Alfred, Lord Tennyson - Delphi Poets Series

by Lord Tennyson Alfred

  “Tenderest of Roman poets nineteen hundred years ago.”

  In 1880 Ballads and other Poems proved that, like Titian, the great poet was not to be defeated by the years. The First Quarrel was in his most popular English style. Rizpah deserved and received the splendid panegyric of Mr Swinburne. The Revenge is probably the finest of the patriotic pieces, and keeps green the memory of an exploit the most marvellous in the annals of English seamen. The Village Wife is a pendant worthy of The Northern Farmer. The poem In the Children’s Hospital caused some irritation at the moment, but there was only one opinion as to the Defence of Lucknow and the beautiful re-telling of the Celtic Voyage of Maeldune. The fragment of Homeric translation was equally fortunate in choice of subject and in rendering.

  In the end of 1880 the poet finished The Cup, which had been worked on occasionally since he completed The Falcon in 1880. The piece was read by the author to Sir Henry Irving and his company, and it was found that the manuscript copy needed few alterations to fit it for the stage. The scenery and the acting of the protagonists are not easily to be forgotten. The play ran for a hundred and thirty nights. Sir Henry Irving had thought that Becket (then unpublished) would prove too expensive, and could only be a succes d’estime. Tennyson had found out that “the worst of writing for the stage is, you must keep some actor always in your mind.” To this necessity authors like Moliere and Shakespeare were, of course, resigned and familiar; they knew exactly how to deal with all their means. But this part of the business of play-writing must always be a cross to the poet who is not at one with the world of the stage.

  In The Cup Miss Ellen Terry made the strongest impression, her part being noble and sympathetic, while Sir Henry Irving had the ungrateful part of the villain. To be sure, he was a villain of much complexity; and Tennyson thought that his subtle blend of Roman refinement and intellectuality, and barbarian, self-satisfied sensuality, was not “hit off.” Synorix is, in fact, half-Greek, half-Celt, with a Roman education, and the “blend” is rather too remote for successful representation. The traditional villain, from Iago downwards, is not apt to utter such poetry as this:-

  “O Thou, that dost inspire the germ with life,

  The child, a thread within the house of birth,

  And give him limbs, then air, and send him forth

  The glory of his father — Thou whose breath

  Is balmy wind to robe our bills with grass,

  And kindle all our vales with myrtle-blossom,

  And roll the golden oceans of our grain,

  And sway the long grape-bunches of our vines,

  And fill all hearts with fatness and the lust

  Of plenty — make me happy in my marriage!”

  The year 1881 brought the death of another of the old Cambridge friends, James Spedding, the biographer of Bacon; and Carlyle also died, a true friend, if rather intermittent in his appreciation of poetry. The real Carlyle did appreciate it, but the Carlyle of attitude was too much of the iron Covenanter to express what he felt. The poem Despair irritated the earnest and serious readers of “know- nothing books.” The poem expressed, dramatically, a mood like another, a human mood not so very uncommon. A man ruined in this world’s happiness curses the faith of his youth, and the unfaith of his reading and reflection, and tries to drown himself. This is one conclusion of the practical syllogism, and it is a free country. However, there were freethinkers who did not think that Tennyson’s kind of thinking ought to be free. Other earnest persons objected to “First drink a health,” in the re-fashioned song of Hands all Round. They might have remembered a royal health drunk in water an hour before the drinkers swept Mackay down the Pass of Killiecrankie. The poet did not specify the fluid in which the toast was to be carried, and the cup might be that which “cheers but not inebriates.” “The common cup,” as the remonstrants had to be informed, “has in all ages been the sacred symbol of unity.”

  The Promise of May was produced in November 1882, and the poet was once more so unfortunate as to vex the susceptibilities of advanced thinkers. The play is not a masterpiece, and yet neither the gallery gods nor the Marquis of Queensberry need have felt their withers wrung. The hero, or villain, Edgar, is a perfectly impossible person, and represents no kind of political, social, or economical thinker. A man would give all other bliss and all his worldly wealth for this, to waste his whole strength in one kick upon this perfect prig. He employs the arguments of evolution and so forth to justify the seduction of a little girl of fifteen, and later, by way of making amends, proposes to commit incest by marrying her sister. There have been evolutionists, to be sure, who believed in promiscuity, like Mr Edgar, as preferable to monogamy. But this only proves that an evolutionist may fail to understand evolution. There be also such folk as Stevenson calls “squirradicals” — squires who say that “the land is the people’s.” Probably no advocate of promiscuity, and no squirradical, was present at the performances of The Promise of May. But people of advanced minds had got it into their heads that their doctrines were to be attacked, so they went and made a hubbub in the sacred cause of freedom of thought and speech. The truth is, that controversial topics, political topics, ought not to be brought into plays, much less into sermons. Tennyson meant Edgar for “nothing thorough, nothing sincere.” He is that venomous thing, the prig-scoundrel: he does not suit the stage, and his place, if anywhere, is in the novel. Advocates of marriage with a deceased wife’s sister might have applauded Edgar for wishing to marry the sister of a mistress assumed to be deceased, but no other party in the State wanted anything except the punching of Edgar’s head by Farmer Dobson.

  In 1883 died Edward FitzGerald, the most kind, loyal, and, as he said, crotchety of old and dear Cambridge friends. He did not live to see the delightful poem which Tennyson had written for him. In almost his latest letter he had remarked, superfluously, that when he called the task of translating The Agamemnon “work for a poet,” he “was not thinking of Mr Browning.”

  In the autumn of 1883 Tennyson was taken, with Mr Gladstone, by Sir Donald Currie, for a cruise round the west coast of Scotland, to the Orkneys, and to Copenhagen. The people of Kirkwall conferred on the poet and the statesman the freedom of the burgh, and Mr Gladstone, in an interesting speech, compared the relative chances of posthumous fame of the poet and the politician. Pericles is not less remembered than Sophocles, though Shakespeare is more in men’s minds than Cecil. Much depends, as far as the statesmen are considered, on contemporary historians. It is Thucydides who immortalises Pericles. But it is improbable that the things which Mr Gladstone did, and attempted, will be forgotten more rapidly than the conduct and characters of, say, Burleigh or Lethington.

  In 1884, after this voyage, with its royal functions and celebrations at Copenhagen, a peerage was offered to the poet. He “did not want to alter his plain Mr,” and he must have known that, whether he accepted or refused, the chorus of blame would be louder than that of applause. Scott had desired “such grinning honour as Sir Walter hath”; the title went well with the old name, and pleased his love of old times. Tennyson had been blamed “by literary men” for thrice evading a baronetcy, and he did not think that a peerage would make smooth the lives of his descendants. But he concluded, “Why should I be selfish and not suffer an honour (as Gladstone says) to be done to literature in my name?” Politically, he thought that the Upper House, while it lasts, partly supplied the place of the American “referendum.” He voted in July 1884 for the extension of the franchise, and in November stated his views to Mr Gladstone in verse. In prose he wrote to Mr Gladstone, “I have a strong conviction that the more simple the dealings of men with men, as well as of man with man, are — the better,” a sentiment which, perhaps, did not always prevail with his friend. The poet’s reflections on the horror of Gordon’s death are not recorded. He introduced the idea of the Gordon Home for Boys, and later supported it by a letter, “Have we forgotten Gordon?” to the Daily Telegraph. They who cannot forget Gordon must always be grateful t
o Tennyson for providing this opportunity of honouring the greatest of an illustrious clan, and of helping, in their degree, a scheme which was dear to the heroic leader.

  The poet, very naturally, was most averse to personal appearance in public matters. Mankind is so fashioned that the advice of a poet is always regarded as unpractical, and is even apt to injure the cause which he advocates. Happily there cannot be two opinions about the right way of honouring Gordon. Tennyson’s poem, The Fleet, was also in harmony with the general sentiment.

  In the last month of 1884 Becket was published. The theme of Fair Rosamund had appealed to the poet in youth, and he had written part of a lyric which he judiciously left unpublished. It is given in his Biography. In 1877 he had visited Canterbury, and had traced the steps of Becket to his place of slaughter in the Cathedral. The poem was printed in 1879, but not published till seven years later. In 1879 Sir Henry Irving had thought the play too costly to be produced with more than a succes d’estime; but in 1891 he put it on the stage, where it proved the most successful of modern poetic dramas. As published it is, obviously, far too long for public performance. It is not easy to understand why dramatic poets always make their works so much too long. The drama seems, by its very nature, to have a limit almost as distinct as the limit of the sonnet. It is easy to calculate how long a play for the stage ought to be, and we might think that a poet would find the natural limit serviceable to his art, for it inculcates selection, conciseness, and concentration. But despite these advantages of the natural form of the drama, modern poets, at least, constantly overflow their banks. The author ruit profusus, and the manager has to reduce the piece to feasible proportions, such as it ought to have assumed from the first.

  Becket has been highly praised by Sir Henry Irving himself, for its “moments of passion and pathos, . . . which, when they exist, atone to an audience for the endurance of long acts.” But why should the audience have such long acts to endure? The reader, one fears, is apt to use his privilege of skipping. The long speeches of Walter Map and the immense period of Margery tempt the student to exercise his agility. A “chronicle play” has the privilege of wandering, but Becket wanders too far and too long. The political details of the quarrel between Church and State, with its domestic and international complexities, are apt to fatigue the attention. Inevitable and insoluble as the situation was, neither protagonist is entirely sympathetic, whether in the play or in history. The struggle in Becket between his love of the king and his duty to the Church (or what he takes to be his duty) is nobly presented, and is truly dramatic, while there is grotesque and terrible relief in the banquet of the Beggars. In the scene of the assassination the poet “never stoops his wing,” and there are passages of tender pathos between Henry and Rosamund, while Becket’s keen memories of his early days, just before his death, are moving.

  ”Becket. I once was out with Henry in the days

  When Henry loved me, and we came upon

  A wild-fowl sitting on her nest, so still

  I reach’d my hand and touch’d; she did not stir;

  The snow had frozen round her, and she sat

  Stone-dead upon a heap of ice-cold eggs.

  Look! how this love, this mother, runs thro’ all

  The world God made — even the beast — the bird!

  John of Salisbury. Ay, still a lover of the beast and bird?

  But these arm’d men — will you not hide yourself?

  Perchance the fierce De Brocs from Saltwood Castle,

  To assail our Holy Mother lest she brood

  Too long o’er this hard egg, the world, and send

  Her whole heart’s heat into it, till it break

  Into young angels. Pray you, hide yourself.

  Becket. There was a little fair-hair’d Norman maid

  Lived in my mother’s house: if Rosamund is

  The world’s rose, as her name imports her — she

  Was the world’s lily.

  John of Salisbury. Ay, and what of her?

  Becket. She died of leprosy.”

  But the part of Rosamund, her innocent ignorance especially, is not very readily intelligible, not quite persuasive, and there is almost a touch of the burlesque in her unexpected appearance as a monk. To weave that old and famous story of love into the terribly complex political intrigue was a task almost too great. The character of Eleanor is perhaps more successfully drawn in the Prologue than in the scene where she offers the choice of the dagger or the bowl, and is interrupted, in a startlingly unexpected manner, by the Archbishop himself. The opportunities for scenic effects are magnificent throughout, and must have contributed greatly to the success on the stage. Still one cannot but regard the published Becket as rather the marble from which the statue may be hewn than as the statue itself. There are fine scenes, powerful and masterly drawing of character in Henry, Eleanor, and Becket, but there is a want of concentration, due, perhaps, to the long period of time covered by the action. So, at least, it seems to a reader who has admitted his sense of incompetency in the dramatic region. The acuteness of the poet’s power of historical intuition was attested by Mr J. R. Green and Mr Bryce. “One cannot imagine,” said Mr Bryce, “a more vivid, a more perfectly faithful picture than it gives both of Henry and Thomas.” Tennyson’s portraits of these two “go beyond and perfect history.” The poet’s sympathy ought, perhaps, to have been, if not with the false and ruffianly Henry, at least with Henry’s side of the question. For Tennyson had made Harold leave

  ”To England

  My legacy of war against the Pope

  From child to child, from Pope to Pope, from age to age,

  Till the sea wash her level with her shores,

  Or till the Pope be Christ’s.”

