BERKELEY IBRARY NIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON By JOHN OATES, Author of " The Sorrow of God," etc. " IVe only feel, whale' er he iil/erc/h, This savours not of death, This hath a relish of eternity." William Watson New and Revised Edition LONDON JAMES BOWDEN 10 HENRIETTA STREET COVENT GARDEN W.C. 1898 First Edition, 4- 4- 4- January 1895. Second Edition, Revised and Enlarged, December 1898. PR 5540 TO MY WIFE AND CHILDREN THIS BOOK IS LOVINGLY DEDICATED. 455 PREFACE T T AS Tennyson any message, or is he merely "an idle singer of an empty day " ? Is he content to leave us in admiration of his beautiful art without a guiding gleam for the con- duct of life ? Does he give us any great verities upon which we may stand, as upon rock, in the midst of the surging voices of doubt ? Does he sing of the ultimate man — the final triumph of the race ; or does he wail a requiem over lost ideals, and a creed out-worn ? By careful classification of the related poems I have striven, in the following pages, to extract the teaching of the poet. We shall find that he not only gives an ethical law for the guidance of life, but an answer to those deeper questions that utter their tremulous voices in the shrine of the soul. The Ethical Poems naturally fall into two groups, and as they delineate the victory and the defeat 7 8 PREFACE. of the soul I have called them Poems of Life and Poems of Death. The ethical law, which is the pivot of the groups, may be thus formulated — the soul must rule the senses and not the senses rule the soul, while the soul itself must be ruled not by self but by that higher love that finds its deepest life in sacrifice. I have placed " In Memoriam " among the Ethical Poems — though it is partly a religious epic — for the reason that it affords a powerful illustration of the conflict of soul with subtle doubt. The second division deals with the Emotional Poems. The first group falls under the classification of the Sanctity of Love, and reveals the poet both as a perfect artist and a pure moralist. The second group I have called the Degradation of Love in which the passion of his indignation burns like flame. The third division comprises the Religious Poems, in which will be found Tennyson's threefold mess- age of immanence and immortality and evolution, along with side-lights, indicating the relation of the poet to certain creeds — viz. Mysticism, Calvinism, Latitudinarianism, and Spiritism. The poet is reported to have said that the English people positively hated poetry and would PREFACE 9 not read it. Doubtless there is a popular dislike of poetry, but the reason lies in its almost enforced obscurity. When the meaning is clear, the most prosaic yield to its charm. I hope it may be found that I have done something towards drawing out the teaching of Tennyson, and that this book may be of service as an introductory study to students, who should, however, carefully read the original poems in the order in which they are classified, along with the delightful " Memoir " by Hallam, Lord Tennyson, to which I am indebted for some explanatory foot- notes. I may, also, be allowed to thank Lord Tennyson for a kind letter in reference to my book, an extract from which, on the next page, I am permitted to publish. Facsimile of Letter from Lord Tennyson. fit n^v^ fe 4T^t^ a. Urn fp'fL <7 ' ^ CONTENTS THE ETHICAL POEMS POEMS OF LIFE ; OR, THE VICTORY OF SOUL The Lady of Shalott The Palace of Art The Two Voices Locksley Hall The Sailor Boy Ulysses In Memoriam The Coming of Arthur Gareth and Lynette Geraint and Enid Balin and Balan . The Holy Grail . Guinevere (in part) The Passing of Arthur TAGE 22 29 37 41 42 43 73 84 94 103 113 132 142 POEMS OF DEATH ; OR, THE VICTORY OF SENSE Merlin and Vivien Lancelot and Elaine Pelleas and Ettarre The Last Tournament (in part) 151 155 165 171 12 CONTENTS. The Vision of Sin The Lotos-Eaters The Sea-Fairies . The Islet . 179 183 185 185 THE EMOTIONAL POEMS THE SANCTITY OF LOVE Love and Death . . 190 The Miller's Daughter . 191 The Gardener's Daughter ■ 193 Dora . 201 The May Queen . 204 Lady Clare . 210 The Lord of Burleigh 212 The Beggar Maid 214 The Talking Oak . 215 The Brook . 217 Sea Dreams . 219 Maud . 22c Enoch Arden • 232 THE DEGRADATION OF LOVE Ayhner's Field .... .... 247 Lady Clara Vere de Vere 254 Edwin Morris 255 The Northern Farmer . 256 The Sisters .... 258 Guinevere . 259 The Wreck .... 260 Mariana .... 262 Mariana in the South 264 The Ballad of Oriana . 264 Edward Gray 266 CONTENTS. i3 THE RELIGIOUS POEMS GOD, HIS DIVINE IMMANENCE PAGE The Higher Pantheism • 273 Flower in the Crannied Wall • 275 De Profundis ..... • 275 The Human Cry ..... . 275 God and the Universe .... . 276 CHRIST, HIS DIVINE PERSONALITY In Memoriam ... Harold Supposed Confession . Locksley Hall Sixty Years After Aylmer's Field Crossing the Bar . 279, 283, 284 282 282 283 284 284 CHRIST, HIS DIVINE SUFFICIENCY In the Children's Hospital The May Queen . Sea Dreams . 286 288 288 MAN, HIS EVOLUTION Idylls of the King In Memoriam Will . Timbuctoo . By an Evolutionist The Dawn . The Play . 293 294 295 296 296 297 298 i4 CONTENTS. I'Af.I The Making ol Man . 298 The Dreamer ... • 299 Locksley Hall Sixty Years After . • 2 99 Merlin and the Gleam ..... . 300 Faith 302 Silent Voices ...... ■ 3°2 MAN, HIS CREEDS MYSTICISM St. Agnes' Eve Sir Galahad . St. Simeon Stylites 303 304 305 CALVINISM Despair Rizpah . 308 3i6 LATITUDINARIANISM Akbar's Dream . The Higher Pantheism In Memoriam Despair 324 328 328 330 SPIRITISM Enoch Arden Aylmer's Field Maud . The Ancient Sage In Memoriam The Holy Grail Locksley Hall Sixty Years After 333 333 333 335 335 337 338 CONTENTS, i5 MAN, HIS IMMORTALITY PAGE In Memoriam ...... • 339. 344 The Two Voices ...... • 34o The Voice and the Peak .... • 34i The Grandmother ..... ■ 342 • 344 The Ancient Sage ..... • 345 THE ETHICAL POEMS. 17 POEMS OF LIFE; OR, THE VICTORY OF SOUL. The Lady of Shalott. The Palace of Art. The Tivo Voices. Locksley Hall. The Sailor Boy. Ulysses. In Memoriam. Idylls of the King (in pari). The In "The Lady of Shalott" we have a Lady of lovely isle pictured with such realism that " nowhere are the vivid pictures of the pre- Raphaelite school more brilliantly forecast than in this extraordinary lyric." We see the white willows, the quivering aspen, the pure lilies, the ever-flowing wave, and, in the centre of the wooded isle, a hoary castle. We see the heavy barges towed by patient horses, and the silken-sailed boats, with swift white wings, flitting down to Camelot. In this sequestered spot lives a Lady. She is never seen at the casement looking out on the flowers, or waving a hand to the passing boatmen ; but the reapers .tell how in the early morn, when cutting the golden grain, a sweet song came floating down the wave, and at noon it came again, and they ;o THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. whispered, " 'Tis the fairy Lady of Shalott." Why docs she live in solitude ? How does she spend her time ? She weaves a magic web, sitting before a mirror. "She has heard a whisper say, A curse is on her if she stay To look down to Camelot. • » # And moving thro' a mirror clear That hangs before her all the year, Shadows lof the world appear." " The mirror into which the Lady gazes is, in the first place, the mirror which always stood behind the tapestry, whose face was turned to the glass, so that the worker could see the effect of her stitches without moving from her seat. But it has another use. Each view which the earlier part of the poem presents is cast upon the mirror. Scene follows scene as in a camera lucida, vivid, detailed, delicate." She sees the highway and the river, the village churls and the market girls, an abbot, a shepherd boy, a page, a mounted knight, a funeral, and two young lovers. " Came two young lovers lately wed ; ' I am half sick of shadows,' said The Lady of Shalott" She is waking out of the world of unrealities. She had seen in her magic mirror the pictures of THE LADY OF SHALOTT. 21 death and love, and the latter had made the deeper impression. She is " half sick of shadows," and longs for realities. Hitherto she had lived in her fairy world of dreams, but now the awakening comes with a shock that dispels the unreal by revealing the actual. Sir Lancelot appears riding gaily down to Camelot. The effect upon the Lady is instan- taneous and complete : she leaps out of the sleep of fancy ; she is in love with Lancelot ; she looks after him down to Camelot. " The mirror crack'd from side to side; ' The curse is come upon me,' cried, The Lady of Shalott." What, then, was the curse ? Why, that if she turned from dreams to doing, from shadows to realities, she should become involved in the passions of mortals and suffer their fate. But is it not better to know the actual and take the risk of pain and loss than live in idle dreams ? The Lady awakes to the passion of love, and is brave enough to take the consequence. She comes to the river, where she finds a boat ; and, as if in expectation of a tragic end, she writes her name about the prow, and is carried by the stream down to Camelot, singing her last song as she glides through " willowy hills," while the reapers pause to listen to her mournful carol. She floats down the wave between the houses, 22 THE TEACHING OF TKNNYSON. and knights and burghers read her name upon the prow and cross themselves in fear. " But Lancelot mused a little space ; He said, ' She has a lovely face.' " The ethical meaning of the lyric is the emptiness of life lived in fancy. The soul, roused by realities, turns from shadows, and is satisfied with the reward of feeling and knowing. Was it not better_ _that she should love and be lost than not know love ? Was not such a reality , t o herself, wo rth_in fin itely morethan the weary life oJ ^mre ality ? The poet teaches here, and always, that the souljrius t awake to actu al ities, and be willing to sufjer jhe curse involved in mortal passions^ that it _may win its highest life of sacrifice. The Tins is a characteristic poem. All the archi- Palace of tectural details of the palace are sharply and accurately defined. It is no cloud-wreathed " castle in the air," vague and film)'. If we were to paint it, we could not omit a single detail without spoiling the effect of the whole. It affords the best illustration of the descriptive imagination of the poet. Suddenly rising out of a meadow-land, where the green grass waves, is a high crag-platform, scaling the light, and difficult of ascent — a great lonely, lordly pile of rocks, that laughs at the storm, and from its smooth, burnished platform mirrors THE PALACE OF ART. 23 the sun. Upon this isolated crag - , looking down in regal splendour upon the little hills that nestle at its feet, the poet builds his stately palace. We see the gleaming pile, which is the " pleasure-house " of the soul, and the four courts, and the squared lawns, and the golden dragons spouting " a flood of fountain-foam," the cloisters running round the courts, through which the flood sends its sonorous music. We see encircling the palace-roof a gilded gallery, looking far away o'er hill and dale to the glistening sands and the creaming sea. We hear the splashing of the fourfold cascades as they fall over the crags, and far up on every peak we see a statue holding a golden cup, from which perfumed clouds of incense rise, while deep-set windows all around the palace, stained and traced, glow with crimson fires. Within the palace art has lavished beauty with prodigal hand. There are long-sounding corridors, and many- sized rooms. " Full of great rooms and small the palace stood, All various, each a perfect whole From living Nature, fit for every mood And change of my still soul."' The artistic rooms are filled with selected pictures to fit the fancy of the changing mood. The subjects are carefully delineated. We have various scenes from nature and domestic life touched with 24 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. shadow and with light. We look' upon faces and forms of classic loveliness. We are charmed with choice paintings of seraphic Milton, or bland Shakespeare, or world-worn Dante. We see the ceiling made celestial with angels ascending and descending, and the floor all mosaic " with cycles of the human tale of this wide world." In the towers great bells swing out their silver sounds. Thus the palace rises in sublime and solitary grandeur on the far-off crag, filled with forms of beauty and rich with glow of colour. But for whom is the palace built ? It is the home of a h uman soul — a soul withdrawn from the stern realities of life, with an ambition to live for sensuous pleasure in its purest form. She will in solitude seek to realise her own ideal, and live for art and all things lovely. For a while we learn of her seraphic bliss ; she has solved the riddle of life, and is steeped in its sensuous delights. The spirit of art charms her into sweet dreams and mystic worlds, but the effect upon the moral nature is seen in her selfish egoism. "'O God-like isolation which art mine, I can but count thee perfect gain, What time I watch the darkening droves of swine That range on yonder plain.' " Living in selfish solitude she becomes self-centred. From the height of her isolation she looks down upon humanity with the disdain of fancied superiority THE PALACE OF ART. 25 and the contempt of irreligion, and speaks of men as " droves of swine ! " Thus she loses touch with human life and with the great questions that move the world. She can look with satisfaction upon the human herd, driven by devils into the raging deep ! This is unnatural and immoral. The process of degeneracy is subtle and sure. What is the cause ? Is the poem a condemnation of pure art ? Is it possible that love of the beautiful can spoil the soul ? Does not beauty inspire and elevate ? Is not it the ideal of true art to realise the mystic beauty of nature which lies around us, and give our mortal eyes some glimpse of immortal loveliness ? It is evident that art, flooding the palace with beauty, was not the cause of her loss of pity. Her degeneracy lies in the fact that she did not use beauty to refine and gladden other lives. She appropriated art as if she alone were selected, and seated on an oriel throne to receive the homage of sculpture and painting and song ! True art is cosmopolitan and teaches its own sublime truths. The poet does not condemn pure art, but the use to which art is put by this self-centred soul. Her selfishness lies in the egoism that claims beauty for herself alone. Living with such surroundings, she conceives herself the elect of heaven. Hence the pride and cynicism that can speak of human beings as " darkening droves of swine." She might 26 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. have used her palace for the people, but she abused it in her isolation. Thus the soul turned a blessing into a curse, and shrank into the littleness of self. She can even prate of the moral instinct and her right of rising from the dead, and at last she vaults on to a throne of pure egoism ! " ' I sit as God holding no form of creed, But contemplating all. ' " The sharp transition from this life of rapt ecstasy, makes the contrast clear and the teaching impressive. The soul passes swiftly from heights of rapture to depths of remorse. The cause of transition lies in the ever-living problem of the meaning of life — whence ? whither ? " Full oft the riddle of the painful earth Flash'd thro' her as she sat alone.'' The pain that throbs with burning pulse through creation strikes into her heart. The sobbing as of a troubled sea, that breaks out of the deep of personality, makes discord in her music. The sun of life, that seems to set in final night over the glad laughter of the young world, flings a shadow across her sensuous soul. Is there a God ? Docs God smile behind the curtain at the tragedies of life ? Does He like to watch the contortions of creation as the fire burns out its heart ? What is man ? Spray flung up from the deep to catch the gleam THE PALACE OF ART. 27 of higher worlds, then sink into the wild, hungry sea ? Thus, " Lest she should fail and perish utterly God before whom ever lie bare The abysmal deeps of Personality, Plagued her with sore despair." Then she awakes to the sense of loneliness. She is face to face with tragic problems, and longs for sympathy and the sound of a human voice. She had chosen solitude and disdained sympathy in her selfish, aesthetic love ; but now that she is waking to the realities of being she hates solitude, and craves sympathy. " Deep dread and loathing of her solitude Fell on her, from which mood was born Scorn of herself." Her sense of : loneliness becomes a terror. The beautiful palace is filled with phantoms weeping tears of blood, and with ghosts bearing hearts of flame, and with corpses standing against the wall. Are not they the shadows of realities falling on her wakeful vision ? She begins to realise her hateful self and lonely isolation. Now she is like a fixed spot amid infinite motion, and now she is like a pool on the shore listening to the music of the sea, and now she is like a star that watches the starry dance, itself motionless. Nature thus aids art in impress- ing; the terror of loneliness. 2 8 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. " Back on herself her serpent pride had curl'd. ' No voice,' she shriek'd in that lone hall, 'No voice breaks thro' the stillness of this world: One drip, deep silence all!" Then despair enters. In her slothful shame she feels exiled from God, and hates death and life, time and eternity. " She finds no comfort anywhere." Is there no satisfaction to be found in her beautiful palace ? None ! Her crime is selfishness. She has lost her pity for the world, and her penalty is to crave the sympathy denied to others. Fierce is her torment, her own self is her hell, and it blurs the palace and blots out the face of beauty. Now she seems to hear the sound of " human footsteps." Her humanity is returning; she will be selfish no more, and will seek the lowly lives in their inno- cence and purity. The soul had lived in the pride of voluptuous enjoyment of nature and art and culture, only to find that these cannot solve " the riddle of the painful earth," nor give peace amid the surging problems of time. "' Make me a cottage in the vale,' she said, ' Where I may mourn and pray.' " She learns to pray ! She comes now to God and duty; and, giving the right place to religion, she may go back to her palace with others, to make art and culture aids to religion and humanity. THE TWO VOICES. 29 The poem teaches that the meaning of life cannot be found in selfish solitude and sensuous enjoyment. Love of beauty in itself is noble, but love of beauty all for self is fatal to religious life. Nature and art and culture may not take the place of religion. We may love the beautiful without feeling any pulse of pity for the world ; but to love God and man is to feel the pain of creation, and to awake out of self and the sensuous to a life of pure sacrifice and helpful service. The To mingle imagination with philosophy, and Two write the purest poetical diction while en- gaged in metaphysical analysis, is the problem of the poet. Tennyson, in " The Two Voices," has solved the problem by giving us in a philo- sophical poem sublime poetry. While sounding the deeps of personality, and showing the conflict of soul with direst doubt and tormenting fear, his music never falters, but flows on until it falls into peaceful triumph. Two voices are represented as speaking within the soul. The one voice stands for faith, and the other voice stands for doubt. DOUBT sees no way out of the "curse," nor how to solve "the riddle of the painful earth," but thinks death is the end * "When I wrote 'The Two Voices,' I was so utterly- miserable, a burden to myself and to my family, that I said, ' Is life worth anything ' ?" — Tennyson, A Memoir, i., p. 193. 3 o THE TEACHING 01 I ENNYSON. of all being, and truth a phantom on far-off hills alluring the soul into blinding mist. It urges self- destruction as giving instant relief to the agony of being. FAITH relies chiefly on the " inner evidence " of soul against sense, on its hunger for God and immortality, which is ever the protest from within against the doubt that would make God the fiction of fancy and immortality the dream of delusion. Listen to the discussion. DOUBT, in view of the miseries of the soul, urges suicide. "Were it not better not to be?" Faith replies that personality, with its wonders of reason and will and consciousness, is of too great worth to be flung away on the voids of death. DOUBT will not concede the value claimed for personality, and draws an illustration from the dragon-fly as it leaves its husk. What could be more beautiful than this bright creature, with its gleaming plates of sapphire mail flashing on its winged way ? Are you of greater worth than the dragon-fly, that you should live ? FAITH will not grant the equality, but claims supremacy for personality in power of mind and heart over the dragon-fly with its fading beauty. Doubt cynically charges the soul with the blindness of self-pride, and alleges, what it does not prove, that in the boundless universe are beings of vast superiority. THE TWO VOICES. 31 Granted you are superior to the dragon-fly, there are many beings superior to you. Faith replies that there are no two things alike, but there is great diversity, and so a specific value attaches to the unit. Doubt, while conceding the argument, scoffs at the conceit of the soul that thinks it will be missed, or that any one will weep, or that any beam of light will be less radiant. This is not argument, but cynicism, in which Faith is silenced by satire. DOUBT, mistaking silence for consent, again urges self-destruction, and draws a vivid picture of the soul's anguish — sleepless nights and impaired reason. Faith answers that life is full of possibilities, and to end it is to destroy its " happier chance." Life is an evolution, and it is instructive to watch the unfolding. "And men, thro' novel spheres of thought Still moving after truth long sought, Will learn new things when I am not." Doubt replies that the end must come sooner or later, and the man cannot remain to witness the evolution of all "new things." Faith affirms that the process is constant, and every month shows some new feature of growth. And so it would be folly to commit suicide, and not see " How grows the day of human power." 32 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. Douiir will not be held too closely to the line of argument, and from the limited strikes off at a tangent to speak of the limitless ; draws a picture of the far-off silent summit of truth, with the sacred morning spreading overhead ; tells how the " highest- mounted mind " (the mind that has scaled the heights) sees only the dawn and not the day, and asks if the soul can expect, in the years of its natural term, to see plainly all the light of knowledge, " Or make that morn, from his cold crown And crystal silence creeping down, Flood with full daylight glebe and town ? " Or should the soul be winged into knowledge, not yet realised, the heights would still be above. " Nor art thou nearer to the light, Because the scale is infinite." This is not fair argument, for the soul pleaded to live, not with the hope of finding here the absolute, but with the wish of watching the growth of the finite towards the infinite. Faith seems to waver, and the argument takes another turn. The soul, almost tempted to self-destruction, is restrained by fear of public opinion. Men will say, " He dared not tarry," he was afraid to face life ! Douj;t replies that to live and be wretched is worse than to commit suicide and be called a coward ; besides, when the soul goes into dust, it cannot be vexed by what men may say. THE TWO VOICES. 33 " The right ear, that is fill'd with dust, Hears little of the false or just." And men will forget, is the cynical taunt of Doubt. Faith, stirred by the possibility of being for- gotten, recalls the " resolve " of its young life to immortalise itself by noble deeds, to war with falsehood, to fight for liberty of thought, to search for hidden causes, to sow generous seeds, and die in some good cause " wept for, honour'd, known." Surely it is better to live an d recall.and strive to realise such a resolve ? Doubt answers, The dream was good, but it was caused by the hot blood of youth, a passing pulse of a generous heart, which cannot be realised in later life, when the heart-fires burn low. " Then comes the check, the change, and fall.'' And should the soul realise its noblest ideal, it would be little worth in solving the riddle of the earth ; every man, like a worm, spins out his own cocoon, and cannot tell the meaning of life, nor scale the height of truth. Truth is unattainable, gleams for a moment upon the mist, and shoots its golden ray along the gloomy crag ; and should Faith leap forward, it would only be to find the " fold is on her brow," and the shadows gird the hills. If so, " Cease to wail and brawl ! Why inch by inch to darkness crawl ? There is one remedy for all." 3 34 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. FAITH answers triumphantly by appealing to the experience of the many who did not find Truth a mocking phantom, nor life a curse, nor heaven a fiction, but who found " the joy that mixes man with heaven," saw the gates of Eden gleam, heard in the vaults of death the murmur of life, and died, like Stephen, touched with glory. Doubt, growing sullen, replies that all this is purely a matter of organism, the mere phantasies of a soul in which " the elements were kindlier mix'd." Then the argument changes. FAITH suggests that death might result in worse evils and in greater suffering. DOUBT, in reply, calls the soul to look on one dead, the face without passion, the hands folded, the lips sealed, deaf to every call, blind to every sight, placid and peaceful, with naught to suggest suffering after death. Tragedies of shame are wrought in his own home, " but he is chill to praise or blame." There lies the dead apparently without will or consciousness or power, crumbling away into dust and darkness. It does look so. It would seem as if death seized all of being, and flung it into the grave of never-broken silence. How will Faith meet this argument ? Can the soul deny its own senses ? There is no motion in the dead man, not a sign of life. Faith replies, How do you know that the man is dead ? The evidence of the senses is in your favour, but THE TWO VOICES. 35 the evidence of soul is against you. I have known all this from youth, have seen the shadow creep from grave to grave, and the daisy die beneath the touch of death. Men have always seen it, and yet refused to believe that death ends all. They have clung to the belief of their immortality, and have felt a something which death cannot kill, and Faith asks — " Who forged that other influence, That heat of inward evidence, By which he doubts against the sense ? " The " inward evidence " is this — Man has the idea of eternity : whence came it ? He has a type of per- fection in his mind not realised in nature : whence is it ? He seems to hear a heavenly voice, and he sees the evolution of beauty and order : who is it that evolves ? He feels a power within, that wars with lower things : what is it ? Doubt does not answer, but changes the argument — You came from nothing, and to nothing may return. Faith replies — How do you know my birth was my beginning ? I may have had a pre-existence, and, as in trances men forget, I may have forgotten my pre-natal life ; or I may have fallen from a nobler place, which would account for my " vague emotion of delight " in the presence of alpine splendours ; or I may have come up out of lower lives which I have forgotten, even as we now forget our first years of childhood ; or I may have been " naked 36 I HE PEACHING 01 I ENNYSON. essence," and, if so, incompetent of memory, yet, at times, I seem to recall some experience of a pre-natal life — "Like glimpses of forgotten dreams." Doubt ridicules the dreams and reminds him of the reality of pain. Faith will not be allured into suicide by false issues, and shows that the universal longing is always for life, and not death. " 'Tis life, whereof our nerves are scant, Oh life, not death, for which we pant ; More life, and fuller, that I want. - ' Thus, by appealing to the " inner evidence " of soul against sense, Dotjp.t is silenced. Still the man sits as one forlorn, for victory has not brought peace. Reason by argument has triumphed over doubt, but his moral and emotional nature are not satisfied. The satisfaction comes in a symbol. He looks out upon a domestic picture — father and mother and a little child between them going to church — and it becomes to him the symbol of the unity of love. " These three made unity so sweet My frozen heart began to beat, Remembering its ancient heat. * * * * The dull and bitter voice was gone!" He could no longer question the existence of God and immortality in presence of such love. THE TWO VOICES. 37 The close of the poem relates the final victory of faith over doubt. "What is it thou knowest, sweet voice?' I cried. ' A hidden hope,' the voice replied." He finds fellowship with God through love, and, filled with peace, finds also a glory in nature, while her varied life quickens the pulse of hope, and he marvels " How the mind was brought To anchor by one gloomy thought.'' We have thus far illustrated the central truth „ ,, of the poet's teaching, that the soul only comes to its best life through strenuous con- flict with the dream of selfish solitude, as it cherishes the egoism of aesthetic culture, and with the despair of materialism, as it wrestles with faith. These Poems of Life portray the different phases of the war waged by the soul with the forces of spiritual death. In " Locksley Hall " the same truth finds fresh illustration. In the hall down by the sea, looking over the sandy tracks, within sound of the roaring waters, there lived a sentimental youth fond of star-gazing and fairy tales of science and mystic musing on the unknown. Such a youth would be sensitive to love, and 38 THE TEACHING OF TKXNYSON. soon he finds " all the current of his being " setting towards his cousin Amy. They become engaged. There is much beauty in the incidental references to the sublime effect of pure love, — how in its hands the moments of time, like golden sands, slipped all too quickly through the hour-glass ; or how self, touched by the hand of love, found no place, but yielded itself gladly and died away as if in music ; or how, in the morning on the moorlands, love found its song in the " ring of the copses," or in the evening, by the sea, watching the stately ships, " Our spirits rush'd together at the touching of the lips." And so the poet sings of the sacredness of love, its power to touch life with tender grace, and transfigure nature with subtle beaut)-. But the scene quickly changes. Amy, utterly weak, yields to the tyranny of her father, is false to her lover, and marries a man of lower character, with the prospect of his coarser nature rudely crushing out the fineness of her own. If the jilted lover had wished for revenge, he might have found it in the degeneracy of the fickle Amy ; but we have to trace the influence of dis- appointment upon the man. Love had created for him new light and beauty : will he lose both, since Amy has been false ? lie had nourished a youth sublime, with great self-esteem, and he writhes LOCKSLEY HALL. 39 beneath the wrong ! Will he allow his life to be spoiled ? Will he yield to the weakness of senti- mental crooning over the " tender grace of the day that is dead," or will he gird himself to noble action, and in earnest doing triumph over fruitless sentiment ? The evolution of character is interesting. At first he is cynical. He pictures the husband with coarse sensibility coming home with heavy eyes, and the duty of Amy to soothe her weary lord with his overwrought brain by her finer fancies and lighter thoughts. Then he finds relief in cursing. He curses most eloquently the " social wants that sin," and " the social lies that warp," and " the sickly forms that err," and " the gold that gilds." He has been dis- appointed in love, and blames the whole social system. Now he becomes introspective. He begins to think that he is mad for cherishing the seed of bitterness, and resolves to pluck it from his bosom ; but to forget seems impossible, and he asks, " Where is comfort ? " Can he find it in thinking only of the Amy he first knew, loving and kind ? Can he think of her as dead ? And since death sanctifies and sweetens the memory of the dead, may not he think only of her love ? No ! for she did not love him truly. Then there is no comfort in memory. 40 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. " This is truth the poet sings, That a sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembering happier tilings." The memory that torments him may have its vision of pain for Amy as well ; though, for her, nature will bring solace in the purer life of her little child. But what of himself? He finds that in cursing the social system, in sentimental introspection, in analysis of memory, there is no compensation. He begins to see there is only one remedy, if he would save himself. " Wherefore should I care ? I myself must mix with action, lest 1 wither by despair." He must find some noble work, and fling himself into action, if he would redeem his manhood from sentimental misery ; but he knows not where to turn, for " every gate is throng'd with suitors." Then comes the vision of his boyhood, with its " wild pulsation " and yearning for the " large excite- ment " of the coming years, its glimpse of the flaring lamps of London and its never-resting sea of life. The vision inspires him, and he seems to see the great end towards which the mighty masses are moving. "Till the war-drum throbb'd no longer, and the battle-flags wire furi'd In the Parliament of man, the federation of the world." He sees " men the workers," shaping the glorious LOCKSLEY HALL. 41 future of the world, and he will be a man among men. " So I triumph'd ere my passion . . . Left me with the palsied heart, and left me with the jaundiced eye." Then he shows how to the " jaundiced eye " all things seem out of joint. Science only creeps along. Feudalism, as it " nods and winks behind a slowly dying fire," dreads the power of the people. Suddenly, with the call of his comrades, another life opens to him, that would tempt him from the life of energy and effort into sensuous delights and mystic dreams, " in yonder shining orient." " There to wander far away, On from island unto island at the gateways of the day.'' It is the temptation which comes to many — the softness and sweetness of a life of self-indulgence, in exchange for the life of strenuous effort. But the hero of " Locksley Hall " resists the temptation by choosing the life of action, and heals the wounds of his heart by mingling with the progress ol humanity. " For the mighty wind arises, roaring seaward, and I go.'' The lesson that the soul only finds its true ._ life in noble effort, with its sacrifice of selfish Boy. ease, rings again in the bright voice of " The Sailor Boy," who, tempted to renounce the 4 a THE TEACHING OV TENNYSON. calls of duty and danger, and accept the life of indolence, bravely answers, — " God help me ! save I take my part Of danger on the roaring sea, A devil rises in my heart, Far worse than any death to me." Ulysses. The same truth, like a battle-cry, is heard clear and strong in the war-song of " Ulysses." # The old king had travelled far and seen many lands, had held his soul in red battle with its clash of arms, and found manhood in strife and action ; but now he feels his strength is being sapped by an indolent, self-indulgent life. " It little profits that an idle king, By this still hearth, among these barren crags, Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and dole Unequal laws unto a savage race." Caged like some bird with strong pinions, he would break from his prison and beat his way through the storm, and gaze in the face of the sun. He will leave his sceptre to his son, and go again upon the dark, broad seas with the old mariners. "Souls that have toil'd, ami wrought, and thought with me." * Ulysses was written soon after Arthur Hallam's death, and gave my feeling about the need of going forward and braving the struggle of life perhaps more simply than anything in " In Memoriam." — Tennyson, A Memoir, i., p. [96. LOCKSLEY HALL. 43 In the following stanzas, " Ulysses " is represented, even in old age, flinging himself into doing and duty, that — " Some work of noble note may yet be done, Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods." How sublimely the poet sings the truth, central to all these poems, that love in sacrifice and service can alone bring out the best and richest life, while the soul self-centred shrinks into littleness and nothingness ! We have thus far traced the conflict of soul -, with various forms of seductive evil. The mor/iam.^ ethical truth which gleams through these poems, that highest life is only found when being awakes to conflict with the deathful forces that surround it, we shall now find sounding deeper depths and scaling heigher heights in " In Memoriam." On its artistic side " In Memoriam " f contains * " The different moods of sorrow, as in a drama, are drama- tically given, and my conviction that fear, doubts, and suffering will find answer and relief only through Faith in a God of Love. ' I ' is not always the author speaking of himself, but the voice of the human race speaking through him." — Tennyson, A Memoir, i., p. 304. " My father sometimes called ' In Memoriam ' ' The Way of the Soul.' "—Ibid, i., p. 394. t A few of the incidental Odes, not necessary to the main subject, are omitted in this analysis. 14 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. a gallery of pictures. The poet-painter has one subject in his mind — grief. In dealing with its lights and shades, hopes and fears, he paints and frames a gallery of portraits, in which we may see the soul wrestling with the problems that start out of the deep of personality, or come out of the darkling shadows of death to haunt imagination. Through all we see the face of grief asking — Why was my love stolen ? does he live with God, or with death ? does he recall the past, or live only in the present of that holy life ? if I should come to him in the hereafter, will he know me ? or is he so far above me that I shall always be " a life behind " ? All these questions look out from the face of grief, revealing moods of hopelessness and hope, of deadening pain and chastened peace, of piercing anguish and calm waiting. The tides within seem to ebb and flow, now in sobbing, now in song, until the angel of peace comes across the moaning sea to the troubled heart, when the wild waves fall, and the soul rests in the vision of " good the final goal of ill." The great sorrow of the poet was caused by the death of Arthur Henry llallam, the man whom he loved with a love half divine * — " that friend of mine who lives in God.'' He was buried in the chancel of Clevedon Church, which stands on a lone hill overlooking * Hallam died September 15th, 1X33. IN MEMORIAM. 45 the Bristol Channel and the far-away waters where the ships come and go. A fitting prelude to " In Memoriam " is the pathetic song — " Break, break, break, On thy cold gray stones, O Sea ! And I would that my tongue could utter The thoughts that arise in me." Throughout his grief verges on despair. There is no line of light upon the weary face. The poem is ethically dark, and might have been written by an agnostic. It is a pathetic wail of unredeemed tragedy, out of which no music of hope flows. The fisher boy will shout, and the sailor will sing, and the ships will sail to their haven — life going on and ever, but not life for him, now that his love lies buried. " But the tender grace of a day that is dead Will never come back to me." Is this, then, the teaching of the poet — death, darkness, oblivion ? No ; it is only the mood of his wild grief. Sorrow has so stunned him that he does not feel the good of life. Doubt has so blinded him that he does not see as yet the dawn of " boundless day." He stumbles through chaos and rushing darkness, where God is not and death seems everywhere. Study this picture of despair before passing into the gallery of " In Memoriam " ; then pass on and watch the face of grief ,<. THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. revealed in the poem — how it changes, until doubt brightens into faith, and sorrow into joy, and despair into hope, when darkness vanishes in the light of God ! Look first at those pictures which speak of Hallam, and describe the moods of the poet as the body of his friend is brought across the sea, and up the Severn, and laid in its grave on the lonely hill looking over the waste waters. The epic may be divided into three main sections. First I« In the first picture we see that mingling Section — of love which saves the soul from utter loss Grief. anc j death. If in its sacred sorrow it is to find a gain in loss, and " grasp the far-off interest of tears," it can only be by wedding grief to love. When they are united, the soul soars over death and its darkness ; but when love dies, the " victor hours " triumph. II. Grief turns to the yew tree, curtained by endless night. The summer suns had shone, but no bright beams had pierced the " thousand years of gloom." In the dark winter's foliage, the stricken soul sees the symbol of its own grief shadowing all things. III. The soul awakes to the consciousness that sorrow has " lying lips " when she declares that the whole course of nature is determined by blind force, IN MEMORIAM. 47 or that the face of the sky is a delusion, or that the music of the many voices of the world is but mocking sound, and asks whether sorrow is to be trusted when she casts such a tragic gloom over the bright sky, and kills the music of the glad creation. Shall he accept her as a guide ? " Embrace her as my natural good ; Or crush her, like a vice of blood?" VI. His grief refuses to be comforted by the kindly meant letters of condolence with the stereo- typed phrases, " other friends remain," and " loss is common to the race." " And common is the commonplace, And vacant chaff well meant for grain." He rejects the proffered consolation. If his love for Hallam were forgotten in the sorrow of others, it would be a loss to himself. Whatever destroys pure love is a curse, not a blessing. God would not have us forget but cherish our sacred loves, that we may find them in Him, or else " what to me remains of good ? " VII. He is thinking of the dead friend and the dark house in the loveless street where the hand of Hallam grasped his. He is unable to sleep, and, rising in the " earliest morning," creeps along like a stricken deer to the well-known door, as if once again to see the radiant face and clasp the outstretched hand of his friend ; but, alas ! 48 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. "He is not here; but far away The noise of life begins again, And ghastly thro' the drizzling rain On the bald street breaks the blank day." What a picture is portrayed in the dreary words, " the drizzling rain," " the bald street," " the blank day " ! We look through them into the soul of grief, and see utter desolation within. VIII. He states the reason for " In Memoriam." As a happy lover returns to look upon the face of his love, and rings the bell only to find her gone, and with her light and music, and then wanders into the deserted walks to find and cherish a flower that she had reared, so the poet, knowing his friend had been pleased with his poems, would take his " poor flower of poesy " and plant it on his tomb. IX. We have a beautiful prayer for the safe arrival of the ship bearing the " loved remains " from Vienna. He would have her come quickly : " Ruffle thy mirror'd mast." Speed creates agita- tion ; the reflection in the mirror of the waters is " ruffled." He would draw all nature into sympathy with his sacred wish for the safety of the " holy urn." At night he would have all the lights above ensphered, and the " gentle heavens " sleep " before the prow," even as the man he loved sleeps. " My Arthur, whom I .shall not see Till all my widow'd race be run."' X. Chastened Grief still lingers about the vessel, IN MEMORIAM. 49 and seems to hear the noise of the keel and the striking of the bell at night, to see a light in the cabin window and the sailor at his watch. The feelings of sorrow thus find expression in the sounds and sights which fill imagination, and in the freight conveyed by the coming vessel ; while the poet contrasts the awful thought of a body buried at sea in the " roaring wells," with the happier thought of burial on shore in some spot blessed of nature. " To rest beneath the clover sod, That takes the sunshine and the rains," or, in the chancel of the church, "where the kneeling hamlet drains The chalice of the grapes of God." XI. His grief looks out upon nature across the wolds, to the sleeping sea beyond, where peace seems to have fallen. It was nature's Sabbath ; but the calm without serves to remind him of " the dead calm in that noble breast " of his sleeping friend, and of the calm in his own stunned heart, only " If any calm, a calm despair." XII. Grief becomes impatient, and takes wings of love and flies to the ship at sea, and hovers about it like a bird, " And circle moaning in the air : 'Is this the end? Is this the end?'" How restless ! — coming and going, wanting to be where the body of Hallam is, who was " More than my brothers are to me.'' 4 5 o THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. Such is grief clasping love — restless until it find the object loved, lingering about the mortal shell, once the duelling of the noble spirit that had left its subtle impress on the calm face. XIV. The bereaved soul cannot realise its loss. If some one came and told him the vessel was lying in the port, and he went down to see the passengers, and the man he loved " as half-divine " suddenly struck a hand with his, and asked " a thousand things of home," he says, — " I should not feel it to be strange." How true ! Death seizes our friend, and still we look for him. We seem to hear his footfall in the hall, and turn to see him enter as of old. XV. A storm has risen. The winds are roaring from out the western sky ; the leaves are whirled before the tempest ; the rooks are driven ; great trees are torn from their roots ; the sea is white with foam ; the cattle huddle in fear. He is con- cerned for the safety of the vessel. " And but for fancies, which aver That all thy motions gently pass Athwart a plane of molten glass, I scarce could brook the strain and stir." XVII. The ship arrives, and he craves the blessing of Heaven on her, for she bears " The (lust o! him I shall not see Till all my widow'd race be run." IN MEMORIAM. 51 xviil. The poet finds some little solace in the thought that his friend will be buried in English earth, among the sacred places of home and youth, while those who bear the body to the last sleeping- place must have " pure hands." Then in the longing of pathetic sorrow he would fain cast himself upon the lifeless form, and breathe his own almost dying life into the frozen lips of the dead, but now he can only treasure the look and the words of the sacred past. XIX. The ship sails up the Severn, bearing " the darken'd heart that beat no more," when his grief is like the flowing of the tide and the hushing of the Wye. The rising tide meets the incoming stream, and by its mightier volume hushes its babbling. So with the coming of the body a greater sea of sorrow floods his being, and his song, like the stream, is hushed. " I brim with sorrow drowning song." Presently the tides of sorrow fall, and the speechless soul finds voice. " My deeper anguish also falls, And I can speak a little then." XXII — XXVII. The poet recalls the past, his tender recollections of all his friend had been, and how the burdens of life were halved by love. In xxvi he cannot bear the thought of love ever forgetting or becoming indifferent — he thinks this 52 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. more awful than death, and would welcome " that shadow " ; while in the next canto he does not envy the linnet " that never knew the summer woods," nor " the heart that never plighted troth," for the power to love lifts us far above the beasts, though the object loved be lost. " Tis better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all." XXVIII — XXX. We have the coming of Christmas and the changing moods of grief. At first there is gloomy sorrow, as they recall the days when Hallam was with them. How can they be glad when he is not there ? They try to be merry. " with an awful sense Ol" one mute Shadow watching all." It is the shadow of death, not the shade of Hallam. But see how the face of grief is changing : a new light plays upon it — the light of hope. " Our voices took a higher range ; Once more we sang : ' They do not die.' " This ends the first section of "In Memoriam." Grief continues, but is rising, transfigured by love — the love that refuses to believe that death breaks the continuity of life, and that the grave is the tomb of the spirit. He now would rise "as if on stepping-stones " of dead regrets, and with straining eyes look into the sacred mysteries of the world where Hallam is with God. He sees that grief, IN MEMORIAM. 53 cherished alone, means death to love and joy ; but should chastened love, true to its deepest instinct, be allowed to take wing and soar, it may find some light on the problems that darken the soul. Second His S TlQ ^ sustained by love, is now face to Section — face with the mystery of the future. Out Doubt. upon the trackless way, as if searching for his friend, he is startled by the mystic pro- blems that rise out of the deep, and so shape themselves as to cast a shadow of doubt upon his spirit. Is immortality a dream, and death extinction ? or is death unconscious sleep, waiting for the touch of the finger of God ? or is it swift transition into life eternal ? Does that life possess memory, or is the past buried deep in Lethe ? Will friendship here win fellowship there, or does identity change ? Such are the troubled questions that cannot be swept out of the way of the bereaved spirit as it passes into the cloud of the mystery of God and im- mortality and death. Most of the great souls have gone into this solemn shadow of Eternity to wrestle with doubt through the lone night, until the dawn broke and grew into the " boundless day." XXXI. The poet begins to face the question of immortality* and the problems that circle round it. * The Odes relating to immortality are xxxi-ii-iv-v. xli-ii-iii-iv-v-vi. 54 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. I Ic is troubled by the secrets that have drawn a veil over the mouth of the grave. He would fain learn from the experience of Lazarus the meaning of death. Did Lazarus yearn to hear his sister " weeping by his grave " ? If asked of all that happened " those four days," the only answer is, — " He told it not ; or something seal'd The lips of that Evangelist."' Our dead do not come back to tell us of the life beyond, or what they found death to be. When they pass into the house of the Eternal Life, the door is shut on us, and we are left wondering without ; but if permitted to visit us and to speak, the poet thinks they " had surely added praise to praise." XXXII. The human note of this praise is sounded in the home at Bethany, when Mary, looking upon Lazarus, turns her ardent gaze upon Christ, " the Life indeed," and her spiritual love for Him super- sedes her natural love for her brother. "She bows, she bathes the Saviour's feet With costly spikenard and with tears." The love that raised Lazarus opens for her the gate into spiritual life. She too has her resurrection, and begins to feel the pulse of Life, and know a little of the bliss of which her brother might not speak. To love the highest is to be raised to the IN MEMORIAM. 55 highest, and to love the lowest is to sink to the lowest. " Thrice blest whose lives are faithful prayers, Whose loves in higher love endure." But here comes the doubt, casting a darkling shadow upon the spirit — Is there any such thing as immortality ? Does not death strangle life ? Is not the grave like some extinct volcano — the burnt-out cinder of all human hopes and aspirations ? Is not spirit a mode of matter, destined to disin- tegrate and dissolve ? If thought is identical with cerebral changes which an accident may end, then what becomes of the ego ? Such questions pass like a procession of mocking phantoms through the solemn shadow of the great doubt. This is the problem — Is mind identical with matter ? Is thought one and the same with motion ? The materialist says it is. If he is right, then immortal- ity is a delusion, and dust and ashes are our destiny ; but the answer to the problem given by the greatest scientists is that it cannot be proved ! They do not regard mind and matter, feeling and motion, as identical.* Their testimony, though * " That a unit of feeling has nothing in common with a unit of motion becomes more than ever manifest when we bring the two into juxtaposition." — Herbert Spencer. " Granted that a definite thought and a definite molecular action in the brain occur simultaneously, we do not possess the organ, nor, apparently, any rudiment of the organ, which would enable us to pass by a process of reasoning from one 56 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. negative, is against the materialist, and favours the Christian belief that the ego is distinct from matter, and that matter is only the vehicle. Hence the poet appeals to the voice of the ego, " the dim life " within, as suggesting reasonable ground for cherishing the hope of immortality — a hope central to the human spirit all the world over. In all ages and under all conditions, man has steadfastly refused to believe that death extinguishes the flame of life, or that all of his wondrous being, with its glowing splendours, is only a flash, meteor-like, into the oblivion of endless night. This fact of the human consciousness has never been explained by philosophy, nor is the philosophy complete which does not take it into account. There it stands, as if a palpitating thing of life, within the house of the body, with piercing eyes that seem to see " Him who is invisible," and with boundless energy of conviction, defying death to touch the spirit, and showing itself superior to matter by thinking sunlit thoughts when the darkness deepens. How explain this spirit-life that refuses to be circumscribed by matter, that leaps the bounds of time, and feels at home only within the spiritual and eternal ? Is not phenomenon to the other. They appear together, hut we do not know why." — Professor Tyndall. "The materialistic assumption that . . . the life of the soul accordingly ends with the life of the body, is perhaps the most baseless assumption that is known to the history of philosophy." — The Pesthty of Mo)i. IN MEMORIAM. 57 the very nature of the restless spirit an argument for a life that death cannot dissolve nor the grave imprison ? Yes, and the poet makes his appeal to the inner consciousness. XXXIV. "My own dim life should teach me this, That life shall live for evermore, Else earth is darkness at the core, And dust and ashes all that is." If life is not immortal, its aspirations are a mockery. The " dim life '' that rises in dawn never grows into day. Robbed of immortality, all the world becomes meaningless. Nature, as if in sympathy with the deluded spirit, reveals only " darkness at the core." The beautiful world of order and adaptation becomes only " fantastic beauty," as it wrought by some wild poet " without a conscience or an aim." God ceases to be the object of love and adoration. For how can the human spirit love and worship a God who formed it to aspire towards Him only to mock its aspirations, or gave it the dim dawn only with cruel hand to blot out the sun, or let it see " the distant gates of Eden gleam " only to bar the gates for ever ? " What then were God to such as I ? " He could not be an object of love and desire, if thus He made a toy of the human soul, or let its aspirations grow like tender flowers, only to blight them in the chilling night of death, or trample them 5 S THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. in sportive mood of ridicule. Such a God would be cruel and hateful indeed. A human soul might well lose all " patience," and welcome the jaws of death and darkness as an escape from infinite tyranny. " 'Twere best at once to sink to peace, Like birds the charming serpent draws." Observe, it is not merely a question of immortality or continued existence beyond the grave apart from God. Such a life, without an object of love, without noble motive or final cause, would be the greatest curse, a very horror of anticipation to make the spirit shudder ! Life is only real life when it is found in union with God. Immortality, without conscious knowledge of the absolute good, must be a living death, or an awful void for ever unfilled, through which wander the winds of darkness. Always to look up to the infinite sky, and never to see the face of an all-loving Father, would be the tragedy of immortality ; and thus the poet by implication not only assumes the existence of God, but that life can never be complete, even though immortal, without the eternal life of God. XXXV. But conceding immortality to be a myth, and that the " jaws of vacant darkness " seize all of being, then another question rises to shadow the soul. •' Miglit I not say? 'Yet even here, But for one hour, O Love, I strive IN MEMORIAM. 59 To keep so sweet a thing alive:' But I should turn mine ears and hear The moanings of the homeless sea." He would hear the work of devastation going on tearing down the hills, while love itself would see in all an image of her own destruction, and languish in "The sound of that forgetful shore." Thus, apart from immortality, the love we cherish would become our pain. The thought that death might put a chilling finger on the warm pulse would eat out the heart of life. But the case is idly put. The poet thinks that love, seeing only death and no immortality, would not have been, or else being, would have run in so narrow a channel as to have left man a mere brute that " wallow'd in the woods." Love linked to death could not be spiritual, must be animal, and would leave man in " coarsest Satyr- shape." In purest human love we find an intimation of immortality. Strike out immortality, and love becomes a mocking phantom, revealing the " narrow house," where hope lies dead for ever. Thus the poet finds in love, lived in the faith and life of God, the possibility of the reunion of lives and an evidence " That life shall live for evermore." XLI. Now another doubt rises. The question of immortality is settled ; but what of the vanished r,o THE I IV HIM; OF TENNYSON. life, what of its growth and glory lifted to a height to which he (the poet) cannot soar ? Must not that interfere with their sacred friendship and exchange of thought and feeling ever ? " My paths are in the fields I know, And thine in undiscover'd lands." While together on earth, though the spirit of Ilallam ever rose like " heavenward altar-fire," it was pos- sible to have companionship ; but now that the earthly links are broken he can no longer watch the growth of his friend, and fain wishes " To leap the grades of life and light," that he ma)- be with him in fellowship of intellect and soul. He fears lest, in that other and spiritual life, his friend may soar beyond his own power to attain, and thus the doubt shadows his heart, — " A spectral doubt which makes me cold, That I shall be thy mate no more." As the eternal years roll on, he grieves lest he may be " evermore a life behind " that of his friend who lives with God. XLII. But he lays the " spectral doubt," as he reasons that his friend when here still soared above him, and it was only their being together — " unity of place " — that made him think he ranked with Ilallam. If here, why not there ? May not unity of place there bring again friendship and fellowship, IN MEMORIAM. 6t when his friend, now " a lord of large experience," would be able to train his mind and will ? "And what delights can equal those That stir the spirit's inner deeps, When one that loves but knows not, reaps A truth from one that loves and knows." The ode suggests not only eternal life in God, but growing knowledge. If growth in knowledge add to the sum of human happiness, may we not infer the same of the life of heaven ? Will not the bliss of the immortals consist in their ever- widening vision of the mystery of God ? XLIII. But what is death ? Suppose it to be unconscious sleep, in which, as if in a trance, the spirit slumbers, folded like a flower at night, bearing traces of the past ? Would not there be in the resurrection, with the unfolding spirits of the dead, a complete record of life ? " So then were nothing lost to man ; So that still garden of the souls In many a figured leaf enrolls The total world since life began." The idea is beautiful — death unconscious sleep. Our " loved and lost awhile " folding within their passive memories the sacred scenes and fond friendships of life, fresh as when they fell asleep, now waiting like flowers for the dawn to open and reveal " the traces of the past." If such be death — a sleep into richer life in which the loves born 62 THE TEACHING ol- TENNYSON. in time appear in eternity — then the grief of the poet is consoled. " And love will last as pure and whole As when he loved me here in Time, And at the spiritual prime Kewaken witli the dawning soul.'' It is a subject which does not admit of dogmatic statement. Our knowledge of consciousness in relation to the body is too limited for us to define how far the one is dependent on the other, or whether the spirit has consciousness apart from the body. As far as science has penetrated it would seem as if consciousness and organism were correlated. If the body perish, we may conceive the " ego " sleeping and waiting unconsciously for the new organism. " There are also celestial bodies and bodies terrestrial." With the new body the consciousness may awake with memories and affections vivid as the unfolding flower. Few are the gleams that pierce the veil of that silent world where our dead ones may be sleeping. XLIV. The subject is continued and viewed from another point. As man grows in knowledge here he forgets the experiences of his infant life when " God shut the doorways of his head/' but still dim memories seem to float up to him out of the mists of those early days, " A little flash, a mystic hint.'' IN MEMORIAM. 63 Then is it not possible that the spirit of the departed, " If Death so taste Lethean springs,"* may be touched with the memory of earthly things ? So he prays that his tormenting doubt may be solved. " If such a dreamy touch should fall, O turn thee round, resolve the doubt." XLV. But if the departed have knowledge of us and the past, shall we know them again ? The question of personal identity after death is suggested. It may have shaped itself thus — Shall I know my friend again in that other world ? Can I be sure that identity will remain unchanged ? It is the shadow that creeps over many hearts, the doubt that they may not recognise the vanished face. The poem shows how conscious identity is formed in childhood — the child grows to distinguish between " I " and " not I." It wins that knowledge through the senses. " So rounds he to a separate mind." But if after death we must begin again to distinguish personal identity, " Had man to learn himself anew Beyond the second birth of Death," * Lethe has a double power — to call to remembrance as well as to obliterate. 6 A THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. then the knowledge gained in the body must be lost, which seems incredible. That our identity once realised does not change with the changes of the bod)- seems clear from the fact that every particle of the body is changed while identity remains, and we know one another. Identity must thus lie in the spirit and not in the body, which is only the fading veil of the spirit. If so, then recognitions hereafter become a certainty. Not to know the vanished face again would break the human heart, and reveal a gulf of darkness in the hills of Life ! XLVI. But all is to be made clear. Upon the retrospect of our chequered life the shadows of forgetfulness fall and veil ■'The path we came by, thorn and flower." But in the life of God the shadows are sunned away. The past lies in His light, and we shall see the meaning of thorn and flower. " So be it : there no shade can last In that deep dawn behind the tomb." The " richest field " of restrospect will be those five years of tender human friendship. But love will not be limited by time and sense. It can only be satisfied with the infinite as the field of pure delights — " Love, a brooding star, A rosy warmth from marge to marge." IN MEMORIAM. 65 Thus in the odes relating to immortality we have seen not only the sanctuary where grief with folded wings sat weeping, but the darkness that dimmed the light on the altar. Will a hand come to wipe away the brimming tears, and the light glow again in the holy place of sorrow ? Third LXXVIII. We have the coming of another Section— Christmas, and, when contrasted with cantos Victory. xxix., xxx., we find a healthier condition. Then excessive grief made the festive games a " vain pretence " ; now " Who shovv'd a token 01 distress ? No single tear, no mark of pain." There are no tears nor marks of pain nor shadow of death. Is grief dead ? No, but death does not seem so awful. A new element, as yet undefined, gives colour and warmth to grief. " Her deep relations are the same, But with long use her tears are dry. : ' LXXX. The poet imagines himself to be dead and Hallam living, and pictures the grief of his friend sustained by religious faith and life — "A grief as deep as life or thought, But stay'd in peace with God and man." He thinks how in his case sorrow would have been sanctified, and seeming loss turned to gain, and the thought of such endurance and progress, 5 66 THE Tl.\< KING oi Tl \\\ SON. gives consolation. That " picture in the brain " of sustaining power is transferred to his own spirit. " Unused example from the grave Reach out dead hands to comfort me.'" LXXXI. He is still looking back upon the past, thinking of his vanished friend, when he is haunted with the thought " More years had made me love thee more " ; but that would be selfish — to wish him back ; and he finds some joy in the sunnier thought that his loss and pain are Hallam's gain and peace. " My sudden frost was sudden gain, And gave all ripeness to the grain, It might have drawn from after-heat." Grain and fruit are ripened by a sudden frost. In the thought of the fruition of his friend, ripened by the frost of death, he finds some compensation. Thus grief, that had looked back into the grave with its blighted hopes, now begins to lift longing eyes to the future. The gaze is turning slowly from the grave. This forward look means the coming of health and hope. Note how he speaks of the gain to Hallam. So long as grief sits over against the sepulchre weeping it is night, but when it sees the angel it hastens to speak of the risen life. LXXXI] He has no feud with death on account of the changes wrought upon the body — '•And these arc but the shatter'd stalks.'' IN MEMORIAM. 67 Nor does he blame death for transplanting his friend, who " Will bloom to profit, otherwhere." It is not of the body he thinks, but of the progress of the spirit. "From state to state the spirit walks." But he is angry with death because their lives are separated. " He put our lives so far apart We cannot hear each other speak." The mood is human, but not healthy. The longing is natural, but not spiritual. Note this thought of the separation, for it will make vivid the contrast when he sings of the finding of his friend and the meeting of their spirits. lxxxiv. He draws a picture of what might have been had Hallam lived. The more tender the scene, the crueller the blighting hand that " Made cypress of her orange flower,* Despair of Hope, and earth of thee." Or he thinks of his friend growing with him until " Arrive at last the blessed goal, And He that died in Holy Land Would reach us out the shining hand, And take us as a single soul." * Hallam was engaged to Miss Emily Tennyson. 68 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. But he realises that in this backward look of possibilities extinguished by death there cannot be health and hope. " Ah, backward fancy, wherefore wake The old bitterness again, and break The low beginnings of content." LXXXV. We have a poem of exquisite music and deeper spiritual mood with the outward and forward look of the soul. In the first stanzas he repeats the assurance of canto XXVII. " 'Tis better to have loved and lost, Than never to have loved at all." Then he addresses a friend * who wished to know what effect sorrow had upon his " trust in things above," and whether his love for Hallam had drained his love. The poet in reply suggests that, when the news first came " That in Vienna's fatal walls God's finger touch'd him, and he slept," the even tenor of his life was broken. Now he seems to see how the risen spirit of Hallam was welcomed by " The great Intelligences fair That range above our mortal state," and was led to the " fountain fresh " of the streams of knowledge. Then came reaction with the faded " E. L. Lushington. IN MEMORIAM. 69 vision, and he tells how lonely he felt in his sorrow with only a memory left. But the poem relates — and this is the transition from sickness to health, from despair to hope — how the sacred memory became a power infusing comfort and strength. " And so my passion hath not swerved To works of weakness, but I find An image comforting the mind, And in my grief a strength reserved." He begins to find the secret of victory over grief and doubt. At present the experience is fitful, but in the end it becomes fixed. The second question he answers thus : — " I woo your love : I count it crime To mourn for any overmuch." But he cannot love him as he loved Hallam. His love had outlived time, and was eternal. Their converse was not in human speech, but by spirit contact. Yet for him he has " the primrose of the later year." XCV. We have an illustration of spirit communion. It marks a crisis in the struggle of the soul through grief and doubt on to joy and victory. It is the meeting of the spirits. Tennyson finds Hallam. There was a family gathering on a warm summer's evening, so calm that the tapers burned upon the lawn, and so still that afar off was heard the music of the stream ; night moths " with ermine capes " 7 o THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. were flitting through the dark, and songs were pealing through the knoll. The poet was left alone and read " In those fall'n leaves which kept their green, T/ie noble letters of the dead." Mark the result. The letters seemed vocal. The spirit of Hallam breathed in them. The fire of his intellect glowed in every line, " And all at once it seem'd at last The living soul was flash'd on mine, And mine in this was wound." Thus the poet finds his friend, and their spirits rush together in the ecstasy of communion. It is the first meeting, and is short-lived — a gleam telling of light, a broken chord prophetic of the rhythmic whole ; but soon the sweet light and mellow music die away. "At length my trance Was cancell'd, stricken thro' with doubt." And he comes back to earth to the old familiar scenes ; but though his spirit is still touched with doubt, he has fulfilled the conditions of xciv, and won "An hour's communion with the dead." It is the way of communion with God and the good — a pure heart, a peaceful spirit, and a hushed being. evin. W'c have a healthy moral resolve giving IN MEMORIAM. 71 tone and colour to the sequel. He resolves no longer to be misanthropic and " stiffen into stone," nor will he eat out " his heart alone." He recognises that a " barren faith " and " vacant yearning " can bring no profit ; and though they may have power to soar to the heights and dive to the deeps, they reveal only " phantoms " and dim reflections, and he sings, — " I'll rather take what fruit may be Of sorrow under human skies." CXV. The noble resolve is realised. He sings of the coming spring. The summer of long ago, when Hallam sunned his spirit by " seraphic in- tellect and force," is dead. The winter of his discontent, when grief, veiled in her sanctuary, heard only the rain and the falling leaves, is buried. But now out of dead regrets the spring of life and hope is born ; we see " the greening gleam," and hear the " happy birds," and feel the coming breath. "And in my breast Spring wakens too ; and my regret Becomes an April violet, And buds and blossoms like the rest." CXVI. The song of the spring is continued. It is " life re-orient out of dust." It strengthens faith in the resurrection, and he feels the spirit presence of his friend. "Not all regret: the face will shine Upon me, while I muse alone." 72 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. His spirit has turned now to the future with the hope of sacred reunion, — " Less yearning for the friendship fled, Than some strong bond which is to be." CXVii. lie finds joy even in the delay, believing that the gain will be richer in the end, " delight a hundredfold." " O days and hours, your work is this, To hold me from my proper place, A little while from his embrace, For fuller gain of after bliss." cxvill. He still sings of the future, and sees in the evolution of the earth a symbol of the high destiny of the unfolding life of man. If this solid earth were evolved out of " fluent heat " and " cyclic storms," until at last " arose the man," who moved on and ever higher, though like iron-ore " heated hot " and " dipt in baths " and battered into " shape and use," then may not we infer from this evolution " ever nobler ends " ? Yes, and in the process man is " working out the beast." The poem rings with the new spirit that fills the soul as it turns from the past to the future. All through we have evidence of the victory of conscious faith over grief and doubt. The grief is chastened by the new joy found in communion with the dead, and in the hope of the reunion. Thus in CXIX he revisits Hallam's old home in YVimpole Street, which he described in VII in language of utter IN MEMORIAM. 73 desolation ; but as he comes back to the scene it is to speak of the singing of birds, and "A light-blue lane of early dawn." His grief is now transfigured with the spirit of resignation. "And in my thoughts with scarce a sigh I take the pressure of thine hand." cxxi. We have the contrast between the poet's past and present experience in the symbol of Venus. As " sad Hesper " she is the evening star wanting to die with the " buried sun." Thus his grief would fain have set with the sun of Hallam's life ; but Venus rises again as Phosphor, the morning star, and is thus the symbol of the new-born hope that ushers in the day. " Thou, like my present and my past, Thy place is changed ; thou art the same." CXXIII. The notes of victory swell on as he pictures the cyclic change in land and sea : where the tree once grew there rolls the sea, and where the deep sea lay in stillness there roars the crowded street. The very hills, like shadows, have changed their forms. " But in my spirit will I dwell, And dream my dream, and hold it true ; For tho' my lips may breathe adieu, I cannot think the thing farewell." 74 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. He is assured of their reunion. CXXIV. In this noble tribute to faith we hear the music of final triumph as he finds rest in the con- sciousness of God. When assailed by a godless scepticism, " And like a man in wrath the heart Stood up and answered ' / have felt," '* and though doubt and fear may come, " Then was I as a child that cries, But, crying, knows his father near." CXXVII. Again we hear " all is well " in the thunder of the storm. " Well roars the storm to those that hear A deeper voice across the storm." We see then how he has found God in pure heart- love ; and in that very feeling, in which his spirit is embraced by the All-loving, he finds again his friend, who comes a spirit presence to mingle with his life. " Dear heavenly friend that canst not die, Mine, mine, for ever, ever mine; Strange friend, past, present, and to be ; Loved deeplier, darklier understood ; * The thought is contained in Hallam's essay, llieodiccea Novissima. " He [God] is for them a being of like passions with themselves, requiring heart for hear/, and capable of inspiring affection because capable of feeling and returning it," IN MEMORIAM. 75 Behold, I dream a dream of good, And mingle all the world with thee, (cxxix.) Far off thou art, but ever nigh ; I have thee still, and I rejoice ; I prosper, circled with thy voice ; I shall not lose thee tho' I die." (cxxx.) The fitful communion is now fixed and the two spirits live together. In finding God he has found the life of his friend, and in that sublime recovery the tears of grief are sunned by radiant hope, and doubt is dissipated. Thus we have the way of a soul through grief and doubt on to final victory. The soul rests on the rock of God and immortality and love. Faith cleaves its way through all sophistry, superstition, scepticism, and materialism ; and when challenged, declares, " I have felt." The service which " In Memoriam " has rendered to Christian Faith is great indeed. Its pure spiritual teaching, through the intuitive faculty of the poet, clears the mind, and calms the soul, and breaks like the dawn upon the night. Idylls We have seen how the poet in varying of the phases illustrates the conflicts and victories of Kin S- the soul. In " Idylls of the King," we shall find the same subject taking a wider range and * " By King Arthur I always meant the soul, by the Round Table the passions and capacities of man " — Tennyson to Mr. Knowlcs. " The whole is the dream of mau coming into practical life ;6 THE rEACHIXG OF TENNYSON. illustrated with perfection of art. It does not fall within the scope of our work to show how through long years the Idylls were constructed not in orderly sequence as they appear, but broken and irregular, and yet it is clear that the poet had in his mind a central truth which drew to itself and harmonized all the parts, so that when finished the Epic rose in " exquisite magnificence," and is probably his greatest work. It is evident that the poet, for the ethical purpose he had in view, took the greatest liberty with the Arthurian legends, either amending or rejecting, or creating as the ethical necessity arose. Two threads run through the Idylls. The one thread is the romantic and leads into the labyrinth of and ruined by one sin. It is not the history of one man, or of one generation, but of a whole cycle of generations." — Tennyson, A Memoir, ii., p. 125. " One noble design warms and unites the whole. In Arthur's coming, his foundation of the Round Table, his struggles and disappointments and departures, we see the conflict continually maintained between the spirit a?id the flesh." — Dean Aleord. " His Arthurian epic is a great attempt to depict the infusion of a soul into a chaos of stately passions." — R. H. Hutton, Literary Essays, p. 366. " It was through the pages of Malory that Tennyson made acquaintance with the story of Arthur, and from these he has drawn most of his Idylls. One other source must be mentioned. In 1838, Lady Charlotte Guest published ' The Mabinogion,' a translation of the ancient Welsh legends contained in the ' red book of Hergest,' which is in the library of Jesus College at Oxford. From this book Tennyson has taken the story of Geraint and Enid." — Henry Van Dyke. IDYLLS OF THE KING. 77 the old legends. The other thread is the ethical and leads into the purpose of the poems. This is the thread we have set ourselves to follow. Ethically the Idylls fall into two groups and may be thus classified. Poems of Life. Poems of Death. The Coming of Arthur — Garcth and Lyncttc — Geraint and Enid — Balin and Balan — The Holy Grail (in part) — Guinevere (in part) — The Passing of Arthur. Merlin and Vivien — Lancelot and Elaine — Pel leas and Etlarre — The Last Tournament (in part). Tennyson has left us without doubt as to the ethical meaning of " The Idylls." It is the war of Sense with Soul. In his dedication " To the Queen " he thus makes clear the serious purport of the Epic. "... Accept this old imperfect tale, New-old, and shadowing Sense at war with Soul, Ideal manhood closed in real man,* Rather than that gray king, whose name, a ghost, Streams like a cloud, man-shaped, from mountain peak, And cleaves to cairn and cromlech still. . . ." In the first group — Poems of Life — we shall find the principal characters " shadowing Sense at war with Soul," in which the victory falls to the side * My father thought that perhaps he had not made the real humanity of the King sufficiently clear in his epilogue ; so he inserted in 1891, as his last correction, "Ideal manhood closed in real man," etc. — A Memoir, ii„ p. 129. 78 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. of soul. In the case of Guinevere Sense is regnant almost to the end, when Soul awakens and is victorious. In the second group — Poems of Death — the victory is more or less on the side of Sense, with, of course, the exception of Arthur and Dagonet in " The Last Tournament." Let us take the first group and watch the war of Soul on its way to the victory of life. The The "Coming of Arthur" introduces us to Coming of the king, that "Ideal manhood closed in real Arthur. man," and the purest type in the Idylls of the spiritual man in conflict with opposing forces. He comes to a kingdom which is a wilderness — a moral waste " Wherein the beast was ever more and more, But man was less and less, till Arthur came."' Sense was regnant over Soul, when the call comes to the King " ' Arise, and help us thou ! Kor here between the man and beast we die.'" Hut when Arthur comes men dispute as to his birth. •'This is the son of Gorloi's, not the King; This is the son of Anton, not the King." While Bedivcrc, in answer to King Leodogran, affirms THE COMING OF ARTHUR. 79 " ' Sir, there be many rumours on this head : For there be those who hate him in their hearts, Call him baseborn, and since his ways are sweet, And theirs are bestial, hold him less than man : And there be those who deem him more than man, And dream he dropt from heaven. . . .' " Here we have the prevailing views of the origin and nature of the soul. Those who look only with the eyes of sense discern no spirit, and regard the soul as the product of matter — " baseborn." There is a materialism so absorbed in the phenomena of sense that it blinds the vision of the soul, so that it sees only " earthworms," where it might see angels ! There is a grosser form in which the sensuous has become sensual, and would fain drag the spirit into its own moral cesspool. "... Since his ways are sweet, And theirs are bestial. ..." Others again, who have not sacrificed but cherished the spiritual, contend for the divine origin of the soul, " And dream he dropt from heaven. . . ." So that Arthur — -the spiritual man — enters upon a realm in which he is opposed from the outset by the animal or sense-bound men. But so kingly is he in the greatness of his spirit and the supremacy of his authority, that soon they yield to his sway. In the great hall they kneel and are knighted, they swear allegiance, accept his will and obey his word. 8o THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. Then the strength of Arthur seems to pass into them, and they go to fight his battles and to win. "'But when lie spake and cheer'd his Table Round With large, divine, and comfortable words, Beyond my tongue to tell thee — I beheld From eye to eye thro' all their Order flash A momentary likeness of the King.' " In "likeness" to him lay the secret of their power and of their victories over the heathen. They were loyal to their king. They witnessed the fire of God fall upon him on the field of battle, and their motto was : '"The King will follow Christ, and we the King.'" Thus he fought " The heathen hordes, and made a realm and reign'd." But the scene changes. Arthur, the spiritual man, will marry Guinevere, the carnal woman. Does it not suggest that soul must be joined to flesh to make the flesh pure ? May not the higher nature in union with the lower infuse its own vitality so that the lower shall be redeemed, as if by an awakened conscience warring with its passions ? Did not " the Word " become " flesh " to redeem the flesh, and was not the union of the twain the secret of redemption ? Thus Arthur : — "'But were 1 join'd with her, I Inn might we live together as one life, THE COMING OF ARTHUR. 81 And reigning with one will in everything Have power on this dark land to lighten it, And power on this dead world to make it live.' " And when the marriage is celebrated, it is with the suggestive words spoken at the altar : " ' Reign ye, and live and love, and make the world Other, and may thy Queen be one with thee, And all this Order of thy Table Round Fulfil the boundless purpose of their King ! ' " But the sequel shows that Arthur wedded to Guinevere — Soul to Sense — may sometimes fail to make flesh one with soul, and that it cannot always be redeemed and vitalized, or only late, " so late," as when Guinevere hides her face in the dust, and feels the breath of the passing King, and sees the shadow of his lifted hands, waved in blessing, ere he goes to be crowned in light. Slowly Sense begins to win supremacy over Soul in the guilty love of Guinevere for Lancelot ; and, as evil is always contagious and taints the very atmosphere, it soon poisons the knights and, working within them, saps their loyalty and scatters their forces and ruins the realm. The King, com- pelled to arm against his rebel knights, falls at last upon the battle-field ; but though he falls he is not vanquished, for he goes to be crowned in the far-off city, and men seem to hear the shout as of welcome to " a king returning from his wars." The character of Arthur will reveal itself through- 6 82 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. out the Idylls. He is the spiritual warrior waging war upon the " heathen of the land." His task is to reconstruct the fabric of society upon a spiritual basis. He would interpenetrate the whole kingdom of Sense with Soul. The powers by which this regeneration is to be wrought are revealed in the beautiful allegories of the " three fair Queens," " the Lady of the Lake," and " Excalibur." "Three fair Queens, Who stood in silence near his throne, the friends Of Arthur, gazing on him, tall, with bright Sweet faces, who will help him at his need." The three Queens may be taken for " three of the noblest women," or " Faith, Hope, and Charity " — those spiritual powers which are as strong angels within the soul as it wars with sense and sin. Ever near the throne of the heart must stand, as sentries on guard, these heavenly powers. Merlin, subtle and powerful, represents intellect or science divorced from religion. "And near him stood the Lady of the Lake, Who knows a subtler magic than his own." The Lady of the Lake is the symbol of religion. She is represented as dwelling " ' Down in a deep ; calm, whatsoever storms May shake the world, and when the surface rolls, Hath power to walk the waters like our Lord.'" THE COMING OF ARTHUR. 83 She gives to Arthur the sword Excalibur "Whereby to drive the heathen out." The sword is the symbol either of the spiritual weapon by which the Soul wars with Sense, or the temporal power by which the Church assailed her enemies. " ' On one side, Graven in the oldest tongue of all this world, " Take me," but turn the blade and ye shall see, And written in the speech ye speak yourself, " Cast me away ! " ***** "Take thou and strike! the time to cast away Is yet far off." So this great brand the King Took, and by this will beat his foemen down.' " The reference may be to the temporal power at the time when the Church conquered by carnal weapons, and to the fact that the time had not yet arrived for the exercise of her purely spiritual functions ; but, as Arthur is the centre of the conflict, Excalibur more probably is the symbol of that " sword of the spirit " by which all through life the soul must wage war with sin, and which can only be " cast away " when at last the soul, having " fought the fight," goes out upon the deep with the three fair Queens to the land where is no storm nor hail. S 4 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. Gareth KING ARTHUR'S court is still unstained and and unshadowed. The knights are pure and Lynette. loyal. There is much fighting in " Gareth and Lynette," but the air is untainted, and light and music play throughout. The romance begins with Gareth, the last of the sons of Lot and Bellicent, who craves to enter Arthur's Hall, but is restrained by his over-anxious mother. He is inspired with a noble ambition, sufficiently clear and lofty to become a fascinating ideal ; he would rise " ' To the great Sun of Glory, and thence swoop Down upon all things base, and dash them dead, A knight of Arthur, working out his will, To cleanse the world. . . .'" But such glory is reached, not on swift wings, but only by patient endurance and strenuous effort. The initial difficulty, his mother, is not easily overcome. She would have Gareth remain with her, and promises him " a comfortable bride." She would have him stay to chase the deer and live a life of sensuous delight. Nobly he replies : "'Follow the deer? follow the Christ, the King, Live pure, speak true, right wrong, follow the King — Else, wherefore born ? ' " Bellicent alleges that Arthur is not " proven " King. Gareth answers wisely : "'Who should be King save him who makes us free?'" GARETH AND LYNETTE. 85 Finding that her appeal to filial feeling and sensuous ease fails to change the purpose of her son, she proposes a condition. He may go to Arthur's Hall, but he must go disguised, and serve for twelve months in the kitchen. " Silent awhile was Gareth, then replied, ' The thrall in person may be free in soul! " He accepts the condition. Gareth represents here, and throughout, the Soul in conflict with the forces that would blind its vision. He strives for the supremacy of the spiritual over the sensuous and selfish. The conflict between Soul and Sense with Gareth begins with the pathetic pleadings of Bellicent. She sees only with Sense, and is selfish. If he had yielded to her he would have followed the deer, not " the Christ, the King." The spiritual would have been lost in the sensuous, and in place of a spiritual warrior we should have had a self-indulgent lord of the manor. Gareth wins the first victory over Sense when he replies to Bellicent : " ' Follow the deer ? follow the Christ, the King.' " Now he comes disguised to Camelot,* the city * " Camelot, ... a city of shadowy palaces, is everywhere symbolic of the gradual growths of human beliefs and institutions, and of the spiritual development of man." — Tennyson, A Memoir, ii., p. 1 27. 86 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. built to music, and into Arthur's Hall, where he listens to the plaints of those who seek redress, "And all about a healthful people stept As in the presence of a gracious king." In turn he craves his boon to serve twelve months among the kitchen knaves. The boon is granted, and Gareth goes to serve under Kay, the seneschal. Of gentle birth, he finds himself surrounded by the vulgar. He sleeps with " grimy kitchen knaves," while Kay, jealous and exacting, imposes the most menial tasks. "... And Gareth bow'd himself With all obedience to the King, and wrought All kind of service with a noble ease That graced the lowliest act in doing it." Thus he gains the second victory over self and circumstance. The conditions were anything but favourable to the high ideal. His ambition was to reach the flashing height, when he finds himself herding in a kitchen with base-born menials ! Thus the soul on its way to the highest life may be conditioned by seeming evils that thwart its pro- gress, but which, rightly estimated, become aids to the attainment of the ideal. If Gareth had judged only by Sense he would have chafed and fumed away his life in the servitude of the kitchen ; but he judged by the spirit and saw "the soul of good in things evil." He accepted the discipline with GARETH AND LYNETTE. 87 patience, and was chastened into beauty. Great lives grow like great trees — in storms. At the end of a month Bellicent relents, and Gareth, loosed from his vow, hastens to tell the King his ambition, to beg that he may be knighted in secret, and the first quest be granted him. " Smiled the great King, and half-unwillingly Loving his lusty youthhood yielded to him." Sir Lancelot is privately informed of the promise, and commanded by the King to follow Gareth. Now Lynette, a maiden of gentle birth, enters the Hall. She tells how the lands of her sister ) Lyonors, are harassed by three lawless knights who had seized three fords of a serpentine river, and how a fourth, the mightiest, had imprisoned Lyonors within her castle, " to break her will and make her wed with him " ; and she begs the King that Lancelot may redress the wrong. She further describes the lawless knights. According to their humour they are " courteous or bestial," they have no law but their own wild will, and they "... Call themselves the Day, Morning-Star, and Noon-Sun, and Evening-Star, Being strong fools ; and never a whit more wise The fourth, who always rideth arm'd in black, A huge man-beast of boundless savagery. He names himself the night, and oftener Death. And all these four be fools, but mighty men, And therefore am I come for Lancelot." 88 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. Suddenly a voice is heard within the Hall — the voice of Gareth, who craves the quest, which the King grants. "And I can topple over a hundred such," " And all hearers were amazed." But Lynette, flushed with anger, exclaims : '"Fie on thee, King! I ask'd for thy chief knight, And thou hast given me but a kitchen-knave.' " Sir Gareth now enters upon the third stage of conflict. He gets to horse, and in the " field of tourney," finds Lynette all in a blaze of passion. What right had the King to scorn her ? If Lance- lot could not be spared, he might have sent a trusty knight and not — " O fie upon him — his kitchen- knave ! " Though Gareth proves his valour by overthrowing Kay, she continues to abuse him as " dish-washer, and broach-turner, loon." So they ride on, " reviler and reviled." Entering a deep pine-wood, whence a man rushes, crying, " They have bound my lord to cast him in the mere," Gareth hastens to the rescue, cudgels the knaves, and releases " the stalwart Baron," who recognises in him one of " Arthur's Table." Lynette admits that he is of the Table, only it is the kitchen table ; she will not sit with him, and tells the Baron the story of her wrongs, and how Arthur, " gone mad," gave the quest to " this frontless kitchen-knave " : GARETH AND LYNETTE. 89 " ' Him — here— a villain fitter to stick swine Than ride abroad redressing women's wrong.' " Thus the chivalry of Sir Gareth is rewarded with the scorn of Lynette. For her he suffers, in obedi- ence to the King, only to be reproached. The object of his solicitude returns him selfish ingrati- tude. It is the picture of a noble soul living by the spirit, following " Christ, the King " through scorn and derision to the victory of life. The divinest things are hidden from Sense, but unveiled to Soul. He enters now upon the fourth stage of his conflicts. " Then to the shore of one of those long loops Wherethro' the serpent river coil'd they came." Here he wages battle with the lawless knights in possession of the bridges and the fords. Sir Morn- ing-Star, living in a gay pavilion by the bridge of single arch, calls to the " daughters of the dawn," three fair girls, to arm him for the fight. On the bridge Sir Gareth and Sir Morning-Star meet in fearful shock of battle when " He drave his enemy backward down the bridge, The damsel crying, ' Well stricken, kitchen-knave ! ' Till Gareth's shield was cloven ; but one stroke Laid him that clove it grovelling on the ground." The " serpent river " represents the winding of the stream of life. The scene of the first conflict at " the stream full, narrow," is the symbol of youth, ijo THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. when life is rushing and full within its narrow limits. A single arch takes the bridge at a leap, and suggests the impetuosity of youth to leap by a bound into manhood. Sir Morning-Star and his gaudy pavilion, with the three fair maidens in rosy raiment, symbolise the seductive pleasures which assail the youthful soul. The soul must wage fierce war with every form of sensual pleasure. To yield is to " reel back into the beast." A pavilion of splendour may hide a skeleton of death. Evil when masked may parade as an angel of light. The spiritual youth, not vigilant as Gareth, may soon waste his substance in the pavilion of " riotous living." The soul must battle with the evils of the sensuous. Temptations must not be parleyed with, but vanquished with sudden and fierce onslaught, " Till Gareth's shield was cloven ; but one stroke Laid him that clove it grovelling on the ground." Gareth is next assailed by Sir Noonday-Sun. " Huge, on a huge red horse, and all in mail Burnish'd to blinding, shone the Noonday Sun Beyond a raging shallow. . . ." The stream of life now spreads into a " raging shallow " unbridged. Manhood is thus symbolised. Youth was bridged to manhood by a single arch and taken at a single leap ; but in manhood the waters are not so full and rushing. They have GARETH AND LYNETTE. 91 broadened and no bridge appears, as in manhood the transitions are not so apparent. Here he meets the Noonday Sun in mid-stream where " four strokes they struck with swords, and these were mighty " ; but in raising his mailed arm to strike the fifth stroke " The hoof of his horse slipt in the stream, the stream Descended, and the Sun was wash'd away." He is found " bone-batter'd on the rock," when he yields to Gareth, who sends him to the King. Thus we have suggested the temptation which most of all assails manhood — the lust of gold. The soul gazing at gold may be quickly dimmed. " All sun ; and Gareth's eyes had flying blots.' Fascinated by the gleam of material wealth, it loses the vision of spiritual realities. The curse of life is the love of gold. Men bow in worship of the Noonday Sun and the burnished tinsel blinds them to the glory of virtue. It is better to batter out the love of gold on some rock of adversity than lose the vision of the King. Now Gareth comes face to face with that lawless knight — Sir Evening-Star. Fierce and long is the deadly struggle. Evening-Star is the symbol of those habits which, once formed, become regnant within the soul, and are like wild beasts on the throne of old age. 92 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. " He seem'd as one That all in later, sadder age begins To war against ill uses of a life, But these from all his life arise, and cry, ' Thou hast made us lords, and canst not put us down ! '" Again "His arms are old, he trusts the harden'd skin." While Gareth "... Hew'd great pieces of his armour off him, But lash'd in vain against the harden'd skin." As rock hardens about the fossil, so evil habits harden about the soul. Evening-Star symbolises the force of habit in old age. Sins repeated become habits, and the habits " hardened skin." Gareth's way is the only way to victory. The soul must assert itself, " straining ev'n his uttermost," and cast them into the deep. There must be no compromise. If the soul is to be victor it must tear from itself encoiling evil, and silence the passionate voices that cry ' " Thou hast made us lords, and canst not put us down ! ' " They must be put down, or there will be no throne for the soul, only the chains of sense. Sir Gareth now wages his last war with Night, or Death, an awful monster, who had struck terror into the country round. GARETH AND LYNETTE. 93 " High on a nightblack horse, in nightblack arms, With white breast-bone, and barren ribs of Death, And crown'd with fleshless laughter — some ten steps — In the half-light — thro' the dim dawn — advanced The monster, and then paused, and spake no word." The moment is intense. Lyonors wrings her hands. Lancelot shudders as Gareth dashes on the foe with splendid valour, and with one blow splits the skull of " Death." "... And out from this Issued the bright face of a blooming boy Fresh as a flower new-born. . . ." The soul, conquering in the crises of life, finds at last that dreaded death wears the face of a " blooming boy." Victorious over sense, it finds in death eternal youth. We see only the hideous mask of death, but it hides the face of a young angel. Thus the poem is a parable. The interpretation lies in the allegory of the hermit's cave, where Morning, Noon, Evening and Night, personify the evils that assail the soul. "And running down the soul, a shape that fled With broken wings, torn raiment and loose hair, For help and shelter to the hermit's cave." But, as we have seen, in the end the spiritual soul is victor, " So large mirth lived, and Gareth won the quest." In contrast to Gareth is Lynette, who throughout 94 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. judges by the sense. She judges him by the out- ward and visible. She has no spiritual perception to sec the noble and beautiful within him. She sees only the kitchen-knave where she might have seen a kingly knight. Lynctte is cheery and charming when not scornful. She is sensitive to nature, ever breaking into song at the sight of birds and flowers. She is entirely sensuous and lives by the outward, and it is only at the last, when the soul sees, that she learns the spiritual worth of Gareth. "... And she clapt her hands, ' Full merry am I to find my goodly knave Is knight and noble. . . .'" Geraint IN " Geraint and Enid" we have the first and indication of the pure air of the court being 1 tainted, and of its effect upon so brave and pure a knight as Geraint. He had married the lovely Enid, daughter of Yniol, whose fortunes had been broken through the treachery of Edyrn, a dis- carded suitor and despised nephew. Enid is a great favourite with the Queen, who loves her. The suspicion that haunts Geraint throughout, and shapes itself into a horrible phantom, has its rise in the scandal of the guilty love of Lancelot for Guinevere. He prevails with the King to grant him leave of absence to defend his own princedom, and to GERAINT AND ENID. 95 purge its lawlessness. Once there he becomes so utterly absorbed in Enid as to neglect all else. " He compass'd her with sweet observances And worship, never leaving her, and grew Forgetful of his princedom and its cares. And this forgetfulness was hateful to her." It is the common talk that he is a prince " whose manhood was all gone." His strength is being sapped by self-indulgence. The temptation is to sacrifice the spiritual quality of love for its sensuous delights. The fact that the temptation comes through Enid — the ideal loveliness — all unconscious to herself, made it all the more subtle. The most seductive temptation may come through the tenderest object. The passion for the object loved may sweep aside duties sacred as the love itself. Absorption in any earthly object weakens the force of the soul in other directions. Love indulged to the point of self-indulgence saps man- hood, and leaves the man a prey to wildest fancy and subtlest suspicion. Enid naturally saddens, and the phantom of fear is again raised in Geraint " that her nature had a taint." Thus weakened in his moral fibre, first by suspi- cion and then by self-indulgence through sensuous devotion, Geraint is most susceptible to jealousy. He who lives by the senses is likely to become a prey to vultures of suspicion that tear out the 9 6 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. heart. Geraint, with the sorrow of the tainted court brooding o'er hirn, begins to doubt the purity of Enid ; and the doubt seems confirmed as she bends over him in his semi-sleep and pours out her sad heart in a soliloquy ending with the innocent words : "'0 me, I fear that I am no true wife.'" Her tears fall in a rain of grief ; he feels the warm tears and believes that she is "'Weeping for some gay knight in Arthur's hall.'" He hears the fragments of her words and thinks she is not faithful to him. He is now maddened with jealousy, and becomes reckless in his treatment of Enid, which reveals in him the soul defeated by sense, and in her the soul victorious over sense. Geraint, believing only in what he can see and hear and feel, becomes the victim of the most painful self-deception. The senses usurp his being and make suspicion and tyranny regnant. Let the story reveal the characters, and note the " Sense at war with Soul." Confirmed in his suspicions, Geraint commands Enid — " ' And thou, put on thy worst and meanest dress And ride with me.' . . ." His fiery passion only blinds him to the goodness of Enid. " O purblind race of miserable men, How many among us at this very hour Do forge a life-long trouble for ourselves, By taking true for false, or false for true." GERAINT AND ENID. 97 They ride into the wilds when Geraint, all un- knightly, compels Enid to ride on before, and on her duty as a wife not to speak to him. They go by the marshes and through the wastes infested with robbers, Enid pale as a lily, bending in obe- dience before the storm, Geraint with the dark cloud of suspicion brooding within him, and the lightning of jealousy flashing in his eyes! Soon Enid espies three tall knights, " caitiffs all," concealed within the shadow of a rock, and the struggle begins between duty to her husband, and a blind, passive obedience. She resolves to disobey to save his life. "'Far liefer by his dear hand had I die, Than that my lord should suffer loss or shame.' " Geraint is wrathful, but strips " the three dead wolves of woman born," and commands Enid to drive on the bandit's horses. Again, in the shadow of a deep wood she sees three horsemen wholly armed and "one larger than her lord," all waiting for their prey. The struggle between duty and obedience is renewed with the result — " ' I needs must disobey him for his good; How should I dare obey him to his harm ? Needs must I speak, and tho' he kill me for it, I save a life dearer to me than mine.'" Again Geraint flings her a wrathful answer, and Enid, with bated breath and " fits of prayer," awaits the issue of the deadly conflict ! When the victory 7 9 8 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. is on the side of Geraint, and the captured horses are bridle-reined, lie utters no word save : " . . . ' Drive them on Before you,' and she drove them thro' the wood." They halt now in a meadow where the mowers are mowing, and where they find a boy with victuals which Geraint speedily devours, and Enid, "to close with her lord's pleasure," tastes a little. The delicate touch reveals her character, she is sensitive to his wish when the wish is not to his hurt. The mower-boy flushes with delight on receiving horse and arms for reward, and exclaims that he will tell his Earl, who would welcome Geraint to his palace. "'I know, God knows, too much of palaces!'" is the significant reply. Geraint and Enid go to a chamber in the little town and there they sit apart, he in sullen melan- choly, and she in gentle sadness — voiceless. Then suddenly there breaks upon the scene the Earl Limours, a rejected lover of Enid, who moves Geraint to laughter, and having obtained of him permission to address her, pours into her ear his bibulous sentiments, and suggests that his followers shall capture her sullen prince. Enid, anticipating danger, answers with discretion, and by postponing the plot until the morrow, gains time for action. She disobeys again and breaks the law of silence, GERAINT AND ENID. 99 and by the dawn they leave the town and escape Limours ; but ever that command is laid upon her "That ye speak not, but obey." Swiftly there sweeps down upon Geraint, like a thunder-cloud, the foiled Limours with his reckless retainers, when Enid, first to hear the sound, but bound to silence, turns and lifts her finger in warning ! The struggle is short and sharp. Limours is hurled, stunned, or dead, from his horse, and the rest are put to speedy flight by the vigour of Geraint ; but he is wounded and bleeding beneath his armour, and "... Without a word, from his horse fell." Enid, hearing the crash, hastens to his side, and with perfect self-control searches for the wound, then tears away her veil and "... Swathed the hurt that drain'd her dear lord's life." There she waited and wept. At noon the lawless Earl Doorm " with a hundred lances " appears. To him Enid appeals, and " since her face is comely," he instructs two spearmen to convey Geraint to the castle. They, cursing all the way, bring him " And cast him and the bier in which he lay Down on an oaken settle in the hall," where he lies in weakness, feigning sleep, and listening to the voice of Enid like the music of gentle streams. At last the shameless Earl returns, ioo THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. and, thinking Geraint dead, strives to bend Enid to his lawless will. lie commands her to eat and to drink, to array herself in a splendid silk of foreign loom ! All of which she steadfastly declines. " 'Yea, God, I pray you of your gentleness, He being as he is, to let me be.' " The Earl, baffled and enraged, rises, and with flat hand strikes her on the cheek, when Enid " sent forth a sharp and bitter cry." Geraint hears, and with a bound and a sweep of his sword " Shore thro' the swarthy neck, and like a ball The russet-bearded head roll'd on the floor. So died Earl Doorm by him he counted dead." With the confession of Geraint comes the recon- ciliation, and two souls estranged blend into one, he becoming the "great prince," and she "Enid the good." Such is the legend ; but what of the ethical teaching, and what place do the characters occupy in the war of Soul with Sense ? It is evident Geraint is not the ideal. He pos- sesses physical power, is great and strong and brave, but he is suspicious and jealous and tyran- nical towards Enid, because the spiritual is asleep within him. At present with the eyes of Sense he can see only the Enid of sensuous beauty, of whom he is jealous. If he could sec with the eyes of Soul he would see her ideal loveliness, and thus GERAINT AND ENID. 101 seeing he could never doubt ; but as it is he is suspicious and becomes jealous and tyrannical. If you say he ought not to have been so, the answer is that, seeing only by the sense, he could not be aught else ; when the soul awakes he will see differently, but so long as he is sense-bound he will see what the sense brings him. Then does Geraint not love Enid ? Yes, indeed ; but his love is animal love ; it is the love of the lion for his lioness ; the love of passion and instinct ; the love that sees physical qualities, but, having no spiritual perception, sees no moral loveliness. There is an animal and instinc- tive love. There is also a spiritual and perceptive love. Geraint is a great animal who loves Enid for her physical beauty, not for her grace of soul. As yet he is blind to the charms of character that would have made his cruel doubt impossible. Thus Geraint stands for the soul stricken through with Sense. He judges Enid ever by the purblind sense, he takes " false for true," and forges his own trouble. While Enid drives the horses through the waste the angel of pity once stirs within him, but quickly folds her wings in the sense-bound cage. Still the angel is there, and in the end will soar beyond the sense. Now what of Enid ? Her own sex have plunged into the fray and shot envenomed arrows at her, until Earl Doorm's treatment of her seems merciful. The whole race of women appears to have conspired against " Enid the lovely." It io2 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. is said that she was weak and silly and ought not to have yielded to the unjust jealousy and mad caprice of her husband, and that there could be no " woman's rights " were we all En ids. We reply, Enid is the ideal of womanhood. Her love is ideal just because she can goon loving and trusting Geraint when he responds only with scorn and suspicion and jealousy. She might have resented his conduct and no one could have blamed her ; she would have been within her woman's rights : but then her love would have fallen short of the ideal — the ideal that can love and wait, believing that the mystery will be cleared and the heart won again by the love and the waiting. Further, the wisdom of her obedience is challenged. She is spoken of as weak and blind in obeying the cruel commands of Geraint. But, observe, she discriminates, she obeys where obedience, painful for her, is no hurt to him, as when she drove the horses on before : but she disobeys when obedience might result in injury to him. Her obedience is thus ideal, because in all it considers the good of the object loved. If she had stood upon her " rights " she would not have won again the heart of Geraint, but because she waived her " rights " and loved him even in the mystery, and obeyed with wise discrimination, she wins the victory in the end. Enid is thus the type of the soul that does not live by sense merely, but by love and trust and obedience when mystery GERAINT AND ENID. 103 enfolds it. So she conquers Geraint, who is now no longer the sense-bound life, but he sees the spiritual beauty, the deathless angel, within the soul of Enid. Here then we have the central truth which the poet sings so sublimely, and teaches with ever-wider range so earnestly — that the highest life is only reached through that moral energy which strikes down every lawless passion. Self-indulgence is best cured by self-sacrifice. Ignoble jealousy is best crushed by the higher love that " thinks no evil." "... Nor did he doubt her more, But rested in her fealty, till he crown'd A happy life with a fair death. . . ." Balin In " Balin and Balan " we trace the tragic and results of cherished evil in Arthur's court. Balan. ^^ e a ; r j s thickening and the shadows are deepening. The taint impregnates the whole atmo- sphere, and the realm of Arthur is in danger. Lancelot and Guinevere must be held morally responsible for the tragedy that follows. Evil is gauged by its results. Its circle may be wide, but its centre is the same, and the centre must be held responsible for the circle. The story begins with Pellam the king, who had taken sides with Lot and lost his kingdom, which, however, Arthur had restored on the condition of io4 THE TEACHING OF TKNNYSON. his paying tribute. Pellam had become an ascetic, and was so absorbed in " other worldliness " as to forget the duties of earth. He thinks more about Arimathean Joseph, the saints and the relics, than of his lawful debts. He is the type of asceticism that degraded religion by cherishing its shell and sacrificing its kernel. While he will allow no women to pass his palace gates, his son Garlon is both sensualist and assassin ! He is so dead to the world as to forget he owes tribute. It is a phase of the ascetic life that separates itself from the currents of humanity. It dies into a stagnant pool. The asceticism that makes Pellam a hypocrite also drives his son into secret sensualism and cowardly murder. The pious Pellam not having paid his tribute, Arthur commands his treasurer to wait upon the defaulter and remind him that " Man's word is God in man." The treasurer hesitates, fearing the two strange knights, Balin and Balan, who sit by the well of Camelot, but, ordered not to molest them, he passes on to the court of Pellam. King Arthur appears at the well where Balin and Balan are " sitting statuelike." When asked why, they reply, " For the sake of glory," and boast of their victories over Arthur's Knights. The King answers that he too is of Arthur's hall and challenges them to combat ; but he lightly smites them down, and leaves them to their own reflcc- BALIN AND BALAN. 105 tions. Ere long he sends and commands them to his hall. Then Balin tells the story of his life, how he had been a Knight of the King's, but in nature was " the savage," and had struck in passion one of Arthur's thralls, with the result that the King had sent him into exile and his life had been bitter in its fury ; but now he thought that if the King could hear of his prowess by the well, he might make his brother Balan, knight, who was " ten times worthier." Resolved to tell the whole truth, he confesses how that very day they had fallen before an unknown knight. Arthur, im- pressed by his honesty, restores him to knighthood. " ' Rise, my true knight. As children learn, be thou Wiser for falling ! walk with me, and move To music with thine Order and the King.' Thereafter, when Sir Balin enter'd hall, The Lost one Found was greeted as in Heaven." Balan, the guardian angel of his brother, is also received into the Order. The treasurer, returning from the court of Pellam, reports the mummery of his ascetic life. Pellam, in his other worldliness, had referred him to his son Garlon for the tribute, who paid it " railing at thine and thee." He had also found in the woods the body of a Knight of Arthur's, " spear- stricken from behind," and had suspected Garlon : but a woodman had told him of a demon, once a man, driven by evil tongues to hate his fellows, 106 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. who sallied from a cave, and from behind flashed his deadly spear. Superstition thus accounts for the natural by the supernatural. The " fiend " was Garlon disguised. Arthur at once calls for a Knight "... 'Who will hunt for me This demon of the woods?' . . ." Balan claims the quest, and ere he rides away embraces Balin and warns him against himself. " ' Let not thy moods prevail, when I am gone Who used to lay them ! hold them outer fiends, Who leap at thee to tear thee ; shake them aside.' " He commends Balin to the purity and fellowship of his Order, all unconscious of the serpent coiled within the " flowery welcome.'' To Balan, Arthur's hall is the ideal life. "'No more of hatred than in Heaven itself, No more of jealousy than in Paradise ! ' " Sir Balin, left to himself, becomes reflective. He is conscious that he is far from having realised the ideal of Arthur. The qualities that make the ideal are courtesy and manhood and knighthood, the last combining strength and gentleness. Now observe : Balin is not satisfied with having the ideal in the abstract, but he must see it in the actual. Sir Lancelot, being the favourite of the King and Queen, is regarded throughout the court as the ideal knicrht. Wherefore Balin " hovered BALIN AND BALAN. 107 round Lancelot," but, as the lame-born boy looks to the heights flushed with the sun and sighs because he cannot climb, so Balin as he watches Lancelot sighs in spirit : " . . . ' These be gifts, Born with the blood, not learnable, divine, Beyond my reach.' ..." Then he imagines that the glory of Lancelot is but the reflected radiance of the Queen — if only he might look upon the Queen and see the realised ideal, he too might win the strength and gentleness of knighthood ; but that being impossible he will crave a boon — a token — upon which he may gaze and thus restrain his violence ; he will ask "To bear her own crown-royal upon shield." The boon is granted. "... And all the world Made music, and he felt his being move In music with his Order, and the King." But as the notes of the nightingale change, so the music in him is broken by fitful gusts of wrath. He strives strenuously to realise the ideal and " seemed at length in peace." Suddenly the scene is changed and the situation becomes dramatic. Sir Balin is sitting one morning close-bowered within the garden when down a path of roses wanders Guinevere, and from a door emerges Lancelot. 10S THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. They meet. Eyes flash their message. The flush upon the face of the Queen tells its story, and Balin sees and hears and starts from his bower. " ' Queen ? subject ? but I see not what I see, Damsel and lover? hear not what I hear.' • • • He sharply caught his lance and shield, Nor stay'd to crave permission of the King, But, mad for strange adventure, dashed away " — away into the woods, where his brother Balan hunts the demon of the cave. The woodman declares the devil to be genuine. "... ' Our devil is a truth, I saw the flash of him but yestereven, Look to the cave.' . . ." But Balin is careless and tempestuous, and does not see the cave ; " Whereout the Demon issued up from Hell." It is not until a spear flashes by him, and a shape with pointed lance vanishes into the woods that he is alarmed, and, blindly pursuing the " fiend," strikes against a tree and is unhorsed ; then remounts and rides in haste until he enters Pellam's hall. "A home of bats, in every tower an owl." The crown-royal upon his shield attracts attention. Garlon is inquisitive, and Balin answers that by BALIN AND BALAN. 109 consent of the Queen, " best and purest," he wears it ; whereupon Garlon hisses " ' Best, purest ? thou from Arthur's hall, and yet So simple ! ' " He assails the honour of the Queen. By the side of Balin stands a goblet " bossed with holy Joseph's legend." This goblet Balin grasps and would hurl at Garlon's head, but the memory of the crown-royal causes him to relax his hold, saying, " I will be gentle " ; but his words belie him as he pours out his wrath upon the man who dare insult the Queen. In the early morn he walks into the castle yard and encounters Garlon, who twits him again upon the " crown-scandalous." Sir Balin now loses all self-control, splits the head of Garlon, and only escapes " a score of pointed lances " by hiding in King Pellam's chapel. Thence by horse he rides through many miles, when the weary creature drops at last by a fallen oak. Thinking he has disgraced himself by violence, he hangs the shield upon the boughs, withdraws into the wood and flings himself upon the ground " moaning, ' My violences, my violences ! ' " Now Vivien, subtle as the serpent, appears upon the scene. She finds the crown-royal, and comes upon the prostrate Balin ; she tells a pathetic story of her simulated wrongs, and claims his protection, but Balin declares that he is disgraced, and will live no THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. and die a savage of the woods. Vivien conjures up a love scene twixt Lancelot and Guinevere by the great tower of Caerleon, and Balin, struck with horror, breaths in a dismal whisper, "It is truth." He grinds his teeth and yells, tears down the shield, stamps out the crown-royal and, cursing, hurls it into the woods. Balan hears the wild yell and, believing it to be the " scream of the wood-devil," dashes through the forest all unconsciously on Balin. Both brothers fall to the ground. Balin is crushed beneath his horse and Balan is wounded with a mortal thrust, while Vivien cries, " Fools ! " Then she bounds away, with her brood of vipers coiled within her breast to lift their heads — perhaps in Arthur's hall ! The Squire of Vivien had loosed the casques from the faces of the brothers, and they recognize each other. Pathetic is the scene where Balin crawls to his dying brother, and Balan draws down the face he loves and kisses it, with sobs of sorrow. Then comes the final parting as the shadow falls from out eternity, and Balin utters his farewell. " ' The night has come. I scarce can see thee now. Goodnight ! for we shall never bid again Goodmorrow.' . . . Balan answer'd low, 'Goodnight, true brother, here! goodmorrow there!' . . . And slept the sleep With Balin, either lock'd in either's arm." BALIN AND BALAN. m Now how do these two characters illustrate the " war of Sense with Soul " ? Both brothers are powerful personalities, but Balin is dominated by sense and Balan by spirit Balin by nature is passionate and volcanic, and his ideas are mixed in that lava flood within. He is radically good, but his goodness is driven by the impulsive and erratic force that makes him weak when he ought to be strong. What he most needs, he most lacks, — the clear, calm vision of spiritual realities apart from persons. He had been " the savage," but the good within revolts and asserts itself, and he longs for the purer life of Arthur's hall. When restored by favour of the King he has a clear conception of the ideal of knighthood — courtesy, manhood, strength, gentleness — but he must see it in bodily form. An ideal has no power over Balin unless it take flesh and live before him, a veritable incarnation. Unless he can see he will not believe. He must have " signs " for his faith and his ideal must have an objective reality. So he turns to Lancelot and " hovers round " the ideal knight, only to find there is a higher ideal — the source of his inspiration — the Queen. If only he may gaze upon the Queen, she may flash her nobility of soul into him, but failing that he will beg to wear the crown-royal upon his shield, that, looking upon it, he may win self-control. Thus Balin lives by the sense. His ideal is good, but he must see it in the flesh. His motive is good — n2 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. self-control ; but the control can only come through Sense, he must have the crown-royal to look upon. Now mark how Sense wars with Soul. When Balin is a witness of the scene in the garden, Sense seems to say to him, There is your ideal ! What do you think of it now ? Then did the senses deceive him ? No, they saw what was. The senses saw only the outward — true as far as the senses could see. The persons were false, but that did not prove the ideal to be false ; it only proved that Balin was living by Sense, and not by Soul. If he had looked through Soul at the ideal he would have been saved, but he looks through Sense at the persons, and is lost. Thus we learn that no human life has ever perfectly realised an absolute ideal. Faith must not be fixed on persons, but on principles. Men on earth reflect only faint rays of the sun in heaven. The Sun is infinitely greater than the rays, and purer. To live by the sense, to believe only what we see, is to see little of heaven in man but much of earth, until earth seems greater than heaven, and, with Balin, the soul plunges again into the wilds, and lives the life of a savage. The character that depends on the sensuous for its ideal is in danger of losing it. The sensuous is as likely to degrade the spiritual as the spiritual is likely to redeem the sensuous. Balan is the antithesis of his brother, and is the BALIN AND BALAN. 113 type of the spiritual man. He does not confound principles with persons, ideals with individuals, but is careful to discriminate. He soars beyond the sense, sees the spiritual and the eternal, and though Lancelot and Guinevere may fail to in- carnate goodness, and though Vivien may hiss like a serpent in Eden, and though the realm of Arthur may be shattered, yet Balan knows that goodness lives ; and when death begins to chill the fire of life, and Balin falls back into materialism, with pathetic despair crying : "'Goodnight! for we shall never bid again Goodmorrovv,' " then Balan, living by the spirit, "seeing Him who is invisible," replies with radiant hope, as if the dawn were already breaking : " ' Goodnight, true brother, here ! Goodmorrovv there ! ' " and lifts him by the power of his own spiritual victory into the coming light, and once again Soul triumphs over Sense by " the evidence of things not seen." Thg In " The Holy Grail " * the war of Sense Holy with Soul is clearly portrayed. The soul Grail. is pictured throughout in conflict with the * " The Holy Grail " is one of the most imaginative of my poems. I have expressed there my strong feeling as to the Reality of the Unseen. — Tennyson, A Memoir, ii., p. 90. ii 4 THE TEACHING OK TENNYSON. dangers arising out of the life of mystic musing and uncontrolled ecstasy and sensuous allurement. The Holy Grail represents the Cup used in the Last Supper. "... And if a man Could touch or see it, he was heal'd at once, By faith, of all his ills. . . ." Sir Percivale, who had " passed into the silent life of prayer," sitting by the cloisters under the yew- tree, tells the story to the monk Ambrosius. His sister, a pure and gentle nun, first heard the legend of the Grail from the lips of an old man, who hoped it might have come when Arthur cleansed the court, " but sin broke out." She, longing for the vision, gave herself to prayer and fasting. One day she sent for Percivale and told him how the Holy Grail had come to her. A silver beam flashed in upon her cell " and down the long beam stole the Holy Grail." " ' And tell thy brother knights to fast and pray, That so perchance the vision may be seen By thee and those, and all the world be heal'd.' " And he went and told the story to all men, and himself fasted and prayed. Galahad was the first to come under the spell of the holy legend and the deathless passion of the saintly maiden. " Then came a year of miracle," and Sir Percivale tells how one summer night "'That Galahad would sit down in Merlin's chair,'" The holy grail. 115 when suddenly there came a storm — thunder and lightning — and in a radiant beam the Holy Grail appeared " covered with a luminous cloud." Then the Knights of Arthur longed to go in search of the sacred cup. They entered into solemn vows without the knowledge of their King. He returned to find tumult in the hall, and when he heard the cause his face darkened as if he saw the shattering of his realm. He told them they had sacrificed the chance of doing noble deeds in following " wandering fires," but their vows were sacred and they must go. So the Knights were scattered. They went their way, some through wilds and wastes, others through conflicts and self- torture, striving to win the vision of the Grail. The war of Soul in varying experiences is pictured in the conflicts of Percivale, Galahad, Bors and Lancelot. The conflicts differ with the differences of character. Each has his battle to wage on the way to the victory of life. Sir Percivale at the outset of the search had to battle with his own self-consciousness. When he recalled his prowess in the lists, the strong arm that had defeated the great and brave, he felt that Heaven smiled upon him as on a favoured son, and that he would surely find the Holy Grail. Then came the memory of the words of Arthur and of his own deeds, as if crying " This Quest is not for thee," and he found himself " in a land of sand ti6 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. and thorns." The soul that would make itself great by its conceits is made little by its conscience. It was the temptation to trust in the outward. The outward may conform to all the rules of decorum and the earthly standards of greatness, but what if the inward be stained with sin and veined with self? Then the supremacy of Sense falls into dust before the eyes of the spirit, and the soul finds itself, in the words of Percivale, " ' Alone, and in a land of sand and thorns, And I was thirsty even unto death.' " Then he rode on with that ever-burning thirst, and came to a brook that made music to his ears, on whose banks goodly apples grew, tempting to the taste, where lawns of tender verdure invited him to rest, and he drank of the brook and tasted of the apples and would have rested on the lawns, when lo ! all fell into dust, and the great thirst remained " in a land of sand and thorns." The symbol reveals the charms of the sensuous, and how they fail to slake the thirst of the inner life. The vision of sensuous beauty, when abused, can only result in spiritual indolence. The streams of worldly indulgence only leave the living soul with the fever of its thirst. Divine realities are won, not in sitting by the stream eating the fruits of sensuous delights, but by strenuous conflict with the evil. THE HOLY GRAIL. 117 Still on he rode, and came to a fair house with a kindly woman spinning at the door. She wel- comed him to rest, but at his touch they " fell into dust and nothing." The delights of domestic life — the loves of home — are thus symbolised as tempting the soul from its high and noble quest. May it not rest here in the joys of human love, with the prattle of little children, " those truants from heaven " ? No. Though natural love may be pure and sweet as the winds blowing down from the hills, no soul that thirsts for the sacred vision can be satisfied. It cannot find its best and highest in human loves, be they never so gentle and good. Well if they lead it on to the divine, but ill indeed if they cause it to rest in things human. At the last these must fade, and when death takes all, there will be naught to slake the burning thirst. " And on I rode, and greater was ?ny thirst." Then came a golden light, and as it flashed across the world he thought, " The sun is rising," but it was one crowned and robed with gold, whose splendour dazed his sight, and who seemed to be " Lord of all the world." It is the symbol of wealth, and of the temptation it presents to the soul in its search after life. To yield to the lust of gold, to exhaust the energies of being in the absorbing desire to be rich, is to u8 THE TEACHING OE TENNYSON. find at last cravings of heart and voices out of the deep that wealth cannot satisfy. Gold may give pleasure to the senses, but it gives no satisfaction to the soul that feels the pulse of immortality and cries, "Give me God." The gold fell into dust. " And I was left alone, And wearying, in a land of sand and thorns." He next arrived at a great hill, where a city rose with spires piercing the heavens, and a crowd at the gateway cried, " Welcome, Percivale ! " But when he reached the heights it was to find the ruins of a city with the silence of death. The crowd had vanished, save one old man, who " fell into dust " as Percivale strove to ask "'Whence and what art thou?'" The fleeting glory of human ambition is thus por- trayed. Fame, like the pinnacles of the city, may soar into the heavens to-day, and fall into the dust of oblivion to-morrow. Though the soul may scale the heights and win the glory it is still conscious of the ever-living thirst. The wind of death passes over the city of human greatness, when it falls into ruins, and the living walk on the graves of the dead ! Thus, Percivale could not find in fame enough to satisfy the thirst of the soul. " And I was left alone.'* Then he found himself within a lowly vale where was a chapel and a holy hermit to whom he spoke THE HOLY GRAIL. n 9 of his strange adventures, of the allurements of the way, and of his failure to find the Holy Grail. The hermit warned him that the secret of his failure was his lack of true humility. " ' Thou hast not lost thyself to save thyself As Galahad.' . . ." Percivale, continuing the conversation with Am- brosius, further relates the appearance of Galahad, and tells how he was made " one with him, to believe as he believed " — how he had followed him up the hill of death where storms raged, and had seen him pass amid a blaze of fire and a roar of thunder, like the " shoutings of the sons of God " — pass like a silver star into the spiritual city, and then it was there flashed upon him the vision of the Grail and he was satisfied, and returned to Arthur's hall. Ambrosius would know whether he had come only upon " phantoms " in his Quest, and learns of a carnal temptation. It was the Princess of the castle, who, with artful wiles, had striven to win him from the holy Quest to a life of sensuous delights. She was beautiful and rich, and the love of his youth. The conflict waged between love and duty : self and self-renunciation glows fiercely in the lines — "'0 me, my brother! but one night my vow Burnt me within, so that I rose and fled, But wail'd and wept, and hated mine own self, 120 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. And ev'n the Holy Quest, and all but her ; Then after I was join'd with Galahad Cared not for her, nor anything upon earth.' " The war of Sense with Soul is thus portrayed in the character of Percivale and in the symbolism of his experience. He is simply a creation standing for the living soul seeking purity and truth and God. His experiences depict the varied conflicts of Soul with Sense. All through Percivale is attacked on the sensuous side of his nature, where he is most susceptible. He is weak, and he is conscious of his weakness. He is not strong enough to stand alone, and is only girded by the might of Galahad, and redeemed from evil by the power of his spirituality, yet even after he has won the sacred vision he cannot trust himself, but goes into " the silent life." So strong arc the allurements of Sense. He is by nature carnal, but is made spiritual by grace. Finding no satisfaction in the temporal he wins at last, through Galahad, the vision of the eternal. Thus the victory is won over Sense. The thirst of the soul cannot be slaked until it drinks of the life of God. The storm must rage within the deeps of being until the peace of heaven falls. "Then fell the floods of Heaven, drowning the deep." Sir Galahad is the most beautiful of the characters and the most difficult to delineate. He is too ethereal and spiritual for analysis. He is not THE HOLY GRAIL. r 2 i of earth, but of heaven. Little is related of his conflicts with self and sense. His spiritual career begins as he looks upon the glowing face and listens to the warning words of the holy maiden. " She sent the deathless passion in her eyes Thro' him, and made him hers, and laid her mind On him, and he believed in her belief."' His nature was sensitive to the spiritual. He moved in white armour among the knights, symbol of purity, and when knighted "'God make thee good as thou art beautiful,'" said Arthur. The soil of his nature was well fitted for the seed of grace that grew into a flower of heavenly beauty. But was there no worm to wither the flower ? There is something in the spiritual making of Galahad which suggests that the flower had a worm at its root, and the worm had to be killed, or it would surely kill the flower. The clue is supplied in the symbolic chair of Merlin " 'For there,' he said, ' No man could sit but he should lose himself : ' And once by misadvertence Merlin sat In his own chair, and so was lost ; but he, Galahad, when he heard of Merlin's doom, Cried, ' If I lose myself I save myself ! ' " The chair, with its mystic scrolls, is the symbol of knowledge. Knowledge involves responsibility. i22 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. To know the difference between good and evil and to choose, as Merlin did, the evil — to sacrifice the spiritual for the sensuous — is to be lost in the chair of knowledge. But to make the sacrifice of self, and all pleasant but fatal things of sense, and become the willing slave of truth and goodness, is to save one's life. Here was the worm of self at the root of the flower. Self would have him sit in Merlin's chair and choose the evil. It is the old conflict waged between flesh and spirit ; the tragedy played on the curtained stage of every human soul. But Sir Galahad said, "'If I lose myself, I save myself!'" He will make the sacrifice of self that he may win the vision of the spirit, and find the higher self born in the death of the lower. It is the great truth of self-renunciation which he sees to be essential to the victory of the soul. The throne of life is only reached over " the stepping-stones of our dead selves." And he made the sacrifice, at what cost the idyll does not tell, for what reward the sequel shows. Ambrosius, the not too spiritual monk, had enough perception to detect the secret of the saintly Galahad when he rebuked the sensuous Percivale, saying "'Thou hast not lost thyself to save thyself As Galahad.' . . ." The King also recognised his spiritual supremacy THE HOLY GRAIL. 123 over his brother Knights when, in reply to his declaration, " I saw the Holy Grail," " ' Ah Galahad, Galahad,' said the King, ' tor such As thou art is the vision, not for these.' " In the conflict between self and self-renunciation, the higher nature is triumphant in Galahad. He shapes into the spiritual warrior. The new forces that awake within him are transmuted into mighty energies that strike down the evil and redress the wrong. The life that thrills his being does not waste itself in pietistic brooding, but leaps, like a sword from its scabbard, to purge the land. The process of his spiritual evolution marks the progress of the living soul from the lower to the higher. First comes the victory over Self and Sense ; then, with the strength born of victory, he becomes the iconoclast of evil. "... 'And in the strength of this I rode, Shattering all evil customs everywhere.' " Having won the battle within, he is armed for the battle without. Galahad is the type of the spiritual warrior drilled into efficiency by the discipline of his own soul. He loses himself in God and in the service of man, and goes at last through the storm and lightning of death to live with God. " ' And hence I go ; and one will crown me king Far in the spiritual city.' . . ." i2 4 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. Thus Soul, through sacrifice of self, is victor over Sense. Sir Bors also wins the vision of the Holy Grail. There is naught in him of the mystic warrior or the religious enthusiast. " ' If God would send the vision, well : if not, The Quest and he were in the hands of Heaven.'" And that calm faith is unshaken though severely tested. Among the crags in a lonely part of the realm he finds a heathen people with their ancient cult. They fail to make a convert of him by persuasion, and would bring him to his senses by coercion. They bind him and bury him in a cell of " great piled stones." There, with faith tested in prospect of death, through the gap of a fallen stone, he wins the vision of the Holy Grail. " . . . ' Beyond all hopes of mine Who scarce had pray'd, or ask'd it for myself.' " The cause of success or failure is to be sought in the character. Sir Bors is the type of a perfectly honest man, transparent in rectitude. He is not in the least emotional, and is incapable of great religious fervour, but he has honest simplicity and pure-heartedncss, and unshaken conviction, which enable him to win the victory of Soul without much effort. That he is beautifully altruistic glows in the words ; THE HOLY GRAIL. 125 " ' He well had been content Not to have seen, so Lancelot might have seen, The Holy Cup of healing.' . . ." This was not indifference to but tender pity for the anguish of Lancelot, so that the very cell in which he was buried may be regarded as a symbol of the buried self. And may we not think of the Maiden of Faith who set him free, as a type of the deathless angel that opens to the spirit the barred gates of Sense ? When the soul stirs within the grave of its dead self it wins the sacred Quest, it sees the angel of the resurrection. Sir Lancelot, in his complex character and tragic experiences, sounds deeper depths in the conflict of Sense with Soul. What a character he is ! We pity him while we blame him. We love him while we spurn him. He stirs within us such mingled feelings, possibly because his life is so human and real. He charms us when the greatness of heaven seems to be about him. He was built for heaven, but marred by earth. He might have been a strong angel, but his wings were broken, and soiled by one subtle sin. Heaven and earth, angel and devil, contend for the mastery. Thus, throughout, Lancelot seems a dual-man. He photographs his inmost self in the confession : "' . . . But in me lived a sin So strange, of such a kind, that all of pure, i26 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. Noble, and knightly in me twined and clung Round that one sin, until the wholesome flower And poisonous grew together. . . .' " His guilty love of Guinevere was the poisonous weed that would suck the life of the flower of goodness. " Who shall deliver me from the body of this death ? " was the agonising cry of Lancelot. The spiritual and the carnal on the silent secret field of every human life wrestle for supremacy. The victories of soul are not chronicled on earth, but they are written in heaven. Its tragedies are not seen by men, but lie open to the eyes of the All-seeing. Lancelot reveals the contest between Sense and Soul at its fiercest, and in the Gethsemane of his agony we catch a glimpse of the blood-red way that leads for some up to the heights of victory. To the King he relates his experiences, and as he states them we are conscious of their spiritual significance. In the effort to tear the " twain asunder " in his heart, the weed of evil and the flower of good, he tells how he was driven into waste places, where he was " beaten down by little men " ! Sir Lancelot, once so strong, is now so weak. His sin had sapped the moral energies of his life. He had cherished it so long that it was like a parasite sucking his strength, so that he succumbs to little sins. It is a vital lesson which the soul struggling with Sense and self must learn — that to THE HOLY GRAIL. 127 cherish sin, even in desire, is to cherish a vampire that drains the life and leaves the soul a prey to every creeping thing of evil. There can be no compromise. Either sin must be slain or the man. Then he tells how he came to a " naked shore " where nought but " coarse grasses " grew. It is the wilderness of the soul that once knew God and goodness, but lost the sacred vision. The soul, like the naked shore, is bereft of the beautiful ; no flowers of heavenly grace grow within, only the coarser growths. It is burnt and hardened by the fire of evil and swept by the storm brewed in the deeps of death. Lancelot is caught in the roar of its tumult. A great blast is heard, louder than the voices of the deep, shaking the clouds into confusion and the sands into sound. What are they but the symbols of his own unrest — the reflex of of the storm that surges and sobs within his own vexed being ? Then he saw a boat in the wild surf and said : " ' " I will embark and I will lose myself, And in the great sea wash away my sin." '"* What does it mean ? Why, he will fight the storm, or it will beat out his life : he will take " arms against a sea of trouble " and in the great sea of spiritual conflict will wash away his sin. "'Seven days I drove along the dreary deep.'" * " Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood clean from my hand ? " — Macbeth. 128 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. They arc the seven days of Soul in struggle with Sense. His guilty love is like the passion of the sea. The soul would be pure, but Sense storms about it, and yet there is hope. " 'And with me drove the moon and all the stars; And the wind fell. . . .'" And these are symbols of the heavenly lights that come out like angel-pilots to guide the soul into the diviner way of peace. Then he came to the enchanted towers of Carbo- nek, " a castle like a rock upon a rock." The sym- bolism is now most significant. He found the steps that met the breakers guarded by two lions, and when he drew his sword to smite he heard a voice : "'"Doubt not, go forward; if thou doubt, the beasts Will tear thee piecemeal." Thus the Soul in conflict with Sense, in its struggle to be pure, must learn the lesson of Faith. To doubt is to be lost ; doubt is the paralysis of action. The soul that lingers to question the possibility of its purity practically renews the invitation to its darling sin, and becomes a lost soul on the very steps of victory. F'aith that not all is lost, that God is in heaven, and that the moon and stars still gleam across the dark sky — faith in the possibility of regeneration — is half the battle, and Lancelot believed, and passed on and up into a " sounding hall." In the hall was no picture or shield upon the wall, no bench or table upon the floor. THE HOLY GRAIL. 129 It is the hall of prayer and meditation. Why the emptiness of the hall ? Surely to teach that the heavenly sounds can only be heard in the being empty of self and Sense and all things that distract. Into that deep silence of being with naught but God comes the heavenly voice of hope. Thus with Lancelot " ' But always in the quiet house I heard, Clear as a lark, high o'er me as a lark, A sweet voice singing in the topmost tower To the eastward. . . ." ' It is the voice of Divine hope that sings its " Excelsior " in every soul fighting its doubts and sins, struggling to be pure and free. It must not live in the lower, it must ascend to the higher. " ' . . . Up I climb'd a thousand steps With pain : as in a dream I seem'd to climb For ever. . . .' " They are the steps of persistence. Not in a flash may the mingled results of the poisonous weed and the wholesome flower be separated. Not in a day will the lower vacate the throne for the higher. The victories of Soul are won through long years of discipline and conflict. " Move upward, working out the beast And let the ape and tiger die,"* is ever the call of that sweet voice out of the East ; * In Mcmoriam, 9 130 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. but the soul cannot soar to that high life and Divine — it must go by way of the thousand steps of persistent effort : yet ever in the " sounding hall " of prayer may be heard the heavenly voice of hope. Sir Lancelot toiled on and upward until at a door he heard " ' "Glory and joy and honour to our Lord And to the Holy Vessel of the Grail." ' " He forced the door and entered, was blinded with the glare as of a great furnace, and swooned in the awful light that smote him. " ' O, yet methought I saw the Holy Grail, All pall'd in crimson samite, and around Great angels, awful shapes, and wings and eyes. . . . But what I saw was veil'd And cover'd ; and this Quest was not for me.'" The unveiled vision is not permitted Lancelot, that he may learn the lesson of reverence. Rev- erence will wait with deep humility praying, " Lord, Lord, open unto us," but Lancelot " essay'd the door." Thus, in the ascending series of faith and prayer and persistence, we find that reverence in the presence of the Awful Purity is essential to the unveiled vision ; but Lancelot is permitted to see the veiled glory. He sees enough to make him pure, and in the end he dies a " holy man." What, now, is the King's estimate of the conduct and the character of his Knights ? THE HOLY GRAIL. 131 " ' " Blessed are Bors, Lancelot and Percivale, For these have seen according to their sight." The Holy Grail was to them a symbol of purity, and their spirits were cleansed by fiery trial or spiritual warfare. But the many knights — like Gawain — who sought the Holy Grail, not for its spiritual significance, but because of superficial sentiment or sensuous excitement, followed " wander- ing fires." In them Sense triumphed over Soul. The spiritual Knights saw " according to their sight " ; looking for purity they found purity. The sensuous knights — the greater number — won no vision of the spiritual, for they had no eye for it. They would have lived more noble lives, and done more noble deeds, if they had been content to do the work nearest to them. The King had uttered a prophecy which in the end was verified. " ' Your places being vacant at my side, This chance of noble deeds will come and go Unchallenged, while ye follow wandering fires Lost in the quagmire ! Many of you, yea most, Return no more. . . .' " Thus the Round Table of the King was broken, and the Knights, upon whose souls he had momen- tarily flashed his likeness, who had fought his foes and won his battles, were scattered. The idyll surely teaches that highest life is found and holiest vision won at the " Table Round " of duty, and in strenuous effort to fulfil the plain prosaic duties i32 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. of life, however loveless. To some few, like the " holy maiden," it may be given to find the highest and the best in spiritual mysticism, but, for most of us, the safest way lies in making the best of our life where it is, and, like the King himself, in never " wandering from the allotted field," and in fighting our evil where we are bravely and patiently. So we shall find a light not of earth, and a vision that shall not pass. "'"Who may not wander from the allotted field Before his work be done ; but, being done, Let visions of the night or of the day Come, as they will ; and many a time they come, Until this earth he walks on seems not earth, This light that strikes his eyeball is not light, This air that smites his forehead is not air But vision — yea, his very hand and foot — *In moments when he feels he cannot die, And knows himself no vision to himself, Nor the High God a vision, nor that One Who rose again. . . ." ' " Guinevere. THROUGH all these years the victory had been on the side of Sense. When Guinevere first rode with Lancelot among the flowers the evil was wrought. She learned to love this courtly Knight, with his warmth of colour. As years passed love deepened ; they met in secret and pledged their vows. Suspicion haunted the court, * "These three lines in Arthur's speech are the (spiritually) central lines of the Idylls." — Tennyson, A Memoir, ii., p. 90. THE HOLY GRAIL. 133 and conscience grappled with their heart-strings. Soul clashed in furious battle with Sense. The agony of Lancelot was stamped upon his face. " The great and guilty love he bare the Queen, In battle with the love he bare his lord, Had marr'd his face and mark'd it ere his time." And so, with Guinevere, Sense did not become regnant without a struggle. She is stronger on the sensuous than on the moral side, her mental powers dominate the spiritual, but she has just enough conscience to make her feel. The remorse of Guinevere, in the earlier scenes, never deepens beyond regret. " . . . ' I for you This many a year have done despite and wrong To one whom ever, in my heart of hearts, I did acknowledge nobler.' . . . ." The regret is not deep, though it suggests a spark of conscience which may flame again. As years pass her reason is more alive to the danger. The guilty love being cooler and more calculating, she becomes suspicious of Modred. " She half-foresaw that he, the subtle beast, Would track her guilt until he found, and hers Would be for evermore a name of scorn." The sense of shame and regret awakens, but even the regret is almost selfish. There is no thought of the great wrong done to Arthur, or of the loss to herself in not having " loved the best and highest." i ; l4 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. As yet she thinks only of her fair name, defamed, should Modred learn the secret. But shame for a lost name is a moral quality which may be strengthened. The fact is, Gui- nevere had not yet realised the badness of her sin. She had toyed with it so long that its features had changed, and ceased to be repulsive. She does not as yet see her sin, only herself lost to fame and name ; but conscience is stirring, and a pulse of nobler life begins to beat. We feel how much stronger it has grown in the lines, " Henceforward too, the Powers that tend the soul, To help it from the death that cannot die, And save it even in extremes, began To vex and plague her. . . ." Even in her dreams conscience makes her coward. She dreams that a shadow falls from out the sun ; it broadens and blackens until land and cities are swathed and burned in the fiery darkness. It is the shadow of her evil which she sees through the eyes of awakened conscience, falling dark and deadly over the fair realm of the King. This slow awakening of the moral nature in Guinevere is an instructive study. Conscience has now so far reasserted itself that she seriously pro- poses to Lancelot their final separation ! " ' O Lancelot, get thee hence to thine own land, Fur if thou tarry we shall meet again, GUINEVERE. 135 And if we meet again, some evil chance Will make the smouldering scandal break and blaze Before the people, and our lord the King.' " Lancelot promised, but failed to perform, and must be held responsible, for " still they met and met." Whatever specious arguments he used he failed to soothe her deep unrest or hush the holy voice that cried through the soiled sanctuary of her being. "... Again she said, ' O Lancelot, if thou love me get thee hence.' " The night for the long farewell is fixed ; " passion pale they met," when suddenly the voice of Modred shouts — " ' Traitor, come out, ye are trapt at last." The guilty secret is out. The cherished evil of two hearts will work its own tragedy ; " the end is come." Sir Lancelot would have the Queen fly across the sea, where he would defend her with his life. She reminds him of the farewell, and calls him "friend," to indicate how final is the separation. At last they come to the parting of the ways. She decides to renounce him. Sense had clashed with Soul for the guilty love, but in the end Soul is victor. " For I will draw me into sanctuary." i 3 6 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. It reveals moral possibilities in Guinevere that she should gain her greatest moral victory at such a crisis. She breaks with Lancelot at the moment she most needs him. Love and expedience and Lancelot plead for elopement, but conscience pleads for right, and conscience wins. It must not be forgotten that Guinevere met the crisis of her life, strangled her guilty love, and banished her lover when in dire necessity. Thus Soul wins supremacy over Sense, and her higher nature slowly emerges to the point of a new vision. Sir Lancelot leaves for his castle, while the Queen travels all night to Almesbury across the " glimmering waste," where her sense of utter loneliness is voiced by nature in the moaning of the spirits of the weald and in the rush of the cold wind, and in the croak of the raven in the dawn, when she thinks the raven " spies a field of death," the slain of the land ! Thus conscience is working out remorse. In the nunnery, all unknown, she finds refuge. Here the little novice chatters of the scandal of the court and sings her sweet song : "Late, late, so late! and dark the night and chill!" The talk of the innocent child is as fire in the heart of Guinevere, and the voices of the song go wailing through her desolate soul. " No. no, too late ! Ye cannot enter now." GUINEVERE. 137 Then the agony of the heart stricken with remorse beats its fevered pulse of pain in the line "Will the child kill me with her foolish prate?" Her every word, as she tells the legend of Arthur, burns like fire, when, with conscious guilt, the Queen flashes out upon the child, " • • • 'Thou their tool, set on to plague And play upon and harry me, petty spy And traitress' ..." The moral sense thus works in flame of passion falling back into the smouldering ashes of reflection, out of which is wreathed at last the form of repentance. " ' But help me, heaven, for surely I repent. For what is true repentance but in thought — Not ev'n in inmost thought to think again The sins that made the past so pleasant to us." And yet, even as she prays, she forgets her own definition of repentance, and her thoughts wander back to Lancelot, through the flowers and over the sunny glades of those forbidden days, when the King seemed cold and colourless and not like Lancelot. "... While she brooded thus And grew half-guilty in her thoughts again, There rode an armed warrior to the doors." It is the King ! Down the long gallery she 138 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. hears the sound of his step, coming nearer. She falls from her seat, and with her arms and hair makes her face a darkness to the king. She cannot look up to his pure, marred manhood, as he stands beside her and tells the story of his vanished hopes. His tones tremble with mingled wrath and love as he speaks of his once great ideal — how he would have driven the heathen out and reconstructed the realm by drawing to himself the flower of men. " ' I made them lay their hands in mine and swear To reverence the King, as if he were Their conscience, and their conscience as their King, To break the heathen and uphold the Christ.' " But what had happened "'And all this throve before I wedded thee, Believing, " lo mine helpmate, one to feel My purpose and rejoicing in my joy.'' ' She had fallen ! Through scandal and contagion of evil his realm had been shattered. " ' Till the loathsome opposite Of all my heart had destined did obtain, And all thro' thee.' " Then the King paused, and she crept nearer and " laid her hands about his feet." It was the better self, striving to articulate the speech of conscience, saying, " I have sinned : forgive ! " The King feels the meaning of the touch, and his tones change. GUINEVERE. 139 " ' Lo ! I forgive thee, as Eternal God Forgives: do thou for thine own soul the rest.'" Leaving her the assurance " I love thee still," he speaks of possible purity and hope of reunion " in that world where all are pure." " ' . . . Leave me that, I charge thee, my last hope. . . .'" Over her prostrate form he waves his hands in blessing, and then goes out into the night. She fain would see his face, " which then was as an angel's," as he commands the nuns to cherish and to guard her. Then he rides to the great battle in the west. Guinevere, now left alone, passes into her night of agony, and we have all the phases of the working of conscience, self-loathing, remorse, peni- tence, despair and hope. In all her being storms rage, and waters moan, and lightnings flash, until the angel of peace comes across the troubled deep. In the midst of all, her sin looms out of the night, tormenting, and she talks of suicide. '''What help in that? I cannot kill my sin, If soul be soul ; nor can I kill my shame.' " No, she cannot. Then is there no hope ? Did not the King speak of hope ? Did not he forgive ? " ' . . . And left me hope That in mine own heart I can live down sin.' " i 4 o THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. Thus the gleam of possible purity shoots through the night of despair. Her repentance is complete, and out of it will grow that diviner vision of a soul no longer chained to Sense. She sees, through her growing purity, what she had not seen before, the real glory of Arthur. "'Who wast, as is the conscience of a saint Among his warring senses, to thy knights.'" Her vision grows to the height of his pure sublimity, and the radiance of it flashes down upon her, like living fire to consume her evil. " ' . . . Now I see thee what thou art, Thou art the highest and most human too, Not Lancelot, nor another. Is there none Will tell the King I love him tho' so late ? ' " She had looked upon him ever with the eyes of Sense, and seeing no " warmth and colour " she had turned to Lancelot. Now she sees him through Soul, and " that pure severity of perfect light," his spiritual supremacy, charms her into love and adoration. The result is that, knowing now the real Arthur, her pain is great, in that she had not known him before. " ' Ah, my God, What might I not have made of Thy fair world, . Had I but loved Thy highest creature here ? ' ' But she is saved by the thought of his love. Long ago by the stately altar he had vowed " I love thee GUINEVERE. 141 to the death," and when she lay in the dust, under the shadow of her shame, and Arthur stood within the shadow of his death, he was still unchanged, and out of a broken heart declared " ' Let no man dream but that I love thee still ! ' " It is the memory of his love that saves her, and we hear the resolve of a nobler life breathing in the line, " ' I must not scorn myself : he loves me still.' " Thus in Guinevere the carnal nature is re- deemed at last by love. For her good deeds and pure life she was chosen Abbess, when she lived for three years and then passed " to where beyond these voices there is peace ; " and Soul, though late, triumphed over Sense. The poem is a parable. Arthur is the spiritual man, subduing and moulding his Knights of the lawless passions into chastity and obedience, until he becomes as the conscience of a saint among them. Guinevere bodies the sensual or carnal nature to which Arthur, the spiritual soul, is wedded. The antagonism between Arthur and Guinevere is the conflict waged in every human life between flesh and spirit. The problem for the spirit is how to save and purify the body. Arthur's love redeems both body and soul. A pure spiritual fire in the i42 THE TEACH INC. OF TKNNVSOX. house of the body will burn up its evil, so that it becomes the shrine of the saintly life. When the senses, like the Knights, submit to con- science, then the soul flashes down its splendour, life is redeemed in its depths as well as in its heights, and the union is complete. " ' Hereafter in that world where all are pure We two may meet before high God, and thou Wilt spring to me, and claim me thine, and know I am thine husband. . . .' " The In "The Passing of Arthur" the soul wages Passing of its last war with death. When the Knights Arthur. are (j ea( j anc j Guinevere a dream and Arthur a memory old Sir Bedivere tells the story of the last great battle. As he walked among the sleeping warriors, near- ing the tent of the King, he heard the pathetic lament of Arthur, who had seen God in the stars and the flowers — "'But in His ways with men I rind Him not. 1 waged His wars, and now I pass and die.' " His own work seemed a failure. " ' . . . All my realm Reels back into the beast, and is no more. My God, thou hast forgotten me in my death.'" The soul in conflict with death is tremulous with doubt ; but only for a passing moment. "'Nay— God my Christ— I pass but shall not die."' GUINEVERE. 143 There is a life which death cannot kill, an im- mortality of deeds that flows on, like a pure stream, to sweeten other lives. There is for such a death- lessness in death. The doubt of Arthur is slain by the consciousness of immortality. His work may be a seeming failure, and the ways of God a mystery ; but he is assured " I shall not die." His pure soul, by noble deeds, had wrought itself into humanity. Then Sir Bedivere relates how the King had slept and dreamed of the ghost of Gawain wailing on the wandering wind " . . . ' Hollow, hollow all delight ! Hail, King ! to-morrow thou shalt pass away. Farewell ! there is an isle of rest for thee.' " In the old superstition it was usual for an appari- tion to predict a battle with its results. The ghost of Gawain suggests, moreover, that what a man is here, he will be hereafter. Gawain had lived a frivolous, empty human life, with corresponding results in the other world. He had sown to the wind and he reaps the whirlwind ; death does not change character, it merely projects it within the curtain ; we start in eternity where we leave off in time. "Light was Gawain in life and light in death," and light after death ! The dream troubled the King, but Bedivere was .44 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. not superstitious ; he did not believe in apparitions and omens ; he was calm and practical, with calcu- lating common-sense. He relates how he urged the King to shake off the nervous dread and fling himself with courage into the battle ; he had heard the tramp of Modred and the rebel knights, then, let the King "'Arise, go forth and conquer as of old.'" We feel the gloom in the heart of Arthur, and the closing of the night about him in his pathetic reply : " ' Yet let us hence and find or feel a way Thro' this blind haze, which ever since I saw One lying in the dust at Almesbury, Hath folded in the passes of the world.' " Then the King rose and flung himself into the last weird battle. In that " deathwhite mist" we hear the clashing of steel, the wail of voices, and the moan of dying men. The death-storm sweeps into silence both friend and foe. The realism of the description suggests the spiritual significance. The sun is burning low, and is a symbol of the flickering fire of life. A " deathwhite mist " sleeps o'er land and sea ; in which we have the image of death veiling the vision of the dying. The cold creates a " formless fear " ; suggesting the fear of the soul tremulous on the threshold of the unknown. THE PASSING OF ARTHUR. 145 Some had " visions out of golden youth " ; and they are the pure loves and delights of long ago gleaming through the mists of death. " Some beheld the faces of old ghosts " ; and these are the evil deeds done in life rising in the dread hour like mocking spectres. Wailing voices filled the air with " shrieks after the Christ," and they suggest the passing souls who feel their need of Him in death. Cursing voices rent and stained the night ; and we hear the despair of those who know not God, and take their wild leap into darkness. " Cryings for the light " ; in which souls awakened to a sense of their need seek the kindly light. Now through the storm of battle upon all alike there fell the last deep sleep, and we are reminded of one who died, and who conquered in dying. " Last, as by some one deathbed after wail Of suffering, silence follows. . . ." Thus the mist of death fell on the gory scene ; and when the mist had cleared Bedivere tells how the King, looking across the field, saw — "... Only the wan wave Brake in among dead faces. . . . And rolling far along the gloomy shores The voice of days of old and days to be." It was the voice of time, not the voice of battle, ringing in his ears. 10 i 4 6 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. " ' Hearest thou this great voice that shakes the world, And wastes the narrow realm whereon we move ? " Time, like ocean hungry for the land, eats away the ever-narrowing ground of life and sweeps us into the great deep. The voice had called for the King, and, for a moment, he was overwhelmed, and doubted his own spiritual ascendency. " ' Confusion, till I know not what I am, Nor whence I am, nor whether I be King.' " It is the final war with death, when the soul begins to question its origin and dignity and destiny. Doubt seizes upon it. What if it be only matter, to be blown on the wandering winds ? What if it change and lose itself in other forms ? For a moment Arthur doubted, staggered, and cried — "'Behold, I seem but King among the dead.'" Bedivere was not troubled with such doubts. He believed in the kingly supremacy, and relates how he urged the King to one more deed of valour to establish faith. He pointed out Sir Mod red, that incarnation of evil. The King fell upon him and slew him, but was well-nigh slain himself. The soul best kills its doubts by rising and slaying the evil. It comes back to its throne through moral victories. Arthur fell, but he fell victorious, no longer doubting that he was King. THE PASSING OF ARTHUR. 147 Then came the final scene. Sir Bedivere tells how he was told to take Excalibur and fling it into the deep ; but he had made excuse, and only after the third command, with threat, had he flung it across the wave, when an arm clothed in white samite rose, caught the sword, brandished it three times, and drew it into the deep. Excalibur, as we have seen, was the symbol of the spiritual weapon by which the victories of the King were won ; but now that his work was done it was time to " cast away " the sword. In the eternal deep to which he goes there is eternal peace. The King, mortally wounded, was borne by Bedi- vere to the margin of the wave, when across the deep loomed a dusky barge with three crowned queens and other stately forms ; and Arthur mur- mured, " Place me in the barge." As it moved away, Bedivere tells of his own lament — "'For now I see the true old times are dead.'" But the passing King replied in those immortal words : "'The old order changeth, yielding place to new, And God fulfils Himself in many ways, Lest one good custom should corrupt the world." The loyal Knight had watched the barge sail out, a speck upon the misty waters, and " vanish into light." What does it mean ? The barge is death, i 4 8 THE TEACHING OK TENNYSON. but it is death passing into life. The three Queens suggest " Faith, Hope and Charity." Charity is the symbol of the infinite love where the weary victor rests after his last war with death, and where he sleeps into the tender dawn, with the welcome voices of the city chanting as if " Around a king returning from his wars." Thus Arthur is a parable of the human soul warring in life with Sense and all its evils, yielding at last to death, but only to win its greatest victory through death. Now what shall we say of Arthur as an ideal ? It is evident that he cannot be regarded as perfect. It would be easy to point out the flaws of his character. We must hold him partly responsible for the sin of Guinevere. His duties to his realm did not release him from his duties to his Queen. To allow her to ride in the early spring with Lancelot, while he was absorbed in state affairs, was to create an opportunity fraught with danger. All through we miss in Arthur that tender humanness that makes the ideal man and husband. He is ever on the far-off heights, very pure, but far too frozen. Even divinity is not perfect without humanity. When the Queen grovels in her shame at his feet, he betrays no sense of imperfection. He utters no word of self-reproach, though his conduct had not been blameless, and, to say the least, we should have THE PASSING OF ARTHUR. 149 preferred less divinity and more humanity. What then ? Why, clearly the poet did not intend to make Arthur the perfect ideal. He is " the ideal man- hood closed in real man," with the defects of man. He is not the Christ, he is only a spiritual soul striving to be like Christ, wrestling through a vast array of opposing forces, within and without, now vanquished, now victorious, but at last passing to the crown of life. In these Poems OF Life we have thus traced the secret war with the varied and subtle forces that make for moral death, and we have noted that the victory falls to Soul. In " The Lady of Shalott " we saw the tempta- tion to waste life in dreaming. Then came the awakening to the reality of mortal passion, with courage to face the consequence, and in the end we found the victory of love, shining in the " lovely face." In " The Palace of Art " we watched the wrestling between Sense and Soul. We saw the danger to the moral life in the allurements of voluptuous delights and in the selfish absorption of aestheticism. At last we heard the strains of victory. "' Make me a cottage in the vale,' she said, ' Where I may mourn and pray.' " In "The Two Voices" we listened to the warring 150 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. of the soul, in contending Faith and Doubt, and witnessed the triumph of Faith. In " Locksley Hall," "The Sailor Boy" and " Ulysses," we noted the struggle with varied forms of seduction. We saw the stirring of the soul, and heard the clarion notes of victory. In "In Memoriam " we heard the wail of grief, and traced the conflict of soul with religious doubt until it gained the heights of faith, when we heard the great anthem of victory. In " Idylls of the King " we caught again the clash of Soul with Sense, and watched the warring victors as they passed to their thrones of life. We come now to the group which we have arranged under Poems of Death or the victory of Sense. In this group of poems the veil is lifted and we see the Soul sapped of its best energies by vicious passion, or sin of sense, or slumber of selfish ease, all portraying the deadly power of evil as, in varied forms, it wrecks the realm of Arthur and kills the great things of the human soul. POEMS OF DEATH, OR VICTORY OF SENSE. Merlin and Vivien. Lancelot and Elaine. Pelleas and Ettarrc. The Last Tournament (in part). The Vision of Sin. The Lotos Eaters. The Sea Fairies. The Islet. Merlin Vivien is attached to the court of Mark, the and Cornish King. She hates Arthur and his Vivien. Knights, with their high ideals ; she is a cynic and laughs to scorn the Table Round, and her cynicism grows to active malevolence. She is an incarnate reptile, this smooth-tongued Vivien. She will leave the court of Mark and enter Arthur's Hall, where she will watch for scandal and circulate her poison. Thus she comes to Camelot and, casting herselt weeping at the feet of the Queen, appeals against the perfidy of Mark. The Queen listens to her plaint, bids her bide awhile, and rides away with Lancelot, while Vivien, through the portal arch, watches with evil-glowing eyes every sign of innocent intimacy and mutters : " '. . . They ride away — to hawk For waterfowl. Koyaller game is mine.'" 152 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. The character and conduct of Vivien are power- fully focussed in the lines " But Vivien half-forgotten of the Queen Among her damsels broidering sat, heard, watch'd And whisper'd : thro' the peaceful court she crept And whisper'd : then as Arthur in the highest Leaven'd the world, so Vivien in the lowest, Lcaven'd his hall. . . ." In the hall and near the King is one Merlin, who is bard, astrologer, architect and wizard. He possesses a " charm " which Vivien covets and sets herself to win. Merlin, under the power of her subtle spell, falls into melancholy. "... He found A doom that ever poised itself to fall, An ever-moaning battle in the mist, World-war of dying flesh against the life, Death in all life and lying in all love." In the heart of the doubt was a foreboding of doom, in that war of Sense with Soul, when the worm of flesh would eat into the spirit of life. He would escape her baneful influence, but she follows him into the boat, and they are driven across to Breton sands, where they pass on into the wild woods. Merlin is morose and taciturn, as if the chilling shadow of some tragic doom lay athwart his spirit. Vivien is playful and loving, intent on winning the secret of the mystic charm. MERLIN AND VIVIEN. 153 " The which if any wrought on anyone With woven paces and with waving arms, The man so wrought on ever seem'd to lie Closed in the four walls of a hollow tower, And lost to life and use and name and fame." How tenderly she pleads and caresses until that " dark forethought rolled about his brain " ! Then her mood changes into humorous sallies and sober argument and flippant satire, but Merlin answers with discretion. Yet there are signs of weakness ; she wins upon his confidence and stirs the pulse of age. He " half believes her true," but when she plays the role of scandal and breathes suspicion from the lowest to the highest of those in Arthur's hall, Merlin is vexed, and mutters, " Tell her the charm," and falls into a soliloquy. "'What did the wanton say? " Not mount as high " ; we scarce can sink as low : For men at most differ as Heaven and earth, But women, worst and best, as Heaven and Hell.'" Vivien, angered at the muttered words, leaps erect as a frozen viper ; her lips are white and bloodless. She breathes in puffs of wrath ; her cheeks are blanched ; her hand steals down to grasp her dagger ! Then suddenly her mood changes and she is reproachful and sentimental. She had hoped her life might have been a path of flowers with him, but now she can only weep 154 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. her life away. A storm is gathering and brooding. Merlin begins to relent, and calls her to shelter from the storm. She replies with simulated passion, and the storm grows nearer. She challenges the light- ning to strike her if she lie. The storm breaks, the lightning flashes, an oak is riven, and Vivien, crying, " Save me ! " creeps closer, with terms of endearment. The storm rages, the winds wail, the rotten things snap. Merlin tells the charm and sleeps. " Then crying, ' I have made his glory mine,' And shrieking out, ' O fool ! ' the harlot leapt Adown the forest, and the thicket closed Behind her, and the forest echo'd, ' Fool ! ' ,: The idyll portrays the complete victory of Sense over Soul. Vivien is a repulsive character, but she is necessary. She incarnates the evil that broke the realm and scattered the Knights, and personifies its most seductive and revolting influence. In none of the Idylls is the heinousncss of sin drawn with such deep dark colours as in Vivien. A woman is chosen because man at his worst is " as earth," but woman is " as hell." Evil has no conscience, neither has Vivien. She is beautiful flesh without soul. She possesses intellect and imagination, but the soul lies coffined in her lovely body. Merlin stands for intellect divorced from religion ; he has knowledge, but not self-control ; he is strong intellectually, but weak morally. His centre of MERLIN AND VIVIEN. 155 gravity lies in reason rather than in conscience, and, being more easily shifted, he quickly falls, and dies to life and use and name and fame. The fallen soul, conquered by Sense, is thus dead to purity. The greatness of being lies in ruins, through which wanders a mocking laughter as of fiends crying, " Fool ! " Lancelot A TOURNAMENT is arranged. The central an ^ diamond and the last of Arthur's is the prize. Lancelot feigns sickness to remain with Guinevere, but she orders him to the joust. He doubts her love, but is reassured : " For who loves me must have a touch of earth ; The low sun makes the colour: I am yours, Not Arthur's. . . ." On his way to the Tournament, he calls at the castle of Astolat where dwells the lily maid Elaine, who falls at once in love with him, though he is twice her years, " and loved him with that love which was her doom." # As he tells the stories of the wars or falls to traits of pleasantry, love weaves his meshes round her tender heart. She cannot sleep, and, in the early dawn, steals down the tower stairs, when she hears the voice of Lancelot as he strokes his steed. She draws near, " rapt on his face as if it were a god's " ; she * "The Lily Maid " seems to me the fairest, purest, sweetest love-poem in the English language." — Professor Jowett. 156 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. would have him wear her favour at the joust, and, as he leaves with her his shield, she " lives in fantasy." Lancelot goes to the Tournament disguised, and, being borne down by numbers, receives a well-nigh fatal wound, and vanishes into a wood whence a hermit bears him to a cave. Meanwhile the King tells his fear to the Queen, but hopes " that Lancelot is no more a lonely heart," for he wore a sleeve of scarlet, doubtless the gift of a gentle maiden. The effect upon the Queen is electric ; she " Past to her chamber, and there flung herself Down on the great King's couch, and writhed upon it, And shrick'd out, ' Traitor !'...." For weeks the life of Lancelot hangs on a thread, when the King, handing Gawain the diamond of the joust, bids him seek the missing Knight and deliver him the prize. Sir Gawain comes to Astolat and lightly falls in love with Elaine. In vain he pleads his suit, but, divining her secret love for Lancelot, drops poison into her pure mind, and gives her the diamond, believing that she knows his hiding-place. Then carolling a song he rides away to the King, and is severely reprimanded for disobedience. He merely stares and circulates the story of Lancelot and Elaine, with the result that jealous)- consumes the heart of the Oueen. LANCELOT AND ELAINE. 157 Meanwhile Elaine, with her father's consent and her brother's help, goes in search of the lost and wounded Knight, and, finding him in the hermit's cave, gives him the diamond. He kisses her, saying, " Rest you must have " ; but as he gazes on the gentle maiden he sees her secret blaze upon her simple face and he is sore perplexed. Then follows a pathetic story of the tender love that flits between Camelot and the cave, hovering like a dove o'er the sorely-stricken Knight, alluring him from the grave, and, with the sweet charm of its tenderness, nursing him into life and strength. Sir Lancelot calls her friend and sister, but love he cannot give, as his heart is not his own. " The shackles of an old love straiten'd him, His honour rooted in dishonour stood, And faith unfaithful kept him falsely true.*' Elaine knows how hopeless it is, and wanders across the fields into the city with that plaintive cry, " Must I die ? " Through the long, lone night she mutters, " Him or death." Sir Lancelot, on recovery, presses on Elaine some friendly gift, when her self-control is swept away by a surging torrent of feeling. " Then suddenly and passionately she spoke : ' I have gone mad. I love you : let me die.' " And Lancelot replies : " . . . ' Had I chosen to wed, I had been wedded earlier, sweet Elaine.' t$B THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. Her pathetic answer rings the knell of passing hope : " My good days are done." Lancelot leaves the castle. " So in her tower alone the maiden sat : His very shield was gone ; only the case, Her own poor work, her empty labour, left." What a picture of desolation and heart-breaking despair ! The Lily Elaine droops beneath the storm. In her chamber she sings the song of love and death. It is the wail of a dying heart. The brothers hear the last notes of the passing cry, " Let me die ! " and hasten to her, only to receive her dying wish that, after death, upon the bed on which she died, she might be placed within the barge decked like the Queen's, and that the old dumb servitor might row the barge to Arthur's palace. She dictates a letter to Lavaine, which she herself will deliver. The promises are made, the letter laid in her hand, and Elaine sleeps her last sleep. The barge is palled in samite, and the body carried to the river ; in her right hand she holds a lily, and with her left she clasps the letter "' For Lancelot and the Queen and all the world.'" The brothers kiss her. The dumb man takes the oars and rows with the flood to the palace of the King. LANCELOT AND ELAINE. 159 " . . . And that clear-featured face Was lovely, for she did not seem as dead, But fast asleep, and lay as tho' she smiled." In an oriel window of the palace may be wit- nessed another scene. The stately Queen gives audience to Sir Lancelot, who kneels at her feet, proffering her the jewels he had won in many a joust. The Queen receives them coldly and her words are hot with jealousy — " '. . . Not for me! For her ! for your new fancy. . . .' " Then suddenly she flings the diamonds through the open casement into the stream below. Lancelot in disdain of love and life leans upon the window-ledge when, "... Slowly past the barge Whereon the lily maid of Astolat Lay smiling, like a star in blackest night." The barge arrives at the palace doors. The servants wonder and ask, " What is it ? " The King comes out, and the body, at his command, is borne by Percivale and Galahad into the hall. Gawain and Lancelot and the Queen look on in pity. The King spies the letter, telling all the secret of her love, with that pathetic farewell, " My true love hath been my death." Then follows the defence of Sir Lancelot, with tender regret for the lovely dead, and the rebuke of the jealous Queen and the burial of Elaine. 160 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. The scene in the oriel window is thus contrasted : "... The Queen Who mark'd Sir Lancelot where he moved apart, Drew near, and sigh'd in passing, ' Lancelot, Forgive me ; mine was jealousy in love.' He answei'd with his eyes upon the ground, ' That is love's curse; pass on, my Queen, forgiven.''* Thus the war of Sense with Soul is seen in the struggles of Lancelot and Elaine and Guinevere. An estimate of each character may help us to understand the conflict waged and the victory won by Sense. Sir Lancelot as the hero of the idyll stands between Elaine and Guinevere. He is the object of a dual-love, the love of Elaine, pure and tender and clinging, and the love of Guinevere, guilty and jealous and suspicious. The question for Lancelot is, Shall he break with the Queen and free himself from a guilty bond by accepting the love of Elaine. or shall he continue bound ? That is the problem out of which emerges the war of Sense with Soul. Soul would say, Free yourself from a false and fatal position, and grow pure again in the face of a pure love. But Sense would say, Cling to the one who has suffered for you and whom you love, though the love be guilty. We have an insight into the struggle of Lancelot when Lavainc calls him "great," and when, feeling his guilt, he shows his inner life in the sad reply : — LANCELOT AND ELAINE. i6t " ' In me there dwells No greatness, save it be some far-off touch Of greatness to know well I am not great : There is the man.' " Again, when the white face of her who might have made " This, and that other world Another world for the sick man," appeared in the palace, his pain is great. Her pure love might have been his to break his bonds, but she is dead through love of him, dead because he deemed his honour bound him to the Queen. "His honour rooted in dishonour stood." And when he sits by the river, watching the returning barge that bore the body of Elaine, and dreams of love and jealousy and knighthood, we hear the cry of a great soul chained to Sense, half hugging the chains, but with conscience enough to know that they are chains. Shall he break the bonds that bind him to the Queen ? Shall he sacrifice her love and rise again to purity and chivalry ? If she willed it, has he the power ? It is the conflict of Sense with Soul, and we hear the clash of it in the warring lines : — " ' . . . I needs must break These bonds that so defame me : not without She wills it : would I, if she will'd it ? Nay, Who knows ? but if I would not, then may God I I [62 THE TEACHING ()!• TENNVSON. I pray Him, send a sudden Angel down To seize me by the hair and bear me far, And fling me deep in that forgotten mere Among the tumbled fragments of the hills.'" Lancelot knows that his will is weak, and yet his conscience is still alive. " So groan'd Sir Lancelot in remorseful pain." His pain was great, for he was great save for that one sin. The nobler the nature the more sensitive it is to evil, and the keener is its suffering. Thus Lancelot suffers first because of Elaine, for her pure love wasted and life blighted, then because of Guinevere, for the guilty love that chained and defamed him, lastly because of Arthur, the stainless King, who loved and trusted him when he was guilty of treachery. Ever side by side with the crystal purity of the King moved this dark sin of his, and the vision of the contrast was his torment : — " The great and guilty love he bare the Queen, In battle with the love he bare his lord, Mad marr'd his face and mark'd it ere his time. Another sinning on such heights with one, The flower of all the west and all the world, Had been the sleeker for it : but in time His mood was often like a fiend, and rose And drove him into wastes and solitudes For agony, who was yet a living soul." The conflict is fierce and the victory lies with Sense. Lancelot, throughout, clings to the guilty love that degrades. LANCELOT AND ELAINE. 163 Now, what shall be said of Elaine ? It is clear she is weak in reason and judgment, but she is strong in feeling. She is the ideal of pure emotion ; the deepest thing in her is love ; she cannot balance it, for she has not the power ; she cannot control it, for it is the stronger force. Elaine is the embodiment of pure and lofty feeling flinging itself against the barred gates of Sense. Her strong, impetuous love, like a torrent met by rocks, dashes back upon herself in a frenzy of passion. Like the torrent, too, she cannot soften the rock upon which her love beats wildly. Her love can only fall back into the surge of her own heart, there to gather strength and spend itself until life is wasted with the backward rush of foiled feeling. Thus the ethical truth emerges that the soul may waste its best force on the impossible. It can only feed itself upon an object rich in noble feeling and responsive. To find and to love what is possible and best and highest, is to become like the object loved. And yet Elaine, weak in intellect and will, is beautiful because of her wonderful capacity for love. " She loved much," though foolishly, and we can forgive her defects, seeing that the charm of womanhood consists in the power to love. Elaine, throughout, is brought into sharp contrast with Guinevere. It has been well said, " The maid of Astolat is the lily of womanhood ; i6 4 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. the Queen is the rose, full-blown and heavy with fragrance." In the love of Elaine we have simplicity and freshness and purity and faith. In the love of Guinevere we find the mingling of suspicion and jealousy and duplicity and doubt. The full-blown rose of her love nourishes the worm of jealousy. When she hears of the " favour " worn by Lancelot, she writhes upon the couch, "And clench'd her fingers till they bit the palm.'* And when the fickle Gawain spreads a story of Lancelot's love for Elaine, she in anger " Crush'd the wild passion out against the floor." How fiercely her jealousy flames again in the oriel window : "'Tell her she shines me down.'" But the contrast between Elaine and Guinevere is finely imaged in the flinging of the diamonds into the stream. "... And down they7flash'd, and smote the stream. Then from the smitten surface flash'd, as it were, Diamonds to meet them, and they past away." Thus Lancelot stands between these two loves, and must choose. When he decides for the guilty love Soul is chained to Sense. The passing diamonds are symbolic of purity passing from Arthur's realm. PELLEAS AND ETTARRE. 165 Pelleas PELLEAS, a simple youth, but pure and brave, and comes to Arthur's court and is knighted, .huarre. Q ne j a y j le r j c j es acr0 ss the Forest of Dean to seek Caerleon and the King, when he lights upon a company of gay damsels and knights who had lost their way. The lady of the party appeals to Sir Pelleas to direct them : "... But while he gazed The beauty of her flesh abash'd the boy, As tho' it were the beauty of her soul." This is the Lady Ettarre, an important personage and an accomplished flirt. Pelleas is so impres- sionable that Ettarre seizes her opportunity, and, seeing him strong in frame with heart all ablaze, she will have him fight for her and win the circlet, " that I may love thee." Pelleas in ecstasy, deceived by the false pressure of her hand, not seeing the mocking glance she flashed around until a smile wriggled over every face, promised, " nor slept that night." In the Tournament of Youth he wins the golden circlet, which the Lady Ettarre accepts, and wearing for " the last time is gracious to him." On their return he is treated with cold and cynical snubbing. She " cannot bide Sir Baby." The damsels are to keep him back and feed him on pap-meat. Arriving at the castle gates he is shut out and left to wander in a field, where he consoles himself with an analysis of woman's mind. r66 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. " These be the ways of ladies," he says, and thinks she is testing his fidelity, and he will persevere ; so all day long by the castle wall he sits upon his steed. The lady in anger bids her minions drive him hence, when Pelleas receives their charge and they are overthrown ; and still he keeps his watch. They charge again, when he submits to be bound, and is carried to Ettarre, with the result that he is " smitten " more deeply, and believes in her and in her word. He thinks she is putting him to the proof, and she will yield in the end. Alas ! how she mocks his knightly vows and thrusts him out of doors, railing — " ' . . . For save he be Fool to the midmost marrow of his bones, He will return no more.' . . ." But at the end of the week he is still there, crouching like a faithful dog ! Ettarre now would have him slain, or bound, and brought once more before her. The caitiffs, three to one, charge upon him, when Sir Gawain flashes on the scene with proffered help to Pelleas, which, however, he declines, and overthrows the minions. They leap again, bind him, and bring him to Ettarre. The lady wreaks her wrath upon the caitiffs, and commands them to thrust him bound from the palace gates. At last upon the love-lorn youth the fact dawns that he has been cruelly fooled ; and yet his love burns on ! PELLEAS AND ETTARRE. 167 " . . . ' Farewell ; And tho' ye kill my hope, not yet my love.' " A glimpse of the better nature in Ettarre, like a star-gleam across a dark sky, is revealed in her reflection : " ' I deem'd him fool ? yea, so ? or that in him A something — was it nobler than myself? — Seem'd my reproach ? He is not of my kind.' " Meanwhile the bound lover is being released by Gawain, who, wayward as the wind, yet doubtless sincere, offers to be proxy. He will do the wooing and bring the lady to her senses ; he will play upon her feelings by assuring her that he had slain Pelleas, and, when he wins her confidence, he will chant the praise of Pelleas " from prime to vespers." Sir Gawain enters the castle, but he lingers within, as Pelleas without sings the song of his " rose." Weary of waiting, Pelleas passes through the open gates across the court into a garden with three pavilions, " And in the third, the circlet of the jousts Bound on her brow, were Gawain and Ettarre." His pure young heart burns with indignation as he creeps away in moral loathing to the castle bridge, when his shame flames into wrath. He will go back and slay them there. With drawn sword he stands over the guilty sleepers, but the vow of brotherhood restrains him. He passes out, but re- turns to lay the gleaming sword across their naked 1 68 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. throats. Then he rides moaning, like a madman, from the castle, calling up the doom of hell upon its walls and women, wailing over the pure love he had wasted on that loathsome creature of sensuous beauty, and exclaiming : " ' I loathe her, as I loved her ; to my shame,' " wildly dashes into night. The guilty sleepers wake with the cold of the sword upon their throats. Kttarre, in wrath, with awakened conscience, charges Gawain with falsity. "... And he that tells the tale Says that her ever-veering fancy turn'd To Pelleas, as the one true knight on earth, And only lover ; and thro' her love her life Wasted and pined, desiring him in vain." Sir Pelleas rides madly on through the starry darkness to the tower " where Percivale was cowled," and there beside the walls he sleeps and dreams of Gawain setting fire to Arthur's hall, when hands are laid upon him and he starts crying "'False! and I held thee pure as Guinevere.'" He is thinking of the lady Kttarre, but Percivale hears the words and asks if he is dreaming or has he heard of Lancelot ? Pelleas, like a wounded man, cries — "'Is the Queen false?' And Percivale was mute." Then Pelleas mounts his steed and, riding over PELLEAS AND ETTARRE. 169 a cripple, dashes on like a fiend until in sight of the tall towers of Arthur's hall. "'Black nest of rats,' he groan'd, 'ye build too high.'" Suddenly Sir Lancelot appears and Pelleas bears down upon him, declines to give his name, and conies as a poisonous wind to " ' . . . Blast And blaze the crime of Lancelot and the Queen.' " He madly dashes, without sword, upon the great Knight, when, his weary steed staggering at the shock, Pelleas falls, crying, " Thou art false as hell." Sir Lancelot, with his heel upon him, in fierce but passing anger, speaks. "'Rise, weakling; I am Lancelot; say thy say.'" They pass together into the hall of Arthur. The Queen learns they have fought, but knows not why. She bids him speak if he have plaint to make. " But Pelleas lifted up an eye so fierce She quail'd ; and he, hissing ' I have no sword,' Sprang from the door into the dark. ..." Then rose between the Queen and Lancelot the phantom of retribution. They saw in the face of each the shadow of the coming doom, that Nemesis which is the penalty of sin. " Then a long silence came upon the hall, And Modred thought, ' The time is hard at hand.' " It is a painful picture, but, like the picture of 170 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. Merlin and Vivien, it is necessary in order to portray the progress of evil in the court. It had demolished the citadel of knowledge in Merlin ; old age with its wisdom had fallen ; but the picture must be completed by the wreck of a young, pure life in Pelleas. He deserved a better fate, and Mr. Hutton thinks he ought to have had it ; but that could only be at the cost of the finished portrait of the tragedy of evil, which is no respecter of persons. In Pelleas the victory falls back to Sense, and delineates the young, pure life rudely awakened to the falsities concealed within the sensuous. Pelleas stands for the ingenuous soul allured by the senses, not seeing how sensuous beauty may conceal moral ugliness, or a worm be curled within a rose, or evil pass as an angel of light. The danger is lest the shock of the discovery may cause such revulsion of feeling that faith in humanity shall be lost and the young life fling itself into the night of infidelity. There is, further, the danger of confusing the sensuous with the spiritual. Pelleas confounds physical beauty with beauty of soul, and when he finds that he has been allured and deceived by the physical, he loses faith in the spiritual. He does not see that the face of gentle culture may hide the meanest of souls. The pure soul gives a subtle beauty of its own to Sense, but Sense may have beauty without Soul, which may allure to death. PELLEAS AND ETTARRE. 171 The bloom of many a life has been blighted by the loveliness of Sense. The soul is only beautiful when goodness dwells within. It can make lovely the loveless face with its own spiritual glory. Beware of physical beauty without moral goodness, is the lesson of " Pelleas and Ettarre." The Last The war of Sense with Soul is shaping to its Tourna- tragic end. The evil, wrought by the guilty m • love of Lancelot and Guinevere and by the scattering of the Knights through following " wander- ing fires " of superstition, now rushes on to its final conflict in "The Last Tournament." The characters are powerfully drawn. In Arthur and Dagonet the victory is on the side of Soul, but in Tristram and Isolt it falls to Sense. Let us watch the unfolding of the spiritual and the sensuous, and note the glory that circles the one and the shame that darkens the other. We have seen how Arthur, the King, stands for the spiritual principle, authoritative and supreme within its own realm, striving to bring all its conflicting forces into obedience. For a time the spiritual was regnant, but we noted the gathering shadows and dying light within the court. We saw the deepening of the moral gloom as that spell of superstition, working secretly among the Knights, drew them into the wastes. Now the night grows darker, and we begin to hear ij2 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. the muttering of the storm that wrecks the goodly realm of the King. We hear its echoes in the insolent message of the Red Knight brought by the maimed churl who escapes to Arthur's Hall. "'"Tell thou the King and all his liars, that I Have founded my Round Table in the North, . . . and say his hour is come, The heathen are upon him, his long lance Broken, and his Excalibur a straw."' The King is not only well informed of the rebel forces without who band themselves to violate the order of his realm, but he is also conscious of a lower tone within his Knights. "'Or have I dream'd the bearing of our knights Tells of a manhood ever less and lower?'" lie had laboured to construct a kingdom of spiritual men, but the carnal forces had not been slain, only maimed, and the recreant rebels lift their heads again. Sense would wrestle with Soul for supremacy. " The Last Tournament " is the symbol of the battle growing ever fiercer between the higher and lower nature. The old question asked in " The Coming of Arthur " we hear once again : " Asking whence Had Arthur right to bind them to himself? I)ropt down from heaven? wash'd up from out the deep? THE LAST TOURNAMENT. 173 They fail'd to trace him thro' the flesh and blood Of our old kings ; whence then ? A doubtful lord To bind them by inviolable laws." It is Sense at war with Soul, questioning its origin and right to reign. It is the gross materialism that would choke the soul out of the universe. Because it cannot trace its genesis through flesh and blood it will deny its supremacy. It will spurn the categorical imperative " Thou shalt and shalt obey and do my bidding And fight my wars." It would pull down the higher nature. The philosophy that would resolve all of man into matter chokes the soul. So Arthur prepares to wage war with the fleshly forces. The description of the fierce onslaught images the fervour and force with which spiritual battles ought to be waged. " Swording right and left Men, women, on their sodden faces, hurl'd The tables over and the wines, and slew Till all the rafters rang with woman-yells, And all the pavement stream'd with massacre. So all the ways were safe from shore to shore, But in the heart of Arthur pain was lord." Once again Soul is regnant over Sense. Arthur is still King, and the spiritual is supreme ; con- science is alive and Sense has been defeated. But )74 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. why pain ? Because it is the law of life that wc pass from the lower to the higher through struggle. Life only comes to its crowning through Gethsemane. It must wrestle with Sense in the red rain of its agony if the angel is to be seen. Arthur had not yet won the final victory, and so " pain was lord." We do not vault into thrones, we wade to them through blood. Sir Tristram had won the jewels in the joust and proclaimed, without the name, Isolt as Queen of Beauty. What more of evidence is needed that the glory of the Round Table had departed ! What an elevation and a crowning of the sin of Guinevere and Lancelot, when, by implication, an adulteress is proclaimed, by the co-respondent, Queen of Beauty in the Tournament of Arthur ! No wonder that Guinevere sits and sighs in her high tower as Arthur passes. No wonder the great Sir Lancelot languidly watches the jousts, "... Sighing weariedly, as one Who sits and gazes on a faded fire, When all the goodlier guests are past away." Was there not a root of the ruin in his own heart ? The Tournament is over, and Tristram whiles away the time with Dagonct. Dagonet is court-jester, and little of stature, but great of soul. No Knight of Arthur was ever more chivalrous. His quick penetration into the causes THE LAST TOURNAMENT. 175 working the ruin of the realm ; his keen sabre thrusts into the fleshly jeering of Tristram ; his clinging to the feet of Arthur, as he climbs " the stairway to the hall," sobbing his secret grief, " I shall never make thee smile again," all reveal the greatness of the soul in so small a body, and the power of the spiritual to clothe even deformity with the robe of beauty. It is interesting to follow Dagonet in his mingled moods of satire, and note how in him Soul riddles Sense in the fleshly target of Tristram. Dagonet refuses to dance to the music of Tristram, and when asked why, " Made answer, ' I had liefer twenty years Skip to the broken music of my brains Than any broken music thou canst make.'" Tristram answers : " ' Good now, what music have I broken, fool ? ' " Dagonet replies : " ' Thou makest broken music with thy bride, Her daintier namesake down in Biittany — And so thou breakest Arthur's music too.'" The delicious play upon the words, the keen retort, and the subtle perception of the discordant notes within the realm that break the music of the King, are most suggestive. Dagonet clearly sees the evil, and makes war upon it. The gross mate- 176 Till': TEACHING OF TENNYSON. rialism of Sense reeks in the answering song of Tristram : " ' " New life, new love, to suit the newer day : New loves are sweet as those that went before : Free love — free field — we love but while we may." ' The war of Sense with Soul could not be more clearly portrayed. Purity wallows in the ethics of the sty. Dagonet sums it up in one significant word — " mud ! " One of the little maidens who sat by the fountain had offered him a draught from her golden cup. " ' . . . And thereupon I drank, Spat — pish — the cup was gold, the draught was mud.' " Tristram answers : " ' Was it muddier than thy gibes ? . . . For here be they Who knew thee swine enow before I came, Smuttier than blasted grain. ..." Uagonet replies : "'Swine? I have wallow'd, I have wash'd — the world Is flesh and shadow — I have had my day. The dirty nurse, Experience, in her kind Hath foul'd me — an I wallow'd, then I wash'd — I have had my day and my philosophies — And thank the Lord I am King Arthur's fool.' " It is the triumphant answer of Soul to Sense. A life taught by experience, having tested materialism, is redeemed from wallowing by the vision of the THE LAST TOURNAMENT. 177 pure splendour lying on the heights of Arthur ; and yet Dagonet sees, in replying to Tristram, how unlikely it is that even the King will succeed in lifting all men from the troughs of evil to the thrones of good. " ' Conceits himself as God that he can make Figs out of thistles, silks from bristles, milk From burning spurge, honey from hornet-combs, And men from beasts. . . .''' In Tristram and Isolt the victory is all on the side of Sense, and we watch it wrestle on its evil way, through love and songs, to its swiftly tragic end. Isolt, the Queen of Mark, had cherished the guilty love of Tristram. She hears his footstep in the hall and flies to meet him at the door. The intensity of her feeling burns in the lines : " ' My God, the measure of my hate for Mark Is as the measure of my love for thee.' "' It is well to contrast the high character of Dagonet with the character of Tristram and Isolt. Compare the spiritual heights that gleam through the serious jesting of Dagonet with the sensual deeps that lie within the words and songs of the guilty lovers. Isolt, as she thinks of the deserted bride of Tristram, is jealous, and declares — " ' O were I not my Mark's, by whom all men Are noble, I should hate thee more than love.' " 12 178 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. Then her mood changes into passionate yearning for assurance of his ever deeper love. She will be satisfied if he will but flatter and lie to her ! " ' Swear to me thou wilt love me ev'n when old, Gray-hair'd, and past desire, and in despair.' " There we have the character of Isolt, shallow, sentimental and voluptuous, so maudlin that she will be content to suck honeyed words filled with flics of falsity. How Soul must have lost itself in Sense when satisfied with sweet sounds of love empty of reality ! The reply of Tristram rings with a mocking void : " ' Wine, wine, and I will love thee to the death, And out beyond into the dream to come.' " In a laughing mood he sings the song of the two stars. " Ay, ay, O ay, the winds that bend the brier ! A star in heaven, a star within the mere." The song is a self-conscious and vivid contrast of himself to Arthur. Arthur's star is the star of spirituality, calm and clear and abiding, shining far away in the heavens. Tristram's star is the star of Sense shining near within the mere, ever shimmering with unrest, swept by gusts of passion " as if a phantom thing," doomed to pass. THE LAST TOURNAMENT. 179 The song is prophetic of his destiny, fulfilled in tragedy. " Behind him ro'se a shadow and a shriek — ' Mark's way,' said Mark, and clove him thro' the brain." Tristram and Isolt are thus epicureans of the lowest type. They make unlawful pleasure the end of existence. There glimmers o'er all their sensuous life and talk a spiritual ideal which they persistently sacrifice to lower ends. The result in character with Isolt is a selfish voluptuary, who seeks to win Tristram from his lawful bride with heartless indifference, and with Tristram a callous sensualist, who is dead even to woman's tears and pleading, who is cynical, with a coldness that shivers in his words, as he speaks to one bereaved, or to Isolt as she pleads for love in old age, or of his wife forsaken and lonely. Thus in Tristram and Isolt Sense is regnant and Soul is trampled in the slime of unholy passion, while the tragedy that sweeps the star of Tristram into oblivion is the symbol of moral retribution standing like an avenging angel within the folds of Sense, awaiting the hour of doom ; " the mind of the flesh is death." The In " The Vision of Sin " we have another Vision of illustration of the working of spiritual death ^ m - in a human soul. It is often complex, always invisible, and only known by its dire results. No i8o THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. one has ever seen a soul die, but when it dies there are mostly signs of death. " The Vision of Sin " portrays the outward aspect of a dying soul. The cause is sensuality and the subject a young man. "A youth came riding toward a palace-gate. He rode a horse with wings. . . ." The horse with wings is, doubtless, borrowed from Plato's " Phaedrus " and is suggestive of high spiritual possibility. The youth has the power to soar, but his pinions are weighted with cloying sensualism. First he is allured by " a child of sin." Then we are introduced to an altogether sensuous scene with its " low voluptuous music " which, as it trembles and dies away, touches the soul into sighs and whispers. Again it " storm'd in orbs of song," shaking them all into a frenzy of sensuality. " Then they started from their places, Moved with violence, changed in hue, Caught each other with wild grimaces." The whole picture portrays the effect of voluptuous music on the quivering nerves of Sense. Wings cannot soar in that reeking atmosphere of sensuous song. Then the scene is changed. The soul is still conscious of its capacity and possibility. The great ideals have not all faded ; upon the mountain lies the light of noble things. "God made Himself an awful rose of dawn." THE VISION OF SIN. 1S1 It is far withdrawn, but powerful enough to penetrate the dense atmosphere and stir the soul in its slumber. That " rose of dawn " is the call to spiritual vigilance and the prophecy of the day of nobler life. But sensuality numbs moral sensi- bility, with the result that the dawn is " Unheeded : and detaching, fold by fold, From those still heights. . . ." And as the neglected light slowly fades, the nemesis comes creeping down. " A heavy vapour, hueless, formless, cold, Came floating on for many a month and year, Unheeded. . . ." The moral atmosphere grows denser and finally wraps the soul in deadly folds, when the young life of soaring genius is shrivelled into an old age of sodden cynicism. The man is dying while living. The withered heath and ruined inn are symbols of wasted, empty being, where no flowers grow and the winds wail a requiem. His talk at the inn with the ostler and barmaid and waiter reveals the man. Sensuality generates subtle evils. Cold-blooded cynicism, contempt of virtue, and blatant infidelity constitute the staple of his speech. " ' We are men of ruin'd blood ; Therefore comes it we are wise. Fish are we that love the mud, Rising to no fancy, flies.' " i8a THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. His cynicism is the dye which gives a colour of vice even to virtue. He assails the Church and religion and liberty. All men are hypocrites, life is a delusion, death is king, and the skull of the dead is a hideous mockery of the divine. " ' Lo ! God's likeness — the ground-plan — Neither modell'd, glazed, nor framed.' " In the last picture we have the death of the old sensualist. He is dying, when there rises again that " mystic mountain range," and the sound of voices is heard. "Then some one spake: 'Behold! it was a crime Of sense avenged by sense that wore with time.'" The voice pleads that his sins were due to sensuous passion, that the higher nature took no active part, that sufficient penalty was exacted of the body and that thus Sense was avenged. "Another said, 'The crime of sense became The crime of malice and is equal blame.' " Precisely ! It was impossible for the man to sin only through Sense. He could not divorce intellect and conscience and feeling. All sin is by consent of the higher nature. His sensuous sin begat malice, but the will was involved in the malice. The soul is a unity and is not divisible. All its moral actions are determined by its executive, the will. Thus the man was to blame. THE VISION OF SIN. 183 Yet another voice on the slope pleads. "... 'He had not wholly quench'd his power; A little grain of conscience made him sour.' " It is urged that he was cynical and contemptuous, not because of malignancy, but because of his own sense of failure, and that, though he had wasted his life and abused his gifts, he had still something left. And the question is asked, "Is there any hope ? " The answer comes, but it is vague and uncertain. Man may not determine the destiny of such an one. God alone knows the hidden things of the soul and whether nobler life can be fashioned out of the wrecks of ruin. But the fact that the dawn wholly withdrawn flushes once again the mystic mountain may carry a suggestion of hope. "And on the glimmering limit far withdrawn God made Himself an awful rose of dawn." Thus " The Vision of Sin " vividly portrays the career of the sensualist and the slain greatness of a human soul. The In "The Lotos-Eaters" we do not find vulgar Lotos- passion at work with its vein of cynicism or Eaters. crime of malice, but merely the abandon of the whole man to the sensuousness of nature. The senses are captivated, with the result that love and duty and great ideals and noble effort are sacrificed 184 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. for the greatest number of pleasing sensations. " The Lotos-Eaters," with its minute detail and exquisite colour, is a perfect picture of the moral effect wrought by sensuous absorption. If we think with one critic only of its artistic merits, as " picture and music and nothing more," or if we regard it ex- clusively on its physical side as " the apotheosis of sensuous enjoyment " we shall miss its deepest meaning. The mariners come to the lotos land and eat of the lotos fruit. They bask in the summer light and breathe the perfumed air. They watch the " crisping ripples on the beach " until their senses steal away their souls. They forget the claims of country and home, love and duty. Sense absorp- tion weakens human feeling, and in hedonism they sacrifice altruism. They would take an oath — " In the hollow Lotos-land to live and lie reclined On the hills like gods together, careless of mankind." So the higher nature dies in self-indulgent ease. When used as a means the sensuous may aid the spiritual, but when regarded as the end it becomes a parasite of the soul to suck its life. Mr. Bayne would like to have seen " the atmo- sphere of Epicurean repose over the heads of the lotos-eaters shaken by the thunder of some higher truth, by the tumult of passionate acting men, by the roar of battle." THE LOTOS-EATERS. 185 Artistically, doubtless, that would have been a gain, but ethically it would have been a loss ; we should have lost the moral force of the slow nemesis that creeps with death upon the soul abandoned to sensuousness. "And all at once they sang, ' Our island home Is far beyond the wave ; we will no longer roam.' " The Sea Fairies. Again in " The Sea-Fairies," the temptation to live for the senses rather than the soul rings like a charming bell in the siren call of the fairies to the weary mariners. " Who can light on as happy a shore All the world o'er, all the world o'er ? Whither away ? listen and stay : mariner, Mariner, fly no more." The And again in " The Islet," when the wife of Islet. the singer would charm him from a life of action to indolent ease we hear the song of death. " ' Whither, O whither, love, shall we go ? ' " And when he asks in the crashing music, if it shall be " ' To a sweet little Eden on earth that I know,' " She at once replies : '"Thither, O thither, love, let us go.'" i86 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. But he knows that in the Eden of sensuous in- toxication there is spiritual death, and bravely answers, " ' No, love, no. For the bud ever breaks into bloom on the tree, And a storm never wakes on the lonely sea, And a worm is there in the lonely wood.' " THE EMOTIONAL POEMS 187 THE SANCTITY OF LOVE. Love and Death. The Miller's Daughter. The Gardener's Daughter. Dora. The May Queen. Lady Clare. The Lord of Burleigh. The Beggar Maid. The Talking Oak. The Brook. Sea Dreams. Maud. Enoch Arden. ^T^ENNYSON is not only the finest of English *~ poets in the exquisite finish of his art, but he is one of the purest. He has not written a line which may not be read in the presence of the most chaste and sensitive. He never leaves a stain upon the whiteness of the tender flower of our home. The breath that breathes through his Idylls is ever fresh and pure. When he sings of the sanctities of love we are in that Eden of long ago, where pure hearts and calm imaged the perfect face of love. Our poet touches the most delicate subjects with a hand so steady and with eyes so clear, that the finished picture impresses us, not with the sensuous, but with the spiritual. Within the veil of Sense he shows the sanctities of the soul. We pass i 9 o THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. quickly through the porch of the human into the temple of the divine, and within he reveals the altar, where burns the sacred fire. Only a pure great soul, finely sensitive to the nobility of love, love in the home, breathing its pure air, soothed by its " voice of gentle stillness," or inspired by its vision of lofty sanctity, could ever have written these " Idylls of the Hearth." With the poet the home is the unit of the nation. Its true greatness lies not in her army and navy, but in the sacredness of home. What the home is the nation will be ; hence the domestic idylls in which the nobility of love is more persistently taught than in any other English poetry. The ideal of its sweetness and strength gleams through these idylls, and should love be degraded by passion or pride or hypocrisy, should the holy place of the soul be desecrated, the anger of Tennyson bursts like a lava flood upon the shameless seducer. Love In "Love and Death" we have the key-note and of the song which the poet sings sublimely Death. through the first five poems of this group. Love and Death are represented as meeting in the walks of Paradise, when Death claims to be pro- prietor. Love concedes the supremacy of death on earth, but flings back the retort that Death is only the shadow of life. As the tree standing in the light of the sun casts its shadow, THE MILLER'S DAUGHTER. 191 " So in the light of great eternity Life eminent creates the shade of death ; The shadow passeth when the tree shall fall, But I shall reign for ever over all." Thus with clear vision the poet inteprets the deepest instinct of the human heart that love is immortal. The The note struck in " Love and Death," is Miller's heard in " The Miller's Daughter." Daughter. It is j n the pure loves of home t ] iat the sanctity of the ideal is most nearly realised. And here we have an exquisite picture of domestic love flowing serenely through tender scenery and fragrant flowers and sweet songs. We listen with delight to the old man's prattle as he tells over again to Alice, his wife, their love-story — how, when angling in the pool, he was haunted with a love-song and saw a reflection in the " level flood," the beauteous form of Alice leaning from the casement ; and when he raised his eyes and looked in hers — " Such eyes ! I swear to you, my love, That these have never lost their light." In the new love his being awoke and nature seemed to awake as well in responsive sympathy. " I loved the brimming wave that swam Thro' quiet meadows round the mill." The story runs on through those golden days of i 9 2 THE TEACH INC. OK TENNYSON. their betrothal. How dcliciously natural arc the lines — " And so it was— half-sly, half-shy, You would, and would not, little one ! Although I pleaded tenderly, And you and I were all alone " ! Slowly he won the consent of his mother, who had made excuse — for the heart of a mother keeps jealous watch over the love of a son ; but at last '"Go fetch your Alice here,' she said: Her eyelid quiver'd as she spake.'" Then he asks Alice to sing the " foolish song " he gave her in those blissful days, and the two lyrics, interrupting the flow of the story, are exquisitely musical and tender. " It is the miller's daughter And she is grown so dear, so dear." '' Love that hath us in the net, Can he pass, and we forget ? " What a vision of sanctity in the heart of home is revealed in the lines — " Look thro' mine eyes with thine. True wife Round my true heart thine arms entwine " ! I low tenderly he touches their sacred sorrow ! " Although the loss had brought us pain, That loss but made us love the more, With farther lookings on. . . ." THE GARDENER'S DAUGHTER. 193 The dredge of grief had deepened the river-bed of their love. Sorrow had cut a window in " the narrow house " through which they looked beyond. Pathetically he speaks of the comfort he had found in her. " But that God bless thee, dear — who wrought Two spirits to one equal mind." Then together they go out into the sunset and die with the sun into the life of the day that never dies. It is a perfect picture of the sanctity of love in the home, making pure all the fires on the altar of the heart. The The same ideal, clothed with equal tender- Gardener's ness, and singing as sweet a song, gleams Daughter, through "The Gardener's Daughter." For clear penetration into the heart of love with its subtle working, for the finished picture of the English garden, the whole of this charming idyll is unique. It fills us with wonder at the great skill of the artist, and the clear penetration of the poet-seer into the secret chamber of the heart. The conception of love is pure and noble, and all the pictures glow with its sanctity. The garden, with its sylvan beauty, seems to make visible that other garden of the soul where the flowers of love are pure and sweet as those of Eden. The story is simple. Two young men living together in the city are brothers in art and 13 i94 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. friendship, when the one, Eustace, is drawn by some law that holds in love, the attraction of opposites, to Juliet. She is a kind of multum in parvo, and outwardly most fascinating, such an one to be " The summer pilot of an empty heart Unto the shores of nothing ! . . ." Of the pure grace and inward loveliness that adorn the spirit and make it the Shekinah naught is told. As a work of art, a child of sensuous beauty, Juliet is captivating. Thus thinks adoring Eustace, who paints her picture and chaffs his friend on its finished beauty, saying, " When will you paint like this ? " He answers that it is all the work of love. " A more ideal artist he than all." At this Juliet, laughing, bids him ". . . 'Go and see The Gardener's daughter ; trust me, after that, You scarce can fail to match his masterpiece.' And up we rose, and on the spur we went." Then follows the description of the garden in which Rose lives. It is well to linger and to note with what power of imagination the garden is pictured. We may sit, " muffled in dark leaves " and hear the minster clock, and look out over fields of dewy freshness, "... Wash'd by a slow broad stream, That, stirr*d with languid pulses of the oar, THE GARDENER'S DAUGHTER. 195 Waves all its lazy lilies, and creeps on, Barge-laden, to three arches of a bridge Crown'd with the minster-towers." We may see the large lime-trees making a summer-house for " murmurous wings." This sylvan beauty of our English scenery in many a rural district is faithfully portrayed. The poet dwelt in seclusion, communing with the soul of nature, watching all her mystic moods and wondrous ways, and tells us ever what he sees. Here Rose lived, "hoarded in herself," her little world the garden, her greater, the sweet self in which she dreamed ; but even flowers in hedgerows are not quite hidden, and bees are allured by their fragrance and beauty. Thus Rose becomes a centre of attraction, and even the vulgar drones buzz about her. "... The common mouth, So gross to express delight, in praise of her Grew oratory. Such a lord is Love, And Beauty such a mistress of the world." Ere he sees her the young artist falls in love ! Her imagined beauty flashes on his vision, and her tender grace flushes his life like the dawn. He reads the unerring instinct and passionate yearning within and says "'My heart was like a prophet to my heart, And told me I should love.'" Then follows a delightful description of the 196 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. desires and hopes created by love, setting fire to the heart, and making imagination glow and giving colour to all things. "... A croud of hopes, That sought to sow themselves like winged seeds, Born out of everything I heard and saw, Flutter'd about my senses and my soul." The passage is an illustration of our poet's power in penetrating and describing subtlest feeling. He is master of the finest woven threads in the delicate web drawn across the chamber of the heart, but his power lies not only in subjective analysis of emotion, but in sympathetic interpretation of nature and in the skill with which he blends the moods of nature with the moods of the soul. He is more than a scientific observer of nature, noting with calm and practised eye her lights and shades ; as when he describes " The curled white of the coming wave Glassed in the slippery sand before it breaks," and "The golden autumn woodland reels Athwart the smoke of burning weeds." Or when he paints a tempest with vivid realism "The forest cracked, the waters curled, The cattle huddled on the lea And wildly dashed on tower and tree The sunbeam strikes along the world." THE GARDENER'S DAUGHTER. 197 And when he touches the colours of the Alps with fine delicacy : " How faintly-flushed, how phantom-fair Was Monte Rosa, hanging there A thousand shadowy pencilled valleys And snowy dells in a golden air." Tennyson is thus a student and lover of nature, who registers what he sees with scientific accuracy. When he tells us that a skylark comes down side- ways on the wing, or when he writes " More black than ashbuds in the front of March," we may be sure that he is right. But when we have said that the poet is a scientific observer of nature we have not said all, nor is it just to say with one critic that " nature to him is neither love nor thought, she is law." Nature to him is law, for law is order, and he sees order everywhere. He owns and reflects the scientific spirit, but he sees much more than law, symbol of the force that drives through all the currents of life. Force is pitiless : but to the poet nature is much more than force. He sees also a mystic life with moods having their counterpart in human emotion, so that the one seems a reflex of the other. He sometimes interprets nature as if she were an infinite mother in tender sympathy with the joys and sorrows of her children, and so not all law but love as well. Nature may not be to him what she was to Words- 198 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. worth ; but it is evident that he feels the power of a Person behind and within nature, evolving beauty and order, and ever in sympathy with the best and purest. He does not merely " describe " nature with scientific accuracy, but he interprets her mystic moods, and, with something of the skill of Shakespeare, shows that she is married to man not merely to serve him, but to sympathise with him in all pure delights and chastise him in all wrong- doing. Take an illustration of this poetic sympathy of nature with the joyous passion of love when the young artist makes his first call upon Rose — " All the land in flowery squares, Beneath a broad and equal-blowing wind, Smelt of the coming summer, as one large cloud Drew downward : but all else of heaven was pure Up to the Sun, and May from verge to verge, And May with me from head to heel. . . ." And so nature is interpreted not merely as law, but as love,* for all her voices blend with the passion of the lover's heart, who replies to Eustace — " . . . ' Were there nothing else For which to praise the heavens but only love, That only love were cause enough for praise.'" In the garden the two friends come suddenly upon Rose, and beautiful is the portrait of the modest maiden among her flowers. * " I report as a man may on God's work — All's love yet all's law." — Robert Browning. THE GARDENER'S DAUGHTER. 199 " But the full day dwelt on her brows, and sunn'd Her violet eyes, and all her Hebe bloom. . . . Half light half shade, She stood, a sight to make an old man young. So rapt, we near'd the house ; but she, a Rose In roses, mingled with her fragrant toil." The fascinated lover begs a flower of the un- suspecting maiden, who hesitates and is slightly nervous ; she drops the branch, and " braids her looser hair," and shapes her lips as if to answer, " Nor yet refused the rose, but granted it, And moved away, and left me, statue-like, In act to render thanks." He keeps watch all day long " till every daisy slept " with the hope of seeing her, but his beauti- ful rose had gone to hide her crimson blush in the seclusion of her home. The friends return to the city, when the love-lorn man is assailed by the good-natured banter of Eustace. Night comes, but he cannot sleep for the vision of her beauty and the call of the voice of love. How charmingly natural is his declaration ! " Henceforward squall nor storm Could keep me from that Eden where she dwelt." Then comes the old story, yet ever fresh and beautiful as the morning. He attends the wedding of Eustace, and as example is better than precept in life, he will follow the example of his friend. 2oo THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. So we have the delightful story of his wooing, and how at last " The silver fragments of a broken voice, Made me most happy, faltering, 'I am thine.'" Then of aspirations realised and hopes fulfilled he may not speak. There are sacred things in the heart veiled by the wings of the cherubim. "... Here, then, my words have end." But he longs to tell the story of the sacred past, and gives an exquisite outline in the words beginning — " Yet might I tell of meetings, of farewells," until at last " Night slid down one long stream of sighing wind, And in her bosom bore the baby, Sleep." And he is left alone and yet not alone, for she is a spirit-presence, a memory and an influence to keep his heart pure and young in old age, and at last to stand with him in the sunset. " The darling of my manhood, and, alas ! Now the most blessed memory of mine age." Thus the poet sings sublimely of the sanctity of love, making life richer and fuller, love giving the glow of tender colour to prosaic things, love inspiring the soul to true nobility, and, when the eventide draws on, filling it with light and music. DORA. 201 Dora. The power of a pure great love is further illustrated in " Dora." The scene of the story lies in the rural home of farmer Allan, who has a son named William and a niece called Dora. The old man having set his heart on the marriage of William and Dora, one day calls his son and tells him how he and Dora's father " had once hard words and parted," and when he died he took Dora to his home, and his one wish had ever been that William might marry Dora. William cuts the conversation short by declaring " ' I cannot marry Dora ; by my life, I will not marry Dora.'" Allan in a violent passion threatens to disinherit William unless he complies with his wish. " ' . . . Take a month to think, And let me have an answer to my wish ; Or, by the Lord that made me, you shall pack, And never more darken my doors again.' " Two strong wills thus clash, with added heat. William, feeling that he is being coerced into love, turns madly from his father's house, becomes a farm labourer and marries Mary Morrison, a labourer's daughter. Allan now pours the vial of his wrath on the patient Dora, forbidding her to speak to William or Mary on pain of expulsion. " ' . . . My will is law.' And Dora promised, being meek . . . ," 202 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. Misfortune falls on William, who passes his father's gate half starving, but is scorned by the unforgiving man. Dora, however, proves to be the guardian angel who, out of " what little she could save," provides for the pressing needs of William and Mary and their boy, until fever cuts short the life of William. Then Dora goes to Mary, and we have a woman's plot to soften the heart of Allan. Believing in the subduing power of love, Dora suggests that she should take the boy into the harvest field and set him among the wheat that " ' He may see the boy, And bless him for the sake of him that's gone. The first day the plot fails, but on the second day Dora returns to the field with her little cupid, places him on a mound and wreaths him with harvest flowers, " To make him pleasing in her uncle's eye. Allan appears on the scene with the question, " Whose child is that ? " When he learns the truth he is angry, and Dora makes the pathetic appeal — " ' Do with me as you will, but take the child, And bless him for the sake of him that's gone.' " Allan cannot tolerate opposition, and yet relents ; he will take the boy, but Dora must not see him again. He disappears with the struggling urchin ; DORA. 203 Dora, returning to Mary, finds her grateful for the prospect opening before her boy ; but when she learns of the hardness of Allan, she repents, saying : " ' For he will teach him hardness, and to slight His mother. . . .' " They resolve to go to Allan's house and to claim the boy, and through the partly open door they witness a lovely scene — " The boy set up betwixt his grandsire's knees, Who thrust him in the hollows of his arm, And clapt him on his hands and on the cheeks, Like one that loved him. . . ." The women enter. Mary tells Allan the pathetic story of his son William and the last broken utterance of his sorrow. She begs of him her son and, further, pleads for Dora. The sequel is described in words of tragic pathos, simple and natural. " ' I have kill'd him — but I loved him — my dear son. May God forgive me ! — I have been to blame. Kiss me, my children.' " Thus Allan softens into contrition and his children come home. " So those four abode Within one house together." The characters need no comment ; they stand self-revealed, and the moral lies upon the surface. The story might have been called " Redeemed by 2o 4 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. Love " in illustration of the truth " A little child shall lead them." Allan enthrones law with in- flexible tyranny as if it were moulded in iron to break the offender. He enthrones it in heart and home, forgetting that law itself must be administered under the sway of a higher power — love. He forgets that charity must go beyond justice and lay her angel hand upon the sword and teach that rigid rule of will and tyranny of selfish desire are not to crush tender emotion. Allan rolled the engine of an iron will across the field of his heart and hardened it into rock, and his nature could only be redeemed, its waste places restored and the seeds of heaven sown by a little child. Thus love, that "greatest thing," reasserts its sway, and the young angel comes back into the heart of an old man. If in " Dora " we have natural emotion wrought into an idyll of exquisite tenderness, then what shall be said of " The May Queen " ? The IN " The May Queen " the first thing we feel May is its strange emotional power over us. And Queen. emotion is stirred so deeply because the delineation of feeling is natural and simple and pathetic. Tennyson is sometimes a little too ornate to be natural, but in " The May Queen " the lines of light and shade arc finely drawn. lie has flashed THE MAY QUEEN. 205 his spirit into the character ; he feels with Alice in her varying moods, and gives clear expression to them. There is a scale of emotion rising from the lower notes of self, ascending to the higher in nature and reaching the climax in the divine. That ascending music which she hears in her dream marks the progress of her own spirit from the lower to the higher. In the opening stanzas we have a child filled with frolic and mirth, absorbed by the sweet expectation " I'm to be Queen o' the May." The thought dominates her and makes her authoritative and selfish. She addresses her mother imperatively "You must wake and call me early, call me early, mother dear." And her self-consciousness is clearly unveiled in the lines " But none so fair as little Alice in all the land they say." Further, her wayward, selfish humour leads her to be cruel to the love-lorn Robin. There is really no excuse for playing the ghost on him, and her words have a cold ring about them, " They call me cruel-hearted, but I care not what they say, They say he's dying all for love, but that can never be : They say his heart is breaking, mother — what is that to me ? " The Alice, in those first stanzas, in the rushing spring of life, with the expectation of being crowned 206 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. queen of the shepherd lads and lasses, is obviously a vain and selfish girl. She is already a tyrannical little queen ; all her subjects must be her slaves. YVc feci instinctively that she lacks the beautiful soul — tender sensibility to the joys and sorrows of others. She has not yet found the selfless, altruistic life. She has not yet become a Christ-child. She is bright and charming in her talk and ways, but she does not know the infinite grace of sacrifice. Now, in the stanzas of " New- Year's Eve " we trace the subtle change wrought in the character of Alice. She is fast wasting away in consumption, and suffering is having its desired effect. In its furnace the dross of self is being destroyed, and the gold of character is being sublimated. Her spirit is becoming fine and sensitive and gentle. The first indication of the change is apparent in the first line, where the imperative becomes an interrogative, in addressing her mother. " You must wake and call me early." is now chastened by suffering into " If you're waking, call me early." It is a delicate touch, so fine that we almost pass it, and yet it marks the transition of the spirit from the lower to the higher. As the spring is prophetic of the summer, so these changes in the disposition tell of a new vitality bearing the promise of richer THE MAY QUEEN. 207 life and fuller. The second indication of awakening out of self lies in the effect wrought by nature upon her. As if the self-soul, not finding any peace within, had gone out of its broken doors to look for it in the soul of nature. Her sweet talk is all about the sun and the blossom on the blackthorn, and the flowers and the hazel copse and the rook in the old elm-tree and the plover piping by " the fallow lea," and the swallow coming with the " summer o'er the wave." The choir of nature sings to her again. Lovely scenes move like pictures in the brain before the eyes of the dying girl, filling her with pathetic yearning for the coming spring and summer. It is the physical craving of a consumptive patient, but deeper still it is the hunger of a heart seeking peace in the sensuous and outward. She has seen the white robe of God and would fain " touch and hold." What pathos sobs in the simple lines — ■ "There's not a flower on all the hills: the frost is on the pane : I only wish to live till the snowdrops come again : I wish the snow would melt and the sun come out on high: I long to see a flower so before the day I die " ! It is the self-child wandering through sunlight and woods and flowers, charmed by the nature-spirit, caressed into tenderness and won from waywardness, so that thus she speaks ; 208 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. "I have been wild and wayward, but you'll forgive me now; You'll kiss me, my own mother, and forgive me ere I go." Thus far under the influence of suffering the movement of the spirit has been from self into nature, but the climax is reached in the " Con- clusion." She lives through the winter to hear again the bleating of the lambs and to see the blowing of the flowers, but, strange to say, the sensuous beauty and the stirring voices of nature no longer satisfy her. "It seem'd so hard at first, mother, to leave the blessed sun, And now it seems as hard to stay, and yet His will be done ! " It is evident that she has realised some higher life and won some sweeter vision. A new movement has taken place in the spirit. The charm of nature is not lost, but she is under the spell of a diviner charm. She finds the vision of God in Christ, who is the pure image in time of what the Father is in eternity. In His sublime sacrifice she finds the life which is the life of God. She sees the sin of self in the pure splendour of the self-less Christ who died, and she is made pure. "He taught me all the mercy, for he show'd me all the sin. Now, tho' my lamp was lighted late, there's One will let me in." Then comes the dream of the calling voices and THE MAY QUEEN. 209 of the sweet music swelling up the valley, passing, as if on rhythmic wings, to heaven, when her spirit interprets the sounds of nature as expressing the movement and mood of her own heart. "... I know The blessed music went that way my soul will have to go. And for myself, indeed, I care not if I go to-day. But, Effie, you must comfort her when I am past away. And say to Robin a kind word, and tell him not to fret." Here we have the climax, the ascending music of her own spirit out of self into nature, then on into the divine. Her last thoughts are for her mother and Robin ; she has become a Christ-child. The essence of the Christian consciousness is that it can project itself into other lives and bear their sickness and heal their wounds. Thus she passes, feeling that her new life here in Christ is the ever old and yet ever young life, a life which death cannot touch. It is the vitality of God. " To lie within the light of God, as I lie upon your breast — And the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest." It may not have been in the mind of the poet to trace in this pathetic idyll the passing of a human soul out of self and the sensuous into the spiritual and the divine, but it is there. One of the marks of a great master is that there is always more in his work than he himself is 14 2io THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. conscious of, and it is left for his disciples to follow the gleam of his genius or fit the broken chord into the rhythmic whole. The music of the sanctity of love still sings on in " Lady Clare," " The Lord of Burleigh," and in " The Beggar Maid," — a beautiful trio in which one great truth is illustrated. The poet links love with worth. He recognises its supremacy over all material wealth, and earthly titles, and pride of birth, and centres it in natural instincts, and spiritual affinities and the merits of character. He enters a noble protest against the tyranny of a caste that will not allow love to wander beyond the boundaries of ancestry, and against the sordid avarice that would bind the soul with a chain of gold to some clod of earth. In the " Lady Clare " this protest is first made. Lady The Lady Clare is engaged to Lord Ronald, Clare. her cousin ; she is, apparently, a rich heiress, but she dwells on the thought that he loves her not for her wealth, but for her worth. " ' lie does not love me for my birth, Nor for my lands so broad and fair; He loves me for my own true worth, And that is well,' said Lady Clare.'' She soon has an opportunity of learning whether LADY CLARE. 211 Lord Ronald loves her for her gold, or for her goodness. The old nurse comes upon the scene and breaks to her the disquieting news : " ' Lord Ronald is heir of all your lands, And you are not the Lady Clare.'" The Earl's daughter had died, and the nurse had substituted her own child. Lady Clare being the daughter of the nurse, Lord Ronald is the legal heir to the property. The situation is embarrassing for all concerned, and there is scope for intrigue and deception. The secret is known only to Lady Clare and her mother-nurse. The supplanter finds it easy to become the temptress and suggests that the secret be kept for life, and the property retained at the marriage. But Lady Clare is incapable of duplicity and, nobly indignant, retorts : " ' If I'm a beggar bom,' she said, ' I will speak out, for I dare not lie.' ' Nay now, my child,' said Alice the nurse, ' But keep the secret all ye can.' She said, ' Not so : but I will know If there be any faith in man.' " The nurse has lost all faith in man, and believes that Lord Ronald will simply claim his right — enthrone property over love. The Lady Clare will put him to the test, and designs a little plot in which she will appear in the dress of a peasant 2i2 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. girl to Lord Ronald — a russet gown with a rose in her hair ; and she will tell him the story of the nurse. She starts for the castle when Lord Ronald meets her. " ' Why come you drest like a village maid, That are the flower of the earth ? ' ' : The crisis has arrived ; man is to be weighed in the balance ! "She look'd into Lord Ronald's eyes And told him all her nurse's tale.'' And the result ! To the honour of manhood and the sanctity of love we read that he turned and kissed her with the tender assurance : "'We two will wed to-morrow morn, And you shall still be Lady Clare.' " Thus Lord Ronald proved himself superior to pride of birth by wedding the child of poverty. We wonder how many, under similar circumstances, would have acted with the honour of Lord Ronald ! The The sanctity of love — its superiority to birth Lord of anc i fame and power — is further illustrated Burleigh. jn „ The Lor1 of Burleigh » The Lord of Burleigh appears in the character of an artist, and woos and wins a village maiden. They are married without her knowledge of his real title and estate. His motive in the concealment does not appear THE LORD OF BURLEIGH. 5 13 to have been selfish. He would awaken within her joyous surprise on learning his social position. The motive is good, but the result is sad. They pass from her father's roof, she thinking only of the cottage home among the flowers and the happiness of her artist husband, and he of the great surprise in store for her. He leads her by the handsome houses of the wealthy nobles, through the ancient parks with oak and chestnut and by the well-ordered gardens ; but all their glory fades in the light of her ideal. " Evermore she seems to gaze On that cottage growing nearer." They arrive at a stately mansion, when the gates swing open and domestics flutter about the doors, as the landscape painter, to the surprise of the village maiden, passes with her on " from hall to hall." " Proudly turns he round and kindly, 'All of this is mine and thine.' Here he lives in state and bounty, Lord of Burleigh, fair and free." But the effect upon her is not what he had fondly hoped. Upon a nature so sensitive the impression is quickly flashed that she is not equal to the exalted station — there had been no preparation and the transition is too swift ; but she strives to fit herself for the place, and succeeds, by inherent grace and careful culture in growing to the gentle life. 2i 4 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. " And her gentle mind was such That she grew a noble lad)', And the people loved her much." But the weight of honour hangs heavily on her sensitive spirit, and she longs that the Lord of Burleigh " Were once more that landscape-painter. So she droop'd and droop'd before him, Fading slowly from his side." The end is pathetic ; and yet we may admire the Lord of Burleigh for placing love above wealth, and marrying for worth. And we see how a village maiden, under gentle culture, may become a noble lady. The secret of the chastened culture lay in the sacred love by which the inferior assimilates the qualities of the superior. He was a gentle consort and she, by a true philosophy, became like the object loved. But the experiment is fraught with difficulty ! The In " The Beggar Maid " the protest against Beggar mere class marriages is further voiced. The Maid. King Cophetua becomes enamoured of a beggar maid, who is " more beautiful than day." " As shines the moon in clouded skies, She in her poor attire was seen ; One praised her ancles, one her eyes, One her dark hair and lovesome mien. THE BEGGAR MAID. 215 So sweet a face, such angel grace, In all that land had never been : Cophetua svvare a royal oath : ' This beggar maid shall be my queen ! ' " In this trio the supreme thought is the pure sanctity of love, and that it shall be allowed freedom in the choice of its object — that no con- siderations of birth, or name, or fame, shall ever be permitted to crush any noble passion when directed towards a noble object, and that marriage only ensures domestic peace in the realisation of dearest hopes, when it is the result of spiritual affinities, soul answering to soul, whether in king and beggar maid, or lord and village peasant. Where the affinities do not exist marriage too often ends in painful tragedy. We have further illustrations of the sanctity of a pure love, with wider variations, in " The Talking Oak," " The Brook," " Sea Dreams," " Maud," and in " Enoch Arden." The In " The Talking Oak " * we find a tender Talking sympathy on the part of inanimate nature 0a k. with the joys and sorrows of mankind. We are borne along on its theme, as if on wings, through * " Its author told me that this poem was an experiment, meant to test the degree in which it is within the power of poetry to harmonise external nature," etc. — Aubrey de Vere, A Memoir ; i. p. 510. 216 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. a fairyland. The oak overlooks Sumner-place, where the fair Olivia lives. Her sentimental lover, not sure whether "The love, that makes me thrice a man, Could hope itself return'd," comes to the " talking oak " to hear the stories of the lovers of long ago folded within its shadowy arms, and of all that Olivia does and feels for him, and to listen to the garrulous babbler as he contrasts Olivia's charms with those of the many who had sought his kindly shade. " Yet, since I first could cast a shade, Did never creature pass So slightly, musically made, So light upon the grass." This most friendly oak reveals the secret of Olivia's love, and pours into the rapt soul of the lover all the story of her coming to kiss the spot where his name was cut into the tree, until the " heart of oak " was deeply moved. " Hard wood I am, and wrinkled rind, But yet my sap was stirr'd." In the end the lover pronounces a. flax tecum over this aged and parental tree, capable of such young and tender emotion. The idyll is playful and sunny ; its loves, as they come and go in those centuries of change, are chaste and good, and THE BROOK. 217 through the leaves of the lover's tree a pure wind wanders and sunbeams play as if no serpent had ever coiled itself in Eden. The sanctity of love gleams through all. The idea of " The Talking Oak " affords an illustration of what has been well called Tennyson's " sensuous-sympathetic " use of nature. The oak is an incarnation of the lover. What he thinks and feels and would say are trans- ferred to the oak. It is a kind of transmigration of a soul into a tree, in which the tree speaks. This use of nature we shall find peculiar to the poet ; he often projects his characters into nature in such a way as to blend them in one current of sympathy — almost identity. His characters do not stand outside nature, merely, and talk to her, but he makes them go inside, so that nature speaks for them, and she becomes a kind of second self, as in the lines — " For oft I talk'd with him apart, And told him of my choice, Until he plagiarised a heart, And answer'd with a voice." " The Talking Oak " is naturally linked to " The Brook." The I TS charm does not lie in the simple love- Brook, story of sweet Katie and James Willows, with their lover's quarrel, along with the incessant chatter 2iS THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. of Philip, the old farmer, who insists on breaking in upon the tender scene of reconciliation. " But evermore her father came across With some long-winded tale and broke him short," until a friend beguiles the farmer across the farm that Katie and James may not be interrupted, and has inflicted upon him, by the garrulous old man, the pedigree and the peculiarities, the beauties and the blemishes, of every animal upon the farm. When they return they " Found the sun of sweet content Re-risen in Katie's eyes, and all things well." Nor does the end of the story charm, but sadden. The old farmer dies — " Poor Philip, of all his lavish waste of words Remains the lean P. W. on his tomb." Katie goes abroad, and years after, Lawrence Aylmer, now an old man, seated on a stile, is startled by a lovely maiden. He recalls the vision of a vanished face, and finds that she is the daughter of the Katie who wandered "About these meadows, twenty years ago." She tells him how they had returned and bought the farm, and bids him welcome. "My brother James is in the harvest-field: But she — you will be welcome — O, come in!" SEA DREAMS. 219 The charm of " The Brook " lies in the lyric threading the story : in its musical modulation, and in mingling moods of soul with moods of nature. " The Brook," like " The Talking Oak," " plagiarises a heart " and with a tongue of tender eloquence tells the story of its travels through sylvan beauty and brambly wildernesses. We forget the chastened love-story in the fascinating lyric-flow. It is one of those illustrations, in which Tennyson abounds, of his marvellous use of nature. He seems to penetrate by his peculiar sympathy into her mystic life and reveal her secrets, showing us beauty where we never saw it before, leading us into the " sound of many voices " where stillness reigned. " After all that philosophers have said, the essentially correct definition of poetry in the concrete is the beautiful in sight wedded to the beautiful in sound." The song of the " The Brook " — " I slip, I slide, I gloom, I glance, Among my skimming swallows ; I make the netted sunbeam dance Against my sandy shallows." is a perfect illustration of the definition. Sea IN " Sea-Dreams " we have a story of a Dreams. gently born and bred city clerk who had married an unknown artist's daughter. They live on slender means in the city with their only child Margaret. He had been led by an unctuous rogue, 22o THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. trading on religion, to invest his capital in Peruvian mines. Margaret fading for lack of air, they take her to the sea. The first Sunday they stray into a chapel and hear a " heated pulpiteer " who, " Not preaching simple Christ to simple men," deals with the dogmatism of a narrow school delighting in a hard theology. The preacher predicts the speedy and tragic end of the world. The gentle-hearted woman shudders, and her husband conjures up the mocking spectre of his ruin. They had entered the sanctuary with troubled hearts, seeking the vision of God and the Infinite Love, when they are regaled with the picture of the scarlet woman ! Out of the confines of the chapel, with its narrow views of God, they come and walk under the wide heaven, and by the vast sea. They drink the larger air and wander on the cliffs and watch the white-winged vessels sail into the west until curtained with the folds of night, or into the east, where they are " touched with roseate hues." Then homeward they return, she haunted by the text : " ' Let not the sun go down upon your wrath,' Said, ' Love, forgive him : ' but he did not speak." Then follows a magnificent description of the rising tide and the roaring sea in the lines : " Dead claps of thunder from within the cliffs Heard thro' the living roar. . . ." SEA DREAMS. 221 They all awake, the man crying, " A wreck, a wreck ! " The sea suggests his own ruined fortunes ; he recalls the words of his wife and falls into a soliloquy, descanting on the word forgive and reflecting on the conduct of the unctuous hypocrite — how he had been warned, as if by something divine, not to trust him, had fought with his own lack of charity, had partaken of the hospitality of the man, had listened to his silvery talk, and had invested with him all his savings, and now " ' Ruin'd ! Ruin'd ! the sea roars Ruin : a fearful night ! ' '' His wife thinks he dreamed, and asks, ' Had you ill dreams ? " Yes, and he tells his dream ; and we have an illustration of how imagination in sleep weaves into the fabric of a dream the sounds and sights of nature. Nature becomes a reflex of the storm within the man, or of the peace for which he craved. His dream — the tossing on the deep, the shelter of the cavern, the lovely star upon the night, and the landward exit of the cave filled with light, the strong woman with the pickaxe, and the deep bearing him on, the woman upon the brink who had worked within the mines scaline the mountain and he following, the vision from the summit of the fleet of glass, as if jewelled, sailing down before a dark cloud and in the distance a 222 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. reef of gold, the fleet bearing down upon the reef and himself frantic to save it, but all in vain — portrays the power of imagination in sleep to construct a dream out of the familiar objects of life which shall reflect the moods of the soul. The ocean, now in wild unrest sobbing through the night, and now in gentle sleep under the summer light, is a picture of life. The woman in her strength, with pickaxe in her hand, stands for noble labour. The fleet of glass wrecked on a shining reef of gold, is the symbol of delusive dreams and broken hopes and vanished ideals. We never fully realise on earth our cherished hopes : we struggle up to some far-off gleaming peak, only to find the height flashing beyond us ; or if we reach the Pisgah of our aspiration, it is only to look upon the promised land and die in the wilder- ness with unrealised hopes and unfinished life. But God lives and eternity is long, and His completeness will flow around our little life and realise our noblest aspiration. We must shift the centre of gravity from the material to the spiritual if we would adjust the focus. To be spiritual is to be in God, and to be in God is to win the vision of life sailing across the troubled deep to the land of untroubled peace. Still the wife thinks it is only a dream, and she says : "'A trifle makes a dream, a trifle breaks," SEA DREAMS. 223 He replies that it is no trifle and goes on to speak of his interview with the fraudulent hypocrite, that worst type, with sleek smooth face and biblical quotations and grip of the hand with poison secreted in the heart ! The slimy envenomed reptile, with its glittering eyes, that charms to its death the innocent bird, is not more repulsive than the man who uses the spell of religion by which to ensnare the trustful. Here is a vivid picture of the loathsome reptile. '". . . I should find he meant me well; And then began to bloat himself, and ooze All over with the fat affectionate smile That makes the widow lean. " My dearest friend, Have faith, have faith ! We live by faith," said he ; "And all things work together for the good Of those '' — it makes me sick to quote him — last Gript my hand hard, and with God-bless-you, went.'" Or when his wife urges that he may be wrong. " Perhaps he meant, or partly meant, you well,' " we have the hypocrite chiselled in the cutting reply of the injured man, " ' Who, never naming God except for gain, So never took that useful name in vain, Made Him his catspaw and the Cross his tool, And Christ the bait to trap his dupe and fool ; Nor deeds of gift, but gifts of grace he forged, And snake-like slimed his victim ere he gorged. How like you this old satire ? ' ' Nay, she said, 'I loathe it. . . .'" 224 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. But she too had a dream that went to music. She dreamed of a belt of luminous vapour in which music lay concealed and swelled at last into a thunderous fulness, that drew into its mystic light the grey cathedrals, broke the statues of king and saint and founder, caught up the cavilling discords of contending mortals into the ascending music, so that their wild wailings were never out of tune with its sweet note, until at last the great wave, " mixt with awful light," swept " The men of flesh and blood, and men of stone, To the waste deeps together." Yes, replies the man, but in that music harmonis- ing our wild cries hate cannot blend. "One shriek of hate would jar all the hymns of heaven." His conscience, even in his wrathful mood and fiery indignation, is sensitive. Hate belongs to hell. " True Devils with no ear, they howl in tune With nothing but the Devil ! " Love belongs to heaven, and the wild passions of men may not blend with its holy music. Hate cannot harmonise with heaven. The injured man, seeing thus the fitness of things, is conscious of wrong in cherishing the spirit of hatred, and his wife is quick to teach him the lesson of forgiveness. She tells him now of the sudden SEA DREAMS. 225 death of his enemy, saying, " We must forgive the dead." She sings, meanwhile, the sweet lullaby, " What does little birdie say," until the child sleeps, and she will sleep the sounder if only he will forgive ! " Then the man, ' His deeds yet live, the worst is yet to come. Yet let your sleep for this one night be sound : I do forgive him ! '" Thus love becomes sublime in sanctity when ijt teaches the lesson of forgiveness. The theme is continued in " Maud," where we have illustrated the redeeming power of a noble love. Maud. " MAUD " is a pure love-story — a mono- dramatic lyric. " It is a ' drama of the soul ' set in a landscape glorified by love," and, according to Lowell, the antiphonal voice to " In Memoriam." * Part I. The story opens with the musing of a youth whose father had been found dead in the " hollow behind the little wood." He is neurotic and morbid and melancholy, and what may seem at first an exaggeration of art, in the lines " blood-red heath," and "The flying gold of the ruin'd woodlands drove thro' the air" is soon seen to fit the colour of his mood, and the wildness of his spirits. * Vide A Memoir, i., p. 393. 15 226 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. It is evident that the shock to his nervous system is great, " for the roots of my hair were stirr'd." How account for the death ? There had been failure in a great speculation in which his father was interested, and it was possible that he had com- mitted suicide, but the youth cherishes the melancholy suspicion that the old man living at the Hall, and who seems to have prospered on the failure, was implicated. And now from stanzas vi. to xiii. we have a self-revelation of the youth, in which he shows himself as steeped to the lips in cynicism, for he is scathing in his criticism of the social order. We begin to see the type, which is a product of a speculative age ; he is of keen, nervous sensibility, with morbid brooding, and deranged imagination, and bitter cynicism — a type which supplies all the conditions of a tragedy, unless balanced by some controlling force. In stanza xvii., he first learns of the return to the Hall of the man whom he suspected, and who for years had lived abroad, with his daughter Maud, once the happy little playfellow of the suspecting youth. At this point the actual drama begins ; he seems to have a secret foreboding that the coming of Maud once again into his life will bring with it a curse. In canto ii. we have his " impressionism " of Maud ; she had passed in the carriage, and he thinks her " Faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null,'' MAUD. 227 and congratulates himself that he has " escaped heart-free." But that night he is distracted, for Maud haunts him, and comes and goes like a beautiful phantom ; ever growing upon him. In canto iv. he tries to free himself from the web into which he feels he is being drawn — and again the cynical mood is upon him ; he will cut himself free from the " long-neck'd geese of the world," and live a philosopher's life in his little woodland home — " And most of all would I flee from the cruel madness of love, The honey of poison-flowers and all the measureless ill." But all these resolves are shattered in canto v., where we have the passion of a pure love surging in the heart of the youth, beginning with — " A voice by the cedar tree, In the meadow under the Hall ! " As he hears Maud singing, love awakens, and with it the feeling that his life has been " languid and base." In canto vi. his mood changes once more, and falls first to suspicion of Maud — "... With her sunny hair, And smile as sunny as cold ; She meant to weave me a snare Of some coquettish deceit" — and then to criticism of her brother, for whom he feels cynical contempt as a " dandy-despot." 228 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. "That oil'd and curl'd Assyrian Bull, Smelling of musk and insolence, Her brother, from whom I keep aloof." Then the mood changes and softens as he thinks of his dead mother, and his own lonely life lived in the woods which had made him so morbid. But if Maud be sincere, "Then the world were not so bitter But a smile could make it sweet." In canto x. his jealousy is aroused by seeing the " new-made lord " riding by her side to the Hall, which gives him fine scope for cynicism ; yet it is evident that the awakening of love within him is having an ennobling influence. " And ah for a man to arise in me, That the man I am may cease to be ! " In canto xi. comes the soul's craving for love. If he can find love "What matter if I go mad, I shall have had my day." It comes to him as he meets with Maud in the wood ; but his peace is soon broken, when in canto xiii. he meets, across the fields, her brother, to whom he would have given his hand, but by whom he was scorned " with a stony British stare." In cantos xiv., xv. we have pictured some more moods of morbid introspection and unhealthy hallu- MAUD. 229 cination, until he brings in canto xvi. his passion to a climax by resolving to declare his love, and in canto xvii. — a most delicate lyric threading the story — we have the worship of love. " Go not, happy day, From the shining fields, Go not, happy day, Till the maiden yields." Canto xviii. — " I have led her home, my love, my only friend " — strikes the highest note in the pure rapture of a noble love. But as a true " drama of the soul," such great bliss cannot last, lest the soul lose itself in its rapture. And so in canto xix. he falls from the height of delight to the depth of misery. "Her brother is coming back to-night, Breaking up my dream of delight." The swift transition is the result of a true dramatic instinct, by which the poet sees the move- ments of the human soul and portrays its changing emotions. The youth finds that her brother had forbidden Maud to speak to him, but for her sake he will bury all the " body of hate " ; and yet the coming of the brother is like a blight on his fresh hope. In the following cantos (xx., xxi., xxii.), we have the projected political dinner to which the lover is not invited ; but he invents a little plot for 230 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. meeting Maud in the garden, and we have the exquisite lyric beginning — " Come into the garden, Maud," ending — " She is coming, my own, my sweet." Part II. Canto i., with swift action, heightening the dramatic effect, introduces us to the duel in the garden. The meeting of the lovers is discovered by Maud's brother, in company with the " babe- faced lord." The brother heaps abuse on his sister, which her lover avenges by a duel, when the brother is slain. " ' The fault was mine,' he whisper'd, ' fly ! ' " and the criminal flies for his life. Canto ii. shows the fanciful working of the now disordered brain, in which images of the dead man intermingle with the haunting image of Maud and the passion of his great love. Canto iii. — " Courage, poor heart of stone ! She is but dead, and the time is at hand When thou shalt more than die " — reveals a suspicion of his own madness. MAUD. 23T Canto iv. — " O that 'twere possible, After long grief and pain, To find the arms of my true love Round me once again " — is one of the most pathetic lyrics sung by the poet. It is the wail of a heart for " the loved and lost," and strikes the keynote to " In Memoriam." How these lines sob with the wild yearning of a desolate heart ! "Always I long to creep Into some still cavern deep, There to weep, and weep, and weep My whole soul out to thee." With a nature so highly strung and morbidly sensitive, and with emotion swaying reason, we are prepared, in canto v., to find that he has gone mad. The surprising thing is that the poet was able to project himself into the delirium of insanity to such an extent as to give, according to medical authority, so vivid and true a picture of the psychology of madness. Part III. Canto vi. tells of his return to sanity, and shows how his noble love redeemed his life. The once " languid " youth now flings himself into the arena 232 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. of the great contending forces of humanity ; and in the life of action he awakes to the high possi- bilities of the soul. " And myself have awaked, as it seems, to the better mind ; It is better to fight for the good than to rail at the ill ; I have felt with my native land, I am one with my kind, I embrace the purpose of God, and the doom assign'd." The character is complex in its mingled moods and passions ; but we must not forget that it is " a drama of the soul." Hence the character speaks, not for one, but for many. It is the great human soul which is portrayed in the varied passions of its loves and changing moods and delirium of grief over the love that is lost. If that were all it would be an irredeemable tragedy ; but the poet in the sequel shows, what he is never weary of singing, that a pure and noble love may redeem life from its follies and be the making of manhood. It is fitting that we should close the first division of The Emotional Poems, on the sanctity of love, with the charming and pathetic idyll of " Enoch Arden." Enoch The opening scene lies in a fishing village. Arden.* We see the long line of cliff and the * " 'Enoch Arden' (like 'Aylmer's Field') is founded on a theme given me by the sculptor Woolner. 1 believe that this particular story came out of Suffolk." — Tennyson, A Memoir, ii., p. 7, ENOCH ARDEN. 233 chasm where the sea dashes into foam, leaving behind the yellow gleaming sand. Beyond there is a wharf about which cluster the red roofs of the fishermen, and yonder a mouldering church speaks of ancient days. We see the long street leading up to a tall-towered mill, and behind it and higher a grey down, where a hollow holds a hazel wood. In this sequestered village lived, a hundred years ago, three families whose children play upon the beach. There is pretty Annie Lea and Philip Ray, the miller's son, and Enoch Arden, whose father lost his life in a winter's shipwreck. These three, like sunbeams alternating with shadows, spend their childhood in mimic games upon the beach or in a narrow cave within the cliff. They play in childish glee at keeping house, and when the boys quarrel, Annie settles the dispute by saying " she will be little wife to both ! " Thus in sweet innocence the rosy dawn of childhood glides into the growing day of manhood, when the hearts of the two men focus their love on Annie. Enoch, of stronger, rougher nature, tells his love. Philip, gentle and reserved, nurses his love in silence. Annie loves Enoch, but she is kind to Philip. Enoch, resolute and resistless, with his heart all aflame sets himself to realise a noble purpose ; he will hoard all his savings, and buy a boat and 234 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. build a home for Annie. He prospers, and wins a name for bravery and caution. One year he served on a merchantman and in the rush of the seas thrice rescued some drowning life. At the age of twenty-one he had saved enough to purchase the boat and make a little home for Annie. The time had come to claim her. It was a golden autumn evening when the village youth went nutting to the hollow in the down, and self-denying Philip, who had remained behind to tend his ailing father, climbs the hill and witnesses a lover's scene. Close by, hand-in-hand, Enoch and Annie are whispering, and we read the deep passion of Enoch in the vivid lines — "His large grey eyes, and weather-beaten face All-kinclled by a still and sacred fire, That burn'd as on an altar. ..." Poor Philip, seeing in all the vision of his doom, broken and bleeding, "... Like a wounded life Crept down into the hollows of the wood," there to pass through his Gethsemane and carry ever after a hunger in his heart. On a day we hear in the old church the ringing of the bells and Enoch and Annie are wed. Seven years pass of happiness and prosperity, and little children make merry laughter in their peaceful home, when a shadow falls ! Enoch meets ENOCH ARDEN. 235 with an accident, a broken limb, and loses his trade. He is tormented by doubt as to what may- befall Annie and the children when his old master offers him the place of boatswain in a vessel bound for China. Before leaving he will make provision for his family ; he will sell the boat to stock a store with all that fisher-folk require. He will then trade in the far-off land and voyage to and fro and grow rich and buy a bigger craft and educate his children and live in peace among them. It is the loving dream of a noble spirit. Annie, with her sickly babe, greets him, and on the morrow he makes known his plan when she, with womanly instinct foreboding ill, pleads with tears and caresses that he may remain. The scene is one of rich and tender feeling. All the deepest things surge out of the heart of the woman and flow like subduing waves across the spirit of the man, only to leave him firm as a rock, not because of the proverbial obstinacy of his sex, but for the sake of Annie and the children. The pain of Enoch is no less keen than hers. He could endure because he loved. " He not for his own self caring but her, Her and her children, let her plead in vain ; So grieving held his will, and bore it thro'." Then the boat is sold and the goods are pur- chased and he fits the little sitting-room as a store ' while in the clang of the hammer Annie seems to hear the sound of her own death-knell. The 236 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. last morning dawns, and with it farewell, and, though he cannot share in Annie's fears, "Yet Enoch as a brave God-fearing man Bow'd himself down, and in that mystery Where God-in-man is one with man-in-God, Pray'd for a blessing on his wife and babes Whatever came to him. . . ." He rocks the cradle of the sickly child, as he talks in sailor fashion of providence and trust, but Annie declares "... Well know I That I shall look upon your face no more." He laughs at her fears, tells her to get a seaman's glass and spy him out as the vessel passes ; he bids her cast her care on God, he puts his strong arms round her, and kisses the wondering children and the now sleeping babe. " But Annie from her baby's forehead dipt A tiny curl, and gave it ; this he kept Thro' all his future. . . ." Then Enoch sails away, and Annie bravely strives, but thrives not in her trade, and the sickly child fades and goes to seek its health in heaven. Now Philip comes upon the scene. He has a true, great heart, and, seeing that ■ Annie weeps over the root of her faded flower, thinks he ought to be a friend in need. The motive is good, but the situation is perilous. He ENOCH ARDEN. 237 goes to the lonely woman who is nursing her grief, not caring to look on any human face, but thinking only of the angel child. With fine delicacy he intrudes himself within the sanctuary of sorrow and speaks of what Enoch would have most desired, the education of his children. " ' Now let me put the boy and girl to school : This is the favour that I came to ask.' " Annie, having no doubt that her husband lives and will refund the money, with swimming eyes of gratitude fixed on his kindly face, accepts his pure and generous offer. Philip sends the boy and girl to school, though he seldom passes her threshold for fear of gossip ; but he does not fail to forward kindly gifts by the children. They are deeply attached to him, and call him " father Philip," for he is real, but Enoch seems a dream. Ten years pass without tidings of the long-lost man, when one evening Annie's children, bent on nutting with her, hasten to the mill for Philip, who consents to join them. She, weary of climbing the hill, needs must rest as the children scamper to the hazelwood. Philip remains with her, recalling the scene of years ago and how like a stricken deer he had crept into the hollows. Then he speaks, " Tired, Annie ? " but her face is buried in her hands. "At which, as with a kind of anger in him, 'The ship was lost,' he said, 'the ship was lost! 238 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. No more of that ! why should you kill yourself And make them orphans quite ? ' And Annie said ' I thought not of it : but — I know not why — Their voices make me feel so solitary.' " So solitary ! They are words of hope for Philip, and the sequel shows they are the sigh of a soul weary of its loneliness. The heart of Philip reads the meaning of the sigh and speaks its hidden thought — Enoch could not be living, she was poor, and he would prove a father to her children ; " 'And we have known each other all our lives, And I have loved you longer than you know.' " In that last line is condensed the pathos of his life. Annie asks if one loves twice ? Philip is willing to be loved a little after Enoch. She pleads a year's delay, to which he consents, but she must feel that she is free. The year passes and he comes to claim her promise, but she puts him off a month and then six months. The neigh- bours gossip: Philip is trifling and Annie is coquetting ; they know not their own minds ! Her son and daughter press the marriage. One night Annie is distracted and cannot sleep, and prays for a sign — " My Enoch, is he gone ? " Then, with the usage of the Puritans, she seizes a Bible and, throwing it open, reads, " Under the palm tree," and, closing the book, she falls asleep — " When lo ! her Enoch sitting on a height, Under a palm-tree, over him the Sun ; ENOCH ARDEN. 239 1 He is gone,' she thought, ' he is happy, he is singing Hosanna in the highest ....'" She is convinced that Enoch is dead, and sends for Philip. " So these were wed and merrily rang the bells." But she is haunted with fears until the new child comes, when Philip takes the place of Enoch. Again the scene changes, and we trace the pathetic story of the long-lost Enoch. His ship Good Fortune after fair and foul at last drops anchor in an oriental haven. On her return voyage she is driven by storms and wrecked upon the breakers. Enoch and two comrades are saved upon a raft, "... Stranding on an isle at morn Rich but the loneliest in a lonely sea." Nature had made every provision for the wrecked mariners, and they built a hut " in a seaward-gazing mountain gorge " and dwell in eternal summer. The comrades die, and Enoch is left alone in that seagirt isle of tropic splendour. The genius of the poet revels here in descriptive imagination, and the lonely isle is made to live before us with its glow of colour in the magnificent lines — " The mountain wooded to the peak . . . The scarlet shafts of sunrise — but no sail." The very profusion of the life of nature intensifies 2 4 o THE TEACH IXC. OF TKNNYSON. the terrible loneliness. Enoch hears the many voices, the shriek of the ocean fowl, the thunder of the sea and the whisper of trees ; he sees the flash of insect and of bird, the beauty of flowers that " coil around the stately stem " ; he watches the shafts of sunrise as they pierce the precipices and the golden day shimmer over the water ; but he never sees a human face, and among all the voices he never hears one kindly voice. What a picture of loneliness is framed in the two lines — " Sat often in the seaward, gazing gorge, A shipwreck'd sailor, waiting for a sail " ! They suggest a finished copy of the Homeric original. " He sat weeping sore Hard by the breakings of the barren wave, Where he did oft afflict his soul before, And through the floods unfruitful evermore Yearned a set gaze with many a tear and groan, Heart-broken captive on a hated shore." Imagination is active and peoples the hut of Enoch with the phantoms of those whom he loved ; he lives in the past and hangs pictures in the chamber of memory, of Annie and the babes and the old love scenes. " Once likewise, in the ringing of his ears, Tho' faintly, merrily — far and far away — - He heard the pealing of his parish bells," and shudders ! ENOCH ARDEN. 241 "... Had not his poor heart Spoken with That, which being everywhere Lets none, who speak with Him, seem all alone, Surely the man had died 01 solitude." The danger is more philosophically but less poetically expressed by Wordsworth. " The innocent sufterer often sees Too clearly, feels too vividly, and longs To realise the vision with intense And ever-constant yearning — there — there lies The excess by which the balance is destroyed." At last release comes for Enoch from his beautiful but hateful prison. Another vessel hove in sight, and Enoch suddenly emerges from his mountain- gorge, wild and muttering, signing to the crew in search of water. He is taken aboard, where he finds speech again and tender human kindness, and in time they land him in the harbour whence he sailed. Then Enoch makes his way to his old home where Annie once lived, only to find a bill of sale ! His heart sinks, and he goes down to the wharf and seeks the tavern, now kept by Miriam Lane, and here for many days he rests. Garrulous Miriam, all unknowing, tells him the story of his house, and the grey head drops and the lips mutter, " Cast away and lost ! " Now comes the yearning to see his Annie again, and know whether she is happy. In the dull November evening he climbs the hill, with its girdle 16 242 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. of sacred memories, and is allured by the light of Philip's house, "... As the beacon-blaze allures The bird of passage, till he madly strikes Against it, and beats out his weary life." Only the bird has this advantage that while it is one of a flock Enoch is solitary. He passes through the gate into the little garden and there under a yew-tree near the window looks upon a scene of domestic peace ; he sees Philip stout and rosy and his own daughter, fair-haired and tall, playing with a babe, and in the midst the face of Annie, smiling. What a passion of feeling rose and swept and wailed through the breast of Enoch ! We feel the shock and hear the fatal rush of it in the tragic lines which describe how he "Stagger'd and shook, holding the branch, and fear'd To send abroad a shrill and terrible cry, Which in one moment, like the blast of doom, Would shatter all the happiness of the hearth." He creeps from under the yew-tree out upon the waste, and, falling, digs his fingers into the wet earth and prays that he may not break in upon her peace. Then he comes back to the tavern, repeating the words, lest memory fail him, " Not to tell her, never to let her know." He knew from Miriam that Annie lived in dread of his return. ENOCH ARDEN. 243 "... And he thought ' After the Lord has call'd me, she shall know.' " Bravely he works for a living, and bears his secret sorrow until he sickens and sees the coming of death. He calls for Miriam, and makes her take an oath not to reveal his secret until he is dead. Then comes the whole sad story of the noble man, and the secret messages to Annie and the boy and girl, with blessing upon Philip ; and his children may come and see him when he is dead. " ' . . . But she must not come, For my dead face would vex her after-life." The curl of his babe, which Annie had given him the day of their parting, he hands to Miriam for the mother. On the third night he dies — " Crying with a loud voice ' A sail ! a sail ! I am saved ; ' and so fell back and spoke no more." Such the pathetic story told by the poet who is master of the subtle chords of human feeling, and can at will sweep his hand across the chords. But the story, though simple, gives rise to many ques- tions and creates various impressions. The interest circles round the character and conduct of Enoch. Are we to take him as the type of actual charac- ter or is he ideal ? With regard to Philip and Annie there is no difficulty Philip is perfectly natural, a gentle, loving soul who, while he does not force himself upon the notice of Annie and is 244 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. sensitive to her position, is still human enough to send her flowers and fruits and to keep himself in tender touch with the children. He is strictly honourable, but like a wise man has an eye for possibilities. Annie, also, is entirely natural, with the emotional side of her character dominating intellect and judgment, making her weak where she ought to have been strong ; she is shallow and sentimental, with a dash of Puritan superstition ; she believes in dreams and signs, and so, not having heard of her husband for ten years, she accepts another and builds a new home on the ashes of the old. Thus Philip and Annie are types of actual, ordinary character. But coming to the character and conduct of Enoch, we are at once upon a higher plane. The natural and legitimate thing for him to have done would have been to have claimed his own. So strong is the popular convic- tion that an illustration was afforded in the reply of one to the query, " What is your estimate of Enoch ? " His answer was more practical than poetic : " I should like to kick him ! " Upon further inquiry as to the ground of this violent attack the reply was : " Because Enoch was not natural, he did not claim and vindicate his own rights ; he ought to have made himself known to his family ! " Pre- cisely, on the supposition that the portraiture of Enoch is actual, not ideal. But it is evident that the poet did not intend Enoch as an actual type. ENOCH ARDEN. 245 Viewed as an ideal character the parts fall into something like harmony ; conceived as natural we have dire confusion. Supposing he had claimed his legal and moral rights, what would have been the result ? Why, the wrecking of the home ! Annie, with divided affection, would have been placed in a position most appalling The children of Enoch must have shared in the dread calamity. Philip's life would have been blasted as if with lightning. All this and more would have happened if Enoch had only been natural, and had claimed his rights. No one could have blamed him, and the many would have applauded him ; but rather than wreck the peace of that domestic circle, rather than break the happiness of Annie and blight the life of Philip and darken the days of the children, he sacrificed his rights and himself for the greater good. Such a character is clearly ideal, though the ideal may be defective in its portraiture. What then is the ethical value of the poem ? Surely, that the best and highest life is only attained by self- renunciation. It has been well said, If one were always claiming one's rights the world would be a hell. Yes, we are not here for self-conservation and the demand of all our privileges. We belong to the social order, and if claiming our rights means for others pain and loss, we arc to surrender them in obedience to that higher law of love, which goes beyond justice, seeking the larger good. We may 246 THE TEACHING OE TENNYSON. demand them if \vc choose, and the world-voices will cry, You are right and none can blame you ; and yet we shall have missed the highest, that law of the life of God, "It is more blessed to give than to receive." Better to sacrifice our rights and ourselves in blessing men, than to hold our life and claim our rights in self-conservation. But will not the surrender kill the joy of life ? No, it will deepen and cleanse our joy. In voluntary accept- ance of the cross of duty that looms before us we shall find the gladness of the Son of Man, who for the joy set before Him "endured the cross." In the bitterness of our sacrifice we shall find, with Enoch, the mingling of the sweet spring of an eternal joy, and know that the secret of Jesus is self-renunciation. " He was not all unhappy. His resolve Upbore him, and firm faith, and evermore Prayer from a living source within the will, And beating up thro' all the bitter world, Like fountains of sweet water in the sea Kept him a living soul. . . ." THE DEGRADATION OF LOVE. Aylmer's Field. Lady Clara Vere de Vere. Edzvin Morris. The Northern Farmer. The Sisters. Guinevere. The Wreck. Mariana. Mariana in the South. Oriana. Edivard Gray. r I N HE purity that gleams like snow through the ■*■ group of poems on the sanctity of love, pre- pares us for the moral indignation that flashes like a sword through the poems on the degradation of love. The purer a poet the more sensitive he will be to impurity, and the higher his ideal of the sacredness of love the fiercer will be his wrath when the ideal is desecrated. We shall now find that when the shrine of love is violated Tennyson is the avenging angel with drawn sword. " Aylmer's Field " and " Lady Clara " voice the protest against pride of birth, " Edwin Morris " voices the protest against pride of wealth, and the " Northern Farmer " is a protest against love of property. Aylmer's I N " Aylmer's Field " we are introduced to Field. two homes. Sir Aylmer Aylmer is lord of the manor and a county magnate. His wife is a faded beauty of the baths, and a mere machine moved by his imperious will. They have one child, 247 248 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. Edith, who is beautiful and finely strung. Sir Aylmer loves her "As heiress and not heir regretfully. But 'he that marries her marries her name.'" The other home is the rectory where Averill, the rector, lives, shared by Leolin his brother, a young barrister. The two homes are closely bound by many years of intimacy. Edith and Leolin are frequently together, biu the possibility of love never disturbs the conceit of Sir Aylmer. The mere suggestion that once there had been an Aylmer-Averill marriage is quickly brushed aside by the baronet. Meanwhile Edith and Leolin meet, when a passion " Lay hidden, as the music of the moon Sleeps in the plain eggs of the nightingale." With that hidden music in their hearts, not knowing that they loved, they wander through the parks and visit the cottagers and hear a good mother whisper, " God bless 'em, marriages are made in Heaven." Then Edith awakes to the knowledge of the hidden music. An Indian kinsman comes to the hall and lavishes upon Edith his Oriental gifts ; among the gifts is a richly jewelled dagger, which Edith shows Leolin, who petulantly remarks that the dagger is not " a gracious gift to give a lady." Quick to detect the lurking jealousy and to allay it, Edith proffers him the weapon, which AYLMER'S FIELD. 249 now he values as her gift. Sir Aylmer passes, hears and sees and is suspicious ! The next day a neighbour calls with neighbourly hints of the danger of a love-match. The baronet merely stiffens and observes, " The girl and boy, sir, know their differences " ; but his eyes are opened to possibilities. The same night a scene occurs and Edith is brought up to judgment. The thunder of her father's rage breaks upon her and she bends before the rushing storm. Leolin enters by a counter door, and, as she passes out, he is caught in the hurricane. Sir Aylmer glares at him, panting for breath, ejaculating envenomed adjectives ; he charges Leolin with playing on Edith's feelings, and demands of him a letter denying any serious purpose. Leolin replies : '". . . I So foul a traitor to myself and her, Never oh never.' " Then the storm bursts. Sir Aylmer, red with fiery passion, forbids Leolin the house under threat of being lashed like a dog ; he swears and kicks the footstool, stammering out " Scoundrel ! " between gleaming teeth. He follows the retreating culprit to the door, and, standing there in the light of a pale moon, he storms out his rage, with uplifted hands and a face twisted by the madness of his passion ! 250 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. Leolin dashes on to the rectory and " foams away his heart at Averill's ear," vents his indignation on " this filthy marriage-hindering mammon," and is cynical at the conceit that rests on an ancient name. " Fall back upon a name ! rest, rot in that ! Not keep it noble, make it nobler ? fools, With such a vantage-ground for nobleness." He, Leolin, will go and win a noble name and fortune, and shame those " mouldy Aylmers in their graves." The scene is changed. Yonder, under the familiar pines, with the winds sighing and the rain falling, the lovers meet and pledge eternal fidelity. In tender sympathy with their passion the dirge of nature mingles "As they kiss'd each other " In darkness, and above them roar'd the pine." Leolin goes to his chambers and reads hard, and the benchers talk of him as the coming man. In the hall of Sir Aylmer there are banquets and balls, with the eldest-born of wealth and rank drawn to the feet of Edith ; but she rejects them all. Her foiled parents limit her freedom at last " to her own home-circle of the poor " ; and yet colour is in her check and light within her eyes ! There is an old oak broken to the base and crumbling into decay. It has a charm for Edith. AYLMER'S FIELD. 251 Watching eyes see her flit between the hall and the oak. So the baronet will go and rake the touch-wood dust — when he finds a sealed packet, breaks it, and reads with writhing a letter from Edith to Leolin. As he reads a crippled lad appears, bearing a letter from Leolin to Edith which the baronet demands. He enters into collusion with the lad, and all the letters pass into his hands. He reads the letters, only to rage and rend and burn them. Leolin, receiving no reply, comes down to the hall to watch, but Edith is closely guarded. Once only the savage mood of Sir Aylmer softens, and he kisses her ; but as quickly the mood changes, and she is greeted with cold sneers, so that she "With twenty months of silence, slowly lost Nor greatly cared to lose, her hold on life." The result being that fever seizes upon her weakened frame, " And flung her down upon a couch of fire, Where careless of the household faces near, And crying upon the name of Leolin, She, and with her the race of Aylmer, past." That night, and at that moment, a startling scene occurs in the room of Leolin. A shriek, " Yes, love, yes, Edith, yes," and there is Leolin, with a weird look, palpitating with emotion, his body flung forward, arms outstretched, not knowing why he cried. The next day, the Indian kinsman rushes into the room, only to find a dead man and a red 252 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. dagger and a black-bordered letter ! The rector comes to look upon the face of his brother and grows old in looking. Lady Aylmer would have the rector speak of Edith to the people. Then follows the scene in the church. The text is, " Behold your house is left unto you desolate." The sermon is terrible ; the thunders of retribution roll, and the lightnings flash. Some weep, others frown, but Sir Aylmer sits " anger-charmed from sorrow, soldier-like." The voice of the preacher changes, the storm dies away, as if into sweet music, as he speaks of the gentle Edith, and the iron mouth of the baronet twitches. Then the tones swell again into anger at the ancestral pride that wrought the death of two pure lives pledged to noble love and, like " a rushing tempest of the wrath of God," the preacher sweeps down upon the guilty parents, shaking their life to its very root. The stricken lady creeps towards her hus- band as if for shelter, shrieks and swoons, and is carried out. Sir Aylmer follows ; his courage for- sakes him in the aisle ; he reels and grasps the pew, but with final effort he gains his carriage. In a month the lady dies, and Sir Aylmer, with the word " desolate " burned into his brain and ever trembling on his lips, dies an imbecile ! "Then the great Hall was wholly broken down." The poem is a powerful delineation of the judg- AYLMER'S FIELD. 253 ment that falls on the shameless desecration of love. The situations are daring and dramatic, and the characters clearly cut. Sir Aylmer is a type of the ignoble aristocracy that roots itself, not in its own honour, but in its ancient name. He is cold and cynical and cruel, a . self-centred county god, whose egoism is magnificent, whose pride of birth deadens sensibility to love, and whose self-esteem transforms him into a tyrant. Lady Aylmer is the sickly shadow of her husband's sun. The two, unconsciously, compass the death of the sweetest of maidens and the noblest of youths, and simply through pride ! There is naught against the character of Leolin, but in the opinion of the baronet character, without birth, is of little worth. Because Edith is loyal to her lover she is done to death and he is driven to suicide ; but judgment is exacted. Imagine the situation ! In the pew are the parents of the dead girl, and in the pulpit is the brother of the suicide, letting loose that tempest of moral wrath upon the parents whose false pride is responsible for a dual tragedy. The retribution that follows is the poet's protest against the folly that enthrones birth and wealth above love and worth. The character of Sir Aylmer, when contrasted with that of Sir Ronald or Lord Burleigh, is repulsive, and " Ichabod " is written in flame over the selfish and proud life that would sacrifice pure divinity of love for ignoble pride of ancestry. 254 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. Lady Clara Lady Clara is as heartless as Sir Aylmer, Vere de but with more refined cruelty in her method. Vere. a country youth voices the protest against her cynical flirtations. She had practised her alluring arts upon him and he had discovered the base motive that would make him the toy of her weary hours. Aware of her ignoble pride of ancestry, masked by her winsome smile, he replies : " ' At me you smiled, but unbeguiled I saw the snare, and I retired.' " He knows the worth of a pure and simple love far above name and wealth and coats- of-arms. But his protest becomes serious when he charges the Lady Clara with moral murder. She had wrought her spell upon young Lawrence, first coquetting with him and then scorning him, with the result that he was found dead ! "But there was that across his throat Which you had hardly cared to see.'' In law the lady would be innocent, and the verdict " temporary insanity," but in morals she is a murderess, and the protest is just. " The guilt of blood is at your door : You changed a wholesome heart to gall." The young country moralist, with a satire upon the claims of ancestry, not rooted in nobility of goodness, utters the pure sentiment that — " Kind hearts are more than coronets, And simple faith than Norman blood," LADY CLARA VERE DE VERE. 255 He concludes by urging the Lady Clara to use her time and wealth in the relief of suffering, and to redeem her life by service. In all this the poet draws a painful picture of one feature of our social life. He utters a pas- sionate protest against the degradation of love and the refined selfishness and sensuous luxury of those who have no pity for the lives wrecked by sin and suffering. It is the voice of a seer who sees that the West End must find a way into the East, not with patronising doles, but with the pity of the Christ. Edwin The failure to. recognise the sanctity of love, Morris. whether in the heart of a country yeoman or village maiden, is not confined to the aristocracy, but is shared, apparently, by the middle class, with its commercial spirit. Purse is too often flaunted in the face of purity. Wealth sits upon his throne and makes love his footstool. Goodness and culture come in the garb of poverty with their offering of love, only to be swept away by the ruthless hand of a wealthy cotton spinner. This protest against pride of wealth is voiced in " Edwin Morris." Three friends, Edwin Morris, poet, Edward Bell, curate, and an artist, relate their love experiences. The young artist had suffered cruelly in his devotion to Letty Hill, who lived by the lake. They met only once, and that by stealth, 256 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. when in the early morn he rowed across the lake and crept up into the garden where she was gathering flowers. When least desired a relative appeared and vanished, and when the lovers were in fond embrace, a score of pugs and poodles yelled their protest, in which trustees and aunts and uncles joined, "'What, with him! Go' (shrill'd the cotton-spinning chorus); 'him!' I choked. Again they shriek'd the burthen — ' Him ! ' Again with hands of wild rejection ' Go ! — Girl, get you in ! ' She went — and in one month They wedded her to sixty thousand pounds." The character of the artist was not questioned by the merchant, nor did he take exception to his profession ; he may have been good and clever, but he was poor, and that fact alone justified his being set upon by yelping poodles and vulgar snobbery. Nor did the purse-proud man consider the natural feelings of Letty, nor the wounded life of the artist. With him love and peace and art compared with wealth were mere dross. The story has its comic side, but is none the less serious as a protest against pride of wealth. rp^ But the poet, not content with these examples Northern of the degradation of love in the higher strata Farmer of society, traces it to the lower in the (NewStyle). "Northern Farmer" (New Style). Here we have a humorous illustration of the value of emotion NORTHERN FARMER. 257 compared with property. The farmer's son is in love with a poor curate's daughter whom he would marry, but his parents are of opinion that he is an ass. " Luvv? what's luvv ? thou can luvv thy lass an' 'er munny too, Maakin' 'em goa togither as they've good right to do. Could'n I luvv thy muther by cause o' 'er munny laaid by? Naay — fur I luvv'd 'er a vast sight moor fur it : reason why." It is clear from the repeated application of the classic word ass to his son that, while he regards love as a pleasing sentiment, he reverences " pro- putty" as a permanent substance Thus, veiled by humour, we have the stofy of a sordid soul crushing out the tenderest flower of the human heart. " The Sisters," " Guinevere," and " The Wreck " form another trio showing the poet's passion when dealing with fleshly loves ; his moral indignation is here a furnace at white heat, whose flames leap upon the betrayer. Tennyson is always in a rage when writing of the degradation of love ; he sees clearly that pure love is the inspiration of noble deeds, but when weakened by ignoble passion its strength is gone. Love must be kept spiritual if life is to be kept noble ; when love is carnalised, life is debased, 17 2.58 HIE TEACHING 01 TENNYSON. The IN " The Sisters " the nemesis is terrible. Sisters. The sinning sister goes to meet her doom in " burning flame," and the living one becomes an avenging angel. She conceives a plot in which feelings of fiendish hate and loving admiration mingle, giving pathos to the tragedy. " I hated him with the hate of hell, But I loved his beauty passing well. O the Earl was fair to see ! " She wins his love to slake her vengeance. Un- conscious of the tragic fate hovering over him, the earl sleeps. She sharpens the dagger and the winds rage. The deed is done ! The despoiler of love pays his penalty. How careful she is of the mur dered body ! Was not there a touch of irony in the combing of his comely head ? Was not it his beauty that had charmed her sister to her shame ? Yes, and so shall he ba carried and laid at his mother's feet, that she may look upon the lovely face that killed another. The vengeance is ex- quisitely refined ! How sympathetically, too, nature is made to express the mood of the avenger ! When the gleaming dagger is in her hand, the wind is " raving," but when the tragedy is over the wind falls with her falling passion. " The wind is blowing in turret and tree." GUINEVERE. 259 Guinevere. We saw how Guinevere was responsible for the degradation of love and the resulting evils. In dealing with fleshly loves the poet points out not so much the cause as the effect. The cause is lightly touched, but the effect is vividly coloured. Through carnal loves he makes us see the spiritual evils. When the Queen lay prostrate at the feet of the King and he, more like a god, stood passing judgment on the sin he dare not justify, it was with the spiritual results rather than with the sensual sin that he dealt. " The children born ot thee are sword and fire, Red ruin and the breaking up of laws.'' Again, when later he spoke of the high aims of the fair order he had established, it was only to give force to the terrible charge that her sin had wrecked the goodly realm. " ' Then came thy shameful sin with Lancelot ; Then came the din of Tristram and Isolt ; Then others . . . And all thro' thee. . . ." That stream of impurity issuing from the highest source in the court of the Queen crept on and grew until it became a torrent sweeping away the realm of chivalry and purity. Thus the results of degraded love are vividly portrayed in the wreckage of spiritual character and sublime ideals. 2 6o THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. The " The Wreck " is powerfully dramatic. It Wreck.* is a story of seduction with the inevitable result of retribution. In the wailing of the woman at the convent gate we hear the cry of an outraged conscience. While her position creates pity, her conduct calls for blame. She is a woman of fine poetic feeling, who reads Shelley and loves art, but she is bound to a husband who is sordid, without culture and tenderness. She is met with a kiss chill as a snowflake, and their only child is scorned for being a girl. The mother's heart dies, and she flings herself on the stage and into the dance. She meets a man of wealth, almost a dwarf and de- formed, but he is highly cultured and can talk wisely, with face all aglow. She has found her affinity and, kissing her babe, they sail together for the Orient in calm and summer and sin. But the calm is broken, the storm broods o'er the deep, and we have another illustration of the poet's use of nature in delineating emotion. In the shriek of the growing wind the fugitive mother hears the cry of her absent child, and in the crash of the thunder she hears the judgment of Heaven. In the cataract of water flung from the deck and in the roar of the storm she hears only voices of doom. " In the rigging, voices of hell — then came the crash of the mast. ' The wages of sin is death.' . . ." * For the origin of "The Wreck" vide A Memoir, ii., p. 319. THE WRECK. 261 The guilty lovers are now in the torments of an avenging conscience ; the woman is consumed with grief at the thought of her sickly, forsaken child, and, as the man strives to comfort her with false platitudes, the storm without voices itself in the terror within. They are reconciled at the moment when the ship shivers beneath an avalanche of water, and all, except the woman and a man lashed to the helm, are swept into the deep. She is rescued by the boat of a passing vessel, but her grief is great, and takes the mood of the storm. When the wind-swept sea rises again in fury, her thoughts are with the drowned man ; but when the sea falls into the peace of a sleeping child, her mood changes and her heart cries : ". . . 'O child, I am coming to thee." On landing she writes to the nurse, and a reply comes from her husband enclosing a notice of the child's death. " And gone — that day ot the storm — O Mother, she came to me there." The poem is a protest against the moral laxity that would break the marriage bond on the ground of non-affinity. The free-thinker urges that persons, legally united, are justified in separating and form- ing a new alliance when affinities are lacking. Such is the situation in the poem. Husband and wife lack mutual sympathy. He is coarse and 262 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. sordid, she is sensitive and cultured, with the result that he kills her love. The question arises, Was she justified in leaving her husband and child and eloping with Stephen whom she loved and who was her intellectual affinity ? In other words : Is a legal marriage morally binding ? Tennyson gives his answer in the storm which sweeps upon the fugitives, tears them asunder, and leaves her in lonely exile tormented by the thought that her sin had drowned the man and killed the child. The marriage bond is inviolable, though no love may exist. If the bond could be broken on the plea of no affinity, the fabric of society would fall. Marriages ought to be the result of affinities ; when these are lacking the contracting parties have only themselves to thank, and must suffer patiently the penalty of marrying in haste. In " Mariana," " Mariana in the South," " The Ballad of Oriana " and " Edward Gray," we have illustrations of the degradation of love under a special aspect. They are all true to life, but to a side of life that needs correcting. In each case love is disappointed, and in each case love is degraded into passionate regret that wastes in wailing the noblest energy. Mariana. Tins is a picture of utter desolation and unredeemed sorrow. The passion of grief never MARIANA. 263 changes except when the wish for death becomes a prayer. The dirge sobs through day and night. "She only said, 'My life is dreary, He cometh not,' she said. She said, ' I am aweary, aweary, I would that I were dead ! ' " The power of the poem lies in the skill with which familiar objects are laid under contribution. They are all stricken with the wailing of Mariana, and wear the same funereal look. The whole poem is pre-Raphaelite in the finish of its detail, and affords one of the earliest examples of the poet's use of nature as a magic mirror reflecting the moods of the soul. In the first lines the flower-pots and the rusted nails and the broken sheds are all appar- ently in sympathy with her grief, and look as if they were suffering from unrequited affection. The following is a realistic picture of death and desola- tion in nature, expressing the waste and loneliness of the grief-stricken soul — " About a stone-cast from the wall A sluice with blacken'd waters slept, And o'er it many, round and small, The cluster'd marish-mosses crept. Hard by a poplar shook alway, All silver-green with gnarled bark : For leagues no other tree did mark The level waste, the rounding gray." Blackened waters, a dreary waste, one poplar casting its shadow, when the moon was low, upon her bed. What a picture of desolation ! 264 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. Mariana Mere we have a portrait of an Italian woman in the disappointed in love. The difference in the two Marianas is apparent. Mariana of the Moated Grange lacks the sensuousness of the Italian. The Italian is more self-conscious ; she is fond of looking at "her melancholy eyes divine" in the mirror. She pities her own sense of loneliness, and prays to the Virgin out of passion rather than piety. It is impossible to feel that her love is anything like so deep and genuine as the love of the other Mariana, and yet she is saved from the hopeless despair of the other by her pure, sensuous feeling. She is sensitive to the sights and sounds of nature. The deep peace of the Italian night and the sweet music of the sea save her. " There all in spaces rosy-bright Large Hesper glitter'd on her tears, And deepening thro' the silent spheres Heaven over Heaven rose the night. And weeping then she made her moan, ' The night comes on that knows not morn, When I shall cease to be all alone, To live forgotten, and to love forlorn.' " The Grief, as in the two Marianas, saps " the Ballad of wine of life " in the ballad of Oriana. It is Onana. full of tender, passionate feeling, and yet it is a tragedy of pathos, for no pure flame of noble deed leaps out of the ashes of vain regret to illumine and cheer the darkened life. THE BALLAD OF ORIANA. 265 We hear the man plight his troth. We see him ride boldly from the castle into the fight. We see Oriana standing on the wall, her lovely face all aglow, as she watches her lover. At that moment a foeman intervenes, when her lover draws his bow, and the winged arrow, missing its mark, quivers in the heart of Oriana. The battle rages as if in sympathy with the passion of his grief, and he falls upon his face and cries for death. "They should have stabb'd me where I lay, Oriana ! " His life is spared ; but what is life without her ! Ever a pulsing pain with dreams of her pale face, and, deepest pain of all, heaven is eclipsed. The darkness of love's remorse blots out the stars of God. "Thou comest a-tween me and the skies." He cannot forgive himself, and sinks into a ceaseless moan, as of a wild, ever- restless sea, sobbing through all his wasted life. " Thou liest beneath the greenwood tree, I dare not die and come to thee, Oriana. I hear the roaring of the sea, Oriana. In all three poems the passion of grief disappointed in love is natural but fatal to the best and noblest 266 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. uses of life. When grief, through love, paralyses action, love is degraded and life is broken. Edward " Edward Gray " affords another illustration Gray. of the waste of life through hopeless love. He is engaged to Ellen Adair, contrary to the wish of her parents, but fails to understand the silent deep of her nature. " ' Shy she was, and I thought her cold ; Thought her proud, and fled over the sea ; Fill'd I was with folly and spite, When Ellen Adair was dying for me.' " On his return home he finds that death has taken her, and now only a grave on a lonely hill and a memory in a lonely heart remain. He was the victim of his vanity ; he had cherished the poison of suspicion until it killed the flowers of his life ; and though, at last, by the side of her grave, he bitterly repents, stills — the flowers are dead. "'"There lies the body of Ellen Adair And there the heart of Edward Gray ! " But I will love no more, no more, Till Ellen Adair come back to me.'" Thus far he feels the sanctity of love, but degrades it in the lack of sensibility to the redeem- ing power of a great sorrow. It does not inspire EDWARD GRAY. 267 him to build over the ashes of ruined hopes a character of chastened beauty and enduring strength. Grief has frozen him into passivity when it ought to have quickened the energy of noble action. Life is redeemed, not by wailing for the dead, but by working for the living. THE RELIGIOUS POEMS 669 GOD: HIS DIVINE IMMANENCE. The Higher Pantheism. Flower in the Crannied Wall. The Human Cry. Dc Profundis. God and the Universe. 'T^ENNYSON is much more than an artist. Art ■*• that contains no moral value is defective. A poet may have a perfect instrument of expression but if the moral idea be lacking the instrument must suffer. The attempt to divorce the ethical from the artistic must result in the decadence of art. Its standard is of necessity determined by its moral idea. " It is easy enough to babble of the beauty of things considered apart from their meaning, it is easy enough to dilate on the satisfaction of art in itself, but all these phrases are merely collocations of terms, empty and meaningless. A thing can only be artistic by virtue of the idea it suggests to us ; when the idea is coarse, ungainly, unspeakable, the object that suggests it is coarse, ungainly, unspeakable ; art and ethics must always be allied in that the merit of the art is dependent on the merit of the idea it prompts." # And, supposing the art form to be infused with * " Reticence in Literature." — Arthur Waugh. 271 272 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. the moral idea, must not the form itself, as the instrument of expression, be enriched ? The relation of ethics to art is not unlike the relation of soul to body. The body as a mere form may be faultless, but does it not gain or lose according to the soul it holds ? If tenanted by the pure soul, the soul will flash its own peculiar beauty through the veil of flesh, but if tenanted by the impure soul the body, even as a form, must suffer. Without an ethical soul it becomes carnal, and so art divorced from the moral idea is apt to be " fleshly." Tennyson gives us the body of beauty, and rarely omits the tenant of the moral idea. While therefore he is such an artist he is also a teacher. But it must be remembered that no great artist sits down with the avowed object to teach. Being what he is, he unconsciously expresses himself, his deepest feeling and highest thought, in his work. As a teacher we shall find him impatient of the rigid forms of faith. " And what are forms ? Fair garments, plain or rich, and fitting close Or flying looselier, warm'd but by the heart Within them, moved but by the living limb, And cast aside, when old, for newer, — form " ("Akbar's Dream"). Faith is the soul and forms are but the dress. The soul of faith is ever growing and the dress must be changed to fit the growth. Truth, the object of faith, is infinite. Why THE HIGHER PANTHEISM. 273 strangle the infinite in the dress of the finite ? The danger lies in fixity of form, and so the poet seldom clothes his teaching with doctrinal dress. The result is that, while much is gained, something is lost. A swifter movement of spirit and a wider sweep of vision are won, but clearness is lost. He draws great outlines and leaves us to fill them in, or he gives us a mystic flash and tells us to follow the gleam, or he sings some broken chord and sends us in search of the rhythmic whole. Further, the poet is an idealist in philosophy, and a realist in art. His philosophy is the philosophy of Kant and Hegel and Coleridge and Wordsworth ; he is the last of the Lake School in his sympathy with and interpretation of nature. Nature to him is the visible garment of God through which the divine glory gleams. Behind the veil of the world there is the Making Soul. He is not a scientific agnostic nor a poetical pantheist, but he is a Christian theist, accentuating the truth of the divine immanence. He does not identify nature with God, but he sees so clearly in nature the working of the mystic life that he is convinced, were the physical veil with- drawn, the spiritual Power would be revealed. The " The Higher Pantheism " gives clear ex- Higher pression to this truth and affords an illustration Pantheism, of pure idealism. God is in nature and in man. The living power which cannot be seen evolves 18 274 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. the things that are seen, and so, through the finite many, we may draw near to the infinite One. "The sun, the moon, the stars, the seas, the hills, and the plains — Are not these, O Soul, the Vision of Him who reigns? Is not the Vision He ? tho' He be not that which He seems ? Dreams are true while they last, and do we not live in dreams ? " And should the world be dark to us and the vision veiled it is because God in nature is not realised as God in consciousness. To have the divine within is to find divinity without, but to be destitute of the feeling of God is to be blind to the vision of God. " Glory about thee, without thee ; and thou fulfillest thy doom Making Him broken gleams, and a stifled splendour and gloom." To the spiritual man nature is the shrine of deity, and all phenomena are symbols of His presence and working, and the pure heart will find Him. God, the ever-present Spirit, answers the cry of the spirit of man. " Speak to Him, thou, for He hears, ud Spirit with Spirit can meet, Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet." The physical is the barrier between God and the soul, but if the barrier were removed the soul would see God. FLOWER IN THE CRANNIED WALL. 275 "And the ear of man cannot hear, and the eye of man cannot see ; But if we could see and hear, this Vision, — were it not He?" Flower And so with the " Flower in the Crannied in the Wall." If man could see into the meaning Crannied of the glory that lies on land and sea, flashing from the wing of the meanest insect and flushing the leaf of the lowliest flower, he would see the divine reality. To know all that makes the flower is to know God. " Little flower — but if I could understand What you are, root and all, and all in all, I should know what God and man is." The same truth finds expression in " De Pro- fundis," with its welcome to the little child that came " From that true world within the world we see, Whereof our world is but the bounding shore, Out of the deep Spirit, out of the deep." The child-spirit is an emanation of God, of that real world in relation to which what we see is but the " bounding shore." More clearly is the truth of the divine The Human . ,. . . ua - TT ~ p immanence voiced in " The Human Cry. Man is imperfect, but he is folded in God until the fulness of God flows around him Now 276 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. he feels that he is nothing and that God is every- thing ; now he is something, for God is moving in him, but God is the something and not the man. "We know we are nothing, but Thou wilt help us to be. Hallowed be Thy name, Hallelujah ! " In the same poem man's highest thinking is powerfully condensed in three lines. In the relation of the human soul to God this sublime trinity of thought emerges, " Infinite Ideality ! Immeasurable Reality ! Infinite Personality ! " It would be difficult for the constructive theologian to match this formula expressive of what God is in the concept of man. God and the Further in the restful poem "God and the Universe. Universe," amid all its sublime and majestic forces the soul is told to look upon the universe as the " shadow " of God, and not to fear. " Spirit, nearing yon dark portal at the limit of thy human state, Fear not thou the hidden purpose of that Power which alone is great, Nor the myriad world, His shadow, nor the silent Opener of the Gate." We may thus claim the poet as teaching the truth of the divine immanence, a truth held by the GOD AND THE UNIVERSE. 277 Greek Fathers but obscured by the Latins. God is near, and the spirit of man in reverent search may find within the veil of sense " the vision of Him who reigns." Hegel, whose disciple Tennyson was, declared that matter cannot be conceived apart from thought ; that it is permeated with thought, hence, as thought presupposes mind, and mind permeates matter, God must be immanent in the universe. Wordsworth sings the same truth: " I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts ; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean, and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man, A motion and a spirit that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things." Goethe also speaks of nature as the garment of God, when in " Faust " he makes the earth-spirit say : — " Thus at the roaring loom of time I ply, And weave for God the garment thou seest Him by." Carlyle again breaks into rapture as the vision of the divine immanence flashes upon him from the meanest to the sublimest object in creation. " This fair universe, even in the meanest province, is in very deed the star-domed city of God. Through 278 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. every star, through every grass-blade, the glory of a present God still beams." Thus, along with our best and greatest minds Tennyson has recovered for us the almost lost truth of the indwelling God. Nature is not a mechanical body, but its phenomenal energy is the result of the activity of the immanent deity. Its out-raying splendour is not the glory of impersonal life, but of a Great Intelligence and an Eternal Will. The poet's faith is not pantheistic but Christian, which faith is also the highest philosophy. His faith in the personality of God is thus expressed : " Eternal lorm shall still divide The Eternal soul from all beside, And I shall know Him when we meet." CHRIST: HIS DIVINE PERSON- ALITY. In Memoriam. Harold. Supposed Confession. Locksley Hall Sixty Years After. Aylmer's Field. Crossing the Bar. P*HE divinity of Christ is never dogmatically -*■ formulated, but it is always assumed. It is clearly expressed in some poems and involved The Incar- in others. What penetration into the mean- nation. j n g of the Incarnation is found in the sugges- tive lines of the " In Memoriam " ! " For Wisdom dealt with mortal powers, Where truth in closest words shall fail, When truth embodied in a tale Shall enter in at lowly doors. "And so the Word had breath, and wrought With human hands the cieed of creeds In loveliness of perfect deeds, More strong than all poetic thought." {Ode xxxvi.) We could have no clearer exposition of St. John's declaration, " The Word became flesh and dwelt among us." A word is the expression of a thought. 279 z8o THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. If the word be unuttered the thought lies in silence. What word is to thought Christ is to God, the divine articulation. Further, deeds reveal character. God must robe Himself in the mantle of our humanity and, through it, shine " in loveliness of perfect deeds," if we are to know what is most vital to man — the character of God. The " Word " must come into the " flesh " before the flesh can apprehend the Word, is a truth the poet firmly held. The IN the prelude the divinity of the person- Divinity ality of Christ is clearly affirmed, of Christ. In the first stanza He is not only addressed as the " Strong Son of God, immortal Love," but He is recognised as the object of Christian faith. The poet always finds the focus of faith, not in Church nor creed nor ceremony, but in Christ. He further attributes creatorship to Christ in the lines : "Thine are these orbs of light and shade; Thou madest Life in man and brute — " in which we seem to hear an echo of the Scripture — " the world was made by Him." In the fourth stanza we have the mingling of the human and divine natures in the mystery of the Incarnation. THE DIVINITY OF CHRIST. 281 "Thou seemest human and divine, The highest, holiest manhood, thou." And we find the secret of the spiritual life in the surrender of the human will to the making will of Christ. " Our wills are ours, we know not how ; Our wills are ours, to make them thine." In the fifth stanza we have the relation of creeds to Christ. They are only broken lights of the sun. They change, for they are fallible opinions of infallible truths — " They are but broken lights of Thee, And Thou, O Lord, art more than they.'' The- poem concludes by acknowledging the Son of God as the source of spiritual knowledge, and prays for more of reverence and asks forgiveness for the grief that would not be consoled. Thus he leaves his friend hidden in the life of Christ. "I trust he lives in Thee and there I find him worthier to be loved." The whole of this sublime Ode, now sung in our churches as a hymn of praise, is a strong affirmation of the divinity of Christ and a clear echo of the primitive truth, " Thou art the Christ, the son of the living God." There are other scattered references which 282 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. acknowledge the Christian teaching relating to the great facts of the life and death of Christ. The References poet's reverence for the Holy Scriptures is to Christ. apparent in the fact that there are no less than 450 quotations from and references to the Bible in his works. We have a reference to the birth of Christ in the line — "The time draws near the birth of Christ." (Ode xxviii.) His birth is noted as the dawn of hope, and of a great gladness to the weary heart of man. " O Father, touch the east, and light The light that shone when Hope was born." (Ode xxx.) And in " Harold " we find the significant line : "The Lord was God and came as man." In the same drama, true to the old legend that there were oxen in the place of His birth, we read, " Like the great King of all A light among the oxen." The birth of Christ is also beautifully touched on in the " Supposed Confession " — " That happy morn When angels spake to men aloud, And Thou and peace to earth were born." REFERENCES TO CHRIST. 283 In the " In Memoriam " we find the miracle of the raising of Lazarus, " Behold a man raised up by Christ ! " {Ode xxxi.) And further, in the lovely lines in which Mary- turns from the face of the risen Lazarus to look upon the Christ, the poet touches a vital truth of the Christian consciousness — that Christ is the secret and the source of its deepest life. " Her ardent gaze Roves from the living brother's face, And rests upon the Life indeed." The highest place is given to the unique per- sonality of our Lord in " Locksley Hall, Sixty Years After." "Love your enemies, bless your haters, said The Greatest of the Great." But more explicitly does he give expression to His moral perfection in two exquisite lines of the " In Memoriam." "The sinless years, That breathed beneath the Syrian blue.'' It may be affirmed that the poet is merely an artistic mirror reflecting current orthodoxy, but the whole of this sublime epic attests the personal faith of the poet. It is impossible that any one, not Christian, could have written such a poem. 284 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. His Char- AGAIN the character of Christ, with His acter and tender ministry, is finely fixed in " Aylmer's Ministry y le \^ » j n t i lc t ] iree words « Lord f Love." " Wearing the light yoke of that Lord of Love, Who stilled the rolling wave of Galilee." In the same poem we have a reference to the sufferings of the Man of Sorrows in the lines — " As cried Christ in His agony to those that swore Not by the temple but the gold." Further, in the " Idylls of the King," we find an allusion to the Resurrection. The knights who do not wander from the field of duty may find the deepest realities. " Nor the high God a vision, nor that one who rose again." And " In Memoriam " is musical with the sweet tones of the bells that chime away the griefs and feuds of men and ring in the crowning of the Christ, — " Ring out the darkness of the land Ring in the Christ that is to be." (Ode cxi.) Lastly, in " Crossing the Bar," we have, clearly and sweetly sung, the poet's own faith and hope. " For tho' from out our bourne of time and place The flood may bear me far, I hope to see my Pilot face to face When I have crost the bar." REFERENCES TO CHRIST. 285 He is not passing into the chilling shadows of materialism, nor into the starless darkness of agnosticism, but into the peaceful night of death, with the Christian hope of seeing his Pilot in the morning. These scattered references contain the central facts of the Christian Gospel. We do not expect to find a doctrine of the Incarnation, and it is possible that the poet could not express himself in the formula of the Nicene creed,* but it is evident that he grasped and taught the truth of the incarnation and the necessary truth of the divine personality of Christ. * His creed, he always said, he would not formulate, for people would not understand him if he did ; but he considered that his poems expressed the principles at the foundation of his faith." — A Memoir, i., p. 307. CHRIST: HIS DIVINE SUFFI- CIENCY. In the Children's Hospital. The May Queen. Sea Dreams. I N " The Children's Hospital " we have pathetically expressed the inspiration for noble service, along The In- w ith the glow of a tender hope in death on spiration the face of a little child, as the result of for Service, practical faith in Christ. The coarse materialist from the schools of France mutters : '"All very well — but the good Lord Jesus has had His day.'" To which the patient nurse replies : " ' Had ? has it come ? It has only dawn'd. It will come by and by. O how could I serve in the wards if the hope of the world were a lie ? ' " And little Emmie, who has overheard the kindly old doctor speak of the pending operation to the nurse, and express his fear that " she'll never live thro' it," is greatly concerned, and turns to her friend Annie, crying, " What shall I do ? " 286 THE INSPIRATION FOR SERVICE. 287 "Annie consider'd. 'If I,' said the wise little Annie, 'was you, I should cry to the dear Lord Jesus to help me.' 'Yes, and I will,' said Emmie; 'but then if I call to the Lord, How should he know that it's me? such a lot of beds in the ward ! ' That was a puzzle for Annie. Again she consider'd and said: 'Emmie, you put out your arms, and you leave 'em outside on the bed — The Lord has so much to see to ! but7 Emmie, you tell it Him plain, It's the little girl with her arms lying out on the counter- pane.' " Emmie, in the dawn, with her white face and her thin arms stretched out to the infinite goodness, is the mute expression of the faith of the human heart in the all-sufficiency of Christ. " Say that His day is done ! Ah why should we care what they say ? The Lord of the children had heard her, and Emmie had past away." The Cry for E MMIE personifies humanity with its sins and Emancipa- sufferings, with its ever-haunting mystery of tion. death, crying to some power, not itself, for emancipation, and Christ is God's infinite answer. When the poet thus records the sufficiency of Christ he reflects the Christian faith and consciousness, and when he affirms that His day has only dawned and that the future lies with Him, he utters a prophecy 288 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. in harmony with the facts of revelation and the slow processes of nature. We are only in the dawn of His day. " It will come by and by." Then in " The May Queen " we have the The W^ork *" rL ., subjective work of the spirit of Christ, in the of Christ. J ,«. , ,. , A .. testimony of the once selfish little Alice, delicately touched in the line — "He taught me all the mercy, for he show'd me all the sin." And in " Sea Dreams " we have a reference to the sufficiency of Christ to soothe the anguish of the city clerk who had been robbed by the canting hypocrite, along with a scathing denunciation of the heated pulpiteer who spends his strength in barren polemics. " Not preaching simple Christ to simple men, Announced the coming doom and fulminated Against the scarlet woman and her creed." Thus, in his religious teaching, the poet does not speculate on the personality of Christ, but at once sees that He is the King of truth, and crowns Him. In the "Idylls of the King" he condenses the ethics of Christ and the essence of Christianity, as the rule of life, in three lines : " ' Follow the Christ, the King, Live pure, speak true, right wrong, follow the King — Else, wherefore born ? " MAN: HIS EVOLUTION, Idylls of Ihe King. In Memoriam. Will. Timbnctoo. By an Evolutionist. The Dawn. The Play. The Making of Man. The Dreamer. Locksley Hall Sixty Years After. Merlin and the Gleam. Faith. Silent Voices. ' I ^HESE poems contain the teaching of the poet ■*■ relative to the evolution of man. God is the unfolding cause within nature and man. He is immanent for a specific and moral purpose. Divine immanence apart from beneficent purpose and activity, is incredible ; but to conceive the activity and purpose, to make always for righteousness in man and order in the world and ultimate perfection, is to conceive what is worthy of deity. The poet believes in evolution, but he sees clearly that evolu- tion is a modal and not a causal theory. It offers an intelligible explanation of the modus operandi of nature, but it does not profess to account for the genesis of life. There is always that vexed problem of " origins." As no life exists apart from " antecedent life " there is room left for God in the scientific theory of development, and the poet, with his pure idealism, sees God at the 289 19 2 9 o THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. root of all things and beings, as the initial cause. The materialist would affirm that the development of life is the result of natural selection, of purely physical causes, but Tennyson traces the order and evolution of nature and man to the divine im- manence. God at the root determines the design and gives bias to the whole series. He believes that the Almighty works through law ; he sees law, universal and uniform, working in the rounding of a dew-drop and the sweep of a planet. " Growth under the conditions of law he sees everywhere, and the progress that will in the remote future make real that which the poet now sees in the ideal. The slowness of this advancement of the world is a kind of nemesis in some of his poems. He expects no radical overturning of the world, such as Shelley believed in, and to ardent natures this snail pace of progress is a cause of chafing and sadness. Tennyson is content with the slow advance which comes of growth, through conditions of law, because his mind rests satisfied with the law itself as the basis of human good." God and In the slow evolution of man, then, he accepts Law. God and Law. There can be no final making of man without the recognition of the supernatural and obedience to law. He has no sympathy with the phase of agnosticism that would calmly dismiss the Almighty from the universe. He burns hot GOD AND LAW. 291 with indignation against the materialism that would resolve all of being into protoplasm. He protests with scorn against the pure and noble things, the victories of right and achievements of genius, being buried, at last, in our own " corpse-coffins." He sees the ultimate man made by God, through pro- cesses of law, finished and crowned. "One God, one law, one element, And one far-off divine event, To which the whole creation moves." But while the poet is not a scientific agnostic in the sense of eliminating God from the universe, he may be called a spiritual agnostic, in the sense that he clearly recognises that the Almighty cannot The be known nor His existence demonstrated by Supremacy intellect alone. Throughout the " In Memo- 01 Emotion. r j am » ^ e asser j- s the supremacy of emotion over reason. He teaches that love is greater than knowledge, and may feel God when the reason staggers with doubt. He believes in faith as the point of contact between God and the soul. By faith he does not mean, necessarily, the acceptance of historic traditions, but the testimony of the soul, in its instincts and intuitions and aspirations, to the existence of a supreme being, along with the evidence that lies in the order and 'beauty and wonder of the universe, to the fact of the divine immanence. Turning now to the poems we have grouped 292 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON. under the evolution of man, we shall find an illustration of these propositions. The THE first great fact which the poet accentuates Existence is the existence of evil. Evil is recognised as of Evil. a t err ible factor in the problem of human life. M. Renan on being asked, " What do you do with sin in your philosophy ? " replied, " I suppress it " ! But no philosophy is complete or moral that does not take into account the existence of evil. The poet or philosopher who would suppress sin fails to interpret a most glaring fact of human life. Tennyson has never been guilty of the suppressio veriy but has expressed himself clearly. The tempt- ation to suppress must have been great in a poet with such pure and delicate sensibility. When he draws a character like Vivien, his moral loath- ing is apparent, and his very repulsion, as Mr. Swinburne thinks, makes the character defective. Evil is the ugliest thing on earth, and he sees it not only with the calm, critical eye of the true artist, but with the sensitive shrinking of the pure soul ; his hand is steady as he draws the divine in man, but it trembles with the hot pulse of indigna- tion when he delineates the diabolical. Not by the cynical method of Renan has he sought to eliminate evil. Note how he points the prophet's finger of reve- lation and of warning as he conceives evil under THE FLESHLY NATURE OF EVIL. 293 the aspect of animalism, the " beast " or " brute " or "ape and tiger" in man. Illustrations abound in the " Idylls of the King." In " The Coming of Arthur " the realm is thus described : " Wherein the beast was ever more and more, But man was less and less, till Arthur came." Again : "Arise, and help us thou! For here between the man and beast we die." The Fleshly And in the cause of the opposition to Arthur, Nature of as assigned by Bedivere, we have the fleshly Evil. nature of evil : — " For there be those who hate him in their hearts, Call him baseborn, and since his ways are sweet, And theirs are bestial, hold him less than man." Further, in " Gareth and Lynette " the lawless knight overthrown by Sir Gareth personifies the carnal forces with their enslaving power : " He seem'd as one That all in later, sadder age begins To war against ill uses of a life, But these from all his life arise and cry, ' Thou hast made us lords, and canst not put us down.' " In " Balin and Balan " the same conception of evil prevails : 294 THE TEACHING OF TENNYSON " ' Let not thy moods prevail, when I am gone Who used to lay them ! hold them outer fiends Who leap at thee and tear thee, shake them aside.' " And in " The Last Tournament " when the King almost despairs of the purity of his realm, we find the " beast " again : " ' Or whence the tear lest this my realm, uprear'd, By noble deeds at one with noble vows, From flat confusion and brute violences, Reel back into the beast, and be no more ? ' " And in " The Passing of Arthur " in that pathetic lament of Bedivere : " ' And all my realm Reels back into the beast and is no more.' " In " Merlin and Vivien," as the magician becomes dimly conscious of the carnal spell that lures him to his doom, evil, as the war of Sense, is thus portrayed : "World-war of dying flesh against the life, Death in all life and lying in all love." And " In Memoriam " fixes in two lines the con- ception of evil which dominates the poet throughout. " Move upward, working out the beast, And let the ape and tiger die." {Ode cxviii.) These passages sufficiently indicate the character which evil assumes — they suggest a strong prejudice in favour of making the flesh rather than the will THE REMEDY FOR ^SIN. 295 the vehicle of evil ; the conception merges on manichaeism — it is always under the symbol of the animal in man that he speaks of evil. The " beast " within has to be chained or crushed or wrought out. Sin is the result of the power of the flesh over the ethical will, and is always the violation of law, physical or moral. What then is the rp^g remedy ? The remedy lies in strengthening Remedy the ethical will by communion with God — for Sin. until it is strong enough to grapple with the " beast " within. The poet believes in the sufficiency of the will, divinely conditioned, to destroy the evil. If evil is immanent in man, so also is God, and the will, linked to the indwelling God, is strong enough to rule. By will he seems to mean con- science, for which he claims implicit obedience. His remedy for evil is thus finely expressed in the poem " Will " : " O well for him whose will is strong ! He suffers, but he will not suffer long ; He suffers, but he cannot suffer wrong." And now, because evil is to be wrought out by the process of obedience to law, ethical and physical, the poet sees clearly that the process must be a slow one, and may involve ages. It is interesting to note how, in one of his early poems, he grasped the slow but sure moral evolution of man, which he expresses with such emphasis and ever growing gladness in his later writings. In the 2