Literary studies by Joseph Jacobs/Tennyson
ALFRED TENNYSON
October 6, 1892
HE greatest poetic artist of the English-speaking race has passed away. There need be no sadness of farewell at such a close to such a career. To have passed a long life in undivided devotion to the noblest of the arts, to have grown in mastery of it almost to the end, to have become in very deed the voice of the nation he loved so well: this has been surely the supreme lot. It is characteristic that almost the only trouble of his later years was the intrusive reverence of his fellow-countrymen, a burden that might have been borne with somewhat more of patience and geniality. But there was a touch of the aristocrat about Tennyson that chimed in well with the dignity of his art, and completes the picture of the vates sacer, the consecrated voice of a mighty people, brooding in self-chosen isolation upon the things of highest import.
That is not the figure which Tennyson presents on his first appearance in the arena where he was to outstrip all rivals. His Keep-sake period lasted long. Looking back, we can indeed discern in the volume of 1842—in the Ulysses, in the Morte d'Arthur, in The Two Voices the promise of nearly all that was to come. But these were imbedded in much that was pretty but petty, Wordsworthian idylls too long drawn out, Lords of Burleigh and Ladies Clare, that half justified the early scoffers, Wilson and the rest. Even the melody, though sweet and clear, was thin and at times tinkling. Grace, not force or dignity, was the characteristic up to and including The Princess of 1847, the most graceful poem of such length in the language. The Rape of the Lock, the only other poem in English literature that can be compared with it, is more witty than graceful.
Yet all the while the master was growing in command over his instrument. Even in the earlier volumes of 1830 and 1832 there were premonitions of the almost flawless workmanship in words which was to be the cachet of Tennyson's style. They say that men's minds ossify after forty. Certainly there comes to languages growing old a stage of ossification, when new collocations of words become increasingly difficult and the conventional epithet is stereotyped and polarised. In the history of English style, in prose indirectly as directly in poetry, that stage of ossification was arrested by Tennyson. He is the great Master of the Epithet in our language. He revived old words like 'marish,' he invented new ones like 'Æonian.' He seems to have taken infinite care over the filing of his phrases. A careful study of the variae lectiones of his successive editions is a liberal education in poetic form, and there was probably much greater modification before anything of his appeared in print at all. The earlier edition of the celebrated Charge of the Light Brigade is of great interest in this connection.
It is for this reason that the poet with whom he is to be affiliated in the history of English poetry, regarded simply as an art, is, of all poets in the world, Pope. It was Pope's aim, he himself avowed, to make English poetry correct in form. It was Tennyson's function to bring back to English verse that care for form which had disappeared from it when he began to write. During his formative period, the titular head of English poetry was Robert Southey, who published amorphous masses which he called poems, while Wordsworth was acting up to a theory of poetry which implied that form was of no consequence. Tennyson rescued English poetry from these tendencies. No wonder that his influence has been the dominant one among all but a few. As in the eighteenth century every poetaster aped Pope, so in the nineteenth every English minor poet has followed in the wake of Tennyson.
There can be little doubt that this loving care for form was due to his University education on the old Trinity lines. Tennyson is of the classical order of poets in a double sense. There are always poets learned in their art who love to reproduce and recall the best work of their predecessors in their own or in the classical languages: Milton and Gray are of this class. There are poets, again, who preserve in their lines the reserve, the dignity, the καιρός of the great poets of antiquity, even though they may not be intimately acquainted with them: Collins and Keats are classical in this sense. Tennyson was classical in both ways: he has antique reserve, he is full of reminiscences. It is this fact that has made the comparison to Virgil or to Theocritus so natural, yet so misleading. The reference to Theocritus might pass for one side of his work, and that the least important. But Tennyson had no such theme as the Majestas Romae of the great Mantuan before him: no national-religious sanction to his subject, no haunting sense of a world-theme in his words.
There is, indeed, in Tennyson's first period, which we are at present considering, no haunting sense of anything. There is none of the magic, the mystical charm of Coleridge or of Rossetti in his lines. They are as clear cut as crystal, and as cold. One feels no rush of impetuous emotion behind the words, no uncontrollable outburst of imaginative force. Yet it is this that gives us the sense of a great poet, a vision of unknown vistas of the poet-soul flashing through the verse. Tennyson in his first period knows exactly what he wants to say, and says it in the best way. This is the side of him that has made him popular, and contrasts so favourably with the obscurity and incoherence of many of his compeers. Yet it has its weakness in the want of depth, want of soul-tone in his earlier work.
Akin to this clear-cut form was the accuracy and minuteness of observation which made him so successful a painter of domesticated Nature. His achievements in this direction may have been over-estimated. He is not immaculate; the songster nightingale is always with him, the female, not the male, as it is in Nature: he was probably misled by the myth of Philomela. But the minuteness and independence of his powers of observation are acknowledged on all hands, and go naturally with the clear vision of the artist in words. Yet here again the result is to impair the true poetic effect, except of course in the purely landscape poems, where this power gave him an advantage over every predecessor in that genre of poetry. Nature in romantic or passionate poetry must be used as a 'pathetic fallacy'—to use Mr. Ruskin's phrase—in order to give the Stimmung to the emotions the poet wishes to arouse. Minute attention to detail diverts the emotion, and at best produces only a decorative effect.
The danger was that this mastery of form and clearness of vision would lead to mere daintiness, might even result in the sugared elegance of vers de société. Tennyson was saved from this by the great chastening sorrow of his life. While he was training himself as a poetic artist with metrical experiments and coinages of five-word phrases enshrining his observations of Nature, he was also elaborating his masterpiece, In Memoriam. For twice the Horatian period he kept this series of poem-sequences by him, adding, revising, inserting, and rejecting, till the whole grew to a moving series of pictures of a soul's development, from the first overwhelming stroke till the final reconciliation of sorrow and hope. Injustice is done to Tennyson in thinking of the In Memoriam as one outburst written in somewhat cold blood immediately after Hallam's death. He is careful to mark the stages of his grief. In one case we can even date a canto at least thirteen years later than the death of Arthur Hallam. When the poet speaks of science charming her secret from the latest moon, there is little doubt he is referring to the discovery of Neptune in 1846; yet this occurs in one of the earlier sections of the poem. The dangers involved in a philosophical poem were overcome by putting the problem in a concrete shape. The theology of the poem was from Rugby: it is the voice of the Broad Church clear, yet somewhat thin, and wanting in the higher imagination. The curious anticipations of Darwinism which occur so frequently in it were due to the interest excited by Chambers's Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, which appeared in 1844, and enable us to see how late these sections of the poem were added. The felicities of phrase with which it abounds cause it to rank as one of the best known poems in the language, and the one with which the name of Tennyson will be indissolubly connected. Here, again, the comparison with Pope is justified. The only other long philosophical poem in the language of any real literary merit is his Essay on Man.
Maud is even a greater surprise when compared with the Tennyson of the first period. There is no lack here of impetuous emotion, no cold decorative work. There is even a touch of hysteria in the highly wrought passion. The poet, under Carlyle's influence, broke here with Manchesterthum: the sword is the voice of God, as a later poet has put it. There was in Maud an indication of emotional power, as in In Memoriam there was an unexpected proof of intellectual power, in one who had hitherto seemed only the idle singer of an empty day. To the poet of In Memoriam and of Maud there seemed no height too high, no poetic exploit too ambitious.
Unhappily, the poet's ambition turned for nearly a quarter of a century into spheres of poetic art where his powers, great as they were, were inadequate. He was not an epic poet, he was not a dramatic poet; yet he devoted his forces at their highest capacity to epic, to drama. An epic is the presentation of a national myth regarded as sacred: the Paradise Lost answers to this description, the Idylls of the King do not. Arthur has never been a national hero: he is mainly the outcome of a long series of literary creation; the Idylls could at best claim only to be a literary epic, not a national one. But the temper required for the literary epic is the romantic, not the classical spirit. There must be something of the Viking delight in battle, a tone of χάρμη, not to mention a certain sensuous glory, surrounding the passion of the epic. Such ideals are different from the Rugby ones, which Tennyson represents in literature. Attempts have been made to defend the Idylls from the lack of epic interest by claiming them as an allegory of the struggle of man's soul through life. But the defence is really a verdict against the poet. The medium that carries the allegory must be of interest on its own account, as in the Faerie Queene, Pilgrim's Progress, Faust, or Dr. Jekyll, or else where is the advantage of the allegorical mode of treatment?
It is scarcely denied that Tennyson transformed the tone of his originals, of the Mabinogion and the Morte d'Arthur. The unworthy gibe that the Morte d'Arthur of Tennyson was a Morte d'Albert was the more unfair, as the Morte d'Arthur is the least unsuccessful of the series, and departs least from the original. But the whole conception of Guinevere, and still more of Vivien, was that of the nineteenth-century English gentleman, and something in the spirit of Mr. Podsnap. The control of passion, which is so characteristic a part of the Rugby ideal, has its noble side, but it has a narrowing effect on the artist when dealing with passionate subjects. Along with it goes a want of humour, conspicuous alike in Tennyson and in Wordsworth. The Northern Farmer is almost the sole exception to the high seriousness of his work. The isolation of the poet must have contributed to this defect: one cannot keep one's-self in cotton wool with impunity.
The epic period, 1860-1872, was succeeded by a dramatic decade even more damaging for his reputation. It is not merely that the dramas were unsuited for the stage; their fatal defect was that they were not dramatic. There is more dramatic force, for example, in the closing lines of Lucretius than in the whole of the dramas put together. It is useless to note that the character of Henry II., or of Mary, is according to the Records: dramas are not histories. Tennyson may have conceived his characters aright according to Stubbs or to Froude; he has not presented them dramatically. Here, again, as in the epic series, one felt the absence of the creative rush, the sense of a personality behind the artistic work, and greater than it. The great poet is himself greater than his work; the sense of easy mastery of their materials is given by men like Shakespeare or Homer. Tennyson's epic and dramatic studies leave a sense of the poet's struggle with an uncongenial task. Even the poet's mastery of form had declined. There are indeed many passages in the Idylls of the King, especially in The Passing of Arthur and the Guinevere, which, by their mere verbal beauty, redeem the poems from insignificance. There are scarcely any in the dramas—apart from the lyrical interludes—which are either worthy of their setting or worthy of being taken out of their setting.
I can well remember the disastrous effect the epic and dramatic periods had on Tennyson's reputation during the 'seventies.' We that were interested in the future of English letters had lost all hope in Tennyson: our eyes were turned to Rossetti and Mr. Swinburne. It became the fashion to think and speak slightingly of the great master, who was all the while maturing to a final creative outburst which was to raise him far above any contemporary, far above most of his predecessors in English song, except the two greatest names of all. The fifth act of the drama of Tennyson's poetic career fulfils all, and more than all, the promise of the earlier ones.
Since Sophocles there has been nothing in all literature like that St. Martin's summer of Tennyson's muse. The old age of Goethe, which seems at first sight a parallel, was devoted to science; the vital portions of the second part of Faust were written years before they were published. The vigour and virility of the volume of Ballads, the Teiresias volume, the New Locksley Hall, and the Demeter volume were astounding: Rizpah, Vastness, the Ballad of the Revenge, Teiresias, to mention some of the more striking, were achievements of the first order in poetic force. There was no want of the rush of inspiration behind the verse; there was rugged vigour, sublime incoherence. The metrical forms could no longer bear the fulness of the poetic fervour. There was no over-niceness of precision; even the metre had grown less smooth, more Michalangelesque. It was as if the frost of eld was sending spikes of ice across the surface of the stream of verse. Thus, in the Crossing of the Bar, which was so mercilessly reiterated immediately after the poet's death, the third line of each stanza is wanting in the old smoothness and ring; yet it is the more effective for that. The rhythm is more complex, the harmony richer. This was the more needed, as Tennyson was never very rich in rhymes, the other expedient for giving mellowness to English verse. It was perhaps from a sense of this defect that he resorted so frequently and with such effect to alliteration.
It is in the Tennyson of these later days that we recognise the Master—the great poet-soul looming behind the poem, and greater than it. He rises at times to an almost prophetic strain. He had always been English of the English; if this had given him some narrowness of vision and sympathy, it gave him in later years the intensity which seems impossible without some narrowness. He had revived for us the half-forgotten sentiment of patriotism. Even throughout the pseudo-cosmopolitanism of the Manchester period of recent history he was always for England first. 'Love thou thy land!' was his refrain throughout, and he set the example himself. He has been the one Laureate that was really the nation's voice. If his utterances as Laureate—except perhaps the Wellington Ode—do not take a foremost place among his compositions, that is simply because the English nation during his laureateship has been happy in having no dramatic episodes in its history. You cannot be strikingly effective in dealing with a slow and unconscious development.
