intercourse of Tennyson with my father and his intercourse with my
father's old friend, Dr. Jowett of Balliol. In both cases there was the
same complete frankness--an unanswerable reply to those who gave it out
that Tennyson best enjoyed the society of flatterers. Jowett, however,
understood Tennyson's poetry far better than my father did. It was
sometimes strange to see that impassive figure, so little given to
emotion, so ready to snub in others any display of feeling, under the
spell of the Poet's lines. I recollect once at Farringford listening with
Jowett after dinner to Tennyson's reading of his "Ode on the Death of the
Duke of Wellington." It was a poem which his peculiar chant made most
moving, and he read the concluding lines with special pathos:
Speak no more of his renown,
Lay your earthly fancies down,
And in the vast cathedral leave him;
God accept him, Christ receive him.
Tennyson then turned to address some observation to Jowett, but no reply
came, and we soon saw that the Master was unable to speak. The tears were
streaming down his cheeks. I ventured to allude to this some time later in
talking to Jowett, and he said, "What would you have? The two Englishmen
for whom I have the deepest feeling of reverence are Tennyson and the
great Duke of Wellington. And one of them was reading what he had himself
written in admiration of the other!"
When my father died Tennyson visited his grave in company with Father
Haythornthwaite, who spoke to me of the visit directly afterwards. A cross
of fresh flowers had been placed on the grave until the monument should be
erected. Tennyson quoted Shirley's couplet:
Only the actions of the just
Smell sweet, and blossom in the dust.
And then, standing over the grave, he recited the whole of the beautiful
poem from which these lines are taken. Tennyson's eldest son wrote to me
at the same time:
His wonderful simplicity in faith and nature, together with his subtle
and far-reaching grasp of intellect, make up a man never to be
forgotten. My father and mother and myself will miss him more than I
can say; I loved him somehow like an intimate college friend.
A few years later Tennyson published the memorial lines in the volume
called _Demeter and other Poems_, which show how closely his observant
mind had taken in the character of his friend:
Farewell, whose living like I shall not find,
Whose Faith and Work were bells of full accord,
My friend, the most unworldly of mankind,
Most generous of all Ultramontanes, Ward,
How subtle at tierce and quart of mind with mind,
How loyal in the following of thy Lord!
[Illustration: HORATIO TENNYSON.]
Freshwater was in those days seething with intellectual life. The Poet
was, of course, its centre, and that remarkable woman, Mrs. Cameron, was
stage-manager of what was for us young people a great drama. For Tennyson
was still writing the "Idylls of the King," which had so greatly moved the
whole country, and we felt that we were in the making of history. There
were many in Freshwater who were keenly alive to their privilege. Even
among the permanent residents in the neighbourhood there were not a few
who were worthy of remark, and Farringford was very hospitable and often
added to their number some of the most interesting people in England. Mrs.
Cameron herself was one of the well-known Miss Pattles, a sister of the
late Lady Somers and Lady Dalrymple. She was a great wit and a most
original and unconventional woman, with an enthusiasm for genius and for
art. Her large artistic photographs are a permanent record of the
remarkable people who congregated from time to time round the Poet's home
in the island. They include Carlyle, Ruskin, Tyndall, Darwin, Lord
Dufferin, Palgrave, D. G. Rossetti, Holman Hunt, Lecky, Aubrey de Vere,
Sir Henry Taylor, Herschell, Longfellow, Auberon, Herbert, Pollock,
Allingham, and many another. Among other residents I would name the Rev.
Christopher Bowen, a man of very unusual ability, though he never had
enough ambition to become famous. His sons--Lord Justice Bowen and Mr.
Edward Bowen of Harrow--are better known. Then there were the Poet's two
remarkable brothers, Horatio and Arthur Tennyson, and two fine old
admirals, Sir Graham Hamond and Admiral Crozier. Then again from 1874
onwards we had at the Briary G. F. Watts, and Mrs. Cameron's sister, Mrs.
Prinsep and her husband, with Mr. Val Prinsep as an occasional guest. A
little earlier Sir John Simeon was still living at Swainston, and was one
of Tennyson's most intimate friends. Again, Mrs. Grosvenor Hood and Mrs.
Brotherton were both people for whom literature and art counted for much.
The large group of people who came to Freshwater in the summer for the
sole reason that Tennyson's writings and himself were among the greatest
things in their lives, sometimes formed an almost unique society. Several
figures are especially prominent in my memory. One great friend of the
Tennysons' was Sir Richard Jebb--intensely shy and intensely refined--with
whom, I may add, by the way, my first meeting at Haslemere was
unpromising. I got into the Tennysons' large old-fashioned brougham to
drive to Aldworth on a dark night, and laid rough hands on what I took to
be a heap of rugs in the corner. I received in return a mild remonstrance
from the fellow-guest, of whose coat-collar I found myself possessed!
Jowett and Sir Alfred Lyall I often met at the Tennysons' and elsewhere.
Each was in his way memorable, and congenial to the Poet's taste, which
was fastidious owing to his very simplicity, to his love of reality and
dislike of affectation. The singular charm--both in person and in
conversation--of Samuel Henry Butcher, another great friend, stands out
vividly from the past. In addition to his brilliant gifts and acquirements
he was endowed in a remarkable degree with that justice of mind which
Tennyson so greatly prized. One used to feel for how much this counted in
the Poet's mind when he talked of the "wisdom" of his old friend, James
Spedding. Henry Irving I once saw at Aldworth, though never at
Farringford, and it was curious to meet at close quarters one with whom I
had had for years the stranger's intimacy which one has with a favourite
actor. But Irving was never an intimate friend of Tennyson's, nor among
the typical figures of his circle. To my mind the friend of Tennyson's
whose saintliness most completely had his sympathy was Aubrey de Vere, of
whom Sarah Coleridge said that he had more entirely a poet's nature even
than her own father, or any other of the great poets she had known. Aubrey
de Vere's simplicity and deep piety were as remarkable as his keen
perception and close knowledge on the subject which most interested
Tennyson himself. I wish I had seen more of the intercourse of two men
whose friendship was almost lifelong, and showed Tennyson at his very best
in conversation.
Speaking generally, it was a society in which good breeding, literary
taste, general information, and personal distinction counted for much more
than worldly or official _status_. I think that we young people looked
upon a government official of average endowment as rather an outsider.
Genius was all in all for us--officialdom and conventionality in general
were unpopular in Freshwater.
Indeed, how could conventionality obtain a footing in a society in which
Mrs. Cameron and Tennyson were the central figures? I recall Mrs. Cameron
pressing my father's hand to her heart, and addressing him as "Squire
Ward." I recall her, during her celebrated private theatricals at Dimbola,
when a distinguished audience tittered at some stage misadventure which
occurred during a tragic scene, mounting a chair and insisting loudly and
with angry gesticulation, "You must not laugh; you must cry." I recall her
bringing Tennyson to my father's house while she was photographing
representatives for the characters in the "Idylls of the King," and
calling out directly she saw Cardinal Vaughan (to whom she was a perfect
stranger), "Alfred, I have found Sir Lancelot." Tennyson's reply was, "I
want a face well worn with evil passion."
My own intercourse with the Poet was chiefly after my father's death in
1882. Tennyson was then an old man who had passed his threescore years and
ten. His deeply serious mind brooded constantly on the prospect for the
future, and the meaning of human life, which was, for him, nearly over.
There is much of autobiography in some of the poems of those years which
he discussed with me. I have elsewhere[65] described his impressive
analysis of the "De Profundis." I will here set down the substance of his
comments on two other poems dealing with his deep problems of human life,
the "Ancient Sage" and "Vastness." "The Ancient Sage" is in form dramatic,
and the personality of the two interlocutors is a very important element
in it viewed as a work of art. An aged seer of high, ascetic life, a
thousand years before the birth of Christ, holds intercourse with a
younger man:
that loved and honour'd him, and yet
Was no disciple, richly garb'd, but worn
From wasteful living...
The younger man has set down his reflections on the philosophy of life in
a set of verses which the Ancient Sage reads, making his comments as the
reading proceeds. There seems to be a deep connection between the personal
characteristics of the two men--their habits and modes of living--and
their respective views. The younger man is wearied with satiety, impatient
for immediate pleasure:
Yet wine and laughter, friends! and set
The lamps alight, and call
For golden music, and forget
The darkness of the pall.
He is dismayed by the first appearance of difficulty and pain in the
world, as he had been satisfied for a time with the immediate pleasures
within his reach. He is unable to steady the nerve of his brain (so to
speak), and trace the riddle of pain and trouble in the universe to its
ultimate solution. In thought, as in conduct, he is filled and swayed by
the immediate inclination and the first impression, without self-restraint
and without the habits of concentrated reflection which go hand in hand
with self-restraint. Failing, in consequence, to have any steady view of
his own soul or of the spiritual life within, he is impressed, probably by
experience, with this one truth, that uncontrolled self-indulgence leads
to regret and pain; and he is consequently pessimistic in his ultimate
view of things. The absence of spiritual light makes him see only the
immediate pain and failure in the universe. He has no patience to look
beyond or to reflect if there be not an underlying and greater purpose
which temporary failure in small things may further, as the death of one
cell in the human organism is but the preparation for its replacement by
another, and a part of the body's natural development. It is a dissipated
character and a dissipated mind. The intangible beauty of moral virtue
finds nothing in the character capable of assimilating it; the spiritual
truth of Gods existence and the spiritual purpose of the universe elude
the mind.
In marked contrast stands forth the "Ancient Sage." He has no taste for
the dissipations of the town:
I am wearied of our city, son, and go
To spend my one last year among the hills.
His gospel is a gospel of _self-restraint_ and long-suffering, of action
for high ends.
Let be thy wail and help thy fellow-men,
And make thy gold thy vassal, not thy king,
And fling free alms into the beggar's bowl,
And send the day into the darken'd heart;
Nor list for guerdon in the voice of men,
A dying echo from a falling wall:
* * * * *
Nor roll thy viands on a luscious tongue,
Nor drown thyself with flies in honied wine.
* * * * *
And more--think well! Do-well will follow thought.
And the patience and self-control which enable him to work for great
purposes and spiritual aims, characterize also his thought. "Things are
not what they seem," he holds. The first view is ever incomplete, though
he who has not patience of thought will not get beyond the first view.
That concentration and that purity of manners which keep the spiritual
soul and self undimmed, and preserve the moral voice within articulate,
are indispensable if we are to understand anything beyond the most
superficial phenomena about us. The keynote is struck in the very first
words which the Seer speaks:
This wealth of waters might but seem to draw
From yon dark cave, but, son, the source is higher,
Yon summit half-a-league in air--and higher,
The cloud that hides it--higher still, the heavens
Whereby the cloud was moulded, and whereout
The cloud descended. Force is from the heights.
"_Force is from the heights_" is the thought which underlies the Sage's
interpretation of all that perplexes the younger man. We cannot fully
understand what is beyond and above us, but if we are wise we shall
steadily look upwards, and enough light will eventually be gained for our
guidance. "Lucerna pedibus meis verbum tuum." As God's law is enough to
guide our footsteps, though we cannot hope to understand His full counsel,
so the light by which the spiritual world is disclosed is sufficient for
those who look for it, though its disclosure is only gradual and partial.
If we are said not to know what we cannot submit in its entirety to
scientific tests, we can never know anything worth knowing. If, again, we
are to disbelieve in the spiritual world because it is filled with
mystery, what are we to say of the mysteries which face us in this
earth--inexplicable yet undeniable? The conception of God is not more
mysterious than the thought that a grain of sand may be divided a million
times, and yet be no nearer its ultimate division than it is now. Time and
space are full of mystery. A man under chloroform has been known to pass
many hours of sensation in a few minutes. Time is made an objective
measure of things, and yet its phenomena are so subjective that Kant
conceived it to have no real existence. When the younger man complains
that "the Nameless Power or Powers that rule were never heard nor seen,"
the Sage thus replies:
If thou would'st hear the Nameless, and wilt dive
Into the Temple-cave of thine own self,
There, brooding by the central altar, thou
May'st haply learn the Nameless hath a voice,
By which thou wilt abide, if thou be wise,
As if thou knewest, tho' thou canst not know;
For Knowledge is the swallow on the lake
That sees and stirs the surface-shadow there
But never yet hath dipt into the abysm,
The Abysm of all Abysms, beneath, within
The blue of sky and sea, the green of earth,
And in the million-millionth of a grain,
Which cleft and cleft again for evermore,
And ever vanishing, never vanishes,
To me, my son, more mystic than myself,
Or even than the Nameless is to me.
And so, too, when the youth calls for further proof of the "Nameless," the
Sage reminds him that there are universally acknowledged truths incapable
of formal proof. The thought which the poet here dwells upon is similar to
Cardinal Newman's teaching in the _Grammar of Assent_, though Tennyson's
use of words does not here, as elsewhere, harmonize with Catholic
doctrine. There are truths, the knowledge of which is so intimately
connected with our own personality, that the material for complete formal
proof eludes verbal statement. We reject, for example, with a clear and
unerring instinct, the notion that when we converse with our friends, the
words and thoughts which come to us proceed possibly from some principle
within us and not from an external cause, and yet it is not a matter on
which we can offer logical proof. The same sensations could conceivably be
produced from within, as they are in a dream. Logical proof, then, has (so
the Ancient Sage maintains) to be dispensed with in much that is of
highest moment:
Thou canst not prove that thou art body alone,
Nor canst thou prove that thou art spirit alone,
Nor canst thou prove that thou art both in one:
Thou canst not prove thou art immortal, no
Nor yet that thou art mortal--nay, my son,
Thou canst not prove that I, who speak with thee,
Am not thyself in converse with thyself,
For nothing worthy proving can be proven,
Nor yet disproven.
And close upon this follows the beautiful passage in which the hopeful and
wistful upward gaze of faith is described. While melancholy and perplexity
constantly attend on the exercises of the speculative intellect, we are to
"cling to faith":
She reels not in the storm of warring words,
She brightens at the clash of "Yes" and "No,"
She sees the Best that glimmers thro' the Worst,
She feels the Sun is hid but for a night.
She spies the summer thro' the winter bud,
She tastes the fruit before the blossom falls,
She hears the lark within the songless egg,
She finds the fountain where they wailed "Mirage"!
These lines present to the reader the hopefulness of the spiritual mind,
hopefulness not akin to the merely sanguine temperament, but based on a
deep conviction of the reality of the spiritual world, and on unfailing
certainty that there is in it a key to the perplexities of this universe
of which we men understand so little. We know from experience that
material Nature is working out her ends, however little we understand the
process, and however unpromising portions of her work might appear without
this knowledge. That an acorn should have within it forces which compel
earth, air, and water to come to its assistance and become the oak tree,
would seem incredible were it not so habitually known as a fact; and the
certainty which such experiences give in the material order, the eye of
faith gives in the spiritual order. However perplexing the universe now
seems to us we have this deep trust that there _is_ an explanation, and
that when we are in a position to judge the _whole_, instead of looking on
from this corner of time and space, the truth of the spiritual
interpretation of its phenomena will be clear--"ut iustificeris in
sermonibus tuis et vincas cum iudicaris." This view runs not only through
the passages I have just quoted, but through all the poem. The poet pleads
for steadfast trust and hope in the face of difficulty, as we would trust
a known and intimate friend in the face of ominous suspicions.
It is, of course, just that keen realization of the plausibleness of the
sceptical view of life, to which some of our modern critics object as a
sign of weakness, which gives this poem its strength. Such assistance as
Tennyson gives us in seeing and realizing the spiritual view is needed
only or mainly by those to whom agnosticism in its various forms is a
plausible, and, at first sight, a reasonable attitude. The old-fashioned
"irrefragable arguments" are of little use by themselves to persons in
such a condition. However evident spiritual truths may be to an absolutely
purified reason, they are not evident to intellects which are impregnated
with a view of things opposed to the religious view. Moreover, we do not
consult a doctor with much confidence if he does not believe in the
reality of our illness; and one who finds the sceptical view persuasive
will have little trust in those who tell him that it has no plausibility
at all. With Tennyson, as with Cardinal Newman, half the secret of his
influence in this respect is that the sceptically minded reader finds
those very disturbing thoughts which had troubled his own mind anticipated
and stated. And yet a truer and deeper view is likewise depicted, which
sees beyond these thoughts, which detects through the clouds the light in
the heavens beyond.
In the "Ancient Sage" there is a striking instance of this characteristic.
The young philosopher, filled with the failure of fair promise and the
collapse of apparent purpose in Nature and in man, pours forth his
sceptical lament. Here is a selection from it, typical of the rest:
The years that made the stripling wise
Undo their work again,
And leave him, blind of heart and eyes,
The last and least of men;
* * * * *
His winter chills him to the root,
He withers marrow and mind;
The kernel of the shrivell'd fruit
Is jutting thro' the rind;
The tiger spasms tear his chest,
The palsy wags his head;
The wife, the sons, who love him best
Would fain that he were dead;
* * * * *
The statesman's brain that sway'd the past
Is feebler than his knees;
The passive sailor wrecks at last
In ever-silent seas;
The warrior hath forgot his arms,
The Learned all his lore;
The changing market frets or charms
The merchant's hope no more;
The prophet's beacon burn'd in vain,
And now is lost in cloud;
The plowman passes, bent with pain,
To mix with what he plow'd;
The poet whom his Age would quote
As heir of endless fame--
He knows not ev'n the book he wrote,
Not even his own name.
For man has overlived his day,
And, darkening in the light,
Scarce feels the senses break away
To mix with ancient Night.
The Sage--far from denying the force of what he says--contends for a
deeper and wider view. The "_darkness is in man_." It is the result of the
incompleteness of his knowledge. That is to say, what is black to his
imperfect view, and taken by itself, may be a necessary part of a great
scheme. Not that the things are not really sad, but that the whole is not
sad. As there may be pain in tears of joy, and yet it is lost in exquisite
pleasure, so the dark elements of life, when our ultimate destiny is
attained and we can view age and suffering as part of the whole, may be so
entirely eclipsed, that we may say with truth that the "world is wholly
fair":
My son, the world is dark with griefs and graves,
So dark that men cry out against the Heavens.
Who knows but that the darkness is in man?
The doors of Night may be the gates of Light;
For wert thou born or blind or deaf, and then
Suddenly heal'd, how would'st thou glory in all
The splendours and the voices of the world!
And we, the poor earth's dying race, and yet
No phantoms, watching from a phantom shore
Await the last and largest sense to make
The phantom walls of this illusion fade,
And show us that the world is wholly fair.
"The doors of night may be the gates of light," says the Sage; and in
unison with this note are his replies to some of the details of the
younger man's wail, while his very argument presupposes that _all_ cannot
now be answered until we have the "last and largest sense." Thus, when the
dreary, hopeless vision of bodily decay, which seems to point to total
dissolution of a noble nature, is referred to, he says:
The shell must break before the bird can fly.
The breaking of the shell might seem, at first sight, total destruction,
but the forthcoming of the bird transforms the conception of decay into a
conception of new birth. And so, too, in answer to the complaint that "the
shaft of scorn that once had stung, but wakes the dotard smile," he
suggests that a more complete view may show it to be "the placid gleam of
sunset after storm." The transition may be not from intense life to
apathy, but from blinding passion to a calmer, a serener vision.
Another of the later poems--"Vastness"--brings into especial relief a
parallel I have often noted between Lord Tennyson and Cardinal Newman in
their keen sense of the mysteries of the universe, which religion helps us
to bear with but does not solve. So far as this planet goes, and our own
human race, Cardinal Newman has expressed this sense in the _Apologia_,
and the parallel between his view and Tennyson's is sufficiently
instructive to make it worth while to quote the passage in full:
To consider the world in its length and breadth, its various history,
the many races of man, their starts, their fortunes, their mutual
alienation, their conflicts; and then their ways, habits, governments,
forms of worship; their enterprises, their aimless courses, their
random achievements and acquirements, the impotent conclusion of
long-standing facts, the tokens so faint and broken of a
superintending design, the blind evolution of what turn out to be
great powers and truths, the progress of things as if from unreasoning
elements, not towards final causes, the greatness and littleness of
man, his far-reaching aims, his short duration, the curtain hung over
his futurity, the disappointments of life, the defeat of good, the
success of evil, physical pain, mental anguish, the prevalence and
intensity of sin, the pervading idolatries, the corruptions, the
dreary hopeless irreligion, that condition of the whole race so
fearfully yet exactly described by the Apostle, "having no hope and
without God in the world," all this is a vision to dizzy and appal;
and inflicts upon the mind the sense of a profound mystery which is
absolutely beyond human solution.