Old Familiar Faces Part 5

Equally striking are the changes in 'The Blessed Damosel.' But the most notable example of the surety of his hand in revising is seen in regard to a poem several times mentioned in this volume, called originally 'Bride's Chamber Talk.' It was begun as early as 'Jenny,' read by Allingham in 1860, but not printed till more than a quarter of a century later. The earliest form is still in existence in MS., and although some of the lines struck out are as poetry most lovely, the poem on the whole is better without them. It was a theory of Rossetti's, indeed, that the very riches of the English language made it necessary for the poet who would achieve excellence to revise and manipulate his lines. And in support of this he would contrast the amazing pa.s.sion for revision disclosed by Dr. Garnett's 'Relics of Sh.e.l.ley,' in which sometimes scarcely half a dozen of the original words are left on a page, with Scott's metrical narratives, which were sent to the printer in cantos as they were written, like one of the contemporary novels thrown off for the serials. The fact seems to be, however, that the poet's power of reaching, as Scott reached, his own ideal expression _per saltum_, or reaching it slowly and tentatively, is simply a matter of temperament.

For whose verses are more loose-jointed than Byron's? whose diction is more commonplace than his? And yet this is what the greatest of Byron specialists, Mr John Murray, says in his extremely interesting remarks upon Byron's autograph:-

"If we except Byron's dramatic pieces and 'Don Juan,' the first draft of Byron's longer poems formed but a nucleus of the work as it was printed. For example, 'English Bards and Scotch Reviewers' grew out of the 'British Bards,' while 'The Giaour,' by constant additions to the ma.n.u.script, the proofs, and even to the work after publication, was expanded to nearly twice its original size. . . . When the inspiration was on him, the printer had to be kept at work the greater part of the night, and fresh 'copy' and fresh revises were crossing one another hour by hour."

The conclusion is that poets cannot be cla.s.sified according to their methods of work, but only in relation to the result of those methods, and that our two great elaborators, Byron and Rossetti, may still be more unlike each other in essentials than are any other two nineteenth-century poets.

On the whole, we cannot help closing this book with kindly feelings towards the editor, inasmuch as it aids in the good work of restoring the true portrait of the man who has suffered more than any other from the mischievous malignity of foes and the more mischievous indiscretion of certain of his friends.

III. ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON.

18091892.

I.

Charles Lamb was so paralyzed, it is said, by Coleridge's death, that for weeks after that event, he was heard murmuring often to himself, "Coleridge is dead, Coleridge is dead." In such a mental condition at this moment is an entire country, I think. "Tennyson is dead! Tennyson is dead!" It will be some time before England's loss can really be expressed by any words so powerful in pathos and in sorrow as these. And if this is so with regard to English people generally, what of those few who knew the man, and knowing him, must needs love him-must needs love him above all others?-those, I mean, who, when speaking of him, used to talk not so much about the poetry as about the man who wrote it-those who now are saying, with a tremor of the voice, and a moistening of the eye:-

There was none like him-none.

[Picture: Alfred, Lord Tennyson, aet. 80. From a photography reproduced by the kind permission of Lord Tennyson]

To say wherein lies the secret of the charm of anything that lives is mostly difficult. Especially is it so with regard to a man of poetic genius. All are agreed, for instance, that D. G. Rossetti possessed an immense charm. So he did, indeed. But who has been able to define that charm? I, too, knew Rossetti well, and loved him well. Sometimes, indeed, the egotism of a sorrowing memory makes me think that outside his own most affectionate and n.o.ble-tempered family, including that old friend in art at whose feet he sat as a boy, no man loved Rossetti so deeply and so lastingly as I did; unless, perhaps, it was the poor blind poet, Philip Marston, who, being so deeply stricken, needed to love and to be loved more sorely than I, to whom Fate has been kind. And yet I should find it difficult to say wherein lay the charm of Rossetti's chameleon-like personality. So with other men and women I could name.

This is not so in regard to the great man now lying dead at Aldworth.

Nothing is easier than to define the charm of Tennyson.

