Chapter X: Part 10

With Irving's arrangement of the play I never wholly agreed. He made of it as a whole a workable piece, but in doing so he sacrificed one scene which, beyond all question, is one of the most vivid and most characteristic in the play, the scene of the beggars' feast. He lost sight of the fact that its omission spoilt the balance of the middle section. There was no foil to the brilliancy of the Council at Northampton. Tennyson (like Shakespeare) knew better the value of contrast, and put in at this point that touch of divine humour which only heightens pathos. The drama needed it. He balanced the traitorous splendour of the nobles with the homely loyalty of the halt, maimed, and blind. Irving also omitted the poem which gave the true lyrical touch to the first Bower scene; a little dialogue which, if it had been sung as was intended after the curtain rose on an empty stage, would have given the same atmosphere to the act, which the Rainbow song at its close drives home. These were, however, almost the only blots upon an otherwise admirably reverent adaptation. Irving told me that he always came down to listen behind the curtain to the last _entr'acte_ (the Martyrdom), in order to get into the right mood for the final scene. Coming from an actor, who knew nothing of musical technique beyond an extraordinarily acute sense of what was fitting or not fitting for stage purposes, this was a great gratification and a still greater encouragement to one of the many composers whom he so loyally befriended. The production of "Becket" was a memorable red-letter day for the modern English stage; the more so as the tragedy came and conquered a public which was little prepared for the finest specimen of its type which had been seen since the days of Shakespeare. It was fitting that the reign of the greatest Queen since Elizabeth should have such a play inscribed in its annals, an appropriate and worthy counterpart to those of her great predecessor's days.

THE ATTITUDE OF TENNYSON TOWARDS SCIENCE

By SIR OLIVER LODGE, F.R.S.

Henry Sidgwick wrote in 1860 concerning Tennyson that he "regarded him as pre-eminently the Poet of Science"; and to explain his meaning he contrasts the attitude of Wordsworth to Nature with that of Tennyson:

The Nature for which Wordsworth stirred our feelings was Nature as
known by simple observation and interpreted by religious and
sympathetic intuition.

--an attitude which left Science unregarded. But, for Tennyson,

the physical world is always the world as known to us through physical
science; the scientific view of it dominates his thought about it, and
his general acceptance of this view is real and sincere, even when he
utters the intensest feeling of its inadequacy to satisfy our deepest
needs.

It is probable that what was then written is now a commonplace of letters, and requires no emphasizing, but as a professed Student of Science, whose life has extended over the greater part of the time which has elapsed since "In Memoriam" was published, I welcome the opportunity of adding my testimony in continued support of the estimate made by Professor Sidgwick half a century ago.

It is generally admitted, and has been recently emphasized, that wherever reference is made to facts of nature in the poems or the fringe of Science touched on,--as it so often is,--the reference is satisfying and the touch precise. Observers of Nature have often called attention to the beautiful accuracy with which natural phenomena are described, with every mark of first-hand personal experience, as distinct from merely remembered conventional modes of expression; and the same sort of feeling is aroused in the mind of a Student of Science as he comes across one after another of the subjects which have kindled discussion during the Victorian epoch,--he is inevitably struck with the clear comprehension of the fundamental aspects of the themes treated which the poems display, he sees that the Poet is never led into misrepresentation or sacrifice of precision in the quest for beauty of form. The two are wedded together "like noble music unto perfect words."

To quote examples might only be tedious, and would assuredly be misleading. It is not that the bare facts of Science are recorded,--such record could not constitute poetry--certainly not high poetry,--it is not merely his acquaintance with contemporary scientific discovery, natural to a man who numbered leading men of Science among his friends;--it is not any of this that arouses our feeling of admiring fellowship, but it is that with all his lordship of language and power of expression so immensely superior to our own, he yet moves in the atmosphere of Science not as an alien, but as an understanding and sympathetic friend.

Look back upon the epoch in which he lived--what a materialistic welter it seems! The mind of man was going through a period of storm; antiquated beliefs were being jettisoned and everything spiritual seemed to be going by the board; the point of view of man was rapidly changing and the whole of existence appeared capable of reducing itself to refined and intricate mechanism.

Poets generally must have felt it as a terrible time. What refuge existed for a poet save to isolate himself from the turmoil, shut himself into his cabin, and think of other times and other surroundings, away from the uproar and the gale. Those who did not thus shelter themselves were liable to bewail the time because the days were evil; as Arnold did, and Clough. But thus did not Tennyson. Out through the tempest he strode, open-eyed and bare-headed, with figure erect, glorying in the conflict of the elements, and summoning the men of his generation to reverence and worship.

Doubt, yes doubt he justified--doubt, so it were straightforward and honest. Forms and accessories--these he was willing to let go--though always with respect and care for the weaker brothers and sisters to whom they stood for things of value; but Faith beyond those forms he clung to, faith fearless and triumphant, uprising out of temporary moods of despondency into ever securer conviction of righteous guidance throughout creation and far-seeing divine Purpose at the heart of things.

Other men retained their faith too, but many only attained security by resolutely closing their eyes and bolting the doors of their water-tight compartments. But the glory of Tennyson's faith was that it never led him to be unfaithful to the kinds of truth that were being revealed to his age. That, too, was an age of revelation, and he knew it; the science of his epoch was true knowledge, as far as it went; it was over-emphatic and explosive, and to weaker or less inspired minds was full of danger, but it was genuine cargo, nevertheless, which must be taken on board; there was a real overload of superstition which had to be discarded; and it was his mission, and that of a few other noble souls, to help us to accomplish with calmness and something like wisdom the task of that revolutionary age.

In the conflict between Science and Faith our business was to accept the one without rejecting the other: and that he achieved. Never did his acceptance of the animal ancestry of man, for instance, upset his belief in the essential divinity of the human soul, its immortality, its supremacy, its eternal destiny. Never did his recognition of the materialistic aspect of nature cloud his perception of its spiritual aspect as supplementing and completing and dominating the mechanism. His was a voice from other centuries, as it were, sounding through the nineteenth; and by his strong majestic attitude he saved the faith of thousands who else would have been overwhelmed; and his writings convey to our own age a magnificent expression of that which we too have still not fully accepted, but which we are on the way to believe.

If asked to quote in support of this statement I will not quote more than the titles of some of the chief poems to which I appeal. Not always the greatest poems perhaps do I here refer to, but those which most clearly uphold the contention of the Poet's special service to humanity during the period of revolution in thought through which mankind has been passing.

Let me instance, therefore, first and most obviously, "In Memoriam"; and thereafter poems such as "De Profundis," "The Two Voices," "The Ancient Sage," "Ulysses," "Vastness," "By an Evolutionist," "Demeter and Persephone," "Akbar's Dream," "God and the Universe," "Flower in the Crannied Wall," "The Higher Pantheism," "The Voice and the Peak," "Wages," and "Morte d'Arthur."

If I do not add to this list the great poem "To Virgil," who in his day likewise assimilated knowledge of diverse kinds and in the light of spiritual vision glorified all he touched, it is only because the atmosphere of the Ancient poet is so like that of the Modern one that it is not by any single poem that their sympathy and kinship has to be displayed, but rather by the similarity of their whole attitude to the Universe.

By the term "Poet of Science" I understand one who assimilates the known truths of Science and Philosophy, through the pores, so to speak, without effort and with intuitive accuracy, one who bears them lightly and raises them above the region of bare fact into the realm of poetry. Such a poet is one who transfuses fact with beauty, he is ready to accept the discoveries of his age, no matter how prosaic and lamentable they seem, and is able to perceive and display the essential beauty and divinity which runs through them all and threads them all together. That is the service which a great poet can perform for Science in his day and generation. The qualities beyond this--exhibited for the most part perhaps in other poems--which enable him to live for all time, are qualities above any that I have the right or the power to estimate.

To be overwhelmed and mastered by the material and the mechanical, even to the extent of being blind to the existence of every other aspect, is common and human enough. But to recognize to the full the reign of law in Nature, the sequence of cause and effect, the strength of the chain-armour of necessity which men of science weave, and yet to discern in it the living garment of God--that is poetic and divine.

TENNYSON AS A STUDENT AND POET OF NATURE[72]

By SIR NORMAN LOCKYER, F.R.S.

When Tennyson passed from life, not only did England lose one of her noblest sons, but the world a poet who, beyond all others who have ever lived, combined the gift of expression with an unceasing interest in the causes of things and in the working out of Nature's laws.

When from this point of view we compare him with his forerunners, Dante is the only one it is needful to name; but although Dante's knowledge was well abreast of his time, he lacked the fullness of Tennyson, for the reason that in his day science was restricted within narrow limits. In Dante's time, indeed--he was born some 300 years before Galileo and Tycho Brahe--science apart from cosmogony had chiefly to do with the various constellations and measurements of the passing of time and the daily and yearly motions of the sun, for the observation of which long before his epoch our ancient monuments were erected; the physical and biological sciences were still unborn. Dante's great work is full of references to the science of his day; his science and song went hand in hand as Tennyson's did in later, fuller times. This in strong contrast with such writers as Goethe who, although both poet and student of science, rarely commingled the two strands of thought.

It is right and fitting that the highest poetry should be associated with the highest knowledge. Tennyson's great achievement has been to show us that in the study of science we have one of the bases of the fullest poetry, a poetry which appeals at the same time to the deepest emotions and the highest and broadest intellects of mankind. Tennyson, in short, has shown that science and poetry, so far from being antagonistic, must for ever advance side by side.

So far as my memory serves me I was introduced to the late Lord Tennyson by Woolner about the year 1864. I was then living in Fairfax Road, West Hampstead, and I had erected my 6-inch Cooke Equatorial in the garden. I soon found that he was an enthusiastic astronomer, and that few points in the descriptive part of the subject had escaped him. He was therefore often in the observatory. Some of his remarks still linger fresh in my memory. One night when the moon's terminator swept across the broken ground round Tycho he said, "What a splendid Hell that would make." Again, after showing him the clusters in Hercules and Perseus he remarked musingly, "I cannot think much of the county families after that." In 1866 my wife was translating Guillemin's _Le Ciel_ and I was editing and considerably expanding it; he read many of the proof sheets and indeed suggested the title of the English edition, _The Heavens_.

In the 'seventies, less so in the 'eighties, he rarely came to London without discussing some points with me, and in these discussions he showed himself to be full of knowledge of the discoveries then being made.

Once I met him accidentally in Paris; he was most anxious to see Leverrier and the Observatory. Leverrier had the reputation of being _difficile_; I never found him so, but I certainly never saw him so happy as when we three were together, and he told me afterwards how delighted he had been that Tennyson should have wished to pay him a visit. I visited Tennyson at Aldworth in 1890 when he was in his 82nd year. I was then writing the _Meteoritic Hypothesis_, and he had asked for proof sheets. When I arrived there I was touched to find that he had had them bound together for convenience in reading, and from the conversation we had I formed the impression that he had read every line. It was a subject after his own heart, as will be shown farther on. One of the nights during my stay was very fine, and he said to me, "Now, Lockyer, let us look at the double stars again," and we did. There was a 2-inch telescope at Aldworth. His interest in Astronomy was persistent until his death.

The last time I met him (July 1892), he would talk of nothing but the possible ages of the sun and earth, and was eager to know to which estimates scientific opinion was then veering.

So far I have referred, and in very condensed fashion, to Tennyson's knowledge of and interest in Astronomy as they came out in our conversations. I have done this because I was naturally most struck with it, but only a short acquaintance was necessary to show me that this interest in my own special subject was only a part of a general interest in and knowledge of scientific questions.

This was borne home to me very forcibly in about the year 1866 or 1867. The evenings of Mondays were then given up to friends who came in, _sans cérémonie_, to talk and smoke. Clays from Broseley, including "churchwardens" and some of larger size (Frank Buckland's held an ounce of tobacco), were provided, and the confirmed smokers (Tennyson, an occasional visitor, being one of them) kept their pipes, on which the name was written, in a rack for future symposia. One night it chanced that many travellers--Bates, Baines, and Winwoode Reade among them--were present, and the question of a certain kind of dust-storms came on the _tapis_. Tennyson, who had not started the subject, listened for some time and then remarked how difficult it was for a student to gain certain knowledge on such subjects, and he then astonished the company by giving the names of eight authors, four of whom had declared they had seen such dust-storms as had been described, the other four insisting that they could not be produced under any known meteorological conditions and that with the best opportunities they had never seen them.

In many of our talks I came across similar evidences of minute knowledge in various fields; nothing in the natural world was trivial to him or to be neglected. This great grasp was associated with a minute accuracy, and it was this double habit of mind which made Tennyson such a splendid observer, and _therefore_ such a poet, for the whole field of nature from which to cull the most appropriate epithets was always present in his mind.

Hence those exquisite presentations of facts, in which true poetry differs from prose, and which in Tennyson's poetry appeal at once both to the brain and heart.

But even this is not all that must be said on this point. Much of Tennyson's finest is so fine that it wants a knowledge on a level with his own to appreciate its truth and beauty; many of the most exquisite and profound touches I am convinced are missed by thousands of his readers on this account. The deep thought and knowledge are very frequently condensed into a simple adjective instead of being expanded into something of a longer breath to make them apparent enough to compel admiration. This it strikes me he consistently avoided.

All the charm of all the Muses often flowering in a lonely word.

Although many of the poems seem to me to be clothed with references to natural phenomena as with a garment, it can on the whole, I think, be gathered from them, as I gathered from our conversations, that the subject deepest in his thoughts was the origin of things in its widest sense, a _Systema Mundi_, which should explain the becoming of the visible universe and _define its different parts_ at different periods in its history. In this respect we have:

Three poets in three ages born.

Dante, Milton, and Tennyson, with their minds saturated with the same theme, and I can fancy nothing in the history of human thought more interesting or encouraging than the studies of this theme as presented to us in their works published we may say, speaking very roughly, three centuries apart.

This of course is another story, but a brief reference to it is essential for my present purpose.

All the old religions of the world were based upon Astronomy, that and Medicine being the only sciences in existence. Sun, Moon, and Stars were all worshipped as Gods, and thus it was that even down to Dante's time Astronomy and religion were inseparably intertwined in the prevalent Cosmogonies. The Cosmogony we find in Dante, the peg on which he hangs his _Divina Commedia_, with the seven heavens surrounding the earth and seven hells inside it, had come down certainly from Arab and possibly prior sources; the Empyrean, the _primum mobile_, the seven Purgatories, and the Earthly Paradise (the antipodes of Jerusalem) were later additions, the latter being added so soon as it was generally recognized that the earth was round, though the time of the navigator was not yet.

Dante constructed none of this machinery, he used it merely; it represented the knowledge, that is, the belief, of his time.

Between Dante and Milton there was a gap; but what a gap! It was filled by Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Galileo, Columbus, Magellan, and Vasco da Gama, to mention no more, and the astronomers and geographers between them smashed the earth-centred heavens, the interior hells, and the earthly paradise into fragments.

It was while this smashing was working its way into men's minds that Milton wrote his poem, and he, like Dante, centred it on a cosmogony. Well might Huxley call it "the Miltonic Hypothesis"! but how different from the former one, from which it was practically a retreat, carefully concealed in an important particular, but still a retreat from the old position.

Milton in his poem uses, so far as heaven is concerned, the cosmogony of Dante, but he carefully puts words into Raphael's mouth to indicate that after all the earth-centred scheme of the seven heavens must give way. But the most remarkable part of "Paradise Lost" is the treatment of hell.

Milton's greatness as a poet, as a _maker_, to my mind is justly based upon the new and vast conceptions which he there gave to the world and to which the world still clings.

To provide a new hell which had been "dismissed with costs" from the earth's centre, he boldly halves heaven and creates chaos and an external hell out of the space he filches from it. "Hellgate" is now the orifice in the _primum mobile_ towards the empyrean.

In Tennyson we find the complete separation of Science from Dogmatic Theology, thus foreshadowed by Milton, finally achieved. In him we find, as in Dante and Milton, one fully abreast with the science and thought of the time, and after another gap, this one filled up by Newton, Kant, Herschel, Laplace, and Darwin, we are brought face to face with the modern Cosmogony based upon science and Evolution. The ideas of heaven and hell in the mediaeval sense no longer form a necessary part of it, in Tennyson they have absolutely disappeared. In those parts of his poems in which he introduces cosmogonic ideas we have to deal with the facts presented by the heavens and the earth which can throw light upon the ancient history of our planet and its inhabitants.

The modern _Systema Mundi_ which Tennyson dwells on over and over again is dominated by

Astronomy and Geology, terrible Muses.

To come back from this parenthesis I must finally point out that although some of the most pregnant and beautiful passages in Tennyson's poems have reference to the modern views of the origin of things, almost all natural phenomena are referred to, in one place or another, in language in which both the truest poetry and most accurate science are blended.

The breadth of the outlook upon Nature shown by the references in the Poet's works is only equalled by the minute accuracy of observation displayed. Astronomy, geology, meteorology, biology, and, indeed, all branches of science except chemistry, are thus made to bring their tribute, so that finally we have a perfect poetic garland, which displays for us the truths of Nature and Human Nature intertwined.

MEMORIES

By E. V. B.

How kind to ask for some of my few small memories of your father--treasured memories which no length of years can ever rub out. And how much I like to recall them, though, alas! there is so little; it was so seldom that we met in those unforgotten times. Once, I remember, I sent him a rose from my garden, a black beauty, rather rare in those old days--"L'Empereur de Maroque," now quite cut out by "Prince Camille de Rohan." I keep the little word of thanks that came afterwards in return:

MY DEAR E. V. B.--Many thanks for your more amiable than beautiful
Black Rose. I don't mean to be personal, but am, yours always,

TENNYSON.

Another of his notes is the one wherein he gave me leave to illustrate "The May Queen." His words in the note were: "I would rather you than any one else should do it." His poems were a joy to me, even in childhood--from the days when, dull lesson hours, etc., being done, I could steal away and no one know, and, sitting on the carpet by the home book-shelves, read over and over on the sly from a bound volume (one of _Blackwood's Magazines_), where were long extracts from Tennyson's poems, especially the earlier ones, and amongst them one called "Adeline." There was certainly a magic in the poetry, scarce found elsewhere--magic even for a child of ten.

Do you remember how you used to tell me that your father had a great love for the red rose? He sent me, for my _Ros Rosarum_, lines on a Rosebud by himself:

THE ROSEBUD

The night with sudden odour reel'd,
The southern stars a music peal'd,
Warm beams across the meadow stole,
For Love flew over grove and field,
Said, "Open, Rosebud, open, yield
Thy fragrant soul."

I know he loved the poet's colour--lilac. A long-past scene in the garden at Farringford still remains in the mind's eye fresh and vivid--painted in with memory's fast colours among the pictures of remembrance.

The sunshine of a morning at Farringford in early summer when we came up the long middle walk, bordered on either side with lilac-flowered aubretia, led up to the open summer-house where Tennyson, with two or three friends, sat in the sun, enjoying the warmth and the lovely lines of lilac. We turned towards the house after a time, going under the budding trees of the grove. There he pointed out some young bushes of Alexandrian laurel--the same, he told us, whose small narrow leaves were used to make the crown for victors in the Olympian games....

Then--can I ever forget?--that delightful evening at Aldworth, when, after dinner, he invited me to his room upstairs. There he smoked his pipe in his high-backed, cane arm-chair, while I sat near. On a little table by the fire were arranged several more of these well-smoked Dublin pipes. Such a large, comfortable "smoke-room"!--with books about everywhere, on tables and chairs. Then he read to me aloud from "Locksley Hall." I think he read all the poem from the beginning to the end; and as Tennyson read on--one seemed almost to feel the pungent, salt sea-breeze blowing from over desolate seas--almost saw visions of the dreary sands lengthening far away. I remember I ventured to ask why the stanza which follows after that line, "And all the wonder that should be," was afterwards omitted:

In the hall there hangs a picture--Amy's arms about my neck,
Happy children in a sunbeam, sitting on the ribs of wreck.
In my life there was a picture--she that clasp'd my neck is flown,
I was left within the shadow, sitting on the wreck alone.

I began saying the lines, but he knew them quite well and repeated them. I can't think how it is, the answer he returned about this is now, alas! forgot.... Such troublous years have come and gone since that happy Long-Ago. (The omitted stanza would have gone, too, had it not been written down for me by a long-lost friend, Sir Robert Morier.)

So the reading aloud went on, with talk between (and clouds of smoke!), until, I think, past eleven o'clock, when you opened the door, and that--for me--rare dream of poetry and charm abruptly broke.

I saw Tennyson, for the last time, as I followed down the wooded path at Aldworth, on his way to the garden door opening on the heath, his fine, big, Russian hound pacing closely after.

No--once more I saw him, his likeness with all the distinctness sometimes known in the slow-moving white clouds of some glorious autumn day. It was after the end had come, and not long before the grave in Westminster Abbey had received him. I was travelling home on the Great-Western from Somerset. Gazing up idly at the assembled multitude of sun-steeped silver clouds above, suddenly, clear and distinct, my eyes beheld the image of his noble profile as if lying back asleep; the eyes were closed, the head at rest upon the pillow--a sculptured cloud in a snowy cloudland, outlined upon an azure sky.... Not until after several minutes did the vision pass, slowly fading into the infinite blue.

TENNYSON AND HIS TALK ON SOME RELIGIOUS QUESTIONS

By the Right Rev. the BISHOP OF RIPON

Among the happy memories of my life, and they are many, the memory of the kindly welcome accorded to me at Aldworth and at Farringford must always possess a special charm. This will readily be understood by those of my own age; for Tennyson was a name to conjure with in the days of my youth. Slowly but surely his influence crept into our lives: we read in text-books at school that the

Poet in a golden age was born, with golden stars above,
Dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn, the love of love.

The thought and the words appealed to me from the first. Then, how I know not, we became familiar with part, at least, of "In Memoriam." Its phrases caught our fancy, and some of our early attempts at versification were cast in the same metre. Then came the "Idylls of the King," and I remember how, when the rest of the party went out one holiday afternoon, I stayed indoors and read the "Idylls" at one sitting. Thus in our youth Tennyson became poet and hero to us. Any one who had seen him or known him became for us invested with a kind of sacred and awful interest; my uncle who lived at Cheltenham grew greater in our eyes when we learned that he had corresponded with him.

Thus our hero-worship grew. We knew indeed that there were those who did not welcome the coming Poet with ardour; we lived, in fact, through the age of his disparagement to the time of his unchallenged supremacy. It will be interesting, I think, to many to read the following letter written by Rev. Frederick W. Robertson when he was experiencing the freer and fresher intellectual atmosphere of Oxford after the stifling oppressiveness of Cheltenham:

I had nearly forgotten to tell you that Tennyson is deeply admired
here by all the brilliant men. Stanley, our first genius, rates him
highly; Hannah, who has guided nearly all the first and double-first
class men for the last three years to honours, told me he considers
his poetical and psychological powers more varied than any poet he
knows. And the "Dread," a choice selection of the most brilliant among
the rising men, have pronounced him to be the first poet of the day.
So you see I have some to keep me company in my judgment. And at all
events he is above ridicule.

Pray inform Miss D---- of all this. One of our first professors raves
about him.

When I went up to Cambridge in 1860, Tennyson was the oracle poet among the younger men; but the feeling of doubt still remained among the older men. I recall a friendly dispute between the Senior and a Junior Fellow of my own College. The elder man charged Tennyson with being "misty"; the younger man defended: the elder man cited a passage from "In Memoriam," and challenged the younger to say what it meant. The elder man was so far successful that he drove the younger man to declare that though he could not explain it then, he hoped to enter into its meaning later on. It was a typical conflict; the older generation could not understand; the younger was under the spell of the Poet, and though unable to interpret everything, believed in Tennyson's message to his own age.

There were charges levelled against Tennyson more serious and more absurd than that of obscurity. The words Scepticism, Pantheism, and even Atheism were heard. One newspaper in a review of "In Memoriam" exclaimed: "Here the poet barely escapes Atheism and plunges into the abyss of Pantheism." Another foolish writer, commenting on the lines:

But what am I?
An infant crying in the night,
An infant crying for the light,
And with no language but a cry,

remarked, with superb _naïveté_, "May we remind Mr. Tennyson that the darkness is past and that the true light now shineth?" I remember, as late as 1867 or 1868, an evening party at Blackheath when the question was started--"Who is the greatest living poet?" To my amazement and amusement a self-satisfied, but very good man, instantly and oracularly replied, "Bonar--without doubt--Bonar." He meant that excellent and devout-minded man, the Rev. Horatius Bonar, the hymn-writer. These were, no doubt, extreme cases, but stupidity is always extreme. I recall these incidents because they are parts of the story which tells of the difficulties through which Tennyson fought the way to his throne. They serve to recall the prejudices which provoked the resentment and stimulated the attachment of those who, like myself, were brought early under the spell of his enchantment. His story repeated familiar features; he had at first a select circle of studious admirers; by degrees the general public became aware of the existence in their midst of a true poet. Then timid partisans awoke and demanded credentials of orthodoxy. Persons of this type did not like to be told that--

There lives more faith in honest doubt,
Believe me, than in half the creeds.

But meanwhile he had drawn the younger generation to his side: they believed in him, and they were right. In spite of misunderstanding and misinterpretation, Tennyson followed the gleam: he would not stoop to make his judgment blind or prevaricate for popularity's sake. He beat his music out, and those who knew him, as I was privileged to do, during the later years of his life, could realize how truly he had made a larger faith his own.

It fell out naturally when I met him that conversation turned on religion or theological subjects. His mind, courageous, inquiring, honest, sought truth beyond the forms of truth. On the occasion of my first visit to Aldworth, in the smoking-room we talked of the problem of pain, of determinism, of apparent contradictions of faith. That night, indeed, we seemed to talk--

Of faith, free will, foreknowledge absolute.

But the impression left upon my mind was that we were engaged in no mere scholastic discussion; it was no mere intellectually satisfactory creed which was sought: it was something deeper and more abiding than anything which may be modified in form from age to age; the soul needs an anchorage, and to find it there must be no ignoring of facts and no juggling with them once they are found. In illustration of this I may relate how once, when walking with him among the heather-clad heights round Aldworth, he spoke of the apparent dualism in Nature: the forces of darkness and light seemed to meet in conflict. "If I were not a Christian," he said, "I should be perhaps a Parsee."[73] He felt, however, that if once we accepted the view that this life was a time of education, then the dark things might be found to have a meaning and a value. In the retrospect hereafter the pain and suffering would seem trivial. I think that this idea must have taken hold of his thought as we were conversing; for he suddenly stopped in his walk, and, standing amid the purple landscape, he declaimed the lines, then unpublished:

The Lord spake out of the skies
To a man good and a wise:
"The world and all within it
Will be nothing in a minute."
Then a beggar began to cry:
"Give me food or else I die."
Is it worth his while to eat,
Or mine to give him meat,
If the world and all within it
Were nothing the next minute?

He once quoted to me Hinton's view that we were not in a position to judge the full meaning of life; that we were in fact looking at the wrong side of things. We saw the work from the underside, and we could not judge of the pattern which was perhaps clear enough on the upper side.

Next day I was able to remind him that he had approved this view of life. He was not well, and I think that the darker aspects loomed larger in his mind; at any rate, he was speaking more gloomily than usual. When I remarked that God did not take away men till their work was done, he said, "He does; look at the promising young fellows cut off." Then I brought up Hinton's theory and illustration, and asked whether we could judge when a man had finished his appointed work. Immediately he acquiesced; the view evidently satisfied him.

He took a deep interest in those borderland questions which sometimes seem so near an answer and yet never are answered. At the hour of death what are the sights which rush upon the vision? Of these he would sometimes speak; he told me how William Allingham, when dying, said to his wife, "I see things beyond your imagination to conceive." Some vision seemed to come to such at death. One lady in the Isle of Wight exclaimed, as though she saw "Cherubim and Seraphim." But these incidents did not disturb the steady thought and trust which found its strength far deeper down than in any surface phenomena. He never shirked the hard and dismaying facts of life. Once he made me take to my room Winwoode Reade's _Martyrdom of Man_. There never was such a passionate philippic against Nature as this book contained. The universe was one vast scene of murder; the deep aspirations and noble visions of men were the follies of flies buzzing for a brief moment in the presence of inexorable destruction. Life was bottled sunshine; death the silent-footed butler who withdrew the cork. The book, with its fierce invective, had a strange rhapsodical charm. It put with irate and verbose extravagance the fact that sometimes

Nature, red in tooth and claw,
With ravin shrieked against his creed;

but it failed to see any but one side of the question. The writer saw clearly enough what Tennyson saw, but Tennyson saw much more. He could not make his judgment blind against faith any more than he would make it blind against facts. He saw more clearly because he saw more largely. He distrusted narrow views from whatever side they were advanced. The same spirit which led him to see the danger of the dogmatic temper in so-called orthodox circles led him to distrust it when it came from other quarters. There was a wholesome balance about his mind. Nothing is farther from the truth than to suppose that men of great genius lack mental balance. Among the lesser lights there may be a brilliant but unbalanced energy, but among the greater men it is not so; there is a large and wholesome sanity among these. There is sufficient breadth of grasp to avoid extremes in Dante, Milton, and Shakespeare; it was the same with Tennyson. We may be right, for instance, in classing Tennyson among those

Whose faith has centre everywhere
Nor cares to fix itself to form;

but we should be wholly wrong if we supposed that he did not realize the value of form. He knew that faith did not lie in the form, but he knew also the protective value of form to faith; the shell was not the kernel, but the kernel ripened all the better in the shelter of the shell. He realized how sacred was the flesh and blood to which truth divine might be linked, and he uttered the wise caution:

Hold thou the good: defend it well
For fear divine philosophy
Should push beyond her mark and be
Procuress to the lords of Hell.

In his view, as it seemed to me, there were two attitudes of mind towards dogmatic forms--the one impatient of form because form was never adequate to express the whole truth, the other impatient of form[74] because impatient of the truth itself. These two attitudes of mind were poles asunder; they must never be confused together.

I may be allowed to illustrate this discriminating spirit by one or two reminiscences. I once asked him whether they were right who interpreted the three ladies who accompanied King Arthur on his last voyage as Faith, Hope, and Charity. He replied with a touch of (shall I call it?) intellectual impatience: "They do and they do not. They are those graces, but they are much more than those. I hate to be tied down to say, 'This means that,' because the thought in the image is much more than the definition suggested or any specific interpretation advanced." The truth was wider than the form, yet the form was a shelter for the truth. It meant this, but not this only; truth must be able to transcend any form in which it may be presented.

Hence he could see piety under varying forms: for example, he described those who were "pious variers from the Church." This phrase, it may here be related, had a remarkable influence on one man's life, as the following letter, written by a clergyman who had formerly been a Nonconformist, will show. The writer died some few years ago; two of his sons are now good and promising clergymen of the Church of England:

OXFORD VILLAS, GUISELEY, LEEDS,
_January 16, 1901_.

MY LORD BISHOP--In reference to your volume on the Poets, may I
intrude upon your attention one moment to say that it was Tennyson's
phrase in reference to dissenters:

Pious variers from the Church,

in his "Sea Dreams" that first kindled me to earnest thought (some
twenty years since) as to my own position in relationship to the
Church of the land. The force that moved me lay in the word "pious."
Were dissenters more pious than Church people? I regret to say I
thought them much less so; and as this conviction deepened I was
compelled to make the change for which I am every day more
thankful.--I am, my Lord Bishop, your Lordship's devoted servant,

W. HAYWARD ELLIOTT.

I have already spoken of his recognition of the apparent dualism in Nature. His outlook on the universe could not ignore the dark and dismaying facts of existence, and his faith, which rose above the shriek of Nature, was not based upon arguments derived from any survey of external, physical Nature. When he confined his outlook to this, he could see power and mechanism, but he could not from these derive faith. His vision must go beyond the mere physical universe; he must see life and see it whole; he must include that which is highest in Nature, even man, and only then could he find the resting-place of faith. He thus summed up the matter once when we had been walking up and down the "Ball-room" at Farringford: "It is hard," he said, "it is hard to believe in God; but it is harder not to believe. I believe in God, not from what I see in Nature, but from what I find in man." I took him to mean that the witness of Nature was only complete when it included all that was in Nature, and that the effort to draw conclusions from Nature when man, the highest-known factor in Nature, was excluded, could only lead to mistake. I do not think he meant, however, that external Nature gave no hints of a superintending wisdom or even love, for his own writings show, I think, that such hints had been whispered to him by flower and star; I think he meant that faith did not find her platform finally secure beneath her feet till she had taken count of man. In short, he seemed to me to be near to the position of Thomas Erskine of Linlathen, who said that truth as soon as learned was felt to be held on a much deeper and more unshakable ground than any authority which appealed to mere intellect, namely, on its own discerned truthfulness. The response to all that is highest in Nature is found in the heart of man, and man cannot deny this highest, because it is latent in himself already. But I must continue Tennyson's own words: "It is hard to believe in God, but it is harder not to believe in Him. I don't believe in His goodness from what I see in Nature. In Nature I see the mechanician; I believe in His goodness from what I find in my own breast." I said, "Then you believe that Man is the highest witness of God?" "Certainly," he replied. I said, "Is not that what Christ said and was? He was in man the highest witness of God to Man," and I quoted the recorded words, "He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father." He assented, but said that there were, of course, difficulties in the idea of a Trinity--the Three. "But mind," he said, "Son of God is quite right--that He was."[75] He said that, of course, we must have doctrine, and then he added, "After all, the greatest thing is Faith." Having said this, he paused, and then recited with earnest emphasis the lines which sang of faith in the reality of the Unseen and Spiritual, of a faith, therefore, which can wait the great disclosure:

Doubt no longer, that the Highest is the wisest and the best,
Let not all that saddens Nature blight thy hope, or break thy rest,
Quail not at the fiery mountain, at the shipwreck, or the rolling
Thunder, or the rending earthquake, or the famine, or the pest.

Neither mourn if human creeds be lower than the heart's desire;
Thro' the gates that bar the distance comes a gleam of what is higher.
Wait till death has flung them open, when the man will make the Maker
Dark no more with human hatred in the glare of deathless fire.

He was alive to the movements of modern thought. He saw in evolution, if not a fully proved law, yet a magnificent working hypothesis; he could not regard it as a theory hostile to ultimate faith; but far beyond the natural wish to reconcile faith and thought, which he shared with all right-thinking men, was the conviction of the changeless personal relationship between God and man. He might find difficulties about faith and about certain dogmas of faith, such as the Trinity. No doubt, however, the Poet's conception brought the divine into all human life; it showed God in touch with us at all epochs of our existence--in our origin, in our history, in our final self-realization, for He is

Our Father and our Brother and our God.[76]

Religion largely lies in the consciousness of our true relation to Him who made us; and the yearning for the realization of this consciousness found constant expression in Tennyson's works and conversation.[77] Perhaps its clearest expression is to be found in his instructions to his son: "Remember, I want 'Crossing the Bar' to be always at the end of all my works."

I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crossed the Bar.

TENNYSON AND SIR JOHN SIMEON, AND TENNYSON'S LAST YEARS

By LOUISA E. WARD[78]

From the misty dawn of early childhood rises the first image of one who was to fill so large a place in my life and that of those dear to me. As I, not yet four years old, lay in my father's arms and he said to me the "Morte d'Arthur," there blended with the picture of the wild winter mere and the mighty King carried, dying, to its shore, a vision of the man who, my father told me, lived somewhere amongst us and who could write words which seemed to me more beautiful than anything I had ever heard.

It was several years before I again came upon the "Morte d'Arthur," when I was a girl of ten or eleven, and I remember how eagerly I seized upon it, and how the fairy glamour of my infancy came back to me as I read it.

It was in the autumn of 1852 that Lord and Lady (then Mr. and Mrs.) Tennyson came to Farringford. They had been looking for a house, and they found themselves one summer evening on the terrace walk, with the rosy sunset lighting up the long line of coast to St. Catherine's Point, and the gold-blue sea with its faint surf line mingling with the rosiness: and they said, "We will go no further, this must be our home." An ideal home it was, ideal in its loveliness, its repose, in its wild but beautiful gardens, and more than all ideal in its calm serenity, the hospitable simplicity, the high thought and utter nobleness of aim and life which that pair brought with them, and which through the long years of change, of sickness, and of sorrow, of which every home must be the scene, made the atmosphere of Farringford impossible to be forgotten by those who had the happiness of breathing it.

Hallam was at that time a baby, and very soon after their arrival at Farringford beautiful Lionel came to gladden the hearts of his parents. It was on the day of Lionel's christening that my father paid his first visit to Farringford, and found the family party just returning from church. My father had already been introduced to Tennyson at Lady Ashburton's house in London, on which occasion he had walked away with Carlyle and had expressed to him his pleasure at meeting so great a man as Tennyson. "Great man," said Carlyle, "yes, he is nearly a great man, but not quite; he stands on a dunghill with yelping dogs about him, and if he were quite a great man, he would call down fire from Heaven, and burn them up"--"but," he went on, speaking of his poetry, "he has the grip on it."

My father had entertained the greatest admiration for Tennyson's poetry since the day when, both being undergraduates at Christchurch, his friend Charles Wynne brought him the first published volume, saying to him, "There is something new for you who love poetry." And his delight may be imagined in now having the Poet for a neighbour. The intimacy between Farringford and Swainston grew apace. My mother and Lady Tennyson, though poor health and numerous occupations interfered with their frequent meetings, conceived a very real affection for each other, which was only cut short by my mother's early death, which left Lady Tennyson with a deep feeling and pity for her children.

During the early years of Farringford, it was one of my father's great and frequent pleasures to ride or drive over in the summer afternoons; he, in turn with her husband, would draw Lady Tennyson in her garden chair, and with the two boys skipping on before them, they would go long expeditions through the lanes, and even up the downs; then back through the soft evening air to dinner, and the long evening of talk and reading which knitted that "fair companionship" and made of it "such a friendship as had mastered time," and which we may well believe has re-formed itself still more perfectly now that both those beloved souls have "crossed the bar." The Tennysons sometimes came over to Swainston for a few days, and I remember his being there on the wonderful July night in 1858 when the tail of the great comet passed over Arcturus. His admiration and excitement knew no bounds; he could not sit at the dinner-table, but rushed out perpetually to look at the glorious sight, repeating: "It is a besom of destruction sweeping the sky."

Little Lionel was that same night taken from his bed to the window, and, opening his sleepy eyes on the unaccustomed splendour, he said, "Am I in Heaven?"

The writing and publication of "Maud" in 1855 was largely due to my father.

Looking through some papers one day at Farringford with his friend, he came upon the exquisite lyric "O that 'twere possible," and said, "Why do you keep these beautiful lines unpublished?" Tennyson told him that the poem had appeared years before in the _Tribute_, an ephemeral publication, but that it was really intended to belong to a dramatic poem which he had never been able to carry out. My father gave him no peace till he had persuaded him to set about the poem, and not very long after, he put "Maud" into his hand.

It was about this time, but I do not remember what year, that Tennyson gave my father the manuscript of "In Memoriam."[79] He had often asked him to give him a manuscript poem, and he had put him off, but one day at Swainston he asked my father to reach him a particular book from a shelf in the library, and as he did so, down fell the MS. which Tennyson had put there as a surprise. Never was gift more valued and appreciated by its recipient. I have always felt grateful to him for the continual pleasure which it gave my father during the whole of his life.

Tennyson's visits were eagerly looked forward to by us children. He would talk to us a good deal, and was fond of puzzling and mystifying us in a way that was very fascinating. He would take the younger ones on his knee, and give them sips of his port after dinner, and I remember my father saying to one of my sisters: "Never forget that the greatest of poets has kissed you and made you drink from his glass."