Chapter 8
All emotion—that of communities as well as that of individuals—is largely governed by the laws of ebb and flow. It is immediately after a national mourning for the loss of a great man that a wave of reaction generally sets in. But the eagerness with which these volumes {132} have been awaited shows that Tennyson’s hold upon the British public is as strong at this moment as it was on the day of his death. This very popularity of his, however, has sometimes been spoken of by critics as though it were an impeachment of him as a poet. “The English public is commonplace,” they say, “and hence the commonplace in poetry suits it.” And no doubt this is true as a general saying, otherwise what would become of certain English poetasters who are such a joy to the many and such a source of laughter to the few? But a hardy critic would he be who should characterize Tennyson’s poetry as commonplace—that very poetry which, before it became popular, was decried because it was merely “poetry for poets.” Still that poetry so rich and so rare as his should find its way to the heart of a people like the English, who have “not sufficient poetic instinct in them to give birth to vernacular poetry,” is undoubtedly a striking fact. With regard to the mass of his work, he belonged to those poets whose appeal is as much through their mastery over the more subtle beauties of poetic art as through the heat of the poetic fire; and such as these must expect to share the fate of Coleridge, Keats, and Shelley. Every true poet must have an individual accent of his own—an accent which is, however, recognizable as another variation of that large utterance of the early gods common to all true poets in all tongues. Is it not, then, in the nature of things that, in England at least, “the fit though few” comprise the audience of such a poet until the voice of recognized Authority proclaims him? But Authority moves slowly in these matters; years have to pass before the music of the new voice can wind its way through the convolutions of the general ear—so many years, indeed, that unless the poet is blessed with the sublime self-esteem of Wordsworth he generally has to die in the belief that his is another name “written in water.” And was it always so? Yes, always.
England having, as we have said, no vernacular song, her poetry is entirely artistic, even such poetry as ‘The May Queen,’ ‘The Northern Farmer,’ and the idyls of William Barnes. And it would be strange indeed if, until Authority spoke out, the beauties of artistic poetry were ever apparent to the many. Is it supposable, for instance, that even the voice of Chaucer—is it supposable that even the voice of Shakspeare—would have succeeded in winning the contemporary ear had it not been for that great mass of legendary and romantic material which each of these found ready to his hand, waiting to be moulded into poetic form? The fate, however, of Moore’s poetical narratives (perhaps we might say of Byron’s too) shows that if any poetry is to last beyond the generation that produced it, there is needed not only the romantic material, but also the accent, new and true, of the old poetic voice. And these volumes show why in these late days, when the poet’s inheritance of romantic material seemed to have been exhausted, there appeared one poet to whom the English public gave an acceptance as wide almost as if he had written in the vernacular like Burns or Béranger.
It is long since any book has been so eagerly looked forward to as this. The main facts of Tennyson’s life have been matter of familiar knowledge for so many years that we do not propose to run over them here once more. Nor shall we fill the space at our command with the biographer’s interesting personal anecdotes. So fierce a light had been beating upon Aldworth and Farringford that the relations of the present Lord Tennyson to his father were pretty generally known. In the story of English poetry these relations held a place that was quite unique. What the biographer says about the poet’s sagacity, judgment, and good sense—especially what he says about his insight into the characters of those with whom he was brought into contact—will be challenged by no one who knew him. Still, the fact remains that Tennyson’s temperament was poetic entirely. And the more attention the poet pays to his art, the more unfitted does he become to pay attention to anything else. For in these days the mechanism of social life moves on grating wheels that need no little oiling if the poet is to bring out the very best that is within him. Not that all poets are equally vexed by the special infirmity of the poetic temperament. Poets like Wordsworth, for instance, are supported against the world by love of Nature and by that “divine arrogance” which is sometimes a characteristic of genius. Tennyson’s case shows that not even love of Nature and intimate communings with her are of use in giving a man peace when he has not Wordsworth’s temperament. No adverse criticism could disturb Wordsworth’s sublime self-complacency.
“Your father,” writes Jowett, with his usual wisdom, to Lord Tennyson, “was very sensitive, and had an honest hatred of being gossiped about. He called the malignant critics and chatterers ‘mosquitos.’ He never felt any pleasure at praise (except from his friends), but he felt a great pain at the injustice of censure. It never occurred to him that a new poet in the days of his youth was sure to provoke dangerous hostilities in the ‘genus irritabile vatum’ and in the old-fashioned public.”
It might almost be said, indeed, that had it not been for the ministrations, first of his beloved wife, and then of his sons, Tennyson’s life would have been one long warfare between the attitude of his splendid intellect towards the universe and the response of his nervous system to human criticism. From his very childhood he seems to have had that instinct for confronting the universe as a whole which, except in the case of Shakespeare, is not often seen among poets. Star-gazing and speculation as to the meaning of the stars and what was going on in them seem to have begun in his childhood. In his first Cambridge letter to his aunt, Mrs. Russell, written from No. 12, Rose Crescent, he says, “I am sitting owl-like and solitary in my room, nothing between me and the stars but a stratum of tiles.” And his son tells us of a story current in the family that Frederick, when an Eton schoolboy, was shy of going to a neighbouring dinner-party to which he had been invited. “Fred,” said his younger brother, “think of Herschel’s great star-patches, and you will soon get over all that.” He had Wordsworth’s passion, too, for communing with Nature alone. He was one of Nature’s elect who knew that even the company of a dear and intimate friend, howsoever close, is a disturbance of the delight that intercourse with her can afford to the true devotee. In a letter to his future wife, written from Mablethorpe in 1839, he says:—
“I am not so able as in old years to commune _alone_ with Nature . . . Dim mystic sympathies with tree and hill reaching far back into childhood, a known landskip is to me an old friend, that continually talks to me of my own youth and half-forgotten things, and indeed does more for me than many an old friend that I know. An old park is my delight, and I could tumble about it for ever.”
Moreover, he was always speculating upon the mystery and the wonder of the human story. “The far future,” he says in a letter to Miss Sellwood, written from High Beech in Epping Forest, “has been my world always.” And yet so powerless is reason in that dire wrestle with temperament which most poets know, that with all these causes for despising criticism of his work, Tennyson was as sensitive to critical strictures as Wordsworth was indifferent. “He fancied,” says his biographer, “that England was an unsympathetic atmosphere, and half resolved to live abroad in Jersey, in the South of France, or in Italy. He was so far persuaded that the English people would never care for his poetry, that, had it not been for the intervention of his friends, he declared it not unlikely that after the death of Hallam he would not have continued to write.” And again, in reference to the completion of ‘The Sleeping Beauty,’ his son says, “He warmed to his work because there had been a favourable review of him lately published in far-off Calcutta.”
We dwell upon this weakness of Tennyson’s—a weakness which, in view of his immense powers, was certainly a source of wonder to his friends—in order to show, once for all, that without the tender care of his son he could never in his later years have done the work he did. This it was which caused the relations between Tennyson and the writer of this admirable memoir to be those of brother with brother rather than of father with son. And those who have been eagerly looking forward to these volumes will not be disappointed. In writing the life of any man there are scores and scores of facts and documents, great and small, which only some person closely acquainted with him, either as relative or as friend, can bring into their true light; and this it is which makes documents so deceptive. Here is an instance of what we mean. In writing to Thompson, Spedding says of Tennyson on a certain occasion: “I could not get Alfred to Rydal Mount. He would and would not (sulky one!), although Wordsworth was hospitably minded towards him.” This remark would inevitably have been construed into another instance of that churlishness which is so often said (though quite erroneously) to have been one of Tennyson’s infirmities. But when we read the following foot-note by the biographer, “He said he did not wish to intrude himself on the great man at Rydal,” we accept the incident as another proof of that “humility” which the son alludes to in his preface as being one of his father’s characteristics. And of such evidence that had not the poet’s son written his biography the loss to literature would have been incalculable the book is full. Evidence of a fine intellect, a fine culture, and a sure judgment is afforded by every page—afforded as much by what is left unsaid as by what is said.
The biographer has invited a few of the poet’s friends to furnish their impressions of him. These could not fail to be interesting; it is pleasant to know what impression Tennyson made upon men of such diverse characters as the Duke of Argyll, Jowett, Tyndall, Froude, and others. But so far as a vital portrait of the man is concerned they were not needed, so vigorously does the man live in the portrait painted by him who knew the poet best of all.
“For my own part,” says the biographer, “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. There is also the impossibility of fathoming a great man’s mind; his deeper thoughts are hardly ever revealed. He himself disliked the notion of a long, formal biography, for
None can truly write his single day, And none can write it for him upon earth.
“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.
“For those who cared to know about his literary history he wrote ‘Merlin and the Gleam.’ From his boyhood he had felt the magic of Merlin—that spirit of poetry—which bade him know his power and follow throughout his work a pure and high ideal, with a simple and single devotedness and a desire to ennoble the life of the world, and which helped him through doubts and difficulties to ‘endure as seeing Him who is invisible.’
Great the Master, And sweet the Magic, When over the valley, In early summers, Over the mountain, On human faces, And all around me, Moving to melody, Floated the Gleam.
“In his youth he sang of the brook flowing through his upland valley, of the ‘ridged wolds’ that rose above his home, of the mountain-glen and snowy summits of his early dreams, and of the beings, heroes and fairies, with which his imaginary world was peopled. Then was heard the ‘croak of the raven,’ the harsh voice of those who were unsympathetic—
The light retreated, The Landskip darken’d, The melody deaden’d, The Master whisper’d, ‘Follow the Gleam.’
“Still the inward voice told him not to be faint-hearted but to follow his ideal. And by the delight in his own romantic fancy, and by the harmonies of nature, ‘the warble of water,’ and ‘cataract music of falling torrents,’ the inspiration of the poet was renewed. His Eclogues and English Idyls followed, when he sang the songs of country life and the joys and griefs of country folk, which he knew through and through,
Innocent maidens, Garrulous children, Homestead and harvest, Reaper and gleaner, And rough-ruddy faces Of lowly labour.
“By degrees, having learnt somewhat of the real philosophy of life and of humanity from his own experience, he rose to a melody ‘stronger and statelier.’ He celebrated the glory of ‘human love and of human heroism’ and of human thought, and began what he had already devised, his epic of King Arthur, ‘typifying above all things the life of man,’ wherein he had intended to represent some of the great religions of the world. He had purposed that this was to be the chief work of his manhood. Yet the death of his friend, Arthur Hallam, and the consequent darkening of the whole world for him made him almost fail in this purpose; nor any longer for a while did he rejoice in the splendour of his spiritual visions, nor in the Gleam that had ‘waned to a wintry glimmer.’
Clouds and darkness Closed upon Camelot; Arthur had vanish’d I knew not whither, The King who loved me, And cannot die.
“Here my father united the two Arthurs, the Arthur of the Idylls and the Arthur ‘the man he held as half divine.’ He himself had fought with death, and had come out victorious to find ‘a stronger faith his own,’ and a hope for himself, for all those in sorrow and for universal human kind, that never forsook him through the future years.
And broader and brighter The Gleam flying onward, Wed to the melody, Sang thro’ the world.
* * *
I saw, wherever In passing it glanced upon Hamlet or city, That under the Crosses The dead man’s garden, The mortal hillock, Would break into blossom; And so to the land’s Last limit I came.
“Up to the end he faced death with the same earnest and unfailing courage that he had always shown, but with an added sense of the awe and the mystery of the Infinite.
I can no longer, But die rejoicing, For thro’ the Magic Of Him the Mighty, Who taught me in childhood, There on the border Of boundless Ocean, And all but in Heaven Hovers the Gleam.
“That is the reading of the poet’s riddle as he gave it to me. He thought that ‘Merlin and the Gleam’ would probably be enough of biography for those friends who urged him to write about himself. However, this has not been their verdict, and I have tried to do what he said that I might do.”
There are many specialists in Tennysonian bibliography who take a pride (and a worthy pride) in their knowledge of the master’s poems. But the knowledge of all of these specialists put together is not equal to that of him who writes this book. Not only is every line at his fingers’ ends, but he knows, either from his own memory or from what his father has told him, where and when and why every line was written. He, however, shares, it is evident that dislike—rather let us say that passionate hatred—which his father, like so many other poets, had of that well-intentioned but vexing being whom Rossetti anathematized as the “literary resurrection man.” Rossetti used to say that “of all signs that a man was devoid of poetic instinct and poetic feeling the impulse of the literary resurrectionist was the surest.” Without going so far as this we may at least affirm that all poets writing in a language requiring, as English does, much manipulation before it can be moulded into perfect form must needs revise in the brain before the line is set down, or in manuscript, as Shelley did, or partly in manuscript and partly in type, as Coleridge did. But the rakers-up of the “chips of the workshop,” to use Tennyson’s own phrase, seem to have been specially irritating to him, because he belonged to those poets who cannot really revise and complete their work till they see it in type. “Poetry,” he said, “looks better, more convincing in print.”
“From the volume of 1832,” says his son, “he omitted several stanzas of ‘The Palace of Art’ because he thought that the poem was too full. ‘The artist is known by his self-limitation’ was a favourite adage of his. He allowed me, however, to print some of them in my notes, otherwise I should have hesitated to quote without his leave lines that he had excised. He ‘gave the people of his best,’ and he usually wished that his best should remain without variorum readings, ‘the chips of the workshop,’ as he called them. The love of bibliomaniacs for first editions filled him with horror, for the first editions are obviously in many cases the worst editions, and once he said to me: ‘Why do they treasure the rubbish I shot from my full-finish’d cantos?’
νήπιοι ουδε ισασιν οσω πλέον ημισυ παντός.
For himself many passages in Wordsworth and other poets have been entirely spoilt by the modern habit of giving every various reading along with the text. Besides, in his case, very often what is published as the latest edition has been the original version in his first manuscript, so that there is no possibility of really tracing the history of what may seem to be a new word or a new passage. ‘For instance,’ he said, ‘in “Maud” a line in the first edition was ‘I will bury myself in _my books_, and the Devil may pipe to his own,’ which was afterwards altered to ‘I will bury myself _in myself_, &c.’: this was highly commended by the critics as an improvement on the _original_ reading—but it was actually in the first MS. draft of the poem.”
Again, it is important to get a statement by one entitled to speak with authority as to what Tennyson did and what he did not believe upon religious matters. He had in ‘In Memoriam’ and other poems touched with a hand so strong and sometimes so daring upon the teaching of modern science, and yet he had spoken always so reverently of what modern civilization reverences, that the most opposite lessons were read from his utterances. To one thinker it would seem that Tennyson had thrown himself boldly upon the very foremost wave of scientific thought. To another it would seem that Wordsworth (although, living and writing when he did, before the birth of the new cosmogony, he believed himself to be still in trammels of the old) was by temperament far more in touch with the new cosmogony than was Tennyson, who studied evolution more ardently than any poet since Lucretius. While Wordsworth, notwithstanding a conventional phrase here and there, had an apprehension of Nature without the ever-present idea of the Power behind her, Spinosa himself was not so “God-intoxicated” a man as Tennyson. His son sets the question at rest in the following pregnant words:—
“Assuredly Religion was no nebulous abstraction for him. He consistently emphasized his own belief in what he called the Eternal Truths; in an Omnipotent, Omnipresent, and All-loving God, Who has revealed Himself through the human attribute of the highest self-sacrificing love; in the freedom of the human will; and in the immortality of the soul. But he asserted that ‘Nothing worthy proving can be proven,’ and that even as to the great laws which are the basis of Science, ‘We have but faith, we cannot know.’ He dreaded the dogmatism of sects and rash definitions of God. ‘I dare hardly name His Name,’ he would say, and accordingly he named Him in ‘The Ancient Sage’ the ‘Nameless.’ ‘But take away belief in the self-conscious personality of God,’ he said, ‘and you take away the backbone of the world.’ ‘On God and God-like men we build our trust.’ A week before his death I was sitting by him, and he talked long of the Personality and of the Love of God, ‘That God, Whose eyes consider the poor,’ ‘Who catereth, even for the sparrow.’ ‘I should,’ he said, ‘infinitely rather feel myself the most miserable wretch on the face of the earth with a God above, than the highest type of man standing alone.’ He would allow that God is unknowable in ‘his whole world-self, and all-in-all,’ and that, therefore, there was some force in the objection made by some people to the word ‘Personality’ as being ‘anthropomorphic,’ and that, perhaps ‘Self-consciousness’ or ‘Mind’ might be clearer to them: but at the same time he insisted that, although ‘man is like a thing of nought’ in ‘the boundless plan,’ our highest view of God must be more or less anthropomorphic: and that ‘Personality,’ as far as our intelligence goes, is the widest definition and includes ‘Mind,’ ‘Self-consciousness,’ ‘Will,’ ‘Love,’ and other attributes of the Real, the Supreme, ‘the High and Lofty One that inhabiteth Eternity, Whose name is Holy.’”
And then Lord Tennyson quotes a manuscript note of Jowett’s in which he says:—
“Alfred Tennyson thinks it ridiculous to believe in a God and deny his consciousness, and was amused at some one who said of him that he had versified Hegelianism.”
He notes also an anecdote of Edward Fitzgerald’s which speaks of a week with Tennyson, when the poet, picking up a daisy, and looking closely at its crimson-tipped leaves, said, “Does not this look like a thinking Artificer, one who wishes to ornament?”
Here is a paragraph which will be read with the deepest interest, not only by every lover of poetry, but by every man whose heart has been rung by the most terrible of all bereavements—the loss of a beloved friend. Close as the tie of blood relationship undoubtedly is, it is based upon convention as much as upon nature. It may exist and flourish vigorously when there is little or no community of taste or of thought:—
“It may be as well to say here that all the letters from my father to Arthur Hallam were destroyed by his father after Arthur’s death: a great loss, as these particular letters probably revealed his inner self more truly than anything outside his poems.”
We confess to belonging to those who always read with a twinge of remorse the private letters of a man in print. But if there is a case where one must needs long to see the letters between two intimate friends, it is that of Tennyson and Arthur Hallam. They would have been only second in interest to Shakespeare’s letters to that mysterious “Mr. W. H.” whose identity now can never be traced. For, notwithstanding all that has recently been said, and ably said, to the contrary, the man to whom many of the sonnets were addressed was he whom “T. T.” addresses as “Mr. W. H.”