MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
BEING occupied at the moment with a long biographical labour which will take me two years at least to complete, I have been obliged to renounce my former habit of giving incidental lectures on literary or political subjects. In my most honest moments I am obliged to confess that I am relieved at possessing a respectable excuse for not having, during the next six months, to nurse a con- stituency. Of all babies, a constituency is the most querulous and exacting to nurse. It entails all the ardours of long journeys and small meetings, all the humiliation of open-air speaking, without the sense of combat or the excitement of an electoral contest. Yet I am sorry that I feel no longer justified in lecturing on literary themes. It is convenient, agreeable and perhaps useful to go abroad from time to time and to talk to foreign audiences about the influence of French or German literature in England or upon the strange cycle being drawn, as aeroplanes weave patterns in the sky, by our own writers, whirling from romanticism to classicism and now back again to what may prove to be a neo-romantic curve. I have discovered also that the urge to go abroad, which has always been for me a recurrent ,lust, can more readily be satisfied if one lectures when one gets there, than by any solicitations for a currency quota. When I go abroad, I like to spend more money than I can afford and to imagine, at least, that I can buy Limoges enamel or dine at the Vert Galant if I wish to. I much dislike the feeling that a glass of Strega after luncheon means that I shall have to carry my luggage to the station. Yet I must absent myself from this felicity awhile (shall I be accused by some testy correspondent of omitting my inverted commas ?) and I must strictly ration any lectures that I may wish to give in this country. Yet there is one temptation which I find it hard to resist. I can reluctantly refrain from going to Oxford and Cambridge to talk to undergraduate clubs. But when asked to lecture to the W.E.A., or other working-class audiences, on a literary subject, I find that the spirit is weak at refusal.
* * * *
This sounds noble, but I do not think it is. Anybody who has lectured frequently to the W.E.A., is aware that they provide the most rewarding audiences of any institution. It is amusing to go down or up to the universities and to see those bright young people, generation after generation, pondering, while one talks, upon the epigrams that they will make when one has finished. Any excuse to go to Oxford or Cambridge is for me a source of elation. But to lecture to working-class audiences on literary subjects is a tempta- tion which, within reasonable limits, I find it difficult to resist. Such expeditions arc often inconvenient in terms of transport, and one sometimes finds oneself landed in ungainly places at ungainly hours. The attendance is seldom very numerous. However careful one may be to state things simply, one is at the same time aware that such audiences much resent being talked down to. These two disadvan- tages combine.to form an advantage. On thc one hand, the bother of the thing gives one self-satisfaction, which is not dishonourable, but which arises from practical inconvenience endured for a decent purpose. On the other hand, the intellectual difficulty of explaining things in such a way as not to give the impression that one is either over-simplifying or showing off provides an excellent mental disci- pline and clears the mind. One is well aware that only one in twenty of one's audience will derive more than a blurred impression of what one wishes to say. But supposing that one did succeed in lighting the lamp of interest in three people, how well worth the journey to Camberwell, or Reading, or Stepney !
* * * * I have been considering this week a lecture which I have agreed to deliver to a working-class audience upon " Tennyson as a Lyric Poet." This has led me to contrast the views which I expressed upon Tennyson in a book first published in 1923 with .those which I have acquired in later age. More specifically, I have been forced to confront the assumptions in which I then indulged with the important material which has recently been given us in Sir Charles Tennyson's remarkable biography of his grandfather. Do the facts which Sir Charles has now divulged tempt me to reconsider my previous opinions ? Or has the experience which I have gained in literary as in other matters in the last twenty-six years lcd me to wish that my early book had been written in a different manner and drawn attention to a different scale of proportions ? Certainly, were I to write that book today, I should adopt a more austere and reverential style. The older one becomes, the more does one tend to think that the value of any book is dependent rather upon its architectural than upon its decorative qualities ; that form is more important than colour ; and that composition and construction give to any book a solidity which no number of purple or ironical passages can ever lend. Certainly, were I to write that book today, I should adopt a duller, more austere, method of writing ; brilliance would be the last of all the effects which I should seek to convey. Not verse now, if I may venture to quote from the poet Browning; only prose. But would I, with further human experience, and after studying Sir Charles Tennyson's so important work, have changed my original opinions ? Not for one moment.
* * * There arc a fcw incidental points on which Sir Charles's outspoken work has corrected my former ignorance. I got compktel) wrong about Tennyson's relations with Edward Fitzgerald, even as I got wrong about his supposed resentment at his sister's marriage. Yet my main thesis that Tennyson was a brooding and unhappy mystic is not altered by Sir Charles's excellent efforts to present him in later years as a slightly abnormal squire. I had guessed at the outset, having only Hallam Tennyson's official and deferential biography to work on, that the Laureate's boyhood had left him with a strain of nervous diffidence. I had supposed that the startling impact made upon him by the kindness of Arthur Hallam was due to this welcome of an exile to a promised land. But until I read Sir Charles's revela- tions, I had little conception, either of the extent of his humiliation at Somersby, or of the miraculous liberation which Hallam brought. Sir Charles has now told us that Tennyson's father was not merely nervous and irritable, as we had supposed, but that he was addicted to drink and a scandal to the parish. He has told us that the con- gested tension of the Rectory was streaked with yellow bars of terror ; one of his brothers was mentally diseased and Frederick and Charles were both unbalanced. Coming as he did from this atmosphere of shame and apprehension, ungainly as he was in speech and dress and manner, the compelling affection shown him by Arthur Hallam must have been an experience of sudden radiance. Hallam, the adored of Gladstone, the pride of Eton, the " phoenix of a century," singled out this huge, swarthy Lincolnshire lad for special friend- ship. These contrasts were implicit in the official biography ; in Sir Charles's book they have been explained in fiercely contrasting blacks and whites. The force of Tennyson's genius, the strength of his character, the sources of his essential inspiration are now at last divulged. *
Thus fortified rnd informed I shall enjoy expounding the lyrical genius of this great poet to a working-class audience. I shall be able to draw attention to the extreme sanity of a poet who, after such terrible experiences as his own boyhood and the loss of Hallam, could become so beautifully urbane. I use those words in a Horatian, and not in a satirical, sense. I am thinking of the lines to Lord Duffcrin or to F. D. Maurice, the lines to Fitzgerald, the lines to Virgil and Catullus. And I shall try to show them that the eternal significance of Tennyson is a mystical significance, that his finest inspiration is truly lyrical. These revelations of his grandson have enhanced and not diminished our respect for the poet, our understanding of the facts by which he was formed. We sec him, as we never saw him so clearly before,
"all dark and red—a tract of sand, And someone pacing there alone, Who paced for ever in a glimmering land, Lit with a large low moon."
Et le reste est litterature.
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