Alfred Tennyson Part 7

"Descend, and touch, and enter; hear The wish too strong for words to name; That in this blindness of the frame My Ghost may feel that thine is near."

The third poem is the crown of In Memoriam, expressing almost such things as are not given to man to utter:-

And all at once it seem'd at last The living soul was flash'd on mine,

And mine in this was wound, and whirl'd About empyreal heights of thought, And came on that which is, and caught The deep pulsations of the world,

AEonian music measuring out The steps of Time--the shocks of Chance - The blows of Death. At length my trance Was cancell'd, stricken thro' with doubt.

Vague words! but ah, how hard to frame In matter-moulded forms of speech, Or ev'n for intellect to reach Thro' memory that which I became."

Experiences like this, subjective, and not matter for argument, were familiar to Tennyson. Jowett said, "He was one of those who, though not an upholder of miracles, thought that the wonders of Heaven and Earth were never far absent from us." In The Mystic, Tennyson, when almost a boy, had shown familiarity with strange psychological and psychical conditions. Poems of much later life also deal with these, and, more or less consciously, his philosophy was tinged, and his confidence that we are more than "cunning casts in clay" was increased, by phenomena of experience, which can only be evidence for the mystic himself, if even for him. But this dim aspect of his philosophy, of course, is "to the Greeks foolishness."

His was a philosophy of his own; not a philosophy for disciples, and "those that eddy round and round." It was the sum of his reflection on the ma.s.s of his impressions. I have shown, by the aid of dates, that it was not borrowed from Huxley, Mr Stopford Brooke, or the late Duke of Argyll. But, no doubt, many of the ideas were "in the air,"

and must have presented themselves to minds at once of religious tendency, and attracted by the evolutionary theories which had always existed as floating speculations, till they were made current coin by the genius and patient study of Darwin. That Tennyson's opinions between 1830 and 1840 were influenced by those of F. D. Maurice is reckoned probable by Canon Ainger, author of the notice of the poet in The Dictionary of National Biography. In the Life of Maurice, Tennyson does not appear till 1850, and the two men were not at Cambridge together. But Maurice's ideas, as they then existed, may have reached Tennyson orally through Hallam and other members of the Trinity set, who knew personally the author of Letters to a Quaker.

However, this is no question of scientific priority: to myself it seems that Tennyson "beat his music out" for himself, as perhaps most people do. Like his own Sir Percivale, "I know not all he meant."

Among the opinions as to In Memoriam current at the time of its publication Lord Tennyson notices those of Maurice and Robertson.

They "thought that the poet had made a definite step towards the unification of the highest religion and philosophy with the progressive science of the day." Neither science nor religion stands still; neither stands now where it then did. Conceivably they are travelling on paths which will ultimately coincide; but this opinion, of course, must seem foolishness to most professors of science.

Bishop Westcott was at Cambridge when the book appeared: he is one of Mr Harrison's possible sources of Tennyson's ideas. He recognised the poet's "splendid faith (in the face of every difficulty) in the growing purpose of the sum of life, and in the n.o.ble destiny of the individual man." Ten years later Professor Henry Sidgwick, a mind sufficiently sceptical, found in some lines of In Memoriam "the indestructible and inalienable minimum of faith which humanity cannot give up because it is necessary for life; and which I know that I, at least so far as the man in me is deeper than the methodical thinker, cannot give up." But we know that many persons not only do not find an irreducible minimum of faith "necessary for life," but are highly indignant and contemptuous if any one else ventures to suggest the logical possibility of any faith at all.

The ma.s.s of mankind will probably never be convinced unbelievers-- nay, probably the backward or forward swing of the pendulum will touch more convinced belief. But there always have been, since the Rishis of India sang, superior persons who believe in nothing not material--whatever the material may be. Tennyson was, it is said, "impatient" of these esprits forts, and they are impatient of him.

It is an error to be impatient: we know not whither the logos may lead us, or later generations; and we ought not to be irritated with others because it leads them into what we think the wrong path. It is unfortunate that a work of art, like In Memoriam, should arouse theological or anti-theological pa.s.sions. The poet only shows us the paths by which his mind travelled: they may not be the right paths, nor is it easy to trace them on a philosophical chart. He escaped from Doubting Castle. Others may "take that for a hermitage," and be happy enough in the residence. We are all determined by our bias: Tennyson's is unconcealed. His poem is not a tract: it does not aim at the conversion of people with the contrary bias, it is irksome, in writing about a poet, to be obliged to discuss a philosophy which, certainly, is not stated in the manner of Spinoza, but is merely the equilibrium of contending forces in a single mind.

The most famous review of In Memoriam is that which declared that "these touching lines evidently come from the full heart of the widow of a military man." This is only equalled, if equalled, by a recent critique which treated a fresh edition of Jane Eyre as a new novel, "not without power, in parts, and showing some knowledge of Yorkshire local colour."

CHAPTER VI.--AFTER IN MEMORIAM.

On June 13 Tennyson married, at Shiplake, the object of his old, long-tried, and constant affection. The marriage was still "imprudent,"--eight years of then uncontested supremacy in English poetry had not brought a golden harvest. Mr Moxon appears to have supplied 300 pounds "in advance of royalties." The sum, so contemptible in the eyes of first-rate modern novelists, was a competence to Tennyson, added to his little pension and the epaves of his patrimony. "The peace of G.o.d came into my life when I married her," he said in later days. The poet made a charming copy of verses to his friend, the Rev. Mr Rawnsley, who tied the knot, as he and his bride drove to the beautiful village of Pangbourne. Thence they went to the stately Clevedon Court, the seat of Sir Abraham Elton, hard by the church where Arthur Hallam sleeps. The place is very ancient and beautiful, and was a favourite haunt of Thackeray. They pa.s.sed on to Lynton, and to Glas...o...b..ry, where a collateral ancestor of Mrs Tennyson's is buried beside King Arthur's grave, in that green valley of Avilion, among the apple-blossoms. They settled for a while at Tent Lodge on Coniston Water, in a land of hospitable Marshalls.

After their return to London, on the night of November 18, Tennyson dreamed that Prince Albert came and kissed him, and that he himself said, "Very kind, but very German," which was very like him. Next day he received from Windsor the offer of the Laureateship. He doubted, and hesitated, but accepted. Since Wordsworth's death there had, as usual, been a good deal of banter about the probable new Laureate: examples of compet.i.tive odes exist in Bon Gaultier. That by Tennyson is Anacreontic, but he was not really set on kissing the Maids of Honour, as he is made to sing. Rogers had declined, on the plea of extreme old age; but it was worthy of the great and good Queen not to overlook the Nestor of English poets. For the rest, the Queen looked for "a name bearing such distinction in the literary world as to do credit to the appointment." In the previous century the great poets had rarely been Laureates. But since Sir Walter Scott declined the bays in favour of Southey, for whom, again, the tale of bricks in the way of Odes was lightened, and when Wordsworth succeeded Southey, the office became honourable. Tennyson gave it an increase of renown, while, though in itself of merely nominal value, it served his poems, to speak profanely, as an advertis.e.m.e.nt. New editions of his books were at once in demand; while few readers had ever heard of Mr Browning, already his friend, and already author of Men and Women.

The Laureateship brought the poet acquainted with the Queen, who was to be his debtor in later days for encouragement and consolation. To his Laureateship we owe, among other good things, the stately and moving Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington, a splendid heroic piece, unappreciated at the moment. But Tennyson was, of course, no Birthday poet. Since the exile of the House of Stuart our kings in England have not maintained the old familiarity with many cla.s.ses of their subjects. Literature has not been fashionable at Court, and Tennyson could in no age have been a courtier. We hear the complaint, every now and then, that official honours are not conferred (except the Laureateship) on men of letters. But most of them probably think it rather distinguished not to be decorated, or to carry t.i.tles borne by many deserving persons unvisited by the Muses. Even the appointment to the bays usually provokes a great deal of jealous and spiteful feeling, which would only be multiplied if official honours were distributed among men of the pen. Perhaps Tennyson's laurels were not for nothing in the chorus of dispraise which greeted the Ode on the Duke of Wellington, and Maud.

