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For though when 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 crossed the bar.’ Those exquisite lines of Lord Tennyson’s seem so appropriate to my father, to his dread of good-byes, to his great and simple faith, that I have ventured to quote them here.
The main facts of Tennyson’s life have been matter of familiar knowledge for so many years that we do not propose to run over them here once more. Nor shall we fill the space at our command with the biographer’s interesting personal anecdotes. So fierce a light had been beating upon Aldworth and Farringford that the relations of the present Lord Tennyson to his father were pretty generally known.
In the story of English poetry these relations held a place that was quite unique. What the biographer says about the poet’s sagacity, judgment, and good sense—especially what he says about his insight into the characters of those with whom he was brought into contact—will be challenged by no one who knew him. Still, the fact remains that Tennyson’s temperament was poetic entirely.
And to say that the words were Tennyson’s is to say that they expressed the simple truth, for his definition of human speech as God meant it to be would have been “the breath that utters truth.” It would have been wonderful, indeed, if he, whose capacity of loving a friend was so great had been without an equal capacity of loving a woman.
Comparisons, however, between Shakespeare and other poets can hardly be satisfactory. A kinship between him and any other poet can only be discovered in relation to one of the many sides of the “myriad-minded” man. Where lies Tennyson’s kinship? Is it on the dramatic side?
There are few more pleasant pages in this book than those which record Tennyson’s relations with another poet who was blessed in his wife—Browning. Knowles at the Hollies, Clapham Common.
A man will say “to which I am not alone bound by honor but also by law,” unaware that what he has unintentionally said is, that he is not alone bound, some other person being bound with him. The time is coming when Tennyson’s Œnone could not say, “I will not die alone,” lest she should be supposed to mean that she would not only die but do something else.
Nay, is it not in a certain sense more wonderful for a lyrical impulse such as Tennyson’s to be found combined with a power of philosophical and metaphysical abstraction such as he shows in some of his poems?
Fancy “the allegorical intent” behind the parting of Hector and Andromache, and behind the death of Desdemona! Thank Heaven, however, Tennyson’s allegorical intent was a destructive afterthought.
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