Old Familiar Faces Part 7

Dear, near and true-no truer Time himself Can prove you, tho' he make you evermore Dearer and nearer, as the rapid of life Shoots to the fall-take this and pray that he Who wrote it, honouring your sweet faith to him, May trust himself;-and after praise and scorn, As one who feels the immeasurable world, Attain the wise indifference of the wise; And after autumn past-if left to pa.s.s His autumn into seeming leafless days- Draw toward the long frost and longest night, Wearing his wisdom lightly, like the fruit Which in our winter woodland looks a flower.

Others dwell on the unique way in which those wistful blue eyes of hers and that beautiful face expressed the "tender spiritual nature" described by the poet-expressed it, indeed, more and more eloquently with the pa.s.sage of years, and the bereavements the years had brought. The present writer saw her within a few days of her death. She did not seem to him then more fragile than ordinary. For many years she whose fragile frame seemed to be kept alive by the love and sweet movements of the soul within had seemed as she lay upon her couch the same as she seemed when death was so near-intensely pale, save when a flush as slight as the pink on a wild rose told her watchful son that the subject of conversation was interesting her more than was well for her. As a matter of fact, however, Lady Tennyson was no less remarkable as an intelligence than as the central heart of love and light that illumined one of the most beautiful households of our time.

Though her special gift was no doubt music, she had, as Tennyson would say with affectionate pride, a "real insight into poetical effects"; and those who knew her best shared his opinion in this matter. Whether, had her life not been devoted so entirely to others, she would have been a noticeable artistic producer it is hard to guess. But there is no doubt that she was born to hold a high place as a conversationalist, brilliant and stimulating. Notwithstanding the jealous watchfulness of her family lest the dinner talk should draw too heavily upon her small stock of physical power, the fascination of her conversation, both as to subject-matter and manner, was so irresistible that her friends were apt to forget how fragile she really was until warned by a sign from her son or, daughter-in-law, who adored her, that the conversation should be brought to a close.

Her diary, upon which her son has drawn for certain biographical portions of his book shows how keen and how persistent was her interest in the poetry of her husband; it also shows how thorough was her insight into its principles. As a rule, diaries, professing as they do to give portraitures of eminent men, are mostly very much worse than worthless.

The points seized upon by the diarist are almost never physiognomic, and even if the diarist does give some glimpse of the character he professes to limn, the picture can only be partially true, inasmuch as it can never be toned down by other aspects of the character unseen by the diarist and unknown to him.

Very different, however, is the record kept by Lady Tennyson. As an instance of her power of selecting really luminous points for preservation in her diary, let me instance this. Many a student of the 'Idylls of the King' has been struck by a certain difference in the style between 'The Coming of Arthur' and 'The Pa.s.sing of Arthur' and the other idylls. Indeed, more than once this difference has been cited as showing Tennyson's inability to fuse the different portions of a long poem. This fact had not escaped the eye of the loving wife and critic, and two days before her death she said to her son, "He said 'The Coming of Arthur' and 'The Pa.s.sing of Arthur' are purposely simpler in style than the other idylls as dealing with the awfulness of birth and death," and wished this remark of the poet's to be put on record in the book.

It is needless to comment on the value of these few words and the light they shed upon Tennyson's method.

Those who saw Lady Tennyson in middle life and in advanced age, and were struck by that spiritual beauty of hers which no painter could ever render, will not find it difficult to imagine what she was at seventeen, when Tennyson suddenly came upon her in the "Fairy Wood," and exclaimed, "Are you an Oread or a Dryad wandering here?" And yet her beauty was only a small part of a charm that was indescribable. An important event for English literature was that meeting in the "Fairy Wood." For, from the moment of his engagement, "the current of his mind was no longer and constantly in the channel of mournful memories and melancholy forebodings," says his son. And speaking of the year, 1838, the son tells us that, on the whole, he was happy in his life. "When I wrote 'The Two Voices,'" he used to say, "I was so utterly miserable, a burden to myself and my family, that I said, 'Is life worth anything?' and now that I am old, I fear that I shall only live a year or two, for I have work still to do."

The hostile manner in which 'Maud' was received vexed him, and would, before his marriage, have deeply disturbed him. A right view of this fine poem seems to have been taken by George Brimley, an admirable critic, who in the 'Cambridge Essays,' had already pointed out with great ac.u.men many of the more subtle beauties of Tennyson.

There are few more pleasant pages in this book than those which record Tennyson's relations with another poet who was blessed in his wife-Browning. Although the two poets had previously met (notably in Paris in 1851), the intimacy between them would seem to have been cemented, if not begun, during one of Tennyson's visits to his and Browning's friends, Mr. and Mrs. Knowles at the Hollies, Clapham Common.

Here Tennyson read to Browning the 'Grail' (which the latter p.r.o.nounced to be Tennyson's "best and highest"); and here Browning came and read his own new poem 'The Ring and the Book,' when Tennyson's verdict on it was, "Full of strange vigour and remarkable in many ways, doubtful if it will ever be popular."

The record of his long intimacy with Coventry Patmore and Aubrey de Vere takes an important place in the biography, and the reminiscences of Tennyson by the latter poet form an interesting feature of the volumes.

In George Meredith's first little book Tennyson was delighted by the 'Love in a Valley,' and he had a full appreciation of the great novelist all round. With the three leading poets of a younger generation, Rossetti, William Morris, and Swinburne, he had slight acquaintance.

Here, however, is an interesting memorandum by Tennyson recording his first meeting with Swinburne:

"I may tell you, however, that young Swinburne called here the other day with a college friend of his, and we asked him to dinner, and I thought him a very modest and intelligent young fellow. Moreover I read him what you vindicated ['Maud'], but what I particularly admired in him was that he did not press upon me any verses of his own."

Of contemporary novels he seems to have been a voracious and indiscriminate reader. In the long list here given of novelists whose books he read-good, bad, and indifferent-it is curious not to find the name of Mrs. Humphry Ward. With Thackeray he was intimate; and he was in cordial relations with d.i.c.kens, Douglas Jerrold, and George Eliot. Among the poets, besides Edward Fitzgerald and Coventry Patmore, he saw much of William Allingham. Though he admired parts of '_Festus_' greatly, we do not gather from these volumes that he met the author. Dobell he saw much of at Malvern in 1846. The letter-diary from Tennyson during his stay in Cornwall with Holman Hunt, Val. Prinsep, Woolner, and Palgrave, shows how exhilarated he could be by wind and sea. The death of Lionel was a sad blow to him. 'Demeter, and other Poems,' was dedicated to Lord Dufferin, "as a tribute," says his son, "of affection and of grat.i.tude; for words would fail me to tell the unremitting kindness shown by himself and Lady Dufferin to my brother Lionel during his fatal illness."

Tennyson's critical insight could not fail to be good when exercised upon poetry. Here are one or two of his sayings about Burns, which show in what spirit he would have read Henley's recent utterances about that poet:-

"Burns did for the old songs of Scotland almost what Shakespeare had done for the English drama that preceded him."

"Read the exquisite songs of Burns. In shape each of them has the perfection of the berry, in light the radiance of the dew-drop: you forget for its sake those stupid things his serious poems."

Among the reminiscences and impressions of the poet which Lord Tennyson has appended to his second volume, it is only fair to specialize the admirable paper by F. T. Palgrave, which, long as it is, is not by one word too long. That Jowett would write wisely and well was in the nature of things. The only contribution, however, we can quote here is Froude's, for it is as brief as it is emphatic:-

"I owe to your father the first serious reflexions upon life and the nature of it which have followed me for more than fifty years. The same voice speaks to me now as I come near my own end, from beyond the bar. Of the early poems, 'Love and Death' had the deepest effect upon me. The same thought is in the last lines of the last poems which we shall ever have from him.

"Your father in my estimate, stands, and will stand far away by the side of Shakespeare above all other English Poets, with this relative superiority even to Shakespeare, that he speaks the thoughts and speaks _to_ the perplexities and misgivings of his own age.

"He was born at the fit time, before the world had grown inflated with the vanity of Progress, and there was still an atmosphere in which such a soul could grow. There will be no such others for many a long age."

"Yours gratefully, "J. A. FROUDE."

This letter is striking evidence of the influence Tennyson had upon his contemporaries. Comparisons, however, between Shakespeare and other poets can hardly be satisfactory. A kins.h.i.+p between him and any other poet can only be discovered in relation to one of the many sides of the "myriad-minded" man. Where lies Tennyson's kins.h.i.+p? Is it on the dramatic side? In a certain sense Tennyson possessed dramatic power undoubtedly; for he had a fine imagination of extraordinary vividness, and could, as in 'Rizpah,' make a character live in an imagined situation. But to write a vital play requires more than this: it requires a knowledge-partly instinctive and partly acquired-of men as well as of man, and especially of the way in which one individual acts and reacts upon another in the complex web of human life. To depict the workings of the soul of man in a given situation is one thing-to depict the impact of ego upon ego is another. When we consider that the more poetical a poet is the more oblivious we expect him to be of the machinery of social life, it is no wonder that poetical dramatists are so rare. In drama, even poetic drama, the poet must leave the "golden clime" in which he was born, must leave those "golden stars above" in order to learn this machinery, and not only learn it, but take a pleasure in learning it.

In honest admiration of Tennyson's dramatic work, where it is admirable, we yield to none, at the time when 'The Foresters' was somewhat coldly accepted by the press on account of its "lack of virility," we considered that in the cla.s.s to which it belonged, the scenic pastoral plays, it held a very worthy place. That Tennyson's admiration for Shakespeare was unbounded is evident enough.

"There was no one," says Jowett in his recollections of Tennyson, "to whom he was so absolutely devoted, no poet of whom he had a more intimate knowledge than Shakespeare. He said to me, and probably to many others, that there was one intellectual process in the world of which he could not even entertain an apprehension-that was the plays of Shakespeare. He thought that he could instinctively distinguish between the genuine and the spurious in them, _e.g._, between those parts of 'King Henry VIII.,'

which are generally admitted to be spurious, and those that are genuine.

The same thought was partly working in his mind on another occasion, when he spoke of two things, which he conceived to be beyond the intelligence of man, and it was certainly not repeated by him from any irreverence; the one, the intellectual genius of Shakespeare-the other, the religious genius of Jesus Christ."

And in the pathetic account of Tennyson's last moments we find it recorded that on the Tuesday before the Wednesday on which he died, he called out, "Where is my Shakespeare? I must have my Shakespeare"; and again on the day of his death, when the breath was pa.s.sing out of his body, he asked for his Shakespeare. All this, however, makes it the more remarkable that of poets Shakespeare had the least influence upon Tennyson's art. There was a fundamental unlikeness between the genius of the two men. The only point in common between them is that each in his own way captivated the suffrages both of the many and of the fit though few, notwithstanding the fact that their methods of dramatic approach in their plays are absolutely and fundamentally different. Even their very methods of writing verse are entirely different. Tennyson's blank verse seems at its best to combine the beauties of the Miltonic and the Wordsworthian line; while nothing is so rare in his work as a Shakespearean line. Now and then such a line as

Authority forgets a dying king

turns up, but very rarely. We agree with all Professor Jebb says in praise of Tennyson's blank verse.

"He has known," says he, "how to modulate it to every theme, and to elicit a music appropriate to each; attuning it in turn to a tender and homely grace, as in 'The Gardener's Daughter '; to the severe and ideal majesty of the antique, as in 't.i.thonus'; to meditative thought, as in 'The Ancient Sage,' or 'Akbar's Dream'; to pathetic or tragic tales of contemporary life, as in 'Aylmer's Field,' or 'Enoch Arden'; or to sustained romance narrative, as in the 'Idylls.' No English poet has used blank verse with such flexible variety, or drawn from it so large a compa.s.s of tones; nor has any maintained it so equably on a high level of excellence."

But we fail to see where he touched Shakespeare on the dramatic side of Shakespeare's immense genius.

Tennyson had the yearning common to all English poets to write Shakespearean plays, and the filial piety with which his son tries to uphold his father's claims as a dramatist is beautiful; indeed, it is pathetic. But the greatest injustice that can be done to a great poet is to claim for him honours that do not belong to him. In his own line Tennyson is supreme, and this book makes it necessary to ask once more what that line is. Shakespeare's stupendous fame has for centuries been the candle into which all the various coloured wings of later days have flown with more or less of disaster. Though much was said in praise of 'Harold' by one of the most accomplished critics and scholars of our time, Dr. Jebb, {168} the play could not keep the stage, nor does it live as a drama as any one of Tennyson's lyrics can be said to live.

'Becket,' to be sure, was a success on the stage. A letter to Tennyson in 1884 from so competent a student of Shakespeare as Sir Henry Irving declares that 'Becket' is a finer play than 'King John.' Still, the 'Morte d'Arthur,' 'The Lotos-Eaters,' 'The Gardener's Daughter,' outweigh the five-act tragedy in the world of literary art. Of acted drama Tennyson knew nothing at all. To him, evidently, the word _act_ in a printed play meant _chapter_; the word _scene_ meant _section_. In his early days he had gone occasionally to see a play, and in 1875 he went to see Irving in Hamlet and liked him better than Macready, whom he had seen in the part. Still later he went to see Lady Archibald Campbell act when 'Becket' was given "among the glades of oak and fern in the Canizzaro Wood at Wimbledon." But handicapped as he was by ignorance of drama as a stage product how could he write Shakespearean plays?

But let us for a moment consider the difference between the two men as poets. It is hard to imagine the master-dramatist of the world-it is hard to imagine the poet who, by setting his foot upon allegory, saved our poetry from drying up after the invasion of gongorism, euphuism, and allegory-it is, we say, hard to imagine Shakespeare, if he had conceived and written such lovely episodes as those of the 'Idylls of the King,' so full of concrete pictures, setting about to turn his flesh-and-blood characters into symbolic abstractions. There is in these volumes a curious doc.u.ment, a memorandum of Tennyson's presented to Mr. Knowles at Aldworth in 1869, in which an elaborate scheme for turning into abstract ideas the characters of the Arthurian story is sketched:-

K.A. Religious Faith.

King Arthur's three Guineveres.

The Lady of the Lake.

Two Guineveres, ye first prim Christianity. 2d Roman Catholicism: ye first is put away and dwells apart, 2d Guinevere flies. Arthur takes to the first again, but finds her changed by lapse of Time.

Modred, the sceptical understanding. He pulls Guinevere, Arthur's latest wife, from the throne.

Merlin Emrys, the Enchanter. Science. Marries his daughter to Modred.

Excalibur, War.

The Sea, the people / The Saxons, the people } the S. are a sea-people and it is theirs and a type of them.

The Round Table: liberal inst.i.tutions.

Battle of Camlan.

2d Guinevere with the enchanted book and cup.

And Mr. Knowles in a letter to the biographer says:-

"He encouraged me to write a short paper, in the form of a letter to _The Spectator_, on the inner meaning of the whole poem, which I did, simply upon the lines he himself indicated. He often said, however, that an allegory should never be pressed too far." Are all the lovely pa.s.sages of human pa.s.sion and human pathos in these 'Idylls' allegorical-that is to say-make-believe? The reason why allegorical poetry is always second-rate, even at its best, is that it flatters the reader's intellect at the expense of his heart. Fancy "the allegorical intent" behind the parting of Hector and Andromache, and behind the death of Desdemona!

Thank Heaven, however, Tennyson's allegorical intent was a destructive afterthought. For, says the biographer, "the allegorical drift here marked out was fundamentally changed in the later schemes in the 'Idylls.'" According to that delicate critic, Canon Ainger, there is a symbolical intent underlying 'The Lady of Shalott':-

"The new-born love for something, for some one in the wide world from whom she has been so long secluded, takes her out of the region of shadows into that of realities."

But what concerns us here is the fact that when Shakespeare wrote, although he yielded too much now and then to the pa.s.sion for gongorism and euphuism which had spread all over Europe, it was against the nature of his genius to be influenced by the contemporary pa.s.sion for allegory.

That he had a natural dislike of allegorical treatment of a subject is evident, not only in his plays, but in his sonnets. At a time when the sonnet was treated as the special vehicle for allegory, Shakespeare's sonnets were the direct outcome of emotion of the most intimate and personal kind-a fact which at once destroys the ignorant drivel about the Baconian authors.h.i.+p of Shakespeare's plays, for what Bacon had was fancy, not imagination, and Fancy is the mother of Allegory, Imagination is the mother of Drama. The moment that Bacon essayed imaginative work, he pa.s.sed into allegory, as we see in the 'New Atlantis.'