The year 1851 was chiefly notable for a tour to Italy, made immortal in the beautiful poem of The Daisy, in a measure of the poet's own invention. The next year, following on the Coup d'etat and the rise of the new French empire, produced patriotic appeals to Britons to "guard their own," which to a great extent former alien owners had been unsuccessful in guarding from Britons. The Tennysons had lost their first child at his birth: perhaps he is remembered in The Grandmother, "the babe had fought for his life." In August 1852 the present Lord Tennyson was born, and Mr Maurice was asked to be G.o.dfather. The Wellington Ode was of November, and was met by "the almost universal depreciation of the press,"--why, except because, as I have just suggested, Tennyson was Laureate, it is impossible to imagine. The verses were worthy of the occasion: more they could not be.

In the autumn of 1853 the poet visited Ardtornish on the Sound of Mull, a beautiful place endeared to him who now writes by the earliest a.s.sociations. It chanced to him to pa.s.s his holidays there just when Tennyson and Mr Palgrave had left--"Mr Tinsmith and Mr Pancake," as Robert the boatman, a very black Celt, called them.

Being then nine years of age, I heard of a poet's visit, and asked, "A real poet, like Sir Walter Scott?" with whom I then supposed that "the Muse had gone away." "Oh, not like Sir Walter Scott, of course," my mother told me, with loyalty unashamed. One can think of the poet as Mrs Sellar, his hostess, describes him, beneath the limes of the avenue at Acharn, planted, Mrs Sellar says, by a cousin of Flora Macdonald. I have been told that the lady who planted the lilies, if not the limes, was the famed Jacobite, Miss Jennie Cameron, mentioned in Tom Jones. An English engraving of 1746 shows the Prince between these two beauties, Flora and Jennie.

"No one," says Mrs Sellar, "could have been more easy, simple, and delightful," and indeed it is no marvel that in her society and that of her husband, the Greek professor, and her cousin, Miss Cross, and in such scenes, "he blossomed out in the most genial manner, making us all feel as if he were an old friend."

In November Tennyson took a house at Farringford, "as it was beautiful and far from the haunts of men." There he settled to a country existence in the society of his wife, his two children (the second, Lionel, being in 1854 the baby), and there he composed Maud, while the sound of the guns, in practice for the war of the Crimea, boomed from the coast. In May Tennyson saw the artists, of schools oddly various, who ill.u.s.trated his poems. Millais, Rossetti, and Holman Hunt gave the tone to the art, but Mr Horsley, Creswick, and Mulgrave were also engaged. While Maud was being composed Tennyson wrote The Charge of the Light Brigade; a famous poem, not in a manner in which he was born to excel--at least in my poor opinion. "Some one HAD blundered," and that line was the first fashioned and the keynote of the poem; but, after all, "blundered" is not an exquisite rhyme to "hundred." The poem, in any case, was most welcome to our army in the Crimea, and is a spirited piece for recitation.

In January 1855 Maud was finished; in April the poet copied it out for the press, and refreshed himself by reading a very different poem, The Lady of the Lake. The author, Sir Walter, had suffered, like the hero of Maud, by an unhappy love affair, which just faintly colours The Lady of the Lake by a single allusion, in the description of Fitz-James's dreams:-

"Then,--from my couch may heavenly might Chase that worst phantom of the night! - Again returned the scenes of youth, Of confident undoubting truth; Again his soul he interchanged With friends whose hearts were long estranged.

They come, in dim procession led, The cold, the faithless, and the dead; As warm each hand, each brow as gay, As if they parted yesterday.

And doubt distracts him at the view - Oh, were his senses false or true?

Dreamed he of death, or broken vow, Or is it all a vision now?"

We learn from Lady Louisa Stuart, to whom Scott read these lines, that they referred to his lost love. I cite the pa.s.sage because the extreme reticence of Scott, in his undying sorrow, is in contrast with what Tennyson, after reading The Lady of the Lake, was putting into the mouth of his complaining lover in Maud.

We have no reason to suppose that Tennyson himself had ever to bewail a faithless love. To be sure, the hero of Locksley Hall is in this att.i.tude, but then Locksley Hall is not autobiographical. Less dramatic and impersonal in appearance are the stanzas -

"Come not, when I am dead, To drop thy foolish tears upon my grave;"

and

"Child, if it were thine error or thy crime I care no longer, being all unblest."

