No More Learning

At last, in
January 1837, the History of the French Revolution was finished.
The English reading world did not, at first, know what to make of
this strange history, any more than it had known what to make
of Sartor; but it was, at least, quicker to feel the power of the
book; and enthusiastic recognition soon began to pour in from the
most unexpected quarters. Fame came at last, the right kind of
fame, a fame, too, that, in course of time, brought reasonable
remuneration in its train.
Carlyle's French Revolution is, again in the continental sense
of the word, a “romantic' work; once more, as in his literary
criticism, he stands out in sharp antagonism to Macaulay, the
heir of rationalism, whose History of England began to appear
some ten years later. The French Revolution is individualistic
history, interpretative history on a subjective basis; it is as far
removed from the sober ideals of a scientific age of faithful
chronicling of 'things as they were,' as it is from the ‘enlightened'
history-writing of the eighteenth century. Carlyle's work is,
essentially, a personal 'confession. ' “You have not,' he declared
to the world, ‘had for two hundred years any book that came
more truly from a man's very heart. ' The French revolution, as
Carlyle sees it, becomes a vindication of the ways of God to man;
a
a sermon on the text: ‘Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he
also reap' on the nemesis that follows the abuse of power or
the neglect of the duties and responsibilities of those in whom
power has been placed by Providence. And Carlyle ranges him-
self unmistakably on the side of that nemesis; he makes no
attempt, so to speak, to write ‘fair' history, to hold the balance


## p. 12 (#28) ##############################################

I 2
[ch.
Carlyle
between the two great antagonistic forces that clashed in the
revolution. The French Revolution, rightly read, is a declaration
of its author's convictions on problems of his own time; a solemn
warning to the England of his own day to avoid a catastrophe
which Carlyle believed, and never ceased to believe all his life long,
was imminent. But this work is, also, something more precious
than a subjective history combined with a tract for the times; it is
a prose epic, a work of creative genius, in which the facts of
history are illumined by the imagination of a poet. Light and
shadow, colour and darkness, are distributed over the picture
with the eye and the instinctive judgment of an artist. Carlyle
does not dilate on motives or on theories of government; he does
not even, in a straightforward way, narrate facts; he paints
pictures; he brings before us only what, as it were, he has first
seen with his own eyes. Setting out from the conviction that
biographies are the most precious of all records of the past—or,
as he put it in lectures On Heroes, “the History of the World is
the Biography of Great Men'-he writes a history which is a
collection of marvellously clear-cut portraits; more than this, he
deals with the history of a nation itself as if it were a human
biography; distils, so to speak, the life of the whole from innu-
merable lives of individuals. Thus, the events he has to narrate
are overshadowed and dominated by the men that were respon-
sible for them; Danton, Mirabeau, the 'sea-green incorruptible'
Robespierre, are masterpieces of historical portraiture; and the
imaginative literature of Carlyle's age knew nothing more graphic
and unforgettable than the description of the royal flight to
Varennes.
Meanwhile, until the material harvest of the labour on The
French Revolution came in, Carlyle was induced, in order to keep
the wolf from the door, to give several series of popular lectures
in London. For the first of these, delivered in May 1837, he
utilised the materials he had gathered for a history of German
literature; the second course, in the following year, was also on
literature, but took a wider sweep of literary history, beginning
with classical times and coming down to the eighteenth century.
A third series dealt with the revolutions of modern Europe, while
the fourth and last, delivered in the early summer of 1840, and
published in the following year under the title On Heroes, Hero-
Worship, and the Heroic in History, was most successful of all. This
has always been one of Carlyle's most attractive and popular works.
It elucidates, with the help of picturesque and contrasting portraits,


## p. 13 (#29) ##############################################

1]
Heroes
13
the cardinal doctrines of his own romantic creed of individualism,
a creed which went back in its essentials to the philosophy of
Fichte, namely, that personality alone matters in the world; that
history is the record of the thoughts and actions of great men;
and that greatness lies in the exercise of the 'heroic' virtues, that
is to say, in the power to renounce, coupled with the will to
achieve. On the basic assumption that the quality of heroism,
which makes a man a leader of men, is capable of realisation in
any sphere of human activity in which the hero happens to be
placed, Carlyle applied his doctrine to the most varied forms
of leadership. Odin, chosen to illustrate the hero as god, gave
Carlyle his first opportunity to proclaim his sympathy with the
virile religion of our Germanic ancestors, a sympathy that grew
with the years and found expression again in his very last work.
Mahomet, the hero as prophet, led him to seek a solid foundation
of sincerity for the faith of Islam. Dante and Shakespeare, again
in contrasting spheres, served to illustrate the hero as vates or
poet; while, for examples of the less soaring activity of the ‘man
of letters,' Carlyle turned to the century he found it hardest to
understand, and singled out as sympathetic figures against an
unsympathetic background, Samuel Johnson, Rousseau and Burns.
For the hero as priest, he chose Luther and John Knox; for the
hero as king, Cromwell and Napoleon; but the last two lectures
show some falling off in comparison with the earlier ones.
The interest in Heroes was, in the main, literary rather
than historical, although, with The French Revolution, Carlyle
had appeared to turn his back definitely on literary criticism;
but readers, not merely of the latter work, but, also, of Heroes,
began to discern a trend in his mind which was neither literary
nor historical, a trend towards actuality and the present. Litera-
ture was never, indeed, for Carlyle, merely literature; its value
as an aesthetic expression had always been subordinate to its
potentiality as an intellectual and moral factor. Great poetry,
for him, was not the embodiment of the highest beauty, but
the poetry that contained the deepest lessons for mankind.
So, too, had it been with history; history was not merely a
record of how things had been, but, also, a writing on the
wall for the benefit of the historian's contemporaries. Carlyle's
mission in life, as he interpreted it, was, in fact, neither to be
a critic of literature nor a chronicler of history; but to be a
teacher and a prophet to his own time. With every new book his
writing was becoming more 'actual' in its aims; the past was


## p. 14 (#30) ##############################################

14
Carlyle
[CH.
1
1
1
1
>
becoming more and more a medium through which he spoke to
the present.
Before the lectures On Heroes were published, Carlyle threw
off all historical disguise and entered the arena of practical, con-
temporary politics. This was with the little book, originally planned
as a review article, entitled Chartism (end of 1839). Carlyle
had begun life as a radical of the radicals; the disturbances of the
Peterloo time had made a deep impression on him in his student
years, and the Corn law agitation had stirred up his sympathies
with the oppressed classes. In his early London days, he was
,
heart and soul with the reform agitation. But, by the time he
came to write on chartism, his radicalism had undergone a
change. He was still convinced that a root-and-branch reform
was urgent; but his faith in the nostrums of political radicalism
was rapidly waning. In his antagonism to what he stigmatised
as the 'quackery' of the radicalism of his day, he appeared almost
conservative; it only meant that his radicalism had become more
radical than before. 'I am not a Tory,' he said in Chartism, 'no,
but one of the deepest though perhaps the quietest of radicals. '
The only radicalism, as it now seemed to him, which would avail
against the ills and cankers of the day was the hand of the just,
strong man. The salvation of the working-classes was not to be
attained by political enfranchisement and the dicta of political
economists, but by reverting to the conditions of the middle ages,
when the labourer was still a serf. The freedom of the working-
man was a delusion; it meant only freedom to be sucked out in
the labour market, freedom to be a greater slave than he had
ever been before. Carlyle's warfare against political economy was
part and parcel of his crusade against the scientific materialism
of his time. The 'dismal science' eliminated the factors of religion
and morality from the relation of man to man, and established
that relation on a scientific ‘profit and loss' basis; it preached
that the business of each man was to get as large a share of
the world's goods as he could, at the expense-strictly regulated
by laws of contract-of his fellow-man. Carlyle believed that the
path marked out by such a science was the way to perdition and
national ruin.
These doctrines were repeated in a more picturesque form in
Carlyle's next contribution to political literature, Past and Present.
In the beginning and end of this little work, which, perhaps, is
his most inspired, as it was his most spontaneous, production-it
was written within the space of two months early in 1843-he
1


