* October, 1892.
We owe no apology for speaking of the dead poet as "Tennyson." This is
how he will be known by posterity. The rank is but the guinea's stamp,
and in this case it was not requisite. A true poet's gold can neither be
made more precious nor more current by empty titles. In our opinion, it
is a degradation, instead of an honor, for one of nature's aristocrats
to herd with the artificial nobility of an hereditary peerage. We
also take the opportunity of regretting that Tennyson ever became Poet
Laureate. The court poet should not survive the court dwarf and
the court jester. It is painful to see a great writer grinding out
professional odes, and bestowing the excrements of his genius on royal
nonentities. The preposterous office of Poet Laureate should now be
abolished. No poet should write for a clique or a coterie; he should
appeal directly to the heart of the nation.
Tennyson's funeral took place at Westminster Abbey. The heads of that
establishment, following the example set by Dean Stanley, now act as
body-snatchers. They appropriate the corpses of distinguished men,
whether they believed or disbelieved the doctrines of the service read
over their coffins. Charles Darwin's body is buried there--the great
Agnostic, who repudiated Christianity; Robert Browning's too--the poet
who said "I am no Christian" to Robert Buchanan. Carlyle took care that
his corpse should not join the museum. Tennyson's, however, is now in
the catalogue; and, it must be admitted, with more plausibility than in
the case of Browning--with far more than in the case of Darwin.
Christian pulpiteers, all over the country, have been shouting their
praises of Tennyson as a Christian poet. They are justified in making
the most of a man of genius when they possess one. We do not quarrel
with them. We only beg to remark that they have overdone it. The
Christianity of Tennyson is a very different thing from the Christianity
they vend to the credulous multitude.
There is no real evidence that Tennyson accepted the legendary part of
Christianity. Even in "In Memoriam," which was published forty-three
years ago, the thought is often extremely Pantheistic. It is nearly
always so in the later poems. God, not Christ, became more and more the
object of the poet's adoration, "Strong Son of God, immortal Love"--the
first line of tne earlier poem--does not necessarily mean Christ; while
the exclamation, "Ring in the Christ that is to be," is more symbolic
than personal. There is also a strong hope, rather than the certitude,
of a future life. No thoroughly convinced Christian could have written
of
The Shadow cloaked from head to foot,
Who keeps the keys of all the creeds.
Nay, the very deity of Christ is held loosely, if at all, in the
thirty-third section, where he
Whose faith has centre everywhere,
Nor cares to fix itself to form.
is bidden to leave his sister undisturbed when she prays; the poet
exclaiming
Oh, sacred be the flesh and blood
To which she links a truth divine!
In the last line of the next stanza this "sacred flesh and blood"
of Christ (it is to be presumed) is called "a type"--which is a wide
departure from orthodox Christianity. And what shall we say of the final
lines of the whole poem?
One God, one law, one element,
And one far-off divine event,
To which the whole creation moves.
Like other passages of "In Memoriam," it is a distinct anticipation of
the thought of "The Higher Pantheism," "Flower in the Crannied Wall,"
"De Profundus," and "The Ancient Sage."
Much has been made of the "Pilot" in one of Tennyson's last poems,
"Crossing the Bar."
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crossed the bar.
This has been treated as a reference to Christ; but a friend of
Tennyson's, writing in the _Athenæum_, says that the reference was
really to the poet's son, Lionel Tennyson, who "crossed the bar" of
death some years previously. How much more natural and human is the
reference in the light of this explanation! Yet it appears, after all,
from a later letter to the press by Tennyson's surviving son, that he
_did_ mean Christ. This is not, however, a confession of orthodoxy. The
sentiment might be shared by men like the venerable Dr. Martineau, who
deny the deity of Christ and strongly dissent from many time-honored
Christian teachings.
Tennyson most assuredly revolted against the brutalities of
Christianity; which, by the way, are countenanced by very explicit texts
in the New Testament. He did not approve the text, "Great is your reward
in heaven." He was above such huckstering. He sang of Virtue--
She desires no isles of the blest, no quiet seats of the just,
To rest in a golden grove, or to bask in a summer sky.
Give her the wages of going on, and not to die.
A noble petition! though in the teeth of a too patent destiny.
The doctrine of eternal Hell he first turned from, then denounced, and
finally despised. It was for wavering as to this hideous dogma that the
Rev. F. D. Maurice got into trouble with his College. He was godfather
to Tennyson's little boy, and the poet invited him, in exquisitely
charming verse, to share his hospitality.
For, being of that honest few,
Who give the Fiend himself his due,
Should eighty-thousand college-councils
Thunder "Anathema," friend, at you;
Should all our churchmen foam in spite
At you, so careful of the right,
Yet one lay-hearth would give you welcome
(Take it and come) to the Isle of Wight.
Tennyson had already, in "In Memoriam," proclaimed himself a
Universalist, as Browning did afterwards in his powerful lines on the
old Morgue at Paris. He had expressed the hope
That nothing walks with aimless feet;
That not one life should be destroyed,
Or cast as rubbish to the void,
When God hath made the pile complete;
That not a worm is cloven in vain;
That not a moth with vain desire
Is shrivelled in a fruitless fire,
Or but subserves another's gain.
Such, a poet could never see the divinity of the wicked, awful words,
"Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire." He denounced it in
"Despair," a poem of his old age. Well does he make the Agnostic cry out
to the minister--
What! I should call on that
Infinite Love that has served us so well?
Infinite cruelty rather that made everlasting Hell,
Made us, foreknew us, foredoomed us, and does what he will with his own;
Better our dead brute mother who never has heard us groan!
This is fierce denunciation, but it pales before the attack on Hell in
"Rizpah"; that splendid poem, which is perhaps the very noblest effort
of Tennyson's genius; outweighing hundreds of Balaclava charges and
sea-fights; outshining the flawless perfection of "Maud":--a poem
written in heart's blood and immortal tears, with a wondrously potent
and subtle imagination, and a fire of humanity to burn up whole
mountains of brutal superstitions.
The passionate words of the poor old dying mother, full of a deathless
love for her boy who was hung, go straight as an arrow to its mark,
through all the conventions of society and all the teachings of the
Church.
Election, Election and Reprobation--it's all very well,
But I go to-night to my boy, and I shall not find him in Hell.
And if he be lost--but to save my soul, that is all your desire;
Do you think that I care for my soul if my boy be gone to the fire?
Tennyson gives the very essence of the moral revolt against Hell. Human
nature has so developed in sympathy that the sufferings of others,
though out of sight, afflict our imaginations. We loathe the spectacle
of Abraham and Lazarus gazing complacently on the torture of Dives.
Once it was not so. Those who were "saved" had little or no care for the
"damned." But the best men and women of to-day do not want to be saved
alone. They want a common salvation or none. And the mother's heart,
which the creeds have trampled upon, hates the thought of any happiness
in Heaven while son or daughter is agonising in Hell.
It is perfectly clear that Tennyson was far from an orthodox Christian.
Quite as certainly he was not a Bibliolator. He read the Bible, of
course; and so did Shelley. There are fine things in it, amidst its
falsehoods and barbarities; and the English version is a monument of our
literature. We regard as apocryphal, however, the story of Tennyson's
telling a boy, "Read the Bible and Shakespeare; the one will teach you
how to speak to God, and the other how to speak to your fellow-men."
Anyhow, when the poet came to die, he did not ask for the Bible and he
did ask for Shakespeare. The copy he habitually used was handed to him;
he opened it at "Cymbeline," one of the most pagan of Shakespeare's
plays; he read a little, and then held the book until Death came with
the fall of "tired eyelids upon tired eyes."
It was a poetic death, and a pagan death. There lay the aged,
world-weary poet; artificial light was withdrawn, and the moonlight
streamed through the window upon his noble figure. Wife and son, doctors
and nurses, were silent around him. And as Death put the last cold touch
on the once passionate heart, it found him still clasping the book of
the mighty magician. * Let it be also noted that no Christian priest was
at his bedside. He needed not the mum-lings of a smaller soul to aid him
in his last extremity. Hope he may have had, but no fear. His life ended
like a long summer day, slowly dying into night.
* The present Lord Tennyson wrote as follows to Sir Arthur
Hodgson, Chairman of the Shakespeare's Birthplace Trustees:
"I beg to convey from my mother and myself our grateful
acknowledgment to the Executive Committee of Shakespeare's
Birthplace for their most kind expression of sympathy and
for their beautiful wreath. My father was reading 'King
Lear,' 'Troilus and Cressida,' and 'Cymbeline' through the
last days of his life. On Wednesday he asked for
Shakespeare. I gave him the book, but said, 'You must not
try to read.' He answered, 'I have opened the book.' I
looked at the book at midnight when I was sitting by him,
lying dead on the Thursday, and found he had opened on one
of the passages which he had called the tenderest in
Shakespeare. We could not part with this volume, but buried
a Shakespeare with him. We had the book enclosed in a metal
box and laid by his side.
--Yours faithfully, Hallam Tennyson."