"Since the days when Dryden held office no Laureate has been appointed so
distinctly pre-eminent above all his contemporaries, so truly the king of
the poets, as he upon whose brows now rests the Laureate crown. Dryden's
grandeur was sullied, his muse was venal, and his life was vicious; still
in his keeping the office acquired a certain dignity; after his death it
declined into the depths of depredation, and each succeeding dullard
dimmed its failing lustre. The first ray of hope for its revival sprang
into life with the appointment of Southey, to whom succeeded Wordsworth,
a poet of worth and genius, whose name certainly assisted in
resuscitating the ancient dignity of the appointment. Alfred Tennyson
derives less honor from the title than he confers upon it; to him we owe
a debt of gratitude that he has redeemed the laurels with his poetry,
noble, pure, and undefiled as ever poet sung."--_Walter Hamilton_.
"Tennyson is many sided; he has a great variety of subjects. He has
treated of the classical and the romantic life of the world; he has been
keenly alive to the beauties of nature; and he has tried to sympathize
with the social problems that confront mankind. In this respect he is a
representative poet of the age, for this very diversity of natural gifts
has made him popular with all classes. Perhaps he has not been perfectly
cosmopolitan, and sometimes the theme in his poetry has received a slight
treatment compared to what might have been given it by deeper thinking
and more philosophical poets, but he has caught the spirit of the age and
has expressed its thought, if not always forcibly, at least more
beautifully than any other poet,"--_Charles Read Nutter_.
"In technical elegance, as an artist in verse, Tennyson is the greatest
of modern poets. Other masters, old and new, have surpassed him in
special instances; but he is the only one who rarely nods, and who always
finishes his verse to the extreme. Here is the absolute sway of metre,
compelling every rhyme and measure needful to the thought; here are
sinuous alliterations, unique and varying breaks and pauses, winged
flights and falls, the glory of sound and color everywhere present, or,
if missing, absent of the poet's free will. The fullness of his art
evades the charm of spontaneity. His original and fastidious art is of
itself a theme for an essay. The poet who studies it may well despair,
he can never excel it; its strength is that of perfection; its weakness,
the ever-perfection which marks a still-life painter."--_Edmund Clarence
Stedman_.
"A striking quality of Tennyson's poetry is its simplicity, both in
thought and expression. This trait was characteristic of his life, and
so we naturally expect to find it in his verse. Tennyson was too sincere
by nature, and too strongly averse to experimenting in new fields of
poetry, to attempt the affected or unique. He purposely avoided all
subjects which he feared he could not treat with simplicity and
clearness. So, in his shorter poems, there are few obscure or ambiguous
passages, little that is not easy of comprehension. His subjects
themselves tend to prevent ambiguity or obscurity. For he wrote of men
and women as he saw them about him, of their joys and sorrows, their
trials, their ideals,--and in this was nothing complex. Thus there is a
homely quality to his poems, but they are kept from the commonplace by
the great tenderness of his feeling. Had Tennyson been primarily of a
metaphysical or philosophical mind all this might have been different.
True, he was somewhat of a student of philosophy and religion, and some
of his poems are of these subjects, but his thought even here is always
simple and plain, and he never attempted the deep study that was not
characteristic of his nature. No less successful is he in avoiding
obscurity in expression. There are few passages that need much
explanation. In this he offers a striking contrast to Browning, who
often painfully hid his meaning under complex phraseology. His
vocabulary is remarkably large, and when we study his use of words, we
find that in many cases they are from the two-syllabled class. This
matter of choice of clear, simple words and phrases is very important.
For, just so much as our attention is drawn from what a poet says to the
medium, the language in which he says it, so much is its clearness
injured. Vividly to see pictures in our imagination or to be affected by
our emotions, we must not, as we read, experience any jar. In Tennyson
we never have to think of his expressions--except to admire their simple
beauty. Simplicity and beauty, then, are two noticeable qualities of his
poetry."--_Charles Read Nutter_.
"An idyllic or picturesque mode of conveying his sentiments is the one
natural to Tennyson, if not the only one permitted by his limitations.
He is a born observer of physical nature, and, whenever he applies an
adjective to some object or passingly alludes to some phenomenon which
others have but noted, is almost infallibly correct. He has the unerring
first touch which in a single line proves the artist; and it justly has
been remarked that there is more true English landscape in many an
isolated stanza of _In Memoriam_ than in the whole of _The Seasons_, that
vaunted descriptive poem of a former century."--_Edmund Clarence Stedman_.
"In describing scenery, his microscopic eye and marvellously delicate ear
are exercised to the utmost in detecting the minutest relations and most
evanescent melodies of the objects before him, in order that his
representation shall include everything which is important to their full
perfection. His pictures of rural English scenery give the inner spirit
as well as the outward form of the objects, and represent them, also, in
their relation to the mind which is gazing on them. The picture in his
mind is spread out before his detecting and dissecting intellect, to be
transformed to words only when it can be done with the most refined
exactness, both as regards color and form and melody."--_E.P. Whipple_.
"For the most part he wrote of the every day loves and duties of men and
women; of the primal pains and joys of humanity; of the aspirations and
trials which are common to all ages and all classes and independent even
of the diseases of civilization, but he made them new and surprising by
the art which he added to them, by beauty of thought, tenderness of
feeling, and exquisiteness of shaping."--_Stopford A. Brooke_.
"The tenderness of Tennyson is one of his remarkable qualities--not so
much in itself, for other poets have been more tender--but in combination
with his rough powers. We are not surprised that his rugged strength is
capable of the mighty and tragic tenderness of Rispah, but we could not
think at first that he could feel and realize the exquisite tenderness of
_Elaine_. It is a wonderful thing to have so wide a tenderness, and only
a great poet can possess it and use it well."--_Stopford A. Brooke_.
"Tennyson is a great master of pathos; knows the very tones that go to
the heart; can arrest every one of these looks of upbraiding or appeal by
which human woe brings the tear into the human eye. The pathos is deep;
but it is the majesty not the prostration of grief."--_Peter Bayne_.
"Indeed the truth must be strongly borne in upon even the warmest
admirers of Tennyson that his recluse manner of life closed to him many
avenues of communication with the men and women of his day, and that,
whether as a result or cause of his exclusiveness, he had but little of
that restless, intellectual curiosity which constantly whets itself upon
new experiences, finds significance where others see confusion, and
beneath the apparently commonplace in human character reaches some
harmonizing truth. _Rizpah_ and _The Grandmother_ show what a rich
harvest he would have reaped had he cared more frequently to walk the
thoroughfares of life. His finely wrought character studies are very few
in number, and even the range of his types is disappointingly
narrow."--_Pelham Edgar_.
"No reader of Tennyson can miss the note of patriotism which he
perpetually sounds. He has a deep and genuine love of country, a pride
in the achievements of the past, a confidence in the greatness of the
future. And this sense of patriotism almost reaches insularity of view.
He looks out upon the larger world with a gentle commiseration, and
surveys its un-English habits and constitution with sympathetic contempt.
The patriotism of Tennyson is sober rather than glowing; it is meditative
rather than enthusiastic. Occasionally indeed, his words catch fire, and
the verse leaps onward with a sound of triumph, as in such a poem as _The
Charge of the Light Brigade_ or in such a glorious ballad as _The
Revenge_. Neither of these poems is likely to perish until the glory of
the nation perishes, and her deeds of a splendid chivalrous past sink
into oblivion, which only shameful cowardice can bring upon her. But as
a rule Tennyson's patriotism is not a contagious and inspiring
patriotism. It is meditative, philosophic, self-complacent. It rejoices
in the infallibility of the English judgment, the eternal security of
English institutions, the perfection of English forms of
government."--_W. J. Dawson_.
"Tennyson always speaks from the side of virtue; and not of that new and
strange virtue which some of our later poets have exalted, and which,
when it is stripped of its fine garments, turns out to be nothing else
than the unrestrained indulgence of every natural impulse; but rather of
that old fashioned virtue whose laws are 'self-reverence, self-knowledge,
self-control,' and which finds its highest embodiment in the morality of
the _New Testament_. There is a spiritual courage in his work, a force
of fate which conquers doubt and darkness, a light of inward hope which
burns dauntless under the shadow of death. Tennyson is the poet of
faith; faith as distinguished from cold dogmatism and the acceptance of
traditional creeds; faith which does not ignore doubt and mystery, but
triumphs over them and faces the unknown with fearless heart. The effect
of Christianity upon the poetry of Tennyson may be felt in its general
moral quality. By this it is not meant that he is always preaching. But
at the same time the poet can hardly help revealing, more by tone and
accent than by definite words, his moral sympathies. He is essentially
and characteristically a poet with a message. His poetry does not exist
merely for the sake of its own perfection of form. It is something more
than the sound of one who has a lovely voice and can play skilfully upon
an instrument. It is a poetry with a meaning and a purpose. It is a
voice that has something to say to us about life. When we read his poems
we feel our hearts uplifted, we feel that, after all it is worth while to
struggle towards the light, it is worth while to try to be upright and
generous and true and loyal and pure, for virtue is victory and goodness
is the only fadeless and immortal crown. The secret of the poet's
influence must lie in his spontaneous witness to the reality and
supremacy of the moral life. His music must thrill us with the
conviction that the humblest child of man has a duty, an ideal, a
destiny. He must sing of justice and of love as a sure reward, a
steadfast law, the safe port and haven of the soul."--_Henry Van Dyke_.