Alfred, Lord Tennyson - Delphi Poets Series

by Lord Tennyson Alfred

  The poem took seventeen years to write, and when it appeared the Poet was at the summit of his great powers. His instinct chose a metre at once strong, simple, fresh, flexible, and grave, and noble — equally adapted to every mood, every form of thought or feeling — the passionate, the meditative, the solemn, the imaginative — for description, argument, aspiration, even for prayer. The tone varies: there are lighter and deeper touches: but it is hardly too much to say, there is not an insignificant stanza, nor a jarring note, from beginning to end.

  In a poem where all is so familiar — which has meant and means so much to all who care for poetry — it is difficult to quote. I will take a few stanzas, so chosen, if possible, as to show somewhat of the variety, the range, the subtlety, the charm, and the power of this great work.

  He goes to the house in London where the dead friend lived: the gloom without typifies and harmonizes with the darkness of his sorrowful thoughts.

  Dark house, by which once more I stand

  Here in the long unlovely street:

  Doors, where my heart was wont to beat

  So quickly, waiting for a hand, —

  A hand that can be clasped no more —

  Behold me — for I cannot sleep —

  And like a guilty thing I creep

  At earliest morning to the door.

  He is not here; but far away

  The noise of life begins again,

  And ghastly thro’ the drizzling rain

  On the bald street breaks the blank day.

  One of the most important motives concerns the doubts raised by the new truths which science was beginning to teach, almost seeming to make in a sense a new heaven and a new earth. The old simple beliefs seemed to the Poet threatened — these misgivings are evil dreams: Nature seems to say:

  ... A thousand types are gone:

  I care for nothing, all shall go.

  Thou makest thine appeal to me;

  I bring to life, I bring to death;

  The spirit does but mean the breath:

  I know no more...

  Then the Poet breaks out:

  And he, shall he,

  Man, her last work, who seem’d so fair,

  Such splendid purpose in his eyes,

  Who roll’d the psalm to wintry skies,

  Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer —

  Who trusted God was love indeed,

  And love Creation’s final law —

  Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw

  With ravine, shriek’d against his creed —

  Who loved, who suffer’d countless ills,

  Who battled for the True, the Just,

  Be blown about the desert dust,

  Or seal’d within the iron hills?...

  O life as futile, then, as frail!

  O for thy voice to soothe and bless!

  What hope of answer, or redress?

  Behind the veil, behind the veil.

  He will not accept the suggestions which seem to empty human life of its deepest meanings. There must be some other solution.

  One more quotation of a different kind — the common sad thought, never so beautifully expressed, of the places we have loved when bereft of our daily loving care — then passing into other hands and forgetting us, and becoming at last to others what they have been to us.

  It is in these common universal human themes that Tennyson with his exquisite musical touch, and sympathy, and unerring choice of significant detail, reaches the heart of every reader.

  Unwatch’d, the garden bough shall sway,

  The tender blossom flutter down,

  Unloved, that beech will gather brown,

  This maple burn itself away:

  Unloved, the sunflower, shining fair,

  Ray round with flames her disk of seed,

  And many a rose-carnation feed

  With summer spice the humming air:

  Unloved, by many a sandy bar,

  The brook shall babble down the plain,

  At noon or when the lesser wain

  Is twisting round the polar star.

  (Omitting a stanza.)

  Till from the garden and the wild

  A fresh association blow,

  And year by year the landscape grow

  Familiar to the stranger’s child.

  As year by year the labourer tills

  His wonted glebe, or lops the glades,

  And year by year our memory fades

  From all the circle of the hills.

  I can quote no more.

  The poem seems gradually to rise from the depths of sorrow and doubt to a new hope and faith — in short, to a new life. The marks of what it has passed through are seen in the deeper thought, the larger nature, and insight, and scope. The soul has grown and strengthened, we may almost say.

  In short, the poem is the inner history of a soul: our deepest feelings, our hopes, our fears, our longings, our weaknesses, our difficulties, all find penetrating, sympathetic, enlightening expression — terse, melodious, inspiring, deeply suggestive — in a word, we feel the magic of poetry.

  I have no time left to deal with the large work, which occupied many years, “The Idylls of the King.” It is a series — in blank verse, always melodious and often exquisite, giving the main incidents of the old Arthurian legend, which as a boy he had read with delight in old Malory’s prose epic.

  I must content myself with two brief references.

  The first idyll, “Gareth and Lynette,” is not in itself one of the most interesting — dealing chiefly as it does with the picture of the eager boy, anxious to be one of Arthur’s knights, who serves a year in menial place as a test of his obedience: but there is one passage which ought never to be omitted in speaking of Tennyson, viz. the answer of the seer when the boys ask him if the castle is enchanted.

  The seer answers ironically, yet with a deep meaning, that it is enchanted:

  For there is nothing in it as it seems

  Saving the King; tho’ some there be that hold

  The King a shadow, and the city real.

  Then he tells them about the vows: which if they fear to take, he warns them

  Pass not beneath this gateway, but abide

  Without, among the cattle of the field,

  For an ye hear a music, like enow

  They are building still, seeing the city is built

  To music, therefore never built at all,

  And therefore built for ever.

