England having, as we have said, no vernacular song, her poetry is entirely artistic, even such poetry as ‘The May Queen,’ ‘The Northern Farmer,’ and the idyls of
William Barnes. And it would be strange indeed if, until Authority spoke out, the beauties of artistic poetry were ever apparent to the many. Is it supposable, for instance, that even the voice of Chaucer—is it supposable that even the voice of Shakspeare—would have succeeded in winning the contemporary ear had it not been for that great mass of legendary and romantic material which each of these found ready to his hand, waiting to be moulded into poetic form? The fate, however, of Moore’s poetical narratives (perhaps we might say of Byron’s too) shows that if any poetry is to last beyond the generation that produced it, there is needed not only the romantic material, but also the accent, new and true, of the old poetic voice. And these volumes show why in these late days, when the poet’s inheritance of romantic material seemed to have been exhausted, there appeared one poet to whom the English public gave an acceptance as wide almost as if he had written in the vernacular like Burns or Béranger.
It is long since any book has been so eagerly looked forward to as this. The main facts of Tennyson’s life have been matter of familiar knowledge for so many years that we do not propose to run over them here once more. Nor shall we fill the space at our command with the biographer’s interesting personal anecdotes. So fierce a light had been beating upon Aldworth
and Farringford that the relations of the present Lord Tennyson to his father were pretty generally known. In the story of English poetry these relations held a place that was quite unique. What the biographer says about the poet’s sagacity, judgment, and good sense—especially what he says about his insight into the characters of those with whom he was brought into contact—will be challenged by no one who knew him. Still, the fact remains that Tennyson’s temperament was poetic entirely. And the more attention the poet pays to his art, the more unfitted does he become to pay attention to anything else. For in these days the mechanism of social life moves on grating wheels that need no little oiling if the poet is to bring out the very best that is within him. Not that all poets are equally vexed by the special infirmity of the poetic temperament. Poets like Wordsworth, for instance, are supported against the world by love of Nature and by that “divine arrogance” which is sometimes a characteristic of genius. Tennyson’s case shows that not even love of Nature and intimate communings with her are of use in giving a man peace when he has not Wordsworth’s temperament. No adverse criticism could disturb Wordsworth’s sublime self-complacency.
“Your father,” writes Jowett, with his usual wisdom, to Lord Tennyson, “was very sensitive,
and had an honest hatred of being gossiped about. He called the malignant critics and chatterers ‘mosquitos.’ He never felt any pleasure at praise (except from his friends), but he felt a great pain at the injustice of censure. It never occurred to him that a new poet in the days of his youth was sure to provoke dangerous hostilities in the ‘genus irritabile vatum’ and in the old-fashioned public.”
It might almost be said, indeed, that had it not been for the ministrations, first of his beloved wife, and then of his sons, Tennyson’s life would have been one long warfare between the attitude of his splendid intellect towards the universe and the response of his nervous system to human criticism. From his very childhood he seems to have had that instinct for confronting the universe as a whole which, except in the case of Shakespeare, is not often seen among poets. Star-gazing and speculation as to the meaning of the stars and what was going on in them seem to have begun in his childhood. In his first Cambridge letter to his aunt, Mrs. Russell, written from No. 12, Rose Crescent, he says, “I am sitting owl-like and solitary in my room, nothing between me and the stars but a stratum of tiles.” And his son tells us of a story current in the family that Frederick, when an Eton schoolboy, was shy of going to a neighbouring dinner-party to which
he had been invited. “Fred,” said his younger brother, “think of Herschel’s great star-patches, and you will soon get over all that.” He had Wordsworth’s passion, too, for communing with Nature alone. He was one of Nature’s elect who knew that even the company of a dear and intimate friend, howsoever close, is a disturbance of the delight that intercourse with her can afford to the true devotee. In a letter to his future wife, written from Mablethorpe in 1839, he says:—
“I am not so able as in old years to commune alone with Nature . . . Dim mystic sympathies with tree and hill reaching far back into childhood, a known landskip is to me an old friend, that continually talks to me of my own youth and half-forgotten things, and indeed does more for me than many an old friend that I know. An old park is my delight, and I could tumble about it for ever.”
Moreover, he was always speculating upon the mystery and the wonder of the human story. “The far future,” he says in a letter to Miss Sellwood, written from High Beech in Epping Forest, “has been my world always.” And yet so powerless is reason in that dire wrestle with temperament which most poets know, that with all these causes for despising criticism of his work, Tennyson was as sensitive to critical strictures as Wordsworth was indifferent. “He fancied,” says his biographer,