Tennyson is without doubt, from first to last, one of the great poetic artists. He is not often an inspired singer like Shelley, but he has other gifts which Shelley lacked—a self-restraint, an artistic finish, a fine and mature taste, a deep reverence for the past, a pervading sympathy with the broad currents of the best thought and feeling of the time. Sometimes this is (as we have seen) a weakness, but it is also the source of his greatest strength. He has not, like Wordsworth, given us a new insight, what I may almost call a new religion: but he has a wider range than Wordsworth, and a surer poetic touch. Wordsworth may be the greater teacher; for many of us he has opened a new world: he has touched the deepest springs of our nature. But Tennyson has left us gifts hardly less rare and precious. He has refined, enriched, beautified, in some sense almost remade our poetic language; he has shown that the classic eighteenth-century finish is not incompatible with the nineteenth-century deeper and wider thought: and, in a word, he has inwoven the golden thread of poetry with the main texture of the life, knowledge, feeling, experience, and ideals of the years whereof we are all alike inheritors.
TENNYSON: HIS LIFE AND WORK[93]
By the Right Hon. Sir Alfred Lyall, G.C.B.
The biography of a great poet has seldom been so written as to enhance his reputation with the world at large. It is almost always the highest artist whose individuality, so to speak, is least discernible in his work, and who, like some divinity, is at his best when his mind and moods, his lofty purpose and his attitude toward the problems of life, are revealed only through the medium which he has chosen for revealing them to mankind. To lay bare the human side of a poet, to retail his domestic history, and to dwell upon his private relations with friends or family, will always interest the public enormously; but for himself it is often a perilous ordeal. The man of restless erratic genius, cut off in his prime like Byron or Shelley, leaves behind him a confession of faults and follies, while one who has lived long takes the risk of intellectual decline; or else, like Coleridge, Landor, and even Scott, he may in other ways suffer loss of dignity by the posthumous record of failings or mistakes. It is a rare coincidence that in this nineteenth century two poets of the first rank—Wordsworth and Tennyson—should each have passed the natural limit of fourscore years, steadily extending their reputation without material loss of their power, and completely fulfilling the ideal of a life devoted to their beautiful art, free alike from adventures and eccentricities, tranquil, blameless, and nobly dignified.
Such is the life which has been described to us in the Memoir of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, by his son. In preparing it he had the singular advantage of very close and uninterrupted association for many years with his father, and of thorough acquaintance with his wishes and feelings in regard to the inevitable biography. In a brief preface, he touches, not without emotion, upon the aims and limitations of the task which it had become his duty to undertake.
“For my part,” he says, “I feel strongly that no biographer could so truly give him as he gives himself in his own works; but this may be because, having lived my life with him, I see him in every word which he has written; and it is difficult for me so far to detach myself from the home circle as to pourtray him for others. He himself disliked the notion of a long, formal biography.... However, he wished that, if I deemed it better, the incidents of his life should be given as shortly as might be without comment; but that my notes should be final and full enough to preclude the chance of further and unauthentic biographies.”
Lord Tennyson has given us a remarkable chronicle of his father’s life from youth to age, illustrated by correspondence that is always interesting and occasionally of supreme value, by anecdotes and reminiscences, by characteristic thoughts and pithy observations—the outcome of the Poet’s reflection, consummate literary judgment, and constant intercourse with the best contemporary intellects. He has, moreover, so arranged the narrative as to show the rapid expansion of Tennyson’s strong, inborn poetic instinct, with the impressions and influences which moulded its development, maturing and perfecting his marvellous powers of artistic execution.
Alfred Tennyson was born in the pastoral village of Somersby, amid the Lincolnshire wolds; and he spent many holidays on the coast at Mablethorpe, where he acquired that passion for the sea which has possessed so many poets. The atmosphere of a public school favours active emulation and discipline for the outer world; but to a boy of sensitive and imaginative temperament it is apt to be uncongenial, so we need not be sorry that Tennyson was spared the experience. At first, like most men of his temperament who go straight from private tuition to a University, he felt solitary and depressed—“the country is so disgustingly level, the revelry of the place so monotonous, the studies of the University so uninteresting, so matter-of-fact.” But there was about him a distinction in mind and body that soon marked him out among his fellows (“a kind of Hyperion,” writes FitzGerald), uniting strength with refinement, showing much insight into character, with the faculty of brief and pointed sallies: “We were looking one day at the portrait of an elderly politician in bland family aspect. A. T. (with his eyeglass): It looks rather like a retired panther. So true.”[94]