Alfred Tennyson Part 6

Maurice, with Jowett, C. Kingsley, F. Robertson, Stopford Brooke, Mr Ruskin, and the Duke of Argyll, Bishops Westcott and Boyd Carpenter?"

The dates answer Mr Harrison. Jowett did not publish anything till at least fifteen years after Tennyson wrote his poems on evolution and belief. Dr Boyd Carpenter's works previous to 1840 are unknown to bibliography. F. W. Robertson was a young parson at Cheltenham.

Ruskin had not published the first volume of Modern Painters. His Oxford prize poem is of 1839. Mr Stopford Brooke was at school. The Duke of Argyll was being privately educated: and so with the rest, except the contemporary Maurice. How can Mr Harrison say that, in the time of In Memoriam, Tennyson was "in touch with the ideas of Herschel, Owen, Huxley, Darwin, and Tyndall"? {8} When Tennyson wrote the parts of In Memoriam which deal with science, n.o.body beyond their families and friends had heard of Huxley, Darwin, and Tyndall.

They had not developed, much less had they published, their "general ideas." Even in his journal of the Cruise of the Beagle Darwin's ideas were religious, and he naively admired the works of G.o.d. It is strange that Mr Harrison has based his criticism, and his theory of Tennyson's want of originality, on what seems to be a historical error. He cites parts of In Memoriam, and remarks, "No one can deny that all this is exquisitely beautiful; that these eternal problems have never been clad in such inimitable grace . . . But the train of thought is essentially that with which ordinary English readers have been made familiar by F. D. Maurice, Professor Jowett, Ecce h.o.m.o, Hypatia, and now by Arthur Balfour, Mr Drummond, and many valiant companies of Septem [why Septem?] contra Diabolum." One must keep repeating the historical verity that the ideas of In Memoriam could not have been "made familiar by" authors who had not yet published anything, or by books yet undreamed of and unborn, such as Ecce h.o.m.o and Jowett's work on some of St Paul's Epistles. If these books contain the ideas of In Memoriam, it is by dint of repet.i.tion and borrowing from In Memoriam, or by coincidence. The originality was Tennyson's, for we cannot dispute the evidence of dates.

When one speaks of "originality" one does not mean that Tennyson discovered the existence of the ultimate problems. But at Cambridge (1828-1830) he had voted "No" in answer to the question discussed by "the Apostles," "Is an intelligible [intelligent?] First Cause deducible from the phenomena of the universe?" {9} He had also propounded the theory that "the development of the human body might possibly be traced from the radiated vermicular molluscous and vertebrate organisms," thirty years before Darwin published The Origin of Species. To be concerned so early with such hypotheses, and to face, in poetry, the religious or irreligious inferences which may be drawn from them, decidedly const.i.tutes part of the poetic originality of Tennyson. His att.i.tude, as a poet, towards religious doubt is only so far not original, as it is part of the general reaction from the freethinking of the eighteenth century. Men had then been freethinkers avec delices. It was a joyous thing to be an atheist, or something very like one; at all events, it was glorious to be "emanc.i.p.ated." Many still find it glorious, as we read in the tone of Mr Huxley, when he triumphs and tramples over pious dukes and bishops. Sh.e.l.ley said that a certain schoolgirl "would make a dear little atheist." But by 1828-1830 men were less joyous in their escape from all that had hitherto consoled and fortified humanity.

Long before he dreamed of In Memoriam, in the Poems chiefly Lyrical of 1830 Tennyson had written -

"'Yet,' said I, in my morn of youth, The unsunn'd freshness of my strength, When I went forth in quest of truth, 'It is man's privilege to doubt.' . . .

Ay me! I fear All may not doubt, but everywhere Some must clasp Idols. Yet, my G.o.d, Whom call I Idol? Let Thy dove Shadow me over, and my sins Be unremember'd, and Thy love Enlighten me. Oh teach me yet Somewhat before the heavy clod Weighs on me, and the busy fret Of that sharp-headed worm begins In the gross blackness underneath.

Oh weary life! oh weary death!

Oh spirit and heart made desolate!

Oh d.a.m.ned vacillating state!"

Now the philosophy of In Memoriam may be, indeed is, regarded by robust, first-rate, and far from sensitive minds, as a "d.a.m.ned vacillating state." The poet is not so imbued with the spirit of popular science as to be sure that he knows everything: knows that there is nothing but atoms and ether, with no room for G.o.d or a soul.

