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Title: Tennyson Author: G. K. Chesterton and Dr. Richard Garnett * A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook * eBook No.: 1300301h.html Language: English Date first posted: Jan 2013 Most recent update: Jan 2013 This eBook was produced by: Colin Choat and Roy Glashan Project Gutenberg of Australia eBooks are created from printed editions which are in the public domain in Australia, unless a copyright notice is included. We do NOT keep any eBooks in compliance with a particular paper edition. Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing this file. This eBook is made available at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg of Australia License which may be viewed online at http://gutenberg.net.au/licence.html To contact Project Gutenberg of Australia go to http://gutenberg.net.auGO TO Project Gutenberg Australia HOME PAGE
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Above all, he exhibited his abstract love of the beautiful in one most
personal and characteristic fact. He was never so successful or so triumphant
as when he was describing not Nature, but art. He could describe a statue as
Shelley could describe a cloud. He was at his very best in describing
buildings, in their blending of aspiration and exactitude.
He found to perfection the harmony between the rhythmic recurrences of
poetry and the rhythmic recurrences of architecture. His description, for
example, of the Palace of Art is a thing entirely victorious and unique. The
whole edifice, as described, rises as lightly as a lyric, it is full of the
surge of the hunger for beauty; and yet a man might almost build upon the
description as upon the plans of an architect or the instructions of a
speculative builder. Such a lover of beauty was Tennyson, a lover of beauty
most especially where it is most to be found, in the works of man. He loved
beauty in its completeness, as we find it in art, not in its more glorious
incompleteness as we find it in Nature.
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There is, perhaps, more loveliness in Nature than in art, but there are
not so many lovely things. The loveliness is broken to pieces and scattered:
the almond tree in blossom will have a mob of nameless insects at its root,
and the most perfect cell in the great forest-house is likely enough to smell
like a sewer. Tennyson loved beauty more in its collected form in art,
poetry, and sculpture; like his own "Lady of Shalott," it was his office to
look rather at the mirror than at the object. He was an artist, as it were,
at two removes: he was a splendid imitator of the splendid imitations. It is
true that his natural history was exquisitely exact, but natural history and
natural religion are things that can be, under certain circumstances, more
unnatural than anything in the world.
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In reading Tennyson's natural descriptions we never seem to be in physical
contact with the earth. We learn nothing of the coarse good-temper and rank
energy of life. We see the whole scene accurately, but we see it through
glass. In Tennyson's works we see Nature indeed, and hear Nature, but we do
not smell it. But this poet of beauty and a certain magnificent idleness
lived at a time when all men had to wrestle and decide. It is not easy for
any person who lives in our time, when the dust has settled and the spiritual
perspective has been restored, to realise what the entrance of the idea of
evolution meant for the men of those days. To us it is a discovery of another
link in a chain which, however far we follow it, still stretches back into a
divine mystery.
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To many of the men of that time it would appear from their writings that
it was the heart-breaking and desolating discovery of the end and origin of
the chain. To them had happened the most black and hopeless catastrophe
conceivable to human nature; they had found a logical explanation of all
things. To them it seemed that an Ape had suddenly risen to gigantic stature
and destroyed the seven heavens. It is difficult, no doubt, for us in
somewhat subtler days to understand how anybody could suppose that the origin
of species had anything to do with the origin of being. To us it appears that
to tell a man who asks who made his mind that evolution made it, is like
telling a man who asks who rolled a cab-wheel over his leg that revolution
rolled it.
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To state the process is scarcely to state the agent. But the position of
those who regarded the opening of the "Descent of Man" as the opening of one
of the seals of the last days, is a great deal sounder than people have
generally allowed.
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It has been constantly supposed that they were angry with Darwinism
because it appeared to do something or other to the Book of Genesis; but this
was a pretext or a fancy. They fundamentally rebelled against Darwinism, not
because they had a fear that it would affect Scripture, but because they had
a fear, not altogether unreasonable or ill-founded, that it would affect
morality. Man had been engaged, through innumerable ages, in a struggle with
sin.
The evil within him was as strong as he could cope with—it was as
powerful as a cannonade and as enchanting as a song. But in this struggle he
had always had Nature on his side. He might be polluted and agonised, but the
flowers were innocent and the hills were strong. All the armoury of life, the
spears of the pinewood and the batteries of the lightning, went into battle
beside him. Tennyson lived in the hour when, to all mortal appearance, the
whole of the physical world deserted to the devil.
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The universe, governed by violence and death, left man to fight alone,
with a handful of myths and memories. Men had now to wander in polluted
fields and lift up their eyes to abominable hills. They had to arm themselves
against the cruelty of flowers and the crimes of the grass.
The first honour, surely, is to those who did not faint in the face of
that confounding cosmic betrayal; to those who sought and found a new
vantage-ground for the army of Virtue. Of these was Tennyson, and it is
surely the more to his honour, since he was the idle lover of beauty of whom
we have spoken. He felt that the time called him to be an interpreter.
Perhaps he might even have been something more of a poet if he had not sought
to be something more than a poet. He might have written a more perfect
Arthurian epic if his heart had been as much buried in prehistoric sepulchres
as the heart of Mr. W. B. Yeats. He might have made more of such poems as
"The Golden Year" if his mind had been as clean of metaphysics and as full of
a poetic rusticity as the mind of William Morris. He might have been a
greater poet if he had been less a man of his dubious and rambling age. But
there are some things that are greater than greatness; there are some things
that no man with blood in his body would sell for the throne of Dante, and
one of them is to fire the feeblest shot in a war that really awaits
decision, or carry the meanest musket in an army that is really marching by.
Tennyson may even have forfeited immortality: but he and the men of his age
were more than immortal; they were alive.
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Tennyson had not a special talent for being a philosophic poet, but he had
a special vocation for being a philosophic poet. This may seem a
contradiction, but it is only because all the Latin or Greek words we use
tend endlessly to lose their meaning.
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A vocation is supposed to mean merely a taste or faculty, just as economy
is held to mean merely the act of saving. Economy means the management of a
house or community. If a man starves his best horse, or causes his best
workman to strike for more pay, he is not merely unwise, he is uneconomical.
So it is with a vocation. If this country were suddenly invaded by some huge
alien and conquering population, we should all be called to become soldiers.
We should not think in that time that we were sacrificing our unfinished work
on Cattle-Feeding or our hobby of fretwork, our brilliant career at the Bar
or our taste for painting in water-colours. We should all have a call to
arms. We should, however, by no means agree that we all had a vocation for
arms. Yet a vocation is only the Latin for a call.
In a celebrated passage in "Maud," Tennyson praised the moral effects of
war, and declared that some great conflict might call out the greatness even
of the pacific swindlers and sweaters whom he saw around him in the
Commercial age. He dreamed, he said, that if—
...The battle-bolt sang from the three-decker out on the
foam,
Many a smooth-faced, snub-nosed rogue would leap from his counter or
till,
And strike, were it but with his cheating yard-wand, home.
Tennyson lived in the time of a conflict more crucial and frightful than
any European struggle, the conflict between the apparent artificiality of
morals and the apparent immorality of science. A ship more symbolic and
menacing than any foreign three-decker hove in sight in that time—the
great, gory pirate-ship of Nature, challenging all the civilisations of the
world. And his supreme honour is this, that he behaved like his own imaginary
snub-nosed rogue.
His honour is that in that hour he despised the flowers and embroideries
of Keats as the counter-jumper might despise his tapes and cottons. He was by
nature a hedonistic and pastoral poet, but he leapt from his poetic counter
and till and struck, were it but with his gimcrack mandolin, home.
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Tennyson's influence on poetry may, for a time, be modified. This is the
fate of every man who throws himself into his own age, catches the echo of
its temporary phrases, is kept busy in battling with its temporary delusions.
There are many men whom history has for a time forgotten to whom it owes more
than it could count. But if Tennyson is extinguished it will be with the most
glorious extinction. There are two ways in which a man may
vanish—through being thoroughly conquered or through being thoroughly
the Conqueror. In the main the great Broad Church philosophy which Tennyson
uttered has been adopted by every one. This will make against his fame. For a
man may vanish as Chaos vanished in the face of creation, or he may vanish as
God vanished in filling all things with that created life.
G. K. Chesterton.
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IT is easy to exaggerate, and equally easy to underrate, the
influence of Tennyson on his age as an intellectual force. It will be
exaggerated if we regard him as a great original mind, a proclaimer or
revealer of novel truth. It will be underrated if we overlook the great part
reserved for him who reveals, not new truth to the age, but the age to
itself, by presenting it with a miniature of its own highest, and frequently
unconscious, tendencies and aspirations. Not Dryden or Pope were more
intimately associated with their respective ages than Tennyson with that
brilliant period to which we now look back as the age of Victoria. His figure
cannot, indeed, be so dominant as theirs.
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The Victorian era was far more affluent in literary genius than the
periods of Dryden and Pope; and Tennyson appears as but one of a splendid
group, some of whom surpass him in native force of mind and intellectual
endowment. But when we measure these illustrious men with the spirit of their
age, we perceive that—with the exception of Dickens, who paints the
manners rather than the mind of the time, and Macaulay, who reproduces its
average but not its higher mood—there is something as it were sectarian
in them which prevents their being accepted as representatives of their epoch
in the fullest sense.
In some instances, such as Carlyle and Browning and Thackeray, the cause
may be an exceptional originality verging upon eccentricity; in others, like
George Eliot, it may be allegiance to some particular scheme of thought; in
others, like Ruskin and Matthew Arnold, exclusive devotion to some particular
mission. In Tennyson, and in him alone, we find the man who cannot be
identified with any one of the many tendencies of the age, but has affinities
with all. Ask for the composition which of all contemporary compositions
bears the Victorian stamp most unmistakably, which tells us most respecting
the age's thoughts respecting itself, and there will be little hesitation in
naming "Locksley Hall."
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Tennyson returns to his times what he has received from them, but in an
exquisitely embellished and purified condition; he is the mirror in which the
age contemplates all that is best in itself. Matthew Arnold would perhaps not
have been wrong in declining to recognise Tennyson as﹃a great and powerful
spirit﹄if "power" had been the indispensable condition of "greatness"; but
he forgot that the receptive poet may be as potent as the creative. His cavil
might with equal propriety have been aimed at Virgil. In truth, Tennyson's
fame rests upon a securer basis than that of some greater poets, for
acquaintance with him will always be indispensable to the history of thought
and culture in England.
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What George Eliot and Anthony Trollope are for the manners of the period,
he is for its mind: all the ideas which in his day chiefly moved the elect
spirits of English society are to be found in him, clothed in the most
exquisite language, and embodied in the most consummate form. That they did
not originate with him is of no consequence whatever. We cannot consider him,
regarded merely as a poet, as quite upon the level of his great immediate
predecessors; but the total disappearance of any of these, except Wordsworth,
would leave a less painful blank in our intellectual history than the
disappearance of Tennyson.
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Beginning, even in his crudest attempts, with a manner distinctly his own,
he attained a style which could be mistaken for that of no predecessor
(though most curiously anticipated by a few blank-verse lines of William
Blake), and which no imitator has been able to rival. What is most truly
remarkable is that while much of his poetry is perhaps the most artificial in
construction of any in our language, and much again wears the aspect of
bird-like spontaneity, these contrasted manners evidently proceed from the
same writer, and no one would think of ascribing them to different hands. As
a master of blank verse Tennyson, though perhaps not fully attaining the
sweetness of Coleridge or the occasional grandeur of Wordsworth and Shelley,
is upon the whole the third in our language after Shakespeare and Milton,
and, unlike Shakespeare and Milton, he has made it difficult for his
successors to write blank verse after him.
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Tennyson is essentially a composite poet. Dryden's famous verses, grand in
expression, but questionable in their application to Milton, are perfectly
applicable to him; save that, in making him, Nature did not combine two
poets, but many.
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This is a common phenomenon at the close of a great epoch; it is almost
peculiar to Tennyson's age that it should then have heralded the appearance
of a new era; and that, simultaneously with the inheritor of the past,
perhaps the most original and self-sufficing of all poets should have
appeared in the person of Robert Browning. A comparison between these
illustrious writers would lead us too far; we have already implied that
Tennyson occupies the more conspicuous place in literary history on account
of his representative character.
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The first important recognition of Tennyson's genius came from Stuart
Mill, who, partly perhaps under the guidance of Mrs. Taylor, evinced about
1835 a remarkable insight into Shelley and Browning as well as Tennyson. In
the course of his observations he declared that all that Tennyson needed to
be a great poet was a system of philosophy, to which Time would certainly
conduct him.
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If he only meant that Tennyson needed﹃the years that bring the
philosophic mind,﹄the observation was entirely just; if he expected the poet
either to evolve a system of philosophy for himself or to fall under the sway
of some great thinker, he was mistaken.
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Had Tennyson done either he might have been a very great and very
interesting poet; but he could not have been the poet of his age: for the
temper of the time, when it was not violently partisan, was liberally
eclectic. There was no one great leading idea, such as that of evolution in
the last quarter of last century, so ample and so characteristic of the age
that a poet might become its disciple without yielding to party what was
meant for mankind.
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Two chief currents of thought there were; but they were antagonistic, even
though Mr. Gladstone has proved that a very exceptional mind might find room
for both. Nothing was more characteristic of the age than the reaction
towards mediaeval ideas, headed by Newman, except the rival and seemingly
incompatible gospel of "the railway and the steamship" and all their
corollaries.
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He is not, however, like Gladstone, alternately a mediaeval and a modern
man; but he uses mediaeval sentiment with exquisite judgment to mellow what
may appear harsh or crude in the new ideas of political reform, diffusion of
education, mechanical invention, free trade, and colonial expansion.
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The Victorian, in fact, finds himself nearly in the position of the
Elizabethan, who also had a future and a past; and, except in his own, there
is no age in which Tennyson would have felt himself more at home than in the
age of Elizabeth. He does, indeed, in "Maud" react very vigorously against
certain tendencies of the age which he disliked; but this is not in the
interest of the mediaeval or any other order of ideas incompatible with the
fullest development of the nineteenth century. If the utterance here appears
passionate, it must be remembered that the poet writes as a combatant.
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When he constructs, there is nothing more characteristic of him than his
sanity. The views on female education propounded in "The Princess" are so
sound that good sense has supplied the place of the spirit of prophecy, which
did not tabernacle with Tennyson. "In Memoriam" is a most perfect expression
of the average theological temper of England in the nineteenth century. As in
composition, so in spirit, Tennyson's writings have all the advantages and
all the disadvantages of the golden mean.
By virtue of this golden mean Tennyson remained at an equal distance from
revolution and reaction in his ideas, and equally remote from extravagance
and insipidity in his work. He is essentially a man of the new time; he
begins his career steeped in the influence of Shelley and Keats, without whom
he would never have attained the height he did—a height nevertheless,
in our opinion, appreciably below theirs, if he is regarded simply as a poet.
But he is a poet and much else; he is the interpreter of the Victorian
era—firstly to itself, secondly to the ages to come. Had even any poet
of greater genius than himself arisen in his own day, which did not happen,
he would still have remained the national poet of the time in virtue of his
universality.
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Some personal friends—splendide mendaces—have hailed
him as our greatest poet since Shakespeare. This is absurd; but it is true
that no other poet since Shakespeare has produced a body of poetry which
comes so near to satisfying all tastes, reconciling all tendencies, and
registering every movement of the intellectual life of the period. Had his
mental balance been less accurately poised, he might have been the laureate
of a party, but he could not have been the laureate of the nation.
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As an intellectual force he is, we think, destined to be powerful and
durable because the charm of his poetry will always keep his ideas before the
popular mind; and these ideas will always be congenial to the solid,
practical, robust, and yet tender and emotional mind of England. They may be
briefly defined as the recognition of the association of continuity with
mutability in human institutions; the utmost reverence for the past combined
with the full and not regretful admission that—
The old order changes, giving place to new,
And God fulfils Himself in many ways;
the conception of Freedom as something that "broadens down, from precedent
to precedent"; veneration for "the Throne unshaken still," so long as it
continues "broad-based upon the People's will," which will always be the case
so long as
..... Statesmen at the Council meet
Who know the seasons.
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Philosophically and theologically, Tennyson is even more conspicuously the
representative of the average English mind of his day. Not that he is a
fusion of conflicting tendencies, but that he occupies a central position,
equally remote from the excesses of scepticism and the excesses of devotion.
This position he is able to fill from his relation to Coleridge, the great
exponent of the via media; not, as in former days, between
Protestantism and Romanism, but between orthodoxy and free thought.
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Tennyson cannot, indeed, be termed Coleridge's intellectual heir. As a
thinker he is far below his predecessor, and almost devoid of originality;
but as a poet he fills up the measure of what was lacking in Coleridge, whose
season of speculation hardly arrived until the season of poetry was past.
Tennyson was but one of a band of auditors—it might be too much to
call them disciples—of the sage who, curiously enough, had himself been
a Cambridge man, and who, short and unsatisfactory as had been his residence
at that seat of learning, seemed to have left behind him some invisible
influence destined to germinate in due time, for all his most distinguished
followers were Cantabs.
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Such another school, only lacking a poet, had flourished at Cambridge in
the seventeenth century, and now came up again like long-buried seeds in a
newly disturbed soil. The precise value of their ideas may always be matter
for discussion; but they exerted without doubt a happy influence by
Turning to scorn with lips divine
The falsehood of extremes,
providing religious minds reverent of the past with an alternative to mere
mediaevalism, and gently curbing Science in the character she sometimes
assumes of "a wild Pallas of the brain."
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When the natural moodiness of Tennyson's temperament is considered, the
prevalent optimism of his ideas, both as regards the individual and the
State, appears infinitely creditable to him. These are ideas natural to sane
and reflecting Englishmen, unchallenged in quiet times, but which may be
obscured or overwhelmed in seasons of great popular excitement. The
intellectual force of Tennyson is perhaps chiefly shown in the art and
attractiveness with which they are set forth; even much that might have
appeared tame or prosaic is invested with all the charms of imagination, and
commends itself to the poet equally with the statesman.
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Tennyson is not the greatest of poets, but appreciation of his poems is
one of the surest criteria of poetical taste; he is not one of the greatest
of thinkers, but agreement with his general cast of thought is an excellent
proof of sanity; many singers have been more Delphic in their inspiration,
but few, by maxims of temperate wisdom, have provided their native land with
such a Palladium.
Richard Garnett.
Cover of First Edition
Tennyson's Down
I made this drawing of the "High Down" ("The Noble Down")
in May, from the edge of the copse on Maiden's Croft. On its highest part
stands the monument placed by English and Americans on the site of the old
Beacon, and from there the Down slopes away for a mile and a half to the
Needles. To the Beacon and back was a favourite walk of the Poet's. The copse
was full of bluebells, and some of them had escaped into the field.
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