“Often lying broad awake, and yet
Remaining from the body, and apart
In intellect and power and will, hath heard
Time flowing in the middle of the night,
And all things creeping to a day of doom.”
In this poem, never republished by the author, is an attempt to express
an experience which in later years he more than once endeavoured to set
forth in articulate speech, an experience which was destined to colour
his finial speculations on ultimate problems of God and of the soul. We
shall later have to discuss the opinion of an eminent critic, Mr Frederic
Harrison, that Tennyson’s ideas, theological, evolutionary, and generally
speculative, “followed, rather than created, the current ideas of his
time.” “The train of thought” (in _In Memoriam_), writes Mr Harrison,
“is essentially that with which ordinary English readers had been made
familiar by F. D. Maurice, Professor Jowett, Dr Martineau, _Ecce Homo_,
_Hypatia_.” Of these influences only Maurice, and Maurice only orally,
could have reached the author of _The Mystic_ and the _Supposed
Confessions_. _Ecce Homo_, _Hypatia_, Mr Jowett, were all in the bosom
of the future when _In Memoriam_ was written. Now, _The Mystic_ and the
_Supposed Confessions_ are prior to _In Memoriam_, earlier than 1830.
Yet they already contain the chief speculative tendencies of _In
Memoriam_; the growing doubts caused by evolutionary ideas (then familiar
to Tennyson, though not to “ordinary English readers”), the longing for a
return to childlike faith, and the mystical experiences which helped
Tennyson to recover a faith that abode with him. In these things he was
original. Even as an undergraduate he was not following “a train of
thought made familiar” by authors who had not yet written a line, and by
books which had not yet been published.
So much, then, of the poet that was to be and of the philosopher existed
in the little volume of the undergraduate. In _The Mystic_ we notice a
phrase, two words long, which was later to be made familiar, “Daughters
of time, divinely tall,” reproduced in the picture of Helen:—
“A daughter of the Gods, divinely tall,
And most divinely fair.”
The reflective pieces are certainly of more interest now (though they
seem to have satisfied the poet less) than the gallery of airy fairy
Lilians, Adelines, Rosalinds, and Eleänores:—
“Daughters of dreams and of stories,”
like
“Faustine, Fragoletta, Dolores,
Félise, and Yolande, and Juliette.”
Cambridge, which he was soon to leave, did not satisfy the poet. Oxford
did not satisfy Gibbon, or later, Shelley; and young men of genius are
not, in fact, usually content with universities which, perhaps, are doing
their best, but are neither governed nor populated by minds of the
highest and most original class.
“You that do profess to teach
And teach us nothing, feeding not the heart.”
The universities, in fact, teach a good deal of that which can be
learned, but the best things cannot be taught. The universities give men
leisure, books, and companionship, to learn for themselves. All tutors
cannot be, and at that time few dreamed of being, men like Jowett and T.
H. Green, Gamaliels at whose feet undergraduates sat with enthusiasm,
“did _eagerly_ frequent,” like Omar Khayyám. In later years Tennyson
found closer relations between dons and undergraduates, and recorded his
affection for his university. She had supplied him with such
companionship as is rare, and permitted him to “catch the blossom of the
flying terms,” even if tutors and lecturers were creatures of routine,
_terriblement enfonces dans la matière_, like the sire of Madelon and
Cathos, that honourable citizen.
Tennyson just missed, by going down, a visit of Wordsworth to Cambridge.
The old enthusiast of revolution was justifying passive obedience: thirty
years had turned the almost Jacobin into an almost Jacobite. Such is the
triumph of time. In the summer of 1830 Tennyson, with Hallam, visited
the Pyrenees. The purpose was political—to aid some Spanish rebels. The
fruit is seen in _Œnone_ and _Mariana in the South_.
In March 1831 Tennyson lost his father. “He slept in the dead man’s bed,
earnestly desiring to see his ghost, but no ghost came.” “You see,” he
said, “ghosts do not generally come to imaginative people;” a remark very
true, though ghosts are attributed to “imagination.” Whatever causes
these phantasms, it is not the kind of _phantasia_ which is consciously
exercised by the poet. Coleridge had seen far too many ghosts to believe
in them; and Coleridge and Donne apart, with the hallucinations of Goethe
and Shelley, who met themselves, what poet ever did “see a ghost”? One
who saw Tennyson as he wandered alone at this period called him “a
mysterious being, seemingly lifted high above other mortals, and having a
power of intercourse with the spirit world not granted to others.” But
it was the world of the poet, not of the “medium.”
The Tennysons stayed on at the parsonage for six years. But,
anticipating their removal, Arthur Hallam in 1831 dealt in prophecy about
the identification in the district of places in his friend’s
poems—“critic after critic will trace the wanderings of the brook,”
as,—in fact, critic after critic has done. Tennyson disliked—these
“localisers.” The poet’s walks were shared by Arthur Hallam, then
affianced to his sister Emily.
II.
POEMS OF 1831–1833.
BY 1832 most of the poems of Tennyson’s second volume were circulating in
MS. among his friends, and no poet ever had friends more encouraging.
Perhaps bards of to-day do not find an eagerness among their acquaintance
for effusions in manuscript, or in proof-sheets. The charmed volume
appeared at the end of the year (dated 1833), and Hallam denounced as
“infamous” Lockhart’s review in the _Quarterly_. Infamous or not, it is
extremely diverting. How Lockhart could miss the great and abundant
poetry remains a marvel. Ten years later the Scorpion repented, and
invited Sterling to review any book he pleased, for the purpose of
enabling him to praise the two volumes of 1842, which he did gladly.
Lockhart hated all affectation and “preciosity,” of which the new book
was not destitute. He had been among Wordsworth’s most ardent admirers
when Wordsworth had few, but the memories of the war with the “Cockney
School” clung to him, the war with Leigh Hunt, and now he gave himself up
to satire. Probably he thought that the poet was a member of a London
clique. There is really no excuse for Lockhart, except that he _did_
repent, that much of his banter was amusing, and that, above all, his
censures were accepted by the poet, who altered, later, many passages of
a fine absurdity criticised by the infamous reviewer. One could name
great prose-writers, historians, who never altered the wondrous errors to
which their attention was called by critics. Prose-writers have been
more sensitively attached to their glaring blunders in verifiable facts
than was this very sensitive poet to his occasional lapses in taste.
_The Lady of Shalott_, even in its early form, was more than enough to
give assurance of a poet. In effect it is even more poetical, in a
mysterious way, if infinitely less human, than the later treatment of the
same or a similar legend in _Elaine_. It has the charm of Coleridge, and
an allegory of the fatal escape from the world of dreams and shadows into
that of realities may have been really present to the mind of the young
poet, aware that he was “living in phantasy.” The alterations are
usually for the better. The daffodil is not an aquatic plant, as the
poet seems to assert in the first form—
“The yellow-leavèd water-lily,
The green sheathed daffodilly,
Tremble in the water chilly,
Round about Shalott.”