## p. 15 (#31) ##############################################

1]
Political Writings
15
unrolls once again "The condition of England question,' in its
familiar form; he reiterates the old demands for duty and respon-
sibility, for earnestness and just dealing on the part of England's
rulers; and he sets up the strong man as the only remedy for
political rottenness. The arguments are the same as before; but
they are put even more trenchantly and vividly; the scornful
contempt which he heaps on the democratic remedies of his
radical friends is more scathing. Encased within these two sec-
tions of the book lies the contrasting picture of the past; he
takes the chronicle of Jocelyn of Brakelond, which, not long before,
had been unearthed by the Camden society, and, with a clearness
of delineation and dramatic actuality hardly surpassed by Scott
himself, he puts life into the records of the abbot Samson and
his monks of St Edmund's and transmutes these dry records into
a veritable prose idyll. Here, Carlyle stands out emphatically as
the poet and the artist, rather than as the politician or economist.
Seven years later, in 1850, Carlyle again essayed the role of
political critic and prophet, namely in his Latter-Day Pamphlets.
In these papers, he brought his doctrines to a still sharper focus
on the actual problems of the day, and expressed them with a viru-
lence and passionate exaggeration which left his earliest utterances
far behind. The consequence was that many of his old friends-
friends of many years' standing like Mazzini and Mill—were
estranged. Carlyle's wholehearted denunciation of philanthropy,
in particular, appeared to that eminently philanthropic age as the
utterances of a misanthrope and a barbarian. Possibly, he overshot
the mark, although the Pamphlets contain little that he had not
already said–in point of fact, Carlyle's political creed turns round
a very few cardinal ideas which are repeated again and again in
different keys throughout his writings. So long as he had been
content to enunciate these political theories as abstractions, they
were accepted no doubt with some demur, but still accepted-as
the curious views of an interesting personality; it was when he
'
brought them to bear on the concrete questions of the day that he
caused real offence. Looking back on the storm that Latter-Day
Pamphlets called forth, one cannot help thinking that this book
was, in some way, a reflex of the great political upheaval of 1848,
from which England had emerged much less scathed than the
nations of the continent. Doubtless, Carlyle saw in the March
revolution and its dire consequences in other lands a realisation
of his forebodings. 'It is long years,' he wrote to Emerson of that
revolution, 'since I felt any such deep-seated satisfaction at a
>


## p. 16 (#32) ##############################################

16
[CH.
Carlyle
a
public event, showing once again that the righteous Gods do yet
live and reign. He felt the surer that England would not escape
the nemesis, that nemesis, indeed, might be all the more terrible
in consequence of the delay of its coming.
As a political preacher and prophet, Carlyle was as one crying
in the wilderness; his hand was against every man's; he was dis-
owned by all parties, and, apart from a certain confidence which,
in earlier days, he had felt in Peel, he was notoriously out of
sympathy with the leaders of the two great political parties. He
trampled ruthlessly on the toes of Victorian liberals, and flouted
their most cherished ideas. Deep down in his heart, he remained
the democratic Scottish peasant, who demanded, with Burns-like
radicalism, that the innate nobility of manhood, whether in king
or peasant, must be recognised; he claimed the right of nobly
born souls to rise to be rulers of men. His own cure for all
political ills was government by the ablest and the best: but
he denied vehemently the possibility of the ablest and best
being discoverable by the vote of a majority; for such a purpose,
reform bills and secret ballots were wholly unsuitable. No nation
could be guided aright-any more than a ship could double cape
Horn-by the votes of a majority. Exactly in what manner the
best man, the hero, is to be discovered and endowed with power,
is a problem Carlyle never reduces to practical terms or intel-
ligible language; and methods similar to those whereby abbot
Samson became the head of his monastery, if applied to the con-
ditions of modern life, would-he must himself have admitted
it-lead to anarchy, not stable government. Carlyle had rather
a kind of mystic belief in the able man entering into his inherit-
ance by virtue of a supernatural right; that the choice of the
man who should rule over men lay not so much with the ruled
themselves as with a higher Power; and that the right to
govern was enforced by a divinely endowed might to compel
the obedience of one's fellow-men.
But the world, as Carlyle clearly saw, was not planned on so
orderly a scheme as his faith implied. 'Might' showed itself by no
means always to be the same thing as 'right'; and, in spite of his
belief in the virtue of strength, none could be more denunciatory
than Carlyle of the victorious usurper, if the usurper's ends were not
in accordance with Carlyle's own interpretation of God's purpose.
Behind all his political writings, and his asseveration of the right
of might, there thus lay a serious and irreconcilable schism.
*The strong thing is the just thing,' he proclaimed with increasing


## p. 17 (#33) ##############################################

1]
As a Historian
17
201
vehemence; but he was forced to add that it might need centuries
to show the identity of strength and justice. In truth, with all his
belief in the strong man, Carlyle never came entirely out into the
open; never expressed himself with the ruthless logical consistency
of the individualistic thinkers of our own time; the doctrine of the
Übermensch was not yet ripe. On the other hand, in the modern
democratic ideal of a state built up on mutually helpful citizen-
ship, Carlyle had little faith.
Amid all these incursions into the politics of the moment, how-
ever, he still felt on surer ground as a historian; the lesson he
had to teach, he felt, could be more effectually set forth from the
platform of history, than by descending into the dusty and noisy
arena of political controversy. His wish to serve the present
by reviving the past is indicated by the masterly portrait he
put together from the letters and utterances of Oliver Cromwel).
The work had been long in preparation; indeed, none of Carlyle's
writings, not even his Frederick the Great, was heralded by so
many groans and despairs as this; in the case of none did he find
it so difficult to discover the form best suited to the matter.
At first, he had some idea of writing a history of the civil wars,
or a history of the commonwealth ; but the ultimate result was
very different from that originally contemplated; in fact, he
arrived at that result unawares. The publication of the letters
and speeches was to have been a mere by-product, but, this
done, he saw that there was nothing more left for him to do.
The Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell (1845) has been
described by Froude as the most important contribution to
English history which has been made in the nineteenth century. '
This opinion may be debatable; but it might, at least, be said
that the task of rehabilitating the protector, of destroying false
legends which had gathered round him, was peculiarly made for
Carlyle's hand. Cromwell lives again here in all his rugged
strength; and lives precisely because his was one of those natures
into which Carlyle could, so to speak, project something of his
own. Again, Carlyle is the artist here: not the artist in form;
nor the Protean artist of many parts, as in The French Revo-
lution or Frederick the Great, where the stage is crowded with
varied figures; but the artist who has concentrated all his creative
power on one great figure.
Standing apart from the turmoil of political controversy as well
as the more serious historical studies in these years, is a work
which cannot be overlooked in an estimate of Carlyle's activity as
2
E. L. XIII.
CH. I.


