Lloyd Evans celebrates Tennyson’s miraculous musicality
‘He had the finest ear of any English poet,’ said W.H. Auden. ‘He was also, undoubtedly, the stupidest.’ This famous jibe aimed at Tennyson (whose bicentenary falls on 6 August) is revealing in its shrill and almost triumphant bitchiness. Every age rejects the one before and it’s no surprise that Auden, a gay, left-wing, pacifist democrat, was keen to advertise his contempt for the uxorious, High Church, monarch-loving imperialist. But the severity of his scorn and its blatant falsehood (Tennyson knew half a dozen languages and was famed for the brilliance of his conversation) suggest that Auden’s real feelings may have been more complex than he liked to admit. Samuel Beckett, his near contemporary, adored Tennyson and it would be no surprise to learn that Auden secretly shared his enthusiasm.
Tennyson is particularly cherished by all lovers of verse and for reasons that aren’t fully appreciated. Those who enjoy poetry find themselves envying those whose first love is music because a lyric poem can never be more than a poor copy of pure melody. With Tennyson that deficit is reduced because musicality is his most striking and constant effect. From the start of his career he was able to create beautiful imagery in language whose magical sounds complemented its luxurious shapes and textures. The pictures and the notes that create them unfold with a miraculous familiarity and an easy interdependence. The man himself was blessed with physical beauty. ‘The best-looking man in the world,’ said Carlyle. Elizabeth Barrett Browning declared herself ready to ‘kiss his shoe-tyes any day’.
The third son of a hard-drinking Lincolnshire clergyman, Alfred Tennyson was sent to Cambridge in his early twenties where, according to Harold Nicolson’s mischievously sarcastic biography, ‘he was in advance of his time. He became a reactionary at 22.’ His otherworldly air and magnificent appearance — the huge broad shoulders and shaggy black mane of hair — attracted plenty of admirers. He liked showing off too. Once he walked across a field, stretched out his arms and picked up a pony. ‘Must you be Hercules,’ panted a watching devotee, ‘as well as Apollo!’
He could be touchy and difficult with his friends. On a walking holiday he grew tired of his chum’s constant questions and told him he’d be better off spending his time assembling an anthology of verse. The friend was F.T. Palgrave. Many of the selections in the Golden Treasury are Tennyson’s own. Not surprisingly he was extremely sensitive about his own work. An early collection published in 1832 was subjected to a mocking and unfair review in the influential Quarterly. The abuse stung Tennyson into silence for the next decade. In 1833 the sudden death of his best friend Arthur Hallam would provide the material for ‘In Memoriam’, the work that made his name, but it wasn’t to be published for a further 17 years. He spent his twenties travelling, writing, drinking port, puffing on tobacco for nine hours a day and amusing his friends with conversation.
He sounds like a hippie, a trustafarian, a drifting sensualist but he was nothing of the sort. When he married, at the age of 40, he was still a virgin. His wife Emily Sellwood was in her late 30s and the pair had first met by chance on a country lane 20 years earlier. The young Tennyson had blurted out to the teenager, ‘Are you a Dryad or an Oread wandering here?’ They remained in casual contact for two decades but propriety prevented Tennyson from marrying. He needed to be sure he could make a living from poetry and he feared he might have inherited his father’s epilepsy, an affliction whose shameful cause, according to a popular myth, was excessive masturbation. His second volume, Poems, appeared in 1842 and dazzled literary London. Tennyson’s reputation was taking root.
In 1850, the year of his marriage, he arranged for ‘In Memoriam’ — a title chosen by his wife — to be published anonymously. Speculation about its authorship grew and one reader concluded, ‘These touching lines evidently come from the full heart of the widow of a military man.’ The poem was a huge and instant success.
In the same year, Tennyson was made laureate, a job in which he easily outclassed every other holder of the office. His skills and his intellectual tastes perfectly matched the task. Most poets asked to commemorate ‘The Opening of the International Exhibition, 1862’ would swallow half a pint of laudanum and emigrate. Tennyson set about it with unruffled sincerity, and the ode he produced, though essentially a table of contents for a trade fair, is a beautifully rhythmic and gorgeously ornamented hymn to the riches of nature. He had a genuine relish, and an obvious talent, for adrenalin-rush recruiting songs like ‘Riflemen Form’ and ‘Britons, Guard Your Own’. Today we can enjoy these poems without the cries of the Somme echoing in our ears and we discern in their brisk and saltily aggressive cadences something as catchy and irresistible as pop music. In 1854 Tennyson read of the disastrous charge of the Light Brigade in a newspaper. Half an hour later he had completed a poem whose fame would spread across the world. In the hospitals of the Crimea it was said to cure wounded soldiers, ‘even after the leeches had failed’.
During the tranquil middle and later years he lived unchallenged and unstretched, surrounded by admirers and cushioned by the fruits of success. The range of his interests and acquaintance, it’s said, were too narrow for greatness. Perhaps. If his style scarcely developed after the age of 24 then it needed little refinement having alighted on his early adulthood fully formed.
This year’s bicentenary celebrations would have flattered and delighted Tennyson, although in public he disparaged his celebrity. ‘Modern fame is nothing. I should rather have an acre of land. I shall go down, down. I am up now. Action and reaction.’ A party of Bostonians once crossed the Atlantic hoping to pay him personal homage and having spotted him in his garden they called out, ‘We have come 4,000 miles to tell you —’ and Tennyson cut them dead. ‘It cannot be!’ He fled into his rhododendrons.
He preferred more formal approaches. When the people of Mantua asked him to supply some lines to commemorate the 19th centenary of Virgil’s death they were expecting a formal public ode. They got a masterpiece.
I salute thee, Mantovano, I that loved thee
since my day began,
Wielder of the stateliest measure ever
moulded by the lips of man.
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