Tennyson’s health, though quite robust for an octogenarian, has been broken of late. In the spring of 1890, he was troubled with a grievous illness, the result of exposure to cold—he having persisted in taking his “daily two hours’ walk along the cliff” in all kinds of weather. It was expected that the poet would spend the following winter in the South to avoid the rigorous climate of the Isle of Wight, but he recovered sufficient strength to remain at Farringford House amid the scenes he loves so well.
Tennyson has always shunned publicity, living in a world apart—removed from the gaze of the profane crowd. He rarely goes into society, preferring rural retirement to social converse. As poet and man, he has gained by this voluntary seclusion. His delight is to mingle with the world of nature. The woods and skies, the streams and billows have been his comrades. How much they have contributed to his poetic greatness cannot be estimated. He is, however, a recluse with his eyes open. He has watched the progress of mankind and observed the trend of the times. Realizing the needs of the age, he grandly rose to the occasion—either to lift up his voice in protest against its faults, or to sing its achievements.
For many years no strangers have been admitted to Farringford Park. Visitors, while welcome at Aldworth in the afternoon, have not been allowed to interrupt the accustomed occupations of the master of the house, who is very methodical in his habits. It has long been his custom to rise early and spend the morning hours in his study—writing and dreaming in an atmosphere laden with smoke and the odor of tobacco. He now uses the pen but little, owing to failing eyesight. The Honorable Hallam Tennyson is his secretary and constant companion.
Personally, his lordship is a man who would attract attention anywhere, with his stalwart form slightly stooping, his noble face, his long flowing hair and bushy beard. He dresses carelessly, and when out of doors wears a shocking bad hat; with his cloak and walking-stick, he makes a picturesque figure. He is a confirmed pedestrian. “Every morning,” says a newspaper correspondent, “in hail, rain or snow, the poet dons his frouzy cap and his frouzier slouch hat, and promenades for an hour or so, none daring to disturb him.”
Tennyson is taciturn and brusque before strangers, whose presence annoys him, but he is delightfully easy and spontaneous with friends. Edward Fitzgerald, in his letters to Frederick Tennyson and others, alludes again and again, in terms of enthusiastic appreciation, to Alfred’s wise and pointed conversation. One of his original “sayings, which strike the nail on the head,” was about Dante. It is well worth quoting in Fitzgerald’s concise language, taken from a letter written in 1876:
“What Mr. Lowell says of him recalled to me what Tennyson said to me some thirty-five or forty years ago. We were stopping before a shop in Regent street where were two figures of Dante and Gœthe. I (I suppose) said, ‘What is there in old Dante’s face that is missing in Gœthe’s?’ And Tennyson (whose profile then had certainly a remarkable likeness to Dante’s) said: ‘The divine.’”
From first to last Alfred Tennyson has recognized that the mission of the poet is that of an æsthetic teacher. Much has he done to educate English-speaking people in the appreciation of beauty. But he is emphatically more than this. A man of stainless reputation, his deeds and words have almost invariably been on the side of righteousness. His career has been free from the excesses which disgraced the lives of Marlowe and Shelley, of Byron and Poe. He is rather to be ranged with the Spensers and Miltons, the Wordsworths and Brownings, as a defender of truth and religion. In the main he has steadfastly kept in mind the austere ideal—
Of those who, far aloof
From envy, hate and pity, and spite and scorn,
Live the great life which all our greatest fain
Would follow, center’d in eternal calm.
II.
The current of Tennyson’s genius is like a rivulet placidly flowing through meadows and groves, occasionally rippling and swirling over stones, then pursuing its even course—gradually widening and deepening; not like a mighty river proudly sweeping in a resistless flood through a wilderness, or tumbling down rocky chasms. All that he has given the world during sixty years of literary activity is contained in less than a dozen volumes of verse. Only a rapid survey of his poetical career is attempted here.