sayings and doings, conversations, correspondence, anecdotes, and glimpses
of notable visits and visitors, Tourguéneff, Longfellow, Jenny Lind,
Huxley, and Gladstone, to the last of whom Tennyson read aloud his "Holy
Grail." At the house of G. H. Lewes he read "Guinevere," "which made
George Eliot weep." The diary is a faithful and valuable memorial of
English country life at its best in the middle of the last century. Living
quietly with his family, he was in constant intercourse with the most
distinguished men of his day, and was himself honoured of them all.
In 1873 Tennyson had declined, for himself, Mr. Gladstone's offer of a
baronetcy. In 1874 this offer was repeated by Mr. Disraeli, who does not
seem to have known that it had been once before made, in a high-flying
sententious letter, evidently attuned to the deeper harmonies of the
mysterious relation between genius and government.
A government should recognize intellect. It elevates and sustains the
spirit. It elevates and sustains the spirit of a nation. But it is an
office not easy to fulfil, for if it falls into favouritism and the
patronage of mediocrity, instead of raising the national sentiment, it
might degrade and debase it. Her Majesty, by the advice of her
Ministers, has testified in the Arctic expedition, and will in other
forms, her sympathy with science. But it is desirable that the claims
of high letters should be equally acknowledged. That is not so easy a
matter, because it is in the nature of things that the test of merit
cannot be so precise in literature as in science. Nevertheless, etc.
etc.
The honour, even thus offered, was again respectfully declined, with a
suggestion that it might be renewed for his son after his own death; but
this was pronounced impracticable.
The Metaphysical Society was founded by Tennyson and two others in 1869,
and a list of the members is given in the _Memoir_, which touches on the
style and topics of the debates, and on the umbrage taken by agnostic
friends at the profound deference shown by Tennyson to Cardinal Manning. A
letter from Dr. James Martineau describes the Poet's general attitude
toward the Society's discussions; he sent his poem on the "Higher
Pantheism" to be read at the first meeting; and he was "usually a silent
listener, interposing some short question or pregnant hint." The letter
discourses, in expansive and perhaps faintly nebulous language, upon the
influence of his poetry on the religious tendencies of the day.
That in a certain sense our great Laureate's poetry has nevertheless
had a dissolving influence upon the over-definite dogmatic creeds
within hearing, or upon the modes of religious thought amid which it
was born, can hardly be doubted. In laying bare, as it does, the
history of his own spirit, its conflicts and aspirations, its
alternate eclipse of doubt and glow of faith, it has reported more
than a personal experience; he has told the story of an age which he
has thus brought into Self-knowledge.... Among thousands of readers
previously irresponsive to anything Divine he has created, or
immeasurably intensified, the susceptibility of religious reverence.
After taking into due account the circumstances in which Dr. Martineau's
letter was written, to many readers this high-flying panegyric will seem
to have in some degree overshot its mark.
It has been my duty, in reviewing this _Memoir_, to pass under some kind
of critical survey the more important writings of Lord Tennyson, in
particular relation to the narrative of his life, and to the formation of
his views and opinions. I am, however, placed in some embarrassment by the
fact that this work is for the most part done already in the volumes
themselves. They contain ample quotations from letters and articles by
very eminent hands, written with all the vigour of immediate impressions
when the poems first appeared. And some of the reminiscences that have
since been contributed to the biography by personal friends deal so
thoroughly with its literary side as to fall little short of elaborate
essays; so that on the whole not much is left to be said by the
retrospective reviewer. We are met with this difficulty in taking up the
chapters on the Historical Plays, which set before us, with an analysis of
the plays by the biographer himself, a catena of judgments upon them,
unanimously favourable, by the highest authorities. Robert Browning writes
with generous enthusiasm of "Queen Mary." Froude, the most dramatic of
historians, expresses unbounded admiration: "You have reclaimed one more
section of English history from the wilderness, and given it a form in
which it will be fixed for ever. No one since Shakespeare has done that."
Gladstone, Mr. Aubrey de Vere, Longfellow, G. H. Lewes and his wife, the
statesmen, the poets, and the men of letters, each from his own standpoint
attests the merits of one or another play, in letters of indisputable
strength and sincerity. Nor can it be doubted that these pieces contain
splendid passages, and fine engravings, so to speak, of historical
personages, with a noble appreciation of the spacious Elizabethan period,
and of the earlier romantic episodes. The dramatic art provides such a
powerful instrument for striking deep into the national mind, and success
in this form of high poetic execution is so lasting--while it is so
rare--that almost every great English poet has written plays. On the other
hand, few of them have ventured, like Tennyson, to face the capricious
ordeal of the public theatre, where the _vox populi_ is at least so far
divine that it pronounces absolutely and often incomprehensibly.
"For Tennyson to begin publishing plays after he was sixty-five years of
age was thought to be a hazardous experiment"; though I may remark that he
started with the advantage of a first-class poetic reputation, which
stimulated public curiosity. But he knew well the immense influence, for
good or for ill, that the stage can bring to bear on the people; and for
the stage all his plays were directly intended, not for literature, in the
expectation that the necessary technical adaptations might be supplied by
the actors or the professional playwright. Their historical truth, their
vigorous conceptions of motive and circumstance, and their poetic force
received ample acknowledgment. W. G. Ward, who was "grotesquely truthful,"
though ultramontane, broke out into unqualified praise after listening to
the reading of "Becket." On the stage, where first impressions are
all-important, the pieces had their share of success. Browning writes of
the "tumult of acclaim" which greeted the appearance of "Queen Mary"; and
of "Becket" Irving has told us that "it is one of the three most
successful plays produced by him at the Lyceum."
It is a question, often debated, whether in these latter days the theatre
can be made a vehicle for the artistic representation of history.
Literature, a jealous rival of all her sister arts, has so vastly extended
her dominion over the people, she speaks so directly to the mind, without
need of plastic or vocal interpretation, she is so independent of
accessories and intermediaries, that her competitive influence weighs down
all other departments of imaginative and pictorial idealization, religious
or romantic. Against this stream of tendency even Tennyson's genius could
hardly make sufficient headway to conquer for his plays a lasting hold
upon English audiences; and moreover his primal vigour had been spent upon
other victories. Yet to have held the stage at all, for a brief space, is
to have done more than has been achieved by any other poet of this (last)
century. In 1880 his drama, "The Cup," was produced with signal success at
the Lyceum; and Tennyson summed up his theatrical experience by observing
that "the success of a piece does not depend on its literary merit or even
on its stage effect, but on its _hitting_ somehow," wherein Miss Ellen
Terry agreed with him.
The annals of his daily life, throughout all this later part of it,
consist of extracts from letters, journals, and memorials of intercourse,
which abound with appropriate, amusing, and valuable matter, connected by
the biographer's personal recollections. We have thus a many-coloured
mosaic, in which many figures and characters are reproduced by a kind of
literary tessellation; while, as to the Poet himself, his habits, wise or
whimsical, his thoughts from year to year on the subjects of the day, his
manner of working, are all preserved. The correspondence of his friends
maintains its high level of quality. Mr. W. H. Lecky gives us, in one of
the best among all the reminiscences, a fine sample of his own faculty for
delineation of character, bringing out the Poet's simplicity of soul, his
love of seclusion, the scope of his religious meditations, the keen
sensibility (acquired by long culture) of his rhythmic ear, and also his
susceptibility to the hum and pricking of critics.
Many persons spoke of your father as too much occupied with his
poetry. It did, no doubt, fill a very large place in his thoughts, and
it is also true that he was accustomed to express his opinions about
it with a curiously childlike simplicity and frankness. But at bottom
his nature seemed to be singularly modest. No poet ever corrected so
many lines in deference to adverse criticism. His sensitiveness
seemed to me curiously out of harmony with his large powerful frame,
with his manly dark colouring, with his great massive hands and strong
square-tipped fingers.
His son records how in lonely walks together Tennyson would chant a poem
that he was composing, would search for strange birds or flowers, and
would himself take flight on discovering that he was being stalked by a
tourist. Among the letters is one from Victor Hugo, in the grand
cosmopolitan style, beginning "Mon Éminent et Cher Confrère," professing
love for all mankind and admiration for noble verse everywhere; another
from Cardinal Newman, smooth and adroit; there is also a note by Dr. Dabbs
of his colloquy with Tennyson, showing how he began with the somewhat
musty question about the incompatibility of Science with Religion, and
found the Poet, as we infer, tolerably dexterous with the foils. Renan
called, and put the essence of his philosophy into one phrase, "La vérité
est une nuance"; there are jottings of talks with Carlyle, and a long
extract from the journal of a yachting voyage with Mr. Gladstone, who
said, "No man since Aeschylus could have written the _Bride of
Lammermoor_." It would be doing less than justice to the biography if I
did not choose a few samples from an ample storehouse, and it would be
unfair to make too many quotations, even from a book which surpasses all
recent memoirs as a repertory of characteristic observations and short
views of life and literature, interchanged by speech or writing, with many
notable friends and visitors.
In 1883 the Queen, on the recommendation of Mr. Gladstone, offered
Tennyson a peerage, which, after some rumination, he accepted, saying, "By
Gladstone's advice I have consented, but for my own part I shall regret my
own simple name all my life." We are to suppose that the Prime Minister's
only misgiving "lest my father might insist on wearing his wideawake in
the House of Lords" had been duly overcome; and so next year the Poet,
having taken his seat, voted, not without some questioning and doubts of
the time's ripeness, for extension of franchise. No more worthy
representative of literature has ever added lustre to that august assembly
than he who now took his seat on the cross benches, holding no form of
party creed, but contemplating all. From a man of his traditions and
tastes, his dislike of extravagance, his feeling for the stateliness of
well-ordered movement, at his age, moderation in politics was to be
expected; and indeed we observe that he commended to his friends Maine's
work on _Popular Government_, which carries political caution to the verge
of timidity. But Tennyson, like Burke, had great confidence in the common
sense and inbred good nature of the English people. "Stagnation," he once
said, "is more dangerous than revolution." As he was throughout
consistently the poet of the _via media_ in politics, the dignified
constitutional Laureate, so he was spared the changes that passed over the
opinions of Wordsworth, Southey, and Coleridge, who were Radicals in
youth, and declined into elderly Tories. Undoubtedly the temper of his
time affected his politics as well as his poetry, for his manhood began in
the calm period which followed the long stormy years when all Europe was
one great war-field, and when the ardent spirits of Byron and Shelley had
been fired by the fierce uprising of the nations.
In 1885, being then in his seventy-sixth year, Lord Tennyson published
"Tiresias," preluding with the verses to E. FitzGerald, so vigorous in
tone and so finely wrought, with their rhymes ringing true to the
expectant ear like the chime of a clear bell. Some years before, he had
paid a passing visit at Woodbridge to "the lonely philosopher, a man of
humorous melancholy mark, with his gray floating locks, sitting among his
doves.... We fell at once into the old humour, as if we had been parted
twenty days instead of so many years." It is a rarity in modern life that
two such men as Tennyson and FitzGerald, whose mutual friendship was never
shaken, should have met but once in some twenty-five years, although
divided by no more space than could be traversed by a three hours' railway
journey. "Tiresias" was soon followed by "Locksley Hall: Sixty Years
After"; then, in 1889, came "Demeter" and other poems; until, in 1892, the
volume containing the "Death of Oenone" and "Akbar's Dream" closed the
long series of poems which had held two generations under their charm. One
line in the second "Locksley Hall" its author held to be the best of the
kind he had ever written:
Universal ocean softly washing all her warless isles;
though in my poor judgment the harmony seems marred by the frequent
sibilants, which vex all English composers[97]; and the suggestion that
the sea would become stormless when the land should be at peace may be
thought overbold.
It was but seasonable that his later poetry should have been tinged with
autumnal colouring. The philosophic bent of his mind had necessarily grown
with increasing years; its range had been widened by constant assimilation
with the scientific ideas of the day, with social and political changes;
but as far horizons breed sadness and wistful uncertainty, so his later
verse leans more toward the moral lessons of experience, toward
reflective and retrospective views of life and character. In poetry, as in
prose, the sequel to a fine original piece has very rarely, if ever, been
successful; though the second part, when it follows the first after a long
interval, often exhibits the special value that comes from alteration of
style and the natural changes of mood. Tennyson himself thought that "the
two 'Locksley Halls' were likely to be in the future two of the most
historically interesting of his poems, as descriptive of the tone of the
age at two distant periods of his life." In my opinion, the interest is
less historical than biographical, in the sense that the second poem takes
its deeper shade from the darkening that seems to have overspread his
later meditations. For the interval of sixty years had, in fact, brought
increased activity and enterprising eagerness to the English people; and
the gray thoughts of the sequel, the heavier feeling of errors and perils
encompassing the onward path toward the remote ideal, are the Poet's own.
He employed them, it is true, for the dramatic presentation of old age,
and disclaimed any identity with the imaginary personage.
However this may be, the poems that appeared toward the close of his long
literary career show a change of manner. We miss, to some degree, the
delicate handling, the self-restraint, the serene air of his best
compositions; there is a certain gloominess of atmosphere,[98] breaking
out occasionally into vehement expression, in the rolling dithyrambic
stanzas of "Vastness," "The Dawn," or "The Dreamer." In the "Death of
Oenone," the beautiful antique nymph of Tennyson's youth, deserted and
passionately lamenting on many-fountained Ida, has become soured and
vindictive.[99] She is now a jealous wife, to whose feet Paris, dying
from the poisoned arrow, crawls "lame, crooked, reeling," to be spurned as
an adulterer, who may "go back to his adulteress and die." Here the Poet
abandons the style and feeling of Hellenic tradition;[100] the echo of the
old-world story has died away; it is rather the voice of some tragedy
queen posing as the injured wife of modern society; and one remembers that
the Homeric adulteress, Helen of Troy, went back to live happily and
respected with her husband in Sparta. It was not to be expected that
Tennyson's later inspirations should reach the supreme level of the poems
which he wrote in his prime, or that there should be no ebb from the
high-water mark that he touched, in my opinion, fifty years earlier in
1842.[101] Yet hardly any poet has so long retained consummate mastery of
his instrument, or has published so little that might have been omitted
with advantage or without detriment to his permanent reputation. And it
will never be forgotten that he wrote "Crossing the Bar" in his
eighty-first year.
It is clear from the _Memoir_, at any rate, that the burden of nigh
fourscore years weakened none of his interest in literature and art, in
political and philosophical speculation, or diminished his resources of
humorous observation and anecdote. Among many recollections he told of
Hallam (the historian) saying to him, "I have lived to read Carlyle's
_French Revolution_, but I cannot get on, the style is so abominable;" and
of Carlyle groaning about Hallam's _Constitutional History_: "Eh, it's a
miserable skeleton of a book"--bringing out into short and sharp contrast
two opposite schools, the picturesque and the precise, of
history-writing. Robert Browning's death in December 1889 distressed him
greatly; it was, moreover, a forewarning to the elder of two brothers, if
not equals, in renown. In 1890 Oliver Wendell Holmes, who was Tennyson's
junior by only twenty-three days, wrote to him:
I am proud of my birth-year, and humbled when I think of who were and
who are my coevals. Darwin, the destroyer and creator; Lord Houghton,
the pleasant and kind-hearted lover of men of letters; Gladstone, whom
I leave it to you to characterise, but whose vast range of
intellectual powers few will question; Mendelssohn, whose music still
rings in our ears; and the Laureate, whose "jewels five words
long"--many of them a good deal longer--sparkle in our memories.
He wrote kindly to William Watson and Rudyard Kipling, whose patriotic
verse pleased him; and twelve months later Watson paid a grateful tribute
to his memory in one of the best among many threnodies. He spoke of
Carlyle's having come to smoke a pipe with him one evening in London,
"when the talk turned upon the immortality of the soul, upon which Carlyle
said, 'Eh, old Jewish rags, you must clear your mind of all that. Why
should we expect a hereafter?'" and likened man's sojourn on earth to a
traveller's rest at an inn, whereupon Tennyson turned the simile against
him. His son describes how the old man's "dignity and repose of manner,
his low musical voice, and the power of his magnetic eye kept the
attention riveted." In August 1892 Lord Selborne and the Master of Balliol
visited him; but
... he did not feel strong enough for religious discussions with
Jowett, and begged Jowett not to consult with him or argue with him,
as was his wont, on points of philosophy and religious doubt. The
Master answered him with a remarkable utterance: "Your poetry has an
element of philosophy more to be considered _than any regular
philosophy in England_";
which is certainly an ambiguous and possibly not an extravagant eulogy.
The final chapter of the _Memoir_ gives, briefly, some sentences from his
last talks, and describes a peaceful and noble ending. He found his
Christianity undisturbed by jarring of sects and creeds; but he said, "I
dread the losing hold of forms. I have expressed this in my 'Akbar.'" The
welfare of the British Empire, its expansion and its destiny, had been
from the beginning and were to the end of his poetic career matters of
intense pride and concern to him. When, in September 1892, he fell
seriously ill, and Sir Andrew Clark arrived, the physician and the patient
fell to discussing Gray's "Elegy"; and a few days later, being much worse,
he sent for his Shakespeare, tried to read but had to let his son read for
him. Next day he said: "'I want the blinds up, I want to see the sky and
the light.' He repeated 'The sky and the light.' It was a glorious
morning, and the warm sunshine was flooding the weald of Sussex and the
line of South Downs, which were seen from his window." On the second day
after this he passed away very quietly. The funeral service in Westminster
Abbey, with its two anthems--"Crossing the Bar" and "The Silent
Voices"--filling the long-drawn aisle and, rising to the fretted vault
above the heads of a great congregation, will long be remembered by those
who were present. "The tributes of sympathy," his son writes, "which we
received from many countries and from all classes and creeds, were not
only remarkable for their universality, but for their depth of feeling."
To those who had so long lived with him, the loss of one whom they had
tended for many years with devoted affection and reverence was indeed
irreparable. Yet they had the consolation of knowing that his life had
been on the whole happy and fortunate, marked by singularly few griefs or
troubles; that he had proved himself a master of the high calling which he
set before himself, and departed, full of honours, at the coming of the
time when no man can work.
A collection of letters that passed between the Queen and Tennyson,
including two from Her Majesty to his son on receiving the news of
Tennyson's death, is added to the _Memoir_; and the volume closes with
"Recollections of the Poet," written at some length, by Lord Selborne,
Jowett, John Tyndall, F. Myers, F. T. Palgrave, and the Duke of Argyll.
These papers will be read, as they deserve to be, with attentive interest
for their descriptions of the personal characteristics, recorded by those
who knew him best, of a very remarkable man; they show also how his poems
were conceived and elaborated, they trace his thoughts on high subjects,
and they contain very ample dissertations on his poetry. They inevitably
anticipate the work of the public reviewer, who cannot pretend to write
with equal authority, while it is not his business to criticize the
carefully composed opinions of others.