Alfred, Lord Tennyson - Delphi Poets Series

by Lord Tennyson Alfred

  In the conflict between Science and Faith our business was to accept the one without rejecting the other: and that he achieved. Never did his acceptance of the animal ancestry of man, for instance, upset his belief in the essential divinity of the human soul, its immortality, its supremacy, its eternal destiny. Never did his recognition of the materialistic aspect of nature cloud his perception of its spiritual aspect as supplementing and completing and dominating the mechanism. His was a voice from other centuries, as it were, sounding through the nineteenth; and by his strong majestic attitude he saved the faith of thousands who else would have been overwhelmed; and his writings convey to our own age a magnificent expression of that which we too have still not fully accepted, but which we are on the way to believe.

  If asked to quote in support of this statement I will not quote more than the titles of some of the chief poems to which I appeal. Not always the greatest poems perhaps do I here refer to, but those which most clearly uphold the contention of the Poet’s special service to humanity during the period of revolution in thought through which mankind has been passing.

  Let me instance, therefore, first and most obviously, “In Memoriam”; and thereafter poems such as “De Profundis,” “The Two Voices,” “The Ancient Sage,” “Ulysses,” “Vastness,” “By an Evolutionist,” “Demeter and Persephone,” “Akbar’s Dream,” “God and the Universe,” “Flower in the Crannied Wall,” “The Higher Pantheism,” “The Voice and the Peak,” “Wages,” and “Morte d’Arthur.”

  If I do not add to this list the great poem “To Virgil,” who in his day likewise assimilated knowledge of diverse kinds and in the light of spiritual vision glorified all he touched, it is only because the atmosphere of the Ancient poet is so like that of the Modern one that it is not by any single poem that their sympathy and kinship has to be displayed, but rather by the similarity of their whole attitude to the Universe.

  By the term “Poet of Science” I understand one who assimilates the known truths of Science and Philosophy, through the pores, so to speak, without effort and with intuitive accuracy, one who bears them lightly and raises them above the region of bare fact into the realm of poetry. Such a poet is one who transfuses fact with beauty, he is ready to accept the discoveries of his age, no matter how prosaic and lamentable they seem, and is able to perceive and display the essential beauty and divinity which runs through them all and threads them all together. That is the service which a great poet can perform for Science in his day and generation. The qualities beyond this — exhibited for the most part perhaps in other poems — which enable him to live for all time, are qualities above any that I have the right or the power to estimate.

  To be overwhelmed and mastered by the material and the mechanical, even to the extent of being blind to the existence of every other aspect, is common and human enough. But to recognize to the full the reign of law in Nature, the sequence of cause and effect, the strength of the chain-armour of necessity which men of science weave, and yet to discern in it the living garment of God — that is poetic and divine.

  TENNYSON AS A STUDENT AND POET OF NATURE by Sir Norman Lockyer, F.R.S.

  When Tennyson passed from life, not only did England lose one of her noblest sons, but the world a poet who, beyond all others who have ever lived, combined the gift of expression with an unceasing interest in the causes of things and in the working out of Nature’s laws.

  When from this point of view we compare him with his forerunners, Dante is the only one it is needful to name; but although Dante’s knowledge was well abreast of his time, he lacked the fullness of Tennyson, for the reason that in his day science was restricted within narrow limits. In Dante’s time, indeed — he was born some 300 years before Galileo and Tycho Brahe — science apart from cosmogony had chiefly to do with the various constellations and measurements of the passing of time and the daily and yearly motions of the sun, for the observation of which long before his epoch our ancient monuments were erected; the physical and biological sciences were still unborn. Dante’s great work is full of references to the science of his day; his science and song went hand in hand as Tennyson’s did in later, fuller times. This in strong contrast with such writers as Goethe who, although both poet and student of science, rarely commingled the two strands of thought.

  It is right and fitting that the highest poetry should be associated with the highest knowledge. Tennyson’s great achievement has been to show us that in the study of science we have one of the bases of the fullest poetry, a poetry which appeals at the same time to the deepest emotions and the highest and broadest intellects of mankind. Tennyson, in short, has shown that science and poetry, so far from being antagonistic, must for ever advance side by side.

  So far as my memory serves me I was introduced to the late Lord Tennyson by Woolner about the year 1864. I was then living in Fairfax Road, West Hampstead, and I had erected my 6-inch Cooke Equatorial in the garden. I soon found that he was an enthusiastic astronomer, and that few points in the descriptive part of the subject had escaped him. He was therefore often in the observatory. Some of his remarks still linger fresh in my memory. One night when the moon’s terminator swept across the broken ground round Tycho he said, “What a splendid Hell that would make.” Again, after showing him the clusters in Hercules and Perseus he remarked musingly, “I cannot think much of the county families after that.” In 1866 my wife was translating Guillemin’s Le Ciel and I was editing and considerably expanding it; he read many of the proof sheets and indeed suggested the title of the English edition, The Heavens.

  In the ‘seventies, less so in the ‘eighties, he rarely came to London without discussing some points with me, and in these discussions he showed himself to be full of knowledge of the discoveries then being made.

  Once I met him accidentally in Paris; he was most anxious to see Leverrier and the Observatory. Leverrier had the reputation of being difficile; I never found him so, but I certainly never saw him so happy as when we three were together, and he told me afterwards how delighted he had been that Tennyson should have wished to pay him a visit. I visited Tennyson at Aldworth in 1890 when he was in his 82nd year. I was then writing the Meteoritic Hypothesis, and he had asked for proof sheets. When I arrived there I was touched to find that he had had them bound together for convenience in reading, and from the conversation we had I formed the impression that he had read every line. It was a subject after his own heart, as will be shown farther on. One of the nights during my stay was very fine, and he said to me, “Now, Lockyer, let us look at the double stars again,” and we did. There was a 2-inch telescope at Aldworth. His interest in Astronomy was persistent until his death.

  The last time I met him (July 1892), he would talk of nothing but the possible ages of the sun and earth, and was eager to know to which estimates scientific opinion was then veering.

  So far I have referred, and in very condensed fashion, to Tennyson’s knowledge of and interest in Astronomy as they came out in our conversations. I have done this because I was naturally most struck with it, but only a short acquaintance was necessary to show me that this interest in my own special subject was only a part of a general interest in and knowledge of scientific questions.

  This was borne home to me very forcibly in about the year 1866 or 1867. The evenings of Mondays were then given up to friends who came in, sans cérémonie, to talk and smoke. Clays from Broseley, including “churchwardens” and some of larger size (Frank Buckland’s held an ounce of tobacco), were provided, and the confirmed smokers (Tennyson, an occasional visitor, being one of them) kept their pipes, on which the name was written, in a rack for future symposia. One night it chanced that many travellers — Bates, Baines, and Winwoode Reade among them — were present, and the question of a certain kind of dust-storms came on the tapis. Tennyson, who had not started the subject, listened for some time and then remarked how difficult it was for a student to gain certain knowledge on such subjects, and he then astonished the company by giving t
he names of eight authors, four of whom had declared they had seen such dust-storms as had been described, the other four insisting that they could not be produced under any known meteorological conditions and that with the best opportunities they had never seen them.

  In many of our talks I came across similar evidences of minute knowledge in various fields; nothing in the natural world was trivial to him or to be neglected. This great grasp was associated with a minute accuracy, and it was this double habit of mind which made Tennyson such a splendid observer, and therefore such a poet, for the whole field of nature from which to cull the most appropriate epithets was always present in his mind.

  Hence those exquisite presentations of facts, in which true poetry differs from prose, and which in Tennyson’s poetry appeal at once both to the brain and heart.

  But even this is not all that must be said on this point. Much of Tennyson’s finest is so fine that it wants a knowledge on a level with his own to appreciate its truth and beauty; many of the most exquisite and profound touches I am convinced are missed by thousands of his readers on this account. The deep thought and knowledge are very frequently condensed into a simple adjective instead of being expanded into something of a longer breath to make them apparent enough to compel admiration. This it strikes me he consistently avoided.

  All the charm of all the Muses often flowering in a lonely word.

  Although many of the poems seem to me to be clothed with references to natural phenomena as with a garment, it can on the whole, I think, be gathered from them, as I gathered from our conversations, that the subject deepest in his thoughts was the origin of things in its widest sense, a Systema Mundi, which should explain the becoming of the visible universe and define its different parts at different periods in its history. In this respect we have:

  Three poets in three ages born.

  Dante, Milton, and Tennyson, with their minds saturated with the same theme, and I can fancy nothing in the history of human thought more interesting or encouraging than the studies of this theme as presented to us in their works published we may say, speaking very roughly, three centuries apart.

  This of course is another story, but a brief reference to it is essential for my present purpose.

  All the old religions of the world were based upon Astronomy, that and Medicine being the only sciences in existence. Sun, Moon, and Stars were all worshipped as Gods, and thus it was that even down to Dante’s time Astronomy and religion were inseparably intertwined in the prevalent Cosmogonies. The Cosmogony we find in Dante, the peg on which he hangs his Divina Commedia, with the seven heavens surrounding the earth and seven hells inside it, had come down certainly from Arab and possibly prior sources; the Empyrean, the primum mobile, the seven Purgatories, and the Earthly Paradise (the antipodes of Jerusalem) were later additions, the latter being added so soon as it was generally recognized that the earth was round, though the time of the navigator was not yet.

  Dante constructed none of this machinery, he used it merely; it represented the knowledge, that is, the belief, of his time.

  Between Dante and Milton there was a gap; but what a gap! It was filled by Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Galileo, Columbus, Magellan, and Vasco da Gama, to mention no more, and the astronomers and geographers between them smashed the earth-centred heavens, the interior hells, and the earthly paradise into fragments.

  It was while this smashing was working its way into men’s minds that Milton wrote his poem, and he, like Dante, centred it on a cosmogony. Well might Huxley call it “the Miltonic Hypothesis”! but how different from the former one, from which it was practically a retreat, carefully concealed in an important particular, but still a retreat from the old position.

  Milton in his poem uses, so far as heaven is concerned, the cosmogony of Dante, but he carefully puts words into Raphael’s mouth to indicate that after all the earth-centred scheme of the seven heavens must give way. But the most remarkable part of “Paradise Lost” is the treatment of hell.

  Milton’s greatness as a poet, as a maker, to my mind is justly based upon the new and vast conceptions which he there gave to the world and to which the world still clings.

  To provide a new hell which had been “dismissed with costs” from the earth’s centre, he boldly halves heaven and creates chaos and an external hell out of the space he filches from it. “Hellgate” is now the orifice in the primum mobile towards the empyrean.

  In Tennyson we find the complete separation of Science from Dogmatic Theology, thus foreshadowed by Milton, finally achieved. In him we find, as in Dante and Milton, one fully abreast with the science and thought of the time, and after another gap, this one filled up by Newton, Kant, Herschel, Laplace, and Darwin, we are brought face to face with the modern Cosmogony based upon science and Evolution. The ideas of heaven and hell in the mediaeval sense no longer form a necessary part of it, in Tennyson they have absolutely disappeared. In those parts of his poems in which he introduces cosmogonic ideas we have to deal with the facts presented by the heavens and the earth which can throw light upon the ancient history of our planet and its inhabitants.

  The modern Systema Mundi which Tennyson dwells on over and over again is dominated by

  Astronomy and Geology, terrible Muses.

  To come back from this parenthesis I must finally point out that although some of the most pregnant and beautiful passages in Tennyson’s poems have reference to the modern views of the origin of things, almost all natural phenomena are referred to, in one place or another, in language in which both the truest poetry and most accurate science are blended.

  The breadth of the outlook upon Nature shown by the references in the Poet’s works is only equalled by the minute accuracy of observation displayed. Astronomy, geology, meteorology, biology, and, indeed, all branches of science except chemistry, are thus made to bring their tribute, so that finally we have a perfect poetic garland, which displays for us the truths of Nature and Human Nature intertwined.

  MEMORIES by E. V. B.

  How kind to ask for some of my few small memories of your father — treasured memories which no length of years can ever rub out. And how much I like to recall them, though, alas! there is so little; it was so seldom that we met in those unforgotten times. Once, I remember, I sent him a rose from my garden, a black beauty, rather rare in those old days—”L’Empereur de Maroque,” now quite cut out by “Prince Camille de Rohan.” I keep the little word of thanks that came afterwards in return:

  My dear E. V. B. — Many thanks for your more amiable than beautiful Black Rose. I don’t mean to be personal, but am, yours always,

  Tennyson.

  Another of his notes is the one wherein he gave me leave to illustrate “The May Queen.” His words in the note were: “I would rather you than any one else should do it.” His poems were a joy to me, even in childhood — from the days when, dull lesson hours, etc., being done, I could steal away and no one know, and, sitting on the carpet by the home book-shelves, read over and over on the sly from a bound volume (one of Blackwood’s Magazines), where were long extracts from Tennyson’s poems, especially the earlier ones, and amongst them one called “Adeline.” There was certainly a magic in the poetry, scarce found elsewhere — magic even for a child of ten.

  Summer-house at Farringford, where “Enoch Arden” was written. Carved and painted by Alfred Lord Tennyson.

  Do you remember how you used to tell me that your father had a great love for the red rose? He sent me, for my Ros Rosarum, lines on a Rosebud by himself:

  The Rosebud

  The night with sudden odour reel’d,

  The southern stars a music peal’d,

  Warm beams across the meadow stole,

  For Love flew over grove and field,

  Said, “Open, Rosebud, open, yield

  Thy fragrant soul.”

  I know he loved the poet’s colour — lilac. A long-past scene in the garden at Farringford still remains in the mind’s eye fresh and vivid — painted in with
memory’s fast colours among the pictures of remembrance.

  The sunshine of a morning at Farringford in early summer when we came up the long middle walk, bordered on either side with lilac-flowered aubretia, led up to the open summer-house where Tennyson, with two or three friends, sat in the sun, enjoying the warmth and the lovely lines of lilac. We turned towards the house after a time, going under the budding trees of the grove. There he pointed out some young bushes of Alexandrian laurel — the same, he told us, whose small narrow leaves were used to make the crown for victors in the Olympian games....

  Then — can I ever forget? — that delightful evening at Aldworth, when, after dinner, he invited me to his room upstairs. There he smoked his pipe in his high-backed, cane arm-chair, while I sat near. On a little table by the fire were arranged several more of these well-smoked Dublin pipes. Such a large, comfortable “smoke-room”! — with books about everywhere, on tables and chairs. Then he read to me aloud from “Locksley Hall.” I think he read all the poem from the beginning to the end; and as Tennyson read on — one seemed almost to feel the pungent, salt sea-breeze blowing from over desolate seas — almost saw visions of the dreary sands lengthening far away. I remember I ventured to ask why the stanza which follows after that line, “And all the wonder that should be,” was afterwards omitted:

  In the hall there hangs a picture — Amy’s arms about my neck,

  Happy children in a sunbeam, sitting on the ribs of wreck.

  In my life there was a picture — she that clasp’d my neck is flown,

  I was left within the shadow, sitting on the wreck alone.