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