Alfred Tennyson - Andrew Lang 4 стр.

Meanwhile the poet in 1833 went on quietly and undefeated with his work. He composed The Gardeners Daughter, and was at work on the Morte dArthur, suppressed till the ninth year, on the Horatian plan. Many poems were produced (and even written out, which a number of his pieces never were), and were left in manuscript till they appeared in the Biography. Most of these are so little worthy of the author that the marvel is how he came to write them in what uninspired hours. Unlike Wordsworth, he could weed the tares from his wheat. His studies were in Greek, German, Italian, history (a little), and chemistry, botany, and electricity cross-grained Muses, these last.

It was on September 15, 1833, that Arthur Hallam died. Unheralded by sign or symptom of disease as it was, the news fell like a thunderbolt from a serene sky. Tennysons and Hallams love had been passing the love of women. A blow like this drives a man on the rocks of the ultimate, the insoluble problems of destiny. Is this the end? Nourished as on the milk of lions, on the elevating and strengthening doctrines of popular science, trained from childhood to forego hope and attend evening lectures, the young critics of our generation find Tennyson a weakling because he had hopes and fears concerning the ultimate renewal of what was more than half his life his friendship.

wrote Lockhart, and the verses echoed ceaselessly in the widowed heart of Carlyle. These men, it is part of the duty of critics later born to remember, were not children or cowards, though they dreamed, and hoped, and feared. We ought to make allowance for failings incident to an age not yet fully enlightened by popular science, and still undivorced from spiritual ideas that are as old as the human race, and perhaps not likely to perish while that race exists. Now and then even scientific men have been mistaken, especially when they have declined to examine evidence, as in this problem of the transcendental nature of the human spirit they usually do. At all events Tennyson was unconvinced that death is the end, and shortly after the fatal tidings arrived from Vienna he began to write fragments in verse preluding to the poem of In Memoriam. He also began, in a mood of great misery, The Two Voices; or, Thoughts of a Suicide. The poem seems to have been partly done by September 1834, when Spedding commented on it, and on the beautiful Sir Galahad, intended for something of a male counterpart to St Agnes. The Morte dArthur Tennyson then thought the best thing I have managed lately. Very early in 1835 many stanzas of In Memoriam had taken form. I do not wish to be dragged forward in any shape before the reading public at present, wrote the poet, when he heard that Mill desired to write on him. His Œnone he had brought to its new perfection, and did not desire comments on work now several years old. He also wrote his Ulysses and his Tithonus.

If ever the term morbid could have been applied to Tennyson, it would have been in the years immediately following the death of Arthur Hallam. But the application would have been unjust. True, the poet was living out of the world; he was unhappy, and he was, as people say, doing nothing. He was so poor that he sold his Chancellors prize gold medal, and he did not

in the way of money-making, which another poet describes as the normal attitude of all men as well as of pirates. A careless observer would have thought that the poet was dawdling. But he dwelt in no Castle of Indolence; he studied, he composed, he corrected his verses: like Sir Walter in Liddesdale, he was making himsel a the time. He did not neglect the movements of the great world in that dawn of discontent with the philosophy of commercialism. But it was not his vocation to plunge into the fray, and on to platforms.

It is a very rare thing anywhere, especially in England, for a man deliberately to choose poetry as the duty of his life, and to remain loyal, as a consequence, to the bride of St Francis Poverty. This loyalty Tennyson maintained, even under the temptation to make money in recognised ways presented by his new-born love for his future wife, Miss Emily Sellwood. They had first met in 1830, when she, a girl of seventeen, seemed to him like a Dryad or an Oread wandering here. But admiration became the affection of a lifetime when Tennyson met Miss Sellwood as bridesmaid to her sister, the bride of his brother Charles, in 1836. The poet could not afford to marry, and, like the hero of Locksley Hall, he may have asked himself, What is that which I should do? By 1840 he had done nothing tangible and lucrative, and correspondence between the lovers was forbidden. That neither dreamed of Tennysons deserting poetry for a more normal profession proved of great benefit to the world. The course is one which could only be justified by the absolute certainty of possessing genius.

III.

18371842

In 1837 the Tennysons left the old rectory; till 1840 they lived at High Beech in Epping Forest, and after a brief stay at Tunbridge Wells went to Boxley, near Maidstone.

It appears that at last the poet had beat his music out, though his friends still tried to cheer him. But the man who wrote Ulysses when his grief was fresh could not be suspected of declining into a hypochondriac. If I mean to make my mark at all, it must be by shortness, he said at this time; for the men before me had been so diffuse, and most of the big things, except King Arthur, had been done. The age had not la tête épique: Poe had announced the paradox that there is no such thing as a long poem, and even in dealing with Arthur, Tennyson followed the example of Theocritus in writing, not an epic, but epic idylls. Long poems suit an age of listeners, for which they were originally composed, or of leisure and few books. At present epics are read for dutys sake, not for the only valid reason, for human pleasure, in FitzGeralds phrase.

Between 1838 and 1840 Tennyson made some brief tours in England with FitzGerald, and, coming from Coventry, wrote Godiva. His engagement with Miss Sellwood seemed to be adjourned sine die, as they were forbidden to correspond.

By 1841 Tennyson was living at Mablethorpe on the Lincolnshire coast; working at his volumes of 1842, much urged by FitzGerald and American admirers, who had heard of the poet through Emerson. Moxon was to be the publisher, himself something of a poet; but early in 1842 he had not yet received the MS. Perhaps Emerson heard of Tennyson through Carlyle, who, says Sterling, said more in your praise than in any ones except Cromwell, and an American backwoodsman who has killed thirty or forty people with a bowie-knife. Carlyle at this time was much attached to Lockhart, editor of the Quarterly Review, and it may have been Carlyle who converted Lockhart to admiration of his old victim. Carlyle had very little more appreciation of Keats than had Byron, or (in early days) Lockhart, and it was probably as much the man of heroic physical mould, a life-guardsman spoilt by making poetry, and the unaffected companion over a pipe, as the poet, that attracted him in Tennyson. As we saw, when the two triumphant volumes of 1842 did appear, Lockhart asked Sterling to review whatever book he pleased (meaning the Poems) in the Quarterly. The praise of Sterling may seem lukewarm to us, especially when compared with that of Spedding in the Edinburgh. But Sterling, and Lockhart too, were obliged to gang warily. Lockhart had, to his constant annoyance, a partner, Mr Croker, and I have heard from the late Dean Boyle that Mr Croker was much annoyed by even the mild applause yielded in the Quarterly to the author of the Morte dArthur.

While preparing the volumes of 1842 at Boxley, Tennysons life was divided between London and the society of his brother-in-law, Mr Edmund Lushington, the great Greek scholar and Professor of Greek at Glasgow University. There was in Mr Lushingtons personal aspect, and noble simplicity of manner and character, something that strongly resembled Tennyson himself. Among their common friends were Lord Houghton (Monckton Milnes), Mr Lear of the Book of Nonsense (with such a pencil, such a pen), Mr Venables (who at school modified the profile of Thackeray), and Lord Kelvin. In town Tennyson met his friends at The Cock, which he rendered classic; among them were Thackeray, Forster, Maclise, and Dickens. The times were stirring: social agitation, and Carol philosophy in Dickens, with growls from Carlyle, marked the period. There was also a kind of optimism in the air, a prophetic optimism, not yet fulfilled.

Fly, happy happy sails, and bear the Press!

That mission no longer strikes us as exquisitely felicitous. The mission of the Cross, and of the missionaries, means international complications; and the markets of the Golden Year are precisely the most fruitful causes of wars and rumours of wars:

Tennysons was not an unmitigated optimism, and had no special confidence in

His political poetry, in fact, was very unlike the socialist chants of Mr William Morris, or Songs before Sunrise. He had nothing to say about

The hands of Presidents have not always been unstained; nor are statements of a mythical nature confined to the lips of the clergy. The poet was anxious that freedom should broaden down, but slowly, not with indelicate haste. Persons who are more in a hurry will never care for the political poems, and it is certain that Tennyson did not feel sympathetically inclined towards the Iberian patriot who said that his darling desire was to cut the throats of all the curés, like some Covenanters of old. Mais vous connaissez mon cœur and a pretty black one it is, thought young Tennyson. So cautious in youth, during his Pyrenean tour with Hallam in 1830, Tennyson could not become a convinced revolutionary later. We must accept him with his limitations: nor must we confuse him with the hero of his Locksley Hall, one of the most popular, and most parodied, of the poems of 1842: full of beautiful images and confusions of a wasted youth, a youth dramatically conceived, and in no way autobiographical.

In so marvellous a treasure of precious things as the volumes of 1842, perhaps none is more splendid, perfect, and perdurable than the Morte dArthur. It had been written seven years earlier, and pronounced by the poet not bad. Tennyson was never, perhaps, a very deep Arthurian student. A little cheap copy of Malory was his companion. 4 He does not appear to have gone deeply into the French and German literature of the subject. Malorys compilation (1485) from French and English sources, with the Mabinogion of Lady Charlotte Guest, sufficed for him as materials. The whole poem, enshrined in the memory of all lovers of verse, is richly studded, as the hilt of Excalibur, with classical memories. A faint Homeric echo it is not, nor a Virgilian echo, but the absolute voice of old romance, a thing that might have been chanted by

The lonely maiden of the Lake

when

Perhaps the most exquisite adaptation of all are the lines from the Odyssey

Where falls not hail nor rain, nor any snow.

Softly through the flutes of the Grecians came first these Elysian numbers, then through Lucretius, then through Tennysons own Lucretius, then in Mr Swinburnes Atalanta in Calydon:

So fortunate in their transmission through poets have been the lines of the Ionian father of the rest, the greatest of them all.

In the variety of excellences which marks Tennyson, the new English idylls of 1842 hold their prominent place. Nothing can be more exquisite and more English than the picture of the garden that I love. Theocritus cannot be surpassed; but the idyll matches to the seventh of his, where it is most closely followed, and possesses such a picture of a girl as the Sicilian never tried to paint.

Dora is another idyll, resembling the work of a Wordsworth in a clime softer than that of the Fells. The lays of Edwin Morris and Edward Bull are not among the more enduring of even the playful poems. The St Simeon Stylites appears made to the hand of the author of Men and Women rather than of Tennyson. The grotesque vanity of the anchorite is so remote from us, that we can scarcely judge of the truth of the picture, though the East has still her parallels to St Simeon. From the almost, perhaps quite, incredible ascetic the poet lightly turns to society verse lifted up into the air of poetry, in the charm of The Talking Oak, and the happy flitting sketches of actual history; and thence to the strength and passion of Love and Duty. Shall

Sin itself be found

The cloudy porch oft opening on the Sun?

That this is the province of sin is a pretty popular modern moral. But Honour is the better part, and here was a poet who had the courage to say so; though, to be sure, the words ring strange in an age when highly respectable matrons assure us that passion, like charity, covers a multitude of sins. Love and Duty, we must admit, is early Victorian.

The Ulysses is almost a rival to the Morte dArthur. It is of an early date, after Arthur Hallams death, and Thackeray speaks of the poet chanting his

Great Achilles whom we knew,

as if he thought that this was in Cambridge days. But it is later than these. Tennyson said, Ulysses was written soon after Arthur Hallams death, and gave my feeling about the need of going forward, and braving the struggle of life, perhaps more simply than anything in In Memoriam. Assuredly the expression is more simple, and more noble, and the personal emotion more dignified for the classic veil. When the plaintive Pessimist (proud of the title, as the Living Skeleton said when they showed him) tells us that not to have been born is best, we may answer with Ulysses

The Ulysses of Tennyson, of course, is Dantes Ulysses, not Homers Odysseus, who brought home to Ithaca not one of his mariners. His last known adventure, the journey to the land of men who knew not the savour of salt, Odysseus was to make on foot and alone; so spake the ghost of Tiresias within the poplar pale of Persephone.