Chapter XII: Part 12

Who trusted God was love indeed,
And love Creation's final law--
Tho' Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek'd against his creed--

Who loved, who suffer'd countless ills,
Who battled for the True, the Just,
Be blown about the desert dust,
Or seal'd within the iron hills?...

O life as futile, then, as frail!
O for thy voice to soothe and bless!
What hope of answer, or redress?
Behind the veil, behind the veil.

He will not accept the suggestions which seem to empty human life of its deepest meanings. There must be some other solution.

One more quotation of a different kind--the common sad thought, never so beautifully expressed, of the places we have loved when bereft of our daily loving care--then passing into other hands and forgetting us, and becoming at last to others what they have been to us.

It is in these common universal _human_ themes that Tennyson with his exquisite musical touch, and sympathy, and unerring choice of significant detail, reaches the heart of every reader.

Unwatch'd, the garden bough shall sway,
The tender blossom flutter down,
Unloved, that beech will gather brown,
This maple burn itself away:

Unloved, the sunflower, shining fair,
Ray round with flames her disk of seed,
And many a rose-carnation feed
With summer spice the humming air:

Unloved, by many a sandy bar,
The brook shall babble down the plain,
At noon or when the lesser wain
Is twisting round the polar star.

(Omitting a stanza.)

Till from the garden and the wild
A fresh association blow,
And year by year the landscape grow
Familiar to the stranger's child.

As year by year the labourer tills
His wonted glebe, or lops the glades,
And year by year our memory fades
From all the circle of the hills.

I can quote no more.

The poem seems gradually to rise from the depths of sorrow and doubt to a new hope and faith--in short, to a new life. The marks of what it has passed through are seen in the deeper thought, the larger nature, and insight, and scope. The _soul_ has grown and strengthened, we may almost say.

In short, the poem is the inner history of a soul: our deepest feelings, our hopes, our fears, our longings, our weaknesses, our difficulties, all find penetrating, sympathetic, enlightening expression--terse, melodious, inspiring, deeply suggestive--in a word, we feel the magic of poetry.

I have no time left to deal with the large work, which occupied many years, "The Idylls of the King." It is a series--in blank verse, always melodious and often exquisite, giving the main incidents of the old Arthurian legend, which as a boy he had read with delight in old Malory's prose epic.

I must content myself with two brief references.

The first idyll, "Gareth and Lynette," is not in itself one of the most interesting[91]--dealing chiefly as it does with the picture of the eager boy, anxious to be one of Arthur's knights, who serves a year in menial place as a test of his obedience: but there is one passage which ought never to be omitted in speaking of Tennyson, viz. the answer of the seer when the boys ask him if the castle is enchanted.

The seer answers ironically, yet with a deep meaning, that it _is_ enchanted:

For there is nothing in it as it seems
Saving the King; tho' some there be that hold
The King a shadow, and the city real.

Then he tells them about the _vows_: which if they fear to take, he warns them

Pass not beneath this gateway, but abide
Without, among the cattle of the field,
For an ye hear a music, like enow
They are building still, seeing the city is built
To music, _therefore never built at all,
And therefore built for ever_.

Beneath the strangely beautiful surface meaning of these lines there lies the deep allegoric meaning that often what seems visionary is in truth a spiritual and eternal reality. It brings to mind the wonderful lines of Browning (in "Abt Vogler"):

The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard,
The passion that left the earth to lose itself in the sky,
Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard;
Enough that he heard it once, we shall hear it by and by.

The other point concerns the end of the poem. The last section is the Passing of Arthur; the old fragment "Morte d'Arthur" enlarged. One notable addition occurs at the very end.

In the earlier version of the fragment, after Arthur had passed away on the dark lake, with him the last hope also disappears.

We are only told:

Long stood Sir Bedivere,
Revolving many memories, till the hull
Look'd one black dot against the verge of dawn,
And on the mere the wailing died away.

In the fragment the end was tragic: the noble attempt failed; the hero and inspirer passed away, his aim defeated, his comrades slain or scattered, his life and efforts vain.

But in the final shape comes a new and very significant end:

Then from the dawn it seem'd there came, but faint,
As from beyond the limit of the world,
Like the last echo born of a great cry,
Sounds, as if some fair city were one voice,
Around a king returning from his wars.

Thereat once more he[92] moved about, and clomb
Ev'n to the highest he could climb--and saw,
Or thought he saw, the speck that bare the King
Somewhere far off, pass on and on, and go
From less to less, and vanish _into light_.
And the new sun rose, bringing the new year.

We feel, as we are meant to feel, that though the death of a noble soul, after unequal war with ill, is deeply sad--fitly pictured with sorrowful sounds and darkness of night--yet the great spirit cannot wholly die: the night breaks into a new day; and the day will be brighter for those who are left, because of the efforts and memories of the leader who is no more.

Tennyson is without doubt, from first to last, one of the great poetic artists. He is not often an inspired singer like Shelley, but he has other gifts which Shelley lacked--a self-restraint, an artistic finish, a fine and mature taste, a deep reverence for the past, a pervading sympathy with the broad currents of the best thought and feeling of the time. Sometimes this is (as we have seen) a weakness, but it is also the source of his greatest strength. He has not, like Wordsworth, given us a new insight, what I may almost call a new religion: but he has a wider range than Wordsworth, and a surer poetic touch. Wordsworth may be the greater teacher; for many of us he has opened a new world: he has touched the deepest springs of our nature. But Tennyson has left us gifts hardly less rare and precious. He has refined, enriched, beautified, in some sense almost remade our poetic language; he has shown that the classic eighteenth-century finish is not incompatible with the nineteenth-century deeper and wider thought: and, in a word, he has inwoven the golden thread of poetry with the main texture of the life, knowledge, feeling, experience, and ideals of the years whereof we are all alike inheritors.

TENNYSON: HIS LIFE AND WORK[93]

By the Right Hon. SIR ALFRED LYALL, G.C.B.

The biography of a great poet has seldom been so written as to enhance his reputation with the world at large. It is almost always the highest artist whose individuality, so to speak, is least discernible in his work, and who, like some divinity, is at his best when his mind and moods, his lofty purpose and his attitude toward the problems of life, are revealed only through the medium which he has chosen for revealing them to mankind. To lay bare the human side of a poet, to retail his domestic history, and to dwell upon his private relations with friends or family, will always interest the public enormously; but for himself it is often a perilous ordeal. The man of restless erratic genius, cut off in his prime like Byron or Shelley, leaves behind him a confession of faults and follies, while one who has lived long takes the risk of intellectual decline; or else, like Coleridge, Landor, and even Scott, he may in other ways suffer loss of dignity by the posthumous record of failings or mistakes. It is a rare coincidence that in this nineteenth century two poets of the first rank--Wordsworth and Tennyson--should each have passed the natural limit of fourscore years, steadily extending their reputation without material loss of their power, and completely fulfilling the ideal of a life devoted to their beautiful art, free alike from adventures and eccentricities, tranquil, blameless, and nobly dignified.

Such is the life which has been described to us in the _Memoir_ of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, by his son. In preparing it he had the singular advantage of very close and uninterrupted association for many years with his father, and of thorough acquaintance with his wishes and feelings in regard to the inevitable biography. In a brief preface, he touches, not without emotion, upon the aims and limitations of the task which it had become his duty to undertake.

"For my part," he says, "I feel strongly that no biographer could so
truly give him as he gives himself in his own works; but this may be
because, having lived my life with him, I see him in every word which
he has written; and it is difficult for me so far to detach myself
from the home circle as to pourtray him for others. He himself
disliked the notion of a long, formal biography.... However, he wished
that, if I deemed it better, the incidents of his life should be given
as shortly as might be without comment; but that my notes should be
final and full enough to preclude the chance of further and
unauthentic biographies."

Lord Tennyson has given us a remarkable chronicle of his father's life from youth to age, illustrated by correspondence that is always interesting and occasionally of supreme value, by anecdotes and reminiscences, by characteristic thoughts and pithy observations--the outcome of the Poet's reflection, consummate literary judgment, and constant intercourse with the best contemporary intellects. He has, moreover, so arranged the narrative as to show the rapid expansion of Tennyson's strong, inborn poetic instinct, with the impressions and influences which moulded its development, maturing and perfecting his marvellous powers of artistic execution.

Alfred Tennyson was born in the pastoral village of Somersby, amid the Lincolnshire wolds; and he spent many holidays on the coast at Mablethorpe, where he acquired that passion for the sea which has possessed so many poets. The atmosphere of a public school favours active emulation and discipline for the outer world; but to a boy of sensitive and imaginative temperament it is apt to be uncongenial, so we need not be sorry that Tennyson was spared the experience. At first, like most men of his temperament who go straight from private tuition to a University, he felt solitary and depressed--"the country is so disgustingly level, the revelry of the place so monotonous, the studies of the University so uninteresting, so matter-of-fact." But there was about him a distinction in mind and body that soon marked him out among his fellows ("a kind of Hyperion," writes FitzGerald), uniting strength with refinement, showing much insight into character, with the faculty of brief and pointed sallies: "We were looking one day at the portrait of an elderly politician in bland family aspect. A. T. (with his eyeglass): It looks rather like a retired panther. So true."[94]

He was an early member of the Society yclept the Apostles, which included many eager and brilliant spirits, whose debates were upon political reform, the bettering of the people's condition, upon morals, religion, and those wider and more liberal views of social needs that were foremost at a period when the new forces were just mustering for attack upon the old entrenchment of Church and State. Edward FitzGerald's notes and Tennyson's own later recollections are drawn upon in this book for lively illustrations of the sayings and doings of this notable group of friends, and for glimpses of their manner of life at Cambridge. Here he lived in the choice society of that day, and formed, among other friendships, an affectionate attachment to Arthur Hallam, who afterwards became engaged to his sister, and in whose memory the famous poem was written. Hallam seems to have been one of those men whose extraordinary promise and early death invest their brief and brilliant career with a kind of romance, explaining and almost justifying the pagan notions of Fate and divine envy.

In June 1829 Tennyson scored his first triumph by the prize poem on Timbuctoo, which, as he said many years afterwards, won the medal to his utter astonishment, for it was an old poem on Armageddon, adapted to Central Africa "by a little alteration of the beginning and the end." Arthur Hallam wrote of it on September 2, 1829: "The splendid imaginative power which pervades it will be seen through all hindrances. I consider Tennyson as promising fair to be the greatest poet of our generation, perhaps of our century"--a remarkably far-reaching prophecy to have been built upon so slender a foundation. Out of his "horror of publicity," as he said, he committed it to Merivale for declamation in the Senate House. In 1830 appeared Tennyson's first volume of poems, upon which Arthur Hallam again wrote, in a review, that "the features of original genius are strongly and clearly marked"; while on the other hand, Coleridge passed upon it the well-known criticism that "he has begun to write verses without very well knowing what metre is"; and Christopher North handled it with a touch of good-natured ridicule. Then followed, in 1832, a fresh issue, including that magnificent allegory, the "Palace of Art"; with other poems whose very blemishes signified exuberant strength. James Montgomery's observation of him at this stage is in the main true as a standing test of latent potency in beginners. "He has very wealthy and luxurious thought and great beauty of expression, and is _a poet_. But there is plenty of room for improvement, and I would have it so. Your trim, correct _young_ writers rarely turn out well; a young poet should have a great deal which he can afford to throw away as he gets older." The judgment was sound, for after a silent interval of ten years, during which the Poet was sedulously husbanding and cultivating his powers, the full-orbed splendour of his genius shone out in the two volumes of 1842.

"This decade," writes his biographer, "wrought a marvellous abatement of my father's real fault," which was undoubtedly "the tendency, arising from the fulness of mind which had not yet learned to master its resources freely, to overcrowd his composition with imagery, to which may be added over-indulgence in the luxuries of the senses." By this and by other extracts from contemporary criticism given in the _Memoir_ its readers may survey and measure the Poet's rapid development of mind and methods, the expansion of his range of thoughts, his increasing command over the musical instrument, and the admirable vigour and beauty which his composition was now disclosing. He had the singular advantage, rarely enjoyed so early in a poetic career, of being surrounded by enthusiastic friends who were also very competent art-critics, and whose unanimous verdict must have given him heart and confidence; so that the few spurts of cold water from professional reviewers troubled him very little. The darts thrown by such enemies might hardly reach or wound him--[Greek: prin gar peribêsan aristoi]--the two Hallams, James Spedding, Edward FitzGerald, the two Lushingtons, Blakesley, and Julius Hare rallied round him enthusiastically. Hartley Coleridge met Tennyson in 1835, and, "after the fourth bottom of gin," deliberately thanked Heaven for having brought them acquainted. Wordsworth, who had at first been slow to appreciate, having afterwards listened to two poems recited by Aubrey de Vere, did "acknowledge that they were very noble in thought, with a diction singularly stately." Even Carlyle, who had implored the Poet to stick to prose, was vanquished, and wrote (1842) a letter so vividly characteristic as to justify a long quotation:

DEAR TENNYSON--Wherever this find you, may it find you well, may it
come as a friendly greeting to you. I have just been reading your
Poems; I have read certain of them over again, and mean to read them
over and over till they become my poems; this fact, with the
inferences that lie in it, is of such emphasis in me, I cannot keep it
to myself, but must needs acquaint you too with it. If you knew what
my relation has been to the thing call'd English "Poetry" for many
years back, you would think such a fact almost surprising! Truly it is
long since in any English Book, Poetry or Prose, I have felt the pulse
of a real man's heart as I do in this same.

* * * * *

I know you cannot read German: the more interesting is it to trace in
your "Summer Oak" a beautiful kindred to something that is best in
Goethe; I mean his "Müllerin" (Miller's daughter) chiefly, with whom
the very Mill-dam gets in love; though she proves a flirt after all,
and the thing ends in satirical lines! Very strangely, too, in the
"Vision of Sin" I am reminded of my friend Jean Paul. This is not
babble, this is speech; true deposition of a volunteer witness. And so
I say let us all rejoice somewhat. And so let us all smite
rhythmically, all in concert, "the sounding furrows," and sail forward
with new cheer "beyond the sunset" whither we are bound.

The _Memoir_ contains some valuable reminiscences of this period, contributed after Tennyson's death by his personal friends, which incidentally throw backward a light upon the literary society of that day. Mr. Aubrey de Vere describes a meeting between Tennyson and Wordsworth; and relates also, subsequently and separately, a conversation with Tennyson, who was enthusiastic over the songs of Burns: "You forget, for their sake, those stupid things, his serious pieces." The same day Mr. de Vere met Wordsworth, who "praised Burns even more vehemently than Tennyson had done ..." but ended, "of course I refer to his serious efforts, those foolish little amatory songs of his one has to forget."

But in addition to contemporary criticism, written or spoken, and to the reminiscences, the biography gives us also several unpublished poems and fragmentary verses belonging to this period, with the original readings of other pieces that were altered before publication. It is in these materials, beyond others, that we can observe the forming and maturing of his style, the fastidious taste which dictated his rejection of work that either did not satisfy the highest standard as a whole, or else marred a poem's symmetrical proportion by superfluity, over-weight, or the undue predominance of some note in the general harmony. One may regret that some fine stanzas or exquisite lines should have been thus expunged, as, for example, those beginning:

Thou may'st remember what I said.

Yet we believe the impartial critic will confirm in every instance the decision. "Anacaona," written at Cambridge, was never published, because "the natural history and the rhymes did not satisfy" Tennyson; it is full of tropical warmth and ardour, with a fine rhythmic beat, but it is certainly below high-water mark. And the same must be said of the "Song of the Three Sisters," published and afterwards suppressed, though the blank verse of its prelude has undoubted quality. He acted, as we can see, inexorably upon his own rule that "the artist is known by his self-limitation"; feeling certain, as he once said, that "if I meant to make any mark in the world it must be by shortness, for the men before me had been so diffuse." Only the concise and perfect work, he thought, would last; and "hundreds of lines were blown up the chimney with his pipe smoke, or were written down and thrown into the fire as not being perfect enough." Yet all his austere resolution must have been needed for condemning some of the fine verses that were struck out of the "Palace of Art," merely to give the poem even balance, and trim it like a boat. Very few poems could have spared or borne the excisions from the "Dream of Fair Women"; though here and there the didactic or scientific note is slightly prominent, as in the following stanza:

All nature widens upward. Evermore
The simpler essence lower lies,
More complex is more perfect, owning more
Discourse, more widely wise.

At any rate the preservation of these unpublished verses adds much to the value of the biography; and we may rank Tennyson among the very few poets whose reputation has rather gained than suffered by the posthumous appearance of pieces that the writer had deliberately withdrawn or withheld.

Of Tennyson's own literary opinions one or two specimens, belonging to this time, may be given.

"Byron and Shelley, however mistaken they were, did yet give the world another heart and new pulses; and so we are kept going"--a just tribute to their fiery lyrical energy, which did much to clear insular prejudice from the souls of a masculine generation. "Lycidas" he held to be the test of any reader's poetic instinct; and "Keats, with his high spiritual vision, would have been, if he had lived, the greatest of us all, though his blank verse lacked originality of movement." It is true that Keats, whose full metrical skill was never developed, may have imitated the Miltonic construction; yet after Milton he was the finest composer up to Tennyson's day. And the first hundred lines of "Hyperion" have no slight affinity, in colouring and cadence, to the Tennysonian blank verse. For indeed it was Keats who, as Tennyson's forerunner, passed on to him the gift of intense romantic susceptibility to the influences of Nature, the "dim mystic sympathies with tree and hill reaching back into childhood." But Tennyson's art inclined more toward the picturesque, toward using words, as a painter uses his brush, for producing the impression of a scene's true outline and colour; his work shows the realistic feeling of a later day, which delights in precision of details. In one of his letters he mentions that there was a time when he was in the habit of chronicling, in four or five words or more, whatever might strike him as a picture, just as an artist would take rough sketches. The subjoined fragment, written on revisiting Mablethorpe on the Lincolnshire coast, contains the quintessence of his descriptive style; the last three lines are sheer landscape painting.

MABLETHORPE

Here often when a child I lay reclined,
I took delight in this fair land and free;
Here stood the infant Ilion of the mind,
And here the Grecian ships all seemed to be.
And here again I come, and only find
_The drain-cut level of the marshy lea,
Gray sand-banks, and pale sunsets, dreary winds,
Dim shores, dense rains, and heavy-clouded sea_.

More frequently, however, he employed his wonderful image-making power to illustrate symbolically some mental state or emotion, availing himself of the mysterious relation between man and his environment, whereby the outer inanimate world is felt to be the resemblance and reflection of human moods. So in the "Palace of Art" the desolate soul is likened to

A still salt pool, lock'd in with bars of sand,
Left on the shore; that hears all night
The plunging seas draw backward from the land
Their moon-led waters white.

And there are passages in the extracts given from his letters written to Miss Emily Sellwood, during the long engagement that preceded their marriage, which indicate the bent of his mind toward philosophic quietism, with frequent signs of that half-veiled fellow-feeling with natural things, that sense of life in all sound and motion, whereby poetry is drawn upward, by degrees and almost unconsciously, into the region of the "Higher Pantheism." Nor has any English poet availed himself more skilfully of a language that is peculiarly rich in metaphors, consisting of words which still so far retain their original meaning as to suggest a picture while they convey a thought.

It is partly due to these qualities of mind and style that no chapter in this book, which mingles grave with gay very attractively, contains matter of higher biographical interest than that which is headed "In Memoriam." For it is in this noble poem, on the whole Tennyson's masterpiece, that he is stirred by his own passionate grief to dwell on the contrast between irremediable human suffering and the calm aspect of Nature, between the short and sorrowful days of man and the long procession of ages. From the doubts and perplexities, the tendency to lose heart, engendered by a sense of forces that are unceasing and relentless, he finds his ultimate escape in the spirit of trust in the Powers invisible, and in the persuasion that God and Nature cannot be at strife. In a letter contributed to this _Memoir_ Professor Henry Sidgwick has described the impression produced on him and others of his time by this poem, showing how it struck in, so to speak, upon their religious debates at a moment of conflicting tendencies and great uncertainty of direction, giving intensity of expression to the dominant feeling, and wider range to the prevailing thought:

The most important influence of "In Memoriam" on my thought, apart
from its poetic charm as an expression of personal emotion, opened in
a region, if I may so say, deeper down than the difference between
Theism and Christianity: it lay in the unparalleled combination of
intensity of feeling with comprehensiveness of view and balance of
judgment, shown in presenting the deepest needs and perplexities of
humanity. And this influence, I find, has increased rather than
diminished as years have gone on, and as the great issues between
Agnostic Science and Faith have become continually more prominent. In
the sixties I should say that these deeper issues were somewhat
obscured by the discussions on Christian dogma and Inspiration of
Scripture, etc. ... During these years we were absorbed in struggling
for freedom of thought in the trammels of a historical religion; and
perhaps what we sympathized with most in "In Memoriam" at this time,
apart from the personal feeling, was the defence of "honest doubt,"
the reconciliation of knowledge and faith in the introductory poem,
and the hopeful trumpet-ring of the lines on the New Year.... Well,
the years pass, the struggle with what Carlyle used to call "Hebrew
old clothes" is over, Freedom is won, and what does Freedom bring us
to? It brings us face to face with atheistic science; the faith in God
and Immortality, which we had been struggling to clear from
superstition, suddenly seems to be in the air; and in seeking for a
firm basis for this faith we find ourselves in the midst of the "fight
with death" which "In Memoriam" so powerfully presents.

To many readers the whole letter will seem to render fitly their feeling of the pathetic intensity with which the everlasting problems of love and death, of human doubts and destinies, are set forth in "In Memoriam." It will also remind them of the limitations, the inevitable inconclusiveness, of a poem which deals emotionally with questions that foil the deepest philosophers. The profound impression that was immediately produced by these exquisitely musical meditations may be ascribed, we think, to their sympathetic association with the peculiar spiritual needs and intellectual dilemmas of the time. It may be affirmed, as a general proposition, that up to about 1840, and for some years later, the majority among Englishmen of thought and culture were content to take morality as the chief test of religious truth, were disposed to hold that the essential principles of religion were best stated in the language of ethics. With this rational theology the pretensions of Science, which undertook to preserve and even to strengthen the moral basis, were not incompatible. But about this time came a spiritual awakening; and just then Tennyson came forward to insist, with poetic force and fervour, that the triumphant advance of Science was placing in jeopardy not merely the formal outworks but the central dogma of Christianity, which is the belief in a future life, in the soul's conscious immortality.[95] Is man subject to the general law of unending mutability? and is he after all but the highest and latest type, to be made and broken like a thousand others, mere clay under the moulding hands that are darkly visible in the processes of Nature? The Poet transfigured these obstinate questionings into the vision of an ever-breaking shore

That tumbled in a godless sea.

He turned our ears to hear the sound of streams that, swift or slow,

Draw down Æonian hills, and sow
The dust of continents to be--

and he was haunted by the misgiving that man also might be a mere atom in an ever-changing universe. Yet after long striving with doubts and fears, after having "fought with death," he resolves that we cannot be "wholly brain, magnetic mockeries," not only cunning casts in clays:

Let Science prove we are, and then
What matters Science unto men,
At least to me? I would not stay.

We think that such passages as these gave emphasis to the gathering alarm, and that many a startled inquirer, daunted by dim uncertainties, recoiled from the abyss that seemed to open at his feet, and made his peace, on such terms as consoled him, with Theology. Not that Tennyson himself retreated, or took refuge behind dogmatic entrenchments. On the contrary, he stood his ground and trod under foot the terrors of Acheron; relying on "the God who ever lives and loves." But since not every one can be satisfied with subjective faith or lofty intuitions, we believe that the note of distress and warning sounded by "In Memoriam" startled more minds than were soothed by its comforting conclusions. If this be so, this utterance of the poet, standing prophet-like at the parting of the ways, moved men diversely. It strengthened the impulse to go onward trustfully; but it may also be counted among the indirect influences which combined to promote that notable reaction toward the sacramental and mysterious side of religion, toward positive faith as the safeguard of morals, which has been the outcome of the great Anglican revival set on foot by the Oxford Movement seventy years ago.

In June 1850, the month which saw "In Memoriam" published, Tennyson married Miss Sellwood. "The wedding was of the quietest, even the cake and the dresses arriving too late." From this union came unbroken happiness during forty-two years; for his wife brought into the partnership a rich and rare treasure of aid, sympathy, and intellectual appreciation. Her son pays his tribute to her memory in an admirable passage, of which the greater part is here extracted:

And let me say here--although, as a son, I cannot allow myself full
utterance about her whom I loved as perfect mother and "very woman of
very woman," "such a wife" and true helpmate she proved herself. It
was she who became my father's adviser in literary matters. "I am
proud of her intellect," he wrote. With her he always discussed what
he was working at; she transcribed his poems: to her, and to no one
else, he referred for a final criticism before publishing. She, with
her "tender spiritual nature" and instinctive nobility of thought, was
always by his side, a ready, cheerful, courageous, wise, and
sympathetic counsellor.... By her quiet sense of humour, by her
selfless devotion, by "her faith as clear as the heights of the
June-blue heaven," she helped him also to the utmost in the hours of
his depression and of his sorrow; and to her he wrote two of the most
beautiful of his shorter lyrics--"Dear, near and true," and the
dedicatory lines which prefaced his last volume, "The Death of
Oenone."

In November 1850, after Wordsworth's death, the Laureateship was offered to Tennyson. We have good authority for stating, though not from this _Memoir_, that Lord John Russell submitted to the Queen the four names of Professor Wilson, Henry Taylor, Sheridan Knowles, and, last on the list, Tennyson. The Prince Consort's admiration of "In Memoriam" determined Her Majesty's choice, which might seem easy enough to those who measure the four candidates by the standard of to-day. His accession to office brought down upon Tennyson, among other honoraria, "such shoals of poems that I am almost crazed with them; the two hundred million poets of Great Britain deluge me daily. Truly the Laureateship is no sinecure." For the inevitable levee he accepted, not without disquietude over the nether garment, the loan of a Court suit from his ancient brother in song, Rogers, who had declined the laurels on the plea of age. Soon afterward he departed with his wife for Italy. Under the title of "The Daisy" he has commemorated this journey in stanzas of consummate metrical form, with their beautiful anapæstic ripple in each fourth line, to be studied by all who would understand the quantitative value (not merely accentual) and rhythmic effects of English syllables. On returning, they met the Brownings at Paris. Then, in 1852, he bought Farringford in the Isle of Wight, the Poet's favourite habitation ever afterward, within sight of the sea and within sound of its rough weather, with its lawns, spreading trees, and meadows under the lee of the chalk downs, that have been frequently sketched into his verse, and will long be identified with his presence. There he worked at "Maud," morning and evening, sitting in his hard, high-backed wooden chair in his little room at the top of the house, smoking the "sacred pipes" during certain half-hours of strict seclusion, when his best thoughts came to him.

From the final edition in 1851 of "In Memoriam" to "Maud" in 1853, which Lowell rather affectedly called the antiphonal voice of the earlier poem, the change of theme, tone, and manner was certainly great; and the public seems to have been taken by surprise. The transition was from lamentation to love-making; from stanzas swaying slow, like a dirge, within their uniform compass, to an abundant variety of metrical movement, quickened by frequent use of the anapæstic measure. The general reader was puzzled and inclined to ridicule what he failed at once to understand; the ordinary reviewer was either loftily contemptuous or indulged in puns and parodies; the higher criticism was divided; but Henry Taylor, Ruskin, Jowett, and the Brownings spoke without hesitation of the work's great merits. Mr. Gladstone, whose judgment had been at first adverse, recanted, twenty years later, in a letter that was published in his _Gleanings_, and that now reappears in this _Memoir_:

"Whether it is to be desired," he wrote, "that a poem should require
from common men a good deal of effort in order to comprehend it;
whether all that is put in the mouth of the Soliloquist in 'Maud' is
within the lines of poetical verisimilitude; whether this poem has the
full moral equilibrium which is so marked a characteristic of the
sister-works, are questions open, perhaps, to discussion. But I have
neither done justice in the text to its rich and copious beauties of
detail, nor to its great lyrical and metrical power. And, what is
worse, I have failed to comprehend rightly the relation between
particular passages in the poem and its general scope."

Jowett wrote:

No poem since Shakespeare seems to show equal power of the same kind,
or equal knowledge of human nature. No modern poem contains more lines
that ring in the ears of men. I do not know any verse of Shakespeare
in which the ecstasy of love soars to such a height.

On the other hand, an anonymous letter, which Tennyson enjoyed repeating, ran thus:

SIR--I used to worship you, but now I hate you. I loathe and detest
you. You beast! So you've taken to imitating Longfellow.

Yours in aversion,
"----"

"I shall never forget," his son writes,

Tennyson's last reading of "Maud," on August 24, 1892. He was sitting
in his high-backed chair, fronting a southern window which looks over
the groves and yellow cornfields of Sussex toward the long line of
South Downs that stretches from Arundel to Hastings (his high-domed
Rembrandt-like head outlined against the sunset-clouds seen through
the western window). His voice, low and calm in everyday life, capable
of delicate and manifold inflection, but with "organ tones" of great
power and range, thoroughly brought out the drama of the poem.

"The peculiarity of this poem," Tennyson said, "is that different phases of passion in one person take the place of different characters"; and the effect of his own recitation was to set this conception in clear relief by showing the connexion and significance of the linked monodies, combined with a vivid musical rendering of a pathetic love-story. The emotional intensity rises by degrees to the rapture of meeting with Maud in the garden, falls suddenly to the depth of blank despair, and revives in an atmosphere of energetic, warlike activity--the precursor of world-wide peace.

The poem, in fact, strikes all the highest lyrical chords, and we are disposed to think that all of them are by no means touched with equal skill. Possibly, the sustained and perfect execution of such a varied composition would be too arduous a task for any artist. It is difficult for the reader to adjust his mind to the changes of mood and motive which succeed each other rapidly, and often abruptly, within the compass of so short a piece; ranging from the almost melodramatic horror of the opening stanzas to the passionate and joyous melodies of the middle part; sinking into a wild wailing, and closing with the trumpet sounds of war. Yet every one will now acknowledge that some passages in "Maud" are immortal, and that the English language contains none more beautiful than the very best of them.

The letters in the _Memoir_ are selected from upwards of forty thousand, and at this period we have many of singular interest. One from Mrs. Vyner, a stranger, touched the Poet deeply. Ruskin writes with reserve, as well he might, about the edition of the poems illustrated by Rossetti, Millais, and others:

I believe, in fact, that good pictures never can be; they are always
another poem, subordinate, but wholly different from the poet's
conception, and serve chiefly to show the reader how variously the
same verses may affect various minds. But these woodcuts will be of
much use in making people think and puzzle a little; art was getting
quite a matter of form in book illustrations, and it does not so much
matter whether any given vignette is right or not, as whether it
contains thought or not, still more whether it contains any kind of
plain facts. If people have no sympathy with St. Agnes, or if people,
as soon as they get a distinct idea of a living girl who probably got
scolded for dropping her candle-wax about the convent-stairs, and
caught cold by looking too long out of the window in her bedgown,
feel no true sympathy with her, they can have no sympathy in them.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning sends a warm-hearted letter; and Jowett, who enjoyed giving advice, evidently sat him down readily to reply when Mrs. Tennyson asked whether he could suggest any subjects for poetry:

I often fancy that the critical form of modern literature is like the
rhetorical one which overlaid ancient literature, and will be regarded
as that is, at its true worth in after times. One drop of natural
feeling in poetry, or the true statement of a single new fact, is
already felt to be of more value than all the critics put together.

Four "Idylls" came out in 1859, to be rapidly and largely taken up by the English public, with many congratulations from personal friends. Thackeray sends, after reading them, a letter full of his characteristic humour and cordiality:

"The landlord"--at Folkestone--"gave two bottles of his claret, and I
think I drank the most, and here I have been lying back in the chair
and thinking of those delightful 'Idylls'; my thoughts being turned to
you; and what could I do but be grateful to that surprising genius
which has made me so happy?"

The Duke of Argyll wrote that Macaulay had been _delighted with it_, whereupon the Poet responds to his Grace somewhat caustically:

MY DEAR DUKE--Doubtless Macaulay's good opinion is worth having, and I
am grateful to you for letting me know it, but this time I intend to
be thick-skinned; nay, I scarcely believe that I should ever feel very
deeply the pen-punctures of those parasitic animalcules of the press,
if they kept themselves to what I write, and did not glance spitefully
and personally at myself. I hate spite.

Ruskin, on the other hand, is but half pleased; could not quite make up his mind about that "increased quietness of style"; feels "the art and finish in these poems a little more than I like"; wishes that the book's nobleness and tenderness had been independent of a romantic condition of externals; and suggests that "so great power ought not to be spent on visions of things past, but on the living present."

These latter sentences touch upon, or at least indicate, a line of criticism upon the general conception of the "Idylls," as seen in their treatment of the Arthurian legend, with which, although it may appear inadequate, some of us are not indisposed to agree. Romanticism has been defined, half seriously, as the art of presenting to a people the literary works which can give the greatest imaginative pleasure in the actual state of their habits and beliefs. The "Idylls" adapted the mythical tales of the Round Table to the very highest standard of æsthetic taste, intellectual refinement, and moral delicacy prevailing in cultivated English society. And by that society they were very cordially appreciated. Undoubtedly the figure of Arthur--representing a stainless mirror of chivalry, a warrior king endowed with the qualities of patriotic self-devotion, clemency, generosity, and noble trustfulness, yet betrayed by his wife and his familiar friend, and dying in a lost fight against treacherous rebels--did present a lofty ideal that might well affect a gravely emotional people. Moreover, the poem is a splendidly illuminated Morality, unfolding scenes and figures that illustrate heroic virtues and human frailties, gallantry, chivalric enterprise, domestic perfidy, chaste virginal loves, and subtle amorous enchantments. It abounds also in descriptive passages which attest the close attention of the Poet's eye and ear to natural sights and sounds, and his supreme art of fashioning his verse to their colours and echoes. In short, to quote from the biography,

he has made the old legends his own, restored the idealism, and
infused into them a spirit of modern thought and of ethical
significance; setting his characters in a rich and varied landscape;
as indeed otherwise these archaic stories would not have appealed to
the world at large.

This indeed he has done well. And yet it is not possible to put away altogether the modern prejudice against unreality, the sense of having here a vision not merely of things that are past, but of things that could never have been, of a world that is neither ancient nor modern, but a fairy land peopled with knights and dames whose habits and conversation are adjusted to the decorous taste of our nineteenth century. The time has long passed when men could look back on distant ages much as they looked forward to futurity, through a haze of unbounded credulity. Not every one has been able to overcome the effect of incongruity produced by a poem which invests the legendary personages of mediæval romance with morals and manners of a fastidious delicacy, and promotes them to be the embodiment of our own ethical ideals. If, indeed, we regard the "Idylls" as beautiful allegories, we may be content, as their author was, with the suggestion that King Arthur represents Conscience, and that the poem is "a picture of the different ways in which men looked on conscience, some reverencing it as a heaven-born king, others ascribing to it an earthly origin." We may then be satisfied with learning, from the Poet himself, that "Camelot, for instance, a city of shadowy palaces, is everywhere symbolic of the gradual growth of human beliefs and institutions, and of the spiritual development of man." In the light of these interpretations the poem is a beautifully woven tissue of poetic mysticism, clothing the old legend of chivalry with esoteric meaning. We can accept and admire it freely, remarking only that the deeper thoughts of the present generation do not run in an allegorical vein, and that such a vesture, though of the finest texture and embroidery, waxes old speedily. "The 'Holy Grail,'" said Tennyson, "is one of the most imaginative of my poems. I have expressed there my strong feeling as to the reality of the Unseen"; and truly it is a marvellous excursion into the field of mystical romance. But Tennyson also said that "there is no single fact or incident in the 'Idylls,' however seemingly mystical, which cannot be explained as without any mystery or allegory whatever"; and herein lies our difficulty. For, unless they can be read as wholly allegorical, there is an air of unreality about those enchanting pictures, as of scenes and persons that could never have existed anywhere. That Tennyson is a master of the art of veiling the lessons of real life under a fairy story, we know from the subtle symbolism with which he tells, in the "Lady of Shalott," the tale of sudden absorbing love, hopeless and unregarded, sinking into despair--a true parable, understood of all men and women in all times. But those who have no great skill at deciphering the Hyponoia, the underlying significance, of the "Idylls" may be pardoned for confessing to an occasional feeling of something abstract, shadowy, and spectacular in the company of these knights and dames.[96]

FitzGerald, after reading the "Holy Grail," writes (1870) to Tennyson:

The whole myth of Arthur's Round Table Dynasty in Britain presents
itself before me with a sort of cloudy Stonehenge grandeur. I am not
sure if the old knights' adventures do not tell upon me better touched
in some lyrical way (like your "Lady of Shalott") than when elaborated
into epic form. I never could care for Spenser, Tasso, or even
Ariosto, whose epic has a ballad ring about it.... Anyhow, Alfred,
while I feel how pure, noble, and holy your work is--and whole
phrases, lines, and sentences of it will abide with me, and, I am
sure, with men after me--I read on till the "Lincolnshire Farmer" drew
tears from my eyes. I was got back to the substantial rough-spun
Nature I knew; and the old brute, invested by you with the solemn
humour of Humanity, like Shakespeare's Shallow, became a more pathetic
phenomenon than the knights who revisit the world in your other verse.
There! I cannot help it, and have made a clean breast.

If the extreme realism of some modern writers has been rightly condemned as truth divorced from beauty, we may say that it has been by his skill in maintaining their indissoluble union that Tennyson's best work shows its peculiar strength and has earned its enduring vitality. He excels in the verisimilitude of his portraiture, in the authentic delineation of character, preserving the type and developing the main lines of thought and action by imaginative insight, with high artistic fidelity in details. I venture to anticipate that his short monodramatic pieces in blank verse--his studies from the antique, like "Ulysses" and "Tithonus," and his poems of English life, breathing the true idyllic spirit, like the "Gardener's Daughter" and "Aylmer's Field"--will sustain their popularity longer than the Arthurian Idylls. Nor can some of us honestly agree with the unqualified praise bestowed by high authority (as the _Memoir_ testifies) on "Guinevere," where the scene between the king and the queen at Almesbury, with all its elevation of tone and purity of sentiment, is not very far from a splendid anachronism. But the epilogue "To the Queen," which closes the Arthurian epic, brings us back to modern thought and circumstance by its ringing protest against faint-heartedness in English politics.

The "Northern Farmer," written in 1861, was at that time a novelty in form and subject. It gave a strong lead, at any rate, to that school of rough humorous versification, largely relying on quaint turns of ideas and phrases, on racy provincial dialect and local colouring generally, which has since had an immense success in the hands of minor artists. We may take it to have begun, for the last century, with the _Biglow Papers_. This form of metrical composition has latterly spread, as a species of modern ballad, to the Indian frontier and the Australian bush, but has little or no place in any language except the English. Such character sketches, taken direct from studies of rude life, have been always common in popular comic song, yet I believe that no first-class poet, after Burns and before Tennyson, had turned his hand to this kind of work; nor has anything been since produced upon the artistic level of the first "Northern Farmer." "Roden Noel," writes Tennyson, "calls the two 'Northern Farmers' photographs; but I call them imaginative"--as of course they are, being far above mere exact copies of some individual person.

There are some very readable _impressions de voyage_ gathered out of journals of tours made about this time (1860) in France and England, and the letters maintain their high level of interest. Upon the death of Macaulay, Tennyson writes to the Duke of Argyll:

I hardly knew him: met him once, I remember, when Hallam and Guizot
were in his company. Hallam was showing Guizot the Houses of
Parliament, then building, and Macaulay went on like a cataract for an
hour or so to those two great men, and, when they had gone, turned to
me and said, "Good morning; I am happy to have had the pleasure of
making your acquaintance," and strode away. Had I been a piquable man
I should have been piqued: but I don't think I was, for the movement
after all was amicable.

Then follows an account, by Mrs. Bradley, of a visit to Farringford, with "its careless ordered garden close to the ridge of a noble down"; and at the end of the _Memoir_ is an appendix containing, among other things, Arthur Hallam's striking critical appreciation of "Mariana in the South," a poem which must be ranked as a masterpiece by all exiled Englishmen who have dreamt of their native breezes and verdure, under the blinding glare and intolerable heat of a tropical summer. Mr. Aubrey de Vere has contributed a reminiscence describing the effect produced upon himself and others by the poems of 1832-45, with a dissertation upon their style and philosophic significance. And in this manner the course and circumstances of the Poet's life are set out, with much taste and regard for proportionate value of the materials for those singularly untroubled years through which he rose steadily from straitened means in youth to comparative affluence in middle age, and from distinction among a group of choice spirits to enduring fame as the greatest of poets born in the nineteenth century.

When, in 1864, Tennyson returned with "Enoch Arden" to the romance of real life among his own people, the poem was heartily welcomed, and sixty thousand copies were speedily sold. Spedding declared it to be the finest story he had ever heard, and added (in our opinion quite rightly) that it was "more especially adapted for Alfred than for any other poet." Yet the plot, so to speak, of this pathetic narrative is as ancient as the _Odyssey_, for it rests upon a situation that must have been common in all times of long and distant voyaging, when men disappeared across the seas, were not heard of for years, and their wives were counted as widows. A well-known sailor's ditty tells in rude popular rhymes the same story of the wandering mariner's return home, to find himself forsaken and forgotten; and it frequently occurs in the folklore of the crusades. The first title in the proof-sheets of the "Enoch Arden" volume was "Idylls of the Hearth," and here, says his biographer,

he writes with as intimate a knowledge, but with greater power (than
in 1842), on subjects from English life, the sailor, the farmer, the
parson, the city lawyer, the squire, the country maiden, and the old
woman who dreams of her past life in a restful old age.

No great poet, in fact, has travelled for his subjects so little beyond his native land; and so his best descriptive work shows the painter's eye on the object, with the impressions drawn fresh and at first hand from Nature, as in the poetry of primitive bards who saw things for themselves. His letters and notes teem with observations of wild flowers and wild creatures, of wide prospects over sea and land; and even when he followed Enoch Arden into the world that was to himself untravelled, he could surprise those who knew it by his rendering of tropical scenery.