“All but in Heaven
Hovers The Gleam,”
whither the wayfarer was soon to follow. There is a marvellous hope and
pathos in the melancholy of these all but the latest songs, reminiscent
of youth and love, and even of the dim haunting memories and dreams of
infancy. No other English poet has thus rounded all his life with music.
Tennyson was in his eighty-first year, when there “came in a moment” the
crown of his work, the immortal lyric, _Crossing the Bar_. It is hardly
less majestic and musical in the perfect Greek rendering by his
brother-in-law, Mr Lushington. For once at least a poem has been “poured
from the golden to the silver cup” without the spilling of a drop. The
new book’s appearance was coincident with the death of Mr Browning, “so
loving and appreciative,” as Lady Tennyson wrote; a friend, not a rival,
however the partisans of either poet might strive to stir emulation
between two men of such lofty and such various genius.
X.
1890.
IN the year 1889 the poet’s health had permitted him to take long walks
on the sea-shore and along the cliffs, one of which, by reason of its
whiteness, he had named “Taliessin,” “the splendid brow.” His mind ran
on a poem founded on an Egyptian legend (of which the source is not
mentioned), telling how “despair and death came upon him who was mad
enough to try to probe the secret of the universe.” He also thought of a
drama on Tristram, who, in the Idylls, is treated with brevity, and not
with the sympathy of the old writer who cries, “God bless Tristram the
knight: he fought for England!” But early in 1890 Tennyson suffered from
a severe attack of influenza. In May Mr Watts painted his portrait, and
“Divinely through all hindrance found the man.”
Tennyson was a great admirer of Miss Austen’s novels: “The realism and
life-likeness of Miss Austen’s _Dramatis Personæ_ come nearest to those
of Shakespeare. Shakespeare, however, is a sun to which Jane Austen,
though a bright and true little world, is but an asteroid.” He was
therefore pleased to find apple-blossoms co-existing with ripe
strawberries on June 28, as Miss Austen has been blamed, by minute
philosophers, for introducing this combination in the garden party in
_Emma_. The poet, like most of the good and great, read novels eagerly,
and excited himself over the confirmation of an adult male in a story by
Miss Yonge. Of Scott, “the most chivalrous literary figure of the
century, and the author with the widest range since Shakespeare,” he
preferred _Old Mortality_, and it is a good choice. He hated “morbid and
introspective tales, with their oceans of sham philosophy.” At this
time, with catholic taste, he read Mr Stevenson and Mr Meredith, Miss
Braddon and Mr Henry James, Ouida and Mr Thomas Hardy; Mr Hall Caine and
Mr Anstey; Mrs Oliphant and Miss Edna Lyall. Not everybody can peruse
all of these very diverse authors with pleasure. He began his poem on
the Roman gladiatorial combats; indeed his years, fourscore and one, left
his intellectual eagerness as unimpaired as that of Goethe. “A crooked
share,” he said to the Princess Louise, “may make a straight furrow.”
“One afternoon he had a long waltz with M— in the ballroom.” Speaking of
“All the charm of all the Muses
Often flowering in a lonely word”
in Virgil, he adduced, rather strangely, the _cunctantem ramum_, said of
the Golden Bough, in the Sixth Æneid. The choice is odd, because the
Sibyl has just told Æneas that, if he be destined to pluck the branch of
gold, _ipse volens facilisque sequetur_, “it will come off of its own
accord,” like the sacred _ti_ branches of the Fijians, which bend down to
be plucked for the Fire rite. Yet, when the predestined Æneas tries to
pluck the bough of gold, it yields _reluctantly_ (_cunctantem_), contrary
to what the Sibyl has foretold. Mr Conington, therefore, thought the
phrase a slip on the part of Virgil. “People accused Virgil of
plagiarising,” he said, “but if a man made it his own there was no harm
in that (look at the great poets, Shakespeare included).” Tennyson, like
Virgil, made much that was ancient his own; his verses are often, and
purposefully, a mosaic of classical reminiscences. But he was vexed by
the hunters after remote and unconscious resemblances, and far-fetched
analogies between his lines and those of others. He complained that, if
he said that the sun went down, a parallel was at once cited from Homer,
or anybody else, and he used a very powerful phrase to condemn critics
who detected such repetitions. “The moanings of the homeless
sea,”—“moanings” from Horace, “homeless” from Shelley. “As if no one
else had ever heard the sea moan except Horace!” Tennyson’s mixture of
memory and forgetfulness was not so strange as that of Scott, and when he
adapted from the Greek, Latin, or Italian, it was of set purpose, just as
it was with Virgil. The beautiful lines comparing a girl’s eyes to
bottom agates that seem to
“Wave and float
In crystal currents of clear running seas,”
he invented while bathing in Wales. It was his habit, to note down in
verse such similes from nature, and to use them when he found occasion.
