Chapter 9
But for an intimacy to be so strong as that which existed between Tennyson and Arthur H. Hallam there must be a kinship of soul so close and so rare that the tie of blood relationship seems weak beside it. It is then that friendship may sometimes pass from a sentiment into a passion. It did so in the case of Shakespeare and his mysterious friend, as the sonnets in question make manifest; but we are not aware that there is in English literature any other instance of friendship as a passion until we get to ‘In Memoriam.’ So profound was the effect of Hallam’s death upon Tennyson that it was the origin, his son tells us, of ‘The Two Voices; or, Thoughts of a Suicide.’ What was the secret of Hallam’s influence over Tennyson can never be guessed from anything that he has left behind either in prose or verse. But besides the creative genius of the artist there is that genius of personality which is irresistible. With a very large gift of this kind of genius Arthur Hallam seems to have been endowed.
“In the letters from Arthur Hallam’s friends,” says Lord Tennyson, “there was a rare unanimity of opinion about his worth. Milnes, writing to his father, says that he had a ‘very deep respect’ for Hallam, and that Thirlwall, in after years the great bishop, for whom Hallam and my father had a profound affection, was ‘actually captivated by him.’ When at Cambridge with Hallam he had written: ‘He is the only man here of my own standing before whom I bow in conscious inferiority in everything.’ Alford writes: ‘Hallam was a man of wonderful mind and knowledge on all subjects, hardly credible at his age. . . . I long ago set him down for the most wonderful person I ever knew. He was of the most tender, affectionate disposition.’”
Lord Tennyson’s remarks upon the ‘Idylls of the King,’ and upon the enormous success of the book have a special interest, and serve to illustrate our opening remarks upon the popularity of his father’s works. Popular as Tennyson had become through ‘The Gardener’s Daughter,’ ‘The Miller’s Daughter,’ ‘The May Queen,’ ‘The Lord of Burleigh,’ and scores of other poems—endeared to every sorrowing heart as he had become through ‘In Memoriam’—it was the ‘Idylls of the King’ that secured for him his unique place. Many explanations of the phenomenon of a true poet securing the popular suffrages have been offered, one of them being his acceptance of the Laureateship. But Wordsworth, a great poet, also accepted it; and he never was and never will be popular. The wisdom of what Goethe says about the enormous importance of “subject” in poetic art is illustrated by the story of Tennyson and the ‘Idylls of the King.’
For what was there in the ‘Idylls of the King’ that brought all England to Tennyson’s feet—made English people re-read with a new seeing in their eyes the poems which they once thought merely beautiful, but now thought half divine? Beautiful these ‘Idylls’ are indeed, but they are not more beautiful than work of his that went before. The rich Klondyke of Malory and Geoffrey of Monmouth had not escaped the eyes of previous prospectors. All his life Milton had dreamed of the mines lying concealed in the “misty mid-region” of King Arthur and the Round Table, but, luckily for Tennyson, was led away from it into other paths. With Milton’s immense power of sensuous expression—a power that impelled him, even when dealing with the spirit world, to flash upon our senses pictures of the very limbs of angels and fiends at fight—we may imagine what an epic of King Arthur he would have produced. Dryden also contemplated working in this mine, but never did; and until Scott came with his Lyulph’s Tale in ‘The Bridal of Triermain,’ no one had taken up the subject but writers like Blackmore. Then came Bulwer’s burlesque. Now no prospector on the banks of the Yukon has a keener eye for nuggets than Tennyson had for poetic ore, and besides ‘The Lady of Shalott’ and ‘Launcelot and Guinevere,’ he had already printed the grandest of all his poems—the ‘Morte d’Arthur.’ It needed only the ‘Idylls of the King,’ where episode after episode of the Arthurian cycle was rendered in poems which could be understood by all—it needed only this for all England to be set reading and re-reading all his poems, some of them more precious than any of these ‘Idylls’—poems whose familiar beauties shone out now with a new light.
Ever since then Tennyson’s hold upon the British public seemed to grow stronger and stronger up to the day of his death, when Great Britain, and, indeed, the entire English-speaking race, went into mourning for him; nor, as we have said, has any weakening of that hold been perceptible during the five years that have elapsed since.
The volumes are so crammed with interesting and important matter that to discuss them in one article is impossible. But before concluding these remarks we must say that the good fortune which attended Tennyson during his life did not end with his death. Fortunate, indeed, is the famous man who escapes the catchpenny biographer. No man so illustrious as Tennyson ever before passed away without his death giving rise to a flood of books professing to tell the story of his life. Yet it chanced that for a long time before his death a monograph on Tennyson by Mr. Arthur Waugh—which, though of course it is sometimes at fault, was carefully prepared and well considered—had been in preparation, as had also a second edition of another sketch of the poet’s life by Mr. Henry Jennings, written with equal reticence and judgment. These two books, coming out, as far as we remember, in the very week of Tennyson’s funeral, did the good service of filling up the gap of five years until the appearance of this authorized biography by his son. Otherwise there is no knowing what pseudo-biographies stuffed with what errors and nonsense might have flooded the market and vexed the souls of Tennysonian students. For the future such pseudo-biographies will be impossible.
III.
Notwithstanding the apparently fortunate circumstances by which Tennyson was surrounded, the record of his early life produces in the reader’s mind a sense of unhappiness. Happiness is an affair of temperament, not of outward circumstances. Happy, in the sense of enjoying the present as Wordsworth enjoyed it, Tennyson could never be. Once, no doubt, Nature’s sweetest gift to all living things—the power of enjoying the present—was man’s inheritance too. Some of the human family have not lost it even yet; but poets are rarely of these. Give Wordsworth any pittance, enough to satisfy the simplest physical wants—enough to procure him plain living and leisure for “high thinking”—and he would be happier than Tennyson would have been, cracking the finest “walnuts” and sipping the richest “wine” amidst a circle of admiring and powerful friends. As to opinion, as to criticism of his work—what was that to Wordsworth? Had he not from the first the good opinion of her of whom he was the high priest elect. Natura Benigna herself? Nay, had he not from the first the good opinions of Wordsworth himself and Dorothy? Without this faculty of enjoying the present, how can a bard be happy? For the present alone exists. The past is a dream; the future is a dream; the present is the narrow plank thrown for an instant from the dream of the past to the dream of the future. And yet it is the poet (who of all men should enjoy the raree show hurrying and scrambling along the plank)—it is he who refuses to enjoy himself on his own trembling little plank in order to “stare round” from side to side.
Spedding, speaking in a letter to Thompson in 1835 of Tennyson’s visit to the Lake country, lets fall a few words that describe the poet in the period before his marriage more fully than could have been done by a volume of subtle analysis:—
“I think he took in more pleasure and inspiration than any one would have supposed who did not know his own almost personal dislike of the present, whatever it might be.”
This is what makes us say that by far the most important thing in Tennyson’s life was his marriage. He began to enjoy the present: “The peace of God came into my life before the altar when I wedded her.” No more beautiful words than these were ever uttered by any man concerning any woman. And to say that the words were Tennyson’s is to say that they expressed the simple truth, for his definition of human speech as God meant it to be would have been “the breath that utters truth.” It would have been wonderful, indeed, if he, whose capacity of loving a friend was so great had been without an equal capacity of loving a woman.
“Although as a son,” says the biographer, “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,’ {156} and instinctive nobility of thought, was always by his side, a ready, cheerful, courageous, wise, and sympathetic counsellor. It was she who shielded his sensitive spirit from the annoyances and trials of life, answering (for example) the innumerable letters addressed to him from all parts of the world. 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.”
There are some few people whose natures are so noble or so sweet that how rich soever may be their endowment of intellect, or even of genius, we seem to remember them mainly by what St. Gregory Nazianzen calls “the rhetoric of their lives.” And surely the knowledge that this is so is encouraging to him who would fain believe in the high destiny of man—surely it is encouraging to know that, in spite of “the inhuman dearth of noble natures,” mankind can still so dearly love moral beauty as to hold it more precious than any other human force. And certainly one of those whose intellectual endowments are outdazzled by the beauty of their qualities of heart and soul was the sweet lady whose death I am recording.
Among those who had the privilege of knowing Lady Tennyson (and they were many, and these many were of the best), some are at this moment eloquent in talk about the perfect helpmate she was to the great poet, and the perfect mother she was to his children, and they quote those lovely lines of Tennyson which every one knows by heart:—
Dear, near and true—no truer Time himself Can prove you, tho’ he make you evermore Dearer and nearer, as the rapid of life Shoots to the fall—take this and pray that he Who wrote it, honouring your sweet faith to him, May trust himself;—and after praise and scorn, As one who feels the immeasurable world, Attain the wise indifference of the wise; And after autumn past—if left to pass His autumn into seeming leafless days— Draw toward the long frost and longest night, Wearing his wisdom lightly, like the fruit Which in our winter woodland looks a flower.
Others dwell on the unique way in which those wistful blue eyes of hers and that beautiful face expressed the “tender spiritual nature” described by the poet—expressed it, indeed, more and more eloquently with the passage of years, and the bereavements the years had brought. The present writer saw her within a few days of her death. She did not seem to him then more fragile than ordinary. For many years she whose fragile frame seemed to be kept alive by the love and sweet movements of the soul within had seemed as she lay upon her couch the same as she seemed when death was so near—intensely pale, save when a flush as slight as the pink on a wild rose told her watchful son that the subject of conversation was interesting her more than was well for her. As a matter of fact, however, Lady Tennyson was no less remarkable as an intelligence than as the central heart of love and light that illumined one of the most beautiful households of our time.
Though her special gift was no doubt music, she had, as Tennyson would say with affectionate pride, a “real insight into poetical effects”; and those who knew her best shared his opinion in this matter. Whether, had her life not been devoted so entirely to others, she would have been a noticeable artistic producer it is hard to guess. But there is no doubt that she was born to hold a high place as a conversationalist, brilliant and stimulating. Notwithstanding the jealous watchfulness of her family lest the dinner talk should draw too heavily upon her small stock of physical power, the fascination of her conversation, both as to subject-matter and manner, was so irresistible that her friends were apt to forget how fragile she really was until warned by a sign from her son or, daughter-in-law, who adored her, that the conversation should be brought to a close.
Her diary, upon which her son has drawn for certain biographical portions of his book shows how keen and how persistent was her interest in the poetry of her husband; it also shows how thorough was her insight into its principles. As a rule, diaries, professing as they do to give portraitures of eminent men, are mostly very much worse than worthless. The points seized upon by the diarist are almost never physiognomic, and even if the diarist does give some glimpse of the character he professes to limn, the picture can only be partially true, inasmuch as it can never be toned down by other aspects of the character unseen by the diarist and unknown to him.
Very different, however, is the record kept by Lady Tennyson. As an instance of her power of selecting really luminous points for preservation in her diary, let me instance this. Many a student of the ‘Idylls of the King’ has been struck by a certain difference in the style between ‘The Coming of Arthur’ and ‘The Passing of Arthur’ and the other idylls. Indeed, more than once this difference has been cited as showing Tennyson’s inability to fuse the different portions of a long poem. This fact had not escaped the eye of the loving wife and critic, and two days before her death she said to her son, “He said ‘The Coming of Arthur’ and ‘The Passing of Arthur’ are purposely simpler in style than the other idylls as dealing with the awfulness of birth and death,” and wished this remark of the poet’s to be put on record in the book.
It is needless to comment on the value of these few words and the light they shed upon Tennyson’s method.
Those who saw Lady Tennyson in middle life and in advanced age, and were struck by that spiritual beauty of hers which no painter could ever render, will not find it difficult to imagine what she was at seventeen, when Tennyson suddenly came upon her in the “Fairy Wood,” and exclaimed, “Are you an Oread or a Dryad wandering here?” And yet her beauty was only a small part of a charm that was indescribable. An important event for English literature was that meeting in the “Fairy Wood.” For, from the moment of his engagement, “the current of his mind was no longer and constantly in the channel of mournful memories and melancholy forebodings,” says his son. And speaking of the year, 1838, the son tells us that, on the whole, he was happy in his life. “When I wrote ‘The Two Voices,’” he used to say, “I was so utterly miserable, a burden to myself and my family, that I said, ‘Is life worth anything?’ and now that I am old, I fear that I shall only live a year or two, for I have work still to do.”
The hostile manner in which ‘Maud’ was received vexed him, and would, before his marriage, have deeply disturbed him. A right view of this fine poem seems to have been taken by George Brimley, an admirable critic, who in the ‘Cambridge Essays,’ had already pointed out with great acumen many of the more subtle beauties of Tennyson.
There are few more pleasant pages in this book than those which record Tennyson’s relations with another poet who was blessed in his wife—Browning. Although the two poets had previously met (notably in Paris in 1851), the intimacy between them would seem to have been cemented, if not begun, during one of Tennyson’s visits to his and Browning’s friends, Mr. and Mrs. Knowles at the Hollies, Clapham Common. Here Tennyson read to Browning the ‘Grail’ (which the latter pronounced to be Tennyson’s “best and highest”); and here Browning came and read his own new poem ‘The Ring and the Book,’ when Tennyson’s verdict on it was, “Full of strange vigour and remarkable in many ways, doubtful if it will ever be popular.”
The record of his long intimacy with Coventry Patmore and Aubrey de Vere takes an important place in the biography, and the reminiscences of Tennyson by the latter poet form an interesting feature of the volumes. In George Meredith’s first little book Tennyson was delighted by the ‘Love in a Valley,’ and he had a full appreciation of the great novelist all round. With the three leading poets of a younger generation, Rossetti, William Morris, and Swinburne, he had slight acquaintance. Here, however, is an interesting memorandum by Tennyson recording his first meeting with Swinburne:
“I may tell you, however, that young Swinburne called here the other day with a college friend of his, and we asked him to dinner, and I thought him a very modest and intelligent young fellow. Moreover I read him what you vindicated [‘Maud’], but what I particularly admired in him was that he did not press upon me any verses of his own.”
Of contemporary novels he seems to have been a voracious and indiscriminate reader. In the long list here given of novelists whose books he read—good, bad, and indifferent—it is curious not to find the name of Mrs. Humphry Ward. With Thackeray he was intimate; and he was in cordial relations with Dickens, Douglas Jerrold, and George Eliot. Among the poets, besides Edward Fitzgerald and Coventry Patmore, he saw much of William Allingham. Though he admired parts of ‘_Festus_’ greatly, we do not gather from these volumes that he met the author. Dobell he saw much of at Malvern in 1846. The letter-diary from Tennyson during his stay in Cornwall with Holman Hunt, Val. Prinsep, Woolner, and Palgrave, shows how exhilarated he could be by wind and sea. The death of Lionel was a sad blow to him. ‘Demeter, and other Poems,’ was dedicated to Lord Dufferin, “as a tribute,” says his son, “of affection and of gratitude; for words would fail me to tell the unremitting kindness shown by himself and Lady Dufferin to my brother Lionel during his fatal illness.”
Tennyson’s critical insight could not fail to be good when exercised upon poetry. Here are one or two of his sayings about Burns, which show in what spirit he would have read Henley’s recent utterances about that poet:—
“Burns did for the old songs of Scotland almost what Shakespeare had done for the English drama that preceded him.”
“Read the exquisite songs of Burns. In shape each of them has the perfection of the berry, in light the radiance of the dew-drop: you forget for its sake those stupid things his serious poems.”
Among the reminiscences and impressions of the poet which Lord Tennyson has appended to his second volume, it is only fair to specialize the admirable paper by F. T. Palgrave, which, long as it is, is not by one word too long. That Jowett would write wisely and well was in the nature of things. The only contribution, however, we can quote here is Froude’s, for it is as brief as it is emphatic:—
“I owe to your father the first serious reflexions upon life and the nature of it which have followed me for more than fifty years. The same voice speaks to me now as I come near my own end, from beyond the bar. Of the early poems, ‘Love and Death’ had the deepest effect upon me. The same thought is in the last lines of the last poems which we shall ever have from him.
“Your father in my estimate, stands, and will stand far away by the side of Shakespeare above all other English Poets, with this relative superiority even to Shakespeare, that he speaks the thoughts and speaks _to_ the perplexities and misgivings of his own age.
“He was born at the fit time, before the world had grown inflated with the vanity of Progress, and there was still an atmosphere in which such a soul could grow. There will be no such others for many a long age.”
“Yours gratefully, “J. A. FROUDE.”
This letter is striking evidence of the influence Tennyson had upon his contemporaries. Comparisons, however, between Shakespeare and other poets can hardly be satisfactory. A kinship between him and any other poet can only be discovered in relation to one of the many sides of the “myriad-minded” man. Where lies Tennyson’s kinship? Is it on the dramatic side? In a certain sense Tennyson possessed dramatic power undoubtedly; for he had a fine imagination of extraordinary vividness, and could, as in ‘Rizpah,’ make a character live in an imagined situation. But to write a vital play requires more than this: it requires a knowledge—partly instinctive and partly acquired—of men as well as of man, and especially of the way in which one individual acts and reacts upon another in the complex web of human life. To depict the workings of the soul of man in a given situation is one thing—to depict the impact of ego upon ego is another. When we consider that the more poetical a poet is the more oblivious we expect him to be of the machinery of social life, it is no wonder that poetical dramatists are so rare. In drama, even poetic drama, the poet must leave the “golden clime” in which he was born, must leave those “golden stars above” in order to learn this machinery, and not only learn it, but take a pleasure in learning it.
In honest admiration of Tennyson’s dramatic work, where it is admirable, we yield to none, at the time when ‘The Foresters’ was somewhat coldly accepted by the press on account of its “lack of virility,” we considered that in the class to which it belonged, the scenic pastoral plays, it held a very worthy place. That Tennyson’s admiration for Shakespeare was unbounded is evident enough.
“There was no one,” says Jowett in his recollections of Tennyson, “to whom he was so absolutely devoted, no poet of whom he had a more intimate knowledge than Shakespeare. He said to me, and probably to many others, that there was one intellectual process in the world of which he could not even entertain an apprehension—that was the plays of Shakespeare. He thought that he could instinctively distinguish between the genuine and the spurious in them, _e.g._, between those parts of ‘King Henry VIII.,’ which are generally admitted to be spurious, and those that are genuine. The same thought was partly working in his mind on another occasion, when he spoke of two things, which he conceived to be beyond the intelligence of man, and it was certainly not repeated by him from any irreverence; the one, the intellectual genius of Shakespeare—the other, the religious genius of Jesus Christ.”