Notwithstanding the apparently fortunate circumstances by which Tennyson was surrounded, the record of his early life produces in the reader’s mind a sense of unhappiness. Happiness is an affair of temperament, not of outward circumstances. Happy, in the sense of enjoying the present as Wordsworth enjoyed it, Tennyson could never be. Once, no doubt, Nature’s sweetest gift to all living things—the power of enjoying the present—was man’s inheritance too. Some of the human family have not lost it even yet; but poets are rarely of these. Give Wordsworth any pittance, enough to satisfy the simplest physical wants—enough to procure him plain living and leisure for “high thinking”—and he would be happier than Tennyson would have been, cracking the finest “walnuts” and sipping the richest “wine” amidst a circle of admiring and powerful friends. As to opinion, as to criticism of his work—what was that to Wordsworth? Had he not from the first the good opinion of her of whom he was the high priest elect. Natura Benigna herself? Nay, had he not from the first the good opinions of Wordsworth himself and Dorothy? Without this faculty of enjoying the
present, how can a bard be happy? For the present alone exists. The past is a dream; the future is a dream; the present is the narrow plank thrown for an instant from the dream of the past to the dream of the future. And yet it is the poet (who of all men should enjoy the raree show hurrying and scrambling along the plank)—it is he who refuses to enjoy himself on his own trembling little plank in order to “stare round” from side to side.
Spedding, speaking in a letter to Thompson in 1835 of Tennyson’s visit to the Lake country, lets fall a few words that describe the poet in the period before his marriage more fully than could have been done by a volume of subtle analysis:—
“I think he took in more pleasure and inspiration than any one would have supposed who did not know his own almost personal dislike of the present, whatever it might be.”
This is what makes us say that by far the most important thing in Tennyson’s life was his marriage. He began to enjoy the present: “The peace of God came into my life before the altar when I wedded her.” No more beautiful words than these were ever uttered by any man concerning any woman. And to say that the words were Tennyson’s is to say that they expressed the simple truth, for his definition of human speech as God meant it to be would have been “the breath that utters truth.” It would
have been wonderful, indeed, if he, whose capacity of loving a friend was so great had been without an equal capacity of loving a woman.
“Although as a son,” says the biographer, “I cannot allow myself full utterance about her whom I loved as perfect mother and ‘very woman of very woman’—‘such a wife’ and true helpmate she proved herself. It was she who became my father’s adviser in literary matters; ‘I am proud of her intellect,’ he wrote. With her he always discussed what he was working at; she transcribed his poems: to her and to no one else he referred for a final criticism before publishing. She, with her ‘tender, spiritual nature,’ [156] and instinctive nobility of thought, was always by his side, a ready, cheerful, courageous, wise, and sympathetic counsellor. It was she who shielded his sensitive spirit from the annoyances and trials of life, answering (for example) the innumerable letters addressed to him from all parts of the world. By her quiet sense of humour, by her selfless devotion, by ‘her faith as clear as the heights of the June-blue heaven,’ she helped him also to the utmost in the hours of his depression and of his sorrow.”
There are some few people whose natures are so noble or so sweet that how rich soever may be their endowment of intellect, or even of genius, we seem to remember them mainly
by what St. Gregory Nazianzen calls “the rhetoric of their lives.” And surely the knowledge that this is so is encouraging to him who would fain believe in the high destiny of man—surely it is encouraging to know that, in spite of “the inhuman dearth of noble natures,” mankind can still so dearly love moral beauty as to hold it more precious than any other human force. And certainly one of those whose intellectual endowments are outdazzled by the beauty of their qualities of heart and soul was the sweet lady whose death I am recording.
Among those who had the privilege of knowing Lady Tennyson (and they were many, and these many were of the best), some are at this moment eloquent in talk about the perfect helpmate she was to the great poet, and the perfect mother she was to his children, and they quote those lovely lines of Tennyson which every one knows by heart:—