“A volume of the poets of her land”
pure Theocritus. It has been admirably rendered into Greek by Mr Gilbert
Murray. The exquisite beauties of style are not less exquisitely blended
in the confusions of a dream, for a dream is the thing most akin to _The
Princess_. Time does not exist in the realm of Gama, or in the ideal
university of Ida. We have a bookless North, severed but by a frontier
pillar from a golden and learned South. The arts, from architecture to
miniature-painting, are in their highest perfection, while knights still
tourney in armour, and the quarrel of two nations is decided as in the
gentle and joyous passage of arms at Ashby de la Zouche. Such confusions
are purposefully dream-like: the vision being a composite thing, as
dreams are, haunted by the modern scene of the holiday in the park, the
“gallant glorious chronicle,” the Abbey, and that “old crusading knight
austere,” Sir Ralph. The seven narrators of the scheme are like the
“split personalities” of dreams, and the whole scheme is of great
technical skill. The earlier editions lacked the beautiful songs of the
ladies, and that additional trait of dream, the strange trance-like
seizures of the Prince: “fallings from us, vanishings,” in Wordsworthian
phrase; instances of “dissociation,” in modern psychological terminology.
Tennyson himself, like Shelley and Wordsworth, had experience of this
kind of dreaming awake which he attributes to his Prince, to strengthen
the shadowy yet brilliant character of his romance. It is a thing of
normal and natural _points de repère_; of daylight suggestion, touched as
with the magnifying and intensifying elements of haschish-begotten
phantasmagoria. In the same way opium raised into the region of
brilliant vision that passage of Purchas which Coleridge was reading
before he dreamed _Kubla Khan_. But in Tennyson the effects were
deliberately sought and secured.
One might conjecture, though Lord Tennyson says nothing on the subject,
that among the suggestions for _The Princess_ was the opening of _Love’s
Labour’s Lost_. Here the King of Navarre devises the College of
Recluses, which is broken up by the arrival of the Princess of France,
Rosaline, and the other ladies:—
_King_. Our Court shall be a little Academe,
Still and contemplative in living art.
You three, Biron, Domain, and Longaville,
Have sworn for three years’ term to live with me,
My fellow-scholars, and to keep those statutes.
* * * * *
_Biron_. That is, to live and study here three years.
But there are other strict observances;
As, not to see a woman in that term.
* * * * *
[_Reads_] ‘That no woman shalt come within a mile of my Court:’ Hath
this been proclaimed?
_Long_. Four days ago.
_Biron_. Let’s see the penalty. [_Reads_] ‘On pain of losing her
tongue.’
The Princess then arrives with her ladies, as the Prince does with Cyril
and Florian, as Charles did, with Buckingham, in Spain. The conclusion
of Shakespeare is Tennyson’s conclusion—
“We cannot cross the cause why we are born.”
The later poet reverses the attitude of the sexes in _Love’s Labour’s
Lost_: it is the women who make and break the vow; and the women in _The
Princess_ insist on the “grand, epic, homicidal” scenes, while the men
are debarred, more or less, from a sportive treatment of the subject.
The tavern catch of Cyril; the laughable pursuit of the Prince by the
feminine Proctors; the draggled appearance of the adventurers in female
garb, are concessions to the humour of the situation. Shakespeare would
certainly have given us the song of Cyril at the picnic, and comic enough
the effect would have been on the stage. It may be a gross employment,
but _The Princess_, with the pretty chorus of girl undergraduates,
“In colours gayer than the morning mist,”
went reasonably well in opera. Merely considered as a romantic fiction,
_The Princess_ presents higher proofs of original narrative genius than
any other such attempt by its author.
The poem is far from being deficient in that human interest which Shelley
said that it was as vain to ask from _him_, as to seek to buy a leg of
mutton at a gin-shop. The characters, the protagonists, with Cyril,
Melissa, Lady Blanche, the child Aglaia, King Gama, the other king, Arac,
and the hero’s mother—beautifully studied from the mother of the poet—are
all sufficiently human. But they seem to waver in the magic air, “as all
the golden autumn woodland reels” athwart the fires of autumn leaves.
For these reasons, and because of the designed fantasy of the whole
composition, _The Princess_ is essentially a poem for the true lovers of
poetry, of Spenser and of Coleridge. The serious motive, the question of
Woman, her wrongs, her rights, her education, her capabilities, was not
“in the air” in 1847. To be sure it had often been “in the air.” The
Alexandrian Platonists, the Renaissance, even the age of Anne, had their
emancipated and learned ladies. Early Greece had Sappho, Corinna, and
Erinna, the first the chief of lyric poets, even in her fragments, the
two others applauded by all Hellas. The French Revolution had begotten
Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and her _Vindication of the Rights of Women_,
and in France George Sand was prominent and emancipated enough while the
poet wrote. But, the question of love apart, George Sand was “very, very
woman,” shining as a domestic character and fond of needlework. England
was not excited about the question which has since produced so many
disputants, inevitably shrill, and has not been greatly meddled with by
women of genius, George Eliot or Mrs Oliphant. The poem, in the public
indifference as to feminine education, came rather prematurely. We have
now ladies’ colleges, not in haunts remote from man, but by the sedged
banks of Cam and Cherwell. There have been no revolutionary results: no
boys have spied these chaste nests, with echoing romantic consequences.
The beauty and splendour of the Princess’s university have not arisen in
light and colour, and it is only at St Andrews that girls wear the
academic and becoming costume of the scarlet gown. The real is far below
the ideal, but the real in 1847 seemed eminently remote, or even
impossible.
The learned Princess herself was not on our level as to knowledge and the
past of womankind. She knew not of their masterly position in the law of
ancient Egypt. Gynæocracy and matriarchy, the woman the head of the
savage or prehistoric group, were things hidden from her. She “glanced
at the Lycian custom,” but not at the Pictish, a custom which would have
suited George Sand to a marvel. She maligned the Hottentots.
“The highest is the measure of the man,
And not the Kaffir, Hottentot, Malay.”
The Hottentots had long ago anticipated the Princess and her shrill
modern sisterhood. If we take the Greeks, or even ourselves, we may say,
with Dampier (1689), “The Hodmadods, though a nasty people, yet are
gentlemen to these” as regards the position of women. Let us hear Mr
Hartland: “In every Hottentot’s house the wife is supreme. Her husband,
poor fellow, though he may wield wide power and influence out of doors,
at home dare not even take a mouthful of sour-milk out of the household
vat without her permission . . . The highest oath a man can take is to
swear by his eldest sister, and if he abuses this name he forfeits to her
his finest goods and sheep.”
However, in 1847 England had not yet thought of imitating the Hodmadods.
Consequently, and by reason of the purely literary and elaborately
fantastical character of _The Princess_, it was not of a nature to
increase the poet’s fame and success. “My book is out, and I hate it,
and so no doubt will you,” Tennyson wrote to FitzGerald, who hated it and
said so. “Like Carlyle, I gave up all hopes of him after _The
Princess_,” indeed it was not apt to conciliate Carlyle. “None of the
songs had the old champagne flavour,” said Fitz; and Lord Tennyson adds,
“Nothing either by Thackeray or by my father met FitzGerald’s approbation
unless he had first seen it in manuscript.” This prejudice was very
human. Lord Tennyson remarks, as to the poet’s meaning in this work,
born too early, that “the sooner woman finds out, before the great
educational movement begins, that ‘woman is not undeveloped man, but
diverse,’ the better it will be for the progress of the world.”
But probably the “educational movement” will not make much difference to
womankind on the whole. The old Platonic remark that woman “does the
same things as man, but not so well,” will eternally hold good, at least
in the arts, and in letters, except in rare cases of genius. A new
Jeanne d’Arc, the most signal example of absolute genius in history, will
not come again; and the ages have waited vainly for a new Sappho or a new
Jane Austen. Literature, poetry, painting, have always been fields open
to woman. But two names exhaust the roll of women of the highest rank in
letters—Sappho and Jane Austen. And “when did woman ever yet invent?”
In “arts of government” Elizabeth had courage, and just saving sense
enough to yield to Cecil at the eleventh hour, and escape the fate of
“her sister and her foe,” the beautiful unhappy queen who told her ladies
that she dared to look on whatever men dared to do, and herself would do
it if her strength so served her.” {58} “The foundress of the Babylonian
walls” is a myth; “the Rhodope that built the Pyramid” is not a
creditable myth; for exceptions to Knox’s “Monstrous Regiment of Women”
we must fall back on “The Palmyrene that fought Aurelian,” and the
revered name of the greatest of English queens, Victoria. Thus history
does not encourage the hope that a man-like education will raise many
women to the level of the highest of their sex in the past, or even that
the enormous majority of women will take advantage of the opportunity of
a man-like education. A glance at the numerous periodicals designed for
the reading of women depresses optimism, and the Princess’s prophecy of
“Two plummets dropped for one to sound the abyss
Of science, and the secrets of the mind,”
is not near fulfilment. Fortunately the sex does not “love the
Metaphysics,” and perhaps has not yet produced even a manual of Logic.
It must suffice man and woman to
“Walk this world
Yoked in all exercise of noble end,”
of a more practical character, while woman is at liberty
“To live and learn and be
All that not harms distinctive womanhood.”
This was the conclusion of the poet who had the most chivalrous reverence
for womanhood. This is the _eirenicon_ of that old strife between the
women and the men—that war in which both armies are captured. It may not
be acceptable to excited lady combatants, who think man their foe, when
the real enemy is (what Porson damned) the Nature of Things.
A new poem like _The Princess_ would soon reach the public of our day, so
greatly increased are the uses of advertisement. But _The Princess_
moved slowly from edition to revised and improved edition, bringing
neither money nor much increase of fame. The poet was living with his
family at Cheltenham, where among his new acquaintances were Sydney
Dobell, the poet of a few exquisite pieces, and F. W. Robertson, later so
popular as a preacher at Brighton. Meeting him for the first time, and
knowing Robertson’s “wish to pluck the heart from my mystery, from pure
nervousness I would only talk of beer.” This kind of shyness beset
Tennyson. A lady tells me that as a girl (and a very beautiful girl) she
and her sister, and a third, _nec diversa_, met the poet, and expected
high discourse. But his speech was all of that wingless insect which
“gets there, all the same,” according to an American lyrist; the insect
which fills Mrs Carlyle’s letters with bulletins of her success or
failure in domestic campaigns.
Tennyson kept visiting London, where he saw Thackeray and the despair of
Carlyle, and at Bath House he was too modest to be introduced to the
great Duke whose requiem he was to sing so nobly. Oddly enough Douglas
Jerrold enthusiastically assured Tennyson, at a dinner of a Society of
Authors, that “you are the one who will live.” To that end, humanly
speaking, he placed himself under the celebrated Dr Gully and his
“water-cure,” a foible of that period. In 1848 he made a tour to King
Arthur’s Cornish bounds, and another to Scotland, where the Pass of
Brander disappointed him: perhaps he saw it on a fine day, and, like
Glencoe, it needs tempest and mist lit up by the white fires of many
waterfalls. By bonny Doon he “fell into a passion of tears,” for he had
all of Keats’s sentiment for Burns: “There never was immortal poet if he
be not one.” Of all English poets, the warmest in the praise of Burns
have been the two most unlike himself—Tennyson and Keats. It was the
songs that Tennyson preferred; Wordsworth liked the _Cottar’s Saturday
Night_.
V.
IN MEMORIAM.
IN May 1850 a few, copies of _In Memoriam_ were printed for friends, and
presently the poem was published without author’s name. The pieces had
been composed at intervals, from 1833 onwards. It is to be observed that
the “section about evolution” was written some years before 1844, when
the ingenious hypotheses of Robert Chambers, in _Vestiges of Creation_,
were given to the world, and caused a good deal of talk. Ten years,
again, after _In Memoriam_, came Darwin’s _Origin of Species_. These
dates are worth observing. The theory of evolution, of course in a rude
mythical shape, is at least as old as the theory of creation, and is
found among the speculations of the most backward savages. The Arunta of
Central Australia, a race remote from the polite, have a hypothesis of
evolution which postulates only a few rudimentary forms of life, a marine
environment, and the minimum of supernormal assistance in the way of
stimulating the primal forms in the direction of more highly
differentiated developments. “The rudimentary forms, _Inapertwa_, were
in reality stages in the transformation of various plants and animals
into human beings. . . . They had no distinct limbs or organs of sight,
hearing, or smell.” They existed in a kind of lumps, and were set free
from the cauls which enveloped them by two beings called Ungambikula, “a
word which means ‘out of nothing,’ or ‘self-existing.’ Men descend from
lower animals thus evolved.” {62}
This example of the doctrine of evolution in an early shape is only
mentioned to prove that the idea has been familiar to the human mind from
the lowest known stage of culture. Not less familiar has been the theory
of creation by a kind of supreme being. The notion of creation, however,
up to 1860, held the foremost place in modern European belief. But
Lamarck, the elder Darwin, Monboddo, and others had submitted hypotheses
of evolution. Now it was part of the originality of Tennyson, as a
philosophic poet, that he had brooded from boyhood on these early
theories of evolution, in an age when they were practically unknown to
the literary, and were not patronised by the scientific, world. In
November 1844 he wrote to Mr Moxon, “I want you to get me a book which I
see advertised in the _Examiner_: it seems to contain many speculations
with which I have been familiar for years, and on which I have written
more than one poem.” This book was _Vestiges of Creation_. These poems
are the stanzas in _In Memoriam_ about “the greater ape,” and about
Nature as careless of the type: “all shall go.” The poetic and
philosophic originality of Tennyson thus faced the popular inferences as
to the effect of the doctrine of evolution upon religious beliefs long
before the world was moved in all its deeps by Darwin’s _Origin of
Species_. Thus the geological record is inconsistent, we learned, with
the record of the first chapters of Genesis. If man is a differentiated
monkey, and if a monkey has no soul, or future life (which is taken for
granted), where are man’s title-deeds to these possessions? With other
difficulties of an obvious kind, these presented themselves to the poet
with renewed force when his only chance of happiness depended on being
able to believe in a future life, and reunion with the beloved dead.
Unbelief had always existed. We hear of atheists in the _Rig Veda_. In
the early eighteenth century, in the age of Swift—
“Men proved, as sure as God’s in Gloucester,
That Moses was a great impostor.”
distrust of Moses increased with the increase of hypotheses of evolution.
But what English poet, before Tennyson, ever attempted “to lay the
spectres of the mind”; ever faced world-old problems in their most recent
aspects? I am not acquainted with any poet who attempted this task, and,
whatever we may think of Tennyson’s success, I do not see how we can deny
his originality.
Mr Frederic Harrison, however, thinks that neither “the theology nor the
philosophy of _In Memoriam_ are new, original, with an independent force
and depth of their own.” “They are exquisitely graceful re-statements of
the theology of the Broad Churchman of the school of F. D. Maurice and
Jowett—a combination of Maurice’s somewhat illogical piety with Jowett’s
philosophy of mystification.” The piety of Maurice may be as illogical
as that of Positivism is logical, and the philosophy of the Master of
Balliol may be whatever Mr Harrison pleases to call it. But as Jowett’s
earliest work (except an essay on Etruscan religion) is of 1855, one does
not see how it could influence Tennyson before 1844. And what had the
Duke of Argyll written on these themes some years before 1844? The late
Duke, to whom Mr Harrison refers in this connection, was born in 1823.
His philosophic ideas, if they were to influence Tennyson’s _In
Memoriam_, must have been set forth by him at the tender age of
seventeen, or thereabouts. Mr Harrison’s sentence is, “But does _In
Memoriam_ teach anything, or transfigure any idea which was not about
that time” (the time of writing was mainly 1833–1840) “common form with
F. D. Maurice, with Jowett, C. Kingsley, F. Robertson, Stopford Brooke,
Mr Ruskin, and the Duke of Argyll, Bishops Westcott and Boyd Carpenter?”
The dates answer Mr Harrison. Jowett did not publish anything till at
least fifteen years after Tennyson wrote his poems on evolution and
belief. Dr Boyd Carpenter’s works previous to 1840 are unknown to
bibliography. F. W. Robertson was a young parson at Cheltenham. Ruskin
had not published the first volume of _Modern Painters_. His Oxford
prize poem is of 1839. Mr Stopford Brooke was at school. The Duke of
Argyll was being privately educated: and so with the rest, except the
contemporary Maurice. How can Mr Harrison say that, in the time of _In
Memoriam_, Tennyson was “in touch with the ideas of Herschel, Owen,
Huxley, Darwin, and Tyndall”? {65} When Tennyson wrote the parts of _In
Memoriam_ which deal with science, nobody beyond their families and
friends had heard of Huxley, Darwin, and Tyndall. They had not
developed, much less had they published, their “general ideas.” Even in
his journal of the _Cruise of the Beagle_ Darwin’s ideas were religious,
and he naïvely admired the works of God. It is strange that Mr Harrison
has based his criticism, and his theory of Tennyson’s want of
originality, on what seems to be a historical error. He cites parts of
_In Memoriam_, and remarks, “No one can deny that all this is exquisitely
beautiful; that these eternal problems have never been clad in such
inimitable grace . . . But the train of thought is essentially that with
which ordinary English readers have been made familiar by F. D. Maurice,
Professor Jowett, _Ecce Homo_, _Hypatia_, and now by Arthur Balfour, Mr
Drummond, and many valiant companies of _Septem_ [why _Septem_?] _contra
Diabolum_.” One must keep repeating the historical verity that the ideas
of _In Memoriam_ could not have been “made familiar by” authors who had
not yet published anything, or by books yet undreamed of and unborn, such
as _Ecce Homo_ and Jowett’s work on some of St Paul’s Epistles. If these
books contain the ideas of _In Memoriam_, it is by dint of repetition and
borrowing from _In Memoriam_, or by coincidence. The originality was
Tennyson’s, for we cannot dispute the evidence of dates.
When one speaks of “originality” one does not mean that Tennyson
discovered the existence of the ultimate problems. But at Cambridge
(1828–1830) he had voted “No” in answer to the question discussed by “the
Apostles,” “Is an intelligible [intelligent?] First Cause deducible from
the phenomena of the universe?” {66} He had also propounded the theory
that “the development of the human body might possibly be traced from the
radiated vermicular molluscous and vertebrate organisms,” thirty years
before Darwin published _The Origin of Species_. To be concerned so
early with such hypotheses, and to face, in poetry, the religious or
irreligious inferences which may be drawn from them, decidedly
constitutes part of the poetic originality of Tennyson. His attitude, as
a poet, towards religious doubt is only so far not original, as it is
part of the general reaction from the freethinking of the eighteenth
century. Men had then been freethinkers _avec délices_. It was a joyous
thing to be an atheist, or something very like one; at all events, it was
glorious to be “emancipated.” Many still find it glorious, as we read in
the tone of Mr Huxley, when he triumphs and tramples over pious dukes and
bishops. Shelley said that a certain schoolgirl “would make a dear
little atheist.” But by 1828–1830 men were less joyous in their escape
from all that had hitherto consoled and fortified humanity. Long before
he dreamed of _In Memoriam_, in the _Poems chiefly Lyrical_ of 1830
Tennyson had written—
“‘Yet,’ said I, in my morn of youth,
The unsunn’d freshness of my strength,
When I went forth in quest of truth,
‘It is man’s privilege to doubt.’ . . .
Ay me! I fear
All may not doubt, but everywhere
Some must clasp Idols. Yet, my God,
Whom call I Idol? Let Thy dove
Shadow me over, and my sins
Be unremember’d, and Thy love
Enlighten me. Oh teach me yet
Somewhat before the heavy clod
Weighs on me, and the busy fret
Of that sharp-headed worm begins
In the gross blackness underneath.
Oh weary life! oh weary death!
Oh spirit and heart made desolate!
Oh damnèd vacillating state!”
Now the philosophy of _In Memoriam_ may be, indeed is, regarded by
robust, first-rate, and far from sensitive minds, as a “damnèd
vacillating state.” The poet is not so imbued with the spirit of popular
science as to be sure that he knows everything: knows that there is
nothing but atoms and ether, with no room for God or a soul. He is far
from that happy cock-certainty, and consequently is exposed to the
contempt of the cock-certain. The poem, says Mr Harrison, “has made
Tennyson the idol of the Anglican clergyman—the world in which he was
born and the world in which his life was ideally passed—the idol of all
cultured youth and of all æsthetic women. It is an honourable post to
fill”—that of idol. “The argument of _In Memoriam_ apparently is . . .
that we should faintly trust the larger hope.” That, I think, is not the
argument, not the conclusion of the poem, but is a casual expression of
one mood among many moods.
The argument and conclusion of _In Memoriam_ are the argument and
conclusion of the life of Tennyson, and of the love of Tennyson, that
immortal passion which was a part of himself, and which, if aught of us
endure, is living yet, and must live eternally. From the record of his
Life by his son we know that his trust in “the larger hope” was not
“faint,” but strengthened with the years. There are said to have been
less hopeful intervals.
His faith is, of course, no argument for others,—at least it ought not to
be. We are all the creatures of our bias, our environment, our
experience, our emotions. The experience of Tennyson was unlike the
experience of most men. It yielded him subjective grounds for belief.
He “opened a path unto many,” like Yama, the Vedic being who discovered
the way to death. But Tennyson’s path led not to death, but to life
spiritual, and to hope, and he did “give a new impulse to the thought of
his age,” as other great poets have done. Of course it may be an impulse
to wrong thought. As the philosophical Australian black said, “We shall
know when we are dead.”
Mr Harrison argues as if, unlike Tennyson, Byron, Wordsworth, Shelley,
and Burns produced “original ideas fresh from their own spirit, and not
derived from contemporary thinkers.” I do not know what original ideas
these great poets discovered and promulgated; their ideas seem to have
been “in the air.” These poets “made them current coin.” Shelley
thought that he owed many of his ideas to Godwin, a contemporary thinker.
Wordsworth has a debt to Plato, a thinker not contemporary. Burns’s
democratic independence was “in the air,” and had been, in Scotland,
since Elder remarked on it in a letter to Ingles in 1515. It is not the
ideas, it is the expression of the ideas, that marks the poet.
Tennyson’s ideas are relatively novel, though as old as Plotinus, for
they are applied to a novel, or at least an unfamiliar, mental situation.
Doubt was abroad, as it always is; but, for perhaps the first time since
Porphyry wrote his letter to Abammon, the doubters desired to believe,
and said, “Lord, help Thou my unbelief.” To robust, not sensitive minds,
very much in unity with themselves, the attitude seems contemptible, or
at best decently futile. Yet I cannot think it below the dignity of
mankind, conscious that it is not omniscient. The poet does fail in
logic (_In Memoriam_, cxx.) when he says—
“Let him, the wiser man who springs
Hereafter, up from childhood shape
His action like the greater ape,
But I was _born_ to other things.”
I am not well acquainted with the habits of the greater ape, but it would
probably be unwise, and perhaps indecent, to imitate him, even if “we
also are his offspring.” We might as well revert to polyandry and paint,
because our Celtic or Pictish ancestors, if we had any, practised the one
and wore the other. However, petulances like the verse on the greater
ape are rare in _In Memoriam_. To declare that “I would not stay” in
life if science proves us to be “cunning casts in clay,” is beneath the
courage of the Stoical philosophy.
Theologically, the poem represents the struggle with doubts and hopes and
fears, which had been with Tennyson from his boyhood, as is proved by the
volume of 1830. But the doubts had exerted, probably, but little
influence on his happiness till the sudden stroke of loss made life for a
time seem almost unbearable unless the doubts were solved. They _were_
solved, or stoically set aside, in the _Ulysses_, written in the
freshness of grief, with the conclusion that we must be
“Strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”
But the gnawing of grief till it becomes a physical pain, the fever fits
of sorrow, the aching _desiderium_, bring back in many guises the old
questions. These require new attempts at answers, and are answered, “the
sad mechanic exercise” of verse allaying the pain. This is the genesis
of _In Memoriam_, not originally written for publication but produced at
last as a monument to friendship, and as a book of consolation.
No books of consolation can console except by sympathy; and in _In
Memoriam_ sympathy and relief have been found, and will be found, by
many. Another, we feel, has trodden our dark and stony path, has been
shadowed by the shapes of dread which haunt our valley of tribulation: a
mind almost infinitely greater than ours has been our fellow-sufferer.
He has emerged from the darkness of the shadow of death into the light,
whither, as it seems to us, we can scarcely hope to come. It is the
sympathy and the example, I think, not the speculations, mystical or
scientific, which make _In Memoriam_, in more than name, a book of
consolation: even in hours of the sharpest distress, when its technical
beauties and wonderful pictures seem shadowy and unreal, like the yellow
sunshine and the woods of that autumn day when a man learned that his
friend was dead. No, it was not the speculations and arguments that
consoled or encouraged us. We did not listen to Tennyson as to Mr
Frederic Harrison’s glorified Anglican clergyman. We could not murmur,
like the Queen of the May—
“That good man, the Laureate, has told us words of peace.”
What we valued was the poet’s companionship. There was a young reader to
whom _All along the Valley_ came as a new poem in a time of recent
sorrow.
“The two-and-thirty years were a mist that rolls away,”
said the singer of _In Memoriam_, and in that hour it seemed as if none
could endure for two-and-thirty years the companionship of loss. But the
years have gone by, and have left
“Ever young the face that dwells
With reason cloister’d in the brain.” {72}
In this way to many _In Memoriam_ is almost a life-long companion: we
walk with Great-heart for our guide through the valley Perilous.
In this respect _In Memoriam_ is unique, for neither to its praise nor
dispraise is it to be compared with the other famous elegies of the
world. These are brief outbursts of grief—real, as in the hopeless words
of Catullus over his brother’s tomb; or academic, like Milton’s
_Lycidas_. We are not to suppose that Milton was heart-broken by the
death of young Mr King, or that Shelley was greatly desolated by the
death of Keats, with whom his personal relations had been slight, and of
whose poetry he had spoken evil. He was nobly stirred as a poet by a
poet’s death—like Mr Swinburne by the death of Charles Baudelaire; but
neither Shelley nor Mr Swinburne was lamenting _dimidium animæ suæ_, or
mourning for a friend
“Dear as the mother to the son,
More than my brothers are to me.”
The passion of _In Memoriam_ is personal, is acute, is life-long, and
thus it differs from the other elegies. Moreover, it celebrates a noble
object, and thus is unlike the ambiguous affection, real or dramatic,
which informs the sonnets of Shakespeare. So the poem stands alone,
cloistered; not fiery with indignation, not breaking into actual
prophecy, like Shelley’s _Adonais_; not capable, by reason even of its
meditative metre, of the organ music of _Lycidas_. Yet it is not to be
reckoned inferior to these because its aim and plan are other than
theirs.
It is far from my purpose to “class” Tennyson, or to dispute about his
relative greatness when compared with Wordsworth or Byron, Coleridge,
Shelley, or Burns. He rated one song of Lovelace above all his lyrics,
and, in fact, could no more have written the Cavalier’s _To Althea from
Prison_ than Lovelace could have written the _Morte d’Arthur_. “It is
not reasonable, it is not fair,” says Mr Harrison, after comparing _In
Memoriam_ with _Lycidas_, “to compare Tennyson with Milton,” and it is
not reasonable to compare Tennyson with any poet whatever. Criticism is
not the construction of a class list. But we may reasonably say that _In
Memoriam_ is a noble poem, an original poem, a poem which stands alone in
literature. The wonderful beauty, ever fresh, howsoever often read, of
many stanzas, is not denied by any critic. The marvel is that the same
serene certainty of art broods over even the stanzas which must have been
conceived while the sorrow was fresh. The second piece,
“Old yew, which graspest at the stones,”
must have been composed soon after the stroke fell. Yet it is as perfect
as the proem of 1849. As a rule, the poetical expression of strong
emotion appears usually to clothe the memory of passion when it has been
softened by time. But here already “the rhythm, phrasing, and
articulation are entirely faultless, exquisitely clear, melodious, and
rare.” {74} It were superfluous labour to point at special beauties, at
the exquisite rendering of nature; and copious commentaries exist to
explain the course of the argument, if a series of moods is to be called
an argument. One may note such a point as that (xiv.) where the poet
says that, were he to meet his friend in life,
“I should not feel it to be strange.”
It may have happened to many to mistake, for a section of a second, the
face of a stranger for the face seen only in dreams, and to find that the
recognition brings no surprise.
Pieces of a character apart from the rest, and placed in a designed
sequence, are xcii., xciii., xcv. In the first the poet says—
“If any vision should reveal
Thy likeness, I might count it vain
As but the canker of the brain;
Yea, tho’ it spake and made appeal
To chances where our lots were cast
Together in the days behind,
I might but say, I hear a wind
Of memory murmuring the past.
Yea, tho’ it spake and bared to view
A fact within the coming year;
And tho’ the months, revolving near,
Should prove the phantom-warning true,
They might not seem thy prophecies,
But spiritual presentiments,
And such refraction of events
As often rises ere they rise.”
The author thus shows himself _difficile_ as to recognising the personal
identity of a phantasm; nor is it easy to see what mode of proving his
identity would be left to a spirit. The poet, therefore, appeals to some
perhaps less satisfactory experience:—
“Descend, and touch, and enter; hear
The wish too strong for words to name;
That in this blindness of the frame
My Ghost may feel that thine is near.”
The third poem is the crown of _In Memoriam_, expressing almost such
things as are not given to man to utter:—
And all at once it seem’d at last
The living soul was flash’d on mine,
And mine in this was wound, and whirl’d
About empyreal heights of thought,
And came on that which is, and caught
The deep pulsations of the world,
Æonian music measuring out
The steps of Time—the shocks of Chance—
The blows of Death. At length my trance
Was cancell’d, stricken thro’ with doubt.
Vague words! but ah, how hard to frame
In matter-moulded forms of speech,
Or ev’n for intellect to reach
Thro’ memory that which I became.”
Experiences like this, subjective, and not matter for argument, were
familiar to Tennyson. Jowett said, “He was one of those who, though not
an upholder of miracles, thought that the wonders of Heaven and Earth
were never far absent from us.” In _The Mystic_, Tennyson, when almost a
boy, had shown familiarity with strange psychological and psychical
conditions. Poems of much later life also deal with these, and, more or
less consciously, his philosophy was tinged, and his confidence that we
are more than “cunning casts in clay” was increased, by phenomena of
experience, which can only be evidence for the mystic himself, if even
for him. But this dim aspect of his philosophy, of course, is “to the
Greeks foolishness.”
His was a philosophy of his own; not a philosophy for disciples, and
“those that eddy round and round.” It was the sum of his reflection on
the mass of his impressions. I have shown, by the aid of dates, that it
was not borrowed from Huxley, Mr Stopford Brooke, or the late Duke of
Argyll. But, no doubt, many of the ideas were “in the air,” and must
have presented themselves to minds at once of religious tendency, and
attracted by the evolutionary theories which had always existed as
floating speculations, till they were made current coin by the genius and
patient study of Darwin. That Tennyson’s opinions between 1830 and 1840
were influenced by those of F. D. Maurice is reckoned probable by Canon
Ainger, author of the notice of the poet in _The Dictionary of National
Biography_. In the Life of Maurice, Tennyson does not appear till 1850,
and the two men were not at Cambridge together. But Maurice’s ideas, as
they then existed, may have reached Tennyson orally through Hallam and
other members of the Trinity set, who knew personally the author of
_Letters to a Quaker_. However, this is no question of scientific
priority: to myself it seems that Tennyson “beat his music out” for
himself, as perhaps most people do. Like his own Sir Percivale, “I know
not all he meant.”
Among the opinions as to _In Memoriam_ current at the time of its
publication Lord Tennyson notices those of Maurice and Robertson. They
“thought that the poet had made a definite step towards the unification
of the highest religion and philosophy with the progressive science of
the day.” Neither science nor religion stands still; neither stands now
where it then did. Conceivably they are travelling on paths which will
ultimately coincide; but this opinion, of course, must seem foolishness
to most professors of science. Bishop Westcott was at Cambridge when the
book appeared: he is one of Mr Harrison’s possible sources of Tennyson’s
ideas. He recognised the poet’s “splendid faith (in the face of every
difficulty) in the growing purpose of the sum of life, and in the noble
destiny of the individual man.” Ten years later Professor Henry
Sidgwick, a mind sufficiently sceptical, found in some lines of _In
Memoriam_ “the indestructible and inalienable minimum of faith which
humanity cannot give up because it is necessary for life; and which I
know that I, at least so far as the man in me is deeper than the
methodical thinker, cannot give up.” But we know that many persons not
only do not find an irreducible minimum of faith “necessary for life,”
but are highly indignant and contemptuous if any one else ventures to
suggest the logical possibility of any faith at all.
The mass of mankind will probably never be convinced unbelievers—nay,
probably the backward or forward swing of the pendulum will touch more
convinced belief. But there always have been, since the _Rishis_ of
India sang, superior persons who believe in nothing not material—whatever
the material may be. Tennyson was, it is said, “impatient” of these
_esprits forts_, and they are impatient of him. It is an error to be
impatient: we know not whither the _logos_ may lead us, or later
generations; and we ought not to be irritated with others because it
leads them into what we think the wrong path. It is unfortunate that a
work of art, like _In Memoriam_, should arouse theological or
anti-theological passions. The poet only shows us the paths by which his
mind travelled: they may not be the right paths, nor is it easy to trace
them on a philosophical chart. He escaped from Doubting Castle. Others
may “take that for a hermitage,” and be happy enough in the residence.
We are all determined by our bias: Tennyson’s is unconcealed. His poem
is not a tract: it does not aim at the conversion of people with the
contrary bias, it is irksome, in writing about a poet, to be obliged to
discuss a philosophy which, certainly, is not stated in the manner of
Spinoza, but is merely the equilibrium of contending forces in a single
mind.
The most famous review of _In Memoriam_ is that which declared that
“these touching lines evidently come from the full heart of the widow of
a military man.” This is only equalled, if equalled, by a recent
critique which treated a fresh edition of _Jane Eyre_ as a new novel,
“not without power, in parts, and showing some knowledge of Yorkshire
local colour.”
VI.
AFTER _IN MEMORIAM_.
ON June 13 Tennyson married, at Shiplake, the object of his old,
long-tried, and constant affection. The marriage was still
“imprudent,”—eight years of then uncontested supremacy in English poetry
had not brought a golden harvest. Mr Moxon appears to have supplied £300
“in advance of royalties.” The sum, so contemptible in the eyes of
first-rate modern novelists, was a competence to Tennyson, added to his
little pension and the _épaves_ of his patrimony. “The peace of God came
into my life when I married her,” he said in later days. The poet made a
charming copy of verses to his friend, the Rev. Mr Rawnsley, who tied the
knot, as he and his bride drove to the beautiful village of Pangbourne.
Thence they went to the stately Clevedon Court, the seat of Sir Abraham
Elton, hard by the church where Arthur Hallam sleeps. The place is very
ancient and beautiful, and was a favourite haunt of Thackeray. They
passed on to Lynton, and to Glastonbury, where a collateral ancestor of
Mrs Tennyson’s is buried beside King Arthur’s grave, in that green valley
of Avilion, among the apple-blossoms. They settled for a while at Tent
Lodge on Coniston Water, in a land of hospitable Marshalls.
After their return to London, on the night of November 18, Tennyson
dreamed that Prince Albert came and kissed him, and that he himself said,
“Very kind, but very German,” which was very like him. Next day he
received from Windsor the offer of the Laureateship. He doubted, and
hesitated, but accepted. Since Wordsworth’s death there had, as usual,
been a good deal of banter about the probable new Laureate: examples of
competitive odes exist in _Bon Gaultier_. That by Tennyson is
Anacreontic, but he was not really set on kissing the Maids of Honour, as
he is made to sing. Rogers had declined, on the plea of extreme old age;
but it was worthy of the great and good Queen not to overlook the Nestor
of English poets. For the rest, the Queen looked for “a name bearing
such distinction in the literary world as to do credit to the
appointment.” In the previous century the great poets had rarely been
Laureates. But since Sir Walter Scott declined the bays in favour of
Southey, for whom, again, the tale of bricks in the way of Odes was
lightened, and when Wordsworth succeeded Southey, the office became
honourable. Tennyson gave it an increase of renown, while, though in
itself of merely nominal value, it served his poems, to speak profanely,
as an advertisement. New editions of his books were at once in demand;
while few readers had ever heard of Mr Browning, already his friend, and
already author of _Men and Women_.
The Laureateship brought the poet acquainted with the Queen, who was to
be his debtor in later days for encouragement and consolation. To his
Laureateship we owe, among other good things, the stately and moving _Ode
on the Death of the Duke of Wellington_, a splendid heroic piece,
unappreciated at the moment. But Tennyson was, of course, no Birthday
poet. Since the exile of the House of Stuart our kings in England have
not maintained the old familiarity with many classes of their subjects.
Literature has not been fashionable at Court, and Tennyson could in no
age have been a courtier. We hear the complaint, every now and then,
that official honours are not conferred (except the Laureateship) on men
of letters. But most of them probably think it rather distinguished not
to be decorated, or to carry titles borne by many deserving persons
unvisited by the Muses. Even the appointment to the bays usually
provokes a great deal of jealous and spiteful feeling, which would only
be multiplied if official honours were distributed among men of the pen.
Perhaps Tennyson’s laurels were not for nothing in the chorus of
dispraise which greeted the _Ode on the Duke of Wellington_, and _Maud_.
The year 1851 was chiefly notable for a tour to Italy, made immortal in
the beautiful poem of _The Daisy_, in a measure of the poet’s own
invention. The next year, following on the _Coup d’état_ and the rise of
the new French empire, produced patriotic appeals to Britons to “guard
their own,” which to a great extent former alien owners had been
unsuccessful in guarding from Britons. The Tennysons had lost their
first child at his birth: perhaps he is remembered in _The Grandmother_,
“the babe had fought for his life.” In August 1852 the present Lord
Tennyson was born, and Mr Maurice was asked to be godfather. The
Wellington Ode was of November, and was met by “the almost universal
depreciation of the press,”—why, except because, as I have just
suggested, Tennyson was Laureate, it is impossible to imagine. The
verses were worthy of the occasion: more they could not be.
In the autumn of 1853 the poet visited Ardtornish on the Sound of Mull, a
beautiful place endeared to him who now writes by the earliest
associations. It chanced to him to pass his holidays there just when
Tennyson and Mr Palgrave had left—“Mr Tinsmith and Mr Pancake,” as Robert
the boatman, a very black Celt, called them. Being then nine years of
age, I heard of a poet’s visit, and asked, “A real poet, like Sir Walter
Scott?” with whom I then supposed that “the Muse had gone away.” “Oh,
not like Sir Walter Scott, of course,” my mother told me, with loyalty
unashamed. One can think of the poet as Mrs Sellar, his hostess,
describes him, beneath the limes of the avenue at Acharn, planted, Mrs
Sellar says, by a cousin of Flora Macdonald. I have been told that the
lady who planted the lilies, if not the limes, was the famed Jacobite,
Miss Jennie Cameron, mentioned in _Tom Jones_. An English engraving of
1746 shows the Prince between these two beauties, Flora and Jennie.
“No one,” says Mrs Sellar, “could have been more easy, simple, and
delightful,” and indeed it is no marvel that in her society and that of
her husband, the Greek professor, and her cousin, Miss Cross, and in such
scenes, “he blossomed out in the most genial manner, making us all feel
as if he were an old friend.”
In November Tennyson took a house at Farringford, “as it was beautiful
and far from the haunts of men.” There he settled to a country existence
in the society of his wife, his two children (the second, Lionel, being
in 1854 the baby), and there he composed _Maud_, while the sound of the
guns, in practice for the war of the Crimea, boomed from the coast. In
May Tennyson saw the artists, of schools oddly various, who illustrated
his poems. Millais, Rossetti, and Holman Hunt gave the tone to the art,
but Mr Horsley, Creswick, and Mulgrave were also engaged. While _Maud_
was being composed Tennyson wrote _The Charge of the Light Brigade_; a
famous poem, not in a manner in which he was born to excel—at least in my
poor opinion. “Some one _had_ blundered,” and that line was the first
fashioned and the keynote of the poem; but, after all, “blundered” is not
an exquisite rhyme to “hundred.” The poem, in any case, was most welcome
to our army in the Crimea, and is a spirited piece for recitation.
In January 1855 _Maud_ was finished; in April the poet copied it out for
the press, and refreshed himself by reading a very different poem, _The
Lady of the Lake_. The author, Sir Walter, had suffered, like the hero
of _Maud_, by an unhappy love affair, which just faintly colours _The
Lady of the Lake_ by a single allusion, in the description of
Fitz-James’s dreams:—
“Then,—from my couch may heavenly might
Chase that worst phantom of the night!—
Again returned the scenes of youth,
Of confident undoubting truth;
Again his soul he interchanged
With friends whose hearts were long estranged.
They come, in dim procession led,
The cold, the faithless, and the dead;
As warm each hand, each brow as gay,
As if they parted yesterday.
And doubt distracts him at the view—
Oh, were his senses false or true?
Dreamed he of death, or broken vow,
Or is it all a vision now?”
We learn from Lady Louisa Stuart, to whom Scott read these lines, that
they referred to his lost love. I cite the passage because the extreme
reticence of Scott, in his undying sorrow, is in contrast with what
Tennyson, after reading _The Lady of the Lake_, was putting into the
mouth of his complaining lover in _Maud_.
We have no reason to suppose that Tennyson himself had ever to bewail a
faithless love. To be sure, the hero of _Locksley Hall_ is in this
attitude, but then _Locksley Hall_ is not autobiographical. Less
dramatic and impersonal in appearance are the stanzas—
“Come not, when I am dead,
To drop thy foolish tears upon my grave;”
and
“Child, if it were thine error or thy crime
I care no longer, being all unblest.”
No biographer tells us whether this was a personal complaint or a mere
set of verses on an imaginary occasion. In _In Memoriam_ Tennyson speaks
out concerning the loss of a friend. In _Maud_, as in _Locksley Hall_,
he makes his hero reveal the agony caused by the loss of a mistress.
There is no reason to suppose that the poet had ever any such mischance,
but many readers have taken _Locksley Hall_ and _Maud_ for
autobiographical revelations, like _In Memoriam_. They are, on the other
hand, imaginative and dramatic. They illustrate the pangs of
disappointed love of woman, pangs more complex and more rankling than
those inflicted by death. In each case, however, the poet, who has sung
so nobly the happiness of fortunate wedded loves, has chosen a hero with
whom we do not readily sympathise—a Hamlet in miniature,
“With a heart of furious fancies,”
as in the old mad song. This choice, thanks to the popular
misconception, did him some harm. As a “monodramatic Idyll,” a romance
in many rich lyric measures, _Maud_ was at first excessively unpopular.
“Tennyson’s _Maud_ is Tennyson’s Maudlin,” said a satirist, and “morbid,”
“mad,” “rampant,” and “rabid bloodthirstiness of soul,” were among the
amenities of criticism. Tennyson hated war, but his hero, at least,
hopes that national union in a national struggle will awake a nobler than
the commercial spirit. Into the rights and wrongs of our quarrel with
Russia we are not to go. Tennyson, rightly or wrongly, took the part of
his country, and must “thole the feud” of those high-souled citizens who
think their country always in the wrong—as perhaps it very frequently is.
We are not to expect a tranquil absence of bias in the midst of military
excitement, when very laudable sentiments are apt to misguide men in both
directions. In any case, political partisanship added to the enemies of
the poem, which was applauded by Henry Taylor, Ruskin, George Brimley,
and Jowett, while Mrs Browning sent consoling words from Italy. The poem
remained a favourite with the author, who chose passages from it often,
when persuaded to read aloud by friends; and modern criticism has not
failed to applaud the splendour of the verse and the subtlety of the mad
scenes, the passion of the love lyrics.
