Tennyson and His Friends Part 37

Come down, O maid, from yonder mountain height:

For Love is of the valley, come thou down And find him; by the happy threshold, he, Or hand in hand with Plenty in the maize, Or red with _spirted purple of the vats_,[89]

Or _foxlike[90] in the vine_; nor cares to walk With Death and Morning on the silver horns...

But follow; let the torrent dance thee down To find him in the valley; let the wild Lean-headed Eagles yelp alone, and leave The monstrous ledges there to slope, and spill Their thousand wreaths of dangling water-smoke, That like a broken purpose waste in air: So waste not thou; but come; for all the vales Await thee; azure pillars of the hearth Arise to thee; the children call, and I Thy shepherd pipe, and sweet is every sound, Sweeter thy voice, but every sound is sweet; Myriads of rivulets hurrying thro' the lawn, The moan of doves in immemorial elms, And murmuring of innumerable bees.

This is the real idyll, with its central note of _love_, and wonderful beauty of sound, and vivid vision of every detail of Nature's sights and life. It suggests a world where all is fresh and sweet, and beautiful and interesting, and simple and wholesome and harmonious.

The year 1850 was marked by three great events in the personal history of Tennyson: his marriage, the publication of his greatest work, "In Memoriam," and his acceptance of the laureate crown of poetry in succession to Wordsworth, who died in the spring.

When I say that "In Memoriam" is Tennyson's greatest work, I am of course aware that it is only a personal opinion on a disputable point. But I incline to think that most lovers of poetry would agree that "In Memoriam" is _the one_ of all the Poet's works the loss of which would be the greatest and most irreparable to poetry.

In the grave and solemn stanzas with which the poem opens, he calls the songs that follow _wild and wandering cries, confusions of a wasted youth_. But in truth they are the expression of the deepest and most heartfelt sorrow: the most musical and imaginative outpouring of every mood, and every trouble, of a n.o.ble love and regret: the cries of a soul stricken with doubt born of anguish, and darkened with shadows of disbelief and despair: the deeper brooding over the eternal problems of life, thought, knowledge, religion: the gradual groping toward a faith rather divined than proved, and slowly pa.s.sing through storm into peace.

The poem took seventeen years to write, and when it appeared the Poet was at the summit of his great powers. His instinct chose a metre at once strong, simple, fresh, flexible, and grave, and n.o.ble--equally adapted to every mood, every form of thought or feeling--the pa.s.sionate, the meditative, the solemn, the imaginative--for description, argument, aspiration, even for prayer. The tone varies: there are lighter and deeper touches: but it is hardly too much to say, there is not an insignificant stanza, nor a jarring note, from beginning to end.

In a poem where all is so familiar--which has meant and means so much to all who care for poetry--it is difficult to quote. I will take a few stanzas, so chosen, if possible, as to show somewhat of the variety, the range, the subtlety, the charm, and the power of this great work.

He goes to the house in London where the dead friend lived: the gloom without typifies and harmonizes with the darkness of his sorrowful thoughts.

Dark house, by which once more I stand Here in the long unlovely street: Doors, where my heart was wont to beat So quickly, waiting for a hand,--

A hand that can be clasped no more-- Behold me--for I cannot sleep-- And like a guilty thing I creep At earliest morning to the door.

He is not here; but far away The noise of life begins again, And ghastly thro' the drizzling rain On the bald street breaks the blank day.

One of the most important motives concerns the doubts raised by the new truths which science was beginning to teach, almost seeming to make in a sense a new heaven and a new earth. The old simple beliefs seemed to the Poet threatened--these misgivings are evil dreams: _Nature_ seems to say:

... A thousand types are gone: I care for nothing, all shall go.

Thou makest thine appeal to me; I bring to life, I bring to death; The spirit does but mean the breath: I know no more...

Then the Poet breaks out:

And he, shall he, Man, her last work, who seem'd so fair, Such splendid purpose in his eyes, Who roll'd the psalm to wintry skies, Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer--

Who trusted G.o.d was love indeed, And love Creation's final law-- Tho' Nature, red in tooth and claw With ravine, shriek'd against his creed--

Who loved, who suffer'd countless ills, Who battled for the True, the Just, Be blown about the desert dust, Or seal'd within the iron hills?...

