Every one will have seen men, distinguished in some line of work,
whose conversation (to take the old figure) either “smelt too
strongly of the lamp,” or lay quite apart from their art or craft.
What, through all these years, struck me about Tennyson, was that
whilst he never deviated into poetical language as such, whether in
rhetoric or highly coloured phrase, yet throughout the substance of
his talk the same mode of thought, the same imaginative grasp of
nature, the same fineness and gentleness in his view of character,
the same forbearance and toleration, the _aurea mediocritas_ despised
by fools and fanatics, which are stamped on his poetry, were
constantly perceptible: whilst in the easy and as it were unsought
choiceness, the conscientious and truth-loving precision of his
words, the same personal identity revealed itself. What a strange
charm lay here, how deeply illuminating the whole character, as in
prolonged intercourse it gradually revealed itself! Artist and man,
Tennyson was invariably true to himself, or rather, in Wordsworth’s
phrase, he “moved altogether”; his nature and his poetry being
harmonious aspects of the same soul; as botanists tell us that flower
and fruit are but transformations of root and stem and leafage. We
read how, in mediæval days, conduits were made to flow with claret.
But this was on great occasions only. Tennyson’s fountain always ran
wine.
Once more: In Mme. Récamier’s _salon_, I have read, at the time when
conversation was yet a fine art in Paris, guests famous for _esprit_
would sit in the twilight round the stove, whilst each in turn let
fly some sparkling anecdote or bon-mot, which rose and shone and died
out into silence, till the next of the elect pyrotechnists was ready.
Good things of this kind, as I have said, were plentiful in
Tennyson’s repertory. But what, to pass from the materials to the
method of his conversation, eminently marked it was the continuity of
the electric current. He spoke, and was silent, and spoke again: but
the circuit was unbroken; there was no effort in taking up the
thread, no sense of disjunction. Often I thought, had he never
written a line of the poems so dear to us, his conversation alone
would have made him the most interesting companion known to me. From
this great and gracious student of humanity, what less, indeed, could
be expected? And if, as a converser, I were to compare him with
Socrates, as figured for us in the dialogues of his great disciple, I
think that I should have the assent of that eminently valued friend
of Tennyson’s, whose long labour of love has conferred English
citizenship upon Plato.
We have called him shy and sensitive in daily intercourse with strangers,
and as to criticism, he freely confessed that a midge of dispraise could
sting, while applause gave him little pleasure. Yet no poet altered his
verses so much in obedience to censure unjustly or irritatingly stated,
yet in essence just. He readily rejected some of his “Juvenilia” on Mr
Palgrave’s suggestion. The same friend tells how well he took a rather
fierce attack on an unpublished piece, when Mr Palgrave “owned that he
could not find one good line in it.” Very few poets, or even versifiers
(fiercer they than poets are), would have continued to show their virgin
numbers to a friend so candid, as Tennyson did. Perhaps most of the
_genus irritabile_ will grant that spoken criticism, if unfavourable,
somehow annoys and stirs opposition in an author; probably because it
confirms his own suspicions about his work. Such criticism is almost
invariably just. But Campbell, when Rogers offered a correction,
“bounced out of the room, with a ‘Hang it! I should like to see the man
who would dare to correct me.’”
Mr Jowett justly recognised in the life of Tennyson two circumstances
which made him other than, but for these, he would have been. He had
intended to do with the Arthurian subject what he never did, “in some way
or other to have represented in it the great religions of the world. . . .
It is a proof of Tennyson’s genius that he should have thus early
grasped the great historical aspect of religion.” His intention was
foiled, his early dream was broken, by the death of Arthur Hallam, and by
the coldness and contempt with which, at the same period, his early poems
were received.
Mr Jowett (who had a firm belief in the “great work”) regretted the
change of plan as to the Arthurian topic, regretted it the more from his
own interest in the History of Religion. But we need not share the
regrets. The early plan for the Arthur (which Mr Jowett never saw) has
been published, and certainly the scheme could not have been executed on
these lines. {218} Moreover, as the Master observed, the work would have
been premature in Tennyson’s youth, and, indeed, it would still be
premature. The comparative science of religious evolution is even now
very tentative, and does not yield materials of sufficient stability for
an epic, even if such an epic could be forced into the mould of the
Arthur legends, a feat perhaps impossible, and certainly undesirable. A
truly fantastic allegory must have been the result, and it is fortunate
that the poet abandoned the idea in favour of more human themes.
Moreover, he recognised very early that his was not a Muse _de longue
haleine_; that he must be “short.” We may therefore feel certain that
his early sorrow and discouragement were salutary to him as a poet, and
as a man. He became more sympathetic, more tender, and was obliged to
put forth that stoical self-control, and strenuous courage and endurance,
through which alone his poetic career was rendered possible. “He had the
susceptibility of a child or a woman,” says his friend; “he had also” (it
was a strange combination) “the strength of a giant or of a god.”
Without these qualities he must have broken down between 1833 and 1842
into a hypochondriac, or a morose, if majestic, failure. Poor, obscure,
and unhappy, he overcame the world, and passed from darkness into light.
The “poetic temperament” in another not gifted with his endurance and
persistent strength would have achieved ruin.
Most of us remember Taine’s parallel between Tennyson and Alfred de
Musset. The French critic has no high approval of Tennyson’s
“respectability” and long peaceful life, as compared with the wrecked
life and genius of Musset, _l’enfant perdu_ of love, wine, and song.
This is a theory like another, and is perhaps attractive to the young.
The poet must have strong passions, or how can he sing of them: he must
be tossed and whirled in the stress of things, like Shelley’s autumn
leaves;—
“Ghosts from an enchanter fleeing.”
Looking at Burns, Byron, Musset, or even at Shelley’s earlier years,
youth sees in them the true poets, “sacred things,” but also “light,” as
Plato says, inspired to break their wings against the nature of
existence, and the _flammantia mænia mundi_. But this is almost a boyish
idea, this idea that the true poet is the slave of the passions, and that
the poet who dominates them has none, and is but a staid domestic animal,
an ass browsing the common, as somebody has written about Wordsworth.
Certainly Tennyson’s was no “passionless perfection.” He, like others,
was tempted to beat with ineffectual wings against the inscrutable nature
of life. He, too, had his dark hour, and was as subject to temptation as
they who yielded to the stress and died, or became unhappy waifs, “young
men with a splendid past.” He must have known, no less than Musset, the
attractions of many a _paradis artificiel_, with its bright visions, its
houris, its offers of oblivion of pain. “He had the look of one who had
suffered greatly,” Mr Palgrave writes in his record of their first
meeting in 1842. But he, like Goethe, Scott, and Victor Hugo, had
strength as well as passion and emotion; he came unscorched through the
fire that has burned away the wings of so many other great poets. This
was no less fortunate for the world than for himself. Of his prolonged
dark hour we know little in detail, but we have seen that from the first
he resisted the Tempter; _Ulysses_ is his _Retro Sathanas_!
About “the mechanism of genius” in Tennyson Mr Palgrave has told us a
little; more appears incidentally in his biography. “It was his way that
when we had entered on some scene of special beauty or grandeur, after
enjoying it together, he should always withdraw wholly from sight, and
study the view, as it were, in a little artificial solitude.”
Tennyson’s poems, Mr Palgrave says, often arose in a kind of _point de
repère_ (like those forms and landscapes which seem to spring from a
floating point of light, beheld with closed eyes just before we sleep).
“More than once he said that his poems sprang often from a ‘nucleus,’
some one word, maybe, or brief melodious phrase, which had floated
through the brain, as it were, unbidden. And perhaps at once while
walking they were presently wrought into a little song. But if he did
not write it down at once the lyric fled from him irrecoverably.” He
believed himself thus to have lost poems as good as his best. It seems
probable that this is a common genesis of verses, good or bad, among all
who write. Like Dickens, and like most men of genius probably, he saw
all the scenes of his poems “in his mind’s eye.” Many authors do this,
without the power of making their readers share the vision; but probably
few can impart the vision who do not themselves “visualise” with
distinctness. We have seen, in the cases of _The Holy Grail_ and other
pieces, that Tennyson, after long meditating a subject, often wrote very
rapidly, and with little need of correction. He was born with “style”;
it was a gift of his genius rather than the result of conscious
elaboration. Yet he did use “the file,” of which much is now written,
especially for the purpose of polishing away the sibilants, so common in
our language. In the nine years of silence which followed the little
book of 1833 his poems matured, and henceforth it is probable that he
altered his verses little, if we except the modifications in _The
Princess_. Many slight verbal touches were made, or old readings were
restored, but important changes, in the way of omission or addition,
became rare.
Of nature Tennyson was scrupulously observant till his very latest days,
eagerly noting, not only “effects,” as a painter does, but their causes,
botanical or geological. Had man been scientific from the beginning he
would probably have evolved no poetry at all; material things would not
have been endowed by him with life and passion; he would have told
himself no stories of the origins of stars and flowers, clouds and fire,
winds and rainbows. Modern poets have resented, like Keats and
Wordsworth, the destruction of the old prehistoric dreams by the
geologist and by other scientific characters. But it was part of
Tennyson’s poetic originality to see the beautiful things of nature at
once with the vision of early poetic men, and of moderns accustomed to
the microscope, telescope, spectrum analysis, and so forth. Thus
Tennyson received a double delight from the sensible universe, and it is
a double delight that he communicates to his readers. His intellect was
thus always active, even in apparent repose. His eyes rested not from
observing, or his mind from recording and comparing, the beautiful
familiar phenomena of earth and sky. In the matter of the study of books
we have seen how deeply versed he was in certain of the Greek, Roman, and
Italian classics. Mr Jowett writes: “He was what might be called a good
scholar in the university or public-school sense of the term, . . . yet I
seem to remember that he had his favourite classics, such as Homer, and
Pindar, and Theocritus. . . . He was also a lover of Greek fragments.
But I am not sure whether, in later life, he ever sat down to read
consecutively the greatest works of Æschylus and Sophocles, although he
used occasionally to dip into them.” The Greek dramatists, in fact, seem
to have affected Tennyson’s work but slightly, while he constantly
reminds us of Virgil, Homer, Theocritus, and even Persius and Horace.
Mediæval French, whether in poetry or prose, and the poetry of the
“Pleiad” seems to have occupied little of his attention. Into the
oriental literatures he dipped—pretty deeply for his _Akbar_; and even
his _Locksley Hall_ owed something to Sir William Jones’s version of “the
old Arabian _Moallakat_.” The debt appears to be infinitesimal. He
seems to have been less closely familiar with Elizabethan poetry than
might have been expected: a number of his _obiter dicta_ on all kinds of
literary points are recorded in the _Life_ by Mr Palgrave. “Sir Walter
Scott’s short tale, _My Aunt Margaret’s Mirror_ (how little known!), he
once spoke of as the finest of all ghost or magical stories.” Lord
Tennyson adds, “_The Tapestried Chamber_ also he greatly admired.” Both
are lost from modern view among the short pieces of the last volumes of
the _Waverley_ novels. Of the poet’s interest in and attitude towards
the more obscure pyschological and psychical problems—to popular science
foolishness—enough has been said, but the remarks of Professor Tyndall
have not been cited:—
My special purpose in introducing this poem, however, was to call
your attention to a passage further on which greatly interested me.
The poem is, throughout, a discussion between a believer in
immortality and one who is unable to believe. The method pursued is
this. The Sage reads a portion of the scroll, which he has taken
from the hands of his follower, and then brings his own arguments to
bear upon that portion, with a view to neutralising the scepticism of
the younger man. Let me here remark that I read the whole series of
poems published under the title “Tiresias,” full of admiration for
their freshness and vigour. Seven years after I had first read them
your father died, and you, his son, asked me to contribute a chapter
to the book which you contemplate publishing. I knew that I had some
small store of references to my interview with your father carefully
written in ancient journals. On the receipt of your request, I
looked up the account of my first visit to Farringford, and there, to
my profound astonishment, I found described that experience of your
father’s which, in the mouth of the Ancient Sage, was made the ground
of an important argument against materialism and in favour of
personal immortality eight-and-twenty years afterwards. In no other
poem during all these years is, to my knowledge, this experience once
alluded to. I had completely forgotten it, but here it was recorded
in black and white. If you turn to your father’s account of the
wonderful state of consciousness superinduced by thinking of his own
name, and compare it with the argument of the Ancient Sage, you will
see that they refer to one and the same phenomenon.
* * * * *
And more, my son! for more than once when I
Sat all alone, revolving in myself
The word that is the symbol of myself,
The mortal limit of the Self was loosed,
And past into the Nameless, as a cloud
Melts into heaven. I touch’d my limbs, the limbs
Were strange, not mine—and yet no shade of doubt,
But utter clearness, and thro’ loss of Self
The gain of such large life as match’d with ours
Were Sun to spark—unshadowable in words,
Themselves but shadows of a shadow-world.
Any words about Tennyson as a politician are apt to excite the sleepless
prejudice which haunts the political field. He probably, if forced to
“put a name to it,” would have called himself a Liberal. But he was not
a social agitator. He never set a rick on fire. “He held aloof, in a
somewhat detached position, from the great social seethings of his age”
(Mr Frederic Harrison). But in youth he helped to extinguish some
flaming ricks. He spoke of the “many-headed beast” (the reading public)
in terms borrowed from Plato. He had no higher esteem for mobs than
Shakespeare or John Knox professed, while his theory of tyrants (in the
case of Napoleon III. about 1852) was that of Liberals like Mr Swinburne
and Victor Hugo. Though to modern enlightenment Tennyson may seem as
great a Tory as Dr Johnson, yet he had spoken his word in 1852 for the
freedom of France, and for securing England against the supposed designs
of a usurper (now fallen). He really believed, obsolete as the faith may
be, in guarding our own, both on land and sea. Perhaps no Continental or
American critic has ever yet dispraised a poetical fellow-countryman
merely for urging the duties of national union and national defence. A
critic, however, writes thus of Tennyson: “When our poet descends into
the arena of party polemics, in such things as _Riflemen_, _Form_!
_Hands all Round_, . . . _The Fleet_, and other topical pieces dear to
the Jingo soul, it is not poetry but journalism.” I doubt whether the
desirableness of the existence of a volunteer force and of a fleet really
is within the arena of _party_ polemics. If any party thinks that we
ought to have no volunteers, and that it is our duty to starve the fleet,
what is that party’s name? Who cries, “Down with the Fleet! Down with
National Defence! Hooray for the Disintegration of the Empire!”?
Tennyson was not a party man, but he certainly would have opposed any
such party. If to defend our homes and this England be “Jingoism,”
Tennyson, like Shakespeare, was a Jingo. But, alas! I do not know the
name of the party which opposes Tennyson, and which wishes the invader to
trample down England—any invader will do for so philanthropic a purpose.
Except when resisting this unnamed party, the poet seldom or never
entered “the arena of party polemics.” Tennyson could not have
exclaimed, like Squire Western, “Hurrah for old England! Twenty thousand
honest Frenchmen have landed in Kent!” He undeniably did write verses
(whether poetry or journalism) tending to make readers take an
unfavourable view of honest invaders. If to do that is to be a “Jingo,”
and if such conduct hurts the feelings of any great English party, then
Tennyson was a Jingo and a partisan, and was, so far, a rhymester, like
Mr Kipling. Indeed we know that Tennyson applauded Mr Kipling’s _The
English Flag_. So the worst is out, as we in England count the worst.
In America and on the continent of Europe, however, a poet may be proud
of his country’s flag without incurring rebuke from his countrymen.
Tennyson did not reckon himself a party man; he believed more in
political evolution than in political revolution, with cataclysms. He
was neither an Anarchist nor a Home Ruler, nor a politician so generous
as to wish England to be laid defenceless at the feet of her foes.
If these sentiments deserve censure, in Tennyson, at least, they claim
our tolerance. He was not born in a generation late enough to be truly
Liberal. Old prejudices about “this England,” old words from _Henry V._
and _King John_, haunted his memory and darkened his vision of the true
proportions of things. We draw in prejudice with our mother’s milk. The
mother of Tennyson had not been an Agnostic or a Comtist; his father had
not been a staunch true-blue anti-Englander. Thus he inherited a certain
bias in favour of faith and fatherland, a bias from which he could never
emancipate himself. But _tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner_. Had
Tennyson’s birth been later, we might find in him a more complete
realisation of our poetic ideal—might have detected less to blame or to
forgive.
With that apology we must leave the fame of Tennyson as a politician to
the clement consideration of an enlightened posterity. I do not defend
his narrow insularities, his Jingoism, or the appreciable percentage of
faith which blushing analysis may detect in his honest doubt: these
things I may regret or condemn, but we ought not to let them obscure our
view of the Poet. He was led away by bad examples. Of all Jingoes
Shakespeare is the most unashamed, and next to him are Drayton, Scott,
and Wordsworth, with his
“Oh, for one hour of that Dundee!”
In the years which followed the untoward affair of Waterloo young
Tennyson fell much under the influence of Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and
the other offenders, and these are extenuating circumstances. By a
curious practical paradox, where the realms of poetry and politics meet,
the Tory critics seem milder of mood and more Liberal than the Liberal
critics. Thus Mr William Morris was certainly a very advanced political
theorist; and in theology Mr Swinburne has written things not easily
reconcilable with orthodoxy. Yet we find Divine-Right Tories, who in
literature are fervent admirers of these two poets, and leave their
heterodoxies out of account. But many Liberal critics appear unable
quite to forgive Tennyson because he did not wish to starve the fleet,
and because he held certain very ancient, if obsolete, beliefs. Perhaps
a general amnesty ought to be passed, as far as poets are concerned, and
their politics and creeds should be left to silence, where “beyond these
voices there is peace.”
One remark, I hope, can excite no prejudice. The greatest of the Gordons
was a soldier, and lived in religion. But the point at which Tennyson’s
memory is blended with that of Gordon is the point of sympathy with the
neglected poor. It is to his wise advice, and to affection for Gordon,
that we owe the Gordon training school for poor boys,—a good school, and
good boys come out of that academy.
The question as to Tennyson’s precise rank in the glorious roll of the
Poets of England can never be determined by us, if in any case or at any
time such determinations can be made. We do not, or should not, ask
whether Virgil or Lucretius, whether Æschylus or Sophocles, is the
greater poet. The consent of mankind seems to place Homer and
Shakespeare and Dante high above all. For the rest no prize-list can be
settled. If influence among aliens is the test, Byron probably takes,
among our poets, the next rank after Shakespeare. But probably there is
no possible test. In certain respects Shelley, in many respects Milton,
in some Coleridge, in some Burns, in the opinion of a number of persons
Browning, are greater poets than Tennyson. But for exquisite variety and
varied exquisiteness Tennyson is not readily to be surpassed. At one
moment he pleases the uncritical mass of readers, in another mood he wins
the verdict of the _raffiné_. It is a success which scarce any English
poet but Shakespeare has excelled. His faults have rarely, if ever, been
those of flat-footed, “thick-ankled” dulness; of rhetoric, of
common-place; rather have his defects been the excess of his qualities.
A kind of John Bullishness may also be noted, especially in derogatory
references to France, which, true or untrue, are out of taste and
keeping. But these errors could be removed by the excision of
half-a-dozen lines. His later work (as the _Voyage of Maeldune_) shows a
just appreciation of ancient Celtic literature. A great critic, F. T.
Palgrave, has expressed perhaps the soundest appreciation of Tennyson:—
It is for “the days that remain” to bear witness to his real place in
the great hierarchy, amongst whom Dante boldly yet justly ranked
himself. But if we look at Tennyson’s work in a twofold
aspect,—_Here_, on the exquisite art in which, throughout, his verse
is clothed, the lucid beauty of the form, the melody almost audible
as music, the mysterious skill by which the words used constantly
strike as the _inevitable_ words (and hence, unforgettable), the
subtle allusive touches, by which a secondary image is suggested to
enrich the leading thought, as the harmonic “partials” give richness
to the note struck upon the string; _There_, when we think of the
vast fertility in subject and treatment, united with happy selection
of motive, the wide range of character, the dramatic force of
impersonation, the pathos in every variety, the mastery over the
comic and the tragic alike, above all, perhaps, those phrases of
luminous insight which spring direct from imaginative observation of
Humanity, true for all time, coming from the heart to the heart,—his
work will probably be found to lie somewhere between that of Virgil
and Shakespeare: having its portion, if I may venture on the phrase,
in the inspiration of both.
A professed enthusiast for Tennyson can add nothing to, and take nothing
from, these words of one who, though his friend, was too truly a critic
to entertain the admiration that goes beyond idolatry.