No biographer tells us whether this was a personal complaint or a mere set of verses on an imaginary occasion. In In Memoriam Tennyson speaks out concerning the loss of a friend. In Maud, as in Locksley Hall, he makes his hero reveal the agony caused by the loss of a mistress. There is no reason to suppose that the poet had ever any such mischance, but many readers have taken Locksley Hall and Maud for autobiographical revelations, like In Memoriam. They are, on the other hand, imaginative and dramatic. They ill.u.s.trate the pangs of disappointed love of woman, pangs more complex and more rankling than those inflicted by death. In each case, however, the poet, who has sung so n.o.bly the happiness of fortunate wedded loves, has chosen a hero with whom we do not readily sympathise--a Hamlet in miniature,

"With a heart of furious fancies,"

as in the old mad song. This choice, thanks to the popular misconception, did him some harm. As a "monodramatic Idyll," a romance in many rich lyric measures, Maud was at first excessively unpopular. "Tennyson's Maud is Tennyson's Maudlin," said a satirist, and "morbid," "mad," "rampant," and "rabid bloodthirstiness of soul,"

were among the amenities of criticism. Tennyson hated war, but his hero, at least, hopes that national union in a national struggle will awake a n.o.bler than the commercial spirit. Into the rights and wrongs of our quarrel with Russia we are not to go. Tennyson, rightly or wrongly, took the part of his country, and must "thole the feud" of those high-souled citizens who think their country always in the wrong--as perhaps it very frequently is. We are not to expect a tranquil absence of bias in the midst of military excitement, when very laudable sentiments are apt to misguide men in both directions.

In any case, political partisanship added to the enemies of the poem, which was applauded by Henry Taylor, Ruskin, George Brimley, and Jowett, while Mrs Browning sent consoling words from Italy. The poem remained a favourite with the author, who chose pa.s.sages from it often, when persuaded to read aloud by friends; and modern criticism has not failed to applaud the splendour of the verse and the subtlety of the mad scenes, the pa.s.sion of the love lyrics.

These merits have ceased to be disputed, but, though a loyal Tennysonian, I have never quite been able to reconcile myself to Maud as a whole. The hero is an unwholesome young man, and not of an original kind. He is un beau tenebreux of 1830. I suppose it has been observed that he is merely The Master of Ravenswood in modern costume, and without Lady Ashton. Her part is taken by Maud's brother. The situations of the hero and of the Master (whose acquaintance Thackeray never renewed after he lost his hat in the Kelpie Flow) are nearly identical. The families and fathers of both have been ruined by "the gray old wolf," and by Sir William Ashton, representing the house of Stair. Both heroes live dawdling on, hard by their lost ancestral homes. Both fall in love with the daughters of the enemies of their houses. The loves of both are baffled, and end in tragedy. Both are concerned in a duel, though the Master, on his way to the ground, "stables his steed in the Kelpie Flow," and the wooer in Maud shoots Lucy Ashton's brother,--I mean the brother of Maud,--though duelling in England was out of date. Then comes an interval of madness, and he recovers amid the patriotic emotions of the ill-fated Crimean expedition. Both lovers are gloomy, though the Master has better cause, for the Tennysonian hero is more comfortably provided for than Edgar with his "man and maid," his Caleb and Mysie.

Finally, both The Bride of Lammermoor, which affected Tennyson so potently in boyhood

("A merry merry bridal, A merry merry day"),

and Maud, excel in pa.s.sages rather than as wholes.

The hero of Maud, with his clandestine wooing of a girl of sixteen, has this apology, that the match had been, as it were, predestined, and desired by the mother of the lady. Still, the brother did not ill to be angry; and the peevishness of the hero against the brother and the parvenu lord and rival strikes a jarring note. In England, at least, the general sentiment is opposed to this moody, introspective kind of young man, of whom Tennyson is not to be supposed to approve. We do not feel certain that his man and maid were "ever ready to slander and steal." That seems to be part of his jaundiced way of looking at everything and everybody. He has even a bad word for the "man-G.o.d" of modern days, -

"The man of science himself is fonder of glory, and vain, An eye well-practised in nature, a spirit bounded and poor."