But the higher criticism, analysing the simile, detected elements from
Shakespeare and from Beaumont and Fletcher.
In June 1891 the poet went on a tour in Devonshire, and began his
_Akbar_, and probably wrote _June Bracken and Heather_; or perhaps it was
composed when “we often sat on the top of Blackdown to watch the sunset.”
He wrote to Mr Kipling—
“The oldest to the youngest singer
That England bore”
(to alter Mr Swinburne’s lines to Landor), praising his _Flag of
England_. Mr Kipling replied as “the private to the general.”
Early in 1892 _The Foresters_ was successfully produced at New York by
Miss Ada Rehan, the music by Sir Arthur Sullivan, and the scenery from
woodland designs by Whymper. Robin Hood (as we learn from Mark Twain) is
a favourite hero with the youth of America. Mr Tom Sawyer himself took,
in Mark Twain’s tale, the part of the bold outlaw.
_The Death of Œnone_ was published in 1892, with the dedication to the
Master of Balliol—
“Read a Grecian tale retold
Which, cast in later Grecian mould,
Quintus Calaber
Somewhat lazily handled of old.”
Quintus Calaber, more usually called Quintus Smyrnæus, is a writer of
perhaps the fourth century of our era. About him nothing, or next to
nothing, is known. He told, in so late an age, the conclusion of the
Tale of Troy, and (in the writer’s opinion) has been unduly neglected and
disdained. His manner, I venture to think, is more Homeric than that of
the more famous and doubtless greater Alexandrian poet of the Argonautic
cycle, Apollonius Rhodius, his senior by five centuries. His materials
were probably the ancient and lost poems of the Epic Cycle, and the story
of the death of Œnone may be from the _Little Iliad_ of Lesches.
Possibly parts of his work may be textually derived from the Cyclics, but
the topic is very obscure. In Quintus, Paris, after encountering evil
omens on his way, makes a long speech, imploring the pardon of the
deserted Œnone. She replies, not with the Tennysonian brevity; she sends
him back to the helpless arms of her rival, Helen. Paris dies on the
hills; never did Helen see him returning. The wood-nymphs bewail Paris,
and a herdsman brings the bitter news to Helen, who chants her lament.
But remorse falls on Œnone. She does not go
“Slowly down
By the long torrent’s ever-deepened roar,”
but rushes “swift as the wind to seek and spring upon the pyre of her
lord.” Fate and Aphrodite drive her headlong, and in heaven Selene,
remembering Endymion, bewails the lot of her sister in sorrow. Œnone
reaches the funeral flame, and without a word or a cry leaps into her
husband’s arms, the wild Nymphs wondering. The lovers are mingled in one
heap of ashes, and these are bestowed in one vessel of gold and buried in
a howe. This is the story which the poet rehandled in his old age,
completing the work of his happy youth when he walked with Hallam in the
Pyrenean hills, that were to him as Ida. The romance of Œnone and her
death condone, as even Homer was apt to condone, the sins of beautiful
Paris, whom the nymphs lament, despite the evil that he has wrought. The
silence of the veiled Œnone, as she springs into her lover’s last
embrace, is perhaps more affecting and more natural than Tennyson’s
“She lifted up a voice
Of shrill command, ‘Who burns upon the pyre?’”
The _St Telemachus_ has the old splendour and vigour of verse, and,
though written so late in life, is worthy of the poet’s prime:—
“Eve after eve that haggard anchorite
Would haunt the desolated fane, and there
Gaze at the ruin, often mutter low
‘Vicisti Galilæe’; louder again,
Spurning a shatter’d fragment of the God,
‘Vicisti Galilæe!’ but—when now
Bathed in that lurid crimson—ask’d ‘Is earth
On fire to the West? or is the Demon-god
Wroth at his fall?’ and heard an answer ‘Wake
Thou deedless dreamer, lazying out a life
Of self-suppression, not of selfless love.’
And once a flight of shadowy fighters crost
The disk, and once, he thought, a shape with wings
Came sweeping by him, and pointed to the West,
And at his ear he heard a whisper ‘Rome,’
And in his heart he cried ‘The call of God!’
And call’d arose, and, slowly plunging down
Thro’ that disastrous glory, set his face
By waste and field and town of alien tongue,
Following a hundred sunsets, and the sphere
Of westward-wheeling stars; and every dawn
Struck from him his own shadow on to Rome.
Foot-sore, way-worn, at length he touch’d his goal,
The Christian city.”
_Akbar’s Dream_ may be taken, more or less, to represent the poet’s own
theology of a race seeking after God, if perchance they may find Him, and
the closing Hymn was a favourite with Tennyson. He said, “It is a
magnificent metre”:—
“HYMN.