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 mass 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 Shelley. 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 gods 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 pass 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 mass 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 Béranger.
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 space 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 attitude 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 passion, 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 documents, 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
documents 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.
“For those who cared to know about his literary history he wrote ‘Merlin
and the Gleam.’ From his boyhood he had felt the magic of Merlin—that
spirit of poetry—which bade him know his power and follow throughout his
work a pure and high ideal, with a simple and single devotedness and a
desire to ennoble the life of the world, and which helped him through
doubts and difficulties to ‘endure as seeing Him who is invisible.’
Great the Master,
And sweet the Magic,
When over the valley,
In early summers,
Over the mountain,
On human faces,
And all around me,
Moving to melody,
Floated the Gleam.
“In his youth he sang of the brook flowing through his upland valley, of
the ‘ridged wolds’ that rose above his home, of the mountain-glen and
snowy summits of his early dreams, and of the beings, heroes and fairies,
with which his imaginary world was peopled. Then was heard the ‘croak of
the raven,’ the harsh voice of those who were unsympathetic—
The light retreated,
The Landskip darken’d,
The melody deaden’d,
The Master whisper’d,
‘Follow the Gleam.’
“Still the inward voice told him not to be faint-hearted but to follow
his ideal. And by the delight in his own romantic fancy, and by the
harmonies of nature, ‘the warble of water,’ and ‘cataract music of
falling torrents,’ the inspiration of the poet was renewed. His Eclogues
and English Idyls followed, when he sang the songs of country life and
the joys and griefs of country folk, which he knew through and through,
Innocent maidens,
Garrulous children,
Homestead and harvest,
Reaper and gleaner,
And rough-ruddy faces
Of lowly labour.
“By degrees, having learnt somewhat of the real philosophy of life and of
humanity from his own experience, he rose to a melody ‘stronger and
statelier.’ He celebrated the glory of ‘human love and of human heroism’
and of human thought, and began what he had already devised, his epic of
King Arthur, ‘typifying above all things the life of man,’ wherein he had
intended to represent some of the great religions of the world. He had
purposed that this was to be the chief work of his manhood. Yet the
death of his friend, Arthur Hallam, and the consequent darkening of the
whole world for him made him almost fail in this purpose; nor any longer
for a while did he rejoice in the splendour of his spiritual visions, nor
in the Gleam that had ‘waned to a wintry glimmer.’
Clouds and darkness
Closed upon Camelot;
Arthur had vanish’d
I knew not whither,
The King who loved me,
And cannot die.
“Here my father united the two Arthurs, the Arthur of the Idylls and the
Arthur ‘the man he held as half divine.’ He himself had fought with
death, and had come out victorious to find ‘a stronger faith his own,’
and a hope for himself, for all those in sorrow and for universal human
kind, that never forsook him through the future years.
And broader and brighter
The Gleam flying onward,
Wed to the melody,
Sang thro’ the world.
* * *
I saw, wherever
In passing it glanced upon
Hamlet or city,
That under the Crosses
The dead man’s garden,
The mortal hillock,
Would break into blossom;
And so to the land’s
Last limit I came.
“Up to the end he faced death with the same earnest and unfailing courage
that he had always shown, but with an added sense of the awe and the
mystery of the Infinite.
I can no longer,
But die rejoicing,
For thro’ the Magic
Of Him the Mighty,
Who taught me in childhood,
There on the border
Of boundless Ocean,
And all but in Heaven
Hovers the Gleam.
“That is the reading of the poet’s riddle as he gave it to me. He
thought that ‘Merlin and the Gleam’ would probably be enough of biography
for those friends who urged him to write about himself. However, this
has not been their verdict, and I have tried to do what he said that I
might do.”
There are many specialists in Tennysonian bibliography who take a pride
(and a worthy pride) in their knowledge of the master’s poems. But the
knowledge of all of these specialists put together is not equal to that
of him who writes this book. Not only is every line at his fingers’
ends, but he knows, either from his own memory or from what his father
has told him, where and when and why every line was written. He,
however, shares, it is evident that dislike—rather let us say that
passionate hatred—which his father, like so many other poets, had of that
well-intentioned but vexing being whom Rossetti anathematized as the
“literary resurrection man.” Rossetti used to say that “of all signs
that a man was devoid of poetic instinct and poetic feeling the impulse
of the literary resurrectionist was the surest.” Without going so far as
this we may at least affirm that all poets writing in a language
requiring, as English does, much manipulation before it can be moulded
into perfect form must needs revise in the brain before the line is set
down, or in manuscript, as Shelley did, or partly in manuscript and
partly in type, as Coleridge did. But the rakers-up of the “chips of the
workshop,” to use Tennyson’s own phrase, seem to have been specially
irritating to him, because he belonged to those poets who cannot really
revise and complete their work till they see it in type. “Poetry,” he
said, “looks better, more convincing in print.”
“From the volume of 1832,” says his son, “he omitted several stanzas of
‘The Palace of Art’ because he thought that the poem was too full. ‘The
artist is known by his self-limitation’ was a favourite adage of his. He
allowed me, however, to print some of them in my notes, otherwise I
should have hesitated to quote without his leave lines that he had
excised. He ‘gave the people of his best,’ and he usually wished that
his best should remain without variorum readings, ‘the chips of the
workshop,’ as he called them. The love of bibliomaniacs for first
editions filled him with horror, for the first editions are obviously in
many cases the worst editions, and once he said to me: ‘Why do they
treasure the rubbish I shot from my full-finish’d cantos?’
νήπιοι ουδε ισασιν οσω πλέον ημισυ παντός.
For himself many passages in Wordsworth and other poets have been
entirely spoilt by the modern habit of giving every various reading along
with the text. Besides, in his case, very often what is published as the
latest edition has been the original version in his first manuscript, so
that there is no possibility of really tracing the history of what may
seem to be a new word or a new passage. ‘For instance,’ he said, ‘in
“Maud” a line in the first edition was ‘I will bury myself in _my books_,
and the Devil may pipe to his own,’ which was afterwards altered to ‘I
will bury myself _in myself_, &c.’: this was highly commended by the
critics as an improvement on the _original_ reading—but it was actually
in the first MS. draft of the poem.”
Again, it is important to get a statement by one entitled to speak with
authority as to what Tennyson did and what he did not believe upon
religious matters. He had in ‘In Memoriam’ and other poems touched with
a hand so strong and sometimes so daring upon the teaching of modern
science, and yet he had spoken always so reverently of what modern
civilization reverences, that the most opposite lessons were read from
his utterances. To one thinker it would seem that Tennyson had thrown
himself boldly upon the very foremost wave of scientific thought. To
another it would seem that Wordsworth (although, living and writing when
he did, before the birth of the new cosmogony, he believed himself to be
still in trammels of the old) was by temperament far more in touch with
the new cosmogony than was Tennyson, who studied evolution more ardently
than any poet since Lucretius. While Wordsworth, notwithstanding a
conventional phrase here and there, had an apprehension of Nature without
the ever-present idea of the Power behind her, Spinosa himself was not so
“God-intoxicated” a man as Tennyson. His son sets the question at rest
in the following pregnant words:—
“Assuredly Religion was no nebulous abstraction for him. He consistently
emphasized his own belief in what he called the Eternal Truths; in an
Omnipotent, Omnipresent, and All-loving God, Who has revealed Himself
through the human attribute of the highest self-sacrificing love; in the
freedom of the human will; and in the immortality of the soul. But he
asserted that ‘Nothing worthy proving can be proven,’ and that even as to
the great laws which are the basis of Science, ‘We have but faith, we
cannot know.’ He dreaded the dogmatism of sects and rash definitions of
God. ‘I dare hardly name His Name,’ he would say, and accordingly he
named Him in ‘The Ancient Sage’ the ‘Nameless.’ ‘But take away belief in
the self-conscious personality of God,’ he said, ‘and you take away the
backbone of the world.’ ‘On God and God-like men we build our trust.’ A
week before his death I was sitting by him, and he talked long of the
Personality and of the Love of God, ‘That God, Whose eyes consider the
poor,’ ‘Who catereth, even for the sparrow.’ ‘I should,’ he said,
‘infinitely rather feel myself the most miserable wretch on the face of
the earth with a God above, than the highest type of man standing alone.’
He would allow that God is unknowable in ‘his whole world-self, and
all-in-all,’ and that, therefore, there was some force in the objection
made by some people to the word ‘Personality’ as being ‘anthropomorphic,’
and that, perhaps ‘Self-consciousness’ or ‘Mind’ might be clearer to
them: but at the same time he insisted that, although ‘man is like a
thing of nought’ in ‘the boundless plan,’ our highest view of God must be
more or less anthropomorphic: and that ‘Personality,’ as far as our
intelligence goes, is the widest definition and includes ‘Mind,’
‘Self-consciousness,’ ‘Will,’ ‘Love,’ and other attributes of the Real,
the Supreme, ‘the High and Lofty One that inhabiteth Eternity, Whose name
is Holy.’”
And then Lord Tennyson quotes a manuscript note of Jowett’s in which he
says:—
“Alfred Tennyson thinks it ridiculous to believe in a God and deny his
consciousness, and was amused at some one who said of him that he had
versified Hegelianism.”
He notes also an anecdote of Edward Fitzgerald’s which speaks of a week
with Tennyson, when the poet, picking up a daisy, and looking closely at
its crimson-tipped leaves, said, “Does not this look like a thinking
Artificer, one who wishes to ornament?”
Here is a paragraph which will be read with the deepest interest, not
only by every lover of poetry, but by every man whose heart has been rung
by the most terrible of all bereavements—the loss of a beloved friend.
Close as the tie of blood relationship undoubtedly is, it is based upon
convention as much as upon nature. It may exist and flourish vigorously
when there is little or no community of taste or of thought:—
“It may be as well to say here that all the letters from my father to
Arthur Hallam were destroyed by his father after Arthur’s death: a great
loss, as these particular letters probably revealed his inner self more
truly than anything outside his poems.”
We confess to belonging to those who always read with a twinge of remorse
the private letters of a man in print. But if there is a case where one
must needs long to see the letters between two intimate friends, it is
that of Tennyson and Arthur Hallam. They would have been only second in
interest to Shakespeare’s letters to that mysterious “Mr. W. H.” whose
identity now can never be traced. For, notwithstanding all that has
recently been said, and ably said, to the contrary, the man to whom many
of the sonnets were addressed was he whom “T. T.” addresses as “Mr. W.
H.”
But for an intimacy to be so strong as that which existed between
Tennyson and Arthur H. Hallam there must be a kinship of soul so close
and so rare that the tie of blood relationship seems weak beside it. It
is then that friendship may sometimes pass from a sentiment into a
passion. It did so in the case of Shakespeare and his mysterious friend,
as the sonnets in question make manifest; but we are not aware that there
is in English literature any other instance of friendship as a passion
until we get to ‘In Memoriam.’ So profound was the effect of Hallam’s
death upon Tennyson that it was the origin, his son tells us, of ‘The Two
Voices; or, Thoughts of a Suicide.’ What was the secret of Hallam’s
influence over Tennyson can never be guessed from anything that he has
left behind either in prose or verse. But besides the creative genius of
the artist there is that genius of personality which is irresistible.
With a very large gift of this kind of genius Arthur Hallam seems to have
been endowed.
“In the letters from Arthur Hallam’s friends,” says Lord Tennyson, “there
was a rare unanimity of opinion about his worth. Milnes, writing to his
father, says that he had a ‘very deep respect’ for Hallam, and that
Thirlwall, in after years the great bishop, for whom Hallam and my father
had a profound affection, was ‘actually captivated by him.’ When at
Cambridge with Hallam he had written: ‘He is the only man here of my own
standing before whom I bow in conscious inferiority in everything.’
Alford writes: ‘Hallam was a man of wonderful mind and knowledge on all
subjects, hardly credible at his age. . . . I long ago set him down for
the most wonderful person I ever knew. He was of the most tender,
affectionate disposition.’”
Lord Tennyson’s remarks upon the ‘Idylls of the King,’ and upon the
enormous success of the book have a special interest, and serve to
illustrate our opening remarks upon the popularity of his father’s works.
Popular as Tennyson had become through ‘The Gardener’s Daughter,’ ‘The
Miller’s Daughter,’ ‘The May Queen,’ ‘The Lord of Burleigh,’ and scores
of other poems—endeared to every sorrowing heart as he had become through
‘In Memoriam’—it was the ‘Idylls of the King’ that secured for him his
unique place. Many explanations of the phenomenon of a true poet
securing the popular suffrages have been offered, one of them being his
acceptance of the Laureateship. But Wordsworth, a great poet, also
accepted it; and he never was and never will be popular. The wisdom of
what Goethe says about the enormous importance of “subject” in poetic art
is illustrated by the story of Tennyson and the ‘Idylls of the King.’
For what was there in the ‘Idylls of the King’ that brought all England
to Tennyson’s feet—made English people re-read with a new seeing in their
eyes the poems which they once thought merely beautiful, but now thought
half divine? Beautiful these ‘Idylls’ are indeed, but they are not more
beautiful than work of his that went before. The rich Klondyke of Malory
and Geoffrey of Monmouth had not escaped the eyes of previous
prospectors. All his life Milton had dreamed of the mines lying
concealed in the “misty mid-region” of King Arthur and the Round Table,
but, luckily for Tennyson, was led away from it into other paths. With
Milton’s immense power of sensuous expression—a power that impelled him,
even when dealing with the spirit world, to flash upon our senses
pictures of the very limbs of angels and fiends at fight—we may imagine
what an epic of King Arthur he would have produced. Dryden also
contemplated working in this mine, but never did; and until Scott came
with his Lyulph’s Tale in ‘The Bridal of Triermain,’ no one had taken up
the subject but writers like Blackmore. Then came Bulwer’s burlesque.
Now no prospector on the banks of the Yukon has a keener eye for nuggets
than Tennyson had for poetic ore, and besides ‘The Lady of Shalott’ and
‘Launcelot and Guinevere,’ he had already printed the grandest of all his
poems—the ‘Morte d’Arthur.’ It needed only the ‘Idylls of the King,’
where episode after episode of the Arthurian cycle was rendered in poems
which could be understood by all—it needed only this for all England to
be set reading and re-reading all his poems, some of them more precious
than any of these ‘Idylls’—poems whose familiar beauties shone out now
with a new light.
Ever since then Tennyson’s hold upon the British public seemed to grow
stronger and stronger up to the day of his death, when Great Britain,
and, indeed, the entire English-speaking race, went into mourning for
him; nor, as we have said, has any weakening of that hold been
perceptible during the five years that have elapsed since.
The volumes are so crammed with interesting and important matter that to
discuss them in one article is impossible. But before concluding these
remarks we must say that the good fortune which attended Tennyson during
his life did not end with his death. Fortunate, indeed, is the famous
man who escapes the catchpenny biographer. No man so illustrious as
Tennyson ever before passed away without his death giving rise to a flood
of books professing to tell the story of his life. Yet it chanced that
for a long time before his death a monograph on Tennyson by Mr. Arthur
Waugh—which, though of course it is sometimes at fault, was carefully
prepared and well considered—had been in preparation, as had also a
second edition of another sketch of the poet’s life by Mr. Henry
Jennings, written with equal reticence and judgment. These two books,
coming out, as far as we remember, in the very week of Tennyson’s
funeral, did the good service of filling up the gap of five years until
the appearance of this authorized biography by his son. Otherwise there
is no knowing what pseudo-biographies stuffed with what errors and
nonsense might have flooded the market and vexed the souls of Tennysonian
students. For the future such pseudo-biographies will be impossible.