He is far from that happy c.o.c.k-certainty, and consequently is exposed to the contempt of the c.o.c.k-certain. The poem, says Mr Harrison, "has made Tennyson the idol of the Anglican clergyman--the world in which he was born and the world in which his life was ideally pa.s.sed- -the idol of all cultured youth and of all aesthetic women. It is an honourable post to fill"--that of idol. "The argument of In Memoriam apparently is . . . that we should faintly trust the larger hope."

That, I think, is not the argument, not the conclusion of the poem, but is a casual expression of one mood among many moods.

The argument and conclusion of In Memoriam are the argument and conclusion of the life of Tennyson, and of the love of Tennyson, that immortal pa.s.sion which was a part of himself, and which, if aught of us endure, is living yet, and must live eternally. From the record of his Life by his son we know that his trust in "the larger hope"

was not "faint," but strengthened with the years. There are said to have been less hopeful intervals.

His faith is, of course, no argument for others,--at least it ought not to be. We are all the creatures of our bias, our environment, our experience, our emotions. The experience of Tennyson was unlike the experience of most men. It yielded him subjective grounds for belief. He "opened a path unto many," like Yama, the Vedic being who discovered the way to death. But Tennyson's path led not to death, but to life spiritual, and to hope, and he did "give a new impulse to the thought of his age," as other great poets have done. Of course it may be an impulse to wrong thought. As the philosophical Australian black said, "We shall know when we are dead."

Mr Harrison argues as if, unlike Tennyson, Byron, Wordsworth, Sh.e.l.ley, and Burns produced "original ideas fresh from their own spirit, and not derived from contemporary thinkers." I do not know what original ideas these great poets discovered and promulgated; their ideas seem to have been "in the air." These poets "made them current coin." Sh.e.l.ley thought that he owed many of his ideas to G.o.dwin, a contemporary thinker. Wordsworth has a debt to Plato, a thinker not contemporary. Burns's democratic independence was "in the air," and had been, in Scotland, since Elder remarked on it in a letter to Ingles in 1515. It is not the ideas, it is the expression of the ideas, that marks the poet. Tennyson's ideas are relatively novel, though as old as Plotinus, for they are applied to a novel, or at least an unfamiliar, mental situation. Doubt was abroad, as it always is; but, for perhaps the first time since Porphyry wrote his letter to Abammon, the doubters desired to believe, and said, "Lord, help Thou my unbelief." To robust, not sensitive minds, very much in unity with themselves, the att.i.tude seems contemptible, or at best decently futile. Yet I cannot think it below the dignity of mankind, conscious that it is not omniscient. The poet does fail in logic (In Memoriam, cxx.) when he says -

"Let him, the wiser man who springs Hereafter, up from childhood shape His action like the greater ape, But I was BORN to other things."

I am not well acquainted with the habits of the greater ape, but it would probably be unwise, and perhaps indecent, to imitate him, even if "we also are his offspring." We might as well revert to polyandry and paint, because our Celtic or Pictish ancestors, if we had any, practised the one and wore the other. However, petulances like the verse on the greater ape are rare in In Memoriam. To declare that "I would not stay" in life if science proves us to be "cunning casts in clay," is beneath the courage of the Stoical philosophy.

Theologically, the poem represents the struggle with doubts and hopes and fears, which had been with Tennyson from his boyhood, as is proved by the volume of 1830. But the doubts had exerted, probably, but little influence on his happiness till the sudden stroke of loss made life for a time seem almost unbearable unless the doubts were solved. They WERE solved, or stoically set aside, in the Ulysses, written in the freshness of grief, with the conclusion that we must be

"Strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."

But the gnawing of grief till it becomes a physical pain, the fever fits of sorrow, the aching desiderium, bring back in many guises the old questions. These require new attempts at answers, and are answered, "the sad mechanic exercise" of verse allaying the pain.

This is the genesis of In Memoriam, not originally written for publication but produced at last as a monument to friendship, and as a book of consolation.

No books of consolation can console except by sympathy; and in In Memoriam sympathy and relief have been found, and will be found, by many. Another, we feel, has trodden our dark and stony path, has been shadowed by the shapes of dread which haunt our valley of tribulation: a mind almost infinitely greater than ours has been our fellow-sufferer. He has emerged from the darkness of the shadow of death into the light, whither, as it seems to us, we can scarcely hope to come. It is the sympathy and the example, I think, not the speculations, mystical or scientific, which make In Memoriam, in more than name, a book of consolation: even in hours of the sharpest distress, when its technical beauties and wonderful pictures seem shadowy and unreal, like the yellow sunshine and the woods of that autumn day when a man learned that his friend was dead. No, it was not the speculations and arguments that consoled or encouraged us.

