artists. He is not often an inspired singer like Shelley, but he has other
gifts which Shelley lacked--a self-restraint, an artistic finish, a fine
and mature taste, a deep reverence for the past, a pervading sympathy with
the broad currents of the best thought and feeling of the time. Sometimes
this is (as we have seen) a weakness, but it is also the source of his
greatest strength. He has not, like Wordsworth, given us a new insight,
what I may almost call a new religion: but he has a wider range than
Wordsworth, and a surer poetic touch. Wordsworth may be the greater
teacher; for many of us he has opened a new world: he has touched the
deepest springs of our nature. But Tennyson has left us gifts hardly less
rare and precious. He has refined, enriched, beautified, in some sense
almost remade our poetic language; he has shown that the classic
eighteenth-century finish is not incompatible with the nineteenth-century
deeper and wider thought: and, in a word, he has inwoven the golden thread
of poetry with the main texture of the life, knowledge, feeling,
experience, and ideals of the years whereof we are all alike inheritors.
TENNYSON: HIS LIFE AND WORK[93]
By the Right Hon. SIR ALFRED LYALL, G.C.B.
The biography of a great poet has seldom been so written as to enhance his
reputation with the world at large. It is almost always the highest artist
whose individuality, so to speak, is least discernible in his work, and
who, like some divinity, is at his best when his mind and moods, his lofty
purpose and his attitude toward the problems of life, are revealed only
through the medium which he has chosen for revealing them to mankind. To
lay bare the human side of a poet, to retail his domestic history, and to
dwell upon his private relations with friends or family, will always
interest the public enormously; but for himself it is often a perilous
ordeal. The man of restless erratic genius, cut off in his prime like
Byron or Shelley, leaves behind him a confession of faults and follies,
while one who has lived long takes the risk of intellectual decline; or
else, like Coleridge, Landor, and even Scott, he may in other ways suffer
loss of dignity by the posthumous record of failings or mistakes. It is a
rare coincidence that in this nineteenth century two poets of the first
rank--Wordsworth and Tennyson--should each have passed the natural limit
of fourscore years, steadily extending their reputation without material
loss of their power, and completely fulfilling the ideal of a life devoted
to their beautiful art, free alike from adventures and eccentricities,
tranquil, blameless, and nobly dignified.
Such is the life which has been described to us in the _Memoir_ of Alfred,
Lord Tennyson, by his son. In preparing it he had the singular advantage
of very close and uninterrupted association for many years with his
father, and of thorough acquaintance with his wishes and feelings in
regard to the inevitable biography. In a brief preface, he touches, not
without emotion, upon the aims and limitations of the task which it had
become his duty to undertake.
"For my part," he says, "I feel strongly that no biographer could so
truly give him as he gives himself in his own works; but this may be
because, having lived my life with him, I see him in every word which
he has written; and it is difficult for me so far to detach myself
from the home circle as to pourtray him for others. He himself
disliked the notion of a long, formal biography.... However, he wished
that, if I deemed it better, the incidents of his life should be given
as shortly as might be without comment; but that my notes should be
final and full enough to preclude the chance of further and
unauthentic biographies."
Lord Tennyson has given us a remarkable chronicle of his father's life
from youth to age, illustrated by correspondence that is always
interesting and occasionally of supreme value, by anecdotes and
reminiscences, by characteristic thoughts and pithy observations--the
outcome of the Poet's reflection, consummate literary judgment, and
constant intercourse with the best contemporary intellects. He has,
moreover, so arranged the narrative as to show the rapid expansion of
Tennyson's strong, inborn poetic instinct, with the impressions and
influences which moulded its development, maturing and perfecting his
marvellous powers of artistic execution.
Alfred Tennyson was born in the pastoral village of Somersby, amid the
Lincolnshire wolds; and he spent many holidays on the coast at
Mablethorpe, where he acquired that passion for the sea which has
possessed so many poets. The atmosphere of a public school favours active
emulation and discipline for the outer world; but to a boy of sensitive
and imaginative temperament it is apt to be uncongenial, so we need not be
sorry that Tennyson was spared the experience. At first, like most men of
his temperament who go straight from private tuition to a University, he
felt solitary and depressed--"the country is so disgustingly level, the
revelry of the place so monotonous, the studies of the University so
uninteresting, so matter-of-fact." But there was about him a distinction
in mind and body that soon marked him out among his fellows ("a kind of
Hyperion," writes FitzGerald), uniting strength with refinement, showing
much insight into character, with the faculty of brief and pointed
sallies: "We were looking one day at the portrait of an elderly politician
in bland family aspect. A. T. (with his eyeglass): It looks rather like a
retired panther. So true."[94]
He was an early member of the Society yclept the Apostles, which included
many eager and brilliant spirits, whose debates were upon political
reform, the bettering of the people's condition, upon morals, religion,
and those wider and more liberal views of social needs that were foremost
at a period when the new forces were just mustering for attack upon the
old entrenchment of Church and State. Edward FitzGerald's notes and
Tennyson's own later recollections are drawn upon in this book for lively
illustrations of the sayings and doings of this notable group of friends,
and for glimpses of their manner of life at Cambridge. Here he lived in
the choice society of that day, and formed, among other friendships, an
affectionate attachment to Arthur Hallam, who afterwards became engaged to
his sister, and in whose memory the famous poem was written. Hallam seems
to have been one of those men whose extraordinary promise and early death
invest their brief and brilliant career with a kind of romance, explaining
and almost justifying the pagan notions of Fate and divine envy.
In June 1829 Tennyson scored his first triumph by the prize poem on
Timbuctoo, which, as he said many years afterwards, won the medal to his
utter astonishment, for it was an old poem on Armageddon, adapted to
Central Africa "by a little alteration of the beginning and the end."
Arthur Hallam wrote of it on September 2, 1829: "The splendid imaginative
power which pervades it will be seen through all hindrances. I consider
Tennyson as promising fair to be the greatest poet of our generation,
perhaps of our century"--a remarkably far-reaching prophecy to have been
built upon so slender a foundation. Out of his "horror of publicity," as
he said, he committed it to Merivale for declamation in the Senate House.
In 1830 appeared Tennyson's first volume of poems, upon which Arthur
Hallam again wrote, in a review, that "the features of original genius are
strongly and clearly marked"; while on the other hand, Coleridge passed
upon it the well-known criticism that "he has begun to write verses
without very well knowing what metre is"; and Christopher North handled it
with a touch of good-natured ridicule. Then followed, in 1832, a fresh
issue, including that magnificent allegory, the "Palace of Art"; with
other poems whose very blemishes signified exuberant strength. James
Montgomery's observation of him at this stage is in the main true as a
standing test of latent potency in beginners. "He has very wealthy and
luxurious thought and great beauty of expression, and is _a poet_. But
there is plenty of room for improvement, and I would have it so. Your
trim, correct _young_ writers rarely turn out well; a young poet should
have a great deal which he can afford to throw away as he gets older."
The judgment was sound, for after a silent interval of ten years, during
which the Poet was sedulously husbanding and cultivating his powers, the
full-orbed splendour of his genius shone out in the two volumes of 1842.
"This decade," writes his biographer, "wrought a marvellous abatement of
my father's real fault," which was undoubtedly "the tendency, arising from
the fulness of mind which had not yet learned to master its resources
freely, to overcrowd his composition with imagery, to which may be added
over-indulgence in the luxuries of the senses." By this and by other
extracts from contemporary criticism given in the _Memoir_ its readers may
survey and measure the Poet's rapid development of mind and methods, the
expansion of his range of thoughts, his increasing command over the
musical instrument, and the admirable vigour and beauty which his
composition was now disclosing. He had the singular advantage, rarely
enjoyed so early in a poetic career, of being surrounded by enthusiastic
friends who were also very competent art-critics, and whose unanimous
verdict must have given him heart and confidence; so that the few spurts
of cold water from professional reviewers troubled him very little. The
darts thrown by such enemies might hardly reach or wound him--[Greek: prin
gar peribêsan aristoi]--the two Hallams, James Spedding, Edward
FitzGerald, the two Lushingtons, Blakesley, and Julius Hare rallied round
him enthusiastically. Hartley Coleridge met Tennyson in 1835, and, "after
the fourth bottom of gin," deliberately thanked Heaven for having brought
them acquainted. Wordsworth, who had at first been slow to appreciate,
having afterwards listened to two poems recited by Aubrey de Vere, did
"acknowledge that they were very noble in thought, with a diction
singularly stately." Even Carlyle, who had implored the Poet to stick to
prose, was vanquished, and wrote (1842) a letter so vividly characteristic
as to justify a long quotation:
DEAR TENNYSON--Wherever this find you, may it find you well, may it
come as a friendly greeting to you. I have just been reading your
Poems; I have read certain of them over again, and mean to read them
over and over till they become my poems; this fact, with the
inferences that lie in it, is of such emphasis in me, I cannot keep it
to myself, but must needs acquaint you too with it. If you knew what
my relation has been to the thing call'd English "Poetry" for many
years back, you would think such a fact almost surprising! Truly it is
long since in any English Book, Poetry or Prose, I have felt the pulse
of a real man's heart as I do in this same.
* * * * *
I know you cannot read German: the more interesting is it to trace in
your "Summer Oak" a beautiful kindred to something that is best in
Goethe; I mean his "Müllerin" (Miller's daughter) chiefly, with whom
the very Mill-dam gets in love; though she proves a flirt after all,
and the thing ends in satirical lines! Very strangely, too, in the
"Vision of Sin" I am reminded of my friend Jean Paul. This is not
babble, this is speech; true deposition of a volunteer witness. And so
I say let us all rejoice somewhat. And so let us all smite
rhythmically, all in concert, "the sounding furrows," and sail forward
with new cheer "beyond the sunset" whither we are bound.
The _Memoir_ contains some valuable reminiscences of this period,
contributed after Tennyson's death by his personal friends, which
incidentally throw backward a light upon the literary society of that day.
Mr. Aubrey de Vere describes a meeting between Tennyson and Wordsworth;
and relates also, subsequently and separately, a conversation with
Tennyson, who was enthusiastic over the songs of Burns: "You forget, for
their sake, those stupid things, his serious pieces." The same day Mr. de
Vere met Wordsworth, who "praised Burns even more vehemently than
Tennyson had done ..." but ended, "of course I refer to his serious
efforts, those foolish little amatory songs of his one has to forget."
But in addition to contemporary criticism, written or spoken, and to the
reminiscences, the biography gives us also several unpublished poems and
fragmentary verses belonging to this period, with the original readings of
other pieces that were altered before publication. It is in these
materials, beyond others, that we can observe the forming and maturing of
his style, the fastidious taste which dictated his rejection of work that
either did not satisfy the highest standard as a whole, or else marred a
poem's symmetrical proportion by superfluity, over-weight, or the undue
predominance of some note in the general harmony. One may regret that some
fine stanzas or exquisite lines should have been thus expunged, as, for
example, those beginning:
Thou may'st remember what I said.
Yet we believe the impartial critic will confirm in every instance the
decision. "Anacaona," written at Cambridge, was never published, because
"the natural history and the rhymes did not satisfy" Tennyson; it is full
of tropical warmth and ardour, with a fine rhythmic beat, but it is
certainly below high-water mark. And the same must be said of the "Song of
the Three Sisters," published and afterwards suppressed, though the blank
verse of its prelude has undoubted quality. He acted, as we can see,
inexorably upon his own rule that "the artist is known by his
self-limitation"; feeling certain, as he once said, that "if I meant to
make any mark in the world it must be by shortness, for the men before me
had been so diffuse." Only the concise and perfect work, he thought, would
last; and "hundreds of lines were blown up the chimney with his pipe
smoke, or were written down and thrown into the fire as not being perfect
enough." Yet all his austere resolution must have been needed for
condemning some of the fine verses that were struck out of the "Palace of
Art," merely to give the poem even balance, and trim it like a boat. Very
few poems could have spared or borne the excisions from the "Dream of Fair
Women"; though here and there the didactic or scientific note is slightly
prominent, as in the following stanza:
All nature widens upward. Evermore
The simpler essence lower lies,
More complex is more perfect, owning more
Discourse, more widely wise.
