the only one it is needful to name; but although Dante's knowledge was
well abreast of his time, he lacked the fullness of Tennyson, for the
reason that in his day science was restricted within narrow limits. In
Dante's time, indeed--he was born some 300 years before Galileo and Tycho
Brahe--science apart from cosmogony had chiefly to do with the various
constellations and measurements of the passing of time and the daily and
yearly motions of the sun, for the observation of which long before his
epoch our ancient monuments were erected; the physical and biological
sciences were still unborn. Dante's great work is full of references to
the science of his day; his science and song went hand in hand as
Tennyson's did in later, fuller times. This in strong contrast with such
writers as Goethe who, although both poet and student of science, rarely
commingled the two strands of thought.
It is right and fitting that the highest poetry should be associated with
the highest knowledge. Tennyson's great achievement has been to show us
that in the study of science we have one of the bases of the fullest
poetry, a poetry which appeals at the same time to the deepest emotions
and the highest and broadest intellects of mankind. Tennyson, in short,
has shown that science and poetry, so far from being antagonistic, must
for ever advance side by side.
So far as my memory serves me I was introduced to the late Lord Tennyson
by Woolner about the year 1864. I was then living in Fairfax Road, West
Hampstead, and I had erected my 6-inch Cooke Equatorial in the garden. I
soon found that he was an enthusiastic astronomer, and that few points in
the descriptive part of the subject had escaped him. He was therefore
often in the observatory. Some of his remarks still linger fresh in my
memory. One night when the moon's terminator swept across the broken
ground round Tycho he said, "What a splendid Hell that would make." Again,
after showing him the clusters in Hercules and Perseus he remarked
musingly, "I cannot think much of the county families after that." In 1866
my wife was translating Guillemin's _Le Ciel_ and I was editing and
considerably expanding it; he read many of the proof sheets and indeed
suggested the title of the English edition, _The Heavens_.
In the 'seventies, less so in the 'eighties, he rarely came to London
without discussing some points with me, and in these discussions he showed
himself to be full of knowledge of the discoveries then being made.
Once I met him accidentally in Paris; he was most anxious to see Leverrier
and the Observatory. Leverrier had the reputation of being _difficile_; I
never found him so, but I certainly never saw him so happy as when we
three were together, and he told me afterwards how delighted he had been
that Tennyson should have wished to pay him a visit. I visited Tennyson at
Aldworth in 1890 when he was in his 82nd year. I was then writing the
_Meteoritic Hypothesis_, and he had asked for proof sheets. When I arrived
there I was touched to find that he had had them bound together for
convenience in reading, and from the conversation we had I formed the
impression that he had read every line. It was a subject after his own
heart, as will be shown farther on. One of the nights during my stay was
very fine, and he said to me, "Now, Lockyer, let us look at the double
stars again," and we did. There was a 2-inch telescope at Aldworth. His
interest in Astronomy was persistent until his death.
The last time I met him (July 1892), he would talk of nothing but the
possible ages of the sun and earth, and was eager to know to which
estimates scientific opinion was then veering.
So far I have referred, and in very condensed fashion, to Tennyson's
knowledge of and interest in Astronomy as they came out in our
conversations. I have done this because I was naturally most struck with
it, but only a short acquaintance was necessary to show me that this
interest in my own special subject was only a part of a general interest
in and knowledge of scientific questions.
This was borne home to me very forcibly in about the year 1866 or 1867.
The evenings of Mondays were then given up to friends who came in, _sans
cérémonie_, to talk and smoke. Clays from Broseley, including
"churchwardens" and some of larger size (Frank Buckland's held an ounce of
tobacco), were provided, and the confirmed smokers (Tennyson, an
occasional visitor, being one of them) kept their pipes, on which the
name was written, in a rack for future symposia. One night it chanced that
many travellers--Bates, Baines, and Winwoode Reade among them--were
present, and the question of a certain kind of dust-storms came on the
_tapis_. Tennyson, who had not started the subject, listened for some time
and then remarked how difficult it was for a student to gain certain
knowledge on such subjects, and he then astonished the company by giving
the names of eight authors, four of whom had declared they had seen such
dust-storms as had been described, the other four insisting that they
could not be produced under any known meteorological conditions and that
with the best opportunities they had never seen them.
In many of our talks I came across similar evidences of minute knowledge
in various fields; nothing in the natural world was trivial to him or to
be neglected. This great grasp was associated with a minute accuracy, and
it was this double habit of mind which made Tennyson such a splendid
observer, and _therefore_ such a poet, for the whole field of nature from
which to cull the most appropriate epithets was always present in his
mind.
Hence those exquisite presentations of facts, in which true poetry differs
from prose, and which in Tennyson's poetry appeal at once both to the
brain and heart.
But even this is not all that must be said on this point. Much of
Tennyson's finest is so fine that it wants a knowledge on a level with his
own to appreciate its truth and beauty; many of the most exquisite and
profound touches I am convinced are missed by thousands of his readers on
this account. The deep thought and knowledge are very frequently condensed
into a simple adjective instead of being expanded into something of a
longer breath to make them apparent enough to compel admiration. This it
strikes me he consistently avoided.
All the charm of all the Muses often flowering in a lonely word.
Although many of the poems seem to me to be clothed with references to
natural phenomena as with a garment, it can on the whole, I think, be
gathered from them, as I gathered from our conversations, that the subject
deepest in his thoughts was the origin of things in its widest sense, a
_Systema Mundi_, which should explain the becoming of the visible universe
and _define its different parts_ at different periods in its history. In
this respect we have:
Three poets in three ages born.
Dante, Milton, and Tennyson, with their minds saturated with the same
theme, and I can fancy nothing in the history of human thought more
interesting or encouraging than the studies of this theme as presented to
us in their works published we may say, speaking very roughly, three
centuries apart.
This of course is another story, but a brief reference to it is essential
for my present purpose.
All the old religions of the world were based upon Astronomy, that and
Medicine being the only sciences in existence. Sun, Moon, and Stars were
all worshipped as Gods, and thus it was that even down to Dante's time
Astronomy and religion were inseparably intertwined in the prevalent
Cosmogonies. The Cosmogony we find in Dante, the peg on which he hangs his
_Divina Commedia_, with the seven heavens surrounding the earth and seven
hells inside it, had come down certainly from Arab and possibly prior
sources; the Empyrean, the _primum mobile_, the seven Purgatories, and the
Earthly Paradise (the antipodes of Jerusalem) were later additions, the
latter being added so soon as it was generally recognized that the earth
was round, though the time of the navigator was not yet.
Dante constructed none of this machinery, he used it merely; it
represented the knowledge, that is, the belief, of his time.
Between Dante and Milton there was a gap; but what a gap! It was filled by
Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Galileo, Columbus, Magellan, and Vasco da Gama,
to mention no more, and the astronomers and geographers between them
smashed the earth-centred heavens, the interior hells, and the earthly
paradise into fragments.
It was while this smashing was working its way into men's minds that
Milton wrote his poem, and he, like Dante, centred it on a cosmogony. Well
might Huxley call it "the Miltonic Hypothesis"! but how different from the
former one, from which it was practically a retreat, carefully concealed
in an important particular, but still a retreat from the old position.
Milton in his poem uses, so far as heaven is concerned, the cosmogony of
Dante, but he carefully puts words into Raphael's mouth to indicate that
after all the earth-centred scheme of the seven heavens must give way. But
the most remarkable part of "Paradise Lost" is the treatment of hell.
Milton's greatness as a poet, as a _maker_, to my mind is justly based
upon the new and vast conceptions which he there gave to the world and to
which the world still clings.
To provide a new hell which had been "dismissed with costs" from the
earth's centre, he boldly halves heaven and creates chaos and an external
hell out of the space he filches from it. "Hellgate" is now the orifice in
the _primum mobile_ towards the empyrean.
In Tennyson we find the complete separation of Science from Dogmatic
Theology, thus foreshadowed by Milton, finally achieved. In him we find,
as in Dante and Milton, one fully abreast with the science and thought of
the time, and after another gap, this one filled up by Newton, Kant,
Herschel, Laplace, and Darwin, we are brought face to face with the modern
Cosmogony based upon science and Evolution. The ideas of heaven and hell
in the mediaeval sense no longer form a necessary part of it, in Tennyson
they have absolutely disappeared. In those parts of his poems in which he
introduces cosmogonic ideas we have to deal with the facts presented by
the heavens and the earth which can throw light upon the ancient history
of our planet and its inhabitants.
The modern _Systema Mundi_ which Tennyson dwells on over and over again is
dominated by
Astronomy and Geology, terrible Muses.
To come back from this parenthesis I must finally point out that although
some of the most pregnant and beautiful passages in Tennyson's poems have
reference to the modern views of the origin of things, almost all natural
phenomena are referred to, in one place or another, in language in which
both the truest poetry and most accurate science are blended.
The breadth of the outlook upon Nature shown by the references in the
Poet's works is only equalled by the minute accuracy of observation
displayed. Astronomy, geology, meteorology, biology, and, indeed, all
branches of science except chemistry, are thus made to bring their
tribute, so that finally we have a perfect poetic garland, which displays
for us the truths of Nature and Human Nature intertwined.
MEMORIES
By E. V. B.
How kind to ask for some of my few small memories of your
father--treasured memories which no length of years can ever rub out. And
how much I like to recall them, though, alas! there is so little; it was
so seldom that we met in those unforgotten times. Once, I remember, I sent
him a rose from my garden, a black beauty, rather rare in those old
days--"L'Empereur de Maroque," now quite cut out by "Prince Camille de
Rohan." I keep the little word of thanks that came afterwards in return:
MY DEAR E. V. B.--Many thanks for your more amiable than beautiful
Black Rose. I don't mean to be personal, but am, yours always,
TENNYSON.
Another of his notes is the one wherein he gave me leave to illustrate
"The May Queen." His words in the note were: "I would rather you than any
one else should do it." His poems were a joy to me, even in
childhood--from the days when, dull lesson hours, etc., being done, I
could steal away and no one know, and, sitting on the carpet by the home
book-shelves, read over and over on the sly from a bound volume (one of
_Blackwood's Magazines_), where were long extracts from Tennyson's poems,
especially the earlier ones, and amongst them one called "Adeline." There
was certainly a magic in the poetry, scarce found elsewhere--magic even
for a child of ten.
[Illustration: SUMMER-HOUSE AT FARRINGFORD, WHERE "ENOCH ARDEN" WAS
WRITTEN. Carved and painted by Alfred Lord Tennyson.]
Do you remember how you used to tell me that your father had a great
love for the red rose? He sent me, for my _Ros Rosarum_, lines on a
Rosebud by himself:
THE ROSEBUD
The night with sudden odour reel'd,
The southern stars a music peal'd,
Warm beams across the meadow stole,
For Love flew over grove and field,
Said, "Open, Rosebud, open, yield
Thy fragrant soul."
I know he loved the poet's colour--lilac. A long-past scene in the garden
at Farringford still remains in the mind's eye fresh and vivid--painted in
with memory's fast colours among the pictures of remembrance.
The sunshine of a morning at Farringford in early summer when we came up
the long middle walk, bordered on either side with lilac-flowered
aubretia, led up to the open summer-house where Tennyson, with two or
three friends, sat in the sun, enjoying the warmth and the lovely lines of
lilac. We turned towards the house after a time, going under the budding
trees of the grove. There he pointed out some young bushes of Alexandrian
laurel--the same, he told us, whose small narrow leaves were used to make
the crown for victors in the Olympian games....
Then--can I ever forget?--that delightful evening at Aldworth, when, after
dinner, he invited me to his room upstairs. There he smoked his pipe in
his high-backed, cane arm-chair, while I sat near. On a little table by
the fire were arranged several more of these well-smoked Dublin pipes.
Such a large, comfortable "smoke-room"!--with books about everywhere, on
tables and chairs. Then he read to me aloud from "Locksley Hall." I think
he read all the poem from the beginning to the end; and as Tennyson read
on--one seemed almost to feel the pungent, salt sea-breeze blowing from
over desolate seas--almost saw visions of the dreary sands lengthening
far away. I remember I ventured to ask why the stanza which follows after
that line, "And all the wonder that should be," was afterwards omitted:
In the hall there hangs a picture--Amy's arms about my neck,
Happy children in a sunbeam, sitting on the ribs of wreck.
In my life there was a picture--she that clasp'd my neck is flown,
I was left within the shadow, sitting on the wreck alone.
I began saying the lines, but he knew them quite well and repeated them. I
can't think how it is, the answer he returned about this is now, alas!
forgot.... Such troublous years have come and gone since that happy
Long-Ago. (The omitted stanza would have gone, too, had it not been
written down for me by a long-lost friend, Sir Robert Morier.)
So the reading aloud went on, with talk between (and clouds of smoke!),
until, I think, past eleven o'clock, when you opened the door, and
that--for me--rare dream of poetry and charm abruptly broke.
I saw Tennyson, for the last time, as I followed down the wooded path at
Aldworth, on his way to the garden door opening on the heath, his fine,
big, Russian hound pacing closely after.
No--once more I saw him, his likeness with all the distinctness sometimes
known in the slow-moving white clouds of some glorious autumn day. It was
after the end had come, and not long before the grave in Westminster Abbey
had received him. I was travelling home on the Great-Western from
Somerset. Gazing up idly at the assembled multitude of sun-steeped silver
clouds above, suddenly, clear and distinct, my eyes beheld the image of
his noble profile as if lying back asleep; the eyes were closed, the head
at rest upon the pillow--a sculptured cloud in a snowy cloudland, outlined
upon an azure sky.... Not until after several minutes did the vision pass,
slowly fading into the infinite blue.
TENNYSON AND HIS TALK ON SOME RELIGIOUS QUESTIONS
By the Right Rev. the BISHOP OF RIPON
Among the happy memories of my life, and they are many, the memory of the
kindly welcome accorded to me at Aldworth and at Farringford must always
possess a special charm. This will readily be understood by those of my
own age; for Tennyson was a name to conjure with in the days of my youth.
Slowly but surely his influence crept into our lives: we read in
text-books at school that the
Poet in a golden age was born, with golden stars above,
Dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn, the love of love.
The thought and the words appealed to me from the first. Then, how I know
not, we became familiar with part, at least, of "In Memoriam." Its phrases
caught our fancy, and some of our early attempts at versification were
cast in the same metre. Then came the "Idylls of the King," and I remember
how, when the rest of the party went out one holiday afternoon, I stayed
indoors and read the "Idylls" at one sitting. Thus in our youth Tennyson
became poet and hero to us. Any one who had seen him or known him became
for us invested with a kind of sacred and awful interest; my uncle who
lived at Cheltenham grew greater in our eyes when we learned that he had
corresponded with him.
Thus our hero-worship grew. We knew indeed that there were those who did
not welcome the coming Poet with ardour; we lived, in fact, through the
age of his disparagement to the time of his unchallenged supremacy. It
will be interesting, I think, to many to read the following letter written
by Rev. Frederick W. Robertson when he was experiencing the freer and
fresher intellectual atmosphere of Oxford after the stifling
oppressiveness of Cheltenham:
I had nearly forgotten to tell you that Tennyson is deeply admired
here by all the brilliant men. Stanley, our first genius, rates him
highly; Hannah, who has guided nearly all the first and double-first
class men for the last three years to honours, told me he considers
his poetical and psychological powers more varied than any poet he
knows. And the "Dread," a choice selection of the most brilliant among
the rising men, have pronounced him to be the first poet of the day.
So you see I have some to keep me company in my judgment. And at all
events he is above ridicule.
Pray inform Miss D---- of all this. One of our first professors raves
about him.
When I went up to Cambridge in 1860, Tennyson was the oracle poet among
the younger men; but the feeling of doubt still remained among the older
men. I recall a friendly dispute between the Senior and a Junior Fellow of
my own College. The elder man charged Tennyson with being "misty"; the
younger man defended: the elder man cited a passage from "In Memoriam,"
and challenged the younger to say what it meant. The elder man was so far
successful that he drove the younger man to declare that though he could
not explain it then, he hoped to enter into its meaning later on. It was a
typical conflict; the older generation could not understand; the younger
was under the spell of the Poet, and though unable to interpret
everything, believed in Tennyson's message to his own age.
There were charges levelled against Tennyson more serious and more absurd
than that of obscurity. The words Scepticism, Pantheism, and even Atheism
were heard. One newspaper in a review of "In Memoriam" exclaimed: "Here
the poet barely escapes Atheism and plunges into the abyss of Pantheism."
Another foolish writer, commenting on the lines:
But what am I?
An infant crying in the night,
An infant crying for the light,
And with no language but a cry,
remarked, with superb _naïveté_, "May we remind Mr. Tennyson that the
darkness is past and that the true light now shineth?" I remember, as late
as 1867 or 1868, an evening party at Blackheath when the question was
started--"Who is the greatest living poet?" To my amazement and amusement
a self-satisfied, but very good man, instantly and oracularly replied,
"Bonar--without doubt--Bonar." He meant that excellent and devout-minded
man, the Rev. Horatius Bonar, the hymn-writer. These were, no doubt,
extreme cases, but stupidity is always extreme. I recall these incidents
because they are parts of the story which tells of the difficulties
through which Tennyson fought the way to his throne. They serve to recall
the prejudices which provoked the resentment and stimulated the attachment
of those who, like myself, were brought early under the spell of his
enchantment. His story repeated familiar features; he had at first a
select circle of studious admirers; by degrees the general public became
aware of the existence in their midst of a true poet. Then timid partisans
awoke and demanded credentials of orthodoxy. Persons of this type did not
like to be told that--
There lives more faith in honest doubt,
Believe me, than in half the creeds.
But meanwhile he had drawn the younger generation to his side: they
believed in him, and they were right. In spite of misunderstanding and
misinterpretation, Tennyson followed the gleam: he would not stoop to
make his judgment blind or prevaricate for popularity's sake. He beat his
music out, and those who knew him, as I was privileged to do, during the
later years of his life, could realize how truly he had made a larger
faith his own.
It fell out naturally when I met him that conversation turned on religion
or theological subjects. His mind, courageous, inquiring, honest, sought
truth beyond the forms of truth. On the occasion of my first visit to
Aldworth, in the smoking-room we talked of the problem of pain, of
determinism, of apparent contradictions of faith. That night, indeed, we
seemed to talk--
Of faith, free will, foreknowledge absolute.
But the impression left upon my mind was that we were engaged in no mere
scholastic discussion; it was no mere intellectually satisfactory creed
which was sought: it was something deeper and more abiding than anything
which may be modified in form from age to age; the soul needs an
anchorage, and to find it there must be no ignoring of facts and no
juggling with them once they are found. In illustration of this I may
relate how once, when walking with him among the heather-clad heights
round Aldworth, he spoke of the apparent dualism in Nature: the forces of
darkness and light seemed to meet in conflict. "If I were not a
Christian," he said, "I should be perhaps a Parsee."[73] He felt,
however, that if once we accepted the view that this life was a time of
education, then the dark things might be found to have a meaning and a
value. In the retrospect hereafter the pain and suffering would seem
trivial. I think that this idea must have taken hold of his thought as we
were conversing; for he suddenly stopped in his walk, and, standing amid
the purple landscape, he declaimed the lines, then unpublished:
The Lord spake out of the skies
To a man good and a wise:
"The world and all within it
Will be nothing in a minute."
Then a beggar began to cry:
"Give me food or else I die."
Is it worth his while to eat,
Or mine to give him meat,
If the world and all within it
Were nothing the next minute?
He once quoted to me Hinton's view that we were not in a position to judge
the full meaning of life; that we were in fact looking at the wrong side
of things. We saw the work from the underside, and we could not judge of
the pattern which was perhaps clear enough on the upper side.
Next day I was able to remind him that he had approved this view of life.
He was not well, and I think that the darker aspects loomed larger in his
mind; at any rate, he was speaking more gloomily than usual. When I
remarked that God did not take away men till their work was done, he said,
"He does; look at the promising young fellows cut off." Then I brought up
Hinton's theory and illustration, and asked whether we could judge when a
man had finished his appointed work. Immediately he acquiesced; the view
evidently satisfied him.