Alfred Tennyson Part 2

"You that do profess to teach And teach us nothing, feeding not the heart."

The universities, in fact, teach a good deal of that which can be learned, but the best things cannot be taught. The universities give men leisure, books, and companionship, to learn for themselves. All tutors cannot be, and at that time few dreamed of being, men like Jowett and T. H. Green, Gamaliels at whose feet undergraduates sat with enthusiasm, "did EAGERLY frequent," like Omar Khayyam. In later years Tennyson found closer relations between dons and undergraduates, and recorded his affection for his university. She had supplied him with such companionship as is rare, and permitted him to "catch the blossom of the flying terms," even if tutors and lecturers were creatures of routine, terriblement enfonces dans la matiere, like the sire of Madelon and Cathos, that honourable citizen.

Tennyson just missed, by going down, a visit of Wordsworth to Cambridge. The old enthusiast of revolution was justifying pa.s.sive obedience: thirty years had turned the almost Jacobin into an almost Jacobite. Such is the triumph of time. In the summer of 1830 Tennyson, with Hallam, visited the Pyrenees. The purpose was political--to aid some Spanish rebels. The fruit is seen in OEnone and Mariana in the South.

In March 1831 Tennyson lost his father. "He slept in the dead man's bed, earnestly desiring to see his ghost, but no ghost came." "You see," he said, "ghosts do not generally come to imaginative people;"

a remark very true, though ghosts are attributed to "imagination."

Whatever causes these phantasms, it is not the kind of phantasia which is consciously exercised by the poet. Coleridge had seen far too many ghosts to believe in them; and Coleridge and Donne apart, with the hallucinations of Goethe and Sh.e.l.ley, who met themselves, what poet ever did "see a ghost"? One who saw Tennyson as he wandered alone at this period called him "a mysterious being, seemingly lifted high above other mortals, and having a power of intercourse with the spirit world not granted to others." But it was the world of the poet, not of the "medium."

The Tennysons stayed on at the parsonage for six years. But, antic.i.p.ating their removal, Arthur Hallam in 1831 dealt in prophecy about the identification in the district of places in his friend's poems--"critic after critic will trace the wanderings of the brook,"

as,--in fact, critic after critic has done. Tennyson disliked--these "localisers." The poet's walks were shared by Arthur Hallam, then affianced to his sister Emily.

CHAPTER II.--POEMS OF 1831-1833.

By 1832 most of the poems of Tennyson's second volume were circulating in MS. among his friends, and no poet ever had friends more encouraging. Perhaps bards of to-day do not find an eagerness among their acquaintance for effusions in ma.n.u.script, or in proof- sheets. The charmed volume appeared at the end of the year (dated 1833), and Hallam denounced as "infamous" Lockhart's review in the Quarterly. Infamous or not, it is extremely diverting. How Lockhart could miss the great and abundant poetry remains a marvel. Ten years later the Scorpion repented, and invited Sterling to review any book he pleased, for the purpose of enabling him to praise the two volumes of 1842, which he did gladly. Lockhart hated all affectation and "preciosity," of which the new book was not dest.i.tute. He had been among Wordsworth's most ardent admirers when Wordsworth had few, but the memories of the war with the "c.o.c.kney School" clung to him, the war with Leigh Hunt, and now he gave himself up to satire. Probably he thought that the poet was a member of a London clique. There is really no excuse for Lockhart, except that he DID repent, that much of his banter was amusing, and that, above all, his censures were accepted by the poet, who altered, later, many pa.s.sages of a fine absurdity criticised by the infamous reviewer. One could name great prose-writers, historians, who never altered the wondrous errors to which their attention was called by critics. Prose-writers have been more sensitively attached to their glaring blunders in verifiable facts than was this very sensitive poet to his occasional lapses in taste.

The Lady of Shalott, even in its early form, was more than enough to give a.s.surance of a poet. In effect it is even more poetical, in a mysterious way, if infinitely less human, than the later treatment of the same or a similar legend in Elaine. It has the charm of Coleridge, and an allegory of the fatal escape from the world of dreams and shadows into that of realities may have been really present to the mind of the young poet, aware that he was "living in phantasy." The alterations are usually for the better. The daffodil is not an aquatic plant, as the poet seems to a.s.sert in the first form -

"The yellow-leaved water-lily, The green sheathed daffodilly, Tremble in the water chilly, Round about Shalott."

n.o.body can prefer to keep

"Though the squally east wind keenly Blew, with folded arms serenely By the water stood the queenly Lady of Shalott."

However stoical the Lady may have been, the reader is too seriously sympathetic with her inevitable discomfort -

"All raimented in snowy white That loosely flew,"

as she was. The original conclusion was distressing; we were dropped from the airs of mysterious romance:-

"They crossed themselves, their stars they blest, Knight, minstrel, abbot, squire, and guest; There lay a parchment on her breast, That puzzled more than all the rest The well-fed wits at Camelot."

Hitherto we have been "puzzled," but as with the sublime incoherences of a dream. Now we meet well-fed wits, who say, "Bless my stars!" as perhaps we should also have done in the circ.u.mstances--a dead lady arriving, in a very cold east wind, alone in a boat, for "her blood was frozen slowly," as was natural, granting the weather and the lady's airy costume. It is certainly matter of surprise that the young poet's vision broke up in this humorous manner. And, after all, it is less surprising that the Scorpion, finding such matter in a new little book by a new young man, was more sensitive to the absurdity than to the romance. But no lover of poetry should have been blind to the almost flawless excellence of Mariana in the South, inspired by the landscape of the Provencal tour with Arthur Hallam.

In consequence of Lockhart's censures, or in deference to the maturer taste of the poet, The Miller's Daughter was greatly altered before 1842. It is one of the earliest, if not the very earliest, of Tennyson's domestic English idylls, poems with conspicuous beauties, but not without sacrifices to that Muse of the home affections on whom Sir Barnes Newcome delivered his famous lecture. The seventh stanza perhaps hardly deserved to be altered, as it is, so as to bring in "minnows" where "fish" had been the reading, and where "trout" would best recall an English chalk stream. To the angler the rising trout, which left the poet cold, is at least as welcome as the "reflex of a beauteous form." "Every woman seems an angel at the water-side," said "that good old angler, now with G.o.d," Thomas Todd Stoddart, and so "the long and listless boy" found it to be. It is no wonder that the mother was "SLOWLY brought to yield consent to my desire." The domestic affections, in fact, do not adapt themselves so well to poetry as the pa.s.sion, unique in Tennyson, of Fatima. The critics who hunt for parallels or plagiarisms will note -

"O Love, O fire! once he drew With one long kiss my whole soul thro'

My lips,"

and will observe Mr Browning's

"Once he kissed My soul out in a fiery mist."

As to OEnone, the scenery of that earliest of the cla.s.sical idylls is borrowed from the Pyrenees and the tour with Hallam. "It is possible that the poem may have been suggested by Beattie's Judgment of Paris," says Mr Collins; it is also possible that the tale which

"Quintus Calaber Somewhat lazily handled of old"

may have reached Tennyson's mind from an older writer than Beattie.

He is at least as likely to have been familiar with Greek myth as with the lamented "Minstrel." The form of 1833, greatly altered in 1842, contained such unlucky phrases as "cedar shadowy," and "snowycoloured," "marblecold," "violet-eyed"--easy spoils of criticism. The alterations which converted a beautiful but faulty into a beautiful and flawless poem perhaps obscure the significance of OEnone's "I will not die alone," which in the earlier volume directly refers to the foreseen end of all as narrated in Tennyson's late piece, The Death of OEnone. The whole poem brings to mind the glowing hues of t.i.tian and the famous Homeric lines on the divine wedlock of Zeus and Hera.

The allegory or moral of The Palace of Art does not need explanation.

Not many of the poems owe more to revision. The early stanza about Isaiah, with fierce Ezekiel, and "Eastern Confutzee," did undeniably remind the reader, as Lockhart said, of The Groves of Blarney.

"With statues gracing that n.o.ble place in, All haythen G.o.ddesses most rare, Petrarch, Plato, and Nebuchadnezzar, All standing naked in the open air."

In the early version the Soul, being too much "up to date,"

"Lit white streams of dazzling gas,"

like Sir Walter Scott at Abbotsford.

"Thus her intense, untold delight, In deep or vivid colour, smell, and sound, Was flattered day and night."

Lockhart was not fond of Sir Walter's experiments in gas, the "smell"

gave him no "deep, untold delight," and his "infamous review" was bia.s.sed by these circ.u.mstances.

The volume of 1833 was in nothing more remarkable than in its proof of the many-sidedness of the author. He offered mediaeval romance, and cla.s.sical perfection touched with the romantic spirit, and domestic idyll, of which The May Queen is probably the most popular example. The "mysterious being," conversant with "the spiritual world," might have been expected to disdain topics well within the range of Eliza Cook. He did not despise but elevated them, and thereby did more to introduce himself to the wide English public than he could have done by a century of Fatimas or Lotos-Eaters. On the other hand, a taste more fastidious, or more perverse, will scarcely be satisfied with pathos which in process of time has come to seem "obvious." The pathos of early death in the prime of beauty is less obvious in Homer, where Achilles is to be the victim, or in the laments of the Anthology, where we only know that the dead bride or maiden was fair; but the poor May Queen is of her nature rather commonplace.

"That good man, the clergyman, has told me words of peace,"

strikes a note rather resembling the Tennysonian parody of Wordsworth -