Tennyson and His Friends Part 38

But in the final shape comes a new and very significant end:

Then from the dawn it seem'd there came, but faint, As from beyond the limit of the world, Like the last echo born of a great cry, Sounds, as if some fair city were one voice, Around a king returning from his wars.

Thereat once more he[92] moved about, and clomb Ev'n to the highest he could climb--and saw, Or thought he saw, the speck that bare the King Somewhere far off, pa.s.s on and on, and go From less to less, and vanish _into light_.

And the new sun rose, bringing the new year.

We feel, as we are meant to feel, that though the death of a n.o.ble soul, after unequal war with ill, is deeply sad--fitly pictured with sorrowful sounds and darkness of night--yet the great spirit cannot wholly die: the night breaks into a new day; and the day will be brighter for those who are left, because of the efforts and memories of the leader who is no more.

Tennyson is without doubt, from first to last, one of the great poetic artists. He is not often an inspired singer like Sh.e.l.ley, but he has other gifts which Sh.e.l.ley lacked--a self-restraint, an artistic finish, a fine and mature taste, a deep reverence for the past, a pervading sympathy with the broad currents of the best thought and feeling of the time. Sometimes this is (as we have seen) a weakness, but it is also the source of his greatest strength. He has not, like Wordsworth, given us a new insight, what I may almost call a new religion: but he has a wider range than Wordsworth, and a surer poetic touch. Wordsworth may be the greater teacher; for many of us he has opened a new world: he has touched the deepest springs of our nature. But Tennyson has left us gifts hardly less rare and precious. He has refined, enriched, beautified, in some sense almost remade our poetic language; he has shown that the cla.s.sic eighteenth-century finish is not incompatible with the nineteenth-century deeper and wider thought: and, in a word, he has inwoven the golden thread of poetry with the main texture of the life, knowledge, feeling, experience, and ideals of the years whereof we are all alike inheritors.

TENNYSON: HIS LIFE AND WORK[93]

By the Right Hon. SIR ALFRED LYALL, G.C.B.

The biography of a great poet has seldom been so written as to enhance his reputation with the world at large. It is almost always the highest artist whose individuality, so to speak, is least discernible in his work, and who, like some divinity, is at his best when his mind and moods, his lofty purpose and his att.i.tude toward the problems of life, are revealed only through the medium which he has chosen for revealing them to mankind. To lay bare the human side of a poet, to retail his domestic history, and to dwell upon his private relations with friends or family, will always interest the public enormously; but for himself it is often a perilous ordeal. The man of restless erratic genius, cut off in his prime like Byron or Sh.e.l.ley, leaves behind him a confession of faults and follies, while one who has lived long takes the risk of intellectual decline; or else, like Coleridge, Landor, and even Scott, he may in other ways suffer loss of dignity by the posthumous record of failings or mistakes. It is a rare coincidence that in this nineteenth century two poets of the first rank--Wordsworth and Tennyson--should each have pa.s.sed the natural limit of fourscore years, steadily extending their reputation without material loss of their power, and completely fulfilling the ideal of a life devoted to their beautiful art, free alike from adventures and eccentricities, tranquil, blameless, and n.o.bly dignified.

Such is the life which has been described to us in the _Memoir_ of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, by his son. In preparing it he had the singular advantage of very close and uninterrupted a.s.sociation for many years with his father, and of thorough acquaintance with his wishes and feelings in regard to the inevitable biography. In a brief preface, he touches, not without emotion, upon the aims and limitations of the task which it had become his duty to undertake.

"For my part," he says, "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. He himself disliked the notion of a long, formal biography.... 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."

Lord Tennyson has given us a remarkable chronicle of his father's life from youth to age, ill.u.s.trated by correspondence that is always interesting and occasionally of supreme value, by anecdotes and reminiscences, by characteristic thoughts and pithy observations--the outcome of the Poet's reflection, consummate literary judgment, and constant intercourse with the best contemporary intellects. He has, moreover, so arranged the narrative as to show the rapid expansion of Tennyson's strong, inborn poetic instinct, with the impressions and influences which moulded its development, maturing and perfecting his marvellous powers of artistic execution.

