APPENDIX D
TENNYSON’S ARTHURIAN POEM[119]
By Sir James Knowles, K.C.V.O.
[This letter was written after a talk with my father, and no doubt Sir James Knowles has caught much of the meaning of “The Idylls of the King.” About this poem my father said to me, “My meaning was spiritual. I only took the legendary stories of the Round Table as illustrations. Arthur was allegorical to me. I intended him to represent the Ideal in the Soul of Man coming in contact with the warring elements of the flesh.”—Ed.]
The fine and wholesome moral breeze which always seems to blow about the higher realms of Art comes to us fresh as ever from this great poem, and more acceptably than ever just now. A constant worship of Purity, and a constant reprobation of Impurity as the rock on which the noble projects of the “blameless king” are wrecked, appear throughout upon the surface of the story.
But besides this, there doubtless does run through it all a sort of under-tone of symbolism, which, while it never interferes with the clear melody of the poem, or perverts it into that most tedious of riddles, a formal allegory, gives a profound harmony to its music and a prophetic strain to its intention most worthy of a great spiritual Bard.
King Arthur, as he has always been treated by Tennyson, stands obviously for no mere individual prince or hero, but for the “King within us”—our highest nature, by whatsoever name it may be called—conscience; spirit; the moral soul; the religious sense; the noble resolve. His story and adventures become the story of the battle and pre-eminence of the soul and of the perpetual warfare between the spirit and the flesh.
For so exalting him there is abundant warrant in the language of many old compilers, by whom “all human perfection was collected in Arthur”; as where, for instance, one says,—“The old world knows not his peer, nor will the future show us his equal,—he alone towers over all other kings, better than the past ones, and greater than those that are to be”; or another, “In short, God has not made, since Adam was, the man more perfect than Arthur.”
How and why Arthur ever grew to so ideal a height we need not now inquire, it is sufficient here to note the fact, and that Tennyson is archæologically justified thereby in making him the type of the soul on earth, from its mysterious coming to its mysterious and deathless going.
In the “Idylls of the King,” the soul comes first before us as a conqueror in a waste and desert land groaning under mere brute power. Its history before then is dark with doubt and mystery, and the questions about its origin and authority form the main subject of the introductory poem.
Many, themselves the basest, hold it to be base-born, and rage against its rule:
And since his ways are sweet,
And theirs are bestial, hold him less than man;
And there be those who deem him more than man,
And dream he dropt from heaven.
Of those who recognize its claim, some, as the hoary chamberlain, accept it on the word of wizards who have written all about it in a sacred book which, doubtless, some day will become intelligible. Others, as Ulfius, and Brastias, standing for commonplace men with commonplace views, are satisfied to think the soul comes as the body does, or not to think at all about it. Others, again, as Bedivere, with warmer hearts, feel there is mystery, where to the careless all is plain, yet seek among the dark ways of excessive natural passion for the key, and drift towards the scandalous accordingly. Then comes the simple touching tenderness of the woman’s discovery of conscience and its influence given by Queen Bellicent in the story of her childhood; and this, again, is supplemented and contrasted by the doctrine of the wise men and philosophers put into Merlin’s mouth. His “riddling triplets” anger the woman, but are a wonderful summary of the way, part-earnest, part-ironical, and all-pathetic, in which great wit confronts the problem of the soul.
The inscrutableness of its origin being thus signified, we see next the recognition of its supremacy, and its first act of kinghood,—the inspiration of the best and bravest near it with a common enthusiasm for Right. The founding of the Order of the Round Table coincides with the solemn crowning of the soul. Conscience, acknowledged and throned as king, binds at once all the best of human powers together into one brotherhood, and that brotherhood to itself by vows so strait and high,
That when they rose, knighted from kneeling, some
Were pale as at the passing of a ghost,
Some flush’d, and others dazed, as one who wakes
Half-blinded at the coming of a light.
At that supreme coronation-moment, the Spirit is surrounded and cheered on by all the powers and influences which can ever help it—earthly servants and allies and heavenly powers and tokens—the knights, to signify the strength of the body; Merlin, to signify the strength of intellect; the Lady of the Lake, who stands for the Church, and gives the soul its sharpest and most splendid earthly weapon; and, above all, three fair and mystic Queens, “tall, with bright sweet faces,” robed in the living colours sacred to love and faith and hope, which flow upon them from the image of our Lord above. These, surely, stand for those immortal virtues which only will abide “when all that seems shall suffer shock,” and leaning upon which alone, the soul, when all else falls from it, shall go towards the golden gates of the new and brighter morning.
As the first and introductory idyll thus seems to indicate the coming and the recognition of the soul, so the ensuing idylls of the “Round Table” show how its influence fares—waxes or wanes—in the great battle of life. Through all of these we see the body and its passions gain continually greater sway, till in the end the Spirit’s earthly work is thwarted and defeated by the flesh. Its immortality alone remains to it, and, with this, a deathless hope.
From the story of “Geraint and Enid,” where the first gust of poisoning passion bows for a time with base suspicion, yet passes, and leaves pure a great and simple heart, we are led through “Merlin and Vivien,” where, early in the storm, we see great wit and genius succumb,—and through “Lancelot and Elaine,” where the piteous early death of innocence and hope results from it,—to “The Holy Grail,” where we find religion itself under the stress of it, and despite the earnest efforts of the soul, blown into mere fantastic shapes of superstition. It would be difficult to find a nobler and manlier apology for pure and sane and practical religion, fit for mighty men, than the verdict of the King at the end of this wonderful poem.
In “Pelleas and Ettarre” the storm of corruption culminates, whirling the sweet waters of young love and faith (the very life-spring of the world) out from their proper channels, sweeping them into mist, and casting them in hail upon the land. A scarcely-concealed harlot here rides splendid to the Court, and is crowned Queen of Beauty in the lists; the lust of the flesh is all but paramount. Then comes in “Guinevere” the final lightning stroke, and all the fabric of the earthly life falls smitten into dust, leaving to the soul a broken heart for company, and a conviction that if in this world only it had hope, it were of all things most miserable.
Thus ends the “Round Table,” and the story of the life-long labour of the soul....
There remains but the passing of the soul “from the great deep to the great deep,” and this is the subject of the closing idyll. Here the “last dim, weird battle,” fought out in densest mist, stands for a picture of all human death, and paints its awfulness and confusion. The soul alone, enduring beyond the end wherein all else is swallowed up, sees the mist clear at last, and finds those three crowned virtues, “abiding” true and fast, and waiting to convey it to its rest. Character, upheld and formed by these, is the immortal outcome of mortal life. They wail with it awhile in sympathy for the failure of its earthly plans; but at the very last of all are heard to change their sorrow into songs of joy, and departing, “vanish into light.”
Such or such like seems to be the high significance and under-meaning of this noble poem,—a meaning worthy of the exquisite expression which conveys it and of the wealth of beauty and imagery which enfolds it.
But nothing is more remarkable than the way in which so much symbolic truth is given without the slightest forcing of the current of the narrative itself. Indeed, so subtle are the touches, and so consummately refined the art employed, that quite possibly many readers may hold there is no parable at all intended. It is most interesting, for instance, to note the thread of realism which is preserved throughout, and which, whether intentionally or not, serves the double purpose of entirely screening any such symbolic under-meaning from all who do not care to seek it, and also of accounting naturally for all the supernatural adventures and beliefs recorded in the story itself.
Thus, in “The Holy Grail,” the various apparitions of the mystic vessel are explicable by passing meteors or sudden lightning flashes seen in a season of great tempests and thunderstorms—first acting on the hysterical exaltation of an enthusiastic nun, and then, by contagion from her faith, upon the imaginations of a few kindred natures.
Again, in the “Coming of Arthur,” the marvellous story of his birth, as told by Bleys, might simply have been founded on a shipwreck when the sea was phosphorescent, and when all hands suddenly perished, save one infant who was washed ashore.
Or, again, in the same poem, the three mystic Queens at the Coronation—who become, in one sense, so all-important in their meaning—derive their import in the eyes of Bellicent simply from the accident of coloured beams of light falling upon them from a stained-glass window.
May I, in conclusion say how happily characteristic of their English author, and their English theme, seems to me the manner in which these “Idylls of the King” have become a complete poem? It brings to mind the method of our old cathedral-builders. Round some early shrine, too precious to be moved, were gathered bit by bit a nave and aisles, then rich side chapels, then the great image-crowded portals, then a more noble chancel, then, perhaps, the towers, all in fulfilment of some general plan made long ago, but each produced and added as occasion urged or natural opportunity arose. As such buildings always seem rather to have grown than been constructed, and have the wealth of interest, and beauty, and variety which makes Canterbury Cathedral, for instance, far more poetical than St. Paul’s—so with these “Idylls.” Bit by bit the poem and its sacred purport have grown continually more and more connected and impressive. Had Tennyson sat down in early youth to write the symbolic epic of King Arthur which he then projected, his “Morte d’Arthur” is enough to show how fine a work might have resulted. But, for once, at any rate, the interposing critics did art good service, for they deferred till the experience of life had given him, as it were, many lives, a poem which could not have been produced without wide acquaintanceship with the world and human nature. We should never otherwise have had the parable “full of voices” which we now fortunately possess.
THE END
Printed by R. & R. Clark, Limited, Edinburgh.
Footnotes:
[1] Henry Sellwood.
[2] Sister of Sir John Franklin.
[3] [Extract from a Letter from my Mother to Mrs. Granville Bradley, April 23, 1873.
“To think of your having been among our Aldworth giants (the monuments in Aldworth Church)! Pibworth belonged to my grandmother, a Rowland from Wales. I am glad you did not go there, for all the grand pine grove, which backed it, was cut down as soon as it was bought, some years ago, by some London man, and I hear it has sunk into a mere commonplace house. The little estate, in which were the ruins of Beche Castle, was ours. The tombs are those of the ‘de la Beches.’ Their pedigree was said to have been taken down to show to Queen Elizabeth—when she came to look at the old yew tree, the remains of which, I hope, still exist—and never to have been replaced, so that no more is known of the giants than that they were ‘de la Beches.’ Neither do we know if they were really our ancestors, as they have been reported to be, or whether the report came from our having owned the remains of the castle.”—Ed.]
[4] Rev. Drummond Rawnsley.
[5] This is written of the Lincolnshire coast.
[6] This taken from what he saw from the cliffs over Scratchell’s Bay near the Needles in the Isle of Wight.
[7] Afterwards married to Judge Alan Ker, Chief Justice of Jamaica.
[8] At Mablethorpe there was no post at all, and Alfred tells how he was indebted to the muffin man for communication with the outer world.
[9] His wife.
[10] Mother of Lady Boyne.
[11] [The unpublished letters from Frederick Tennyson, quoted throughout the chapter, were written either to my father, or to my father’s friend, Mary Brotherton, the novelist. The lives of my uncles Frederick and Charles were so much interwoven with the lives of some of my father’s friends that I have ventured to insert this account of them here. Moreover, these two brothers represent “the two extremes of the Tennyson temperament, the mean and perfection of which is found in Alfred.”—Ed.]
[12] Unpublished letter to Alfred Tennyson.
[13] Alfred was always telling his brother that Spiritualism was a subject well worthy of examination, but not to be swallowed whole. He had a great admiration for certain passages in Swedenborg’s writings.
[14] Alfred used to say of the Sonnets that many of them had all the tenderness of the Greek epigram, while a few were among the finest in our language.
[15] The other three were Franklin, Harry, and Tom.
[16] She often used to sing to us “Elaine’s song” which she had set to music.
[17] [My father was devoted to Henry Lushington, and pronounced him to be the best critic he had ever known. To him he dedicated “In Memoriam.”—Ed.]
[18] There are also the fine “beardless bust” by Tennyson’s friend, Thomas Woolner, R.A., and the earliest “beardless portrait” of him by his sister-in-law, Mrs. Weld.
[19] This was a misunderstanding on the part of FitzGerald.
[20] This account of the talk in the Woodbridge garden has been taken from a letter to me from the present Lord Tennyson.
[21] Sophocles, Ajax, 674-5.
[22] This old French paraphrase of Horace, Odes, I. xi., FitzGerald was very fond of, and quotes more than once in his letters.
[23] Of the Conversations with Eckermann, he said, “almost as repeatedly to be read as Boswell’s Johnson—a German Johnson—and (as with Boswell) more interesting to me in Eckermann’s Diary than in all his own famous works.”—Letters to Mrs. Kemble.
[24] [Some of these sayings appeared in my Memoir of my father.—Ed.]
[25] See Tennyson: a Memoir, by his Son, p. 373.
[26] See Tennyson: a Memoir, by his Son, p. 352.
[27] “I suppose the worship of wonder, such as I have heard grown-up children tell of at first sight of the Alps.”—Euphranor, by E. F. G.
[28] Arthur Hallam, Harry Lushington, and Sir John Simeon.
[29] “The Death of Œnone.”
[30] [“Ulysses,” the title of a number of essays by W. G. Palgrave, brother of my father’s devoted friend Francis T. Palgrave.—Ed.]
[31] 1888.
[32] Garibaldi said to me, alluding to his barren island, “I wish I had your trees.”
[33] The tale of Nejd.
[34] The Philippines.
[35] In Dominica.
[36] The Shadow of the Lord. Certain obscure markings on a rock in Siam, which express the image of Buddha to the Buddhist more or less distinctly according to his faith and his moral worth.
[37] The footstep of the Lord on another rock.
[38] The monastery of Sumelas.
[39] Anatolian Spectre stories.
[40] The Three Cities.
[41] Travels in Egypt.
[42] Lionel Tennyson.
[43] In Bologna.
[44] They say, for the fact is doubtful.
[45] Demeter and Persephone.
[46] [This Home was founded at the suggestion of my father, for he and Gordon had discussed the desirability of founding training camps all over England for the training of poor boys as soldiers or emigrants, Gordon saying to him, “You are the man to found them.”—Ed.]
[47] One of Tennyson’s friends asked a cabman at Freshwater, “Whose house is that?” Cabman: “It belongs to one Tennyson.” Friend: “He is a great man, you know?” Cabman: “He a great man! he only keeps one man-servant, and he don’t sleep in the house!”
[48] Now grown into one hundred and fifty acres.
[49] He used to protest against the misuse of words of mighty content as mere expletives, contrasting “God made Himself an awful rose of dawn,” and the colloquial “young-ladyism,” as he called it, of “awfully jolly.” (See the Memoir.)
[50] And, though I knew him to the end of his days, that interval never seemed to lengthen. [Among Mr. Dakyns’s rough notes I find the Greek phrase ἀεὶ παῖς, with an emphatic reference to “The Wanderer.” I know he thought the spirit of him “who loves the world from end to end and wanders on from home to home” was really Tennyson’s own.—F. M. S.]
[51] See Memoir, ii. 400.
[52] [I think that this riddle was originally made by Franklin Lushington.—Ed.]
[53] See Memoir, ii. 288.
[54] ii. 284 foll., 293, “Some Criticism on Poets and Poetry”; ib. 420 foll., “Last Talks”: that wonderful chapter.
[55] See “Poets and Critics,” one of his last poems.
[56] Solaciolum, “poor dear, some solace”; turgiduli ... ocelli (see below), “her poor dear swollen eyes.”
[57] Miselle, epithet of the dead like our “poor” So-and-so.
[58] Robinson Ellis notes, “The rhythm of the line and the continued a-sound well represent the eternity of the sleep that knows no waking,” and that is just the effect that Tennyson’s reading gave with infinite pathos; and then the sudden passionate change, da mi basia——
[59] An old experiment, being written in 1859, finished in 1860. He himself only called it “a far-off echo of the Attis of Catullus.”
[60] See Carlyle, Fr. Rev. (Part I. Bk. v. c. ix), for the cry of the mob. And for Béranger, cf. Memoir, ii. 422.
[61] Compare Merlin’s song, “From the great deep to the great deep he goes.”
[62] Some commentators insist that Tennyson was born on August 5 because the date looks like 5th in the Register of his birth. He used to say, “All I can state is that my mother always kept my birthday on August 6, and I suppose she knew.”
[63] I can confirm this last statement from more than one talk with him. He would note the perfection of the metre. The second line affords an instance of the delicacy of his ear. We were speaking of the undoubtedly correct reading:
The lowing herd wind slowly o’er the lea,
not, as is so often printed, winds. I forget his exact comment, but the point of it was that the double s, winds slowly, would have been to his ear most displeasing.
Again, speaking of the line,
And all the air a solemn stillness holds,
he observed how seldom Gray seemed satisfied with this inversion of the accusative and the nominative, and how he himself endeavoured, as a rule, to avoid it.—H. M. B.
[64] My own writing he compared to “the limbs of a flea.”
[65] In Problems and Persons (Longmans), Appendix A.
[66] Nineteenth Century, January 1893.
[67] Sunday, October 27, 1872.—I asked A. T. at Aldworth what he thought he had done most perfect. He said, “Nothing,” only fragments of things that he could think at all so—such as “Come down, O Maid,” written on his first visit to Switzerland, and “Tears, idle Tears.”
He told me he meant to write the siege of Delhi, an ode in rhyme, but was refused the papers.
[68] [“Until absorbed into the Divine.”—Ed.]
[69] See Appendix C.
[70] See Translation by Frederick Tennyson, p. 56.
[71] Some extracts from the paper on Tennyson in Studies and Memories are included in this chapter by kind permission of Messrs. Constable & Co.
[72] [First published as a preface to Tennyson as a Student and Poet of Nature in 1910, and republished here by the kind permission of Sir Norman Lockyer and Messrs. Macmillan.—Ed.]
[73] See the fine Parsee Hymn to the Sun (written by Tennyson when he was 82) at the end of “Akbar’s Dream”:
I
Once again thou flamest heavenward, once again we see thee rise.
Every morning is thy birthday gladdening human hearts and eyes.
Every morning here we greet it, bowing lowly down before thee,
Thee the Godlike, thee the changeless in thine ever-changing skies.
II
Shadow-maker, shadow-slayer, arrowing light from clime to clime,
Hear thy myriad laureates hail thee monarch in their woodland rhyme.
Warble bird, and open flower, and, men, below the dome of azure
Kneel adoring Him the Timeless in the flame that measures Time!
[74] [See Tennyson: a Memoir, p. 259. “It is impossible,” he said, “to imagine that the Almighty will ask you, when you come before Him in the next life, what your particular form of creed was: but the question will rather be ‘Have you been true to yourself, and given in My Name a cup of cold water to one of these little ones?’” Yet he felt that religion could never be founded on mere moral philosophy; that there were no means of impressing upon children systematic ethics apart from religion; and that the highest religion and morality would only come home to the people in the noble, simple thoughts and facts of a Scripture like ours.—Ed.]
[75] [He added, “The Son of Man is the most tremendous title possible.”—Ed.]
[76] From Tennyson’s last published sonnet, “Doubt and Prayer.”
[77] [Toward the end of his life he would say, “My most passionate desire is to have a clearer vision of God.”—Ed.]
[78] [The eldest daughter of Sir John Simeon, who was my father’s most intimate friend in later life—a tall, broad-shouldered, genial, generous, warm-hearted, highly gifted, and thoroughly noble country gentleman; in face like the portrait of Sir Thomas Wyatt, by Holbein.—Ed.]
[79] This MS. was given back to Tennyson at his request after Sir John Simeon’s death, and after Tennyson’s death presented by his son and Catherine, Lady Simeon, to the library of Trinity College, Cambridge.
[80] He afterwards built a larger study for himself, “looking into the heart of the wood,” as he said.
[81] “In the Garden at Swainston.”
[82] Tennyson said to her, “Perhaps your babe will remember all these lights and this splendour in future days, as if it were the memory of another life.”
[83] From “The Death of Œnone and other Poems,” afterwards published 1892.
[84] First published 1909, by Sidgwick and Jackson, Ltd., 1s. net., and kindly corrected by the author for republication here.
[85] Now Lady Ritchie.
[86] οὐρανόθεν τε ὑπερράγη ἄσπετος αἰθήρ.
[87] See note by Tennyson in the “Eversley Edition” of the poems: “I made this simile from a stream (in North Wales), and it is different, tho’ like Theocritus, Idyll xxii. 48 ff.:
ἐν δὲ μύες στερεοῖσι βραχίοσιν ἄκρον ὑπ᾽ ὦμον
ἔστασαν, ἠΰτε πέτροι ὁλοίτροχοι, .οὕστε κυλίνδων
χειμάρρους ποταμὸς μεγάλαις περιέξεσε δίναις.”
When some one objected that he had taken this simile from Theocritus, he answered: “It is quite different. Geraint’s muscles are not compared to the rounded stones, but to the stream pouring vehemently over them.”—Ed.
[88] [I am much obliged to Mr. Sidgwick for having omitted his original statement that Tennyson “takes the anti-reform line” in the matter of the higher education of women. My father’s friends report him to have said that the great social questions impending in England were “the housing and education of the poor, and the higher education of women”; and that the sooner woman finds out, before the great educational movement begins, that “woman is not undevelopt man, but diverse,” the better it will be for the progress of the world. She must train herself to do the large work that lies before her, even though she may not be destined to be wife and mother, cultivating her understanding, not her memory only, her imagination in its higher phases, her inborn spirituality, and her sympathy with all that is pure, noble, and beautiful, rather than mere social accomplishments; then and then only will she further the progress of humanity, then and then only will men continue to hold her in reverence. See Tennyson: a Memoir, pp. 206, 208.—Ed.]
[89] From Virgil’s Georgics.
[90] From Theocritus.
[91] [For another view of “Gareth” see FitzGerald’s letter to my father in 1873:
My dear Alfred—I write my yearly letter to yourself this time, because I have a word to say about “Gareth” which your publisher sent me as “from the author.” I don’t think it is mere perversity that makes me like it better than all its predecessors, save and except (of course) the old “Morte.” The subject, the young knight who can endure and conquer, interests me more than all the heroines of the 1st volume. I do not know if I admire more separate passages in this “Idyll” than in the others; for I have admired many in all. But I do admire several here very much, as
The journey to Camelot, pp. 13-14,
All Gareth’s vassalage, 31-34,
Departure with Lynette, 42,
Sitting at table with the Barons, 54,
Phantom of past life, 71,
and many other passages and expressions “quae nunc perscribere longum est.”—Ed.]
[92] Bedivere.
[93] Reprinted, with some few alterations, from the Edinburgh Review, No. ccclxxxii., by the kind permission of the Editor and the late Sir Alfred Lyall.
[94] E. FitzGerald.
[95] He said to Bishop Lightfoot, “The cardinal point of Christianity is the Life after Death.”
[96] See Appendix C.
[97] [The sibilants give the lisping peacefulness of the waves. For beauty of sound he would cite the following lines:
The moan of doves in immemorial elms,
And murmuring of innumerable bees;
and
The mellow ouzel fluted in the elm;
and
And affluent Fortune emptied all her horn,
Ed.]
[98] [My father would not have allowed this. He said, “It is pure nonsense to say that my later poems are melancholy. In old age I have a stronger faith in God and human good than I had in youth.”—Ed.]
[99] [This is taken from Quintus Calaber.—Ed.]
[100] [It is interesting to note that Sir Richard Jebb held that the “Death of Œnone” was “essentially Greek.”—Ed.]
[101] [This passage must not be misunderstood, as Sir Alfred Lyall thought that he had touched high-water mark in some of his later poems, such as: “In Memoriam,” certain passages in the “Idylls of the King,” “The Ancient Sage,” and “Maud,” the “Northern Farmers,” “Rizpah,” “The Revenge,” the Dedication to Edward FitzGerald of “Tiresias,” and “Crossing the Bar.”—Ed.]
[102] Presidential Address to the British Academy, October 1909 (Tennyson centenary), published here by the late Professor Butcher’s kind permission.
[103] The Master of Christ’s.
[104] Captain Thomas Hamilton, who then lived at Elleray. He was the brother of Sir William Hamilton, and is frequently mentioned in Sir Walter Scott’s Journal.
[105] Philip van Artevelde, by Henry Taylor.
[106] Probably August 10. See letter to Thompson, August 19, 1841.
[107] The reply referred to is:—
Farringford, Jan. 19th, 1870.
My dear James—Send the box, please, not without your new volume hither. I shall be grateful for both. I am glad that you find anything to approve of in the “H. G.” I have not yet finished the Arthurian legends, otherwise I might consider your Job theme. Strange that I quite forgot our conversation thereupon. Where is Westbourne Terrace? If I had ever clearly made out I should assuredly have called. I have often when in town past by the old 60, the “vedovo sito,” with a groan, thinking of you as no longer the comeatable, runupableto, smokeablewith J. S. of old, but as a family man, far in the west, sitting cigarless among many nieces, clean and forlorn, but I hope to see you somewhere in ’70, for I have taken chambers in Victoria Street for three years, though they are not yet furnished.
Where is the difficulty of that line in the “Flower”? It is rather rough certainly, but, had you followed the clue of “little flower” in the preceding line, you would not have stumbled over this, which is accentual anapaest,
What you are, root and all:
rough—doubtless.—Believe me yours ever,
A. Tennyson.
[108] [The Holy Grail and other Poems. It was Spedding chiefly who urged my father about this time to write his plays, because he thought that he had the true dramatic instinct. He criticized them in proof, and gave them his warm commendation.—Ed.]
[109] Life and Letters, vol. v.
[110] The passage from Shakespeare prefixed to this paper contains probably as much as can be said of the mental, not less than the affectionate conditions, under which such a report as “In Memoriam” is produced, and may give us more insight into the imaginative faculty’s mode of working, than all our philosophizing and analysis. It seems to let out with the fulness, simplicity, and unconsciousness of a child—“Fancy’s Child”—the secret mechanism or procession of the greatest creative mind our race has produced. In itself, it has no recondite meaning, it answers fully its own sweet purpose. We are not believers, like some folks, in the omniscience of even Shakespeare. But, like many things that he and other wise men and many simple children say, it has a germ of universal meaning, which it is quite lawful to bring out of it, and which may be enjoyed to the full without any wrong to its own original beauty and fitness. A dewdrop is not the less beautiful that it illustrates in its structure the law of gravitation which holds the world together, and by which “the most ancient heavens are fresh and strong.” This is the passage. The Friar speaking of Claudio, hearing that Hero “died upon his words,” says:
The idea of her life shall sweetly creep
Into his study of imagination;
And every lovely organ of her life
Shall come apparelled in more precious habit—
More moving delicate, and full of life,
Into the eye and prospect of his soul,
Than when she lived indeed.
We have here expressed in plain language the imaginative memory of the beloved dead, rising upon the past, like moonlight upon midnight:
The gleam, the shadow, and the peace supreme.
This is its simple meaning—the statement of a truth, the utterance of personal feeling. But observe its hidden abstract significance—it is the revelation of what goes on in the depths of the soul, when the dead elements of what once was, are laid before the imagination, and so breathed upon as to be quickened into a new and higher life. We have first the Idea of her Life—all he remembered and felt of her, gathered into one vague shadowy image, not any one look, or action, or time,—then the idea of her life creeps—is in before he is aware, and SWEETLY creeps—it might have been softly or gently, but it is the addition of affection to all this, and bringing in another sense,—and now it is in his study of imagination—what a place! fit for such a visitor. Then out comes the Idea, more particular, more questionable, but still ideal, spiritual,—every lovely organ of her life—then the clothing upon, the mortal putting on its immortal, spiritual body—shall come apparelled in more precious habit, more moving delicate—this is the transfiguring, the putting on strength, the poco più—the little more which makes immortal,—more full of life, and all this submitted to—the eye and prospect of the soul.
Dark house, by which once more I stand
Here in the long unlovely street;
Doors, where my heart was wont to beat
So quickly, waiting for a hand.
“In Memoriam.”
This is a mistake, as his friend Dr. A. P. Stanley thus corrects: “‘The long unlovely street’ was Wimpole Street, No. 67, where the Hallams lived; and Arthur used to say to his friends, ‘You know you will always find us at sixes and sevens.’”
[112] We had read these lives, and had remarked them, before we knew whose they were, as being of rare merit. No one could suppose they were written by one so young. We give his estimate of the character of Burke. “The mind of this great man may perhaps be taken as a representation of the general characteristics of the English intellect. Its groundwork was solid, practical, and conversant with the details of business; but upon this, and secured by this, arose a superstructure of imagination and moral sentiment. He saw little, because it was painful to him to see anything, beyond the limits of the national character. In all things, while he deeply reverenced principles, he chose to deal with the concrete rather than with abstractions. He studied men rather than man.” The words in italics imply an insight into the deepest springs of human action, the conjunct causes of what we call character, such as few men of large experience attain.
[113] This will remind the reader of a fine passage in Edwin the Fair, on the specific differences in the sounds made by the ash, the elm, the fir, etc., when moved by the wind; and of some lines by Landor on flowers speaking to each other; and of something more exquisite than either, in Consuelo—the description of the flowers in the old monastic garden, at the “sweet hour of prime.”
[114] Remains, vol. iii. p. 105.
[115] This is the passage referred to in Henry Taylor’s delightful Notes from Life (“Essay on Wisdom”):
“Fear, indeed, is the mother of foresight: spiritual fear, of a foresight that reaches beyond the grave; temporal fear, of a foresight that falls short; but without fear there is neither the one foresight nor the other; and as pain has been truly said to be “the deepest thing in our nature,” so is it fear that will bring the depths of our nature within our knowledge. A great capacity of suffering belongs to genius; and it has been observed that an alternation of joyfulness and dejection is quite as characteristic of the man of genius as intensity in either kind.” In his Notes from Books, p. 216, he recurs to it: “‘Pain,’ says a writer whose early death will not prevent his being long remembered, ‘pain is the deepest thing that we have in our nature, and union through pain has always seemed more real and more holy than any other.’”
[116] From Problems and Persons, by Wilfrid Ward, published here by his kind permission and that of Longmans, Green and Co.
[117] “From the great deep to the great deep he goes;” and “when that which drew from out the boundless deep turns again home.”
For in the world which is not ours, they said,
“Let us make man,” and that which should be man,
From that one light no man can look upon,
Drew to this shore, lit by the suns and moons
And all the shadows.
[119] Reprinted from the Spectator of January 1, 1870.