It cannot be said of Tennyson that he has been a great spiritual force in the national development of the last half-century. The Princess may have aided the movement for the higher education of women, though it is in essence a protest against it. In Memoriam has liberalised theology, and been to the Broad Church movement what The Christian Year has been to the High Church. But where is the Broad Church now? Tennyson was, on the whole, adverse to evolution, which has been almost an instinct in English speculation for the last quarter of a century. So far as he was the voice of his age in speculative matters, he only represented the thought of the 'sixties.' Maud may have helped to free England from the shackles of Manchesterthum. His later incursions into polemics, In the Children's Hospital and the unfortunate Promise of May, were best forgotten. Direct didacticism is likely at all times to lead to priggishness. The teaching of the true poet is indirect—a sort of induction of the poetic temper and attitude, far more subtle and penetrating in its effects than all your direct teaching. The pictures of still and cleanly English life in the earlier idylls, of sturdy heroism in the ballads, even the somewhat namby-pamby chivalry of the epical Idylls—these were the teachings of Tennyson, so far as he was a teacher. It is noteworthy that, in almost all these aspects, he was carrying on the tradition of his predecessor on the poetic throne.
There were so many Tennysons that one would never have done in attempting to deal with all sides of his multifarious poetic activity. But throughout the five acts of his poetic life there is one common element that binds them into an organic unity. His lyrics were as sweet last as first. They run through and connect together, like a string of pearls, all his poetic phases, even his bronze and iron periods. They give unity to The Princess; they relieve the heaviness of the dramas. Dainty and exquisite in form, they have, besides that haunting charm, that imaginative atmosphere which is too often wanting in Tennyson's other work. Their melody is almost unsurpassed in our language, and they have received the homage of musicians in frequent settings. Yet I remember George Eliot saying to me, that, exquisite as they are, they are seldom suitable for singing, especially when compared with the Elizabethan lyrics which trill forth as naturally as from a bird. The collocations of consonants in Tennyson's lyrics often impede voice production. It is easy to explain the difference. The Elizabethans were writing for a nation of singers; Tennyson was writing for a people with whom singing is a lost art.
It was his lyrics that made him the popular poet he undoubtedly was. He was emphatically, for the Victorian era, the man that sang the nation's songs. If these were at times wanting in the finer harmonies and the more complex rhythms, that was no bar to their popularity—it was rather a condition of it. The critical problem of Tennyson's art, we have been told, is his simultaneous acceptance by mob and by dilettanti. The solution of the problem is a tolerably obvious one: he appealed to these different classes with different phases of his art. He could use the simplicity, even the banality, of Longfellow,, and he could also wield the wand of Coleridge, or of Rossetti. There were so many Tennysons.
Of Tennyson the man the public know nothing; it was his dignified wish to live his life apart. The glimpses we catch of him reveal something akin to his own bluff English squires, tempered by even more than the usual share of poetic sensitiveness. This aloofness need only be here considered in reference to its consequences on his art. This cannot but have suffered from want of contact with the larger life, which made him impossible as a dramatist. But it prepared the way for the Seerhood of the closing period, and, above all, enabled him to live his life solely devoted to his glorious art.
No English poet impresses one with such a sense of continuous improvement in the technique of his vocation. At first the echoes resound: a phrase of Keats, a sentiment of Wordsworth, a rhythm of Byron, a lilt of Shelley or of Coleridge, experiments in metrical quantity—everywhere we find the poet testing all things poetical, and holding fast that which was good. Soon the individual accent comes, in the Palace of Art, in the Lotus Eaters, in The Epic, and the music strengthens and deepens till the last. No English poet but Milton shows so steady an advance in his art from the beginning of his career till its close. Nor has Milton the same wide command of all the keys. Tennyson is undoubtedly the greatest poetic artist of England, and he will thus remain at once the people's poet and the poets' poet of these isles.
It is no world-poet that England now is mourning with commingled pride and grief. No world-pain throbs through his lines. No world-problem finds in him expression or solution. The sweet domesticities, the manly and refined ideals of English life in the middle period of the nineteenth century—Tennyson was the fluted voice of these. To these he has given immortality while he has gained immortality from them. For us he has helped to express the English ideals which are destined to be an abiding influence in the national life. He spoke not to the world at large: he spoke only to his beloved England. He was, and is, our own Tennyson.