Alfred Tennyson was born in the pastoral village of Somersby, amid the Lincolnshire wolds; and he spent many holidays on the coast at Mablethorpe, where he acquired that pa.s.sion for the sea which has possessed so many poets. The atmosphere of a public school favours active emulation and discipline for the outer world; but to a boy of sensitive and imaginative temperament it is apt to be uncongenial, so we need not be sorry that Tennyson was spared the experience. At first, like most men of his temperament who go straight from private tuition to a University, he felt solitary and depressed--"the country is so disgustingly level, the revelry of the place so monotonous, the studies of the University so uninteresting, so matter-of-fact." But there was about him a distinction in mind and body that soon marked him out among his fellows ("a kind of Hyperion," writes FitzGerald), uniting strength with refinement, showing much insight into character, with the faculty of brief and pointed sallies: "We were looking one day at the portrait of an elderly politician in bland family aspect. A. T. (with his eyegla.s.s): It looks rather like a retired panther. So true."[94]

He was an early member of the Society yclept the Apostles, which included many eager and brilliant spirits, whose debates were upon political reform, the bettering of the people's condition, upon morals, religion, and those wider and more liberal views of social needs that were foremost at a period when the new forces were just mustering for attack upon the old entrenchment of Church and State. Edward FitzGerald's notes and Tennyson's own later recollections are drawn upon in this book for lively ill.u.s.trations of the sayings and doings of this notable group of friends, and for glimpses of their manner of life at Cambridge. Here he lived in the choice society of that day, and formed, among other friendships, an affectionate attachment to Arthur Hallam, who afterwards became engaged to his sister, and in whose memory the famous poem was written. Hallam seems to have been one of those men whose extraordinary promise and early death invest their brief and brilliant career with a kind of romance, explaining and almost justifying the pagan notions of Fate and divine envy.

In June 1829 Tennyson scored his first triumph by the prize poem on Timbuctoo, which, as he said many years afterwards, won the medal to his utter astonishment, for it was an old poem on Armageddon, adapted to Central Africa "by a little alteration of the beginning and the end."

Arthur Hallam wrote of it on September 2, 1829: "The splendid imaginative power which pervades it will be seen through all hindrances. I consider Tennyson as promising fair to be the greatest poet of our generation, perhaps of our century"--a remarkably far-reaching prophecy to have been built upon so slender a foundation. Out of his "horror of publicity," as he said, he committed it to Merivale for declamation in the Senate House.

In 1830 appeared Tennyson's first volume of poems, upon which Arthur Hallam again wrote, in a review, that "the features of original genius are strongly and clearly marked"; while on the other hand, Coleridge pa.s.sed upon it the well-known criticism that "he has begun to write verses without very well knowing what metre is"; and Christopher North handled it with a touch of good-natured ridicule. Then followed, in 1832, a fresh issue, including that magnificent allegory, the "Palace of Art"; with other poems whose very blemishes signified exuberant strength. James Montgomery's observation of him at this stage is in the main true as a standing test of latent potency in beginners. "He has very wealthy and luxurious thought and great beauty of expression, and is _a poet_. But there is plenty of room for improvement, and I would have it so. Your trim, correct _young_ writers rarely turn out well; a young poet should have a great deal which he can afford to throw away as he gets older."

The judgment was sound, for after a silent interval of ten years, during which the Poet was sedulously husbanding and cultivating his powers, the full-orbed splendour of his genius shone out in the two volumes of 1842.

"This decade," writes his biographer, "wrought a marvellous abatement of my father's real fault," which was undoubtedly "the tendency, arising from the fulness of mind which had not yet learned to master its resources freely, to overcrowd his composition with imagery, to which may be added over-indulgence in the luxuries of the senses." By this and by other extracts from contemporary criticism given in the _Memoir_ its readers may survey and measure the Poet's rapid development of mind and methods, the expansion of his range of thoughts, his increasing command over the musical instrument, and the admirable vigour and beauty which his composition was now disclosing. He had the singular advantage, rarely enjoyed so early in a poetic career, of being surrounded by enthusiastic friends who were also very competent art-critics, and whose unanimous verdict must have given him heart and confidence; so that the few spurts of cold water from professional reviewers troubled him very little. The darts thrown by such enemies might hardly reach or wound him--[Greek: prin gar peribesan aristoi]--the two Hallams, James Spedding, Edward FitzGerald, the two Lushingtons, Blakesley, and Julius Hare rallied round him enthusiastically. Hartley Coleridge met Tennyson in 1835, and, "after the fourth bottom of gin," deliberately thanked Heaven for having brought them acquainted. Wordsworth, who had at first been slow to appreciate, having afterwards listened to two poems recited by Aubrey de Vere, did "acknowledge that they were very n.o.ble in thought, with a diction singularly stately." Even Carlyle, who had implored the Poet to stick to prose, was vanquished, and wrote (1842) a letter so vividly characteristic as to justify a long quotation:

DEAR TENNYSON--Wherever this find you, may it find you well, may it come as a friendly greeting to you. I have just been reading your Poems; I have read certain of them over again, and mean to read them over and over till they become my poems; this fact, with the inferences that lie in it, is of such emphasis in me, I cannot keep it to myself, but must needs acquaint you too with it. If you knew what my relation has been to the thing call'd English "Poetry" for many years back, you would think such a fact almost surprising! Truly it is long since in any English Book, Poetry or Prose, I have felt the pulse of a real man's heart as I do in this same.

I know you cannot read German: the more interesting is it to trace in your "Summer Oak" a beautiful kindred to something that is best in Goethe; I mean his "Mullerin" (Miller's daughter) chiefly, with whom the very Mill-dam gets in love; though she proves a flirt after all, and the thing ends in satirical lines! Very strangely, too, in the "Vision of Sin" I am reminded of my friend Jean Paul. This is not babble, this is speech; true deposition of a volunteer witness. And so I say let us all rejoice somewhat. And so let us all smite rhythmically, all in concert, "the sounding furrows," and sail forward with new cheer "beyond the sunset" whither we are bound.

The _Memoir_ contains some valuable reminiscences of this period, contributed after Tennyson's death by his personal friends, which incidentally throw backward a light upon the literary society of that day.

Mr. Aubrey de Vere describes a meeting between Tennyson and Wordsworth; and relates also, subsequently and separately, a conversation with Tennyson, who was enthusiastic over the songs of Burns: "You forget, for their sake, those stupid things, his serious pieces." The same day Mr. de Vere met Wordsworth, who "praised Burns even more vehemently than Tennyson had done ..." but ended, "of course I refer to his serious efforts, those foolish little amatory songs of his one has to forget."

But in addition to contemporary criticism, written or spoken, and to the reminiscences, the biography gives us also several unpublished poems and fragmentary verses belonging to this period, with the original readings of other pieces that were altered before publication. It is in these materials, beyond others, that we can observe the forming and maturing of his style, the fastidious taste which dictated his rejection of work that either did not satisfy the highest standard as a whole, or else marred a poem's symmetrical proportion by superfluity, over-weight, or the undue predominance of some note in the general harmony. One may regret that some fine stanzas or exquisite lines should have been thus expunged, as, for example, those beginning:

Thou may'st remember what I said.

Yet we believe the impartial critic will confirm in every instance the decision. "Anacaona," written at Cambridge, was never published, because "the natural history and the rhymes did not satisfy" Tennyson; it is full of tropical warmth and ardour, with a fine rhythmic beat, but it is certainly below high-water mark. And the same must be said of the "Song of the Three Sisters," published and afterwards suppressed, though the blank verse of its prelude has undoubted quality. He acted, as we can see, inexorably upon his own rule that "the artist is known by his self-limitation"; feeling certain, as he once said, that "if I meant to make any mark in the world it must be by shortness, for the men before me had been so diffuse." Only the concise and perfect work, he thought, would last; and "hundreds of lines were blown up the chimney with his pipe smoke, or were written down and thrown into the fire as not being perfect enough." Yet all his austere resolution must have been needed for condemning some of the fine verses that were struck out of the "Palace of Art," merely to give the poem even balance, and trim it like a boat. Very few poems could have spared or borne the excisions from the "Dream of Fair Women"; though here and there the didactic or scientific note is slightly prominent, as in the following stanza:

All nature widens upward. Evermore The simpler essence lower lies, More complex is more perfect, owning more Discourse, more widely wise.

At any rate the preservation of these unpublished verses adds much to the value of the biography; and we may rank Tennyson among the very few poets whose reputation has rather gained than suffered by the posthumous appearance of pieces that the writer had deliberately withdrawn or withheld.

Of Tennyson's own literary opinions one or two specimens, belonging to this time, may be given.

"Byron and Sh.e.l.ley, however mistaken they were, did yet give the world another heart and new pulses; and so we are kept going"--a just tribute to their fiery lyrical energy, which did much to clear insular prejudice from the souls of a masculine generation. "Lycidas" he held to be the test of any reader's poetic instinct; and "Keats, with his high spiritual vision, would have been, if he had lived, the greatest of us all, though his blank verse lacked originality of movement." It is true that Keats, whose full metrical skill was never developed, may have imitated the Miltonic construction; yet after Milton he was the finest composer up to Tennyson's day. And the first hundred lines of "Hyperion" have no slight affinity, in colouring and cadence, to the Tennysonian blank verse. For indeed it was Keats who, as Tennyson's forerunner, pa.s.sed on to him the gift of intense romantic susceptibility to the influences of Nature, the "dim mystic sympathies with tree and hill reaching back into childhood." But Tennyson's art inclined more toward the picturesque, toward using words, as a painter uses his brush, for producing the impression of a scene's true outline and colour; his work shows the realistic feeling of a later day, which delights in precision of details. In one of his letters he mentions that there was a time when he was in the habit of chronicling, in four or five words or more, whatever might strike him as a picture, just as an artist would take rough sketches. The subjoined fragment, written on revisiting Mablethorpe on the Lincolnshire coast, contains the quintessence of his descriptive style; the last three lines are sheer landscape painting.

MABLETHORPE

Here often when a child I lay reclined, I took delight in this fair land and free; Here stood the infant Ilion of the mind, And here the Grecian ships all seemed to be.

And here again I come, and only find _The drain-cut level of the marshy lea, Gray sand-banks, and pale sunsets, dreary winds, Dim sh.o.r.es, dense rains, and heavy-clouded sea_.

More frequently, however, he employed his wonderful image-making power to ill.u.s.trate symbolically some mental state or emotion, availing himself of the mysterious relation between man and his environment, whereby the outer inanimate world is felt to be the resemblance and reflection of human moods. So in the "Palace of Art" the desolate soul is likened to

A still salt pool, lock'd in with bars of sand, Left on the sh.o.r.e; that hears all night The plunging seas draw backward from the land Their moon-led waters white.

And there are pa.s.sages in the extracts given from his letters written to Miss Emily Sellwood, during the long engagement that preceded their marriage, which indicate the bent of his mind toward philosophic quietism, with frequent signs of that half-veiled fellow-feeling with natural things, that sense of life in all sound and motion, whereby poetry is drawn upward, by degrees and almost unconsciously, into the region of the "Higher Pantheism." Nor has any English poet availed himself more skilfully of a language that is peculiarly rich in metaphors, consisting of words which still so far retain their original meaning as to suggest a picture while they convey a thought.

It is partly due to these qualities of mind and style that no chapter in this book, which mingles grave with gay very attractively, contains matter of higher biographical interest than that which is headed "In Memoriam."

For it is in this n.o.ble poem, on the whole Tennyson's masterpiece, that he is stirred by his own pa.s.sionate grief to dwell on the contrast between irremediable human suffering and the calm aspect of Nature, between the short and sorrowful days of man and the long procession of ages. From the doubts and perplexities, the tendency to lose heart, engendered by a sense of forces that are unceasing and relentless, he finds his ultimate escape in the spirit of trust in the Powers invisible, and in the persuasion that G.o.d and Nature cannot be at strife. In a letter contributed to this _Memoir_ Professor Henry Sidgwick has described the impression produced on him and others of his time by this poem, showing how it struck in, so to speak, upon their religious debates at a moment of conflicting tendencies and great uncertainty of direction, giving intensity of expression to the dominant feeling, and wider range to the prevailing thought:

The most important influence of "In Memoriam" on my thought, apart from its poetic charm as an expression of personal emotion, opened in a region, if I may so say, deeper down than the difference between Theism and Christianity: it lay in the unparalleled combination of intensity of feeling with comprehensiveness of view and balance of judgment, shown in presenting the deepest needs and perplexities of humanity. And this influence, I find, has increased rather than diminished as years have gone on, and as the great issues between Agnostic Science and Faith have become continually more prominent. In the sixties I should say that these deeper issues were somewhat obscured by the discussions on Christian dogma and Inspiration of Scripture, etc. ... During these years we were absorbed in struggling for freedom of thought in the trammels of a historical religion; and perhaps what we sympathized with most in "In Memoriam" at this time, apart from the personal feeling, was the defence of "honest doubt,"

the reconciliation of knowledge and faith in the introductory poem, and the hopeful trumpet-ring of the lines on the New Year.... Well, the years pa.s.s, the struggle with what Carlyle used to call "Hebrew old clothes" is over, Freedom is won, and what does Freedom bring us to? It brings us face to face with atheistic science; the faith in G.o.d and Immortality, which we had been struggling to clear from superst.i.tion, suddenly seems to be in the air; and in seeking for a firm basis for this faith we find ourselves in the midst of the "fight with death" which "In Memoriam" so powerfully presents.

To many readers the whole letter will seem to render fitly their feeling of the pathetic intensity with which the everlasting problems of love and death, of human doubts and destinies, are set forth in "In Memoriam." It will also remind them of the limitations, the inevitable inconclusiveness, of a poem which deals emotionally with questions that foil the deepest philosophers. The profound impression that was immediately produced by these exquisitely musical meditations may be ascribed, we think, to their sympathetic a.s.sociation with the peculiar spiritual needs and intellectual dilemmas of the time. It may be affirmed, as a general proposition, that up to about 1840, and for some years later, the majority among Englishmen of thought and culture were content to take morality as the chief test of religious truth, were disposed to hold that the essential principles of religion were best stated in the language of ethics. With this rational theology the pretensions of Science, which undertook to preserve and even to strengthen the moral basis, were not incompatible. But about this time came a spiritual awakening; and just then Tennyson came forward to insist, with poetic force and fervour, that the triumphant advance of Science was placing in jeopardy not merely the formal outworks but the central dogma of Christianity, which is the belief in a future life, in the soul's conscious immortality.[95] Is man subject to the general law of unending mutability? and is he after all but the highest and latest type, to be made and broken like a thousand others, mere clay under the moulding hands that are darkly visible in the processes of Nature? The Poet transfigured these obstinate questionings into the vision of an ever-breaking sh.o.r.e

That tumbled in a G.o.dless sea.

He turned our ears to hear the sound of streams that, swift or slow,

Draw down aeonian hills, and sow The dust of continents to be--

and he was haunted by the misgiving that man also might be a mere atom in an ever-changing universe. Yet after long striving with doubts and fears, after having "fought with death," he resolves that we cannot be "wholly brain, magnetic mockeries," not only cunning casts in clays:

Let Science prove we are, and then What matters Science unto men, At least to me? I would not stay.

We think that such pa.s.sages as these gave emphasis to the gathering alarm, and that many a startled inquirer, daunted by dim uncertainties, recoiled from the abyss that seemed to open at his feet, and made his peace, on such terms as consoled him, with Theology. Not that Tennyson himself retreated, or took refuge behind dogmatic entrenchments. On the contrary, he stood his ground and trod under foot the terrors of Acheron; relying on "the G.o.d who ever lives and loves." But since not every one can be satisfied with subjective faith or lofty intuitions, we believe that the note of distress and warning sounded by "In Memoriam" startled more minds than were soothed by its comforting conclusions. If this be so, this utterance of the poet, standing prophet-like at the parting of the ways, moved men diversely. It strengthened the impulse to go onward trustfully; but it may also be counted among the indirect influences which combined to promote that notable reaction toward the sacramental and mysterious side of religion, toward positive faith as the safeguard of morals, which has been the outcome of the great Anglican revival set on foot by the Oxford Movement seventy years ago.

In June 1850, the month which saw "In Memoriam" published, Tennyson married Miss Sellwood. "The wedding was of the quietest, even the cake and the dresses arriving too late." From this union came unbroken happiness during forty-two years; for his wife brought into the partnership a rich and rare treasure of aid, sympathy, and intellectual appreciation. Her son pays his tribute to her memory in an admirable pa.s.sage, of which the greater part is here extracted:

And let me say here--although, as a son, I cannot allow myself full utterance about her whom I loved as perfect mother and "very woman of very woman," "such a wife" and true helpmate she proved herself. It was she who became my father's adviser in literary matters. "I am proud of her intellect," he wrote. With her he always discussed what he was working at; she transcribed his poems: to her, and to no one else, he referred for a final criticism before publishing. She, with her "tender spiritual nature" and instinctive n.o.bility of thought, was always by his side, a ready, cheerful, courageous, wise, and sympathetic counsellor.... By her quiet sense of humour, by her selfless devotion, by "her faith as clear as the heights of the June-blue heaven," she helped him also to the utmost in the hours of his depression and of his sorrow; and to her he wrote two of the most beautiful of his shorter lyrics--"Dear, near and true," and the dedicatory lines which prefaced his last volume, "The Death of none."

In November 1850, after Wordsworth's death, the Laureateship was offered to Tennyson. We have good authority for stating, though not from this _Memoir_, that Lord John Russell submitted to the Queen the four names of Professor Wilson, Henry Taylor, Sheridan Knowles, and, last on the list, Tennyson. The Prince Consort's admiration of "In Memoriam" determined Her Majesty's choice, which might seem easy enough to those who measure the four candidates by the standard of to-day. His accession to office brought down upon Tennyson, among other honoraria, "such shoals of poems that I am almost crazed with them; the two hundred million poets of Great Britain deluge me daily. Truly the Laureateship is no sinecure." For the inevitable levee he accepted, not without disquietude over the nether garment, the loan of a Court suit from his ancient brother in song, Rogers, who had declined the laurels on the plea of age. Soon afterward he departed with his wife for Italy. Under the t.i.tle of "The Daisy" he has commemorated this journey in stanzas of consummate metrical form, with their beautiful anapaestic ripple in each fourth line, to be studied by all who would understand the quant.i.tative value (not merely accentual) and rhythmic effects of English syllables. On returning, they met the Brownings at Paris. Then, in 1852, he bought Farringford in the Isle of Wight, the Poet's favourite habitation ever afterward, within sight of the sea and within sound of its rough weather, with its lawns, spreading trees, and meadows under the lee of the chalk downs, that have been frequently sketched into his verse, and will long be identified with his presence. There he worked at "Maud," morning and evening, sitting in his hard, high-backed wooden chair in his little room at the top of the house, smoking the "sacred pipes" during certain half-hours of strict seclusion, when his best thoughts came to him.

From the final edition in 1851 of "In Memoriam" to "Maud" in 1853, which Lowell rather affectedly called the antiphonal voice of the earlier poem, the change of theme, tone, and manner was certainly great; and the public seems to have been taken by surprise. The transition was from lamentation to love-making; from stanzas swaying slow, like a dirge, within their uniform compa.s.s, to an abundant variety of metrical movement, quickened by frequent use of the anapaestic measure. The general reader was puzzled and inclined to ridicule what he failed at once to understand; the ordinary reviewer was either loftily contemptuous or indulged in puns and parodies; the higher criticism was divided; but Henry Taylor, Ruskin, Jowett, and the Brownings spoke without hesitation of the work's great merits. Mr.

Gladstone, whose judgment had been at first adverse, recanted, twenty years later, in a letter that was published in his _Gleanings_, and that now reappears in this _Memoir_: