Alfred, Lord Tennyson - Delphi Poets Series

by Lord Tennyson Alfred

  Dear Tennyson — Wherever this find you, may it find you well, may it come as a friendly greeting to you. I have just been reading your Poems; I have read certain of them over again, and mean to read them over and over till they become my poems; this fact, with the inferences that lie in it, is of such emphasis in me, I cannot keep it to myself, but must needs acquaint you too with it. If you knew what my relation has been to the thing call’d English “Poetry” for many years back, you would think such a fact almost surprising! Truly it is long since in any English Book, Poetry or Prose, I have felt the pulse of a real man’s heart as I do in this same.

  I know you cannot read German: the more interesting is it to trace in your “Summer Oak” a beautiful kindred to something that is best in Goethe; I mean his “Müllerin” (Miller’s daughter) chiefly, with whom the very Mill-dam gets in love; though she proves a flirt after all, and the thing ends in satirical lines! Very strangely, too, in the “Vision of Sin” I am reminded of my friend Jean Paul. This is not babble, this is speech; true deposition of a volunteer witness. And so I say let us all rejoice somewhat. And so let us all smite rhythmically, all in concert, “the sounding furrows,” and sail forward with new cheer “beyond the sunset” whither we are bound.

  The Memoir contains some valuable reminiscences of this period, contributed after Tennyson’s death by his personal friends, which incidentally throw backward a light upon the literary society of that day. Mr. Aubrey de Vere describes a meeting between Tennyson and Wordsworth; and relates also, subsequently and separately, a conversation with Tennyson, who was enthusiastic over the songs of Burns: “You forget, for their sake, those stupid things, his serious pieces.” The same day Mr. de Vere met Wordsworth, who “praised Burns even more vehemently than Tennyson had done ...” but ended, “of course I refer to his serious efforts, those foolish little amatory songs of his one has to forget.”

  But in addition to contemporary criticism, written or spoken, and to the reminiscences, the biography gives us also several unpublished poems and fragmentary verses belonging to this period, with the original readings of other pieces that were altered before publication. It is in these materials, beyond others, that we can observe the forming and maturing of his style, the fastidious taste which dictated his rejection of work that either did not satisfy the highest standard as a whole, or else marred a poem’s symmetrical proportion by superfluity, over-weight, or the undue predominance of some note in the general harmony. One may regret that some fine stanzas or exquisite lines should have been thus expunged, as, for example, those beginning:

  Thou may’st remember what I said.

  Yet we believe the impartial critic will confirm in every instance the decision. “Anacaona,” written at Cambridge, was never published, because “the natural history and the rhymes did not satisfy” Tennyson; it is full of tropical warmth and ardour, with a fine rhythmic beat, but it is certainly below high-water mark. And the same must be said of the “Song of the Three Sisters,” published and afterwards suppressed, though the blank verse of its prelude has undoubted quality. He acted, as we can see, inexorably upon his own rule that “the artist is known by his self-limitation”; feeling certain, as he once said, that “if I meant to make any mark in the world it must be by shortness, for the men before me had been so diffuse.” Only the concise and perfect work, he thought, would last; and “hundreds of lines were blown up the chimney with his pipe smoke, or were written down and thrown into the fire as not being perfect enough.” Yet all his austere resolution must have been needed for condemning some of the fine verses that were struck out of the “Palace of Art,” merely to give the poem even balance, and trim it like a boat. Very few poems could have spared or borne the excisions from the “Dream of Fair Women”; though here and there the didactic or scientific note is slightly prominent, as in the following stanza:

  All nature widens upward. Evermore

  The simpler essence lower lies,

  More complex is more perfect, owning more

  Discourse, more widely wise.

  At any rate the preservation of these unpublished verses adds much to the value of the biography; and we may rank Tennyson among the very few poets whose reputation has rather gained than suffered by the posthumous appearance of pieces that the writer had deliberately withdrawn or withheld.

  Of Tennyson’s own literary opinions one or two specimens, belonging to this time, may be given.

  “Byron and Shelley, however mistaken they were, did yet give the world another heart and new pulses; and so we are kept going” — a just tribute to their fiery lyrical energy, which did much to clear insular prejudice from the souls of a masculine generation. “Lycidas” he held to be the test of any reader’s poetic instinct; and “Keats, with his high spiritual vision, would have been, if he had lived, the greatest of us all, though his blank verse lacked originality of movement.” It is true that Keats, whose full metrical skill was never developed, may have imitated the Miltonic construction; yet after Milton he was the finest composer up to Tennyson’s day. And the first hundred lines of “Hyperion” have no slight affinity, in colouring and cadence, to the Tennysonian blank verse. For indeed it was Keats who, as Tennyson’s forerunner, passed on to him the gift of intense romantic susceptibility to the influences of Nature, the “dim mystic sympathies with tree and hill reaching back into childhood.” But Tennyson’s art inclined more toward the picturesque, toward using words, as a painter uses his brush, for producing the impression of a scene’s true outline and colour; his work shows the realistic feeling of a later day, which delights in precision of details. In one of his letters he mentions that there was a time when he was in the habit of chronicling, in four or five words or more, whatever might strike him as a picture, just as an artist would take rough sketches. The subjoined fragment, written on revisiting Mablethorpe on the Lincolnshire coast, contains the quintessence of his descriptive style; the last three lines are sheer landscape painting.

  Mablethorpe

  Here often when a child I lay reclined,

  I took delight in this fair land and free;

  Here stood the infant Ilion of the mind,

  And here the Grecian ships all seemed to be.

  And here again I come, and only find

  The drain-cut level of the marshy lea,

  Gray sand-banks, and pale sunsets, dreary winds,

  Dim shores, dense rains, and heavy-clouded sea.

  More frequently, however, he employed his wonderful image-making power to illustrate symbolically some mental state or emotion, availing himself of the mysterious relation between man and his environment, whereby the outer inanimate world is felt to be the resemblance and reflection of human moods. So in the “Palace of Art” the desolate soul is likened to

  A still salt pool, lock’d in with bars of sand,

  Left on the shore; that hears all night

  The plunging seas draw backward from the land

  Their moon-led waters white.

  And there are passages in the extracts given from his letters written to Miss Emily Sellwood, during the long engagement that preceded their marriage, which indicate the bent of his mind toward philosophic quietism, with frequent signs of that half-veiled fellow-feeling with natural things, that sense of life in all sound and motion, whereby poetry is drawn upward, by degrees and almost unconsciously, into the region of the “Higher Pantheism.” Nor has any English poet availed himself more skilfully of a language that is peculiarly rich in metaphors, consisting of words which still so far retain their original meaning as to suggest a picture while they convey a thought.

  It is partly due to these qualities of mind and style that no chapter in this book, which mingles grave with gay very attractively, contains matter of higher biographical interest than that which is headed “In Memoriam.” For it is in this noble poem, on the whole Tennyson’s masterpiece, that he is stirred by his own passionate grief to dwell on the contrast between irremediable human suffering and the calm aspect of
Nature, between the short and sorrowful days of man and the long procession of ages. From the doubts and perplexities, the tendency to lose heart, engendered by a sense of forces that are unceasing and relentless, he finds his ultimate escape in the spirit of trust in the Powers invisible, and in the persuasion that God and Nature cannot be at strife. In a letter contributed to this Memoir Professor Henry Sidgwick has described the impression produced on him and others of his time by this poem, showing how it struck in, so to speak, upon their religious debates at a moment of conflicting tendencies and great uncertainty of direction, giving intensity of expression to the dominant feeling, and wider range to the prevailing thought:

  The most important influence of “In Memoriam” on my thought, apart from its poetic charm as an expression of personal emotion, opened in a region, if I may so say, deeper down than the difference between Theism and Christianity: it lay in the unparalleled combination of intensity of feeling with comprehensiveness of view and balance of judgment, shown in presenting the deepest needs and perplexities of humanity. And this influence, I find, has increased rather than diminished as years have gone on, and as the great issues between Agnostic Science and Faith have become continually more prominent. In the sixties I should say that these deeper issues were somewhat obscured by the discussions on Christian dogma and Inspiration of Scripture, etc. ... During these years we were absorbed in struggling for freedom of thought in the trammels of a historical religion; and perhaps what we sympathized with most in “In Memoriam” at this time, apart from the personal feeling, was the defence of “honest doubt,” the reconciliation of knowledge and faith in the introductory poem, and the hopeful trumpet-ring of the lines on the New Year.... Well, the years pass, the struggle with what Carlyle used to call “Hebrew old clothes” is over, Freedom is won, and what does Freedom bring us to? It brings us face to face with atheistic science; the faith in God and Immortality, which we had been struggling to clear from superstition, suddenly seems to be in the air; and in seeking for a firm basis for this faith we find ourselves in the midst of the “fight with death” which “In Memoriam” so powerfully presents.

  To many readers the whole letter will seem to render fitly their feeling of the pathetic intensity with which the everlasting problems of love and death, of human doubts and destinies, are set forth in “In Memoriam.” It will also remind them of the limitations, the inevitable inconclusiveness, of a poem which deals emotionally with questions that foil the deepest philosophers. The profound impression that was immediately produced by these exquisitely musical meditations may be ascribed, we think, to their sympathetic association with the peculiar spiritual needs and intellectual dilemmas of the time. It may be affirmed, as a general proposition, that up to about 1840, and for some years later, the majority among Englishmen of thought and culture were content to take morality as the chief test of religious truth, were disposed to hold that the essential principles of religion were best stated in the language of ethics. With this rational theology the pretensions of Science, which undertook to preserve and even to strengthen the moral basis, were not incompatible. But about this time came a spiritual awakening; and just then Tennyson came forward to insist, with poetic force and fervour, that the triumphant advance of Science was placing in jeopardy not merely the formal outworks but the central dogma of Christianity, which is the belief in a future life, in the soul’s conscious immortality. Is man subject to the general law of unending mutability? and is he after all but the highest and latest type, to be made and broken like a thousand others, mere clay under the moulding hands that are darkly visible in the processes of Nature? The Poet transfigured these obstinate questionings into the vision of an ever-breaking shore

  That tumbled in a godless sea.

  He turned our ears to hear the sound of streams that, swift or slow,

  Draw down Æonian hills, and sow

  The dust of continents to be —

  and he was haunted by the misgiving that man also might be a mere atom in an ever-changing universe. Yet after long striving with doubts and fears, after having “fought with death,” he resolves that we cannot be “wholly brain, magnetic mockeries,” not only cunning casts in clays:

  Let Science prove we are, and then

  What matters Science unto men,

  At least to me? I would not stay.

  We think that such passages as these gave emphasis to the gathering alarm, and that many a startled inquirer, daunted by dim uncertainties, recoiled from the abyss that seemed to open at his feet, and made his peace, on such terms as consoled him, with Theology. Not that Tennyson himself retreated, or took refuge behind dogmatic entrenchments. On the contrary, he stood his ground and trod under foot the terrors of Acheron; relying on “the God who ever lives and loves.” But since not every one can be satisfied with subjective faith or lofty intuitions, we believe that the note of distress and warning sounded by “In Memoriam” startled more minds than were soothed by its comforting conclusions. If this be so, this utterance of the poet, standing prophet-like at the parting of the ways, moved men diversely. It strengthened the impulse to go onward trustfully; but it may also be counted among the indirect influences which combined to promote that notable reaction toward the sacramental and mysterious side of religion, toward positive faith as the safeguard of morals, which has been the outcome of the great Anglican revival set on foot by the Oxford Movement seventy years ago.

