Tennyson and His Friends Part 36

The horrors, like Gorgons and Furies of ancient poets, are perhaps a trifle too material; but in the description of the Nemesis there are touches of real power, which at least are impressive and arresting.

"none" is perhaps the most absolutely beautiful of these early poems, and for the triumph of melodious sound, and finished picturesqueness of description, the opening lines are unsurpa.s.sed. We should also note that it took more than one edition to bring it to its present perfection of form. It is very well known, but no one will object to hear it again:

There lies a vale in Ida, lovelier Than all the valleys of Ionian hills.

The swimming vapour slopes athwart the glen, Puts forth an arm, and creeps from pine to pine, And loiters, slowly drawn. On either hand The lawns and meadow-ledges midway down Hang rich in flowers, and far below them roars The long brook falling thro' the clov'n ravine In cataract after cataract to the sea.

Behind the valley topmost Gargarus Stands up and takes the morning: but in front The gorges, opening wide apart, reveal Troas and Ilion's column'd citadel, The crown of Troas.

Before I pa.s.s on from "none," I may perhaps add a word or two on Tennyson's cla.s.sical poetry generally, and his debt to the great ancient masterpieces.

He was, perhaps, not exactly a scholar in what I may call the narrow professional sense; but in the broadest and deepest and truest sense he was a _great_ scholar. Direct imitations of cla.s.sical form, even when they show such power and poetry as Swinburne's "Atalanta" and "Erechtheus,"

have always something artificial about them. But in all Tennyson's cla.s.sic pieces--"none," "Ulysses," "Demeter," "t.i.thonus," the legendary subjects--and in the two historic subjects, "Lucretius" and "Boadicea,"

the cla.s.sical tradition is there with full detail, but by the poet's art it is trans.m.u.ted. "none" is epic in form, the rest are brief monodramas; the material is all ancient, and in many subtle ways the spirit; the handling is modern and original. In translations--too few--Tennyson can only be called consummate: his version of one pa.s.sage of the _Iliad_ (viii. 552) makes all other translations seem second-rate. Let me quote a few lines:

And these all night upon the bridge of war Sat glorying; many a fire before them blazed: As when in heaven the stars about the moon Look beautiful, when all the winds are laid, And every height comes out, and jutting peak And valley, and _the immeasurable heavens Break open to their highest_,[86] and all the stars Shine, and the Shepherd gladdens in his heart: So many a fire between the ships and stream Of Xanthus blazed before the towers of Troy, A thousand on the plain; and close by each Sat fifty in the blaze of burning fire; And eating h.o.a.ry grain and pulse the steeds, Fixt by their cars, waited the golden dawn.

The pa.s.sage, let me add, is a crucial test of the power of a translator, for this reason: it is a plain, simple description of the Trojan camp-fires in the darkness, with a simile or comparison of the sight to a clearance of the sky at night and the sudden shining of the mult.i.tude of stars. With the infallible instinct of Greek Poetry there is a rapid lift in the style, a sudden glorious phrase [Greek: huperrage aspetos aither], to suggest adequately the magnificent sight of the sudden clearance. It is this effect that is difficult to give in the translation; and it is exactly this splendid climax that Tennyson's incomparable rendering, "And the immeasurable heavens break open to their highest," so perfectly conveys.

Again, in the metrical imitations--which are deliberately somewhat in the vein of sport and artifice--Tennyson alone, it seems to me, has exactly done what he intended, and shown what English effects can be produced by a master's hand, even in these unfamiliar measures.

Of the serious cla.s.sic pieces one of the most beautiful and moving is "t.i.thonus." The tale is familiar: the beautiful youth t.i.thonus was beloved by the G.o.ddess of the Dawn, and her love bestowed immortality on him; _but they both forgot to ask for immortal youth_. So he grew old: and the pathos of the boon, granted by love at love's request, thus turning out a curse, is the motive of the tale. He speaks:

Yet hold me not for ever in thine East: How can my nature longer mix with thine?

Coldly thy rosy shadows bathe me, cold Are all thy lights, and cold my wrinkled feet Upon thy glimmering thresholds, when the steam Floats up from those dim fields about the homes Of happy men that have the power to die, And gra.s.sy barrows of the happier dead.

Release me, and restore me to the ground; Thou seest all things, thou wilt see my grave: Thou wilt renew thy beauty morn by morn; I earth in earth forget these empty courts, And thee returning on thy silver wheels.

A great scholar has said that it is one of the most incomparable powers of poetry _to make sad things beautiful_, and so to go some way towards healing the sorrow in the reader's heart. He was speaking of Greek Tragedy; but there is, I think, a deep truth in the saying, and it is not confined to that particular form of poetry. And I know no better instance of the truth than the singularly beautiful poem quoted above.

But the cla.s.sic influences are, of course, not limited to the avowed borrowings from ancient legend. There are constantly lines in Tennyson where the student of ancient poetry recognizes a phrase--a turn--an echo--beautiful in themselves, and giving a special pleasure to the instructed reader; such a line as "When the first matin-song hath wakened loud," which occurs in the "Address to Memory"--the striking early poem containing the description of his Somersby home--and is itself an exquisitely turned translation from Sophocles' _Electra_. So again we have an echo from Homer through Virgil, in the half-playful line, "This way and that dividing the swift mind"; or, again, the vivid simile from Theocritus in the bold description:

And arms on which the standing muscles sloped, As slopes a wild brook o'er a little stone, Running too vehemently to break upon it.[87]

--where the reader with an ear will note the bold metrical variation adding so much to the effect. So again the Poet himself has told us how the famous phrase for the kingfisher, "The sea-blue bird of March," arose one day when he was haunted by the lovely stanza of Alcman (Greek lyric poet) about the "halcyon" whom he calls "the sea-blue bird of spring." The fact is that Tennyson had an inborn instinct for the subtle power of language, and for musical sound--in a word, for that insight, finish, feeling for beauty in phrase and thought and _thing_, and that perfection of form, which, taken all together, we call poetry, and he is, like Virgil and Milton, a true son of the Greeks: and if his open imitations are few, the influence of the springs from which he drank is none the less powerful and pervading.

In 1842 came a carefully revised selection of the earlier books--he was always revising and improving--along with a large number of new poems.

I will pa.s.s over the English Idylls, which, in spite of beautiful touches, have never as a whole appealed to me. But, setting these aside, there are a few pieces which I cannot pa.s.s by without a word. They are "Love and Duty," the political poems, and songs. "Morte d'Arthur" I leave over till we reach the Idylls.

"Love and Duty" is a pa.s.sionate tragedy, the parting of two lovers at the call of duty. Perhaps the high-wrought pathos is a sign of youth; but youth may be a strength as well as a weakness; and the lines are surely of extraordinary beauty and force. I will quote the last pa.s.sage, for a reason which will appear:

Should my Shadow cross thy thoughts Too sadly for their peace, remand it thou For calmer hours to Memory's darkest hold, If not to be forgotten--not at once-- Not all forgotten. Should it cross thy dreams, O might it come like one that looks content, With quiet eyes unfaithful to the truth, And point thee forward to a distant light, Or seem to lift a burthen from thy heart And leave thee freer, till thou wake refresh'd Then when the first low matin-chirp hath grown Full quire, and morning driv'n her plow of pearl Far furrowing into light the mounded rack, Beyond the fair green field and eastern sea.

Certain critics have found fault with the splendid description of Dawn, as being untrue to nature; a lover in such a crisis, they think, would not be concerned with such images. I regard this suggestion as wholly at fault.

The tragedy, the parting, has come to pa.s.s: the vision of dawn is a _hope_ for _her_, now that the new life, apart from each other, has to begin for both of them. If the broken love was all, if they could not look beyond, the parting would have been different--like Lancelot and Guinevere--"Stammering and staring; a madness of farewells." But here the note is higher. The pa.s.sion barred from its issue rushes into new channels, and the exalted mood finds its only adequate vent in the rapturous vision of a future dawn, the symbol of his hopes for her, those hopes into which his sacrificed love is translated.

In the political poems we have a new departure. It is easy to idealize freedom, revolution, or war: and the ancients found it easy to compose lyrics on kings, athletes, warriors, or other powerful persons. From the days of Tyrtaeus and Pindar, to Byron, Sh.e.l.ley, and Swinburne, one or other of these themes has been the seed of song. But the praise of ordered liberty, of settled government, of political moderation, is far harder to idealize in poetry. It has been the peculiar aim of Tennyson to be the const.i.tutional, and in this sense the national, poet: and it is his peculiar merit and good fortune to have succeeded in giving eloquent and forcible expression to the ideas suggested by these aims.

I will not quote the poems about "the Falsehood of extremes," or "the land of just and old renown where freedom slowly broadens down from precedent to precedent," because these poems, terse and forcible summaries as they are, have suffered, like other epigrammatic maxims in verse, from vulgarizing quotation. It is not the Poet's fault in the least; in fact it is due to his very merits--to the memorable brevity, truth, and point of the phrasing. I will quote another--perhaps the most remarkable--of these political poems, "Love thou thy land." It is close packed with thought, and must have been especially hard to write, since the Poet's problem was to express in terse and picturesque and imaginative language what at bottom is philosophic and even prosaic detail. Nevertheless, where the material lends itself at all to imaginative handling we get effects that are impressive and even superb. Take a few lines--I cannot quote at length:

Oh yet, if Nature's evil star Drive men in manhood, as in youth, To follow flying steps of Truth Across the brazen bridge of war--

If New and Old, disastrous feud, Must ever shock, like armed foes, And this be true, till Time shall close, That Principles are rain'd in blood;

Not yet the wise of heart would cease To hold his hope thro' shame and guilt, But with his hand against the hilt, Would pace the troubled land, like Peace;

Not less, tho' dogs of Faction bay, Would serve his kind in deed and word, Certain, if knowledge bring the sword, That knowledge takes the sword away.

The last couplet seems to me--where all is powerful and imaginative--to be a master-stroke of terse and pointed expression. It would be hardly an exaggeration to say that it sums up human history in regard to one point--namely, the disturbing and even desolating effect of the new Political Idea, until its triumph comes, bringing a higher and more stable adjustment, and a peace more righteous and secure.

Far more widely known than these didactic poems, rich as they are in poetry and thought, are the patriotic odes--the three greatest being the poems on the Duke of Wellington, the "Revenge," and Lucknow.

The ode on the Duke is a n.o.ble commemoration-poem, grave and stately and solemn--a worthy expression of "the mourning of a mighty nation" with a musical and dignified sorrow--a terse and vivid reference to the Duke's exploits--a fine imaginative pa.s.sage where he pictures the dead Nelson asking who the newcomer is, and the stately answer--a striking tribute to the simple and n.o.ble character of the dead hero--and then this:

A people's voice! we are a people yet.

Tho' all men else their n.o.bler dreams forget, Confused by brainless mobs and lawless Powers; Thank Him who isled us here, and roughly set His Briton in blown seas and storming showers...

O Statesmen, guard us, guard the eye, the soul, Of Europe, keep our n.o.ble England whole, And save the one true seed of freedom sown Betwixt a people and their ancient throne...

For, saving that, ye help to save mankind Till public wrong be crumbled into dust, And drill the raw world for the march of mind, Till crowds at length be sane and crowns be just.

Again, for the judgment of the poem, the _date_ is important. It was written only four years after the European earthquake of 1848, and only one year after the Coup d'etat. The allusions are not mere commonplaces: they deal with live issues. It is not too much to say that in the great ode Tennyson had a subject after his own heart, and that he has done it magnificent justice.

Of the "Revenge" I will quote one pa.s.sage, because it contains what always strikes me as _the_ most wonderful effect of _sound_ in poetry to be found anywhere. The whole poem, I may observe, is full of novel and effective handling of metre: but this is the most remarkable. It occurs in the description of the rising storm in which the gallant little ship went down:

And they mann'd the Revenge with a swarthier alien crew, And away she sail'd with her loss, and long'd for her own; When a wind from the lands they had ruin'd awoke from sleep, And the water began to heave, and the weather to moan, And or ever that evening ended a great gale blew, And a wave like the wave that is raised by an earthquake grew, Till it smote on their hulls and their sails and their masts and their flags, And the whole sea plunged and fell on the shot-shatter'd navy of Spain, And the little Revenge herself went down by the island crags To be lost evermore in the main.

Lastly, in the 1842 volume, there was a little song without a t.i.tle, which will certainly live as long as the English language.

In 1833, nine years before the volume appeared, had died abroad suddenly the rarely-gifted youth who was bound to Tennyson by the double tie of being his best-loved friend and the betrothed of his sister. The body had been brought home for burial by the sea at a little place called Clevedon.

This is the song:

Break, break, break, On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!

And I would that my tongue could utter The thoughts that arise in me.

O well for the fisherman's boy, That he shouts with his sister at play!

O well for the sailor lad, That he sings in his boat on the bay!

And the stately ships go on To their haven under the hill; But O for the touch of a vanish'd hand, And the sound of a voice that is still!

Break, break, break, At the foot of thy crags, O Sea!

But the tender grace of a day that is dead Will never come back to me.

There is something in the magical expression of deep love and sorrow in these lines--with the swift and vivid touches of scenery, sympathetic and suggestive--which we can only compare to the few greatest outbursts of pa.s.sionate regret in poetry.

Five years later came "The Princess" (1847). The idea--a bold design--was to treat, by poetic and half-playful narrative, the comparative intellectual and moral natures of men and women, and the right method of education. The Poet's views may perhaps to-day seem somewhat old-fashioned, the truths that he suggests or enunciates, in very finished and beautiful language, are controversial, and suffer from the inevitable failing of such writing, viz., that the issues of the strife have changed: experience has shown the forecasts, the fears, and the prophetic satire to be misplaced: and what seemed important truths have turned out to be prejudices or irrelevant plat.i.tudes.[88]

The one thing that is consummate in "The Princess" is the handful of little songs that come as interludes between the acts. They are so well known that they need no quotation: their t.i.tles will suffice: "As through the land at eve we went," "Sweet and low," "The splendour falls," "Tears, idle tears," "Thy voice is heard thro' rolling drums," "Home they brought her warrior dead," "Ask me no more."

The extraordinary effect of these songs is not due only to their marvellous poetic force and finish and variety, but perhaps even more to the illuminating and pointed contrast between the true and deep and permanent realities of human experience--life, death, love, joy, and sorrow--each of which is touched in turn in these exquisite little pictures, and on the other hand the fantastic unreality (in the Poet's view) of the Princess's ideals and experiment.

If I must quote one pa.s.sage, let it be abridged from the shepherd's song which the Princess reads: