Alfred, Lord Tennyson - Delphi Poets Series

by Lord Tennyson Alfred

  I began saying the lines, but he knew them quite well and repeated them. I can’t think how it is, the answer he returned about this is now, alas! forgot.... Such troublous years have come and gone since that happy Long-Ago. (The omitted stanza would have gone, too, had it not been written down for me by a long-lost friend, Sir Robert Morier.)

  So the reading aloud went on, with talk between (and clouds of smoke!), until, I think, past eleven o’clock, when you opened the door, and that — for me — rare dream of poetry and charm abruptly broke.

  I saw Tennyson, for the last time, as I followed down the wooded path at Aldworth, on his way to the garden door opening on the heath, his fine, big, Russian hound pacing closely after.

  No — once more I saw him, his likeness with all the distinctness sometimes known in the slow-moving white clouds of some glorious autumn day. It was after the end had come, and not long before the grave in Westminster Abbey had received him. I was travelling home on the Great-Western from Somerset. Gazing up idly at the assembled multitude of sun-steeped silver clouds above, suddenly, clear and distinct, my eyes beheld the image of his noble profile as if lying back asleep; the eyes were closed, the head at rest upon the pillow — a sculptured cloud in a snowy cloudland, outlined upon an azure sky.... Not until after several minutes did the vision pass, slowly fading into the infinite blue.

  TENNYSON AND HIS TALK ON SOME RELIGIOUS QUESTIONS by the Right Rev. the Bishop of Ripon

  Among the happy memories of my life, and they are many, the memory of the kindly welcome accorded to me at Aldworth and at Farringford must always possess a special charm. This will readily be understood by those of my own age; for Tennyson was a name to conjure with in the days of my youth. Slowly but surely his influence crept into our lives: we read in text-books at school that the

  Poet in a golden age was born, with golden stars above,

  Dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn, the love of love.

  The thought and the words appealed to me from the first. Then, how I know not, we became familiar with part, at least, of “In Memoriam.” Its phrases caught our fancy, and some of our early attempts at versification were cast in the same metre. Then came the “Idylls of the King,” and I remember how, when the rest of the party went out one holiday afternoon, I stayed indoors and read the “Idylls” at one sitting. Thus in our youth Tennyson became poet and hero to us. Any one who had seen him or known him became for us invested with a kind of sacred and awful interest; my uncle who lived at Cheltenham grew greater in our eyes when we learned that he had corresponded with him.

  Thus our hero-worship grew. We knew indeed that there were those who did not welcome the coming Poet with ardour; we lived, in fact, through the age of his disparagement to the time of his unchallenged supremacy. It will be interesting, I think, to many to read the following letter written by Rev. Frederick W. Robertson when he was experiencing the freer and fresher intellectual atmosphere of Oxford after the stifling oppressiveness of Cheltenham:

  I had nearly forgotten to tell you that Tennyson is deeply admired here by all the brilliant men. Stanley, our first genius, rates him highly; Hannah, who has guided nearly all the first and double-first class men for the last three years to honours, told me he considers his poetical and psychological powers more varied than any poet he knows. And the “Dread,” a choice selection of the most brilliant among the rising men, have pronounced him to be the first poet of the day. So you see I have some to keep me company in my judgment. And at all events he is above ridicule.

  Pray inform Miss D —— of all this. One of our first professors raves about him.

  When I went up to Cambridge in 1860, Tennyson was the oracle poet among the younger men; but the feeling of doubt still remained among the older men. I recall a friendly dispute between the Senior and a Junior Fellow of my own College. The elder man charged Tennyson with being “misty”; the younger man defended: the elder man cited a passage from “In Memoriam,” and challenged the younger to say what it meant. The elder man was so far successful that he drove the younger man to declare that though he could not explain it then, he hoped to enter into its meaning later on. It was a typical conflict; the older generation could not understand; the younger was under the spell of the Poet, and though unable to interpret everything, believed in Tennyson’s message to his own age.

  There were charges levelled against Tennyson more serious and more absurd than that of obscurity. The words Scepticism, Pantheism, and even Atheism were heard. One newspaper in a review of “In Memoriam” exclaimed: “Here the poet barely escapes Atheism and plunges into the abyss of Pantheism.” Another foolish writer, commenting on the lines:

  But what am I?

  An infant crying in the night,

  An infant crying for the light,

  And with no language but a cry,

  remarked, with superb naïveté, “May we remind Mr. Tennyson that the darkness is past and that the true light now shineth?” I remember, as late as 1867 or 1868, an evening party at Blackheath when the question was started—”Who is the greatest living poet?” To my amazement and amusement a self-satisfied, but very good man, instantly and oracularly replied, “Bonar — without doubt — Bonar.” He meant that excellent and devout-minded man, the Rev. Horatius Bonar, the hymn-writer. These were, no doubt, extreme cases, but stupidity is always extreme. I recall these incidents because they are parts of the story which tells of the difficulties through which Tennyson fought the way to his throne. They serve to recall the prejudices which provoked the resentment and stimulated the attachment of those who, like myself, were brought early under the spell of his enchantment. His story repeated familiar features; he had at first a select circle of studious admirers; by degrees the general public became aware of the existence in their midst of a true poet. Then timid partisans awoke and demanded credentials of orthodoxy. Persons of this type did not like to be told that —

  There lives more faith in honest doubt,

  Believe me, than in half the creeds.

  But meanwhile he had drawn the younger generation to his side: they believed in him, and they were right. In spite of misunderstanding and misinterpretation, Tennyson followed the gleam: he would not stoop to make his judgment blind or prevaricate for popularity’s sake. He beat his music out, and those who knew him, as I was privileged to do, during the later years of his life, could realize how truly he had made a larger faith his own.

  It fell out naturally when I met him that conversation turned on religion or theological subjects. His mind, courageous, inquiring, honest, sought truth beyond the forms of truth. On the occasion of my first visit to Aldworth, in the smoking-room we talked of the problem of pain, of determinism, of apparent contradictions of faith. That night, indeed, we seemed to talk —

  Of faith, free will, foreknowledge absolute.

  But the impression left upon my mind was that we were engaged in no mere scholastic discussion; it was no mere intellectually satisfactory creed which was sought: it was something deeper and more abiding than anything which may be modified in form from age to age; the soul needs an anchorage, and to find it there must be no ignoring of facts and no juggling with them once they are found. In illustration of this I may relate how once, when walking with him among the heather-clad heights round Aldworth, he spoke of the apparent dualism in Nature: the forces of darkness and light seemed to meet in conflict. “If I were not a Christian,” he said, “I should be perhaps a Parsee.” He felt, however, that if once we accepted the view that this life was a time of education, then the dark things might be found to have a meaning and a value. In the retrospect hereafter the pain and suffering would seem trivial. I think that this idea must have taken hold of his thought as we were conversing; for he suddenly stopped in his walk, and, standing amid the purple landscape, he declaimed the lines, then unpublished:

  The Lord spake out of the skies

  To a man good and a wise:

  “The world and all within it


  Will be nothing in a minute.”

  Then a beggar began to cry:

  “Give me food or else I die.”

  Is it worth his while to eat,

  Or mine to give him meat,

  If the world and all within it

  Were nothing the next minute?

  He once quoted to me Hinton’s view that we were not in a position to judge the full meaning of life; that we were in fact looking at the wrong side of things. We saw the work from the underside, and we could not judge of the pattern which was perhaps clear enough on the upper side.

  Next day I was able to remind him that he had approved this view of life. He was not well, and I think that the darker aspects loomed larger in his mind; at any rate, he was speaking more gloomily than usual. When I remarked that God did not take away men till their work was done, he said, “He does; look at the promising young fellows cut off.” Then I brought up Hinton’s theory and illustration, and asked whether we could judge when a man had finished his appointed work. Immediately he acquiesced; the view evidently satisfied him.

  He took a deep interest in those borderland questions which sometimes seem so near an answer and yet never are answered. At the hour of death what are the sights which rush upon the vision? Of these he would sometimes speak; he told me how William Allingham, when dying, said to his wife, “I see things beyond your imagination to conceive.” Some vision seemed to come to such at death. One lady in the Isle of Wight exclaimed, as though she saw “Cherubim and Seraphim.” But these incidents did not disturb the steady thought and trust which found its strength far deeper down than in any surface phenomena. He never shirked the hard and dismaying facts of life. Once he made me take to my room Winwoode Reade’s Martyrdom of Man. There never was such a passionate philippic against Nature as this book contained. The universe was one vast scene of murder; the deep aspirations and noble visions of men were the follies of flies buzzing for a brief moment in the presence of inexorable destruction. Life was bottled sunshine; death the silent-footed butler who withdrew the cork. The book, with its fierce invective, had a strange rhapsodical charm. It put with irate and verbose extravagance the fact that sometimes

  Nature, red in tooth and claw,

  With ravin shrieked against his creed;

  but it failed to see any but one side of the question. The writer saw clearly enough what Tennyson saw, but Tennyson saw much more. He could not make his judgment blind against faith any more than he would make it blind against facts. He saw more clearly because he saw more largely. He distrusted narrow views from whatever side they were advanced. The same spirit which led him to see the danger of the dogmatic temper in so-called orthodox circles led him to distrust it when it came from other quarters. There was a wholesome balance about his mind. Nothing is farther from the truth than to suppose that men of great genius lack mental balance. Among the lesser lights there may be a brilliant but unbalanced energy, but among the greater men it is not so; there is a large and wholesome sanity among these. There is sufficient breadth of grasp to avoid extremes in Dante, Milton, and Shakespeare; it was the same with Tennyson. We may be right, for instance, in classing Tennyson among those

  Whose faith has centre everywhere

  Nor cares to fix itself to form;

  but we should be wholly wrong if we supposed that he did not realize the value of form. He knew that faith did not lie in the form, but he knew also the protective value of form to faith; the shell was not the kernel, but the kernel ripened all the better in the shelter of the shell. He realized how sacred was the flesh and blood to which truth divine might be linked, and he uttered the wise caution:

  Hold thou the good: defend it well

  For fear divine philosophy

  Should push beyond her mark and be

  Procuress to the lords of Hell.

  In his view, as it seemed to me, there were two attitudes of mind towards dogmatic forms — the one impatient of form because form was never adequate to express the whole truth, the other impatient of form because impatient of the truth itself. These two attitudes of mind were poles asunder; they must never be confused together.

  I may be allowed to illustrate this discriminating spirit by one or two reminiscences. I once asked him whether they were right who interpreted the three ladies who accompanied King Arthur on his last voyage as Faith, Hope, and Charity. He replied with a touch of (shall I call it?) intellectual impatience: “They do and they do not. They are those graces, but they are much more than those. I hate to be tied down to say, ‘This means that,’ because the thought in the image is much more than the definition suggested or any specific interpretation advanced.” The truth was wider than the form, yet the form was a shelter for the truth. It meant this, but not this only; truth must be able to transcend any form in which it may be presented.

  Hence he could see piety under varying forms: for example, he described those who were “pious variers from the Church.” This phrase, it may here be related, had a remarkable influence on one man’s life, as the following letter, written by a clergyman who had formerly been a Nonconformist, will show. The writer died some few years ago; two of his sons are now good and promising clergymen of the Church of England:

  Oxford Villas, Guiseley, Leeds,

  January 16, 1901.

  My Lord Bishop — In reference to your volume on the Poets, may I intrude upon your attention one moment to say that it was Tennyson’s phrase in reference to dissenters:

  variers from the Church,

  in his “Sea Dreams” that first kindled me to earnest thought (some twenty years since) as to my own position in relationship to the Church of the land. The force that moved me lay in the word “pious.” Were dissenters more pious than Church people? I regret to say I thought them much less so; and as this conviction deepened I was compelled to make the change for which I am every day more thankful. — I am, my Lord Bishop, your Lordship’s devoted servant,

  W. Hayward Elliott.

  I have already spoken of his recognition of the apparent dualism in Nature. His outlook on the universe could not ignore the dark and dismaying facts of existence, and his faith, which rose above the shriek of Nature, was not based upon arguments derived from any survey of external, physical Nature. When he confined his outlook to this, he could see power and mechanism, but he could not from these derive faith. His vision must go beyond the mere physical universe; he must see life and see it whole; he must include that which is highest in Nature, even man, and only then could he find the resting-place of faith. He thus summed up the matter once when we had been walking up and down the “Ball-room” at Farringford: “It is hard,” he said, “it is hard to believe in God; but it is harder not to believe. I believe in God, not from what I see in Nature, but from what I find in man.” I took him to mean that the witness of Nature was only complete when it included all that was in Nature, and that the effort to draw conclusions from Nature when man, the highest-known factor in Nature, was excluded, could only lead to mistake. I do not think he meant, however, that external Nature gave no hints of a superintending wisdom or even love, for his own writings show, I think, that such hints had been whispered to him by flower and star; I think he meant that faith did not find her platform finally secure beneath her feet till she had taken count of man. In short, he seemed to me to be near to the position of Thomas Erskine of Linlathen, who said that truth as soon as learned was felt to be held on a much deeper and more unshakable ground than any authority which appealed to mere intellect, namely, on its own discerned truthfulness. The response to all that is highest in Nature is found in the heart of man, and man cannot deny this highest, because it is latent in himself already. But I must continue Tennyson’s own words: “It is hard to believe in God, but it is harder not to believe in Him. I don’t believe in His goodness from what I see in Nature. In Nature I see the mechanician; I believe in His goodness from what I find in my own breast.” I said, “Then you believe that Man is the highest witness of God?” “Certainly,”
he replied. I said, “Is not that what Christ said and was? He was in man the highest witness of God to Man,” and I quoted the recorded words, “He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father.” He assented, but said that there were, of course, difficulties in the idea of a Trinity — the Three. “But mind,” he said, “Son of God is quite right — that He was.” He said that, of course, we must have doctrine, and then he added, “After all, the greatest thing is Faith.” Having said this, he paused, and then recited with earnest emphasis the lines which sang of faith in the reality of the Unseen and Spiritual, of a faith, therefore, which can wait the great disclosure:

  Doubt no longer, that the Highest is the wisest and the best,

  Let not all that saddens Nature blight thy hope, or break thy rest,

  Quail not at the fiery mountain, at the shipwreck, or the rolling

  Thunder, or the rending earthquake, or the famine, or the pest.

  Neither mourn if human creeds be lower than the heart’s desire;

  Thro’ the gates that bar the distance comes a gleam of what is higher.

  Wait till death has flung them open, when the man will make the Maker

  Dark no more with human hatred in the glare of deathless fire.

  He was alive to the movements of modern thought. He saw in evolution, if not a fully proved law, yet a magnificent working hypothesis; he could not regard it as a theory hostile to ultimate faith; but far beyond the natural wish to reconcile faith and thought, which he shared with all right-thinking men, was the conviction of the changeless personal relationship between God and man. He might find difficulties about faith and about certain dogmas of faith, such as the Trinity. No doubt, however, the Poet’s conception brought the divine into all human life; it showed God in touch with us at all epochs of our existence — in our origin, in our history, in our final self-realization, for He is

  Our Father and our Brother and our God.

  Religion largely lies in the consciousness of our true relation to Him who made us; and the yearning for the realization of this consciousness found constant expression in Tennyson’s works and conversation. Perhaps its clearest expression is to be found in his instructions to his son: “Remember, I want ‘Crossing the Bar’ to be always at the end of all my works.”