Alfred, Lord Tennyson - Delphi Poets Series

by Lord Tennyson Alfred

  The last and least of men;

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  His winter chills him to the root,

  He withers marrow and mind;

  The kernel of the shrivell’d fruit

  Is jutting thro’ the rind;

  The tiger spasms tear his chest,

  The palsy wags his head;

  The wife, the sons, who love him best

  Would fain that he were dead;

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  The statesman’s brain that sway’d the past

  Is feebler than his knees;

  The passive sailor wrecks at last

  In ever-silent seas;

  The warrior hath forgot his arms,

  The Learned all his lore;

  The changing market frets or charms

  The merchant’s hope no more;

  The prophet’s beacon burn’d in vain,

  And now is lost in cloud;

  The plowman passes, bent with pain,

  To mix with what he plow’d;

  The poet whom his Age would quote

  As heir of endless fame —

  He knows not ev’n the book he wrote,

  Not even his own name.

  For man has overlived his day,

  And, darkening in the light,

  Scarce feels the senses break away

  To mix with ancient Night.

  The Sage — far from denying the force of what he says — contends for a deeper and wider view. The “darkness is in man.” It is the result of the incompleteness of his knowledge. That is to say, what is black to his imperfect view, and taken by itself, may be a necessary part of a great scheme. Not that the things are not really sad, but that the whole is not sad. As there may be pain in tears of joy, and yet it is lost in exquisite pleasure, so the dark elements of life, when our ultimate destiny is attained and we can view age and suffering as part of the whole, may be so entirely eclipsed, that we may say with truth that the “world is wholly fair”:

  My son, the world is dark with griefs and graves,

  So dark that men cry out against the Heavens.

  Who knows but that the darkness is in man?

  The doors of Night may be the gates of Light;

  For wert thou born or blind or deaf, and then

  Suddenly heal’d, how would’st thou glory in all

  The splendours and the voices of the world!

  And we, the poor earth’s dying race, and yet

  No phantoms, watching from a phantom shore

  Await the last and largest sense to make

  The phantom walls of this illusion fade,

  And show us that the world is wholly fair.

  “The doors of night may be the gates of light,” says the Sage; and in unison with this note are his replies to some of the details of the younger man’s wail, while his very argument presupposes that all cannot now be answered until we have the “last and largest sense.” Thus, when the dreary, hopeless vision of bodily decay, which seems to point to total dissolution of a noble nature, is referred to, he says:

  The shell must break before the bird can fly.

  The breaking of the shell might seem, at first sight, total destruction, but the forthcoming of the bird transforms the conception of decay into a conception of new birth. And so, too, in answer to the complaint that “the shaft of scorn that once had stung, but wakes the dotard smile,” he suggests that a more complete view may show it to be “the placid gleam of sunset after storm.” The transition may be not from intense life to apathy, but from blinding passion to a calmer, a serener vision.

  Another of the later poems—”Vastness” — brings into especial relief a parallel I have often noted between Lord Tennyson and Cardinal Newman in their keen sense of the mysteries of the universe, which religion helps us to bear with but does not solve. So far as this planet goes, and our own human race, Cardinal Newman has expressed this sense in the Apologia, and the parallel between his view and Tennyson’s is sufficiently instructive to make it worth while to quote the passage in full:

  To consider the world in its length and breadth, its various history, the many races of man, their starts, their fortunes, their mutual alienation, their conflicts; and then their ways, habits, governments, forms of worship; their enterprises, their aimless courses, their random achievements and acquirements, the impotent conclusion of long-standing facts, the tokens so faint and broken of a superintending design, the blind evolution of what turn out to be great powers and truths, the progress of things as if from unreasoning elements, not towards final causes, the greatness and littleness of man, his far-reaching aims, his short duration, the curtain hung over his futurity, the disappointments of life, the defeat of good, the success of evil, physical pain, mental anguish, the prevalence and intensity of sin, the pervading idolatries, the corruptions, the dreary hopeless irreligion, that condition of the whole race so fearfully yet exactly described by the Apostle, “having no hope and without God in the world,” all this is a vision to dizzy and appal; and inflicts upon the mind the sense of a profound mystery which is absolutely beyond human solution.

  Lord Tennyson takes in a wider range of considerations than the Cardinal. He paints graphically, not only the mystery of the lot of mankind, but the further sense of bewilderment which arises when we contemplate the aimlessness of this vast universe of which our earth is such an inappreciable fragment. Logically the poem asks only the question: “Great or small, grand or ignoble, what does anything matter if we are but creatures of the day with no eternal destiny?” But its grandeur consists in the manner in which it sweeps from end to end of human experience and knowledge, from thoughts overwhelming in their vastness, from ideas carrying the mind over the length and breadth of space and over visions of all eternity, to pictures of this planet, with its microscopic details, the hopes, anxieties, plans, pleasures, griefs which make up the immediate life of man. The imagination vacillates between a keen sense of the importance of all, even the smallest, and the worthlessness of all, even the greatest. At one moment comes the thought that one life out of the myriads of lives passed on this tiny planet, if it be lived and given up for righteousness, is of infinite and eternal value, and the next moment comes the sense that the whole universe is worthless and meaningless, if, indeed, the only percipient beings who are affected by it are but creatures who feel for a day and then pass to nothingness. Each picture of the various aspects of human life rouses an instinctive sympathy, and a feeling in the background, “it can’t be worthless and meaningless,” and yet the poet relentlessly forces us to confess that it is only some far wider view of human nature and destiny than this world alone can justify, which can make the scenes he depicts of any value. What Mill called “the disastrous feeling of ‘not worth while’” threatens the reader at every turn; though the pictures of life in its innumerable aspects of happiness, misery, sensuality, purity, selfishness, self-devotion, ambition, aspiration, craft, cruelty, are so intensely real and rivet the imagination so strongly, that he refuses to yield to the feeling. I subjoin some of the couplets where good and bad, great and small, alternate:

  Many a hearth upon our dark globe sighs after many a vanish’d face,

  Many a planet by many a sun may roll with the dust of a vanish’d race.

  Raving politics, never at rest — as this poor earth’s pale history runs, —

  What is it all but a trouble of ants in the gleam of a million million of suns?

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  Faith at her zenith, or all but lost in the gloom of doubts that darken the schools;

  Craft with a bunch of all-heal in her hand, follow’d up by her vassal legion of fools.

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  Wealth with his wines and his wedded harlots; honest Poverty, bare to the bone;

  Opulent Avarice, lean as Poverty: Flattery gilding the rift in a throne.

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  Love for the maiden, crown’d with marriage, no regrets for aught that has be
en,

  Household happiness, gracious children, debtless competence, golden mean;

  National hatreds of whole generations, and pigmy spites of the village spire;

  Vows that will last to the last death-ruckle, and vows that are snapt in a moment of fire;

  He that has lived for the lust of the minute, and died in the doing it, flesh without mind;

  He that has nail’d all flesh to the Cross, till Self died out in the love of his kind;

  Spring and Summer and Autumn and Winter, and all these old revolutions of earth;

  All new-old revolutions of Empire — change of the tide — what is all of it worth?

  What the philosophies, all the sciences, poesy, varying voices of prayer?

  All that is noblest, all that is basest, all that is filthy with all that is fair?

  What is it all, if we all of us end but in being our own corpse-coffins at last,

  Swallowed in Vastness, lost in Silence, drown’d in the deeps of a meaningless Past?

  What but a murmur of gnats in the gloom, or a moment’s anger of bees in their hive?

  The thought which seems to oppress the seer is the insignificance of everything when compared to a standard — ever conceivable and ever actual — above it. The ruts of a ploughed field may seem to the diminutive insect as vast and overcoming as the Alps seem to us. Then contrast the thought of Mont Blanc with that of the whole globe; proceed from the globe to the solar system, and from that to the myriads of systems lost in space. All that is great to us is relatively great, and becomes small at once when the mind rises higher. So, too, in the moral order, all those aspects of human life which sway our deepest emotions are but “a murmur of gnats in the gloom,” if regard be had to our comparative insignificance. The ground yields at every step, and the mind looks for some terra firma, some absolute basis of trust, and this is only to be found in the conception of man as possessing an eternal destiny. The infinite value of all that concerns an immortal being stands proof against the thoughts that bewildered our vision. “He that has nailed all flesh to the cross till self died out in the love of his kind” may be but a speck in the universe, but faith measures him by a standard other than that of spacial vastness. The idea of the eternal worth of morality steps in to calm the imagination, and this idea in its measure justifies the conception of the value and importance of all the phases of human existence which make up the drama of life. Human Love is the side of man’s nature which the poet looks to as conveying the sense of his immortal destiny. The undying union of spirit with spirit is a union which the grave cannot end. The bewildering nightmare of the nothingness and vanity of all things is abruptly cut short, as the sense of what is deepest in the human heart promptly gives the lie to what it cannot solve in detail:

  Peace, let it be! for I loved him and love him for ever.

  The dead are not dead but alive.

  The South Side of Entrance from below the Terrace, Aldworth. Drawn by W. Biscombe Gardner.

  TENNYSON AND ALDWORTH by Sir James Knowles, K.C.V.O.

  Farringford he never forsook, though he added another home to it; and assuredly no poet has ever before called two such residences his own. Both of them were sweetened by the presence there, so graciously prolonged, of her to whom the lovers of song owe so deep a debt of gratitude. The second home was as well chosen as the first. It lifted England’s great poet to a height from which he could gaze on a large portion of that English land which he loved so well, see it basking in its most affluent summer beauty, and only bounded by “the inviolate sea.” Year after year he trod its two stately terraces with men the most noted of their time; statesmen, warriors, men of letters, science, and art, some of royal race, some famous in far lands, but none more welcome to him than the friends of his youth. Nearly all of those were taken from him by degrees; but many of them stand successively recorded in his verse. The days which I passed there yearly with him and his were the happiest days of each year. They will retain a happy place in my memory during whatever short period my life may last; and the sea-murmurs of Freshwater will blend with the sighing of the woods around Aldworth, for me, as for many more worthy, a music, if mournful, yet full of consolation.

  MS. Note, Aubrey de Vere.

  When I was “little more than a boy” I made, accidentally, my first acquaintance with Tennyson as a poet, long before I knew him as a man. I came by chance upon a copy of “In Memoriam,” then just published anonymously. I was quite entirely ignorant and indifferent in those days about all poetry, and did not in the least know or guess who had written it, but, opening it haphazard at the Geological Stanzas, was so impressed and riveted by them, — for I was a student of Geology at the time, — that I could not put the book down until I had read it all through and from end to end. I was caught up and enthralled by its spirit, and my eyes seemed suddenly opened on a whole new world. It made an epoch in my life and an ineffaceable impression. I soon came to know my Tennyson almost by heart, and was taunted by my friends for my worship of the “divine Alfred,” as I reverently called him. In this frame of mind it was that I made the bold venture of asking his leave to dedicate to him my little book on King Arthur and his Knights, his kind acceptance of which homage I have already mentioned in my former article.

  My first personal acquaintance with him was in the autumn of 1866, when I was staying at Freshwater. I felt that I must call upon him and offer him my respects and thanks before I left, but put it off through shyness until the day before my holiday was to end. Then I took my courage in both hands and went to Farringford. “Mr. Tennyson was out walking, but Mrs. Tennyson was at home and would be happy to see me.” It was a disappointment, but Mrs. Tennyson received me most kindly and graciously, and begged me to return later in the evening if I could, and see her husband who would like to meet me. When I did return I was shown upstairs to the top of the house and into an attic which was the Poet’s own study, and presently, with my heart in my mouth, I heard his great steps as he climbed up the little wooden stairs. His bodily presence seemed as kingly as I felt it ought to be, though a little grim and awful at first; but he made me very welcome, and then groped about for and lighted a pipe, and sat down and began to speak of King Arthur as being a subject of common interest and sympathy.

  This soon thawed the chill of my spirits and I began to feel more at home, until I felt I could make the request I was longing to do — would he read to me one of his Poems, as I desired earnestly to hear from his own lips what I already knew and loved? Then came a great surprise and delight, for it was not reading as usually understood, but intoning on a note, almost chanting, which I heard, and which brought the instant conviction that this was the proper vehicle for poetry as distinguished from prose. I was so enchanted that I begged for more and more; and then I suppose may have begun a personal sympathy which grew and lasted always afterwards till his death. For when I made to go he took me all about the house, showing me the pictures and drawings with which his walls were lined, peering into them so closely with a lighted candle that I thought he would set them or himself on fire. This was, perhaps, another common ground, — I having been all my life interested in art and in a small way a collector of drawings and pictures.

  Before I left he told me to come and claim acquaintance if ever we met before I came to Farringford again, for if not his short sight would prevent his knowing me. On this friendly request I acted in the spring of the following year, 1867, when my wife and I were going to pay a visit at Haslemere. At Haslemere station, to my surprise, I saw him standing on the platform, and went up and spoke to him, reminding him of his desire that I should do so. I then introduced my wife to him, and he explained how he came to be there — namely, because he was in search of a site where he might build a cottage to take refuge in from the tourists who made his life a burden to him in the Isle of Wight. He added, “You are an architect, why should you not make the plans of it for me?” I said, “With the greatest possible pleasure, upon one condition that I may act prof
essionally without making any professional charge; for I cannot be paid twice over, and you, Mr. Tennyson, have over-paid me already long ago — in the pleasure and delight your works have given me — for any little work I could do for you.” He protested, but in the end accepted my terms.

  The cottage, as he first proposed it, was to be a small square, four-roomed house, with a door in the middle, like one in which he was then staying near Haslemere. I went there to see him and to describe plans and the question of a site. After inspecting several with him, he took me secretly to one which a friend had found out as being possibly procurable, and on which Aldworth was finally built. It was a natural terrace, formed just below the summit of Black Down, and was known as Green Hill. There was a potato-patch where the house now stands, — a little flat clearance in the midst of sloping coppices that covered all the southern side of the hill; and it was a spot of ideal seclusion, just wide enough and no more for a moderately sized house, quite perfect for his objects, — almost too perfect in the way of inaccessibility, for it took years of negotiation and trouble to obtain a practicable road to it. The view from it was simply perfect, extending over the whole of woody Sussex to the South Downs and the sea. “It wants nothing,” he said as he gazed at it, “but a great river looping along through the midst of it.” “Gloriously crimson flowers set along the edge of the terrace would burn like lamps against the purple distance” — as presently was realized.

  The plans for a four-roomed cottage gave way somewhat as I talked the matter over with Mr. and Mrs. Tennyson, the latter giving me certain rough ideas which she could not quite express by drawing, but which I understood enough to put into shape; and presently I went to Farringford with designs for a less unimportant dwelling. It grew and grew as it was talked over and considered, the details being all discussed with Mrs. Tennyson, while he contented himself by pretending to protest against any addition and improvement.

  At last, one day, when I brought sketches for an arcaded porch to complete the design, he put his foot down and said he would have nothing to do with it — that he would have no more additions — that it would ruin him and could not be entertained for a moment. He walked to and fro, coming back from time to time to the table where the drawing lay and looking at it. He admitted that he liked it more and more the more he looked at it, but presently cried out with simulated fury, “Get thee behind me, Satan,” and ran out of the room. Then I knew that the porch was won. When it was built he got to be very fond of it, and used to call attention to the way in which the landscape was framed by the arches of it. He even had a picture of it made by a friend to show this effect.