Tennyson’s place is not among the “lords of the visionary eye,” among seers, among prophets, but not the least part of the debt which his countrymen owe to him is his dedication of his art to the noblest purposes. At a time when poetry was beginning to degenerate into what it has now almost universally become—a mere sense-pampering siren, and when critics were telling us, as they are still telling us, that we are to understand by it “all literary production which attains the power of giving pleasure by its form as distinct from its matter,” he remained true to the creed of his great predecessors. “L’art pour art,” he would say, quoting Georges Sand, “est un vain mot: l’art pour le vrai, l’art pour le beau et le bon, voila la religion que je cherche.” When he succeeded to the laureateship he was proud to remember that the wreath which had descended to him was

greener from the brows
Of him that utter’d nothing base,

and he was a loyal disciple of that poet whose aim had been, in his own words, “to console the afflicted, to add sunshine to daylight by making the happy happier, to teach the young and the gracious of every age to see, to think, to feel, and therefore to become more actively and securely virtuous”.[[7]] Wordsworth had said that he wished to be regarded as a teacher or as nothing, but unhappily he did not always distinguish between the way in which a poet and a philosopher should teach. He forgot that the didactic element in a poem should be, to employ a homely illustration, what garlic should be in a salad, “scarce suspected, animate the whole,” that the poet teaches not as the moralist and the preacher teach, but as nature and life teach us. He taught us when he wrote The Fountain and The Highland Reaper, The Leach-gatherer and Michael, he merely wearied us when he sermonised in The Excursion and in The Prelude. Tennyson never makes this mistake. He is seldom directly didactic. Would he inculcate subjugation to the law of duty—he gives us the funeral ode on Wellington, The Charge of the Light Brigade, and Love and Duty. Would he inculcate resignationto the will of God, and the moral efficacy of conventional Christianity—he gives us Enoch Arden. Would he picture the endless struggle between the sensual and the spiritual, and the relation of ideals to life—he gives us the Idylls of the King. Would he point to what atheism may lead—he gives us Lucretius. Poems which are masterpieces of sensuous art, such as mere æsthetes, like Rosetti and his school, must contemplate with admiring despair, he makes vehicles of the most serious moral and spiritual teaching. The Vision of Sin is worth a hundred sermons on the disastrous effects of unbridled profligacy. In The Palace of Art we have the quintessence of The Book of Ecclesiastes and much more besides. Even in The Lotos Eaters we have the mirror held up to Hedonism. On the education of the affections and on the purity of domestic life must depend very largely, not merely the happiness of individuals, but the well-being of society, and how wide a space is filled by poems in Tennyson’s works bearing influentially on these subjects is obvious. And they admit us into a pleasaunce with which it is good to be familiar, so pure and wholesome is their atmosphere, so tranquilly beautiful the world in which the characters move and the little dramas unfold themselves. They preach nothing, but deep into every heart must sink their silent lessons. “Upon the sacredness of home life,” writes his son, “he would maintain that the stability and greatness of a nation largely depend; and one of the secrets of his power over mankind was his true joy in the family duties and affections.” What sermons have we in The Miller’s Daughter, in Dora, in The Gardener’s Daughter and in Love and Duty. The Princess was a direct contribution to a social question of momentous importance to our time. Maud had an immediate political purpose, while in In Memoriam he became the interpreter and teacher of his generation in a still higher sense.

Since Shakespeare no English poet has been so essentially patriotic, or appealed so directly to the political conscience of the nation. In his noble eulogies of the English constitution and of the virtue and wisdom of its architects, in his spirit-stirring pictures of the heroic actions of our forefathers and contemporaries both by land and sea, in his passionate denunciations of all that he believed would detract from England’s greatness and be prejudicial to her real interests, in his hearty sympathy with every movement and with every measure which he believed would contribute to her honour and her power, in all this he stands alone among modern poets. But if he loved England as Shakespeare loved her, he had other lessons than Shakespeare’s to teach her. The responsibilities imposed on the England of our time—and no poet knew this better—are very different from those imposed on the England of Elizabeth. An empire vaster and more populous than that of the Cæsars has since then been added to our dominion. Millions, indeed, who are of the same blood as ourselves and who speak our language have, by the folly of common ancestors, become aliens. But how immense are the realms peopled by the colonies which are still loyal to us, and by the three hundred millions who in India own us as their rulers: of this vast empire England is now the capital and centre. That she should fulfil completely and honourably the duties to which destiny has called her will be the prayer of every patriot, that he should by his own efforts contribute all in his power to further such fulfilment must be his earnest desire. It would be no exaggeration to say that Tennyson contributed more than any man who has ever lived to what may be called the higher political education of the English-speaking races. Of imperial federation he was at once the apostle and the pioneer. In poetry which appealed as probably no other poetry has appealed to every class, wherever our language is spoken, he dwelt fondly on all that constitutes the greatness and glory of England, on her grandeur in the past, on the magnificent promise of the part she will play in the future, if her sons are true to her. There should be no distinction, for she recognises no distinction between her children at home and her children in her colonies. She is the common mother of a common race: one flag, one sceptre, the same proud ancestry, the same splendid inheritance. “How strange England cannot see,” he once wrote, “that her true policy lies in a close union with her colonies.”

Sharers of our glorious past,
Shall we not thro’ good and ill
Cleave to one another still?
Britain’s myriad voices call,
Sons be welded all and all
Into one imperial whole,
One with Britain, heart and soul!
One life, one flag, one fleet, one Throne!

Thus did the poetry of Tennyson draw closer, and thus will it continue to draw closer those sentimental ties—ties, in Burke’s phrase, “light as air, but strong as links of iron,” which bind the colonies to the mother country; and in so doing, if he did not actually initiate, he furthered, as no other single man has furthered, the most important movement of our time. Nor has any man of genius in the present century—not Dickens, not Ruskin—been moved by a purer spirit of philanthropy, or done more to show how little the qualities and actions which dignify humanity depend, or need depend, on the accidents of fortune. He brought poetry into touch with the discoveries of science, and with the speculations of theology and metaphysics, and though, in treating such subjects, his power is not, perhaps, equal to his charm, the debt which his countrymen owe him, even intellectually, is incalculable.

[7] See Wordsworth’s letter to Lady Beaumont, Prose Works, vol. ii., p. 176.

Early Poems

To the Queen

This dedication was first prefixed to the seventh edition of these poems in 1851, Tennyson having succeeded Wordsworth as Poet Laureate, 19th Nov., 1850.