ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON (1809–92)
1. His Life. Alfred Tennyson, the son of a clergyman, was born at his father’s living at Somersby in Lincolnshire. After some schooling at Louth, which was not agreeable to him, he proceeded to Cambridge (1828). At the university he was a wholly conventional person, and the only mark he made was to win the Chancellor’s Prize for a poem on Timbuctoo. He left Cambridge without taking a degree; but before doing so he published a small volume of mediocre verse. During the next twenty years he passed a tranquil existence, living chiefly with his parents, and writing much poetry. Pleasant jaunts—to the Lake District, to Stratford-on-Avon, and other places—varied his peaceful life, and all the while his fame as a poet was making headway. In 1844 he lost most of his small means in an unlucky speculation, but in the nick of time (1845) he received a Government pension. He was appointed Poet Laureate (1850) in succession to Wordsworth, married, and removed to Freshwater, in the Isle of Wight, which was his home for the next twenty years. In his later years recognition and applause came increasingly upon him, and he was regarded as the greatest poet of his day. In 1884 he was created a baron, sat in the House of Lords, and for a time took himself rather seriously as a politician, falling out with Gladstone over the Irish question. He died at Aldworth, near Haslemere, in Surrey, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.
2. His Poetry. When he was seventeen years old Tennyson collaborated with his elder brother Charles in Poems by Two Brothers (1826). The volume is a slight one, but in the light of his later work we can already discern a little of the Tennysonian metrical aptitude and descriptive power. His prize poem of Timbuctoo (1829) is not much better than the usual prize poem. His Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830), published while he was an undergraduate, are yet immature, but in pieces like Isabel and Madeleine the pictorial effect and the sumptuous imagery of his maturer style are already conspicuous.
His volume of Poems (1832) is of a different quality, and marks a decided advance. In this book, which contains Mariana in the South and The Palace of Art, we see the Tennysonian features approaching perfection. Poems (1833), with such notable items as Œnone and The Lotos-Eaters, advances still further in technique. Then in 1842 he produced two volumes of poetry that set him once and for all among the greater poets of his day. The first volume contains revised forms of some of the numbers published previously, the second is entirely new. It opens with Morte d’Arthur, and contains Ulysses, Locksley Hall, and several other poems that stand at the summit of his achievement.
The later stages of his career are marked chiefly by much longer poems. The Princess (1847) is a serio-comic attempt to handle the theme that was then known as “the new woman.” For the sake of his story Tennyson imagines a ladies’ academy with a mutinously intellectual princess at the head of it. For a space a tragedy seems imminent, but in the end all is well, for the Princess is married to the blameless hero. The poem is in blank verse, but interspersed are several singularly beautiful lyrics. The humor is heavy, but many of the descriptions are as rich and wonderful as any Tennyson ever attempted.
In Memoriam (1850) caused a great stir when it first appeared. It is a very long series of meditations upon the death of Arthur Henry Hallam, Tennyson’s college friend, who died at Vienna in 1833. Tennyson brooded over the subject for years; and upon this elegiac theme he imposed numerous meditations on life and death, showing how these subjects were affected by the new theories of the day. To a later generation his ideas appear pallid enough; but at the time they marked a great advance upon the notions of the past. The poem is adorned with many beautiful sketches of English scenery; and the meter—now called the In Memoriam meter—which is quite rare, is deftly managed.
Maud and Other Poems (1855) was received with amazement by the public. The chief poem is called a “monodrama”; it consists of a series of lyrics which reflect the love and hatred, the hope and despair, of a lover who slays his mistress’s brother, and then flies broken to France. The whole tone of the work is forced and fevered, and it ends in a glorification of war and bloodshed. It does not add to Tennyson’s fame.
Beginning in 1859, Tennyson issued a series of Idylls of the King, which had considered and attempted a great theme that Milton abandoned—that of King Arthur and the Round Table. Many doting admirers saw in the Idylls an allegory of the soul of man; but in effect Tennyson drew largely upon the simple tales of Malory, stripping them of their “bold bawdry” to please his public, and covering them with a thick coating of his delicate and detailed ornamentation. It is doubtful if this unnatural compound of Malory-Tennyson is quite a happy one, but we do obtain much blank verse of noble and sustained power.
The only other poem of any length is Enoch Arden (1864), which became the most popular of all, and found its way in translation into foreign languages. The plot is cheap enough, dealing with a seaman, supposedly drowned, who returns and, finding his wife happily married to another man, regretfully retires without making himself known. The tale, as ever, is rich with Tennysonian adornment. In particular, there is a description of the tropical island where Enoch is wrecked that is among the highest flights of the poet:
The mountain wooded to the peak, the lawns
And winding glades high up like ways to Heaven,
The slender coco’s drooping crown of plumes,
The lightning flash of insect and of bird,
The lustre of the long convolvuluses
That coiled around the stately stems, and ran
Even to the limit of the land, the glows
And glories of the broad belt of the world,
All these he saw; but what he fain had seen
He could not see, the kindly human face,
Nor ever hear a kindly voice, but heard
The myriad shriek of wheeling ocean-fowl,
The league-long roller thundering on the reef.
His last poems contain a harsher note, as if old age had brought disillusion and a peevish discontent with the pleasant artifices that had graced his prime. Even the later instalments of the Idylls of the King contain jarring notes, and are often fretful and unhappy in tone. Among the shorter poems, Locksley Hall Sixty Years after (1885) and The Death of Œnone (1892) are sad echoes of the sumptuous imaginings of the years preceding 1842.
3. His Plays. Tennyson’s dramas occupied his later years. He wrote three historical plays—Queen Mary (1875), Harold (1877), and Becket (1884). The last, owing chiefly to the exertions of Sir Henry Irving, the actor-manager, was quite a stage success. None, however, ranks high as a real dramatic effort, though all show much care and skill. The Falcon (1879) is a comedy based on a story from Boccaccio; The Cup (1880) is based on a story from Plutarch, and scored a success, also through the skill of Irving. The Foresters (1892), dealing with the familiar Robin Hood theme, was produced in America.
4. His Poetical Characteristics. (a) His Craftsmanship. No one can deny the great care and skill shown in Tennyson’s work. His method of producing poetry was slowly to evolve the lines in his mind, commit them to paper, and to revise them till they were as near perfection as he could make them. Consequently we have a high level of poetical artistry. No one excels Tennyson in the deft application of sound to sense and in the subtle and pervading employment of alliteration and vowel-music. Such passages as this abound in his work:
Myriads of rivulets hurrying thro’ the lawn,
The moan of doves in immemorial elms,
And murmuring of innumerable bees.
The Princess
This is perhaps not the highest poetry, but shows only a kind of manual, or rather aural, dexterity; yet as Tennyson employs it, it is effective to a degree.
His excellent craftsmanship is also apparent in his handling of English meters, in which he is a tireless experimenter. In blank verse he is not so varied and powerful as Shakespeare, nor so majestical as Milton, but in the skill of his workmanship and in his wealth of diction he falls but little short of these great masters.
(b) His Pictorial Quality. In this respect Tennyson follows the example of Keats. Nearly all of his poems, even the simplest, abound in ornate description of natural and other scenes. His method is to seize upon appropriate details, dress them in expressive and musical phrases, and thus throw a glistening image before the reader’s eye:
The silk star-broider’d coverlid
Unto her limbs itself doth mould
Languidly ever; and, amid
Her full black ringlets downward rolled,
Glows forth each softly-shadowed arm
With bracelets of the diamond bright:
Her constant beauty doth inform
Stillness with love, and day with light.
The Sleeping Beauty
Till now the doubtful dusk reveal’d
The knolls once more where, couched at ease,
The white kine glimmered, and the trees
Laid their dark arms about the field:
And sucked from out the distant gloom
A breeze began to tremble o’er
The large leaves of the sycamore,
And fluctuate all the still perfume.
In Memoriam
Such passages as these reveal Tennyson at his best; but once again the doubt arises as to whether they represent the highest poetry. They show care of observation and a studious loveliness of epithet; but they lack the intense insight, the ringing and romantic note, of the best efforts of Keats.
(c) Tennyson’s lyrical quality is somewhat uneven. The slightest of his pieces, like Blow, bugle, blow, are musical and attractive; but on the whole his nature was too self-conscious, and perhaps his life too regular and prosperous, to provide a background for the true lyrical intensity of emotion. Once or twice, as in the wonderful Break, break, break and Crossing the Bar, he touches real greatness:
Break, break, break,
On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!
And I would that my tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me.
O well for the fisherman’s boy,
That he shouts with his sister at play!
O well for the sailor lad,
That he sings in his boat on the bay!
And the stately ships go on
To their haven under the hill;
But O for the touch of a vanished hand,
And the sound of a voice that is still!
Break, break, break,
At the foot of thy crags, O Sea!
But the tender grace of a day that is dead
Will never come back to me.
This lyric has a brevity, unity, and simple earnestness of emotion that make it truly great.
(d) The extracts already given have sufficiently revealed the qualities of his style. It can be quite simple, as in The Brook and Will Waterproof’s Lyrical Monologue; but his typical style shows a slow and somewhat sententious progress, heavy with imagery and all the other devices of the poetical artist. In particular, he is an adept at coining phrases—“jewels five words long,” as he himself aptly expressed it; and he is almost invariably happy in his choice of epithet.
(e) His reputation has already declined from the idolatry in which he was held when he was alive. He himself foresaw “the clamour and the cry” that was bound to arise after his death. To his contemporaries he was a demigod; but younger men strongly assailed his patent literary mannerisms, his complacent acceptance of the evils of his time, his flattery of the great, and his somewhat arrogant assumption of the airs of immortality. Consequently for twenty years after his death his reputation suffered considerably. Once more reaction has set in, and his detractors have modified their attitude. He is not a supreme poet; and whether he will maintain the primacy among the singers of his own generation, as he undoubtedly did during his lifetime, remains to be seen; but, after all deductions are made, his high place in the Temple of Fame is assured.