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I. BOYHOOD—CAMBRIDGE—EARLY POEMS. 1
II. POEMS OF 1831–1833. 22
III. 1837–1842. 35
IV. 1842–848—THE PRINCESS. 46
V. IN MEMORIAM. 61
VI. AFTER IN MEMORIAM. 81
VII. THE IDYLLS OF THE KING. 103
VIII ENOCH ARDEN. THE DRAMAS. 158
IX. LAST YEARS. 194
X. 1890. 203
XI. LAST CHAPTER. 212
I
BOYHOOD—CAMBRIDGE—EARLY POEMS.
THE life and work of Tennyson present something like the normal type of
what, in circumstances as fortunate as mortals may expect, the life and
work of a modern poet ought to be. A modern poet, one says, because even
poetry is now affected by the division of labour. We do not look to the
poet for a large share in the practical activities of existence: we do
not expect him, like Æschylus and Sophocles, Theognis and Alcæus, to take
a conspicuous part in politics and war; or even, as in the Age of Anne,
to shine among wits and in society. Life has become, perhaps, too
specialised for such multifarious activities. Indeed, even in ancient
days, as a Celtic proverb and as the picture of life in the Homeric epics
prove, the poet was already a man apart—not foremost among statesmen and
rather backward among warriors. If we agree with a not unpopular
opinion, the poet ought to be a kind of “Titanic” force, wrecking himself
on his own passions and on the nature of things, as did Byron, Burns,
Marlowe, and Musset. But Tennyson’s career followed lines really more
normal, the lines of the life of Wordsworth, wisdom and self-control
directing the course of a long, sane, sound, and fortunate existence.
The great physical strength which is commonly the basis of great mental
vigour was not ruined in Tennyson by poverty and passion, as in the case
of Burns, nor in forced literary labour, as in those of Scott and
Dickens. For long he was poor, like Wordsworth and Southey, but never
destitute. He made his early effort: he had his time of great sorrow,
and trial, and apparent failure. With practical wisdom he conquered
circumstances; he became eminent; he outlived reaction against his
genius; he died in the fulness of a happy age and of renown. This
full-orbed life, with not a few years of sorrow and stress, is what
Nature seems to intend for the career of a divine minstrel. If Tennyson
missed the “one crowded hour of glorious life,” he had not to be content
in “an age without a name.”
It was not Tennyson’s lot to illustrate any modern theory of the origin
of genius. Born in 1809 of a Lincolnshire family, long connected with
the soil but inconspicuous in history, Tennyson had nothing Celtic in his
blood, as far as pedigrees prove. This is unfortunate for one school of
theorists. His mother (genius is presumed to be derived from mothers)
had a genius merely for moral excellence and for religion. She is
described in the poem of _Isabel_, and was “a remarkable and saintly
woman.” In the male line, the family was not (as the families of genius
ought to be) brief of life and unhealthy. “The Tennysons never die,”
said the sister who was betrothed to Arthur Hallam. The father, a
clergyman, was, says his grandson, “a man of great ability,” and his
“excellent library” was an element in the education of his family. “My
father was a poet,” Tennyson said, “and could write regular verse very
skilfully.” In physical type the sons were tall, strong, and unusually
dark: Tennyson, when abroad, was not taken for an Englishman; at home,
strangers thought him “foreign.” Most of the children had the
temperament, and several of the sons had some of the accomplishments, of
genius: whence derived by way of heredity is a question beyond
conjecture, for the father’s accomplishment was not unusual. As Walton
says of the poet and the angler, they “were born to be so”: we know no
more.
The region in which the paternal hamlet of Somersby lies, “a land of
quiet villages, large fields, grey hillsides, and noble tall-towered
churches, on the lower slope of a Lincolnshire wold,” does not appear to
have been rich in romantic legend and tradition. The folk-lore of
Lincolnshire, of which examples have been published, does seem to have a
peculiar poetry of its own, but it was rather the humorous than the
poetical aspect of the country-people that Tennyson appears to have
known. In brief, we have nothing to inform us as to how genius came into
that generation of Tennysons which was born between 1807 and 1819. A
source and a cause there must have been, but these things are hidden,
except from popular science.
Precocity is not a sign of genius, but genius is perhaps always
accompanied by precocity. This is especially notable in the cases of
painting, music, and mathematics; but in the matter of literature genius
may chiefly show itself in acquisition, as in Sir Walter Scott, who when
a boy knew much, but did little that would attract notice. As a child
and a boy young Tennyson was remarked both for acquisition and
performance. His own reminiscences of his childhood varied somewhat in
detail. In one place we learn that at the age of eight he covered a
slate with blank verse in the manner of Jamie Thomson, the only poet with
whom he was then acquainted. In another passage he says, “The first
poetry that moved me was my own at five years old. When I was eight I
remember making a line I thought grander than Campbell, or Byron, or
Scott. I rolled it out, it was this—
‘With slaughterous sons of thunder rolled the flood’—
great nonsense, of course, but I thought it fine!”
It _was_ fine, and was thoroughly Tennysonian. Scott, Campbell, and
Byron probably never produced a line with the qualities of this nonsense
verse. “Before I could read I was in the habit on a stormy day of
spreading my arms to the wind and crying out, ‘I hear a voice that’s
speaking in the wind,’ and the words ‘far, far away’ had always a strange
charm for me.” A late lyric has this overword, _Far_, _far away_!
A boy of eight who knew the contemporary poets was more or less
precocious. Tennyson also knew Pope, and wrote hundreds of lines in
Pope’s measure. At twelve the boy produced an epic, in Scott’s manner,
of some six thousand lines. He “never felt himself more truly inspired,”
for the sense of “inspiration” (as the late Mr Myers has argued in an
essay on the “Mechanism of Genius”) has little to do with the actual
value of the product. At fourteen Tennyson wrote a drama in blank verse.
A chorus from this play (as one guesses), a piece from “an unpublished
drama written very early,” is published in the volume of 1830:—
“The varied earth, the moving heaven,
The rapid waste of roving sea,
The fountain-pregnant mountains riven
To shapes of wildest anarchy,
By secret fire and midnight storms
That wander round their windy cones.”
These lines are already Tennysonian. There is the classical transcript,
“the varied earth,” _dædala tellus_. There is the geological interest in
the forces that shape the hills. There is the use of the favourite word
“windy,” and later in the piece—
“The troublous autumn’s _sallow_ gloom.”
The young poet from boyhood was original in his manner.
Byron made him _blasé_ at fourteen. Then Byron died, and Tennyson
scratched on a rock “Byron is dead,” on “a day when the whole world
seemed darkened for me.” Later he considered Byron’s poetry “too much
akin to rhetoric.” “Byron is not an artist or a thinker, or a creator in
the higher sense, but a strong personality; he is endlessly clever, and
is now unduly depreciated.” He “did give the world another heart and new
pulses, and so we are kept going.” But “he was dominated by Byron till
he was seventeen, when he put him away altogether.”
In his boyhood, despite the sufferings which he endured for a while at
school at Louth; despite bullying from big boys and masters, Tennyson
would “shout his verses to the skies.” “Well, Arthur, I mean to be
famous,” he used to say to one of his brothers. He observed nature very
closely by the brook and the thundering sea-shores: he was never a
sportsman, and his angling was in the manner of the lover of _The
Miller’s Daughter_. He was seventeen (1826) when _Poems by Two Brothers_
(himself and his brother Frederick) was published with the date 1827.
These poems contain, as far as I have been able to discover, nothing
really Tennysonian. What he had done in his own manner was omitted,
“being thought too much out of the common for the public taste.” The
young poet had already saving common-sense, and understood the public.
Fragments of the true gold are found in the volume of 1830, others are
preserved in the Biography. The ballad suggested by _The Bride of
Lammermoor_ was not unworthy of Beddoes, and that novel, one cannot but
think, suggested the opening situation in _Maud_, where the hero is a
modern Master of Ravenswood in his relation to the rich interloping
family and the beautiful daughter. To this point we shall return. It
does not appear that Tennyson was conscious in _Maud_ of the suggestion
from Scott, and the coincidence may be merely accidental.
_The Lover’s Tale_, published in 1879, was mainly a work of the poet’s
nineteenth year. A few copies had been printed for friends. One of
these, with errors of the press, and without the intended alterations,
was pirated by an unhappy man in 1875. In old age Tennyson brought out
the work of his boyhood. “It was written before I had ever seen Shelley,
though it is called Shelleyan,” he said; and indeed he believed that his
work had never been imitative, after his earliest efforts in the manner
of Thomson and of Scott. The only things in _The Lover’s Tale_ which
would suggest that the poet here followed Shelley are the Italian scene
of the story, the character of the versification, and the extraordinary
luxuriance and exuberance of the imagery. {7} As early as 1868 Tennyson
heard that written copies of _The Lover’s Tale_ were in circulation. He
then remarked, as to the exuberance of the piece: “Allowance must be made
for abundance of youth. It is rich and full, but there are mistakes in
it. . . . The poem is the breath of young love.”
How truly Tennysonian the manner is may be understood even from the
opening lines, full of the original cadences which were to become so
familiar:—
“Here far away, seen from the topmost cliff,
Filling with purple gloom the vacancies
Between the tufted hills, the sloping seas
Hung in mid-heaven, and half way down rare sails,
White as white clouds, floated from sky to sky.”
The narrative in parts one and two (which alone were written in youth) is
so choked with images and descriptions as to be almost obscure. It is
the story, practically, of a love like that of Paul and Virginia, but the
love is not returned by the girl, who prefers the friend of the narrator.
Like the hero of _Maud_, the speaker has a period of madness and
illusion; while the third part, “The Golden Supper”—suggested by a story
of Boccaccio, and written in maturity—is put in the mouth of another
narrator, and is in a different style. The discarded lover, visiting the
vault which contains the body of his lady, finds her alive, and restores
her to her husband. The whole finished legend is necessarily not among
the author’s masterpieces. But perhaps not even Keats in his earliest
work displayed more of promise, and gave more assurance of genius. Here
and there come turns and phrases, “all the charm of all the Muses,” which
remind a reader of things later well known in pieces more mature. Such
lines are—
“Strange to me and sweet,
Sweet through strange years,”
and—
“Like to a low-hung and a fiery sky
Hung round with _ragged rims_ and burning folds.”