The Life of Tennyson

“ IF I may venture to speak of his special influence on the world,” writes Lord Hallam Tennyson in the preface to his biography of his father, " my conviction is that its main and enduring factors are his power of expression, the perfection of his workmanship, his strong common sense, the high purport of his life and work, his humility, and his open-hearted and helpful sympathy, —

Filial piety has not often been more reverent of a great fame, and at the same time more self - restrained and tactful, than in the biography of the poet whom all men are practically agreed in regarding as the central figure of the Victorian age. It would have been easy to blur the outlines of the portrait by too free and intimate a touch; it would have been easy to give the figure academic accuracy and remoteness by too great a formality of manner. The perils which beset the biographer, and so often mar the beauty and endanger the fidelity of his work, have been skillfully avoided. Hallam Tennyson has written of his father wisely, generously, frankly ; he has neither ignored nor exploited the kinship which fitted him more than any other man of his time to perform this delicate task, and at the same time made the task far more difficult than it would have been in the hands of another. He has escaped the danger of feeling that he was discharging a great literary function in writing the biography of the foremost man in English literature in the last half-century; he has done his work modestly, simply, and with a reverence which is the more effective in awakening a kindred feeling in the mind of the reader because it is unstudied, genuine, and restrained.

It has fallen to the lot of few biographers to deal with a richer nature, a finer genius, a life more harmoniously adjusted to the higher claims of art, a nobler group of friends, or a more interesting period. Alfred Tennyson was not only a child, but a favorite, of the Muses, if these conditions are taken into account; and the more sensitive the gift, the more important the conditions under which it is tempered, tested, and used. In one sense the man of genius is more independent of his surrounding than the man of lesser endowment, but in another sense he is far more dependent upon them. The light will shine, no matter how opaque the medium through which it sends its rays ; but its clarity, its steadiness, its power of illumination, are dependent upon what may be called the accidents of its place, its time, and the circumstance in which it is set.

In these respects Tennyson was fortunate beyond most men of his quality. He was well-born in the truest sense of the word. The rectory at Somersby, on the slope of a Lincolnshire wold, was a nest of singing birds ; for of the twelve children born to the Rev. Dr. George Clayton Tennyson, nearly all were poets by instinct, and at least three by practice. The woodbine climbed to the nursery lattice ; the stained-glass windows made what Charles Tennyson called “ butterfly souls ” on the walls ; the stone chimneypiece had been carved by the father ; the drawing-room was lined with books ; larch, sycamore, and wych-elms overshadowed the lawn. Here the future Laureate made one of his earliest songs ; and at the foot of the garden which sloped to the field ran the brook whose music never ceased to haunt him. To this stream, Hallam Tennyson tells us, the poem beginning, “ Flow down, cold rivulet, to the sea,” was specially dedicated. On the right of the lawn was the orchard, a place fragrant in the memory of the poet, as the orchard has always been fragrant in the poetry of the world. “How often,” he said, “ have I risen in the early dawn to see the golden globes lying in the dewy grass among those apple-trees ! ” A little further from the rectory were shaded lanes, such as make England a bower of delight when the hedges are in bloom. Close at hand were the little church, the quiet churchyard with its ancient Norman cross, the wooded hollows, the hidden springs, the ferns and flowers and mosses. It is a fair picture as one looks at it through the haze of years, — a rich and wholesome background for a poet’s childhood. The father was a man of striking presence, a scholar by instinct and habit; spirited, sensitive, with a genius for conversation. The mother has had loving portraiture in the poem entitled Isabel. “ A remarkable and saintly woman,” her son said of her ; and Edward Fitzgerald described her as “ one of the most innocent and tender-hearted ladies I ever saw.”

The children were high-spirited, imaginative, and merry. They matched the world about them with another world of their own making, and they were equally at home in both worlds. The touch of fancy was in their games : they were knights and ladies, whose perils and adventures were as frequent and varied as those recorded by Sir Thomas Malory. They were story-tellers of high degree; and Alfred was their master craftsman in this charming art. Sometimes an old English play was acted ; sometimes, as Cecilia Tennyson, afterwards Mrs. Lushington, narrates, Alfred would take her on his knee in the winter firelight, with the younger children grouped about him, beguiling and bewitching them with stories of heroes performing feats of valor in behalf of distressed ladies, fighting dragons, and doing all manner of brave and noble deeds.

Behind all this play of the imagination, however, there was a solid ground of reality in the life at the rectory. With all his exquisite taste and refinement, Tennyson had, in later life, a notable faculty of putting strong things in a strong way ; his talk had quite as much picturesque directness and force as Carlyle’s. The boy learned plain speech in his own home and among the blunt Lincolnshire folk of the neighborhood. They were a sturdy, frank people, who did not hesitate to speak their minds. The Somersby cook, Lord Tennyson tells us, in a rage against her master and mistress, was once heard to say, “ If you raäked out hell with a smaäl tooth coämb you weänt find their likes.” There was no lack of humor in the household, although it was sometimes unconscious. The poet’s aunt, Mrs. Bourne, who was a rigid and “ consistent Calvinist,” — to quote an old-time Andover phrase, — once said to him, “ Alfred, Alfred, when I look at you, I think of the words of Holy Scripture, — Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire.”There were books of the right sort within reach of these children : books with the stuff of life in them, books full of reality and vitality, the books which liberate the imagination and give the growing mind its proper food and direction. Shakespeare, Milton, Goldsmith, Burke, Addison, Swift, Cervantes, and Bunyan were the natural companions and guides of boys and girls who were awake in body and soul to the wonder and romance and tragedy of life.

Of the grammar school at Louth, with its “ tempestuous, flogging master,” to which the poet was sent when he was seven years old, his chief recollections seem to have preserved merely exterior circumstances : such as being cuffed for the crime of being a new boy, taking part in a procession in honor of George IV., standing on a wall to make a political speech to his fellows, and being called down by an usher, who brutally asked him whether he wished to be the parish beadle. “ How I did hate that school! The only good I ever got from it was the memory of the words sonus desilientis aquœ, and of an old wall covered with wild weeds opposite the school windows,” were the words in which the man recorded the boy’s impressions. His real educational opportunity was his father’s companionship and teaching.

It is interesting to find him, in his twelfth year, writing a letter of formal literary comment and criticism on Samson Agonistes to his aunt Marianne Fytche. “To an English reader,” he says gravely, “ the metre of the Chorus may seem unusual, but the difficulty will vanish when I tell him that it is taken from the Greek.” His earliest attempt at poetry antedated this epistle by four years. “ According to the best of my recollection, when I was about eight years old I covered two sides of a slate with Thomsonian verse in praise of flowers for my brother Charles, who was a year older than I was ; Thomson then being the only poet I knew. Before I could read, I was in the habit, on a stormy day, of spreading my arms to the wind and crying out, ' I hear a voice that’s speaking in the wind! ’ and the words ' far, far away ’ had always a strange charm for me. About ten or twelve Pope’s Homer’s Iliad became a favorite of mine, and I wrote hundreds and hundreds of lines in the regular Popeian metre, — nay, even could improvise them ; so could my two elder brothers, for my father was a poet and could write regular metre very skillfully.” Four years later the future Laureate was writing a long epic, full of battles, adventure, and sea and mountain scenery. The lines were often shouted in the fields at night; for the boy was already showing that sensitiveness to sound which went so far toward making him the consummate artist he became. The earliest published verse from his hand showed, indeed, a training of the ear in advance of that of the imagination. The belief that the boy had the stuff of real poetry in him took root in the minds of the family at an early day. After reading one of these youthful productions, Dr. Tennyson declared that if Alfred died, “one of our greatest poets will have gone. " On another occasion he was heard to say that he “ should not wonder if Alfred were to revive the greatness of his relative William Pitt.” But this faith was not unchallenged ; there were doubters in the home, as there always are. “Here is half a guinea for you,” said Alfred’s grandfather, on reading a poem which the boy had written on his grandmother’s death : “ the first you have ever earned by poetry, and, take my word for it, the last.” It ought to be added that two lines of verse by this critic are still extant, describing a goat drinking out of a stream on a crest:—

It was due to a caprice of this unpoetic grandfather that Dr. Tennyson, who was his oldest son, was disinherited in favor of his brother Charles, who subsequently took the name of d’Eyncourt.

The boy was constantly improvising, and acquired great dexterity in metre and rhyme. He was given to roaming through the woods, to watching the stars, to keen observation of plants and trees and flowers. He was training his eye to that marvelous accuracy which his descriptive verse shows in every detail. There were those stirrings of the imagination, too, which announce the unfolding of a poet’s mind. On a certain occasion when his brother Frederick was expressing a great shyness with regard to a dinner-party to which he had been bidden, Alfred said, “ Fred, think of Herschel’s great star-patches, and you will get over all that.” Not a bad philosophy of life, and one which Emerson has expounded with great beauty and persuasiveness. It was at this time that the boy formed that acquaintance with the sea which ripened into a lifelong intimacy. The passion for the sea was in his blood, and he delighted in its wildest tumult. For this reason he found special satisfaction in the North Sea, whose waves are tremendous in stormy weather ; the breakers on the Lincolnshire coast sending their thunderous roar far inland.

