THE POET WHO VOICED THE ASPIRATIONS OF HIS AGE--"LOCKSLEY
HALL," "IN MEMORIAM" AND "THE IDYLLS OF THE KING" AMONG HIS
BEST WORKS.
Of all the great English writers of the Victorian age it is probable
that the next century will give the foremost place to Tennyson. Better
than any other poet of his day, he stands as a type of the English
people in obedience to law, in strong religious faith, in splendid
imaginative force and in a certain unyielding cast of mind that made
him bide his time during the dark years when he was bitterly
criticized or coldly neglected. Tennyson had to the full the poet's
temperament, but he had also a superb physique, which carried him into
his eighty-fourth year. From a boy he was a lover of nature, and in
nearly every poem that he wrote are found many proofs of his close
observation in English woods and fields. Through a period of general
skepticism he kept unimpaired his strong faith in God and in
immortality that lends so much force to his best verse.
[Illustration: ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON AFTER AN ENGRAVING BY G.J.
STODART FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY J. MAYALL]
Tennyson's genius found its natural expression in verse, and it is his
distinction that while he explored many realms of thought he was
always clear and always musical. Browning had more passion, but it was
the misfortune of the author of _The Ring and the Book_ that he could
not refrain from a cramped and obscure style of verse that makes much
of his work very hard reading. Many Browning societies have been
formed to study the works of the poet whom they are proud to call
master; but Tennyson needs no societies, as the man in the street and
the woman whose soul is troubled can understand every line he has
written. Nor is Tennyson lacking in passion, as any one may see by
reading _Locksley Hall_ or _Maud_.
Tennyson summed up in his poetry all the spiritual aspiration and the
eager search for knowledge of his time. He explored all domains of
thought, and he enriched his verse with the fruit of his studies. All
the great elemental forces are found in his poems: he is the laureate
of love and sorrow, of grief and aspiration. Throughout his verse runs
the great natural law that the man who is not pure in heart can never
see the glory of the poet's vision.
The purity of his own life was reflected in his verse, just as the mad
license and the furious self-indulgence of Byron are mirrored in _Don
Juan_, _Manfred_ and _Cain_. Even to extreme old age Tennyson
preserved that high poetic faculty which he manifested in early youth.
One of his latest poems, _Crossing the Bar_, is also one of the finest
in the language, breathing the old man's assurance of a life beyond
the grave and a reunion with the dear friend of his youth, whom he
mourned and immortalized in _In Memoriam_.
Alfred Tennyson had one of the finest lives in the roll of English
authors. He was born in 1809 and lived to 1892. He spent his early
years in one of the most beautiful parts of Lincolnshire. He enjoyed
the personal training of his father, a very accomplished clergyman,
and much of his boyhood and youth was spent in the open air. In this
way he absorbed that knowledge of birds and animals, trees and flowers
and all the aspects of nature which is reflected in his verse. As a
youth he experimented in many styles of verse, and when only eighteen
he issued, with his brother Charles, _Poems by Two Brothers_. The next
year he and Charles entered Trinity College, Cambridge. There they
received the greatest impulse toward culture in a society of
undergraduates known as the "Apostles." Its membership included
Thackeray, Trench, Spedding, Monckton Milnes and Alfred and Arthur
Henry Hallam, sons of the famous author of _The Middle Ages_.
In his second year at college Tennyson won the Chancellor's gold medal
with his prize poem, _Timbuctoo_, and in the following year he
published his first volume, _Poems, Chiefly Lyrical_. He left college
without a degree, and in 1833 he issued another volume of poems which
contained some of his best work--_The Lady of Shalott_, _The Lotos
Eaters_, _The Palace of Art_ and _A Dream of Fair Women_. Any one of
these poems if issued to-day would make the reputation of a poet, but
this book made little impression on the Victorian public which had
lost its taste for poetry and was devoted mainly to prose fiction. The
world has yet to catch the note of this master singer.
In 1837 Arthur Hallam, Tennyson's friend and other self, the one man
who predicted that he would be the greatest poet of his age, died
suddenly in Vienna while traveling abroad. The shock made a profound
impression on Tennyson. For ten years he put forth no work. Finally,
in 1842, he issued two volumes of poems that at once caught the public
fancy. Among the poems that brought him fame were _Locksley Hall_,
_Lady Godiva_, _Ulysses_, _The Two Voices_ and _Morte d' Arthur_. The
latter was the seed of the splendid _Idylls of the King_. Five years
later he published _The Princess_, with its beautiful songs, and three
years after _In Memoriam_ the greatest elegiac poem in the language,
in which he lamented the fate of Arthur Hallam and poured forth his
own grief over this irreparable loss. In the same year he married Miss
Emily Sellwood, who made his home a haven of rest and of whom he once
said that with her "the peace of God came into my life."
_Maud_, his most dramatic poem, was issued in 1855. As early as 1859
he published the first part of _The Idylls of the King_, but it was
not until 1872 that the complete sequence of the _Idylls_ was given
to the public. These Arthurian legends are cast by Tennyson in his
most musical blank verse, and he has given to them a tinge of
mysticism that seems to lift them above the everyday world into a
realm of pure romance and chivalry.
[Illustration: FACSIMILE OF TENNYSON'S ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPT OF
"CROSSING THE BAR" COPYRIGHT BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY]
_Enoch Arden_, a domestic idyll, written in 1864, made a great hit. It
was followed by several plays--_Queen Mary_, _Harold_, _Becket_ and
others--all finely written, but none appealing to the great public. Up
to his last years Tennyson remained the real laureate of his people,
his words always tinged with the fire of inspiration. Only three years
before his death he wrote _Crossing the Bar_, a poem which met with
instant response from the English-speaking world because of its signs
of courage in the face of death and its proofs of steadfast faith in
the life beyond the grave.
No adequate estimate of Tennyson's work can be made in the small space
allotted to this article. All that can be done is to mention a few of
his best works and to quote a few of his stirring lines. If the reader
will study these poems he will be pretty sure to read more of
Tennyson. To my mind, _Locksley Hall_ is Tennyson's finest poem, as
true to-day as when it was written seventy years ago. The long,
rolling, trochaic verse, like the billows on the coast that it
pictures, suits the thought. The poem is the passionate lament of a
returned soldier from India over the mercenary marriage of the cousin
whom he loved. Here are a few of the lines that will never die:
Many a night I saw the Pleiades, rising through the mellow shade,
Glitter like a swarm of fireflies tangled in a silver braid.
Love took up the harp of Life, and smote on all the chords with might;
Smote the chord of Self, that, trembling, pass'd in music out of sight.
Cursed be the sickly forms that err from honest Nature's rule!
Cursed be the gold that gilds the straiten'd forehead of a fool!
Comfort? Comfort scorn'd of devils! this is truth the poet sings,
That a sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembering happier things.
But the jingling of the guinea helps the hurt that Honor feels,
And the nations do but murmur, snarling at each other's heels.
Mated with a squalid savage--what to me were sun or clime?
I the heir of all the ages in the foremost files of time.
Not in vain the distance beacons. Forward, forward, let us range,
Let the great world spin forever down the ringing grooves of change.
Thro' the shadow of the globe we sweep into the younger day:
Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay.
It would be difficult among the poets of the last century to parallel
these passages for their imaginative sweep and magnetic appeal to the
reader. The new criticism that disparages Tennyson and raises Browning
to the seventh heaven calls _Locksley Hall_ old-fashioned and
sentimental, but to me it is the greatest poem of its age. Next to
this I would place _In Memoriam_, which has never received its just
recognition. Readers of Taine will recall his flippant Gaelic comment
on Tennyson's conventional but cold words of lament. Nothing, it seems
to me, is further from the truth. The many beautiful lines in the poem
depict the changing moods of the man who mourned for his dead and
finally found comfort in the words of the Bible--the only source of
comfort in this world for the sorely wounded heart. The whole poem, as
his son Hallam says, emphasizes the poet's belief "in an omnipotent
and all-loving God, who has revealed himself through the highest
self-sacrificing love in the freedom of the human will and in the
immortality of the soul."
The meter of _In Memoriam_ serves to fix the poem in the memory. It
seems to fit the thought with perfect naturalness. It is not strange
that Queen Victoria should have placed this poem next to the Bible as
a means of comfort after the loss of her husband, whom she loved so
dearly that all the attractions of power and wealth never made her
forget him a single day.
_The Idylls of the King_ are also unappreciated in these days, yet
they contain a body of splendid poetry that cannot be duplicated. They
represent the author's dreams from early youth, when his imagination
was first fired by old Malory's chronicle of the good King Arthur.
They breathe a chivalry as lofty as Sidney's, and they teach many
ethical lessons that it would do the present-day world good to take to
heart. These noble poems, cast in the most musical blank verse in our
literature, were the work of thirty years, written only when the poet
felt genuine inspiration. They represent, as the poet told his son,
"the dream of a man coming into practical life and ruined by one sin.
It is not the history of one man or of one generation, but of a whole
cycle of generations." And the old poet added these fine words:
"Poetry is like shot silk with many glancing colors. Every reader must
find his own interpretation according to his ability and according to
his sympathy with the poet."
Other fine poems of Tennyson which one should read are the noble _Ode
on the Death of the Duke of Wellington_, _Break, Break, Break_, the
perfect songs in _The Princess_, and _Crossing the Bar_. If you read
these aright you will wish to know more of Tennyson, the poet who
reconciled science and religion and kept his old faith strong to the
end.