Alfred, Lord Tennyson - Delphi Poets Series

by Lord Tennyson Alfred

  The learned Princess herself was not on our level as to knowledge and the past of womankind. She knew not of their masterly position in the law of ancient Egypt. Gynaeocracy and matriarchy, the woman the head of the savage or prehistoric group, were things hidden from her. She “glanced at the Lycian custom,” but not at the Pictish, a custom which would have suited George Sand to a marvel. She maligned the Hottentots.

  “The highest is the measure of the man,

  And not the Kaffir, Hottentot, Malay.”

  The Hottentots had long ago anticipated the Princess and her shrill modern sisterhood. If we take the Greeks, or even ourselves, we may say, with Dampier (1689), “The Hodmadods, though a nasty people, yet are gentlemen to these” as regards the position of women. Let us hear Mr Hartland: “In every Hottentot’s house the wife is supreme. Her husband, poor fellow, though he may wield wide power and influence out of doors, at home dare not even take a mouthful of sour-milk out of the household vat without her permission . . . The highest oath a man can take is to swear by his eldest sister, and if he abuses this name he forfeits to her his finest goods and sheep.”

  However, in 1847 England had not yet thought of imitating the Hodmadods. Consequently, and by reason of the purely literary and elaborately fantastical character of The Princess, it was not of a nature to increase the poet’s fame and success. “My book is out, and I hate it, and so no doubt will you,” Tennyson wrote to FitzGerald, who hated it and said so. “Like Carlyle, I gave up all hopes of him after The Princess,” indeed it was not apt to conciliate Carlyle. “None of the songs had the old champagne flavour,” said Fitz; and Lord Tennyson adds, “Nothing either by Thackeray or by my father met FitzGerald’s approbation unless he had first seen it in manuscript.” This prejudice was very human. Lord Tennyson remarks, as to the poet’s meaning in this work, born too early, that “the sooner woman finds out, before the great educational movement begins, that ‘woman is not undeveloped man, but diverse,’ the better it will be for the progress of the world.”

  But probably the “educational movement” will not make much difference to womankind on the whole. The old Platonic remark that woman “does the same things as man, but not so well,” will eternally hold good, at least in the arts, and in letters, except in rare cases of genius. A new Jeanne d’Arc, the most signal example of absolute genius in history, will not come again; and the ages have waited vainly for a new Sappho or a new Jane Austen. Literature, poetry, painting, have always been fields open to woman. But two names exhaust the roll of women of the highest rank in letters — Sappho and Jane Austen. And “when did woman ever yet invent?” In “arts of government” Elizabeth had courage, and just saving sense enough to yield to Cecil at the eleventh hour, and escape the fate of “her sister and her foe,” the beautiful unhappy queen who told her ladies that she dared to look on whatever men dared to do, and herself would do it if her strength so served her.” “The foundress of the Babylonian walls” is a myth; “the Rhodope that built the Pyramid” is not a creditable myth; for exceptions to Knox’s “Monstrous Regiment of Women” we must fall back on “The Palmyrene that fought Aurelian,” and the revered name of the greatest of English queens, Victoria. Thus history does not encourage the hope that a man-like education will raise many women to the level of the highest of their sex in the past, or even that the enormous majority of women will take advantage of the opportunity of a man-like education. A glance at the numerous periodicals designed for the reading of women depresses optimism, and the Princess’s prophecy of

  “Two plummets dropped for one to sound the abyss

  Of science, and the secrets of the mind,”

  is not near fulfilment. Fortunately the sex does not “love the Metaphysics,” and perhaps has not yet produced even a manual of Logic. It must suffice man and woman to

  ”Walk this world

  Yoked in all exercise of noble end,”

  of a more practical character, while woman is at liberty

  ”To live and learn and be

  All that not harms distinctive womanhood.”

  This was the conclusion of the poet who had the most chivalrous reverence for womanhood. This is the eirenicon of that old strife between the women and the men — that war in which both armies are captured. It may not be acceptable to excited lady combatants, who think man their foe, when the real enemy is (what Porson damned) the Nature of Things.

  A new poem like The Princess would soon reach the public of our day, so greatly increased are the uses of advertisement. But The Princess moved slowly from edition to revised and improved edition, bringing neither money nor much increase of fame. The poet was living with his family at Cheltenham, where among his new acquaintances were Sydney Dobell, the poet of a few exquisite pieces, and F. W. Robertson, later so popular as a preacher at Brighton. Meeting him for the first time, and knowing Robertson’s “wish to pluck the heart from my mystery, from pure nervousness I would only talk of beer.” This kind of shyness beset Tennyson. A lady tells me that as a girl (and a very beautiful girl) she and her sister, and a third, nec diversa, met the poet, and expected high discourse. But his speech was all of that wingless insect which “gets there, all the same,” according to an American lyrist; the insect which fills Mrs Carlyle’s letters with bulletins of her success or failure in domestic campaigns.

  Tennyson kept visiting London, where he saw Thackeray and the despair of Carlyle, and at Bath House he was too modest to be introduced to the great Duke whose requiem he was to sing so nobly. Oddly enough Douglas Jerrold enthusiastically assured Tennyson, at a dinner of a Society of Authors, that “you are the one who will live.” To that end, humanly speaking, he placed himself under the celebrated Dr Gully and his “water-cure,” a foible of that period. In 1848 he made a tour to King Arthur’s Cornish bounds, and another to Scotland, where the Pass of Brander disappointed him: perhaps he saw it on a fine day, and, like Glencoe, it needs tempest and mist lit up by the white fires of many waterfalls. By bonny Doon he “fell into a passion of tears,” for he had all of Keats’s sentiment for Burns: “There never was immortal poet if he be not one.” Of all English poets, the warmest in the praise of Burns have been the two most unlike himself — Tennyson and Keats. It was the songs that Tennyson preferred; Wordsworth liked the Cottar’s Saturday Night.

  CHAPTER V. — IN MEMORIAM.

  In May 1850 a few, copies of In Memoriam were printed for friends, and presently the poem was published without author’s name. The pieces had been composed at intervals, from 1833 onwards. It is to be observed that the “section about evolution” was written some years before 1844, when the ingenious hypotheses of Robert Chambers, in Vestiges of Creation, were given to the world, and caused a good deal of talk. Ten years, again, after In Memoriam, came Darwin’s Origin of Species. These dates are worth observing. The theory of evolution, of course in a rude mythical shape, is at least as old as the theory of creation, and is found among the speculations of the most backward savages. The Arunta of Central Australia, a race remote from the polite, have a hypothesis of evolution which postulates only a few rudimentary forms of life, a marine environment, and the minimum of supernormal assistance in the way of stimulating the primal forms in the direction of more highly differentiated developments. “The rudimentary forms, Inapertwa, were in reality stages in the transformation of various plants and animals into human beings. . . . They had no distinct limbs or organs of sight, hearing, or smell.” They existed in a kind of lumps, and were set free from the cauls which enveloped them by two beings called Ungambikula, “a word which means ‘out of nothing,’ or ‘self- existing.’ Men descend from lower animals thus evolved.”

  This example of the doctrine of evolution in an early shape is only mentioned to prove that the idea has been familiar to the human mind from the lowest known stage of culture. Not less familiar has been the theory of creation by a kind of supreme being. The notion of creation, however, up to 1860, held the foremost place in modern European belief. But Lamarck,
the elder Darwin, Monboddo, and others had submitted hypotheses of evolution. Now it was part of the originality of Tennyson, as a philosophic poet, that he had brooded from boyhood on these early theories of evolution, in an age when they were practically unknown to the literary, and were not patronised by the scientific, world. In November 1844 he wrote to Mr Moxon, “I want you to get me a book which I see advertised in the Examiner: it seems to contain many speculations with which I have been familiar for years, and on which I have written more than one poem.” This book was Vestiges of Creation. These poems are the stanzas in In Memoriam about “the greater ape,” and about Nature as careless of the type: “all shall go.” The poetic and philosophic originality of Tennyson thus faced the popular inferences as to the effect of the doctrine of evolution upon religious beliefs long before the world was moved in all its deeps by Darwin’s Origin of Species. Thus the geological record is inconsistent, we learned, with the record of the first chapters of Genesis. If man is a differentiated monkey, and if a monkey has no soul, or future life (which is taken for granted), where are man’s title-deeds to these possessions? With other difficulties of an obvious kind, these presented themselves to the poet with renewed force when his only chance of happiness depended on being able to believe in a future life, and reunion with the beloved dead. Unbelief had always existed. We hear of atheists in the Rig Veda. In the early eighteenth century, in the age of Swift -

  “Men proved, as sure as God’s in Gloucester,

  That Moses was a great impostor.”

  distrust of Moses increased with the increase of hypotheses of evolution. But what English poet, before Tennyson, ever attempted “to lay the spectres of the mind”; ever faced world-old problems in their most recent aspects? I am not acquainted with any poet who attempted this task, and, whatever we may think of Tennyson’s success, I do not see how we can deny his originality.

  Mr Frederic Harrison, however, thinks that neither “the theology nor the philosophy of In Memoriam are new, original, with an independent force and depth of their own.” “They are exquisitely graceful re- statements of the theology of the Broad Churchman of the school of F. D. Maurice and Jowett — a combination of Maurice’s somewhat illogical piety with Jowett’s philosophy of mystification.” The piety of Maurice may be as illogical as that of Positivism is logical, and the philosophy of the Master of Balliol may be whatever Mr Harrison pleases to call it. But as Jowett’s earliest work (except an essay on Etruscan religion) is of 1855, one does not see how it could influence Tennyson before 1844. And what had the Duke of Argyll written on these themes some years before 1844? The late Duke, to whom Mr Harrison refers in this connection, was born in 1823. His philosophic ideas, if they were to influence Tennyson’s In Memoriam, must have been set forth by him at the tender age of seventeen, or thereabouts. Mr Harrison’s sentence is, “But does In Memoriam teach anything, or transfigure any idea which was not about that time” (the time of writing was mainly 1833-1840) “common form with F. D. Maurice, with Jowett, C. Kingsley, F. Robertson, Stopford Brooke, Mr Ruskin, and the Duke of Argyll, Bishops Westcott and Boyd Carpenter?”

  The dates answer Mr Harrison. Jowett did not publish anything till at least fifteen years after Tennyson wrote his poems on evolution and belief. Dr Boyd Carpenter’s works previous to 1840 are unknown to bibliography. F. W. Robertson was a young parson at Cheltenham. Ruskin had not published the first volume of Modern Painters. His Oxford prize poem is of 1839. Mr Stopford Brooke was at school. The Duke of Argyll was being privately educated: and so with the rest, except the contemporary Maurice. How can Mr Harrison say that, in the time of In Memoriam, Tennyson was “in touch with the ideas of Herschel, Owen, Huxley, Darwin, and Tyndall”? When Tennyson wrote the parts of In Memoriam which deal with science, nobody beyond their families and friends had heard of Huxley, Darwin, and Tyndall. They had not developed, much less had they published, their “general ideas.” Even in his journal of the Cruise of the Beagle Darwin’s ideas were religious, and he naively admired the works of God. It is strange that Mr Harrison has based his criticism, and his theory of Tennyson’s want of originality, on what seems to be a historical error. He cites parts of In Memoriam, and remarks, “No one can deny that all this is exquisitely beautiful; that these eternal problems have never been clad in such inimitable grace . . . But the train of thought is essentially that with which ordinary English readers have been made familiar by F. D. Maurice, Professor Jowett, Ecce Homo, Hypatia, and now by Arthur Balfour, Mr Drummond, and many valiant companies of Septem [why Septem?] contra Diabolum.” One must keep repeating the historical verity that the ideas of In Memoriam could not have been “made familiar by” authors who had not yet published anything, or by books yet undreamed of and unborn, such as Ecce Homo and Jowett’s work on some of St Paul’s Epistles. If these books contain the ideas of In Memoriam, it is by dint of repetition and borrowing from In Memoriam, or by coincidence. The originality was Tennyson’s, for we cannot dispute the evidence of dates.

  When one speaks of “originality” one does not mean that Tennyson discovered the existence of the ultimate problems. But at Cambridge (1828-1830) he had voted “No” in answer to the question discussed by “the Apostles,” “Is an intelligible [intelligent?] First Cause deducible from the phenomena of the universe?” He had also propounded the theory that “the development of the human body might possibly be traced from the radiated vermicular molluscous and vertebrate organisms,” thirty years before Darwin published The Origin of Species. To be concerned so early with such hypotheses, and to face, in poetry, the religious or irreligious inferences which may be drawn from them, decidedly constitutes part of the poetic originality of Tennyson. His attitude, as a poet, towards religious doubt is only so far not original, as it is part of the general reaction from the freethinking of the eighteenth century. Men had then been freethinkers avec delices. It was a joyous thing to be an atheist, or something very like one; at all events, it was glorious to be “emancipated.” Many still find it glorious, as we read in the tone of Mr Huxley, when he triumphs and tramples over pious dukes and bishops. Shelley said that a certain schoolgirl “would make a dear little atheist.” But by 1828-1830 men were less joyous in their escape from all that had hitherto consoled and fortified humanity. Long before he dreamed of In Memoriam, in the Poems chiefly Lyrical of 1830 Tennyson had written -

  “‘Yet,’ said I, in my morn of youth,

  The unsunn’d freshness of my strength,

  When I went forth in quest of truth,

  ‘It is man’s privilege to doubt.’ . . .

  Ay me! I fear

  All may not doubt, but everywhere

  Some must clasp Idols. Yet, my God,

  Whom call I Idol? Let Thy dove

  Shadow me over, and my sins

  Be unremember’d, and Thy love

  Enlighten me. Oh teach me yet

  Somewhat before the heavy clod

  Weighs on me, and the busy fret

  Of that sharp-headed worm begins

  In the gross blackness underneath.

  Oh weary life! oh weary death!

  Oh spirit and heart made desolate!

  Oh damned vacillating state!”

  Now the philosophy of In Memoriam may be, indeed is, regarded by robust, first-rate, and far from sensitive minds, as a “damned vacillating state.” The poet is not so imbued with the spirit of popular science as to be sure that he knows everything: knows that there is nothing but atoms and ether, with no room for God or a soul. He is far from that happy cock-certainty, and consequently is exposed to the contempt of the cock-certain. The poem, says Mr Harrison, “has made Tennyson the idol of the Anglican clergyman — the world in which he was born and the world in which his life was ideally passed- -the idol of all cultured youth and of all aesthetic women. It is an honourable post to fill” — that of idol. “The argument of In Memoriam apparently is . . . that we should faintly trust the larger hope.” That, I think, is not the argument, not the conclusion
of the poem, but is a casual expression of one mood among many moods.

  The argument and conclusion of In Memoriam are the argument and conclusion of the life of Tennyson, and of the love of Tennyson, that immortal passion which was a part of himself, and which, if aught of us endure, is living yet, and must live eternally. From the record of his Life by his son we know that his trust in “the larger hope” was not “faint,” but strengthened with the years. There are said to have been less hopeful intervals.

  His faith is, of course, no argument for others, — at least it ought not to be. We are all the creatures of our bias, our environment, our experience, our emotions. The experience of Tennyson was unlike the experience of most men. It yielded him subjective grounds for belief. He “opened a path unto many,” like Yama, the Vedic being who discovered the way to death. But Tennyson’s path led not to death, but to life spiritual, and to hope, and he did “give a new impulse to the thought of his age,” as other great poets have done. Of course it may be an impulse to wrong thought. As the philosophical Australian black said, “We shall know when we are dead.”