is but typical of his era, to him one of reposeful content and calm,
reasoning progress. Of permanent, lasting value much of his verse
undoubtedly is, but not all of it will escape the indifference of
posterity or the measuring-rod and censure, it may be, of the future
critic. He had not the stirring strains or the careless rapture of other
and earlier poets of the motherland,--his characteristic is more
contemplative and brooding,--yet his range is unusually comprehensive
and his power varied and sustained, as well as marked by the highest
qualities of rhythmic beauty. In the idyll, where he specially shines,
we have much that is lovely and limpid, with abounding instances of that
felicitous word-painting for which he was noted. This is especially seen
in the simple pastoral idylls, such as 'Dora,' 'The May Queen,' and 'The
Miller's Daughter,' or in those tender lyrics such as 'Mariana,' 'Sir
Galahad,' 'The Dying Swan,' and 'The Talking Oak.' In the ballads and
songs, how felicitous again is the poet's work, and how rich yet
mellifluous is the strain! Had Tennyson written nothing else but these,
with the verse included in the volumes issued by him in 1832 and 1842,
how high would he have been placed in the choir of song, and how supreme
should we have deemed his art! In "The Princess" alone there are songs
that would have made any poet's reputation, while for music and color,
and especially for perfection of poetic workmanship, they are almost
matchless in their beauty.
Fortunately, however, the poet was to give us much even beyond these
surpassingly beautiful things, and make a more unique and distinctive
contribution to the verse of his era. In the years that followed the
production of his early writings the poet matures in thought as his art
ripens and reaches still higher qualities of craftsmanship. Recluse as
he was, he moreover had his experiences of life and drank deeply of
sorrow's cup, as we see in "In Memoriam,"--that noble tribute to his
youthful friend, Arthur Hallam, with its grand hymnal qualities and
powerful and reverent lessons for an age shifting in its beliefs and
unconfirmed in its faith. In later work from his pen we also see the
Laureate--for he has now received official recognition from his
nation--in his relations to the culture as well as to the thought of his
time, keeping pace with the age in all its complex engrossments and
problems. This is shown in much and varied work turned out with its
author's loving interest in the poetic art, and with characteristic
delicacy and finish. The most important labor of this later time
includes "The Princess," "Maud and Other Poems," "Enoch Arden," the
dramas "Becket," "Queen Mary," and "Harold," "Tiresias," "Demeter," "The
Foresters," but above all, and most notably, that grand epic of King
Arthur's time,--"The Idylls of the King." In the latter, the most
characteristic, and perhaps the most permanent, of Tennyson's work, the
poet manifests his historic sense and love for England's legendary past,
and achieves his design not only to glorify it, but to imbue it with a
deep ethical motive and underlying purpose, the expression of his own
chivalrous, knightly soul and strenuous, thoughtful, and blameless life.
In these splendid tales of knight-errantry we have the full flower of
the poet's genius, narrated in the true romantic spirit, but with an
ideality and imagination quite Tennysonian, and with a spiritualistic
touch in harmony with "the voice of the age" that reminds us that,--
"Our little systems have their day;
They have their day and cease to be:
They are but broken lights of thee,
And thou, O Lord, art more than they."
It is with such themes and speculations that Tennyson has powerfully and
impressively influenced his age. Beyond and above the mere artistry of
the poet, we recognize his interest in man's higher, spiritual being,
his love for nature, and awe in contemplating the heights and depths of
infinite time and space, ever looking upward and inward at the mysteries
of the world behind the phenomena of sense. It is difficult, in set
theological terms, to define the poet's creed, though we know that he
was won by the Broad Church teaching of his friends, Frederick Robertson
and Denison Maurice, and had himself many a battle to fight with honest
doubts until--as his 'Crossing the Bar' shows us--he finally conquered
and laid them. But while there is an absence of definite doctrine in his
work there is no question about his religious convictions or of his
belief in the eternal verities, the immanence of God in man and the
universe. Throughout his poems he assumes the existence of a great
Spirit and recognizes that our souls are a part of Him, however Faith at
times seems to veil her face from the poet, and all appears a mystery,
though a mystery presided over by infinite Power and Love. The great
problems of metaphysics and of man's origin and destiny, we are told,
occupied much of his thought, and he dwelt upon them with eager, intense
interest, and touched upon them with great candor, earnestness, and
truthfulness. No sophistry could shake his belief in man's immortality,
for without belief in this doctrine the human race, he was convinced,
had not incentive enough to virtue, while all man's inspirations were
otherwise meaningless. For the doctrine of Evolution, in its
materialistic aspect, he had nothing but scorn, though he accepted it in
the more spiritual guise with which Russel Wallace propounded it. If we
come from the brutes we are nevertheless linked with the Divine, he
believed, and it was the Divine in man that was to conquer the brute
within him, and, in the upward struggle, work out salvation. So, in the
realm of physical science, on the principles of which, as Huxley tells
us, he had a great grasp, the poet, while appalled by the mystery,
accepts and indeed rejoices in its truths, though he cannot acquiesce in
a godless world or in the denial of a life to come, in which the race,
through infinite love, shall be brought into union with God.
But leaving here Tennyson's speculations and beliefs,--a most
interesting part of the poet's analytical and reflective character,--let
us look for a little at the man personally, and record briefly the chief
incidents in his quiet though ideal home-life. To those who know the
Memoir by his son, Hallam Tennyson,--a memoir that while paying honor to
filial reverence and devotion is at the same time and in all respects
most worthy of its high theme,--the events in the poet's life will
hardly need dwelling upon, though they throw much light on, and impart
the distinction of a high dignity to, the Laureate's work. The life
Hallam Tennyson describes was, we know, not lived in the public eye, and
was wholly without sensational elements or any of the vapid interests
which usually attach to a man whose name is, in a special sense, public
property, and about whom the world was eagerly, and often officiously,
curious. The life the poet lived, in a popular sense, lacked all that
usually attracts the masses, for he was personally little known to his
generation, rarely seen among large gatherings of the people, and, great
Englishman as he was, was almost a stranger, in his later years at
least, in the English metropolis, or, if we except the seats of the
universities, in any of the chief towns of the kingdom. And yet, in
another and a higher sense, the century has hardly known among its many
intellectual forces one that has been more influential in its effect
upon literary art, or in certain directions has more potently influenced
the ideals and more profoundly given expression to the ethical and
philosophic thought of the time. Secluded as his life was, it was one
not of obscurity or of mere asceticism; on the contrary, it was rich in
all the elements that make for a great reputation, and ever devoted to
strenuous, elevating purpose, and to an ideal poetic career.
So far as his tastes and opportunity offered, Tennyson's life, moreover,
was enriched by many wise and noble friendships, and by intimacy with
not a few of the best and most thoughtful minds of his age. It was
spent, we rejoice to think also, in unceasing toil in and for his high
art, with a resulting productiveness which proved the extent and varied
range of his labors as well as the mastery of his craft.
Until the appearance of the biography referred to, we had known the
Laureate almost wholly through his books. Now, thanks to the
authoritative record of his accomplished surviving son, we know the poet
as he lived, and feel that behind his writings there is a personality of
the most interesting and impressive kind. It is a personality such as
consorts with the opinions which most thoughtful readers of Tennyson's
writings must have had of one of the greatest and serenest minds of the
age,--a poet who, aside from the splendor of his workmanship and the
beauty and melody of his verse, has greatly enriched the poetic
literature of the century, and has, we feel, given profound thought to
the intellectual problems and spiritual aspirations of his era. Nor does
the Memoir, as a revelation of the poet's intellectual and personal
life, fall away, on any page of it, from the high plane on which it has
been prepared and written. There is no undue invasion, which a son's
pride might be apt to make, of domestic privacy, and no dealing with
irrelevant topics or elaboration of those set forth with becoming
modesty and restraint; far less is there the discussion of any subject,
for a trivial or vain purpose. Throughout the work we meet with no
unnecessary lifting of veils or treatment of themes merely to satisfy
morbid curiosity. Everywhere there is the evidence of sound judgment,
unimpeachable taste, and a wholesome sanity. This is especially the case
in the frank revelation of the poet's views on religion and his attitude
towards scientific and theological thought, to which we have ourselves
referred. In this respect, a large debt is due to the biographer for
setting before the reader, not only the high ethical purpose which
Tennyson had in view in selecting the themes of his poems and in the
mode of handling them, but, as we have said, in showing us what beyond
peradventure were his religious opinions, and, despite a certain
curtaining of gloom, how profoundly he was influenced by faith in the
Divine life. Nor is the least interest in the Memoir to be found in the
light the biographer throws on the poet's writings as a whole--how they
were conceived and elaborated, and on the often hidden meaning that
underlies some of the most thoughtful verse. This, to students of the
Laureate's writings, is of high value, in addition to the service
rendered by the biographer in tracing in his father's poetic work the
influences which fashioned it and the pains he took to give it its
marvellous beauty and artistic finish of expression.
It is this instructive as well as skilled and dignified treatment, with
the vast literary and deep personal interest in the life, that will
commend the Memoir to all who are proud of the Laureate's fame, and
wished to have nothing written that was unworthy of either the poet or
the man, or that would in the least detract from his laurels. Nor does
the restraint which the biographer imposes upon himself conceal from us
the man in his human aspects, or lead him to set before the reader an
imaginary, rather than a veritable and real, portraiture. We have a
picture, it is true, of an almost ideal domestic life, and of a man of
rare gifts and fine culture, whose work and career have been and are the
pride and glory of the English-speaking race. But we have also the story
of an author not free from human weaknesses, and though endowed with
manifold and great gifts, yet who had to labor long and earnestly to
perfect himself in his art, and in his early years had much
discouragement and not a little adversity to contend with. With all the
toil and stress his early years had known, when success came to the poet
no one was less unspoiled by it; and when sunshine fell upon and gilded
his life, maturing years brought him serenity, happiness, and, at
length, peace.
Alfred Tennyson was born at his father's rectory, Somersby,
Lincolnshire, August 6,1809. He was the fourth of twelve children, seven
of whom were sons, two of them, Frederick and Charles, being endowed,
like Alfred, with poetic gifts. The poet's mother, a woman of sweet and
tender disposition, had much to do in moulding the future Laureate's
character; while from his father, a man of fine culture, he received not
only much of his education, but his bent towards a recluse, bookish
career. Alfred was from his earliest days a retired, shy child, fond of
reading and given to rhyming, and with a characteristic love of nature
and of quiet rural life. Later on he had a passion for the sea-coast,
and for those scenes of storm and stress about the seagirt shores of old
England which he was so feelingly and with such poetic beauty to depict
in "Sea Dreams," and in those incomparable songs, embodiments at once of
sorrow and of faith, 'Break, break, break,' and 'Crossing the Bar.'
Besides the education he received from his scholarly father, and at a
school at Louth for four years, young Tennyson spent some years at
Trinity College, Cambridge, where, though he did not take a degree, he
won in 1829 the Chancellor's medal for the best English poem of the
year, the subject of which was 'Timbuctoo.' At college he had the good
fortune to number among his friends several men who later in life were,
like himself, to rise to eminence,--such as Henry Alford (afterwards
Dean of Canterbury), R.C. Trench (later Archbishop of Dublin), C.
Merivale (historian and Dean of Ely), Monckton Milnes (Lord Houghton),
James Spedding (editor of Lord Bacon's Works), Macaulay, Thackeray, and,
most endeared of all, Arthur Henry Hallam, son of the historian, whose
memory Tennyson has immortalized in "In Memoriam." With him at college
was also his brother Charles, one year his senior, with whom he
collaborated in the collection of verse, issued in 1827, under the title
of "Poems by Two Brothers." In 1830, Tennyson made a journey to the
Pyrenees with Arthur Hallam, who was engaged to the poet's sister
Emilia, and in the same year he published an independent volume,
entitled "Poems chiefly Lyrical." In this, his first venture alone in
poetry, and in another issued in 1832, Tennyson was to manifest to the
world his poetic powers and art, for they contained, besides much
rhythmical and contemplative verse, such poems as 'Mariana,' 'Claribel;
'Lilian,' 'Lady Clare,' 'The Lotus Eaters,' 'A Dream of Pair Women,'
'The May Queen,' and 'The Miller's Daughter,' In spite of the great
promise bodied forth in these works, the volumes were subject to not a
little unfavorable criticism, which stayed his further publishing for a
period of ten years, though not the furtherance of his creative work,
nor his enthusiastic efforts towards increasing the perfection of
his art.
It was not until 1842 that the poet again appeared in print, this time
with a volume to which he appended his name, "Poems by Alfred Tennyson,"
and which gave him high rank among the acknowledged singers of his
day,--Wordsworth, Southey, Landor, Campbell, Rogers, and Leigh Hunt, in
England; and in the New World, Longfellow, Bryant, Lowell, Whittier, and
Emerson. The poet-contemporaries of his youth--Byron, Scott, Coleridge,
Shelley, and Keats--had by this time all died, and in 1843 Southey died,
when Wordsworth, whom Tennyson reverenced, became Poet Laureate. The
gap occasioned by the death of these early English poets of the century
was now to be filled in large measure by Tennyson, though among the
writers of song to arise were the Brownings, Rossetti, Matthew Arnold,
and Swinburne. Critical appreciation of the volume of 1842 was happily
encouraging to the poet; indeed, it was most gratifying, for its many
remarkable beauties were now justly and adequately appraised,
particularly such fine new themes as the volume contained--'Ulysses,'
'Godiva,' 'The Two Voices,' 'The Talking Oak,' 'Oenone,' 'Locksley
Hall,' 'The Vision of Sin,' and 'Morte D'Arthur,' the germ of the future
"Idylls of the King." Nor on this side the Atlantic did the new volume
lack substantial recognition, and from such competent critics as Emerson
and Hawthorne; while among his English contemporaries Tennyson became,
if we except for the time Wordsworth, the acknowledged head of English
song. At this period the poet resided in London or its neighborhood, his
family home in Lincolnshire having been broken up in 1837, six years
after the death of his father. Here, in spite of the secluded life he
led, he became a notable figure in literary circles, and greatly
increased the range of his friends, correspondents, and admirers. Among
the latter were the Carlyles, Thomas and his clever wife Jane being
especially drawn to the poet, and to them we owe interesting sketches
of the personal appearance of Tennyson at this time. Mrs. Carlyle, in
one of her delightful letters gossiping about Dickens, Bulwer-Lytton,
and Tennyson, esteems the latter "the greatest genius of the three,"
adding that "besides, he is a very handsome man, and a noble-hearted
one, with something of the gypsy in his appearance, which for me is
perfectly charming." This is the historian, her husband's, piece of
portraiture: "A fine, large-featured, dim-eyed, bronze-colored,
shaggy-headed man, dusty, smoky, free-and-easy; who swims, outwardly and
inwardly, with great composure in an articulate element as of tranquil
chaos and tobacco smoke; great now and then when he does emerge; a most
restful, brotherly, solid-hearted man." Another portrait we have from
the Chelsea philosopher and scorner of shams which describes the poet
very humanly as "one of the finest-looking men in the world, with a
great shock of rough, dusky, dark hair; bright, laughing, hazel eyes;
massive, aquiline face, most massive, yet most delicate; of sallow-brown
complexion, almost Indian looking; clothes cynically loose,
free-and-easy; smokes infinite tobacco. His voice is musical, metallic,
fit for loud laughter and piercing wail, and all that may lie between;
speech and speculation free and plenteous. I do not meet in these late
decades such company over a pipe! We shall see what he will grow to."
Besides the Carlyles and other notable contemporaries, Tennyson numbered
at this time among his intimates John Sterling, whose life was written
by the author of "Sartor Resartus," James Spedding, Bacon's editor, who
wrote a fine critique of the 1842 volume of poems for the Edinburgh
Review, Aubrey De Vere, Edmund Lushington, A.P. Stanley (afterwards
Dean of Westminster), and Edward Fitzgerald, the future translator of
the "Rubaiyat," or Quatrains of the Persian Poet, Omar Khayyam. These
were all enthusiastic admirers of Tennyson's work and art, and his close
personal friends, who have left on record many interesting sketches of
the poet in their published writings, or in letters to him, and
especially in reminiscences furnished for the Memoir by the poet's son.
Nine years before the appearance of the 1842 volume of Tennyson's verse
the poet's bosom friend, Arthur Hallam, died at an immature age at
Vienna, and his death was the subject of much brooding in noble, elegiac
verse, written, as was Milton's 'Lycidas,' to commemorate the loss of
one very dear to the poet. In "In Memoriam," as all know, Tennyson
sought to assuage his grief and give fine, artistic expression to his
profound sorrow at the loss of his companion and friend; but the work is
more than a labored monument of woe, since it enshrines reflections of
the most exalted and inspiring character on the eternally momentous
themes of life, death, and immortality. The work was published in 1850,
and it at once challenged the admiration of the world for the perfection
of its art, no less than for its high contemplative beauty. This was the
year when Wordsworth passed to the grave, and Tennyson, in his room, was
given the English laureateship. In this year, also, we find him happily
married to Emily S. Sellwood, a lady of Berks, to whom the poet had been
engaged since 1837. With his bride he took up house at Twickenham, near
London, where his son, Hallam Tennyson, was born in 1852. In the
following year he removed to Farringford, on the Isle of Wight, which
was to be his home for forty years, and where, as his son tells us, some
of his best-known works were written. Here, in 1854, his second son,
Lionel, was born, whose young life of promise was terminated by jungle
fever thirty-two years later on a return voyage from India,--all that
was mortal of him finding repose in the depths of the Red Sea. To
complete the chief incidents in the poet's personal career, we may here
record that while Tennyson acquired another home at Aldworth,
Surrey,--where he died Oct. 6, 1892, followed some four years later by
his wife,--his happiest days were spent at Farringford, the pilgrimage
place of many eminent worshippers of the poet's muse, where was
dispensed an unostentatious but open-handed and genial British
hospitality. It should be added that, besides the perquisites which
attach to the office of the Poet Laureate, Tennyson was given from 1845
a pension of £200 ($1000) and that, while in 1865 he refused a
baronetcy, in 1884 he accepted a peerage, and had the honor of burial
(Oct. 12, 1892) in Westminster Abbey.
We now revert to the poet's early, or, rather, to his middle-age,
creative years, and to a resume of his principal writings, with a brief,
running comment on his message and art. In 1847, three years before he
became Laureate, he published "The Princess," a charming narrative poem
in blank verse, which, though it abounds in fine descriptions and has an
obvious moral in the treatment of the theme,--the woman question of
today,--is inherently lacking in unity and strength, as well as weak in
the depicting of the characters. In later editions the poem was amended
in several faulty respects, and was especially enriched by the insertion
between the cantos of many lovely and now familiar songs, which serve
not only to bind together the whole structure of the poem, but to
enhance and enforce its high moral meaning. Any analysis of "The
Princess" is here deemed unnecessary, since it must not only be familiar
to most readers of the poet's works, but familiar also in the varied
annotated editions of such editors as Rolfe, Woodberry, and Wilson
Farrand. Familiar, it is believed, also, that it will be to Tennysonian
students in the "Study of the Princess," with critical and explanatory
notes by Dr. S.E. Dawson, of Montreal (now of Ottawa, Canada),--an able
commentary which received the approval of Lord Tennyson himself, and
elicited from him a highly interesting letter to the author on points in
the poem either misunderstood or not discerningly apprehended by other
critics and reviewers. The purport of the poem, it may be said, however,
is to frown upon revolutionary attempts to alter the position of women,
of scholastically be-gowned and college-capped dames, who would seek by
other than nature's ways to put the sex upon an equality with man, while
repressing their own individuality, doing violence to their maternal
instincts, and trampling upon their "gracious household ways." In the
handling of the "medley" Tennyson brings into exercise not only his
far-seeing powers, which were greatly in advance of his time, but his
gifts of raillery and humor, especially in the early divisions of the
poem, as well as his high, serious motives in the moral lessons to which
he points in the later cantos, where he aims at the elevation of women
in correspondence with the diversity of their natures, for, as he
himself says, "Woman is not undeveloped man, but diverse." His ideal of
perfect womanhood he would attain through the awakening power of the
affections and the transforming power of love, rather than by ignoring
the difference of physique, founding women's universities, and becoming
blue-stockinged high priestesses of learning. Of the medley of
characters in the poem, poet-princes in disguise at the college,
violet-hooded lady principals,
"With prudes for proctors, dowagers for deans,
And sweet girl-graduates in their golden hair,"