Chapter III.

Tennyson's Treatment of Love.

There is in the Life a very remarkable letter from Lord Dufferin to the poet, in which the writer expressed his gratitude for what may fairly rank among the greatest of all services.

"For the first twenty years of my life", he says, "I not only did not care for poetry, but to the despair of my friends absolutely disliked it, at least so much of it as until that time had fallen in my way. In vain my mother read to me Dryden, Pope, Byron, Young, Cowper, and all the standard classics of the day; each seemed to me as distasteful as I had from early infancy found Virgil. Soon afterwards I fell in with a volume of yours, and suddenly felt such a sensation of delight as I never experienced before. A new world seemed open to me, and from that day, by a constant study of your works, I gradually worked my way to a thorough appreciation of what is good in all kinds of authors." 1

That is, put in an extreme case, the service which each poet renders to his generation or his age. He reveals to it the beauty and colour of life, as it is interpreted by art. Byron had done the same for a generation earlier, had done it for Tennyson himself in boyhood. How far back may be traced the new ascendency is matter for conjecture, but one may say with confidence that almost every lover of literature who speaks our language, born since 1830, has begun his own personal pursuit of poetry with Tennyson's love poems. There are, of course, minds among young people who seize from the first upon those poems, with In Memoriam at their head, which embody Tennyson's central thought, his pe

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1 Life, i. p. 427.

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culiar message. But the natural taste of youth in poetry is for love poetry. It is the awakening consciousness of the sex attraction that demands to find itself expressed in a harmony of words; and just as that is the first passion in the lovers of poetry, so also it is the poet's first inspiration. That is to say, Tennyson was the first poet that most of us cared about when we were young, and what we cared for especially was his love poetry. As we grew older we probably found that there was a great deal to be said on the subject which Tennyson had not attempted to say. We found, most of us, in Browning a stronger passion, beside which the vague aspirations of youth after an ideal of beauty seemed unsatisfying; and though we still admired Tennyson, we admired him now for other excellences. But none the less, his love poetry remains historically and logically the first thing to be considered.

If one looks at the Juvenilia one sees just one poem, The Supposed Confessions of a Second-rate Sensitive Mind, which is interesting for what it says-only one which is a document in the poet's spiritual biography. It is also by far the least interesting and least accomplished in point of form and style. Nearly all the rest are experiments in metre, the work of a young artist trying what he could do with language. From that point of view they will have to be considered later on. The point to note at present is, that they are mostly about women-imaginary women, the ideals built up about some pretty face or attractive personality. You have the Madelines and Adelines, Lilians, Margarets, Kates, and the rest, elaborately described in phrases that one remembers for their beauty, but the women are never individualized by a single human touch. The boy who wrote these things had certainly been in love with the desire to be in love, but never got beyond himself so far as

to realize what is meant by passion. In Oriana he writes a ballad, telling the tragic end of a love, and he writes it chiefly to ring the changes upon musical syllables. In Mariana there is indeed a generalized study of passion-a woman's yearning for the absent-but practically the poem is a study in landscape effects. Like a boy, when he sees the beauty of nature, or its suggestion, he sees it as a setting for some vague dream of love. The one poem of this period, The Lover's Tale, which attempts definitely to portray passion, was suppressed, and only published in self-defence years afterwards; and a very curious poem it is. The whole is

wrapped in a haze of wild and whirling words out of which you gather that there is a boy very much in love. But whom is he in love with? The girl is the shadow of a shadow, a boy's dream. He loves her because she is a girl and he is a boy, not because he is he and she is she. The definite and irresistible attraction between two individual natures has not yet dawned upon him; only the vague impulse of sex towards sex and youth towards youth.

In the volume of 1832 there were two distinct attempts to render passion: Fatima and Mariana in the South. In each the poet was working with pure imagination in the effort to show the love of woman -passion simply in its most naked form of complete abandonment. Why these women love, whom they love, the poet never stops to tell us; they are simply pictures of passion. Mariana dwells in solitude-a solitude of the South, where burning sunshine drives all life out of the open to seek for shelter, but at the heart of this solitude is a sleepless longing. In Fatima almost for the only time Tennyson paints the physical traits of passion:

Last night, when some one spoke his name,
From my swift blood that went and came

A thousand little shafts of flame
Were shiver'd in my narrow frame.
O Love, O fire! once he drew

With one long kiss my whole soul thro'
My lips, as sunlight drinketh dew.

Women have praised Fatima, and in this matter they should be judges. But it is interesting to note how unlike is this to Tennyson's portrayal of love in man. Nowhere is this self-surrender hinted at; always the man's desire is to master-to be

Lord of the pulse that is lord of my breast

And it is curious to note how frequently in the love idylls man is put into an attitude of condescension. So it is in The Miller's Daughter. The lover has to soothe away the apprehensions of his Alice, and love her the better for her fears; he is conscious that she will do him credit, even when she cannot make up her mind about the dress in which she ought to be seen by his mother. In The Lord of Burleigh the promoted bride feels herself unequal to the splendours of her lot, and droops under her lord's superiority. Even the Gardener's Daughter is very much in the attitude of the Beggar Maid before King Cophetua. This does not alter the beauty of the poems-King Cophetua is admirable, and The Gardener's Daughter a miracle of luxuriant word-painting; but after all, one looks in vain through all this for the authentic note of passion. This Cupid is charming, bowered about with roses, and attended by a procession of prospective babies, but he is a very domestic deity, not the "lord of terrible aspect" who lives in Romeo and Juliet or Antony and Cleopatra. And the interminable condescension of the hero grows irritating in the long run. In Edwin Morris there is a kind of preliminary sketch of Locksley Hall; we find the slight, pretty

little person who is terrified by her parents out of the nobler fortunes which awaited her as the chosen of a heroic character. In Locksley Hall itself, which is a real love poem, one has to admit that the note of passion is there. But all the same one comes upon the old central idea. Amy has proved unworthy of the high destiny that was in store for her. There is condescension in the wooing.

And I said, "My cousin Amy, speak, and speak the truth to me, Trust me, cousin, all the current of my being sets to thee".

In a word, the lover will be graciously pleased to love her. Then come the magnificent lines that would redeem a hundred imperfections-though it is not imperfections that one has to allege: this fault is of the very essence.

Love took up the harp of Life, and smote on all the chords with might;

Smote the chord of Self, that, trembling, pass'd in music out of sight.

I do not believe that love ever induced this young man to forget himself. He is always conscious of his improving influence upon the submissive Amy -and when she deserts him, he reproaches her with forsaking the ideal

Is it well to wish thee happy?—having known me-to decline On a range of lower feelings and a narrower heart than mine?

Heaven forgive you for a prig! is the inevitable comment. Of course the thing is human nature, but it is not agreeable human nature. Still, it is genuine love poetry. But in the 1832 volume there had already appeared one poem, The Sisters, which was really tense with passion. That made it apparent that, if Tennyson avoided subjects where men and women were to be seen transfigured, and