Alfred, Lord Tennyson - Delphi Poets Series

by Lord Tennyson Alfred

  It was not long before he became a complete convert to Swedenborgianism and firmly convinced of the reality of the Spiritualistic phenomena with which the press and literature of the day began to be flooded. Indeed at one time he believed that spirits communicated with himself by a kind of electrical ticking, which he was constantly hearing in his room at night, and used at their dictation to do a certain amount of automatic writing. The results, however, were so unsatisfactory that he was forced to conclude the spirits to be of an evil and untrustworthy nature, and he therefore abandoned the practice of spiritualism altogether. He remained, however, convinced of the fact that living men were able to communicate with the spirits of the departed, who had been able, since the end (in 1757) of the second dispensation (according to Swedenborg) and the abolition of the intermediate state of purgatory which accompanied it, to establish direct intercourse with our world, and he believed that this rapid increase of communication was a sign of the approach of the kingdom of heaven, that is to say, of the total abolition of all barriers between the material and spiritual worlds, and the actual physical regeneration of man in the Millennium predicted by Christ and the prophets. The natural and political tumults of which the nineteenth century was so prolific seemed to him to point in the same direction, and to fall in with the prophecy of Daniel which he was never tired of quoting.

  Frederick abandoned these views at the end of his life, but it is not difficult to see how they came to acquire such a hold on him. He was essentially a mystic and clung most fervently to the belief in a future life, where all good things should be taken up into the spiritual life and glorified.

  “My daylight,” he wrote in 1853, “is sombered by a natural instinct of unearthliness, a looking backwards and forwards for that sunny land which Imagination robes in unfailing Summer where no tears dim the Light, and no graves lie underneath our feet, by the side of which Riches, honors, even Health the first of blessings, all, in short, that is commonly called Happiness, looks cold and imperfect — while the great Shadow of Death fills up the distance, and the steps to it lie over withered garlands and dry bones.” And again: “For an illustration of the bliss and delight of that higher state of being which under the influence of that Spirit-Sun shall hereafter rise daily to its appointed task, whatever that may be, with full heart and mind — I go back to ‘the days that are no more,’ when I used to dive into the sunny morn, rejoicing in my strength, refreshed with dreamless sleep ‘like a giant with wine,’ carrying my whole soul with me without fears or regrets, with a joy focussed like sunlight through a lens, on the infinite present moment! Such memories, tho’ mournful, are blessed if they bring with them analogies of the ‘Higher State to Be.’ For the angel is but the infant sublimated — the rapture and the innocence, with the Wisdom and the Power adjoined, and crowned with Immortality! That is to say his will being in all things conformable to the Divine — he receives the divine influences which are heaven! And surely my unshakable belief is that all created beings — even those who have chosen the lowest Hell — will be eventually redeemed, exalted, and glorified — or there would be an Infinite Power of Good unable or unwilling to subdue Finite Evil.”

  His mind, however, was too independent to accept any of the creeds of orthodoxy. He is perpetually thundering against the “frowzy diatribes of black men with white ties — too often the only white thing about them” (one can hear him rap out the parenthesis), and the “little papacies” that dominate a country town or village. Rome he regarded with an excessive hatred, and Oxford and Cambridge, twin homes of orthodoxy, did not escape his wrath.

  Indeed, he regarded most modern Christianity as a perversion of the original truth, and Atheism in all its guises he hated with an even greater bitterness, as the following letter shows:

  This, as you truly say, is the age of Atheism — both practical and professional. But it is not only Bradlaugh and Mrs. —— who distinguish it as such — multitudes of most worthy and respectable people (in their own estimation) are classifiable under this category. Indeed all worldly people whose religion consists in saving appearances, all self-interested folk whose lives are passed in struggles with their neighbour for their own advantage — all such as wear down heart and mind and even physical well-being in the feverish ambition to pile up riches, not knowing who shall gather them or purely for the renown of possessing them. All ritualists who think they get to heaven by peculiar haberdashery, and intoning the prayers, which makes a farce of them by depriving them of articulate meaning. All believers in the vicarious atonement of faith alone, which creed signifies that all has been done instead of all has to be done for them. All who hurry to conventicles on Sunday with gilt-edged prayer-books, and begin on Monday morning to slander, ill-treat, or cheat their neighbours. In short all that excludes the spiritual from this life — which generally indicates unbelief in any other and virtually denies the necessity, and therefore the existence, of a Divine Governor. All Professors —— and —— in Physical science, all Herbert Spencers, etc. in metaphysical — who arrive by different courses at the same conclusion, viz. that God is unknowable [sic] and that therefore they need not take the trouble to know Him. All this is but Atheism virtual and avowed.

  And materialism he considered little better than rank Atheism.

  It was not unnatural, therefore, that he should have come to regard the phenomena of spiritualism as the strongest evidence of those beliefs which were to him more important than life itself, and, this conviction once established, submission to the strange genius of Swedenborg followed almost as a matter of course, for by his “science of correspondencies,” the new phenomena seemed to fall naturally and inevitably into their proper place in that strange dual scheme of spirit and matter into which Swedenborg had resolved the Universe. When he had once embarked upon Occultism, other curious beliefs followed in the train of these main convictions. He became greatly impressed with the work of a certain Mr. Melville who believed that he had rediscovered an ancient and long forgotten method of reading the stars which was in fact the original mystery of Freemasonry. Frederick took eagerly to this idea which seemed to fall naturally into place with the Swedenborgian science of correspondencies, and in 1872 he actually came to England with Mr. Melville in the hope of being able to convince the Freemasons that all modern Masonry with its boasted mysteries was futile and meaningless without the key of Mr. Melville’s discovery in which lay the true explanation of all the masonic signs and symbols. Unfortunately an interview with the Duke of Leinster, the then Grand Master, gave the two apostles little satisfaction. It was on this visit that Frederick saw FitzGerald for the last time, and the latter described him to Mrs. Kemble as being “quite grand and sincere in this as in all else; with the Faith of a gigantic child — pathetic and yet humorous to consider and consort with.”

  The influence of these ideas gradually coloured Frederick’s view on all current subjects. His years in Florence had been spent in the “hubbub of imminent war,” and he writes indignantly of “the rottenness of these pitiable petty States and the incredible fantastic tricks of their abominable rulers.” None the less, though he hated and despised most existing monarchies, he was too much imbued with the romance and dignity of the past to look with a very favourable eye on revolution. At first he dismissed Mazzini as “deserving a hempen collar with Nana Sahib and the King of Delhi,” an opinion which the experience of later years compelled him to reverse. The story of nineteenth-century Europe seemed to him chaos, but it was the chaos which was to precede the new spiritual dispensation, and political prejudice never hindered him from the true appreciation of progress. Thus he writes in 1869:

  It is certain that Evil has never been more rampant than during the last century — witness the great French Revolution, subsequent wars, minor revolutions, and minor wars throughout the globe, the hundreds of millions wasted on warlike machinery, the countless numbers of young men sacrificed to the fiends of ambition and racial jealousy, society honeycombed with frauds, conspira
cies, and class animosities, etc. etc. On the other hand, never has knowledge of all kinds been more progressive, never have the Arts and Sciences and Literature been so rapidly multiplied and so various. Never were charitable institutions more widely extended or practically beneficent. Never, in short, were the researches into all kinds of truths, especially those which concern the relations of man to God and his neighbour, more earnest, and if this seems to contradict the notorious fact that we are living at present in a world of Atheism and Materialism — which is the same thing — it does not really do so, for the two movements, though separate, are parallel and simultaneous. In short, “The Time of the End” is a transitional state — which will eventually issue in the triumph of Good over Evil once and for ever.

  France he always hated as the leader of materialism, and he would repeat with a snort of disgust the remark of M. Bert, who, during the debate in the Chamber on the secularization of Education, observed that it was superfluous to exclude what did not exist. The debacle of 1870 seemed a just if tragic retribution.

  “One cannot help, however,” he wrote on October 19, 1870, “feeling for beautiful Paris as one would for a Marie Antoinette passing on her way to execution. There she is in her solitude and in her beauty. Around her a circle of iron and fire — within her a restless seething of tumultuous passions embittering the present — her future a prospect of burning and famine. Such a downfall is unparalleled in history, and the agonies of her expiration — if things are carried to their bitter end — promise to equal those of the terrible siege of Jerusalem.”

  As might be expected, he tended to Conservatism in politics; Home Rule was anathema, and Disraeli, endeared to him as the possible leader of a United Israel, he regarded as a sincerer statesman than Gladstone. None the less he was able to applaud Gladstone’s action on the occasion of the Bulgarian atrocities, though “even he” seemed to have yielded so much

  ... to the delicacies and squeamish sensibility, and fluttering nerves of a lolling generation — an age of sofas and carpets — the rousing of which even in the justest of causes, the vindication of the rights of unoffending humanity outraged by savages in comparison with whom niggers and Red Indians are angels, is not to be attempted without careful thought — and though a great cry has gone through the land I fear there will be little wool. There is, however, one consolation — neither Turkey, nor Egypt, nor any ruffian with a bundle of dirty clothes upon his head instead of a hat, will ever get another farthing of our money.

  None the less he hated a bigoted Toryism, and thought that “a proper democratic spirit which aims at a reconstruction of society on the principle of ‘each for all and all for each,’ the correlation of privileges and duties, worth and honour, wealth and charity (in its best sense), the substitution of altruism for egoism, ought to find its echo in every loyal heart — and would in fact be the very ‘end of Sin, and bringing in of the Everlasting Righteousness’ foretold.”

  In literature, too, his mind — in spite of an occasional failure to recognize individual genius — was remarkably alive to the progressive movements of the day. Indeed, for a man so steeped in classicism, his freedom from prejudice was remarkable. Browning’s poetry, however, in spite of his affection for the author, he could never appreciate. He wrote to Mrs. Brotherton:

  “What you say of Browning’s Ring and the Book,” he says, soon after the publication of that work, “I have no doubt is strictly applicable, however slashing.... I confess, however, that I have never had the courage to read the book. He is a great friend of mine.... But it does not follow that I should put up with obsolete horrors, and unrhythmical composition. What has come upon the world that it should take any metrical (?) arrangement of facts for holy Poesy? It has been my weakness to believe that the Fine Arts and Imaginative Literature should do something more than astonish us by tours de force, black and white contrasts, outrageous inhumanities, or anything criminally sensational, or merely intellectually potent. As you say a good heart is better than a clever head, so I say better a page of feeling than a volume of spasms. Spasms, I fear, is the order of the day. The late Lord Robertson, a legal celebrity at Edinburgh, pleading on behalf of some one, said, with his serious face, which was more tickling than the happiest efforts of Pantaloon: ‘We are bound to respect his feelings as a man and a butcher.’ Here the man and the butcher are bound up in one. Now, in Browning’s case, I separate the man from the butcher. I have nothing to say to him in his blue apron and steel by his side, but if I meet him in plain clothes I honour him as a gentleman.” And in 1885 he writes: “The Public, it would seem, is beginning to rouse itself to a perception of the unreliability of the Browningian school — I have seen several articles on that subject. How is it that it has never struck his partisans that the probability of one man being so infinitely superior to his contemporaries as to be totally unintelligible to them — is infinitely small?

  “One thing appears to me certain in Browning, that all his performances are pure brain-work — whatever that may be worth — but as for the ‘divine heat of temperament,’ where is it? I can find nothing but the inextricably hard and the extravagantly fantastical. On such diet I cannot live.”

  Nevertheless, it was always the future of Art, not its past, which stirred his interest, and a letter of his written in 1885, when he was seventy-eight, shows a youth and vitality of mind truly remarkable in one whose life had been so cloistered.

  “There can never,” he says, “be a second Shakespeare, that is to say, given a man of equal Genius he cannot in this complex and analytical age of Literature embody himself in the metrical and dramatic form if his purpose is to ‘hold up the mirror to Nature, and to give the Time its form and pressure.’ The form of prose fiction is a vastly greater one, indeed it may be termed all-comprehensive, and admits of the introduction of lyric or epic verse, in all varieties, as well as the profoundest analysis of character and motive, and is susceptible of the highest range of eloquence and unrhythmical poetry, and whatever it may lose in metrical melody (which, however, is not greatly regarded in dramatic dialogue) it gains immeasurably in its other elements. All things considered, I am of opinion that if a man were endowed with such faculties as Shakespeare’s, they would be more freely and effectively exercised in prose fiction with its wider capabilities than when ‘cribbed, cabined, and confined’ in the trammels of verse.”

  It may be that the very remoteness of his life was in part the cause of this lasting freshness and freedom of his mind. He lived so far from the world as to be almost entirely removed from any bias of self-interest — the most fruitful source of prejudice. Ambition played no part in his life.

  “Once,” he wrote in 1888, “I used to have some ambition — that is when I was a boy at school — I verily believe that at that early age I exhausted the demoniacal passion which chains you to fixed purposes like a Prometheus and preys upon you like a Vulture. Though many great works have been accomplished under the spur of this (so-called) noble passion, think how much chaotic rubbish has been projected into Space and Time which ought to have been imprisoned to Eternity — how many heart-burnings, jealousies, and disappointments — how often the love of the Beautiful and True is entirely subordinated to that of mere distinction to be won at any cost. How seldom do we hear writers of the same school speak well of one another. Especially poisonous are poets, I think, wherever they apprehend a rival — Honey-suckers like the Bee, they know how to use their stings even while sipping the flowers. The unambitious man is at any rate free to use his eyes, to walk up to and contemplate in the pure clear air and solitude of his mountain-top the face and form of Nature, and like Turner a-fishing, see wonderful effects never to be come at by the hosts of those who get on (or off) by copying one another. I daresay you will disapprove all this and attribute it to indolent epicurism.

  “Latterly since the supernatural and the Future Life, and its conditions ‘such as eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor hath it entered into the heart of man to conceive,’ have occ
upied and absorbed my whole soul to the exclusion of almost every subject which the Gorillas of this world most delight in, whether scientific, political, or literary — I have been led to see what men in general consider a proper use of their stewardship, i.e. ruin of body and soul by inordinate superhuman struggles for supremacy — Samson-like heavings to upset the neighbour, or supplant him — carbonic acid-breathing creepings along the dark floors of stifling caverns such as may enable them to scrape together a preponderance of a certain mineral, etc. etc. — as the most lamentable examples of Phrenitis — arising simply from the ineradicable instinct — of Immortality it is true, but misplaced Immortality — Immortality in this life.”