IX.LAST YEARS.

Theend of 1884 saw the publication ofTiresias 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, wroteŒnoneandUlysses. 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 roarFor blood, for war, whose issue was their doom,To cast wise words among the multitudeWas flinging fruit to lions; nor, in hoursOf civil outbreak, when I knew the twainWould each waste each, and bring on both the yokeOf stronger states, was mine the voice to curbThe madness of our cities and their kings.Who ever turn’d upon his heel to hearMy warning that the tyranny of oneWas prelude to the tyranny of all?My counsel that the tyranny of allLed 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 flashThe faces of the Gods—the wise man’s word,Here trampled by the populace underfoot,There crown’d with worship—and these eyes will findThe men I knew, and watch the chariot whirlAbout the goal again, and hunters raceThe shadowy lion, and the warrior-kings,In height and prowess more than human, striveAgain for glory, while the golden lyreIs ever sounding in heroic earsHeroic hymns, and every way the valesWind, clouded with the grateful incense-fumeOf those who mix all odour to the GodsOn 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 henceShall fade with him into the unknown,My close of earth’s experienceMay 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 inIn 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 ISat all alone, revolving in myselfThe word that is the symbol of myself,The mortal limit of the Self was loosed,And past into the Nameless, as a cloudMelts into Heaven. I touch’d my limbs, the limbsWere strange not mine—and yet no shade of doubt,But utter clearness, and thro’ loss of SelfThe gain of such large life as match’d with oursWere Sun to spark—unshadowable in words,Themselves but shadows of a shadow-world.”

The poet’s habit of

“Revolving in myselfThe word that is the symbol of myself”—

that is, of dwelling on the sound of his own name, was familiar to the Arabs. M. Lefébure has drawn my attention to a passage in the works of a mediæval Arab philosopher, Ibn Khaldoun:[196]“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. Lefébure has shown in the modern instances of George Sand and Alfred de Musset: we might add Shelley, Goethe, and even Scott.

The poet’s versatility was displayed in the appearance with these records of “weird seizures”, of the Irish dialect pieceTo-morrow, the popularSpinster’s Sweet-Arts, and theLocksley Hall Sixty Years After. The old fire of the versification is unabated, but the hero has relapsed on the gloom of the hero ofMaud. 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 theCharge of the Heavy Brigade, and speaks of

“Green Sussex fading into blueWith one gray glimpse of sea.”

The linesTo Virgilwere written at the request of the Mantuans, by the most Virgilian of all the successors of the

“Wielder of the stateliest measureever 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 ofEarly Spring. The lines onPoets and their Bibliographies, withThe 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. ThePrefatory Poem to my Brother’s Sonnetsis 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 theIliad, 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 ofIvanhoe, 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 theIliadare 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 enduredNor 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. HisDemeter 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. TheDemeter and Persephoneis 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 fliesAll night across the darkness, and at dawnFalls on the threshold of her native land.”

The spring, the restored Persephone, comes more vigorous and joyous to the shores of the Ægean 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 ofOwd Roäis one of the most spirited of the essays in dialect to which Tennyson had of late years inclined.Vastnessmerely 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 inThe 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 dawnStranger than earth has ever seen; the veilIs rending, and the Voices of the dayAre 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—Æonian Evolution, swift or slow,Thro’ all the Spheres—an ever opening height,An ever lessening earth.”

The Ringis, 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 Gleamis the spiritual allegory of the poet’s own career:—

“Arthur had vanish’dI knew not whither,The king who loved me,And cannot die.”

So at last

“All but in HeavenHovers 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.

Inthe 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’sDramatis Personæcome 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 inEmma. 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 preferredOld 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 MusesOften flowering in a lonely word”

in Virgil, he adduced, rather strangely, thecunctantem ramum, said of the Golden Bough, in the Sixth Æneid. The choice is odd, because the Sibyl has just told Æneas 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 sacredtibranches of the Fijians, which bend down to be plucked for the Fire rite. Yet, when the predestined Æneas tries to pluck the bough of gold, it yieldsreluctantly(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 floatIn 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 hisAkbar, and probably wroteJune 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 singerThat England bore”

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

Early in 1892The Foresterswas 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 Œnonewas published in 1892, with the dedication to the Master of Balliol—

“Read a Grecian tale retoldWhich, cast in later Grecian mould,Quintus CalaberSomewhat lazily handled of old.”

Quintus Calaber, more usually called Quintus Smyrnæus, 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 Œnone may be from theLittle Iliadof 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 Œnone. 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 Œnone. She does not go

“Slowly downBy 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. Œnone 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 Œnone 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 Œnone, as she springs into her lover’s last embrace, is perhaps more affecting and more natural than Tennyson’s

“She lifted up a voiceOf shrill command, ‘Who burns upon the pyre?’”

TheSt Telemachushas 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 anchoriteWould haunt the desolated fane, and thereGaze at the ruin, often mutter low‘Vicisti Galilæe’; louder again,Spurning a shatter’d fragment of the God,‘Vicisti Galilæe!’ but—when nowBathed in that lurid crimson—ask’d ‘Is earthOn fire to the West? or is the Demon-godWroth at his fall?’ and heard an answer ‘WakeThou deedless dreamer, lazying out a lifeOf self-suppression, not of selfless love.’And once a flight of shadowy fighters crostThe disk, and once, he thought, a shape with wingsCame 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 downThro’ that disastrous glory, set his faceBy waste and field and town of alien tongue,Following a hundred sunsets, and the sphereOf westward-wheeling stars; and every dawnStruck from him his own shadow on to Rome.Foot-sore, way-worn, at length he touch’d his goal,The Christian city.”

Akbar’s Dreammay 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 azureKneel adoring Him the Timeless in the flame that measures Time!”

“Hymn.

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 azureKneel 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 ofIl Bizarro, which the dying Sir Walter records in his Journal in Italy.The Churchwarden and the Curateis not inferior to the earlier peasant poems in its expression of shrewdness, humour, and superstition. A verse ofPoets and Criticsmay be taken as the poet’s last word on the old futile quarrel:—

“This thing, that thing is the rage,Helter-skelter runs the age;Minds on this round earth of oursVary like the leaves and flowers,Fashion’d after certain laws;Sing thou low or loud or sweet,All at all points thou canst not meet,Some will pass and some will pause.What is true at last will tell:Few at first will place thee well;Some too low would have thee shine,Some too high—no fault of thine—Hold thine own, and work thy will!Year will graze the heel of year,But seldom comes the poet here,And the Critic’s rarer still.”

What is true at last will tell:Few at first will place thee well;Some too low would have thee shine,Some too high—no fault of thine—Hold thine own, and work thy will!Year will graze the heel of year,But seldom comes the poet here,And the Critic’s rarer still.”

Still the lines hold good—

“Some too low would have thee shine,Some too high—no fault of thine.”

The end was now at hand. A sense of weakness was felt by the poet on September 3, 1892: on the 28th his family sent for Sir Andrew Clark; but the patient gradually faded out of life, and expired on Thursday, October 6, at 1.35A.M.To the very last he had Shakespeare by him, and his windows were open to the sun; on the last night they were flooded by the moonlight. The description of the final scenes must be read in the Biography by the poet’s son. “His patience and quiet strength had power upon those who were nearest and dearest to him; we felt thankful for the love and the utter peace of it all.” “The life after death,” Tennyson had said just before his fatal illness, “is the cardinal point of Christianity. I believe that God reveals Himself in every individual soul; and my idea of Heaven is the perpetual ministry of one soul to another.” He had lived the life of heaven upon earth, being in all his work a minister of things honourable, lovely, consoling, and ennobling to the souls of others, with a ministry which cannot die. His body sleeps next to that of his friend and fellow-poet, Robert Browning, in front of Chaucer’s monument in the Abbey.

“O,thatPress will get hold of me now,” Tennyson said when he knew that his last hour was at hand. He had a horror of personal tattle, as even his early poems declare—

“For now the Poet cannot die,Nor leave his music as of old,But round him ere he scarce be coldBegins the scandal and the cry.”

But no “carrion-vulture” has waited

“To tear his heart before the crowd.”

About Tennyson, doubtless, there is much anecdotage: most of the anecdotes turn on his shyness, his really exaggerated hatred of personal notoriety, and the odd and brusque things which he would say when alarmed by effusive strangers. It has not seemed worth while to repeat more than one or two of these legends, nor have I sought outside the Biography by his son for more than the biographer chose to tell. The readers who are least interested in poetry are most interested in tattle about the poet. It is the privilege of genius to retain the freshness and simplicity, with some of the foibles, of the child. When Tennyson read his poems aloud he was apt to be moved by them, and to express frankly his approbation where he thought it deserved. Only very rudimentary psychologists recognised conceit in this freedom; and only the same set of persons mistook shyness for arrogance. Effusiveness of praise or curiosity in a stranger is apt to produce bluntness of reply in a Briton. “Don’t talk d—d nonsense, sir,” said the Duke of Wellington to the gushing person who piloted him, in his old age, across Piccadilly. Of Tennyson Mr Palgrave says, “I have known him silenced, almost frozen, before the eager unintentional eyes of a girl of fifteen. And under the stress of this nervous impulse compelled to contradict his inner self (especially when under the terror of leonisation . . . ), he was doubtless at times betrayed into an abrupt phrase, a cold unsympathetic exterior; a moment’s ‘defect of the rose.’” Had he not been sensitive in all things, he would have been less of a poet. The chief criticism directed against his mode of life is that hewassensitive and reserved, but he could and did make himself pleasant in the society ofles pauvres d’esprit. Curiosity alarmed him, and drove him into his shell: strangers who met him in that mood carried away false impressions, which developed into myths. As the Master of Balliol has recorded, despite his shyness “he was extremely hospitable, often inviting not only his friends, but the friends of his friends, and giving them a hearty welcome. For underneath a sensitive exterior he was thoroughly genial if he was understood.” In these points he was unlike his great contemporary, Browning; for instance, Tennyson never (I think) was the Master’s guest at Balliol, mingling, like Browning, with the undergraduates, to whom the Master’s hospitality was freely extended. Yet, where he was familiar, Tennyson was a gay companion, not shunning jest or even paradox. “As Dr Johnson says, every man may be judged of by his laughter”: but no Boswell has chronicled the laughters of Tennyson. “He never, or hardly ever, made puns or witticisms” (though one pun, at least, endures in tradition), “but always lived in an attitude of humour.” Mr Jowett writes (and no description of the poet is better than his)—

If I were to describe his outward appearance, I should say that he was certainly unlike any one else whom I ever saw. A glance at some of Watts’ portraits of him will give, better than any description which can be expressed in words, a conception of his noble mien and look. He was a magnificent man, who stood before you in his native refinement and strength. The unconventionality of his manners was in keeping with the originality of his figure. He would sometimes say nothing, or a word or two only, to the stranger who approached him, out of shyness. He would sometimes come into the drawing-room reading a book. At other times, especially to ladies, he was singularly gracious and benevolent. He would talk about the accidents of his own life with an extraordinary freedom, as at the moment they appeared to present themselves to his mind, the days of his boyhood that were passed at Somersby, and the old school of manners which he came across in his own neighbourhood: the days of the “apostles” at Cambridge: the years which he spent in London; the evenings enjoyed at the Cock Tavern, and elsewhere, when he saw another side of life, not without a kindly and humorous sense of the ridiculous in his fellow-creatures. His repertory of stories was perfectly inexhaustible; they were often about slight matters that would scarcely bear repetition, but were told with such lifelike reality, that they convulsed his hearers with laughter. Like most story-tellers, he often repeated his favourites; but, like children, his audience liked hearing them again and again, and he enjoyed telling them. It might be said of him that he told more stories than any one, but was by no means the regular story-teller. In the commonest conversation he showed himself a man of genius.

To this description may be added another by Mr F. T. Palgrave:—

Every one will have seen men, distinguished in some line of work, whose conversation (to take the old figure) either “smelt too strongly of the lamp,” or lay quite apart from their art or craft. What, through all these years, struck me about Tennyson, was that whilst he never deviated into poetical language as such, whether in rhetoric or highly coloured phrase, yet throughout the substance of his talk the same mode of thought, the same imaginative grasp of nature, the same fineness and gentleness in his view of character, the same forbearance and toleration, theaurea mediocritasdespised by fools and fanatics, which are stamped on his poetry, were constantly perceptible: whilst in the easy and as it were unsought choiceness, the conscientious and truth-loving precision of his words, the same personal identity revealed itself. What a strange charm lay here, how deeply illuminating the whole character, as in prolonged intercourse it gradually revealed itself! Artist and man, Tennyson was invariably true to himself, or rather, in Wordsworth’s phrase, he “moved altogether”; his nature and his poetry being harmonious aspects of the same soul; as botanists tell us that flower and fruit are but transformations of root and stem and leafage. We read how, in mediæval days, conduits were made to flow with claret. But this was on great occasions only. Tennyson’s fountain always ran wine.Once more: In Mme. Récamier’ssalon, I have read, at the time when conversation was yet a fine art in Paris, guests famous forespritwould sit in the twilight round the stove, whilst each in turn let fly some sparkling anecdote or bon-mot, which rose and shone and died out into silence, till the next of the elect pyrotechnists was ready. Good things of this kind, as I have said, were plentiful in Tennyson’s repertory. But what, to pass from the materials to the method of his conversation, eminently marked it was the continuity of the electric current. He spoke, and was silent, and spoke again: but the circuit was unbroken; there was no effort in taking up the thread, no sense of disjunction. Often I thought, had he never written a line of the poems so dear to us, his conversation alone would have made him the most interesting companion known to me. From this great and gracious student of humanity, what less, indeed, could be expected? And if, as a converser, I were to compare him with Socrates, as figured for us in the dialogues of his great disciple, I think that I should have the assent of that eminently valued friend of Tennyson’s, whose long labour of love has conferred English citizenship upon Plato.