## p. 18 (#34) ##############################################

18
[ch.
Carlyle
.
>
a man of letters, the biography of his friend John Sterling,
which appeared in 1851. Sterling himself, whose life of brilliant
promise had been darkened and prematurely eclipsed by con-
sumption, was hardly a significant enough figure to warrant the
monument which Carlyle has erected to him; but Carlyle felt
that a duty was imposed upon him to remove the stigma which
Sterling's first biographer, Christopher Hare, had placed on his
memory, in presenting him too exclusively as a renegade from
church of England orthodoxy. Carlyle's book has been declared
by more than one critic to be his best from the point of view
of pure literature; but it is unduly long, and suffers by excessive
and unnecessary detail. It contains, however, some of Carlyle's
most trenchant writing, notably the often quoted pen-portrait
of Coleridge. Its chief value, perhaps, is the light it throws
on Carlyle himself. We obtain from it an instructive glimpse
of the writer's own religion, that religion which was an almost
ludicrous combination of the 'dourest' Scottish Calvinism and
the Spinozistic pantheism of Goethe; we get a pleasanter, less
atrabilious picture in it, too, of the Carlyle of the early London
days, than is to be obtained from Froude’s biography; and, most
valuable of all, we are able to gather from it, not merely what
he felt towards one disciple, but towards all the young aspiring
souls of the time who, setting out in life, looked to him for
spiritual guidance,
The most ambitious of Carlyle's work had still to come, The
History of Friedrich II of Prussia, called Frederick the Great.
The first volume appeared in 1858, the sixth and last in March
1865. There has been much difference of opinion concerning
Carlyle's Frederick, much questioning of the wisdom which led
him to spend many years of racking labour, torments and misery
over the production of this work. It was asserted quite openly in
the sixties and seventies, and it is a very generally held opinion
today, that the result of those labours was in no fair proportion to
what they meant to the author. It cannot be said that Carlyle has
uttered any very final word about his hero; it is doubtful if any of
the acknowledged standard writings on Frederick in our day
would have been essentially different had Carlyle never laboured.
At most, he has been commended by German historians for his
vivid and accurate accounts of Frederick's decisive battles. In
point of fact, Carlyle had once more set out, in his imperturbable
romantic way, to do something more than make known to the world
'what had happened. Not but what he was, in respect of the
.
1


## p. 19 (#35) ##############################################

1]
Frederick the Great
19
truth of history, just as conscientious in his way as historians of the
scientific school are. This is to be seen in the unwearying labour
with which he collected his materials, poring over libraries of dull
books'; and in his efforts, notwithstanding that travel was to him
a torture, to see with his own eyes the backgrounds against which
Frederick’s life was played, the battlefields on which he fought.
But there was another purpose which, in the first instance, moved
him to undertake the work; he set out with the object of
demonstrating the heroic in Frederick, of illustrating his thesis of
'the hero as king. He had written his previous histories—The
French Revolution and Cromwell—with similar preconceived ends;
but there was an essential difference in these cases, in so far as
hypotheses and fact are dovetailed into one another. The French
revolution, in reality, was an illustration of the nemesis of misrule;
and Cromwell was well adapted to the role of Carlylean strong
man; whereas, it is very much open to question if the friend
and patron of the French encyclopedists, the extremely practical
and hardheaded ruler who built up the modern Prussian state,
could be adjudged a hero in Carlyle's sense at all. Thus, the
history suffers from a too apparent dissonance; it suffers, also,
from a certain futility in its author's efforts to make it throw
a shadow across the world of his own day. For, just as The
French Revolution was intended to be an overwhelming object-
lesson to an England which Carlyle believed to be rushing
blindly into the whirlpool of chartism, so, his Frederick the Great
was intended to clinch his gospel of might as right, to be an embodi-
ment, in its highest form, of the ideal of romantic individualism.
Of all men of the past, none, it seems to us, was less suited to
such an interpretation than Frederick the great. There are,
however, many pages in this history which bear witness to the
cunning of the artist; the gallery of living portraits is even wider
than that in the first history, the battle scenes are on a grander
scale.
In 1865, an event happened which brought peculiar gratifi-
cation to Carlyle: he was invited by the students of his own
university of Edinburgh to become their lord rector. At last, the
prophet was to find honour in his own country. In many ways
-bound as he was by every fibre of his nature to his native land
-he regarded 2 April 1866, when he delivered his inaugural
address on the Choice of Books, in Edinburgh, as a kind of coping-
stone to his career. The address, although it makes but ineffective
reading, was a triumph in delivery. Very shortly afterwards,
22


## p. 20 (#36) ##############################################

20
[ch.
Carlyle
.
however, a blow fell on him of the direst kind. Before he got
back to London, the news reached him that his wife had been
found dead in her carriage when driving in Hyde park. “She died
at London 21 April 1866, suddenly snatched from him, and the
light of his life as if gone out. ' The light of his life was very
literally gone out; the remaining fifteen years he had still to
live were years of gradual decadence. Still one other book
it was given to him to publish, entitled The Early Kings of
Norway (1875), but it has little of the old fire and strength;
and his name appeared frequently attached to letters in the
press. Notable among such letters was his vigorous appeal in
The Times in behalf of Germany in her war with France, an
appeal which, no doubt, had weight with Bismarck when, later,
he conferred on him the much prized Prussian order of merit.
Disraeli made an effort to get Carlyle to accept an honour from
the British government, but he declined. Years before the end,
his right hand failed him and made literary work impossible, even
although his intellectual power and energy remained unimpaired.
His death took place on 4 February 1881. He lies buried, not as
his friends would have wished, in Westminster abbey, but with
his own kinsfolk in Ecclefechan.
Carlyle is not to be regarded as a mere apostle or transmitter
of German ideas and German ideals; he built up, under the
stimulus, and with the help, of these ideas, a spiritual and
moral world of his own. He saw human life and earthly hap-
penings against a vast background of mystic spiritualism, of
eternities and immensities; he was an individualist, to whom the
development of the race depends on great personal virtues, on
heroic abnegation and self-sacrificing activity. His rugged inde-
pendence made it difficult for his contemporaries to 'place' him;
he resolutely refused to be labelled, or to be identified with any
specific intellectual, literary or political creed. He would admit
allegiance to no one; he treated his peers and contemporaries with
crying injustice, often with quite indefensible contumely; he scorned
every link with the world around him. He went through life
fighting for high causes, scattering the forces of cant and unbelief,
grappling, like a modern Luther, with the very devil himself. No
man was ever more terribly in earnest about his 'God-given hest,'
than Carlyle; and yet, perhaps, none was less conscious of his
own precise place and rôle in the world-history. Carlyle's own
personal convictions were full of irreconcilable contradictions.
At one time, for instance, the making of books, his own craft, is


## p. 21 (#37) ##############################################

1]
Carlyle as a Moral Force
21
endowed, in his eyes, with priesthood; at another, it is the paltriest
and meanest of trades; at one time, his utterances are radical of
the radical; at another, his radical friends are appalled and struck
dumb by his apparent apostasy. A preacher of the virtue of silence,
he himself has left us well-nigh forty volumes of printed speech;
a scorner of philanthropy, he was the most generous and open-
handed disburser of charity. Possibly, his own love of startling
paradox and contrast led him to accentuate such antitheses in his
own nature; but, perhaps, they only meant that he saw deeper into
the essence of things and relationships than other men; that the
irreconcilability was a mere mirage of the surface. One might
fittingly apply to Carlyle the phrase with which George Brandes
characterised Nietzsche ; he is 'an aristocratic radical'; or, as
MacCunn bas called him, 'an anti-democratic radical. ' Equally
distraught was his own personal life; it was built up on dis-
sonances. The agonies and despairs which made the life at
Cheyne row often a veritable purgatory for his faithful helpmate
were not all the emanation of dyspepsia and insomnia; he was
the irritable man of genius, who, as his mother had discovered
long before, was 'gey ill to live wi'. ' Below all his reflections
on human things and fates, there lay a deep and ineradicable
discord. Outwardly, he would fain have appeared as a convinced
optimist, to whom God was ‘in his heaven,' and all was 'right with
the world’; inwardly, he was often haunted with pessimistic
doubts as to the right governance of the world. He proclaimed,
incessantly and fervently, that the world is God's, but the
converse thought of the 'absentee-God sitting outside the Uni-
verse and seeing it go' often tempted and assailed him. Thus,
Carlyle's 'Everlasting Yea' is an 'Everlasting Yea' against a
background of 'the Everlasting No. ' He may well have cried
‘Love not Pleasure; love God! ' but these words were originally
wrung from him by bitter, enforced resignation. He had spurned
mere 'happiness' all his life; but it is not given to everyone
who thus places himself above the common lot of men to find
what he himself calls 'blessedness. ' And we sometimes doubt
whether Carlyle ever found it. Such a struggle as is reflected in
his life is, too often, the consequence when a man sees his own
life-happiness slip through his fingers in the pursuit of other
ideals, and when all that is left to him is to make of the stern
Entbehren sollst du, sollst entbehren! such virtue as he can.
Certainly, the higher, harmonious life, to which Goethe attained,
Carlyle only saw afar off as an ideal beyond his reach. Rather,
>


