Alfred, Lord Tennyson - Delphi Poets Series

by Lord Tennyson Alfred

  ... he did not feel strong enough for religious discussions with Jowett, and begged Jowett not to consult with him or argue with him, as was his wont, on points of philosophy and religious doubt. The Master answered him with a remarkable utterance: “Your poetry has an element of philosophy more to be considered than any regular philosophy in England”;

  which is certainly an ambiguous and possibly not an extravagant eulogy.

  The final chapter of the Memoir gives, briefly, some sentences from his last talks, and describes a peaceful and noble ending. He found his Christianity undisturbed by jarring of sects and creeds; but he said, “I dread the losing hold of forms. I have expressed this in my ‘Akbar.’” The welfare of the British Empire, its expansion and its destiny, had been from the beginning and were to the end of his poetic career matters of intense pride and concern to him. When, in September 1892, he fell seriously ill, and Sir Andrew Clark arrived, the physician and the patient fell to discussing Gray’s “Elegy”; and a few days later, being much worse, he sent for his Shakespeare, tried to read but had to let his son read for him. Next day he said: “‘I want the blinds up, I want to see the sky and the light.’ He repeated ‘The sky and the light.’ It was a glorious morning, and the warm sunshine was flooding the weald of Sussex and the line of South Downs, which were seen from his window.” On the second day after this he passed away very quietly. The funeral service in Westminster Abbey, with its two anthems—”Crossing the Bar” and “The Silent Voices” — filling the long-drawn aisle and, rising to the fretted vault above the heads of a great congregation, will long be remembered by those who were present. “The tributes of sympathy,” his son writes, “which we received from many countries and from all classes and creeds, were not only remarkable for their universality, but for their depth of feeling.”

  To those who had so long lived with him, the loss of one whom they had tended for many years with devoted affection and reverence was indeed irreparable. Yet they had the consolation of knowing that his life had been on the whole happy and fortunate, marked by singularly few griefs or troubles; that he had proved himself a master of the high calling which he set before himself, and departed, full of honours, at the coming of the time when no man can work.

  A collection of letters that passed between the Queen and Tennyson, including two from Her Majesty to his son on receiving the news of Tennyson’s death, is added to the Memoir; and the volume closes with “Recollections of the Poet,” written at some length, by Lord Selborne, Jowett, John Tyndall, F. Myers, F. T. Palgrave, and the Duke of Argyll. These papers will be read, as they deserve to be, with attentive interest for their descriptions of the personal characteristics, recorded by those who knew him best, of a very remarkable man; they show also how his poems were conceived and elaborated, they trace his thoughts on high subjects, and they contain very ample dissertations on his poetry. They inevitably anticipate the work of the public reviewer, who cannot pretend to write with equal authority, while it is not his business to criticize the carefully composed opinions of others.

  One can see, looking backward, that Tennyson’s genius flowered in due season; there had been a plentiful harvest of verse in the preceding generation, but it had been garnered, and the field was clear. The hour had come for a new writer to take up the succession to that brilliant and illustrious group who, in the first quarter of the last century, raised English poetry to a height far above the classic level of the age before them. Three leaders of that band — Byron, Keats, and Shelley — died young; the sum total of their years added together exceeds by no more than a decade the space of Tennyson’s single life. And if the creative period of a poet’s life may be reckoned as beginning at twenty-one (which is full early), it sums up to no more than thirty-one years for all the three poets whom we have named, and to sixty years for Tennyson alone. When his first volume appeared (1832), Byron, Shelley, and Keats were dead; Scott and Coleridge had long ceased to write poetry, and were dying; Wordsworth, who had done all his best work long before, alone survived, for Southey cannot be counted in the same rank. Moreover, England may be said to have been just then passing through one of those periods of artistic depression that precede a revival; the popular taste was artificial and decadent, it was running down to the pseudo-romantic and false Gothic, to the conventional Keepsake note in sentiment, to extravagant admiration of such poems as Moore’s Lalla Rookh. The purchase by the State of the Elgin Marbles, and the opening of the National Gallery, had prepared the way for better things in art; but I may affirm, speaking broadly, that it was a flat interval, when the new generation was just looking for some one to give form to an upward movement of ideas.

  It was upon the rising wave after this calm that Tennyson was lifted forward by the quick recognition of his talent among his ardent and open-minded contemporaries; although his general popularity came gradually, since even in 1850, as may be seen from the list already given of his competitors for the Laureateship, his pre-eminence had not been indisputably established in high political society. Yet all genuine judges might perceive at once that here was the man to raise again from the lower plane the imaginative power of verse, who knew the magical charm that endows with beauty and dramatic force the incidents and impressions which the ordinary artist can only reproduce in a commonplace or unreal way, while the master-hand suddenly illumines the whole scene, foreground and background. He struck a note that touched the feelings and satisfied the spiritual needs of his contemporaries, and herein lay the promise of his poetry; for to the departing generation the coming man can say little or nothing. We have to bear in mind, also, that during Tennyson’s youth the whole complexion and “moving circumstance” of the age had undergone a great alteration. It was the uproar and martial clang, the drums and trampling of long and fierce wars, the mortal strife between revolutionary and reactionary forces, that kindled the fiery indignation of Shelley and Byron, inspiring such lines as

  Still, Freedom, still thy banner, torn yet flying,

  Streams like a meteor flag against the wind,

  and affected Coleridge and even Southey “in their hot youth, when George the Third was king.” Tennyson’s opportunity came when these thunderous echoes had died away, when the Reform Bill had become law, when the era of general peace and comfortable prosperity that marks for England the middle of this century was just setting in. The change may be noticed in Tennyson’s treatment of landscape, of the aspects of earth, sea, and sky. With Byron and Coleridge the prevailing effects were grand, stormy, wildly magnificent; with Tennyson the impressions are mainly peaceful, melancholy, mysterious: he is looking on the happy autumn fields, or listening in fancy to the long wash of Australasian seas. There are of course exceptions on both sides; yet in Byron the best-known descriptive passages are all of the former, and in Tennyson of the latter, character. The difference in style corresponds, manifestly, not only with the contrast in the temper of their times, warlike for the earlier poets and peaceful for the later, but also with the disorder and unrest which vexed the private lives of Byron, Shelley, and Coleridge, as compared with the happy domestic fortunes of Tennyson.

  It is almost superfluous to lay stress on the well-known metrical variety of Tennyson’s poems, or upon the musical range of his language. He followed the best models, and perhaps improved upon them, in using the primitive onomatopœia as the base for a higher order of composition, in which the words have a subtle connotation, blending sound and colour into harmonies that accord with the sense and spirit of a passage, convey the thought, and create the image. His skill in wielding the long flowing line was remarkable, nor had any poet before him employed it so frequently; its flexibility lent freedom and scope to his impersonations of character, and in other pieces he could give it the rolling melody of a chant or a chorus. On the instrumental power of blank verse we know that he set the highest value; he had his own secret methods of scansion, and his long practice enabled him to extend the capabilities of this peculiarly English metre. But for an exce
llent critical analysis of Tennyson’s blank verse, in comparison with the rhythm of other masters, I must refer my readers to Mr. J. B. Mayor’s Chapters on English Metre, with especial reference to the final chapter, where the styles of Tennyson and Browning, as representative of modern English verse, are scientifically examined.

  I make no apology for having included some criticisms of Tennyson’s work in this review of his life, because not the least valuable feature of the Memoir is that it has been so arranged as to form a running commentary upon and interpretation of his poems, as reflecting his mind and his manner of life. Throughout the second half of the last century Tennyson has been foremost among English men of letters, and it is his proud distinction to have maintained the apostolic succession of our national poets in a manner not unworthy of those famous men who went immediately before him.

  TENNYSON: THE POET AND THE MAN by Professor Henry Butcher

  A hundred years have passed since Tennyson’s birth, seventeen years since his death. It is too soon to attempt to fix his permanent place among English poets, but it is not too soon to feel assured that much that he has written is of imperishable worth. Will you bear with me if I offer some brief remarks, not by way of critical estimate, but in loving appreciation of the poet and the man? And let me say at once how deeply all who care for Tennyson are indebted to the illuminating Memoir and Annotated Edition published by his son.