  In June 1850, the month which saw “In Memoriam” published, Tennyson married Miss Sellwood. “The wedding was of the quietest, even the cake and the dresses arriving too late.” From this union came unbroken happiness during forty-two years; for his wife brought into the partnership a rich and rare treasure of aid, sympathy, and intellectual appreciation. Her son pays his tribute to her memory in an admirable passage, of which the greater part is here extracted:

  And let me say here — although, as a son, I cannot allow myself full utterance about her whom I loved as perfect mother and “very woman of very woman,” “such a wife” and true helpmate she proved herself. It was she who became my father’s adviser in literary matters. “I am proud of her intellect,” he wrote. With her he always discussed what he was working at; she transcribed his poems: to her, and to no one else, he referred for a final criticism before publishing. She, with her “tender spiritual nature” and instinctive nobility of thought, was always by his side, a ready, cheerful, courageous, wise, and sympathetic counsellor.... By her quiet sense of humour, by her selfless devotion, by “her faith as clear as the heights of the June-blue heaven,” she helped him also to the utmost in the hours of his depression and of his sorrow; and to her he wrote two of the most beautiful of his shorter lyrics—”Dear, near and true,” and the dedicatory lines which prefaced his last volume, “The Death of Œnone.”

  In November 1850, after Wordsworth’s death, the Laureateship was offered to Tennyson. We have good authority for stating, though not from this Memoir, that Lord John Russell submitted to the Queen the four names of Professor Wilson, Henry Taylor, Sheridan Knowles, and, last on the list, Tennyson. The Prince Consort’s admiration of “In Memoriam” determined Her Majesty’s choice, which might seem easy enough to those who measure the four candidates by the standard of to-day. His accession to office brought down upon Tennyson, among other honoraria, “such shoals of poems that I am almost crazed with them; the two hundred million poets of Great Britain deluge me daily. Truly the Laureateship is no sinecure.” For the inevitable levee he accepted, not without disquietude over the nether garment, the loan of a Court suit from his ancient brother in song, Rogers, who had declined the laurels on the plea of age. Soon afterward he departed with his wife for Italy. Under the title of “The Daisy” he has commemorated this journey in stanzas of consummate metrical form, with their beautiful anapæstic ripple in each fourth line, to be studied by all who would understand the quantitative value (not merely accentual) and rhythmic effects of English syllables. On returning, they met the Brownings at Paris. T
hen, in 1852, he bought Farringford in the Isle of Wight, the Poet’s favourite habitation ever afterward, within sight of the sea and within sound of its rough weather, with its lawns, spreading trees, and meadows under the lee of the chalk downs, that have been frequently sketched into his verse, and will long be identified with his presence. There he worked at “Maud,” morning and evening, sitting in his hard, high-backed wooden chair in his little room at the top of the house, smoking the “sacred pipes” during certain half-hours of strict seclusion, when his best thoughts came to him.

  From the final edition in 1851 of “In Memoriam” to “Maud” in 1853, which Lowell rather affectedly called the antiphonal voice of the earlier poem, the change of theme, tone, and manner was certainly great; and the public seems to have been taken by surprise. The transition was from lamentation to love-making; from stanzas swaying slow, like a dirge, within their uniform compass, to an abundant variety of metrical movement, quickened by frequent use of the anapæstic measure. The general reader was puzzled and inclined to ridicule what he failed at once to understand; the ordinary reviewer was either loftily contemptuous or indulged in puns and parodies; the higher criticism was divided; but Henry Taylor, Ruskin, Jowett, and the Brownings spoke without hesitation of the work’s great merits. Mr. Gladstone, whose judgment had been at first adverse, recanted, twenty years later, in a letter that was published in his Gleanings, and that now reappears in this Memoir:

  “Whether it is to be desired,” he wrote, “that a poem should require from common men a good deal of effort in order to comprehend it; whether all that is put in the mouth of the Soliloquist in ‘Maud’ is within the lines of poetical verisimilitude; whether this poem has the full moral equilibrium which is so marked a characteristic of the sister-works, are questions open, perhaps, to discussion. But I have neither done justice in the text to its rich and copious beauties of detail, nor to its great lyrical and metrical power. And, what is worse, I have failed to comprehend rightly the relation between particular passages in the poem and its general scope.”