The work which he und.!rtook soon after, the Lettres ecrites a m1
provincial, is a masterpiece of religious controversy at the opposite
pole from mysticism. We know quite well that he was at the time
when he received his illumination from God in extremely poor
health ; but it is a commonplace that some forms of illness are
extremely favourable, not only to religious illumination, but to
artistic and literary composition. A piece of writing meditated,
apparently without progress, for months or years, may suddenly
take shape and word ; and in this state long passages may be
produced which require little or no retouch. I have no good word
to say for the cultivation of automatic writing as the model of
literary composition ; I doubt whether these moments can be
cultivated by the writer; but he to whom this happens assuredly
has the sensation of being a vehicle rather than a maker. No
masterpiece can be produced whole by such means : but neither
does even the higher form of religious inspiration suffice for the
religious life; even the most exalted mystic must return to the
world, and use his reason to employ the results of his experience
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in daily life. You may call i t communion with the Divine, o r you
may call it a temporary crystallization of the mind. Until science
can teach us to reproduce such phenomena at will, science cannot
claim to have explained them ; and they can be judged only by
their fruits.
I N MEMOR I AM
Tennyson is a great poet, for reasons that are perfectly clear. He
has three qualities which are seldom found together except in the
greatest poets : abundance, variety, and complete competence. We
therefore cannot appreciate his work unless we read a good deal
of it. We may not admire his aims : but whatever he sets out to do,
he succeeds in doing, with a mastery which gives us the sense of
confidence that is one of the major pleasures of poetry. His
variety of metrical accomplishment is astonishing. Without making the mistake of trying to write Latin verse in English, he knew everything about Latin versification that an English poet could
use ; and he said of himself that he thought he knew the quantity
of the sounds of every English word except perhaps scissors. He
had the finest ear of any English poet since Milton. He was the
master of Swinburne ; and the versification of Swinburne, himself a classical scholar, is often crude and sometimes cheap in comparison with Tennyson's. Tennyson extended very widely the
range of active metrical forms in English : in Maud alone the
variety is prodigious. But innovation in metric is not to be
measured solely by the width of the deviation from accepted
practice. It is a matter of the historical situation : at some moments
a more violent change may be necessary than at others. The
problem differs at every period. At some times, a violent revolution may be neither possible nor desirable ; at such times, a change which may appear very slight is the change which the
important poet will make. The innovation of Pope, after Dryden,
may not seem very great ; but it is the mark of the master to be
able to make small changes which will be highly significant, as at
another time to make radical changes, through which poetry will
curve back again to its norm.
There is an early poem, only published in the official biography,
which already exhibits Tennyson as a master. According to a note,
Tennyson later expressed regret that he had removed the poem
from his Juvenilia ; it is a fragmentary Hesperides, in which only
the 'Song of the Three Sisters' is complete. The poem illustrates
Tennyson's classical learning and his mastery of metre. The first
stanza of the 'Song of the Three Sisters' is as follows :
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The Golden Apple, the Golden Apple, the hallow' d fruit,
Guard it well, guard it wari!y,
Singing airily,
·
Standing about the charmed root.
Round about all is mute,
As the snowfield on the mountain peaks,
As the sandfield at the mountain foot.
Crocodiles in briny creeks
Sleep and stir not; all is mute.
If ye sing not, if ye make false measure,
We shall lose eternal pleasure,
Worth eternal want of rest.
Laugh not loudly: watch the treasure
Of the wisdom of the West.
In a corner wisdom whispers. Five and three
(Let it not be preach'd abroad) make an awful mystery:
For the blossom unto threefold music bloweth;
Evermore it is born anew,
And the sap in threefold music floweth,
From the root,
Drawn in the dark,
Up to the fruit,
Creeping under the fragrant bark,
Liquid gold, honeysweet through and through.
Keen-eyed Sisters, singing airily,
Looking warily
Every way,
Guard the apple night and day,
Lest one from the East come and take it away.
A young man who can write like that has not much to learn about
metric ; and the young man who wrote these lines somewhere
between 1 828 and 1 830 was doing something new. There is something not derived from any of his predecessors. In some of Tennyson's early verse the influence of Keats is visible - in
songs and in blank verse ; and less successfully, there is the
influence of Wordsworth, as in Dora. But in the lines I have just
quoted, and in the two Mariana poems, The Sea Fairies, The Lotos
Eaters, The Lady of Shalott and elsewhere, there is something
wholly new.
All day within the dreamy house,
The doors upon their hinges creak'd;
The blue fly sung in the pane; the mouse
Behind the mouldering wainscoat shriek' d,
Or from the crevice peer' d about.
' I N MEMOR I A M'
The blue fly sung in the pane (the line would be ruined if you
substituted sang for sung) is enough to tell us that something
important has happened.
The reading of long poems is not nowadays much practised : in
the age of Tennyson it appears to have been easier. For a good
many long poems were not only written but widely circulated ;
and the level was high : even the second-rate long poems of that
time, like The Light of Asia, are better worth reading than most
long modern novels. But Tennyson's long poems are not long
poems in quite the same sense as those of his contemporaries.
They are very different in kind from Sordello or The Ring and the
Book, to name the greatest by the greatest of his contemporary
poets. Maud and In Memoriam are each a series of poems, given
form by the greatest lyrical resourcefulness that a poet has ever
shown. The Idylls of the King have merits and defects similar to
those of The Pri11cess. An idyll is a 'short poem descriptive of some
picturesque scene or incident' ; in choosing the name Tennyson
perhaps showed an appreciation
of his limitations. For his poems
are always descriptive, and always picturesque ; they are never
really narrative. The Idylls of the King are no different in kind
from some of his early poems ; the Morte d'Arthur is in fact an
early poem. The Princess is still an idyll, but an idyll that is too
long. Tennyson's versification in this poem is as masterly as elsewhere : it is a poem which we must read, but which we excuse ourselves from reading twice. And it is worth while recognizing
the reason why we return again and again, and are always stirred
by the lyrics which intersperse it, and which are among the greatest
of all poetry of their kind, and yet avoid the poem itself. It is not,
as we may think while reading, the outmoded attitude towards the
relations of the sexes, the exasperating views on the subjects of
matrimony, celibacy and female education, that make us recoil
from The Princess. 1 We can swallow the most antipathetic doctrines if we are given an exciting narrative. But for narrative Tennyson had no gift at all. For a static poem, and a moving
poem, on the same subject, you have only to compare his U()'sses
with the condensed and intensely exciting narrative of that hero
in the XXVI th Canto of Dante's Infemo. Dante is telling a story .
Tennyson is only stating an elegiac mood. The very greatest poets
set before you real men talking, carry you on in real events
moving. Tennyson could not tell a story at all. It is not that in
1 For a revelation of the Victorian mind on these matters, and of
opinions to which Tennyson would probably have subscribed, see the
Introduction by Sir Edward Strachey, Bt., to his emasculated edition
of the Aforte D'Artlwr of Malory, still current. Sir Edward admired
the Idylls of the King.
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The Princess h e tries to tell a story and failed : i t i s rather that an
idyll protracted to such length b.ecomes unreadable. So The
Princess is a dull poem ; one of the poems of which we may say
that they are beautiful but dull.
But in Maud and in In Memoriam, Tennyson is doing what
every conscious artist does, turning his limitations to good purpose. Maud consists of a few very beautiful lyrics, such as 0 let the solid ground, Birds in the high Hall-garden, and Go not, happy
day, around which the semblance of a dramatic situation has been
constructed with the greatest metrical virtuosity. The whole
situation is unreal ; the ravings of the lover on the edge of insanity
sound false, and fail, as do the bellicose bellowings, to make one's
flesh creep with sincerity. It would be foolish to suggest that
Tennyson ought to have gone through some experience similar to
that described : for a poet with dramatic gifts, a situation quite
remote from his personal experience may release the strongest
emotion. And I do not believe for a moment that Tennyson was a
man of mild feelings or weak passions. There is no evidence in his
poetry that he knew the experience of violent passion for a
woman ; but there is plenty of evidence of emotional intensity and
violence - but of emotion so deeply suppressed, even from himself, as to tend rather towards the blackest melancholia than towards dramatic action. And it is emotion which, so far as my
reading of the poems can discover, attained no ultimate clear
purgation. I should reproach Tennyson not for mildness, or
tepidity, but rather for lack of serenity.
OJ love that never found his earthly close,
What sequel ?
The fury of Maud is shrill rather than deep, though one feels
in every passage what exquisite adaptation of metre to the mood
Tennyson is attempting to express. I think that the effect of feeble
violence, which the poem as a whole produces, is the result of a
fundamental error ofform. A poet can express his feelings as fully
through a dramatic, as through a lyrical form ; but Maud is neither
one thing nor the other : just as The Princess is more than an
idyll, and less than a narrative. In Maud, Tennyson neither
identifies himself with the lover, nor identifies the lover with
himself: consequently, the real feelings of Tennyson, profound
and tumultuous as they are, never arrive at expression.
It is, in my opinion, in In Memoriam, that Tennyson finds full
expression. Its technical merit alone is enough to ensure its
perpetuity. While Tennyson's technical competence is everywhere
masterly and satisfying, In Memoriam is the most unapproach-
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able of all his poems. Here are one hundred and thirty-two
passages, each of several quatrains in the same form, and never
monotony or repetition. And the poem has to be comprehended
as a whole. We may not memorize a few passages, we cannot
find a 'fair sample' ; we have to comprehend the whole of a
poem which is essentially the length that it is. We may choose to
remember :
Dark house, by which once more I stand
Here in the long unlovely street,
Doors, where my heart was used to beat
So quickly, waiting for a hand,
A hand that can be clasp' d no more -
Behold me, for I cannot sleep,
And like a guilty thing I creep
At earliest morning to the door.
He is not here; but far away
The noise of life begins again,
And ghastly thro' the drizzling rain
On the bald street breaks the blank day.
This is great poetry, economical of words, a universal emotion
related to a particular place ; and it gives me the shudder that I
fail to get from anything in Maud. But such a passage, by itself, is
not In Memoriam: In Memoriam is the whole poem. It is unique :
it is a long poem made by putting together lyrics, which have only
the unity and continuity of a diary, the concentrated diary of a
man confessing himself. It is a diary of which we have to read
every word.
Apparently Tennyson's contemporaries, once they had accepted In Memoriam, regarded it as a message of hope and reassurance to their rather fading Christian faith. It happens now and then that a poet by some strange accident expresses the mood
of his generation, at the same time that he is expressing a mood of
his own which is quite remote from that of his generation. This is
not a question of insincerity : there is an amalgam of yielding and
opposition below the level of consciousness. Tennyson himself,
on the conscious level of the man who talks to reporters and poses
for photographers, to judge from remarks made in conversation
and recorded in his son's Memoir, consistently asserted a convinced, if somewhat sketchy, Christian belief. And he was a friend of Frederick Denison Maurice - nothing seems odder
about that age than the respect which its eminent people felt for
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each other. Nevertheless, I get ·a very different impression from
In Memoriam from that which Tennyson's contemporaries seem
to have got. It is of a very mucn more interesting and tragic
Tennyson. His biographers have not failed to remark th
at he had
a good deal of the temperament of the mystic - certainly not at all
the mind of the theologian. He was desperately anxious to hold
the faith of the believer, without being very clear about what he
wanted to believe : he was capable of illumination which he was
incapable of understanding. The 'Strong Son of God, immortal
Love,' with an invocation of whom the poem opens, has only a
hazy connection with the Logos, or the Incarnate God. Tennyson
is distressed by the idea of a mechanical universe ; he is naturally,
in lamenting his friend, teased by the hope of immortality and
reunion beyond death. Yet the renewal craved for seems at best
but a continuance, or a substitute for the joys of friendship upon
earth. His desire for immortality never is quite the desire for
Eternal Life ; his concern is for the loss of man rather than for the
gain of God.
shall he,
Man, her last work, who seem'd so fair,
Such splendid purpose in his eyes,
Who roll' d the psalm to wintry skies,
Who built him Janes of fruitless prayer, .
Who trusted God was love indeed,
And love Creation's final law -
Tho' Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek'd against his creed -
Who loved, who suffer'd countless ills.
Who battled for the True, the Just,
Be blown about the desert dust,
Or seal' d within the iron hills ?
That strange abstraction, 'Nature,' becomes a real god or goddess,
perhaps more real, at moments, to Tennyson than God ('Are
God and Nature then at strife ?'). The hope of immortality is confused (typically of the period) with the hope of the gradual and steady improvement of this world. Much has been said of
Tennyson's interest in contemporary science, and of the impression of Darwin. In Memoriam, in any case, antedates The Origin of Species by several years, and the belief in social progress by
democracy antedates it by many more ; and I suspect that the
faith of Tennyson's age in human progress would have been quite
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" I N MEM O R I A M '
as strong even had the discoveries of Darwin been postponed by
fifty years. And after all, there is no logical connection : the belief
in progress being current already, the discoveries of Darwin were
harnessed to it :
No longer half-akin to brute,
For all we thought, and loved and did
Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot Page 35