Chapter XIII: Part 13

A very good account, by the late Mr. Locker-Lampson, of his tour through France and Switzerland with Tennyson in 1869, has preserved for us the flavour of his table and travelling talk upon literature, and occasionally upon religious problems. Into the philosophical or metaphysical abyss he did not let down his plummet very far; he recognized the limits of human knowledge, and for the dim regions beyond he accepted Faith as his guide and comforter. In regard to the poets--"As a boy," he said, "I was a great admirer of Byron, so much so that I got a surfeit of him, and now I cannot read him as I should like to do." Probably this habit of premature and excessive indulgence in Byron has blunted many an eager admirer's appetite, and has had something to do with the prevailing distaste for him, wherein we think that he has fallen into unmerited neglect. Of Shelley Tennyson said that there was "a great wind of words in a good deal of him, but that as a writer of blank verse he was perhaps the most skilful of the moderns. Nobody admires Shelley more than I once did, and I still admire him." For Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" he had a profound admiration; yet even in that poem he thought "the old poet had shown a want of literary instinct," and he touched upon some defects of composition; but he ended by saying emphatically that Wordsworth's very best is the best in its way that has been sent out by moderns. He told an anecdote of Samuel Rogers. "One day we were walking arm and arm, and I spoke of what is called Immortality, and remarked how few writers could be sure of it. Upon this Rogers squeezed my arm and said, 'I am sure of it.'"

His wife's journal of this time is full of interest, recording various sayings and doings, conversations, correspondence, anecdotes, and glimpses of notable visits and visitors, Tourguéneff, Longfellow, Jenny Lind, Huxley, and Gladstone, to the last of whom Tennyson read aloud his "Holy Grail." At the house of G. H. Lewes he read "Guinevere," "which made George Eliot weep." The diary is a faithful and valuable memorial of English country life at its best in the middle of the last century. Living quietly with his family, he was in constant intercourse with the most distinguished men of his day, and was himself honoured of them all.

In 1873 Tennyson had declined, for himself, Mr. Gladstone's offer of a baronetcy. In 1874 this offer was repeated by Mr. Disraeli, who does not seem to have known that it had been once before made, in a high-flying sententious letter, evidently attuned to the deeper harmonies of the mysterious relation between genius and government.

A government should recognize intellect. It elevates and sustains the
spirit. It elevates and sustains the spirit of a nation. But it is an
office not easy to fulfil, for if it falls into favouritism and the
patronage of mediocrity, instead of raising the national sentiment, it
might degrade and debase it. Her Majesty, by the advice of her
Ministers, has testified in the Arctic expedition, and will in other
forms, her sympathy with science. But it is desirable that the claims
of high letters should be equally acknowledged. That is not so easy a
matter, because it is in the nature of things that the test of merit
cannot be so precise in literature as in science. Nevertheless, etc.
etc.

The honour, even thus offered, was again respectfully declined, with a suggestion that it might be renewed for his son after his own death; but this was pronounced impracticable.

The Metaphysical Society was founded by Tennyson and two others in 1869, and a list of the members is given in the _Memoir_, which touches on the style and topics of the debates, and on the umbrage taken by agnostic friends at the profound deference shown by Tennyson to Cardinal Manning. A letter from Dr. James Martineau describes the Poet's general attitude toward the Society's discussions; he sent his poem on the "Higher Pantheism" to be read at the first meeting; and he was "usually a silent listener, interposing some short question or pregnant hint." The letter discourses, in expansive and perhaps faintly nebulous language, upon the influence of his poetry on the religious tendencies of the day.

That in a certain sense our great Laureate's poetry has nevertheless
had a dissolving influence upon the over-definite dogmatic creeds
within hearing, or upon the modes of religious thought amid which it
was born, can hardly be doubted. In laying bare, as it does, the
history of his own spirit, its conflicts and aspirations, its
alternate eclipse of doubt and glow of faith, it has reported more
than a personal experience; he has told the story of an age which he
has thus brought into Self-knowledge.... Among thousands of readers
previously irresponsive to anything Divine he has created, or
immeasurably intensified, the susceptibility of religious reverence.

After taking into due account the circumstances in which Dr. Martineau's letter was written, to many readers this high-flying panegyric will seem to have in some degree overshot its mark.

It has been my duty, in reviewing this _Memoir_, to pass under some kind of critical survey the more important writings of Lord Tennyson, in particular relation to the narrative of his life, and to the formation of his views and opinions. I am, however, placed in some embarrassment by the fact that this work is for the most part done already in the volumes themselves. They contain ample quotations from letters and articles by very eminent hands, written with all the vigour of immediate impressions when the poems first appeared. And some of the reminiscences that have since been contributed to the biography by personal friends deal so thoroughly with its literary side as to fall little short of elaborate essays; so that on the whole not much is left to be said by the retrospective reviewer. We are met with this difficulty in taking up the chapters on the Historical Plays, which set before us, with an analysis of the plays by the biographer himself, a catena of judgments upon them, unanimously favourable, by the highest authorities. Robert Browning writes with generous enthusiasm of "Queen Mary." Froude, the most dramatic of historians, expresses unbounded admiration: "You have reclaimed one more section of English history from the wilderness, and given it a form in which it will be fixed for ever. No one since Shakespeare has done that." Gladstone, Mr. Aubrey de Vere, Longfellow, G. H. Lewes and his wife, the statesmen, the poets, and the men of letters, each from his own standpoint attests the merits of one or another play, in letters of indisputable strength and sincerity. Nor can it be doubted that these pieces contain splendid passages, and fine engravings, so to speak, of historical personages, with a noble appreciation of the spacious Elizabethan period, and of the earlier romantic episodes. The dramatic art provides such a powerful instrument for striking deep into the national mind, and success in this form of high poetic execution is so lasting--while it is so rare--that almost every great English poet has written plays. On the other hand, few of them have ventured, like Tennyson, to face the capricious ordeal of the public theatre, where the _vox populi_ is at least so far divine that it pronounces absolutely and often incomprehensibly.

"For Tennyson to begin publishing plays after he was sixty-five years of age was thought to be a hazardous experiment"; though I may remark that he started with the advantage of a first-class poetic reputation, which stimulated public curiosity. But he knew well the immense influence, for good or for ill, that the stage can bring to bear on the people; and for the stage all his plays were directly intended, not for literature, in the expectation that the necessary technical adaptations might be supplied by the actors or the professional playwright. Their historical truth, their vigorous conceptions of motive and circumstance, and their poetic force received ample acknowledgment. W. G. Ward, who was "grotesquely truthful," though ultramontane, broke out into unqualified praise after listening to the reading of "Becket." On the stage, where first impressions are all-important, the pieces had their share of success. Browning writes of the "tumult of acclaim" which greeted the appearance of "Queen Mary"; and of "Becket" Irving has told us that "it is one of the three most successful plays produced by him at the Lyceum."

It is a question, often debated, whether in these latter days the theatre can be made a vehicle for the artistic representation of history. Literature, a jealous rival of all her sister arts, has so vastly extended her dominion over the people, she speaks so directly to the mind, without need of plastic or vocal interpretation, she is so independent of accessories and intermediaries, that her competitive influence weighs down all other departments of imaginative and pictorial idealization, religious or romantic. Against this stream of tendency even Tennyson's genius could hardly make sufficient headway to conquer for his plays a lasting hold upon English audiences; and moreover his primal vigour had been spent upon other victories. Yet to have held the stage at all, for a brief space, is to have done more than has been achieved by any other poet of this (last) century. In 1880 his drama, "The Cup," was produced with signal success at the Lyceum; and Tennyson summed up his theatrical experience by observing that "the success of a piece does not depend on its literary merit or even on its stage effect, but on its _hitting_ somehow," wherein Miss Ellen Terry agreed with him.

The annals of his daily life, throughout all this later part of it, consist of extracts from letters, journals, and memorials of intercourse, which abound with appropriate, amusing, and valuable matter, connected by the biographer's personal recollections. We have thus a many-coloured mosaic, in which many figures and characters are reproduced by a kind of literary tessellation; while, as to the Poet himself, his habits, wise or whimsical, his thoughts from year to year on the subjects of the day, his manner of working, are all preserved. The correspondence of his friends maintains its high level of quality. Mr. W. H. Lecky gives us, in one of the best among all the reminiscences, a fine sample of his own faculty for delineation of character, bringing out the Poet's simplicity of soul, his love of seclusion, the scope of his religious meditations, the keen sensibility (acquired by long culture) of his rhythmic ear, and also his susceptibility to the hum and pricking of critics.

Many persons spoke of your father as too much occupied with his
poetry. It did, no doubt, fill a very large place in his thoughts, and
it is also true that he was accustomed to express his opinions about
it with a curiously childlike simplicity and frankness. But at bottom
his nature seemed to be singularly modest. No poet ever corrected so
many lines in deference to adverse criticism. His sensitiveness
seemed to me curiously out of harmony with his large powerful frame,
with his manly dark colouring, with his great massive hands and strong
square-tipped fingers.

His son records how in lonely walks together Tennyson would chant a poem that he was composing, would search for strange birds or flowers, and would himself take flight on discovering that he was being stalked by a tourist. Among the letters is one from Victor Hugo, in the grand cosmopolitan style, beginning "Mon Éminent et Cher Confrère," professing love for all mankind and admiration for noble verse everywhere; another from Cardinal Newman, smooth and adroit; there is also a note by Dr. Dabbs of his colloquy with Tennyson, showing how he began with the somewhat musty question about the incompatibility of Science with Religion, and found the Poet, as we infer, tolerably dexterous with the foils. Renan called, and put the essence of his philosophy into one phrase, "La vérité est une nuance"; there are jottings of talks with Carlyle, and a long extract from the journal of a yachting voyage with Mr. Gladstone, who said, "No man since Aeschylus could have written the _Bride of Lammermoor_." It would be doing less than justice to the biography if I did not choose a few samples from an ample storehouse, and it would be unfair to make too many quotations, even from a book which surpasses all recent memoirs as a repertory of characteristic observations and short views of life and literature, interchanged by speech or writing, with many notable friends and visitors.

