English Literature for Boys and Girls Part 82

Chapter Lx.x.xV TENNYSON--THE POET OF FRIENDs.h.i.+P

KEATS had lain beneath the Roman violets six years, and Sh.e.l.ley somewhat less than five, when a little volume of poems was published in England. It was called Poems by two Brothers. No one took any notice of it, and yet in it was the first little twitter of one of our sweetest singing birds. For the two brothers were Alfred and Charles Tennyson, boys then of sixteen and seventeen. It is of Alfred that I mean to tell you in this last chapter. You have heard of him already in one of the chapters on the Arthur story, and also you have heard of him as a friend of Carlyle. And now I will tell you a little more about him.

Alfred Tennyson was born in 1809 in the Lincolns.h.i.+re village of Somersby. His father was the rector there, and had, besides Alfred, eleven other children. And here about the Rectory garden, orchard and fields, the Tennyson children played at knights and warriors. Beyond the field flowed a brook--

"That loves To purl o'er matted cress and ribbed sand, Or dimple in the dark of rushy coves, Drawing into his narrow earthen urn, In every elbow and turn, The filter'd tribute of the rough woodland."*

*Ode to Memory.

Of the garden and the fields and of the brook especially, Alfred kept a memory all through his long life. But at seven he was sent to live with his grandmother and go to school at Louth, about ten miles away. "How I did hate that school!" he said, long afterwards, so we may suppose the years he spent there were not altogether happy. But when he was eleven he went home again to be taught by his father, until he went to Cambridge.

At home, Alfred read a great deal, especially poetry. He wrote, too, romances like Sir Walter Scott's, full of battles, epics in the manner of Pope, plays, and blank verse. He wrote so much that his father said, "If Alfred die, one of our greatest poets will have gone." And besides writing poems, Alfred, who was one of the big children, used to tell stories to the little ones,-- stories these of knights and ladies, giants and dragons and all manner of wonderful things. So the years pa.s.sed, and one day the two boys, Charles and Alfred, resolved to print their poems, and took them to a bookseller in Louth. He gave them 20 pounds for the ma.n.u.script, but more than half was paid in books out of the shop. So the grand beginning was made. But the little book caused no stir in the great world. No one knew that a poet had broken silence.

The next year Charles and Alfred went to Cambridge. Alfred soon made many friends among the clever young men of his day, chief among them being Arthur Hallam, whose father was a famous historian.

At college Tennyson won the chancellor's prize for a poem on Timbuctoo, and the following year he published a second little volume of poems. This, though kindly received by some great writers, made hardly more stir than the little volume by "Two Brothers."

Tennyson did not take a degree at Cambridge, for, owing to his father's failing health, he was called home. He left college, perhaps with no very keen regret, for his heart was not in sympathy with the teaching. In his undergraduate days he wrote some scathing lines about it. You "teach us nothing," he said, "feeding not the heart." But he did remember with tenderness that Cambridge had been the spot where his first and warmest friends.h.i.+p had been formed.

Soon after Alfred left college, his father died very suddenly.

Although the father was now gone the Tennysons did not need to leave their home, for the new rector did not want the house. So life in the Rectory went quietly on; friends came and went, the dearest friend of all, Arthur Hallam, came often, for he loved the poet's young sister, and one day they were to be married. It was a peaceful happy time--

"And all we met was fair and good, And all was good that Time could bring, And all the secret of the Spring, Moved in the chambers of the blood."

Long days were spent reading poetry and talking of many things--

"Or in the all-golden afternoon A guest, or happy sister, sung, Or here she brought the harp and flung A ballad to the brightening moon.

"Nor less it pleased the livelier moods, Beyond the bounding hill to stray, And break the live long summer day With banquet in the distant woods."

And amid this pleasant country life the poet worked on, and presently another little book of poems appeared. Still fame did not come, and one severe and blundering review kept Tennyson, it is said, from publis.h.i.+ng anything more for ten years.

But now there fell upon him what was perhaps the darkest sorrow of his life. Arthur Hallam, who was traveling on the Continent, died suddenly at Vienna. When the news came to Tennyson that his friend was gone--

"That in Vienna's fatal walls G.o.d's finger touch'd him, and he slept,"

for a time joy seemed blotted out of life, and only that he might help to comfort his sister did he wish to live, for--

"That remorseless iron hour Made cypress of her orange flower, Despair of Hope."

As an outcome of this grief we have one of Tennyson's finest poems, In Memoriam. It is an elegy which we place beside Lycidas and Adonais. But In Memoriam strikes yet a sadder note. For in Lycidas and Adonais Milton and Sh.e.l.ley mourned kindred souls rather than dear loved friends. To Tennyson, Arthur Hallam was "The brother of my love"--

"Dear as the mother to the son More than my brothers are to me."

In Memoriam is a group of poems rather than one long poem--

"Short swallow-flights of song, that dip Their wings in tears, and skim away."

It is written in a meter which Tennyson believed he had invented, but which Ben Jonson and others had used before him. Two hundred years before Jonson had written a little elegy beginning--

"Though Beautie be the Marke of praise, And yours of whom I sing be such As not the world can praise too much, Yet is't your vertue now I raise."

Here again we see that our literature of to-day is no new born thing, but rooted in the past. Jonson's poem, however, is a mere trifle, Tennyson's one of the great things of our literature.

The first notes of In Memoriam were written when sorrow was fresh, but it was not till seventeen years later that it was given to the world. It is perhaps the most perfect monument ever raised to friends.h.i.+p. For in mourning his own loss Tennyson mourned the loss of all the world. "'I' is not always the author speaking of himself, but the voice of the human race speaking thro' him," he says.

After the prologue, the poem tells of the first bitter hopeless grief, of how friends try to comfort the mourners.

"One writes, that 'Other friends remain,'

That 'Loss is common to the race'-- And common is the common-place, And vacant chaff well meant for grain.

"That loss if common would not make My own less bitter, rather more: Too common! Never morning wore To evening, but some heart did break."

And yet even now he can say--

"I hold it true, whate'er befall; I feel it, when I sorrow most; 'Tis better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all."

And so the months glide by, and the first Christmas comes, "The time draws near the birth of Christ," the bells ring--

"Peace and goodwill, goodwill and peace, Peace and goodwill, to all mankind.

"This year I slept and woke with pain, I almost wish'd no more to wake, And that my hold on life would break Before I heard those bells again."

But when Christmas comes again the year has brought calm if not forgetfulness--

"Again at Christmas did we weave The holly round the Christmas hearth; The silent snow possess'd the earth, And calmly fell our Christmas-eve:

"The yule-log sparkled keen with frost, No wing of wind the region swept, But over all things brooding slept The quiet sense of something lost.

"As in the winters left behind, Again our ancient games had place, The mimic picture's breathing grace, And dance and song and hoodman-blind."

The years pa.s.s on, the brothers and sisters grow up and scatter, and at last the old home has to be left. Sadly the poet takes leave of all the loved spots in house and garden. Strangers will soon come there, people who will neither care for nor love the dear familiar scene--

"We leave the well-beloved place Where first we gazed upon the sky; The roofs, that heard our earliest cry, Will shelter one of stranger race.

"We go, but ere we go from home, As down the garden-walks I move, Two spirits of a diverse love Contend for loving masterdom.

"One whispers, 'Here thy boyhood sung Long since its matin song, and heard The low love-language of the bird In native hazels ta.s.sel-hung.'

"The other answers, 'Yea, but here Thy feet have stray'd in after hours With thy lost friend among the bowers, And this hath made them trebly dear.'"