Alfred Tennyson Part 5

The "small sweet Idyll" from

"A volume of the poets of her land"

pure Theocritus. It has been admirably rendered into Greek by Mr Gilbert Murray. The exquisite beauties of style are not less exquisitely blended in the confusions of a dream, for a dream is the thing most akin to The Princess. Time does not exist in the realm of Gama, or in the ideal university of Ida. We have a bookless North, severed but by a frontier pillar from a golden and learned South.

The arts, from architecture to miniature-painting, are in their highest perfection, while knights still tourney in armour, and the quarrel of two nations is decided as in the gentle and joyous pa.s.sage of arms at Ashby de la Zouche. Such confusions are purposefully dream-like: the vision being a composite thing, as dreams are, haunted by the modern scene of the holiday in the park, the "gallant glorious chronicle," the Abbey, and that "old crusading knight austere," Sir Ralph. The seven narrators of the scheme are like the "split personalities" of dreams, and the whole scheme is of great technical skill. The earlier editions lacked the beautiful songs of the ladies, and that additional trait of dream, the strange trance- like seizures of the Prince: "fallings from us, vanishings," in Wordsworthian phrase; instances of "dissociation," in modern psychological terminology. Tennyson himself, like Sh.e.l.ley and Wordsworth, had experience of this kind of dreaming awake which he attributes to his Prince, to strengthen the shadowy yet brilliant character of his romance. It is a thing of normal and natural points de repere; of daylight suggestion, touched as with the magnifying and intensifying elements of haschish-begotten phantasmagoria. In the same way opium raised into the region of brilliant vision that pa.s.sage of Purchas which Coleridge was reading before he dreamed Kubla Khan. But in Tennyson the effects were deliberately sought and secured.

One might conjecture, though Lord Tennyson says nothing on the subject, that among the suggestions for The Princess was the opening of Love's Labour's Lost. Here the King of Navarre devises the College of Recluses, which is broken up by the arrival of the Princess of France, Rosaline, and the other ladies:-

King. Our Court shall be a little Academe, Still and contemplative in living art.

You three, Biron, Domain, and Longaville, Have sworn for three years' term to live with me, My fellow-scholars, and to keep those statutes.

Biron. That is, to live and study here three years.

But there are other strict observances; As, not to see a woman in that term.

[Reads] 'That no woman shalt come within a mile of my Court:' Hath this been proclaimed?

Long. Four days ago.

Biron. Let's see the penalty. [Reads] 'On pain of losing her tongue.'

The Princess then arrives with her ladies, as the Prince does with Cyril and Florian, as Charles did, with Buckingham, in Spain. The conclusion of Shakespeare is Tennyson's conclusion -

"We cannot cross the cause why we are born."

The later poet reverses the att.i.tude of the s.e.xes in Love's Labour's Lost: it is the women who make and break the vow; and the women in The Princess insist on the "grand, epic, homicidal" scenes, while the men are debarred, more or less, from a sportive treatment of the subject. The tavern catch of Cyril; the laughable pursuit of the Prince by the feminine Proctors; the draggled appearance of the adventurers in female garb, are concessions to the humour of the situation. Shakespeare would certainly have given us the song of Cyril at the picnic, and comic enough the effect would have been on the stage. It may be a gross employment, but The Princess, with the pretty chorus of girl undergraduates,

"In colours gayer than the morning mist,"

went reasonably well in opera. Merely considered as a romantic fiction, The Princess presents higher proofs of original narrative genius than any other such attempt by its author.

