Part 5 (1/2)
Equally striking are the changes in 'The Blessed Damosel.' But the most notable example of the surety of his hand in revising is seen in regard to a poem several times mentioned in this volume, called originally 'Bride's Chamber Talk.' It was begun as early as 'Jenny,' read by Allingham in 1860, but not printed till more than a quarter of a century later. The earliest form is still in existence in MS., and although some of the lines struck out are as poetry most lovely, the poem on the whole is better without them. It was a theory of Rossetti's, indeed, that the very riches of the English language made it necessary for the poet who would achieve excellence to revise and manipulate his lines. And in support of this he would contrast the amazing pa.s.sion for revision disclosed by Dr. Garnett's 'Relics of Sh.e.l.ley,' in which sometimes scarcely half a dozen of the original words are left on a page, with Scott's metrical narratives, which were sent to the printer in cantos as they were written, like one of the contemporary novels thrown off for the serials. The fact seems to be, however, that the poet's power of reaching, as Scott reached, his own ideal expression _per saltum_, or reaching it slowly and tentatively, is simply a matter of temperament.
For whose verses are more loose-jointed than Byron's? whose diction is more commonplace than his? And yet this is what the greatest of Byron specialists, Mr John Murray, says in his extremely interesting remarks upon Byron's autograph:-
”If we except Byron's dramatic pieces and 'Don Juan,' the first draft of Byron's longer poems formed but a nucleus of the work as it was printed. For example, 'English Bards and Scotch Reviewers' grew out of the 'British Bards,' while 'The Giaour,' by constant additions to the ma.n.u.script, the proofs, and even to the work after publication, was expanded to nearly twice its original size. . . . When the inspiration was on him, the printer had to be kept at work the greater part of the night, and fresh 'copy' and fresh revises were crossing one another hour by hour.”
The conclusion is that poets cannot be cla.s.sified according to their methods of work, but only in relation to the result of those methods, and that our two great elaborators, Byron and Rossetti, may still be more unlike each other in essentials than are any other two nineteenth-century poets.
On the whole, we cannot help closing this book with kindly feelings towards the editor, inasmuch as it aids in the good work of restoring the true portrait of the man who has suffered more than any other from the mischievous malignity of foes and the more mischievous indiscretion of certain of his friends.
III. ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON.
18091892.
I.
Charles Lamb was so paralyzed, it is said, by Coleridge's death, that for weeks after that event, he was heard murmuring often to himself, ”Coleridge is dead, Coleridge is dead.” In such a mental condition at this moment is an entire country, I think. ”Tennyson is dead! Tennyson is dead!” It will be some time before England's loss can really be expressed by any words so powerful in pathos and in sorrow as these. And if this is so with regard to English people generally, what of those few who knew the man, and knowing him, must needs love him-must needs love him above all others?-those, I mean, who, when speaking of him, used to talk not so much about the poetry as about the man who wrote it-those who now are saying, with a tremor of the voice, and a moistening of the eye:-
There was none like him-none.
[Picture: Alfred, Lord Tennyson, aet. 80. From a photography reproduced by the kind permission of Lord Tennyson]
To say wherein lies the secret of the charm of anything that lives is mostly difficult. Especially is it so with regard to a man of poetic genius. All are agreed, for instance, that D. G. Rossetti possessed an immense charm. So he did, indeed. But who has been able to define that charm? I, too, knew Rossetti well, and loved him well. Sometimes, indeed, the egotism of a sorrowing memory makes me think that outside his own most affectionate and n.o.ble-tempered family, including that old friend in art at whose feet he sat as a boy, no man loved Rossetti so deeply and so lastingly as I did; unless, perhaps, it was the poor blind poet, Philip Marston, who, being so deeply stricken, needed to love and to be loved more sorely than I, to whom Fate has been kind. And yet I should find it difficult to say wherein lay the charm of Rossetti's chameleon-like personality. So with other men and women I could name.
This is not so in regard to the great man now lying dead at Aldworth.
Nothing is easier than to define the charm of Tennyson.
It lay in a great veracity of soul-in a simple-mindedness so childlike that, unless you had known him to be the undoubted author of his exquisitely artistic poems, you would have supposed that even the subtleties of poetic art must be foreign to a nature so devoid of all subtlety as his. ”Homer,” you would have said, ”might have been such a man as this, for Homer worked in a language which is Poetry's very voice.
But Tennyson works in a language which has to be moulded into harmony by a myriad subtleties of art. How can this great inspired child, who yet has the simple wisdom of Bragi, the poetry-smith of the Northern Olympus, be the delicate-fingered artist of 'The Princess,' 'The Palace of Art,'
'The Day-Dream,' and 'The Dream of Fair Women'?”
As deeply as some men feel that language was given to men to disguise their thoughts did Tennyson feel that language was given to _him_ to declare his thoughts without disguise. He knew of but one justification for the thing he said, viz., that it was the thing he thought. _Arriere pensee_ was with him impossible. But, it may be asked, when a man carries out-speaking to such a pa.s.s as this, is he not apt to become a somewhat troublesome and discordant thread in the complex web of modern society? No doubt any other man than Tennyson would have been so. But the honest ring in the voice-which, by-the-by, was strengthened and deepened by the old-fas.h.i.+oned Lincolns.h.i.+re accent-softened and, to a great degree, neutralized the effect of the bluntness. Moreover, behind this uncompromising directness was apparent a n.o.ble and a splendid courtesy; for, above all things, Tennyson was a great and forthright English gentleman. As he stood at the porch at Aldworth, meeting a guest or bidding him good-bye-as he stood there, tall, far beyond the height of average men, his naturally fair skin showing dark and tanned by the sun and wind-as he stood there no one could mistake him for anything but a great gentleman, who was also much more. Up to the last a man of extraordinary presence, he showed, I think, the beauty of old age to a degree rarely seen.
A friend of his who, visiting him on his birthday, discovered him thus standing at the door to welcome him, has described his unique appearance in words which are literally accurate at least:-
A poet should be limned in youth, they say, Or else in prime, with eyes and forehead beaming Of manhood's noon-the very body seeming To lend the spirit wings to win the bay; But here stands he whose noontide blooms for aye, Whose eyes, where past and future both are gleaming With lore beyond all youthful poets' dreaming, Seem lit from sh.o.r.es of some far-glittering day.
Our master's prime is now-is ever now; Our star that wastes not in the wastes of night Holds Nature's dower undimmed in Time's despite; Those eyes seem Wisdom's own beneath that brow, Where every furrow Time hath dared to plough s.h.i.+nes a new bar of still diviner light.
This, then, was the secret of Tennyson's personal charm. And if the reader is sceptical as to its magnetic effect upon his friends, let me remind him of the amazing rarity of these great and guileless natures; let me remind him also that this world is comprised of two cla.s.ses of people-the bores, whose name is legion, and the interesting people, whose name is _not_ legion-the former being those whose natural instinct of self-protective mimicry impels them to move about among their fellows hiding their features behind a mask of convention, the latter being those who move about with uncovered faces just as Nature fas.h.i.+oned them. If guilelessness lends interest to a dullard, it is still more so with the really luminous souls. So infinite is the creative power of nature that she makes no two individuals alike. If we only had the power of inquiring into the matter, we should find not only that each individual creature that once inhabited one of the minute sh.e.l.ls that go to the building of England's fortress walls of chalk was absolutely unlike all the others, but that even the poor microbe himself, who in these days is so maligned, is also very intensely an individual.
Some time ago the old discussion was revived in _The Athenaeum_ as to whether the nightingale's song was joyful or melancholy. And, perhaps, if the poems of the late James Thomson and the poems of Mr. Austin Dobson were recited by their authors to a congregation of nightingales, the question would at once be debated amongst them, ”Is the note of the human songster joyful or melancholy?” The truth is that the humidity or the dryness of the atmosphere in the various habitats of the nightingale modifies so greatly the _timbre_ of the voice that, while a nightingale chorus at Fiesole may seem joyous, a nightingale chorus in the moist thickets along the banks of the Ouse may seem melancholy. Nay, more, as I once told Tennyson at Aldworth, I, when a truant boy wandering along the banks of the Ouse (where six nightingales' nests have been found in the hedge of a single meadow), got so used to these matters that I had my own favourite individuals, and could easily distinguish one from another.
That rich climacteric swell which is reached just before the ”jug, jug, jug,” varies amazingly, if the listener will only give the matter attention. And if this infinite variety of individualism is thus seen in the lower animals, what must it be in man?
There is, however, in the entire human race, a fatal instinct for marring itself. To break down the exterior signs of this variety of individualism in the race by mutual imitation, by all sorts of affectations, is the object not only of the civilization of the Western world, but of the very negroes on the Gaboon River. No wonder, then, that whensoever we meet, as at rarest interval we do meet, an individual who is able to preserve his personality as Nature meant it to live, we feel an attraction towards him such as is irresistible. Now I would challenge those who knew him to say whether they ever knew any other man so free from this great human infirmity as Tennyson. The way in which his simplicity of nature would manifest itself was, in some instances, most remarkable. Though, of course, he had his share of that egoism of the artist without which imaginative genius may become sterile, it seemed impossible for him to realize what a transcendent position he took among contemporary writers all over the world. ”Poets,” he once said to me, ”have not had the advantage of being _born_ to the purple.” Up to the last he felt himself to be a poet at struggle more or less with the Wilsons and the Crokers who, in his youth, a.s.sailed him. I, and a very dear friend of his, a family connexion, tried in vain to make him see that when a poet had reached a position such as he had won, no criticism could injure him or benefit him one jot.
What has been called his exclusiveness is entirely mythical. He was the most hospitable of men. It was very rare, indeed, for him to part from a friend at his hall door, or at the railway station without urging him to return as soon as possible, and generally with the words, ”Come whenever you like.” The fact is, however, that for many years the strangest notions seem to have got abroad as to the claims of the public upon men of genius. There seems now to be scarcely any one who does not look upon every man who has pa.s.sed into the purgatory of fame as his or her common property. The unlucky victim is to be pestered by letters upon every sort of foolish subject, and to be hunted down in his walks and insulted by senseless adulation. Tennyson resented this, and so did Rossetti, and so ought every man who has reached eminence and respects his own genius.
Neither fame nor life itself is worth having on such terms as these.
One day, Tennyson when walking round his garden at Farringford, saw perched up in the trees that surrounded it, two men who had been refused admittance at the gate-two men dressed like gentlemen. He very wisely gave the public to understand that his fame was not to be taken as an abrogation of his rights as a private English gentleman. For my part, whenever I hear any one railing against a man of eminence with whom he cannot possibly have been brought into contact, I know at once what it means: the railer has been writing an idle letter to the eminent one and received no reply.
Tennyson's knowledge of nature-nature in every aspect-was very great.