At any rate the preservation of these unpublished verses adds much to the
value of the biography; and we may rank Tennyson among the very few poets
whose reputation has rather gained than suffered by the posthumous
appearance of pieces that the writer had deliberately withdrawn or
withheld.
Of Tennyson's own literary opinions one or two specimens, belonging to
this time, may be given.
"Byron and Shelley, however mistaken they were, did yet give the world
another heart and new pulses; and so we are kept going"--a just tribute to
their fiery lyrical energy, which did much to clear insular prejudice from
the souls of a masculine generation. "Lycidas" he held to be the test of
any reader's poetic instinct; and "Keats, with his high spiritual vision,
would have been, if he had lived, the greatest of us all, though his blank
verse lacked originality of movement." It is true that Keats, whose full
metrical skill was never developed, may have imitated the Miltonic
construction; yet after Milton he was the finest composer up to Tennyson's
day. And the first hundred lines of "Hyperion" have no slight affinity, in
colouring and cadence, to the Tennysonian blank verse. For indeed it was
Keats who, as Tennyson's forerunner, passed on to him the gift of intense
romantic susceptibility to the influences of Nature, the "dim mystic
sympathies with tree and hill reaching back into childhood." But
Tennyson's art inclined more toward the picturesque, toward using words,
as a painter uses his brush, for producing the impression of a scene's
true outline and colour; his work shows the realistic feeling of a later
day, which delights in precision of details. In one of his letters he
mentions that there was a time when he was in the habit of chronicling, in
four or five words or more, whatever might strike him as a picture, just
as an artist would take rough sketches. The subjoined fragment, written on
revisiting Mablethorpe on the Lincolnshire coast, contains the
quintessence of his descriptive style; the last three lines are sheer
landscape painting.
MABLETHORPE
Here often when a child I lay reclined,
I took delight in this fair land and free;
Here stood the infant Ilion of the mind,
And here the Grecian ships all seemed to be.
And here again I come, and only find
_The drain-cut level of the marshy lea,
Gray sand-banks, and pale sunsets, dreary winds,
Dim shores, dense rains, and heavy-clouded sea_.
More frequently, however, he employed his wonderful image-making power to
illustrate symbolically some mental state or emotion, availing himself of
the mysterious relation between man and his environment, whereby the outer
inanimate world is felt to be the resemblance and reflection of human
moods. So in the "Palace of Art" the desolate soul is likened to
A still salt pool, lock'd in with bars of sand,
Left on the shore; that hears all night
The plunging seas draw backward from the land
Their moon-led waters white.
And there are passages in the extracts given from his letters written to
Miss Emily Sellwood, during the long engagement that preceded their
marriage, which indicate the bent of his mind toward philosophic quietism,
with frequent signs of that half-veiled fellow-feeling with natural
things, that sense of life in all sound and motion, whereby poetry is
drawn upward, by degrees and almost unconsciously, into the region of the
"Higher Pantheism." Nor has any English poet availed himself more
skilfully of a language that is peculiarly rich in metaphors, consisting
of words which still so far retain their original meaning as to suggest a
picture while they convey a thought.
It is partly due to these qualities of mind and style that no chapter in
this book, which mingles grave with gay very attractively, contains matter
of higher biographical interest than that which is headed "In Memoriam."
For it is in this noble poem, on the whole Tennyson's masterpiece, that he
is stirred by his own passionate grief to dwell on the contrast between
irremediable human suffering and the calm aspect of Nature, between the
short and sorrowful days of man and the long procession of ages. From the
doubts and perplexities, the tendency to lose heart, engendered by a sense
of forces that are unceasing and relentless, he finds his ultimate escape
in the spirit of trust in the Powers invisible, and in the persuasion that
God and Nature cannot be at strife. In a letter contributed to this
_Memoir_ Professor Henry Sidgwick has described the impression produced on
him and others of his time by this poem, showing how it struck in, so to
speak, upon their religious debates at a moment of conflicting tendencies
and great uncertainty of direction, giving intensity of expression to the
dominant feeling, and wider range to the prevailing thought:
The most important influence of "In Memoriam" on my thought, apart
from its poetic charm as an expression of personal emotion, opened in
a region, if I may so say, deeper down than the difference between
Theism and Christianity: it lay in the unparalleled combination of
intensity of feeling with comprehensiveness of view and balance of
judgment, shown in presenting the deepest needs and perplexities of
humanity. And this influence, I find, has increased rather than
diminished as years have gone on, and as the great issues between
Agnostic Science and Faith have become continually more prominent. In
the sixties I should say that these deeper issues were somewhat
obscured by the discussions on Christian dogma and Inspiration of
Scripture, etc. ... During these years we were absorbed in struggling
for freedom of thought in the trammels of a historical religion; and
perhaps what we sympathized with most in "In Memoriam" at this time,
apart from the personal feeling, was the defence of "honest doubt,"
the reconciliation of knowledge and faith in the introductory poem,
and the hopeful trumpet-ring of the lines on the New Year.... Well,
the years pass, the struggle with what Carlyle used to call "Hebrew
old clothes" is over, Freedom is won, and what does Freedom bring us
to? It brings us face to face with atheistic science; the faith in God
and Immortality, which we had been struggling to clear from
superstition, suddenly seems to be in the air; and in seeking for a
firm basis for this faith we find ourselves in the midst of the "fight
with death" which "In Memoriam" so powerfully presents.
To many readers the whole letter will seem to render fitly their feeling
of the pathetic intensity with which the everlasting problems of love and
death, of human doubts and destinies, are set forth in "In Memoriam." It
will also remind them of the limitations, the inevitable inconclusiveness,
of a poem which deals emotionally with questions that foil the deepest
philosophers. The profound impression that was immediately produced by
these exquisitely musical meditations may be ascribed, we think, to their
sympathetic association with the peculiar spiritual needs and intellectual
dilemmas of the time. It may be affirmed, as a general proposition, that
up to about 1840, and for some years later, the majority among Englishmen
of thought and culture were content to take morality as the chief test of
religious truth, were disposed to hold that the essential principles of
religion were best stated in the language of ethics. With this rational
theology the pretensions of Science, which undertook to preserve and even
to strengthen the moral basis, were not incompatible. But about this time
came a spiritual awakening; and just then Tennyson came forward to insist,
with poetic force and fervour, that the triumphant advance of Science was
placing in jeopardy not merely the formal outworks but the central dogma
of Christianity, which is the belief in a future life, in the soul's
conscious immortality.[95] Is man subject to the general law of unending
mutability? and is he after all but the highest and latest type, to be
made and broken like a thousand others, mere clay under the moulding hands
that are darkly visible in the processes of Nature? The Poet transfigured
these obstinate questionings into the vision of an ever-breaking shore
That tumbled in a godless sea.
He turned our ears to hear the sound of streams that, swift or slow,
Draw down Æonian hills, and sow
The dust of continents to be--
and he was haunted by the misgiving that man also might be a mere atom in
an ever-changing universe. Yet after long striving with doubts and fears,
after having "fought with death," he resolves that we cannot be "wholly
brain, magnetic mockeries," not only cunning casts in clays:
Let Science prove we are, and then
What matters Science unto men,
At least to me? I would not stay.
We think that such passages as these gave emphasis to the gathering alarm,
and that many a startled inquirer, daunted by dim uncertainties, recoiled
from the abyss that seemed to open at his feet, and made his peace, on
such terms as consoled him, with Theology. Not that Tennyson himself
retreated, or took refuge behind dogmatic entrenchments. On the contrary,
he stood his ground and trod under foot the terrors of Acheron; relying on
"the God who ever lives and loves." But since not every one can be
satisfied with subjective faith or lofty intuitions, we believe that the
note of distress and warning sounded by "In Memoriam" startled more minds
than were soothed by its comforting conclusions. If this be so, this
utterance of the poet, standing prophet-like at the parting of the ways,
moved men diversely. It strengthened the impulse to go onward trustfully;
but it may also be counted among the indirect influences which combined to
promote that notable reaction toward the sacramental and mysterious side
of religion, toward positive faith as the safeguard of morals, which has
been the outcome of the great Anglican revival set on foot by the Oxford
Movement seventy years ago.