O life as futile, then, as frail!

O for thy voice to soothe and bless!

What hope of answer, or redress?

Behind the veil, behind the veil.

He will not accept the suggestions which seem to empty human life of its deepest meanings. There must be some other solution.

One more quotation of a different kind--the common sad thought, never so beautifully expressed, of the places we have loved when bereft of our daily loving care--then pa.s.sing into other hands and forgetting us, and becoming at last to others what they have been to us.

It is in these common universal _human_ themes that Tennyson with his exquisite musical touch, and sympathy, and unerring choice of significant detail, reaches the heart of every reader.

Unwatch'd, the garden bough shall sway, The tender blossom flutter down, Unloved, that beech will gather brown, This maple burn itself away:

Unloved, the sunflower, shining fair, Ray round with flames her disk of seed, And many a rose-carnation feed With summer spice the humming air:

Unloved, by many a sandy bar, The brook shall babble down the plain, At noon or when the lesser wain Is twisting round the polar star.

(Omitting a stanza.)

Till from the garden and the wild A fresh a.s.sociation blow, And year by year the landscape grow Familiar to the stranger's child.

As year by year the labourer tills His wonted glebe, or lops the glades, And year by year our memory fades From all the circle of the hills.

I can quote no more.

The poem seems gradually to rise from the depths of sorrow and doubt to a new hope and faith--in short, to a new life. The marks of what it has pa.s.sed through are seen in the deeper thought, the larger nature, and insight, and scope. The _soul_ has grown and strengthened, we may almost say.

In short, the poem is the inner history of a soul: our deepest feelings, our hopes, our fears, our longings, our weaknesses, our difficulties, all find penetrating, sympathetic, enlightening expression--terse, melodious, inspiring, deeply suggestive--in a word, we feel the magic of poetry.

I have no time left to deal with the large work, which occupied many years, "The Idylls of the King." It is a series--in blank verse, always melodious and often exquisite, giving the main incidents of the old Arthurian legend, which as a boy he had read with delight in old Malory's prose epic.

I must content myself with two brief references.

The first idyll, "Gareth and Lynette," is not in itself one of the most interesting[91]--dealing chiefly as it does with the picture of the eager boy, anxious to be one of Arthur's knights, who serves a year in menial place as a test of his obedience: but there is one pa.s.sage which ought never to be omitted in speaking of Tennyson, viz. the answer of the seer when the boys ask him if the castle is enchanted.

The seer answers ironically, yet with a deep meaning, that it _is_ enchanted:

For there is nothing in it as it seems Saving the King; tho' some there be that hold The King a shadow, and the city real.

Then he tells them about the _vows_: which if they fear to take, he warns them

Pa.s.s not beneath this gateway, but abide Without, among the cattle of the field, For an ye hear a music, like enow They are building still, seeing the city is built To music, _therefore never built at all, And therefore built for ever_.

Beneath the strangely beautiful surface meaning of these lines there lies the deep allegoric meaning that often what seems visionary is in truth a spiritual and eternal reality. It brings to mind the wonderful lines of Browning (in "Abt Vogler"):

The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard, The pa.s.sion that left the earth to lose itself in the sky, Are music sent up to G.o.d by the lover and the bard; Enough that he heard it once, we shall hear it by and by.

The other point concerns the end of the poem. The last section is the Pa.s.sing of Arthur; the old fragment "Morte d'Arthur" enlarged. One notable addition occurs at the very end.

In the earlier version of the fragment, after Arthur had pa.s.sed away on the dark lake, with him the last hope also disappears.

We are only told:

Long stood Sir Bedivere, Revolving many memories, till the hull Look'd one black dot against the verge of dawn, And on the mere the wailing died away.

In the fragment the end was tragic: the n.o.ble attempt failed; the hero and inspirer pa.s.sed away, his aim defeated, his comrades slain or scattered, his life and efforts vain.