Alfred Tennyson Part 14

Guinevere is one of the greatest of the Idylls. Malory makes Lancelot more sympathetic; his fight, unarmed, in Guinevere's chamber, against the felon knights, is one of his most spirited scenes. Tennyson omits this, and omits all the unpardonable behaviour of Arthur as narrated in Malory. Critics have usually condemned the last parting of Guinevere and Arthur, because the King doth preach too much to an unhappy woman who has no reply. The position of Arthur is not easily redeemable: it is difficult to conceive that a n.o.ble nature could be, or should be, blind so long.

He does rehabilitate his Queen in her own self-respect, perhaps, by a.s.suring her that he loves her still:-

"Let no man dream but that I love thee still."

Had he said that one line and no more, we might have loved him better. In the Idylls we have not Malory's last meeting of Lancelot and Guinevere, one of the scenes in which the wandering composite romance ends as n.o.bly as the Iliad.

The Pa.s.sing of Arthur, except for a new introductory pa.s.sage of great beauty and appropriateness, is the Morte d'Arthur, first published in 1842:-

"So all day long the noise of battle roll'd Among the mountains by the winter sea."

The year has run its course, spring, summer, gloomy autumn, and dies in the mist of Arthur's last wintry battle in the west -

"And the new sun rose, bringing the new year."

The splendid and sombre procession has pa.s.sed, leaving us to muse as to how far the poet has fulfilled his own ideal. There could be no new epic: he gave a chain of heroic Idylls. An epic there could not be, for the Iliad and Odyssey have each a unity of theme, a narrative compressed into a few days in the former, in the latter into forty days of time. The tragedy of Arthur's reign could not so be condensed; and Tennyson chose the only feasible plan. He has left a work, not absolutely perfect, indeed, but such as he conceived, after many tentative essays, and such as he desired to achieve. His fame may not rest chiefly on the Idylls, but they form one of the fairest jewels in the crown that s.h.i.+nes with unnumbered gems, each with its own glory.

CHAPTER VIII.--ENOCH ARDEN. THE DRAMAS.

The success of the first volume of the Idylls recompensed the poet for the slings and arrows that gave Maud a hostile welcome. His next publication was the beautiful t.i.thonus, a fit pendant to the Ulysses, and composed about the same date (1833-35). "A quarter of a century ago," Tennyson dates it, writing in 1860 to the Duke of Argyll. He had found it when "ferreting among my old books," he said, in search of something for Thackeray, who was establis.h.i.+ng the Cornhill Magazine. What must the wealth of the poet have been, who, possessing t.i.thonus in his portfolio, did not take the trouble to insert it in the volumes of 1842! n.o.body knows how many poems of Tennyson's never even saw pen and ink, being composed unwritten, and forgotten. At this time we find him recommending Mr Browning's Men and Women to the Duke, who, like many Tennysonians, does not seem to have been a ready convert to his great contemporary. The Duke and d.u.c.h.ess urged the Laureate to attempt the topic of the Holy Grail, but he was not in the mood. Indeed the vision of the Grail in the early Sir Galahad is doubtless happier than the allegorical handling of a theme so obscure, remote, and difficult, in the Idylls. He wrote his Boadicea, a piece magnificent in itself, but of difficult popular access, owing to the metrical experiment.

In the autumn of 1860 he revisited Cornwall with F. T. Palgrave, Mr Val Prinsep, and Mr Holman Hunt. They walked in the rain, saw Tintagel and the Scilly Isles, and were feted by an enthusiastic captain of a little river steamer, who was more interested in "Mr Tinman and Mr Pancake" than the Celtic boatman of Ardtornish. The winter was pa.s.sed at Farringford, and the Northern Farmer was written there, a Lincolns.h.i.+re reminiscence, in the February of 1861. In autumn the Pyrenees were visited by Tennyson in company with Arthur Clough and Mr Dakyns of Clifton College. At Cauteretz in August, and among memories of the old tour with Arthur Hallam, was written All along the Valley. The ways, however, in Auvergne were "foul," and the diet "unhappy." The dedication of the Idylls was written on the death of the Prince Consort in December, and in January 1862 the Ode for the opening of an exhibition. The poet was busy with his "Fisherman," Enoch Arden. The volume was published in 1864, and Lord Tennyson says it has been, next to In Memoriam, the most popular of his father's works. One would have expected the one volume containing the poems up to 1842 to hold that place. The new book, however, mainly dealt with English, contemporary, and domestic themes--"the poetry of the affections." An old woman, a district visitor reported, regarded Enoch Arden as "more beautiful" than the other tracts which were read to her. It is indeed a tender and touching tale, based on a folk-story which Tennyson found current in Brittany as well as in England. Nor is the unseen and unknown landscape of the tropic isle less happily created by the poet's imagination than the familiar English cliffs and hazel copses:-

"The mountain wooded to the peak, the lawns And winding glades high up like ways to Heaven, The slender coco's drooping crown of plumes, The lightning flash of insect and of bird, The l.u.s.tre of the long convolvuluses That coil'd around the stately stems, and ran Ev'n to the limit of the land, the glows And glories of the broad belt of the world, All these he saw; but what he fain had seen He could not see, the kindly human face, Nor ever hear a kindly voice, but heard The myriad shriek of wheeling ocean-fowl, The league-long roller thundering on the reef, The moving whisper of huge trees that branch'd And blossom'd in the zenith, or the sweep Of some precipitous rivulet to the wave, As down the sh.o.r.e he ranged, or all day long Sat often in the seaward-gazing gorge, A s.h.i.+pwreck'd sailor, waiting for a sail: No sail from day to day, but every day The sunrise broken into scarlet shafts Among the palms and ferns and precipices; The blaze upon the waters to the east; The blaze upon his island overhead; The blaze upon the waters to the west; Then the great stars that globed themselves in Heaven, The hollower-bellowing ocean, and again The scarlet shafts of sunrise--but no sail."

Aylmer's Field somewhat recalls the burden of Maud, the curse of purse-proud wealth, but is too gloomy to be a fair specimen of Tennyson's art. In Sea Dreams (first published in 1860) the awful vision of crumbling faiths is somewhat out of harmony with its environment:-

"But round the North, a light, A belt, it seem'd, of luminous vapour, lay, And ever in it a low musical note Swell'd up and died; and, as it swell'd, a ridge Of breaker issued from the belt, and still Grew with the growing note, and when the note Had reach'd a thunderous fulness, on those cliffs Broke, mixt with awful light (the same as that Living within the belt) whereby she saw That all those lines of cliffs were cliffs no more, But huge cathedral fronts of every age, Grave, florid, stern, as far as eye could see, One after one: and then the great ridge drew, Lessening to the lessening music, back, And past into the belt and swell'd again Slowly to music: ever when it broke The statues, king or saint or founder fell; Then from the gaps and chasms of ruin left Came men and women in dark cl.u.s.ters round, Some crying, 'Set them up! they shall not fall!'

And others, 'Let them lie, for they have fall'n.'

And still they strove and wrangled: and she grieved In her strange dream, she knew not why, to find Their wildest wailings never out of tune With that sweet note; and ever as their shrieks Ran highest up the gamut, that great wave Returning, while none mark'd it, on the crowd Broke, mixt with awful light, and show'd their eyes Glaring, and pa.s.sionate looks, and swept away The men of flesh and blood, and men of stone, To the waste deeps together.

'Then I fixt My wistful eyes on two fair images, Both crown'd with stars and high among the stars, - The Virgin Mother standing with her child High up on one of those dark minster-fronts - Till she began to totter, and the child Clung to the mother, and sent out a cry Which mixt with little Margaret's, and I woke, And my dream awed me: --well--but what are dreams?"

The pa.s.sage is rather fitted for a despairing mood of Arthur, in the Idylls, than for the wife of the city clerk ruined by a pious rogue.

The Lucretius, later published, is beyond praise as a masterly study of the great Roman sceptic, whose heart is at eternal odds with his Epicurean creed. Nascent madness, or fever of the brain drugged by the blundering love philtre, is not more cunningly treated in the mad scenes of Maud. No prose commentary on the De Rerum Natura, however long and learned, conveys so clearly as this concise study in verse the sense of magnificent mingled ruin in the mind and poem of the Roman.

The "Experiments in Quant.i.ty" were, perhaps, suggested by Mr Matthew Arnold's Lectures on the Translating of Homer. Mr Arnold believed in a translation into English hexameters. His negative criticism of other translators and translations was amusing and instructive: he had an easy game to play with the Yankee-doodle metre of F. W.

Newman, the ponderous blank verse of Cowper, the tripping and clipping couplets of Pope, the Elizabethan fantasies of Chapman. But Mr Arnold's hexameters were neither musical nor rapid: they only exhibited a new form of failure. As the Prince of Abyssinia said to his tutor, "Enough; you have convinced me that no man can be a poet,"

so Mr Arnold went some way to prove that no man can translate Homer.

Tennyson had the lowest opinion of hexameters as an English metre for serious purposes.

"These lame hexameters the strong-wing'd music of Homer!"

Lord Tennyson says, "German hexameters he disliked even more than English." Indeed there is not much room for preference. Tennyson's Alcaics (Milton) were intended to follow the Greek rather than the Horatian model, and resulted, at all events, in a poem worthy of the "mighty-mouth'd inventor of harmonies." The specimen of the Iliad in blank verse, beautiful as it is, does not, somehow, reproduce the music of Homer. It is entirely Tennysonian, as in

"Roll'd the rich vapour far into the heaven."

The reader, in that one line, recognises the voice and trick of the English poet, and is far away from the Chian:-

"As when in heaven the stars about the moon Look beautiful, when all the winds are laid, And every height comes out, and jutting peak And valley, and the immeasurable heavens Break open to their highest, and all the stars s.h.i.+ne, and the Shepherd gladdens in his heart: So many a fire between the s.h.i.+ps and stream Of Xanthus blazed before the towers of Troy, A thousand on the plain; and close by each Sat fifty in the blaze of burning fire; And eating h.o.a.ry grain and pulse the steeds, Fixt by their cars, waited the golden dawn."

This is excellent, is poetry, escapes the conceits of Pope (who never "wrote with his eye on the object"), but is pure Tennyson. We have not yet, probably we never shall have, an adequate rendering of the Iliad into verse, and prose translations do not pretend to be adequate. When parents and dominies have abolished the study of Greek, something, it seems, will have been lost to the world,-- something which even Tennyson could not restore in English. He thought blank verse the proper equivalent; but it is no equivalent.

One even prefers his own prose:-

Nor did Paris linger in his lofty halls, but when he had girt on his gorgeous armour, all of varied bronze, then he rushed thro' the city, glorying in his airy feet. And as when a stall-kept horse, that is barley-fed at the manger, breaketh his tether, and dasheth thro' the plain, spurning it, being wont to bathe himself in the fair-running river, rioting, and reareth his head, and his mane flieth back on either shoulder, and he glorieth in his beauty, and his knees bear him at the gallop to the haunts and meadows of the mares; so ran the son of Priam, Paris, from the height of Pergamus, all in arms, glittering like the sun, laughing for light-heartedness, and his swift feet bare him.

In February 1865 Tennyson lost the mother whose portrait he drew in Isabel,--"a thing enskied and sainted."

In the autumn of 1865 the Tennysons went on a Continental tour, and visited Waterloo, Weimar, and Dresden; in September they entertained Emma I., Queen of the Sandwich Islands. The months pa.s.sed quietly at home or in town. The poet had written his Lucretius, and, to please Sir George Grove, wrote The Song of the Wrens, for music. Tennyson had not that positive aversion to music which marked Dr Johnson, Victor Hugo, Theophile Gautier, and some other poets. Nay, he liked Beethoven, which places him higher in the musical scale than Scott, who did not rise above a Border lilt or a Jacobite ditty. The Wren songs, ent.i.tled The Window, were privately printed by Sir Ivor Guest in 1867, were set to music by Sir Arthur Sullivan, and published by Strahan in December 1870. "A puppet," Tennyson called the song-book, "whose only merit is, perhaps, that it can dance to Mr Sullivan's instrument. I am sorry that my puppet should have to dance at all in the dark shadow of these days" (the siege of Paris), "but the music is now completed, and I am bound by my promise." The verses are described as "partly in the old style," but the true old style of the Elizabethan and cavalier days is lost.

In the summer of 1867 the Tennysons moved to a farmhouse near Haslemere, at that time not a centre of literary Londoners. "Sandy soil and heather-scented air" allured them, and the result was the purchase of land, and the building of Aldworth, Mr Knowles being the architect. In autumn Tennyson visited Lyme Regis, and, like all other travellers thither, made a pilgrimage to the Cobb, sacred to Louisa Musgrove. The poet now began the study of Hebrew, having a mind to translate the Book of Job, a vision unfulfilled. In 1868 he thought of publis.h.i.+ng his boyish piece, The Lover's Tale, but delayed. An anonymously edited piracy of this and other poems was perpetrated in 1875, limited, at least nominally, to fifty copies.

In July Longfellow visited Tennyson. "The Longfellows and he talked much of spiritualism, for he was greatly interested in that subject, but he suspended his judgment, and thought that, if in such manifestations there is anything, 'Pucks, not the spirits of dead men, reveal themselves.'" This was Southey's suggestion, as regards the celebrated disturbances in the house of the Wesleys. "Wit might have much to say, wisdom, little," said Sam Wesley. Probably the talk about David Dunglas Home, the "medium" then in vogue, led to the discussion of "spiritualism." We do not hear that Tennyson ever had the curiosity to see Home, whom Mr Browning so firmly detested.

In September The Holy Grail was begun: it was finished "in about a week. It came like a breath of inspiration." The subject had for many years been turned about in the poet's mind, which, of course, was busy in these years of apparent inactivity. At this time (August 1868) Tennyson left his old publishers, the Moxons, for Mr Strahan, who endured till 1872. Then he was succeeded by Messrs H. S. King & Co., who gave place (1879) to Messrs Kegan Paul & Co., while in 1884 Messrs Macmillan became, and continue to be, the publishers. A few pieces, except Lucretius (Macmillan's Magazine, May 1868) unimportant, appeared in serials.

Very early in 1869 The Coming of Arthur was composed, while Tennyson was reading Browning's The Ring and the Book. He and his great contemporary were on terms of affectionate friends.h.i.+p, though Tennyson, perhaps, appreciated less of Browning than Browning of Tennyson. Meanwhile "Old Fitz" kept up a fire of unsympathetic growls at Browning and all his works. "I have been trying in vain to read it" (The Ring and the Book), "and yet the Athenaeum tells me it is wonderfully fine." FitzGerald's ply had been taken long ago; he wanted verbal music in poetry (no exorbitant desire), while, in Browning, carmina desunt. Perhaps, too, a personal feeling, as if Browning was Tennyson's rival, affected the judgment of the author of Omar Khayyam. We may almost call him "the author."

The Holy Grail, with the smaller poems, such as Lucretius, was published at the end of 1869. FitzGerald appears to have preferred The Northern Farmer, "the substantial rough-spun nature I knew," to all the visionary knights in the airy Quest. To compare "--"

(obviously Browning) with Tennyson, was "to compare an old Jew's curiosity shop with the Phidian Marbles." Tennyson's poems "being clear to the bottom as well as beautiful, do not seem to c.o.c.kney eyes so deep as muddy waters."

In November 1870 The Last Tournament was begun; it was finished in May 1871. Conceivably the vulgar scandals of the last days of the French Imperial regime may have influenced Tennyson's picture of the corruption of Arthur's Court; but the Empire did not begin, like the Round Table, with aspirations after the Ideal. In the autumn of the year Tennyson entertained, and was entertained by, Mr Huxley. In their ideas about ultimate things two men could not vary more widely, but each delighted in the other's society. In the spring of 1872 Tennyson visited Paris and the ruins of the Louvre. He read Victor Hugo, and Alfred de Musset, whose comedies he admired. The little that we hear of his opinion of the other great poet runs to this effect, "Victor Hugo is an unequal genius, sometimes sublime; he reminds one that there is but one step between the sublime and the ridiculous," but the example by which Tennyson ill.u.s.trated this was derived from one of the poet's novels. In these we meet not only the sublime and the ridiculous, but pa.s.sages which leave us in some perplexity as to their true category. One would have expected Hugo's lyrics to be Tennyson's favourites, but only Gastibelza is mentioned in that character. At this time Tennyson was vexed by