It lay in a great veracity of soul-in a simple-mindedness so childlike that, unless you had known him to be the undoubted author of his exquisitely artistic poems, you would have supposed that even the subtleties of poetic art must be foreign to a nature so devoid of all subtlety as his. "Homer," you would have said, "might have been such a man as this, for Homer worked in a language which is Poetry's very voice.

But Tennyson works in a language which has to be moulded into harmony by a myriad subtleties of art. How can this great inspired child, who yet has the simple wisdom of Bragi, the poetry-smith of the Northern Olympus, be the delicate-fingered artist of 'The Princess,' 'The Palace of Art,'

'The Day-Dream,' and 'The Dream of Fair Women'?"

As deeply as some men feel that language was given to men to disguise their thoughts did Tennyson feel that language was given to _him_ to declare his thoughts without disguise. He knew of but one justification for the thing he said, viz., that it was the thing he thought. _Arriere pensee_ was with him impossible. But, it may be asked, when a man carries out-speaking to such a pa.s.s as this, is he not apt to become a somewhat troublesome and discordant thread in the complex web of modern society? No doubt any other man than Tennyson would have been so. But the honest ring in the voice-which, by-the-by, was strengthened and deepened by the old-fashioned Lincolnshire accent-softened and, to a great degree, neutralized the effect of the bluntness. Moreover, behind this uncompromising directness was apparent a n.o.ble and a splendid courtesy; for, above all things, Tennyson was a great and forthright English gentleman. As he stood at the porch at Aldworth, meeting a guest or bidding him good-bye-as he stood there, tall, far beyond the height of average men, his naturally fair skin showing dark and tanned by the sun and wind-as he stood there no one could mistake him for anything but a great gentleman, who was also much more. Up to the last a man of extraordinary presence, he showed, I think, the beauty of old age to a degree rarely seen.

A friend of his who, visiting him on his birthday, discovered him thus standing at the door to welcome him, has described his unique appearance in words which are literally accurate at least:-

A poet should be limned in youth, they say, Or else in prime, with eyes and forehead beaming Of manhood's noon-the very body seeming To lend the spirit wings to win the bay; But here stands he whose noontide blooms for aye, Whose eyes, where past and future both are gleaming With lore beyond all youthful poets' dreaming, Seem lit from sh.o.r.es of some far-glittering day.

Our master's prime is now-is ever now; Our star that wastes not in the wastes of night Holds Nature's dower undimmed in Time's despite; Those eyes seem Wisdom's own beneath that brow, Where every furrow Time hath dared to plough Shines a new bar of still diviner light.

This, then, was the secret of Tennyson's personal charm. And if the reader is sceptical as to its magnetic effect upon his friends, let me remind him of the amazing rarity of these great and guileless natures; let me remind him also that this world is comprised of two cla.s.ses of people-the bores, whose name is legion, and the interesting people, whose name is _not_ legion-the former being those whose natural instinct of self-protective mimicry impels them to move about among their fellows hiding their features behind a mask of convention, the latter being those who move about with uncovered faces just as Nature fashioned them. If guilelessness lends interest to a dullard, it is still more so with the really luminous souls. So infinite is the creative power of nature that she makes no two individuals alike. If we only had the power of inquiring into the matter, we should find not only that each individual creature that once inhabited one of the minute sh.e.l.ls that go to the building of England's fortress walls of chalk was absolutely unlike all the others, but that even the poor microbe himself, who in these days is so maligned, is also very intensely an individual.

Some time ago the old discussion was revived in _The Athenaeum_ as to whether the nightingale's song was joyful or melancholy. And, perhaps, if the poems of the late James Thomson and the poems of Mr. Austin Dobson were recited by their authors to a congregation of nightingales, the question would at once be debated amongst them, "Is the note of the human songster joyful or melancholy?" The truth is that the humidity or the dryness of the atmosphere in the various habitats of the nightingale modifies so greatly the _timbre_ of the voice that, while a nightingale chorus at Fiesole may seem joyous, a nightingale chorus in the moist thickets along the banks of the Ouse may seem melancholy. Nay, more, as I once told Tennyson at Aldworth, I, when a truant boy wandering along the banks of the Ouse (where six nightingales' nests have been found in the hedge of a single meadow), got so used to these matters that I had my own favourite individuals, and could easily distinguish one from another.

That rich climacteric swell which is reached just before the "jug, jug, jug," varies amazingly, if the listener will only give the matter attention. And if this infinite variety of individualism is thus seen in the lower animals, what must it be in man?

There is, however, in the entire human race, a fatal instinct for marring itself. To break down the exterior signs of this variety of individualism in the race by mutual imitation, by all sorts of affectations, is the object not only of the civilization of the Western world, but of the very negroes on the Gaboon River. No wonder, then, that whensoever we meet, as at rarest interval we do meet, an individual who is able to preserve his personality as Nature meant it to live, we feel an attraction towards him such as is irresistible. Now I would challenge those who knew him to say whether they ever knew any other man so free from this great human infirmity as Tennyson. The way in which his simplicity of nature would manifest itself was, in some instances, most remarkable. Though, of course, he had his share of that egoism of the artist without which imaginative genius may become sterile, it seemed impossible for him to realize what a transcendent position he took among contemporary writers all over the world. "Poets," he once said to me, "have not had the advantage of being _born_ to the purple." Up to the last he felt himself to be a poet at struggle more or less with the Wilsons and the Crokers who, in his youth, a.s.sailed him. I, and a very dear friend of his, a family connexion, tried in vain to make him see that when a poet had reached a position such as he had won, no criticism could injure him or benefit him one jot.

What has been called his exclusiveness is entirely mythical. He was the most hospitable of men. It was very rare, indeed, for him to part from a friend at his hall door, or at the railway station without urging him to return as soon as possible, and generally with the words, "Come whenever you like." The fact is, however, that for many years the strangest notions seem to have got abroad as to the claims of the public upon men of genius. There seems now to be scarcely any one who does not look upon every man who has pa.s.sed into the purgatory of fame as his or her common property. The unlucky victim is to be pestered by letters upon every sort of foolish subject, and to be hunted down in his walks and insulted by senseless adulation. Tennyson resented this, and so did Rossetti, and so ought every man who has reached eminence and respects his own genius.

Neither fame nor life itself is worth having on such terms as these.

One day, Tennyson when walking round his garden at Farringford, saw perched up in the trees that surrounded it, two men who had been refused admittance at the gate-two men dressed like gentlemen. He very wisely gave the public to understand that his fame was not to be taken as an abrogation of his rights as a private English gentleman. For my part, whenever I hear any one railing against a man of eminence with whom he cannot possibly have been brought into contact, I know at once what it means: the railer has been writing an idle letter to the eminent one and received no reply.

Tennyson's knowledge of nature-nature in every aspect-was very great.

His pa.s.sion for "star-gazing" has often been commented upon by readers of his poetry. Since Dante no poet in any land has so loved the stars. He had an equal delight in watching the lightning; and I remember being at Aldworth once during a thunderstorm, when I was alarmed at the temerity with which he persisted, in spite of all remonstrances, in gazing at the blinding lightning. For moonlight effects he had a pa.s.sion equally strong, and it is especially pathetic to those who know this to remember that he pa.s.sed away in the light he so loved-in a room where there was no artificial light-nothing to quicken the darkness but the light of the full moon (which somehow seems to shine more brightly at Aldworth than anywhere else in England); and that on the face of the poet, as he pa.s.sed away, fell that radiance in which he so loved to bathe it when alive.

If it is as easy to describe the personal attraction of Tennyson as it is difficult to describe that of any one of his great contemporaries, we do not find the same relations existing between him and them as regards his place in the firmament of English poetry. In a country with a composite language such as ours, it may be affirmed with special emphasis, that there are two kinds of poetry; one appealing to the uncultivated ma.s.ses, whose vocabulary is of the narrowest; the other appealing to the few who, partly by temperament, and partly by education, are sensitive to the true beauties of poetic art. While in the one case the appeal is made through a free and popular use of words, partly commonplace and partly steeped in that literary sentimentalism which in certain stages of an artificial society takes the place of the simple utterances of simple pa.s.sion of earlier and simpler times; in the other case the appeal is made very largely through what Dante calls the "use of the sieve for n.o.ble words."

Of the one perhaps Byron is the type, the exemplars being such poets as those of the Mrs. Hemans school in England, and of the Longfellow school in America. Of the other cla.s.s of poets, the cla.s.s typified by Milton, the most notable exemplars are Keats, Sh.e.l.ley, and Coleridge. Wordsworth partakes of the qualities of both cla.s.ses. The methods of the first of these two groups are so cheap-they are so based on the wide severance between the popular taste and the poetic temper (which, though in earlier times it inspired the people, is now confined to the few)-that one may say of the first group that their success in finding and holding an audience is almost d.a.m.natory to them as poets. As compared with the poets of Greece, however, both groups may be said to have secured only a partial success in poetry; for not only aeschylus and Sophocles, but Homer too, are as satisfying in the matter of n.o.ble words as though they had never tried to win that popular success which was their goal. In this respect-as being, I mean, the compeer of the great poets of Greece-Shakespeare takes his peculiar place in English poetry. Of all poets he is the most popular, and yet in his use of the "sieve for n.o.ble words" his skill transcends that of even Milton, Coleridge, Sh.e.l.ley, and Keats. His felicities of diction in the great pa.s.sages seem little short of miraculous, and they are so many that it is easy to understand why he is so often spoken of as being a kind of inspired improvisatore. That he was _not_ an improvisatore, however, any one can see who will take the trouble to compare the first edition of 'Romeo and Juliet' with the received text, the first sketch of 'The Merry Wives of Windsor' with the play as we now have it, and the 'Hamlet' of 1603 with the 'Hamlet' of 1604, and with the still further varied version of the play given by Heminge and Condell in the Folio of 1623. If we take into account, moreover, that it is only by the lucky chapter of accidents that we now possess the earlier forms of the three plays mentioned above, and that most likely the other plays were once in a like condition, we shall come to the conclusion that there was no more vigilant worker with Dante's sieve than Shakespeare. Next to Shakespeare in this great power of combining the forces of the two great cla.s.ses of English poets, appealing both to the commonplace sense of a commonplace public and to the artistic sense of the few, stands, perhaps, Chaucer; but since Shakespeare's time no one has met with anything like Tennyson's success in effecting a reconciliation between popular and artistic sympathy with poetry in England.

The biography of such a poet, one who has had such an immense influence upon the literary history of the entire Victorian epoch-indeed, upon the nineteenth century, for his work covers two-thirds of the century-will be a work of incalculable importance. There is but one man who is fully equipped for such an undertaking, and fortunately that is his own son-a man of great ability, of admirable critical ac.u.men, and of quite exceptional accomplishments. His son's filial affection was so precious to Tennyson that, although the poet's powers remained undimmed to the last day of his life, I do not believe that we should have had all the splendid work of the last ten years without his affectionate and unwearied aid.

II.

All emotion-that of communities as well as that of individuals-is largely governed by the laws of ebb and flow. It is immediately after a national mourning for the loss of a great man that a wave of reaction generally sets in. But the eagerness with which these volumes {132} have been awaited shows that Tennyson's hold upon the British public is as strong at this moment as it was on the day of his death. This very popularity of his, however, has sometimes been spoken of by critics as though it were an impeachment of him as a poet. "The English public is commonplace," they say, "and hence the commonplace in poetry suits it."

And no doubt this is true as a general saying, otherwise what would become of certain English poetasters who are such a joy to the many and such a source of laughter to the few? But a hardy critic would he be who should characterize Tennyson's poetry as commonplace-that very poetry which, before it became popular, was decried because it was merely "poetry for poets." Still that poetry so rich and so rare as his should find its way to the heart of a people like the English, who have "not sufficient poetic instinct in them to give birth to vernacular poetry,"

is undoubtedly a striking fact. With regard to the ma.s.s of his work, he belonged to those poets whose appeal is as much through their mastery over the more subtle beauties of poetic art as through the heat of the poetic fire; and such as these must expect to share the fate of Coleridge, Keats, and Sh.e.l.ley. Every true poet must have an individual accent of his own-an accent which is, however, recognizable as another variation of that large utterance of the early G.o.ds common to all true poets in all tongues. Is it not, then, in the nature of things that, in England at least, "the fit though few" comprise the audience of such a poet until the voice of recognized Authority proclaims him? But Authority moves slowly in these matters; years have to pa.s.s before the music of the new voice can wind its way through the convolutions of the general ear-so many years, indeed, that unless the poet is blessed with the sublime self-esteem of Wordsworth he generally has to die in the belief that his is another name "written in water." And was it always so? Yes, always.

England having, as we have said, no vernacular song, her poetry is entirely artistic, even such poetry as 'The May Queen,' 'The Northern Farmer,' and the idyls of William Barnes. And it would be strange indeed if, until Authority spoke out, the beauties of artistic poetry were ever apparent to the many. Is it supposable, for instance, that even the voice of Chaucer-is it supposable that even the voice of Shakspeare-would have succeeded in winning the contemporary ear had it not been for that great ma.s.s of legendary and romantic material which each of these found ready to his hand, waiting to be moulded into poetic form? The fate, however, of Moore's poetical narratives (perhaps we might say of Byron's too) shows that if any poetry is to last beyond the generation that produced it, there is needed not only the romantic material, but also the accent, new and true, of the old poetic voice. And these volumes show why in these late days, when the poet's inheritance of romantic material seemed to have been exhausted, there appeared one poet to whom the English public gave an acceptance as wide almost as if he had written in the vernacular like Burns or Beranger.

It is long since any book has been so eagerly looked forward to as this.

The main facts of Tennyson's life have been matter of familiar knowledge for so many years that we do not propose to run over them here once more.

Nor shall we fill the s.p.a.ce at our command with the biographer's interesting personal anecdotes. So fierce a light had been beating upon Aldworth and Farringford that the relations of the present Lord Tennyson to his father were pretty generally known. In the story of English poetry these relations held a place that was quite unique. What the biographer says about the poet's sagacity, judgment, and good sense-especially what he says about his insight into the characters of those with whom he was brought into contact-will be challenged by no one who knew him. Still, the fact remains that Tennyson's temperament was poetic entirely. And the more attention the poet pays to his art, the more unfitted does he become to pay attention to anything else. For in these days the mechanism of social life moves on grating wheels that need no little oiling if the poet is to bring out the very best that is within him. Not that all poets are equally vexed by the special infirmity of the poetic temperament. Poets like Wordsworth, for instance, are supported against the world by love of Nature and by that "divine arrogance" which is sometimes a characteristic of genius. Tennyson's case shows that not even love of Nature and intimate communings with her are of use in giving a man peace when he has not Wordsworth's temperament. No adverse criticism could disturb Wordsworth's sublime self-complacency.

"Your father," writes Jowett, with his usual wisdom, to Lord Tennyson, "was very sensitive, and had an honest hatred of being gossiped about.

He called the malignant critics and chatterers 'mosquitos.' He never felt any pleasure at praise (except from his friends), but he felt a great pain at the injustice of censure. It never occurred to him that a new poet in the days of his youth was sure to provoke dangerous hostilities in the 'genus irritabile vatum' and in the old-fashioned public."

It might almost be said, indeed, that had it not been for the ministrations, first of his beloved wife, and then of his sons, Tennyson's life would have been one long warfare between the att.i.tude of his splendid intellect towards the universe and the response of his nervous system to human criticism. From his very childhood he seems to have had that instinct for confronting the universe as a whole which, except in the case of Shakespeare, is not often seen among poets.

Star-gazing and speculation as to the meaning of the stars and what was going on in them seem to have begun in his childhood. In his first Cambridge letter to his aunt, Mrs. Russell, written from No. 12, Rose Crescent, he says, "I am sitting owl-like and solitary in my room, nothing between me and the stars but a stratum of tiles." And his son tells us of a story current in the family that Frederick, when an Eton schoolboy, was shy of going to a neighbouring dinner-party to which he had been invited. "Fred," said his younger brother, "think of Herschel's great star-patches, and you will soon get over all that." He had Wordsworth's pa.s.sion, too, for communing with Nature alone. He was one of Nature's elect who knew that even the company of a dear and intimate friend, howsoever close, is a disturbance of the delight that intercourse with her can afford to the true devotee. In a letter to his future wife, written from Mablethorpe in 1839, he says:-

"I am not so able as in old years to commune _alone_ with Nature . . .

Dim mystic sympathies with tree and hill reaching far back into childhood, a known landskip is to me an old friend, that continually talks to me of my own youth and half-forgotten things, and indeed does more for me than many an old friend that I know. An old park is my delight, and I could tumble about it for ever."

Moreover, he was always speculating upon the mystery and the wonder of the human story. "The far future," he says in a letter to Miss Sellwood, written from High Beech in Epping Forest, "has been my world always."

And yet so powerless is reason in that dire wrestle with temperament which most poets know, that with all these causes for despising criticism of his work, Tennyson was as sensitive to critical strictures as Wordsworth was indifferent. "He fancied," says his biographer, "that England was an unsympathetic atmosphere, and half resolved to live abroad in Jersey, in the South of France, or in Italy. He was so far persuaded that the English people would never care for his poetry, that, had it not been for the intervention of his friends, he declared it not unlikely that after the death of Hallam he would not have continued to write."

And again, in reference to the completion of 'The Sleeping Beauty,' his son says, "He warmed to his work because there had been a favourable review of him lately published in far-off Calcutta."

We dwell upon this weakness of Tennyson's-a weakness which, in view of his immense powers, was certainly a source of wonder to his friends-in order to show, once for all, that without the tender care of his son he could never in his later years have done the work he did. This it was which caused the relations between Tennyson and the writer of this admirable memoir to be those of brother with brother rather than of father with son. And those who have been eagerly looking forward to these volumes will not be disappointed. In writing the life of any man there are scores and scores of facts and doc.u.ments, great and small, which only some person closely acquainted with him, either as relative or as friend, can bring into their true light; and this it is which makes doc.u.ments so deceptive. Here is an instance of what we mean. In writing to Thompson, Spedding says of Tennyson on a certain occasion: "I could not get Alfred to Rydal Mount. He would and would not (sulky one!), although Wordsworth was hospitably minded towards him." This remark would inevitably have been construed into another instance of that churlishness which is so often said (though quite erroneously) to have been one of Tennyson's infirmities. But when we read the following foot-note by the biographer, "He said he did not wish to intrude himself on the great man at Rydal," we accept the incident as another proof of that "humility" which the son alludes to in his preface as being one of his father's characteristics. And of such evidence that had not the poet's son written his biography the loss to literature would have been incalculable the book is full. Evidence of a fine intellect, a fine culture, and a sure judgment is afforded by every page-afforded as much by what is left unsaid as by what is said.

The biographer has invited a few of the poet's friends to furnish their impressions of him. These could not fail to be interesting; it is pleasant to know what impression Tennyson made upon men of such diverse characters as the Duke of Argyll, Jowett, Tyndall, Froude, and others.

But so far as a vital portrait of the man is concerned they were not needed, so vigorously does the man live in the portrait painted by him who knew the poet best of all.

"For my own part," says the biographer, "I feel strongly that no biographer could so truly give him as he gives himself in his own works; but this may be because, having lived my life with him, I see him in every word which he has written; and it is difficult for me so far to detach myself from the home circle as to pourtray him for others. There is also the impossibility of fathoming a great man's mind; his deeper thoughts are hardly ever revealed. He himself disliked the notion of a long, formal biography, for

None can truly write his single day, And none can write it for him upon earth.

"However, he wished that, if I deemed it better, the incidents of his life should be given as shortly as might be without comment, but that my notes should be final and full enough to preclude the chance of further and unauthentic biographies.