## p. 22 (#38) ##############################################

22
[CH. I
Carlyle
we have to think of him, even in his maturity, as he appears in
early days, when he chose as a symbol of his life the burning candle
with the motto: terar dum prosim.
But it is just this discord, this Misston auf der grossen Laute
of which Schiller sang, that gave the enormous impetus to Carlyle's
influence; it was this optimism, tossed fitfully on a vast ocean
of pessimism, that acted as a tonic on the national life of the
Victorian age. Carlyle's idealism, whether in literature or in
morals, was an impracticable creed, but idealisms, after all, are
not there to be practicable, but, rather, to leaven the practice of
life. It was this leaven that Carlyle brought to many who, in
youth, fell under the spell of his teaching. We have already
claimed Carlyle as the greatest moral force in the England of his
day, and it is difficult to say more. His influence penetrated
deep into English intellectual life, at no time overprone to im-
practicable idealisms; and it acted as a deterrent and antidote
to the allurements held out by Benthamism, Saint-Simonism,
Comtism; it helped to counteract the secondary effects of the re-
birth and advance of science-a re-birth which made appalling
havoc on intellectual idealism in Germany itself. To Carlyle, the
first of all practical problems was for a man to discover his
appointed activity, the activity which alone is capable of destroying
the canker of doubt. The life of the individual man passes, but
his work remains.
The only happiness a brave man ever troubled himself with asking much
about was happiness enough to get his work done. Not I can't eat! ' but
"I can't work! ' that was the burden of all wise complaining among men. It
is, after all, the one unhappiness of a man, that he cannot work; that he
cannot get his destiny as a man fulfilled. Behold the day is passing swiftly
over, our life is passing swiftly over; and the night cometh when no man can
work. The night once come, our happiness, our unhappiness-it is all
abolished; vanished; clean gone; a thing that has been. . . . But our work-
behold, that is not abolished, that has not vanished; our work, behold it
remains, or the want of it remains; for endless Times and Eternities remains;
and that is now the sole question for us for evermore!
This was Carlyle's firm positive faith, his panacea for the tempta-
tions and despairs that assail human life; it stands out now as
his greatest message to his generation.


## p. 23 (#39) ##############################################

CHAPTER II
THE TENNYSONS
ALFRED TENNYSON, the most representative, and by far the
most popular, poet of Victorian England, born in 1809, was the
fourth son of the rector of Somersby in Lincolnshire. His two elder
brothers, Frederick and Charles, were also poets and must receive
some mention later. They were all, not least the greatest of them,
,
men of singular physical beauty and strength, dark and stalwart,
and through most of them ran a vein of almost morbid hyper-
sensitiveness and melancholy, to which, in Alfred, we may trace
the rare delicacy and intensity of his sensuous and emotional
renderings of nature and mood and dream, as well as the
hysterical extravagances of some of the poems in which he touched
on subjects, political and religious, that moved him deeply.
Educated at Louth grammar school (of which his only pleasant
memory was the music of the Latin words sonus desilientis aquae)
and by his father at home, Tennyson's genius struck its roots deep
into that soil of family affection and love of country the alienation
from which, in varying degree, of most of the earlier romantic
poets-Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley-contributed to the
independent, revolutionary tone of their poetry, and the slowness
with which some of them gained the ear of English readers.
When Tennyson went up to Cambridge, Shelley's was still a name
of doubtful omen. Tennyson was always to be--not entirely for
the benefit of his poetry-in closer sympathy with the sentiments
of the English middle-classes, domestic, distrustful of passion or,
at least, of the frank expression and portrayal of passion, patriotic,
utilitarian.
And the influence of these classes, politically and morally, was
becoming dominant. Tennyson went to Cambridge a few months
before Gladstone, the representative statesman of the coming era,
went to Oxford. The group of friends who gathered round
Tennyson included Arthur Henry Hallam, Gladstone's most intimate


## p. 24 (#40) ##############################################

24
[CH.
The Tennysons
1
friend at Eton. They were all of them young men of the high and
strenuous seriousness which breathes from the letters of Sterling
and Hallam-James Spedding, Richard Trench, Henry Alford,
Edward Lushington. The life they led was a very different one
from that which Byron describes in his letters of twenty years
earlier.
These have the hard, reckless ring of the age of Fox
and his dissipated, aristocratic friends. The young band of
* Apostles' who debated
on mind and art,
And labour, and the changing mart,
And all the framework of the land
were imbued with the serious, practical temper of the great
merchant class which was to reshape England during the next
fifty years. They were strangers alike to the revolutionary hopes
that intoxicated the youthful Wordsworth, and the reactionary
spirit of 'blood and iron' against which Byron fought and over
which Shelley lamented in strains of ineffable music :
Oh, cease! must hate and death return?
Cease! must men kill and die ?
The era of conservative reform, of Canning and Peel, of attach-
ment to English institutions combined with a philanthropic ardour
for social betterment, had begun. The repeal of the Test act,
Catholic emancipation, the first great Reform bill were all carried
between the date at which Gladstone and Tennyson went up to
college and a year after they had gone down. Of this movement,
Tennyson was to make conscientious efforts to approve himself
the poet; but, as experience was to show, the conservative instincts
of the would-be liberal poet were deeper and more indestructible
than those of the young statesman who, in these years, was still
'the rising hope of stern and unbending Tories? . '
The same via media was the path followed by Tennyson and
his friends in the region of theology and philosophy. Disciples,
some of them, of Coleridge, they were all more or less broad
churchmen, Christian in sentiment but with little of Gladstone's
reverence for dogma, and sensitive, as Gladstone never was, to
movements of contemporary thought and science. “Christianity
is always rugging at my heart, Tennyson said, and his heart and
mind were too often divided against one another to allow of his
attaining to the heights of inspired and inspiring religious
song. But in no mind of his day did the conflict of feeling and
1 Macaulay, Essays : Gladstone on Church and State, 1839.
1
6


## p. 25 (#41) ##############################################

11] Alfred's Early Poems
25
thought produce more sensitive reactions. In the widened and
altered vision of the universe which natural science was slowly
unfolding, Tennyson was to find, at moments, a fresh justification
of the deepest hopes and instincts of his heart, at moments, their
utter negation. To the conflict between his sensitive and conser-
vative temperament and that Lucretian vision of the universe
which physical science seemed more and more to unroll, we owe
some of the most haunting notes of Tennyson's poetry.
But these notes were not sounded at once. Tennyson's first
concern was with poetry alone, the object of his assiduous and
patient quest being to discover and to master the style and measures
in which he could best express the poetry with which his mind
was charged to overflowing. Poems, by Two Brothers (1827) is
negligible. In these early verses, he threw off, as in a kind of
mental measles, the infection of the more popular poets of the
day-Byron and Moore and Scott. At Cambridge, Wordsworth
and Coleridge and Shelley and Keats displaced their more popular
rivals, and Tennyson's genius entered upon a period of experiment,
of growing clearness and sureness of judgment, of increasing
richness and felicity of diction and rhythm, the record of which
has been preserved with unusual fulness in the successive Poems,
Chiefly Lyrical (1830), Poems (1833) and Poems. By Alfred
Tennyson, 2 vols. (1842).
The relation in which these stand to one another is not unlike
that of the different states' of an etching, the successive 'pulls'
in which the artist studies the progress he has made towards the
complex perfection of the final plate. Some poems were rejected
altogether; others dropped only to reappear; a few suffered little
or no alteration between the first edition and the last; yet others
(and these are the most interesting and the most important)
underwent an elaborate process of rearrangement of the com-
ponent features, of rehandling that included every kind of erasing,
deepening and enriching-processes of which the final outcome
was the pomp and magnificence of the 1842 volumes, the beauty
and glow presented in their final form by such studies as The
Lady of Shalott, The Miller's Daughter, Enone, The Palace
of Art (considering the poem only on the side of its music and
pictures), A Dream of Fair Women and The Lotos Eaters.
Tennyson's aim in all this elaboration is clear enough now,
though it was not to such early critics as Christopher North and
Lockhart—who were justifiably witty at the expense of the poet's
lapses, if Lockhart was less justifiably blind to the final result to
6


## p. 26 (#42) ##############################################

26
[Ch.
The Tennysons
which the experiments tended. It was no deepening insight into
his subjects which guided Tennyson's efforts, for they were to
him subjects and no more. They were the common topics of his
romantic predecessors, nature, English pastorals, ballad themes,
medieval romance, classical legend, love and death. But Tennyson
was burdened with no message, no new interpretation of nature
or the peasant, no fresh insight into the significance of things
medieval or things Hellenic. Each and all were subjects that
quickened his poetic imagination, and his concern was to attain
to the perfect rendering in melody and picturesque suggestion
of the mood which each begat in his brooding temperament.
Much has been said of Tennyson's relation to Keats and
Wordsworth ; but a closer tie unites him to Coleridge, the poet.
Like Coleridge, Tennyson is a poet not so much of passion and
passionate thinking as of moods-moods subtle and luxurious and
sombre, moods in which it is not always easy to discern the
line that separates waking from dreaming.
And, like Coleridge, Tennyson, from the outset, was a metrist,
bold in experiment and felicitous in achievement. Almost every
poem in these volumes was a distinct, conscious experiment in the
metrical expression of a single, definite mood. There were some
failures, not from inadequate control of the poet's medium of
verse (as Coleridge was inclined to think) but because, as
Christopher North pointed out, Tennyson occasionally mistook
for a poetic mood what was merely a fleeting fancy and recorded
it in lines that were, at times, even silly. Of the poems which
survived the purgation to which Tennyson subjected his work,
some are less happy than others, again not because the poet has
failed to make the verse the echo of the mood, but because the
mood itself was not one that was altogether congenial to his
mind. In lighter and simpler strains, Tennyson is never quite
spontaneous. But, when the mood was one of the poet's very
soul, luxurious or sombre or a complex blend of both, the metrical
expression was, from the first, a triumphant success. Claribel,
Mariana, 'A spirit haunts the year's last hours,' Recollections of
the Arabian Nights, The Dying Swan, The Lady of Shalott, the
blank verse of Enone, A Dream of Fair Women, The Palace of
Art, The Vision of Sin, The Lotos Eaters—all reveal (think what
one may of the philosophy of some or of the faults of phrase and
figure which marred the first transcripts) a poet with a command
of new and surprising and delightful metrical effects as unmis-
takably as did the early poems of Milton, the masterpieces of
>


## p. 27 (#43) ##############################################

11] Changes in Tennyson's Poems
27
Coleridge, Shelley's songs or Swinburne's Poems and Ballads.
The true character of the English verse foot which the romantic
poets had rediscovered without all of them quite knowing what
they had done, the possibilities of what Saintsbury calls 'substi-
tution,' the fact that, in verse whose indicator is a recurring stress,
the foot may be iambic, trochaic, spondaic or monosyllabic without
altering the time-lengths of the rhythmical interval, Tennyson
understood perfectly and he experimented on it with a conscious
and felicitous art, combining with this subtle management of
the foot a careful attention to the musical value of vowel
and consonant combinations in which his precursors are Gray and
Pope and Milton. And, for Tennyson, the guiding principle in
every experiment, from Claribel to The Vision of Sin, is the
dramatic appropriateness of verse to mood.
Many of the poems, as has been said, underwent drastic
revision ; but this revision seldom affected the metre, though the
concluding stanza of The Lotos Eaters is a striking exception.
It was the phrasing and imagery, the richly decorative and
picturesque diction, that was revised before the eyes of the reader
with wonderful results. The motive which dictated this labour
was the same as that which controlled the varied cadences of the
poet's verse, the desire to secure the full and exact expression
for the single mood which dominates the poem throughout. For
each of Tennyson's shorter poems, at any rate-hence, perhaps,
his preference of the idyll to the epic—is the expression of a
single mood of feeling. It is seldom that one of his songs or odes
or idylls carries the imagination of the reader from one mood of
feeling to another, as does an ode by Keats or Wordsworth,
while the stream of impassioned thought flows through the mind.
In his longer poems, In Memoriam and Idylls of the King, as
will be seen later, the plan of construction finally adopted is a
concession to this quality of the poet's genius. A brooding
imagination, a fine ear and a vivid and curious eye, the eye of
an artist who, also, was something of a naturalist-these are the
distinctive qualities of Tennyson's poetic temperament.
He
divined, as Keats had before him (but Keats's eye was not, to
a like extent, the dominant factor in his sensibility), that a picture
presented with extraordinary precision of detail may, if every
detail be relevant, contribute potently to the communication of
a mood of feeling-the whole secret of pre-Raphaelitism. But
he was also aware that mere description is no business of the
poet who describes only to communicate feeling. Accordingly,
>


## p. 28 (#44) ##############################################

28
[CH.
The Tennysons
i
1
1
1
1
1
the alterations which Tennyson introduced into his work, in so
far as they were not dictated by the ear, by the desire to secure
a purer more flute-like melody of vowel and consonant, had one of
two purposes in view, either to present a picture with greater
clearness of arrangement and vividness or wealth of detail, or, even
more often, to diminish merely descriptive effects, to substitute one
or two significant, suggestive details for a fully drawn picture, in
every way to intensify the emotional, dramatic effect as by passing
the stanza once more through the dyeing vat of the poet's own
passionate mood. Of passages in which the first aim predominates,
a classical example is the opening landscape in Enone, but a
shorter may be cited from The Palace of Art :
One seemed a foreground black with stones and slags,
Below sunsmitten icy spires
Rose striped with long white cloud the scornful crags
Deeptrenched with thunderfires,
compared with
And one a foreground black with stones and slags,
Beyond, a line of heights, and higher
All barr'd with long white cloud the scornful crags,
And highest, snow and fire.
Of the other process, the subtle heightening of the emotional
thrill, examples will be found in all the poems mentioned; but two
short passages may be cited by way of illustration :
No time hath she to sport and play,
A charmed web she weaves alway,
A curse is on her if she stay
Her weaving either night or day,
To look down to Camelot,
compared with
There she weaves by night and day
A magic web with colours gay.
She has heard a whisper say,
A curse is on her if she stay
To look down to Camelot,
or,
She moved her lips, she prayed alone,
She praying disarrayed and warm
From slumber, deep her wavy form
In the darklustrous mirror shone.
“Madonna,” in a low, clear tone
Said Mariana, night and morn,
Low she mourned, “I am all alone,
Love-forgotten, and love-forlorn,"
compared with
Complaining, 'Mother, give me grace
To help me of my weary load. '
And on the liquid mirror glow'd
The clear perfection of her face.
.
1
1
i
6
!


## p. 29 (#45) ##############################################

11]
His Style and Topics
29
6
• Is this the form,' she made her moan,
'That won his praises night and morn? '
And 'Ah,' she said, 'but I wake alone,
I sleep forgotten, I wake forlorn. '
The heightened glow of the picture in the lines italicised is not
more striking than the dramatic significance of 'Is this the form,'
etc. But, perhaps, the supreme examples of the poet's power to
enrich his verses by passing them once again through the mood in
which the whole poem was conceived are the closing stanzas of
The Lady of Shalott and of The Lotos Eaters.
The outcome of the severe course of training to which Tenuyson
submitted his art-a process that never quite came to an end, for
later poems were, also, carefully revised after publication—was a
style, the ground and texture of which is a pure, idiomatic English,
mannered as, in a different way, the style of Milton is mannered,
decorative as, in a different way, the style of Milton is decorative',
and a verse of wonderful variety, a felicitous adaptability to the
mood of the poem, and a curiously elaborated melody of vowel
and consonant. With the exception of Gray-for Pope's 'correct-
ness' is not entirely a poetical excellence-English poetry had
produced nothing since Milton that is so obviously the result of a
strenuous and unwearied pursuit of perfection of form.
Tennyson's range of topics is, also, fully represented in the
1842 volumes-studies of mood and character ranging from the
first slight sketches of Adelines and Marianas to the complexities
of Simeon Stylites, St Agnes and Sir Galahad, and the nobility of
Ulysses ; studies of English rural life like Dora, among the least
successful of Tennyson's poems, not because (as a critic has com-
plained) they have too much of Wordsworth’s ‘silly sooth,' but
because they lack the intense conviction which keeps Wordsworth
from ever being 'silly,' though he may at times be absurd, and
exalts his 'sooth' into imaginative truth; medieval studies in
which was now included Morte d'Arthur, starting point of the
later Idylls of the King; classical legend represented by the
early Enone recast and Ulysses, for Tithonus though written was
not yet published; and, lastly, poems in which Tennyson touches
on the mysteries of life and death and immortality, themes round
1 The ground-work of Milton's style is English Latinised in syntax, idiom and
vocabulary. Of Tennyson's Idylls of the King, a contemporary critic says: 'In the
history of the English language these poems will occupy a remarkable place as
examples of vigorous, unaffected, and almost unmixed Saxon written at a time in
which all the ordinary walks of literature are becoming rapidly vulgarised with bastard
Latinity,' The Edinburgh Review, 1859. Dyboski's Tennyson's Sprache und Stil
collects Tennyson's usages and throws an instructive light on his mannerisms.
6
6
>


## p. 30 (#46) ##############################################

30
[CH.
The Tennysons
which his brooding imagination was to circle all his life with a
sincerer passionate and pathetic interest than he felt for any
other
subject that engaged his art-seeking, finding, but never long sure
that he really had found, like some lone, ghostly sea-bird wheeling
round the luring, dazzling, baffling beams of a lighthouse on some
stormy headland. For all his questing, Tennyson was never to get
much further than the vague hope of the closing section of The
Vision of Sin :
At last I heard a voice upon the slope
Cry to the summit, “Is there any hope ? '
To which an answer peal'd from that high land,
But in a tongue no man could understand;
And on the glimmering limit far withdrawn
God made Himself an awful rose of dawn.
The sombre note of the scene and the song which precede this
close was to be heard more than once again in the verse of the
poet who had already written The Two Voices and was yet to
write Vastness. Of political pieces, the volumes included the
very characteristic poems 'You ask me, why,' 'Love thou thy land,'
*Of old sat Freedom' and the very popular, if now somewhat faded,
trochaics of Locksley Hall.
These latter poems, and such additions to his earlier work as
Morte d'Arthur, Ulysses and Love and Duty, were proof that
not only had Tennyson completely mastered his decorative, musical
style but that his poetry had gained in thought, in dramatic insight,
in depth and poignancy of feeling ; and the question for a lover
of Tennyson's poetry in 1842 must have been, was this advance to
be continuous, such an increasing dramatic understanding of the
passionate heart of man as carried Shakespeare from A Mid-
summer Night's Dream to Macbeth and Othello, with all the change
in style and verse which that process brought with it, or such an
absorption in a great theme, the burden of a message, as produced
La Divina Commedia or Paradise Lost. For there were dangers
besetting Tennyson's laborious cultivation of a new and rich
poetic diction, dangers which betrayed themselves very evidently
in the first considerable poem that followed the 1842 volumes,
the longest poem Tennyson had yet attempted, and the first in
which he set himself conscientiously in the mood in which he
had conceived The Palace of Art) to give to his poetry a didactic
intention. The Princess, first published in 1847 but revised and
re-revised in 1851 and 1853, if it exhibits all the characteristic
excellences of Tennyson's style, his mellifluous blank verse and


## p. 31 (#47) ##############################################

11]
The Princess
31
6
polished, jewelled phrasing, reveals with equal clearness its limita-
tions and faults. The blend of humour and sentiment and serious
purpose is not altogether a success—Alfred, whatever he may
think,' said FitzGerald, 'cannot trifle. His smile is rather a
grim one'—and of dramatic interest there is the merest suggestion
in the grandiloquent princess, the silly prince and their slightly
outlined companions. Moreover, the style, with all its beauties,
reveals, as some of the later Idylls of the King were to do, the
radical want of simplicity, which is not really disguised by the
purity, of Tennyson's style, a tendency to conceit and decoration
which seeks to make poetry of a plain statement by periphrasis
and irrelevant, even if beautiful, figure. Gladstone admired the
skill with which Tennyson could make poetical the description of
a game-pie :
Where quail and pigeon, lark and leveret lay
Like fossils of the rock, with golden yolks
Imbedded and injellied,
and describe mathematics as
The hard-grain'd Muses of the cube and square.
The Princess abounds in refinements of this kind, as when the
prince
sat down and wrote,
In such a hand as when a field of corn
Bows all its ears before the roaring East,
or the remark that Cyril's wilder frolics are not the surest index
to his character is thus adorned :
He has a solid base of temperament:
But as the waterlily starts and slides
Upon the level in little puffs of wind,
Tho' anchor'd to the bottom, such is he.
Even when the poem rises to a higher level of seriousness in
the closing sections, the style is still elaborated and brocaded out
of all proportion to the theme. Yet of such art the final per-
fection is found in an appearance of simplicity, and that, too,
Tennyson achieved in the lyrics which were added to the third
edition—the subtle ‘silly sooth' of 'We fell out' and 'Sweet and
low,' the pealing music of 'The splendour falls,' the sophisticated,
coloured art of ‘Now sleeps the crimson petal,' and, lastly, the
melody, the vision and the passionate wail of Tears, idle tears'
the most moving and finely wrought lyric Tennyson ever wrote.
6


## p. 32 (#48) ##############################################

32
[CH.
The Tennysons
The quality which such art, with all its wonderful elaboration,
lacks is that last secret of a great style which Dante indicates
when he defines the dolce stil nuovo-for what is true of love
is true of any other adequate theme-
Ed io a lui : 'Io mi son un che, quando
Amor mi spira, noto, ed a quel modo
Che ditta dentro, vo significando l'
He had not yet written as when a great subject appears to take
the pen and write itself. But, in 1850, Tennyson seemed to
his readers to have found such an inspiring theme, when the poem
on which he had been at work ever since the death in 1833 of his
friend Arthur Henry Hallam was published under the simple title
In Memoriam, for the theme, death and immortality, was that
on which Tennyson ever felt most deeply, was most constantly
haunted and agitated by conflicting hopes and fears. In no
poems had he written with more evident sincerity, more directness,
a finer balance of thought and style, than in those poems which,
like Ulysses and The Vision of Sin, were precursors of this longer
poem on life and death and immortality, sorrow and sin and the
justification of God's ways to men.
In Memoriam is not altogether free from the faults of Tenny-
sonian diction, phrasing such as 'eaves of weary eyes' or
And where the kneeling hamlet drains
The chalice of the grapes of God,
but, with few exceptions, the style is pure, direct and masculine,
and to this not only the theme but the verse contributed, a verse
which Ben Jonson and lord Herbert of Cherbury had used before
him, but which Tennyson made his own by the new weight and
melody which he gave to it. In Tennyson's hands, the verse
acquired something of the weight and something of the fittingness
for a long meditative poem of the terza rima as used by Dante,
the same perfection of internal movement combined with the
same invitation to continue, an eddying yet forward movement?
The construction of the poem in separate sections, some of
which are linked together in groups by continuity of theme, was
that which gave freest scope to Tennyson's genius, allowing him to
make of each section the expression of a single, intense mood.
But the claim for In Memoriam, that it is not merely a collection
of poems of varying degrees of beauty but a great poem, rests on
6
1 Purgatorio, xxiv, 52–4.
? See Saintsbury, History of English Prosody, vol. 11, p. 205, and, on the terza rima,
as used by Dante and by English poets, ibid. pp. 361–5.
9


## p. 33 (#49) ##############################################

II]
In Memoriam
33
а
the degree of success with which Tennyson has woven these
together into a poem portraying the progress of the human spirit
from sorrow to joy, not by the loss of love or the mere dulling of
grief, but by the merging of the passion for the individual friend,
removed but still living, into the larger love of God and of his
fellow-men! If the present generation does not estimate In
Memoriam quite so highly as its first readers, it is because time,
which has a way of making clear the interval between a poet's
intention and his achievement, the expressed purpose of a Paradise
Lost and its final effect, has shown that Tennyson failed to make
this central experience, this great transition, imaginatively con-
vincing and impressive. It is not in the vague philosophy, with a
dash of semi-mystical experience, in which is veiled the simple
process by which the heart grows reconciled to loss and life renews
her spell, nor in the finished and illuminated style in which all
this is clothed—it is not here that the reader of today finds the
true Tennyson, the poet with his own unique and splendid gifts,
but in the sombre moods and the lovely landscapes of individual
sections. "Old Yew, which graspest at the stones,' 'Dark house, by
which once more I stand,' 'Calm is the morn without a sound,'
‘To-night the winds begin to rise,' 'With trembling fingers did we
weave'-sections such as these, or the passionate sequence begin-
ning ‘Oh yet we trust that somehow good,' and later, lovelier
flights as 'When on my bed the moonlight falls,' 'I cannot see the
features right,'Witch-elms that counterchange the floor,''By
night we linger'd on the lawn,' ‘Unwatch’d, the garden bough
shall sway,' 'Sad Hesper o'er the buried sun'—these are likely to
be dear to lovers of English poetry by their expression of
mood in picture and music, long after the philosophy of In
Memoriam has been forgotten. It is not the mystical experience
of the ninety-fifth section which haunts the memory, but the
beauty of the sun-rise that follows when
&
>
6
6
the doubtful dusk reveald
The knolls once more where, couch'd at ease,
The white kine glimmer'd, and the trees
Laid their dark arms about the field :
And suck'd from out the distant gloom
A breeze began to tremble oʻer
The large leaves of the sycamore,
And fluctuate all the still perfume,
2
See A. C. Bradley, A Commentary on Tennyson's 'In Memoriam,' in which
the development of this thought is traced.
E. L. XIII. CH. II.
3


## p. 34 (#50) ##############################################

34
[CH.
The Tennysons
And gathering freshlier overhead,
Rock'd the full foliaged elms, and swung
The heavy-folded rose, and flung
The lilies to and fro, and said
*The dawn, the dawn,' and died away;
And East and West, without a breath,
Mixt their dim lights, like life and death,
To broaden into boundless day.
6
To the theme of the most agitated sections of the poem, those
whose theme is not the removal of the friend by death from the
sight and touch of those that loved him, but the more terrible
doubt as to a life after death, the poet was to recur again, to
fight more than one 'weird battle of the west,' before he faced the
final issue with courage and resignation and hope.
In the year of In Memoriam, Tennyson succeeded Wordsworth
in the post of poet laureate, and his first official poem was the fine
Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington (1852), a bold metrical
experiment, the motif for which is given by the funeral march and
the pomp of the obsequies in St Paul's. In the dramatic use of
varying metres no poet was ever a more constant and generally
felicitous experimenter than Tennyson, and in his next considerable
poem Maud, issued in Maud, and Other Poems (1855), he employed
the device of sections, not, as in In Memoriam, of like metrical
structure, but varying in the boldest fashion from long six-foot to
short three-foot lines, to tell in monodrama a story of tragic
passion. The hero and narrator is dramatically conceived, and
Tennyson was very anxious not to be identified with the Hamlet
of his story. But the political opinions which he put into his
mouth were his own, in the main, and the morbid, hysterical tem-
perament was his own, too, dramatically intensified and elaborated.
The result was a poem which greatly disconcerted his admirers
-alike those who would have had him content to remain the
Theocritus of idylls like The Gardener's Daughter and The Brook
(which was published in the same volume as Maud), and those who
were calling on him for a great poem, and were prepared to acclaim
him-mainly on the strength of Locksley Hall—as the laureate of
an age of 'unexampled progress. ' The latter were profoundly
shocked at the poet's fierce exultation over war for a cause, his
clear perception of the seamy side of commercial prosperity and
his contempt for what he thought a mean conception of the
blessing of peace. A great poem Maud is not. The heroine is
too shadowy, the hero a Hamlet only in the hysterical instability
of his temperament, with none of Hamlet's range of thought, or


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11]
Idylls of the King
35
that ultimate strength of soul which held madness and suicide at
arm's length; but ‘I have led her home,' 'Come into the garden,
Maud,' and 'O that 'twere possible' are among the most perfect of
Tennyson's dramatic love-lyrics.
The great poem, the magnum opus, to which Tennyson's critics
summoned him insistently and on which his mind dwelt with
almost too conscientious a desire to fulfil what was expected of
him, began to take shape finally, in the only form in which his
genius could work at ease (the concentration, in a poem of not too
great length, on a single mood of feeling), with the composition of
Idylls of the King. Malory's Morte d'Arthur had early arrested
his attention.
I could not read Palmerin of England nor Amadis, nor any other of
those Romances through. The Morte d'Arthur is much the best: there are
very fine things in it; but all strung together without Art.
So he told FitzGerald, and his first experiment in the retelling of
the old legends, Morte d'Arthur, had appeared in 1842 as a
fragment of Homeric epic. Nothing more was added till 1857,
when Enid and Nimuë was issued in an edition of some six
copies. This issue was followed, in 1859, by The True and the
False, Four Idylls of the King, containing Enid, Nimuë (Vivien),
Elaine and Guinevere. In the same year, the four idylls were
issued as Idylls of the King. In 1869 were added The Coming
of Arthur, The Holy Grail, Pelleas and Ettarre and The
Passing of Arthur. The Last Tournament (1871), Gareth and
Lynette (1872), Balin and Balan (1885) came later, and, in the
final arrangement, Geraint and Enid was divided into two
parts.
In the later poems, the epic, Homeric flavour of the first Morte
is abandoned for a more purely idyllic tone, a chiselled, polished,
jewelled exquisiteness of Alexandrian art.
Of blank verse,
Tennyson was an exacting critic and a master in a manner as
definitely his own as Thomson's, but with a greater claim to be
compared with the finest of English non-dramatic blank verse,
that is Milton's. And when the theme is reflective, oratorical or
dramatic—at least in monologue, Tennyson's blank verse is
melodious and sonorous, variously paused and felicitously drawn
out into effective paragraphs. A continuous study reveals a
greater monotony of effect than in Milton's ever varied harmonies,
1 'We once more call upon him to do the duty which England has long expected
of him, and to give us a great poem on a great subject,' The Edinburgh Review,
1855.
34-2


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36
[ch.
The Tennysons
6
and there is never the grand undertone of passion, of the storm
that has raised the ground swell. It is in narrative that the faults
of Tennyson's blank verse become apparent-its too flagrant
artificiality. The pauses and cadences are too carefully chosen,
the diction too precious, the movement too mincing, the whole
'too picked, too spruce, too affected':
So coming to the fountain-side beheld
Balin and Balan sitting statuelike,
Brethren, to right and left the spring, that down,
From underneath a plume of lady-fern
Sang, and the sand danced at the bottom of it.
One could multiply such instances-taken quite at random-from
the Idylls, especially from the descriptions of tournament or
combat. In his parody of The Brook, Calverley has caught to
perfection the mincing gait and affected phrasing of this
Tennysonian fine-writing :
Thus on he prattled like a babbling brook,
Then I, “The sun hath slipt behind the hill,
And my Aunt Vivian dines at half-past six. ”
So in all love we parted; I to the Hall,
They to the village. It was noised next noon
That chickens had been miss'd at Syllabub Farm.
The over-exquisite elaboration of form is in keeping with
Tennyson's whole treatment of the old legends, rich in a colour
and atmosphere of their own. With the spirit of the Arthurian
stories, in which elements of a Celtic, primitive world are blended
in a complex, now hardly to be disentangled, fashion with medieval
chivalry and catholic, sacramental symbolism, the Victorian poet
was out of sympathy. Neither the aimless fighting in which they
abound, nor the cult of love as a passion so inspiring and ennobling
that it glorified even sin, nor the mystical adoration of the Host
and the ascetic quest of a spotless purity in the love and service
of God, appealed deeply to Tennyson, who wished to give to the
fighting a philanthropic purpose, to combine love with purity in
marriage and to find the mystic revelation of God in the world
in which we move and serve.
It is not easy to pour new wine into old bottles, to charge old
stories with a new spirit. If Milton's classical treatment of Biblical
themes is a wonderful tour de force—and it is not a complete
success—it is because the spirit of the poet and the poem is, after
all, rather Hebraic than Hellenic. There is as much of the Hebrew
prophets in his work as of the Greek poets. It is still harder to
give a new soul to old legends if one is not quite sure what that


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Idylls of the King
37
soul is to be. The allegory which was to connect the whole, 'the
conflict continually maintained between the spirit and the flesh,'
is, at once, too obvious and too vague, too vague as an interpre-
tation of the story as a whole, too obvious when it appears as an
occasional intrusion of a double meaning—in Gareth and Lynette
or The Holy Grail. It was, indeed, a misfortune that Tennyson
was determined to tie the tin kettle of a didactic intention to
the tail of all poems of this period. The general moral signi-
ficance of the old story was clear enough—do after the good
and leave the evil and it shall bring you to good fame and
renommee '—and needed no philosophic pointer.
-
The sole
justification for rehandling the legends was the possibility of
giving them a new and heightened poetic beauty and dramatic
significance.
In the latter, the poet has certainly not wholly failed, and it is
this dramatic significance, rather than the vague allegory, which
connects the stories and gives to the series a power over and above
the charm of the separate tales. As in In Memoriam, so in Idylls
of the King, the connecting link between the parts is a gradually
induced change of mood. Each Idyll has its dominant mood
reflected in the story, the characters and the scenery in which
these are set, from the bright youth and glad spring-tide of
Gareth and Lynette to the disillusionment and flying yellow
leaves of The Last Tournament, the mists and winter-cold of
the parting with Guinevere and that last, dim, weird battle of the
west. ' The dramatic background to this change of mood is the
story of Lancelot and Guinevere, and the final test of Tennyson's
success or failure in his most ambitious work is his handling of
this story; the most interesting group of characters are the four
that contemplate each other with mournful and troubled eyes
as in some novel of modern life, Arthur, Lancelot, Guinevere
and Elaine. In part, Tennyson has succeeded, almost greatly ; in
part, he has inevitably failed. Elaine is perfect, a wonderful
humanising of the earlier, half mystical Lady of Shalott. Lancelot,
too, is surely a great study of the flower of knighthood caught in
the trammels of an overpowering, ruining passion, a modern
picture drawn on the lines of the old; and Guinevere, too,
slightly, yet distinctly, drawn
6
in her splendid beauty--wilful, impetuous, self-indulgent-yet full of courtesy
and grace and, when she pleases, of self-control also; not without a sense in
her of the greatness of the work which she is marring; not without a bitter
consciousness of her secret humiliation and the place she has lost; but yet


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38
[ch.
The Tennysons
too proud, too passionate, too resolute to yield even to her own com-
punctions 1
The failure is Arthur, and it could hardly be otherwise. A
shadowy figure in the old legends, Tennyson has made him not
more but less real, a 'conception of man as he might be,' Gladstone
declared, and, in consequence, of man as he ought not to be in such
a dramatic setting. Like the Lady in Comus, Arthur has become
a symbol, not a human being. As the former, when she speaks,
is not a young English girl, but the personification of chastity, so
Arthur is, as in Spenser's poem, the embodiment of complete
virtue conceived in a Victorian fashion, with a little too much
in him of the endless clergyman,' which Tennyson said was the
Englishman's idea of God. And the last speech he delivers over
the fallen Guinevere is, in consequence, at once magnificent and
intolerable. The most popular of his works when they appeared,
Idylls of the King, is, today, probably the chief stumbling-block
to a young student of Tennyson. Its Parnassian beauties, its
vaguely religious and somewhat timid morality reflect too vividly
the spirit of their own day. Yet, even English poetry would need
to be richer than it is before we could afford to forget or ignore
such a wealth of splendid colour and music as these poems
present.
The same excess of sentiment, which, in a great poem, should
have given place to thought and passion, and the same over-
elaborate art, are apparent in the rustic idyll which gives its name
to the volume published in 1864, Enoch Arden, etc. , a tragedy of
village life founded on a story given to Tennyson by the sculptor
Woolner, recalling, in many of its details, Crabbe's The Parting
Hour. Fundamentally, there is more of Crabbe than of
Wordsworth in Tennyson's tales of English country-life, for,
though Tennyson is more sentimental than Crabbe and his treat-
ment far more decorative, he does not idealise in the mystical
manner of Wordsworth. But, in style and verse, there could not
well be a greater difference than that between the vivid pictures,
the tropical colouring, the sophisticate simplicity of Enoch Arden
and the limited, conventional phraseology, the monotonous verse
in which Crabbe tells his story with so much more of sheer
dramatic truth. But it was in the direction of sheer dramatic
truth, mastering and, to some extent, simplifying the style, that
Tennyson's genius was advancing most fruitfully, and the earnest
of this is two poems which accompany Enoch Arden, the dialect
1 From a review of Idylls of the King in The Edinburgh Review, April 1870.


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The Dramas and Later Poems
39
ballads in six-foot anapaests, The Grandmother and The Northern
Farmer-old Style, the first of which owes its poignancy to the
sorrow with which Tennyson gazed on his own first child born
dead, while the latter is the earliest altogether felicitous expression
of the vein of dramatic humour which ran through his naturally
sombre temperament. Tennyson could not trifle, but he had a
gift of caustic satire to which he might have given freer play with
advantage to his permanent, if not his immediate, popularity. The
two farmer poems and The Village Wife are worth several such
poems as Dora and Enoch Arden.
He bestowed infinite trouble on his dramas,' his son says,
and they bear every mark of a careful study of the sources, thought-
ful delineation of character, finished expression and versification.
What they want is dramatic life and force. The historical plays
are the product of his patriotism and his dislike of catholicism;
but the political interest is not, as in Shakespeare's plays, quickly
superseded by the dramatic. The characters do not become alive
and take the conduct of the play into their own hands, as Falstaff
and the humorous characters in Shakespeare's English plays tend
to do. In Queen Mary, no single character arrests and dominates
our interest, and the hero of Harold, as of many modern plays,
is of the Hamlet type of character, without quite being a Hamlet,
more interested in the conflict of his own impulses and inhibitions
than the driving force of a play full of action and incident.
The most single in interest and the most impressive is Becket.
Thoughtful and accomplished as they are, none of Tennyson's
dramas is the product of the imagination which begat the
greatest and most characteristic of his poems.