In March, 1827, the slender volume of Poems by Two Brothers appeared, the authors being promised the goodly sum of twenty pounds ; with the proviso, however, that they were to take half of this amount in books from the publisher’s shop. It was a youthful venture, for Charles was between sixteen and eighteen, and Alfred between fifteen and seventeen. The poets were not unmindful of the gravity of their enterprise, and their preface says, “ We have passed the Rubicon, and we leave the rest to fate, though its edict may create a fruitless regret that we ever emerged ‘ from the shade ’ and courted notoriety,” It was characteristic of the authors that on the afternoon of the day of publication they spent some of the money thus earned on carriage hire, drove fourteen miles to the seashore, and “ shared their triumph with the winds and waves.”

At this point in his biography Lord Tennyson begins the introduction of a large number of unpublished poems left in manuscript by his father. The difficult question of dealing with work which, although falling below the highest standards, often has great interest of another kind is thus very wisely settled. By this use of unprinted work Lord Tennyson has set an example which literary editors and biographers will do well to follow. The greatest injustice has been done more than one writer of the keenest critical discernment by including in later editions of his work prose or verse which, after careful deliberation, had been rejected. If a man’s decision on matters which are in the deepest sense within the scope of his judgment is to be respected at all, it ought to be accepted as final when it relates to the work by which he wishes to be known and judged. In instances too recent to need more than allusion, such decisions have been set aside when the victim could no longer protect himself. Work of this kind often has very great psychological interest; in many instances, indeed, it has very great literary interest. In the case of so fastidious an artist as Tennyson, it was to be expected that much would be withheld which the world would be glad to possess. This is abundantly illustrated in many of the verses which are given to the world for the first time in these volumes. In point of artistic workmanship and of human interest they are on the level of much of the best work from the same hand. Lines and verses which will seem to the reader integral parts of wellknown poems were omitted from these poems because, in the opinion of the poet, they were redundant, or made the pieces from which they were detached too long. These selections form, therefore, a very considerable and important addition to the poet’s work, — an addition so valuable and interesting that Lord Tennyson’s loyal obedience to his father’s decisions must have been adhered to in the face of temptations to which many editors and biographers would have fallen victims. It would have been easy to put these pieces into a separate volume, and to give them a place in the complete works of the Poet Laureate ; there would have been some criticism from a few fastidious people — but there would have been a great sale of the volume.

Lord Tennyson has introduced these unpublished pieces where they belong, in his father’s biography. Here they are shown in their natural order : they mark, in the earlier years, the growth of his mind and art; and in the later years they bring out very instructively the searching application of his artistic conscience to his work. The earlier verse, standing by itself, would not mean much or promise much ; but in its time and place one finds it suggestive of the intellectual experience through which the boy was passing, while at intervals there are lines which seem to foreshadow the style which was later to captivate two generations. In a fragment of a long poem entitled The Coach of Death, full of all kinds of immaturity, the eye is arrested by such lines as these : —

In the main, this boyish verse, like all boyish verse, is merely a record of exercise and discipline, and is interesting, as the earlier studies of a great painter are interesting, because it indicates the path by which apprenticeship was slowly but surely merged into mastery of the materials and tools of art.

When Tennyson went to Cambridge with his brother Charles and matriculated at Trinity College, in 1828, he was a shy and reserved youth, but he soon made the acquaintance of a group of young men who were later to become distinguished for many kinds of ability. He was strikingly handsome. Edward Fitzgerald described him as “ a sort of Hyperion.” Another friend drew this sketch of him: “Six feet high, broadchested, strong-limbed; his face Shakespearean, with deep eyelids ; his forehead ample, crowned with dark wavy hair ; his head finely poised ; his hand the admiration of sculptors, long fingers with square tips, — soft as a child’s, but of great size and strength. What struck me most about him was the union of strength with refinement.” He impressed every one who came in contact with him as a man of singular attractiveness and promise. Lord Tennyson reports that on seeing his father first come into the hall at Trinity, Thompson, who afterwards became the Master of the college, exclaimed, “That man must be a poet! ” In that hall now hangs the noble portrait by Mr. Watts, and in the library of the college is the bust by Woolner, — studies made at different periods, but both giving the most authoritative report of the poet’s impressive face and head. When one remembers that among the men with whom the Tennysons soon became intimate were Spedding, Milnes, Trench, Alford, Merivale, Charles Butler, Tennant, and Arthur Hallam, Lord Houghton appears to have spoken with moderation when he said, many years later, “ I am inclined to believe that the members of that generation were, for the wealth of their promise, a rare body of men such as this university has seldom contained.”

They had the high spirits, the large hopes, and the generous enthusiasms of young men of original force. They hated rhetoric and sentimentalism, Lord Tennyson tells us, and they were full of enthusiasm for literature. Tennyson had these qualities in ample measure ; but he had a cool, clear judgment as well, and was already a prime judge of character, his criticism going to the very heart in a few trenchant phrases. He took a deep interest in the tempestuous politics of the time, and his sympathies were with the party of progress, but he hated violence ; he read the classics, natural science, and history, and he wrote Latin and Greek odes and English verse. When asked what his politics were, he replied, “ I am of the same politics as Shakespeare, Bacon, and every sane man.” Of those days of young hope and exalted ideals he has left an imperishable impression in more than one beautiful section of In Memoriam. After the announcement that his poem in blank verse had won the prize medal, Arthur Hallam wrote to Mr. Gladstone, “ I consider Tennyson as promising fair to be the greatest poet of our generation, perhaps of our century.”

When the volume of Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, appeared, in 1830, faith in the poet’s genius was as firmly established in the minds of his friends as in those of his family. The serious temper with which he regarded poetry at this time, and the spiritual outlook which opened before him, are clearly disclosed in the verse which Lord Tennyson now prints for the first time. These lines have the vision of a true poet in them : —

The friendship with Arthur Hallam, already deep and intimate, was strengthened, after Tennyson left the university, by Hallam’s engagement to his sister Emily ; and his “ bright, angelic spirit and his gentle, chivalrous manner ” appreciably enriched the life of the circle at Somersby, from which death had removed Dr. Tennyson. The young men took long walks and had longer talks together. Hallam was reading law : Tennyson was reading, meditating, writing, and smoking in his attic in the rectory. There were walking-tours later, meetings in London, a trip in the Rhine provinces. The year 1832 came, and with it the second volume of the poems. Many who were still doubtful of the young poet’s genius surrendered to the charm of The Lady of Shalott, Œnone, The Miller’s Daughter, and The Palace of Art. The question was asked at the Cambridge Union, “ Tennyson or Milton, which is the greater poet ? ”

The Quarterly Review was characteristically insolent and brutal ; for those were the days when, in the minds of many Englishmen, criticism was still identified with slashing condemnation, and violence and bitterness were mistaken for vigor and authority. Tennyson was always supersensitive to criticism which seemed to him ignorant or unjust, and the sneers of the Quarterly cut him to the quick. It must not be forgotten that the Quarterly was still a great force ; Tennyson was once assured by a Lincolnshire squire that “ the Quarterly was the next book to God’s Bible.” He could not conceal his sensitiveness, and neither then nor later did he make the attempt. “ I could not recognize one spark of genius or a single touch of true humor or good feeling,” he said of the truculent criticism. He thought of going abroad to live and work, for he fancied that he should never find appreciation in England. While this mood of depression was on him came the news of Hallam’s sudden death at Vienna. It was a crushing blow to many hopes, for Hallam had awakened in the minds of all his friends not only the deepest affection, but the most brilliant expectations. Dean Alford said of him, “ I long ago set him down for the most wonderful person I ever knew,” and Mr. Gladstone has expressed substantially the same feeling. In the hour when the poet most sorely needed the swift comprehension, the delicate sympathy and sustaining faith of this rare nature, his friend vanished from his side and left him desolate. In those melancholy days of the early winter of 1834, he wrote in his scrap-book the fragmentary lines which, his biographer tells us, proved to be the germ of In Memoriam : —

Out of this deep grief came The Two Voices and the earliest sections of In Memoriam. To this period belongs the first draft of Morte d’Arthur, and an unpublished poem of great interest entitled The Statesman. A verse from this characteristic work will not only indicate its quality, but will also bring out the Tennysonian conception of progress :

Tennyson’s nature was too virile to remain long under the shadow of deep depression, and he was gradually brought back to his normal mood by work. He was not only keenly sensitive to criticism, but he was also keenly critical of himself. It is doubtful if any poet of the time has had a sounder judgment of the quality of his own verse. His ear had acquired extraordinary sensitiveness; his feeling for words was quite as delicate as his sense of sound ; and this instinctive perception of the musical qualities in sounds and words had been trained with the highest intelligence and the utmost patience. If to natural aptitude and trained skill there are added great power of expression and depth and volume of thought, it is evident that all the elements of the true poet were present. Poe had a magical command of sounds ; Tennyson had the same magic with a far wider knowledge of the potencies and mysteries of words. No detail escaped him; nothing was insignificant in that perfection of expression toward which he consciously and unweariedly pressed. His artistic instinct is seen in nothing more clearly than in his passion to match his thought with the words which were elected from all eternity to express it. If he did not always feel the inevitableness of every word in a perfect style, as Flaubert felt it and worked for it with a kind of heart-breaking passion, he was alive to that subtle adjustment of sound to sense which makes a true style in its entirety as resonant of the deepest thought of a writer as Westminster is resonant of every note of its organ.

Out of this mastery of sound and speech, with that deep and prolonged brooding on his own thought which made it bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh, came that rich and musical style which has been the joy and refreshment of two generations, and is likely to be heard in times more sympathetic with art than ours. The perfection of form which is characteristic of Tennyson at his best did not come at once. There was a slow ripening not only of the poet’s mind, but of his art; and on this development this admirable biography sheds abundant light, both by the publication of early verse, and by the preservation of the various readings of many later poems which, for one reason or another, the poet rejected. The changes made in the volume which was issued in 1832 show how exacting his taste had already become, and with what conscience his work was done.

The partial neglect of the two volumes which had now appeared, and the distinct note of depreciation heard among certain people who were supposed to have the making of literary opinion in their keeping, drove the poet back upon himself at a fortunate moment. If the later success had come at the beginning, there would have been no compromise with the artist’s conscience, no concession to the taste of the moment, but some deeper notes might not have been sounded, some greater chords might not have been swept. For Tennyson had now entered into the communion of human sorrow, and had become partaker of the heritage of human experience. He was beginning to touch humanity through kinship of suffering, and to know his time in its doubts and uncertainties and questionings. He was living for the most part at Somersby, studying German, Italian, Greek, theology, the sciences ; he was writing and smoking, blowing hundreds of lines “ up the chimney with his pipe-smoke,” or throwing them into the fire because they were not perfect enough. He was drawing near to his age and his race through the broadening of his vision and the deepening of his nature. The years of silence which intervened between the publication of the volume of 1832 and that of 1842 were years of intense activity. The poet was not only entering through sympathy and imagination into the life of his time in such a way as to become its interpreter, but he was also testing and studying his own resources and powers. Sensitive as he had shown himself to unsympathetic criticism, he was much more concerned with the quality of his work than with the impression it made upon readers at large. " I do not wish to be dragged forward again in any shape before the reading public at present,” he wrote to Spedding in 1835, “ particularly on the score of my old poems, most of which I have so corrected as to make them much less imperfect.”

In 1830, on a path in a wood at Somersby, Tennyson came unexpectedly upon a slender, beautiful girl of seventeen, and impulsively said to her, “ Are you a dryad or an oread wandering here ? ” Six years later he met Emily Sellwood again, on the occasion of the marriage of his brother Charles to her youngest sister. The friendship ripened into love, but for lack of means the marriage did not take place until June, 1850, the month in which In Memoriam was published. The cake and dresses came too late, and the wedding was so quiet that Tennyson declared it was the nicest wedding he had ever attended. Many years later he said of his wife, “ The peace of God came into my life before the altar when I wedded her.” Of this marriage the son writes: “ 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 counselor. It was she who shielded his sensitive spirit from the annoyances and trials of life, answering (for example) the innumerable letters addressed to him from all parts of the world. By her quiet sense of humor, by her selfless devotion, by ‘ her faith as clear as the heights of the Juneblue heaven,’she helped him also to the utmost in the hours of his depression and 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 Œnone.”

The years of waiting were rich not only in study and work, but in friendships of the kind which stimulate and enrich as well as console and refresh him to whom they are given. The letters of this period are full of vivacity, warm feeling, and keen criticism. The bits of talk with which the biography is generously furnished show the quickest humor and the surest discernment in literary matters. It is a pleasure to know that the young poet not only felt to the full the wonderful beauty of Keats’s poetry, but also discerned in him that spiritual quality which so many critics have failed to discover. His son reports him as saying that “ Keats, with his high spiritual vision, would have been, if he had lived, the greatest of us all (though his blank verse was poor), and there is something magic and of the innermost soul of poetry in almost everything he wrote.”

He was often in London, finding endless delight in the stir and roar of the Strand and Fleet Street, in Westminster Abbey and St. Paul’s, in the glimpses of the city from the bridges. Carlyle, Thackeray, Dickens, Forster, Landor, Rogers, Leigh Hunt, and Campbell had been added to the earlier group of friends. Tennyson’s interests were wide, and he touched many men on many sides ; his talk and reading ranged over the fields of modern theology, scientific discovery, politics, economics, and the questions of the day. Chartism and socialism were moving England widely, if not deeply, and there was great alarm in conservative circles. Tennyson took the larger view of the situation, and believed that the difficulties should be met, not by repression, but by universal education, by freedom of trade, and by a more sympathetic attitude among those who called themselves Christians. His chief concern, however, was his art, and much of his most characteristic work belongs to this period. His imagination was stirred by incidents and happenings which would have been passed unnoted by a nature less responsive and an ear less sensitive. When he went from Liverpool to Manchester, the steady running of the wheels, becoming a kind of tune, suggested that line in Locksley Hall, —

His mind was full of rhymes; verses making themselves, as it were. Then, as later, he composed before he put pen to paper, and was always reciting the lines upon which he was brooding. It was this habit of constant composition and revision, of testing accent and rhythm by vocal repetition, which gave the impression that he was wholly absorbed in his own work. The same charge, it will be remembered, was brought against Wordsworth, nine tenths of whose verse was probably composed out of doors, much of it on the old road which ran across the hills from Dove Cottage to Rydal. “ This is my master’s library where he keeps his books,” said the servant to the visitor whom he was showing through Rydal Mount; “ his study is outdoors.” Both men were self - contained ; both gave themselves completely to their art ; but both were men of profound humility.

When the volumes of 1842 were published, and the world read for the first time Ulysses, Locksley Hall, The DayDream, The Two Voices, The Gardener’s Daughter, Sir Galahad, The Vision of Sin, and “Break, break, break,” — which Lord Tennyson tells us was made “ between blossoming hedges in a Lincolnshire lane, at five o’olock in the morning,”— it was at once seen that a new poet had appeared. It is true Carlyle told him that he was “a life-guardsman spoiled by making poetry ; ” but Carlyle can be forgiven much, for he has given us a portrait of the poet at this period which deserves to rank with the representations of Watts and Woolner : “ One of the finest-looking men in the world. A great shock of rough dusky dark hair ; bright, laughing hazel eyes ; massive aquiline face, most massive, yet most delicate; of sallow brown complexion, almost Indian-looking; clothes cynically loose, free-andeasy, smokes infinite tobacco. His voice is musical, metallic, fit for loud laughter and piercing wail, and all that may lie between; speech and speculation free and plenteous. I do not meet in these late decades such company over a pipe! We shall see what he will grow to.” And Mrs. Carlyle, who was as keen a judge of men as her tempestuous husband, said of him that he was not only “ a very handsome man,” but “ a very noble-hearted one, with something of the gypsy in his appearance, which for me is perfectly charming.”

The tide of thought and feeling was running deep in those days, and melodies were rising like a mist out of the invisible stream of his meditation. “Tears, idle tears,” which the world has known by heart these many years, was composed in the mellow autumn at Tintern Abbey, a place which has evoked two imperishable poems. “ Come down, O maid,” was called out by the heights about Lauterbrunnen ; “ Blow, bugle, blow,” by the echoes at Killarney.

The Princess, which appeared in 1847, had been long in the making, but not so long as In Memoriam, which was published three years later, and upon which the poet had been at work, consciously or unconsciously, since the death of Hallam in 1833. It must be remembered, he wrote, “ that this is a poem, not an actual biography. ... It was meant to be a kind of Divina Commedia ending with happiness. The sections were written at many different places, and as the phases of our intercourse came to my memory and suggested them. I did not write them with any view of weaving them into a whole, or for publication, until I found that I had written so many. The different moods of sorrow, as in a drama, are dramatically given, and my conviction that fear, doubts, and suffering will find answer and relief only through faith in a God of love.” He believed himself to be the originator of the metre, until after the publication of the poem, when his attention was called to the fact that Ben Jonson and Sir Philip Sidney had used it.

It was fortunate that Tennyson’s biography was not prepared by a biographer who was anxious to minimize the religious element in his life ; on the contrary, it is thrown into the boldest relief, and the reader is let into those profound convictions which gave the Laureate’s poetry such depth and spiritual splendor. The whole subject is dealt with, in connection with In Memoriam, with the most satisfying fullness. “ In this vale of Time, the hills of Time often shut out the mountains of Eternity,” Tennyson once said. The nobility of his verse had its springs in those mountains, and they inclosed and glorified the landscape of life as he looked over it. He refused to formulate his faith, but he has given it an expression which is at once definite and poetic, illuminating and enduring. “ I hardly dare name His Name,” he writes ; “ but take away belief in the self-conscious personality of God, and you take away the backbone of the world.” And again, “ On God and God-like men we build our trust.” A week before his death, his son tells us, he talked long of the personality and love of God, — “ that God Whose eyes consider the poor,” “ Who catereth even for the sparrow.” “ For myself,” he said on another occasion, “ the world is the shadow of God.” In his case, as in Wordsworth’s and Browning’s, poetry issued out of the deepest springs of being ; and he made it great by committing to it the expression of the highest truth.

To a young man going to a university he said, “ The love of God is the true basis of duty, truth, reverence, loyalty, love, virtue, and work ; ” and he added characteristically, “ But don’t be a prig.” Through his verse, as through his life, there ran this deep current of faith; but the expression of it was free from the taint and distortion of dogmatic or ecclesiastical phrase. In the whole of it there is not a single phrase which reminds one of what the French call the patois de Canaan. In his imagination, religious truth was as clearly and naturally reflected as the truth of nature, of experience, of observation. It was not a phase of being distinct from other aspects of life; it was the fundamental conception which included all phenomena, and gave them coherence, order, and significance. And this conception was expressed in terms, not of philosophy or theology, but of art. The broad treatment of the great theme of immortality in In Memoriam, based as it was on profound knowledge and insight, has made the poem one of the most significant utterances of the century, while its deep and searching beauty has given it place among those few and famous poems of philosophic quality which are not only admired as classics, but loved as intimate confessions of the spirit. Both qualities are present in these unpublished verses : —

The idea of immortality was rooted so deep in all his thinking that he refused to qualify or limit it in any way. Lord Tennyson tells us that when his father spoke of “ faintly trusting the larger hope,” he meant by the phrase “ larger hope ” the final purification and salvation of the whole human race. He would not believe that Christ preached everlasting punishment. On an October day, in his eighty-first year, he wrote Crossing the Bar, explaining to his son that the Pilot is “ that Divine and Unseen Who is always guiding us ; ” and a few days before his death he enjoined his son to print the poem at the end of all editions of his works. It will stand, therefore, in its beautiful simplicity and trustfulness, as the final confession of his faith.

When the monodramatic lyric Maud, which Lowell called “ the antiphonal voice to In Memoriam,” was published in 1855, it was widely misunderstood and sharply criticised. Many readers, including some who, like Mr. Gladstone, were in deep sympathy with Tennyson’s genius and work, failed to perceive that it was in no sense autobiographical, but entirely objective and dramatic. The tone of much of this criticism irritated the poet, and drew from him some vigorous expressions of opinion with regard to the insight and discernment of contemporary critical opinion. He said that while, in a certain way, “poets and novelists, however dramatic they are, give themselves in their works, the mistake that people make is that they think the poet’s poems are a kind of catalogue raisonné of his very own self, and of all the facts of his life; not seeing that they often only express a poetic instinct, or judgment on character real or imagined, and on the facts of lives real or imagined.” It was, no doubt, the objective, dramatic quality in Maud which gave it such a great place in Tennyson’s affection, — an affection fanned by the hostile criticism which met it at every turn. He took the keenest delight in reading or reciting it to the very close of his life, and to hear his rendering was to receive an entirely new conception of the poem. Dr. Jowett, who contributes many characteristic passages to this biography in the form of selections from his letters, wrote Lady Tennyson: “ And as to the critics, their power is not really great. Wagon-loads of them are lighting fires every week on their way to the grocers.”

When The Idylls of the King appeared, four years later, they were more generally understood; the reviewers were appreciative, and the public interest, as evidenced by the sales of the volume, was widespread. The Duke of Argyle wrote: “ The applause of the Idylls goes on crescendo, and so far as I can hear without exception. Detractors are silenced.” Even Macaulay was moved to admiration by the reading of Guinevere. The poet was gratified, and did not conceal his pleasure : “ 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 thickskinned; nay, I scarcely believe that I should ever feel very deeply the penpunctures of those parasitic animalcules of the press, if they kept themselves to what I write, and did not glance spitefully and personally at myself : ” which shows plainly enough that he did care, in spite of his contempt. Such sensitiveness often goes with the delicacy of taste which was so marked in Tennyson ; and the fact that much of the criticism to which he was subjected was unintelligent, and therefore of no possible significance to anybody, did not lessen the sting.

The Holy Grail had long been germinating ; at twenty-four Tennyson had determined to write an epic or drama about King Arthur. When the poem appeared, he declared it to be one of the most imaginative of his works. “ I have expressed there my strong feeling as to the reality of the Unseen. The end, when the King speaks of his work and of his visions, is intended to be the summing up of all in the highest note by the highest of human men.” " Of all the Idylls of the King,” writes Lord Tennyson, “ The Holy Grail seems to me to express the most of my father’s highest self. Perhaps this is because I saw him, in the writing of this poem more than in the writing of any other, with that far-away rapt look on his face, which he had whenever he worked at a story that touched him greatly, or because I vividly recall the inspired way in which he chanted to us the different parts of the poem as they were composed.”

In answer to the criticism which was offended by the moral significance of the Idylls, and became somewhat hysterical in its urgence of “ art for art’s sake,” the poet quoted those fine words of George Sand : “ L’art pour art est un vain mot : l’art pour le vrai, I’art pour le beau et le bon, voilà la religion que je cherche ; ” and composed these vigorous and plain-spoken lines : —

Tennyson’s interest in the drama had been keen from boyhood, — at fourteen he had written plays ; he knew dramatic literature; he believed in the humanizing influence of the drama, and he felt deeply that the great English historical plays should form part of the education of the English people. He was not blind to his own lack of knowledge of the technique of play-writing, and he wrote with the intention that his dramas should be edited for the stage by actors who could understand and preserve their poetic quality. It is interesting to note the breadth of view with which, at the very summit of his success and fame, he undertook to create in a field that was both untried and full of difficulties. Of Harold, Becket, and Queen Mary he wrote, “ This trilogy portrays the making of England.” In Harold he strove to represent dramatically the struggle between the Danes, Saxons, and Normans for mastery in England, and the awakening of the English people; in Becket, the conflict between Church and Crown; in Queen Mary, the downfall of Romanism and the dawning of the age of free individuality; and in The Foresters, the transition period when the barons and the people stood together for English liberty.

Three times the baronetcy was offered to Tennyson, and as many times he refused it. When, therefore, one day in 1883, Mr. Gladstone said to the Laureate’s son that, for the sake of literature, he wished to offer his father the higher distinction of a barony, there was grave doubt about its acceptance. The only difficulty which the Prime Minister thought insurmountable was the possible insistence by Tennyson on his right to wear his wide-awake in the House of Lords ! Tennyson was so well beyond the mere flattery of an offer of the peerage that he took the friendly urgence of Mr. Gladstone with great calmness, and at first was not to be moved from his determination to remain plain Mr. Tennyson to the end of his days. He was finally persuaded, however, that, as the foremost representative of literature in England, he ought not to put aside a distinction which would mark the formal recognition of the place and function of literature in the life of a great people. “I cannot but be touched,” he wrote to Mr. Gladstone, ” by the friendliness of your desire that this mark of distinction should be conferred on myself, and I rejoice that you, who have shown such true devotion to literature, by pursuing it in the midst of what seems to most of us overwhelming and all-absorbing business, should be the first thus publicly to proclaim the position which literature ought to hold in the world’s work.”

In the long history of English literature there is no picture of old age more beautiful and satisfying than that which appears in this biography, — an old age rich in fame and honor, but richer still in the fulfillments and fruition of a lifelong devotion to the highest ends of art ; an age free from envy, generous in appreciation, fresh in feeling, and moving steadily forward into larger and clearer vision of truth. Tennyson was no more free from the imperfections of a strong nature than are men of smaller grasp and gift; but his life was stamped by a genuine nobility of spirit. He put aside all the subtle temptations which popularity brings to the artist by artistic instinct, and by the force and steadfastness of his character. He valued fame, and knew how to separate it from its counterfeit popularity. Matthew Arnold once said to Hallam Tennyson with characteristic humor, " Your father has been our most popular poet for over forty years, and I am of opinion that he fully deserves his reputation.” In Tennyson’s case, as in that of Arnold himself in lesser degree, popularity rested upon a sound instinct, if not upon clear intelligence ; and neither poet was indifferent to an applause which was both heartfelt and respectful. In his friendships, especially, the largeness of Tennyson’s nature revealed itself in the most unconscious and beautiful way, and the story of his intimacy with Browning and of the noble generosity of admiration which knit them together will be remembered as long as the famous friendship between Goethe and Schiller, and with kindred reverence. Such passages illuminate the painful history of the race with a splendor not born of these lower skies.

When all has been said about the beauty and significance of Tennyson’s work, it may be seen that his finest contribution to civilization was, not his poetry, but his life. In his case there was no schism between the art and the artist; the work disclosed the man, and the man lives imperishable in the work. In these days of confused and conflicting ideals of the artist’s place and function among men, this biography becomes something more than the record of an illustrious career; it is an authoritative revelation of the aims, the method, and the development of a great creative spirit.

Hamilton Wright Mabie.