Alfred, Lord Tennyson - Delphi Poets Series

by Lord Tennyson Alfred

  Only the actions of the just

  Smell sweet, and blossom in the dust.

  And then, standing over the grave, he recited the whole of the beautiful poem from which these lines are taken. Tennyson’s eldest son wrote to me at the same time:

  His wonderful simplicity in faith and nature, together with his subtle and far-reaching grasp of intellect, make up a man never to be forgotten. My father and mother and myself will miss him more than I can say; I loved him somehow like an intimate college friend.

  A few years later Tennyson published the memorial lines in the volume called Demeter and other Poems, which show how closely his observant mind had taken in the character of his friend:

  Farewell, whose living like I shall not find,

  Whose Faith and Work were bells of full accord,

  My friend, the most unworldly of mankind,

  Most generous of all Ultramontanes, Ward,

  How subtle at tierce and quart of mind with mind,

  How loyal in the following of thy Lord!

  Horatio Tennyson.

  Freshwater was in those days seething with intellectual life. The Poet was, of course, its centre, and that remarkable woman, Mrs. Cameron, was stage-manager of what was for us young people a great drama. For Tennyson was still writing the “Idylls of the King,” which had so greatly moved the whole country, and we felt that we were in the making of history. There were many in Freshwater who were keenly alive to their privilege. Even among the permanent residents in the neighbourhood there were not a few who were worthy of remark, and Farringford was very hospitable and often added to their number some of the most interesting people in England. Mrs. Cameron herself was one of the well-known Miss Pattles, a sister of the late Lady Somers and Lady Dalrymple. She was a great wit and a most original and unconventional woman, with an enthusiasm for genius and for art. Her large artistic photographs are a permanent record of the remarkable people who congregated from time to time round the Poet’s home in the island. They include Carlyle, Ruskin, Tyndall, Darwin, Lord Dufferin, Palgrave, D. G. Rossetti, Holman Hunt, Lecky, Aubrey de Vere, Sir Henry Taylor, Herschell, Longfellow, Auberon, Herbert, Pollock, Allingham, and many another. Among other residents I would name the Rev. Christopher Bowen, a man of very unusual ability, though he never had enough ambition to become famous. His sons — Lord Justice Bowen and Mr. Edward Bowen of Harrow — are better known. Then there were the Poet’s two remarkable brothers, Horatio and Arthur Tennyson, and two fine old admirals, Sir Graham Hamond and Admiral Crozier. Then again from 1874 onwards we had at the Briary G. F. Watts, and Mrs. Cameron’s sister, Mrs. Prinsep and her husband, with Mr. Val Prinsep as an occasional guest. A little earlier Sir John Simeon was still living at Swainston, and was one of Tennyson’s most intimate friends. Again, Mrs. Grosvenor Hood and Mrs. Brotherton were both people for whom literature and art counted for much.

  The large group of people who came to Freshwater in the summer for the sole reason that Tennyson’s writings and himself were among the greatest things in their lives, sometimes formed an almost unique society. Several figures are especially prominent in my memory. One great friend of the Tennysons’ was Sir Richard Jebb — intensely shy and intensely refined — with whom, I may add, by the way, my first meeting at Haslemere was unpromising. I got into the Tennysons’ large old-fashioned brougham to drive to Aldworth on a dark night, and laid rough hands on what I took to be a heap of rugs in the corner. I received in return a mild remonstrance from the fellow-guest, of whose coat-collar I found myself possessed! Jowett and Sir Alfred Lyall I often met at the Tennysons’ and elsewhere. Each was in his way memorable, and congenial to the Poet’s taste, which was fastidious owing to his very simplicity, to his love of reality and dislike of affectation. The singular charm — both in person and in conversation — of Samuel Henry Butcher, another great friend, stands out vividly from the past. In addition to his brilliant gifts and acquirements he was endowed in a remarkable degree with that justice of mind which Tennyson so greatly prized. One used to feel for how much this counted in the Poet’s mind when he talked of the “wisdom” of his old friend, James Spedding. Henry Irving I once saw at Aldworth, though never at Farringford, and it was curious to meet at close quarters one with whom I had had for years the stranger’s intimacy which one has with a favourite actor. But Irving was never an intimate friend of Tennyson’s, nor among the typical figures of his circle. To my mind the friend of Tennyson’s whose saintliness most completely had his sympathy was Aubrey de Vere, of whom Sarah Coleridge said that he had more entirely a poet’s nature even than her own father, or any other of the great poets she had known. Aubrey de Vere’s simplicity and deep piety were as remarkable as his keen perception and close knowledge on the subject which most interested Tennyson himself. I wish I had seen more of the intercourse of two men whose friendship was almost lifelong, and showed Tennyson at his very best in conversation.

  Speaking generally, it was a society in which good breeding, literary taste, general information, and personal distinction counted for much more than worldly or official status. I think that we young people looked upon a government official of average endowment as rather an outsider. Genius was all in all for us — officialdom and conventionality in general were unpopular in Freshwater.

  Indeed, how could conventionality obtain a footing in a society in which Mrs. Cameron and Tennyson were the central figures? I recall Mrs. Cameron pressing my father’s hand to her heart, and addressing him as “Squire Ward.” I recall her, during her celebrated private theatricals at Dimbola, when a distinguished audience tittered at some stage misadventure which occurred during a tragic scene, mounting a chair and insisting loudly and with angry gesticulation, “You must not laugh; you must cry.” I recall her bringing Tennyson to my father’s house while she was photographing representatives for the characters in the “Idylls of the King,” and calling out directly she saw Cardinal Vaughan (to whom she was a perfect stranger), “Alfred, I have found Sir Lancelot.” Tennyson’s reply was, “I want a face well worn with evil passion.”

  My own intercourse with the Poet was chiefly after my father’s death in 1882. Tennyson was then an old man who had passed his threescore years and ten. His deeply serious mind brooded constantly on the prospect for the future, and the meaning of human life, which was, for him, nearly over.

  There is much of autobiography in some of the poems of those years which he discussed with me. I have elsewhere described his impressive analysis of the “De Profundis.” I will here set down the substance of his comments on two other poems dealing with his deep problems of human life, the “Ancient Sage” and “Vastness.” “The Ancient Sage” is in form dramatic, and the personality of the two interlocutors is a very important element in it viewed as a work of art. An aged seer of high, ascetic life, a thousand years before the birth of Christ, holds intercourse with a younger man:

  that loved and honour’d him, and yet

  Was no disciple, richly garb’d, but worn

  From wasteful living...

  The younger man has set down his reflections on the philosophy of life in a set of verses which the Ancient Sage reads, making his comments as the reading proceeds. There seems to be a deep connection between the personal characteristics of the two men — their habits and modes of living — and their respective views. The younger man is wearied with satiety, impatient for immediate pleasure:

  Yet wine and laughter, friends! and set

  The lamps alight, and call

  For golden music, and forget

  The darkness of the pall.

  He is dismayed by the first appearance of difficulty and pain in the world, as he had been satisfied for a time with the immediate pleasures within his reach. He is unable to steady the nerve of his brain (so to speak), and trace the riddle of pain and trouble in the universe to its ultimate solution. In thought, as in conduct, he is filled and swayed by the immediate inclination and the first impression, without self-restraint and without the
habits of concentrated reflection which go hand in hand with self-restraint. Failing, in consequence, to have any steady view of his own soul or of the spiritual life within, he is impressed, probably by experience, with this one truth, that uncontrolled self-indulgence leads to regret and pain; and he is consequently pessimistic in his ultimate view of things. The absence of spiritual light makes him see only the immediate pain and failure in the universe. He has no patience to look beyond or to reflect if there be not an underlying and greater purpose which temporary failure in small things may further, as the death of one cell in the human organism is but the preparation for its replacement by another, and a part of the body’s natural development. It is a dissipated character and a dissipated mind. The intangible beauty of moral virtue finds nothing in the character capable of assimilating it; the spiritual truth of Gods existence and the spiritual purpose of the universe elude the mind.

  In marked contrast stands forth the “Ancient Sage.” He has no taste for the dissipations of the town:

  I am wearied of our city, son, and go

  To spend my one last year among the hills.

  His gospel is a gospel of self-restraint and long-suffering, of action for high ends.

  Let be thy wail and help thy fellow-men,

  And make thy gold thy vassal, not thy king,

  And fling free alms into the beggar’s bowl,

  And send the day into the darken’d heart;

  Nor list for guerdon in the voice of men,

  A dying echo from a falling wall:

  ·······

  Nor roll thy viands on a luscious tongue,

  Nor drown thyself with flies in honied wine.

  ·······

  And more — think well! Do-well will follow thought.

  And the patience and self-control which enable him to work for great purposes and spiritual aims, characterize also his thought. “Things are not what they seem,” he holds. The first view is ever incomplete, though he who has not patience of thought will not get beyond the first view. That concentration and that purity of manners which keep the spiritual soul and self undimmed, and preserve the moral voice within articulate, are indispensable if we are to understand anything beyond the most superficial phenomena about us. The keynote is struck in the very first words which the Seer speaks:

  This wealth of waters might but seem to draw

  From yon dark cave, but, son, the source is higher,

  Yon summit half-a-league in air — and higher,

  The cloud that hides it — higher still, the heavens

  Whereby the cloud was moulded, and whereout

  The cloud descended. Force is from the heights.

  “Force is from the heights” is the thought which underlies the Sage’s interpretation of all that perplexes the younger man. We cannot fully understand what is beyond and above us, but if we are wise we shall steadily look upwards, and enough light will eventually be gained for our guidance. “Lucerna pedibus meis verbum tuum.” As God’s law is enough to guide our footsteps, though we cannot hope to understand His full counsel, so the light by which the spiritual world is disclosed is sufficient for those who look for it, though its disclosure is only gradual and partial. If we are said not to know what we cannot submit in its entirety to scientific tests, we can never know anything worth knowing. If, again, we are to disbelieve in the spiritual world because it is filled with mystery, what are we to say of the mysteries which face us in this earth — inexplicable yet undeniable? The conception of God is not more mysterious than the thought that a grain of sand may be divided a million times, and yet be no nearer its ultimate division than it is now. Time and space are full of mystery. A man under chloroform has been known to pass many hours of sensation in a few minutes. Time is made an objective measure of things, and yet its phenomena are so subjective that Kant conceived it to have no real existence. When the younger man complains that “the Nameless Power or Powers that rule were never heard nor seen,” the Sage thus replies:

  If thou would’st hear the Nameless, and wilt dive

  Into the Temple-cave of thine own self,

  There, brooding by the central altar, thou

  May’st haply learn the Nameless hath a voice,

  By which thou wilt abide, if thou be wise,

  As if thou knewest, tho’ thou canst not know;

  For Knowledge is the swallow on the lake

  That sees and stirs the surface-shadow there

  But never yet hath dipt into the abysm,

  The Abysm of all Abysms, beneath, within

  The blue of sky and sea, the green of earth,

  And in the million-millionth of a grain,

  Which cleft and cleft again for evermore,

  And ever vanishing, never vanishes,

  To me, my son, more mystic than myself,

  Or even than the Nameless is to me.

  And so, too, when the youth calls for further proof of the “Nameless,” the Sage reminds him that there are universally acknowledged truths incapable of formal proof. The thought which the poet here dwells upon is similar to Cardinal Newman’s teaching in the Grammar of Assent, though Tennyson’s use of words does not here, as elsewhere, harmonize with Catholic doctrine. There are truths, the knowledge of which is so intimately connected with our own personality, that the material for complete formal proof eludes verbal statement. We reject, for example, with a clear and unerring instinct, the notion that when we converse with our friends, the words and thoughts which come to us proceed possibly from some principle within us and not from an external cause, and yet it is not a matter on which we can offer logical proof. The same sensations could conceivably be produced from within, as they are in a dream. Logical proof, then, has (so the Ancient Sage maintains) to be dispensed with in much that is of highest moment:

  Thou canst not prove that thou art body alone,

  Nor canst thou prove that thou art spirit alone,

  Nor canst thou prove that thou art both in one:

  Thou canst not prove thou art immortal, no

  Nor yet that thou art mortal — nay, my son,

  Thou canst not prove that I, who speak with thee,

  Am not thyself in converse with thyself,

  For nothing worthy proving can be proven,

  Nor yet disproven.

  And close upon this follows the beautiful passage in which the hopeful and wistful upward gaze of faith is described. While melancholy and perplexity constantly attend on the exercises of the speculative intellect, we are to “cling to faith”:

  She reels not in the storm of warring words,

  She brightens at the clash of “Yes” and “No,”

  She sees the Best that glimmers thro’ the Worst,

  She feels the Sun is hid but for a night.

  She spies the summer thro’ the winter bud,

  She tastes the fruit before the blossom falls,

  She hears the lark within the songless egg,

  She finds the fountain where they wailed “Mirage”!

  These lines present to the reader the hopefulness of the spiritual mind, hopefulness not akin to the merely sanguine temperament, but based on a deep conviction of the reality of the spiritual world, and on unfailing certainty that there is in it a key to the perplexities of this universe of which we men understand so little. We know from experience that material Nature is working out her ends, however little we understand the process, and however unpromising portions of her work might appear without this knowledge. That an acorn should have within it forces which compel earth, air, and water to come to its assistance and become the oak tree, would seem incredible were it not so habitually known as a fact; and the certainty which such experiences give in the material order, the eye of faith gives in the spiritual order. However perplexing the universe now seems to us we have this deep trust that there is an explanation, and that when we are in a position to judge the whole, instead of looking on from this corner of time and space, the truth of the spiritual interpretati
on of its phenomena will be clear—”ut iustificeris in sermonibus tuis et vincas cum iudicaris.” This view runs not only through the passages I have just quoted, but through all the poem. The poet pleads for steadfast trust and hope in the face of difficulty, as we would trust a known and intimate friend in the face of ominous suspicions.

  It is, of course, just that keen realization of the plausibleness of the sceptical view of life, to which some of our modern critics object as a sign of weakness, which gives this poem its strength. Such assistance as Tennyson gives us in seeing and realizing the spiritual view is needed only or mainly by those to whom agnosticism in its various forms is a plausible, and, at first sight, a reasonable attitude. The old-fashioned “irrefragable arguments” are of little use by themselves to persons in such a condition. However evident spiritual truths may be to an absolutely purified reason, they are not evident to intellects which are impregnated with a view of things opposed to the religious view. Moreover, we do not consult a doctor with much confidence if he does not believe in the reality of our illness; and one who finds the sceptical view persuasive will have little trust in those who tell him that it has no plausibility at all. With Tennyson, as with Cardinal Newman, half the secret of his influence in this respect is that the sceptically minded reader finds those very disturbing thoughts which had troubled his own mind anticipated and stated. And yet a truer and deeper view is likewise depicted, which sees beyond these thoughts, which detects through the clouds the light in the heavens beyond.

  In the “Ancient Sage” there is a striking instance of this characteristic. The young philosopher, filled with the failure of fair promise and the collapse of apparent purpose in Nature and in man, pours forth his sceptical lament. Here is a selection from it, typical of the rest:

  The years that made the stripling wise

  Undo their work again,

  And leave him, blind of heart and eyes,