Tennyson, Ruskin, Carlyle

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Title:     Tennyson, Ruskin, Carlyle
Author: Arthur C. Benson [More Titles by Benson]

There were three great men of the nineteenth century of whom we know more than we know of most men, Carlyle, Ruskin, and Tennyson, in whose lives fear was a prominent element.

Tennyson has suffered no loss of fame, but he has suffered of late a certain loss of influence, which was bound to come, if simply from the tremendous domination which his writings exercised in his lifetime. He was undoubtedly one of the first word-artists who ever lived and wrote, but he was a great deal more than that; he was a great mystic, a man whose mind moved in a shining cloud of inspiration. He had the constitution and the temperament of a big Lincolnshire yeoman, with that simple rusticity that is said to have characterised Vergil. But his spirit dwelt apart, revolving dim and profound thoughts, brooding over mysteries; if he is lightly said to be Early Victorian, it is not because he was typical of his age, but because he contributed so much to make it what it was. While Browning lived an eager personal life, full of observation, zest, and passion, Tennyson abode in more impersonal thoughts. In the dawn of science, when there was a danger of life becoming over-materialised, contented with the first steps of swiftly apprehended knowledge, and with solutions which were no solutions at all, but only the perception of laws, Tennyson was the man of all others who saw that science had a deeply poetical side, and could enforce rather than destroy the religious spirit; he saw that a knowledge of processes was not the same thing as an explanation of impulses, and that while it was a little more clear in the light of science what was actually happening in the world, men were no nearer the perception of why it happened so, or why it happened at all. Tennyson saw clearly the wonders of astronomy and geology, and discerned that the laws of nature were nothing more than the habits, so to speak, of a power that was incredibly dim and vast, a power which held within itself the secrets of motion and rest, of death and life. Thus he claimed for his disciples not only the average thoughtful men, but the very best and finest minds of his generation who wished to link the past and the present together, and not to break with the old sanctities.

Tennyson's art suffered from the consciousness of his enormous responsibility, and where he failed was from his dread of unpopularity, or his fear of alienating the ordinary man. Browning was interested in ethical problems; his robust and fortunate temperament allowed him to bridge over with a sort of buoyant healthiness the gaps of his philosophy. But Tennyson's ethical failure lay in his desire to improve the occasion, and to rule out all impulses that had not a social and civic value. In the later "Idylls" he did his best to represent the prig trailing clouds of glory, and to discourage lawlessness in every form; but he was more familiar with the darker and grosser sides of life than he allowed to appear in his verse, which suffers from an almost prudish delicacy, which is more akin to respectability than to moral courage.

But all this was the shadow of a very sensitive and melancholy temperament. Comparatively little is known of the first forty years of his life; it is after that time that the elaborate legend begins. Till the time of his marriage, he must have been a constant anxiety to his friends; his gloom, his inertia, his drifting mooning ways, his hypochondria, his incapacity for any settled plan of life, all seemed to portend an ultimate failure. But this troubled inertness was the soil of his inspiration; his conceptions took slow and stately shape. He never suffered from the haste, which as Dante says "mars all decency of act." After that time he enjoyed a great domestic happiness, and practised considerable sociability. His terrifying demeanour, his amazing personal dignity and majesty, the certainty that he would say whatever came into his head, whether it was profound and solemn, or testy and discourteous, gave him a personal ascendancy that never disappointed a pilgrim.

But he lived all his life in a perpetual melancholy, feeling the smallest slights acutely, hating at once obscurity and publicity, aware of his renown, yet shrinking from the evidences of it. He could be distracted by company, soothed by wine and tobacco; but left to itself, his mind fell helplessly down the dark slope into a sadness and a dreariness which deprived life of its savour. It was not that his dread was a definite one; he was strong and tough physically, and he regarded death with a solemn curiosity; but he had a sense of the profitlessness of vacant hours, unthrilled by beauty and delight, and had also a morbid pride, of the nature of vanity, which caused him to resent the smallest criticism of his works from the humblest reader. There are many stories of this, how he declaimed against the lust of gossip, which he called with rough appositeness "ripping up a man like a pig," and thanked God with all his heart and soul that he knew nothing of Shakespeare's private life; and in the same breath went on to say that he thought that his own fame was suffering from a sort of congestion, because he had received no letters about his poems for several days.

In later life he became very pessimistic, and believed that the world was sinking fast into dull materialism, petty selfishness, and moral anarchy. He had less opportunity of knowing what was going on in the world than most people, in his sheltered and secluded life, with his court of friends and worshippers. And indeed it was not a rational pessimism; it was but the shadow of his fear. And the fact remains that in spite of a life of great good fortune, and an undimmed supremacy of fame, he spent much of his time in fighting shadows, involved in clouds of darkness and dissatisfaction. That was no doubt the price he paid for his exquisite perception of beauty and his power of melodious expression. But we make a great mistake if we merely think of Tennyson as a rich and ample nature moving serenely through life. He was "black-blooded," he once said, adding, "like all the Tennysons." Doubtless he had in his mind his father, a man often deeply in the grip of melancholy. And the absurd legend, invented probably by Rossetti, contains a truth in it and may be quoted here. Rossetti said that he once went to dine with a friend in London, and was shown into a dimly lit drawing-room with no one to receive him. He went towards the fireplace, and suddenly to his surprise discovered an immensely tall man in evening dress lying prostrate on the hearthrug, his face downwards, in an attitude of prone despair. While he gazed, the stranger rose to his feet, looked fixedly at him, and said, "I must introduce myself; I am Octavius, the most morbid of the Tennysons."

With Ruskin we have a different case. He was brought up in the most secluded fashion, and though he was sharply enough disciplined into decorous behaviour by his very grim and positive mother, he was guarded like a precious jewel, and as he grew up he was endlessly petted and indulged. The Ruskins lived a very comfortable life in a big villa with ample grounds at Denmark Hill. Whatever the wonderful boy did was applauded and even dangerously encouraged, both in the way of drawing and of writing. Though he seems to have been often publicly snubbed by both his parents, it was more a family custom than anything else, and was accompanied by undisguised admiration and patent pride. They were his stupefied critics, when he read aloud his works in the family circle, and his father obediently produced large sums of money to gratify his brilliant son's artistic desire for the possession of Turner's paintings. Ruskin in his morbid moments, in later life, turned fiercely and unjustly against his fond and tender father. He accused him with an in temperate bitterness of having lavished everything upon him except the intelligent sympathy of which he stood in need, and his father's gentle and mournful apologies have an extraordinary beauty of puzzled and patient dignity about them.

When Ruskin went to Oxford, his mother went to reside there too, to look after her darling. One might have supposed that this would have involved Ruskin in ridicule, but he was petted and indulged by his fellow-undergraduates, who found his charm, his swift wit, his childlike waywardness, his freakish humour irresistible. Then he had a serious illness, and his first taste of misery; he was afraid of death, he hated the constraints of invalid life and the grim interruption to his boundless energies and plans. Then came his first great book, and he strode full-fledged into fame. His amazing attractiveness, his talk, which combined incisiveness and fancy and humour and fire and gentleness, made him a marked figure from the first. Moreover, he had the command of great wealth, yet no temptation to be idle. The tale of Ruskin's industry for the next fifty years is one that would be incredible if it were not true. His brief and dim experience of married life seems hardly to have affected him. As a critic of art and ethics, as the writer of facile magnificent sentences, full of beauty and rhythm, as the composer of word-structures, apparently logical in form but deeply prejudiced and inconsequent in thought, he became one of the great influences of the day, and wielded not only power but real domination. The widespread delusion of the English educated classes, that they are interested in art, was of Ruskin's making. Then something very serious happened to him; a baffled passion of extraordinary intensity, a perception of the realities of life, the consciousness that his public indulged and humoured him as his parents had done, and admired his artistic advice without paying the smallest heed to his ethical principles--all these experiences broke over him, wearied as he was with excessive strain, like a bitter wave. But his pessimism took the noble form of an intense concern with the blindness and impenetrability of the world at large. He made a theory of political economy, which, peremptory and prejudiced as it is, is yet built on large lines, and has been fruitful in suggestiveness. But he tasted discouragement and failure in deep draughts. His parents frankly expressed their bewildered disappointment, his public looked upon him as a perverse man who was throwing away a beautiful message for the sake of a crabbed whim; and he fell into a fierce depression, alternating between savage energy and listless despondency, which lasted for several years, till at last the overwrought brain and mind gave way; and for the rest of his life he was liable to recurrent attacks of insanity, which cleared off and left him normal again, or as normal as he ever had been. Wide and eager as Ruskin's tenderness was, one feels that his heart was never really engaged; he was always far away, in a solitude full of fear, out of the reach of affection, always solemnly and mournfully alone. Ruskin was never really allied with any other human soul; he knew most of the great men of the day; he baited Rossetti, he petted Carlyle; he had correspondents like Norton, to whom he poured out his overburdened heart; but he was always the spoiled and indulged child of his boyhood, infinitely winning, provoking, wilful. He could not be helped, because he could never get away from himself; he could admire almost frenziedly, but he could not worship; he could not keep himself from criticism even when he adored, and he had a bitter superiority of spirit, a terrible perception of the imperfections and faults of others, a real despair of humanity.

I do not know exactly what the terrors which Ruskin suffered were-- very few people will tell the tale of the valley of hobgoblins, or probably cannot! In the Pilgrim's Progress itself, the unreality of the spirits of fear, their secrecy and leniency, is very firmly and wittily told. They scream in their dens, sitting together, I have thought, like fowls in a roost. They come padding after the pilgrim, they show themselves obscurely, swollen by the mist at the corners of the road. They give the sense of being banded together in a numerous ambush, they can deceive eye and ear, and even nose with noisome stenches; but they cannot show themselves, and they cannot hurt. If they could be seen, they would be nothing but limp ungainly things that would rouse disdain and laughter and even pity, at anything at once so weak and so malevolent. But they are not like the demons of sin that can hamper and wound; they are just little gnomes and elves that can make a noise, and their strength is a spiteful and a puny thing.

Ruskin had no sordid or material fears; he had no fear of poverty, for he flung his father's hard-earned wealth profusely away; nor did he fear illness; indeed one of the bravest and most gallant things about him was the way in which he talked and wrote about his insane fits, described his haunted visions, told, half-ruefully, half-humorously, how he fought and struggled with his nurses, and made fun of the matter. That was a very courageous thing to do, because most people are ashamed of insanity, no doubt from the old sad ignorant tradition that it was the work of demoniacal agencies, and not a mere disease like other diseases. Half the tragedy of insanity is that it shocks people, and cannot be alluded to or spoken about; but one can take the sting out of almost any calamity if one can make fun of it, and this Ruskin did.

But he was wounded by his fears, as we most of us are, not only through his vanity but through his finest emotions. He felt his impotence and his failure. He had thought of his gift of language as one might think of a magic wand which one can wave, and thus compel duller spirits to do one's bidding. Ruskin began by thinking that there was not much amiss with the world except a sort of pathetic stupidity; and he thought that if only people could be told, clearly and loudly enough, what was right, they would do it gladly; and then it dawned upon him by slow degrees that the confusion was far deeper than that, that men mostly did not live in motives but in appetites. And so he fell into a sort of noble rage with the imperfection of mortal things; and one of the clearest signs, as he himself knew, that he was drifting into one of the mind-storms which swept across him, was that in these moods everything that people said or wrote had power to arouse his irritation, to interrupt his work, to break his sleep, and to show him that he was powerless indeed. What he feared was derision, and the good-natured indifferent stolidity that is worse than any derision, and the knowledge that, with all his powers and perceptions, his common-sense, which was great, and his sense of responsibility, he was treated by the world like a spoilt child, charming even in his wrath, who had full license to be as vehement as he liked, with the understanding that no one would act on his advice.

I often go to Brantwood, which is a sacred place indeed, and see with deep emotion the little rooms, with all their beautiful treasures, and all the great accumulations of that fierce industry of mind, and remember that in that peaceful background a man of exquisite genius fought with sinister shadows, and was worsted in the fight, for a time; because the last ten years of that long life were a time of serene waiting for death, a beguiling by little childish and homely occupations the heavy hours: he could uplift his voice no more, often could hardly frame an intelligible thought. But meanwhile his great message went on rippling out to the world, touching heart after heart into light and hope, and doing, insensibly and graciously, by the spirit, the very thing he had failed to do by might and power.

And then we come to Carlyle, and here we are on somewhat different ground. Carlyle had a colossal quarrel with the age, but he thought very little of the message of beauty and peace. His idea of the world was that of a stern combative place, with the one hope a strenuous and grim righteousness; Carlyle thought of the world as a place where cheats and liars cozened and beguiled men, for their own advantage, with all sorts of shams and pretences: but he did not really know the world; he put down to individual action and deliberate policy much that was due simply to the prevalence of tradition and system, and to the complexity of civilisation. He was so fierce an individualist himself that he credited everyone else with purpose and prejudice. He did not realise the vast preponderance of helpless good-nature and muddled kindliness. The mistake of much of Carlyle's work is that it is too poignantly dramatic, and bristles with intention and significance; and he did not allow sufficiently for the crowd of vague supers who throng the background of the stage. Neither did he ever go about the world with his eyes open for general facts. Wherever he was, he was intensely observant, but he spent his days either in a fierce absorption of work, blind even to the sorrow and discomfort of his wife, or taking rapid tours to store his mind with the details of historical scenes, or in the big houses of wealthy people, where he kept much to himself, stored up irresistibly absurd caricatures of the other guests, and lamented his own inaction. I have never been able to discover exactly why Carlyle spent so much time in staying at great houses, deriding and satirising everything he set eyes upon; it was, I believe, vaguely gratifying to him to have raised himself unaided into the highest social stratum; and the old man was after all a tremendous aristocrat at heart. Or else he skulked with infinite melancholy in his mother's house, being waited upon and humoured, and indulging his deep and true family affection. But he was a solitary man for the most part, and mixed with men, involved in a cloud of his own irresistibly fantastic and whimsical talk; for his real gift was half-humorous, half-melancholy improvisation rather than deliberate writing.

But it is difficult to discern in all this what his endless and plangent melancholy was concerned with. He had a very singular physical frame, immensely tough and wiry, with an imagination which emphasized and particularised every slight touch of bodily disorder. When he was at work, he toiled like a demon day after day, entirely and vehemently absorbed. When he was not at work he suffered from dreary reaction. He fought out in early days a severe moral combat, and found his way to a belief in God which was very different from his former Calvinism. Carlyle can by no stretch of the word be called a Christian, but he was one of the most thoroughgoing Deists that ever lived. The terror that beset him in that first great conflict was a ghastly fear of his own insignificance, and a horrible suspicion that the world was made on fortuitous and indifferent lines. His dread was that of being worsted, in spite of all his eager sensibility and immense desire to do a noble work, of being crushed, silenced, thrown ruthlessly on the dust-heap of the world. He learned a fiery sort of Determinism, and a faith in the stubborn power of the will, not to achieve anything, but to achieve something.

Yet after this tremendous conflict, described in Sartor Resartus, where he found himself at bay with his back to the wall, he never had any ultimate doubt again of his own purpose. Still, it brought him no serenity; and I suppose there is no writer in the world whose letters and diaries are so full of cries of anguish and hopelessness. He was crushed under the sense of the world's immensity; his own observation was so microscopic, his desire to perceive and know so strong, his appetite for definiteness so profound, that I feel that Carlyle's terror was like that of a mite in an enormous cheese, longing to explore it all, lost in the high- flavoured dusk, and conscious of a scale of mystery so vast that it humiliated a brain that wanted to know the truth about everything. In these sad hours--and they were numerous and protracted--he felt like a knight worn out by conflict, under a listless enchantment which he could not break. I know few confessions that are so filled with gleams of high poetry and beauty as many of these solitary lamentations. But I believe that the terrors that Carlyle had to face were the terrors of a swift, clear-sighted, feverishly active, intuitive brain, prevented by mortal weakness and frailty from dealing as he desired with the dazzling immensity and intricacy of the world's life and history.

I feel no real doubt of this, because Carlyle's passion for accurate and minute knowledge, his intense interest in temperament and character, his almost unequalled power of observation--which is really the surest sign of genius--come out so clearly all through his life, that his finite limitations must have been of the nature of a torture to him. One who desired to know the truth about everything so vehemently, was crushed and bewildered by the narrow range and limited scope of his own insatiable thought. His power of expressing all that he saw and felt, so delicately, so humorously, and at times so tenderly, must have beguiled his sadness more than he knew. It was Ruskin who said that he could never fit the two sides of the puzzle together--on the one side the awful dejection and despondency which Carlyle always claimed to feel in the presence of his work, as a dredger in lakes of mud and as a sorter of mountains of rubbish, and on the other side the endless relish for salient traits, and the delighted apprehension of quality which emerges so clearly in all he wrote.

But it is clear that Carlyle suffered ceaselessly, though never unutterably. He was a matchless artist, with an unequalled gift of putting into vivid words everything he experienced; but his sadness was a disease of the imagination, a fear, not of anything definite-- for he never even saw the anxieties that were nearest to him--but a nightmare dream of chaos and whirling forces all about him, a dread of slipping off his own very fairly comfortable perch into oceans of confusion and dismay.

[The end]
Arthur C. Benson's essay: Tennyson, Ruskin, Carlyle

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