Once more: In Mme. Récamier’ssalon, I have read, at the time when conversation was yet a fine art in Paris, guests famous forespritwould sit in the twilight round the stove, whilst each in turn let fly some sparkling anecdote or bon-mot, which rose and shone and died out into silence, till the next of the elect pyrotechnists was ready. Good things of this kind, as I have said, were plentiful in Tennyson’s repertory. But what, to pass from the materials to the method of his conversation, eminently marked it was the continuity of the electric current. He spoke, and was silent, and spoke again: but the circuit was unbroken; there was no effort in taking up the thread, no sense of disjunction. Often I thought, had he never written a line of the poems so dear to us, his conversation alone would have made him the most interesting companion known to me. From this great and gracious student of humanity, what less, indeed, could be expected? And if, as a converser, I were to compare him with Socrates, as figured for us in the dialogues of his great disciple, I think that I should have the assent of that eminently valued friend of Tennyson’s, whose long labour of love has conferred English citizenship upon Plato.

We have called him shy and sensitive in daily intercourse with strangers, and as to criticism, he freely confessed that a midge of dispraise could sting, while applause gave him little pleasure. Yet no poet altered his verses so much in obedience to censure unjustly or irritatingly stated, yet in essence just. He readily rejected some of his “Juvenilia” on Mr Palgrave’s suggestion. The same friend tells how well he took a rather fierce attack on an unpublished piece, when Mr Palgrave “owned that he could not find one good line in it.” Very few poets, or even versifiers (fiercer they than poets are), would have continued to show their virgin numbers to a friend so candid, as Tennyson did. Perhaps most of thegenus irritabilewill grant that spoken criticism, if unfavourable, somehow annoys and stirs opposition in an author; probably because it confirms his own suspicions about his work. Such criticism is almost invariably just. But Campbell, when Rogers offered a correction, “bounced out of the room, with a ‘Hang it! I should like to see the man who would dare to correct me.’”

Mr Jowett justly recognised in the life of Tennyson two circumstances which made him other than, but for these, he would have been. He had intended to do with the Arthurian subject what he never did, “in some way or other to have represented in it the great religions of the world. . . . It is a proof of Tennyson’s genius that he should have thus early grasped the great historical aspect of religion.” His intention was foiled, his early dream was broken, by the death of Arthur Hallam, and by the coldness and contempt with which, at the same period, his early poems were received.

Mr Jowett (who had a firm belief in the “great work”) regretted the change of plan as to the Arthurian topic, regretted it the more from his own interest in the History of Religion. But we need not share the regrets. The early plan for the Arthur (which Mr Jowett never saw) has been published, and certainly the scheme could not have been executed on these lines.[218]Moreover, as the Master observed, the work would have been premature in Tennyson’s youth, and, indeed, it would still be premature. The comparative science of religious evolution is even now very tentative, and does not yield materials of sufficient stability for an epic, even if such an epic could be forced into the mould of the Arthur legends, a feat perhaps impossible, and certainly undesirable. A truly fantastic allegory must have been the result, and it is fortunate that the poet abandoned the idea in favour of more human themes. Moreover, he recognised very early that his was not a Musede longue haleine; that he must be “short.” We may therefore feel certain that his early sorrow and discouragement were salutary to him as a poet, and as a man. He became more sympathetic, more tender, and was obliged to put forth that stoical self-control, and strenuous courage and endurance, through which alone his poetic career was rendered possible. “He had the susceptibility of a child or a woman,” says his friend; “he had also” (it was a strange combination) “the strength of a giant or of a god.” Without these qualities he must have broken down between 1833 and 1842 into a hypochondriac, or a morose, if majestic, failure. Poor, obscure, and unhappy, he overcame the world, and passed from darkness into light. The “poetic temperament” in another not gifted with his endurance and persistent strength would have achieved ruin.

