I.

Charles Lamb was so paralyzed, it is said, by Coleridge’s death, that for

weeks after that event, he was heard murmuring often to himself,

“Coleridge is dead, Coleridge is dead.” In such a mental condition at

this moment is an entire country, I think. “Tennyson is dead! Tennyson

is dead!” It will be some time before England’s loss can really be

expressed by any words so powerful in pathos and in sorrow as these. And

if this is so with regard to English people generally, what of those few

who knew the man, and knowing him, must needs love him—must needs love

him above all others?—those, I mean, who, when speaking of him, used to

talk not so much about the poetry as about the man who wrote it—those who

now are saying, with a tremor of the voice, and a moistening of the eye:—

There was none like him—none.

[Picture: Alfred, Lord Tennyson, æt. 80. From a photography reproduced

by the kind permission of Lord Tennyson]

To say wherein lies the secret of the charm of anything that lives is

mostly difficult. Especially is it so with regard to a man of poetic

genius. All are agreed, for instance, that D. G. Rossetti possessed an

immense charm. So he did, indeed. But who has been able to define that

charm? I, too, knew Rossetti well, and loved him well. Sometimes,

indeed, the egotism of a sorrowing memory makes me think that outside his

own most affectionate and noble-tempered family, including that old

friend in art at whose feet he sat as a boy, no man loved Rossetti so

deeply and so lastingly as I did; unless, perhaps, it was the poor blind

poet, Philip Marston, who, being so deeply stricken, needed to love and

to be loved more sorely than I, to whom Fate has been kind. And yet I

should find it difficult to say wherein lay the charm of Rossetti’s

chameleon-like personality. So with other men and women I could name.

This is not so in regard to the great man now lying dead at Aldworth.

Nothing is easier than to define the charm of Tennyson.

It lay in a great veracity of soul—in a simple-mindedness so childlike

that, unless you had known him to be the undoubted author of his

exquisitely artistic poems, you would have supposed that even the

subtleties of poetic art must be foreign to a nature so devoid of all

subtlety as his. “Homer,” you would have said, “might have been such a

man as this, for Homer worked in a language which is Poetry’s very voice.

But Tennyson works in a language which has to be moulded into harmony by

a myriad subtleties of art. How can this great inspired child, who yet

has the simple wisdom of Bragi, the poetry-smith of the Northern Olympus,

be the delicate-fingered artist of ‘The Princess,’ ‘The Palace of Art,’

‘The Day-Dream,’ and ‘The Dream of Fair Women’?”

As deeply as some men feel that language was given to men to disguise

their thoughts did Tennyson feel that language was given to _him_ to

declare his thoughts without disguise. He knew of but one justification

for the thing he said, viz., that it was the thing he thought. _Arrière

pensée_ was with him impossible. But, it may be asked, when a man

carries out-speaking to such a pass as this, is he not apt to become a

somewhat troublesome and discordant thread in the complex web of modern

society? No doubt any other man than Tennyson would have been so. But

the honest ring in the voice—which, by-the-by, was strengthened and

deepened by the old-fashioned Lincolnshire accent—softened and, to a

great degree, neutralized the effect of the bluntness. Moreover, behind

this uncompromising directness was apparent a noble and a splendid

courtesy; for, above all things, Tennyson was a great and forthright

English gentleman. As he stood at the porch at Aldworth, meeting a guest

or bidding him good-bye—as he stood there, tall, far beyond the height of

average men, his naturally fair skin showing dark and tanned by the sun

and wind—as he stood there no one could mistake him for anything but a

great gentleman, who was also much more. Up to the last a man of

extraordinary presence, he showed, I think, the beauty of old age to a

degree rarely seen.

A friend of his who, visiting him on his birthday, discovered him thus

standing at the door to welcome him, has described his unique appearance

in words which are literally accurate at least:—

A poet should be limned in youth, they say,

Or else in prime, with eyes and forehead beaming

Of manhood’s noon—the very body seeming

To lend the spirit wings to win the bay;

But here stands he whose noontide blooms for aye,

Whose eyes, where past and future both are gleaming

With lore beyond all youthful poets’ dreaming,

Seem lit from shores of some far-glittering day.

Our master’s prime is now—is ever now;

Our star that wastes not in the wastes of night

Holds Nature’s dower undimmed in Time’s despite;

Those eyes seem Wisdom’s own beneath that brow,

Where every furrow Time hath dared to plough

Shines a new bar of still diviner light.

This, then, was the secret of Tennyson’s personal charm. And if the

reader is sceptical as to its magnetic effect upon his friends, let me

remind him of the amazing rarity of these great and guileless natures;

let me remind him also that this world is comprised of two classes of

people—the bores, whose name is legion, and the interesting people, whose

name is _not_ legion—the former being those whose natural instinct of

self-protective mimicry impels them to move about among their fellows

hiding their features behind a mask of convention, the latter being those

who move about with uncovered faces just as Nature fashioned them. If

guilelessness lends interest to a dullard, it is still more so with the

really luminous souls. So infinite is the creative power of nature that

she makes no two individuals alike. If we only had the power of

inquiring into the matter, we should find not only that each individual

creature that once inhabited one of the minute shells that go to the

building of England’s fortress walls of chalk was absolutely unlike all

the others, but that even the poor microbe himself, who in these days is

so maligned, is also very intensely an individual.

Some time ago the old discussion was revived in _The Athenæum_ as to

whether the nightingale’s song was joyful or melancholy. And, perhaps,

if the poems of the late James Thomson and the poems of Mr. Austin Dobson

were recited by their authors to a congregation of nightingales, the

question would at once be debated amongst them, “Is the note of the human

songster joyful or melancholy?” The truth is that the humidity or the

dryness of the atmosphere in the various habitats of the nightingale

modifies so greatly the _timbre_ of the voice that, while a nightingale

chorus at Fiesole may seem joyous, a nightingale chorus in the moist

thickets along the banks of the Ouse may seem melancholy. Nay, more, as

I once told Tennyson at Aldworth, I, when a truant boy wandering along

the banks of the Ouse (where six nightingales’ nests have been found in

the hedge of a single meadow), got so used to these matters that I had my

own favourite individuals, and could easily distinguish one from another.

That rich climacteric swell which is reached just before the “jug, jug,

jug,” varies amazingly, if the listener will only give the matter

attention. And if this infinite variety of individualism is thus seen in

the lower animals, what must it be in man?

There is, however, in the entire human race, a fatal instinct for marring

itself. To break down the exterior signs of this variety of

individualism in the race by mutual imitation, by all sorts of

affectations, is the object not only of the civilization of the Western

world, but of the very negroes on the Gaboon River. No wonder, then,

that whensoever we meet, as at rarest interval we do meet, an individual

who is able to preserve his personality as Nature meant it to live, we

feel an attraction towards him such as is irresistible. Now I would

challenge those who knew him to say whether they ever knew any other man

so free from this great human infirmity as Tennyson. The way in which

his simplicity of nature would manifest itself was, in some instances,

most remarkable. Though, of course, he had his share of that egoism of

the artist without which imaginative genius may become sterile, it seemed

impossible for him to realize what a transcendent position he took among

contemporary writers all over the world. “Poets,” he once said to me,

“have not had the advantage of being _born_ to the purple.” Up to the

last he felt himself to be a poet at struggle more or less with the

Wilsons and the Crokers who, in his youth, assailed him. I, and a very

dear friend of his, a family connexion, tried in vain to make him see

that when a poet had reached a position such as he had won, no criticism

could injure him or benefit him one jot.

What has been called his exclusiveness is entirely mythical. He was the

most hospitable of men. It was very rare, indeed, for him to part from a

friend at his hall door, or at the railway station without urging him to

return as soon as possible, and generally with the words, “Come whenever

you like.” The fact is, however, that for many years the strangest

notions seem to have got abroad as to the claims of the public upon men

of genius. There seems now to be scarcely any one who does not look upon

every man who has passed into the purgatory of fame as his or her common

property. The unlucky victim is to be pestered by letters upon every

sort of foolish subject, and to be hunted down in his walks and insulted

by senseless adulation. Tennyson resented this, and so did Rossetti, and

so ought every man who has reached eminence and respects his own genius.

Neither fame nor life itself is worth having on such terms as these.

One day, Tennyson when walking round his garden at Farringford, saw

perched up in the trees that surrounded it, two men who had been refused

admittance at the gate—two men dressed like gentlemen. He very wisely

gave the public to understand that his fame was not to be taken as an

abrogation of his rights as a private English gentleman. For my part,

whenever I hear any one railing against a man of eminence with whom he

cannot possibly have been brought into contact, I know at once what it

means: the railer has been writing an idle letter to the eminent one and

received no reply.

Tennyson’s knowledge of nature—nature in every aspect—was very great.

His passion for “star-gazing” has often been commented upon by readers of

his poetry. Since Dante no poet in any land has so loved the stars. He

had an equal delight in watching the lightning; and I remember being at

Aldworth once during a thunderstorm, when I was alarmed at the temerity

with which he persisted, in spite of all remonstrances, in gazing at the

blinding lightning. For moonlight effects he had a passion equally

strong, and it is especially pathetic to those who know this to remember

that he passed away in the light he so loved—in a room where there was no

artificial light—nothing to quicken the darkness but the light of the

full moon (which somehow seems to shine more brightly at Aldworth than

anywhere else in England); and that on the face of the poet, as he passed

away, fell that radiance in which he so loved to bathe it when alive.

If it is as easy to describe the personal attraction of Tennyson as it is

difficult to describe that of any one of his great contemporaries, we do

not find the same relations existing between him and them as regards his

place in the firmament of English poetry. In a country with a composite

language such as ours, it may be affirmed with special emphasis, that

there are two kinds of poetry; one appealing to the uncultivated masses,

whose vocabulary is of the narrowest; the other appealing to the few who,

partly by temperament, and partly by education, are sensitive to the true

beauties of poetic art. While in the one case the appeal is made through

a free and popular use of words, partly commonplace and partly steeped in

that literary sentimentalism which in certain stages of an artificial

society takes the place of the simple utterances of simple passion of

earlier and simpler times; in the other case the appeal is made very

largely through what Dante calls the “use of the sieve for noble words.”

Of the one perhaps Byron is the type, the exemplars being such poets as

those of the Mrs. Hemans school in England, and of the Longfellow school

in America. Of the other class of poets, the class typified by Milton,

the most notable exemplars are Keats, Shelley, and Coleridge. Wordsworth

partakes of the qualities of both classes. The methods of the first of

these two groups are so cheap—they are so based on the wide severance

between the popular taste and the poetic temper (which, though in earlier

times it inspired the people, is now confined to the few)—that one may

say of the first group that their success in finding and holding an

audience is almost damnatory to them as poets. As compared with the

poets of Greece, however, both groups may be said to have secured only a

partial success in poetry; for not only Æschylus and Sophocles, but Homer

too, are as satisfying in the matter of noble words as though they had

never tried to win that popular success which was their goal. In this

respect—as being, I mean, the compeer of the great poets of

Greece—Shakespeare takes his peculiar place in English poetry. Of all

poets he is the most popular, and yet in his use of the “sieve for noble

words” his skill transcends that of even Milton, Coleridge, Shelley, and

Keats. His felicities of diction in the great passages seem little short

of miraculous, and they are so many that it is easy to understand why he

is so often spoken of as being a kind of inspired improvisatore. That he

was _not_ an improvisatore, however, any one can see who will take the

trouble to compare the first edition of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ with the

received text, the first sketch of ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor’ with the

play as we now have it, and the ‘Hamlet’ of 1603 with the ‘Hamlet’ of

1604, and with the still further varied version of the play given by

Heminge and Condell in the Folio of 1623. If we take into account,

moreover, that it is only by the lucky chapter of accidents that we now

possess the earlier forms of the three plays mentioned above, and that

most likely the other plays were once in a like condition, we shall come

to the conclusion that there was no more vigilant worker with Dante’s

sieve than Shakespeare. Next to Shakespeare in this great power of

combining the forces of the two great classes of English poets, appealing

both to the commonplace sense of a commonplace public and to the artistic

sense of the few, stands, perhaps, Chaucer; but since Shakespeare’s time

no one has met with anything like Tennyson’s success in effecting a

reconciliation between popular and artistic sympathy with poetry in

England.

The biography of such a poet, one who has had such an immense influence

upon the literary history of the entire Victorian epoch—indeed, upon the

nineteenth century, for his work covers two-thirds of the century—will be

a work of incalculable importance. There is but one man who is fully

equipped for such an undertaking, and fortunately that is his own son—a

man of great ability, of admirable critical acumen, and of quite

exceptional accomplishments. His son’s filial affection was so precious

to Tennyson that, although the poet’s powers remained undimmed to the

last day of his life, I do not believe that we should have had all the

splendid work of the last ten years without his affectionate and

unwearied aid.