  CHAPTER IX. — LAST YEARS.

  The end of 1884 saw the publication of Tiresias and other Poems, dedicated to “My good friend, Robert Browning,” and opening with the beautiful verses to one who never was Mr Browning’s friend, Edward FitzGerald. The volume is rich in the best examples of Tennyson’s later work. Tiresias, the monologue of the aged seer, blinded by excess of light when he beheld Athene unveiled, and under the curse of Cassandra, is worthy of the author who, in youth, wrote OEnone and Ulysses. Possibly the verses reflect Tennyson’s own sense of public indifference to the voice of the poet and the seer. But they are of much earlier date than the year of publication:-

  ”For when the crowd would roar

  For blood, for war, whose issue was their doom,

  To cast wise words among the multitude

  Was flinging fruit to lions; nor, in hours

  Of civil outbreak, when I knew the twain

  Would each waste each, and bring on both the yoke

  Of stronger states, was mine the voice to curb

  The madness of our cities and their kings.

  Who ever turn’d upon his heel to hear

  My warning that the tyranny of one

  Was prelude to the tyranny of all?

  My counsel that the tyranny of all

  Led backward to the tyranny of one?

  This power hath work’d no good to aught that lives.”

  The conclusion was a favourite with the author, and his blank verse never reached a higher strain:-

  ”But for me,

  I would that I were gather’d to my rest,

  And mingled with the famous kings of old,

  On whom about their ocean-islets flash

  The faces of the Gods — the wise man’s word,

  Here trampled by the populace underfoot,

  There crown’d with worship — and these eyes will find

  The men I knew, and watch the chariot whirl

  About the goal again, and hunters race

  The shadowy lion, and the warrior-kings,

  In height and prowess more than human, strive

  Again for glory, while the golden lyre

  Is ever sounding in heroic ears

  Heroic hymns, and every way the vales

&nbs
p; Wind, clouded with the grateful incense-fume

  Of those who mix all odour to the Gods

  On one far height in one far-shining fire.”

  Then follows the pathetic piece on FitzGerald’s death, and the prayer, not unfulfilled -

  ”That, when I from hence

  Shall fade with him into the unknown,

  My close of earth’s experience

  May prove as peaceful as his own.”

  The Ancient Sage, with its lyric interludes, is one of Tennyson’s meditations on the mystery of the world and of existence. Like the poet himself, the Sage finds a gleam of light and hope in his own subjective experiences of some unspeakable condition, already recorded in In Memoriam. The topic was one on which he seems to have spoken to his friends with freedom:-

  “And more, my son! for more than once when I

  Sat all alone, revolving in myself

  The word that is the symbol of myself,

  The mortal limit of the Self was loosed,

  And past into the Nameless, as a cloud

  Melts into Heaven. I touch’d my limbs, the limbs

  Were strange not mine — and yet no shade of doubt,

  But utter clearness, and thro’ loss of Self

  The gain of such large life as match’d with ours

  Were Sun to spark — unshadowable in words,

  Themselves but shadows of a shadow-world.”

  The poet’s habit of

  ”Revolving in myself

  The word that is the symbol of myself” -

  that is, of dwelling on the sound of his own name, was familiar to the Arabs. M. Lefebure has drawn my attention to a passage in the works of a mediaeval Arab philosopher, Ibn Khaldoun: “To arrive at the highest degree of inspiration of which he is capable, the diviner should have recourse to the use of certain phrases marked by a peculiar cadence and parallelism. Thus he emancipates his mind from the influence of the senses, and is enabled to attain an imperfect contact with the spiritual world.” Ibn Khaldoun regards the “contact” as extremely “imperfect.” He describes similar efforts made by concentrating the gaze on a mirror, a bowl of water, or the like. Tennyson was doubtless unaware that he had stumbled accidentally on a method of “ancient sages.” Psychologists will explain his experience by the word “dissociation.” It is not everybody, however, who can thus dissociate himself. The temperament of genius has often been subject to such influence, as M. Lefebure has shown in the modern instances of George Sand and Alfred de Musset: we might add Shelley, Goethe, and even Scott.