When he was first appointed, Queen Victoria had let him know that he was to be excused from the obligation of writing complimentary verse to celebrate the doings of the court. Of his own accord he composed occasional odes for the marriages of her sons, and showed some of his practised skill in dignifying such themes; but it is not here that he found his work as laureate. He achieved greater success in the poems which he wrote to honour the exploits of our army and navy, in the past or the present. In his ballad of 'The Revenge', in his Balaclava poems, in the 'Siege of Lucknow', he struck a heroic note which found a ready echo in the hearts of soldiers and sailors and those who love the services. Above all, in the great ode on the death of the Duke of Wellington he has stirred all the chords of national feeling as no other laureate before him, and has enriched our literature with a jewel which is beyond price.
The Arthurian epic failed to achieve its national aim, and the historical dramas, though inspired by great principles which have helped to shape our history, never touched those large circles to which as laureate he should appeal. Some might judge that his function was best fulfilled in the lyrics to be found scattered throughout his work which praise the slow, ordered progress of English liberties. Passages from Maud or In Memoriam will occur to many readers, still more the three lyrics generally printed together at the end of the 1842 poems, beginning with the well-known tines, 'Of old sat Freedom on the heights', 'Love thou thy land', and 'You ask me why though ill at ease'. Here we listen to the voice of English Liberalism uttered in very different tones from those of Byron and Shelley, expressing the mind of one who recoiled from French Revolutions and had little sympathy with their aims of universal equality. In this he represented very truly that Victorian movement which was guided by Cobden and Mill, by Peel and Gladstone, which conferred such practical benefits upon the England of their day; but it is hardly the temper that we expect of an ardent poet, at any rate in the days of his youth. The burning passion of Carlyle, Ruskin, or William Morris, however tempered by other feelings, called forth a heartier response in the breast of the toiling multitudes.
It may be that the claim of Tennyson to popular sovereignty will, in the end, rest chiefly on the pleasure which he gave to many thousands of his fellow-countrymen, a pleasure to be renewed and found again in English scenes, and in thoughts which coloured grey lives and warmed cold hearts, which shed the ray of faith on those who could accept no creeds and who yet yearned for some hope of an after-life to cheer their declining days. That he gave this pleasure is certain—to men and women of all classes from Samuel Bamford,[29] the Durham weaver, who saved his pence to buy the precious volumes of the 'thirties, to Queen Victoria on her throne, who in the reading of In Memoriam found one of her chief consolations in the hour of widowhood.
It was given to Tennyson to live a long life, and to know more joy than sorrow—to be gladdened by the homage of two hemispheres, to lament the loss of his old friends who went before him (Spedding in 1881, FitzGerald in 1883, Robert Browning in 1889), to write his most famous lyric 'Crossing the Bar' at the age of 80, and to be soothed and strengthened to the end by the presence of his wife. For some weeks in the autumn of 1892 he lay in growing weakness at Aldworth taking farewell of the sights and sounds that he had loved so long. To him now it had come to hear with dying ears 'the earliest pipe of half-awakened birds' and to see with dying eyes 'the casement slowly grow a glimmering square'. Early on October 5 he had an access of energy, and called to have the blinds drawn up—'I want', he said, 'to see the sky and the light'. The next day he died, and a week later a country wagon bore the coffin to Haslemere. Thence it passed to Westminster, where his dust was to be laid beside that of Browning, among the great men who had gone before. In what mood he faced death we can learn from his own words:
Spirit, nearing yon dark portal at the limit of thy human state,
Fear not thou the hidden purpose of that Power which alone is great,
Nor the myriad world, His shadow, nor the silent Opener of the Gate![30]
charles kingsley
From a drawing by W. S. Hunt in the National Portrait Gallery