In 1883 the Queen, on the recommendation of Mr. Gladstone, offered Tennyson a peerage, which, after some rumination, he accepted, saying, "By Gladstone's advice I have consented, but for my own part I shall regret my own simple name all my life." We are to suppose that the Prime Minister's only misgiving "lest my father might insist on wearing his wideawake in the House of Lords" had been duly overcome; and so next year the Poet, having taken his seat, voted, not without some questioning and doubts of the time's ripeness, for extension of franchise. No more worthy representative of literature has ever added lustre to that august assembly than he who now took his seat on the cross benches, holding no form of party creed, but contemplating all. From a man of his traditions and tastes, his dislike of extravagance, his feeling for the stateliness of well-ordered movement, at his age, moderation in politics was to be expected; and indeed we observe that he commended to his friends Maine's work on _Popular Government_, which carries political caution to the verge of timidity. But Tennyson, like Burke, had great confidence in the common sense and inbred good nature of the English people. "Stagnation," he once said, "is more dangerous than revolution." As he was throughout consistently the poet of the _via media_ in politics, the dignified constitutional Laureate, so he was spared the changes that passed over the opinions of Wordsworth, Southey, and Coleridge, who were Radicals in youth, and declined into elderly Tories. Undoubtedly the temper of his time affected his politics as well as his poetry, for his manhood began in the calm period which followed the long stormy years when all Europe was one great war-field, and when the ardent spirits of Byron and Shelley had been fired by the fierce uprising of the nations.

In 1885, being then in his seventy-sixth year, Lord Tennyson published "Tiresias," preluding with the verses to E. FitzGerald, so vigorous in tone and so finely wrought, with their rhymes ringing true to the expectant ear like the chime of a clear bell. Some years before, he had paid a passing visit at Woodbridge to "the lonely philosopher, a man of humorous melancholy mark, with his gray floating locks, sitting among his doves.... We fell at once into the old humour, as if we had been parted twenty days instead of so many years." It is a rarity in modern life that two such men as Tennyson and FitzGerald, whose mutual friendship was never shaken, should have met but once in some twenty-five years, although divided by no more space than could be traversed by a three hours' railway journey. "Tiresias" was soon followed by "Locksley Hall: Sixty Years After"; then, in 1889, came "Demeter" and other poems; until, in 1892, the volume containing the "Death of Oenone" and "Akbar's Dream" closed the long series of poems which had held two generations under their charm. One line in the second "Locksley Hall" its author held to be the best of the kind he had ever written:

Universal ocean softly washing all her warless isles;

though in my poor judgment the harmony seems marred by the frequent sibilants, which vex all English composers[97]; and the suggestion that the sea would become stormless when the land should be at peace may be thought overbold.

It was but seasonable that his later poetry should have been tinged with autumnal colouring. The philosophic bent of his mind had necessarily grown with increasing years; its range had been widened by constant assimilation with the scientific ideas of the day, with social and political changes; but as far horizons breed sadness and wistful uncertainty, so his later verse leans more toward the moral lessons of experience, toward reflective and retrospective views of life and character. In poetry, as in prose, the sequel to a fine original piece has very rarely, if ever, been successful; though the second part, when it follows the first after a long interval, often exhibits the special value that comes from alteration of style and the natural changes of mood. Tennyson himself thought that "the two 'Locksley Halls' were likely to be in the future two of the most historically interesting of his poems, as descriptive of the tone of the age at two distant periods of his life." In my opinion, the interest is less historical than biographical, in the sense that the second poem takes its deeper shade from the darkening that seems to have overspread his later meditations. For the interval of sixty years had, in fact, brought increased activity and enterprising eagerness to the English people; and the gray thoughts of the sequel, the heavier feeling of errors and perils encompassing the onward path toward the remote ideal, are the Poet's own. He employed them, it is true, for the dramatic presentation of old age, and disclaimed any identity with the imaginary personage.

However this may be, the poems that appeared toward the close of his long literary career show a change of manner. We miss, to some degree, the delicate handling, the self-restraint, the serene air of his best compositions; there is a certain gloominess of atmosphere,[98] breaking out occasionally into vehement expression, in the rolling dithyrambic stanzas of "Vastness," "The Dawn," or "The Dreamer." In the "Death of Oenone," the beautiful antique nymph of Tennyson's youth, deserted and passionately lamenting on many-fountained Ida, has become soured and vindictive.[99] She is now a jealous wife, to whose feet Paris, dying from the poisoned arrow, crawls "lame, crooked, reeling," to be spurned as an adulterer, who may "go back to his adulteress and die." Here the Poet abandons the style and feeling of Hellenic tradition;[100] the echo of the old-world story has died away; it is rather the voice of some tragedy queen posing as the injured wife of modern society; and one remembers that the Homeric adulteress, Helen of Troy, went back to live happily and respected with her husband in Sparta. It was not to be expected that Tennyson's later inspirations should reach the supreme level of the poems which he wrote in his prime, or that there should be no ebb from the high-water mark that he touched, in my opinion, fifty years earlier in 1842.[101] Yet hardly any poet has so long retained consummate mastery of his instrument, or has published so little that might have been omitted with advantage or without detriment to his permanent reputation. And it will never be forgotten that he wrote "Crossing the Bar" in his eighty-first year.

It is clear from the _Memoir_, at any rate, that the burden of nigh fourscore years weakened none of his interest in literature and art, in political and philosophical speculation, or diminished his resources of humorous observation and anecdote. Among many recollections he told of Hallam (the historian) saying to him, "I have lived to read Carlyle's _French Revolution_, but I cannot get on, the style is so abominable;" and of Carlyle groaning about Hallam's _Constitutional History_: "Eh, it's a miserable skeleton of a book"--bringing out into short and sharp contrast two opposite schools, the picturesque and the precise, of history-writing. Robert Browning's death in December 1889 distressed him greatly; it was, moreover, a forewarning to the elder of two brothers, if not equals, in renown. In 1890 Oliver Wendell Holmes, who was Tennyson's junior by only twenty-three days, wrote to him:

I am proud of my birth-year, and humbled when I think of who were and
who are my coevals. Darwin, the destroyer and creator; Lord Houghton,
the pleasant and kind-hearted lover of men of letters; Gladstone, whom
I leave it to you to characterise, but whose vast range of
intellectual powers few will question; Mendelssohn, whose music still
rings in our ears; and the Laureate, whose "jewels five words
long"--many of them a good deal longer--sparkle in our memories.

He wrote kindly to William Watson and Rudyard Kipling, whose patriotic verse pleased him; and twelve months later Watson paid a grateful tribute to his memory in one of the best among many threnodies. He spoke of Carlyle's having come to smoke a pipe with him one evening in London, "when the talk turned upon the immortality of the soul, upon which Carlyle said, 'Eh, old Jewish rags, you must clear your mind of all that. Why should we expect a hereafter?'" and likened man's sojourn on earth to a traveller's rest at an inn, whereupon Tennyson turned the simile against him. His son describes how the old man's "dignity and repose of manner, his low musical voice, and the power of his magnetic eye kept the attention riveted." In August 1892 Lord Selborne and the Master of Balliol visited him; but

... he did not feel strong enough for religious discussions with
Jowett, and begged Jowett not to consult with him or argue with him,
as was his wont, on points of philosophy and religious doubt. The
Master answered him with a remarkable utterance: "Your poetry has an
element of philosophy more to be considered _than any regular
philosophy in England_";

which is certainly an ambiguous and possibly not an extravagant eulogy.

The final chapter of the _Memoir_ gives, briefly, some sentences from his last talks, and describes a peaceful and noble ending. He found his Christianity undisturbed by jarring of sects and creeds; but he said, "I dread the losing hold of forms. I have expressed this in my 'Akbar.'" The welfare of the British Empire, its expansion and its destiny, had been from the beginning and were to the end of his poetic career matters of intense pride and concern to him. When, in September 1892, he fell seriously ill, and Sir Andrew Clark arrived, the physician and the patient fell to discussing Gray's "Elegy"; and a few days later, being much worse, he sent for his Shakespeare, tried to read but had to let his son read for him. Next day he said: "'I want the blinds up, I want to see the sky and the light.' He repeated 'The sky and the light.' It was a glorious morning, and the warm sunshine was flooding the weald of Sussex and the line of South Downs, which were seen from his window." On the second day after this he passed away very quietly. The funeral service in Westminster Abbey, with its two anthems--"Crossing the Bar" and "The Silent Voices"--filling the long-drawn aisle and, rising to the fretted vault above the heads of a great congregation, will long be remembered by those who were present. "The tributes of sympathy," his son writes, "which we received from many countries and from all classes and creeds, were not only remarkable for their universality, but for their depth of feeling."

To those who had so long lived with him, the loss of one whom they had tended for many years with devoted affection and reverence was indeed irreparable. Yet they had the consolation of knowing that his life had been on the whole happy and fortunate, marked by singularly few griefs or troubles; that he had proved himself a master of the high calling which he set before himself, and departed, full of honours, at the coming of the time when no man can work.

A collection of letters that passed between the Queen and Tennyson, including two from Her Majesty to his son on receiving the news of Tennyson's death, is added to the _Memoir_; and the volume closes with "Recollections of the Poet," written at some length, by Lord Selborne, Jowett, John Tyndall, F. Myers, F. T. Palgrave, and the Duke of Argyll. These papers will be read, as they deserve to be, with attentive interest for their descriptions of the personal characteristics, recorded by those who knew him best, of a very remarkable man; they show also how his poems were conceived and elaborated, they trace his thoughts on high subjects, and they contain very ample dissertations on his poetry. They inevitably anticipate the work of the public reviewer, who cannot pretend to write with equal authority, while it is not his business to criticize the carefully composed opinions of others.

One can see, looking backward, that Tennyson's genius flowered in due season; there had been a plentiful harvest of verse in the preceding generation, but it had been garnered, and the field was clear. The hour had come for a new writer to take up the succession to that brilliant and illustrious group who, in the first quarter of the last century, raised English poetry to a height far above the classic level of the age before them. Three leaders of that band--Byron, Keats, and Shelley--died young; the sum total of their years added together exceeds by no more than a decade the space of Tennyson's single life. And if the creative period of a poet's life may be reckoned as beginning at twenty-one (which is full early), it sums up to no more than thirty-one years for all the three poets whom we have named, and to sixty years for Tennyson alone. When his first volume appeared (1832), Byron, Shelley, and Keats were dead; Scott and Coleridge had long ceased to write poetry, and were dying; Wordsworth, who had done all his best work long before, alone survived, for Southey cannot be counted in the same rank. Moreover, England may be said to have been just then passing through one of those periods of artistic depression that precede a revival; the popular taste was artificial and decadent, it was running down to the pseudo-romantic and false Gothic, to the conventional Keepsake note in sentiment, to extravagant admiration of such poems as Moore's _Lalla Rookh_. The purchase by the State of the Elgin Marbles, and the opening of the National Gallery, had prepared the way for better things in art; but I may affirm, speaking broadly, that it was a flat interval, when the new generation was just looking for some one to give form to an upward movement of ideas.

It was upon the rising wave after this calm that Tennyson was lifted forward by the quick recognition of his talent among his ardent and open-minded contemporaries; although his general popularity came gradually, since even in 1850, as may be seen from the list already given of his competitors for the Laureateship, his pre-eminence had not been indisputably established in high political society. Yet all genuine judges might perceive at once that here was the man to raise again from the lower plane the imaginative power of verse, who knew the magical charm that endows with beauty and dramatic force the incidents and impressions which the ordinary artist can only reproduce in a commonplace or unreal way, while the master-hand suddenly illumines the whole scene, foreground and background. He struck a note that touched the feelings and satisfied the spiritual needs of his contemporaries, and herein lay the promise of his poetry; for to the departing generation the coming man can say little or nothing. We have to bear in mind, also, that during Tennyson's youth the whole complexion and "moving circumstance" of the age had undergone a great alteration. It was the uproar and martial clang, the drums and trampling of long and fierce wars, the mortal strife between revolutionary and reactionary forces, that kindled the fiery indignation of Shelley and Byron, inspiring such lines as

Still, Freedom, still thy banner, torn yet flying,
Streams like a meteor flag _against_ the wind,

and affected Coleridge and even Southey "in their hot youth, when George the Third was king." Tennyson's opportunity came when these thunderous echoes had died away, when the Reform Bill had become law, when the era of general peace and comfortable prosperity that marks for England the middle of this century was just setting in. The change may be noticed in Tennyson's treatment of landscape, of the aspects of earth, sea, and sky. With Byron and Coleridge the prevailing effects were grand, stormy, wildly magnificent; with Tennyson the impressions are mainly peaceful, melancholy, mysterious: he is looking on the happy autumn fields, or listening in fancy to the long wash of Australasian seas. There are of course exceptions on both sides; yet in Byron the best-known descriptive passages are all of the former, and in Tennyson of the latter, character. The difference in style corresponds, manifestly, not only with the contrast in the temper of their times, warlike for the earlier poets and peaceful for the later, but also with the disorder and unrest which vexed the private lives of Byron, Shelley, and Coleridge, as compared with the happy domestic fortunes of Tennyson.

It is almost superfluous to lay stress on the well-known metrical variety of Tennyson's poems, or upon the musical range of his language. He followed the best models, and perhaps improved upon them, in using the primitive onomatopoeia as the base for a higher order of composition, in which the words have a subtle connotation, blending sound and colour into harmonies that accord with the sense and spirit of a passage, convey the thought, and create the image. His skill in wielding the long flowing line was remarkable, nor had any poet before him employed it so frequently; its flexibility lent freedom and scope to his impersonations of character, and in other pieces he could give it the rolling melody of a chant or a chorus. On the instrumental power of blank verse we know that he set the highest value; he had his own secret methods of scansion, and his long practice enabled him to extend the capabilities of this peculiarly English metre. But for an excellent critical analysis of Tennyson's blank verse, in comparison with the rhythm of other masters, I must refer my readers to Mr. J. B. Mayor's _Chapters on English Metre_, with especial reference to the final chapter, where the styles of Tennyson and Browning, as representative of modern English verse, are scientifically examined.

I make no apology for having included some criticisms of Tennyson's work in this review of his life, because not the least valuable feature of the _Memoir_ is that it has been so arranged as to form a running commentary upon and interpretation of his poems, as reflecting his mind and his manner of life. Throughout the second half of the last century Tennyson has been foremost among English men of letters, and it is his proud distinction to have maintained the apostolic succession of our national poets in a manner not unworthy of those famous men who went immediately before him.

TENNYSON: THE POET AND THE MAN

By PROFESSOR HENRY BUTCHER[102]

A hundred years have passed since Tennyson's birth, seventeen years since his death. It is too soon to attempt to fix his permanent place among English poets, but it is not too soon to feel assured that much that he has written is of imperishable worth. Will you bear with me if I offer some brief remarks, not by way of critical estimate, but in loving appreciation of the poet and the man? And let me say at once how deeply all who care for Tennyson are indebted to the illuminating _Memoir_ and Annotated Edition published by his son.

Tennyson's poetic career is in some respects unique in English literature. He fell upon a time when fiction, science, and sociology were displacing poetry. He succeeded in conquering the poetic indifference of his age. For nearly sixty years he held a listening and eager audience, including not only fastidious hearers but also the larger public. Probably no English poet except Shakespeare has exercised such a commanding sway over both learned and unlearned. He unsealed the eyes of his contemporaries and revealed to them again the significance of beauty. To the English people, and indeed the English-speaking race, he was not merely the gracious and entrancing singer, but also the seer who divined their inmost thoughts and interpreted them in melodious forms of verse.

At the outset of his poetic life, Arthur Hallam notes the "strange earnestness of his worship of beauty." Like Milton, he was studious of perfection. Like Milton, too, he had in a supreme degree the poet's double endowment of an exquisite ear for the music of verse and an unerring eye for the images of nature. Like Milton, he acquired a mastery of phrase which has enriched the capacities of our English speech; and not Milton himself drew from the purely English elements in the language more finely modulated tones. No poet since Milton has been more deeply imbued with classical literature, and the perfection of form which he sought fell at once into a classic and mainly a Hellenic mould. We find in him reminiscences or close reproductions not only of Homer and Theocritus, of Virgil and Horace, of Lucretius and Catullus, of Ovid and Persius, but also of Sappho and Alcman, of Pindar and Aeschylus, of Moschus, Callimachus, and Quintus Smyrnaeus, more doubtfully of Simonides and Sophocles. We can follow the tracks of his reading also in Herodotus, Plato, Plutarch, and Livy. His early volumes contain varied strains of classical and romantic legend. In some of the poems we are aware at once of the pervasive atmosphere and enchantment of romance, as in "The Lady of Shalott," "Mariana," "Sir Galahad," and many more. Others--such as "Oenone," "The Lotos-Eaters," "Ulysses," "Tithonus"--what are we to call them, classical or romantic? The thought and the form are chiefly classical, but the poems are shot through with romantic gleams and tinged with modern sentiment. Yet so skilful is the handling that there is no sense of incongruity between the things of the past and the feelings of a later day. The harmony of tone and colour is almost faultless, more so than in the treatment of the longer themes taken from Celtic sources. But while some poems are dominantly classical, others dominantly romantic, Tennyson's genius as a whole is the spirit of romance expressing itself in forms of classical perfection. To the romanticist he may seem classical; to the classicist he is romantic: romantic in his choice of subjects, in his attitude towards Nature, in his profusion of detail, in an ornateness sometimes running to excess; in his moods, too, of reverie or languor and in the slumberous charm that broods over many of his landscapes. Yet he is free from the disordered individualism of the extreme romantic school. Disquietude and unrest are not wanting, but there is no unruly self-assertion; the cry of social revolt is faintly heard, and, when heard, its tones are among the least Tennysonian. Those who demand subtle or curious psychology find him disappointing; his characters are in the Greek manner _broadly human_, types rather than deviations from the type. That he was capable of expressing intense and poignant feeling is shown by such impassioned utterances as those of "Fatima" and "Maud"; but passion with him is usually restrained. There are critics for whom passion is genuine only if turbid, just as thought is profound only if obscure; and for them Tennyson's reserve--again a Greek quality--seems an almost inhuman calm. His own most deeply felt experiences find their truest expression when passed through the medium of art; they come out tranquillized and transfigured. The sorrow and love of "In Memoriam"--which poem I take to be the supreme effort of his genius--are merged in large impersonal emotions. The poem, as he himself says, "is rather the cry of the whole human race than mine." Tennyson's intense humanity gives rise to a peculiar vein of pathos, and even of melancholy. Side by side there are his "mighty hopes" for the future and the power and "passion of the past"--"the voice of days of old and days to be": on the one hand the forward straining intellect, on the other the backward glance, the lingering regret, and "some divine farewell." Those haunting and recurrent words, "the days that are no more," "for ever and for ever," and the "vague world whisper" of the "far-far-away," are charged with a sadness which recalls the pathetic but stoical refrain of "Nequiquam" in Lucretius.

Throughout Tennyson's long career we can trace the essential oneness of his mind and art, beginning with his early experiments in language and metrical form. By degrees his range of subjects was enlarged; we are amazed at the ever-growing variety of theme and treatment and his manifold modes of utterance. In some, as in his lyrics and dramatic monologues, he displays a flawless excellence, in almost all consummate art. But diverse as are the chords he has struck, the voice, the touch, the melody are all his own. In his latest poems we may miss something of the early rapture of his lyric song, but he is still himself and unmistakable; and had he written nothing but the lines "To Virgil" and "Crossing the Bar" he would surely take rank among the highest. We think of him primarily as the artist, but the artist and the man in him were never far apart; and as years went on his human sympathies, always strong, were strengthened and broadened, and drew him closer to the common life of humble people. We overhear more of "the still sad music of humanity." Towards the close of his life the moral and religious content of the poems becomes fuller with his deepening sense of the grandeur and the pathos of man's existence. Some see in this a weakening of his art, the intrusion into poetry of an alien substance. Yet eliminate this element from art, and how much of the greatest poetry of the world is gone! Now and then, it must be confessed, the ethical aim in Tennyson seems to some of us unduly prominent, but _very rarely_ does the artist lose himself in the teacher or the preacher. He has a message to deliver, but it is not a mere moral lesson: its true appeal is to the imagination; put it into prose and it is no longer his. It lives only in its proper form of imaginative beauty.

Aristotle noted two types of poet, the [Greek: euphyês], the finely gifted artist, plastic to the Muse's touch, who can assume many characters in turn; and the [Greek: manikos], the inspired poet, with a strain of frenzy, who is lifted out of himself in a divine transport. Were we asked to select three examples of the former type, one from Greece, one from Rome, and one from England, our choice from the ancient world would probably fall on Sophocles and Virgil, and might we not, as a fitting third, add Tennyson to the list? I do not attempt to determine their relative rank, but I do suggest that they all belong to the same family, and that already in this centenary year of our Poet we can recognize the poetic kinship. Each of the three had in him the inmost heart of poetry, beating with a full humanity and instinct with human tenderness; each remained true to his calling as an artist and pursued throughout life the vision of beauty; and each achieved, in his own individual way, a noble and harmonious beauty of thought and form, of soul and sense.

JAMES SPEDDING

JAMES SPEDDING

By W. ALDIS WRIGHT, Vice-Master of Trinity College, Cambridge.

"Spedding was the Pope among us young men--the wisest man I
know."--_Tennyson: a Memoir, by his Son_, p. 32.

James Spedding, of whom FitzGerald wrote, "He was the wisest man I have known," was born June 20, 1808, at Mirehouse, Keswick, and was the third son of John Spedding. He was educated at the Grammar School, Bury St. Edmunds, where his father, leaving his Cumberland home, went to live for the purpose of putting his sons under the care of Dr. Malkin. Among his school-fellows were W. B. Donne, J. M. Kemble (the Anglo-Saxon scholar), the three brothers FitzGerald, and his own brother Edward, who with himself was at the head of the school when they left. From Bury he went to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1827, where he was contemporary with Frederick, Charles, and Alfred Tennyson, Arthur Hallam, Monckton Milnes (afterwards Lord Houghton), and W. H. Thompson (afterwards Master of Trinity), and was very early admitted into the fellowship of the Apostles. On Commemoration Day, 1830, he was called upon to deliver an oration in the College Chapel, the subject being "An Apology for the Moral and Literary Character of the Nineteenth Century," which was afterwards printed. Another of his early productions was a speech against Political Unions, written for a debating society in the University of Cambridge, which, although anonymous, attracted the notice of the author of _Philip van Artevelde_, afterwards his colleague in the Colonial Office, who quoted some passages from it in the notes to his poem, with the remark: "It is a singular trait of the times that a speech containing so much of sagacity and mature reflection as is to be found in this exercitation, should have been delivered in an academical debating club, and should have passed away in a pamphlet, which, as far as I am aware, attracted no notice. Time and place consenting, a brilliant Parliamentary reputation might be built upon a tithe of the merit." In 1831 he won the Members' Prize with a Latin essay on "Utrum boni plus an mali hominibus et civitatibus attulerit dicendi copia," and in 1832 he was again a candidate, and wrote to Thompson on the 4th of May about it:

Tennant and I both got in our Essays, both in a very imperfect state,
and both the last minute but one.... I find that Alford also wrote. So
the Apostles have three chances. What Alford's may be I do not know.
But Tennant's and mine are neither of them worth much: Tennant's from
dryness, mine from impertinence: for of all the impertinent things I
ever wrote (and this is a bold word) my "Dissertatio Latina" was the
most impertinent. It was in the form of a letter from Son Marcus to
Father Cicero; cutting up the Offices in the most reverential way
possible. The merit of it is, that if no prize is given at all I may
fairly put it down to the novelty of the experiment and the nature of
the Judges, whom to my horror I found out the day after to be the
Heads of Colleges! Marry, God forbid! I rather calculated on
Graham's[103] being one of the chief voters, who is fond of fun in
general, and of my Latin in particular. However, it is no matter. I
spent an amusing fortnight and improved my composition: and my mind is
easy anyhow, which you will not easily believe.

On June 21 he writes again:

You will be glad to know that scoffing and utilizing march (like
humanity according to the St. Simonians), and that Cicero the son has
justified his parentage by getting the first prize for Latin
composition. You will be sorry to hear that not Alford nor Tennant,
but Hildyard Pet. hath obtained the second. Whether their labour has
been lost I know not, but mine has been fairly paid, being at the rate
of a guinea a day, and therefore 365 guineas a year, a very tolerable
income, and I shall increase my establishment accordingly.... I wish
you would decide, with your character, to come to Cambridge in the
vacation and not stay by that dismal sea. There will be George Farish,
and Edm. Lushington, and God knows whether Tennant, and do but add
yourself to myself, and ourselves to the aforesaid: and lo you a
select company as ever smoked under the shadow of a horse chesnut. If
you do not come, you will simply be behind the world of the wise
(which you know is as much like a goad as like a nail fastened by the
master of an assembly) in the understanding of things spoken. For we
talk out of the "Palace of Art" and the "Legend of Fair Women." The
great Alfred is here, _i.e._ in Southampton Row, smoking all the day,
and we went from this house [14 Queen Square, Westminster] on a
pilgrimage to see him; to wit, Two Heaths, my brother and myself, and,
meeting Allen on the way, we took him along with us, and when we
arrived at the place appointed we found A. T. and A. H. H. and J. M.
K. So we made a goodly company, and did as we do at Cambridge, and,
but that you were not among us, we should have been happy.

Again, on the 18th of July:

A new volume by A. T. is in preparation and will, I suppose, be out in
Autumn. In the meantime I have no copy of the "Palace of Art," but
shall be happy to repeat it to you when you come,--no copy of the
"Legend of Fair Women," but can repeat about a dozen stanzas which are
of the finest,--no copy of the conclusion of "Oenone" but one in
pencil which no one but myself can read. The two concluding stanzas of
"The Miller's Daughter," I can give you in this letter.... A broad
smiling letter from John Heath commissions me this morning to engage
Mrs. Perry's lodgings for Dunbar, whereat I rejoice: also informs me
that he himself keeps a Parroquet, and that Douglas has become a great
Berkeleian, and would leave his body, like Jeremy Bentham's, to be
dissected, if he thought he had one.

His brother Edward, who had been for some time in delicate health, died on the 24th of August 1832, and a few days later Spedding writes to Thompson:

If you have seen Tennant you will be prepared to hear that my brother
Edward died early on Friday morning, after above a month of severe
suffering, leaving a ghastly vacancy in my prospects, not to be filled
up. However, what is past--the profit and the pleasure which I have
gathered out of long and pleasant years of brotherly society--this at
least is safe, and is so much to be thankful for. Why should I be the
sorrier because I have so long been graced with a source of comfort
and of pride, which, if I had never known, I should now be as cheerful
as when I last wrote to you? You knew him but little, but you knew him
enough to form some notion of how much I have to regret--or, in other
words, how much I have had to bless God for. He made a good and a
Christian end, and it is ascertained by a _post-mortem_ inspection
that he could not possibly have had health for any length of time
together. His disease was the formation of internal abscesses, in
consequence of a failure of some of the membranes, and quite beyond
the reach of surgery, so that, had one been at liberty to decide by a
wish whether he should live or die, it would have been an act of
unpardonable selfishness to wish him a moment more of captivity. This
too is something to take off the bitterness of regret, which, however,
in any way has no business to be bitter. But whether it is that I
value high human friendship more highly than I ought to do, or
whatever be the cause, a strange fatality seems to hang over the
objects of my more especial esteem, and I would have you, Thompson,
beware in time. But I shall lose my character with you if I do not
take care. I hope you will communicate the news to Tennant and Farish,
and to all our common friends, for explanations face to face are
formidable things.

It was the death of this brother that gave occasion to the verses "To J. S." which Tennyson published in the volume then in course of preparation.

In October 1832, after unsuccessfully sitting for a Fellowship, he decided upon another trial. Writing from Mirehouse to Thompson, he says:

I find it impossible to read here, the valleys look so independent of
circumstances. There stand the mountains, there lie the valleys, and
there is that brook which thou hast made to take its pastime therein,
a jolly old beck that has lately taken to worshipping its maker; for
it overflowed and went into the church, turning us Christians out, or
rather preventing us from going in--a better thing, inasmuch as
prevention is better than cure.

He was again unsuccessful, and Whiston was elected before him.

In the spring of this year (1833) he had written to Thompson: "Hallam announces himself this morning as not otherwise than unwell." He had long been delicate, and his early and sudden death at Vienna on the 15th of September came as a shock but not a surprise to his friends. There was a suggestion that his memory should be perpetuated by an inscription in the College Chapel, but it came to nothing. Spedding wrote to Thompson on November 18:

Phillips has been consulting me and others as to the propriety and
possibility of getting a tablet to Arthur Hallam's memory erected in
Trinity Chapel. Everybody approves cordially to whom he has
communicated the proposal, and he now wishes it to be known among
Hallam's friends that such a plan is in contemplation, but privately
and quietly. He will then get Christopher Wordsworth to get the
Master's permission, and then it will be time to think about the rest.
It is just possible that there may be some College etiquette or other
in the way, and it would be a pity in that case that the intention
should have been talked about publicly. Will you communicate this to
friends in Cambridge who may communicate with friends out of
Cambridge, and so there will be little difficulty in letting every one
know who is interested in the matter? Kemble can tell Trench, etc.;
Merivale, Alford, etc. Who will write to Monteith, or send me his
address? I will write to Donne myself. I think you must know every
friend of Hallam's whom I know. I have communicated with no one yet,
except those in town. You will be able to do what is fitting better
than I can tell you.

The scheme came to nothing, for what reason we do not know; possibly "college etiquette," as Spedding anticipated, might stand in the way, for Hallam was neither Fellow nor Scholar of the College.

In the spring of 1834 Spedding was still at Mirehouse, and gives Thompson an account of a day and night he spent with Hartley Coleridge:

The said Hartley is indeed a spirit of no common rate--his mind is
brimful of rare and precious fancies, which leap out of him as fresh
as a fountain in the sunshine. His biographical engagement with
Bingley is for the present suspended, by his own fault, as he says. I
suppose he could not stand it any longer. But the three first numbers
are completed, and bound up in a goodly fat volume of 720 closely
printed pages. It contains twelve or fifteen lives, and more good
things of all sorts and sizes than any other book of 720 pages. It is
published by Bingley in Leeds and Whitaker in London, called
_Biographia Borealis_, costs sixteen shillings, and the notes alone
are worth the money. Wherefore, I pray you not only to get it
yourself, but likewise to make everybody else get it. No apostolic
bookcase should be without it. It should become a _household_ book;
therefore, let no one think of borrowing it, but whosoever is wise and
good let him buy or steal it. If any man should ask what are the
_politics_ of the work (a question which no Apostle, who is indeed an
Apostle, ever thought of asking but in the way of mere curiosity),
then say thou, the same politics which were held in common by Plato,
Demosthenes, Shakespeare, Bacon, Burke, and God Almighty, and let him
make what he can of the information.