Most of us remember Taine’s parallel between Tennyson and Alfred de Musset. The French critic has no high approval of Tennyson’s “respectability” and long peaceful life, as compared with the wrecked life and genius of Musset,l’enfant perduof love, wine, and song. This is a theory like another, and is perhaps attractive to the young. The poet must have strong passions, or how can he sing of them: he must be tossed and whirled in the stress of things, like Shelley’s autumn leaves;—

“Ghosts from an enchanter fleeing.”

Looking at Burns, Byron, Musset, or even at Shelley’s earlier years, youth sees in them the true poets, “sacred things,” but also “light,” as Plato says, inspired to break their wings against the nature of existence, and theflammantia mænia mundi. But this is almost a boyish idea, this idea that the true poet is the slave of the passions, and that the poet who dominates them has none, and is but a staid domestic animal, an ass browsing the common, as somebody has written about Wordsworth. Certainly Tennyson’s was no “passionless perfection.” He, like others, was tempted to beat with ineffectual wings against the inscrutable nature of life. He, too, had his dark hour, and was as subject to temptation as they who yielded to the stress and died, or became unhappy waifs, “young men with a splendid past.” He must have known, no less than Musset, the attractions of many aparadis artificiel, with its bright visions, its houris, its offers of oblivion of pain. “He had the look of one who had suffered greatly,” Mr Palgrave writes in his record of their first meeting in 1842. But he, like Goethe, Scott, and Victor Hugo, had strength as well as passion and emotion; he came unscorched through the fire that has burned away the wings of so many other great poets. This was no less fortunate for the world than for himself. Of his prolonged dark hour we know little in detail, but we have seen that from the first he resisted the Tempter;Ulyssesis hisRetro Sathanas!

About “the mechanism of genius” in Tennyson Mr Palgrave has told us a little; more appears incidentally in his biography. “It was his way that when we had entered on some scene of special beauty or grandeur, after enjoying it together, he should always withdraw wholly from sight, and study the view, as it were, in a little artificial solitude.”

Tennyson’s poems, Mr Palgrave says, often arose in a kind ofpoint de repère(like those forms and landscapes which seem to spring from a floating point of light, beheld with closed eyes just before we sleep). “More than once he said that his poems sprang often from a ‘nucleus,’ some one word, maybe, or brief melodious phrase, which had floated through the brain, as it were, unbidden. And perhaps at once while walking they were presently wrought into a little song. But if he did not write it down at once the lyric fled from him irrecoverably.” He believed himself thus to have lost poems as good as his best. It seems probable that this is a common genesis of verses, good or bad, among all who write. Like Dickens, and like most men of genius probably, he saw all the scenes of his poems “in his mind’s eye.” Many authors do this, without the power of making their readers share the vision; but probably few can impart the vision who do not themselves “visualise” with distinctness. We have seen, in the cases ofThe Holy Grailand other pieces, that Tennyson, after long meditating a subject, often wrote very rapidly, and with little need of correction. He was born with “style”; it was a gift of his genius rather than the result of conscious elaboration. Yet he did use “the file,” of which much is now written, especially for the purpose of polishing away the sibilants, so common in our language. In the nine years of silence which followed the little book of 1833 his poems matured, and henceforth it is probable that he altered his verses little, if we except the modifications inThe Princess. Many slight verbal touches were made, or old readings were restored, but important changes, in the way of omission or addition, became rare.

Of nature Tennyson was scrupulously observant till his very latest days, eagerly noting, not only “effects,” as a painter does, but their causes, botanical or geological. Had man been scientific from the beginning he would probably have evolved no poetry at all; material things would not have been endowed by him with life and passion; he would have told himself no stories of the origins of stars and flowers, clouds and fire, winds and rainbows. Modern poets have resented, like Keats and Wordsworth, the destruction of the old prehistoric dreams by the geologist and by other scientific characters. But it was part of Tennyson’s poetic originality to see the beautiful things of nature at once with the vision of early poetic men, and of moderns accustomed to the microscope, telescope, spectrum analysis, and so forth. Thus Tennyson received a double delight from the sensible universe, and it is a double delight that he communicates to his readers. His intellect was thus always active, even in apparent repose. His eyes rested not from observing, or his mind from recording and comparing, the beautiful familiar phenomena of earth and sky. In the matter of the study of books we have seen how deeply versed he was in certain of the Greek, Roman, and Italian classics. Mr Jowett writes: “He was what might be called a good scholar in the university or public-school sense of the term, . . . yet I seem to remember that he had his favourite classics, such as Homer, and Pindar, and Theocritus. . . . He was also a lover of Greek fragments. But I am not sure whether, in later life, he ever sat down to read consecutively the greatest works of Æschylus and Sophocles, although he used occasionally to dip into them.” The Greek dramatists, in fact, seem to have affected Tennyson’s work but slightly, while he constantly reminds us of Virgil, Homer, Theocritus, and even Persius and Horace. Mediæval French, whether in poetry or prose, and the poetry of the “Pleiad” seems to have occupied little of his attention. Into the oriental literatures he dipped—pretty deeply for hisAkbar; and even hisLocksley Hallowed something to Sir William Jones’s version of “the old ArabianMoallakat.” The debt appears to be infinitesimal. He seems to have been less closely familiar with Elizabethan poetry than might have been expected: a number of hisobiter dictaon all kinds of literary points are recorded in theLifeby Mr Palgrave. “Sir Walter Scott’s short tale,My Aunt Margaret’s Mirror(how little known!), he once spoke of as the finest of all ghost or magical stories.” Lord Tennyson adds, “The Tapestried Chamberalso he greatly admired.” Both are lost from modern view among the short pieces of the last volumes of theWaverleynovels. Of the poet’s interest in and attitude towards the more obscure pyschological and psychical problems—to popular science foolishness—enough has been said, but the remarks of Professor Tyndall have not been cited:—

My special purpose in introducing this poem, however, was to call your attention to a passage further on which greatly interested me. The poem is, throughout, a discussion between a believer in immortality and one who is unable to believe. The method pursued is this. The Sage reads a portion of the scroll, which he has taken from the hands of his follower, and then brings his own arguments to bear upon that portion, with a view to neutralising the scepticism of the younger man. Let me here remark that I read the whole series of poems published under the title “Tiresias,” full of admiration for their freshness and vigour. Seven years after I had first read them your father died, and you, his son, asked me to contribute a chapter to the book which you contemplate publishing. I knew that I had some small store of references to my interview with your father carefully written in ancient journals. On the receipt of your request, I looked up the account of my first visit to Farringford, and there, to my profound astonishment, I found described that experience of your father’s which, in the mouth of the Ancient Sage, was made the ground of an important argument against materialism and in favour of personal immortality eight-and-twenty years afterwards. In no other poem during all these years is, to my knowledge, this experience once alluded to. I had completely forgotten it, but here it was recorded in black and white. If you turn to your father’s account of the wonderful state of consciousness superinduced by thinking of his own name, and compare it with the argument of the Ancient Sage, you will see that they refer to one and the same phenomenon.

And more, my son! for more than once when ISat all alone, revolving in myselfThe word that is the symbol of myself,The mortal limit of the Self was loosed,And past into the Nameless, as a cloudMelts into heaven. I touch’d my limbs, the limbsWere strange, not mine—and yet no shade of doubt,But utter clearness, and thro’ loss of SelfThe gain of such large life as match’d with oursWere Sun to spark—unshadowable in words,Themselves but shadows of a shadow-world.

Any words about Tennyson as a politician are apt to excite the sleepless prejudice which haunts the political field. He probably, if forced to “put a name to it,” would have called himself a Liberal. But he was not a social agitator. He never set a rick on fire. “He held aloof, in a somewhat detached position, from the great social seethings of his age” (Mr Frederic Harrison). But in youth he helped to extinguish some flaming ricks. He spoke of the “many-headed beast” (the reading public) in terms borrowed from Plato. He had no higher esteem for mobs than Shakespeare or John Knox professed, while his theory of tyrants (in the case of Napoleon III. about 1852) was that of Liberals like Mr Swinburne and Victor Hugo. Though to modern enlightenment Tennyson may seem as great a Tory as Dr Johnson, yet he had spoken his word in 1852 for the freedom of France, and for securing England against the supposed designs of a usurper (now fallen). He really believed, obsolete as the faith may be, in guarding our own, both on land and sea. Perhaps no Continental or American critic has ever yet dispraised a poetical fellow-countryman merely for urging the duties of national union and national defence. A critic, however, writes thus of Tennyson: “When our poet descends into the arena of party polemics, in such things asRiflemen,Form!Hands all Round, . . .The Fleet, and other topical pieces dear to the Jingo soul, it is not poetry but journalism.” I doubt whether the desirableness of the existence of a volunteer force and of a fleet really is within the arena ofpartypolemics. If any party thinks that we ought to have no volunteers, and that it is our duty to starve the fleet, what is that party’s name? Who cries, “Down with the Fleet! Down with National Defence! Hooray for the Disintegration of the Empire!”?

Tennyson was not a party man, but he certainly would have opposed any such party. If to defend our homes and this England be “Jingoism,” Tennyson, like Shakespeare, was a Jingo. But, alas! I do not know the name of the party which opposes Tennyson, and which wishes the invader to trample down England—any invader will do for so philanthropic a purpose. Except when resisting this unnamed party, the poet seldom or never entered “the arena of party polemics.” Tennyson could not have exclaimed, like Squire Western, “Hurrah for old England! Twenty thousand honest Frenchmen have landed in Kent!” He undeniably did write verses (whether poetry or journalism) tending to make readers take an unfavourable view of honest invaders. If to do that is to be a “Jingo,” and if such conduct hurts the feelings of any great English party, then Tennyson was a Jingo and a partisan, and was, so far, a rhymester, like Mr Kipling. Indeed we know that Tennyson applauded Mr Kipling’sThe English Flag. So the worst is out, as we in England count the worst. In America and on the continent of Europe, however, a poet may be proud of his country’s flag without incurring rebuke from his countrymen. Tennyson did not reckon himself a party man; he believed more in political evolution than in political revolution, with cataclysms. He was neither an Anarchist nor a Home Ruler, nor a politician so generous as to wish England to be laid defenceless at the feet of her foes.

If these sentiments deserve censure, in Tennyson, at least, they claim our tolerance. He was not born in a generation late enough to be truly Liberal. Old prejudices about “this England,” old words fromHenry V.andKing John, haunted his memory and darkened his vision of the true proportions of things. We draw in prejudice with our mother’s milk. The mother of Tennyson had not been an Agnostic or a Comtist; his father had not been a staunch true-blue anti-Englander. Thus he inherited a certain bias in favour of faith and fatherland, a bias from which he could never emancipate himself. Buttout comprendre c’est tout pardonner. Had Tennyson’s birth been later, we might find in him a more complete realisation of our poetic ideal—might have detected less to blame or to forgive.

With that apology we must leave the fame of Tennyson as a politician to the clement consideration of an enlightened posterity. I do not defend his narrow insularities, his Jingoism, or the appreciable percentage of faith which blushing analysis may detect in his honest doubt: these things I may regret or condemn, but we ought not to let them obscure our view of the Poet. He was led away by bad examples. Of all Jingoes Shakespeare is the most unashamed, and next to him are Drayton, Scott, and Wordsworth, with his

“Oh, for one hour of that Dundee!”

In the years which followed the untoward affair of Waterloo young Tennyson fell much under the influence of Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and the other offenders, and these are extenuating circumstances. By a curious practical paradox, where the realms of poetry and politics meet, the Tory critics seem milder of mood and more Liberal than the Liberal critics. Thus Mr William Morris was certainly a very advanced political theorist; and in theology Mr Swinburne has written things not easily reconcilable with orthodoxy. Yet we find Divine-Right Tories, who in literature are fervent admirers of these two poets, and leave their heterodoxies out of account. But many Liberal critics appear unable quite to forgive Tennyson because he did not wish to starve the fleet, and because he held certain very ancient, if obsolete, beliefs. Perhaps a general amnesty ought to be passed, as far as poets are concerned, and their politics and creeds should be left to silence, where “beyond these voices there is peace.”

One remark, I hope, can excite no prejudice. The greatest of the Gordons was a soldier, and lived in religion. But the point at which Tennyson’s memory is blended with that of Gordon is the point of sympathy with the neglected poor. It is to his wise advice, and to affection for Gordon, that we owe the Gordon training school for poor boys,—a good school, and good boys come out of that academy.

The question as to Tennyson’s precise rank in the glorious roll of the Poets of England can never be determined by us, if in any case or at any time such determinations can be made. We do not, or should not, ask whether Virgil or Lucretius, whether Æschylus or Sophocles, is the greater poet. The consent of mankind seems to place Homer and Shakespeare and Dante high above all. For the rest no prize-list can be settled. If influence among aliens is the test, Byron probably takes, among our poets, the next rank after Shakespeare. But probably there is no possible test. In certain respects Shelley, in many respects Milton, in some Coleridge, in some Burns, in the opinion of a number of persons Browning, are greater poets than Tennyson. But for exquisite variety and varied exquisiteness Tennyson is not readily to be surpassed. At one moment he pleases the uncritical mass of readers, in another mood he wins the verdict of theraffiné. It is a success which scarce any English poet but Shakespeare has excelled. His faults have rarely, if ever, been those of flat-footed, “thick-ankled” dulness; of rhetoric, of common-place; rather have his defects been the excess of his qualities. A kind of John Bullishness may also be noted, especially in derogatory references to France, which, true or untrue, are out of taste and keeping. But these errors could be removed by the excision of half-a-dozen lines. His later work (as theVoyage of Maeldune) shows a just appreciation of ancient Celtic literature. A great critic, F. T. Palgrave, has expressed perhaps the soundest appreciation of Tennyson:—

It is for “the days that remain” to bear witness to his real place in the great hierarchy, amongst whom Dante boldly yet justly ranked himself. But if we look at Tennyson’s work in a twofold aspect,—Here, on the exquisite art in which, throughout, his verse is clothed, the lucid beauty of the form, the melody almost audible as music, the mysterious skill by which the words used constantly strike as theinevitablewords (and hence, unforgettable), the subtle allusive touches, by which a secondary image is suggested to enrich the leading thought, as the harmonic “partials” give richness to the note struck upon the string;There, when we think of the vast fertility in subject and treatment, united with happy selection of motive, the wide range of character, the dramatic force of impersonation, the pathos in every variety, the mastery over the comic and the tragic alike, above all, perhaps, those phrases of luminous insight which spring direct from imaginative observation of Humanity, true for all time, coming from the heart to the heart,—his work will probably be found to lie somewhere between that of Virgil and Shakespeare: having its portion, if I may venture on the phrase, in the inspiration of both.

A professed enthusiast for Tennyson can add nothing to, and take nothing from, these words of one who, though his friend, was too truly a critic to entertain the admiration that goes beyond idolatry.

[1]Macmillan & Co.

[7]To the present writer, as to others,The Lover’s Taleappeared to be imitative of Shelley, but if Tennyson had never read Shelley,cadit quæstio.

[16]F. W. H. Myers,Science and a Future Life, p. 133.

[39]The writer knew this edition before he knew Tennyson’s poems.

[50]The author of the spiteful letters was an unpublished anonymous person.

[58]The Lennox MSS.

[62]Spencer and Gillen,Natives of Central Australia, pp. 388, 389.

[65]Tennyson,Ruskin,and Mill, pp. 11, 12.

[66]Life, p. 37, 1899.

[72]Poem omitted fromIn Memoriam.Life, p. 257, 1899.

[74]Mr Harrison,Tennyson,Ruskin,and Mill, p. 5.

[112]The English reader may consult Mr Rhys’sThe Arthurian Legend, Oxford, 1891, and Mr Nutt’sStudies of the Legend of the Holy Grail, which will direct him to other authorities and sources.

[113]I have summarised, with omissions, Miss Jessie L. Watson’s sketch inKing Arthur and his Knights. Nutt, 1899. The learning of the subject is enormous; Dr Sommer’sLe Mort d’Arthur, the second volume may be consulted. Nutt, 1899.

[129a]Βέλενος and Βήληνος. He is referred to in inscriptions,e.g.Berlin,Corpus, iii. 4774, V. 732, 733, 1829, 2143–46; xii. 405. See also Ausonius (Leipsic, 1886, pp. 52, 59), cited by Rhys,The Arthurian Legendp. 159, note 4.

[129b]Brebeuf;Relations des Jésuites, 1636, pp. 100–102.

[139]Malory, xviii. 8et seq.

[196]Notices et Extraits des MSS. de la Bibliothèque Impériale, I. xix. pp. 643–645.

[218]See theLife, 1899, p. 521.

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