  Tennyson’s poetic career is in some respects unique in English literature. He fell upon a time when fiction, science, and sociology were displacing poetry. He succeeded in conquering the poetic indifference of his age. For nearly sixty years he held a listening and eager audience, including not only fastidious hearers but also the larger public. Probably no English poet except Shakespeare has exercised such a commanding sway over both learned and unlearned. He unsealed the eyes of his contemporaries and revealed to them again the significance of beauty. To the English people, and indeed the English-speaking race, he was not merely the gracious and entrancing singer, but also the seer who divined their inmost thoughts and interpreted them in melodious forms of verse.

  At the outset of his poetic life, Arthur Hallam notes the “strange earnestness of his worship of beauty.” Like Milton, he was studious of perfection. Like Milton, too, he had in a supreme degree the poet’s double endowment of an exquisite ear for the music of verse and an unerring eye for the images of nature. Like Milton, he acquired a mastery of phrase which has enriched the capacities of our English speech; and not Milton himself drew from the purely English elements in the language more finely modulated tones. No poet since Milton has been more deeply imbued with classical literature, and the perfection of form which he sought fell at once into a classic and mainly a Hellenic mould. We find in him reminiscences or close reproductions not only of Homer and Theocritus, of Virgil and Horace, of Lucretius and Catullus, of Ovid and Persius, but also of Sappho and Alcman, of Pindar and Aeschylus, of Moschus, Callimachus, and Quintus Smyrnaeus, more doubtfully of Simonides and Sophocles. We can follow the tracks of his reading also in Herodotus, Plato, Plutarch, and Livy. His early volumes contain varied strains of classical and romantic legend. In some of the poems we are aware at once of the pervasive atmosphere and enchantment of romance, as in “The Lady of Shalott,” “Mariana,” “Sir Galahad,” and many more. Others — such as “Œnone,” “The Lotos-Eaters,” “Ulysses,” “Tithonus” — what are we to call them, classical or romantic? The thought and the form are chiefly classical, but the poems are shot through with romantic gleams and tinged with modern sentiment. Yet so skilful is the handling that there is no sense of incongruity between the things of the past and the feelings of a later day. The harmony of tone and colour is almost faultless, more so than in the treatment of the longer themes taken from Celtic sources. But while some poems are dominantly classical, others dominantly romantic, Tennyson’s genius as a whole is the spirit of romance expressing itself in forms of classical perfection. To the romanticist he may seem classical; to the classicist he is romantic: romantic in his choice of subjects, in his attitude towards Nature, in his profusion of detail, in an ornateness sometimes running to excess; in his moods, too, of reverie or languor and in the slumberous charm that broods over many of his landscapes. Yet he is free from the disordered individualism of the extreme romantic school. Disquietude and unrest are not wanting, but there is no unruly self-assertion; the cry of social revolt is faintly heard, and, when heard, its tones are among the least Tennysonian. Those who demand subtle or curious psychology find him disappointing; his characters are in the Greek manner broadly human, types rather than deviations from the type. That he was capable of expressing intense and poignant feeling is shown by such impassioned utterances as those of “Fatima” and “Maud”; but passion with him is usually restrained. There are critics for whom passion is genuine only if turbid, just as thought is profound only if obscure; and for them Tennyson’s reserve — again a Greek quality — seems an almost inhuman calm. His own most deeply felt experiences find their truest expression when passed through the medium of art; they come out tranquillized and transfigured. The sorrow and love of “In Memoriam” — which poem I take to be the supreme effort of his genius — are merged in large impersonal emotions. The poem, as he himself says, “is rather the cry of the whole human race than mine.” Tennyson’s intense humanity gives rise to a peculiar vein of pathos, and even of melancholy. Side by side there are his “mighty hopes” for the future and the power and “passion of the past”—”the voice of days of old and days to be”: on the one hand the forward straining intellect, on the other the backward glance, the lingering regret, and “some divine farewell.” Those haunting and recurrent words, “the days that are no more,” “for ever and for ever,” and the “vague world whisper” of the “far-far-away,” are charged with a sadness which recalls the pathetic but stoical refrain of “Nequiquam” in Lucretius.

  Throughout Tennyson’s long career we can trace the essential oneness of his mind and art, beginning with his early experiments in language and metrical form. By degrees his range of subjects was enlarged; we are amazed at the ever-growing variety of theme and treatment and his manifold modes of utterance. In some, as in his lyrics and dramatic monologues, he displays a flawless excellence, in almost all consummate art. But diverse as are the chords he has struck, the voice, the touch, the melody are all his own. In his latest poems we may miss something of the early rapture of his lyric song, but he is still himself and unmistakable; and had he written nothing but the lines “To Virgil” and “Crossing the Bar” he would surely take rank among the highest. We think of him primarily as the artist, but the artist and the man in him were never far apart; and as years went on his human sympathies, always strong, were strengthened and broadened, and drew him closer to the common life of humble people. We overhear more of “the still sad music of humanity.” Towards the close of his life the moral and religious content of the poems becomes fuller with his deepening sense of the grandeur and the pathos of man’s existence. Some see in this a weakening of his art, the intrusion into poetry of an alien substance. Yet eliminate this element from art, and how much of the greatest poetry of the world is gone! Now and then, it must be confessed, the ethical aim in Tennyson seems to some of us unduly prominent, but very rarely does the artist lose himself in the teacher or the preacher. He has a message to deliver, but it is not a mere moral lesson: its true appeal is to the imagination; put it into prose and it is no longer his. It lives only in its proper form of imaginative beauty.

  Aristotle noted two types of poet, the εὐφυής, the finely gifted artist, plastic to the Muse’s touch, who can assume many characters in turn; and the μανικός, the inspired poet, with a strain of frenzy, who is lifted out of himself in a divine transport. Were we asked to select three examples of the former type, one from Greece, one from Rome, and one from England, our choice from the ancient world would probably fall on Sophocles and Virgil, and might we not, as a fitting third, add T
ennyson to the list? I do not attempt to determine their relative rank, but I do suggest that they all belong to the same family, and that already in this centenary year of our Poet we can recognize the poetic kinship. Each of the three had in him the inmost heart of poetry, beating with a full humanity and instinct with human tenderness; each remained true to his calling as an artist and pursued throughout life the vision of beauty; and each achieved, in his own individual way, a noble and harmonious beauty of thought and form, of soul and sense.

  JAMES SPEDDING

  JAMES SPEDDING by W. Aldis Wright

  (Vice-Master of Trinity College, Cambridge.)

  “Spedding was the Pope among us young men — the wisest man I know.” — Tennyson: a Memoir, by his Son, p. 32.

  James Spedding, of whom FitzGerald wrote, “He was the wisest man I have known,” was born June 20, 1808, at Mirehouse, Keswick, and was the third son of John Spedding. He was educated at the Grammar School, Bury St. Edmunds, where his father, leaving his Cumberland home, went to live for the purpose of putting his sons under the care of Dr. Malkin. Among his school-fellows were W. B. Donne, J. M. Kemble (the Anglo-Saxon scholar), the three brothers FitzGerald, and his own brother Edward, who with himself was at the head of the school when they left. From Bury he went to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1827, where he was contemporary with Frederick, Charles, and Alfred Tennyson, Arthur Hallam, Monckton Milnes (afterwards Lord Houghton), and W. H. Thompson (afterwards Master of Trinity), and was very early admitted into the fellowship of the Apostles. On Commemoration Day, 1830, he was called upon to deliver an oration in the College Chapel, the subject being “An Apology for the Moral and Literary Character of the Nineteenth Century,” which was afterwards printed. Another of his early productions was a speech against Political Unions, written for a debating society in the University of Cambridge, which, although anonymous, attracted the notice of the author of Philip van Artevelde, afterwards his colleague in the Colonial Office, who quoted some passages from it in the notes to his poem, with the remark: “It is a singular trait of the times that a speech containing so much of sagacity and mature reflection as is to be found in this exercitation, should have been delivered in an academical debating club, and should have passed away in a pamphlet, which, as far as I am aware, attracted no notice. Time and place consenting, a brilliant Parliamentary reputation might be built upon a tithe of the merit.” In 1831 he won the Members’ Prize with a Latin essay on “Utrum boni plus an mali hominibus et civitatibus attulerit dicendi copia,” and in 1832 he was again a candidate, and wrote to Thompson on the 4th of May about it: