In the stormy east wind straining,
The pale yellow woods were waning,
The broad stream in his banks complaining,
Heavily the low sky raining
Over tower'd Camelot.
Give him but such scenery as that which he can see in every parish in
England, and he will find it a fit scene for an ideal myth, subtler
than a casuist's questionings, deep as the deepest heart of woman.
But in this earlier volume the poet has not yet arrived at the art of
combining his new speculations on man with his new mode of viewing
Nature. His objective pieces are too exclusively objective, his
subjective too exclusively subjective; and where he deals with
natural imagery in these latter, he is too apt, as in "Eleanore," to
fall back upon the old and received method of poetic diction, though
he never indulges in a commonplace or a stock epithet. But in the
interval between 1830 and 1842 the needful interfusion of the two
elements has taken place. And in "Locksley Hall" and the "'Two
Voices" we find the new doubts and questions of the time embodied
naturally and organically, in his own method of simple natural
expression. For instance, from the Search for Truth in the "Two
Voices"--
Cry, faint not, climb: the summits lope
Beyond the furthest flights of hope,
Wrapt in dense cloud from base to cope.
Sometimes a little corner shines
As over rainy mist inclines
A gleaming crag with belts of pines.
"I will go forward," sayest thou;
"I shall not fail to find her now.
Look up, the fold is on her brow."
Or again, in "Locksley Hall," the poem which, as we think deservedly,
has had most influence on the minds of the young men of our day:
Eager-hearted as a boy when first he leaves his father's field,
And at night along the dusky highway near and nearer drawn,
Sees in heaven the light of London flaring like a dreary dawn;
And his spirit leaps within him to be gone before him then,
Underneath the light he looks at, in among the throngs of men;
Men, my brothers, men the workers, over reaping something new:
That which they have done but earnest of the things which they shall
do:
and all the grand prophetic passage following, which is said, we know
not how truly, to have won for the poet the respect of that great
statesman whose loss all good men deplore.
In saying that "Locksley Hall" has deservedly had so great an
influence over the minds of the young, we shall, we are afraid, have
offended some who are accustomed to consider that poem as Werterian
and unhealthy. But, in reality, the spirit of the poem is simply
anti-Werterian. It is man rising out of sickness into health--not
conquered by Werterism, but conquering his selfish sorrow, and the
moral and intellectual paralysis which it produces, by faith and
hope--faith in the progress of science and civilisation, hope in the
final triumph of good. Doubtless, that is not the highest
deliverance--not a permanent deliverance at all. Faith in God and
hope in Christ alone can deliver a man once and for all from
Werterism, or any other moral disease; that truth was reserved for
"In Memoriam:" but as far as "Locksley Hall" goes, it is a step
forward--a whole moral aeon beyond Byron and Shelley; and a step,
too, in the right direction, just because it is a step forward--
because the path of deliverance is, as "Locksley Hall" sets forth,
not backwards towards a fancied paradise of childhood--not backward
to grope after an unconsciousness which is now impossible, an
implicit faith which would be unworthy of the man, but forward on the
road on which God has been leading him, carrying upward with him the
aspirations of childhood, and the bitter experience of youth, to help
the organised and trustful labour of manhood. There are, in fact,
only two deliverances from Werterism possible in the nineteenth
century; one is into Popery, and the other is--
Forward, forward, let us range;
Let the peoples spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change;
Through the shadow of the world we sweep into the younger day:
Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay.
But such a combination of powers as Mr. Tennyson's naturally develop
themselves into a high idyllic faculty; for it is the very essence of
the idyl to set forth the poetry which lies in the simpler
manifestations of Man and Nature; yet not explicitly, by a reflective
moralising on them, as almost all our idyllists--Cowper, Gray,
Crabbe, and Wordsworth--have been in the habit of doing, but
implicitly, by investing them all with a rich and delightful tone of
colouring, perfect grace of manner, perfect melody of rhythm, which,
like a gorgeous summer atmosphere, shall glorify without altering the
most trivial and homely sights. And it is this very power, as
exhibited in the "Lord of Burleigh," "Audley Court," and the
"Gardener's Daughter," which has made Mr. Tennyson, not merely the
only English rival of Theocritus and Bion, but, in our opinion, as
much their superior as modern England is superior to ancient Greece.
Yet in "The Princess," perhaps, Mr. Tennyson rises higher still. The
idyllic manner alternates with the satiric, the pathetic, even the
sublime, by such imperceptible gradations, and continual delicate
variations of key, that the harmonious medley of his style becomes
the fit outward expression of the bizarre and yet harmonious
fairyland in which his fancy ranges. In this work, too, Mr. Tennyson
shows himself more than ever the poet of the day. In it more than
ever the old is interpenetrated with the new--the domestic and
scientific with the ideal and sentimental. He dares, in every page,
to make use of modern words and notions, from which the mingled
clumsiness and archaism of his compeers shrinks, as unpoetical.
Though, as we just said, his stage is an ideal fairyland, yet he has
reached the ideal by the only true method--by bringing the Middle Age
forward to the Present one, and not by ignoring the Present to fall
back on a cold and galvanised Medievalism; and thus he makes his
"Medley" a mirror of the nineteenth century, possessed of its own new
art and science, its own new temptations and aspirations, and yet
grounded on, and continually striving to reproduce, the forms and
experiences of all past time. The idea, too, of "The Princess" is an
essentially modern one. In every age women have been tempted, by the
possession of superior beauty, intellect, or strength of will, to
deny their own womanhood, and attempt to stand alone as men, whether
on the ground of political intrigue, ascetic saintship, or
philosophic pride. Cleopatra and St. Hedwiga, Madame de Stael and
the Princess, are merely different manifestations of the same self-
willed and proud longing of woman to unsex herself, and realise,
single and self-sustained, some distorted and partial notion of her
own as to what the "angelic life" should be. Cleopatra acted out the
pagan ideal of an angel; St. Hedwiga, the medieval one; Madame de
Stael hers, with the peculiar notions of her time as to what
"spirituel" might mean; and in "The Princess" Mr. Tennyson has
embodied the ideal of that nobler, wider, purer, yet equally
fallacious, because equally unnatural, analogue, which we may meet
too often up and down England now. He shows us the woman, when she
takes nor stand on the false masculine ground of intellect, working
out her own moral punishment, by destroying in herself the tender
heart of flesh: not even her vast purposes of philanthropy can
preserve her, for they are built up, not on the womanhood which God
has given her, but on her own self-will; they change, they fall, they
become inconsistent, even as she does herself, till, at last, she
loses all feminine sensibility; scornfully and stupidly she rejects
and misunderstands the heart of man; and then falling from pride to
sternness, from sternness to sheer inhumanity, she punishes sisterly
love as a crime, robs the mother of her child, and becomes all but a
vengeful fury, with all the peculiar faults of woman, and none of the
peculiar excellences of man.
The poem being, as its title imports, a medley of jest and earnest,
allows a metrical licence, of which we are often tempted to wish that
its author had not availed himself; yet the most unmetrical and
apparently careless passages flow with a grace, a lightness, a
colloquial ease and frolic, which perhaps only heighten the effect of
the serious parts, and serve as a foil to set off the unrivalled
finish and melody of these latter. In these come out all Mr.
Tennyson's instinctive choice of tone, his mastery of language, which
always fits the right word to the right thing, and that word always
the simplest one, and the perfect ear for melody which makes it
superfluous to set to music poetry which, read by the veriest
schoolboy, makes music of itself. The poem, we are glad to say, is
so well known that it seems unnecessary to quote from it; yet there
are here and there gems of sound and expression of which, however
well our readers may know them, we cannot forbear reminding them
again. For instance, the end of the idyl in book vii. beginning
"Come down, O maid" (the whole of which is perhaps one of the most
perfect fruits of the poet's genius):
Myriads of rivulets hurrying through the lawn,
The moan of doves in immemorial elms,
And murmuring of innumerable bees.
Who, after three such lines, will talk of English as a harsh and
clumsy language, and seek in the effeminate and monotonous Italian
for expressive melody of sound? Who cannot hear in them the rapid
rippling of the water, the stately calmness of the wood-dove's note,
and, in the repetition of short syllables and soft liquids in the
last line, the
Murmuring of innumerable bees?
Or again, what combination of richness with simplicity in such a
passage as this:
Breathe upon my brows;
In that fine air I tremble, all the past
Melts mist-like into this bright hour, and this
I scarce believe, and all the rich to come
Reels, as the golden Autumn woodland reels
Athwart the smoke of burning leaves.
How Mr. Tennyson can have attained the prodigal fulness of thought
and imagery which distinguishes this poem, and especially the last
canto, without his style ever becoming overloaded, seldom even
confused, is perhaps one of the greatest marvels of the whole
production. The songs themselves, which have been inserted between
the cantos in the last edition of the book, seem, perfect as they
are, wasted and smothered among the surrounding fertility; till we
discover that they stand there, not merely for the sake of their
intrinsic beauty, but serve to call back the reader's mind, at every
pause in the tale of the Princess's folly, to that very healthy ideal
of womanhood which she has spurned.
At the end of the first canto, fresh from the description of the
female college, with its professoresses, and hostleresses, and other
utopian monsters, we turn the page, and--
As through the land at eve we went,
And pluck'd the ripen'd ears.
We fell out, my wife and I,
And kissed again with tears:
And blessings on the falling-out
That all the more endears,
When we fall out with those we love,
And kiss again with tears!
For when we came where lies the child
We lost in other years,
There above the little grave,
We kissed again with tears.
Between the next two cantos intervenes the well-known cradle-song,
perhaps the best of all; and at the next interval is the equally
well-known bugle-song, the idea of which is that of twin-labour and
twin-fame, in a pair of lovers:
Our echoes roll from soul to soul,
And grow for ever and for ever.
In the next, the memory of wife and child inspirits the soldier in
the field; in the next, the sight of the fallen hero's child opens
the sluices of his widow's tears; and in the last, and perhaps the
most beautiful of all, the poet has succeeded, in the new edition, in
superadding a new form of emotion to a canto in which he seemed to
have exhausted every resource of pathos which his subject allowed;
and prepares us for the triumph of that art by which he makes us,
after all, love the heroine whom he at first taught us to hate and
despise, till we see that the naughtiness is after all one that must
be kissed and not whipped out of her, and look on smiling while she
repents, with Prince Harry of old, "not in sackcloth and ashes, but
in new silk and old sack:"
Ask me no more: the moon may draw the sea;
The cloud may stoop from Heaven and take the shape,
With fold to fold, of mountain or of cape;
But, O too fond, when have I answered thee?
Ask me no more.
Ask me no more: what answer should I give?
I love not hollow cheek or faded eye:
Yet, O my friend, I will not have thee die!
Ask me no more, lest I should bid thee live;
Ask me no more.
Ask me no more: thy fate and mine are seal'd:
I strove against the stream and all in vain:
Let the great river take me to the main:
No more, dear love, for at a touch I yield;
Ask me no more.
We now come to "In Memoriam;" a collection of poems on a vast variety
of subjects, but all united, as their name implies, to the memory of
a departed friend. We know not whether to envy more--the poet the
object of his admiration, or that object the monument which has been
consecrated to his nobleness. For in this latest and highest volume,
written at various intervals during a long series of years, all the
poet's peculiar excellences, with all that he has acquired from
others, seem to have been fused down into a perfect unity, and
brought to bear on his subject with that care and finish which only a
labour of love can inspire. We only now know the whole man, all his
art, all his insight, all his faculty of discerning the piu nell'
uno, and the uno nell' piu. As he says himself:
My love has talked with rocks and trees,
He finds on misty mountain-ground,
His own vast shadow glory-crowned;
He sees himself in all he sees.
