“Revolving in myself
The word that is the symbol of myself”—
that is, of dwelling on the sound of his own name, was familiar to the
Arabs. M. Lefébure has drawn my attention to a passage in the works of a
mediæval Arab philosopher, Ibn Khaldoun: {196} “To arrive at the highest
degree of inspiration of which he is capable, the diviner should have
recourse to the use of certain phrases marked by a peculiar cadence and
parallelism. Thus he emancipates his mind from the influence of the
senses, and is enabled to attain an imperfect contact with the spiritual
world.” Ibn Khaldoun regards the “contact” as extremely “imperfect.” He
describes similar efforts made by concentrating the gaze on a mirror, a
bowl of water, or the like. Tennyson was doubtless unaware that he had
stumbled accidentally on a method of “ancient sages.” Psychologists will
explain his experience by the word “dissociation.” It is not everybody,
however, who can thus dissociate himself. The temperament of genius has
often been subject to such influence, as M. Lefébure has shown in the
modern instances of George Sand and Alfred de Musset: we might add
Shelley, Goethe, and even Scott.
The poet’s versatility was displayed in the appearance with these records
of “weird seizures”, of the Irish dialect piece _To-morrow_, the popular
_Spinster’s Sweet-Arts_, and the _Locksley Hall Sixty Years After_. The
old fire of the versification is unabated, but the hero has relapsed on
the gloom of the hero of _Maud_. He represents himself, of course, not
Tennyson, or only one of the moods of Tennyson, which were sometimes
black enough. A very different mood chants the _Charge of the Heavy
Brigade_, and speaks of
“Green Sussex fading into blue
With one gray glimpse of sea.”
The lines _To Virgil_ were written at the request of the Mantuans, by the
most Virgilian of all the successors of the
“Wielder of the stateliest measure
ever moulded by the lips of man.”
Never was Tennyson more Virgilian than in this unmatched panegyric, the
sum and flower of criticism of that
“Golden branch amid the shadows,
kings and realms that pass to rise no more.”
Hardly less admirable is the tribute to Catullus, and the old poet is
young again in the bird-song of _Early Spring_. The lines on _Poets and
their Bibliographies_, with _The Dead Prophet_, express Tennyson’s
lifelong abhorrence of the critics and biographers, whose joy is in the
futile and the unimportant, in personal gossip and the sweepings of the
studio, the salvage of the wastepaper basket. The _Prefatory Poem to my
Brother’s Sonnets_ is not only touching in itself, but proves that the
poet can “turn to favour and to prettiness” such an affliction as the
ruinous summer of 1879.
The year 1880 brought deeper distress in the death of the poet’s son
Lionel, whose illness, begun in India, ended fatally in the Red Sea. The
interest of the following years was mainly domestic. The poet’s health,
hitherto robust, was somewhat impaired in 1888, but his vivid interest in
affairs and in letters was unabated. He consoled himself with Virgil,
Keats, Wordsworth, Gibbon, Euripides, and Mr Leaf’s speculations on the
composite nature of the _Iliad_, in which Coleridge, perhaps alone among
poets, believed. “You know,” said Tennyson to Mr Leaf; “I never liked
that theory of yours about the many poets.” It would be at least as easy
to prove that there were many authors of _Ivanhoe_, or perhaps it would
be a good deal more easy. However, he admitted that three lines which
occur both in the Eighth and the Sixteenth Books of the _Iliad_ are more
appropriate in the later book. Similar examples might be found in his
own poems. He still wrote, in the intervals of a malady which brought
him “as near death as a man could be without dying.” He was an example
of the great physical strength which, on the whole, seems usually to
accompany great mental power. The strength may be dissipated by passion,
or by undue labour, as in cases easily recalled to memory, but neither
cause had impaired the vigour of Tennyson. Like Goethe, he lived out all
his life; and his eightieth birthday was cheered both by public and
private expressions of reverence and affection.
Of Tennyson’s last three years on earth we may think, in his own words,
that his
“Life’s latest eve endured
Nor settled into hueless grey.”
Nature was as dear to him and as inspiring as of old; men and affairs and
letters were not slurred by his intact and energetic mind. His _Demeter
and other Poems_, with the dedication to Lord Dufferin, appeared in the
December of the year. The dedication was the lament for the dead son and
the salutation to the Viceroy of India, a piece of resigned and manly
regret. The _Demeter and Persephone_ is a modern and tender study of the
theme of the most beautiful Homeric Hymn. The ancient poet had no such
thought of the restored Persephone as that which impels Tennyson to
describe her
“Faint as a climate-changing bird that flies
All night across the darkness, and at dawn
Falls on the threshold of her native land.”
The spring, the restored Persephone, comes more vigorous and joyous to
the shores of the Ægean than to ours. All Tennyson’s own is Demeter’s
awe of those “imperial disimpassioned eyes” of her daughter, come from
the bed and the throne of Hades, the Lord of many guests. The hymn,
happy in its ending, has no thought of the grey heads of the Fates, and
their answer to the goddess concerning “fate beyond the Fates,” and the
breaking of the bonds of Hades. The ballad of _Owd Roä_ is one of the
most spirited of the essays in dialect to which Tennyson had of late
years inclined. _Vastness_ merely expresses, in terms of poetry,
Tennyson’s conviction that, without immortality, life is a series of
worthless contrasts. An opposite opinion may be entertained, but a man
has a right to express his own, which, coming from so great a mind, is
not undeserving of attention; or, at least, is hardly deserving of
reproof. The poet’s idea is also stated thus in _The Ring_, in terms
which perhaps do not fall below the poetical; or, at least, do not drop
into “the utterly unpoetical”:—
“The Ghost in Man, the Ghost that once was Man,
But cannot wholly free itself from Man,
Are calling to each other thro’ a dawn
Stranger than earth has ever seen; the veil
Is rending, and the Voices of the day
Are heard across the Voices of the dark.
No sudden heaven, nor sudden hell, for man,
But thro’ the Will of One who knows and rules—
And utter knowledge is but utter love—
Æonian Evolution, swift or slow,
Thro’ all the Spheres—an ever opening height,
An ever lessening earth.”
_The Ring_ is, in fact, a ghost story based on a legend told by Mr Lowell
about a house near where he had once lived; one of those houses vexed by
“A footstep, a low throbbing in the walls,
A noise of falling weights that never fell,
Weird whispers, bells that rang without a hand,
Door-handles turn’d when none was at the door,
And bolted doors that open’d of themselves.”
These phenomena were doubtless caused by rats and water-pipes, but they
do not destroy the pity and the passion of the tale. The lines to Mary
Boyle are all of the normal world, and worthy of a poet’s youth and of
the spring. _Merlin and the Gleam_ is the spiritual allegory of the
poet’s own career:—
“Arthur had vanish’d
I knew not whither,
The king who loved me,
And cannot die.”