Tennyson and his friends

by Unknown

TENNYSON AND W. G. WARD AND OTHER FARRINGFORD FRIENDS

By Wilfrid Ward

Among Tennyson’s friends in his later years was my father—William George Ward—who was his neighbour at Freshwater from 1870 to 1882. I have been asked to contribute to the picture of “Tennyson and his Friends” some account of their intercourse, and at the same time to set down some of the extremely interesting comments on his own poems which I myself was privileged yet later to hear from the Poet. I need not say that such an act of piety in regard of two men for whom I have so deep a reverence is a work of love, and I only regret that my recollections of what so well deserves recording should be so imperfect and fragmentary.

Tennyson’s friendship with my father began at a date considerably subsequent to their first acquaintance. My father came rather unexpectedly into the family property in the Isle of Wight in 1849 when his uncle died without a son; but he did not desire to leave the house Pugin had built for him in Hertfordshire, where he had settled immediately after he joined the Catholic Church in 1845. He and the late Cardinal Vaughan were, in the ’fifties, doing a work for ecclesiastical education at St. Edmund’s College, Ware—a work which came to my father naturally as the sequel to his share in the Oxford Movement. Therefore, when Tennyson in 1853 came to live in the Isle of Wight my father was an absentee. He tried in 1858 for two years to live at his grandfather’s old home near Cowes, Northwood Park, but his health broke down, and he returned to Hertfordshire. In the ’sixties, however, he used to pay long visits to Freshwater, in the scenery of which he delighted; and, on one of these occasions, Tennyson was introduced to him by their common friend, Dean Bradley. The meeting was not, I think, a great success on either side. Later on, however, in 1870, when my father, despairing of the Cowes climate, built a house at Freshwater, he was Tennyson’s near neighbour, and they soon became great friends.

Arthur Tennyson.

Tennyson’s friendship with my father grew up from close neighbourhood, and from the fact that they had so much more in common with each other than with most of their other Isle of Wight neighbours. It was cemented by my father’s devotion to Mrs. (afterwards Lady) Tennyson, who, in her conversation, he always said, reminded him of the John Henry Newman of Oxford days. Also they had many friends in common—such as Dean Stanley, Lord Selborne, and Jowett—who often visited Freshwater. They were both members of the Metaphysical Society, and loved to discuss in private problems of religious faith which formed the subject of the Society’s debates. They were also both great Shakespearians. But most of all they were drawn together by a simplicity and directness of mind, in which, I think, they had few rivals—if I may say of my own father what every one else said. Nevertheless, their intimacy was almost as remarkable for diversity of interests as for similarity. It might seem at first sight to be a point of similarity between them that each revelled in his way in the scenery of the beautiful island which was their home. Yet the love of external nature was very different in the two men. It had that marked contrast which Ruskin has described in his Modern Painters. Ruskin contrasts three typical ways of being affected by what is beautiful. There is first “the man who perceives rightly because he does not feel, and to whom the primrose is very accurately the primrose because he does not love it. Then, secondly, the man who perceives wrongly because he feels, and to whom the primrose is anything else than a primrose—a star, or a sun, or a fairy’s shield, or a forsaken maiden. And then lastly, there is the man who perceives rightly in spite of his feelings, and to whom the primrose is for ever nothing else than itself—a little flower apprehended in the very plain and leafy fact of it, whatever and how many soever the associations and passions may be that crowd around it.”

My father’s imagination was of the second order, Tennyson’s of the third. My father often perceived wrongly, or not at all, because he felt so strongly. Consequently, while the bold outlines of mountain scenery and the large vistas of sea and down in the Isle of Wight moved him greatly, he did not look at them with the accurate eye of an artist; and the minute beauty of flowers and trees was non-existent for him. Tennyson, on the contrary, had the most delicate and true perception of the minute as well as the great. Each man chose for his home a site which suited his taste. Weston was on a high hill with a wide view. Farringford was lower down and buried in trees. The two men used sometimes to walk together on the great Down which stretches from the Needles rocks to Freshwater Bay, on which the boundary between Tennyson’s property and my father’s is marked by the dyke beyond the Tennyson memorial cross. At other times they walked in the Freshwater lanes. And there was a suggestion in these different surroundings of their sympathy and of their difference. The immense expanse of scenery visible from the Beacon Down was equally inspiring to both, but the lanes and fields which were full of inspiration to Tennyson had nothing in them which appealed to W. G. Ward. If he heard a bird singing, the only suggestion it conveyed to him was of a tiresome being who kept him awake at night. Trees were only the unpleasant screens which stood in the way of the view of the Solent from his house, and which he cut down as fast as they grew up. To Tennyson, on the contrary—as we see constantly in his poetry—there was a whole world of interest in Nature created by his knowledge of botany and natural history, as well as by his exceptionally accurate and observant eye.

Let me quote the words of a great critic—the late Mr. Hutton—on this characteristic of the Poet:

No poet has so many and such accurate references to the vegetable world, and yet at the same time references so thoroughly poetic. He calls dark hair

More black than ash-buds in the front of March;

auburn hair,

In gloss and hue the chestnut, when the shell
Divides three-fold to show the fruit within.

He is never tired of reflecting in his poetry the physiology of flowers and trees and buds. The “living smoke” of the yew is twice commemorated in his poems. He tells us how the sunflower, “shining fair,”

Rays round with flames her disk of seed;

observes on the blasts “that blow the poplars white”; and, to make a long story short—for the list of instances might be multiplied to hundreds—in his latest published “Idylls of the King,” he thus dates an early hour in the night:

Nigh upon that hour
When the lone hern forgets his melancholy,
Lets down his other leg, and, stretching, dreams
Of goodly supper in the distant pool.

When Tennyson and W. G. Ward walked together there was then a most curious contrast in their attitude towards the Nature that surrounded them,—Tennyson noting every bird, every flower, every tree, as he passed it, Ward buried in the conversation, and alive only to the great, broad effects in the surrounding country.

W. G. Ward was himself not only no poet, but almost barbarously indifferent to poetry, with some few exceptions. He was exceedingly frank with Tennyson, and plainly intimated to him that there was very little in his poetry that he understood or cared for. But this fact never impaired their friendship. Indeed, I think Tennyson enjoyed his almost eccentric candour in this and in other matters, and he used, in later years, to tell me stories which illustrated it. Once when the question of persecution had been debated at the Metaphysical Society he remarked to my father, “You know you would try to get me put into prison if the Pope told you to.” “Your father would not say ‘No,’” Tennyson said to me. “He only replied, ‘The Pope would never tell me to do anything so foolish.’”

I think his intercourse with my father did a good deal to diminish a certain prejudice against Roman Catholicism; and his intimacy with my father’s chaplain—Father Haythornthwaite, a man as opposed to the popular conception of a Jesuit as could well be imagined—told in the same direction. “When Haythornthwaite dies,” Tennyson once said, “I shall write as his epitaph: ‘Here lies Peter Haythornthwaite, Human by nature, Roman by fate!’”

W. G. Ward’s own extreme frankness led Tennyson to remark to a friend: “The popular idea of Roman Catholics as Jesuitical and untruthful is contrary to my own experience. The most truthful man I ever met was an Ultramontane. He was grotesquely truthful.”

Tennyson would sometimes retort in kind to my father’s frank criticisms, and once, after vainly trying to decipher one of his letters, observed that the handwriting was “like walking-sticks gone mad,” a curiously true description of my father’s very peculiar characters.[64]

As with scenery, so with poetry; my father only took in broad effects and simple pathos, and would single out for special admiration such a poem as the “Children’s Hospital,” over which he shed many tears.

Tennyson soon accustomed himself to my father’s indifference to his poetry in general. But he hoped that, at all events, his metaphysical poems would interest his neighbour, and sent him the MS. of “De Profundis” when he wrote it; but the reply was only an entreaty that he would put explanatory notes to it when it should be published. One exception, however, must be made in favour of “Becket,” which Tennyson read aloud to Ward, who, greatly to his own surprise, admired it enthusiastically. “How do you like it?” Tennyson asked, and the reply was, “Very much, though I did not expect to like it at all. It is quite splendid. The development of character in Chancellor and Archbishop is wonderfully drawn. Where did you learn it all?”

I used to think there was a good deal that was alike between the intercourse of Tennyson with my father and his intercourse with my father’s old friend, Dr. Jowett of Balliol. In both cases there was the same complete frankness—an unanswerable reply to those who gave it out that Tennyson best enjoyed the society of flatterers. Jowett, however, understood Tennyson’s poetry far better than my father did. It was sometimes strange to see that impassive figure, so little given to emotion, so ready to snub in others any display of feeling, under the spell of the Poet’s lines. I recollect once at Farringford listening with Jowett after dinner to Tennyson’s reading of his “Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington.” It was a poem which his peculiar chant made most moving, and he read the concluding lines with special pathos:

Speak no more of his renown,
Lay your earthly fancies down,
And in the vast cathedral leave him;
God accept him, Christ receive him.

Tennyson then turned to address some observation to Jowett, but no reply came, and we soon saw that the Master was unable to speak. The tears were streaming down his cheeks. I ventured to allude to this some time later in talking to Jowett, and he said, “What would you have? The two Englishmen for whom I have the deepest feeling of reverence are Tennyson and the great Duke of Wellington. And one of them was reading what he had himself written in admiration of the other!”

When my father died Tennyson visited his grave in company with Father Haythornthwaite, who spoke to me of the visit directly afterwards. A cross of fresh flowers had been placed on the grave until the monument should be erected. Tennyson quoted Shirley’s couplet:

Only the actions of the just
Smell sweet, and blossom in the dust.

And then, standing over the grave, he recited the whole of the beautiful poem from which these lines are taken. Tennyson’s eldest son wrote to me at the same time:

His wonderful simplicity in faith and nature, together with his subtle and far-reaching grasp of intellect, make up a man never to be forgotten. My father and mother and myself will miss him more than I can say; I loved him somehow like an intimate college friend.

A few years later Tennyson published the memorial lines in the volume called Demeter and other Poems, which show how closely his observant mind had taken in the character of his friend:

Farewell, whose living like I shall not find,
Whose Faith and Work were bells of full accord,
My friend, the most unworldly of mankind,
Most generous of all Ultramontanes, Ward,
How subtle at tierce and quart of mind with mind,
How loyal in the following of thy Lord!

Horatio Tennyson.

Freshwater was in those days seething with intellectual life. The Poet was, of course, its centre, and that remarkable woman, Mrs. Cameron, was stage-manager of what was for us young people a great drama. For Tennyson was still writing the “Idylls of the King,” which had so greatly moved the whole country, and we felt that we were in the making of history. There were many in Freshwater who were keenly alive to their privilege. Even among the permanent residents in the neighbourhood there were not a few who were worthy of remark, and Farringford was very hospitable and often added to their number some of the most interesting people in England. Mrs. Cameron herself was one of the well-known Miss Pattles, a sister of the late Lady Somers and Lady Dalrymple. She was a great wit and a most original and unconventional woman, with an enthusiasm for genius and for art. Her large artistic photographs are a permanent record of the remarkable people who congregated from time to time round the Poet’s home in the island. They include Carlyle, Ruskin, Tyndall, Darwin, Lord Dufferin, Palgrave, D. G. Rossetti, Holman Hunt, Lecky, Aubrey de Vere, Sir Henry Taylor, Herschell, Longfellow, Auberon, Herbert, Pollock, Allingham, and many another. Among other residents I would name the Rev. Christopher Bowen, a man of very unusual ability, though he never had enough ambition to become famous. His sons—Lord Justice Bowen and Mr. Edward Bowen of Harrow—are better known. Then there were the Poet’s two remarkable brothers, Horatio and Arthur Tennyson, and two fine old admirals, Sir Graham Hamond and Admiral Crozier. Then again from 1874 onwards we had at the Briary G. F. Watts, and Mrs. Cameron’s sister, Mrs. Prinsep and her husband, with Mr. Val Prinsep as an occasional guest. A little earlier Sir John Simeon was still living at Swainston, and was one of Tennyson’s most intimate friends. Again, Mrs. Grosvenor Hood and Mrs. Brotherton were both people for whom literature and art counted for much.

The large group of people who came to Freshwater in the summer for the sole reason that Tennyson’s writings and himself were among the greatest things in their lives, sometimes formed an almost unique society. Several figures are especially prominent in my memory. One great friend of the Tennysons’ was Sir Richard Jebb—intensely shy and intensely refined—with whom, I may add, by the way, my first meeting at Haslemere was unpromising. I got into the Tennysons’ large old-fashioned brougham to drive to Aldworth on a dark night, and laid rough hands on what I took to be a heap of rugs in the corner. I received in return a mild remonstrance from the fellow-guest, of whose coat-collar I found myself possessed! Jowett and Sir Alfred Lyall I often met at the Tennysons’ and elsewhere. Each was in his way memorable, and congenial to the Poet’s taste, which was fastidious owing to his very simplicity, to his love of reality and dislike of affectation. The singular charm—both in person and in conversation—of Samuel Henry Butcher, another great friend, stands out vividly from the past. In addition to his brilliant gifts and acquirements he was endowed in a remarkable degree with that justice of mind which Tennyson so greatly prized. One used to feel for how much this counted in the Poet’s mind when he talked of the “wisdom” of his old friend, James Spedding. Henry Irving I once saw at Aldworth, though never at Farringford, and it was curious to meet at close quarters one with whom I had had for years the stranger’s intimacy which one has with a favourite actor. But Irving was never an intimate friend of Tennyson’s, nor among the typical figures of his circle. To my mind the friend of Tennyson’s whose saintliness most completely had his sympathy was Aubrey de Vere, of whom Sarah Coleridge said that he had more entirely a poet’s nature even than her own father, or any other of the great poets she had known. Aubrey de Vere’s simplicity and deep piety were as remarkable as his keen perception and close knowledge on the subject which most interested Tennyson himself. I wish I had seen more of the intercourse of two men whose friendship was almost lifelong, and showed Tennyson at his very best in conversation.

Speaking generally, it was a society in which good breeding, literary taste, general information, and personal distinction counted for much more than worldly or official status. I think that we young people looked upon a government official of average endowment as rather an outsider. Genius was all in all for us—officialdom and conventionality in general were unpopular in Freshwater.

Indeed, how could conventionality obtain a footing in a society in which Mrs. Cameron and Tennyson were the central figures? I recall Mrs. Cameron pressing my father’s hand to her heart, and addressing him as “Squire Ward.” I recall her, during her celebrated private theatricals at Dimbola, when a distinguished audience tittered at some stage misadventure which occurred during a tragic scene, mounting a chair and insisting loudly and with angry gesticulation, “You must not laugh; you must cry.” I recall her bringing Tennyson to my father’s house while she was photographing representatives for the characters in the “Idylls of the King,” and calling out directly she saw Cardinal Vaughan (to whom she was a perfect stranger), “Alfred, I have found Sir Lancelot.” Tennyson’s reply was, “I want a face well worn with evil passion.”

My own intercourse with the Poet was chiefly after my father’s death in 1882. Tennyson was then an old man who had passed his threescore years and ten. His deeply serious mind brooded constantly on the prospect for the future, and the meaning of human life, which was, for him, nearly over.

There is much of autobiography in some of the poems of those years which he discussed with me. I have elsewhere[65] described his impressive analysis of the “De Profundis.” I will here set down the substance of his comments on two other poems dealing with his deep problems of human life, the “Ancient Sage” and “Vastness.” “The Ancient Sage” is in form dramatic, and the personality of the two interlocutors is a very important element in it viewed as a work of art. An aged seer of high, ascetic life, a thousand years before the birth of Christ, holds intercourse with a younger man:

that loved and honour’d him, and yet
Was no disciple, richly garb’d, but worn
From wasteful living...

The younger man has set down his reflections on the philosophy of life in a set of verses which the Ancient Sage reads, making his comments as the reading proceeds. There seems to be a deep connection between the personal characteristics of the two men—their habits and modes of living—and their respective views. The younger man is wearied with satiety, impatient for immediate pleasure:

Yet wine and laughter, friends! and set
The lamps alight, and call
For golden music, and forget
The darkness of the pall.

He is dismayed by the first appearance of difficulty and pain in the world, as he had been satisfied for a time with the immediate pleasures within his reach. He is unable to steady the nerve of his brain (so to speak), and trace the riddle of pain and trouble in the universe to its ultimate solution. In thought, as in conduct, he is filled and swayed by the immediate inclination and the first impression, without self-restraint and without the habits of concentrated reflection which go hand in hand with self-restraint. Failing, in consequence, to have any steady view of his own soul or of the spiritual life within, he is impressed, probably by experience, with this one truth, that uncontrolled self-indulgence leads to regret and pain; and he is consequently pessimistic in his ultimate view of things. The absence of spiritual light makes him see only the immediate pain and failure in the universe. He has no patience to look beyond or to reflect if there be not an underlying and greater purpose which temporary failure in small things may further, as the death of one cell in the human organism is but the preparation for its replacement by another, and a part of the body’s natural development. It is a dissipated character and a dissipated mind. The intangible beauty of moral virtue finds nothing in the character capable of assimilating it; the spiritual truth of Gods existence and the spiritual purpose of the universe elude the mind.

In marked contrast stands forth the “Ancient Sage.” He has no taste for the dissipations of the town:

I am wearied of our city, son, and go
To spend my one last year among the hills.

His gospel is a gospel of self-restraint and long-suffering, of action for high ends.

Let be thy wail and help thy fellow-men,
And make thy gold thy vassal, not thy king,
And fling free alms into the beggar’s bowl,
And send the day into the darken’d heart;
Nor list for guerdon in the voice of men,
A dying echo from a falling wall:
·······
Nor roll thy viands on a luscious tongue,
Nor drown thyself with flies in honied wine.
·······
And more—think well! Do-well will follow thought.

And the patience and self-control which enable him to work for great purposes and spiritual aims, characterize also his thought. “Things are not what they seem,” he holds. The first view is ever incomplete, though he who has not patience of thought will not get beyond the first view. That concentration and that purity of manners which keep the spiritual soul and self undimmed, and preserve the moral voice within articulate, are indispensable if we are to understand anything beyond the most superficial phenomena about us. The keynote is struck in the very first words which the Seer speaks:

This wealth of waters might but seem to draw
From yon dark cave, but, son, the source is higher,
Yon summit half-a-league in air—and higher,
The cloud that hides it—higher still, the heavens
Whereby the cloud was moulded, and whereout
The cloud descended. Force is from the heights.

“Force is from the heights” is the thought which underlies the Sage’s interpretation of all that perplexes the younger man. We cannot fully understand what is beyond and above us, but if we are wise we shall steadily look upwards, and enough light will eventually be gained for our guidance. “Lucerna pedibus meis verbum tuum.” As God’s law is enough to guide our footsteps, though we cannot hope to understand His full counsel, so the light by which the spiritual world is disclosed is sufficient for those who look for it, though its disclosure is only gradual and partial. If we are said not to know what we cannot submit in its entirety to scientific tests, we can never know anything worth knowing. If, again, we are to disbelieve in the spiritual world because it is filled with mystery, what are we to say of the mysteries which face us in this earth—inexplicable yet undeniable? The conception of God is not more mysterious than the thought that a grain of sand may be divided a million times, and yet be no nearer its ultimate division than it is now. Time and space are full of mystery. A man under chloroform has been known to pass many hours of sensation in a few minutes. Time is made an objective measure of things, and yet its phenomena are so subjective that Kant conceived it to have no real existence. When the younger man complains that “the Nameless Power or Powers that rule were never heard nor seen,” the Sage thus replies:

If thou would’st hear the Nameless, and wilt dive
Into the Temple-cave of thine own self,
There, brooding by the central altar, thou
May’st haply learn the Nameless hath a voice,
By which thou wilt abide, if thou be wise,
As if thou knewest, tho’ thou canst not know;
For Knowledge is the swallow on the lake
That sees and stirs the surface-shadow there
But never yet hath dipt into the abysm,
The Abysm of all Abysms, beneath, within
The blue of sky and sea, the green of earth,
And in the million-millionth of a grain,
Which cleft and cleft again for evermore,
And ever vanishing, never vanishes,
To me, my son, more mystic than myself,
Or even than the Nameless is to me.

And so, too, when the youth calls for further proof of the “Nameless,” the Sage reminds him that there are universally acknowledged truths incapable of formal proof. The thought which the poet here dwells upon is similar to Cardinal Newman’s teaching in the Grammar of Assent, though Tennyson’s use of words does not here, as elsewhere, harmonize with Catholic doctrine. There are truths, the knowledge of which is so intimately connected with our own personality, that the material for complete formal proof eludes verbal statement. We reject, for example, with a clear and unerring instinct, the notion that when we converse with our friends, the words and thoughts which come to us proceed possibly from some principle within us and not from an external cause, and yet it is not a matter on which we can offer logical proof. The same sensations could conceivably be produced from within, as they are in a dream. Logical proof, then, has (so the Ancient Sage maintains) to be dispensed with in much that is of highest moment:

Thou canst not prove that thou art body alone,
Nor canst thou prove that thou art spirit alone,
Nor canst thou prove that thou art both in one:
Thou canst not prove thou art immortal, no
Nor yet that thou art mortal—nay, my son,
Thou canst not prove that I, who speak with thee,
Am not thyself in converse with thyself,
For nothing worthy proving can be proven,
Nor yet disproven.

And close upon this follows the beautiful passage in which the hopeful and wistful upward gaze of faith is described. While melancholy and perplexity constantly attend on the exercises of the speculative intellect, we are to “cling to faith”:

She reels not in the storm of warring words,
She brightens at the clash of “Yes” and “No,”
She sees the Best that glimmers thro’ the Worst,
She feels the Sun is hid but for a night.
She spies the summer thro’ the winter bud,
She tastes the fruit before the blossom falls,
She hears the lark within the songless egg,
She finds the fountain where they wailed “Mirage”!

These lines present to the reader the hopefulness of the spiritual mind, hopefulness not akin to the merely sanguine temperament, but based on a deep conviction of the reality of the spiritual world, and on unfailing certainty that there is in it a key to the perplexities of this universe of which we men understand so little. We know from experience that material Nature is working out her ends, however little we understand the process, and however unpromising portions of her work might appear without this knowledge. That an acorn should have within it forces which compel earth, air, and water to come to its assistance and become the oak tree, would seem incredible were it not so habitually known as a fact; and the certainty which such experiences give in the material order, the eye of faith gives in the spiritual order. However perplexing the universe now seems to us we have this deep trust that there is an explanation, and that when we are in a position to judge the whole, instead of looking on from this corner of time and space, the truth of the spiritual interpretation of its phenomena will be clear—“ut iustificeris in sermonibus tuis et vincas cum iudicaris.” This view runs not only through the passages I have just quoted, but through all the poem. The poet pleads for steadfast trust and hope in the face of difficulty, as we would trust a known and intimate friend in the face of ominous suspicions.

It is, of course, just that keen realization of the plausibleness of the sceptical view of life, to which some of our modern critics object as a sign of weakness, which gives this poem its strength. Such assistance as Tennyson gives us in seeing and realizing the spiritual view is needed only or mainly by those to whom agnosticism in its various forms is a plausible, and, at first sight, a reasonable attitude. The old-fashioned “irrefragable arguments” are of little use by themselves to persons in such a condition. However evident spiritual truths may be to an absolutely purified reason, they are not evident to intellects which are impregnated with a view of things opposed to the religious view. Moreover, we do not consult a doctor with much confidence if he does not believe in the reality of our illness; and one who finds the sceptical view persuasive will have little trust in those who tell him that it has no plausibility at all. With Tennyson, as with Cardinal Newman, half the secret of his influence in this respect is that the sceptically minded reader finds those very disturbing thoughts which had troubled his own mind anticipated and stated. And yet a truer and deeper view is likewise depicted, which sees beyond these thoughts, which detects through the clouds the light in the heavens beyond.

In the “Ancient Sage” there is a striking instance of this characteristic. The young philosopher, filled with the failure of fair promise and the collapse of apparent purpose in Nature and in man, pours forth his sceptical lament. Here is a selection from it, typical of the rest:

The years that made the stripling wise
Undo their work again,
And leave him, blind of heart and eyes,
The last and least of men;
······
His winter chills him to the root,
He withers marrow and mind;
The kernel of the shrivell’d fruit
Is jutting thro’ the rind;
The tiger spasms tear his chest,
The palsy wags his head;
The wife, the sons, who love him best
Would fain that he were dead;
······
The statesman’s brain that sway’d the past
Is feebler than his knees;
The passive sailor wrecks at last
In ever-silent seas;
The warrior hath forgot his arms,
The Learned all his lore;
The changing market frets or charms
The merchant’s hope no more;
The prophet’s beacon burn’d in vain,
And now is lost in cloud;
The plowman passes, bent with pain,
To mix with what he plow’d;
The poet whom his Age would quote
As heir of endless fame—
He knows not ev’n the book he wrote,
Not even his own name.
For man has overlived his day,
And, darkening in the light,
Scarce feels the senses break away
To mix with ancient Night.

The Sage—far from denying the force of what he says—contends for a deeper and wider view. The “darkness is in man.” It is the result of the incompleteness of his knowledge. That is to say, what is black to his imperfect view, and taken by itself, may be a necessary part of a great scheme. Not that the things are not really sad, but that the whole is not sad. As there may be pain in tears of joy, and yet it is lost in exquisite pleasure, so the dark elements of life, when our ultimate destiny is attained and we can view age and suffering as part of the whole, may be so entirely eclipsed, that we may say with truth that the “world is wholly fair”:

My son, the world is dark with griefs and graves,
So dark that men cry out against the Heavens.
Who knows but that the darkness is in man?
The doors of Night may be the gates of Light;
For wert thou born or blind or deaf, and then
Suddenly heal’d, how would’st thou glory in all
The splendours and the voices of the world!
And we, the poor earth’s dying race, and yet
No phantoms, watching from a phantom shore
Await the last and largest sense to make
The phantom walls of this illusion fade,
And show us that the world is wholly fair.

“The doors of night may be the gates of light,” says the Sage; and in unison with this note are his replies to some of the details of the younger man’s wail, while his very argument presupposes that all cannot now be answered until we have the “last and largest sense.” Thus, when the dreary, hopeless vision of bodily decay, which seems to point to total dissolution of a noble nature, is referred to, he says:

The shell must break before the bird can fly.

The breaking of the shell might seem, at first sight, total destruction, but the forthcoming of the bird transforms the conception of decay into a conception of new birth. And so, too, in answer to the complaint that “the shaft of scorn that once had stung, but wakes the dotard smile,” he suggests that a more complete view may show it to be “the placid gleam of sunset after storm.” The transition may be not from intense life to apathy, but from blinding passion to a calmer, a serener vision.

Another of the later poems—“Vastness”—brings into especial relief a parallel I have often noted between Lord Tennyson and Cardinal Newman in their keen sense of the mysteries of the universe, which religion helps us to bear with but does not solve. So far as this planet goes, and our own human race, Cardinal Newman has expressed this sense in the Apologia, and the parallel between his view and Tennyson’s is sufficiently instructive to make it worth while to quote the passage in full:

To consider the world in its length and breadth, its various history, the many races of man, their starts, their fortunes, their mutual alienation, their conflicts; and then their ways, habits, governments, forms of worship; their enterprises, their aimless courses, their random achievements and acquirements, the impotent conclusion of long-standing facts, the tokens so faint and broken of a superintending design, the blind evolution of what turn out to be great powers and truths, the progress of things as if from unreasoning elements, not towards final causes, the greatness and littleness of man, his far-reaching aims, his short duration, the curtain hung over his futurity, the disappointments of life, the defeat of good, the success of evil, physical pain, mental anguish, the prevalence and intensity of sin, the pervading idolatries, the corruptions, the dreary hopeless irreligion, that condition of the whole race so fearfully yet exactly described by the Apostle, “having no hope and without God in the world,” all this is a vision to dizzy and appal; and inflicts upon the mind the sense of a profound mystery which is absolutely beyond human solution.

Lord Tennyson takes in a wider range of considerations than the Cardinal. He paints graphically, not only the mystery of the lot of mankind, but the further sense of bewilderment which arises when we contemplate the aimlessness of this vast universe of which our earth is such an inappreciable fragment. Logically the poem asks only the question: “Great or small, grand or ignoble, what does anything matter if we are but creatures of the day with no eternal destiny?” But its grandeur consists in the manner in which it sweeps from end to end of human experience and knowledge, from thoughts overwhelming in their vastness, from ideas carrying the mind over the length and breadth of space and over visions of all eternity, to pictures of this planet, with its microscopic details, the hopes, anxieties, plans, pleasures, griefs which make up the immediate life of man. The imagination vacillates between a keen sense of the importance of all, even the smallest, and the worthlessness of all, even the greatest. At one moment comes the thought that one life out of the myriads of lives passed on this tiny planet, if it be lived and given up for righteousness, is of infinite and eternal value, and the next moment comes the sense that the whole universe is worthless and meaningless, if, indeed, the only percipient beings who are affected by it are but creatures who feel for a day and then pass to nothingness. Each picture of the various aspects of human life rouses an instinctive sympathy, and a feeling in the background, “it can’t be worthless and meaningless,” and yet the poet relentlessly forces us to confess that it is only some far wider view of human nature and destiny than this world alone can justify, which can make the scenes he depicts of any value. What Mill called “the disastrous feeling of ‘not worth while’” threatens the reader at every turn; though the pictures of life in its innumerable aspects of happiness, misery, sensuality, purity, selfishness, self-devotion, ambition, aspiration, craft, cruelty, are so intensely real and rivet the imagination so strongly, that he refuses to yield to the feeling. I subjoin some of the couplets where good and bad, great and small, alternate:

Many a hearth upon our dark globe sighs after many a vanish’d face,
Many a planet by many a sun may roll with the dust of a vanish’d race.
Raving politics, never at rest—as this poor earth’s pale history runs,—
What is it all but a trouble of ants in the gleam of a million million of suns?
············
Faith at her zenith, or all but lost in the gloom of doubts that darken the schools;
Craft with a bunch of all-heal in her hand, follow’d up by her vassal legion of fools.
············
Wealth with his wines and his wedded harlots; honest Poverty, bare to the bone;
Opulent Avarice, lean as Poverty: Flattery gilding the rift in a throne.
············
Love for the maiden, crown’d with marriage, no regrets for aught that has been,
Household happiness, gracious children, debtless competence, golden mean;
National hatreds of whole generations, and pigmy spites of the village spire;
Vows that will last to the last death-ruckle, and vows that are snapt in a moment of fire;
He that has lived for the lust of the minute, and died in the doing it, flesh without mind;
He that has nail’d all flesh to the Cross, till Self died out in the love of his kind;
Spring and Summer and Autumn and Winter, and all these old revolutions of earth;
All new-old revolutions of Empire—change of the tide—what is all of it worth?

What the philosophies, all the sciences, poesy, varying voices of prayer?
All that is noblest, all that is basest, all that is filthy with all that is fair?
What is it all, if we all of us end but in being our own corpse-coffins at last,
Swallowed in Vastness, lost in Silence, drown’d in the deeps of a meaningless Past?
What but a murmur of gnats in the gloom, or a moment’s anger of bees in their hive?

The thought which seems to oppress the seer is the insignificance of everything when compared to a standard—ever conceivable and ever actual—above it. The ruts of a ploughed field may seem to the diminutive insect as vast and overcoming as the Alps seem to us. Then contrast the thought of Mont Blanc with that of the whole globe; proceed from the globe to the solar system, and from that to the myriads of systems lost in space. All that is great to us is relatively great, and becomes small at once when the mind rises higher. So, too, in the moral order, all those aspects of human life which sway our deepest emotions are but “a murmur of gnats in the gloom,” if regard be had to our comparative insignificance. The ground yields at every step, and the mind looks for some terra firma, some absolute basis of trust, and this is only to be found in the conception of man as possessing an eternal destiny. The infinite value of all that concerns an immortal being stands proof against the thoughts that bewildered our vision. “He that has nailed all flesh to the cross till self died out in the love of his kind” may be but a speck in the universe, but faith measures him by a standard other than that of spacial vastness. The idea of the eternal worth of morality steps in to calm the imagination, and this idea in its measure justifies the conception of the value and importance of all the phases of human existence which make up the drama of life. Human Love is the side of man’s nature which the poet looks to as conveying the sense of his immortal destiny. The undying union of spirit with spirit is a union which the grave cannot end. The bewildering nightmare of the nothingness and vanity of all things is abruptly cut short, as the sense of what is deepest in the human heart promptly gives the lie to what it cannot solve in detail:

Peace, let it be! for I loved him and love him for ever.
The dead are not dead but alive.

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The South Side of Entrance from below the Terrace, Aldworth.
Drawn by W. Biscombe Gardner.