Alfred, Lord Tennyson - Delphi Poets Series

by Lord Tennyson Alfred

  I am going to write out for Alfred a few lines from a Finnish Poem which I find quoted in Lowell’s “Among my Books” — which I think a good Book. But I must let my eyes rest now.

  In September 1876 a lucky chance brought Tennyson and himself face to face again after twenty years. The Poet was travelling with his son, and together they visited him at Woodbridge. They found him, as Tennyson describes, in his garden at Little Grange. He was delighted to see them, and specially pleased with the son’s relation and attitude to his father.

  Together he and Tennyson walked about the garden and talked as of old. When Tennyson complained of the multitude of poems which were sent him, Old Fitz recommended him to imitate Charles Lamb and throw them into his neighbour’s cucumber frames. Tennyson noticed a number of small sunflowers, with a bee half-dying — probably from the wet season — on each, “Like warriors dying on their shields, Fitz,” he said. He reverted, of course, to his favourite Crabbe, and told the story of how Crabbe (when he was a chaplain in the country) felt an irresistible longing to see the sea, mounted a horse suddenly, rode thirty miles to the coast, saw it, and rode back comforted.

  FitzGerald did not compliment them on their looks, because, he said, he had always noticed men said, “How well you are looking!” whenever you were going to be very ill. Therefore he had ceased saying it to any one. He told, too, a story of a vision, how he had one day clearly seen from outside his sister and her children having tea round the table in his dining-room. He then saw his sister quietly withdraw from the room, so as not to disturb the children. At that moment she died in Norfolk.

  He wrote shortly after this visit to Tennyson:

  Little Grange, Woodbridge,

  October 31st, 1876.

  My dear Alfred — I am reading delightful Boccacio through once more, escaping to it from the Eastern Question as the company he tells of from the Plague. I thought of you yesterday when I came to the Theodore and Honoria story, and read of Teodoro “un mezzo meglio per la pineta entrato”—”More than a Mile immersed within the wood,” as you used to quote from Glorious John. This Decameron must be read in its Italian, as my Don in his Spanish: the language fits either so exactly. I am thinking of trying Faust in German, with Hayward’s Prose Translation. I never could take to it in any Shape yet: and — don’t believe in it: which I suppose is a piece of Impudence.

  But neither this, nor The Question are you called on to answer — much use if I did call. But I am — always yours,

  E. F. G.

  When I thought of you and Boccacio, I was sitting in the Sun on that same Iron Seat with the pigeons about us, and the Trees still in Leaf.

  One of the poems after 1842 which he liked was the “Ode on the Duke of Wellington,” though characteristically he made a somewhat fastidious criticism on the “vocalization” of the opening.

  “I mumble over your old verses in my memory as often as any one’s,” he wrote, “and was lately wishing you had found bigger vowels for the otherwise fine opening of the Duke’s Funeral:

  ‘Twas at the Royal Feast for Persia won, etc.

  (Dryden.)

  Bury the great Duke, etc.

  (A. T.)

  So you see I am always the same crotchetty

  Fitz.”

  The paradox is that it was FitzGerald who was always urging “Alfred” to go on, and finding fault with him for not doing more, and not singing in grander, sterner strains, — not becoming the Tyrtaeus of his country. In truth, Tennyson’s strength and physical force and his splendid appearance in youth, added to his mental grandeur, seem to have deeply impressed his youthful contemporaries. He was, they felt, heroic, and made for heroic songs and deeds. When he did go on, in his own way, FitzGerald did not like it, or only half liked it. For Tennyson did go forward on his own lines. He had not a little to daunt and deter him. He, too, had his sensitiveness and capacity for feeling and passion not less exquisite than FitzGerald’s own. FitzGerald said his friendships were more like loves. He was not alone in this attitude. “What passions our friendships were,” wrote Thackeray, another of the set, the early friend of both FitzGerald and Tennyson. But of no friendship could such language be used more truly than of that which existed between Tennyson and Arthur Hallam. When, however, the sundering blow fell, and the friendship which was a love lay shattered, Tennyson braced himself and went on. For

  It becomes no man to nurse despair,

  But in the teeth of clench’d antagonisms

  To follow up the worthiest till he die.

  His faith, even to the last, was still at times dashed with doubt, for, with “the universality of his mind,” he could not help seeing many sides of a question. But he “followed the Gleam,” as he has himself described. FitzGerald did the opposite. He drifted, he dallied, he delayed, he despaired. He ruined his own life in great measure by his marriage. His early ambitions seemed to wither prematurely, and he let his career slide. Yet he was always, as Mr. A. C. Benson has excellently brought out, admirable in his sincerity, his friendly kindliness, his innocence, his conscientious adherence to his literary standards. Too much has been made of his unconventionality, his slovenliness and slackness, his love of low or common company. He remained a gentleman and a man of business. Thackeray, a man of the world, when he was starting for America, wanted to leave him the legal guardian of his daughters. He was an Epicurean, not a Pyrrhonist. He took life seriously. He showed at times an austerity of spirit which was surprising. His Omar has often, and naturally, been compared to Lucretius and to Ecclesiastes. There is probably more of Lucretius about the poem, but more of Ecclesiastes about the translator.

  There is another Epicurean, with whose tenets he might have been thought to show even more sympathy — the easy-going poet-critic Horace. Vitae summa brevis spem nos vetat incohare longam is the constant burden of FitzGerald’s strain. His friendship, early formed, with Tennyson, the contrast of their divergent views, might be compared with the friendship of Horace and Virgil. For Virgil, too, began as an Epicurean. But FitzGerald was not content with Horace. “Why is it,” he wrote, “that I can never take up with Horace, so sensible, agreeable, elegant, and sometimes even grand?” It was, perhaps, just that masculine and worldly element that put him off. Yet he not seldom quotes Horace, and perhaps liked him better than he knew. “Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret,” he wrote in a copy of Polonius which he gave to a special friend, and Nature was what he was always seeking in poetry. Still he preferred Virgil, just as he really preferred Tennyson.

  Though he was destined to produce a poem which bids as fair for immortality as any of its time, he did not think highly of his own powers as a poet. But he did plume himself on being a critic. “I pretend to no Genius,” he said, “but to Taste, which according to my aphorism is the feminine of Genius.” This was another gift in common. Tennyson was himself a consummate critic, as FitzGerald was the first to recognize.

  FitzGerald had his limitations and his prejudices — his “crotchets.” He did not like many even of those whom the world has agreed to admire. He did not like Euripides or even Homer. With Goethe’s poems he could not get on. He eschewed Victor Hugo. He liked, indeed, very little of the prose and none of the poetry of his contemporaries, except that of the Tennysons. He could not away with Browning. Arnold, he wrote down “a pedant.” He thought very little of Rossetti and Swinburne, though the former, especially, was a great admirer not only of Omar but of Jami and some of the Spanish translations. He tried to read Morris’s Jason, but said, “No go.” He “could not read the Adam Bedes and the Daisy Chains.” All this must be remembered when we read his criticism of Tennyson’s later work which belonged to the period of these writers and their productions. But within certain limits he was a very fine critic. It cannot be said of him as of his special favourite among Greek poets, Sophocles, that

  He saw life steadily and saw it whole.

  As he was aware himself, he by no means saw it whole. But with his detachment and his critical gift
, it may, perhaps, be said:

  He saw life lazily, but saw it plain.

  To the question of Browning’s merits, or want of merits, he is always returning. A very characteristic letter is a long, discursive one, written to Tennyson himself in 1867:

  Markethill, Woodbridge,

  November 3rd, 1867.

  My dear old Alfred — I abuse Browning myself; and get others to abuse him; and write to you about it; for the sake of easing my own heart — not yours. Why is it (as I asked Mrs. Tennyson) that, while the Magazine critics are belauding him, not one of the men I know, who are not inferior to the writers in the Athenæum, Edinburgh, etc., can endure, and (for the most part) can read him at all? I mean his last poem. Thus it has been with the Cowells, Trinity Thompsons, Donnes, and some others whom you don’t know, but in whose candour and judgment I have equal confidence, men and women too.

  Since I wrote to your wife, Pollock, a great friend of Browning’s, writes to me. “I agree with you about Browning and A. T. I can’t understand it. Ter conatus eram to get through the Ring and the Book — and failing to perform the feat in its totality, I have stooped to the humiliation to point out extracts for me (they having read it all quite through three times) and still could not do it. So I pretend to have read it, and let Browning so suppose when I talk to him about it. But don’t you be afraid”? (N.B. I am not, only angry) “things will come round, and A. T. will take his right place again, and R. B. will have all the honours due to his learning, wit and philosophy.”

  Then I had the curiosity to ask Carlyle in my yearly letter to him. He also is, or was, a friend of B.’s, and used to say that he looked on him as a sort of light-cavalry man to follow you. Well, Carlyle writes, “Browning’s book I read — insisted on reading: it is full of talent, of energy, and effort, but totally without backbone, or basis of common sense. I think among the absurdest books ever written by a gifted man.” (Italics are his.)

  Who, then, are the people that write the nonsense in the Reviews? I believe the reason at the bottom is that R. B. is a clever London diner-out, etc., while A. T. holds aloof from the newspaper men, etc. “Long life to him!” But I don’t understand why Venables, or some of the men who think as I do, and wield trenchant pens in high places, why they don’t come out, and set all this right. I only wish I could do it: but I can only see the right thing, but not prove it to others. “I do not like you, Dr. Fell,” etc.

  I found a Memorandum the other day (I can’t now light on it) of a Lincolnshire story about “Haxey Wood” or “Haxey Hood” — which — if I had not told it to you, but left it as by chance in your way some thirty years ago, you would have turned into a shape to outlast all R. B.’s poems put together. There is no use in my finding and sending it now, because it doesn’t do (with Paltry Poets) to try and drag them to the water. The two longest and worst tales (I think) in Crabbe’s Tales of the Hall, were suggested to him by Sir S. Romilly, and “a lady in Wiltshire.” I wish Murray would let me make a volume of “Selections from Crabbe” — which I know I could, so that common readers would wish to read the whole original; which now scarce any one does; nor can one wonder they do not. But Crabbe will flourish when R. B. is dead and buried. Lots of lines which he cut out of his MS. would be the beginning of a little fortune to others. I happened on this couplet the other day:

  The shapeless purpose of a soul that feels,

  And half suppresses wrath and half reveals.

  Not that Crabbe is to live by single couplets or epigrams, but by something far better, as you know better than I. There is a long passage in the Tales of the Hall (Old Bachelor) which always reminds me of you, A. T., where the Old Bachelor recounts how he pleaded with his Whig father to be allowed to marry the Tory Squire’s daughter; when,

  Coolly my father looked, and much enjoy’d

  The broken eloquence his eye destroy’d, etc.

  and then pleads to the Tory mother of the girl.

  Methinks I have the tigress in my eye, etc.

  Do look at this, A. T., when you get the Book, and don’t let my praise set you against it.

  I have written you a very long letter, you see, with one very bad eye too. I thought it had mended, by help of cold water and goggles; but these last three days it has turned rusty again. I believe it misses the sea air.

  δεινῶν τ᾽ ἄημα πνευμάτων ἐκοίμισε

  στένοντα πόντον

  Do you quite understand this ἐκοίμισε? But what lines, understood or not! The two last words go alongside of my little ship with me many a time. Well, Alfred, neither you, nor the Mistress, are to answer this letter, which I still hope may please you, as it is (all the main part) written very loyally, and is all true. Now, good-bye, and remember me as your old

  E. F. G.

  Ne cherchez point, Iris, à percer les ténèbres

  Dont les Dieux sagement ont voilé l’Avenir;

  Et ne consultez point tant de Devins célèbres

  Pour chercher le moment qui doit nous désunir.

  Livrez-vous au plaisir; tout le reste est frivole;

  Et songez que, trop court pour de plus longs projets,

  Tandis que nous parlons le Temps jaloux s’envole,

  Et que ce Temps, hélas! est perdu pour jamais.

  But wait — before I finish I must ask why you assure Clark of Trinity that it is the rooks who call “Maud, Maud, etc.” Indeed it is the Thrush, as I have heard a hundred times in a summer’s evening, when scared in the evergreens of a garden. Therefore:

  Rooks in a classroom quarrel up in the tall trees caw’d;

  But ‘twas the thrush in the laurel, that kept crying, Maud, Maud, Maud.

  Keats he put very high indeed. “I have been again reading Lord Houghton’s Life of Keats” he wrote, “whose hastiest doggrel should show Browning, Morris & Co., that they are not what the newspapers tell them they are.” “What a fuss the cockneys make about Shelley just now, surely not worth Keats’ little finger,” he wrote on another occasion. And again, “Is Mr. Rossetti a Great Poet like Browning and Morris? So the Athenæum tells me. Dear me, how thick Great Poets do grow nowadays.” And yet again, “I can’t read G. Eliot as I presume you can; I really conclude that the fault lies in me, not in her; so with Goethe (except in his letters, Table-Talk, etc.), whom I try in vain to admire.”

  His real love was for Crabbe, the poet, not of “realism” but of reality.

  Life’s sternest painter and its best —

  the poet of disillusionment. This love, which has been felt in different generations by Byron, Cardinal Newman, and Bishop Gore, he could get few of his friends to share with him. Tennyson himself was one of the few. “I keep reading Crabbe from time to time,” he writes to Tennyson; “nobody else does unless it be another ‘paltry Poet’ whom I know. The edition only sells at a shilling a volume — second-hand. I don’t wonder at young people and women (I mean no disparagement at all) not relishing even the good parts: and certainly there is plenty of bad for all readers.”

  What he loved before all was “touches of nature,” the humour, the pathos, of ordinary life. He liked home-thrusts at human foibles and frailty, and again the outwelling of native nobility, generosity, or love. Newman’s early Sermons, “Plain and Parochial” as they were, perhaps for this very reason he much affected. “The best that were ever written in my judgment,” he said. He remained an admirer of Newman, and speaks enthusiastically of the Apologia and its “sincerity.” But he did not like the ritualism of the Oxford movement. His traditions were Evangelical, — one reason perhaps why he liked Newman. John Wesley was “one of his heroes,” and he had much sympathy with, and was at one period personally drawn by, evangelical and revivalist Mission preaching.

  He would have sympathized with Keble’s lines teaching that his fellow-creatures should not

  Strive to wind themselves too high

  For sinful man beneath the sky.

  This was probably one of the reasons why he did not
like “In Memoriam.” He said indeed that he thought it too artistic, too machine-made. He said that he thought Tennyson became gradually altogether too artistic and lost in spontaneity, vigour, and freshness. Yet he himself was a most laborious artist, both in his verse and in his prose. Omar is most carefully elaborated, with correction on correction, and so are the best parts of Euphranor. His reasons were really deeper, and went more against the matter than the form. He did not like the early “Idylls of the King.” “The Holy Grail” he liked as he had liked the “Vision of Sin.” But what moved him to tears was the old-style “Northern Farmer,” the “substantial, rough-spun Nature he knew,” and “the old brute, invested by the poet with the solemn humour of Humanity like Shakespeare’s Shallow.” Yet even here a “crotchet” cropped up, as appears from the following note:

  Woodbridge, May 20th, 1877.

  The enclosed scrap from Notes and Queries reminded me (as probably the writer has been reminded) of your Old Farmer, the only part of which that goes against me is the “canter and canter away” of the last line. I can scarce tell you (as usual with me) why I don’t like Doctor Fell; but you know I must be right.

  By the by, my old Crabbe in the Parish Register (Burials), says

  Bless me! I die — and not a warning giv’n —

  With much to do on earth, and all for Heaven:

  No preparation for my soul’s affairs,

  No leave petitioned for the Barn’s repairs, etc.