Alfred, Lord Tennyson - Delphi Poets Series

by Lord Tennyson Alfred

  In the autumn of 1853 the poet visited Ardtornish on the Sound of Mull, a beautiful place endeared to him who now writes by the earliest associations. It chanced to him to pass his holidays there just when Tennyson and Mr Palgrave had left—”Mr Tinsmith and Mr Pancake,” as Robert the boatman, a very black Celt, called them. Being then nine years of age, I heard of a poet’s visit, and asked, “A real poet, like Sir Walter Scott?” with whom I then supposed that “the Muse had gone away.” “Oh, not like Sir Walter Scott, of course,” my mother told me, with loyalty unashamed. One can think of the poet as Mrs Sellar, his hostess, describes him, beneath the limes of the avenue at Acharn, planted, Mrs Sellar says, by a cousin of Flora Macdonald. I have been told that the lady who planted the lilies, if not the limes, was the famed Jacobite, Miss Jennie Cameron, mentioned in Tom Jones. An English engraving of 1746 shows the Prince between these two beauties, Flora and Jennie.

  “No one,” says Mrs Sellar, “could have been more easy, simple, and delightful,” and indeed it is no marvel that in her society and that of her husband, the Greek professor, and her cousin, Miss Cross, and in such scenes, “he blossomed out in the most genial manner, making us all feel as if he were an old friend.”

  In November Tennyson took a house at Farringford, “as it was beautiful and far from the haunts of men.” There he settled to a country existence in the society of his wife, his two children (the second, Lionel, being in 1854 the baby), and there he composed Maud, while the sound of the guns, in practice for the war of the Crimea, boomed from the coast. In May Tennyson saw the artists, of schools oddly various, who illustrated his poems. Millais, Rossetti, and Holman Hunt gave the tone to the art, but Mr Horsley, Creswick, and Mulgrave were also engaged. While Maud was being composed Tennyson wrote The Charge of the Light Brigade; a famous poem, not in a manner in which he was born to excel — at least in my poor opinion. “Some one HAD blundered,” and that line was the first fashioned and the keynote of the poem; but, after all, “blundered” is not an exquisite rhyme to “hundred.” The poem, in any case, was most welcome to our army in the Crimea, and is a spirited piece for recitation.

  In January 1855 Maud was finished; in April the poet copied it out for the press, and refreshed himself by reading a very different poem, The Lady of the Lake. The author, Sir Walter, had suffered, like the hero of Maud, by an unhappy love affair, which just faintly colours The Lady of the Lake by a single allusion, in the description of Fitz-James’s dreams:-

  “Then, — from my couch may heavenly might

  Chase that worst phantom of the night! -

  Again returned the scenes of youth,

  Of confident undoubting truth;

  Again his soul he interchanged

  With friends whose hearts were long estranged.

  They come, in dim procession led,

  The cold, the faithless, and the dead;

  As warm each hand, each brow as gay,

  As if they parted yesterday.

  And doubt distracts him at the view -

  Oh, were his senses false or true?

  Dreamed he of death, or broken vow,

  Or is it all a vision now?”

  We learn from Lady Louisa Stuart, to whom Scott read these lines, that they referred to his lost love. I cite the passage because the extreme reticence of Scott, in his undying sorrow, is in contrast with what Tennyson, after reading The Lady of the Lake, was putting into the mouth of his complaining lover in Maud.

  We have no reason to suppose that Tennyson himself had ever to bewail a faithless love. To be sure, the hero of Locksley Hall is in this attitude, but then Locksley Hall is not autobiographical. Less dramatic and impersonal in appearance are the stanzas -

  “Come not, when I am dead,

  To drop thy foolish tears upon my grave;”

  and

  “Child, if it were thine error or thy crime

  I care no longer, being all unblest.”

  No biographer tells us whether this was a personal complaint or a mere set of verses on an imaginary occasion. In In Memoriam Tennyson speaks out concerning the loss of a friend. In Maud, as in Locksley Hall, he makes his hero reveal the agony caused by the loss of a mistress. There is no reason to suppose that the poet had ever any such mischance, but many readers have taken Locksley Hall and Maud for autobiographical revelations, like In Memoriam. They are, on the other hand, imaginative and dramatic. They illustrate the pangs of disappointed love of woman, pangs more complex and more rankling than those inflicted by death. In each case, however, the poet, who has sung so nobly the happiness of fortunate wedded loves, has chosen a hero with whom we do not readily sympathise — a Hamlet in miniature,

  “With a heart of furious fancies,”

  as in the old mad song. This choice, thanks to the popular misconception, did him some harm. As a “monodramatic Idyll,” a romance in many rich lyric measures, Maud was at first excessively unpopular. “Tennyson’s Maud is Tennyson’s Maudlin,” said a satirist, and “morbid,” “mad,” “rampant,” and “rabid bloodthirstiness of soul,” were among the amenities of criticism. Tennyson hated war, but his hero, at least, hopes that national union in a national struggle will awake a nobler than the commercial spirit. Into the rights and wrongs of our quarrel with Russia we are not to go. Tennyson, rightly or wrongly, took the part of his country, and must “thole the feud” of those high-souled citizens who think their country always in the wrong — as perhaps it very frequently is. We are not to expect a tranquil absence of bias in the midst of military excitement, when very laudable sentiments are apt to misguide men in both directions. In any case, political partisanship added to the enemies of the poem, which was applauded by Henry Taylor, Ruskin, George Brimley, and Jowett, while Mrs Browning sent consoling words from Italy. The poem remained a favourite with the author, who chose passages from it often, when persuaded to read aloud by friends; and modern criticism has not failed to applaud the splendour of the verse and the subtlety of the mad scenes, the passion of the love lyrics.

  These merits have ceased to be disputed, but, though a loyal Tennysonian, I have never quite been able to reconcile myself to Maud as a whole. The hero is an unwholesome young man, and not of an original kind. He is un beau tenebreux of 1830. I suppose it has been observed that he is merely The Master of Ravenswood in modern costume, and without Lady Ashton. Her part is taken by Maud’s brother. The situations of the hero and of the Master (whose acquaintance Thackeray never renewed after he lost his hat in the Kelpie Flow) are nearly identical. The families and fathers of both have been ruined by “the gray old wolf,” and by Sir William Ashton, representing the house of Stair. Both heroes live dawdling on, hard by their lost ancestral homes. Both fall in love with the daughters of the enemies of their houses. The loves of both are baffled, and end in tragedy. Both are concerned in a duel, though the Master, on his way to the ground, “stables his steed in the Kelpie Flow,” and the wooer in Maud shoots Lucy Ashton’s brother, — I mean the brother of Maud, — though duelling in England was out of date. Then comes an interval of madness, and he recovers amid the patriotic emotions of the ill-fated Crimean expedition. Both lovers are gloomy, though the Master has better cause, for the Tennysonian hero is more comfortably provided for than Edgar with his “man and maid,” his Caleb and Mysie. Finally, both The Bride of Lammermoor, which affected Tennyson so potently in boyhood

  (“A merry merry bridal,

  A merry merry day”),

  and Maud, excel in passages rather than as wholes.

  The hero of Maud, with his clandestine wooing of a girl of sixteen, has this apology, that the match had been, as it were, predestined, and desired by the mother of the lady. Still, the brother did not ill to be angry; and the peevishness of the hero against the brother and the parvenu lord and rival strikes a jarring note. In England, at least, the general sentiment is opposed to this moody, introspective kind of young man, of whom Tennyson is not to be supposed to approve. We do not feel certain that his man and maid were
“ever ready to slander and steal.” That seems to be part of his jaundiced way of looking at everything and everybody. He has even a bad word for the “man-god” of modern days, -

  “The man of science himself is fonder of glory, and vain,

  An eye well-practised in nature, a spirit bounded and poor.”

  Rien n’est sacre for this cynic, who thinks himself a Stoic. Thus Maud was made to be unpopular with the author’s countrymen, who conceived a prejudice against Maud’s lover, described by Tennyson as “a morbid poetic soul, . . . an egotist with the makings of a cynic.” That he is “raised to sanity” (still in Tennyson’s words) “by a pure and holy love which elevates his whole nature,” the world failed to perceive, especially as the sanity was only a brief lucid interval, tempered by hanging about the garden to meet a girl of sixteen, unknown to her relations. Tennyson added that “different phases of passion in one person take the place of different characters,” to which critics replied that they wanted different characters, if only by way of relief, and did not care for any of the phases of passion. The learned Monsieur Janet has maintained that love is a disease like another, and that nobody falls in love when in perfect health of mind and body. This theory seems open to exception, but the hero of Maud is unhealthy enough. At best and last, he only helps to give a martial force a “send-off”:-

  “I stood on a giant deck and mixed my breath

  With a loyal people shouting a battle-cry.”

  He did not go out as a volunteer, and probably the Crimean winters brought him back to his original estate of cynical gloom — and very naturally.

  The reconciliation with Life is not like the reconciliation of In Memoriam. The poem took its rise in old lines, and most beautiful lines, which Tennyson had contributed in 1837 to a miscellany:-

  “O that ‘twere possible,

  After long grief and pain,

  To find the arms of my true love

  Round me once again.”

  Thence the poet, working back to find the origin of the situation, encountered the ideas and the persons of Maud.

  I have tried to state the sources, in the general mind, of the general dislike of Maud. The public, “driving at practice,” disapproved of the “criticism of life” in the poem; confused the suffering narrator with the author, and neglected the poetry. “No modern poem,” said Jowett, “contains more lines that ring in the ears of men. I do not know any verse out of Shakespeare in which the ecstacy of love soars to such a height.” With these comments we may agree, yet may fail to follow Jowett when he says, “No poem since Shakespeare seems to show equal power of the same kind, or equal knowledge of human nature.” Shakespeare could not in a narrative poem have preferred the varying passions of one character to the characters of many persons.

  Tennyson was “nettled at first,” his son says, “by these captious remarks of the ‘indolent reviewers,’ but afterwards he would take no notice of them except to speak of them in a half-pitiful, half- humorous, half-mournful manner.” The besetting sin and error of the critics was, of course, to confound Tennyson’s hero with himself, as if we confused Dickens with Pip.

  Like Aurora Leigh, Lucile, and other works, Maud is under the disadvantage of being, practically, a novel of modern life in verse. Criticised as a tale of modern life (and it was criticised in that character), it could not be very highly esteemed. But the essence of Maud, of course, lies in the poetical vehicle. Nobody can cavil at the impressiveness of the opening stanzas -

  “I hate the dreadful hollow behind the little wood”;

  with the keynotes of colour and of desolation struck; the lips of the hollow “dabbled with blood-red heath,” the “red-ribb’d ledges,” and “the flying gold of the ruin’d woodlands”; and the contrast in the picture of the child Maud -

  “Maud the delight of the village, the ringing joy of the Hall.”

  The poem abounds in lines which live in the memory, as in the vernal description -

  “A million emeralds break from the ruby-budded lime”;

  and the voice heard in the garden singing

  “A passionate ballad gallant and gay,”

  as Lovelace’s Althea, and the lines on the far-off waving of a white hand, “betwixt the cloud and the moon.” The lyric of

  “Birds in the high Hall-garden

  When twilight was falling,

  Maud, Maud, Maud, Maud,

  They were crying and calling,”

  was a favourite of the poet.

  “What birds were these?” he is said to have asked a lady suddenly, when reading to a silent company.

  “Nightingales,” suggested a listener, who did not probably remember any other fowl that is vocal in the dusk.

  “No, they were rooks,” answered the poet.

  “Come into the Garden, Maud,” is as fine a love-song as Tennyson ever wrote, with a triumphant ring, and a soaring exultant note. Then the poem drops from its height, like a lark shot high in heaven; tragedy comes, and remorse, and the beautiful interlude of the

  “lovely shell, Small and pure as a pearl.”

  Then follows the exquisite

  “O that ‘twere possible,”

  and the dull consciousness of the poem of madness, with its dumb gnawing confusion of pain and wandering memory; the hero being finally left, in the author’s words, “sane but shattered.”

  Tennyson’s letters of the time show that the critics succeeded in wounding him: it was not a difficult thing to do. Maud was threatened with a broadside from “that pompholygous, broad-blown Apollodorus, the gifted X.” People who have read Aytoun’s diverting Firmilian, where Apollodorus plays his part, and who remember “gifted Gilfillan” in Waverley, know who the gifted X. was. But X. was no great authority south of Tay.

  Despite the almost unanimous condemnation by public critics, the success of Maud enabled Tennyson to buy Farringford, so he must have been better appreciated and understood by the world than by the reviewers.

  In February 1850 Tennyson returned to his old Arthurian themes, “the only big thing not done,” for Milton had merely glanced at Arthur, Dryden did not

  “Raise the Table Round again,”

  and Blackmore has never been reckoned adequate. Vivien was first composed as Merlin and Nimue, and then Geraint and Enid was adapted from the Mabinogion, the Welsh collection of Marchen and legends, things of widely different ages, now rather Celtic, or Brythonic, now amplifications made under the influence of mediaeval French romance. Enid was finished in Wales in August, and Tennyson learned Welsh enough to be able to read the Mabinogion, which is much more of Welsh than many Arthurian critics possess. The two first Idylls were privately printed in the summer of 1857, being very rare and much desired of collectors in this embryonic shape. In July Guinevere was begun, in the middle, with Arthur’s valedictory address to his erring consort. In autumn Tennyson visited the late Duke of Argyll at Inveraray: he was much attached to the Duke — unlike Professor Huxley. Their love of nature, the Duke being as keen-eyed as the poet was short-sighted, was one tie of union. The Indian Mutiny, or at least the death of Havelock, was the occasion of lines which the author was too wise to include in any of his volumes: the poem on Lucknow was of later composition.

  Guinevere was completed in March 1858; and Tennyson met Mr Swinburne, then very young. “What I particularly admired in him was that he did not press upon me any verses of his own.” Tennyson would have found more to admire if he had pressed for a sight of the verses. Neither he nor Mr Matthew Arnold was very encouraging to young poets: they had no sons in Apollo, like Ben Jonson. But both were kept in a perpetual state of apprehension by the army of versifiers who send volumes by post, to whom that can only be said what Tennyson did say to one of them, “As an amusement to yourself and your friends, the writing it” (verse) “is all very well.” It is the friends who do not find it amusing, while the stranger becomes the foe. The psychology of these pests of the Muses is bewildering. They do not seem to read poetry, only to write it an
d launch it at unoffending strangers. If they bought each other’s books, all of them could afford to publish.

  The Master of Balliol, the most adviceful man, if one may use the term, of his age, appears to have advised Tennyson to publish the Idylls at once. There had been years of silence since Maud, and the Master suspected that “mosquitoes” (reviewers) were the cause. “There is a note needed to show the good side of human nature and to condone its frailties which Thackeray will never strike.” To others it seems that Thackeray was eternally striking this note: at that time in General Lambert, his wife, and daughters, not to speak of other characters in The Virginians. Who does not condone the frailties of Captain Costigan, and F. B., and the Chevalier Strong? In any case, Tennyson took his own time, he was (1858) only beginning Elaine. There is no doubt that Tennyson was easily pricked by unsympathetic criticism, even from the most insignificant source, and, as he confessed, he received little pleasure from praise. All authors, without exception, are sensitive. A sturdier author wrote that he would sometimes have been glad to meet his assailant “where the muir-cock was bailie.” We know how testily Wordsworth replied in defence to the gentlest comments by Lamb.

  The Master of Balliol kept insisting, “As to the critics, their power is not really great. . . . One drop of natural feeling in poetry or the true statement of a single new fact is already felt to be of more value than all the critics put together.” Yet even critics may be in the right, and of all great poets, Tennyson listened most obediently to their censures, as we have seen in the case of his early poems. His prolonged silences after the attacks of 1833 and 1855 were occupied in work and reflection: Achilles was not merely sulking in his tent, as some of his friends seem to have supposed. An epic in a series of epic idylls cannot be dashed off like a romantic novel in rhyme; and Tennyson’s method was always one of waiting for maturity of conception and execution.