Part 6 (1/2)

”For those who cared to know about his literary history he wrote 'Merlin and the Gleam.' From his boyhood he had felt the magic of Merlin-that spirit of poetry-which bade him know his power and follow throughout his work a pure and high ideal, with a simple and single devotedness and a desire to enn.o.ble the life of the world, and which helped him through doubts and difficulties to 'endure as seeing Him who is invisible.'

Great the Master, And sweet the Magic, When over the valley, In early summers, Over the mountain, On human faces, And all around me, Moving to melody, Floated the Gleam.

”In his youth he sang of the brook flowing through his upland valley, of the 'ridged wolds' that rose above his home, of the mountain-glen and snowy summits of his early dreams, and of the beings, heroes and fairies, with which his imaginary world was peopled. Then was heard the 'croak of the raven,' the harsh voice of those who were unsympathetic-

The light retreated, The Landskip darken'd, The melody deaden'd, The Master whisper'd, 'Follow the Gleam.'

”Still the inward voice told him not to be faint-hearted but to follow his ideal. And by the delight in his own romantic fancy, and by the harmonies of nature, 'the warble of water,' and 'cataract music of falling torrents,' the inspiration of the poet was renewed. His Eclogues and English Idyls followed, when he sang the songs of country life and the joys and griefs of country folk, which he knew through and through,

Innocent maidens, Garrulous children, Homestead and harvest, Reaper and gleaner, And rough-ruddy faces Of lowly labour.

”By degrees, having learnt somewhat of the real philosophy of life and of humanity from his own experience, he rose to a melody 'stronger and statelier.' He celebrated the glory of 'human love and of human heroism'

and of human thought, and began what he had already devised, his epic of King Arthur, 'typifying above all things the life of man,' wherein he had intended to represent some of the great religions of the world. He had purposed that this was to be the chief work of his manhood. Yet the death of his friend, Arthur Hallam, and the consequent darkening of the whole world for him made him almost fail in this purpose; nor any longer for a while did he rejoice in the splendour of his spiritual visions, nor in the Gleam that had 'waned to a wintry glimmer.'

Clouds and darkness Closed upon Camelot; Arthur had vanish'd I knew not whither, The King who loved me, And cannot die.

”Here my father united the two Arthurs, the Arthur of the Idylls and the Arthur 'the man he held as half divine.' He himself had fought with death, and had come out victorious to find 'a stronger faith his own,'

and a hope for himself, for all those in sorrow and for universal human kind, that never forsook him through the future years.

And broader and brighter The Gleam flying onward, Wed to the melody, Sang thro' the world.

I saw, wherever In pa.s.sing it glanced upon Hamlet or city, That under the Crosses The dead man's garden, The mortal hillock, Would break into blossom; And so to the land's Last limit I came.

”Up to the end he faced death with the same earnest and unfailing courage that he had always shown, but with an added sense of the awe and the mystery of the Infinite.

I can no longer, But die rejoicing, For thro' the Magic Of Him the Mighty, Who taught me in childhood, There on the border Of boundless Ocean, And all but in Heaven Hovers the Gleam.

”That is the reading of the poet's riddle as he gave it to me. He thought that 'Merlin and the Gleam' would probably be enough of biography for those friends who urged him to write about himself. However, this has not been their verdict, and I have tried to do what he said that I might do.”

There are many specialists in Tennysonian bibliography who take a pride (and a worthy pride) in their knowledge of the master's poems. But the knowledge of all of these specialists put together is not equal to that of him who writes this book. Not only is every line at his fingers'

ends, but he knows, either from his own memory or from what his father has told him, where and when and why every line was written. He, however, shares, it is evident that dislike-rather let us say that pa.s.sionate hatred-which his father, like so many other poets, had of that well-intentioned but vexing being whom Rossetti anathematized as the ”literary resurrection man.” Rossetti used to say that ”of all signs that a man was devoid of poetic instinct and poetic feeling the impulse of the literary resurrectionist was the surest.” Without going so far as this we may at least affirm that all poets writing in a language requiring, as English does, much manipulation before it can be moulded into perfect form must needs revise in the brain before the line is set down, or in ma.n.u.script, as Sh.e.l.ley did, or partly in ma.n.u.script and partly in type, as Coleridge did. But the rakers-up of the ”chips of the workshop,” to use Tennyson's own phrase, seem to have been specially irritating to him, because he belonged to those poets who cannot really revise and complete their work till they see it in type. ”Poetry,” he said, ”looks better, more convincing in print.”

”From the volume of 1832,” says his son, ”he omitted several stanzas of 'The Palace of Art' because he thought that the poem was too full. 'The artist is known by his self-limitation' was a favourite adage of his. He allowed me, however, to print some of them in my notes, otherwise I should have hesitated to quote without his leave lines that he had excised. He 'gave the people of his best,' and he usually wished that his best should remain without variorum readings, 'the chips of the workshop,' as he called them. The love of bibliomaniacs for first editions filled him with horror, for the first editions are obviously in many cases the worst editions, and once he said to me: 'Why do they treasure the rubbish I shot from my full-finish'd cantos?'

??p??? ??de ?sas?? ?s? p???? ??s? pa?t??.

For himself many pa.s.sages in Wordsworth and other poets have been entirely spoilt by the modern habit of giving every various reading along with the text. Besides, in his case, very often what is published as the latest edition has been the original version in his first ma.n.u.script, so that there is no possibility of really tracing the history of what may seem to be a new word or a new pa.s.sage. 'For instance,' he said, 'in ”Maud” a line in the first edition was 'I will bury myself in _my books_, and the Devil may pipe to his own,' which was afterwards altered to 'I will bury myself _in myself_, &c.': this was highly commended by the critics as an improvement on the _original_ reading-but it was actually in the first MS. draft of the poem.”

Again, it is important to get a statement by one ent.i.tled to speak with authority as to what Tennyson did and what he did not believe upon religious matters. He had in 'In Memoriam' and other poems touched with a hand so strong and sometimes so daring upon the teaching of modern science, and yet he had spoken always so reverently of what modern civilization reverences, that the most opposite lessons were read from his utterances. To one thinker it would seem that Tennyson had thrown himself boldly upon the very foremost wave of scientific thought. To another it would seem that Wordsworth (although, living and writing when he did, before the birth of the new cosmogony, he believed himself to be still in trammels of the old) was by temperament far more in touch with the new cosmogony than was Tennyson, who studied evolution more ardently than any poet since Lucretius. While Wordsworth, notwithstanding a conventional phrase here and there, had an apprehension of Nature without the ever-present idea of the Power behind her, Spinosa himself was not so ”G.o.d-intoxicated” a man as Tennyson. His son sets the question at rest in the following pregnant words:-

”a.s.suredly Religion was no nebulous abstraction for him. He consistently emphasized his own belief in what he called the Eternal Truths; in an Omnipotent, Omnipresent, and All-loving G.o.d, Who has revealed Himself through the human attribute of the highest self-sacrificing love; in the freedom of the human will; and in the immortality of the soul. But he a.s.serted that 'Nothing worthy proving can be proven,' and that even as to the great laws which are the basis of Science, 'We have but faith, we cannot know.' He dreaded the dogmatism of sects and rash definitions of G.o.d. 'I dare hardly name His Name,' he would say, and accordingly he named Him in 'The Ancient Sage' the 'Nameless.' 'But take away belief in the self-conscious personality of G.o.d,' he said, 'and you take away the backbone of the world.' 'On G.o.d and G.o.d-like men we build our trust.' A week before his death I was sitting by him, and he talked long of the Personality and of the Love of G.o.d, 'That G.o.d, Whose eyes consider the poor,' 'Who catereth, even for the sparrow.' 'I should,' he said, 'infinitely rather feel myself the most miserable wretch on the face of the earth with a G.o.d above, than the highest type of man standing alone.'

He would allow that G.o.d is unknowable in 'his whole world-self, and all-in-all,' and that, therefore, there was some force in the objection made by some people to the word 'Personality' as being 'anthropomorphic,'

and that, perhaps 'Self-consciousness' or 'Mind' might be clearer to them: but at the same time he insisted that, although 'man is like a thing of nought' in 'the boundless plan,' our highest view of G.o.d must be more or less anthropomorphic: and that 'Personality,' as far as our intelligence goes, is the widest definition and includes 'Mind,'

'Self-consciousness,' 'Will,' 'Love,' and other attributes of the Real, the Supreme, 'the High and Lofty One that inhabiteth Eternity, Whose name is Holy.'”

And then Lord Tennyson quotes a ma.n.u.script note of Jowett's in which he says:-

”Alfred Tennyson thinks it ridiculous to believe in a G.o.d and deny his consciousness, and was amused at some one who said of him that he had versified Hegelianism.”