CHAPTER VI TENNYSON: MEMORY AND THE MYSTIC ELEMENT. I. Although Tennyson did not possess as intense and penetrating a power of will as Wordsworth, he avoided. some of the excesses of sterility, arbitrariness, and lack of humor accompanying the too strenuous exercise of will. He retained comparatively a greater mobility in his thought and feeling and more humor in his life and works, though there is neither an overabundance of humor nor a lack of arbitrariness to be found even in him. Wordsworth, we have seen, fixed his mind somewhat arbitrarily upon the experiences of his childhood, and by the power of will and memory reproduced in himself an immediate mystical experience which he thought had value as giving to us suggestions or intimations of immortality. Tennyson, in common with Wordsworth, was possessed with the same romantic "Passion of the Past." It expressed itself less arbitrarily in him than in Wordsworth and therefore less definitely and more flexibly. It was not so directly the memory of our childhood instincts and intuitions that was "a master of light of all our seeing" as with Wordsworth, but it was the more general memory of certain god-like experiences of the past, and his passion for them, by which he could perceive The high-heaven dawn of more than mortal day Strike on the Mount of Vision.1 In our study of Wordsworth we saw that the bareness of his interest in his college days and the moral shock sustained from the French Revolution set his boyhood experiences before him in bold perspective, and made him recur to them in an unusual way for moral support and for poetic material. When Tennyson was twenty-four he received a similar moral shock that produced somewhat similar effects. To a mind as sensitive and as capable literally of being haunted as Tennyson's it is hard to conceive how great was the shock of the death of his fellow student and most intimate friend. Then, too, there are times when an idea, or a theory, takes hold of people's minds like an obsession. The thing seems to be infectious. Such an idea was the materialistic notion that man is not immortal, which, borne on the wings of scientific progress, now swept through the thoughts of the English people with ungovernable rapidity. Tennyson was caught in the spirit of it for a time. It seized hold of him and unmanned him. Such an idea is always doubly and trebly powerful when it is connected with some specific personal fact. The fact of his friend's sudden death and the fact of grave men's grave doubts as to the permanence of anything human or divine were easily sufficient to plunge the young poet into utter despair, to make him aware suddenly of the happiness of past days, and conscious that those days were irrevocably past, and to make him long all the more poignantly for them. No wonder that the finest lyrics of a great lyric poet "Break, Break, Break," and "Tears, Idle Tears"should have their chief motive in the infinite longing for "The Ancient Sage." the touch of a vanished hand and in an indescribable yearning for the days that are no more. In each case Tennyson gives himself completely to the emotion of the poem, and there is no consolation in either. The only relieving elements are the exquisite beauty of the imagery, language, and music; yet the ultimate service of these is to enhance the poignancy of the grief. In Wordsworth's lyrical songs that express yearning there is always an under current movement of resistance to the yearning itself. No matter how much Wordsworth longs for the radiance that is forever taken from his sight he Will grieve not, rather find Strength in what remains behind,2 while Tennyson voluntarily and whole-heartedly surrenders himself to the yearning or to the emotion of grief. Even this abandon is the abandon of a strong soul; and we are soon to see the poet on the way to recovery from the severe shock. It was natural that during the process of his recovery from the loss of his friend he would produce one of his longest poems in memory of that friend, that in the poem itself there would be a thousand backward glances, not to his early boyhood days, but to the days of love and glorious companionship, days of walking "beside the river's wooded beach," of reading "the Tuscan poets on the lawn," of divinely singing "old Philosophy on Argive heights," of "threading some Socratic dream," days when the first raptures of conscious authorship were at their height, when Thought leapt out to wed with Thought Ere Thought could wed itself with Speech. "Intimations of Immortality." "In Memoriam," Poem, XXIII. Tennyson deepens immeasurably the pathos in the poem by contrasting endlessly, in the subtlest ways imaginable, the happiness of his "four sweet years" of friendship to the emptiness of the days of mourning that followed. It was natural that he should idealize that friendship, and all the objects associated with it, as, for instance: And all we met was fair and good, And all was good that Time could bring, Moved in the chambers of the blood.* It was natural, too, that the poet's scientific and somewhat skeptical spirit should make him perfectly conscious of this idealizing tendency, and aware that the past will always win a glory from its being far And orb into the perfect star We saw not when we moved therein." If Tennyson is sometimes dangerously near the sentimental he is never naive. The scientific spirit which helped to plunge him into unutterable woe also taught him to distinguish between the dream that has orbed itself into a perfect star and the fact that the star really was never seen when he moved within the orb of it. Wordsworth had a vision of the past which he would not undo, but upon which he would build a constructive creation. Tennyson's fancy and his scientific temper made him set about to meditate between the dream and the fact. And the result in "In Memoriam" is the expression of a deep human grief and the fanciful and pictorial idealizing of past facts and associations that gave rise to that grief. "In Memoriam," Poem, XXIII. "In Memoriam," Poem, XXIV. But there was another order of memory in Tennyson distinct from and above the memory of days that have been and never more can be. This order was the memory of more than mortal things, of something that touched him with mystic gleams, of a transcendental world of experience. It was this memory that led to the same inner mystical experiences-confessedly beyond the power of words to render adequately-that were for Tennyson, as for Wordsworth, the proof and seal of his faith in immortality. In "The Poet," written as early as 1830, Tennyson conceived the poet not only Dower'd with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn, The love of love, but he imagined the poet to possess mystic insight both into the secret of his own soul and into the "marvel of the everlasting will:" He saw thro' life and death, thro' good and ill, He saw thro' his own soul, The marvel of the everlasting will, An open scroll, Before him lay. This no doubt is a youthful over-statement of the might of a poet's mind, for Tennyson himself was soon to learn and to teach in his poetry that there are a few things in the universe that even the prophetic mind of a poet cannot see through, and that one of these things is the marvel of the everlasting will, both the will of man and the will of God. But in the same edition in which "The Poet" was published was another poem entitled "The Mystic," in the following lines of which we have suggested to us what it was that the poet "saw thro':" |