Alfred Tennyson. A saintly life

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BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME FROM THE

Preface

Tennyson was once stirred to wrath by an old lady who had some traditional memories of Dr Johnson which were not altogether to his advantage, as " that he stirred his tea with his finger and that not clean." We should relate nothing unworthy of great men, he declared. He disputed the right of the world to search into the foibles and peccadilloes of its celebrities, denying the justice of the French proverb, Tdt ou tard tout se sait. " The surface of the tout may be, but the tout^ never is, correctly known. If one knew all one would pardon all, is much more likely to be the truth." " The poet's work is his life," he would say, "and no one has a right to ask for more."

It seems then an obligation of honour in writing of Tennyson, to decline the gossip of curiosity or malignity, and to rest content with the facts which are revealed by a biographer "who wholly loves the man whose life he writes, yet loves him with a discriminating love'' {Tennyson: a Memoir, ii. 165). I have felt it better, therefore, and it is quite sufficient for the purpose, to take Tennyson in the main as he appears in that Memoir which a devoted son viii Preface

compiled in four arduous years, under the eye of that wife who was Tennyson's most faithful critic and truest friend, and with the aid of the living recollections of distinguished men who had known him long and intimately.

The writer had no personal knowledge of the poet ; and he has felt at liberty to set off against all the criticisms and detractions, which may have gained a dubious currency, the deliberate opinions of such men as Jowett, Aubrey de Vere, and Palgrave.

If it be objected that when the Life is already recorded in so adequate a fashion, it is superfluous to write a book which stands in such a relation to the authoritative volumes, the answer is two-fold.

In the first place, the two large volumes of more than a thousand octavo pages can hardly come into the hands of the general public. And further, the material there collected is rather a quarry from which to dig, than a life in the ordinary sense of the term. Though all is interesting, all is not essential to the understanding of Tennyson; and some of it might be tedious to readers who would yet gladly know what manner of man Tennyson was.

But in the second place, though no son could write a biography of his father with fuller knowledge or with more perfect taste, that taste itself imposes a certain reticence and restraint. A son may give the facts but he will hesitate to draw the inferences.

Preface

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Just as reverence will disincline him to criticise, modesty will make him hesitate to praise.

For an estimate of Tennyson as a poet, some one other than a near and deeply interested relative must necessarily be sought ; and in the same way for an estimate, favourable or unfavourable, of the man and of the life, one must go beyond the household circle, and see through eyes which are not veiled by the reverence and affection of years.

In all lives it is possible to know men " after the flesh," that is from a vicinity, and an intimacy, which makes a true perspective impossible. But it is necessary to know them too "after the spirit," that is, to stand a little aloof, where the judgment is not influenced by personal contact, and detachment of mind presents clearness of outline.

This study of Tennyson, therefore, from a particular point of view, an ethical, or I may even say a religious, point of view, has its justification, whatever verdict may be passed on the way in which the study is carried out.

In the obiter dicta judgments on the poetry of Tennyson I am most indebted to Dr Stopford Brooke's interesting and eloquent book on the subject, and to Mr Frederick Harrison's discriminating judgment in his more recent book on " Tennyson, Ruskin, etc."

Robert F. Horton.

Hampstead, Sept. 1900.

Contents

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I

I. A Saintly Life ....

Chapter 1 A Saintly Life

" O young Mariner, You from the haven Under the sea-cliff, You that are watching The gray Magician With eyes of wonder, / am Merlin, And / am dying, /am Merlin Who follow the Gleam."

The Mariner it should be observed is the poet ; and Merlin is the world-old spirit of Poesy ; and the Gleam is that elusive truth or beauty which it is the function of the Poet to seize and to express. The poet's life must be the dutiful following of the Gleam. And if he dutifully follow it to the end, his life becomes apart from his poems, a fresh contribution to the sum of devoted lives which constitute the value and the purpose of humanity. The life we are to study is such a following of the Gleam.

But, since there are catalogued in the British Museum two and fifty books on the subject of Tennyson, a writer who offers a fifty-third is bound to give a reason, or at least an apology, for his undertaking. That reason or apology he will present on the first page, that no reader may be led into the pages which follow on a false plea or with a delusive expectation. The motif of this book is suggested in the title of this the opening chapter, A Saintly Life.

When the Memoir of the Poet written by Hallam Lord Tennyson appeared, it dawned upon some who read it that the Life was as great a poem as any that the Poet had written, and that, as a whole, it constituted a possession as precious as the whole body of his poetry. This of course a son could hardly say, though he has furnished us with the materials which sustain the contention. And yet this ought to be said, and said with sufficient emphasis to attract the attention of his countrymen who riiay thus reap from their great poet the noblest harvest in an aftermath. To say this, or rather to bring it out into evidence, is the object of these pages, and the writer asks the reader's help in the endeavour.

The poems of Tennyson, which most of us have known and loved from our youth upward, can now be fitted into the life, as the pictures of Perugino frame themselves in the landscape of Perugia. The life interprets the poems, while the poems illuminate the life, and the two together compose a poem, large and varied and complete. And lest a son's noble reticence or the hurry of the general reader might hinder the recognition of the fact, it is necessary to state succinctly yet distinctly, that Englishmen have had among them in the nineteenth century, one who, according to the fine Miltonic ideal, being set on the composition of poetry, found it essential himself to be a true Poem.

As in the eighteenth century the most notable man of letters, Samuel Johnson, was found to have been greater than his writings, so that his life is a more lasting possession than any of his books ; so in the succeeding century, though there has been no Boswell to record it, the most distinguished author of the time proves to have been greater in his life than in his work. A life-long friend, Fitzgerald, the translator of the Rubaiydt of Omar Khayam, once said : "I wish I had been Alfred Tennyson's Boswell." We cannot but wish that he had. But we have enough of the acts, the conversations, the minor thoughts of our poet, to serve the purpose. And not the least element of value in the life is the unconsciousness of being great, or of doing anything that the world would care to keep, which at once strikes anyone who turns the pages of the Memoir.

Tennyson used to narrate a conversation between himself and Samuel Rogers. "One day we were walking arm in arm, and I spoke of what is called Immortality, and remarked how few writers could be sure of it. Upon this, Rogers squeezed my arm and said : ' I am sure of it' " Rogers was sure of his literary Immortality. Tennyson was not sure of his. Unlike Horace, or Dante, or Shakespere, unlike indeed the majority of poets both great and small, he had a noble humility ; few would allow it to be a just self-estimate. "O little bard," he wrote once to a spiteful rival,

" O little bard, is your lot so hard, If men neglect your pages ?

I think not much of yours or of mine, I hear the roll of the ages."

He heard the roll of the ages ; his hearing may have been exact. It required detachment of mind, unusual even in the greatest, to say in his address to Dante, at a time when he enjoyed a fame, a universal acclamation, never accorded to that sad exile in his lifetime,

" I, wearing but the garland of a day, Cast at thy feet one flower that f^des away."

But there is a point of view, and it is the point of view of this book, from which the humility which deprecated, immortality in letters may be greater, and for that reason more immortal, than literary immortality itself.

On that memorable voyage which Gladstone and Tennyson took in Sir Donald Currie's yacht, the statesman spoke of the poet and for him, when they both received the freedom of the burgh of Kirkwall. " He has worked in a higher field," said the statesman of the poet, "and his work will be rnore durable. We public men — who play a part which places us more in view of our countrymen — ^we are subject to the danger of being momentarily intoxicated by the kindness, the undue homage of kindness, we may receive. It is our business to speak, but the words which we speak have wings, and fly away and disappear. The work of Mr Tennyson is of a higher order. I anticipate for him the immortality for which England and Scotland have supplied in the course of their long national life many claims. Your record to-day of the additions which have been made to your municipal body may happen to be examined in distant times, and some may ask with regard to the Prime Minister, * Who was he, and what did he do? We know nothing about him.' But the Poet Laureate has written his own song on the hearts of his countrymen that can never die. Time is powerless against him, and I believe this, that were the period of enquiry to be so long distant as between this day and the time when Maeshowe was built, still, in regard to the poet laureate of to-day there would be no difficulty in stating who he was and what he had done to raise the intellects and hearts of his fellow-creatures to a higher level, and by so doing acquire a deathless fame."

It was a touching amoebean contest in humility, and happily we have not to adjudge the prize. We may leave undetermined which will be best remembered, the statesman or the poet ; but we may hazard a conjecture that both of them will command the allegiance of after ages rather for what they were than for what they did. And probably the poet heard more distinctly " the roll of the ages " ; and a time may come when the poems which have been in the nineteenth century the articulate voice for England, or at least for the cultured part of England, will have lost their vogue. The severity of history reminds us how poets great and famous in their time, Waller, Cowley, Warton, have yet, as poets, been forgotten.

But the man, whose life has been piously placed on record by his son, the man who composed the poems which charmed the English ear for the better part of a century, will not, or ought not, to be forgotten. Here was a piece of living which for its heroism, its singleness of aim, its human tenderness, its Divine outlook, passes for ever into the treasure house of humanity.

Exception, however, may be taken to describing this as a saintly life. And as it is admittedly a somewhat wider use of the word ' saintly ' than is generally intended, some explanation may be offered.

" His life," says Dr Stopford Brooke, " like every faithful artist's life was incessant pursuit. The true device of the artist, as it is of the religious man in religion, is this : ' While we look not at the things which are seen and temporal, but at the things which are not seen and eternal,' and what the visible world said or offered to Tennyson, however now and then he was disturbed by the temporary and material, was in reality nothing to him. It had no influence upon his work. 'Brothers I count not myself to have attained, but I press forward,' is also as much a device of the artist as it is of the saint." We include in our use of the term ' saintly ' this strenuous consecration of the artist to an ideal ; for the artist's ideal is Beauty, and as the Greeks maintained though in a deeper sense than the Greeks realised, the Beautiful is the Good. Blake was not wide of the mark, if he spoke in paradox, when he said " Christianity is art and art is Christianity."

In any case, we venture to claim as saintly the life of an artist who sets before himself a noble ideal, and then, nobly and consistently lives for it, sacrificing everything to it. He may forfeit the title because his ideal is ignoble, or because he strives ignobly after it, or because he declines from the quest. But in itself — such is the contention of this series — the strenuous pursuit of an Ideal, and the self-renunciation which is involved in the pursuit, is intrinsically saintly. We are not speaking of the saints of a church, hardly even of the saints of a religion, but of the saints of humanity in the broader sense. According to this view, all who have striven after truth, and in striving have helped that body of humanity to which they belong, are candidates for canonisation. Let the advocatus diaboli by all means be heard. But if they stand the test, they shall be enrolled. It would appear that the life of our poet stands the test. From early boyhood to the term of his long life, without faltering though not, as we shall see, without misgiving, he realised and exercised his sacred function of poet. No eremite of the desert, no monk in his cell, was ever more resolute in the execution of his vows. No worker for men whose work lies in philanthropy, in statesmanship, in the reform of abuses, in personal ministry, or in public teaching, ever played his part more manfully and consistently than Tennyson. His function, as he discovered early, was to be a poet. He was to be one

Who saw through life and death, through good and ill.

He saw through his own soul, The marvel of the everlasting will,

An open scroll.

It was his to read and to proclaim melodiously what he read in that open scroll. By the utterance of that, so far as he was concerned, Wisdom would " shake the world." He spared no pains to read it and to utter it in music. He never relaxed his efforts even in extreme old age. Death found him at the task : the open scroll was still before him ; he was trying to decipher it. His was a soul with a forward trend ; it moved on ! always on ; he never supposed that he had attained, but he " followed the gleam." This is the first, the fundamental, condition of saintliness ; and a life which vindicates its claim to so high a degree of this quality may surely be called a Saintly Life.

But there is something more. While the poet consecrated his life with unfaltering devotion to work at his poetry, which was, he felt, his contribution to the service of humanity, the poetry itself was, in a degree almost unexampled in England, the vehicle of a message to the time. There have been didactic poets, but Tennyson was not of their number. What is singular is, that not being didactic, he yet should be such a teacher. He could speak of his predecessor, Wordsworth, as one "who uttered nothing base." Perhaps he might have put the statement a little more strongly : certainly something much stronger might be said of him himself Not only is there nothing base in the large volume of his works, not only is he delicate as a girl in handling the dark problems of sin, but a burden of lofty teaching, a teaching which grew clearer and loftier with the years, gives a continuity to all his work.

lo A Saintly Life

It is a burden of the same kind, though not of the same content, as that which came to the old Hebrew prophets. It is essentially the burden of the valley of vision.

Yet we must be careful not to charge him with what, from his own point of view, would be a reproach. He did not set out to be a teacher, nor was he even conscious of his work in that capacity. He wrought as an artist. As an artist he succeeded. As an artist he won the ear of the world. He became a teacher because he was what he was. All unconsciously his personality, his practice, his ideals, his principles, were breathed through his verse. In the long run it is himself that the great artist expresses ; the form is the result of his labour on his art, the substance is produced by his labour on himself. And when a poet, working unremittingly at his craft, so bears himself, so disciplines his thought and emotion, so toils in thought and inward aspiration, that his poetry, which is read in the first instance for its beauty, establishes its hold for its truth, we may without departing far from the usual meaning of the word claim that poet as a saint.

Without attempting at this point to go into particulars, we may mark out three master-thoughts which together composed the burden of the message. In each case, as the sequel should show, the truth was practised in his own life, and so found expression in his utterance. He was like Chaucer's parson :

" For first he wrought, and afterward he taught."

And he deserves the gratitude of men not so much for stating truths which others may have stated with similar emphasis, but for having given to the truths the peculiar weight which comes only from living them afresh in the special conditions of a man's own time.

The first of these Tennysonian dogmas was the sanctity of marriage. It is the peculiar temptation of the poetic temperament to glorify the impulse of love as a vagrant passion following its own sweet will. Poets tend to be troubadours. And Tennyson began his poetical work in the atmosphere of Burns and Byron and Shelley. He knew, or might have known, that to the world at large lubricity has a fatal fascination, that married love is pronounced prosaic, a subject not so much for the praise of poets as for the mirth of satirists. Illicit love is romantic ; glancing past the dull uniformity of domestic interiors, it plays like lambent flame about castle walls, the enchanted gardens of palaces, and the wild recesses of nature. With this brilliant fire a poet is tempted to play, knowing that he has there a power which can always touch and melt the hearts of men.

Tennyson threw all the glamour of poetry over married love. In this he was the true poet of the y Victorian age, when on a throne, almost for the first time, an ideal marriage swayed the heart of a nation. And, by a great stroke of divine coincidence, his message was echoed by the other great poet of the period, Robert Browning.

This message of a lifetime was expressed in the early poem Love and Duty. The lovers part, lest the sacred enclosure of marriage should be invaded. Duty is first, and love is second. But that duty were first, love would not be love. The renunciation rings out a clearer and a loftier note than all the random passion and fulfilled desire which have been the breath of poetry from the days of Sappho to the days of Swinburne. The scheme of the Princess is broken upon a rock ; the rock is the eternal value of wedded love. The motive of the Idylls of the King is what might be done if Arthur and Guinivere were mutually loyal,

" Then might we live together as one life, And reigning with one will in everything Have power on this dark land to lighten it, And power on this dead world to make it live,"

and the development of the tragedy is what actually resulted, the ruin of the realm, from the sin of the queen. The ancient tale becomes in the poet's hands — such is the prepossession of his heart — becomes perhaps to the detriment of its poetical value, a morality, an urgent and prophetic appeal to keep inviolate the marriage tie. No poet ever uttered in more magical words this particular truth than Milton in the descriptions of the nuptials of Adam and Eve ; but Milton's chill experience of married life took the fire out of his lesson : the lesson itself became cold. Tennyson spoke from the depth of his own romantic and lifelong experience, when he thus made his most ambitious poem a study in the sanctity of marriage.

This theme he handled from every point of view ; its tragedies were depicted in Enoch Arden and in Queen Mary; but his special delight was to show the mutual help and discipline of the relation between man and wife ; he loved to heal the differences at the baby's grave ; he loved to unveil the mystical trinity of husband, wife, and child. That scene at the close of Sea Dreams comes from the poet's heart and reaches the heart of the reader: the wife has persuaded her husband to forgive the man who has injured them, and in the blessed spirit of reconciliation clasps husband and child in her two hands :

" And the woman half turned round from him she loved, Left him one hand, and reaching through the night Her other, found (for it was close beside) And half embraced the basket cradle-head With one soft arm, which, like the pliant bough That moving moves the nest and nestling, swayed The cradle, while she sang this baby song.

What does little birdie say In her nest at peep of day ?

Let me fly, says little birdie, Mother, let me fly away.

Birdie, rest a little longer Till the little wings are stronger. So she rests a Uttle longer, Then she flies away.

What does Uttle baby say In her bed at peep of day ?

Baby says, like little birdie, Let me rise and fly away.

Baby, sleep a little longer.

Till the little limbs are stronger. If she sleeps a little longer.

Baby too shall fly away."

Such a passage as this is of course diverting to the cynic ; but for that reason it suggests that the writer may be a saint. No one could have written it who had not felt deeply the divine influence of a wife's charity, and all the mysterious awe of a son's cradle. Having felt it, the poet utters it with all his heart, and is perfectly indifferent if the world with a sneer pronounces him prudish. It must always be true of the saints that the world knows them not.

It is characteristic of Tennyson's simplicity and whole-heartedness in any faith that he holds, that in the Death of jEnone he does not hesitate to sing the triumph of wedded love, though in doing so he has to bid defiance to all the probabilities of the ancient tale. As Dr Stopford Brooke points out, a mountain nymph of the Greek imagination, like Aenone, never dreamt of marriage and would have smiled at the mention of such a union. But Tennyson chooses to urge his great theme by representing her as united with Paris in her death :

And all at once The morning light of happy marriage broke Through all the clouded years of widowhood, And muffling up her comely head, and crying ' Husband,' she leapt upon the funeral pile. And mixed herself with him, and passed in fire.

Here for a rare moment the saint prevails over the poet.

But there is a second thought which forms the burden of the message ; and it is in the constant reiteration of it that the two great poets of the Victorian age, Tennyson and Browning, are bound together, and become the two witnesses of a better time coming. Both of them have sung to one clear harp in divine tones, the master - truth that love is the greatest thing in the world.

Nor was this with Tennyson merely a theme of poetry. His heart hungered for a universal charity. He could not endure the quarrels and mutual depreciations which fill the lives of men. It was observed that he never spoke ill of men. And if the shyness of his temperament prevented him from mingling freely with those around him, he shrank from promiscuous society still more because of its lovelessness. He might be brusque in manner : for one so famous, and sought out by men all over the world, the brusque manner was an almost necessary protection ; but there was nothing which in his heart he more admired or desired than the love of man to man. In his description of the poet he exactly describes himself, his inner feeling as he knew it.

Dowered with the love of love, the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn.

He loved love, he hated hate, he scorned scorn. The type of charity which was cultivated in his life and expressed in his verse is all the more effective because it rests rather on principle than, on emotion. It is not ardent or passionate. It does not glow like St Paul's, it does not throb like that of St Francis; it is not even tender like Hartley Coleridge's ; but it is a firm and deepening conviction that mutual respect, self-restraint, patience, consideration for one another, unselfishness, are the vital principles of conduct.

No one rouses his wrath more than Sir Aylmer Aylmer, who allows his barren pride to blight the love of his only daughter, to bring her to the grave, to drive her lover to suicide. Much as Tennyson loved the old landed-proprietor as such, much as he respected an ancient family, much as he delighted to describe the country houses of gentlemen, haunts of ancient peace, he empties the vials of his wrath upon this representative of all these cherished traditions. All the charm is cancelled by this cruel pride. Whatever mars or conquers love, however venerable in itself, stands condemned.

It may not be noticed at first, but in all the best work of Tennyson there is observable a movement, which can only be described as a procession of Love; it is love moving from the personal and particular to the general and the universal. And nowhere is this more manifest than in the greatest poem, In Memoriam, where the love of the lost friend, never dying or growing cold, widens to the love of men, the love of all. He seems to realise that all personal love fades away unless it is sublimated, and brought into connection with a Love which is the principle of all being. And it is this Love, — not inappropriately called God, — which named or unnamed is the burden of all the poems, illustrated in all the charming stories, and ingrained into the very texture of the verse.

But of all the three master - thoughts in the message of Tennyson, the one which is the most constant, the one which he has made most his own, is the belief in Immortality. It chanced that the poet was called to work in a world which for one reason or another was tempted to question the survival of the soul after death. When Dante wrote, the future life was as certain as this; its conditions and divisions were described with the utmost nicety. The mediaeval poet had not, therefore, to spend his strength in proving the world to come; he could devote all his time to enforcing its lessons. But the poet of the nineteenth century found the future life regarded with incredulity, flatly denied, dogmatically disproved. In the seventies Materialism reached its zenith and began to decline. But from the earlier days of the century the spirit of Comte was in the air ; and Positivism took the place of faith even in those who were no positivists. By an instinct which may be called prophetic Tennyson perceived the threats of the coming battle; he seemed to know that the crucial struggle of the century would turn on the old question, When a man dies shall he live again.' If the poet had given a dogmatic answer, or rested his answer on the authority of Church or Bible, he would have been no prophet for the nineteenth century, by which most authorities themselves were called in question. If he had simply been possessed by the overwhelming personal conviction of immortality he would have carried but little weight. The first consideration for a teacher to influence doubters is that he himself should have doubted. To have fought the doubts and laid them, that alone raises the teacher to the chair of authority. But as the man of his age he fought Jthe battle of his age. All the doubts of the time were within him ; what also was in him was the power to vanquish them. The In Memoriam, an argument, in the structure of the poem spread over three years, in the actual production spread over a period four times as long, the poet carries the hearts of men with him because he faces, for them, the dread question, What has happened to our beloved whom we have lost? The curious interest of the poem is, not so much that in it love widens from the personal to the universal, as that all the wastes of doubt are traversed before the rocks of certainty are reached. Though he can never for a moment feel that Arthur has ceased to be, he faces the intellectual possibility ; he discusses all the questions of the mode and form of existence after death, and of the relation between the dead and the living. It is only as the third Christmas comes round that the peace of trust replaces the calm of despair. But the triumph is complete. It is not only a truth of feeling that has achieved it,