In 1892 two men died-Tennyson, the poet, in England, and Renan, the great prose writer, in France. The sensation caused by the death of Tennyson in England was unparalleled: he was treated like a demi-god: on all sides one heard that he was the greatest English poet of the nineteenth century. The Quarterly Review affirmed that "no English poet has possessed a more complete command of his genius in its highest form. No crudities of image like those of Byron, nor cloudy word-phantasms such as those of Shelley, nor fanciful affectations like those of Keats, nor versified prose, such as that of Wordsworth, mar his equality of treatment." A well known writer declared that "the marvellous island held nothing more glorious than this man, nothing more holy, wonderful and dear." Swinburne published a threnody on him of lyrical adoration, and in the press many compared him with Shakespeare. Renan, too, was overpraised by the French, but to nothing like the same extent: they recognized that he was a master of prose, a really great writer, but no Frenchman would have thought of putting him with Montaigne.
Or let us take Victor Hugo, whose life has more points of resemblance with that of Tennyson: he was a greater singer and his genius was far more widely recognized; he was as peculiarly French as Tennyson was English; he, too, lived to a great age and was accorded a public state funeral which was turned into a great ceremony. But there were no such dithyrambs of praise in the French press over Hugo: there was far more measure, more reason; the best heads did not hesitate to qualify their admiration for a great poet and master of musical French.
Tennyson's last day was described by a journalist on the Pall Mall Gazette with a fervor of admiration that made him a sacred memory to thousands who had never seen him or read a line of his finer work. I quote the account because it was peculiarly characteristic of English sentiment.
The morning yesterday rose in almost unearthly splendour over the hills and valleys on which the windows of Aldworth House look out, where Lord Tennyson lay dying. From the mullioned window of the room where the poet lay, he could look down upon the peaceful fields, the silent hills beyond them, and the sky above, which was a blue so deep and pure as is rarely seen in this country.
Lord Tennyson woke ever and again out of the painless, dreamy state into which he had fallen, and looked out into the silence and the sunlight.
In the afternoon, in one of his waking moments, during which he was always perfectly conscious, he asked for his Shakespeare, and with his own hands turned the leaves till he found Cymbeline. His eyes were fixed on the pages, but whether and how much he read no one will ever know, for again he lay in dream or slumber, or let his eyes rest on the scene outside.
As the day advanced a change came over the scene, a change almost awful to those who watched the death-bed. Slowly the sun went down, the blue died out of the sky, and upon the valley below there fell a perfectly white mist. The hills, as our representative was told, put on their purple garments to watch this strange, white stillness; there was not a sound in the air, and, high above, the clear, cloudless sky shone like a pale glittering dome. All nature seemed to be watching, waiting.
Then the stars came out and looked in at the big mullioned window, and those within saw them grow brighter and brighter, until at last a moon-a harvest moon for splendour, though it was an October moon-sailed slowly up and flooded the room with golden light. The bed on which Lord Tennyson lay, now very near to the gate of death, and with his left hand still resting on his Shakespeare, was in deep darkness; the rest of the room lit up with the glory of the night, which poured in through the uncurtained windows. And thus, without pain, without a struggle, the greatest of England's poets passed away.
The idea of the stars growing brighter as the moon rose, and the hills putting on purple while the Lord was dying is pure English, or, perhaps I should say, English journalism. Yet everyone praised the description, and there was no criticism of it.
In every paper, too, one found Carlyle's pen portrait of the poet, which is excellent, though not unduly flattering:
Tennyson is one of the finest looking men in the world. A great shock of rough, dusty hair; bright, laughing hazel eyes; massive aquiline face, most massive yet most delicate; of sallow-brown complexion; almost Indianlooking; clothes cynically loose, free-and-easy; smokes infinite tobacco. His voice is musical, metallic-fit for loud laughter and piercing wail, and all that may lie between speech and speculation free and plenteous. I do not meet in these late decades such company over a pipe! We shall see what he will grow to. He is often unwell; very chaotic-his way is through Chaos and the Bottomless and Pathless; not handy for making out many miles upon.
Carlyle does not even notice that Tennyson was tall and well-made, but he saw distinctly the want of brains in him or he would hardly have emphasized that "chaotic" or shown contempt for his speculative activities. A great part of Tennyson's popularity was undoubtedly due to his Victorian religious belief, for he was an aristocrat by nature and would never even issue a cheap edition of his works. To mention him with Shakespeare, the supremest intellect England has produced, seems to me a crime of lese majeste: he wasn't even a thinker, but a sentimentalist.
I saw Tennyson twice: first in a house in London where he sat enthroned like a god and surrounded by worshipers, male and female. In spite of the incense of unmeasured praise, he said nothing of any value, but I caught a phrase or two that may be worth recording. Speaking of morality, he said, "Moral good is the crown of life. But what value is it," he added, "without immortality? If I knew my life was coming to an end in an hour, should I give anything to a starving beggar? Not a penny, if I didn't believe myself immortal… At the same time, I can't believe in Hell; endless punishment seems stupid to me."
The whole talk appeared to me simply brainless, but he was remarkably handsome, and at the request of his hostess he chanted several stanzas of Maude in a fine deep voice that brought out all the music of the verse. But I really formed no definite opinion of him till John Addington Symonds took me with him to Haslemere in this year, 1892. Tennyson then talked of Symonds' Renaissance in Italy, which he had been reading with his son Hallam, and the two had a long discussion about Bruno, in the course of which Tennyson declared that Huxley's belief that we were descended from apes had nothing in it to shock him. "It may be God's way of creation," he said.
But soon he got upon Gladstone, whom he recognized as an evil influence. I could not understand why, till he came upon Irish Home Rule, when he asserted that the Irish were more incapable of self-government than any other people in the world. "Really," I interjected, "perhaps better than niggers!" He turned sharply on me: "Niggers are hardly higher in the scale than animals, indeed I prefer dogs-very much."
There was nothing more to be said; all the while I felt I was listening to mere temper, not to intellect, much less genius, which is the intelligence of the heart. Half a dozen men in this last decade of the nineteenth century were his superiors in mind: Matthew Arnold, Browning, Russel Wallace, and Huxley in England, and of course Lord Kelvin; and in France, Hugo, Renan, Flaubert and Taine were altogether on a higher level. Yet he was apotheosized even in his life and before he reached maturity. His semi-religious sentimentality and his narrow jingoism were the sources of his astounding popularity in England.
"It is understood," wrote one well-informed critic about him, "that he believed he wrote many of the best and truest things he ever published under the direct influence of higher intelligences, of whose presence he was directly conscious." Writing on March 7th, 1874, to a gentleman who had communicated to him some strange experience which he had had under anaesthetics, Tennyson said, "I have never had any revelations through anaesthetics, but a kind of waking trance (this for lack of a better name) I have frequently had, quite up from boyhood, when I have been all alone. This has often come upon me through repeating of my own name to myself silently till, all at once, as it were, out of the intensity of the consciousness of individuality, the individuality itself seemed to dissolve and fade away into boundless being, and this not a confused state, but the clearest of the clearest, the surest of the surest, utterly beyond words, where death was an almost laughable impossibility, the loss of personality (if so it were) seeming no extinction, but the only true life."
As if conscious of the significance of the statement thus detailed, he adds:
"I am ashamed of my feeble description. Have I not said the state is utterly beyond words?"
The poet repeating his own name in order to pass from the consciousness of individuality into "boundless being, the only true life" is surely calculated to make one smile. Yet this letter is a prose explanation by the poet of one of the mysterious passages of In Memorlam.
So word by word, and line by line,
The dead man touch'd me from the past,
And all at once it seem'd at last
The living soul was flashed on mine.
And mine in this was wound and whirl'd
About empyreal heights of thought,
And came on that which is and caught
The deep pulsations of the world.
Aeolian music measuring out
The steps of Time-the shocks of Chance-
The blows of Death. At length my trance Was cancell'd, stricken thro' with doubt.
Vague words! but ah! how hard to frame
Or ev'n for intellect to reach
In matter-moulded forms of speech
Thro' memory that which I became.
There are many allusions in the Idylls of the King and elsewhere in his work to these same visions of the night or of the day, but all confirming the belief in his own immortality, which he sets forth finally in superb verse: … And he, shall he, Man, her last work, who seem'd so fair, Such splendid purpose in his eyes, Who roll'd the psalm to wintry skies, Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer, Who lov'd, who suffer'd countless ills, Who battled for the True, the Just, Be blown about the desert dust, Or seal'd within the iron hills?
Curiously enough, Hugo, as we learn from his Journal de l'Exile, was even more superstitious than Tennyson: he believed in table-turning and rappings, and in a spirit he called "The White Lady," who made her presence known in the most trivial ways. This superstition seems to belong to the time. In mature manhood, Hugo declares that he never lies down "without a certain terror," and "When I awake in the night, I awake with a shudder! I hear rapping spirits in my room"; and the "White Lady" he calls "an accursed horror." Yet he writes of all this much more reasonably than Tennyson: he says, "The world is still in its infancy: we require ruts and religions; it is doubtful if the average human being has arrived at even a moderate degree of reason: man still has need of written revelation"; and then we get the true reason of his superstition. "All great men have had revelations-all superior minds.
Socrates had his familiar genius. Zoroaster, too, and Shakespeare saw phantoms"; and, as if to atone for this nonsense, he adds finely: "In this century I am the first who has spoken not only of the souls of animals, but also of the soul of things. All my life I have constantly said when I saw a tree branch broken or a leaf torn off-'Leave that branch or leaf. Do not disturb the harmony of nature!' "
Another interesting fact about Hugo is that he always refused to publish as his own the poetry he believed was dictated to him by some table-rapping spirit. Here are two verses which Moliere is supposed to have dictated to him, though I think them curiously characteristic of Hugo himself:
Quand Moliere te dit: Femme, prends tes aiguilles, Fiere pensee, apprends que je te fais honneur, Toute main qui recoud, dans l'ombre, des guenilles Erode le manteau du Seigneur.
Ton autre fonction, pensee, est la science, Pour elle, rien n'est vil et rien n'est importun, L'homme materiel est le vase; elle est 1'anse, La poesie est le parfum.
The great social movement in favor of the poor and disinherited, which is the glory of the nineteenth century, never touched Tennyson; in this, as indeed in every domain of thought, he was far inferior to Victor Hugo, though in the Frenchman, too, the gift of musical speech could not mask the poverty of new ideas and lack of creative power.
When we think of Victor Hugo's constant appeals to reason and justice in all international disputes, and contrast them with Tennyson's wild ravings against Russia or France or Ireland, we are almost compelled to admit that the French habit of mind is higher than the English.
Anecdotes of Victor Hugo are legion, and some of them are very interesting.
During the worst days of the siege of Paris, the poet gave away a great deal of money, making use of Madame Paul Meurice-who did not long survive that terrible time-as his almoner. She told him one day of a poor woman without clothes, food or fuel, whom she thought very deserving. Victor Hugo gave her a hundred francs, which were gratefully accepted. Two days afterwards, Madame Meurice found the woman in the same state of destitution and asked where the hundred francs had gone. She said she had distributed them among famishing mothers and children of her acquaintance; and, as inquiry proved that this was perfectly true, Victor Hugo sent her another hundred francs, on condition that she spend it on her own necessities. This she absolutely refused to do, saying that she would rather not have it at all, so Madame Meurice gave her carte blanche to do as she pleased with it. This obstinate woman was no other than Louise Michel, the Communist, who had already suffered imprisonment and expatriation for her unselfish creed.
I have said nothing about the sex life of either Hugo or Tennyson. That of Hugo is fairly well known, whereas Tennyson's is unknown, even his intimate friends asserting that they knew nothing certainly. I should not think he had ever gone deeply into life anywhere. He was put upon a pedestal too early; he was too fortunate in every way, too highly rewarded. The sacred guides are never so well received; they get prison and hemlock, or the cross, as their reward.
Whenever I recall Tennyson's death and the unmeasured glorification of him in the English press, I am compelled to think of poor James Thomson and his end.
The poet of The City of Dreadful Night died ten years before Tennyson, died in miserable poverty and almost unappreciated; yet, in my opinion, he was as gifted a poet as Tennyson, and far wiser; intellectually, indeed, one of the greatest, a master of prose as well as verse. His life and fate throw a sinister light on English conditions.
In every respect he comes nearer to ideal wisdom than any other modern English poet.
While Tennyson lauds the Crimean War, Thomson condemns it as "a mere selfish haggle, badly begun and meanly finished." He refers to the more recent exploits of English jingoism as "purely iniquitous, battue-wars against tribes of ill-armed savages." He showed sympathy for all the struggling nationalism of his time, for Italy and Poland and even for the Basques, who had supported the Carlist cause in '73. Here are his words:
"Such was the loyalty of these people, far more noble than ours; for they were giving freely of their substance and their lives, whereas we give chiefly snobbish cringing and insincere adulation, and our rich give the money of the nation in large part wrung from the poor."
Unlike Tennyson, he was devoted to the cause of the people, and fought against every form of privilege and capitalism.
Every Englishman should read his satirical essay on Bumbledom. He points out that though there is more liberty in England than on the continent in matters affecting political discussion, "the reverse is true as regards questions of morals and sociology, for here the power of Bumble's purse rules our socalled free press and free institutions with a hand heavier than that of any Continental despot."
Thomson knew that there were worse faults of democracy than "political inequalities." "Bumble," he says, "imposes death by starvation."
He tells us in a letter that he used to read and "hugely admired Byron when about fifteen, but when I was sixteen I fell under the domination of Shelley, to whom I have been loyal ever since"-from Byron to Shelley in a year!
Thomson is really the only Englishman who stands with Heine and Leopardi as a great modern master, and his translations of their poems are the best in English. And Thomson was kindlier and sweeter in all his personal relations than either of them. Even Heine at times distresses one by the contempt he shows for the greatest, such as Goethe. We have no such apology to make for Thomson. He was the most gifted of all his English contemporaries, and he praises the wisest of them enthusiastically. He almost reached perfection, but alas, he sometimes drank too much, is the accusation brought against him, and by Englishmen.
There is the famous reply to a similar accusation brought against General Grant in the Civil War by his detractors. "Tell me what drink he uses," said Lincoln, "and I will send it to the rest of our generals, and then perhaps they, too, will win victories like Grant."
No wonder Thomson let himself drink too much; he could find no market for his work in England, nothing but poverty and neglect. He told me, with that rare power of laughing at himself, which only high genius possesses, that he failed in spite of good resolutions. "You see," he said, "the resolutions were made when I was sober, but after the first glass one is not quite the same who made the resolution, and after the second glass one is still more unlike. If you have been badly nourished, it needs a drink or two, or three, to bring you to your full vigor, and then one glass more for good fellowship and you're lost!"
One man who knew Thomson even at the end and saw this side of him, that I only caught a glimpse of, wrote:
"I am far from saying that Thomson did not find any happiness in life. His wit and broad fun vied with his varied information and gift of a happy talk in making him a prince of good fellows; and he least of all would be suspected of harboring the worm in his jovial heart.
"But these were the glints of sunshine that made life tolerable; the eversmouldering fire of unassuageable grief and inextinguishable despair burned the core out of that great heart when the curtain of night hid the play-acting scenes of the day."
After getting to know him fairly well, I met Thomson once by chance coming out of a public house, and I soon found that he was beyond intelligent speech.
I turned away too hastily. Yet I cherish more than almost any other memory the memory of my casual meetings with him.
Thomson's essays, especially on the poets, are far and away the best in English. His view of Tennyson shows the sureness of his judgment, the width of his impartiality:
"Scarcely any other artist in verse of the same rank has ever lived on such scanty revenues of thought (both pure and applied or mixed) as Tennyson…
He is continually petty… A great school of the poets is dying out: it will die decently, elegantly, in the full odor of respectability, with our Laureate."
Thomson wrote better of Meredith than even Meredith could write of him:
"His name and various passages in his works reveal Welsh blood, more swift and fiery and imaginative than the English… So with his conversation. The speeches do not follow one another mechanically, adjusted like a smooth pavement for easy walking; they leap and break, resilient and resurgent, like running foam-crested sea-waves, impelled and repelled and crossed by under-currents and great tides and broad breezes; in their restless agitations you must divine the immense life abounding beneath and around and above them."
Here is what he says of Browning:
"Robert Browning, a really great thinker, a true and splendid genius, though his vigorous and restless talents often overpower and run away with his genius so that some of his creations are left but half-redeemed from chaos."
And then he selects for highest praise his Lazarus in the Epistle of Karshish, an Arab Physician.
Thomson's portrait of Heine gives a better picture of Thomson himself than any one else has given:
In all moods, tender, imaginative, fantastic, humorous, ironical, cynical; in anguish and horror, in weariness and revulsion, longing back to enjoyment, and longing forward to painless rest; through the doleful days, and the dreadful immeasurable sleepless nights, this intense and luminous spirit was enchained and constrained to look down into the vast black void, which undermines our seemingly solid existence… and the power of the spell on him, as the power of his spell on us, is increased by the fact that he, thus in Deathin- Life brooding on Death and Life, was no ascetic spiritualist, no selftorturing eremite or hypochondriac monk, but by nature a joyous heathen of richest blood, a Greek, a Persian, as he often proudly proclaimed, a lusty lover of this world and life, an enthusiastic apostle of the rehabilitation of the flesh.
I want finally to put Thomson with the great masters of the nineteenth century. I always think of Blake first as the earliest prophet-seer, then of Wordsworth and Shelley and Keats; but Thomson and Browning stand with these. His friend and biographer, Bertram Dobell, the poet, says nobly of Thomson that he "was one of the finest and rarest spirits that has ever worn the vestments of mortality." Think of Thomson's final word, which I would put in the forefront of every English Bible, if I could: "England and France are so proudly in the van of civilization that it is impossible for a great poet to live greatly to old age in either of them."
I am not sure that this is true of France; I am quite certain it is profoundly true of England.
Tennyson and Thomson-between these poles you can find England: the one man, supremely endowed with genius for words but the mind of a sentimental schoolboy, was ruined by too great adulation and too many rewards; the other, of far higher mental endowment, bred as a charity orphan, was gradually disheartened by neglect and finally broken by the universal indifference that kept him a pauper.
I know that this judgment will not be accepted readily in England; the English would much rather blame a great man than take any shame to themselves for maltreating him. But one proof occurs to me: in the nineties, more than fifteen years after Thomson's death, H. D. Traill, one of the first journalists and men of letters of the time, wrote an article in the Nineteenth Century on English poets of the Victorian era. He gave a list of sixty-six who were able to speak "the veritable and authentic language of the poet"; he puts Tennyson as the first, mentions even a Mrs. Graham Thomson; but omits James Thomson altogether. Yet, of the two, Tennyson and Thomson-the lord and the outcast-it was the outcast orphan alone that reached the heights.
There is no such handicap to genius as praise and money.
O wretched Earth! God sends thee age by age, In pity of thy wild perpetual moan, The saint, the bard, the hero, and the sage:
But still the lofty life is led alone,
The singer sings as in a tongue unknown, The sage's wisdom lamps his single urn;
Thou wilt not heed or imitate or learn.