Part 1

TENNYSON

BY

G. K. CHESTERTON

AND

DR. RICHARD GARNETT, C.B.

WITH NUMEROUS ILLUSTRATIONS

NEW YORK

JAMES POTT AND COMPANY

LONDON

HODDER AND STOUGHTON

PRINTED BY HAZELL, WATSON AND VINEY, LD. LONDON AND AYLESBURY ENGLAND.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PAGE

ALFRED TENNYSON _Frontispiece_

THE BROOK AT SOMERSBY 1

AN EARLY PORTRAIT OF TENNYSON 2

SOMERSBY RECTORY, LINCOLNSHIRE (where Alfred Tennyson was born) 3

LOUTH 4

SOMERSBY CHURCH 4

ALFRED TENNYSON (from the painting by Samuel Laurence) 5

TENNYSON’S MOTHER 6

BAG ENDERBY CHURCH 6

ALFRED TENNYSON, 1838 7

OLD GRAMMAR SCHOOL, LOUTH 7

ARTHUR H. HALLAM (from the bust by Chantrey) 8

ALFRED TENNYSON (from the medallion by Thomas Woolner, R.A.) 9

THE LADY OF SHALOTT 10

THE PALACE OF ART 11

ALFRED TENNYSON (from the bust by Thomas Woolner, R.A.) 12

MARIANA IN THE SOUTH 13

STOCKWORTH MILL 14

CLEVEDON CHURCH 14

GERAINT AND EDYRN 15

IN MEMORIAM (“Man dies: nor is there hope in dust”) 16

IN MEMORIAM (“Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky”) 17

LADY TENNYSON 18

HORNCASTLE (the home of Emily Sellwood) 19

GRASBY CHURCH 20

CHAPEL HOUSE, TWICKENHAM (Tennyson’s first home after his marriage) 20

ELAINE 21

ALFRED TENNYSON (1867) 22

ALFRED TENNYSON (from a portrait by G. F. Watts, R.A., 1859) 23

ALFRED TENNYSON (from the chalk drawing by M. Arnault) 24

FARRINGFORD (Tennyson’s residence at Freshwater) 25

TENNYSON (about 1871) 26

MERLIN AND VIVIEN 27

FACSIMILE OF TENNYSON’S MANUSCRIPT, “CROSSING THE BAR” 28

GLADE AT FARRINGFORD (from a water-colour drawing by Mrs. Allingham) 29

FRESHWATER 30

FRESHWATER BAY 30

GUINEVERE 31

ALFRED TENNYSON 32

TENNYSON’S LANE, HASLEMERE 33

ALDWORTH (Tennyson’s home near Haslemere) 33

TENNYSON’S MEMORIAL, BEACON HILL, FRESHWATER 34

ALFRED TENNYSON (from a portrait by G. F. Watts, R.A.) 35

TENNYSON

It was merely the accident of his hour, the call of his age, which made Tennyson a philosophic poet. He was naturally not only a pure lover of beauty, but a pure lover of beauty in a much more peculiar and distinguished sense even than a man like Keats, or a man like Robert Bridges. He gave us scenes of Nature that cannot easily be surpassed, but he chose them like a landscape painter rather than like a religious poet. Above all, he exhibited his abstract love of the beautiful in one most personal and characteristic fact. He was never so successful or so triumphant as when he was describing not Nature, but art. He could describe a statue as Shelley could describe a cloud. He was at his very best in describing buildings, in their blending of aspiration and exactitude. He found to perfection the harmony between the rhythmic recurrences of poetry and the rhythmic recurrences of architecture. His description, for example, of the Palace of Art is a thing entirely victorious and unique. The whole edifice, as

described, rises as lightly as a lyric, it is full of the surge of the hunger for beauty; and yet a man might almost build upon the description as upon the plans of an architect or the instructions of a speculative builder. Such a lover of beauty was Tennyson, a lover of beauty most especially where it is most to be found, in the works of man. He loved beauty in its completeness, as we find it in art, not in its more glorious incompleteness as we

