The Age of Tennyson

by Hugh Walker

In Memoriam is essentially a lyrical poem, and the years immediately before and after its publication are those in which Tennyson’s lyrical genius was in fullest flower. Maud (1855) is a lyrical poem. The beautiful songs interspersed between the parts of The Princess belong to this period, and so does the grand Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington. The lyrics of these years are on the whole superior both in fervour of passion and in weight of thought to the earlier lyrics. Some of the songs, like ‘Tears, idle tears,’ are, as songs, almost overcharged with thought, yet they are beautifully melodious; and Tennyson never wrote anything more full of exquisite sound than ‘The splendour falls on castle walls.’

The Ode on the Death of Wellington is worthy of study, because it is the best specimen of a class of poems for which Tennyson was distinguished from first to last. He was always a patriot, and there is no feeling he expresses more fervently than that of pride in England. He contrasts her stability with the fickleness of France. He is proud of her freedom slowly won and surely kept. Patriotic ballads like The Revenge and The Defence of Lucknow are among the most prominent characteristics of his later volumes. His great success in the case of the Ode is due to the fact, first that his heart is stirred by the sense that ‘the last great Englishman is low;’ and secondly, to the fact that he saw in Wellington an impersonation of all that he had admired in England. The picture he draws of the duke is identical in its great features with that he had painted of the nation, and it has the advantage of being concrete.

The passionate fervour of which Tennyson’s lyric strain was capable is best illustrated from Maud, a poem which it is more easy to praise in parts than as a whole; for it must be admitted that the character of the hero is deficient in greatness and self-restraint; and the part which depicts his madness is poor. A good deal of at best exaggerated blame has likewise been meted out to the references to war in the course of the poem. But these faults are more than redeemed by such lyric outbursts as ‘Come into the garden, Maud,’ and ‘O that ’twere possible.’ The first is perhaps the most splendid, as it is one of the most justly popular, of all Tennyson’s lyrics; while the second is among the most exquisite and delicately finished. These pieces have a deeper tone of feeling and more reality of passion than we find in Tennyson’s earlier lyrics.

The Idylls of the King are the outcome of an interest in Arthurian legends that seems to have gradually developed. The Lady of Shalott proves that Tennyson’s mind was dallying with the story of Arthur as early as 1833; and Sir Galahad and Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere attest the continuance of the interest in the volumes of 1842. Another piece, the Morte d’Arthur, published along with these, was afterwards embodied in the Idylls. It was professedly a fragment, and the epic of which it was described as the sole relic was spoken of disparagingly as ‘faint Homeric echoes, nothing-worth.’ Notwithstanding the disparagement, The Passing of Arthur is the gem of the Idylls; but the reference serves at least to direct attention to an actual difference between Tennyson’s earlier and later work. Though the Morte d’Arthur is far from being a mere echo of Homer, there are numerous lines and phrases in it directly recalling Homer, and different in tone from the context. In the later Idylls the classical allusions seem to be one with the piece, they do not call attention to themselves but are transformed and made Tennyson’s own.

There is no clear evidence before 1859 of an intention to treat the Arthurian story as a whole. In that year four of the idylls were published; but they were still fragments, and great gaps were left between. Gradually the gaps were filled, until in 1885 the poem was completed. Still, the connexion of the parts is loose. Each idyll is a separate story, related to the others because all are parts of one greater story. But the idylls have not the coherence required in the books of an epic. Tennyson was conscious of the want of unity, and he sought for a principle of connexion in allegory. At best the allegory is very indistinct; it appears chiefly in the parts later in order of publication; and we may suspect that it was an after-thought meant to supply a defect to which the author slowly awakened. The very name, Idylls of the King, serves as a warning not to expect too much unity. An ‘idyll’ is a short story, and the word therefore indicates the essentially episodic character of the whole poem.

The Idylls were, as they still are, Tennyson’s greatest experiment in blank verse; and next to Milton’s Paradise Lost they are the finest body of non-dramatic blank verse in the language. The form had gone out of fashion in the eighteenth century. Thomson, it is true, revived it, and the poets of the period of the Revolution followed his example. But through the early death of Keats, through that feebleness of will which robbed the world of an untold wealth of poetry in Coleridge, and through the fate that forbade Wordsworth to write long poems well, it remained true that no very great and sustained modern English poem was written in blank verse. The measure attracted Tennyson, and he soon mastered it. A number of pieces prior to the Idylls seem to be experiments in preparation for a bolder flight. The English Idylls, Ulysses, Aylmer’s Field, Sea Dreams and Lucretius are specimens. The measure is used on a larger scale in The Princess. But Tennyson’s supreme success was in the Idylls of the King. They cannot be said to rise higher than the best of the early poems; for the English Idylls include the Morte d’Arthur, and Ulysses is among the finest of Tennyson’s poems. These pieces show the same exquisite grace, the same smoothness, the same variety of pause, the same skill in the use of adjuncts, such as alliteration. But there is necessarily more scope and variety in a long poem; and one of the finest features of Tennyson’s verse is the flexibility with which it adapts itself to the soft idyllic tone appropriate to Enid, to the darkness of moral degradation in The Last Tournament, to the crisis of the parting of Arthur and Guinevere, to the spiritual rapture of The Holy Grail, and to the mysticism of The Passing of Arthur. Tennyson cannot equal the stateliness of Milton; but Milton is the only poet with whom, in respect of blank verse, he need greatly fear comparison.

When we come down to later years the principal change visible in Tennyson’s work is the development of the dramatic element. The dramas proper have been the most neglected of all sections of his work; but ‘the dramatic element’ is by no means confined to them. They are rather just the final result of a process which had been long going on. Tennyson, as we have already seen, gradually put more and more thought into his verse. In doing so he felt the need of a closer grip of reality, and he found, as other poets have found too, that the dramatic mode of conception brought him closest to the real. This is all the more remarkable because nothing could well be more foreign to the dramatic spirit than his early work. His youthful character sketches are not in the least dramatic. Neither is there much trace of humour, a quality without which true dramatic conception is impossible. The change begins to show itself about the middle of the century. In The Grandmother and The Northern Farmer we have genuine dramatic sketches of character. The poet does not regard them from his own point of view, he speaks from theirs. The Northern Farmer is moreover rich in humour. Tennyson never surpassed this creation, but he multiplied similar sketches. All his poems in dialect are of a like kind. They are in dialect not from mere caprice, but because the characters could only be painted to the life by using their own speech. Other pieces, not in dialect, like Sir John Oldcastle and Columbus, are likewise dramatic in their nature. Less prominent, but not less genuine, is the dramatic element in the patriotic ballads, such as The Revenge. The greater part of the work of Tennyson’s last twenty years is, in fact, of this nature, and herein we detect the principal cause of the change of which all must be sensible in that work as compared with the work of his youth. The old smoothness and melody are in great part gone, but a number of pieces prove that Tennyson retained the skill though he did not always choose to exercise it. It is the early style with which his name is still associated, and probably the majority of his readers have never been quite reconciled to the change. But while we may legitimately mourn for what time took away, we ought to rejoice over what it added, rather than left. If there is less melody there is more strength; if the delightful dreamy languor of The Lotos-Eaters is gone, we have the vivid truth of The Northern Farmer and The Northern Cobbler, and the tragic pathos of Rizpah; if the romantic sentiment of Locksley Hall is lost, something more valuable has taken its place in the criticism of life in Locksley Hall Sixty Years After.

Tennyson’s dramas then, surprising as they were when they first appeared, are merely the legitimate and almost the inevitable outcome of his course of development. Inevitable he seems to have felt them, for he persevered in the face of censure or half-hearted approval, perhaps it should be said, in the face of failure. A deep-rooted scepticism of his dramatic powers has stood in the way of a fair appreciation. The fame of his earlier poetry has cast a shadow over these later fruits of his genius; and the question, ‘Is Saul also among the prophets?’ was hardly asked with greater surprise than the question whether Tennyson could possibly be a dramatist. And, in truth, at sixty-six he had still to learn the rudiments of his business. Queen Mary (1875) is a failure. It is not a great poem, and still less is it a great drama. The stage is overcrowded with dramatis personæ who jostle each other and hide one another’s features. Harold (1876) showed a marked advance; but Becket (1884) was the triumph which justified all the other experiments. It is a truly great drama, and, though not yet recognised as such, will probably rank finally among the greatest of Tennyson’s works. The characters are firmly and clearly delineated. Becket and Henry, closely akin in some of their natural gifts, are different in circumstances and develop into very different men. Rosamond and Eleanor are widely contrasted types of female character, the former a little commonplace, the latter a subtle conception excellently worked out. All the materials out of which the play is built are great. No finer theme could be found than the mediæval conflict between Church and State; and Tennyson has seized it in the true dramatic way, as concentrated in the single soul of Becket, torn between his duty to the Church and his duty to the King, whose Chancellor and trusted friend he had been and to whom he owed his promotion.

The minor dramatic pieces are of inferior worth, and in some of them, as for example, The Promise of May and The Falcon, Tennyson showed a certain infelicity in his choice of subjects. But their failure leaves unimpaired the interest of the dramatic period. It seemed an almost wanton experiment on the part of Tennyson. But he was an artist all his life, and here too he was only obeying the inherent law of development of his art. Instead of wantonness, there is deep pathos in the old man’s perseverance under unfamiliar conditions, and there can only be joy at his final success. There is surprise too that he who, from his earlier work, would have been judged one of the least dramatic of poets, should have so decidedly surpassed a poet so markedly dramatic as Browning.

Tennyson wrote up to the very close of his long life. His last publications were The Foresters and The Death of Œnone. They show some decline of power. Demeter too (1889) was probably a little below his level. But previous to that, though there had been change, there had been nothing that can be called decay. For the long period of sixty years and upwards Tennyson had written, and with rare exceptions he had written greatly. From the death of Wordsworth to his own death he was almost universally looked upon as the first poet of his time. No one else has wielded so great an influence. In no other poet’s work is the record of change during the period so clearly written. In part he made the age, in still larger measure it made him. The hesitancy of his early work was typical of the spirit of the time. The gradual awakening, the deeper thought, the larger subjects, the more varied interests of the intermediate period, were typical too. In this last period, while Tennyson was as faithful as ever to the law of his own development, he did not move precisely with the time. Another race was rising and other palms were to be won.