Tennyson and his friends

by Unknown

TENNYSON

By Arthur Sidgwick, Fellow of Corpus Christi, Oxford, and sometime Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.

(Read in the Chapel of Trinity College, Cambridge, October 30, 1909.[84])

We are met here to-day to do honour to the memory and the life’s work of one of the greatest of Trinity’s sons, who has also won for himself—few lovers of poetry here or anywhere can feel a doubt—a high and secure place in the glorious roll of English Poets, that roll which records the poetic achievements of over 500 years.

In accepting (with whatever misgivings) the request of the College authorities to speak some preliminary words in appreciation of the Poet, I do not propose to deal in any detail with the history of his life and work, on which the biography has thrown such interesting and welcome light. The most that can here be attempted is to select a few aspects and illustrations of Tennyson’s life-long devotion to his art, such as may serve to bring out something of those gifts and qualities which, wherever English poetry is read, are felt to give to his work its special charm and value.

Though I must pass the early years almost in silence, I cannot refrain from quoting the delightful tale, first made known (I believe) by Miss Thackeray,[85] how at the age of five the Poet was seen with outspread arms in a high wind, sailing gaily along and shouting his first line of poetry

I hear a voice that’s speaking in the wind

—he did indeed all his life hear that voice and all other Nature-voices; and also the other tale of ten years later, how on the news of Byron’s death (in 1824) the boy went out, desolate, and carved the sad tidings on the sandstone, and (to use his own words) “thought everything over and finished for every one, and that nothing else mattered.”

Such despairing grief has seemed to some readers extravagant, to be excused on the plea of youth—he was only fifteen: but it must not be forgotten that Byron’s death was the final blow of a triple fatality such as finds no parallel in the history of literature. Three men of striking genius and rich poetic gifts—Byron, Shelley, and Keats—were all prematurely lost to the world within four years (1821-4). The fervid sorrow of the impulsive and gifted boy of fifteen, so far from being extravagant, must have been shared by countless readers of all ages who cared for poetry, not in England only.

It is true that as the years went on the youthful sympathy of Tennyson with what has been called the Revolutionary poetry was materially modified—perhaps especially in the case of Shelley. Yet there is a striking letter of the date 1834—when Shelley had been dead twelve years, and Tennyson was twenty-five—which should not be forgotten. Henry Taylor had attacked the Byron-Shelley school of poetry; and Tennyson, while not disputing much of his general judgment, adds this penetrating comment: “It may be that he (Taylor) does not sufficiently take into consideration the peculiar strength evolved by such writers as Byron and Shelley, who, however mistaken they may be, did yet give the world another heart and new pulses, and so we are kept going.”

Matthew Arnold was a fine critic and a poet of high distinction, but I have always felt, if we compare his somewhat severe attitude towards the earlier school with that of Tennyson, that it was the latter who showed the truer insight, the wider sympathy, and the juster appreciation.

Of his Cambridge life, 1828-30, two main points stand out: the grievous want he felt of any real stimulus or inspiration in the instruction provided by the authorities; and, secondly, the remarkable group of distinguished men of his own age with whom his college life was passed. As to the first, the scathing lines written at the time, and published with his express consent in the biography, are more eloquent than any description could be. After naming all the glories of the Colleges—their portals, gardens, libraries, chapels, “doctors, proctors and deans”—“all these,” he cries, “shall not avail you when the Daybeam sports, new-risen over Albion ...” and the poem ends with the reason:

Because your manner sorts
Not with this age wherefrom ye stand apart,
Because the lips of little children preach
Against you,—you that do profess to teach
And teach us nothing, feeding not the heart.

On the other hand, this lack (of official wisdom) was more than supplied by the friends with whom he lived—James Spedding, Monckton Milnes (afterwards Lord Houghton), Trench, Alford, Brookfield, Blakesley, Thompson (afterwards Master), Merivale, Stephen Spring-Rice, J. Kemble, Heath, C. Buller, Monteith, Tennant, and above all Arthur Hallam. Thirty-five years later Lord Houghton justly said of this group of friends that “for the wealth of their promise they were a body of men such as this University has seldom contained.” To this should be added the special influence of the “Apostles,” to which Society most of these friends belonged, who had organized from the first regular weekly meetings for essays and discussions, where no topic was barred, and speech was absolutely free. The immense stimulus of such discussion to thought, to study, to readiness and power of argument, to widening the range of intellectual interests and literary judgment and appreciation, must be obvious to all. And we must not forget that the years covered by young Tennyson’s residence at Cambridge were precisely the period of the keenest intellectual stir and the stormiest political warfare that preceded the great Reform Bill.

To return to the poetry. Passing over the purely juvenile Poems by two Brothers printed in his eighteenth year, we have, in 1830, the first book of poems which have partially survived the mature and fastidious taste which suppressed so much of the early work. Even here, half the pieces have been withdrawn, and much of the rest re-written: what remains is rather slight—the Isabels and Claribels and Adelines and Lilians and Eleanores, poems which in some critics’ views border on the trivial. Really they should be regarded as experiments in lyric measures: and the careful student will note the signs of the poet’s fine ear and keen eye for nature: but the depths were not sounded.

Two years later came the second volume (1832). Again much has been withdrawn, much re-written: but when in this collection we find “Œnone,” “The Palace of Art,” “A Dream of Fair Women,” and “The Lotos-eaters,” we see that we have the real poet at last.

“The Palace of Art” is an attempt to trace the Nemesis of selfish culture, secluding itself from social human life and duty. After three years of these exclusive delights, the man’s outraged nature—or conscience if you will—reasserts itself in a kind of incipient madness: the soul of him sees visions. Then a weird passage:

But in dark corners of her palace stood
Uncertain shapes; and unawares
On white-eyed phantasms weeping tears of blood,
And horrible nightmares,
And hollow shades enclosing hearts of flame,
And, with dim fretted foreheads all,
On corpses three-months-old at noon she came,
That stood against the wall.

The horrors, like Gorgons and Furies of ancient poets, are perhaps a trifle too material; but in the description of the Nemesis there are touches of real power, which at least are impressive and arresting.

“Œnone” is perhaps the most absolutely beautiful of these early poems, and for the triumph of melodious sound, and finished picturesqueness of description, the opening lines are unsurpassed. We should also note that it took more than one edition to bring it to its present perfection of form. It is very well known, but no one will object to hear it again:

There lies a vale in Ida, lovelier
Than all the valleys of Ionian hills.
The swimming vapour slopes athwart the glen,
Puts forth an arm, and creeps from pine to pine,
And loiters, slowly drawn. On either hand
The lawns and meadow-ledges midway down
Hang rich in flowers, and far below them roars
The long brook falling thro’ the clov’n ravine
In cataract after cataract to the sea.
Behind the valley topmost Gargarus
Stands up and takes the morning: but in front
The gorges, opening wide apart, reveal
Troas and Ilion’s column’d citadel,
The crown of Troas.

Before I pass on from “Œnone,” I may perhaps add a word or two on Tennyson’s classical poetry generally, and his debt to the great ancient masterpieces.

He was, perhaps, not exactly a scholar in what I may call the narrow professional sense; but in the broadest and deepest and truest sense he was a great scholar. Direct imitations of classical form, even when they show such power and poetry as Swinburne’s “Atalanta” and “Erechtheus,” have always something artificial about them. But in all Tennyson’s classic pieces—“Œnone,” “Ulysses,” “Demeter,” “Tithonus,” the legendary subjects—and in the two historic subjects, “Lucretius” and “Boädicea,” the classical tradition is there with full detail, but by the poet’s art it is transmuted. “Œnone” is epic in form, the rest are brief monodramas; the material is all ancient, and in many subtle ways the spirit; the handling is modern and original. In translations—too few—Tennyson can only be called consummate: his version of one passage of the Iliad (viii. 552) makes all other translations seem second-rate. Let me quote a few lines:

And these all night upon the bridge of war
Sat glorying; many a fire before them blazed:
As when in heaven the stars about the moon
Look beautiful, when all the winds are laid,
And every height comes out, and jutting peak
And valley, and the immeasurable heavens
Break open to their highest,[86] and all the stars
Shine, and the Shepherd gladdens in his heart:
So many a fire between the ships and stream
Of Xanthus blazed before the towers of Troy,
A thousand on the plain; and close by each
Sat fifty in the blaze of burning fire;
And eating hoary grain and pulse the steeds,
Fixt by their cars, waited the golden dawn.

The passage, let me add, is a crucial test of the power of a translator, for this reason: it is a plain, simple description of the Trojan camp-fires in the darkness, with a simile or comparison of the sight to a clearance of the sky at night and the sudden shining of the multitude of stars. With the infallible instinct of Greek Poetry there is a rapid lift in the style, a sudden glorious phrase ὑπερράγη ἄσπετος αἰθήρ, to suggest adequately the magnificent sight of the sudden clearance. It is this effect that is difficult to give in the translation; and it is exactly this splendid climax that Tennyson’s incomparable rendering, “And the immeasurable heavens break open to their highest,” so perfectly conveys.

Again, in the metrical imitations—which are deliberately somewhat in the vein of sport and artifice—Tennyson alone, it seems to me, has exactly done what he intended, and shown what English effects can be produced by a master’s hand, even in these unfamiliar measures.

Of the serious classic pieces one of the most beautiful and moving is “Tithonus.” The tale is familiar: the beautiful youth Tithonus was beloved by the goddess of the Dawn, and her love bestowed immortality on him; but they both forgot to ask for immortal youth. So he grew old: and the pathos of the boon, granted by love at love’s request, thus turning out a curse, is the motive of the tale. He speaks:

Yet hold me not for ever in thine East:
How can my nature longer mix with thine?
Coldly thy rosy shadows bathe me, cold
Are all thy lights, and cold my wrinkled feet
Upon thy glimmering thresholds, when the steam
Floats up from those dim fields about the homes
Of happy men that have the power to die,
And grassy barrows of the happier dead.
Release me, and restore me to the ground;
Thou seëst all things, thou wilt see my grave:
Thou wilt renew thy beauty morn by morn;
I earth in earth forget these empty courts,
And thee returning on thy silver wheels.

A great scholar has said that it is one of the most incomparable powers of poetry to make sad things beautiful, and so to go some way towards healing the sorrow in the reader’s heart. He was speaking of Greek Tragedy; but there is, I think, a deep truth in the saying, and it is not confined to that particular form of poetry. And I know no better instance of the truth than the singularly beautiful poem quoted above.

But the classic influences are, of course, not limited to the avowed borrowings from ancient legend. There are constantly lines in Tennyson where the student of ancient poetry recognizes a phrase—a turn—an echo—beautiful in themselves, and giving a special pleasure to the instructed reader; such a line as “When the first matin-song hath wakened loud,” which occurs in the “Address to Memory”—the striking early poem containing the description of his Somersby home—and is itself an exquisitely turned translation from Sophocles’ Electra. So again we have an echo from Homer through Virgil, in the half-playful line, “This way and that dividing the swift mind”; or, again, the vivid simile from Theocritus in the bold description:

And arms on which the standing muscles sloped,
As slopes a wild brook o’er a little stone,
Running too vehemently to break upon it.[87]

—where the reader with an ear will note the bold metrical variation adding so much to the effect. So again the Poet himself has told us how the famous phrase for the kingfisher, “The sea-blue bird of March,” arose one day when he was haunted by the lovely stanza of Alcman (Greek lyric poet) about the “halcyon” whom he calls “the sea-blue bird of spring.” The fact is that Tennyson had an inborn instinct for the subtle power of language, and for musical sound—in a word, for that insight, finish, feeling for beauty in phrase and thought and thing, and that perfection of form, which, taken all together, we call poetry, and he is, like Virgil and Milton, a true son of the Greeks: and if his open imitations are few, the influence of the springs from which he drank is none the less powerful and pervading.

In 1842 came a carefully revised selection of the earlier books—he was always revising and improving—along with a large number of new poems.

I will pass over the English Idylls, which, in spite of beautiful touches, have never as a whole appealed to me. But, setting these aside, there are a few pieces which I cannot pass by without a word. They are “Love and Duty,” the political poems, and songs. “Morte d’Arthur” I leave over till we reach the Idylls.

“Love and Duty” is a passionate tragedy, the parting of two lovers at the call of duty. Perhaps the high-wrought pathos is a sign of youth; but youth may be a strength as well as a weakness; and the lines are surely of extraordinary beauty and force. I will quote the last passage, for a reason which will appear:

Should my Shadow cross thy thoughts
Too sadly for their peace, remand it thou
For calmer hours to Memory’s darkest hold,
If not to be forgotten—not at once—
Not all forgotten. Should it cross thy dreams,
O might it come like one that looks content,
With quiet eyes unfaithful to the truth,
And point thee forward to a distant light,
Or seem to lift a burthen from thy heart
And leave thee freër, till thou wake refresh’d
Then when the first low matin-chirp hath grown
Full quire, and morning driv’n her plow of pearl
Far furrowing into light the mounded rack,
Beyond the fair green field and eastern sea.

Certain critics have found fault with the splendid description of Dawn, as being untrue to nature; a lover in such a crisis, they think, would not be concerned with such images. I regard this suggestion as wholly at fault. The tragedy, the parting, has come to pass: the vision of dawn is a hope for her, now that the new life, apart from each other, has to begin for both of them. If the broken love was all, if they could not look beyond, the parting would have been different—like Lancelot and Guinevere—“Stammering and staring; a madness of farewells.” But here the note is higher. The passion barred from its issue rushes into new channels, and the exalted mood finds its only adequate vent in the rapturous vision of a future dawn, the symbol of his hopes for her, those hopes into which his sacrificed love is translated.

In the political poems we have a new departure. It is easy to idealize freedom, revolution, or war: and the ancients found it easy to compose lyrics on kings, athletes, warriors, or other powerful persons. From the days of Tyrtaeus and Pindar, to Byron, Shelley, and Swinburne, one or other of these themes has been the seed of song. But the praise of ordered liberty, of settled government, of political moderation, is far harder to idealize in poetry. It has been the peculiar aim of Tennyson to be the constitutional, and in this sense the national, poet: and it is his peculiar merit and good fortune to have succeeded in giving eloquent and forcible expression to the ideas suggested by these aims.

I will not quote the poems about “the Falsehood of extremes,” or “the land of just and old renown where freedom slowly broadens down from precedent to precedent,” because these poems, terse and forcible summaries as they are, have suffered, like other epigrammatic maxims in verse, from vulgarizing quotation. It is not the Poet’s fault in the least; in fact it is due to his very merits—to the memorable brevity, truth, and point of the phrasing. I will quote another—perhaps the most remarkable—of these political poems, “Love thou thy land.” It is close packed with thought, and must have been especially hard to write, since the Poet’s problem was to express in terse and picturesque and imaginative language what at bottom is philosophic and even prosaic detail. Nevertheless, where the material lends itself at all to imaginative handling we get effects that are impressive and even superb. Take a few lines—I cannot quote at length:

Oh yet, if Nature’s evil star
Drive men in manhood, as in youth,
To follow flying steps of Truth
Across the brazen bridge of war—
If New and Old, disastrous feud,
Must ever shock, like armed foes,
And this be true, till Time shall close,
That Principles are rain’d in blood;
Not yet the wise of heart would cease
To hold his hope thro’ shame and guilt,
But with his hand against the hilt,
Would pace the troubled land, like Peace;
Not less, tho’ dogs of Faction bay,
Would serve his kind in deed and word,
Certain, if knowledge bring the sword,
That knowledge takes the sword away.

The last couplet seems to me—where all is powerful and imaginative—to be a master-stroke of terse and pointed expression. It would be hardly an exaggeration to say that it sums up human history in regard to one point—namely, the disturbing and even desolating effect of the new Political Idea, until its triumph comes, bringing a higher and more stable adjustment, and a peace more righteous and secure.

Far more widely known than these didactic poems, rich as they are in poetry and thought, are the patriotic odes—the three greatest being the poems on the Duke of Wellington, the “Revenge,” and Lucknow.

The ode on the Duke is a noble commemoration-poem, grave and stately and solemn—a worthy expression of “the mourning of a mighty nation” with a musical and dignified sorrow—a terse and vivid reference to the Duke’s exploits—a fine imaginative passage where he pictures the dead Nelson asking who the newcomer is, and the stately answer—a striking tribute to the simple and noble character of the dead hero—and then this:

A people’s voice! we are a people yet.
Tho’ all men else their nobler dreams forget,
Confused by brainless mobs and lawless Powers;
Thank Him who isled us here, and roughly set
His Briton in blown seas and storming showers...
O Statesmen, guard us, guard the eye, the soul,
Of Europe, keep our noble England whole,
And save the one true seed of freedom sown
Betwixt a people and their ancient throne...
For, saving that, ye help to save mankind
Till public wrong be crumbled into dust,
And drill the raw world for the march of mind,
Till crowds at length be sane and crowns be just.

Again, for the judgment of the poem, the date is important. It was written only four years after the European earthquake of 1848, and only one year after the Coup d’État. The allusions are not mere commonplaces: they deal with live issues. It is not too much to say that in the great ode Tennyson had a subject after his own heart, and that he has done it magnificent justice.

Of the “Revenge” I will quote one passage, because it contains what always strikes me as the most wonderful effect of sound in poetry to be found anywhere. The whole poem, I may observe, is full of novel and effective handling of metre: but this is the most remarkable. It occurs in the description of the rising storm in which the gallant little ship went down:

And they mann’d the Revenge with a swarthier alien crew,
And away she sail’d with her loss, and long’d for her own;
When a wind from the lands they had ruin’d awoke from sleep,
And the water began to heave, and the weather to moan,
And or ever that evening ended a great gale blew,
And a wave like the wave that is raised by an earthquake grew,
Till it smote on their hulls and their sails and their masts and their flags,
And the whole sea plunged and fell on the shot-shatter’d navy of Spain,
And the little Revenge herself went down by the island crags
To be lost evermore in the main.

Lastly, in the 1842 volume, there was a little song without a title, which will certainly live as long as the English language.

In 1833, nine years before the volume appeared, had died abroad suddenly the rarely-gifted youth who was bound to Tennyson by the double tie of being his best-loved friend and the betrothed of his sister. The body had been brought home for burial by the sea at a little place called Clevedon.

This is the song:

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 vanish’d 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.

There is something in the magical expression of deep love and sorrow in these lines—with the swift and vivid touches of scenery, sympathetic and suggestive—which we can only compare to the few greatest outbursts of passionate regret in poetry.

Five years later came “The Princess” (1847). The idea—a bold design—was to treat, by poetic and half-playful narrative, the comparative intellectual and moral natures of men and women, and the right method of education. The Poet’s views may perhaps to-day seem somewhat old-fashioned, the truths that he suggests or enunciates, in very finished and beautiful language, are controversial, and suffer from the inevitable failing of such writing, viz., that the issues of the strife have changed: experience has shown the forecasts, the fears, and the prophetic satire to be misplaced: and what seemed important truths have turned out to be prejudices or irrelevant platitudes.[88]

The one thing that is consummate in “The Princess” is the handful of little songs that come as interludes between the acts. They are so well known that they need no quotation: their titles will suffice: “As through the land at eve we went,” “Sweet and low,” “The splendour falls,” “Tears, idle tears,” “Thy voice is heard thro’ rolling drums,” “Home they brought her warrior dead,” “Ask me no more.”

The extraordinary effect of these songs is not due only to their marvellous poetic force and finish and variety, but perhaps even more to the illuminating and pointed contrast between the true and deep and permanent realities of human experience—life, death, love, joy, and sorrow—each of which is touched in turn in these exquisite little pictures, and on the other hand the fantastic unreality (in the Poet’s view) of the Princess’s ideals and experiment.

If I must quote one passage, let it be abridged from the shepherd’s song which the Princess reads:

Come down, O maid, from yonder mountain height:
·······
For Love is of the valley, come thou down
And find him; by the happy threshold, he,
Or hand in hand with Plenty in the maize,
Or red with spirted purple of the vats,[89]
Or foxlike[90] in the vine; nor cares to walk
With Death and Morning on the silver horns...
But follow; let the torrent dance thee down
To find him in the valley; let the wild
Lean-headed Eagles yelp alone, and leave
The monstrous ledges there to slope, and spill
Their thousand wreaths of dangling water-smoke,
That like a broken purpose waste in air:
So waste not thou; but come; for all the vales
Await thee; azure pillars of the hearth
Arise to thee; the children call, and I
Thy shepherd pipe, and sweet is every sound,
Sweeter thy voice, but every sound is sweet;
Myriads of rivulets hurrying thro’ the lawn,
The moan of doves in immemorial elms,
And murmuring of innumerable bees.

This is the real idyll, with its central note of love, and wonderful beauty of sound, and vivid vision of every detail of Nature’s sights and life. It suggests a world where all is fresh and sweet, and beautiful and interesting, and simple and wholesome and harmonious.

The year 1850 was marked by three great events in the personal history of Tennyson: his marriage, the publication of his greatest work, “In Memoriam,” and his acceptance of the laureate crown of poetry in succession to Wordsworth, who died in the spring.

When I say that “In Memoriam” is Tennyson’s greatest work, I am of course aware that it is only a personal opinion on a disputable point. But I incline to think that most lovers of poetry would agree that “In Memoriam” is the one of all the Poet’s works the loss of which would be the greatest and most irreparable to poetry.

In the grave and solemn stanzas with which the poem opens, he calls the songs that follow wild and wandering cries, confusions of a wasted youth. But in truth they are the expression of the deepest and most heartfelt sorrow: the most musical and imaginative outpouring of every mood, and every trouble, of a noble love and regret: the cries of a soul stricken with doubt born of anguish, and darkened with shadows of disbelief and despair: the deeper brooding over the eternal problems of life, thought, knowledge, religion: the gradual groping toward a faith rather divined than proved, and slowly passing through storm into peace.

The poem took seventeen years to write, and when it appeared the Poet was at the summit of his great powers. His instinct chose a metre at once strong, simple, fresh, flexible, and grave, and noble—equally adapted to every mood, every form of thought or feeling—the passionate, the meditative, the solemn, the imaginative—for description, argument, aspiration, even for prayer. The tone varies: there are lighter and deeper touches: but it is hardly too much to say, there is not an insignificant stanza, nor a jarring note, from beginning to end.

In a poem where all is so familiar—which has meant and means so much to all who care for poetry—it is difficult to quote. I will take a few stanzas, so chosen, if possible, as to show somewhat of the variety, the range, the subtlety, the charm, and the power of this great work.

He goes to the house in London where the dead friend lived: the gloom without typifies and harmonizes with the darkness of his sorrowful thoughts.

Dark house, by which once more I stand
Here in the long unlovely street:
Doors, where my heart was wont to beat
So quickly, waiting for a hand,—
A hand that can be clasped no more—
Behold me—for I cannot sleep—
And like a guilty thing I creep
At earliest morning to the door.
He is not here; but far away
The noise of life begins again,
And ghastly thro’ the drizzling rain
On the bald street breaks the blank day.

One of the most important motives concerns the doubts raised by the new truths which science was beginning to teach, almost seeming to make in a sense a new heaven and a new earth. The old simple beliefs seemed to the Poet threatened—these misgivings are evil dreams: Nature seems to say:

... A thousand types are gone:
I care for nothing, all shall go.
Thou makest thine appeal to me;
I bring to life, I bring to death;
The spirit does but mean the breath:
I know no more...

Then the Poet breaks out:

And he, shall he,
Man, her last work, who seem’d so fair,
Such splendid purpose in his eyes,
Who roll’d the psalm to wintry skies,
Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer—
Who trusted God was love indeed,
And love Creation’s final law—
Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek’d against his creed—
Who loved, who suffer’d countless ills,
Who battled for the True, the Just,
Be blown about the desert dust,
Or seal’d within the iron hills?...
O life as futile, then, as frail!
O for thy voice to soothe and bless!
What hope of answer, or redress?
Behind the veil, behind the veil.

He will not accept the suggestions which seem to empty human life of its deepest meanings. There must be some other solution.

One more quotation of a different kind—the common sad thought, never so beautifully expressed, of the places we have loved when bereft of our daily loving care—then passing into other hands and forgetting us, and becoming at last to others what they have been to us.

It is in these common universal human themes that Tennyson with his exquisite musical touch, and sympathy, and unerring choice of significant detail, reaches the heart of every reader.

Unwatch’d, the garden bough shall sway,
The tender blossom flutter down,
Unloved, that beech will gather brown,
This maple burn itself away:
Unloved, the sunflower, shining fair,
Ray round with flames her disk of seed,
And many a rose-carnation feed
With summer spice the humming air:
Unloved, by many a sandy bar,
The brook shall babble down the plain,
At noon or when the lesser wain
Is twisting round the polar star.

(Omitting a stanza.)

Till from the garden and the wild
A fresh association blow,
And year by year the landscape grow
Familiar to the stranger’s child.
As year by year the labourer tills
His wonted glebe, or lops the glades,
And year by year our memory fades
From all the circle of the hills.

I can quote no more.

The poem seems gradually to rise from the depths of sorrow and doubt to a new hope and faith—in short, to a new life. The marks of what it has passed through are seen in the deeper thought, the larger nature, and insight, and scope. The soul has grown and strengthened, we may almost say.

In short, the poem is the inner history of a soul: our deepest feelings, our hopes, our fears, our longings, our weaknesses, our difficulties, all find penetrating, sympathetic, enlightening expression—terse, melodious, inspiring, deeply suggestive—in a word, we feel the magic of poetry.

I have no time left to deal with the large work, which occupied many years, “The Idylls of the King.” It is a series—in blank verse, always melodious and often exquisite, giving the main incidents of the old Arthurian legend, which as a boy he had read with delight in old Malory’s prose epic.

I must content myself with two brief references.

The first idyll, “Gareth and Lynette,” is not in itself one of the most interesting[91]—dealing chiefly as it does with the picture of the eager boy, anxious to be one of Arthur’s knights, who serves a year in menial place as a test of his obedience: but there is one passage which ought never to be omitted in speaking of Tennyson, viz. the answer of the seer when the boys ask him if the castle is enchanted.

The seer answers ironically, yet with a deep meaning, that it is enchanted:

For there is nothing in it as it seems
Saving the King; tho’ some there be that hold
The King a shadow, and the city real.

Then he tells them about the vows: which if they fear to take, he warns them

Pass not beneath this gateway, but abide
Without, among the cattle of the field,
For an ye hear a music, like enow
They are building still, seeing the city is built
To music, therefore never built at all,
And therefore built for ever.

Beneath the strangely beautiful surface meaning of these lines there lies the deep allegoric meaning that often what seems visionary is in truth a spiritual and eternal reality. It brings to mind the wonderful lines of Browning (in “Abt Vogler”):

The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard,
The passion that left the earth to lose itself in the sky,
Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard;
Enough that he heard it once, we shall hear it by and by.

The other point concerns the end of the poem. The last section is the Passing of Arthur; the old fragment “Morte d’Arthur” enlarged. One notable addition occurs at the very end.

In the earlier version of the fragment, after Arthur had passed away on the dark lake, with him the last hope also disappears.

We are only told:

Long stood Sir Bedivere,
Revolving many memories, till the hull
Look’d one black dot against the verge of dawn,
And on the mere the wailing died away.

In the fragment the end was tragic: the noble attempt failed; the hero and inspirer passed away, his aim defeated, his comrades slain or scattered, his life and efforts vain.

But in the final shape comes a new and very significant end:

Then from the dawn it seem’d there came, but faint,
As from beyond the limit of the world,
Like the last echo born of a great cry,
Sounds, as if some fair city were one voice,
Around a king returning from his wars.
Thereat once more he[92] moved about, and clomb
Ev’n to the highest he could climb—and saw,
Or thought he saw, the speck that bare the King
Somewhere far off, pass on and on, and go
From less to less, and vanish into light.
And the new sun rose, bringing the new year.

We feel, as we are meant to feel, that though the death of a noble soul, after unequal war with ill, is deeply sad—fitly pictured with sorrowful sounds and darkness of night—yet the great spirit cannot wholly die: the night breaks into a new day; and the day will be brighter for those who are left, because of the efforts and memories of the leader who is no more.

Tennyson is without doubt, from first to last, one of the great poetic artists. He is not often an inspired singer like Shelley, but he has other gifts which Shelley lacked—a self-restraint, an artistic finish, a fine and mature taste, a deep reverence for the past, a pervading sympathy with the broad currents of the best thought and feeling of the time. Sometimes this is (as we have seen) a weakness, but it is also the source of his greatest strength. He has not, like Wordsworth, given us a new insight, what I may almost call a new religion: but he has a wider range than Wordsworth, and a surer poetic touch. Wordsworth may be the greater teacher; for many of us he has opened a new world: he has touched the deepest springs of our nature. But Tennyson has left us gifts hardly less rare and precious. He has refined, enriched, beautified, in some sense almost remade our poetic language; he has shown that the classic eighteenth-century finish is not incompatible with the nineteenth-century deeper and wider thought: and, in a word, he has inwoven the golden thread of poetry with the main texture of the life, knowledge, feeling, experience, and ideals of the years whereof we are all alike inheritors.

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TENNYSON: HIS LIFE AND WORK[93]

By the Right Hon. Sir Alfred Lyall, G.C.B.

The biography of a great poet has seldom been so written as to enhance his reputation with the world at large. It is almost always the highest artist whose individuality, so to speak, is least discernible in his work, and who, like some divinity, is at his best when his mind and moods, his lofty purpose and his attitude toward the problems of life, are revealed only through the medium which he has chosen for revealing them to mankind. To lay bare the human side of a poet, to retail his domestic history, and to dwell upon his private relations with friends or family, will always interest the public enormously; but for himself it is often a perilous ordeal. The man of restless erratic genius, cut off in his prime like Byron or Shelley, leaves behind him a confession of faults and follies, while one who has lived long takes the risk of intellectual decline; or else, like Coleridge, Landor, and even Scott, he may in other ways suffer loss of dignity by the posthumous record of failings or mistakes. It is a rare coincidence that in this nineteenth century two poets of the first rank—Wordsworth and Tennyson—should each have passed the natural limit of fourscore years, steadily extending their reputation without material loss of their power, and completely fulfilling the ideal of a life devoted to their beautiful art, free alike from adventures and eccentricities, tranquil, blameless, and nobly dignified.

Such is the life which has been described to us in the Memoir of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, by his son. In preparing it he had the singular advantage of very close and uninterrupted association for many years with his father, and of thorough acquaintance with his wishes and feelings in regard to the inevitable biography. In a brief preface, he touches, not without emotion, upon the aims and limitations of the task which it had become his duty to undertake.

“For my part,” he says, “I feel strongly that no biographer could so truly give him as he gives himself in his own works; but this may be because, having lived my life with him, I see him in every word which he has written; and it is difficult for me so far to detach myself from the home circle as to pourtray him for others. He himself disliked the notion of a long, formal biography.... However, he wished that, if I deemed it better, the incidents of his life should be given as shortly as might be without comment; but that my notes should be final and full enough to preclude the chance of further and unauthentic biographies.”

Lord Tennyson has given us a remarkable chronicle of his father’s life from youth to age, illustrated by correspondence that is always interesting and occasionally of supreme value, by anecdotes and reminiscences, by characteristic thoughts and pithy observations—the outcome of the Poet’s reflection, consummate literary judgment, and constant intercourse with the best contemporary intellects. He has, moreover, so arranged the narrative as to show the rapid expansion of Tennyson’s strong, inborn poetic instinct, with the impressions and influences which moulded its development, maturing and perfecting his marvellous powers of artistic execution.

Alfred Tennyson was born in the pastoral village of Somersby, amid the Lincolnshire wolds; and he spent many holidays on the coast at Mablethorpe, where he acquired that passion for the sea which has possessed so many poets. The atmosphere of a public school favours active emulation and discipline for the outer world; but to a boy of sensitive and imaginative temperament it is apt to be uncongenial, so we need not be sorry that Tennyson was spared the experience. At first, like most men of his temperament who go straight from private tuition to a University, he felt solitary and depressed—“the country is so disgustingly level, the revelry of the place so monotonous, the studies of the University so uninteresting, so matter-of-fact.” But there was about him a distinction in mind and body that soon marked him out among his fellows (“a kind of Hyperion,” writes FitzGerald), uniting strength with refinement, showing much insight into character, with the faculty of brief and pointed sallies: “We were looking one day at the portrait of an elderly politician in bland family aspect. A. T. (with his eyeglass): It looks rather like a retired panther. So true.”[94]

He was an early member of the Society yclept the Apostles, which included many eager and brilliant spirits, whose debates were upon political reform, the bettering of the people’s condition, upon morals, religion, and those wider and more liberal views of social needs that were foremost at a period when the new forces were just mustering for attack upon the old entrenchment of Church and State. Edward FitzGerald’s notes and Tennyson’s own later recollections are drawn upon in this book for lively illustrations of the sayings and doings of this notable group of friends, and for glimpses of their manner of life at Cambridge. Here he lived in the choice society of that day, and formed, among other friendships, an affectionate attachment to Arthur Hallam, who afterwards became engaged to his sister, and in whose memory the famous poem was written. Hallam seems to have been one of those men whose extraordinary promise and early death invest their brief and brilliant career with a kind of romance, explaining and almost justifying the pagan notions of Fate and divine envy.

In June 1829 Tennyson scored his first triumph by the prize poem on Timbuctoo, which, as he said many years afterwards, won the medal to his utter astonishment, for it was an old poem on Armageddon, adapted to Central Africa “by a little alteration of the beginning and the end.” Arthur Hallam wrote of it on September 2, 1829: “The splendid imaginative power which pervades it will be seen through all hindrances. I consider Tennyson as promising fair to be the greatest poet of our generation, perhaps of our century”—a remarkably far-reaching prophecy to have been built upon so slender a foundation. Out of his “horror of publicity,” as he said, he committed it to Merivale for declamation in the Senate House. In 1830 appeared Tennyson’s first volume of poems, upon which Arthur Hallam again wrote, in a review, that “the features of original genius are strongly and clearly marked”; while on the other hand, Coleridge passed upon it the well-known criticism that “he has begun to write verses without very well knowing what metre is”; and Christopher North handled it with a touch of good-natured ridicule. Then followed, in 1832, a fresh issue, including that magnificent allegory, the “Palace of Art”; with other poems whose very blemishes signified exuberant strength. James Montgomery’s observation of him at this stage is in the main true as a standing test of latent potency in beginners. “He has very wealthy and luxurious thought and great beauty of expression, and is a poet. But there is plenty of room for improvement, and I would have it so. Your trim, correct young writers rarely turn out well; a young poet should have a great deal which he can afford to throw away as he gets older.” The judgment was sound, for after a silent interval of ten years, during which the Poet was sedulously husbanding and cultivating his powers, the full-orbed splendour of his genius shone out in the two volumes of 1842.

“This decade,” writes his biographer, “wrought a marvellous abatement of my father’s real fault,” which was undoubtedly “the tendency, arising from the fulness of mind which had not yet learned to master its resources freely, to overcrowd his composition with imagery, to which may be added over-indulgence in the luxuries of the senses.” By this and by other extracts from contemporary criticism given in the Memoir its readers may survey and measure the Poet’s rapid development of mind and methods, the expansion of his range of thoughts, his increasing command over the musical instrument, and the admirable vigour and beauty which his composition was now disclosing. He had the singular advantage, rarely enjoyed so early in a poetic career, of being surrounded by enthusiastic friends who were also very competent art-critics, and whose unanimous verdict must have given him heart and confidence; so that the few spurts of cold water from professional reviewers troubled him very little. The darts thrown by such enemies might hardly reach or wound him—πρὶν γὰρ περιβῆσαν ἄριστοι—the two Hallams, James Spedding, Edward FitzGerald, the two Lushingtons, Blakesley, and Julius Hare rallied round him enthusiastically. Hartley Coleridge met Tennyson in 1835, and, “after the fourth bottom of gin,” deliberately thanked Heaven for having brought them acquainted. Wordsworth, who had at first been slow to appreciate, having afterwards listened to two poems recited by Aubrey de Vere, did “acknowledge that they were very noble in thought, with a diction singularly stately.” Even Carlyle, who had implored the Poet to stick to prose, was vanquished, and wrote (1842) a letter so vividly characteristic as to justify a long quotation:

Dear Tennyson—Wherever this find you, may it find you well, may it come as a friendly greeting to you. I have just been reading your Poems; I have read certain of them over again, and mean to read them over and over till they become my poems; this fact, with the inferences that lie in it, is of such emphasis in me, I cannot keep it to myself, but must needs acquaint you too with it. If you knew what my relation has been to the thing call’d English “Poetry” for many years back, you would think such a fact almost surprising! Truly it is long since in any English Book, Poetry or Prose, I have felt the pulse of a real man’s heart as I do in this same.

---

I know you cannot read German: the more interesting is it to trace in your “Summer Oak” a beautiful kindred to something that is best in Goethe; I mean his “Müllerin” (Miller’s daughter) chiefly, with whom the very Mill-dam gets in love; though she proves a flirt after all, and the thing ends in satirical lines! Very strangely, too, in the “Vision of Sin” I am reminded of my friend Jean Paul. This is not babble, this is speech; true deposition of a volunteer witness. And so I say let us all rejoice somewhat. And so let us all smite rhythmically, all in concert, “the sounding furrows,” and sail forward with new cheer “beyond the sunset” whither we are bound.

The Memoir contains some valuable reminiscences of this period, contributed after Tennyson’s death by his personal friends, which incidentally throw backward a light upon the literary society of that day. Mr. Aubrey de Vere describes a meeting between Tennyson and Wordsworth; and relates also, subsequently and separately, a conversation with Tennyson, who was enthusiastic over the songs of Burns: “You forget, for their sake, those stupid things, his serious pieces.” The same day Mr. de Vere met Wordsworth, who “praised Burns even more vehemently than Tennyson had done ...” but ended, “of course I refer to his serious efforts, those foolish little amatory songs of his one has to forget.”

But in addition to contemporary criticism, written or spoken, and to the reminiscences, the biography gives us also several unpublished poems and fragmentary verses belonging to this period, with the original readings of other pieces that were altered before publication. It is in these materials, beyond others, that we can observe the forming and maturing of his style, the fastidious taste which dictated his rejection of work that either did not satisfy the highest standard as a whole, or else marred a poem’s symmetrical proportion by superfluity, over-weight, or the undue predominance of some note in the general harmony. One may regret that some fine stanzas or exquisite lines should have been thus expunged, as, for example, those beginning:

Thou may’st remember what I said.

Yet we believe the impartial critic will confirm in every instance the decision. “Anacaona,” written at Cambridge, was never published, because “the natural history and the rhymes did not satisfy” Tennyson; it is full of tropical warmth and ardour, with a fine rhythmic beat, but it is certainly below high-water mark. And the same must be said of the “Song of the Three Sisters,” published and afterwards suppressed, though the blank verse of its prelude has undoubted quality. He acted, as we can see, inexorably upon his own rule that “the artist is known by his self-limitation”; feeling certain, as he once said, that “if I meant to make any mark in the world it must be by shortness, for the men before me had been so diffuse.” Only the concise and perfect work, he thought, would last; and “hundreds of lines were blown up the chimney with his pipe smoke, or were written down and thrown into the fire as not being perfect enough.” Yet all his austere resolution must have been needed for condemning some of the fine verses that were struck out of the “Palace of Art,” merely to give the poem even balance, and trim it like a boat. Very few poems could have spared or borne the excisions from the “Dream of Fair Women”; though here and there the didactic or scientific note is slightly prominent, as in the following stanza:

All nature widens upward. Evermore
The simpler essence lower lies,
More complex is more perfect, owning more
Discourse, more widely wise.

At any rate the preservation of these unpublished verses adds much to the value of the biography; and we may rank Tennyson among the very few poets whose reputation has rather gained than suffered by the posthumous appearance of pieces that the writer had deliberately withdrawn or withheld.

Of Tennyson’s own literary opinions one or two specimens, belonging to this time, may be given.

“Byron and Shelley, however mistaken they were, did yet give the world another heart and new pulses; and so we are kept going”—a just tribute to their fiery lyrical energy, which did much to clear insular prejudice from the souls of a masculine generation. “Lycidas” he held to be the test of any reader’s poetic instinct; and “Keats, with his high spiritual vision, would have been, if he had lived, the greatest of us all, though his blank verse lacked originality of movement.” It is true that Keats, whose full metrical skill was never developed, may have imitated the Miltonic construction; yet after Milton he was the finest composer up to Tennyson’s day. And the first hundred lines of “Hyperion” have no slight affinity, in colouring and cadence, to the Tennysonian blank verse. For indeed it was Keats who, as Tennyson’s forerunner, passed on to him the gift of intense romantic susceptibility to the influences of Nature, the “dim mystic sympathies with tree and hill reaching back into childhood.” But Tennyson’s art inclined more toward the picturesque, toward using words, as a painter uses his brush, for producing the impression of a scene’s true outline and colour; his work shows the realistic feeling of a later day, which delights in precision of details. In one of his letters he mentions that there was a time when he was in the habit of chronicling, in four or five words or more, whatever might strike him as a picture, just as an artist would take rough sketches. The subjoined fragment, written on revisiting Mablethorpe on the Lincolnshire coast, contains the quintessence of his descriptive style; the last three lines are sheer landscape painting.

Mablethorpe
Here often when a child I lay reclined,
I took delight in this fair land and free;
Here stood the infant Ilion of the mind,
And here the Grecian ships all seemed to be.
And here again I come, and only find
The drain-cut level of the marshy lea,
Gray sand-banks, and pale sunsets, dreary winds,
Dim shores, dense rains, and heavy-clouded sea.

More frequently, however, he employed his wonderful image-making power to illustrate symbolically some mental state or emotion, availing himself of the mysterious relation between man and his environment, whereby the outer inanimate world is felt to be the resemblance and reflection of human moods. So in the “Palace of Art” the desolate soul is likened to

A still salt pool, lock’d in with bars of sand,
Left on the shore; that hears all night
The plunging seas draw backward from the land
Their moon-led waters white.

And there are passages in the extracts given from his letters written to Miss Emily Sellwood, during the long engagement that preceded their marriage, which indicate the bent of his mind toward philosophic quietism, with frequent signs of that half-veiled fellow-feeling with natural things, that sense of life in all sound and motion, whereby poetry is drawn upward, by degrees and almost unconsciously, into the region of the “Higher Pantheism.” Nor has any English poet availed himself more skilfully of a language that is peculiarly rich in metaphors, consisting of words which still so far retain their original meaning as to suggest a picture while they convey a thought.

It is partly due to these qualities of mind and style that no chapter in this book, which mingles grave with gay very attractively, contains matter of higher biographical interest than that which is headed “In Memoriam.” For it is in this noble poem, on the whole Tennyson’s masterpiece, that he is stirred by his own passionate grief to dwell on the contrast between irremediable human suffering and the calm aspect of Nature, between the short and sorrowful days of man and the long procession of ages. From the doubts and perplexities, the tendency to lose heart, engendered by a sense of forces that are unceasing and relentless, he finds his ultimate escape in the spirit of trust in the Powers invisible, and in the persuasion that God and Nature cannot be at strife. In a letter contributed to this Memoir Professor Henry Sidgwick has described the impression produced on him and others of his time by this poem, showing how it struck in, so to speak, upon their religious debates at a moment of conflicting tendencies and great uncertainty of direction, giving intensity of expression to the dominant feeling, and wider range to the prevailing thought:

The most important influence of “In Memoriam” on my thought, apart from its poetic charm as an expression of personal emotion, opened in a region, if I may so say, deeper down than the difference between Theism and Christianity: it lay in the unparalleled combination of intensity of feeling with comprehensiveness of view and balance of judgment, shown in presenting the deepest needs and perplexities of humanity. And this influence, I find, has increased rather than diminished as years have gone on, and as the great issues between Agnostic Science and Faith have become continually more prominent. In the sixties I should say that these deeper issues were somewhat obscured by the discussions on Christian dogma and Inspiration of Scripture, etc. ... During these years we were absorbed in struggling for freedom of thought in the trammels of a historical religion; and perhaps what we sympathized with most in “In Memoriam” at this time, apart from the personal feeling, was the defence of “honest doubt,” the reconciliation of knowledge and faith in the introductory poem, and the hopeful trumpet-ring of the lines on the New Year.... Well, the years pass, the struggle with what Carlyle used to call “Hebrew old clothes” is over, Freedom is won, and what does Freedom bring us to? It brings us face to face with atheistic science; the faith in God and Immortality, which we had been struggling to clear from superstition, suddenly seems to be in the air; and in seeking for a firm basis for this faith we find ourselves in the midst of the “fight with death” which “In Memoriam” so powerfully presents.

To many readers the whole letter will seem to render fitly their feeling of the pathetic intensity with which the everlasting problems of love and death, of human doubts and destinies, are set forth in “In Memoriam.” It will also remind them of the limitations, the inevitable inconclusiveness, of a poem which deals emotionally with questions that foil the deepest philosophers. The profound impression that was immediately produced by these exquisitely musical meditations may be ascribed, we think, to their sympathetic association with the peculiar spiritual needs and intellectual dilemmas of the time. It may be affirmed, as a general proposition, that up to about 1840, and for some years later, the majority among Englishmen of thought and culture were content to take morality as the chief test of religious truth, were disposed to hold that the essential principles of religion were best stated in the language of ethics. With this rational theology the pretensions of Science, which undertook to preserve and even to strengthen the moral basis, were not incompatible. But about this time came a spiritual awakening; and just then Tennyson came forward to insist, with poetic force and fervour, that the triumphant advance of Science was placing in jeopardy not merely the formal outworks but the central dogma of Christianity, which is the belief in a future life, in the soul’s conscious immortality.[95] Is man subject to the general law of unending mutability? and is he after all but the highest and latest type, to be made and broken like a thousand others, mere clay under the moulding hands that are darkly visible in the processes of Nature? The Poet transfigured these obstinate questionings into the vision of an ever-breaking shore

That tumbled in a godless sea.

He turned our ears to hear the sound of streams that, swift or slow,

Draw down Æonian hills, and sow
The dust of continents to be—

and he was haunted by the misgiving that man also might be a mere atom in an ever-changing universe. Yet after long striving with doubts and fears, after having “fought with death,” he resolves that we cannot be “wholly brain, magnetic mockeries,” not only cunning casts in clays:

Let Science prove we are, and then
What matters Science unto men,
At least to me? I would not stay.

We think that such passages as these gave emphasis to the gathering alarm, and that many a startled inquirer, daunted by dim uncertainties, recoiled from the abyss that seemed to open at his feet, and made his peace, on such terms as consoled him, with Theology. Not that Tennyson himself retreated, or took refuge behind dogmatic entrenchments. On the contrary, he stood his ground and trod under foot the terrors of Acheron; relying on “the God who ever lives and loves.” But since not every one can be satisfied with subjective faith or lofty intuitions, we believe that the note of distress and warning sounded by “In Memoriam” startled more minds than were soothed by its comforting conclusions. If this be so, this utterance of the poet, standing prophet-like at the parting of the ways, moved men diversely. It strengthened the impulse to go onward trustfully; but it may also be counted among the indirect influences which combined to promote that notable reaction toward the sacramental and mysterious side of religion, toward positive faith as the safeguard of morals, which has been the outcome of the great Anglican revival set on foot by the Oxford Movement seventy years ago.

In June 1850, the month which saw “In Memoriam” published, Tennyson married Miss Sellwood. “The wedding was of the quietest, even the cake and the dresses arriving too late.” From this union came unbroken happiness during forty-two years; for his wife brought into the partnership a rich and rare treasure of aid, sympathy, and intellectual appreciation. Her son pays his tribute to her memory in an admirable passage, of which the greater part is here extracted:

And let me say here—although, as a son, I cannot allow myself full utterance about her whom I loved as perfect mother and “very woman of very woman,” “such a wife” and true helpmate she proved herself. It was she who became my father’s adviser in literary matters. “I am proud of her intellect,” he wrote. With her he always discussed what he was working at; she transcribed his poems: to her, and to no one else, he referred for a final criticism before publishing. She, with her “tender spiritual nature” and instinctive nobility of thought, was always by his side, a ready, cheerful, courageous, wise, and sympathetic counsellor.... By her quiet sense of humour, by her selfless devotion, by “her faith as clear as the heights of the June-blue heaven,” she helped him also to the utmost in the hours of his depression and of his sorrow; and to her he wrote two of the most beautiful of his shorter lyrics—“Dear, near and true,” and the dedicatory lines which prefaced his last volume, “The Death of Œnone.”

In November 1850, after Wordsworth’s death, the Laureateship was offered to Tennyson. We have good authority for stating, though not from this Memoir, that Lord John Russell submitted to the Queen the four names of Professor Wilson, Henry Taylor, Sheridan Knowles, and, last on the list, Tennyson. The Prince Consort’s admiration of “In Memoriam” determined Her Majesty’s choice, which might seem easy enough to those who measure the four candidates by the standard of to-day. His accession to office brought down upon Tennyson, among other honoraria, “such shoals of poems that I am almost crazed with them; the two hundred million poets of Great Britain deluge me daily. Truly the Laureateship is no sinecure.” For the inevitable levee he accepted, not without disquietude over the nether garment, the loan of a Court suit from his ancient brother in song, Rogers, who had declined the laurels on the plea of age. Soon afterward he departed with his wife for Italy. Under the title of “The Daisy” he has commemorated this journey in stanzas of consummate metrical form, with their beautiful anapæstic ripple in each fourth line, to be studied by all who would understand the quantitative value (not merely accentual) and rhythmic effects of English syllables. On returning, they met the Brownings at Paris. Then, in 1852, he bought Farringford in the Isle of Wight, the Poet’s favourite habitation ever afterward, within sight of the sea and within sound of its rough weather, with its lawns, spreading trees, and meadows under the lee of the chalk downs, that have been frequently sketched into his verse, and will long be identified with his presence. There he worked at “Maud,” morning and evening, sitting in his hard, high-backed wooden chair in his little room at the top of the house, smoking the “sacred pipes” during certain half-hours of strict seclusion, when his best thoughts came to him.

From the final edition in 1851 of “In Memoriam” to “Maud” in 1853, which Lowell rather affectedly called the antiphonal voice of the earlier poem, the change of theme, tone, and manner was certainly great; and the public seems to have been taken by surprise. The transition was from lamentation to love-making; from stanzas swaying slow, like a dirge, within their uniform compass, to an abundant variety of metrical movement, quickened by frequent use of the anapæstic measure. The general reader was puzzled and inclined to ridicule what he failed at once to understand; the ordinary reviewer was either loftily contemptuous or indulged in puns and parodies; the higher criticism was divided; but Henry Taylor, Ruskin, Jowett, and the Brownings spoke without hesitation of the work’s great merits. Mr. Gladstone, whose judgment had been at first adverse, recanted, twenty years later, in a letter that was published in his Gleanings, and that now reappears in this Memoir:

“Whether it is to be desired,” he wrote, “that a poem should require from common men a good deal of effort in order to comprehend it; whether all that is put in the mouth of the Soliloquist in ‘Maud’ is within the lines of poetical verisimilitude; whether this poem has the full moral equilibrium which is so marked a characteristic of the sister-works, are questions open, perhaps, to discussion. But I have neither done justice in the text to its rich and copious beauties of detail, nor to its great lyrical and metrical power. And, what is worse, I have failed to comprehend rightly the relation between particular passages in the poem and its general scope.”

Jowett wrote:

No poem since Shakespeare seems to show equal power of the same kind, or equal knowledge of human nature. No modern poem contains more lines that ring in the ears of men. I do not know any verse of Shakespeare in which the ecstasy of love soars to such a height.

On the other hand, an anonymous letter, which Tennyson enjoyed repeating, ran thus:

Sir—I used to worship you, but now I hate you. I loathe and detest you. You beast! So you’ve taken to imitating Longfellow.

Yours in aversion,
“——”

“I shall never forget,” his son writes,

Tennyson’s last reading of “Maud,” on August 24, 1892. He was sitting in his high-backed chair, fronting a southern window which looks over the groves and yellow cornfields of Sussex toward the long line of South Downs that stretches from Arundel to Hastings (his high-domed Rembrandt-like head outlined against the sunset-clouds seen through the western window). His voice, low and calm in everyday life, capable of delicate and manifold inflection, but with “organ tones” of great power and range, thoroughly brought out the drama of the poem.

“The peculiarity of this poem,” Tennyson said, “is that different phases of passion in one person take the place of different characters”; and the effect of his own recitation was to set this conception in clear relief by showing the connexion and significance of the linked monodies, combined with a vivid musical rendering of a pathetic love-story. The emotional intensity rises by degrees to the rapture of meeting with Maud in the garden, falls suddenly to the depth of blank despair, and revives in an atmosphere of energetic, warlike activity—the precursor of world-wide peace.

The poem, in fact, strikes all the highest lyrical chords, and we are disposed to think that all of them are by no means touched with equal skill. Possibly, the sustained and perfect execution of such a varied composition would be too arduous a task for any artist. It is difficult for the reader to adjust his mind to the changes of mood and motive which succeed each other rapidly, and often abruptly, within the compass of so short a piece; ranging from the almost melodramatic horror of the opening stanzas to the passionate and joyous melodies of the middle part; sinking into a wild wailing, and closing with the trumpet sounds of war. Yet every one will now acknowledge that some passages in “Maud” are immortal, and that the English language contains none more beautiful than the very best of them.

The letters in the Memoir are selected from upwards of forty thousand, and at this period we have many of singular interest. One from Mrs. Vyner, a stranger, touched the Poet deeply. Ruskin writes with reserve, as well he might, about the edition of the poems illustrated by Rossetti, Millais, and others:

I believe, in fact, that good pictures never can be; they are always another poem, subordinate, but wholly different from the poet’s conception, and serve chiefly to show the reader how variously the same verses may affect various minds. But these woodcuts will be of much use in making people think and puzzle a little; art was getting quite a matter of form in book illustrations, and it does not so much matter whether any given vignette is right or not, as whether it contains thought or not, still more whether it contains any kind of plain facts. If people have no sympathy with St. Agnes, or if people, as soon as they get a distinct idea of a living girl who probably got scolded for dropping her candle-wax about the convent-stairs, and caught cold by looking too long out of the window in her bedgown, feel no true sympathy with her, they can have no sympathy in them.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning sends a warm-hearted letter; and Jowett, who enjoyed giving advice, evidently sat him down readily to reply when Mrs. Tennyson asked whether he could suggest any subjects for poetry:

I often fancy that the critical form of modern literature is like the rhetorical one which overlaid ancient literature, and will be regarded as that is, at its true worth in after times. One drop of natural feeling in poetry, or the true statement of a single new fact, is already felt to be of more value than all the critics put together.

Four “Idylls” came out in 1859, to be rapidly and largely taken up by the English public, with many congratulations from personal friends. Thackeray sends, after reading them, a letter full of his characteristic humour and cordiality:

“The landlord”—at Folkestone—“gave two bottles of his claret, and I think I drank the most, and here I have been lying back in the chair and thinking of those delightful ‘Idylls’; my thoughts being turned to you; and what could I do but be grateful to that surprising genius which has made me so happy?”

The Duke of Argyll wrote that Macaulay had been delighted with it, whereupon the Poet responds to his Grace somewhat caustically:

My dear Duke—Doubtless Macaulay’s good opinion is worth having, and I am grateful to you for letting me know it, but this time I intend to be thick-skinned; nay, I scarcely believe that I should ever feel very deeply the pen-punctures of those parasitic animalcules of the press, if they kept themselves to what I write, and did not glance spitefully and personally at myself. I hate spite.

Ruskin, on the other hand, is but half pleased; could not quite make up his mind about that “increased quietness of style”; feels “the art and finish in these poems a little more than I like”; wishes that the book’s nobleness and tenderness had been independent of a romantic condition of externals; and suggests that “so great power ought not to be spent on visions of things past, but on the living present.”

These latter sentences touch upon, or at least indicate, a line of criticism upon the general conception of the “Idylls,” as seen in their treatment of the Arthurian legend, with which, although it may appear inadequate, some of us are not indisposed to agree. Romanticism has been defined, half seriously, as the art of presenting to a people the literary works which can give the greatest imaginative pleasure in the actual state of their habits and beliefs. The “Idylls” adapted the mythical tales of the Round Table to the very highest standard of æsthetic taste, intellectual refinement, and moral delicacy prevailing in cultivated English society. And by that society they were very cordially appreciated. Undoubtedly the figure of Arthur—representing a stainless mirror of chivalry, a warrior king endowed with the qualities of patriotic self-devotion, clemency, generosity, and noble trustfulness, yet betrayed by his wife and his familiar friend, and dying in a lost fight against treacherous rebels—did present a lofty ideal that might well affect a gravely emotional people. Moreover, the poem is a splendidly illuminated Morality, unfolding scenes and figures that illustrate heroic virtues and human frailties, gallantry, chivalric enterprise, domestic perfidy, chaste virginal loves, and subtle amorous enchantments. It abounds also in descriptive passages which attest the close attention of the Poet’s eye and ear to natural sights and sounds, and his supreme art of fashioning his verse to their colours and echoes. In short, to quote from the biography,

he has made the old legends his own, restored the idealism, and infused into them a spirit of modern thought and of ethical significance; setting his characters in a rich and varied landscape; as indeed otherwise these archaic stories would not have appealed to the world at large.

This indeed he has done well. And yet it is not possible to put away altogether the modern prejudice against unreality, the sense of having here a vision not merely of things that are past, but of things that could never have been, of a world that is neither ancient nor modern, but a fairy land peopled with knights and dames whose habits and conversation are adjusted to the decorous taste of our nineteenth century. The time has long passed when men could look back on distant ages much as they looked forward to futurity, through a haze of unbounded credulity. Not every one has been able to overcome the effect of incongruity produced by a poem which invests the legendary personages of mediæval romance with morals and manners of a fastidious delicacy, and promotes them to be the embodiment of our own ethical ideals. If, indeed, we regard the “Idylls” as beautiful allegories, we may be content, as their author was, with the suggestion that King Arthur represents Conscience, and that the poem is “a picture of the different ways in which men looked on conscience, some reverencing it as a heaven-born king, others ascribing to it an earthly origin.” We may then be satisfied with learning, from the Poet himself, that “Camelot, for instance, a city of shadowy palaces, is everywhere symbolic of the gradual growth of human beliefs and institutions, and of the spiritual development of man.” In the light of these interpretations the poem is a beautifully woven tissue of poetic mysticism, clothing the old legend of chivalry with esoteric meaning. We can accept and admire it freely, remarking only that the deeper thoughts of the present generation do not run in an allegorical vein, and that such a vesture, though of the finest texture and embroidery, waxes old speedily. “The ‘Holy Grail,’” said Tennyson, “is one of the most imaginative of my poems. I have expressed there my strong feeling as to the reality of the Unseen”; and truly it is a marvellous excursion into the field of mystical romance. But Tennyson also said that “there is no single fact or incident in the ‘Idylls,’ however seemingly mystical, which cannot be explained as without any mystery or allegory whatever”; and herein lies our difficulty. For, unless they can be read as wholly allegorical, there is an air of unreality about those enchanting pictures, as of scenes and persons that could never have existed anywhere. That Tennyson is a master of the art of veiling the lessons of real life under a fairy story, we know from the subtle symbolism with which he tells, in the “Lady of Shalott,” the tale of sudden absorbing love, hopeless and unregarded, sinking into despair—a true parable, understood of all men and women in all times. But those who have no great skill at deciphering the Hyponoia, the underlying significance, of the “Idylls” may be pardoned for confessing to an occasional feeling of something abstract, shadowy, and spectacular in the company of these knights and dames.[96]

FitzGerald, after reading the “Holy Grail,” writes (1870) to Tennyson:

The whole myth of Arthur’s Round Table Dynasty in Britain presents itself before me with a sort of cloudy Stonehenge grandeur. I am not sure if the old knights’ adventures do not tell upon me better touched in some lyrical way (like your “Lady of Shalott”) than when elaborated into epic form. I never could care for Spenser, Tasso, or even Ariosto, whose epic has a ballad ring about it.... Anyhow, Alfred, while I feel how pure, noble, and holy your work is—and whole phrases, lines, and sentences of it will abide with me, and, I am sure, with men after me—I read on till the “Lincolnshire Farmer” drew tears from my eyes. I was got back to the substantial rough-spun Nature I knew; and the old brute, invested by you with the solemn humour of Humanity, like Shakespeare’s Shallow, became a more pathetic phenomenon than the knights who revisit the world in your other verse. There! I cannot help it, and have made a clean breast.

If the extreme realism of some modern writers has been rightly condemned as truth divorced from beauty, we may say that it has been by his skill in maintaining their indissoluble union that Tennyson’s best work shows its peculiar strength and has earned its enduring vitality. He excels in the verisimilitude of his portraiture, in the authentic delineation of character, preserving the type and developing the main lines of thought and action by imaginative insight, with high artistic fidelity in details. I venture to anticipate that his short monodramatic pieces in blank verse—his studies from the antique, like “Ulysses” and “Tithonus,” and his poems of English life, breathing the true idyllic spirit, like the “Gardener’s Daughter” and “Aylmer’s Field”—will sustain their popularity longer than the Arthurian Idylls. Nor can some of us honestly agree with the unqualified praise bestowed by high authority (as the Memoir testifies) on “Guinevere,” where the scene between the king and the queen at Almesbury, with all its elevation of tone and purity of sentiment, is not very far from a splendid anachronism. But the epilogue “To the Queen,” which closes the Arthurian epic, brings us back to modern thought and circumstance by its ringing protest against faint-heartedness in English politics.

The “Northern Farmer,” written in 1861, was at that time a novelty in form and subject. It gave a strong lead, at any rate, to that school of rough humorous versification, largely relying on quaint turns of ideas and phrases, on racy provincial dialect and local colouring generally, which has since had an immense success in the hands of minor artists. We may take it to have begun, for the last century, with the Biglow Papers. This form of metrical composition has latterly spread, as a species of modern ballad, to the Indian frontier and the Australian bush, but has little or no place in any language except the English. Such character sketches, taken direct from studies of rude life, have been always common in popular comic song, yet I believe that no first-class poet, after Burns and before Tennyson, had turned his hand to this kind of work; nor has anything been since produced upon the artistic level of the first “Northern Farmer.” “Roden Noel,” writes Tennyson, “calls the two ‘Northern Farmers’ photographs; but I call them imaginative”—as of course they are, being far above mere exact copies of some individual person.

There are some very readable impressions de voyage gathered out of journals of tours made about this time (1860) in France and England, and the letters maintain their high level of interest. Upon the death of Macaulay, Tennyson writes to the Duke of Argyll:

I hardly knew him: met him once, I remember, when Hallam and Guizot were in his company. Hallam was showing Guizot the Houses of Parliament, then building, and Macaulay went on like a cataract for an hour or so to those two great men, and, when they had gone, turned to me and said, “Good morning; I am happy to have had the pleasure of making your acquaintance,” and strode away. Had I been a piquable man I should have been piqued: but I don’t think I was, for the movement after all was amicable.

Then follows an account, by Mrs. Bradley, of a visit to Farringford, with “its careless ordered garden close to the ridge of a noble down”; and at the end of the Memoir is an appendix containing, among other things, Arthur Hallam’s striking critical appreciation of “Mariana in the South,” a poem which must be ranked as a masterpiece by all exiled Englishmen who have dreamt of their native breezes and verdure, under the blinding glare and intolerable heat of a tropical summer. Mr. Aubrey de Vere has contributed a reminiscence describing the effect produced upon himself and others by the poems of 1832-45, with a dissertation upon their style and philosophic significance. And in this manner the course and circumstances of the Poet’s life are set out, with much taste and regard for proportionate value of the materials for those singularly untroubled years through which he rose steadily from straitened means in youth to comparative affluence in middle age, and from distinction among a group of choice spirits to enduring fame as the greatest of poets born in the nineteenth century.

When, in 1864, Tennyson returned with “Enoch Arden” to the romance of real life among his own people, the poem was heartily welcomed, and sixty thousand copies were speedily sold. Spedding declared it to be the finest story he had ever heard, and added (in our opinion quite rightly) that it was “more especially adapted for Alfred than for any other poet.” Yet the plot, so to speak, of this pathetic narrative is as ancient as the Odyssey, for it rests upon a situation that must have been common in all times of long and distant voyaging, when men disappeared across the seas, were not heard of for years, and their wives were counted as widows. A well-known sailor’s ditty tells in rude popular rhymes the same story of the wandering mariner’s return home, to find himself forsaken and forgotten; and it frequently occurs in the folklore of the crusades. The first title in the proof-sheets of the “Enoch Arden” volume was “Idylls of the Hearth,” and here, says his biographer,

he writes with as intimate a knowledge, but with greater power (than in 1842), on subjects from English life, the sailor, the farmer, the parson, the city lawyer, the squire, the country maiden, and the old woman who dreams of her past life in a restful old age.

No great poet, in fact, has travelled for his subjects so little beyond his native land; and so his best descriptive work shows the painter’s eye on the object, with the impressions drawn fresh and at first hand from Nature, as in the poetry of primitive bards who saw things for themselves. His letters and notes teem with observations of wild flowers and wild creatures, of wide prospects over sea and land; and even when he followed Enoch Arden into the world that was to himself untravelled, he could surprise those who knew it by his rendering of tropical scenery.

A very good account, by the late Mr. Locker-Lampson, of his tour through France and Switzerland with Tennyson in 1869, has preserved for us the flavour of his table and travelling talk upon literature, and occasionally upon religious problems. Into the philosophical or metaphysical abyss he did not let down his plummet very far; he recognized the limits of human knowledge, and for the dim regions beyond he accepted Faith as his guide and comforter. In regard to the poets—“As a boy,” he said, “I was a great admirer of Byron, so much so that I got a surfeit of him, and now I cannot read him as I should like to do.” Probably this habit of premature and excessive indulgence in Byron has blunted many an eager admirer’s appetite, and has had something to do with the prevailing distaste for him, wherein we think that he has fallen into unmerited neglect. Of Shelley Tennyson said that there was “a great wind of words in a good deal of him, but that as a writer of blank verse he was perhaps the most skilful of the moderns. Nobody admires Shelley more than I once did, and I still admire him.” For Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” he had a profound admiration; yet even in that poem he thought “the old poet had shown a want of literary instinct,” and he touched upon some defects of composition; but he ended by saying emphatically that Wordsworth’s very best is the best in its way that has been sent out by moderns. He told an anecdote of Samuel Rogers. “One day we were walking arm and arm, and I spoke of what is called Immortality, and remarked how few writers could be sure of it. Upon this Rogers squeezed my arm and said, ‘I am sure of it.’”

His wife’s journal of this time is full of interest, recording various sayings and doings, conversations, correspondence, anecdotes, and glimpses of notable visits and visitors, Tourguéneff, Longfellow, Jenny Lind, Huxley, and Gladstone, to the last of whom Tennyson read aloud his “Holy Grail.” At the house of G. H. Lewes he read “Guinevere,” “which made George Eliot weep.” The diary is a faithful and valuable memorial of English country life at its best in the middle of the last century. Living quietly with his family, he was in constant intercourse with the most distinguished men of his day, and was himself honoured of them all.

In 1873 Tennyson had declined, for himself, Mr. Gladstone’s offer of a baronetcy. In 1874 this offer was repeated by Mr. Disraeli, who does not seem to have known that it had been once before made, in a high-flying sententious letter, evidently attuned to the deeper harmonies of the mysterious relation between genius and government.

A government should recognize intellect. It elevates and sustains the spirit. It elevates and sustains the spirit of a nation. But it is an office not easy to fulfil, for if it falls into favouritism and the patronage of mediocrity, instead of raising the national sentiment, it might degrade and debase it. Her Majesty, by the advice of her Ministers, has testified in the Arctic expedition, and will in other forms, her sympathy with science. But it is desirable that the claims of high letters should be equally acknowledged. That is not so easy a matter, because it is in the nature of things that the test of merit cannot be so precise in literature as in science. Nevertheless, etc. etc.

The honour, even thus offered, was again respectfully declined, with a suggestion that it might be renewed for his son after his own death; but this was pronounced impracticable.

The Metaphysical Society was founded by Tennyson and two others in 1869, and a list of the members is given in the Memoir, which touches on the style and topics of the debates, and on the umbrage taken by agnostic friends at the profound deference shown by Tennyson to Cardinal Manning. A letter from Dr. James Martineau describes the Poet’s general attitude toward the Society’s discussions; he sent his poem on the “Higher Pantheism” to be read at the first meeting; and he was “usually a silent listener, interposing some short question or pregnant hint.” The letter discourses, in expansive and perhaps faintly nebulous language, upon the influence of his poetry on the religious tendencies of the day.

That in a certain sense our great Laureate’s poetry has nevertheless had a dissolving influence upon the over-definite dogmatic creeds within hearing, or upon the modes of religious thought amid which it was born, can hardly be doubted. In laying bare, as it does, the history of his own spirit, its conflicts and aspirations, its alternate eclipse of doubt and glow of faith, it has reported more than a personal experience; he has told the story of an age which he has thus brought into Self-knowledge.... Among thousands of readers previously irresponsive to anything Divine he has created, or immeasurably intensified, the susceptibility of religious reverence.

After taking into due account the circumstances in which Dr. Martineau’s letter was written, to many readers this high-flying panegyric will seem to have in some degree overshot its mark.

It has been my duty, in reviewing this Memoir, to pass under some kind of critical survey the more important writings of Lord Tennyson, in particular relation to the narrative of his life, and to the formation of his views and opinions. I am, however, placed in some embarrassment by the fact that this work is for the most part done already in the volumes themselves. They contain ample quotations from letters and articles by very eminent hands, written with all the vigour of immediate impressions when the poems first appeared. And some of the reminiscences that have since been contributed to the biography by personal friends deal so thoroughly with its literary side as to fall little short of elaborate essays; so that on the whole not much is left to be said by the retrospective reviewer. We are met with this difficulty in taking up the chapters on the Historical Plays, which set before us, with an analysis of the plays by the biographer himself, a catena of judgments upon them, unanimously favourable, by the highest authorities. Robert Browning writes with generous enthusiasm of “Queen Mary.” Froude, the most dramatic of historians, expresses unbounded admiration: “You have reclaimed one more section of English history from the wilderness, and given it a form in which it will be fixed for ever. No one since Shakespeare has done that.” Gladstone, Mr. Aubrey de Vere, Longfellow, G. H. Lewes and his wife, the statesmen, the poets, and the men of letters, each from his own standpoint attests the merits of one or another play, in letters of indisputable strength and sincerity. Nor can it be doubted that these pieces contain splendid passages, and fine engravings, so to speak, of historical personages, with a noble appreciation of the spacious Elizabethan period, and of the earlier romantic episodes. The dramatic art provides such a powerful instrument for striking deep into the national mind, and success in this form of high poetic execution is so lasting—while it is so rare—that almost every great English poet has written plays. On the other hand, few of them have ventured, like Tennyson, to face the capricious ordeal of the public theatre, where the vox populi is at least so far divine that it pronounces absolutely and often incomprehensibly.

“For Tennyson to begin publishing plays after he was sixty-five years of age was thought to be a hazardous experiment”; though I may remark that he started with the advantage of a first-class poetic reputation, which stimulated public curiosity. But he knew well the immense influence, for good or for ill, that the stage can bring to bear on the people; and for the stage all his plays were directly intended, not for literature, in the expectation that the necessary technical adaptations might be supplied by the actors or the professional playwright. Their historical truth, their vigorous conceptions of motive and circumstance, and their poetic force received ample acknowledgment. W. G. Ward, who was “grotesquely truthful,” though ultramontane, broke out into unqualified praise after listening to the reading of “Becket.” On the stage, where first impressions are all-important, the pieces had their share of success. Browning writes of the “tumult of acclaim” which greeted the appearance of “Queen Mary”; and of “Becket” Irving has told us that “it is one of the three most successful plays produced by him at the Lyceum.”

It is a question, often debated, whether in these latter days the theatre can be made a vehicle for the artistic representation of history. Literature, a jealous rival of all her sister arts, has so vastly extended her dominion over the people, she speaks so directly to the mind, without need of plastic or vocal interpretation, she is so independent of accessories and intermediaries, that her competitive influence weighs down all other departments of imaginative and pictorial idealization, religious or romantic. Against this stream of tendency even Tennyson’s genius could hardly make sufficient headway to conquer for his plays a lasting hold upon English audiences; and moreover his primal vigour had been spent upon other victories. Yet to have held the stage at all, for a brief space, is to have done more than has been achieved by any other poet of this (last) century. In 1880 his drama, “The Cup,” was produced with signal success at the Lyceum; and Tennyson summed up his theatrical experience by observing that “the success of a piece does not depend on its literary merit or even on its stage effect, but on its hitting somehow,” wherein Miss Ellen Terry agreed with him.

The annals of his daily life, throughout all this later part of it, consist of extracts from letters, journals, and memorials of intercourse, which abound with appropriate, amusing, and valuable matter, connected by the biographer’s personal recollections. We have thus a many-coloured mosaic, in which many figures and characters are reproduced by a kind of literary tessellation; while, as to the Poet himself, his habits, wise or whimsical, his thoughts from year to year on the subjects of the day, his manner of working, are all preserved. The correspondence of his friends maintains its high level of quality. Mr. W. H. Lecky gives us, in one of the best among all the reminiscences, a fine sample of his own faculty for delineation of character, bringing out the Poet’s simplicity of soul, his love of seclusion, the scope of his religious meditations, the keen sensibility (acquired by long culture) of his rhythmic ear, and also his susceptibility to the hum and pricking of critics.

Many persons spoke of your father as too much occupied with his poetry. It did, no doubt, fill a very large place in his thoughts, and it is also true that he was accustomed to express his opinions about it with a curiously childlike simplicity and frankness. But at bottom his nature seemed to be singularly modest. No poet ever corrected so many lines in deference to adverse criticism. His sensitiveness seemed to me curiously out of harmony with his large powerful frame, with his manly dark colouring, with his great massive hands and strong square-tipped fingers.

His son records how in lonely walks together Tennyson would chant a poem that he was composing, would search for strange birds or flowers, and would himself take flight on discovering that he was being stalked by a tourist. Among the letters is one from Victor Hugo, in the grand cosmopolitan style, beginning “Mon Éminent et Cher Confrère,” professing love for all mankind and admiration for noble verse everywhere; another from Cardinal Newman, smooth and adroit; there is also a note by Dr. Dabbs of his colloquy with Tennyson, showing how he began with the somewhat musty question about the incompatibility of Science with Religion, and found the Poet, as we infer, tolerably dexterous with the foils. Renan called, and put the essence of his philosophy into one phrase, “La vérité est une nuance”; there are jottings of talks with Carlyle, and a long extract from the journal of a yachting voyage with Mr. Gladstone, who said, “No man since Aeschylus could have written the Bride of Lammermoor.” It would be doing less than justice to the biography if I did not choose a few samples from an ample storehouse, and it would be unfair to make too many quotations, even from a book which surpasses all recent memoirs as a repertory of characteristic observations and short views of life and literature, interchanged by speech or writing, with many notable friends and visitors.

In 1883 the Queen, on the recommendation of Mr. Gladstone, offered Tennyson a peerage, which, after some rumination, he accepted, saying, “By Gladstone’s advice I have consented, but for my own part I shall regret my own simple name all my life.” We are to suppose that the Prime Minister’s only misgiving “lest my father might insist on wearing his wideawake in the House of Lords” had been duly overcome; and so next year the Poet, having taken his seat, voted, not without some questioning and doubts of the time’s ripeness, for extension of franchise. No more worthy representative of literature has ever added lustre to that august assembly than he who now took his seat on the cross benches, holding no form of party creed, but contemplating all. From a man of his traditions and tastes, his dislike of extravagance, his feeling for the stateliness of well-ordered movement, at his age, moderation in politics was to be expected; and indeed we observe that he commended to his friends Maine’s work on Popular Government, which carries political caution to the verge of timidity. But Tennyson, like Burke, had great confidence in the common sense and inbred good nature of the English people. “Stagnation,” he once said, “is more dangerous than revolution.” As he was throughout consistently the poet of the via media in politics, the dignified constitutional Laureate, so he was spared the changes that passed over the opinions of Wordsworth, Southey, and Coleridge, who were Radicals in youth, and declined into elderly Tories. Undoubtedly the temper of his time affected his politics as well as his poetry, for his manhood began in the calm period which followed the long stormy years when all Europe was one great war-field, and when the ardent spirits of Byron and Shelley had been fired by the fierce uprising of the nations.

In 1885, being then in his seventy-sixth year, Lord Tennyson published “Tiresias,” preluding with the verses to E. FitzGerald, so vigorous in tone and so finely wrought, with their rhymes ringing true to the expectant ear like the chime of a clear bell. Some years before, he had paid a passing visit at Woodbridge to “the lonely philosopher, a man of humorous melancholy mark, with his gray floating locks, sitting among his doves.... We fell at once into the old humour, as if we had been parted twenty days instead of so many years.” It is a rarity in modern life that two such men as Tennyson and FitzGerald, whose mutual friendship was never shaken, should have met but once in some twenty-five years, although divided by no more space than could be traversed by a three hours’ railway journey. “Tiresias” was soon followed by “Locksley Hall: Sixty Years After”; then, in 1889, came “Demeter” and other poems; until, in 1892, the volume containing the “Death of Œnone” and “Akbar’s Dream” closed the long series of poems which had held two generations under their charm. One line in the second “Locksley Hall” its author held to be the best of the kind he had ever written:

Universal ocean softly washing all her warless isles;

though in my poor judgment the harmony seems marred by the frequent sibilants, which vex all English composers[97]; and the suggestion that the sea would become stormless when the land should be at peace may be thought overbold.

It was but seasonable that his later poetry should have been tinged with autumnal colouring. The philosophic bent of his mind had necessarily grown with increasing years; its range had been widened by constant assimilation with the scientific ideas of the day, with social and political changes; but as far horizons breed sadness and wistful uncertainty, so his later verse leans more toward the moral lessons of experience, toward reflective and retrospective views of life and character. In poetry, as in prose, the sequel to a fine original piece has very rarely, if ever, been successful; though the second part, when it follows the first after a long interval, often exhibits the special value that comes from alteration of style and the natural changes of mood. Tennyson himself thought that “the two ‘Locksley Halls’ were likely to be in the future two of the most historically interesting of his poems, as descriptive of the tone of the age at two distant periods of his life.” In my opinion, the interest is less historical than biographical, in the sense that the second poem takes its deeper shade from the darkening that seems to have overspread his later meditations. For the interval of sixty years had, in fact, brought increased activity and enterprising eagerness to the English people; and the gray thoughts of the sequel, the heavier feeling of errors and perils encompassing the onward path toward the remote ideal, are the Poet’s own. He employed them, it is true, for the dramatic presentation of old age, and disclaimed any identity with the imaginary personage.

However this may be, the poems that appeared toward the close of his long literary career show a change of manner. We miss, to some degree, the delicate handling, the self-restraint, the serene air of his best compositions; there is a certain gloominess of atmosphere,[98] breaking out occasionally into vehement expression, in the rolling dithyrambic stanzas of “Vastness,” “The Dawn,” or “The Dreamer.” In the “Death of Œnone,” the beautiful antique nymph of Tennyson’s youth, deserted and passionately lamenting on many-fountained Ida, has become soured and vindictive.[99] She is now a jealous wife, to whose feet Paris, dying from the poisoned arrow, crawls “lame, crooked, reeling,” to be spurned as an adulterer, who may “go back to his adulteress and die.” Here the Poet abandons the style and feeling of Hellenic tradition;[100] the echo of the old-world story has died away; it is rather the voice of some tragedy queen posing as the injured wife of modern society; and one remembers that the Homeric adulteress, Helen of Troy, went back to live happily and respected with her husband in Sparta. It was not to be expected that Tennyson’s later inspirations should reach the supreme level of the poems which he wrote in his prime, or that there should be no ebb from the high-water mark that he touched, in my opinion, fifty years earlier in 1842.[101] Yet hardly any poet has so long retained consummate mastery of his instrument, or has published so little that might have been omitted with advantage or without detriment to his permanent reputation. And it will never be forgotten that he wrote “Crossing the Bar” in his eighty-first year.

It is clear from the Memoir, at any rate, that the burden of nigh fourscore years weakened none of his interest in literature and art, in political and philosophical speculation, or diminished his resources of humorous observation and anecdote. Among many recollections he told of Hallam (the historian) saying to him, “I have lived to read Carlyle’s French Revolution, but I cannot get on, the style is so abominable;” and of Carlyle groaning about Hallam’s Constitutional History: “Eh, it’s a miserable skeleton of a book”—bringing out into short and sharp contrast two opposite schools, the picturesque and the precise, of history-writing. Robert Browning’s death in December 1889 distressed him greatly; it was, moreover, a forewarning to the elder of two brothers, if not equals, in renown. In 1890 Oliver Wendell Holmes, who was Tennyson’s junior by only twenty-three days, wrote to him:

I am proud of my birth-year, and humbled when I think of who were and who are my coevals. Darwin, the destroyer and creator; Lord Houghton, the pleasant and kind-hearted lover of men of letters; Gladstone, whom I leave it to you to characterise, but whose vast range of intellectual powers few will question; Mendelssohn, whose music still rings in our ears; and the Laureate, whose “jewels five words long”—many of them a good deal longer—sparkle in our memories.

He wrote kindly to William Watson and Rudyard Kipling, whose patriotic verse pleased him; and twelve months later Watson paid a grateful tribute to his memory in one of the best among many threnodies. He spoke of Carlyle’s having come to smoke a pipe with him one evening in London, “when the talk turned upon the immortality of the soul, upon which Carlyle said, ‘Eh, old Jewish rags, you must clear your mind of all that. Why should we expect a hereafter?’” and likened man’s sojourn on earth to a traveller’s rest at an inn, whereupon Tennyson turned the simile against him. His son describes how the old man’s “dignity and repose of manner, his low musical voice, and the power of his magnetic eye kept the attention riveted.” In August 1892 Lord Selborne and the Master of Balliol visited him; but

... he did not feel strong enough for religious discussions with Jowett, and begged Jowett not to consult with him or argue with him, as was his wont, on points of philosophy and religious doubt. The Master answered him with a remarkable utterance: “Your poetry has an element of philosophy more to be considered than any regular philosophy in England”;

which is certainly an ambiguous and possibly not an extravagant eulogy.

The final chapter of the Memoir gives, briefly, some sentences from his last talks, and describes a peaceful and noble ending. He found his Christianity undisturbed by jarring of sects and creeds; but he said, “I dread the losing hold of forms. I have expressed this in my ‘Akbar.’” The welfare of the British Empire, its expansion and its destiny, had been from the beginning and were to the end of his poetic career matters of intense pride and concern to him. When, in September 1892, he fell seriously ill, and Sir Andrew Clark arrived, the physician and the patient fell to discussing Gray’s “Elegy”; and a few days later, being much worse, he sent for his Shakespeare, tried to read but had to let his son read for him. Next day he said: “‘I want the blinds up, I want to see the sky and the light.’ He repeated ‘The sky and the light.’ It was a glorious morning, and the warm sunshine was flooding the weald of Sussex and the line of South Downs, which were seen from his window.” On the second day after this he passed away very quietly. The funeral service in Westminster Abbey, with its two anthems—“Crossing the Bar” and “The Silent Voices”—filling the long-drawn aisle and, rising to the fretted vault above the heads of a great congregation, will long be remembered by those who were present. “The tributes of sympathy,” his son writes, “which we received from many countries and from all classes and creeds, were not only remarkable for their universality, but for their depth of feeling.”

To those who had so long lived with him, the loss of one whom they had tended for many years with devoted affection and reverence was indeed irreparable. Yet they had the consolation of knowing that his life had been on the whole happy and fortunate, marked by singularly few griefs or troubles; that he had proved himself a master of the high calling which he set before himself, and departed, full of honours, at the coming of the time when no man can work.

A collection of letters that passed between the Queen and Tennyson, including two from Her Majesty to his son on receiving the news of Tennyson’s death, is added to the Memoir; and the volume closes with “Recollections of the Poet,” written at some length, by Lord Selborne, Jowett, John Tyndall, F. Myers, F. T. Palgrave, and the Duke of Argyll. These papers will be read, as they deserve to be, with attentive interest for their descriptions of the personal characteristics, recorded by those who knew him best, of a very remarkable man; they show also how his poems were conceived and elaborated, they trace his thoughts on high subjects, and they contain very ample dissertations on his poetry. They inevitably anticipate the work of the public reviewer, who cannot pretend to write with equal authority, while it is not his business to criticize the carefully composed opinions of others.

One can see, looking backward, that Tennyson’s genius flowered in due season; there had been a plentiful harvest of verse in the preceding generation, but it had been garnered, and the field was clear. The hour had come for a new writer to take up the succession to that brilliant and illustrious group who, in the first quarter of the last century, raised English poetry to a height far above the classic level of the age before them. Three leaders of that band—Byron, Keats, and Shelley—died young; the sum total of their years added together exceeds by no more than a decade the space of Tennyson’s single life. And if the creative period of a poet’s life may be reckoned as beginning at twenty-one (which is full early), it sums up to no more than thirty-one years for all the three poets whom we have named, and to sixty years for Tennyson alone. When his first volume appeared (1832), Byron, Shelley, and Keats were dead; Scott and Coleridge had long ceased to write poetry, and were dying; Wordsworth, who had done all his best work long before, alone survived, for Southey cannot be counted in the same rank. Moreover, England may be said to have been just then passing through one of those periods of artistic depression that precede a revival; the popular taste was artificial and decadent, it was running down to the pseudo-romantic and false Gothic, to the conventional Keepsake note in sentiment, to extravagant admiration of such poems as Moore’s Lalla Rookh. The purchase by the State of the Elgin Marbles, and the opening of the National Gallery, had prepared the way for better things in art; but I may affirm, speaking broadly, that it was a flat interval, when the new generation was just looking for some one to give form to an upward movement of ideas.

It was upon the rising wave after this calm that Tennyson was lifted forward by the quick recognition of his talent among his ardent and open-minded contemporaries; although his general popularity came gradually, since even in 1850, as may be seen from the list already given of his competitors for the Laureateship, his pre-eminence had not been indisputably established in high political society. Yet all genuine judges might perceive at once that here was the man to raise again from the lower plane the imaginative power of verse, who knew the magical charm that endows with beauty and dramatic force the incidents and impressions which the ordinary artist can only reproduce in a commonplace or unreal way, while the master-hand suddenly illumines the whole scene, foreground and background. He struck a note that touched the feelings and satisfied the spiritual needs of his contemporaries, and herein lay the promise of his poetry; for to the departing generation the coming man can say little or nothing. We have to bear in mind, also, that during Tennyson’s youth the whole complexion and “moving circumstance” of the age had undergone a great alteration. It was the uproar and martial clang, the drums and trampling of long and fierce wars, the mortal strife between revolutionary and reactionary forces, that kindled the fiery indignation of Shelley and Byron, inspiring such lines as

Still, Freedom, still thy banner, torn yet flying,
Streams like a meteor flag against the wind,

and affected Coleridge and even Southey “in their hot youth, when George the Third was king.” Tennyson’s opportunity came when these thunderous echoes had died away, when the Reform Bill had become law, when the era of general peace and comfortable prosperity that marks for England the middle of this century was just setting in. The change may be noticed in Tennyson’s treatment of landscape, of the aspects of earth, sea, and sky. With Byron and Coleridge the prevailing effects were grand, stormy, wildly magnificent; with Tennyson the impressions are mainly peaceful, melancholy, mysterious: he is looking on the happy autumn fields, or listening in fancy to the long wash of Australasian seas. There are of course exceptions on both sides; yet in Byron the best-known descriptive passages are all of the former, and in Tennyson of the latter, character. The difference in style corresponds, manifestly, not only with the contrast in the temper of their times, warlike for the earlier poets and peaceful for the later, but also with the disorder and unrest which vexed the private lives of Byron, Shelley, and Coleridge, as compared with the happy domestic fortunes of Tennyson.

It is almost superfluous to lay stress on the well-known metrical variety of Tennyson’s poems, or upon the musical range of his language. He followed the best models, and perhaps improved upon them, in using the primitive onomatopœia as the base for a higher order of composition, in which the words have a subtle connotation, blending sound and colour into harmonies that accord with the sense and spirit of a passage, convey the thought, and create the image. His skill in wielding the long flowing line was remarkable, nor had any poet before him employed it so frequently; its flexibility lent freedom and scope to his impersonations of character, and in other pieces he could give it the rolling melody of a chant or a chorus. On the instrumental power of blank verse we know that he set the highest value; he had his own secret methods of scansion, and his long practice enabled him to extend the capabilities of this peculiarly English metre. But for an excellent critical analysis of Tennyson’s blank verse, in comparison with the rhythm of other masters, I must refer my readers to Mr. J. B. Mayor’s Chapters on English Metre, with especial reference to the final chapter, where the styles of Tennyson and Browning, as representative of modern English verse, are scientifically examined.

I make no apology for having included some criticisms of Tennyson’s work in this review of his life, because not the least valuable feature of the Memoir is that it has been so arranged as to form a running commentary upon and interpretation of his poems, as reflecting his mind and his manner of life. Throughout the second half of the last century Tennyson has been foremost among English men of letters, and it is his proud distinction to have maintained the apostolic succession of our national poets in a manner not unworthy of those famous men who went immediately before him.

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