find it in Nature. There is, perhaps, more loveliness in Nature than in art, but there are not so many lovely things. The loveliness is broken to pieces and scattered: the almond tree in blossom will have a mob of nameless insects at its root, and the most perfect cell in the great forest-house is likely enough to smell like a sewer. Tennyson loved beauty more in its collected form in art, poetry, and sculpture; like his own “Lady of Shalott,” it was his office to look rather at the mirror than at the object. He was an artist, as it were, at two removes: he was a splendid imitator of the splendid imitations. It is true that his natural history was exquisitely exact, but natural history and natural religion are things that can be, under certain circumstances, more unnatural than anything in the world. In reading Tennyson’s natural descriptions we never seem to be in physical contact with the earth. We learn nothing of the coarse good-temper and rank energy of life. We see the whole scene accurately, but we see it through glass. In Tennyson’s works we see Nature indeed, and hear Nature, but we do not smell it.

But this poet of beauty and a certain magnificent idleness lived at a time when all men had to wrestle and decide. It is not easy for any person who lives in our time, when the dust has settled and the spiritual perspective has been restored, to realise what the entrance of the idea of evolution meant for the men of those days. To us it is a discovery of another link in a chain which, however far we follow it, still stretches back into a divine mystery. To

many of the men of that time it would appear from their writings that it was the heart-breaking and desolating discovery of the end and origin of the chain. To them had happened the most black and hopeless catastrophe conceivable to human nature; they had found a logical explanation of all things. To them it seemed that an Ape had suddenly risen to gigantic stature and destroyed the seven heavens. It is difficult, no doubt, for us

in somewhat subtler days to understand how anybody could suppose that the origin of species had anything to do with the origin of being. To us it appears that to tell a man who asks who made his mind that evolution made it, is like telling a man who asks who rolled a cab-wheel over his leg that revolution rolled it. To state the process is scarcely to state the agent. But the position of those who regarded the opening of the “Descent of Man” as the opening of one of the seals of the last days, is a great deal sounder than people have generally allowed. It has been constantly supposed that they were angry with Darwinism because it appeared to do something or other to the Book of Genesis; but this was a pretext or a fancy. They fundamentally rebelled against Darwinism, not because they had a fear that it would affect Scripture, but because they had a fear, not altogether unreasonable or ill-founded, that it would affect morality. Man had been engaged, through innumerable ages, in a struggle with sin. The evil within him was as strong as he could cope

with--it was as powerful as a cannonade and as enchanting as a song. But in this struggle he had always had Nature on his side. He might be polluted and agonised, but the flowers were innocent and the hills were strong. All the armoury of life, the spears of the pinewood and the batteries of the lightning, went into battle beside him. Tennyson lived in the hour when, to all mortal appearance, the whole of the physical world deserted to the devil. The universe, governed by violence and death, left man to fight alone, with a handful of myths and memories. Men had now to wander in polluted fields and lift up their eyes to abominable hills. They had to arm themselves against the cruelty of flowers and the crimes of the grass. The first honour, surely, is to those who did not faint in the face of that confounding

cosmic betrayal; to those who sought and found a new vantage-ground for the army of Virtue. Of these was Tennyson, and it is surely the more to his honour, since he was the idle lover of beauty of whom we have spoken. He felt that the time called him to be an interpreter. Perhaps he might even have been something more of a poet if he had not sought to be something more than a poet. He might have written a more perfect Arthurian epic if his heart had been as much buried in prehistoric sepulchres as the heart of Mr. W. B. Yeats. He might have made more of such poems as “The Golden Year” if his mind had been as clean of metaphysics and as full of a poetic rusticity as the mind of William Morris. He might have been a greater poet if he had been less a man of his dubious and rambling age. But there are some things that are greater than greatness; there are some things that no man with blood in his body would sell for the throne of Dante, and one of them is to fire the feeblest shot in a war that really awaits decision, or carry the meanest musket in an army that is really marching by. Tennyson may even have forfeited immortality: but he and the men of his age were more than immortal; they were alive.

