married Miss Sellwood. "The wedding was of the quietest, even the cake and
the dresses arriving too late." From this union came unbroken happiness
during forty-two years; for his wife brought into the partnership a rich
and rare treasure of aid, sympathy, and intellectual appreciation. Her son
pays his tribute to her memory in an admirable passage, of which the
greater part is here extracted:
And let me say here--although, as a son, I cannot allow myself full
utterance about her whom I loved as perfect mother and "very woman of
very woman," "such a wife" and true helpmate she proved herself. It
was she who became my father's adviser in literary matters. "I am
proud of her intellect," he wrote. With her he always discussed what
he was working at; she transcribed his poems: to her, and to no one
else, he referred for a final criticism before publishing. She, with
her "tender spiritual nature" and instinctive nobility of thought, was
always by his side, a ready, cheerful, courageous, wise, and
sympathetic counsellor.... By her quiet sense of humour, by her
selfless devotion, by "her faith as clear as the heights of the
June-blue heaven," she helped him also to the utmost in the hours of
his depression and of his sorrow; and to her he wrote two of the most
beautiful of his shorter lyrics--"Dear, near and true," and the
dedicatory lines which prefaced his last volume, "The Death of
Oenone."
In November 1850, after Wordsworth's death, the Laureateship was offered
to Tennyson. We have good authority for stating, though not from this
_Memoir_, that Lord John Russell submitted to the Queen the four names of
Professor Wilson, Henry Taylor, Sheridan Knowles, and, last on the list,
Tennyson. The Prince Consort's admiration of "In Memoriam" determined Her
Majesty's choice, which might seem easy enough to those who measure the
four candidates by the standard of to-day. His accession to office brought
down upon Tennyson, among other honoraria, "such shoals of poems that I am
almost crazed with them; the two hundred million poets of Great Britain
deluge me daily. Truly the Laureateship is no sinecure." For the
inevitable levee he accepted, not without disquietude over the nether
garment, the loan of a Court suit from his ancient brother in song,
Rogers, who had declined the laurels on the plea of age. Soon afterward he
departed with his wife for Italy. Under the title of "The Daisy" he has
commemorated this journey in stanzas of consummate metrical form, with
their beautiful anapæstic ripple in each fourth line, to be studied by all
who would understand the quantitative value (not merely accentual) and
rhythmic effects of English syllables. On returning, they met the
Brownings at Paris. Then, in 1852, he bought Farringford in the Isle of
Wight, the Poet's favourite habitation ever afterward, within sight of
the sea and within sound of its rough weather, with its lawns, spreading
trees, and meadows under the lee of the chalk downs, that have been
frequently sketched into his verse, and will long be identified with his
presence. There he worked at "Maud," morning and evening, sitting in his
hard, high-backed wooden chair in his little room at the top of the house,
smoking the "sacred pipes" during certain half-hours of strict seclusion,
when his best thoughts came to him.
From the final edition in 1851 of "In Memoriam" to "Maud" in 1853, which
Lowell rather affectedly called the antiphonal voice of the earlier poem,
the change of theme, tone, and manner was certainly great; and the public
seems to have been taken by surprise. The transition was from lamentation
to love-making; from stanzas swaying slow, like a dirge, within their
uniform compass, to an abundant variety of metrical movement, quickened by
frequent use of the anapæstic measure. The general reader was puzzled and
inclined to ridicule what he failed at once to understand; the ordinary
reviewer was either loftily contemptuous or indulged in puns and parodies;
the higher criticism was divided; but Henry Taylor, Ruskin, Jowett, and
the Brownings spoke without hesitation of the work's great merits. Mr.
Gladstone, whose judgment had been at first adverse, recanted, twenty
years later, in a letter that was published in his _Gleanings_, and that
now reappears in this _Memoir_:
"Whether it is to be desired," he wrote, "that a poem should require
from common men a good deal of effort in order to comprehend it;
whether all that is put in the mouth of the Soliloquist in 'Maud' is
within the lines of poetical verisimilitude; whether this poem has the
full moral equilibrium which is so marked a characteristic of the
sister-works, are questions open, perhaps, to discussion. But I have
neither done justice in the text to its rich and copious beauties of
detail, nor to its great lyrical and metrical power. And, what is
worse, I have failed to comprehend rightly the relation between
particular passages in the poem and its general scope."
Jowett wrote:
No poem since Shakespeare seems to show equal power of the same kind,
or equal knowledge of human nature. No modern poem contains more lines
that ring in the ears of men. I do not know any verse of Shakespeare
in which the ecstasy of love soars to such a height.
On the other hand, an anonymous letter, which Tennyson enjoyed repeating,
ran thus:
SIR--I used to worship you, but now I hate you. I loathe and detest
you. You beast! So you've taken to imitating Longfellow.
Yours in aversion,
"----"
"I shall never forget," his son writes,
Tennyson's last reading of "Maud," on August 24, 1892. He was sitting
in his high-backed chair, fronting a southern window which looks over
the groves and yellow cornfields of Sussex toward the long line of
South Downs that stretches from Arundel to Hastings (his high-domed
Rembrandt-like head outlined against the sunset-clouds seen through
the western window). His voice, low and calm in everyday life, capable
of delicate and manifold inflection, but with "organ tones" of great
power and range, thoroughly brought out the drama of the poem.
"The peculiarity of this poem," Tennyson said, "is that different phases
of passion in one person take the place of different characters"; and the
effect of his own recitation was to set this conception in clear relief by
showing the connexion and significance of the linked monodies, combined
with a vivid musical rendering of a pathetic love-story. The emotional
intensity rises by degrees to the rapture of meeting with Maud in the
garden, falls suddenly to the depth of blank despair, and revives in an
atmosphere of energetic, warlike activity--the precursor of world-wide
peace.
The poem, in fact, strikes all the highest lyrical chords, and we are
disposed to think that all of them are by no means touched with equal
skill. Possibly, the sustained and perfect execution of such a varied
composition would be too arduous a task for any artist. It is difficult
for the reader to adjust his mind to the changes of mood and motive which
succeed each other rapidly, and often abruptly, within the compass of so
short a piece; ranging from the almost melodramatic horror of the opening
stanzas to the passionate and joyous melodies of the middle part; sinking
into a wild wailing, and closing with the trumpet sounds of war. Yet every
one will now acknowledge that some passages in "Maud" are immortal, and
that the English language contains none more beautiful than the very best
of them.
The letters in the _Memoir_ are selected from upwards of forty thousand,
and at this period we have many of singular interest. One from Mrs. Vyner,
a stranger, touched the Poet deeply. Ruskin writes with reserve, as well
he might, about the edition of the poems illustrated by Rossetti, Millais,
and others:
I believe, in fact, that good pictures never can be; they are always
another poem, subordinate, but wholly different from the poet's
conception, and serve chiefly to show the reader how variously the
same verses may affect various minds. But these woodcuts will be of
much use in making people think and puzzle a little; art was getting
quite a matter of form in book illustrations, and it does not so much
matter whether any given vignette is right or not, as whether it
contains thought or not, still more whether it contains any kind of
plain facts. If people have no sympathy with St. Agnes, or if people,
as soon as they get a distinct idea of a living girl who probably got
scolded for dropping her candle-wax about the convent-stairs, and
caught cold by looking too long out of the window in her bedgown,
feel no true sympathy with her, they can have no sympathy in them.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning sends a warm-hearted letter; and Jowett, who
enjoyed giving advice, evidently sat him down readily to reply when Mrs.
Tennyson asked whether he could suggest any subjects for poetry:
I often fancy that the critical form of modern literature is like the
rhetorical one which overlaid ancient literature, and will be regarded
as that is, at its true worth in after times. One drop of natural
feeling in poetry, or the true statement of a single new fact, is
already felt to be of more value than all the critics put together.
Four "Idylls" came out in 1859, to be rapidly and largely taken up by the
English public, with many congratulations from personal friends. Thackeray
sends, after reading them, a letter full of his characteristic humour and
cordiality:
"The landlord"--at Folkestone--"gave two bottles of his claret, and I
think I drank the most, and here I have been lying back in the chair
and thinking of those delightful 'Idylls'; my thoughts being turned to
you; and what could I do but be grateful to that surprising genius
which has made me so happy?"
The Duke of Argyll wrote that Macaulay had been _delighted with it_,
whereupon the Poet responds to his Grace somewhat caustically:
MY DEAR DUKE--Doubtless Macaulay's good opinion is worth having, and I
am grateful to you for letting me know it, but this time I intend to
be thick-skinned; nay, I scarcely believe that I should ever feel very
deeply the pen-punctures of those parasitic animalcules of the press,
if they kept themselves to what I write, and did not glance spitefully
and personally at myself. I hate spite.
Ruskin, on the other hand, is but half pleased; could not quite make up
his mind about that "increased quietness of style"; feels "the art and
finish in these poems a little more than I like"; wishes that the book's
nobleness and tenderness had been independent of a romantic condition of
externals; and suggests that "so great power ought not to be spent on
visions of things past, but on the living present."
These latter sentences touch upon, or at least indicate, a line of
criticism upon the general conception of the "Idylls," as seen in their
treatment of the Arthurian legend, with which, although it may appear
inadequate, some of us are not indisposed to agree. Romanticism has been
defined, half seriously, as the art of presenting to a people the literary
works which can give the greatest imaginative pleasure in the actual state
of their habits and beliefs. The "Idylls" adapted the mythical tales of
the Round Table to the very highest standard of æsthetic taste,
intellectual refinement, and moral delicacy prevailing in cultivated
English society. And by that society they were very cordially appreciated.
Undoubtedly the figure of Arthur--representing a stainless mirror of
chivalry, a warrior king endowed with the qualities of patriotic
self-devotion, clemency, generosity, and noble trustfulness, yet betrayed
by his wife and his familiar friend, and dying in a lost fight against
treacherous rebels--did present a lofty ideal that might well affect a
gravely emotional people. Moreover, the poem is a splendidly illuminated
Morality, unfolding scenes and figures that illustrate heroic virtues and
human frailties, gallantry, chivalric enterprise, domestic perfidy, chaste
virginal loves, and subtle amorous enchantments. It abounds also in
descriptive passages which attest the close attention of the Poet's eye
and ear to natural sights and sounds, and his supreme art of fashioning
his verse to their colours and echoes. In short, to quote from the
biography,
he has made the old legends his own, restored the idealism, and
infused into them a spirit of modern thought and of ethical
significance; setting his characters in a rich and varied landscape;
as indeed otherwise these archaic stories would not have appealed to
the world at large.
This indeed he has done well. And yet it is not possible to put away
altogether the modern prejudice against unreality, the sense of having
here a vision not merely of things that are past, but of things that could
never have been, of a world that is neither ancient nor modern, but a
fairy land peopled with knights and dames whose habits and conversation
are adjusted to the decorous taste of our nineteenth century. The time has
long passed when men could look back on distant ages much as they looked
forward to futurity, through a haze of unbounded credulity. Not every one
has been able to overcome the effect of incongruity produced by a poem
which invests the legendary personages of mediæval romance with morals and
manners of a fastidious delicacy, and promotes them to be the embodiment
of our own ethical ideals. If, indeed, we regard the "Idylls" as beautiful
allegories, we may be content, as their author was, with the suggestion
that King Arthur represents Conscience, and that the poem is "a picture of
the different ways in which men looked on conscience, some reverencing it
as a heaven-born king, others ascribing to it an earthly origin." We may
then be satisfied with learning, from the Poet himself, that "Camelot, for
instance, a city of shadowy palaces, is everywhere symbolic of the gradual
growth of human beliefs and institutions, and of the spiritual development
of man." In the light of these interpretations the poem is a beautifully
woven tissue of poetic mysticism, clothing the old legend of chivalry with
esoteric meaning. We can accept and admire it freely, remarking only that
the deeper thoughts of the present generation do not run in an allegorical
vein, and that such a vesture, though of the finest texture and
embroidery, waxes old speedily. "The 'Holy Grail,'" said Tennyson, "is
one of the most imaginative of my poems. I have expressed there my strong
feeling as to the reality of the Unseen"; and truly it is a marvellous
excursion into the field of mystical romance. But Tennyson also said that
"there is no single fact or incident in the 'Idylls,' however seemingly
mystical, which cannot be explained as without any mystery or allegory
whatever"; and herein lies our difficulty. For, unless they can be read as
wholly allegorical, there is an air of unreality about those enchanting
pictures, as of scenes and persons that could never have existed anywhere.
That Tennyson is a master of the art of veiling the lessons of real life
under a fairy story, we know from the subtle symbolism with which he
tells, in the "Lady of Shalott," the tale of sudden absorbing love,
hopeless and unregarded, sinking into despair--a true parable, understood
of all men and women in all times. But those who have no great skill at
deciphering the Hyponoia, the underlying significance, of the "Idylls" may
be pardoned for confessing to an occasional feeling of something abstract,
shadowy, and spectacular in the company of these knights and dames.[96]
FitzGerald, after reading the "Holy Grail," writes (1870) to Tennyson:
The whole myth of Arthur's Round Table Dynasty in Britain presents
itself before me with a sort of cloudy Stonehenge grandeur. I am not
sure if the old knights' adventures do not tell upon me better touched
in some lyrical way (like your "Lady of Shalott") than when elaborated
into epic form. I never could care for Spenser, Tasso, or even
Ariosto, whose epic has a ballad ring about it.... Anyhow, Alfred,
while I feel how pure, noble, and holy your work is--and whole
phrases, lines, and sentences of it will abide with me, and, I am
sure, with men after me--I read on till the "Lincolnshire Farmer" drew
tears from my eyes. I was got back to the substantial rough-spun
Nature I knew; and the old brute, invested by you with the solemn
humour of Humanity, like Shakespeare's Shallow, became a more pathetic
phenomenon than the knights who revisit the world in your other verse.
There! I cannot help it, and have made a clean breast.
If the extreme realism of some modern writers has been rightly condemned
as truth divorced from beauty, we may say that it has been by his skill in
maintaining their indissoluble union that Tennyson's best work shows its
peculiar strength and has earned its enduring vitality. He excels in the
verisimilitude of his portraiture, in the authentic delineation of
character, preserving the type and developing the main lines of thought
and action by imaginative insight, with high artistic fidelity in details.
I venture to anticipate that his short monodramatic pieces in blank
verse--his studies from the antique, like "Ulysses" and "Tithonus," and
his poems of English life, breathing the true idyllic spirit, like the
"Gardener's Daughter" and "Aylmer's Field"--will sustain their popularity
longer than the Arthurian Idylls. Nor can some of us honestly agree with
the unqualified praise bestowed by high authority (as the _Memoir_
testifies) on "Guinevere," where the scene between the king and the queen
at Almesbury, with all its elevation of tone and purity of sentiment, is
not very far from a splendid anachronism. But the epilogue "To the Queen,"
which closes the Arthurian epic, brings us back to modern thought and
circumstance by its ringing protest against faint-heartedness in English
politics.
The "Northern Farmer," written in 1861, was at that time a novelty in form
and subject. It gave a strong lead, at any rate, to that school of rough
humorous versification, largely relying on quaint turns of ideas and
phrases, on racy provincial dialect and local colouring generally, which
has since had an immense success in the hands of minor artists. We may
take it to have begun, for the last century, with the _Biglow Papers_.
This form of metrical composition has latterly spread, as a species of
modern ballad, to the Indian frontier and the Australian bush, but has
little or no place in any language except the English. Such character
sketches, taken direct from studies of rude life, have been always common
in popular comic song, yet I believe that no first-class poet, after Burns
and before Tennyson, had turned his hand to this kind of work; nor has
anything been since produced upon the artistic level of the first
"Northern Farmer." "Roden Noel," writes Tennyson, "calls the two 'Northern
Farmers' photographs; but I call them imaginative"--as of course they are,
being far above mere exact copies of some individual person.
There are some very readable _impressions de voyage_ gathered out of
journals of tours made about this time (1860) in France and England, and
the letters maintain their high level of interest. Upon the death of
Macaulay, Tennyson writes to the Duke of Argyll:
I hardly knew him: met him once, I remember, when Hallam and Guizot
were in his company. Hallam was showing Guizot the Houses of
Parliament, then building, and Macaulay went on like a cataract for an
hour or so to those two great men, and, when they had gone, turned to
me and said, "Good morning; I am happy to have had the pleasure of
making your acquaintance," and strode away. Had I been a piquable man
I should have been piqued: but I don't think I was, for the movement
after all was amicable.
Then follows an account, by Mrs. Bradley, of a visit to Farringford, with
"its careless ordered garden close to the ridge of a noble down"; and at
the end of the _Memoir_ is an appendix containing, among other things,
Arthur Hallam's striking critical appreciation of "Mariana in the South,"
a poem which must be ranked as a masterpiece by all exiled Englishmen who
have dreamt of their native breezes and verdure, under the blinding glare
and intolerable heat of a tropical summer. Mr. Aubrey de Vere has
contributed a reminiscence describing the effect produced upon himself and
others by the poems of 1832-45, with a dissertation upon their style and
philosophic significance. And in this manner the course and circumstances
of the Poet's life are set out, with much taste and regard for
proportionate value of the materials for those singularly untroubled years
through which he rose steadily from straitened means in youth to
comparative affluence in middle age, and from distinction among a group of
choice spirits to enduring fame as the greatest of poets born in the
nineteenth century.
When, in 1864, Tennyson returned with "Enoch Arden" to the romance of real
life among his own people, the poem was heartily welcomed, and sixty
thousand copies were speedily sold. Spedding declared it to be the finest
story he had ever heard, and added (in our opinion quite rightly) that it
was "more especially adapted for Alfred than for any other poet." Yet the
plot, so to speak, of this pathetic narrative is as ancient as the
_Odyssey_, for it rests upon a situation that must have been common in all
times of long and distant voyaging, when men disappeared across the seas,
were not heard of for years, and their wives were counted as widows. A
well-known sailor's ditty tells in rude popular rhymes the same story of
the wandering mariner's return home, to find himself forsaken and
forgotten; and it frequently occurs in the folklore of the crusades. The
first title in the proof-sheets of the "Enoch Arden" volume was "Idylls of
the Hearth," and here, says his biographer,
he writes with as intimate a knowledge, but with greater power (than
in 1842), on subjects from English life, the sailor, the farmer, the
parson, the city lawyer, the squire, the country maiden, and the old
woman who dreams of her past life in a restful old age.
No great poet, in fact, has travelled for his subjects so little beyond
his native land; and so his best descriptive work shows the painter's eye
on the object, with the impressions drawn fresh and at first hand from
Nature, as in the poetry of primitive bards who saw things for themselves.
His letters and notes teem with observations of wild flowers and wild
creatures, of wide prospects over sea and land; and even when he followed
Enoch Arden into the world that was to himself untravelled, he could
surprise those who knew it by his rendering of tropical scenery.
A very good account, by the late Mr. Locker-Lampson, of his tour through
France and Switzerland with Tennyson in 1869, has preserved for us the
flavour of his table and travelling talk upon literature, and occasionally
upon religious problems. Into the philosophical or metaphysical abyss he
did not let down his plummet very far; he recognized the limits of human
knowledge, and for the dim regions beyond he accepted Faith as his guide
and comforter. In regard to the poets--"As a boy," he said, "I was a great
admirer of Byron, so much so that I got a surfeit of him, and now I cannot
read him as I should like to do." Probably this habit of premature and
excessive indulgence in Byron has blunted many an eager admirer's
appetite, and has had something to do with the prevailing distaste for
him, wherein we think that he has fallen into unmerited neglect. Of
Shelley Tennyson said that there was "a great wind of words in a good deal
of him, but that as a writer of blank verse he was perhaps the most
skilful of the moderns. Nobody admires Shelley more than I once did, and I
still admire him." For Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" he had a profound
admiration; yet even in that poem he thought "the old poet had shown a
want of literary instinct," and he touched upon some defects of
composition; but he ended by saying emphatically that Wordsworth's very
best is the best in its way that has been sent out by moderns. He told an
anecdote of Samuel Rogers. "One day we were walking arm and arm, and I
spoke of what is called Immortality, and remarked how few writers could be
sure of it. Upon this Rogers squeezed my arm and said, 'I am sure of it.'"