in words, Themselves but shadows of a shadow-world."

The poet's habit of

"Revolving in myself The word that is the symbol of myself" -

that is, of dwelling on the sound of his own name, was familiar to the Arabs. M. Lefebure has drawn my attention to a pa.s.sage in the works of a mediaeval Arab philosopher, Ibn Khaldoun: {17} "To arrive at the highest degree of inspiration of which he is capable, the diviner should have recourse to the use of certain phrases marked by a peculiar cadence and parallelism. Thus he emanc.i.p.ates his mind from the influence of the senses, and is enabled to attain an imperfect contact with the spiritual world." Ibn Khaldoun regards the "contact" as extremely "imperfect." He describes similar efforts made by concentrating the gaze on a mirror, a bowl of water, or the like. Tennyson was doubtless unaware that he had stumbled accidentally on a method of "ancient sages." Psychologists will explain his experience by the word "dissociation." It is not everybody, however, who can thus dissociate himself. The temperament of genius has often been subject to such influence, as M. Lefebure has shown in the modern instances of George Sand and Alfred de Musset: we might add Sh.e.l.ley, Goethe, and even Scott.

The poet's versatility was displayed in the appearance with these records of "weird seizures", of the Irish dialect piece To-morrow, the popular Spinster's Sweet-Arts, and the Locksley Hall Sixty Years After. The old fire of the versification is unabated, but the hero has relapsed on the gloom of the hero of Maud. He represents himself, of course, not Tennyson, or only one of the moods of Tennyson, which were sometimes black enough. A very different mood chants the Charge of the Heavy Brigade, and speaks of

"Green Suss.e.x fading into blue With one gray glimpse of sea."

The lines To Virgil were written at the request of the Mantuans, by the most Virgilian of all the successors of the

"Wielder of the stateliest measure ever moulded by the lips of man."

Never was Tennyson more Virgilian than in this unmatched panegyric, the sum and flower of criticism of that

"Golden branch amid the shadows, kings and realms that pa.s.s to rise no more."

Hardly less admirable is the tribute to Catullus, and the old poet is young again in the bird-song of Early Spring. The lines on Poets and their Bibliographies, with The Dead Prophet, express Tennyson's lifelong abhorrence of the critics and biographers, whose joy is in the futile and the unimportant, in personal gossip and the sweepings of the studio, the salvage of the wastepaper basket. The Prefatory Poem to my Brother's Sonnets is not only touching in itself, but proves that the poet can "turn to favour and to prettiness" such an affliction as the ruinous summer of 1879.

The year 1880 brought deeper distress in the death of the poet's son Lionel, whose illness, begun in India, ended fatally in the Red Sea.

The interest of the following years was mainly domestic. The poet's health, hitherto robust, was somewhat impaired in 1888, but his vivid interest in affairs and in letters was unabated. He consoled himself with Virgil, Keats, Wordsworth, Gibbon, Euripides, and Mr Leaf's speculations on the composite nature of the Iliad, in which Coleridge, perhaps alone among poets, believed. "You know," said Tennyson to Mr Leaf; "I never liked that theory of yours about the many poets." It would be at least as easy to prove that there were many authors of Ivanhoe, or perhaps it would be a good deal more easy. However, he admitted that three lines which occur both in the Eighth and the Sixteenth Books of the Iliad are more appropriate in the later book. Similar examples might be found in his own poems.

He still wrote, in the intervals of a malady which brought him "as near death as a man could be without dying." He was an example of the great physical strength which, on the whole, seems usually to accompany great mental power. The strength may be dissipated by pa.s.sion, or by undue labour, as in cases easily recalled to memory, but neither cause had impaired the vigour of Tennyson. Like Goethe, he lived out all his life; and his eightieth birthday was cheered both by public and private expressions of reverence and affection.

Of Tennyson's last three years on earth we may think, in his own words, that his

"Life's latest eve endured Nor settled into hueless grey."

Nature was as dear to him and as inspiring as of old; men and affairs and letters were not slurred by his intact and energetic mind. His Demeter and other Poems, with the dedication to Lord Dufferin, appeared in the December of the year. The dedication was the lament for the dead son and the salutation to the Viceroy of India, a piece of resigned and manly regret. The Demeter and Persephone is a modern and tender study of the theme of the most beautiful Homeric Hymn.

The ancient poet had no such thought of the restored Persephone as that which impels Tennyson to describe her