Tennyson had not a special talent for being a philosophic poet, but he had a special vocation for being a philosophic poet. This may seem a contradiction, but it is only because all the Latin or Greek words we use tend endlessly to lose their meaning. A vocation is supposed to mean merely a taste or faculty, just as economy is held to mean merely the act of saving. Economy means the management of a house or community. If a man starves his best horse, or causes his best workman to strike for more pay, he is not merely unwise, he is uneconomical. So it is with a vocation. If this country were suddenly invaded by some huge alien and conquering population, we should all be called to become soldiers. We should not think in that time that we were sacrificing our unfinished work on Cattle-Feeding or our hobby of fretwork, our brilliant career at the Bar or our taste for painting in water-colours. We should all have a call to arms. We should, however, by no means agree that we all had a vocation for arms. Yet a vocation is only the Latin for a call.

In a celebrated passage in “Maud,” Tennyson praised the moral effects of war, and declared that some great conflict might call out the greatness even of the pacific swindlers and sweaters whom he saw around him in the Commercial age. He dreamed, he said, that if--

... The battle-bolt sang from the three-decker out on the foam, Many a smooth-faced, snub-nosed rogue would leap from his counter or till, And strike, were it but with his cheating yard-wand, home.

Tennyson lived in the time of a conflict more crucial and frightful than any European struggle, the conflict between the apparent artificiality of morals and the apparent immorality of science. A ship more symbolic and menacing than any foreign three-decker hove in sight in that time--the great, gory pirate-ship of Nature, challenging all the civilisations of the world. And his supreme honour is this, that he behaved like his own imaginary snub-nosed rogue. His honour is that in that hour he despised the flowers and embroideries of Keats as the counter-jumper might despise his tapes and cottons. He was by nature a hedonistic and pastoral poet, but he leapt from his poetic counter and till and struck, were it but with his gimcrack mandolin, home.

Tennyson’s influence on poetry may, for a time, be modified. This is the fate of every man who throws himself into his own age, catches the echo of its temporary phrases, is kept busy in battling with its temporary delusions. There are many men whom history has for a time forgotten to whom it owes more than it could count. But if Tennyson is extinguished it will be with the most glorious extinction. There are two ways in which a man may vanish--through being thoroughly conquered or through being thoroughly the Conqueror. In the main, the great Broad Church philosophy which Tennyson uttered has been adopted by every one. This will make against his fame. For a man may vanish as Chaos vanished in the face of creation, or he may vanish as God vanished in filling all things with that created life.

G. K. CHESTERTON.

TENNYSON AS AN INTELLECTUAL FORCE

It is easy to exaggerate, and equally easy to underrate, the influence of Tennyson on his age as an intellectual force. It will be exaggerated if we regard him as a great original mind, a proclaimer or revealer of novel truth. It will be underrated if we overlook the great part reserved for him who reveals, not new truth to the age, but the age to itself, by presenting it with a

miniature of its own highest, and frequently unconscious, tendencies and aspirations. Not Dryden or Pope were more intimately associated with their respective ages than Tennyson with that brilliant period to which we now look back as the age of Victoria. His figure cannot, indeed, be so dominant as theirs. The Victorian era was far more affluent in literary genius than the periods of Dryden and Pope; and Tennyson appears as but one of a splendid group, some of whom surpass him in native force of mind and intellectual endowment. But when we measure these illustrious men with the spirit of their age, we perceive that--with the exception of Dickens, who paints the manners rather than the mind of the time, and Macaulay, who reproduces its average but not its higher mood--there is something as it were sectarian in them which prevents their being accepted

as representatives of their epoch in the tidiest sense. In some instances, such as Carlyle and Browning and Thackeray, the cause may be an exceptional originality verging upon eccentricity; in others, like George Eliot, it may be allegiance to some particular scheme of thought; in others, like Ruskin and Matthew Arnold, exclusive devotion to some particular mission. In Tennyson, and in him alone, we find the man who cannot be identified with any one of the many tendencies of the age, but has affinities with all. Ask for the composition which of all contemporary compositions bears the Victorian stamp most unmistakably, which tells us most respecting the age’s thoughts respecting itself, and there will be little hesitation in naming “Locksley Hall.”