These merits have ceased to be disputed, but, though a loyal Tennysonian,
I have never quite been able to reconcile myself to _Maud_ as a whole.
The hero is an unwholesome young man, and not of an original kind. He is
_un beau ténébreux_ of 1830. I suppose it has been observed that he is
merely The Master of Ravenswood in modern costume, and without Lady
Ashton. Her part is taken by Maud’s brother. The situations of the hero
and of the Master (whose acquaintance Thackeray never renewed after he
lost his hat in the Kelpie Flow) are nearly identical. The families and
fathers of both have been ruined by “the gray old wolf,” and by Sir
William Ashton, representing the house of Stair. Both heroes live
dawdling on, hard by their lost ancestral homes. Both fall in love with
the daughters of the enemies of their houses. The loves of both are
baffled, and end in tragedy. Both are concerned in a duel, though the
Master, on his way to the ground, “stables his steed in the Kelpie Flow,”
and the wooer in _Maud_ shoots Lucy Ashton’s brother,—I mean the brother
of Maud,—though duelling in England was out of date. Then comes an
interval of madness, and he recovers amid the patriotic emotions of the
ill-fated Crimean expedition. Both lovers are gloomy, though the Master
has better cause, for the Tennysonian hero is more comfortably provided
for than Edgar with his “man and maid,” his Caleb and Mysie. Finally,
both _The Bride of Lammermoor_, which affected Tennyson so potently in
boyhood
(“_A merry merry bridal_,
_A merry merry day_”),
and _Maud_, excel in passages rather than as wholes.
The hero of _Maud_, with his clandestine wooing of a girl of sixteen, has
this apology, that the match had been, as it were, predestined, and
desired by the mother of the lady. Still, the brother did not ill to be
angry; and the peevishness of the hero against the brother and the
parvenu lord and rival strikes a jarring note. In England, at least, the
general sentiment is opposed to this moody, introspective kind of young
man, of whom Tennyson is not to be supposed to approve. We do not feel
certain that his man and maid were “ever ready to slander and steal.”
That seems to be part of his jaundiced way of looking at everything and
everybody. He has even a bad word for the “man-god” of modern days,—
“The man of science himself is fonder of glory, and vain,
An eye well-practised in nature, a spirit bounded and poor.”
_Rien n’est sacré_ for this cynic, who thinks himself a Stoic. Thus
_Maud_ was made to be unpopular with the author’s countrymen, who
conceived a prejudice against Maud’s lover, described by Tennyson as “a
morbid poetic soul, . . . an egotist with the makings of a cynic.” That
he is “raised to sanity” (still in Tennyson’s words) “by a pure and holy
love which elevates his whole nature,” the world failed to perceive,
especially as the sanity was only a brief lucid interval, tempered by
hanging about the garden to meet a girl of sixteen, unknown to her
relations. Tennyson added that “different phases of passion in one
person take the place of different characters,” to which critics replied
that they wanted different characters, if only by way of relief, and did
not care for any of the phases of passion. The learned Monsieur Janet
has maintained that love is a disease like another, and that nobody falls
in love when in perfect health of mind and body. This theory seems open
to exception, but the hero of Maud is unhealthy enough. At best and
last, he only helps to give a martial force a “send-off”:—
“I stood on a giant deck and mixed my breath
With a loyal people shouting a battle-cry.”
He did not go out as a volunteer, and probably the Crimean winters
brought him back to his original estate of cynical gloom—and very
naturally.
The reconciliation with Life is not like the reconciliation of _In
Memoriam_. The poem took its rise in old lines, and most beautiful
lines, which Tennyson had contributed in 1837 to a miscellany:—
“O that ’twere possible,
After long grief and pain,
To find the arms of my true love
Round me once again.”
Thence the poet, working back to find the origin of the situation,
encountered the ideas and the persons of _Maud_.
I have tried to state the sources, in the general mind, of the general
dislike of _Maud_. The public, “driving at practice,” disapproved of the
“criticism of life” in the poem; confused the suffering narrator with the
author, and neglected the poetry. “No modern poem,” said Jowett,
“contains more lines that ring in the ears of men. I do not know any
verse out of Shakespeare in which the ecstacy of love soars to such a
height.” With these comments we may agree, yet may fail to follow Jowett
when he says, “No poem since Shakespeare seems to show equal power of the
same kind, or equal knowledge of human nature.” Shakespeare could not in
a narrative poem have preferred the varying passions of one character to
the characters of many persons.
Tennyson was “nettled at first,” his son says, “by these captious remarks
of the ‘indolent reviewers,’ but afterwards he would take no notice of
them except to speak of them in a half-pitiful, half-humorous,
half-mournful manner.” The besetting sin and error of the critics was,
of course, to confound Tennyson’s hero with himself, as if we confused
Dickens with Pip.
Like _Aurora Leigh_, _Lucile_, and other works, _Maud_ is under the
disadvantage of being, practically, a novel of modern life in verse.
Criticised as a tale of modern life (and it was criticised in that
character), it could not be very highly esteemed. But the essence of
_Maud_, of course, lies in the poetical vehicle. Nobody can cavil at the
impressiveness of the opening stanzas—
“I hate the dreadful hollow behind the little wood”;
with the keynotes of colour and of desolation struck; the lips of the
hollow “dabbled with blood-red heath,” the “red-ribb’d ledges,” and “the
flying gold of the ruin’d woodlands”; and the contrast in the picture of
the child Maud—
“Maud the delight of the village, the ringing joy of the Hall.”
The poem abounds in lines which live in the memory, as in the vernal
description—
“A million emeralds break from the ruby-budded lime”;
and the voice heard in the garden singing
“A passionate ballad gallant and gay,”
as Lovelace’s _Althea_, and the lines on the far-off waving of a white
hand, “betwixt the cloud and the moon.” The lyric of
“Birds in the high Hall-garden
When twilight was falling,
Maud, Maud, Maud, Maud,
They were crying and calling,”
was a favourite of the poet.
“What birds were these?” he is said to have asked a lady suddenly, when
reading to a silent company.
“Nightingales,” suggested a listener, who did not probably remember any
other fowl that is vocal in the dusk.
“No, they were rooks,” answered the poet.
“Come into the Garden, Maud,” is as fine a love-song as Tennyson ever
wrote, with a triumphant ring, and a soaring exultant note. Then the
poem drops from its height, like a lark shot high in heaven; tragedy
comes, and remorse, and the beautiful interlude of the
“lovely shell,
Small and pure as a pearl.”