“Though the squally east wind keenly
Blew, with folded arms serenely
By the water stood the queenly
Lady of Shalott.”
However stoical the Lady may have been, the reader is too seriously
sympathetic with her inevitable discomfort—
“All raimented in snowy white
That loosely flew,”
as she was. The original conclusion was distressing; we were dropped
from the airs of mysterious romance:—
“They crossed themselves, their stars they blest,
Knight, minstrel, abbot, squire, and guest;
There lay a parchment on her breast,
That puzzled more than all the rest
The well-fed wits at Camelot.”
Hitherto we have been “puzzled,” but as with the sublime incoherences of
a dream. Now we meet well-fed wits, who say, “Bless my stars!” as
perhaps we should also have done in the circumstances—a dead lady
arriving, in a very cold east wind, alone in a boat, for “her blood was
frozen slowly,” as was natural, granting the weather and the lady’s airy
costume. It is certainly matter of surprise that the young poet’s vision
broke up in this humorous manner. And, after all, it is less surprising
that the Scorpion, finding such matter in a new little book by a new
young man, was more sensitive to the absurdity than to the romance. But
no lover of poetry should have been blind to the almost flawless
excellence of _Mariana in the South_, inspired by the landscape of the
Provençal tour with Arthur Hallam. In consequence of Lockhart’s
censures, or in deference to the maturer taste of the poet, _The Miller’s
Daughter_ was greatly altered before 1842. It is one of the earliest, if
not the very earliest, of Tennyson’s domestic English idylls, poems with
conspicuous beauties, but not without sacrifices to that Muse of the home
affections on whom Sir Barnes Newcome delivered his famous lecture. The
seventh stanza perhaps hardly deserved to be altered, as it is, so as to
bring in “minnows” where “fish” had been the reading, and where “trout”
would best recall an English chalk stream. To the angler the rising
trout, which left the poet cold, is at least as welcome as the “reflex of
a beauteous form.” “Every woman seems an angel at the water-side,” said
“that good old angler, now with God,” Thomas Todd Stoddart, and so “the
long and listless boy” found it to be. It is no wonder that the mother
was “_slowly_ brought to yield consent to my desire.” The domestic
affections, in fact, do not adapt themselves so well to poetry as the
passion, unique in Tennyson, of _Fatima_. The critics who hunt for
parallels or plagiarisms will note—
“O Love, O fire! once he drew
With one long kiss my whole soul thro’
My lips,”
and will observe Mr Browning’s
“Once he kissed
My soul out in a fiery mist.”
As to _Œnone_, the scenery of that earliest of the classical idylls is
borrowed from the Pyrenees and the tour with Hallam. “It is possible
that the poem may have been suggested by Beattie’s _Judgment of Paris_,”
says Mr Collins; it is also possible that the tale which
“Quintus Calaber
Somewhat lazily handled of old”
may have reached Tennyson’s mind from an older writer than Beattie. He
is at least as likely to have been familiar with Greek myth as with the
lamented “Minstrel.” The form of 1833, greatly altered in 1842,
contained such unlucky phrases as “cedar shadowy,” and “snowycoloured,”
“marblecold,” “violet-eyed”—easy spoils of criticism. The alterations
which converted a beautiful but faulty into a beautiful and flawless poem
perhaps obscure the significance of Œnone’s “I will not die alone,” which
in the earlier volume directly refers to the foreseen end of all as
narrated in Tennyson’s late piece, _The Death of Œnone_. The whole poem
brings to mind the glowing hues of Titian and the famous Homeric lines on
the divine wedlock of Zeus and Hera.
The allegory or moral of _The Palace of Art_ does not need explanation.
Not many of the poems owe more to revision. The early stanza about
Isaiah, with fierce Ezekiel, and “Eastern Confutzee,” did undeniably
remind the reader, as Lockhart said, of _The Groves of Blarney_.
“With statues gracing that noble place in,
All haythen goddesses most rare,
Petrarch, Plato, and Nebuchadnezzar,
All standing naked in the open air.”
In the early version the Soul, being too much “up to date,”
“Lit white streams of dazzling gas,”
like Sir Walter Scott at Abbotsford.
“Thus her intense, untold delight,
In deep or vivid colour, smell, and sound,
Was flattered day and night.”
Lockhart was not fond of Sir Walter’s experiments in gas, the “smell”
gave him no “deep, untold delight,” and his “infamous review” was biassed
by these circumstances.
The volume of 1833 was in nothing more remarkable than in its proof of
the many-sidedness of the author. He offered mediæval romance, and
classical perfection touched with the romantic spirit, and domestic
idyll, of which _The May Queen_ is probably the most popular example.
The “mysterious being,” conversant with “the spiritual world,” might have
been expected to disdain topics well within the range of Eliza Cook. He
did not despise but elevated them, and thereby did more to introduce
himself to the wide English public than he could have done by a century
of _Fatimas_ or _Lotos-Eaters_. On the other hand, a taste more
fastidious, or more perverse, will scarcely be satisfied with pathos
which in process of time has come to seem “obvious.” The pathos of early
death in the prime of beauty is less obvious in Homer, where Achilles is
to be the victim, or in the laments of the Anthology, where we only know
that the dead bride or maiden was fair; but the poor May Queen is of her
nature rather commonplace.
“That good man, the clergyman, has told me words of peace,”
strikes a note rather resembling the Tennysonian parody of Wordsworth—
“A Mr Wilkinson, a clergyman.”
_The Lotos-Eaters_, of course, is at the opposite pole of the poet’s
genius. A few plain verses of the _Odyssey_, almost bald in their
reticence, are the _point de repère_ of the most magical vision expressed
in the most musical verse. Here is the languid charm of Spenser,
enriched with many classical memories, and pictures of natural beauty
gorgeously yet delicately painted. After the excision of some verses,
rather fantastical, in 1842, the poem became a flawless masterpiece,—one
of the eternal possessions of song.
On the other hand, the opening of _The Dream of Fair Women_ was marred in
1833 by the grotesque introductory verses about “a man that sails in a
balloon.” Young as Tennyson was, these freakish passages are a
psychological marvel in the work of one who did not lack the saving sense
of humour. The poet, wafted on the wing and “pinion that the Theban
eagle bear,” cannot conceivably be likened to an aeronaut waving flags
out of a balloon—except in a spirit of self-mockery which was not
Tennyson’s. His remarkable self-discipline in excising the fantastic and
superfluous, and reducing his work to its classical perfection of thought
and form, is nowhere more remarkable than in this magnificent vision. It
is probably by mere accidental coincidence of thought that, in the verses
_To J. S._ (James Spedding), Tennyson reproduces the noble speech on the
warrior’s death which Sir Walter Scott places in the lips of the great
Dundee: “It is the memory which the soldier leaves behind him, like the
long train of light that follows the sunken sun, _that_ is all that is
worth caring for,” the light which lingers eternally on the hills of
Atholl. Tennyson’s lines are a close parallel:—
“His memory long will live alone
In all our hearts, as mournful light
That broods above the fallen sun,
And dwells in heaven half the night.”
Though Tennyson disliked the exhibition of “the chips of the workshop,”
we have commented on them, on the early readings of the early volumes.
They may be regarded more properly as the sketches of a master than as
“chips,” and do more than merely engage the idle curiosity of the
fanatics of first editions. They prove that the poet was studious of
perfection, and wisely studious, for his alterations, unlike those of
some authors, were almost invariably for the better, the saner, the more
mature in taste. The early readings are also worth notice, because they
partially explain, by their occasionally fantastic and humourless
character, the lack of early and general recognition of the poet’s
genius. The native prejudice of mankind is not in favour of a new poet.
Of new poets there are always so many, most of them bad, that nature has
protected mankind by an armour of suspiciousness. The world, and
Lockhart, easily found good reasons for distrusting this new claimant of
the ivy and the bays: moreover, since about 1814 there had been a
reaction against new poetry. The market was glutted. Scott had set
everybody on reading, and too many on writing, novels. The great
reaction of the century against all forms of literature except prose
fiction had begun. Near the very date of Tennyson’s first volume Bulwer
Lytton, as we saw, had frankly explained that he wrote novels because
nobody would look at anything else. Tennyson had to overcome this
universal, or all but universal, indifference to new poetry, and, after
being silent for ten years, overcome it he did—a remarkable victory of
art and of patient courage. Times were even worse for poets than to-day.
Three hundred copies of the new volume were sold! But Tennyson’s friends
were not puffers in league with pushing publishers.
Meanwhile the poet in 1833 went on quietly and undefeated with his work.
He composed _The Gardener’s Daughter_, and was at work on the _Morte
d’Arthur_, suppressed till the ninth year, on the Horatian plan. Many
poems were produced (and even written out, which a number of his pieces
never were), and were left in manuscript till they appeared in the
Biography. Most of these are so little worthy of the author that the
marvel is how he came to write them—in what uninspired hours. Unlike
Wordsworth, he could weed the tares from his wheat. His studies were in
Greek, German, Italian, history (a little), and chemistry, botany, and
electricity—“cross-grained Muses,” these last.
It was on September 15, 1833, that Arthur Hallam died. Unheralded by
sign or symptom of disease as it was, the news fell like a thunderbolt
from a serene sky. Tennyson’s and Hallam’s love had been “passing the
love of women.” A blow like this drives a man on the rocks of the
ultimate, the insoluble problems of destiny. “Is this the end?”
Nourished as on the milk of lions, on the elevating and strengthening
doctrines of popular science, trained from childhood to forego hope and
attend evening lectures, the young critics of our generation find
Tennyson a weakling because he had hopes and fears concerning the
ultimate renewal of what was more than half his life—his friendship.
“That faith I fain would keep,
That hope I’ll not forego:
Eternal be the sleep—
Unless to waken so,”
wrote Lockhart, and the verses echoed ceaselessly in the widowed heart of
Carlyle. These men, it is part of the duty of critics later born to
remember, were not children or cowards, though they dreamed, and hoped,
and feared. We ought to make allowance for failings incident to an age
not yet fully enlightened by popular science, and still undivorced from
spiritual ideas that are as old as the human race, and perhaps not likely
to perish while that race exists. Now and then even scientific men have
been mistaken, especially when they have declined to examine evidence, as
in this problem of the transcendental nature of the human spirit they
usually do. At all events Tennyson was unconvinced that death is the
end, and shortly after the fatal tidings arrived from Vienna he began to
write fragments in verse preluding to the poem of _In Memoriam_. He also
began, in a mood of great misery, _The Two Voices_; _or_, _Thoughts of a
Suicide_. The poem seems to have been partly done by September 1834,
when Spedding commented on it, and on the beautiful _Sir Galahad_,
“intended for something of a male counterpart to _St Agnes_.” The _Morte
d’Arthur_ Tennyson then thought “the best thing I have managed lately.”
Very early in 1835 many stanzas of _In Memoriam_ had taken form. “I do
not wish to be dragged forward in any shape before the reading public at
present,” wrote the poet, when he heard that Mill desired to write on
him. His _Œnone_ he had brought to its new perfection, and did not
desire comments on work now several years old. He also wrote his
_Ulysses_ and his _Tithonus_.
If ever the term “morbid” could have been applied to Tennyson, it would
have been in the years immediately following the death of Arthur Hallam.
But the application would have been unjust. True, the poet was living
out of the world; he was unhappy, and he was, as people say, “doing
nothing.” He was so poor that he sold his Chancellor’s prize gold medal,
and he did not
“Scan his whole horizon
In quest of what he could clap eyes on,”
in the way of money-making, which another poet describes as the normal
attitude of all men as well as of pirates. A careless observer would
have thought that the poet was dawdling. But he dwelt in no Castle of
Indolence; he studied, he composed, he corrected his verses: like Sir
Walter in Liddesdale, “he was making himsel’ a’ the time.” He did not
neglect the movements of the great world in that dawn of discontent with
the philosophy of commercialism. But it was not his vocation to plunge
into the fray, and on to platforms.
It is a very rare thing anywhere, especially in England, for a man
deliberately to choose poetry as the duty of his life, and to remain
loyal, as a consequence, to the bride of St Francis—Poverty. This
loyalty Tennyson maintained, even under the temptation to make money in
recognised ways presented by his new-born love for his future wife, Miss
Emily Sellwood. They had first met in 1830, when she, a girl of
seventeen, seemed to him like “a Dryad or an Oread wandering here.” But
admiration became the affection of a lifetime when Tennyson met Miss
Sellwood as bridesmaid to her sister, the bride of his brother Charles,
in 1836. The poet could not afford to marry, and, like the hero of
_Locksley Hall_, he may have asked himself, “What is that which I should
do?” By 1840 he had done nothing tangible and lucrative, and
correspondence between the lovers was forbidden. That neither dreamed of
Tennyson’s deserting poetry for a more normal profession proved of great
benefit to the world. The course is one which could only be justified by
the absolute certainty of possessing genius.
III.
1837–1842.
IN 1837 the Tennysons left the old rectory; till 1840 they lived at High
Beech in Epping Forest, and after a brief stay at Tunbridge Wells went to
Boxley, near Maidstone.
It appears that at last the poet had “beat his music out,” though his
friends “still tried to cheer him.” But the man who wrote _Ulysses_ when
his grief was fresh could not be suspected of declining into a
hypochondriac. “If I mean to make my mark at all, it must be by
shortness,” he said at this time; “for the men before me had been so
diffuse, and most of the big things, except _King Arthur_, had been
done.” The age had not _la tête épique_: Poe had announced the paradox
that there is no such thing as a long poem, and even in dealing with
Arthur, Tennyson followed the example of Theocritus in writing, not an
epic, but epic idylls. Long poems suit an age of listeners, for which
they were originally composed, or of leisure and few books. At present
epics are read for duty’s sake, not for the only valid reason, “for human
pleasure,” in FitzGerald’s phrase.
Between 1838 and 1840 Tennyson made some brief tours in England with
FitzGerald, and, coming from Coventry, wrote _Godiva_. His engagement
with Miss Sellwood seemed to be adjourned _sine die_, as they were
forbidden to correspond.
By 1841 Tennyson was living at Mablethorpe on the Lincolnshire coast;
working at his volumes of 1842, much urged by FitzGerald and American
admirers, who had heard of the poet through Emerson. Moxon was to be the
publisher, himself something of a poet; but early in 1842 he had not yet
received the MS. Perhaps Emerson heard of Tennyson through Carlyle, who,
says Sterling, “said more in your praise than in any one’s except
Cromwell, and an American backwoodsman who has killed thirty or forty
people with a bowie-knife.” Carlyle at this time was much attached to
Lockhart, editor of the _Quarterly Review_, and it may have been Carlyle
who converted Lockhart to admiration of his old victim. Carlyle had very
little more appreciation of Keats than had Byron, or (in early days)
Lockhart, and it was probably as much the man of heroic physical mould,
“a life-guardsman spoilt by making poetry,” and the unaffected companion
over a pipe, as the poet, that attracted him in Tennyson. As we saw,
when the two triumphant volumes of 1842 did appear, Lockhart asked
Sterling to review whatever book he pleased (meaning the Poems) in the
_Quarterly_. The praise of Sterling may seem lukewarm to us, especially
when compared with that of Spedding in the _Edinburgh_. But Sterling,
and Lockhart too, were obliged to “gang warily.” Lockhart had, to his
constant annoyance, “a partner, Mr Croker,” and I have heard from the
late Dean Boyle that Mr Croker was much annoyed by even the mild applause
yielded in the _Quarterly_ to the author of the _Morte d’Arthur_.
While preparing the volumes of 1842 at Boxley, Tennyson’s life was
divided between London and the society of his brother-in-law, Mr Edmund
Lushington, the great Greek scholar and Professor of Greek at Glasgow
University. There was in Mr Lushington’s personal aspect, and noble
simplicity of manner and character, something that strongly resembled
Tennyson himself. Among their common friends were Lord Houghton
(Monckton Milnes), Mr Lear of the _Book of Nonsense_ (“with such a
pencil, such a pen”), Mr Venables (who at school modified the profile of
Thackeray), and Lord Kelvin. In town Tennyson met his friends at The
Cock, which he rendered classic; among them were Thackeray, Forster,
Maclise, and Dickens. The times were stirring: social agitation, and
“Carol philosophy” in Dickens, with growls from Carlyle, marked the
period. There was also a kind of optimism in the air, a prophetic
optimism, not yet fulfilled.
“Fly, happy happy sails, and bear the Press!”
That mission no longer strikes us as exquisitely felicitous. “The
mission of the Cross,” and of the missionaries, means international
complications; and “the markets of the Golden Year” are precisely the
most fruitful causes of wars and rumours of wars:—
“Sea and air are dark
With great contrivances of Power.”
Tennyson’s was not an unmitigated optimism, and had no special confidence
in
“The herd, wild hearts and feeble wings
That every sophister can lime.”
His political poetry, in fact, was very unlike the socialist chants of Mr
William Morris, or _Songs before Sunrise_. He had nothing to say about
“The blood on the hands of the King,
And the lie on the lips of the Priest.”
The hands of Presidents have not always been unstained; nor are
statements of a mythical nature confined to the lips of the clergy. The
poet was anxious that freedom should “broaden down,” but “slowly,” not
with indelicate haste. Persons who are more in a hurry will never care
for the political poems, and it is certain that Tennyson did not feel
sympathetically inclined towards the Iberian patriot who said that his
darling desire was “to cut the throats of all the _curés_,” like some
Covenanters of old. “Mais vous connaissez mon cœur”—“and a pretty black
one it is,” thought young Tennyson. So cautious in youth, during his
Pyrenean tour with Hallam in 1830, Tennyson could not become a convinced
revolutionary later. We must accept him with his limitations: nor must
we confuse him with the hero of his _Locksley Hall_, one of the most
popular, and most parodied, of the poems of 1842: full of beautiful
images and “confusions of a wasted youth,” a youth dramatically
conceived, and in no way autobiographical.
In so marvellous a treasure of precious things as the volumes of 1842,
perhaps none is more splendid, perfect, and perdurable than the _Morte
d’Arthur_. It had been written seven years earlier, and pronounced by
the poet “not bad.” Tennyson was never, perhaps, a very deep Arthurian
student. A little cheap copy of Malory was his companion. {39} He does
not appear to have gone deeply into the French and German “literature of
the subject.” Malory’s compilation (1485) from French and English
sources, with the _Mabinogion_ of Lady Charlotte Guest, sufficed for him
as materials. The whole poem, enshrined in the memory of all lovers of
verse, is richly studded, as the hilt of Excalibur, with classical
memories. “A faint Homeric echo” it is not, nor a Virgilian echo, but
the absolute voice of old romance, a thing that might have been chanted
by
“The lonely maiden of the Lake”
when
“Nine years she wrought it, sitting in the deeps,
Upon the hidden bases of the hills.”
Perhaps the most exquisite adaptation of all are the lines from the
_Odyssey_—
“Where falls not hail nor rain, nor any snow.”
“Softly through the flutes of the Grecians” came first these Elysian
numbers, then through Lucretius, then through Tennyson’s own _Lucretius_,
then in Mr Swinburne’s _Atalanta in Calydon_:—
“Lands indiscoverable in the unheard-of west
Round which the strong stream of a sacred sea
Rolls without wind for ever, and the snow
There shows not her white wings and windy feet,
Nor thunder nor swift rain saith anything,
Nor the sun burns, but all things rest and thrive.”
So fortunate in their transmission through poets have been the lines of
“the Ionian father of the rest,” the greatest of them all.
In the variety of excellences which marks Tennyson, the new English
idylls of 1842 hold their prominent place. Nothing can be more exquisite
and more English than the picture of “the garden that I love.”
Theocritus cannot be surpassed; but the idyll matches to the seventh of
his, where it is most closely followed, and possesses such a picture of a
girl as the Sicilian never tried to paint.
_Dora_ is another idyll, resembling the work of a Wordsworth in a clime
softer than that of the Fells. The lays of Edwin Morris and Edward Bull
are not among the more enduring of even the playful poems. The _St
Simeon Stylites_ appears “made to the hand” of the author of _Men and
Women_ rather than of Tennyson. The grotesque vanity of the anchorite is
so remote from us, that we can scarcely judge of the truth of the
picture, though the East has still her parallels to St Simeon. From the
almost, perhaps quite, incredible ascetic the poet lightly turns to
“society verse” lifted up into the air of poetry, in the charm of _The
Talking Oak_, and the happy flitting sketches of actual history; and
thence to the strength and passion of _Love and Duty_. Shall
“Sin itself be found
The cloudy porch oft opening on the Sun?”
That this is the province of sin is a pretty popular modern moral. But
Honour is the better part, and here was a poet who had the courage to say
so; though, to be sure, the words ring strange in an age when highly
respectable matrons assure us that “passion,” like charity, covers a
multitude of sins. _Love and Duty_, we must admit, is “early Victorian.”
The _Ulysses_ is almost a rival to the _Morte d’Arthur_. It is of an
early date, after Arthur Hallam’s death, and Thackeray speaks of the poet
chanting his
“Great Achilles whom we knew,”
as if he thought that this was in Cambridge days. But it is later than
these. Tennyson said, “_Ulysses_ was written soon after Arthur Hallam’s
death, and gave my feeling about the need of going forward, and braving
the struggle of life, perhaps more simply than anything in _In
Memoriam_.” Assuredly the expression is more simple, and more noble, and
the personal emotion more dignified for the classic veil. When the
plaintive Pessimist (“‘proud of the title,’ as the Living Skeleton said
when they showed him”) tells us that “not to have been born is best,” we
may answer with Ulysses—
“Life piled on life
Were all too little.”
The Ulysses of Tennyson, of course, is Dante’s Ulysses, not Homer’s
Odysseus, who brought home to Ithaca not one of his mariners. His last
known adventure, the journey to the land of men who knew not the savour
of salt, Odysseus was to make on foot and alone; so spake the ghost of
Tiresias within the poplar pale of Persephone.
_The Two Voices_ expresses the contest of doubts and griefs with the
spirit of endurance and joy which speaks alone in _Ulysses_. The man who
is unhappy, but does not want to put an end to himself, has certainly the
better of the argument with the despairing Voice. The arguments of “that
barren Voice” are, indeed, remarkably deficient in cogency and logic, if
we can bring ourselves to strip the discussion of its poetry. The
original title, _Thoughts of a Suicide_, was inappropriate. The suicidal
suggestions are promptly faced and confuted, and the mood of the author
is throughout that of one who thinks life worth living:—
“Whatever crazy sorrow saith,
No life that breathes with human breath
Has ever truly long’d for death.
’Tis life whereof our nerves are scant,
Oh life, not death, for which we pant;
More life, and fuller, that I want.”
This appears to be a satisfactory reply to the persons who eke out a
livelihood by publishing pessimistic books, and hooting, as the great
Alexandre Dumas says, at the great drama of Life.
With _The Day-Dream_ (of The Sleeping Beauty) Tennyson again displays his
matchless range of powers. Verse of Society rises into a charmed and
musical fantasy, passing from the Berlin-wool work of the period
(“Take the broidery frame, and add
A crimson to the quaint Macaw”)
into the enchanted land of the fable: princes immortal, princesses
eternally young and fair. The _St Agnes_ and _Sir Galahad_, companion
pieces, contain the romance, as _St Simeon Stylites_ shows the repulsive
side of asceticism; for the saint and the knight are young, beautiful,
and eager as St Theresa in her childhood. It has been said, I do not
know on what authority, that the poet had no recollection of composing
_Sir Galahad_, any more than Scott remembered composing _The Bride of
Lammermoor_, or Thackeray parts of _Pendennis_. The haunting of
Tennyson’s mind by the Arthurian legends prompted also the lovely
fragment on the Queen’s last Maying, _Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere_,
a thing of perfect charm and music. The ballads of _Lady Clare_ and _The
Lord of Burleigh_ are not examples of the poet in his strength; for his
power and fantasy we must turn to _The Vision of Sin_, where the early
passages have the languid voluptuous music of _The Lotos-Eaters_, with
the ethical element superadded, while the portion beginning—
“Wrinkled ostler, grim and thin!”
is in parts reminiscent of Burns’s _Jolly Beggars_. In _Break_, _Break_,
_Break_, we hear a note prelusive to _In Memoriam_, much of which was
already composed.
The Poems of 1842 are always vocal in the memories of all readers of
English verse. None are more familiar, at least to men of the
generations which immediately followed Tennyson’s. FitzGerald was apt to
think that the poet never again attained the same level, and I venture to
suppose that he never rose above it. For FitzGerald’s opinion, right or
wrong, it is easy to account. He had seen all the pieces in manuscript;
they were his cherished possession before the world knew them. _C’est
mon homme_, he might have said of Tennyson, as Boileau said of Molière.
Before the public awoke FitzGerald had “discovered Tennyson,” and that at
the age most open to poetry and most enthusiastic in friendship. Again,
the Poems of 1842 were _short_, while _The Princess_, _Maud_, and _The
Idylls of the King_ were relatively long, and, with _In Memoriam_,
possessed unity of subject. They lacked the rich, the unexampled variety
of topic, treatment, and theme which marks the Poems of 1842. These were
all reasons why FitzGerald should think that the two slim green volumes
held the poet’s work at its highest level. Perhaps he was not wrong,
after all.
IV.
1842–848—THE PRINCESS.
THE Poems, and such criticisms as those of Spedding and Sterling, gave
Tennyson his place. All the world of letters heard of him. Dean Bradley
tells us how he took Oxford by storm in the days of the undergraduateship
of Clough and Matthew Arnold. Probably both of these young writers did
not share the undergraduate enthusiasm. Mr Arnold, we know, did not
reckon Tennyson _un esprit puissant_. Like Wordsworth (who thought
Tennyson “decidedly the first of our living poets, . . . he has expressed
in the strongest terms his gratitude to my writings”), Arnold was no
fervent admirer of his contemporaries. Besides, if Tennyson’s work is “a
criticism of Life,” the moral criticism, so far, was hidden in flowers,
like the sword of Aristogiton at the feast. But, on the whole, Tennyson
had won the young men who cared for poetry, though Sir Robert Peel had
never heard of him: and to win the young, as Theocritus desired to do, is
more than half the battle. On September 8, 1842, the poet was able to
tell Mr Lushington that “500 of my books are sold; according to Moxon’s
brother, I have made a sensation.” The sales were not like those of
_Childe Harold_ or _Marmion_; but for some twenty years new poetry had
not sold at all. Novels had come in about 1814, and few wanted or bought
recent verse. But Carlyle was converted. He spoke no more of a spoiled
guardsman. “If you knew what my relation has been to the thing called
‘English Poetry’ for many years back, you would think such a fact” (his
pleasure in the book) “surprising.” Carlyle had been living (as Mrs
Carlyle too well knew) in Oliver Cromwell, a hero who probably took no
delight in _Lycidas_ or _Comus_, in Lovelace or Carew. “I would give all
my poetry to have made one song like that,” said Tennyson of Lovelace’s
_Althea_. But Noll would have disregarded them all alike, and Carlyle
was full of the spirit of the Protector. To conquer him was indeed a
victory for Tennyson; while Dickens, not a reading man, expressed his
“earnest and sincere homage.”
But Tennyson was not successful in the modern way. Nobody “interviewed”
him. His photograph, of course, with disquisitions on his pipes and
slippers, did not adorn the literary press. His literary income was not
magnified by penny-a-liners. He did not become a lion; he never would
roar and shake his mane in drawing-rooms. Lockhart held that Society was
the most agreeable form of the stage: the dresses and actresses
incomparably the prettiest. But Tennyson liked Society no better than
did General Gordon. He had friends enough, and no desire for new
acquaintances. Indeed, his fortune was shattered at this time by a
strange investment in wood-carving by machinery. Ruskin had only just
begun to write, and wood-carving by machinery was still deemed an
enterprise at once philanthropic and æsthetic. “My father’s worldly
goods were all gone,” says Lord Tennyson. The poet’s health suffered
extremely: he tried a fashionable “cure” at Cheltenham, where he saw
miracles of healing, but underwent none. In September 1845 Peel was
moved by Lord Houghton to recommend the poet for a pension (£200
annually). “I have done nothing slavish to get it: I never even
solicited for it either by myself or others.” Like Dr Johnson, he
honourably accepted what was offered in honour. For some reason many
persons who write in the press are always maddened when such good
fortune, however small, however well merited, falls to a brother in
letters. They, of course, were “causelessly bitter.” “Let them rave!”
If few of the rewards of literary success arrived, the penalties at once
began, and only ceased with the poet’s existence. “If you only knew what
a nuisance these volumes of verse are! Rascals send me theirs per post
from America, and I have more than once been knocked up out of bed to pay
three or four shillings for books of which I can’t get through one page,
for of all books the most insipid reading is second-rate verse.”
Would that versifiers took the warning! Tennyson had not sent his little
firstlings to Coleridge and Wordsworth: they are only the hopeless
rhymers who bombard men of letters with their lyrics and tragedies.
Mr Browning was a sufferer. To one young twitterer he replied in the
usual way. The bard wrote acknowledging the letter, but asking for a
definite criticism. “I do not think myself a Shakespeare or a Milton,
but I _know_ I am better than Mr Coventry Patmore or Mr Austin Dobson.”
Mr Browning tried to procrastinate: he was already deeply engaged with
earlier arrivals of volumes of song. The poet was hurt, not angry; he
had expected other things from Mr Browning: _he_ ought to know his duty
to youth. At the intercession of a relation Mr Browning now did his
best, and the minstrel, satisfied at last, repeated his conviction of his
superiority to the authors of _The Angel in the House_ and _Beau
Brocade_. Probably no man, not even Mr Gladstone, ever suffered so much
from minstrels as Tennyson. He did not suffer them gladly.
In 1846 the Poems reached their fourth edition. Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton
(bitten by what fly who knows?) attacked Tennyson in _The New Timon_, a
forgotten satire. We do not understand the ways of that generation. The
cheap and spiteful _genre_ of satire, its forged morality, its sham
indignation, its appeal to the ape-like passions, has gone out. Lytton
had suffered many things (not in verse) from Jeames Yellowplush: I do not
know that he hit back at Thackeray, but he “passed it on” to Thackeray’s
old college companion. Tennyson, for once, replied (in _Punch_: the
verses were sent thither by John Forster); the answer was one of
magnificent contempt. But he soon decided that
“The noblest answer unto such
Is perfect stillness when they brawl.”
Long afterwards the poet dedicated a work to the son of Lord Lytton. He
replied to no more satirists. {50} Our difficulty, of course, is to
conceive such an attack coming from a man of Lytton’s position and
genius. He was no hungry hack, and could, and did, do infinitely better
things than “stand in a false following” of Pope. Probably Lytton had a
false idea that Tennyson was a rich man, a branch of his family being
affluent, and so resented the little pension. The poet was so far from
rich in 1846, and even after the publication of _The Princess_, that his
marriage had still to be deferred for four years.
On reading _The Princess_ afresh one is impressed, despite old
familiarity, with the extraordinary influence of its beauty. Here are,
indeed, the best words best placed, and that curious felicity of style
which makes every line a marvel, and an eternal possession. It is as if
Tennyson had taken the advice which Keats gave to Shelley, “Load every
rift with ore.” To choose but one or two examples, how the purest and
freshest impression of nature is re-created in mind and memory by the
picture of Melissa with
“All her thoughts as fair within her eyes,
As bottom agates seen to wave and float
In crystal currents of clear morning seas.”
The lyric, “Tears, idle tears,” is far beyond praise: once read it seems
like a thing that has always existed in the world of poetic archetypes,
and has now been not so much composed as discovered and revealed. The
many pictures and similitudes in _The Princess_ have a magical
gorgeousness:—
“From the illumined hall
Long lanes of splendour slanted o’er a press
Of snowy shoulders, thick as herded ewes,
And rainbow robes, and gems and gem-like eyes,
And gold and golden heads; they to and fro
Fluctuated, as flowers in storm, some red, some pale.”