though in my poor judgment the harmony seems marred by the frequent sibilants, which vex all English composers[97]; and the suggestion that the sea would become stormless when the land should be at peace may be thought overbold.
It was but seasonable that his later poetry should have been tinged with autumnal colouring. The philosophic bent of his mind had necessarily grown with increasing years; its range had been widened by constant assimilation with the scientific ideas of the day, with social and political changes; but as far horizons breed sadness and wistful uncertainty, so his later verse leans more toward the moral lessons of experience, toward reflective and retrospective views of life and character. In poetry, as in prose, the sequel to a fine original piece has very rarely, if ever, been successful; though the second part, when it follows the first after a long interval, often exhibits the special value that comes from alteration of style and the natural changes of mood. Tennyson himself thought that “the two ‘Locksley Halls’ were likely to be in the future two of the most historically interesting of his poems, as descriptive of the tone of the age at two distant periods of his life.” In my opinion, the interest is less historical than biographical, in the sense that the second poem takes its deeper shade from the darkening that seems to have overspread his later meditations. For the interval of sixty years had, in fact, brought increased activity and enterprising eagerness to the English people; and the gray thoughts of the sequel, the heavier feeling of errors and perils encompassing the onward path toward the remote ideal, are the Poet’s own. He employed them, it is true, for the dramatic presentation of old age, and disclaimed any identity with the imaginary personage.
However this may be, the poems that appeared toward the close of his long literary career show a change of manner. We miss, to some degree, the delicate handling, the self-restraint, the serene air of his best compositions; there is a certain gloominess of atmosphere,[98] breaking out occasionally into vehement expression, in the rolling dithyrambic stanzas of “Vastness,” “The Dawn,” or “The Dreamer.” In the “Death of Œnone,” the beautiful antique nymph of Tennyson’s youth, deserted and passionately lamenting on many-fountained Ida, has become soured and vindictive.[99] She is now a jealous wife, to whose feet Paris, dying from the poisoned arrow, crawls “lame, crooked, reeling,” to be spurned as an adulterer, who may “go back to his adulteress and die.” Here the Poet abandons the style and feeling of Hellenic tradition;[100] the echo of the old-world story has died away; it is rather the voice of some tragedy queen posing as the injured wife of modern society; and one remembers that the Homeric adulteress, Helen of Troy, went back to live happily and respected with her husband in Sparta. It was not to be expected that Tennyson’s later inspirations should reach the supreme level of the poems which he wrote in his prime, or that there should be no ebb from the high-water mark that he touched, in my opinion, fifty years earlier in 1842.[101] Yet hardly any poet has so long retained consummate mastery of his instrument, or has published so little that might have been omitted with advantage or without detriment to his permanent reputation. And it will never be forgotten that he wrote “Crossing the Bar” in his eighty-first year.
It is clear from the Memoir, at any rate, that the burden of nigh fourscore years weakened none of his interest in literature and art, in political and philosophical speculation, or diminished his resources of humorous observation and anecdote. Among many recollections he told of Hallam (the historian) saying to him, “I have lived to read Carlyle’s French Revolution, but I cannot get on, the style is so abominable;” and of Carlyle groaning about Hallam’s Constitutional History: “Eh, it’s a miserable skeleton of a book”—bringing out into short and sharp contrast two opposite schools, the picturesque and the precise, of history-writing. Robert Browning’s death in December 1889 distressed him greatly; it was, moreover, a forewarning to the elder of two brothers, if not equals, in renown. In 1890 Oliver Wendell Holmes, who was Tennyson’s junior by only twenty-three days, wrote to him:
I am proud of my birth-year, and humbled when I think of who were and who are my coevals. Darwin, the destroyer and creator; Lord Houghton, the pleasant and kind-hearted lover of men of letters; Gladstone, whom I leave it to you to characterise, but whose vast range of intellectual powers few will question; Mendelssohn, whose music still rings in our ears; and the Laureate, whose “jewels five words long”—many of them a good deal longer—sparkle in our memories.
He wrote kindly to William Watson and Rudyard Kipling, whose patriotic verse pleased him; and twelve months later Watson paid a grateful tribute to his memory in one of the best among many threnodies. He spoke of Carlyle’s having come to smoke a pipe with him one evening in London, “when the talk turned upon the immortality of the soul, upon which Carlyle said, ‘Eh, old Jewish rags, you must clear your mind of all that. Why should we expect a hereafter?’” and likened man’s sojourn on earth to a traveller’s rest at an inn, whereupon Tennyson turned the simile against him. His son describes how the old man’s “dignity and repose of manner, his low musical voice, and the power of his magnetic eye kept the attention riveted.” In August 1892 Lord Selborne and the Master of Balliol visited him; but
... he did not feel strong enough for religious discussions with Jowett, and begged Jowett not to consult with him or argue with him, as was his wont, on points of philosophy and religious doubt. The Master answered him with a remarkable utterance: “Your poetry has an element of philosophy more to be considered than any regular philosophy in England”;
which is certainly an ambiguous and possibly not an extravagant eulogy.
The final chapter of the Memoir gives, briefly, some sentences from his last talks, and describes a peaceful and noble ending. He found his Christianity undisturbed by jarring of sects and creeds; but he said, “I dread the losing hold of forms. I have expressed this in my ‘Akbar.’” The welfare of the British Empire, its expansion and its destiny, had been from the beginning and were to the end of his poetic career matters of intense pride and concern to him. When, in September 1892, he fell seriously ill, and Sir Andrew Clark arrived, the physician and the patient fell to discussing Gray’s “Elegy”; and a few days later, being much worse, he sent for his Shakespeare, tried to read but had to let his son read for him. Next day he said: “‘I want the blinds up, I want to see the sky and the light.’ He repeated ‘The sky and the light.’ It was a glorious morning, and the warm sunshine was flooding the weald of Sussex and the line of South Downs, which were seen from his window.” On the second day after this he passed away very quietly. The funeral service in Westminster Abbey, with its two anthems—“Crossing the Bar” and “The Silent Voices”—filling the long-drawn aisle and, rising to the fretted vault above the heads of a great congregation, will long be remembered by those who were present. “The tributes of sympathy,” his son writes, “which we received from many countries and from all classes and creeds, were not only remarkable for their universality, but for their depth of feeling.”
To those who had so long lived with him, the loss of one whom they had tended for many years with devoted affection and reverence was indeed irreparable. Yet they had the consolation of knowing that his life had been on the whole happy and fortunate, marked by singularly few griefs or troubles; that he had proved himself a master of the high calling which he set before himself, and departed, full of honours, at the coming of the time when no man can work.