Tennyson and His Friends Part 39

"Whether it is to be desired," he wrote, "that a poem should require from common men a good deal of effort in order to comprehend it; whether all that is put in the mouth of the Soliloquist in 'Maud' is within the lines of poetical verisimilitude; whether this poem has the full moral equilibrium which is so marked a characteristic of the sister-works, are questions open, perhaps, to discussion. But I have neither done justice in the text to its rich and copious beauties of detail, nor to its great lyrical and metrical power. And, what is worse, I have failed to comprehend rightly the relation between particular pa.s.sages in the poem and its general scope."

Jowett wrote:

No poem since Shakespeare seems to show equal power of the same kind, or equal knowledge of human nature. No modern poem contains more lines that ring in the ears of men. I do not know any verse of Shakespeare in which the ecstasy of love soars to such a height.

On the other hand, an anonymous letter, which Tennyson enjoyed repeating, ran thus:

SIR--I used to wors.h.i.+p you, but now I hate you. I loathe and detest you. You beast! So you've taken to imitating Longfellow.

Yours in aversion, "----"

"I shall never forget," his son writes,

Tennyson's last reading of "Maud," on August 24, 1892. He was sitting in his high-backed chair, fronting a southern window which looks over the groves and yellow cornfields of Suss.e.x toward the long line of South Downs that stretches from Arundel to Hastings (his high-domed Rembrandt-like head outlined against the sunset-clouds seen through the western window). His voice, low and calm in everyday life, capable of delicate and manifold inflection, but with "organ tones" of great power and range, thoroughly brought out the drama of the poem.

"The peculiarity of this poem," Tennyson said, "is that different phases of pa.s.sion in one person take the place of different characters"; and the effect of his own recitation was to set this conception in clear relief by showing the connexion and significance of the linked monodies, combined with a vivid musical rendering of a pathetic love-story. The emotional intensity rises by degrees to the rapture of meeting with Maud in the garden, falls suddenly to the depth of blank despair, and revives in an atmosphere of energetic, warlike activity--the precursor of world-wide peace.

The poem, in fact, strikes all the highest lyrical chords, and we are disposed to think that all of them are by no means touched with equal skill. Possibly, the sustained and perfect execution of such a varied composition would be too arduous a task for any artist. It is difficult for the reader to adjust his mind to the changes of mood and motive which succeed each other rapidly, and often abruptly, within the compa.s.s of so short a piece; ranging from the almost melodramatic horror of the opening stanzas to the pa.s.sionate and joyous melodies of the middle part; sinking into a wild wailing, and closing with the trumpet sounds of war. Yet every one will now acknowledge that some pa.s.sages in "Maud" are immortal, and that the English language contains none more beautiful than the very best of them.

The letters in the _Memoir_ are selected from upwards of forty thousand, and at this period we have many of singular interest. One from Mrs. Vyner, a stranger, touched the Poet deeply. Ruskin writes with reserve, as well he might, about the edition of the poems ill.u.s.trated by Rossetti, Millais, and others:

I believe, in fact, that good pictures never can be; they are always another poem, subordinate, but wholly different from the poet's conception, and serve chiefly to show the reader how variously the same verses may affect various minds. But these woodcuts will be of much use in making people think and puzzle a little; art was getting quite a matter of form in book ill.u.s.trations, and it does not so much matter whether any given vignette is right or not, as whether it contains thought or not, still more whether it contains any kind of plain facts. If people have no sympathy with St. Agnes, or if people, as soon as they get a distinct idea of a living girl who probably got scolded for dropping her candle-wax about the convent-stairs, and caught cold by looking too long out of the window in her bedgown, feel no true sympathy with her, they can have no sympathy in them.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning sends a warm-hearted letter; and Jowett, who enjoyed giving advice, evidently sat him down readily to reply when Mrs.

Tennyson asked whether he could suggest any subjects for poetry:

I often fancy that the critical form of modern literature is like the rhetorical one which overlaid ancient literature, and will be regarded as that is, at its true worth in after times. One drop of natural feeling in poetry, or the true statement of a single new fact, is already felt to be of more value than all the critics put together.

Four "Idylls" came out in 1859, to be rapidly and largely taken up by the English public, with many congratulations from personal friends. Thackeray sends, after reading them, a letter full of his characteristic humour and cordiality:

"The landlord"--at Folkestone--"gave two bottles of his claret, and I think I drank the most, and here I have been lying back in the chair and thinking of those delightful 'Idylls'; my thoughts being turned to you; and what could I do but be grateful to that surprising genius which has made me so happy?"

The Duke of Argyll wrote that Macaulay had been _delighted with it_, whereupon the Poet responds to his Grace somewhat caustically:

MY DEAR DUKE--Doubtless Macaulay's good opinion is worth having, and I am grateful to you for letting me know it, but this time I intend to be thick-skinned; nay, I scarcely believe that I should ever feel very deeply the pen-punctures of those parasitic animalcules of the press, if they kept themselves to what I write, and did not glance spitefully and personally at myself. I hate spite.

Ruskin, on the other hand, is but half pleased; could not quite make up his mind about that "increased quietness of style"; feels "the art and finish in these poems a little more than I like"; wishes that the book's n.o.bleness and tenderness had been independent of a romantic condition of externals; and suggests that "so great power ought not to be spent on visions of things past, but on the living present."

These latter sentences touch upon, or at least indicate, a line of criticism upon the general conception of the "Idylls," as seen in their treatment of the Arthurian legend, with which, although it may appear inadequate, some of us are not indisposed to agree. Romanticism has been defined, half seriously, as the art of presenting to a people the literary works which can give the greatest imaginative pleasure in the actual state of their habits and beliefs. The "Idylls" adapted the mythical tales of the Round Table to the very highest standard of aesthetic taste, intellectual refinement, and moral delicacy prevailing in cultivated English society. And by that society they were very cordially appreciated.

Undoubtedly the figure of Arthur--representing a stainless mirror of chivalry, a warrior king endowed with the qualities of patriotic self-devotion, clemency, generosity, and n.o.ble trustfulness, yet betrayed by his wife and his familiar friend, and dying in a lost fight against treacherous rebels--did present a lofty ideal that might well affect a gravely emotional people. Moreover, the poem is a splendidly illuminated Morality, unfolding scenes and figures that ill.u.s.trate heroic virtues and human frailties, gallantry, chivalric enterprise, domestic perfidy, chaste virginal loves, and subtle amorous enchantments. It abounds also in descriptive pa.s.sages which attest the close attention of the Poet's eye and ear to natural sights and sounds, and his supreme art of fas.h.i.+oning his verse to their colours and echoes. In short, to quote from the biography,

he has made the old legends his own, restored the idealism, and infused into them a spirit of modern thought and of ethical significance; setting his characters in a rich and varied landscape; as indeed otherwise these archaic stories would not have appealed to the world at large.

This indeed he has done well. And yet it is not possible to put away altogether the modern prejudice against unreality, the sense of having here a vision not merely of things that are past, but of things that could never have been, of a world that is neither ancient nor modern, but a fairy land peopled with knights and dames whose habits and conversation are adjusted to the decorous taste of our nineteenth century. The time has long pa.s.sed when men could look back on distant ages much as they looked forward to futurity, through a haze of unbounded credulity. Not every one has been able to overcome the effect of incongruity produced by a poem which invests the legendary personages of mediaeval romance with morals and manners of a fastidious delicacy, and promotes them to be the embodiment of our own ethical ideals. If, indeed, we regard the "Idylls" as beautiful allegories, we may be content, as their author was, with the suggestion that King Arthur represents Conscience, and that the poem is "a picture of the different ways in which men looked on conscience, some reverencing it as a heaven-born king, others ascribing to it an earthly origin." We may then be satisfied with learning, from the Poet himself, that "Camelot, for instance, a city of shadowy palaces, is everywhere symbolic of the gradual growth of human beliefs and inst.i.tutions, and of the spiritual development of man." In the light of these interpretations the poem is a beautifully woven tissue of poetic mysticism, clothing the old legend of chivalry with esoteric meaning. We can accept and admire it freely, remarking only that the deeper thoughts of the present generation do not run in an allegorical vein, and that such a vesture, though of the finest texture and embroidery, waxes old speedily. "The 'Holy Grail,'" said Tennyson, "is one of the most imaginative of my poems. I have expressed there my strong feeling as to the reality of the Unseen"; and truly it is a marvellous excursion into the field of mystical romance. But Tennyson also said that "there is no single fact or incident in the 'Idylls,' however seemingly mystical, which cannot be explained as without any mystery or allegory whatever"; and herein lies our difficulty. For, unless they can be read as wholly allegorical, there is an air of unreality about those enchanting pictures, as of scenes and persons that could never have existed anywhere.

That Tennyson is a master of the art of veiling the lessons of real life under a fairy story, we know from the subtle symbolism with which he tells, in the "Lady of Shalott," the tale of sudden absorbing love, hopeless and unregarded, sinking into despair--a true parable, understood of all men and women in all times. But those who have no great skill at deciphering the Hyponoia, the underlying significance, of the "Idylls" may be pardoned for confessing to an occasional feeling of something abstract, shadowy, and spectacular in the company of these knights and dames.[96]

FitzGerald, after reading the "Holy Grail," writes (1870) to Tennyson:

The whole myth of Arthur's Round Table Dynasty in Britain presents itself before me with a sort of cloudy Stonehenge grandeur. I am not sure if the old knights' adventures do not tell upon me better touched in some lyrical way (like your "Lady of Shalott") than when elaborated into epic form. I never could care for Spenser, Ta.s.so, or even Ariosto, whose epic has a ballad ring about it.... Anyhow, Alfred, while I feel how pure, n.o.ble, and holy your work is--and whole phrases, lines, and sentences of it will abide with me, and, I am sure, with men after me--I read on till the "Lincolns.h.i.+re Farmer" drew tears from my eyes. I was got back to the substantial rough-spun Nature I knew; and the old brute, invested by you with the solemn humour of Humanity, like Shakespeare's Shallow, became a more pathetic phenomenon than the knights who revisit the world in your other verse.

There! I cannot help it, and have made a clean breast.

If the extreme realism of some modern writers has been rightly condemned as truth divorced from beauty, we may say that it has been by his skill in maintaining their indissoluble union that Tennyson's best work shows its peculiar strength and has earned its enduring vitality. He excels in the verisimilitude of his portraiture, in the authentic delineation of character, preserving the type and developing the main lines of thought and action by imaginative insight, with high artistic fidelity in details.

I venture to antic.i.p.ate that his short monodramatic pieces in blank verse--his studies from the antique, like "Ulysses" and "t.i.thonus," and his poems of English life, breathing the true idyllic spirit, like the "Gardener's Daughter" and "Aylmer's Field"--will sustain their popularity longer than the Arthurian Idylls. Nor can some of us honestly agree with the unqualified praise bestowed by high authority (as the _Memoir_ testifies) on "Guinevere," where the scene between the king and the queen at Almesbury, with all its elevation of tone and purity of sentiment, is not very far from a splendid anachronism. But the epilogue "To the Queen,"

which closes the Arthurian epic, brings us back to modern thought and circ.u.mstance by its ringing protest against faint-heartedness in English politics.

The "Northern Farmer," written in 1861, was at that time a novelty in form and subject. It gave a strong lead, at any rate, to that school of rough humorous versification, largely relying on quaint turns of ideas and phrases, on racy provincial dialect and local colouring generally, which has since had an immense success in the hands of minor artists. We may take it to have begun, for the last century, with the _Biglow Papers_.

This form of metrical composition has latterly spread, as a species of modern ballad, to the Indian frontier and the Australian bush, but has little or no place in any language except the English. Such character sketches, taken direct from studies of rude life, have been always common in popular comic song, yet I believe that no first-cla.s.s poet, after Burns and before Tennyson, had turned his hand to this kind of work; nor has anything been since produced upon the artistic level of the first "Northern Farmer." "Roden Noel," writes Tennyson, "calls the two 'Northern Farmers' photographs; but I call them imaginative"--as of course they are, being far above mere exact copies of some individual person.

There are some very readable _impressions de voyage_ gathered out of journals of tours made about this time (1860) in France and England, and the letters maintain their high level of interest. Upon the death of Macaulay, Tennyson writes to the Duke of Argyll:

I hardly knew him: met him once, I remember, when Hallam and Guizot were in his company. Hallam was showing Guizot the Houses of Parliament, then building, and Macaulay went on like a cataract for an hour or so to those two great men, and, when they had gone, turned to me and said, "Good morning; I am happy to have had the pleasure of making your acquaintance," and strode away. Had I been a piquable man I should have been piqued: but I don't think I was, for the movement after all was amicable.

Then follows an account, by Mrs. Bradley, of a visit to Farringford, with "its careless ordered garden close to the ridge of a n.o.ble down"; and at the end of the _Memoir_ is an appendix containing, among other things, Arthur Hallam's striking critical appreciation of "Mariana in the South,"

a poem which must be ranked as a masterpiece by all exiled Englishmen who have dreamt of their native breezes and verdure, under the blinding glare and intolerable heat of a tropical summer. Mr. Aubrey de Vere has contributed a reminiscence describing the effect produced upon himself and others by the poems of 1832-45, with a dissertation upon their style and philosophic significance. And in this manner the course and circ.u.mstances of the Poet's life are set out, with much taste and regard for proportionate value of the materials for those singularly untroubled years through which he rose steadily from straitened means in youth to comparative affluence in middle age, and from distinction among a group of choice spirits to enduring fame as the greatest of poets born in the nineteenth century.

When, in 1864, Tennyson returned with "Enoch Arden" to the romance of real life among his own people, the poem was heartily welcomed, and sixty thousand copies were speedily sold. Spedding declared it to be the finest story he had ever heard, and added (in our opinion quite rightly) that it was "more especially adapted for Alfred than for any other poet." Yet the plot, so to speak, of this pathetic narrative is as ancient as the _Odyssey_, for it rests upon a situation that must have been common in all times of long and distant voyaging, when men disappeared across the seas, were not heard of for years, and their wives were counted as widows. A well-known sailor's ditty tells in rude popular rhymes the same story of the wandering mariner's return home, to find himself forsaken and forgotten; and it frequently occurs in the folklore of the crusades. The first t.i.tle in the proof-sheets of the "Enoch Arden" volume was "Idylls of the Hearth," and here, says his biographer,

he writes with as intimate a knowledge, but with greater power (than in 1842), on subjects from English life, the sailor, the farmer, the parson, the city lawyer, the squire, the country maiden, and the old woman who dreams of her past life in a restful old age.

No great poet, in fact, has travelled for his subjects so little beyond his native land; and so his best descriptive work shows the painter's eye on the object, with the impressions drawn fresh and at first hand from Nature, as in the poetry of primitive bards who saw things for themselves.

His letters and notes teem with observations of wild flowers and wild creatures, of wide prospects over sea and land; and even when he followed Enoch Arden into the world that was to himself untravelled, he could surprise those who knew it by his rendering of tropical scenery.

A very good account, by the late Mr. Locker-Lampson, of his tour through France and Switzerland with Tennyson in 1869, has preserved for us the flavour of his table and travelling talk upon literature, and occasionally upon religious problems. Into the philosophical or metaphysical abyss he did not let down his plummet very far; he recognized the limits of human knowledge, and for the dim regions beyond he accepted Faith as his guide and comforter. In regard to the poets--"As a boy," he said, "I was a great admirer of Byron, so much so that I got a surfeit of him, and now I cannot read him as I should like to do." Probably this habit of premature and excessive indulgence in Byron has blunted many an eager admirer's appet.i.te, and has had something to do with the prevailing distaste for him, wherein we think that he has fallen into unmerited neglect. Of Sh.e.l.ley Tennyson said that there was "a great wind of words in a good deal of him, but that as a writer of blank verse he was perhaps the most skilful of the moderns. n.o.body admires Sh.e.l.ley more than I once did, and I still admire him." For Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" he had a profound admiration; yet even in that poem he thought "the old poet had shown a want of literary instinct," and he touched upon some defects of composition; but he ended by saying emphatically that Wordsworth's very best is the best in its way that has been sent out by moderns. He told an anecdote of Samuel Rogers. "One day we were walking arm and arm, and I spoke of what is called Immortality, and remarked how few writers could be sure of it. Upon this Rogers squeezed my arm and said, 'I am sure of it.'"

His wife's journal of this time is full of interest, recording various sayings and doings, conversations, correspondence, anecdotes, and glimpses of notable visits and visitors, Tourgueneff, 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 p.r.o.nounced 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 att.i.tude 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 circ.u.mstances 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 pa.s.s 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 embarra.s.sment 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 a.n.a.lysis 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 pa.s.sages, and fine engravings, so to speak, of historical personages, with a n.o.ble appreciation of the s.p.a.cious 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 p.r.o.nounces absolutely and often incomprehensibly.

"For Tennyson to begin publis.h.i.+ng 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-cla.s.s 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 circ.u.mstance, 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 compet.i.tive 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 s.p.a.ce, 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.