Alfred Tennyson Part 3

"A Mr Wilkinson, a clergyman."

The Lotos-Eaters, of course, is at the opposite pole of the poet's genius. A few plain verses of the Odyssey, almost bald in their reticence, are the point de repere of the most magical vision expressed in the most musical verse. Here is the languid charm of Spenser, enriched with many cla.s.sical memories, and pictures of natural beauty gorgeously yet delicately painted. After the excision of some verses, rather fantastical, in 1842, the poem became a flawless masterpiece,--one of the eternal possessions of song.

On the other hand, the opening of The Dream of Fair Women was marred in 1833 by the grotesque introductory verses about "a man that sails in a balloon." Young as Tennyson was, these freakish pa.s.sages are a psychological marvel in the work of one who did not lack the saving sense of humour. The poet, wafted on the wing and "pinion that the Theban eagle bear," cannot conceivably be likened to an aeronaut waving flags out of a balloon--except in a spirit of self-mockery which was not Tennyson's. His remarkable self-discipline in excising the fantastic and superfluous, and reducing his work to its cla.s.sical perfection of thought and form, is nowhere more remarkable than in this magnificent vision. It is probably by mere accidental coincidence of thought that, in the verses To J. S. (James Spedding), Tennyson reproduces the n.o.ble speech on the warrior's death which Sir Walter Scott places in the lips of the great Dundee: "It is the memory which the soldier leaves behind him, like the long train of light that follows the sunken sun, THAT is all that is worth caring for," the light which lingers eternally on the hills of Atholl.

Tennyson's lines are a close parallel:-

"His memory long will live alone In all our hearts, as mournful light That broods above the fallen sun, And dwells in heaven half the night."

Though Tennyson disliked the exhibition of "the chips of the workshop," we have commented on them, on the early readings of the early volumes. They may be regarded more properly as the sketches of a master than as "chips," and do more than merely engage the idle curiosity of the fanatics of first editions. They prove that the poet was studious of perfection, and wisely studious, for his alterations, unlike those of some authors, were almost invariably for the better, the saner, the more mature in taste. The early readings are also worth notice, because they partially explain, by their occasionally fantastic and humourless character, the lack of early and general recognition of the poet's genius. The native prejudice of mankind is not in favour of a new poet. Of new poets there are always so many, most of them bad, that nature has protected mankind by an armour of suspiciousness. The world, and Lockhart, easily found good reasons for distrusting this new claimant of the ivy and the bays: moreover, since about 1814 there had been a reaction against new poetry. The market was glutted. Scott had set everybody on reading, and too many on writing, novels. The great reaction of the century against all forms of literature except prose fiction had begun. Near the very date of Tennyson's first volume Bulwer Lytton, as we saw, had frankly explained that he wrote novels because n.o.body would look at anything else. Tennyson had to overcome this universal, or all but universal, indifference to new poetry, and, after being silent for ten years, overcome it he did--a remarkable victory of art and of patient courage. Times were even worse for poets than to-day. Three hundred copies of the new volume were sold!

But Tennyson's friends were not puffers in league with pus.h.i.+ng publishers.

Meanwhile the poet in 1833 went on quietly and undefeated with his work. He composed The Gardener's Daughter, and was at work on the Morte d'Arthur, suppressed till the ninth year, on the Horatian plan.

Many poems were produced (and even written out, which a number of his pieces never were), and were left in ma.n.u.script till they appeared in the Biography. Most of these are so little worthy of the author that the marvel is how he came to write them--in what uninspired hours.

Unlike Wordsworth, he could weed the tares from his wheat. His studies were in Greek, German, Italian, history (a little), and chemistry, botany, and electricity--"cross-grained Muses," these last.

It was on September 15, 1833, that Arthur Hallam died. Unheralded by sign or symptom of disease as it was, the news fell like a thunderbolt from a serene sky. Tennyson's and Hallam's love had been "pa.s.sing the love of women." A blow like this drives a man on the rocks of the ultimate, the insoluble problems of destiny. "Is this the end?" Nourished as on the milk of lions, on the elevating and strengthening doctrines of popular science, trained from childhood to forego hope and attend evening lectures, the young critics of our generation find Tennyson a weakling because he had hopes and fears concerning the ultimate renewal of what was more than half his life-- his friends.h.i.+p.

"That faith I fain would keep, That hope I'll not forego: Eternal be the sleep - Unless to waken so,"

wrote Lockhart, and the verses echoed ceaselessly in the widowed heart of Carlyle. These men, it is part of the duty of critics later born to remember, were not children or cowards, though they dreamed, and hoped, and feared. We ought to make allowance for failings incident to an age not yet fully enlightened by popular science, and still undivorced from spiritual ideas that are as old as the human race, and perhaps not likely to perish while that race exists. Now and then even scientific men have been mistaken, especially when they have declined to examine evidence, as in this problem of the transcendental nature of the human spirit they usually do. At all events Tennyson was unconvinced that death is the end, and shortly after the fatal tidings arrived from Vienna he began to write fragments in verse preluding to the poem of In Memoriam. He also began, in a mood of great misery, The Two Voices; or, Thoughts of a Suicide. The poem seems to have been partly done by September 1834, when Spedding commented on it, and on the beautiful Sir Galahad, "intended for something of a male counterpart to St Agnes." The Morte d'Arthur Tennyson then thought "the best thing I have managed lately." Very early in 1835 many stanzas of In Memoriam had taken form. "I do not wish to be dragged forward in any shape before the reading public at present," wrote the poet, when he heard that Mill desired to write on him. His OEnone he had brought to its new perfection, and did not desire comments on work now several years old. He also wrote his Ulysses and his t.i.thonus.

If ever the term "morbid" could have been applied to Tennyson, it would have been in the years immediately following the death of Arthur Hallam. But the application would have been unjust. True, the poet was living out of the world; he was unhappy, and he was, as people say, "doing nothing." He was so poor that he sold his Chancellor's prize gold medal, and he did not

"Scan his whole horizon In quest of what he could clap eyes on,"

in the way of money-making, which another poet describes as the normal att.i.tude of all men as well as of pirates. A careless observer would have thought that the poet was dawdling. But he dwelt in no Castle of Indolence; he studied, he composed, he corrected his verses: like Sir Walter in Liddesdale, "he was making himsel' a' the time." He did not neglect the movements of the great world in that dawn of discontent with the philosophy of commercialism. But it was not his vocation to plunge into the fray, and on to platforms.

It is a very rare thing anywhere, especially in England, for a man deliberately to choose poetry as the duty of his life, and to remain loyal, as a consequence, to the bride of St Francis--Poverty. This loyalty Tennyson maintained, even under the temptation to make money in recognised ways presented by his new-born love for his future wife, Miss Emily Sellwood. They had first met in 1830, when she, a girl of seventeen, seemed to him like "a Dryad or an Oread wandering here." But admiration became the affection of a lifetime when Tennyson met Miss Sellwood as bridesmaid to her sister, the bride of his brother Charles, in 1836. The poet could not afford to marry, and, like the hero of Locksley Hall, he may have asked himself, "What is that which I should do?" By 1840 he had done nothing tangible and lucrative, and correspondence between the lovers was forbidden. That neither dreamed of Tennyson's deserting poetry for a more normal profession proved of great benefit to the world. The course is one which could only be justified by the absolute certainty of possessing genius.

CHAPTER III.--1837-1842.

In 1837 the Tennysons left the old rectory; till 1840 they lived at High Beech in Epping Forest, and after a brief stay at Tunbridge Wells went to Boxley, near Maidstone.

It appears that at last the poet had "beat his music out," though his friends "still tried to cheer him." But the man who wrote Ulysses when his grief was fresh could not be suspected of declining into a hypochondriac. "If I mean to make my mark at all, it must be by shortness," he said at this time; "for the men before me had been so diffuse, and most of the big things, except King Arthur, had been done." The age had not la tete epique: Poe had announced the paradox that there is no such thing as a long poem, and even in dealing with Arthur, Tennyson followed the example of Theocritus in writing, not an epic, but epic idylls. Long poems suit an age of listeners, for which they were originally composed, or of leisure and few books. At present epics are read for duty's sake, not for the only valid reason, "for human pleasure," in FitzGerald's phrase.

Between 1838 and 1840 Tennyson made some brief tours in England with FitzGerald, and, coming from Coventry, wrote G.o.diva. His engagement with Miss Sellwood seemed to be adjourned sine die, as they were forbidden to correspond.

By 1841 Tennyson was living at Mablethorpe on the Lincolns.h.i.+re coast; working at his volumes of 1842, much urged by FitzGerald and American admirers, who had heard of the poet through Emerson. Moxon was to be the publisher, himself something of a poet; but early in 1842 he had not yet received the MS. Perhaps Emerson heard of Tennyson through Carlyle, who, says Sterling, "said more in your praise than in any one's except Cromwell, and an American backwoodsman who has killed thirty or forty people with a bowie-knife." Carlyle at this time was much attached to Lockhart, editor of the Quarterly Review, and it may have been Carlyle who converted Lockhart to admiration of his old victim. Carlyle had very little more appreciation of Keats than had Byron, or (in early days) Lockhart, and it was probably as much the man of heroic physical mould, "a life-guardsman spoilt by making poetry," and the unaffected companion over a pipe, as the poet, that attracted him in Tennyson. As we saw, when the two triumphant volumes of 1842 did appear, Lockhart asked Sterling to review whatever book he pleased (meaning the Poems) in the Quarterly. The praise of Sterling may seem lukewarm to us, especially when compared with that of Spedding in the Edinburgh. But Sterling, and Lockhart too, were obliged to "gang warily." Lockhart had, to his constant annoyance, "a partner, Mr Croker," and I have heard from the late Dean Boyle that Mr Croker was much annoyed by even the mild applause yielded in the Quarterly to the author of the Morte d'Arthur.

While preparing the volumes of 1842 at Boxley, Tennyson's life was divided between London and the society of his brother-in-law, Mr Edmund Lus.h.i.+ngton, the great Greek scholar and Professor of Greek at Glasgow University. There was in Mr Lus.h.i.+ngton's personal aspect, and n.o.ble simplicity of manner and character, something that strongly resembled Tennyson himself. Among their common friends were Lord Houghton (Monckton Milnes), Mr Lear of the Book of Nonsense ("with such a pencil, such a pen"), Mr Venables (who at school modified the profile of Thackeray), and Lord Kelvin. In town Tennyson met his friends at The c.o.c.k, which he rendered cla.s.sic; among them were Thackeray, Forster, Maclise, and d.i.c.kens. The times were stirring: social agitation, and "Carol philosophy" in d.i.c.kens, with growls from Carlyle, marked the period. There was also a kind of optimism in the air, a prophetic optimism, not yet fulfilled.

"Fly, happy happy sails, and bear the Press!"

That mission no longer strikes us as exquisitely felicitous. "The mission of the Cross," and of the missionaries, means international complications; and "the markets of the Golden Year" are precisely the most fruitful causes of wars and rumours of wars:-

"Sea and air are dark With great contrivances of Power."

Tennyson's was not an unmitigated optimism, and had no special confidence in

"The herd, wild hearts and feeble wings That every sophister can lime."

His political poetry, in fact, was very unlike the socialist chants of Mr William Morris, or Songs before Sunrise. He had nothing to say about

"The blood on the hands of the King, And the lie on the lips of the Priest."

The hands of Presidents have not always been unstained; nor are statements of a mythical nature confined to the lips of the clergy.

The poet was anxious that freedom should "broaden down," but "slowly," not with indelicate haste. Persons who are more in a hurry will never care for the political poems, and it is certain that Tennyson did not feel sympathetically inclined towards the Iberian patriot who said that his darling desire was "to cut the throats of all the cures," like some Covenanters of old. "Mais vous connaissez mon coeur"--"and a pretty black one it is," thought young Tennyson.

So cautious in youth, during his Pyrenean tour with Hallam in 1830, Tennyson could not become a convinced revolutionary later. We must accept him with his limitations: nor must we confuse him with the hero of his Locksley Hall, one of the most popular, and most parodied, of the poems of 1842: full of beautiful images and "confusions of a wasted youth," a youth dramatically conceived, and in no way autobiographical.

In so marvellous a treasure of precious things as the volumes of 1842, perhaps none is more splendid, perfect, and perdurable than the Morte d'Arthur. It had been written seven years earlier, and p.r.o.nounced by the poet "not bad." Tennyson was never, perhaps, a very deep Arthurian student. A little cheap copy of Malory was his companion. {4} He does not appear to have gone deeply into the French and German "literature of the subject." Malory's compilation (1485) from French and English sources, with the Mabinogion of Lady Charlotte Guest, sufficed for him as materials. The whole poem, enshrined in the memory of all lovers of verse, is richly studded, as the hilt of Excalibur, with cla.s.sical memories. "A faint Homeric echo" it is not, nor a Virgilian echo, but the absolute voice of old romance, a thing that might have been chanted by

"The lonely maiden of the Lake"

when

"Nine years she wrought it, sitting in the deeps, Upon the hidden bases of the hills."

Perhaps the most exquisite adaptation of all are the lines from the Odyssey -

"Where falls not hail nor rain, nor any snow."

"Softly through the flutes of the Grecians" came first these Elysian numbers, then through Lucretius, then through Tennyson's own Lucretius, then in Mr Swinburne's Atalanta in Calydon:-