_Tennyson’s Diction_
In connection with his diction it will be convenient at first to
consider a single poem of Tennyson’s, which embodies most of the
characteristics of his style--this from _In Memoriam_--
Calm is the morn without a sound,
Calm as to suit a calmer grief,
And only thro’ the faded leaf
The chestnut pattering to the ground:
Calm and deep peace on this high wold,
And on these dews that drench the furze
And all the silvery gossamers
That twinkle into green and gold:
Calm and still light on yon great plain
That sweeps with all its autumn bowers,
And crowded farms and lessening towers,
To mingle with the bounding main:
Calm and deep peace in this wide air,
These leaves that redden to the fall;
And in my heart, if calm at all,
If any calm, a calm despair;
Calm on the seas, and silver sleep,
And waves that sway themselves in rest,
And dead calm in that noble breast
Which heaves but with the heaving deep.
First in these lines is apparent a poetic virtue of which Tennyson was
an almost constant master, the faculty for seeing a natural object in
minutely exact definition. “Thro’ the faded leaf The chestnut pattering
to the ground,” the “dews that drench the furze,” the whole of the
third stanza, the “waves that sway themselves in rest,” each phrase
is incontrovertible evidence of a thing personally seen with creative
intensity. In the first of these examples we see how Tennyson could
manage that elaboration of the simple statement, which is the first of
the four problems that have been discussed as awaiting him. If Chaucer
had been presenting an autumn landscape--which, in his preoccupation
with spring, he very rarely did--and had wanted to use foliage as a
figure, he would almost certainly have been content with “the faded
leaf” without embellishment, and from his tongue the economy would
have been convincing. But by Tennyson’s time the phrase by itself
would have been something barren, and it needed fertilising by some
further imaginative life. To the simple image Tennyson adds another,
and together they brighten into one perfect realisation. Faded leaves,
falling chestnuts--there for any schoolboy’s observation, and yet,
placed thus exactly, the witnesses of a rich poetic power in full
exercise. And whenever Tennyson felt called upon to intensify the
simple statement of a natural object, he was able to do it by reference
to his own vivid experience, and thus to deal satisfactorily with the
problem in question, and also, so far as the delineation of landscape
(as apart from the further questions of human emotion and character)
was concerned, to keep his yellow sands away from coral. If he wants to
speak of marshy waste-lands, the “glooming flats” of Lincolnshire are
to mind for his purpose, and the “glooming” is the signature written
at once; if the violets were to blow, he had seen them “thick by ashen
roots”; and even the familiar poppy in sleep he has seen precisely
hanging from “the craggy ledge.” I have said that Tennyson heightened
his images in this way whenever he felt called upon to do so--called
upon, that is to say, by the unaccountable poetic impulse. It was, even
with so deliberate an artist, no matter of course to do this, and he
was often, and by a just instinct, content to leave the simple image in
its simplicity, though he would be careful not to leave it unfortified
by some such intensification near at hand. Love is to be looked for not
only “by the happy threshold” but also
hand in hand with Plenty in the maize,
Or red with spirted purple of the vats,
Or foxlike in the vine ...
though sometimes the poet leaves magic to the barest statement with an
entirely just confidence, as in--
And the sun went down, and the stars came out far
over the summer sea ...
where even Chaucer is matched for rich economy of descriptive effect.
In which connection it may be as well here to remark that Tennyson was
a notable example of the poets who pass in the evolution of their
style from a luxuriously decorative manner to this same economy as a
final characteristic. And it is a characteristic that can be arrived
at through evolution only, it can never as it were be jumped at in the
beginning. The simplicity of ignorance is inevitably bald commonplace,
but the simplicity slowly achieved out of a vast poetic experience may
be _Crossing the Bar_. It may be worth while to look again at
this noble lyric, set beside something of the poet’s early luxuriance.
_The Lady of Shalott_ was written when he was twenty-three years
old:--
A bow-shot from her bower-eaves,
He rode between the barley-sheaves,
The sun came dazzling thro’ the leaves,
And flamed upon the brazen greaves
Of bold Sir Lancelot.
A red-cross knight for ever kneel’d
To a lady in his shield,
That sparkled on the yellow field,
Beside remote Shalott.
* * * * *
All in the blue unclouded weather
Thick-jewell’d shone the saddle leather,
The helmet and the helmet-feather
Burn’d like one burning flame together,
As he rode down to Camelot.
As often thro’ the purple night,
Below the starry clusters bright
Some bearded meteor, trailing light,
Moves over still Shalott.
The missal-like illumination of verse such as this will be further
mentioned, but for the moment I want merely to contrast it with this,
written sixty years later, when the poet was over eighty:--
Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea.
But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.
Twilight and evening bell,
And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
When I embark;
For tho’ from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crost the bar.
In the diction of that there is a serene directness that has been won
only out of many years of technical liberality.
The second of our problems in diction, that of keeping clear of
words with a too definitely associative value, Tennyson met in his
best work by a steady concentration on his own subject. Although
in actual craftsmanship he was sophisticated and selective in a
far more than common degree, an unusually self-conscious artist,
in the spiritual and emotional content of his poetry Tennyson had
hardly any virtuosity at all. His success or failure in philosophic
originality will be discussed in a later section of this essay, but
the point here is that in the experiences of his soul he may often
have been strangely disingenuous for a major poet, but he was always
absolutely himself. His poetic technique is clearly and manifoldly
subject to influence--Shakespeare, Milton, Pope even, Byron by
glimpses, Keats--without any one of these his manner would have been a
little different, but upon the emotional life of his poetry there is
practically no literary influence discernible at all. The tumultuous
passion of the Elizabethans, the subtle lay metaphysic of Donne,
Milton’s darkly voluptuous Puritanism, Herrick’s exquisitely tutored
rustic urbanity, Wordsworth’s moral clairvoyance--all these might never
have existed in poetry at all for the traces of them to be found in the
self-portraiture figured in Tennyson’s art. Whether the fact is to be
accounted as a defect or a virtue depends upon what we ask of poetry.
To return to our passage from _In Memoriam_--
Calm is the morn without a sound ...
we cannot but at once allow the obvious excellence of the mere writing,
but if we want acute analysis of sorrow in her more elusive moods
or discovering flights of mysticism, we shall find little enough of
satisfaction. Here is nothing but the most childlike assertion of
calm grief and its reflection in the calm dissolution of an autumn
landscape. But if we are content with a mood so unvexed by argument,
a thought so incapable of obscurity, we shall be well rewarded. For
this very fixity of emotional purpose, to be confused perhaps by an
unsympathetic judgment with an empty self-sufficiency, achieves its
own purity of poetic style with, for us, its accompanying delight.
It is just because Tennyson is so singly intent upon the elementary
content matter of his poetry that he has no need of care to avoid
assuming other men’s emotions, or, more precisely, their emotional
accent. In the “calm is the morn” passage there is not a word that is
obviously reminiscent. Tennyson’s mind may be a figure of homespun in
the intellectual world, but it can appear in any company without the
slightest embarrassment and apparently without any temptation to ape
livelier or more ceremonious wits. This poet was in a literal sense too
simple to be in even remote danger of borrowing “sessions.”
Of the journalistic virus Tennyson’s style cannot be said to be so
entirely free. When he was concerned with the life of his own moods
he was, as has just been said, proof against poetic suggestion from
without, but when his subject was some public occasion or some external
event that only accidentally came within his own experience, he was
not so wholly proof against the _clichés_ of journalism. It is
true that he was one of the best occasional poets in the language, and
particularly in the graver manner of his laureate office. And yet, even
in the justly famous _Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington_
there is, in parts at least, a lower level of integrity in expression
than, for example again, in our passage from _In Memoriam_,
where, with the doubtful exception of “that noble breast,” there is
not a word that is not manifestly of the poet’s own minting. But in
the Ode, written clearly upon an occasion by which Tennyson was deeply
moved, and one rich in associations that were of peculiar appeal to his
genius, he cannot keep his style wholly free of editorial influence.
This is not to speak in disparagement of a poem to which on the
whole the term magnificent is not misapplied, and one of the supreme
successes of its kind. But to acknowledge this is not to concede that
the whole of the splendid eulogy of “the statesman-warrior, moderate,
resolute” is couched in terms of pure poetry. It was hardly the
Tennyson of the finest authority whom we find addressing Nelson thus--
Thine island loves thee well, thou famous man,
The greatest sailor since our world began....
and Wellington as--
England’s greatest son,
He that gain’d a hundred fights
Nor ever lost an English gun ...
and as being
as the greatest only are,
In his simplicity sublime ...
who called upon an unregenerate world to
Let his great example stand
Colossal, seen of every land ...
and exclaimed that on Napoleon’s overthrow at Waterloo
Heaven flash’d a sudden jubilant ray.
These are not the simplicities of
Calm and deep peace in this wide air,
These leaves that redden to the fall;
And in my heart, if calm at all,
If any calm, a calm despair ...
nor of such things as this, from the Ode itself--
More than is of man’s degree
Must be with us, watching here
At this, our great solemnity.
Whom we see not we revere,
We revere, and we refrain
From talk of battles loud and vain,
And brawling memories all too free
For such a wise humility
As befits a solemn fane;
We revere, and while we hear
The tides of Music’s golden sea
Setting towards eternity,
Uplifted high in heart and hope are we,
Until we doubt not that for one so true
There must be other nobler work to do
Than when he fought at Waterloo ...
Nor, on the other hand, are the passages here questioned, and others
like them, instances of the lowered tension in writing such as we
often find introduced with artistic propriety into narrative poetry.
They are, rather, indications that the poet is momentarily relaxed
in creative attention, and borrowing, and from a bad source at that.
Other examples may be found by those who care to look for them, in both
_Locksley Halls_, and in a way, though less evidently and with
more excuse, from such amusing exercises as the Northern Farmer poems.
Tis’n them as ’as munny as breäks into ’ouses an’ steäls,
Them as ’as coäts to their backs an’ taäkes their regular meäls.
Noä, but it’s them as niver knaws wheer a meäl’s to be ’ad.
Taäke my word for it, Sammy, the poor in a loomp is bad.
That has humorous charm, and as a _tour de force_ in writing its
merit is obvious. But it comes something short of poetry, because it
is fundamentally an expression which is not natural to the poet. It is
witty and extremely sensitive reporting, but it is no more, in so far,
that is to say, as the diction is concerned, the selective and shaping
power of art not being here in question. In saying that poetic language
should be based on common idiom, we mean an idiom that is naturally
within the poet’s range, part of his own expressive habit, not an idiom
that he deliberately copies. The Northern Farmer poems remain brilliant
strokes of virtuosity, but Tennyson the poet had very little to do with
them. It must be repeated, however, that in the great body of his work
that explores the world of his own emotions, his response to nature and
his simple but ever-brooding speculation, there is hardly a hint of the
journalist confusing the poet.
Tennyson in relation to the fourth of our problems, that of allowing
natural objects to call up ready-shaped images in association from the
stores of poetry, has already been briefly considered in connection
with his faded leaf and falling chestnut. And in this matter he was no
more troubled when the content of his poetry was something other than
natural description and its inferences. He writes--
And I would that my tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me ...
but so intent is the mood that the siren voices of literature are
beyond hearing, and on a sea unruffled by any alien wind
the stately ships go on
To their haven under the hill.
When Tennyson first published his poetry--or the more significant
part of his juvenile poetry--there would be little to impress itself
as remarkable originality of style, and this was as it should be.
It is only the eccentric in art that arrests garrulous attention,
an attention that has no memory. But the readers of the volumes of
1830 and 1833 could not but be aware that here was the old faculty
speaking with a note of new personality, an impression to be strikingly
confirmed in 1842. This was English poetry plainly enough, quite
content to give tradition its due, properly proud of its ancestry, and
yet it was the work of a man deeply engaged, indeed almost reclusively
so, in the artistic ordering of his own spiritual life. In so far as he
satisfactorily solved the technical problems that have been mentioned,
he did so by a subconscious instinct of the creative mind--they
cannot, it is needless to say, have appeared to him in the simple
tabulation that we are able to give them at this distance of time.
But the instinct that performed this office for him told him too that
in drawing freely upon the tradition of English versification he must
also add to it to be justified of his calling. This is true of every
poet, but Tennyson knew it more decidedly, or at least more explicitly,
than most. Tennyson’s subject matter could not well have been more
unsophisticated, less affected by the challenge of the spiritual
experience of the great poets who preceded him; but at the same time
his style could not well have been more manipulated, more meticulously
and self-consciously wrought into the highest excellence that he could
attain. The picture of Tennyson as a “poet of the file,” forever
labouring in a lapidarian discontent, is, perhaps, one that has been
overdrawn, but hardly any creative faculty of the first rank in poetry
has ever been so pervaded by the mood of the artificer. Nothing could
be wider of the truth than to argue that the poise and balance and
perfect dovetailing that mark all his best versification are merely so
much decoration, a kind of seductive jugglery that used up good energy
that might have been better employed. It was his peculiar distinction
as a poetic craftsman that he was able to work his style to the highest
pitch of minutely considered arrangement without sacrificing anything
of spontaneity in effect.
The stanzas quoted from _The Lady of Shalott_ show something of
Tennyson’s deftness in the disposition of his words. A more matured
example is this from _The Princess_--
Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white;
Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk;
Nor winks the gold fin in the porphyry font:
The firefly wakens: waken thou with me.
Now droops the milk-white peacock like a ghost,
And like a ghost she glimmers on to me.
Now lies the Earth all Danaë to the stars,
And all thy heart lies open unto me.
Now slides the silent meteor on, and leaves
A shining furrow, as thy thoughts in me.
Now folds the lily all her sweetness up,
And slips into the bosom of the lake:
So fold thyself, my dearest, thou, and slip
Into my bosom and be lost in me:
A good deal has been said by critics about Tennyson’s mastery over
vowel and consonantal movement, but, in the light of such instances
as this, certainly not more than enough, and in these later days at
least rather less, I think, than is due. It is easy for unsympathetic
criticism to see nothing but manufactured verse in this poem, but it
is always easy for unsympathetic criticism to be stupidly unjust. This
is not merely fine writing, it is style, and not to allow this is to
be wanton about Tennyson altogether. Whatever personal taste may say,
considered judgment should not permit itself to be blinded thus by
partialities. That the artistry in these lines is deliberate, proving
itself at every word, indeed at every letter, is unquestionable, but it
is equally clear that the fusion of a poetic mood into this limpidly
composed expression is complete. The perfect packing or building of the
words, as though they had something of the quality of solid material
in them, was for Tennyson an actual means of expression, and one in
which he has never been excelled, and, perhaps, never equalled. Under
analysis two lines in the poem call for separate comment.
Nor winks the gold fin in the porphyry font
is exquisitely done, but detraction might protest that it is just a
shade too assertively picturesque, and there is, moreover, for once a
definite reminiscence of Keats with his “beaded bubbles winking at the
brim.” The line is, in some odd way, almost too good. Then we have that
other one,
Now lies the Earth all Danaë to the stars,
which stands out by itself, as it would do in any context, by sheer
imaginative power. But the poem for the rest is a normal illustration
of Tennyson’s method. The verbal opulence is peculiarly his own. It is
not like that of Keats, such as he uses in many passages of _The Eve
of St. Agnes_, where the inspiration is an almost swooning delight
in tropical colours and spiced odours and textures very mellow to the
touch. Keats aimed at and succeeded marvellously in finding in words
some equivalence for these sensations, but with Tennyson the artistic
intention was to arrest some almost impalpable property in the words
themselves. When we charge a poet with merely using words we can only
mean that he is using impoverished words. To complain that Tennyson
overestimated the power of words to give up some remote, and as it
were almost independent, life of their own to the poet’s incantation,
is to complain that he presumed to look upon language as in itself a
source of poetic life, which was no very wild thing for a poet to do,
since life, like God, does move in a mysterious way. “Now droops the
milk-white peacock like a ghost,” “Now slides the silent meteor on,”
“Now folds the lily all her sweetness up, And slips into the bosom of
the lake”--these words are revealing something at Tennyson’s touch that
they had kept to themselves before. What precisely it is we cannot say,
because it exists only in terms of Tennyson’s divine manipulation. We
can talk, rationally enough, about vowels and consonants, but we are
still compelled to leave something unsaid. But we miss much of the
essential Tennyson if we do not recognise that in his orchestration of
language he was, in a sense almost peculiar to himself among poets,
creating life. “The chestnut pattering to the ground,” already quoted,
may be given as another case in point. “Pattering” is here something
more than the best word in the usual sense. It is true that it is
more precise than “falling,” or “dropping,” but when that margin of
superiority is allowed for there is still something over. And that
something is not a lucky but inessential grace; it is life, and life of
Tennyson’s especial engendering.
This was, I think, Tennyson’s particular enrichment of the tradition
that he took up. A few other poets, Rossetti, for example, and others
less celebrated, such as de Tabley, caught something of the way of
it, but on the whole it was a very personal thing, perfected by its
originator,[4] and not having any lasting influence. With Tennyson came
and went the vital undertone of such lines as--
The moan of doves in immemorial elms,
The murmuring of innumerable bees.
If it was heard again it could be as an echo only.