A study of the works of Alfred Tennyson, D. C. L., poet laureate

Front matter

tonic "Ts

I

A STUDY OF THE WORKS

Contents

CHAPTEK I.

Page jeneral Principles 11

CHAPTEK II.

Chapter I. General Principles

The study of a poet may be directed towards either the art forms, or the conceptions, embodied in his works ; towards either the beauties of execution and detail by means of which he sets forth the truths and lessons he desires to exhibit, or towards those truths and lessons themselves. In Tennyson, either of these is a rich field. I have chosen but one. Upon the strictly art field, I have but touched, here and there. My main purpose, throughout, has been to bring out the central thought or lesson of each poem During my work, the constant discovery of fresh art beauties has been a large part of my reward. Of this reward, at all events, the reader who consents to accompany me for a little is not less sure.

The highest poetry — and indeed, the highest art in general — will within its body of beauty contain a soul of truth. The body of beauty is as essential as the soul of truth— truth without beauty cannot mate art. The truth must be moral truth, or, at lowest, emotional, which is akin to moral. With intellectual truth, pure and simple, poetry has nothing to do. Intellectual truth of a high order will oftentimes be found in a great poem, but it will always be in organic connexion with some moral or emotional truth.

A moral truth may be set forth under an abstract or a concrete form. The poet has not much to do with the abstract ; the concrete is his sphere. The concrete form of moral truth is character; the poet's chief concern is with character. But there are philosophical poets, and these deal with abstract truths. In their hands, symbol and metaphor form a garment, if not a body, for the abstract, and enable it, in some sort, to become concrete. The very essence of the poet's relation to truth lies in his tendency to give it concrete forms. In this respect, the philosopher absolute and the poet absolute, though both, by their very nature, truth-seekers, are antipodal; the terms poet, philosophical poet, poetical philosopher, and philosopher might be used to express the gradations of the tendency which differentiates them.

As the poet is not a philosopher, so also he is not a moralist. Didactic poetry is almost a contradiction in terms. The poet's appeal is rather to the moral sentiments than to the conscience direct. Eather by the exhibition, than by the prescription, of goodness, he aims to influence the character. He desires not that you should listen to a sermon, but that, through sympathy with them, you should catch the tone of his noble characters, or that, through healthy moral indignation, there should be awakened in you a keener repugnance to the faults of his baser characters. So, though no moralist, his ultimate aim is wholly moral, and though he never bids you what to do, the direct tendency of his work is always the ennobling of your practical life.

The moral soul of a poem must live within a body of beauty. Without beauty there is no art. Over both the choice of subjects and their execution, this canon is inflexible. No other consideration in the choice of a subject, and no other merit in its execution, can atone for the neglect of beauty. Mere accuracy of portraiture is draughtsmanship, not art. The artist is he who, above all men, has an eye for the beautiful, who loves the beautiful, and who can embody the beautiful in some art form. To this body of beauty the penetrating power of the poet's teaching is due. A poem is more potent than a sermon or an essay setting forth the same truth, because, while, in the latter the truth still retains, so to say, its solid form, and needs to undergo all the processes of mastication and digestion before it can be taken up into the system, in the former it is dissolved in the nectar of beauty, and woos the lips, and permeates the blood with a thrill of pleasure that is only known to be more than pleasure from the fact that the frame grows strong and puts out its force into worthy action under its influence. But if the beauty be wanting, the poetic form is but a shell put around the truth, and when the shell is broken there is still the mastication and digestion of a solid truth to be accomplished.

There is room for poetry that shall contain no soul of moral truth — which shall be but a body of beauty, but which yet shall not lie outside tbe region of the educational. All beauty, pure and simple, tends to refinement, and all refinement, pure and simple, to goodness ; and so the poet, or, in general, the artist, who but sets forth forms of beauty, may yet be aiding the growth of the good. Even so much as this is not needed to justify his work ; if he give but pure pleasure, his work is far from vain. But it must be rigidly demanded of the poet who aims to create a body of beauty alone, and who holds back from the attempt to breathe into the body a soul of goodness, that he put no other soul therein. All art must be at least negative in relation to the moral. He who sends out a coarse or a mean thought into the world at all, does ill service to his kind ; but the poet who does this plays the part of the devil. For the poetic solvent of beauty is not less potent in aiding the permeation of the soul by evil than by good. The solid coarseness or meanness of prose will tempt none whose appetites are not already degraded to its liking ; but beauty is nectar whatever be dissolved in it, and the frame may be poisoned, unconsciously, or with half-resistance, because the mind was too simple, or the will too feeble, to shut the lips against the wooing death. In the body of beauty may live an angel of light or a devil of darkness, and the poet is the magician at whose word the spirit enters. If he leave the body untenanted, it is well, for it is a body of beauty ; if he beckon in an angel of light, it is noble, and he has done well for his kind; if the devil of darkness have taken possession at his word, he has earned for his name a place on the scroll of the enemies of our race.

Thus much for the essence of poetry ; concerning the form little need be said here. There are at bottom three kinds of poetry — Dramatic, Epic, Lyric ; Play, Tale, and

Song. Each of these must, of course, have a subject-matter ; hut they differ greatly in the degree in which the personality of the poet is mingled with the subject-matter. In the perfect drama, the poet does not appear at all. He places his characters before you, and suffers them to speak and act and work out their own destinies, unaffected by and uncommented upon by him. Whether they are good or bad, whether they speak wisely or foolishly, what emotions are the proper response to their destinies — of these things he gives you no hint. The drama is before you ; judge. It is a bit of the story of life cut out for your contemplation, and life has no interpreter. It is not life represented or narrated ; it is life. There is no poet. You are face to face with humanity.

This is the perfect idea of the drama. If once the poet shows himself, the play, as such, is marred. If you feel him selecting, arranging, interpreting or commenting, you feel that the dramatic simplicity is gone. You may be glad, for you may prefer the poet to his subject ; but that is not the point ; the play is no longer a fragment of life, — it is a show ; and the poet is showman and commentator.

The drama is in the present tense ; the epic is in the past. In the drama, life is before you ; in the epic, the drama has been seen by the poet, and he is telling you the story of what he has seen. Characters, action, plot and catastrophe form the elements of both, but they differ in tense. There is however another and a deeper difference. The perfect drama has no room for the personality of the poet ; the epic has. The epic is the union of the subject-matter with the personality of the poet. The whole story passes through the medium of his mind, and becomes coloured by it. You see the characters as he saw them, form his judgments, feel his preferences, move with his emotions. He is not only narrator, he is interpreter, and interpreter not according to the canons of absolute truth, but by the key of his own character and sympathies. The epic is permeated by the poet ; it is the union of it with him.

The drama shows a stoiy ; the epic tells it ; the lyric assumes it to be known, and sings about it. About a story , or about a character, an act, or a sentiment, the lyric may sing. But in the lyric, still more than in the epic, the personality of the poet rises into view. The purpose of the poem is to tell how the poet feels about his subject. You learn how he feels about his subject in the epic; but the epic is not made for the purpose of telling you the poet's feelings, but to tell the story. The expression of feeling is incidental. But in the lyric the expression of feeling is

c all. A story or a character falls upon the mind of the poet, and sets it in vibration ; the vibration rendered audible is a lyric. The subject-matter is essential to set the poet's mind moving and to give a direction to that movement, but for this only is it necessary. Hence the lyric is, as nearly as possible, the expression, pure and simple, of the poet's personality. For what a man abstracted from the outer life b} r the power of imagination in action feels, that he really is. Not a man's thoughts, nor his actions and feelings in response to the passing events of life tell his essential character. This only is told when, withdrawn into the sanctuary of the unseen by the enchantment of the imagination, the soul sends up its unrestrained incense of worship to that which it esteems as its "highest and best.

These are the great kinds of poetry, and these are some of their essential characteristics. Few poets, and, indeed, few poems, belong exclusively to either of these kinds, and in quite modern poetry the tendency to blend the lines of demarcation is especially strong. The lyric is perpetually finding for itself a place in the heart of the drama ; the ballad is the union of story and song, and man} 7 modern poems, though narrative in form, are dramatic in tone. But however the kinds may be mingled, the distinctions

GENEBAL PRINCIPLES. 19

are real, and every fragment of poetry must have in it the quality of the drama, the epic, or the lyric.

To glance, .next, at the characteristics of Tennyson's poetry in relation to the general principles thus laid down.

That the body of beauty is found everywhere throughout his writings, there can be small doubt. Of mere sound beauty the poems are full ; in metrical beauty and variety they are singularly rich ; the very rhymes oftentimes hold you in surprise at their abundance and spontaneity. The eighteenth canto of Maud and the Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington display a wealth and beauty of rhyming almost unmatched in English poetry.

In the musical combinations of his words, Tennyson is equalled, I think, among English poets, only by Spenser and Shelley, unless, indeed, Keats may be added. And, over and above its music, there is a certain suggestive power about much of our poet's language altogether apart from its meaning, which is especially worthy of notice. The power comes partly out of the matching of sense by sound, but it is not wholly due to this. It is partly this, and it is partly the effect of metre, but it is more than both. The words seem to bear the same relation to the meaning or sentiment underlying them, that a human face does to the underlying heart and mind. The fact will make itself felt "by every lover of those poems in In Memoriam and Maud especially.

Tennyson's metrification has been often studied, and often praised. Its rich and expressive variety is nowhere better seen than in the Maud volume. In Maud itself, each change of metre matches, and matches exquisitely, an emotional change. And then the symbolism of the metre in single verses is oftentimes so wonderful. To take, for instance, the second verse cf the fifth canto, and mark how the lines grow, as the yearning intensifies, while the revulsion of feeling caused by the return to the contemplation of his own poor life and nipped heart finds expression in the broken line that closes the verse. The third verse of the sixth canto, again, affords a splendid instance of symbolic metrification.

' : And thus a delicate spark Of glowing and growing light, Through the live-long hours of the dark, Kept itself warm in the heart of my dreams

. Beady to burst in a coloured flame ; Till, at last, when the morning came In a cloud, it faded, and seems But an ashen-gray delight."

The steady flow of the words tip to the culmination of the long happy fourth line, followed by the broken weary movement of the latter part of the verse, expresses perfectly the growth of the imaginative happiness during the idealizing hours of the night and the ultimate triumph of the daylight with its cold insistance upon facts, even though the words meant nothing.

The Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington is a great study in metrification, though the remarkable suitability of the metre of In Memoriam for a poem of which thought and subtle distinctions of thought were to be so large and important an element is not less the result of an instinct true and keen. But upon this and such matters we must not dwell, for our chief business is with the soul rather than the body of our poet's writings.

Yet a little more concerning the body must be said. I spoke of the vague pictorial power of Tennyson's language. A step on from this leads us to the observation of the keen flashing power of his words, due to their often presenting, instantaneously and vividly, just those qualities in the thought or the thing, pertinent to the situation in which that thought or thing presents itself. Epithets form the crucial test of the poet. Men's nouns and verbs agree much more than their adjectives and adverbs. The poet and the poetaster see the same things, and write about the same things also. But the poetaster sees only the general characteristics of the thing, and to express these the noun alone will suffice. But he dare not use the noun alone, for in doing so he would reveal to himself and to all men that of the true poet's power of seeing he had none. So the poetaster is very given to epithets ; but his epithets are either such as by immemorial usage are accredited as sound and appropriate (only that by their familiarity they have lost the power of epithets, and, at best, are not the poetaster's any more than they are the reader's), or else they are windy, blustering epithets that but cheat the poetaster and his weakest readers into the belief that they add something to the meaning of the noun about which they shake so turbulently. The epithets of the true poet, on the other hand, are full of revealing power. All men see as much of a thing as the noun expresses. The poet sees more, and his epithet reveals the more which he sees. The power of seeing this more is perhaps the distinctive power of the poet, or, more generally, of the artist. The power of learning this " more " from the epithet is perhaps the chief and the rarest faculty in the poet's reader. Were this faculty less rare, there would be less confounding of poets and poetasters. The careful reading of such poems as

Godiva, the Gardener's Daughter, or the Morte D' Arthur will make clear what is meant by the foregoing remarks.

In studying Tennyson's epithets, then, we should be studying his seeing faculty — his real and personal knowledge of nature and all outer things. Such a study would be rich in both teaching and. training — in teaching us what the poet has seen for us ; in training us to see for ourselves. The power of seeing deeper than the noun qualities, so to say, is very rare. The man of science teaches us to see deeper ; so also does the poet. But except the man of science or the poet be the very highest of his order, they teach us to see very different things. The mere man of science seeks for appearances indicating structure ; the mere poet looks for beauty. But the highest man of science sees also with the poet's eyes ; the great poet sees with the eyes of the man of science, as well as with his poet eyes. He is a great teacher in the art of the true observation of nature and all outer things.

Tennyson's sympathy with science is remarkable, and colours all his poetry. But it does not cause him to cease to be the poet observer. All his seeings are transmuted into beauty, or symbol of higher truth. But though, to some reader, the beauty and the symbolism were nothing,

24 A STUDY OF TENXYS.OX.

none the less, his guidance in the art of observing would be invaluable. A friend of mine went through his poems, marking all his references to flowers. The study was a valuable one, and many similar experiments will suggest themselves to the thoughtful reader. The precision of our poet's observations is everywhere remarkable, and, oftentimes, his most incidental references to natural objects are full of point and instruction. He sees, at once, with the precision of the man of science and the intensity of the poet. I do not attempt to give illustrations, for it will make itself apparent to any thoughtful student who turns his attention to the matter.

Possessing an intimate knowledge of nature, Tennyson puts his knowledge to a distinctive use. He does not make it the subject of his poetry. Everywhere, his poetry is about man. Yet everywhere, nature enters largely into his poetry. It enters, too, in a close and peculiar connexion with the human characters which form the subjects of the poetry. He does not draw the man, and then draw the nature around him ; but he enters into the man, and sees nature through his eyes, nature, at the same time, so adapting herself to the mood of the man, that her spirit and his seem one. This relation I have expressed by the name sensuo-sympathetic. There is nothing like it in the

.poetry of Wordsworth, or of Shelley, or of Keats. In each of these, nature, after one manner or another, masters the man. In Keats, she subdues him ; in Shelley, she transfigures him ; in Wordsworth, she is his teacher. But in Tennyson, she is one with him. As she presents herself to his senses, she is in absolute sympathy with him. His pain and fear, his hopes and questionings, are hers. All through In Memoriam one feels this. In such poems as Mariana and the Lotus Eaters, the spirit of the picture would remain the same, though the human beings were struck out. In Claribel the picture is made by nature, yet it is not a natural but a human situation that is pictured. Maud is full of the same sensuo-sympathetic relation between man and nature. It is altogether characteristic of Tennyson, and it gives a reality to his similes which otherwise they could not have. You feel, not that he is bringing together two things that happen to have an external resemblance upon some particular point, but that he is bringing out a harmony between things the which you had not before perceived. In such a simile as

" She did not weep, But o'er her meek eyes came a happy mist, Like that which kept the heart of Eden green Before the useful trouble of the rain ;"

there seems to be something deeper than an accidental resemblance.

In passing on to notice the subjects which Tennyson has chosen for his poems, we reach a point where it is hard to separate the body of beauty from the soul which it contains. Yet, conceivably, the same truths might have been taught, and taught poetically, through less beautiful subjects. To the setting forth of the lesson of Enid, so exquisite a portraiture as that of Enid herself was not essential. Were the beauty altogether absent, the truths would not be put poet-fashion at all ; but I think it would be hard to find more than one or two English poets whose subjects are so generally harmonious to the taste and sensibilities, and so dear to the heart as those of our laureate. 1 If with him, Wordsworth, for instance, be compared, the contrast will make itself very distinctly felt.

Of poetry that is only beauty Tennyson has written very little indeed. Some few poems of this order there are, as we shall see hereafter, but nearly all these were produced quite early in the poet's career.

Of poems with an evil soul there are none. Vivien is no exception to this, as also we shall see hereafter. Everywhere purity, honour, reverence, shine out through the poems.

There are many philosophical poems, some of them approaching daringly near to the setting forth of purely abstract truths. But in every case that garment of concreteness, made up of symbol and metaphor, of which I spoke, and an abundant richness of colour and atmosphere save the poem from intellectual coldness, and usher it through the portals of the head into the holier chambers of the heart.

No poet more fully recognizes his duty as a teacher than Tennyson, but no poet is less explicitly didactic. He remembers that he is an artist, not a divine, a poet, not a moralist. So his moral teachings are rendered in the concrete not in the abstract form, and shine out from his characters rather than are uttered by or for them. To present a human character radiant with moral beauty — that is his way of preaching a poet-sermon. But this matter is the subject of our study; more, therefore, need not be said upon it in this place.

Turning now to the subject of poetic form, it strikes us at once that the dramatic, the epic, and the lyric tendencies are all largely represented in Tennyson's mind — the epic, nevertheless, least so. This last, notwithstanding he has written no play, and scarcely a dramatic fragment, and very few pure lyrics, while in narrative poems his works abound. But his personality is so intensely present in many of his narrative poems that the feeling of them is altogether lyric ; while in others he so succeeds in projecting himself into and embodying the characters of the poems that they have the vividness and presentness of dramatic characters.

It would be very interesting to study Tennyson's poems after the three following cues. (1) Starting from purely narrative poems, to form a series in which the lyrical spirit more and more pervades the narrative ; (2) To trace the gradations between the narrative and the dramatic forms; (3) To observe the encroachments of the lyric upon the dramatic. It would be beside my purpose to attempt this study here, but I may be permitted to give an illustration or two of what I mean. Taking (2) for the purpose, we have, —

First. Purely narrative poems, such as Dora, Enoch Arden, and the^Idylls of the King, in which the whole story is in the past tense, and the narrator, the poet himself, has no relation to the story.

Second. Poems in which a narrator is introduced to tell the story, he having no further relation to that story than that it has come into his knowledge.

The Morte If Arthur and Aylmers Field are somewhat imperfect examples of this step.

Tliird. Poems in which the speaker is one of the characters of the story, the other characters being supposed absent, and the narrative still being in the past. The Princess, the Two Voices, and LocJcsley Hall are examples of this. There will generally be a strong lyric tendency about this class of poems, the speaker's present feelings perpetually colouring, and, for the moment, frequently overriding his story. This is very apparent in LocJcsley Hall. Also in poems of this class, there is very often an audience supposed to be present and addressed, like the mother in the May Queen.

Fourth. Poems in which the speaker is one of the characters in the story, the other character or characters being present and addressed, the narrative still being in the past. Here the lyric tendency is also strong. The Miller s Daughter illustrates this kind.

Fifth. Poems in which the speaker is one of the characters of the story, the narrative being always in the present tense, because, at each advance in

A STUDY OF TENNYSON.

the story, the speaker shifts his position, so to say, and adjusts himself to the present, or rather (for that is the true notion of the poem), the utterances occur as the story advances. In this case, the other characters will be absent ; I know of no case in which they are supposed to be present. Maud and In Memoriam are the highest examples of this class, though in neither of these is there an absolute adherence to the immediate present : at several points the speaker seems to advance a step and look back over the short space he has just traversed. All poems of this kind will be intensely lyrical, because the speaker is under the glow of present feeling, and is not curbed in the utterance of that feeling by such limitations as the presence of other speaking characters would necessarily impose. . Hence Maud is at the same time the most dramatic and the most lyrical of all Tennyson's poems.

Sixth. Dramatic poems, in which there is no narrative at all, but each character stands upon his own feet as in an ordinary play. Walking to the Mail humbly illustrates this step.

In these six steps we have a regular gradation from the pure narrative to the pure dramatic form. It must be confessed that the climax is somewhat of a collapse. Tennyson has a strong dramatic tendency, but he has no tendency to write plays. This is because of his also strong lyric tendency. He loves to project himself into other and very different characters; but then he loves to sing through them, or at least to make them sing. He consents to become objective, that his characters may become subjective. But this is not the pure dramatic spirit. In the perfect play, not only the poet lives in his characters, but they live in each other. If the poet forgets his characters, and begins to utter himself, or if the characters forget each other, and begin simply to utter themselves, the drama is at an end. Tennyson does not usually do the former, but his -characters are very apt to do the latter, or rather would do the latter were he not wise enough to place them in what I may call lyrical situations. I should say that Tennyson is a lyric poet, singing with many voices by virtue of the dramatic power through which he is able to project himself into many and diverse characters.

Thus much (very brief and imperfect as it is) must suffice for our general comment upon the spirit and character of our Laureate's writings.

A STUDY OF TENNYSON.

Chapter II. Classification

Bearing in mind the principles laid down, and the characteristics of our poet, indicated in the last chapter, but not feeling ourselves bound by the lines of demarcation suggested by those principles and characteristics, we proceed to a general classification of all the poems that have as yet come to us from our Laureate's hand.* This classification will have little relation to outer form, being based rather upon the intellectual and moral aims manifest

* As a matter of fact, not quite all the Laureate's published are here treated of. Some that appeared in his earlier publications have been withdrawn from the later editions of those publications, and some few that he has suffered to appear in magazines or newspapers he has not seen fit to republish in any permanent form. I think that I am right to take the poet's works as he chooses them to stand, and to abstain from disinterring what it has been his pleasure to bury.

CLASSIFICATION. ?,?>

in the poems. A very interesting classification might also be made upon the basis of form, but, in pursuit of our present purpose, what we have already suggested in that direction will suffice.