Essays in Modernity: Criticisms and Dialogues

Front matter

ESSAYS IN MODERNITY

ESSAYS IN

MODERNITY

Tennyson

TENNYSON

ESSAYS IN MODERNITY

TENNYSON

This attempt to treat a contemporary writer with absolute critical candour will not, it is hoped, be misunderstood. The case is a special one. To the younger generation of us, the position of Tennyson in the realm of English poetry seemed from the first to differ little, if at all, so far as its actuality went, from that of Wordsworth and Coleridge, of Byron and Shelley and Keats. He presented himself to our youthful imagination as an accomplished fact. The only difference lay in a comparative ignorance of his private life, an ignorance which was by no means ambiguous enough to prove a stumbling-block. It is not too much to say that it has cost many of us far more trouble to arrive at anything like an impartial judgment of Shelley than of Tennyson. Shelley was as much a superstition to us as Byron was to our fathers. They both have the passionately personal element in them, and nothing obscures the calm and clear view like that. In the other case this element scarcely existed. There is only one standard by which we can attempt to judge any serious writer, and that is by the highest and best which we know of. The judgment we may hold of Lord Tennyson now may be hopelessly irreconcilable with that which we held once, if judgment it could be called, and not the blind acceptance of the enthusiasm of the generation that immediately preceded us. But so is our judgment of Wordsworth and Coleridge, of Byron and Shelley and Keats. Them also we accepted blindly as such or such or such, and it was not until we had turned back upon those guides and companions of our spiritual pilgrimage, after their power of leadership had been tested by the agony of the first hard stages, that we realised how they were to appear to us for the large remainder of the way. That same realisation came at that same period with regard also to others beside the older ones. The names of these others are the foremost names of our time, and we instinctively recognise the fact that all of them, those who went before and those who followed after, form but one company. They do. They form the company of the Age of Transition. They close the epoch. They pass the lamp of life to the New Race. They pause on the threshold of the New World. Fifty years hence this will be plain to all. To-day it is hidden from many, and from none more perhaps than from the victorious children of Yesterday, to whom we owe all the hope and the trust of To-morrow.

Why, however, should we any longer hesitate to attempt the treatment of the later brood with the same fearless curiosity as the earlier? The parentage is the same: the habitat the same. Both have fought the good fight and won, each in their special manner. The hour has come in which the keen desire to know and express the truth about them all must be satisfied. They interest, they concern us too deeply for us to palter any longer with half views of them. We shall best show our admiration and reverence for what they have done by resolutely striving to see them—not as our fathers saw them—not as they saw or see themselves—but as they really were and are.

I

We too often speak of the poetical movement of the opening of the century as if we did not realise that it consisted of two phases remarkably distinct from one another. The principal writers of the first of these phases survived their successors, and thus helped to confuse the significance of the movement in every way. Its beginning and its ending, its causes and its effects, still largely escape us. Four years saw the premature extinction of the three young leaders. Keats died in 1820; Shelley in '22; Byron in '24. Coleridge and Scott did not follow till '30 and '32, and Wordsworth dragged on up to 1850. But we must not forget that all Wordsworth's best work was done before his fortieth year—say, in the decade of 1798 to 1808—and the same is even more definitely true of Coleridge. If we except the purely literary criticism of the latter, little, very little that either of them did in their later years counts in any final estimate we may form of them. The fact is that their influence was all this time mostly for evil. The one in the realms of poetry, the other in those of thought, helped only too well to produce a hopeless intellectual lethargy. The young men of intelligence pointed to Coleridge and said: 'Here is a man who admittedly has produced some exquisite poetry, is the very first of literary critics, has a supreme culture' (as culture went in those days), 'has scaled all the heights and sounded all the depths of philosophic endeavour—and he stands there with a shining face and tells you he is ready to die for—the Church of England of 1830!' Reaction of this sort was indeed to have the day in every department of the national life for twenty years to come, and when the first stirrings of a better state began to agitate the inert mass, they came in the sole shape of popular politics. The realms of poetry and of thought remained almost entirely unaffected.

Lord Tennyson's first appearance in literature is in the astonishing capacity of the subject of a deliberate criticism by Coleridge. Nothing could show us more clearly the dearth of all excellence than that the first literary critic of his epoch (and we may even go so far as to say both of the epoch that preceded and of that which has followed him) could treat with anything approaching seriousness such a book as the Poems, chiefly Lyrical. 'The misfortune is,' says Coleridge, 'that he has begun to write verses without very well understanding what metre is,' and he gives him quite a nice little pedagogic lecture on the way to attain 'a sense of metre.' It had got to this. The only thing you could talk about in a new poet was his mastery or want of mastery of metre. It never occurred to Coleridge to declare that the whole performance was effeminate and factitious. Virility, alas, had passed out of his own bones too long ago for him to notify the fact that it was wanting in any one else's. Opium had helped his facile temperament to relegate reality to the pleasant distance of a dream; and what fault was it in this young man to start from the point at which he was himself leaving off? Thus, then, he spake, and died, while the subject of his criticism passed on to the elaboration of his life-work.

What impresses one in the poems which Lord Tennyson has since quite justly seen fit to label 'Juvenilia,' is just this, that so far as he was concerned the movement which preceded him might almost as well never have taken place. Everything that was permanent and progressive in it he rejected. Everything that was temporary and trumpery he assimilated. The sicklier side of the art of Byron, Keats, and Shelley was absolutely to his taste. The audacity and manly scorn of Byron, the high, clear, spiritual note of Keats, the restless, searching lamentation of Shelley, fell unregarded on his ears. Such gifts were either above and beyond him, or they troubled his 'lisping in love's delicious creeds,' whose girlish votaresses sit 'steeped in golden languors,' 'languors of love-deep eyes,' and he would have none of them. His one resolute instinct here is to look nothing in the face. He would make of life a pretty play. In after years he devoted ceaseless limæ labor to the perfection of this earlier work, but his touch bewrayeth him. It is always felicitous, but the felicity is doomed to inferiority. He has against him the inescapable difference between enamel work and painting; the exquisite artisan never can become a sovereign artist because his ideal is on a lower level where realisation is well within reach. Care, taste, 'the graceful tact, the Christian art,' as he calls it, never yet attained to magic. You must look at things with all your eyes before you can hope to render their shapes and beings to us, and this Juvenis will never look at anything longer than will give him its superficial picturesqueness. 'The form, the form,' he says, 'alone is eloquent,' and this is what, just at present, he means by 'the form.' Presently, however, he struck higher, but not yet with a secure flight. 'The Lotus Eaters,' as we have it now, is almost a new poem, and it is praised for its lovely landscape.

'A land of streams! Some like a downward smoke, Slow-dropping veils of thinnest lawn, did go.'

Do you call that 'natural magic'? Clearly, it is nothing of the kind. It is the daintily but ever superficially picturesque—the sort of thing that satisfies the sensitive book-reader who sees this for the first time, and wants to become familiar with it. Or again: in 'A Dream of Fair Women,' where for the first time he succeeds, though only transiently, in attaining to the note of reality, take one of his best descriptions:

'Enormous elm-tree boles did stoop and lean Upon the dusky brushwood underneath, Their broad curved branches, fledged with clearest green, New from its silken sheath.'

Fledged with clearest green? How happy, how charmingly apt! Why, a man who has just begun to be aware that there are such things as art and literature is delighted with it. He does not see the gulf that yawns between it and

'Daffodils That come before the swallow dares, and take The winds of March with beauty.'

What, however, the 'Lotus Eaters' really stands for, of course, is the first successful essay of the genuine Tennysonian music. Half a hundred failures have at last enabled him to 'beat his music out' Certainly, this counts. Any individual articulation in a poet counts. It is a new contribution to the sum of our literature—a fresh note, another rendering of the beauty or the force of things. But in the 'Dream' he does even better still. There we shall find verse like

'I saw, wherever light illumineth, Beauty and anguish walking hand in hand The downward slope to death.'

He is beginning to look at life as it really presents itself, and to try and render it in speech fit for men to listen to.

If we turn from the merely technical aspects of his work, the same timid artificiality still meets us at all points. He juggles away everything which he cannot transmute into the frail and gracious loveliness which feeds his senses. When he erects a Palace of Art and hangs up some paintings of the poets, Shakespeare figures under the semblance of one 'bland and mild.' Tennyson likes him bland and mild: it is so much nicer, you know, than strenuous and heart-sick, and this is his criticism of literature. Dark hours, however, will fall upon all of us, and then there begins the sombre dialogue of 'The Two Voices.' When the dark hour passes, he goes out into the fields, and, as he is feeling considerably better, he is at once aware that 'altho' no tongue can prove, every cloud that spreads above and veileth love, itself is love.' And, therefore, he 'marvels how the mind can be brought to anchor by one gloomy thought,' and this is his criticism on life. No thought, no ideas either way: merely the appeal to sensations. Round about him there is much worry and outcry on the part of what he calls 'the people.' They seemed dissatisfied with their lot. They say they are wretched, and they seem to think they ought not to be. Well—

'Two parties still divide the world, Of those that want and those that have, and still The same old sore breaks out from age to age With much the same result';

and this is his criticism on the social problem. Buonaparte was a 'madman' whose one thought in life was 'to quell the stubborn hearts of oak,' but 'we taught him lowlier moods—we—,' until 'late he learned humility perforce, like those whom Gideon school'd with briars'; and this is his criticism on history. Finally, my friends, these are troublesome days, these days of reform or Chartist agitation, but why should we doubt of the final issue? This is the land where, 'girt with friends or foes, a man may speak the thing he will' (so Byron and Shelley found it), and, thanks be to God, it is the land where nobody is influenced by thoughts or ideas; but our dear old friend, sober-suited Freedom, 'slowly broadens down from precedent o precedent,' till her base is more than pyramidal. The truth to put it shortly, is that if you are only fairly comfortably off, 'the world comes gently to those that are cast in gentle mould,' like our poet; and what can help us better towards this pleasant preliminary than writing poems which 'everybody' has to admire as quite too pretty and pathetic? 'The May Queen' stands for the first of those resolute bids for popularity which Lord Tennyson has always been careful to reiterate. There are thirty-nine verses in this well-known poem. In twenty-eight of them one of the most perfect little female prigs in all literature takes an even more unconscionable time in dying than Charles ii. The nauseating quality of some of the verse is very remarkable.

'Nay, nay, you must not weep, nor let your grief be wild, You should not fret for me, mother, you have another child!

The whole edificatory agony is gone through, right down to the pet clergyman of the Adelphi pit.

'It seemed so hard at first, mother, to leave the blessed sun, And now it seems so hard to stay, and yet His will be done! But still I think it can't be long before I find release; And that good man, the clergyman, has told me words of peace… He taught me all the mercy, for he showed me all the sin, Now, tho' my lamp was lighted late, there 's One will let me in: Nor would I now be well, mother, again if that could be; Now my desire is but to pass to Him that died for me.'

Which suggests the horrible suspicion that it was 'that good man' who had made it too hard for the poor thing to stay.

The conclusion to be drawn from all this seems only too clear. Here we have Tennyson at work as a poet for a whole decade, and, with the exception of a few snatches of fine verse in 'The Lotus Eaters' and 'A Dream of Fair Women,' he has produced nothing of any permanent interest. It is a notable record, even for a popular poet.

II

Matthew Arnold declared that Lord Tennyson's 'decisive appearance dated from 1842,' and we are now indeed arriving at the hour of this 'golden prime.' But that early period of timorous ease had for ever saved his tranquillity. The storm and stress which had buffeted all our true moderns, strewing the shores of the European literature of the nineteenth century with the splendid wrecks of barks that have run but one or two record-breaking voyages, would have sunk this fragile, fairy skiff at its first putting out from port. Three years of what Heine or Musset or Byron or Keats bore would have annihilated Tennyson at any period of his teens or twenties. When the intellectual side of the poetical movement which preceded him, and which, as we have seen, he had so far resisted with the completest success, actually came upon him, he had had time to attain to a considerable amount of robust Philistinism. By the time the later developments of his younger contemporaries had worked the revolution of Science, and were beginning to work that of Literature, Tennyson was safely in the harbour. He was understood to say that he had gone through all this in his time, just as Coleridge had, and was as ready to die for the supposititious Church of 'the Lord Jesus' as the other had been for the actual Evangelical Church of England. What, then, he was now facing was in reality nothing very formidable from the intellectual and critical side. Its danger lay in its hold on his emotions. The amount of sheer thought, of powerful and fecund ideas, in both of the early phases of the movement was slight. Byron and Shelley speak through the heart and spirit, not through the brain. The social and religious creeds of Coleridge and Wordsworth scarcely count. It was no very aggressive and convincing criticism of life and nature, of Literature, and Art, and Science, which afflicted the Christianising poet of 'In Memoriam.' He admits quite ingenuously at the end that he never really quite meant it all.

'Whatever I have said or sung, Some bitter notes my harp would give, Yea, tho' there often seem'd to live A contradiction on the tongue,

Yet Hope had never lost her youth; She did but look thro' dimmer eyes; Or Love but played with gracious lies, Because he felt so fixed in truth.'

He reveals, again and again, all his childlike, commercial egotism with a perfect simplicity of primal shamelessness. 'Does Job serve God for nought?' Let science prove him not to be a little God in his own style, prove him not to have an eternal individuality with a claim for perpetual wages' for having been an honest man—'and what matters science unto men, at least to him? He would not stay!' Oh, no; the game would not be worth the candle! He would be a fool, in such a case, not to freely 'take his pastime.' Why, the only thing that prevents him from such creditable moral courses now is the knowledge that his spiritual banking account, whether debit or credit, is an everlasting one, and has got to be worked out satisfactorily sooner or later 'to the uttermost farthing.' How could a nurse in a hospital 'bear with the sights and the loathsome smells of disease' except she had been told on unimpeachable authority that her ministrations to the patients would count just as much as if they had been to the big Banker himself? Tennyson 'wouldn't live' unless he thought that a profit and loss system like this assured us that 'our griefs were our gains.' 'If the wages of virtue,' he exclaims, 'be dust, would she have heart to endure for the life of the worm and the fly?' He has not a single idea on the subject; it is the mere primæval religious barter of the infantile savage. He knows of no justification for virtue in itself, in the happiness it affords, in the consciousness that our salvation as individuals and as a community lies demonstratively and scientifically on these lines, and on none other. How shockingly wanting in knowledge as a thinker and in self-respect as a man!

Equally shocking, alas, are the intellectual contrasts in him. At one moment he astonishes us by his insight into the natural world and the laws which govern it, an insight exceedingly rare at the time at which he wrote. Long before 'the struggle for existence and survival of the fittest' had become a commonplace with all the incoherencies of popular acceptance, Tennyson had asked:

'Are God and Nature then at strife, That Nature lends such evil dreams? So careful of the type she seems, So careless of the single life…

So careful of the type"? But no, From scarped cliff and quarried stone She cries: "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, all shall go.

Thou makest thine appeal to me: I bring to life, I bring to death: The spirit does but mean the breath: I know no more.

Leopardi never saw things more clearly. 'For nature,' says the Englishman, 'is one with rapine, a harm no preacher can heal.' Yet the next moment, like Paul, he would tell us a mystery. Once upon a time a man was raised from the dead. His name was Lazarus. He had been dead four days. Where was he? 'There lives no record of reply,' says the poet, 'which, telling what it was to die, had surely added praise to praise.' What brought about this regrettable suppressio veri? Lazarus 'revealed nothing; he told it not'—

Or something sealed The lips of that Evangelist!

Can he be serious? He provokes the smile. Does Lord Tennyson still hold to that explanation—still in December, 1892? Truly the note of insincerity and fatuity is struck so often in 'In Memoriam' that one cannot tell. To begin with, he tried to make a tenth-rate person into an ideal type that should yet remain real, and as a pedestal for this impossible figure he must needs try to give us a statement of what he took to be Christian philosophy revised and amended up to date. We have some literary remains of Arthur Hallam, and can judge of him. His friend tells us he 'had heart affluence in discursive talk from household fountains never dry'; he was the best literary critic of his time, especially of poetry; he had 'seraphic intellect and force' as a polemist; 'impassion'd logic,' and all the graces and charms of the perfected creature. His converse compelled all men, and made the weak and wicked strong and good, etc. In a word, 'he bore without abuse the grand old name of gentleman.' Such was the phoenix who proceeded from the loins of 'the judicious Hallam'! Talk like this is stupid—bête. No one who has perused the literary remains of Arthur Hallam could tolerate it for a moment. It is as bad as Mill's babble about Mrs. Taylor. As for making the poem a contribution to modern thought from the supposititiously Christian standpoint, this was obviously impossible for a man who had never given himself the trouble to seriously think at all. Tennyson had no faculty that way. We have only to consider what Browning did here to see what a terribly bad use the other made of his materials, even such as they were. He 'plays with gracious lies' right through, and, when he is tired of his amusement, falls back without a misgiving on the divine instincts which he holds in common with a hundred per cent, of the blockheads of his age and clime. But what a disgusted impatience he lays in the long run upon every earnest reader who comes to him seeing the green leaves afar off, for refreshment and repose for the teased, o'erlaboured spirit! He raises conclusion after conclusion of the most disquieting sort to the 'honest doubter,' and then, without laying one of them, or even attempting to do so, repeats his naïf premises with an air of charming conviction. Oh, it is all right! 'Though Faith and Form be sundered in the night of fear,' you can still hear the sentinels passing the cheery watchword. My friend, you are on the eve of a great victory. You have felt it; you were born for it (he tells you so in italics). Then, to crown this barefaced sophistication, he remarks with a bland impertinence that he 'trusts he has not wasted breath,' and that he has not 'fought in vain, like Paul, with beasts.' Fought with beasts? Why, he never was once fifty yards away from his comfortable easy-chair in his cosy study the whole time! 'In Memoriam' would be one of the most dishonest works ever written by a man of ability were it not for a dozen snatches of sweet and true affection which he had in his heart of hearts for his friend. There is little or none of the passion of love, the terrible splendour of desire and renunciation, which aches and flashes in the latter half of Shakespeare's sonnets. Tennyson tells the simple truth when he says of himself:

'Mine the love that will not tire, And, born of love, the vague desire That spurs an imitative will.'

No criticism on him can better his own in that phrase of 'the imitative will.' We have him there, the intellectual side of him, complete. But this is not the side on which our final judgment of him in this poem rests. It is the exactly opposite side—the emotional side. And here we now enter within the golden gates of pleasure and praise.

What charming pictures he gives us of the quiet, radiant purity of his love as it takes shape in his sorrow! A dozen of these are the property of all poetry lovers, and are not needed here as ocular proof 'Dark house whereby once more I stand' (No. vii.); 'Be near me when my light is low' (No. l.); 'When on my bed the moonlight falls' (No. lxvii.); 'Ring out, wild bells' (No. cvi). Why should I string these pearls together out of those bushels of vacant intellectual 'chaff well meant for grain'? That will be some one else's task before thirty years are gone, or, perchance, twenty.

And this note of sincerity, the true note, the characteristic note, the vital note, he attains to now at last in another department of his work—in the department of the love-poem. Passion seizes on him. In the actual results, of course, all his faults and limitations still grievously afflict him, and the first poem of power which he wrote—'Locksley Hall'—is disfigured no less as a serious piece of social criticism by the crudest enthusiasms than morally and spiritually by the vindictive meanness of the lover gloating over his mistress as she tends her drunken master and 'perishes' in her final 'self-contempt' as an orthodox materfamilias. With an amazing want of perception Lord Tennyson, half a century later, tried to paint his hero even blacker than he had already painted him, and in a sequel shows us Amy as a happy saint, and her husband as a model husband! This is very funny—far funnier than 'The Northern Cobbler,' or even our terrible young friend 'The May Queen'; but surely it was not needed. The fact remains that in 'Locksley Hall' he wrote some exceedingly fine verse, and, when he arrived at his more lucid moods, was able to compose some love-songs to a woman as perfect in their way as his love-elegiacs to his friend. Here and there 'Maud' reaches to real passion and the perfected expression of it. Her love has made his life 'a perfumed altar flame.' 'He has walked awake with Truth' for the first time in his life, and he takes us with him. And the poignant note—the tone of the agony of loss, 'deep as first love and wild with all regret'—he has won it at last. And there is more to be said. The advance he makes now is made all along the line. Compare 'Tithonus' with 'Œnone,' 'Lucretius' with 'The Palace of Art,' 'The Grandmother' and the two 'Northern Farmers' with (once more, and for the last time) that cruel 'May Queen,' 'The Sailor Boy' with 'Lady Clara Vere de Vere,' 'Flower in the Crannied Wall' with 'To J. S.' It is all the difference between the amateur and the professional, the half-hearted dilettante and the serious worker. We have at last reached the point where we have to reckon with him, where we can no longer relegate him to girls and undergraduates, but must face him and what he has done on this line and on that, and consider the claims advanced in his behalf as a representative modern poet.

III

Those claims (let it at once be noted) are not now what they were even ten years ago. Men not devoid of the saving grace of intelligence could then be found ready to contend for a place for Tennyson above all the poets of the century. They spoke of him as the supreme mouthpiece of his epoch in the same way as Milton was, as Shakespeare was, as Chaucer was. At this hour one is at least spared the trouble of wasting time on any such vain proposition. Even the veteran survivals of the Tennysonian cult of the seventies and early eighties would now be content to accept an admission of his superiority over his contemporaries, and of an equality with Wordsworth and Byron and Keats, with Coleridge and Shelley, with Gray and Burns. These at least are the claims that will be considered here, because they are still being made, and in all probability will continue to be made for some time to come.

We have seen in 'In Memoriam' some of the poet's efforts to figure as a modern in the domain of what is usually called thought. Let us have samples of his ripest criticism on other aspects. The revolution in Science worked out under the leadership of Darwin, Professor Wallace, and Mr. Herbert Spencer, of Professors Huxley and Tyndall (to give no other names), is a present fact too solidly obvious to be gainsaid. Some opinion on it is inevitable from a 'representative modern poet.' What has ours to say about it? Little enough, but that little is extremely instructive as showing how far and in what manner he has realised this fact. Sitting pensively on a rock on the seashore, the hero of 'Maud' sees a pretty sea-shell. 'What is it?' he wonders. Then he adds immediately, 'A learned man could give it a clumsy name.' And so much for learned men. A pious nurse in a hospital (none other than the lady who puts up with the sights and loathsome smells of disease in considera of a big supernal pourboire) knows a bold bad doctor who doubted that 'seeking the Lord Jesus in prayer' would 'set a broken knee.' He himself puts up with the sights and smells and the rest without any such exceptional future 'perquisites' as hers; but to the pious nurse he 'looks so coarse and so red' that, with her wonderful, sweet, womanly charitableness, she could think (admirable phrase!) 'he was one of those who would break their jests on the dead, or mangle the living dog that had loved him and fawn'd at his knee—drench'd with the hellish oorali.' And so much for men who come 'fresh from the surgery-schools of France and other lands.' A woman's-rights woman, who is also a princess and a genius ('a lovely, lordly creature,' 'fair and strong and terrible,' 'a strange poet-princess with grand imaginations,' 'the flower of womanhood,' etc.), thus again disposes off-hand of this facile subject of vivisection: