vein of sport and artifice--Tennyson alone, it seems to me, has exactly
done what he intended, and shown what English effects can be produced by a
master's hand, even in these unfamiliar measures.
Of the serious classic pieces one of the most beautiful and moving is
"Tithonus." The tale is familiar: the beautiful youth Tithonus was beloved
by the goddess of the Dawn, and her love bestowed immortality on him; _but
they both forgot to ask for immortal youth_. So he grew old: and the
pathos of the boon, granted by love at love's request, thus turning out a
curse, is the motive of the tale. He speaks:
Yet hold me not for ever in thine East:
How can my nature longer mix with thine?
Coldly thy rosy shadows bathe me, cold
Are all thy lights, and cold my wrinkled feet
Upon thy glimmering thresholds, when the steam
Floats up from those dim fields about the homes
Of happy men that have the power to die,
And grassy barrows of the happier dead.
Release me, and restore me to the ground;
Thou seëst all things, thou wilt see my grave:
Thou wilt renew thy beauty morn by morn;
I earth in earth forget these empty courts,
And thee returning on thy silver wheels.
A great scholar has said that it is one of the most incomparable powers of
poetry _to make sad things beautiful_, and so to go some way towards
healing the sorrow in the reader's heart. He was speaking of Greek
Tragedy; but there is, I think, a deep truth in the saying, and it is not
confined to that particular form of poetry. And I know no better instance
of the truth than the singularly beautiful poem quoted above.
But the classic influences are, of course, not limited to the avowed
borrowings from ancient legend. There are constantly lines in Tennyson
where the student of ancient poetry recognizes a phrase--a turn--an
echo--beautiful in themselves, and giving a special pleasure to the
instructed reader; such a line as "When the first matin-song hath wakened
loud," which occurs in the "Address to Memory"--the striking early poem
containing the description of his Somersby home--and is itself an
exquisitely turned translation from Sophocles' _Electra_. So again we have
an echo from Homer through Virgil, in the half-playful line, "This way and
that dividing the swift mind"; or, again, the vivid simile from Theocritus
in the bold description:
And arms on which the standing muscles sloped,
As slopes a wild brook o'er a little stone,
Running too vehemently to break upon it.[87]
--where the reader with an ear will note the bold metrical variation
adding so much to the effect. So again the Poet himself has told us how
the famous phrase for the kingfisher, "The sea-blue bird of March," arose
one day when he was haunted by the lovely stanza of Alcman (Greek lyric
poet) about the "halcyon" whom he calls "the sea-blue bird of spring." The
fact is that Tennyson had an inborn instinct for the subtle power of
language, and for musical sound--in a word, for that insight, finish,
feeling for beauty in phrase and thought and _thing_, and that perfection
of form, which, taken all together, we call poetry, and he is, like Virgil
and Milton, a true son of the Greeks: and if his open imitations are few,
the influence of the springs from which he drank is none the less powerful
and pervading.
In 1842 came a carefully revised selection of the earlier books--he was
always revising and improving--along with a large number of new poems.
I will pass over the English Idylls, which, in spite of beautiful touches,
have never as a whole appealed to me. But, setting these aside, there are
a few pieces which I cannot pass by without a word. They are "Love and
Duty," the political poems, and songs. "Morte d'Arthur" I leave over till
we reach the Idylls.
"Love and Duty" is a passionate tragedy, the parting of two lovers at the
call of duty. Perhaps the high-wrought pathos is a sign of youth; but
youth may be a strength as well as a weakness; and the lines are surely of
extraordinary beauty and force. I will quote the last passage, for a
reason which will appear:
Should my Shadow cross thy thoughts
Too sadly for their peace, remand it thou
For calmer hours to Memory's darkest hold,
If not to be forgotten--not at once--
Not all forgotten. Should it cross thy dreams,
O might it come like one that looks content,
With quiet eyes unfaithful to the truth,
And point thee forward to a distant light,
Or seem to lift a burthen from thy heart
And leave thee freër, till thou wake refresh'd
Then when the first low matin-chirp hath grown
Full quire, and morning driv'n her plow of pearl
Far furrowing into light the mounded rack,
Beyond the fair green field and eastern sea.
Certain critics have found fault with the splendid description of Dawn, as
being untrue to nature; a lover in such a crisis, they think, would not be
concerned with such images. I regard this suggestion as wholly at fault.
The tragedy, the parting, has come to pass: the vision of dawn is a _hope_
for _her_, now that the new life, apart from each other, has to begin for
both of them. If the broken love was all, if they could not look beyond,
the parting would have been different--like Lancelot and
Guinevere--"Stammering and staring; a madness of farewells." But here the
note is higher. The passion barred from its issue rushes into new
channels, and the exalted mood finds its only adequate vent in the
rapturous vision of a future dawn, the symbol of his hopes for her, those
hopes into which his sacrificed love is translated.
In the political poems we have a new departure. It is easy to idealize
freedom, revolution, or war: and the ancients found it easy to compose
lyrics on kings, athletes, warriors, or other powerful persons. From the
days of Tyrtaeus and Pindar, to Byron, Shelley, and Swinburne, one or
other of these themes has been the seed of song. But the praise of ordered
liberty, of settled government, of political moderation, is far harder to
idealize in poetry. It has been the peculiar aim of Tennyson to be the
constitutional, and in this sense the national, poet: and it is his
peculiar merit and good fortune to have succeeded in giving eloquent and
forcible expression to the ideas suggested by these aims.
I will not quote the poems about "the Falsehood of extremes," or "the land
of just and old renown where freedom slowly broadens down from precedent
to precedent," because these poems, terse and forcible summaries as they
are, have suffered, like other epigrammatic maxims in verse, from
vulgarizing quotation. It is not the Poet's fault in the least; in fact it
is due to his very merits--to the memorable brevity, truth, and point of
the phrasing. I will quote another--perhaps the most remarkable--of these
political poems, "Love thou thy land." It is close packed with thought,
and must have been especially hard to write, since the Poet's problem was
to express in terse and picturesque and imaginative language what at
bottom is philosophic and even prosaic detail. Nevertheless, where the
material lends itself at all to imaginative handling we get effects that
are impressive and even superb. Take a few lines--I cannot quote at
length:
Oh yet, if Nature's evil star
Drive men in manhood, as in youth,
To follow flying steps of Truth
Across the brazen bridge of war--
If New and Old, disastrous feud,
Must ever shock, like armed foes,
And this be true, till Time shall close,
That Principles are rain'd in blood;
Not yet the wise of heart would cease
To hold his hope thro' shame and guilt,
But with his hand against the hilt,
Would pace the troubled land, like Peace;
Not less, tho' dogs of Faction bay,
Would serve his kind in deed and word,
Certain, if knowledge bring the sword,
That knowledge takes the sword away.
The last couplet seems to me--where all is powerful and imaginative--to be
a master-stroke of terse and pointed expression. It would be hardly an
exaggeration to say that it sums up human history in regard to one
point--namely, the disturbing and even desolating effect of the new
Political Idea, until its triumph comes, bringing a higher and more stable
adjustment, and a peace more righteous and secure.
Far more widely known than these didactic poems, rich as they are in
poetry and thought, are the patriotic odes--the three greatest being the
poems on the Duke of Wellington, the "Revenge," and Lucknow.
The ode on the Duke is a noble commemoration-poem, grave and stately and
solemn--a worthy expression of "the mourning of a mighty nation" with a
musical and dignified sorrow--a terse and vivid reference to the Duke's
exploits--a fine imaginative passage where he pictures the dead Nelson
asking who the newcomer is, and the stately answer--a striking tribute to
the simple and noble character of the dead hero--and then this:
A people's voice! we are a people yet.
Tho' all men else their nobler dreams forget,
Confused by brainless mobs and lawless Powers;
Thank Him who isled us here, and roughly set
His Briton in blown seas and storming showers...
O Statesmen, guard us, guard the eye, the soul,
Of Europe, keep our noble England whole,
And save the one true seed of freedom sown
Betwixt a people and their ancient throne...
For, saving that, ye help to save mankind
Till public wrong be crumbled into dust,
And drill the raw world for the march of mind,
Till crowds at length be sane and crowns be just.
Again, for the judgment of the poem, the _date_ is important. It was
written only four years after the European earthquake of 1848, and only
one year after the Coup d'État. The allusions are not mere commonplaces:
they deal with live issues. It is not too much to say that in the great
ode Tennyson had a subject after his own heart, and that he has done it
magnificent justice.
Of the "Revenge" I will quote one passage, because it contains what always
strikes me as _the_ most wonderful effect of _sound_ in poetry to be found
anywhere. The whole poem, I may observe, is full of novel and effective
handling of metre: but this is the most remarkable. It occurs in the
description of the rising storm in which the gallant little ship went
down:
And they mann'd the Revenge with a swarthier alien crew,
And away she sail'd with her loss, and long'd for her own;
When a wind from the lands they had ruin'd awoke from sleep,
And the water began to heave, and the weather to moan,
And or ever that evening ended a great gale blew,
And a wave like the wave that is raised by an earthquake grew,
Till it smote on their hulls and their sails and their masts and their
flags,
And the whole sea plunged and fell on the shot-shatter'd navy of Spain,
And the little Revenge herself went down by the island crags
To be lost evermore in the main.
Lastly, in the 1842 volume, there was a little song without a title, which
will certainly live as long as the English language.
In 1833, nine years before the volume appeared, had died abroad suddenly
the rarely-gifted youth who was bound to Tennyson by the double tie of
being his best-loved friend and the betrothed of his sister. The body had
been brought home for burial by the sea at a little place called Clevedon.
This is the song:
Break, break, break,
On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!
And I would that my tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me.
O well for the fisherman's boy,
That he shouts with his sister at play!
O well for the sailor lad,
That he sings in his boat on the bay!
And the stately ships go on
To their haven under the hill;
But O for the touch of a vanish'd hand,
And the sound of a voice that is still!
Break, break, break,
At the foot of thy crags, O Sea!
But the tender grace of a day that is dead
Will never come back to me.
There is something in the magical expression of deep love and sorrow in
these lines--with the swift and vivid touches of scenery, sympathetic and
suggestive--which we can only compare to the few greatest outbursts of
passionate regret in poetry.
Five years later came "The Princess" (1847). The idea--a bold design--was
to treat, by poetic and half-playful narrative, the comparative
intellectual and moral natures of men and women, and the right method of
education. The Poet's views may perhaps to-day seem somewhat
old-fashioned, the truths that he suggests or enunciates, in very finished
and beautiful language, are controversial, and suffer from the inevitable
failing of such writing, viz., that the issues of the strife have changed:
experience has shown the forecasts, the fears, and the prophetic satire to
be misplaced: and what seemed important truths have turned out to be
prejudices or irrelevant platitudes.[88]
The one thing that is consummate in "The Princess" is the handful of
little songs that come as interludes between the acts. They are so well
known that they need no quotation: their titles will suffice: "As through
the land at eve we went," "Sweet and low," "The splendour falls," "Tears,
idle tears," "Thy voice is heard thro' rolling drums," "Home they brought
her warrior dead," "Ask me no more."
The extraordinary effect of these songs is not due only to their
marvellous poetic force and finish and variety, but perhaps even more to
the illuminating and pointed contrast between the true and deep and
permanent realities of human experience--life, death, love, joy, and
sorrow--each of which is touched in turn in these exquisite little
pictures, and on the other hand the fantastic unreality (in the Poet's
view) of the Princess's ideals and experiment.
If I must quote one passage, let it be abridged from the shepherd's song
which the Princess reads:
Come down, O maid, from yonder mountain height:
* * * * *
For Love is of the valley, come thou down
And find him; by the happy threshold, he,
Or hand in hand with Plenty in the maize,
Or red with _spirted purple of the vats_,[89]
Or _foxlike[90] in the vine_; nor cares to walk
With Death and Morning on the silver horns...
But follow; let the torrent dance thee down
To find him in the valley; let the wild
Lean-headed Eagles yelp alone, and leave
The monstrous ledges there to slope, and spill
Their thousand wreaths of dangling water-smoke,
That like a broken purpose waste in air:
So waste not thou; but come; for all the vales
Await thee; azure pillars of the hearth
Arise to thee; the children call, and I
Thy shepherd pipe, and sweet is every sound,
Sweeter thy voice, but every sound is sweet;
Myriads of rivulets hurrying thro' the lawn,
The moan of doves in immemorial elms,
And murmuring of innumerable bees.
This is the real idyll, with its central note of _love_, and wonderful
beauty of sound, and vivid vision of every detail of Nature's sights and
life. It suggests a world where all is fresh and sweet, and beautiful and
interesting, and simple and wholesome and harmonious.
The year 1850 was marked by three great events in the personal history of
Tennyson: his marriage, the publication of his greatest work, "In
Memoriam," and his acceptance of the laureate crown of poetry in
succession to Wordsworth, who died in the spring.
When I say that "In Memoriam" is Tennyson's greatest work, I am of course
aware that it is only a personal opinion on a disputable point. But I
incline to think that most lovers of poetry would agree that "In
Memoriam" is _the one_ of all the Poet's works the loss of which would be
the greatest and most irreparable to poetry.
In the grave and solemn stanzas with which the poem opens, he calls the
songs that follow _wild and wandering cries, confusions of a wasted
youth_. But in truth they are the expression of the deepest and most
heartfelt sorrow: the most musical and imaginative outpouring of every
mood, and every trouble, of a noble love and regret: the cries of a soul
stricken with doubt born of anguish, and darkened with shadows of
disbelief and despair: the deeper brooding over the eternal problems of
life, thought, knowledge, religion: the gradual groping toward a faith
rather divined than proved, and slowly passing through storm into peace.
The poem took seventeen years to write, and when it appeared the Poet was
at the summit of his great powers. His instinct chose a metre at once
strong, simple, fresh, flexible, and grave, and noble--equally adapted to
every mood, every form of thought or feeling--the passionate, the
meditative, the solemn, the imaginative--for description, argument,
aspiration, even for prayer. The tone varies: there are lighter and deeper
touches: but it is hardly too much to say, there is not an insignificant
stanza, nor a jarring note, from beginning to end.
In a poem where all is so familiar--which has meant and means so much to
all who care for poetry--it is difficult to quote. I will take a few
stanzas, so chosen, if possible, as to show somewhat of the variety, the
range, the subtlety, the charm, and the power of this great work.
He goes to the house in London where the dead friend lived: the gloom
without typifies and harmonizes with the darkness of his sorrowful
thoughts.
Dark house, by which once more I stand
Here in the long unlovely street:
Doors, where my heart was wont to beat
So quickly, waiting for a hand,--
A hand that can be clasped no more--
Behold me--for I cannot sleep--
And like a guilty thing I creep
At earliest morning to the door.
He is not here; but far away
The noise of life begins again,
And ghastly thro' the drizzling rain
On the bald street breaks the blank day.
One of the most important motives concerns the doubts raised by the new
truths which science was beginning to teach, almost seeming to make in a
sense a new heaven and a new earth. The old simple beliefs seemed to the
Poet threatened--these misgivings are evil dreams: _Nature_ seems to say:
... A thousand types are gone:
I care for nothing, all shall go.
Thou makest thine appeal to me;
I bring to life, I bring to death;
The spirit does but mean the breath:
I know no more...
Then the Poet breaks out:
And he, shall he,
Man, her last work, who seem'd so fair,
Such splendid purpose in his eyes,
Who roll'd the psalm to wintry skies,
Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer--
Who trusted God was love indeed,
And love Creation's final law--
Tho' Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek'd against his creed--
Who loved, who suffer'd countless ills,
Who battled for the True, the Just,
Be blown about the desert dust,
Or seal'd within the iron hills?...
O life as futile, then, as frail!
O for thy voice to soothe and bless!
What hope of answer, or redress?
Behind the veil, behind the veil.
He will not accept the suggestions which seem to empty human life of its
deepest meanings. There must be some other solution.
One more quotation of a different kind--the common sad thought, never so
beautifully expressed, of the places we have loved when bereft of our
daily loving care--then passing into other hands and forgetting us, and
becoming at last to others what they have been to us.
It is in these common universal _human_ themes that Tennyson with his
exquisite musical touch, and sympathy, and unerring choice of significant
detail, reaches the heart of every reader.
Unwatch'd, the garden bough shall sway,
The tender blossom flutter down,
Unloved, that beech will gather brown,
This maple burn itself away:
Unloved, the sunflower, shining fair,
Ray round with flames her disk of seed,
And many a rose-carnation feed
With summer spice the humming air:
Unloved, by many a sandy bar,
The brook shall babble down the plain,
At noon or when the lesser wain
Is twisting round the polar star.
(Omitting a stanza.)
Till from the garden and the wild
A fresh association blow,
And year by year the landscape grow
Familiar to the stranger's child.
As year by year the labourer tills
His wonted glebe, or lops the glades,
And year by year our memory fades
From all the circle of the hills.
I can quote no more.
The poem seems gradually to rise from the depths of sorrow and doubt to a
new hope and faith--in short, to a new life. The marks of what it has
passed through are seen in the deeper thought, the larger nature, and
insight, and scope. The _soul_ has grown and strengthened, we may almost
say.
In short, the poem is the inner history of a soul: our deepest feelings,
our hopes, our fears, our longings, our weaknesses, our difficulties, all
find penetrating, sympathetic, enlightening expression--terse, melodious,
inspiring, deeply suggestive--in a word, we feel the magic of poetry.
I have no time left to deal with the large work, which occupied many
years, "The Idylls of the King." It is a series--in blank verse, always
melodious and often exquisite, giving the main incidents of the old
Arthurian legend, which as a boy he had read with delight in old Malory's
prose epic.
I must content myself with two brief references.
The first idyll, "Gareth and Lynette," is not in itself one of the most
interesting[91]--dealing chiefly as it does with the picture of the eager
boy, anxious to be one of Arthur's knights, who serves a year in menial
place as a test of his obedience: but there is one passage which ought
never to be omitted in speaking of Tennyson, viz. the answer of the seer
when the boys ask him if the castle is enchanted.
The seer answers ironically, yet with a deep meaning, that it _is_
enchanted:
For there is nothing in it as it seems
Saving the King; tho' some there be that hold
The King a shadow, and the city real.
Then he tells them about the _vows_: which if they fear to take, he warns
them
Pass not beneath this gateway, but abide
Without, among the cattle of the field,
For an ye hear a music, like enow
They are building still, seeing the city is built
To music, _therefore never built at all,
And therefore built for ever_.
Beneath the strangely beautiful surface meaning of these lines there lies
the deep allegoric meaning that often what seems visionary is in truth a
spiritual and eternal reality. It brings to mind the wonderful lines of
Browning (in "Abt Vogler"):
The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard,
The passion that left the earth to lose itself in the sky,
Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard;
Enough that he heard it once, we shall hear it by and by.
The other point concerns the end of the poem. The last section is the
Passing of Arthur; the old fragment "Morte d'Arthur" enlarged. One notable
addition occurs at the very end.
In the earlier version of the fragment, after Arthur had passed away on
the dark lake, with him the last hope also disappears.
We are only told:
Long stood Sir Bedivere,
Revolving many memories, till the hull
Look'd one black dot against the verge of dawn,
And on the mere the wailing died away.
In the fragment the end was tragic: the noble attempt failed; the hero and
inspirer passed away, his aim defeated, his comrades slain or scattered,
his life and efforts vain.
But in the final shape comes a new and very significant end:
Then from the dawn it seem'd there came, but faint,
As from beyond the limit of the world,
Like the last echo born of a great cry,
Sounds, as if some fair city were one voice,
Around a king returning from his wars.
Thereat once more he[92] moved about, and clomb
Ev'n to the highest he could climb--and saw,
Or thought he saw, the speck that bare the King
Somewhere far off, pass on and on, and go
From less to less, and vanish _into light_.
And the new sun rose, bringing the new year.
We feel, as we are meant to feel, that though the death of a noble soul,
after unequal war with ill, is deeply sad--fitly pictured with sorrowful
sounds and darkness of night--yet the great spirit cannot wholly die: the
night breaks into a new day; and the day will be brighter for those who
are left, because of the efforts and memories of the leader who is no
more.