The poem is far from being deficient in that human interest which Sh.e.l.ley said that it was as vain to ask from HIM, as to seek to buy a leg of mutton at a gin-shop. The characters, the protagonists, with Cyril, Melissa, Lady Blanche, the child Aglaia, King Gama, the other king, Arac, and the hero's mother--beautifully studied from the mother of the poet--are all sufficiently human. But they seem to waver in the magic air, "as all the golden autumn woodland reels athwart the fires of autumn leaves. For these reasons, and because of the designed fantasy of the whole composition, The Princess is essentially a poem for the true lovers of poetry, of Spenser and of Coleridge. The serious motive, the question of Woman, her wrongs, her rights, her education, her capabilities, was not "in the air" in 1847. To be sure it had often been "in the air." The Alexandrian Platonists, the Renaissance, even the age of Anne, had their emanc.i.p.ated and learned ladies. Early Greece had Sappho, Corinna, and Erinna, the first the chief of lyric poets, even in her fragments, the two others applauded by all h.e.l.las. The French Revolution had begotten Mary Wollstonecraft G.o.dwin and her Vindication of the Rights of Women, and in France George Sand was prominent and emanc.i.p.ated enough while the poet wrote. But, the question of love apart, George Sand was "very, very woman," shining as a domestic character and fond of needlework. England was not excited about the question which has since produced so many disputants, inevitably shrill, and has not been greatly meddled with by women of genius, George Eliot or Mrs Oliphant. The poem, in the public indifference as to feminine education, came rather prematurely. We have now ladies' colleges, not in haunts remote from man, but by the sedged banks of Cam and Cherwell. There have been no revolutionary results: no boys have spied these chaste nests, with echoing romantic consequences. The beauty and splendour of the Princess's university have not arisen in light and colour, and it is only at St Andrews that girls wear the academic and becoming costume of the scarlet gown. The real is far below the ideal, but the real in 1847 seemed eminently remote, or even impossible.

The learned Princess herself was not on our level as to knowledge and the past of womankind. She knew not of their masterly position in the law of ancient Egypt. Gynaeocracy and matriarchy, the woman the head of the savage or prehistoric group, were things hidden from her.

She "glanced at the Lycian custom," but not at the Pictish, a custom which would have suited George Sand to a marvel. She maligned the Hottentots.

"The highest is the measure of the man, And not the Kaffir, Hottentot, Malay."

The Hottentots had long ago antic.i.p.ated the Princess and her shrill modern sisterhood. If we take the Greeks, or even ourselves, we may say, with Dampier (1689), "The Hodmadods, though a nasty people, yet are gentlemen to these" as regards the position of women. Let us hear Mr Hartland: "In every Hottentot's house the wife is supreme.

Her husband, poor fellow, though he may wield wide power and influence out of doors, at home dare not even take a mouthful of sour-milk out of the household vat without her permission . . . The highest oath a man can take is to swear by his eldest sister, and if he abuses this name he forfeits to her his finest goods and sheep."

However, in 1847 England had not yet thought of imitating the Hodmadods. Consequently, and by reason of the purely literary and elaborately fantastical character of The Princess, it was not of a nature to increase the poet's fame and success. "My book is out, and I hate it, and so no doubt will you," Tennyson wrote to FitzGerald, who hated it and said so. "Like Carlyle, I gave up all hopes of him after The Princess," indeed it was not apt to conciliate Carlyle.

"None of the songs had the old champagne flavour," said Fitz; and Lord Tennyson adds, "Nothing either by Thackeray or by my father met FitzGerald's approbation unless he had first seen it in ma.n.u.script."

This prejudice was very human. Lord Tennyson remarks, as to the poet's meaning in this work, born too early, that "the sooner woman finds out, before the great educational movement begins, that 'woman is not undeveloped man, but diverse,' the better it will be for the progress of the world."

But probably the "educational movement" will not make much difference to womankind on the whole. The old Platonic remark that woman "does the same things as man, but not so well," will eternally hold good, at least in the arts, and in letters, except in rare cases of genius.

A new Jeanne d'Arc, the most signal example of absolute genius in history, will not come again; and the ages have waited vainly for a new Sappho or a new Jane Austen. Literature, poetry, painting, have always been fields open to woman. But two names exhaust the roll of women of the highest rank in letters--Sappho and Jane Austen. And "when did woman ever yet invent?" In "arts of government" Elizabeth had courage, and just saving sense enough to yield to Cecil at the eleventh hour, and escape the fate of "her sister and her foe," the beautiful unhappy queen who told her ladies that she dared to look on whatever men dared to do, and herself would do it if her strength so served her." {6} "The foundress of the Babylonian walls" is a myth; "the Rhodope that built the Pyramid" is not a creditable myth; for exceptions to Knox's "Monstrous Regiment of Women" we must fall back on "The Palmyrene that fought Aurelian," and the revered name of the greatest of English queens, Victoria. Thus history does not encourage the hope that a man-like education will raise many women to the level of the highest of their s.e.x in the past, or even that the enormous majority of women will take advantage of the opportunity of a man-like education. A glance at the numerous periodicals designed for the reading of women depresses optimism, and the Princess's prophecy of

"Two plummets dropped for one to sound the abyss Of science, and the secrets of the mind,"

is not near fulfilment. Fortunately the s.e.x does not "love the Metaphysics," and perhaps has not yet produced even a manual of Logic. It must suffice man and woman to

"Walk this world Yoked in all exercise of n.o.ble end,"

of a more practical character, while woman is at liberty

"To live and learn and be All that not harms distinctive womanhood."

This was the conclusion of the poet who had the most chivalrous reverence for womanhood. This is the eirenicon of that old strife between the women and the men--that war in which both armies are captured. It may not be acceptable to excited lady combatants, who think man their foe, when the real enemy is (what Porson d.a.m.ned) the Nature of Things.

A new poem like The Princess would soon reach the public of our day, so greatly increased are the uses of advertis.e.m.e.nt. But The Princess moved slowly from edition to revised and improved edition, bringing neither money nor much increase of fame. The poet was living with his family at Cheltenham, where among his new acquaintances were Sydney Dobell, the poet of a few exquisite pieces, and F. W.

Robertson, later so popular as a preacher at Brighton. Meeting him for the first time, and knowing Robertson's "wish to pluck the heart from my mystery, from pure nervousness I would only talk of beer."

This kind of shyness beset Tennyson. A lady tells me that as a girl (and a very beautiful girl) she and her sister, and a third, nec diversa, met the poet, and expected high discourse. But his speech was all of that wingless insect which "gets there, all the same,"

according to an American lyrist; the insect which fills Mrs Carlyle's letters with bulletins of her success or failure in domestic campaigns.

Tennyson kept visiting London, where he saw Thackeray and the despair of Carlyle, and at Bath House he was too modest to be introduced to the great Duke whose requiem he was to sing so n.o.bly. Oddly enough Douglas Jerrold enthusiastically a.s.sured Tennyson, at a dinner of a Society of Authors, that "you are the one who will live." To that end, humanly speaking, he placed himself under the celebrated Dr Gully and his "water-cure," a foible of that period. In 1848 he made a tour to King Arthur's Cornish bounds, and another to Scotland, where the Pa.s.s of Brander disappointed him: perhaps he saw it on a fine day, and, like Glencoe, it needs tempest and mist lit up by the white fires of many waterfalls. By bonny Doon he "fell into a pa.s.sion of tears," for he had all of Keats's sentiment for Burns: "There never was immortal poet if he be not one." Of all English poets, the warmest in the praise of Burns have been the two most unlike himself--Tennyson and Keats. It was the songs that Tennyson preferred; Wordsworth liked the Cottar's Sat.u.r.day Night.

CHAPTER V.--IN MEMORIAM.

In May 1850 a few, copies of In Memoriam were printed for friends, and presently the poem was published without author's name. The pieces had been composed at intervals, from 1833 onwards. It is to be observed that the "section about evolution" was written some years before 1844, when the ingenious hypotheses of Robert Chambers, in Vestiges of Creation, were given to the world, and caused a good deal of talk. Ten years, again, after In Memoriam, came Darwin's Origin of Species. These dates are worth observing. The theory of evolution, of course in a rude mythical shape, is at least as old as the theory of creation, and is found among the speculations of the most backward savages. The Arunta of Central Australia, a race remote from the polite, have a hypothesis of evolution which postulates only a few rudimentary forms of life, a marine environment, and the minimum of supernormal a.s.sistance in the way of stimulating the primal forms in the direction of more highly differentiated developments. "The rudimentary forms, Inapertwa, were in reality stages in the transformation of various plants and animals into human beings. . . . They had no distinct limbs or organs of sight, hearing, or smell." They existed in a kind of lumps, and were set free from the cauls which enveloped them by two beings called Ungambikula, "a word which means 'out of nothing,' or 'self- existing.' Men descend from lower animals thus evolved." {7}

This example of the doctrine of evolution in an early shape is only mentioned to prove that the idea has been familiar to the human mind from the lowest known stage of culture. Not less familiar has been the theory of creation by a kind of supreme being. The notion of creation, however, up to 1860, held the foremost place in modern European belief. But Lamarck, the elder Darwin, Monboddo, and others had submitted hypotheses of evolution. Now it was part of the originality of Tennyson, as a philosophic poet, that he had brooded from boyhood on these early theories of evolution, in an age when they were practically unknown to the literary, and were not patronised by the scientific, world. In November 1844 he wrote to Mr Moxon, "I want you to get me a book which I see advertised in the Examiner: it seems to contain many speculations with which I have been familiar for years, and on which I have written more than one poem." This book was Vestiges of Creation. These poems are the stanzas in In Memoriam about "the greater ape," and about Nature as careless of the type: "all shall go." The poetic and philosophic originality of Tennyson thus faced the popular inferences as to the effect of the doctrine of evolution upon religious beliefs long before the world was moved in all its deeps by Darwin's Origin of Species. Thus the geological record is inconsistent, we learned, with the record of the first chapters of Genesis. If man is a differentiated monkey, and if a monkey has no soul, or future life (which is taken for granted), where are man's t.i.tle-deeds to these possessions? With other difficulties of an obvious kind, these presented themselves to the poet with renewed force when his only chance of happiness depended on being able to believe in a future life, and reunion with the beloved dead. Unbelief had always existed. We hear of atheists in the Rig Veda. In the early eighteenth century, in the age of Swift -

"Men proved, as sure as G.o.d's in Gloucester, That Moses was a great impostor."

distrust of Moses increased with the increase of hypotheses of evolution. But what English poet, before Tennyson, ever attempted "to lay the spectres of the mind"; ever faced world-old problems in their most recent aspects? I am not acquainted with any poet who attempted this task, and, whatever we may think of Tennyson's success, I do not see how we can deny his originality.

Mr Frederic Harrison, however, thinks that neither "the theology nor the philosophy of In Memoriam are new, original, with an independent force and depth of their own." "They are exquisitely graceful re- statements of the theology of the Broad Churchman of the school of F.

D. Maurice and Jowett--a combination of Maurice's somewhat illogical piety with Jowett's philosophy of mystification." The piety of Maurice may be as illogical as that of Positivism is logical, and the philosophy of the Master of Balliol may be whatever Mr Harrison pleases to call it. But as Jowett's earliest work (except an essay on Etruscan religion) is of 1855, one does not see how it could influence Tennyson before 1844. And what had the Duke of Argyll written on these themes some years before 1844? The late Duke, to whom Mr Harrison refers in this connection, was born in 1823. His philosophic ideas, if they were to influence Tennyson's In Memoriam, must have been set forth by him at the tender age of seventeen, or thereabouts. Mr Harrison's sentence is, "But does In Memoriam teach anything, or transfigure any idea which was not about that time" (the time of writing was mainly 1833-1840) "common form with F. D.