Everything reminds him of the dead. Every joy or sorrow of man,
every aspect of nature, from
The forest crack'd, the waters, curl'd,
The cattle huddled on the lea.
The thousand waves of wheat
That ripple round the lonely grange.
In every place where in old days they had met and conversed; in every
dark wrestling of the spirit with the doubts and fears of manhood,
throughout the whole outward universe of Nature, and the whole inward
universe of spirit, the soul of his dead friend broods--at first a
memory shrouded in blank despair, then, a living presence, a
ministering spirit, answering doubts, calming fears, stirring up
noble aspirations, utter humility, leading the poet upward, step by
step, to faith, and peace, and hope. Not that there runs throughout
the book a conscious or organic method. The poems seem often merely
to be united by the identity of their metre, so exquisitely chosen,
that while the major rhyme in the second and third lines of each
stanza gives the solidity and self-restraint required by such deep
themes, the mournful minor rhyme of each first and fourth line always
leads the ear to expect something beyond, and enables the poet's
thoughts to wander sadly on, from stanza to stanza and poem to poem,
in an endless chain of
Linked sweetness long drawn out.
There are records of risings and fallings again, of alternate cloud
and sunshine, throughout the book; earnest and passionate, yet never
bitter; humble, yet never abject; with a depth and vehemence of
affection "passing the love of woman," yet without a taint of
sentimentality; self-restrained and dignified, without ever narrowing
into artificial coldness; altogether rivalling the sonnets of
Shakespeare; and all knit together into one spiritual unity by the
proem at the opening of the volume--in our eyes, the noblest English
Christian poem which several centuries have seen.
We shall not quote the very poems which we should most wish to sink
into men's hearts. Let each man find for himself those which suit
him best, and meditate on them in silence. They are fit only to be
read solemnly in our purest and most thoughtful moods, in the
solitude of our chamber, or by the side of those we love, with thanks
to the great heart who has taken courage to bestow on us the record
of his own friendship, doubt, and triumph.
It has been often asked why Mr. Tennyson's great and varied powers
had never been concentrated on one immortal work. The epic, the
lyric, the idyllic faculties, perhaps the dramatic also, seemed to be
all there, and yet all sundered, scattered about in small fragmentary
poems. "In Memoriam," as we think, explains the paradox. Mr.
Tennyson had been employed on higher, more truly divine, and yet more
truly human work than either epos or drama. Within the unseen and
alone truly Real world which underlies and explains this mere time-
shadow, which men miscall the Real, he had been going down into the
depths, and ascending into the heights, led, like Dante of old, by
the guiding of a mighty spirit. And in this volume, the record of
seventeen years, we have the result of those spiritual experiences in
a form calculated, as we believe, to be a priceless benefit to many
an earnest seeker in this generation, and perhaps to stir up some who
are priding themselves on a cold dilettantism and barren epicurism,
into something like a living faith and hope. Blessed and delightful
it is to find, that even in these new ages the creeds which so many
fancy to be at their last gasp, are still the final and highest
succour, not merely of the peasant and the outcast, but of the subtle
artist and the daring speculator. Blessed it is to find the most
cunning poet of our day able to combine the complicated rhythm and
melody of modern times with the old truths which gave heart to
martyrs at the stake; and to see in the science and the history of
the nineteenth century new and living fulfilments of the words which
we learnt at our mother's knee. Blessed, thrice blessed, to find
that hero-worship is not yet passed away; that the heart of man still
beats young and fresh; that the old tales of David and Jonathan,
Damon and Pythias, Socrates and Alcibiades, Shakespeare and his
nameless friend, of "love passing the love of woman," ennobled by its
own humility, deeper than death, and mightier than the grave, can
still blossom out, if it be but in one heart here and there, to show
men still how, sooner or later, "he that loveth knoweth God, for God
is love."