We did not listen to Tennyson as to Mr Frederic Harrison's glorified Anglican clergyman. We could not murmur, like the Queen of the May -

"That good man, the Laureate, has told tis words of peace."

What we valued was the poet's companionship. There was a young reader to whom All along the Valley came as a new poem in a time of recent sorrow.

"The two-and-thirty years were a mist that rolls away,"

said the singer of In Memoriam, and in that hour it seemed as if none could endure for two-and-thirty years the companionship of loss. But the years have gone by, and have left

"Ever young the face that dwells With reason cloister'd in the brain." {10}

In this way to many In Memoriam is almost a life-long companion: we walk with Great-heart for our guide through the valley Perilous.

In this respect In Memoriam is unique, for neither to its praise nor dispraise is it to be compared with the other famous elegies of the world. These are brief outbursts of grief--real, as in the hopeless words of Catullus over his brother's tomb; or academic, like Milton's Lycidas. We are not to suppose that Milton was heart-broken by the death of young Mr King, or that Sh.e.l.ley was greatly desolated by the death of Keats, with whom his personal relations had been slight, and of whose poetry he had spoken evil. He was n.o.bly stirred as a poet by a poet's death--like Mr Swinburne by the death of Charles Baudelaire; but neither Sh.e.l.ley nor Mr Swinburne was lamenting dimidium animae suae, or mourning for a friend

"Dear as the mother to the son, More than my brothers are to me."

The pa.s.sion of In Memoriam is personal, is acute, is life-long, and thus it differs from the other elegies. Moreover, it celebrates a n.o.ble object, and thus is unlike the ambiguous affection, real or dramatic, which informs the sonnets of Shakespeare. So the poem stands alone, cloistered; not fiery with indignation, not breaking into actual prophecy, like Sh.e.l.ley's Adonais; not capable, by reason even of its meditative metre, of the organ music of Lycidas. Yet it is not to be reckoned inferior to these because its aim and plan are other than theirs.

It is far from my purpose to "cla.s.s" Tennyson, or to dispute about his relative greatness when compared with Wordsworth or Byron, Coleridge, Sh.e.l.ley, or Burns. He rated one song of Lovelace above all his lyrics, and, in fact, could no more have written the Cavalier's To Althea from Prison than Lovelace could have written the Morte d'Arthur. "It is not reasonable, it is not fair," says Mr Harrison, after comparing In Memoriam with Lycidas, "to compare Tennyson with Milton," and it is not reasonable to compare Tennyson with any poet whatever. Criticism is not the construction of a cla.s.s list. But we may reasonably say that In Memoriam is a n.o.ble poem, an original poem, a poem which stands alone in literature. The wonderful beauty, ever fresh, howsoever often read, of many stanzas, is not denied by any critic. The marvel is that the same serene certainty of art broods over even the stanzas which must have been conceived while the sorrow was fresh. The second piece,

"Old yew, which graspest at the stones,"

must have been composed soon after the stroke fell. Yet it is as perfect as the proem of 1849. As a rule, the poetical expression of strong emotion appears usually to clothe the memory of pa.s.sion when it has been softened by time. But here already "the rhythm, phrasing, and articulation are entirely faultless, exquisitely clear, melodious, and rare." {11} It were superfluous labour to point at special beauties, at the exquisite rendering of nature; and copious commentaries exist to explain the course of the argument, if a series of moods is to be called an argument. One may note such a point as that (xiv.) where the poet says that, were he to meet his friend in life,

"I should not feel it to be strange."

It may have happened to many to mistake, for a section of a second, the face of a stranger for the face seen only in dreams, and to find that the recognition brings no surprise.

Pieces of a character apart from the rest, and placed in a designed sequence, are xcii., xciii., xcv. In the first the poet says -

"If any vision should reveal Thy likeness, I might count it vain As but the canker of the brain; Yea, tho' it spake and made appeal

To chances where our lots were cast Together in the days behind, I might but say, I hear a wind Of memory murmuring the past.

Yea, tho' it spake and bared to view A fact within the coming year; And tho' the months, revolving near, Should prove the phantom-warning true,

They might not seem thy prophecies, But spiritual presentiments, And such refraction of events As often rises ere they rise."

The author thus shows himself difficile as to recognising the personal ident.i.ty of a phantasm; nor is it easy to see what mode of proving his ident.i.ty would be left to a spirit. The poet, therefore, appeals to some perhaps less satisfactory experience:-