Alfred, Lord Tennyson - Delphi Poets Series

by Lord Tennyson Alfred

  The poet’s versatility was displayed in the appearance with these records of “weird seizures”, of the Irish dialect piece To-morrow, the popular Spinster’s Sweet-Arts, and the Locksley Hall Sixty Years After. The old fire of the versification is unabated, but the hero has relapsed on the gloom of the hero of Maud. He represents himself, of course, not Tennyson, or only one of the moods of Tennyson, which were sometimes black enough. A very different mood chants the Charge of the Heavy Brigade, and speaks of

  “Green Sussex fading into blue

  With one gray glimpse of sea.”

  The lines To Virgil were written at the request of the Mantuans, by the most Virgilian of all the successors of the

  “Wielder of the stateliest measure

  ever moulded by the lips of man.”

  Never was Tennyson more Virgilian than in this unmatched panegyric, the sum and flower of criticism of that

  “Golden branch amid the shadows,

  kings and realms that pass to rise no more.”

  Hardly less admirable is the tribute to Catullus, and the old poet is young again in the bird-song of Early Spring. The lines on Poets and their Bibliographies, with The Dead Prophet, express Tennyson’s lifelong abhorrence of the critics and biographers, whose joy is in the futile and the unimportant, in personal gossip and the sweepings of the studio, the salvage of the wastepaper basket. The Prefatory Poem to my Brother’s Sonnets is not only touching in itself, but proves that the poet can “turn to favour and to prettiness” such an affliction as the ruinous summer of 1879.

  The year 1880 brought deeper distress in the death of the poet’s son Lionel, whose illness, begun in India, ended fatally in the Red Sea. The interest of the following years was mainly domestic. The poet’s health, hitherto robust, was somewhat impaired in 1888, but his vivid interest in affairs and in letters was unabated. He consoled himself with Virgil, Keats, Wordsworth, Gibbon, Euripides, and Mr Leaf’s speculations on the composite nature of the Iliad, in which Coleridge, perhaps alone among poets, believed. “You know,” said Tennyson to Mr Leaf; “I never liked that theory of yours about the many poets.” It would be at least as easy to prove that there were many authors of Ivanhoe, or perhaps it would be a good deal more easy. However, he admitted that three lines which occur both in the Eighth and the Sixteenth Books of the Iliad are more appropriate in the later book. Similar examples might be found in his own poems. He still wrote, in the intervals of a malady which brought him “as near death as a man could be without dying.” He was an example of the great physical strength which, on the whole, seems usually to accompany great mental power. The strength may be dissipated by passion, or by undue labour, as in cases easily recalled to memory, but neither cause had impaired the vigour of Tennyson. Like Goethe, he lived out all his life; and his eightieth birthday was cheered both by public and private expressions of reverence and affection.

  Of Tennyson’s last three years on earth we may think, in his own words, that his

  ”Life’s latest eve endured

  Nor settled into hueless grey.”

  Nature was as dear to him and as inspiring as of old; men and affairs and letters were not slurred by his intact and energetic mind. His Demeter and other Poems, with the dedication to Lord Dufferin, appeared in the December of the year. The dedication was the lament for the dead son and the salutation to the Viceroy of India, a piece of resigned and manly regret. The Demeter and Persephone is a modern and tender study of the theme of the most beautiful Homeric Hymn. The ancient poet had no such thought of the restored Persephone as that which impels Tennyson to describe her

  “Faint as a climate-changing bird that flies

  All night across the darkness, and at dawn

  Falls on the threshold of her native land.”

  The spring, the restored Persephone, comes more vigorous and joyous to the shores of the AEgean than to ours. All Tennyson’s own is Demeter’s awe of those “imperial disimpassioned eyes” of her daughter, come from the bed and the throne of Hades, the Lord of many guests. The hymn, happy in its ending, has no thought of the grey heads of the Fates, and their answer to the goddess concerning “fate beyond the Fates,” and the breaking of the bonds of Hades. The ballad of Owd Roa is one of the most spirited of the essays in dialect to which Tennyson had of late years inclined. Vastness merely expresses, in terms of poetry, Tennyson’s conviction that, without immortality, life is a series of worthless contrasts. An opposite opinion may be entertained, but a man has a right to express his own, which, coming from so great a mind, is not undeserving of attention; or, at least, is hardly deserving of reproof. The poet’s idea is also stated thus in The Ring, in terms which perhaps do not fall below the poetical; or, at least, do not drop into “the utterly unpoetical”:-

  “The Ghost in Man, the Ghost that once was Man,

  But cannot wholly free itself from Man,

  Are calling to each other thro’ a dawn

  Stranger than earth has ever seen; the veil

  Is rending, and the Voices of the day

  Are heard across the Voices of the dark.

  No sudden heaven, nor sudden hell, for man,

  But thro’ the Will of One who knows and rules -

  And utter knowledge is but utter love -

  AEonian Evolution, swift or slow,

  Thro’ all the Spheres — an ever opening height,

  An ever lessening earth.”

  The Ring is, in fact, a ghost story based on a legend told by Mr Lowell about a house near where he had once lived; one of those houses vexed by

  “A footstep, a low throbbing in the walls,

  A noise of falling weights that never fell,

  Weird whispers, bells that rang without a hand,

  Door-handles turn’d when none was at the door,

  And bolted doors that open’d of themselves.”

  These phenomena were doubtless caused by rats and water-pipes, but they do not destroy the pity and the passion of the tale. The lines to Mary Boyle are all of the normal world, and worthy of a poet’s youth and of the spring. Merlin and the Gleam is the spiritual allegory of the poet’s own career:-

  “Arthur had vanish’d

  I knew not whither,

  The king who loved me,

  And cannot die.”

  So at last

  ”All but in Heaven

  Hovers The Gleam,”

  whither the wayfarer was soon to follow. There is a marvellous hope and pathos in the melancholy of these all but the latest songs, reminiscent of youth and love, and even of the dim haunting memories and dreams of infancy. No other English poet has thus rounded all his life with music. Tennyson was in his eighty-first year, when there “came in a moment” the crown of his work, the immortal lyric, Crossing the Bar. It is hardly less majestic and musical in the perfect Greek rendering by his brother-in-law, Mr Lushington. For once at least a poem has been “poured from the golden to the silver cup” without the spilling of a drop. The new book’s appearance was coincident with the death of Mr Browning, “so loving and appreciative,” as Lady Tennyson wrote; a friend, not a rival, however the partisans of either poet might strive to stir emulation between two men of such lofty and such various genius.

  CHAPTER X. — 1890.

  In the year 1889 the poet’s health had permitted him to take long walks on the sea-shore and along the cliffs, one of which, by reason of its whiteness, he had named “Taliessin,” “the splendid brow.” His mind ran on a poem founded on an Egyptian legend (of which the source is not mentioned), telling how “despair and death came upon him who was mad enough to try to probe the secret of the universe.” He also thought of a drama on Tristram, who, in the Idylls, is treated with brevity, and not with the sympathy of the old writer who cries, “God bless Tristram the knight: he fought for England!” But early in 1890 Tennyson suffered from a severe attack of influenza. In May Mr Watts painted his portrait, and

  “Divinely through all hindrance found the man.”

 
; Tennyson was a great admirer of Miss Austen’s novels: “The realism and life-likeness of Miss Austen’s Dramatis Personae come nearest to those of Shakespeare. Shakespeare, however, is a sun to which Jane Austen, though a bright and true little world, is but an asteroid.” He was therefore pleased to find apple-blossoms co-existing with ripe strawberries on June 28, as Miss Austen has been blamed, by minute philosophers, for introducing this combination in the garden party in Emma. The poet, like most of the good and great, read novels eagerly, and excited himself over the confirmation of an adult male in a story by Miss Yonge. Of Scott, “the most chivalrous literary figure of the century, and the author with the widest range since Shakespeare,” he preferred Old Mortality, and it is a good choice. He hated “morbid and introspective tales, with their oceans of sham philosophy.” At this time, with catholic taste, he read Mr Stevenson and Mr Meredith, Miss Braddon and Mr Henry James, Ouida and Mr Thomas Hardy; Mr Hall Caine and Mr Anstey; Mrs Oliphant and Miss Edna Lyall. Not everybody can peruse all of these very diverse authors with pleasure. He began his poem on the Roman gladiatorial combats; indeed his years, fourscore and one, left his intellectual eagerness as unimpaired as that of Goethe. “A crooked share,” he said to the Princess Louise, “may make a straight furrow.” “One afternoon he had a long waltz with M- in the ballroom.” Speaking of

  “All the charm of all the Muses

  Often flowering in a lonely word”

  in Virgil, he adduced, rather strangely, the cunctantem ramum, said of the Golden Bough, in the Sixth AEneid. The choice is odd, because the Sibyl has just told AEneas that, if he be destined to pluck the branch of gold, ipse volens facilisque sequetur, “it will come off of its own accord,” like the sacred ti branches of the Fijians, which bend down to be plucked for the Fire rite. Yet, when the predestined AEneas tries to pluck the bough of gold, it yields reluctantly (cunctantem), contrary to what the Sibyl has foretold. Mr Conington, therefore, thought the phrase a slip on the part of Virgil. “People accused Virgil of plagiarising,” he said, “but if a man made it his own there was no harm in that (look at the great poets, Shakespeare included).” Tennyson, like Virgil, made much that was ancient his own; his verses are often, and purposefully, a mosaic of classical reminiscences. But he was vexed by the hunters after remote and unconscious resemblances, and far-fetched analogies between his lines and those of others. He complained that, if he said that the sun went down, a parallel was at once cited from Homer, or anybody else, and he used a very powerful phrase to condemn critics who detected such repetitions. “The moanings of the homeless sea,”—”moanings” from Horace, “homeless” from Shelley. “As if no one else had ever heard the sea moan except Horace!” Tennyson’s mixture of memory and forgetfulness was not so strange as that of Scott, and when he adapted from the Greek, Latin, or Italian, it was of set purpose, just as it was with Virgil. The beautiful lines comparing a girl’s eyes to bottom agates that seem to

  ”Wave and float

  In crystal currents of clear running seas,”

  he invented while bathing in Wales. It was his habit, to note down in verse such similes from nature, and to use them when he found occasion. But the higher criticism, analysing the simile, detected elements from Shakespeare and from Beaumont and Fletcher.

  In June 1891 the poet went on a tour in Devonshire, and began his Akbar, and probably wrote June Bracken and Heather; or perhaps it was composed when “we often sat on the top of Blackdown to watch the sunset.” He wrote to Mr Kipling -

  “The oldest to the youngest singer

  That England bore”

  (to alter Mr Swinburne’s lines to Landor), praising his Flag of England. Mr Kipling replied as “the private to the general.”

  Early in 1892 The Foresters was successfully produced at New York by Miss Ada Rehan, the music by Sir Arthur Sullivan, and the scenery from woodland designs by Whymper. Robin Hood (as we learn from Mark Twain) is a favourite hero with the youth of America. Mr Tom Sawyer himself took, in Mark Twain’s tale, the part of the bold outlaw.

  The Death of OEnone was published in 1892, with the dedication to the

  Master of Balliol -

  ”Read a Grecian tale retold

  Which, cast in later Grecian mould,

  Quintus Calaber

  Somewhat lazily handled of old.”

  Quintus Calaber, more usually called Quintus Smyrnaeus, is a writer of perhaps the fourth century of our era. About him nothing, or next to nothing, is known. He told, in so late an age, the conclusion of the Tale of Troy, and (in the writer’s opinion) has been unduly neglected and disdained. His manner, I venture to think, is more Homeric than that of the more famous and doubtless greater Alexandrian poet of the Argonautic cycle, Apollonius Rhodius, his senior by five centuries. His materials were probably the ancient and lost poems of the Epic Cycle, and the story of the death of OEnone may be from the Little Iliad of Lesches. Possibly parts of his work may be textually derived from the Cyclics, but the topic is very obscure. In Quintus, Paris, after encountering evil omens on his way, makes a long speech, imploring the pardon of the deserted OEnone. She replies, not with the Tennysonian brevity; she sends him back to the helpless arms of her rival, Helen. Paris dies on the hills; never did Helen see him returning. The wood-nymphs bewail Paris, and a herdsman brings the bitter news to Helen, who chants her lament. But remorse falls on OEnone. She does not go

  ”Slowly down

  By the long torrent’s ever-deepened roar,”

  but rushes “swift as the wind to seek and spring upon the pyre of her lord.” Fate and Aphrodite drive her headlong, and in heaven Selene, remembering Endymion, bewails the lot of her sister in sorrow. OEnone reaches the funeral flame, and without a word or a cry leaps into her husband’s arms, the wild Nymphs wondering. The lovers are mingled in one heap of ashes, and these are bestowed in one vessel of gold and buried in a howe. This is the story which the poet rehandled in his old age, completing the work of his happy youth when he walked with Hallam in the Pyrenean hills, that were to him as Ida. The romance of OEnone and her death condone, as even Homer was apt to condone, the sins of beautiful Paris, whom the nymphs lament, despite the evil that he has wrought. The silence of the veiled OEnone, as she springs into her lover’s last embrace, is perhaps more affecting and more natural than Tennyson’s

  ”She lifted up a voice

  Of shrill command, ‘Who burns upon the pyre?’”

  The St Telemachus has the old splendour and vigour of verse, and, though written so late in life, is worthy of the poet’s prime:-

  ”Eve after eve that haggard anchorite

  Would haunt the desolated fane, and there

  Gaze at the ruin, often mutter low

  ‘Vicisti Galilaee’; louder again,

  Spurning a shatter’d fragment of the God,

  ‘Vicisti Galilaee!’ but — when now

  Bathed in that lurid crimson — ask’d ‘Is earth

  On fire to the West? or is the Demon-god

  Wroth at his fall?’ and heard an answer ‘Wake

  Thou deedless dreamer, lazying out a life

  Of self-suppression, not of selfless love.’

  And once a flight of shadowy fighters crost

  The disk, and once, he thought, a shape with wings

  Came sweeping by him, and pointed to the West,

  And at his ear he heard a whisper ‘Rome,’

  And in his heart he cried ‘The call of God!’

  And call’d arose, and, slowly plunging down

  Thro’ that disastrous glory, set his face

  By waste and field and town of alien tongue,

  Following a hundred sunsets, and the sphere

  Of westward-wheeling stars; and every dawn

  Struck from him his own shadow on to Rome.

  Foot-sore, way-worn, at length he touch’d his goal,

  The Christian city.”

  Akbar’s Dream may be taken, more or less, to represent the poet’s own theology of a race seeking
after God, if perchance they may find Him, and the closing Hymn was a favourite with Tennyson. He said, “It is a magnificent metre”:-

  HYMN.

  I.

  Once again thou flamest heavenward, once again we see thee rise.

  Every morning is thy birthday gladdening human hearts and eyes.

  Every morning here we greet it, bowing lowly down before thee,

  Thee the Godlike, thee the changeless in thine ever-changing skies.

  II.

  Shadow-maker, shadow-slayer, arrowing light from clime to clime,

  Hear thy myriad laureates hail thee monarch in their woodland rhyme.

  Warble bird, and open flower, and, men, below the dome of azure

  Kneel adoring Him the Timeless in the flame that measures Time!”

  In this final volume the poet cast his handful of incense on the altar of Scott, versifying the tale of Il Bizarro, which the dying Sir Walter records in his Journal in Italy. The Churchwarden and the Curate is not inferior to the earlier peasant poems in its expression of shrewdness, humour, and superstition. A verse of Poets and Critics may be taken as the poet’s last word on the old futile quarrel:-

  “This thing, that thing is the rage,