Tennyson returns to his times and what he has received from them, but in an exquisitely embellished and purified condition; he is the mirror in which the age contemplates all that is best in itself. Matthew Arnold would perhaps not have been wrong in declining to recognize Tennyson as “a great and powerful spirit” if “power” had been the indispensable condition of “greatness”; but he forgot that the receptive poet may be as potent as the creative. His cavil might with equal propriety have been aimed at Virgil. In truth, Tennyson’s fame rests upon a securer basis than that of some greater poets, for acquaintance with him will always be indispensable to the history of thought and culture in England. What George Eliot and Anthony Trollope are for the manners of the period, he is for its mind: all the ideas which in his day chiefly moved the elect spirits of English society are to be found in him, clothed in the most exquisite language, and embodied in the most consummate form. That they did not originate with him is of no consequence whatever. We cannot consider him, regarded merely as a poet, as quite upon the level of his great immediate predecessors; but the total disappearance of any of these, except Wordsworth, would leave a less painful blank in our intellectual history than the disappearance of Tennyson.

Beginning, even in his crudest attempts, with a manner distinctly his own, he attained a style which could be mistaken for that of no predecessor (though most curiously anticipated by a few blank-verse lines of William Blake), and which no imitator has been able to rival. What is most truly remarkable is that while much of his poetry is perhaps the most artificial in construction of any in our language, and much again wears the aspect of bird-like spontaneity, these contrasted manners evidently proceed from the same writer, and no one would think of ascribing them to different hands. As a master of blank verse Tennyson, though perhaps not fully attaining the sweetness of Coleridge or the occasional grandeur of Wordsworth and Shelley, is upon the whole the third in our language after Shakespeare and Milton, and, unlike Shakespeare and Milton, he has made it difficult for his successors to write blank verse after him.

Tennyson is essentially a composite poet. Dryden’s famous verses, grand in expression, but questionable in their application to Milton, are perfectly applicable to him: save that, in making him, Nature did not combine two poets, but many. This is a common phenomenon at the close of a great epoch; it is almost peculiar to Tennyson’s age that it should then have heralded the appearance of a new era; and that, simultaneously with the inheritor of the past, perhaps the most original and self-sufficing of all poets should have appeared in the person of Robert Browning. A comparison between these illustrious writers would lead us too far; we have already implied that Tennyson occupies the more conspicuous place in literary history on account of his representative character.

The first important recognition of Tennyson’s genius came from Stuart Mill, who, partly perhaps under the guidance of Mrs. Taylor, evinced

about 1835 a remarkable insight into Shelley and Browning as well as Tennyson. In the course of his observations he declared that Tennyson needed to be a great poet was a system of philosophy, to which time would certainly conduct him. If he only meant that Tennyson needed “the years that bring the philosophic mind,” the observation was entirely just; if he expected the poet either to evolve a system of philosophy for himself or to fall under the sway of some great thinker, he was mistaken. Had Tennyson done either he might have been a very great and very interesting poet, but he could not have been the poet of his age; for the temper of the time, when it was not violently partisan, was liberally eclectic. There was no one great leading idea, such as that of evolution in the last quarter of last century, so ample and so characteristic of the age that a poet might become its disciple without yielding to party what was meant for mankind. Two chief currents of thought there were; but they were antagonistic, even though Mr. Gladstone has proved that a very