Tennyson, his art and relation to modern life

Contents

I. Tennyson as an Artist .

II. His Relation to Christianity .

III. His Relation to Social Politics

Introduction

THE death of Tennyson was worthy of his life. He died with the simplicity which marked his life, and yet with a certain conscious stateliness which was all his own ; and these two, simplicity and stateliness, were also vital in the texture of his poetry. But his dying hour, though it has left a noble picture on the mind of England, is not the important thing. His life and poetry are the real matter of use and interest, and his death gains its best import from its being the beautiful and fitting end of all the work that had gone before it. It became an artist, it became a Christian, it became a man. To these three points this Introduction is dedicated — to his relation to beauty, to his relation to the Christian faith, and to his relation to the movement of humanity. The art of his poems, his work on nature and his work on human life, as far as this immense subject

I can be compressed into a few hundred pages, will be treated of in the rest of this book. For more than sixty years he practised his art, and his practice of it, being original and extraordinarily careful and self-respecting, suggests and comments on almost every question that concerns the art of poetry. For more than sixty years he lived close to the present Ufe of England, as far as he was capable of comprehending and sympathising with its movements ; and he inwove what he felt concerning it into his poetry. For many years to come that poetry — so close to modern life — will open a vast storehouse of subjects to those writers who are interested in the application of imaginative emotion to the problems and pleasures of life. Half at least of those problems and pleasures eluded Tennyson, or he did not see them. But he felt the other half all the more strongly, and he felt it for this long period of sixty years. He then who writes on Tennyson has so wide a country over which to travel, that he cannot do much more than visit it here and there. When he has finished his journey, he knows how much he has left unseen, untouched ; how much more of pleasure and good he will gain in many more journeys over this varied, home-like, and romantic land.

Tennyson as an Artist. — The first characteristic of

Tennyson's art — that is, of his shaping of the beauty which he saw in Nature and Humanity — was simplicity, and this came directly out of his character. The way in which he worked, his choice of subjects, his style, were all the revelation of a character drawn on large and uncomplicated lines ; and in this sense, in the complete sincerity to his inner being of all he did and in the manner of its doing, he was simple in the truest sense of the word. Nothing was ever done for effect ; no subject in which he was not veritably involved was taken up. Nothing was even tried, save a few metrical exercises, for experiment's sake alone, much less to please the popular moment. The thing shaped was the legitimate child of natural thought and natural feeling. Vital sincerity or living correspondence between idea and form, that absolute necessity for all fine art as for all noble life, was his, and it is contained in what I have called his simplicity.

His clearness is also contained in this simplicity — clearness in thought, in expression, and in representation of the outward world, one of the first and greatest things an artist can attain. It is true that Tennyson never went down into the obscure and thorny depths of metaphysics and theology ; it is true that he did not attempt to express the more dreadful and involved passions of mankind, such as Shakespeare in his Tragic worked upon, nor the subtle and distant analogies and phases of human nature in which Browning had his pleasure. It was easy, then, it may be said, for him to be clear. But I think it was not from inability to try these subjects that he did not write about them, but from deliberate choice not to write about that which he could not express with lucidity of thought and form. He determined to be clear. He chose plain and easy lines of thought in philosophy and theology, but he expressed them with art — that is, in beautiful form proceeding outwards from impassioned feeling ; and a poem like The Two Voices or Out of the Deep is an instance of the way this was done. The same choice of the easy to be understood presided over his human subjects. For the most part he wrote of the everyday loves and duties of men and women ; of the primal pains and joys of humanity ; of the aspirations and trials which are common to all ages and all classes and independent even of the disease of civilisation ; but he made them new and surprising by the art which he added to them — by beauty of thought, tenderness of feeling, and exquisiteness of shaping. The main lines of the subjects, even of the classical subjects, are few, are simple, are clear. And I think all the more that this choice of clearness (of clearness as a part of simplicity) was deliberate, because of his representation of Nature. It is plain that he might have entered into infinite and involuted description ; that he could, if he pleased, have expressed the stranger and remoter aspects of Nature, for he had an eye to see everything from small to large. But he selected the simple,' the main lines of a landscape or an event of Nature, and rejected the minuter detail or the obscurer relations between the parts of that which he described. What was done was done in the fewest words possible, and with luminous fitness of phrase.

English literature owes him gratitude for this clearness. At a time when we are running close to the edge of all the errors of the later Elizabethans, Tennyson never allowed himself to drift into obscurity of thought or obscurity of expression, and showed (as those did not who restored clearness to English song in the time of Dryden) that simplicity of words, as well as jewelled brightness of thought and description, might be also compact of imagination. The lamp of language which he held in his hand burnt with a bright, keen, and glowing flame. The debt we owe Tennyson for this is not owed by English literature alone ; it is personal also. Every writer should acknowledge the debt and follow the example. Clearness in thought and words ought to be a part of a writer's religion ; it is certainly a necessary part of his morality. Nay, to follow clearness like a star, clearness of thought, clearness of phrase, in every kind of life, is the duty of all. But the poets are most bound to feel and fulfil that duty, and it is not one of the least which belong to their art and their influence. Tennyson felt it and fulfilled it.

One other thing I may briefly add to these judgments concerning his simplicity. It is that (after his very earliest work) his stuff is of almost an equal quality throughout. I do not mean that all the poems are equally good, but that the web on which their pattern was woven kept, with but a few exceptions, the same closeness and fineness throughout. The invention, the pictures, the arrangement, and the colouring of the things wrought on the web were variable in excellence, but the stuff was uniform. This is an excessively rare excellence in a poet, and it continued to the close. The workmanship is curiously level from youth to age ; and that kind J of simplicity has also its root in character. ^

Mingled with this simplicity, which was due to the unconscious entrance of his character into his art, there was also in all his poetry, as I have said with regard to his death, a certain stateliness entirely conscious of itself, and arising out of a reverence for his own individuality. The personality of Tennyson, vividly conscious of itself and respecting itself, pervades his poetry, is part of his art, and gives it part of its power. I have called it self-respecting to distinguish it from the personality of those poets who, like Byron, spread out their personality before us, but whom we cannot suspect of reverencing themselves. " Reverencing themselves " seems an invidious term, but in the case of poets like Tennyson, and there is a distinct class of such poets, it means that they look upon themselves as prophets, as endowed with power to proclaim truth and beauty, as consecrated to do work which will delight, console, and exalt mankind. It is, then, rather their high vocation which they rever- j ence than anything in themselves ; and this bestows on all their work that stateliness which is self-conscious, as it were, in all their poems. They are never seen in undress, never without their singing and prophetic robes, never unattended by one or other of the graver Muses.

We have had two great examples of this type of poet in the past. Milton was one, Wordsworth was another. Milton never moved his verse unconscious of Urania by his side. Wordsworth never lost the sense that he was a consecrated spirit, ^ nd Tenny s on nev er forgot thatjhg^ poet's work was to convince the world of love and beauty ; that he was born to do that work, and to do it worthily. This is an egotism (if we choose to give it that term) which is charged with power and with fire. Any individuality, conscious of itself, respecting itself because of its faith in a sacred mission entrusted to it, and beneath which it may not fall without dishonour, lifts and kindles other individualities, and exalts their views of human life. It does this work with tenfold greater force when it is in a poet, that is, in one who adds to its moral force the all-subduing power of beauty. This conviction, which cannot belong to a weak poet, but does (when it is consistent throughout life) belong to poets whose nature is hewn out of the living rock, enters as stateliness into all their verse, gives it a moral virtue, a spiritual strength, and emerges in a certain grandeur or splendour of style, more or less fine as the character is more or less nobly mixed. This sense of the relation the poet bears to mankind, this sense he has of his office and of the duty it imposes on him, was profoundly felt by Tennyson, became a part of him as an artist, and was an element in every line he wrote. Personal it was, but it was personal for the sake of humanity ; and dignity, stateliness in subjects, in thoughts and in style, issued naturally from that conviction.

These are things which belong to a poet's art, but by themselves they would not, of course, make him an artist. The essential difference of an artist is love of beauty and the power of shaping it. The greatness of an artist is proportionate to the depth and truth of his love of beauty ; to his faithfulness to it, and to his unremitting effort to train his natural gift of shaping it into fuller ease, power, and permanence. As to beauty itself, men talk of natural beauty, of physical, moral, and spiritual beauty, and these term-divisions have their use ; but at root all beauty is one, and these divided forms of it are modes only of one energy, conditioned by the elements through which it passes. They can all pass into one another, and they can all be expressed in terms of one another.

To define, then, what beauty is in itself is beyond our power, but we can approach a definition of it by marking out clearly its results on us. What is always true of beauty is this, that, wherever it appears, it awakens love of it which has no return on self, but which bears us out of ourselves ; it stirs either joy or reverence in the heart without bringing with it any self-admiration or vanity ; and it kindles the desire of reproducing it, not that we may exult in our own skill in forming it, but that our reproduction of it may awaken emotions in others similar to those which the original sight of beauty stirred in our own heart — that is, it more or less forces the seer of it into creation. This creation, this representation of the beautiful, is art ; and the most skilful representation of the ugly — that is, of anything which awakens either repulsion, or base pleasure, or horror which does not set free and purify the soul, or scorn instead of reverence, or which does not kindle in us the desire of reproduction of it that we may stir in others similar emotions to our own — is not art at all. It is clever imitation, it is skill, it is artifice, it is not art. It is characteristic of an age which is writhing under the frivolous despotism of positive science that the accurate and skilful representation of things and facts which are not beautiful is called art ; and it belongs to all persons who care for the growth of humanity, not to denounce this error, for denunciation is barren of results, but to live and labour for the opposite truth. Far more rests on that effort than men imagine. A third at least of the future betterment of mankind, to which we now look forward with more hope than we have done for years, depends on this effort, on all that it involves, on all that it will create in the imaginative and spiritual life of the human race.

With a few exceptions, into which this tendency to scientific representation carried him — poems of dissection and denunciation, like Despair^ and worse still. The Promise of May^ Tennyson was faithful through his whole life to beauty, writing always of what was worthy of love, of joy, of solemn or happy reverence ; and by this, and in this sphere, was the steady artist. The manifestation of these things, his creation of them, for the love and pleasure and veneration of himself and men, was his unbroken delight.

lo Tennyson

How much we owe to him for this, especially at this time, only the future will fully know. It is true, this faithfulness to beauty is the foremost characteristic of all great artists, the very quintessence of their genius, that which makes them permanent ; but he deserves perhaps more praise for it than many others, for he was tempted by the tendency of his time to swerve from it, as Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats were not tempted. Once or twice he yielded, as I said, but these instances only show how much he resisted, and how faithfully. This, then, it was which kept him always fresh, even to advanced age. He whose eyes are steadily fixed on the beautiful, always loves, and is always young.

Moreover, the true artist has written on his heart, " Love not the world, nor the things of the world," and this, in spite of many foolish things said of him, was true of Tennyson. If what I said of his love of beauty be true, he could not have bent his art to the world, and he never did. For the artist knows that absolute beauty is a perfection which he never can fully grasp, which always becomes before him a greater ocean, which therefore invites and kindles an incessant pursuit. He can never furl his sail in this pursuit ; he can never turn aside, while he is full of its ardour, to any lower or meaner love, to any selfish strife. The passion it makes glow is one which devours all other passions. The desire to reveal beauty, to make it clear, so far as he has seen it, is a desire which makes all merely personal desires common and unclean.

Whatever vulgar folk have said of Tennyson, his whole work breathes with that desire. I do not believe, and I cannot trace in one line of his poetry, that he ever wrote for the sake of money, or place, or to catch the popular ear, or to win a transient praise. He wrote only that of which he loved to write, that which moved him to joy or reverence, that which he thought of good report for its loveliness. Even the things he did as Poet Laureate, where, if ever, he might have been untrue to this, have no tinge of the world about them. They speak to royalties of the things of eternal beauty, of the natural sorrows and joys of faithful motherhood and wifehood, of duties and sacrifice performed in high places — the same duties and sacrifice which might be done by the labourer and the slave — of love and honour and faith, of those ideals of humanity which are as capable of being pursued and fulfilled in the cottage as in the palace. The Laureate Odes are more lessons to royal folk than celebrations of them.

He was, then, faithful to loveliness. It is not too much to say that he saw all the universe of man and Nature and of God in their relation to ineffable beauty, and that the getting of this pervading essence outf of all things, the shaping of it, and the crying of — " Look there ; love and worship, rejoice and reverence," was the one supreme thing in his art for which he cared. This may be said of all true poets, and it is here said of him. It is the mightiest debt we owe to the faithful artists, and we feel it all the more deeply at a time when art yields more than is seemly to the temptations of the world.

But the power of seeing beauty, and the love of beauty, are not all that makes the great artist. He must also have the power of shaping the beauty which he sees, and in a way peculiarly his own. There must be in thework the personal touch, the individual surprise, the unique way, the unimitated shaping which provokes imitation. We ought to feel in every artist's work the immediate pressure of an original, personal creator, who has his own special manner with things and words. This is one of the main tests of genius. Of every great poet it is true, and it is plainly true of Tennyson. Every line is alive with his own distinction.

On his natural gift of creating, and on his careful training of it, I need not dwell, nor yet on his practice and love of the skilfulnesses of his art, of the careful study of words and their powers in verse, of his mingled strength and daintiness and weakness, of all that belongs to Form. These things and their like in him have been for years the food of critics. No one disputes that he touched excellence in them, or that he had the power of creation. But I maintain that all his technique was not for his own sake, but was first urged by his love of beauty. It was necessary, for the sake of his faithfulness to her, that the shape he gave to what he loved should be as perfect, as strong, as gracious, and as full of delightful surprises as he could make it ; and not one of our poets has striven with a more unfailing intensity to do this honour to all the beauty he saw in Nature and in man ; as eager in this at eighty as at thirty years. It is a great lesson to all artists ; it is a lesson to us all.

Power, then, to see beauty, power to shape it, these were his. How far he saw it, with what degrees of excellence he shaped it, how great an artist he was — is not now the question. The question is. Did he always see it with love and joy ; did he always shape it with faithfulness ? And I answer that his fidelity to beauty, whenever he saw it, was unbroken.

II

Tennyson's Relation to Christianity.—The next subject I treat of in this Introduction is Tennyson's relation to Christianity. y,When Tennyson passed from school to the university, religious life in England had very much decayed. The spirit which animated Wesley, and which had fallen like the prophet's mantle on the earlier Evangelicals, had now become cold. English religion, in and out of the Church, was like the valley Ezekiel described, full of bones, and the bones were dry. And in the midst of the valley one figure, now old, who had seen the fire of religious sacrifice rise high to God in the past, who had welcomed its descent and directed it into new channels but who had outlived his enthusiasms, went to and fro, chilled at heart, and wailing for what had been. It was the soul of Coleridge, and if the voice of the Spirit asked him : " Son of Man, can these bones live ? " he answered, but not in hope, " O Lord God, Thou knowest." He died before he saw the resurrection which Tennyson saw, the blowing of the wind of God, and the bones coming together, and the slain breathed upon, so that they lived and stood upon their feet, an exceeding great army. Nevertheless, the old prophet did his work, and his power moved in the two men, though in a very different fashion, who, in the same years which saw a political and poetic resurrection, awakened into a new spring, with all the promise of summer, the religious life of England. The true beginning of Tennyson's as of Browning's poetical life was coincident with the birth of the movements afterwards called the High Church and the Broad Church movements, and with the birth of a new political and social era.

Never alone

Come the immortals.

This religious awakening was felt and seized by two distinct types of character, or of human tendency, and crystallised by two representative men, by J. H. Newman and Frederick Maurice ; and it is curious for those who care for analogies to the evolution of species to trace how the one was the child of the University of Oxford and the other of the University of Cambridge. The main difference which lay between their method of presenting the faith was a time-difference, if I may be allowed to invent that term. In the matter of religion the past was the foremost thing to Newman, to Maurice the present. Newman looked back to the past (the nearer to the Apostles the nearer to truth) for the highest point to which religious life, but not doctrine, had attained, and his immense reverence for the past became part of the mind of Tennyson. ^But it was balanced in Tennyson by even a greater reverence for the present as containing in it an immediate inspiration and revelation from God. This foundation for poetic thought and emotion was given to him by the religious work of Maurice. The deepest thought in the mind of Maurice was that God was moving in the present as fully as He had moved in the past ; and the incessant representation of this, in every form of it, was his great contribution to Theology!] Of course, others before him had said similar things, but he said this in a new way, and under new conditions. Maurice could not, however, quite escape from the web of the past, and his struggle to combine the past and the present entangled him, entangled his mind, and entangled his followers. When he clung, as he did, to the ancient intellectual formulas as laid down in the Creeds and Services of the Church, and tried to weave them into harmony with his main faith, he damaged his position, and, up to a certain point, his work.

Tennyson, as a poet, did not fall into this ill-fortuned position. What his personal views were concerning the creed of Christendom is not the question here. It would be an impertinence to discuss them. That is a private matter, and we shall hear what his family chose to disclose to us at the fitting time. But his poetry is a public possession, and in that poetry there is naturally no doctrinal confession, no intellectual propositions which define his faith. I say naturally^ because art has to do with the illimitable, with that which is for ever incapable of definition, with the things that belong to love and beauty, joy and hope and veneration — the shapes, degrees, powers, and glory of which are for ever building, un-building, and rebuilding themselves in each man's soul and in the soul of the whole world. Art not only rejects, it abhors all attempts to bind down into unchanging forms the thoughts and emotions which play like lightning round the infinite horizons towards which the imagination sails, piloted by love, and hope, and faith. It has no creeds, no articles of faith, no schemes of salvation, no confessions ; it cannot have them by its very nature. The unknowable, but the believable, is its country, its native land, its home.

Whatever, then, in this matter of religion, the man as thinker may confess, the man as poet keeps in the realm of the undefined, beyond analysis, beyond reasoning. When he does not, when he is tempted into analytic discussion, into doctrinal definition, he ceases to be a poet for the time and the trouble into which he gets is pitiable. When Milton argues like a school divine, when Wordsworth draws out a plan of education, when Byron explains his view of original sin, how sad it is, how the Muses cover their faces, how angrily Apollo frowns ! Even Dante, who was obliged to do something of this kind of work, does it only as a means by which he may launch him.self forward into the infinite. And Tennyson rarely in this way lost his position as an artist. There is no formulated creed in his work.

But the main faiths of Maurice, which were assertions of what he conceived to be " eternal verities " concerning the relations of God to man and to the universe, and concerning the end to which God was leading them — assertions backed up by no proof, for the matters insisted on could neither be proved nor disproved — were naturally in the realm of the imagination, of faith and hope, in the infinite realm of love, and were brought to receive acceptance or dismissal before the tribunal of human emotion, not before the tribunal of the understanding. As such they were proper subjects of poetry; and the ever-working immanence of God in man and in the universe as Will and Love, as King and Father ; the necessary brotherhood of man, and the necessary practice of love one to another, if all were in God ; the necessary evolution (if this vital union between God and man existed) of the human race into perfect love and righteousness, and the necessary continuance on the same hypothesis of each man's personal consciousness in a life to be ; the necessary vitality of the present — that deep need for high poetic work — man alive and Nature alive, and alive with the life of God — these faiths (I will not call them doctrines, for their definition changes incessantly with the progress of human thought and feeling) lay at the root of the religion we find in the poetry of Tennyson and influenced that poetry from 1830 to 1892. They were part of the elements of the soil out of which his poetry grew, and by them, and by the way in which he held them, carefully keeping them apart from all intellectual definition and in the realm of faith alone, he is separated on the one side from all those poets who either ignore these things like Keats or profess disbelief in them like Shelley, and on the other side from all those poets who like Milton, Byron, or Browning have a definite theology in their poetry.

These things, then, may justly be said with regard to the religious elements in the poetry of Tennyson, and they are all contained in In Memoriam ; nay more, they are the very basis of that poem. But the assertion of them does not answer the question : What relation does Tennyson's poetry bear to Christianity ? For all these beliefs might be held by a Theist — even by one who ignored or depreciated the teaching of Jesus. If Tennyson is then to be claimed as a Christian poet it must be shown that he considered Jesus to be the great proclaimer of these truths, the one who concentrated into Himself the religious truths which before Him had been in man, re-formed them in His own thought, and issued them with new power and charged with new love, to claim the belief of men. This certainly was Tennyson's position.* So far as that goes, Tennyson was distinctly Christian, and this is the position of a great

* In Memoriam, xxxvi.

number of persons at the present day. But if that be all, then a great number of persons will deny him the right to call himself a Christian. In their mind a Christian man must have a distinct faith in Jesus as God, as the unique Saviour of man, and as a revealer of God in a way different in kind from that in which we can call any other person a saviour or revealer. Is that view contained in Tennyson's poetry ? We cannot take the phrases concerning Christ used in the Idylls of the King, or such phrases as " Him who died for me " in The May Queen, as any proof of his views, for these might be said to be only local colour ; but when we come to In Meinoriam we have before us a poem exceedingly personal and distinctly theological ; and Christ is called there " The Life indeed " ; His power to raise the dead is confessed ; He is the receiver of the souls of the dead into the world beyond this world ; He is the Word of God that breathed human breath and wrought out the faith with human deeds. This is not enough to make Tennyson, as a poet, an orthodox Christian in the doctrinal sense, but it is enough to place him among those who confess Jesus as the Light of the world, as their spiritual Master, their Life ; and that with a distinctness which does not belong to any other of the great poets of this century, so far as their poetry is concerned. This position becomes a certainty if the introduction to I71 Me7noriam — beginning " Strong Son of God, immortal Love " — be an address to Jesus. I think it is, and that this is the most natural explanation ; but nevertheless it is left vague. On the whole, there is no clear doctrinal definition of the person or the work of Christ. What is not left vague, what is quite clear, is that Tennyson is more Christian than Theist ; that no mere Theist could have said the things that he has said in In Memoriam.