  Beneath the strangely beautiful surface meaning of these lines there lies the deep allegoric meaning that often what seems visionary is in truth a spiritual and eternal reality. It brings to mind the wonderful lines of Browning (in “Abt Vogler”):

  The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard,

  The passion that left the earth to lose itself in the sky,

  Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard;

  Enough that he heard it once, we shall hear it by and by.

  The other point concerns the end of the poem. The last section is the Passing of Arthur; the old fragment “Morte d’Arthur” enlarged. One notable addition occurs at the very end.

  In the earlier version of the fragment, after Arthur had passed away on the dark lake, with him the last hope also disappears.

  We are only told:

  Long stood Sir Bedivere,

  Revolving many memories, till the hull

  Look’d one black dot against the verge of dawn,

  And on the mere the wailing died away.

  In the fragment the end was tragic: the noble attempt failed; the hero and inspirer passed away, his aim defeated, his comrades slain or scattered, his life and efforts vain.

  But in the final shape comes a new and very significant end:

  Then from the dawn it seem’d there came, but faint,

  As from beyond the limit of the world,

  Like the last echo born of a great cry,

  Sounds, as if some fair city were one voic
e,

  Around a king returning from his wars.

  Thereat once more he moved about, and clomb

  Ev’n to the highest he could climb — and saw,

  Or thought he saw, the speck that bare the King

  Somewhere far off, pass on and on, and go

  From less to less, and vanish into light.

  And the new sun rose, bringing the new year.

  We feel, as we are meant to feel, that though the death of a noble soul, after unequal war with ill, is deeply sad — fitly pictured with sorrowful sounds and darkness of night — yet the great spirit cannot wholly die: the night breaks into a new day; and the day will be brighter for those who are left, because of the efforts and memories of the leader who is no more.

  Tennyson is without doubt, from first to last, one of the great poetic artists. He is not often an inspired singer like Shelley, but he has other gifts which Shelley lacked — a self-restraint, an artistic finish, a fine and mature taste, a deep reverence for the past, a pervading sympathy with the broad currents of the best thought and feeling of the time. Sometimes this is (as we have seen) a weakness, but it is also the source of his greatest strength. He has not, like Wordsworth, given us a new insight, what I may almost call a new religion: but he has a wider range than Wordsworth, and a surer poetic touch. Wordsworth may be the greater teacher; for many of us he has opened a new world: he has touched the deepest springs of our nature. But Tennyson has left us gifts hardly less rare and precious. He has refined, enriched, beautified, in some sense almost remade our poetic language; he has shown that the classic eighteenth-century finish is not incompatible with the nineteenth-century deeper and wider thought: and, in a word, he has inwoven the golden thread of poetry with the main texture of the life, knowledge, feeling, experience, and ideals of the years whereof we are all alike inheritors.

  TENNYSON: HIS LIFE AND WORK by the Right Hon. Sir Alfred Lyall, G.C.B.

  The biography of a great poet has seldom been so written as to enhance his reputation with the world at large. It is almost always the highest artist whose individuality, so to speak, is least discernible in his work, and who, like some divinity, is at his best when his mind and moods, his lofty purpose and his attitude toward the problems of life, are revealed only through the medium which he has chosen for revealing them to mankind. To lay bare the human side of a poet, to retail his domestic history, and to dwell upon his private relations with friends or family, will always interest the public enormously; but for himself it is often a perilous ordeal. The man of restless erratic genius, cut off in his prime like Byron or Shelley, leaves behind him a confession of faults and follies, while one who has lived long takes the risk of intellectual decline; or else, like Coleridge, Landor, and even Scott, he may in other ways suffer loss of dignity by the posthumous record of failings or mistakes. It is a rare coincidence that in this nineteenth century two poets of the first rank — Wordsworth and Tennyson — should each have passed the natural limit of fourscore years, steadily extending their reputation without material loss of their power, and completely fulfilling the ideal of a life devoted to their beautiful art, free alike from adventures and eccentricities, tranquil, blameless, and nobly dignified.

  Such is the life which has been described to us in the Memoir of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, by his son. In preparing it he had the singular advantage of very close and uninterrupted association for many years with his father, and of thorough acquaintance with his wishes and feelings in regard to the inevitable biography. In a brief preface, he touches, not without emotion, upon the aims and limitations of the task which it had become his duty to undertake.

  “For my part,” he says, “I feel strongly that no biographer could so truly give him as he gives himself in his own works; but this may be because, having lived my life with him, I see him in every word which he has written; and it is difficult for me so far to detach myself from the home circle as to pourtray him for others. He himself disliked the notion of a long, formal biography.... However, he wished that, if I deemed it better, the incidents of his life should be given as shortly as might be without comment; but that my notes should be final and full enough to preclude the chance of further and unauthentic biographies.”

  Lord Tennyson has given us a remarkable chronicle of his father’s life from youth to age, illustrated by correspondence that is always interesting and occasionally of supreme value, by anecdotes and reminiscences, by characteristic thoughts and pithy observations — the outcome of the Poet’s reflection, consummate literary judgment, and constant intercourse with the best contemporary intellects. He has, moreover, so arranged the narrative as to show the rapid expansion of Tennyson’s strong, inborn poetic instinct, with the impressions and influences which moulded its development, maturing and perfecting his marvellous powers of artistic execution.

  Alfred Tennyson was born in the pastoral village of Somersby, amid the Lincolnshire wolds; and he spent many holidays on the coast at Mablethorpe, where he acquired that passion for the sea which has possessed so many poets. The atmosphere of a public school favours active emulation and discipline for the outer world; but to a boy of sensitive and imaginative temperament it is apt to be uncongenial, so we need not be sorry that Tennyson was spared the experience. At first, like most men of his temperament who go straight from private tuition to a University, he felt solitary and depressed—”the country is so disgustingly level, the revelry of the place so monotonous, the studies of the University so uninteresting, so matter-of-fact.” But there was about him a distinction in mind and body that soon marked him out among his fellows (“a kind of Hyperion,” writes FitzGerald), uniting strength with refinement, showing much insight into character, with the faculty of brief and pointed sallies: “We were looking one day at the portrait of an elderly politician in bland family aspect. A. T. (with his eyeglass): It looks rather like a retired panther. So true.”

  He was an early member of the Society yclept the Apostles, which included many eager and brilliant spirits, whose debates were upon political reform, the bettering of the people’s condition, upon morals, religion, and those wider and more liberal views of social needs that were foremost at a period when the new forces were just mustering for attack upon the old entrenchment of Church and State. Edward FitzGerald’s notes and Tennyson’s own later recollections are drawn upon in this book for lively illustrations of the sayings and doings of this notable group of friends, and for glimpses of their manner of life at Cambridge. Here he lived in the choice society of that day, and formed, among other friendships, an affectionate attachment to Arthur Hallam, who afterwards became engaged to his sister, and in whose memory the famous poem was written. Hallam seems to have been one of those men whose extraordinary promise and early death invest their brief and brilliant career with a kind of romance, explaining and almost justifying the pagan notions of Fate and divine envy.

  In June 1829 Tennyson scored his first triumph by the prize poem on Timbuctoo, which, as he said many years afterwards, won the medal to his utter astonishment, for it was an old poem on Armageddon, adapted to Central Africa “by a little alteration of the beginning and the end.” Arthur Hallam wrote of it on September 2, 1829: “The splendid imaginative power which pervades it will be seen through all hindrances. I consider Tennyson as promising fair to be the greatest poet of our generation, perhaps of our century” — a remarkably far-reaching prophecy to have been built upon so slender a foundation. Out of his “horror of publicity,” as he said, he committed it to Merivale for declamation in the Senate House. In 1830 appeared Tennyson’s first volume of poems, upon which Arthur Hallam again wrote, in a review, that “the features of original genius are strongly and clearly marked”; while on the other hand, Coleridge passed upon it the well-known criticism that “he has begun to write verses without very well knowing what metre is”; and Christopher North handled it with a touch of good-natured ridicule. Then followed, in 1832, a fresh issue, including that magnificent allegory, the “Palace of Art�
�; with other poems whose very blemishes signified exuberant strength. James Montgomery’s observation of him at this stage is in the main true as a standing test of latent potency in beginners. “He has very wealthy and luxurious thought and great beauty of expression, and is a poet. But there is plenty of room for improvement, and I would have it so. Your trim, correct young writers rarely turn out well; a young poet should have a great deal which he can afford to throw away as he gets older.” The judgment was sound, for after a silent interval of ten years, during which the Poet was sedulously husbanding and cultivating his powers, the full-orbed splendour of his genius shone out in the two volumes of 1842.

  “This decade,” writes his biographer, “wrought a marvellous abatement of my father’s real fault,” which was undoubtedly “the tendency, arising from the fulness of mind which had not yet learned to master its resources freely, to overcrowd his composition with imagery, to which may be added over-indulgence in the luxuries of the senses.” By this and by other extracts from contemporary criticism given in the Memoir its readers may survey and measure the Poet’s rapid development of mind and methods, the expansion of his range of thoughts, his increasing command over the musical instrument, and the admirable vigour and beauty which his composition was now disclosing. He had the singular advantage, rarely enjoyed so early in a poetic career, of being surrounded by enthusiastic friends who were also very competent art-critics, and whose unanimous verdict must have given him heart and confidence; so that the few spurts of cold water from professional reviewers troubled him very little. The darts thrown by such enemies might hardly reach or wound him — πρὶν γὰρ περιβῆσαν ἄριστοι — the two Hallams, James Spedding, Edward FitzGerald, the two Lushingtons, Blakesley, and Julius Hare rallied round him enthusiastically. Hartley Coleridge met Tennyson in 1835, and, “after the fourth bottom of gin,” deliberately thanked Heaven for having brought them acquainted. Wordsworth, who had at first been slow to appreciate, having afterwards listened to two poems recited by Aubrey de Vere, did “acknowledge that they were very noble in thought, with a diction singularly stately.” Even Carlyle, who had implored the Poet to stick to prose, was vanquished, and wrote (1842) a letter so vividly characteristic as to justify a long quotation: