Alfred Tennyson

HANDBOLND
AT THE

UNI\'ERSITY OF

THE OXFORD BIOGRAPHIES

Yh^\

TENNYSON

THE OXFORD BIOGRAPHIES

DANTE

SAVONAROLA

JOHN HOWARD

ALFRED TENNYSON

WALTER RALEIGH

ERASMUS

THE YOUNG PRETENDER

ROBERT BURNS

LORD CHATHAM

FRANCIS OF ASSISI

CANNING

BEACONSFIELD

GOETHE

By Paget Toynbee
By E. L. S. HoRSBURGH
By E. C. S. Gibson
By A. C. Benson
By I. A. Taylor
By E. F. H. Capey
By C. S. Terry
By T. F. Henderson
By A. S. McDowall
By A. M. Stoddart
By W. Alison Phillips
By Walter Sichel
By H. G. Atkins

ALFRED TENNYSON

(about i860)

From a photo:; yapli by RfJIatider

Alfred Tennyson

BY

ARTHUR CHRISTOPHER BENSON

WITH EIGHT ILLUSTRATIONS

METHUEN & CO. 7 /

36 ESSEX STREET W.C.

LONDON

Ntw and Cheaper Issue

PR.

First Published . . . February igo4
New and Cheaper Issue jgoj

PREFACE

THE object of this little book is threefold ; I
have tried (1) to give a simple narrative of
the life of Tennyson, with a sketch of his tempera-
ment, character, ideals and beliefs ; (2) I have tried
from his own words and writings to indicate what 1
believe to have been his view of the poetical life and
character ; (3) I have attempted to touch the chief
characteristics of his art from the technical point of
view, here again as far as possible using his own
recorded words.

My aim has been not to deal largely in quota-
tion, but to take for granted a knowledge of the
works, and if possible to send a reader back to them.

I am, of course, deeply indebted to the present
Lord Tennyson's great Memoir, which, for all its
tender simplicity of form, is a perfect mine of in-
terest and pleasure ; and I here acknowledge very
gratefully the kind permission which Lord Tennyson
readily gave me to make use of his book,^ and even

^ I may liere also record ray obligation to ray sister, Miss
Marpiret Benson, lo Mr. . dmuud Gosse, and to Mr. F. E. B.
Duti' for valuable assistance, crit.cism and advice.

vi PREFACE

to reproduce certain of the illustrations. I have
read and re-read the poems ; I have studied several
critical volumes ; I have talked with friends of the
Poet ; with himself to my eternal regret I never
exchanged a word. Virgilium vidi taidum !

It will thus be seen that I claim neither novelty
of view nor elaborate apparatus of learning ; but
my work is based on admiration and reverent love,
and the desire to share with others an inheritance of
pure and deep delight.

A. C. B.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Alfred Tennyson (about 1860)(/rom a Photograph byRejiander)

Frontispiece

Alfred Tennyson (1835) (frcnn a Sketch by J. Spedding)

to face p. 19

Alfred Tennyson (1844) (from the Painting by Samuel
Laurence) to face p. 26

Alfred Tennyson (circa 1850) (by Richard Doyle, from the
Sketch in the British Museum) ... to face p. 31

Farringford, Tennyson's home from 1853 . . to face p. 39

Aldworth, near Haslemere (built 1868) . . to face p. 48

Lady Tennyson (from the Pictv/re by O. F. Watts, R.A.)

to face p. 53

Alfred, Lord Tennyson (after the Portrait by Mr. G. F.
Watts, R.A., 1891, presented by the Painter to Trinity
College, Oambridge ; from a Photograph by F. Hollyer)

to face p. 74

AUTHORITIES

ATO biography of the first Lord Tennyson can be
named in the same day with that published, in
1 897, in two volumes, by his son, the second Lord, hi the
course of the present work my indebtedness to this rich
store of mateiial is patent. Until the publication of
this official Life, the most importatit studies in the bio-
graphy of Tennyson were the charming Records, by
Mrs. Thackeray Ritchie, and the painstaking atid
critical Life by Mr. Arthur Waugh, each published in
1892. The volumes by Hallam, Lord Tennyson, ren-
dered both of these earlier compilations in the main
obsolete, yet each contains material not found in the larger
Memoir. In 1898 the Master of the Temple {T)r.
Alfred Ainger) produced a valuable summary of Tenny-
son's career in the Dictionary of National Biography.
Other monographs of more or less value call for no
special reference here, but it should be added that, si?ice
the following pages were written, a volume, mainly
critical, dealing ivith Tennyson, has been published by
Mr. Andrew Lang (I9OI) ; and a monograph, biogra-
phical and critical, in the English Men of Letters
series, by Sir Alfred Lyall (1902).

X AUTHORITIES

The great importance of comparing the early texts
of Tennyson rvith one another was earliest perceived by
the late Mr. J. Dykes Campbell, who, in 1862, printed
the early text of the poems later rewiitten, in a small
t;o/Mwee«^27/<?rfPoemsMDCCCXXX-MDCCCXXXIII,
which was issued anonymously and almost surreptitiously,
in reference to Tennyson's known sensitiveness on the
S2ibject. The peculiarities of these texts rvere further
dwelt upon by the late Mr. Richard Heme Shepherd in
his Tennysoniana of 1866 (enlarged in 1879 ^nd again
in 1896). They have been made the subject of still
fuller examination by Mr. J. Churton Collins in his
Early Poems of Alfred Tennyson, 1900, to which
reference has been made in the following pages.

ALFRED TENNYSON

CHAPTER I

ALFRED TENNYSON was born in 1809, a year
that, as Homer says, was " ayaO]^ Kovp6Tpo<^o<i "
" a goodly nurse of heroes." ^ He came of a stock of
Lincolnshire landed gentry. He was descended
through his grandmother from John, Earl Rivers,
and on his father's side from a vigorous and puri-
tanical race of yeomen. His grandfather, George
Tennyson of Bayons Manor, was an M.P. and a large
land-owner, but the Poet's fatlier, though he was the
eldest son, had been disinherited in favour of his
younger brother,who assumed the name of d'Eyncourt.
Alfred was the fourth of twelve children, eight sons
and four daughters. Two of his brothers, Frederick
and Charles, — the latter of whom inherited the name
of Turner with a small estate, — attained to eminence
as poets. Ten of the family reached a patriarchal
age, which testifies to the extraordinary physical
vigour of the race. " The Tennysons never die,"

1 In 1809 were born Mendelssohn, Darwin, Abraham Lincoln,
Oliver Wendell Holmes, FitzGerald and Gladstone.
1

2 TENNYSON

said one of them, at a moment when death seemed
the one thing to be desired.

The Poet's father was a man of strong character
and imperious temper, with a deep vein of morbid
melancholy, an inheritance from which his children
did not entirely escape ; his dark moods often over-
shadowed the family circle with severity and in-
justice, and caused Alfred, as a boy, hours of
bewildered depression. Charles Tennyson Turner,
writing in 1831 of his father's death, said that his
father, " a man of sorrow and acquainted with grief,"
had been " on earth daily racked by bitter fancies
and tossed about by strong troubles." " My father,"
he once said, "almost mocked at our attempts
(to write poetry), although he used himself to
write verses ; " but he also records how he and his
brother Alfred used to read their verses to his
mother as they went slowly through green lanes,
she in her chair, drawn by a great mastiff, her boys
beside her. "Oh," he said, "all that there is of
good and kind in any of us came from her tender
heart ! "

Though the family seems to have been Danish in
origin, there was evidently a strong strain of dark
southern blood in them, perhaps derived from a
Huguenot ancestress. " Macaulay was afraid of
you," said Carlyle, with a loud guffaw, to Tennyson,
when the latter had described a highly unsatisfactory
interview with the historian, " you are such a black

BIRTH AND RACE 3

man." Alfred was often taken for a foreigner in
later life, and the portrait of Charles exhibits some-
thing of a Semitic cast of feature, and is like a wise
and kindly Rabbi. " I am black-blooded," the
Poet used to say, "like all the Tennysons." He
no doubt used this expression with a primary
allusion to his superficial appearance, but with an
ultimate reference to the hereditary melancholy
which characterised the family.

There is a charming legend, which, it is said, D.
G. Rossetti used to relate with infinite gusto, of a
guest being invited to dine at a certain house in
London and arriving early ; he was shown into an
apparently deserted drawing-room, and while he
was occupying the moments in the uneasy and self-
regarding pastimes characteristic of such a situation,
a gigantic dark man rose with a heavy sigh from the
rug in front of the fire where he had been reclining
in full evening dress, saying, " I must introduce
myself: I am Septimus, the most morbid of the
Tennysons." Grotesque as the story is, it is a humor-
ous illustration of what was a far from humorous
inheritance for the family.

Alfi'ed was born on the 6th of August, 1 809, at
his father's rectory of Somersby in Lincolnshire.
According to the fashion of the times Dr. Tenny-
son held three other preferments, but resided at
Somersby, in a quaint rambling house, with later
Gothic additions, the most conspicuous being a large

4 TENNYSON

dining-room with stained glass in the windows, that
cast, as Charles said, " butterfly souls " on the walls.

Somersby lies on the edge of a wold, in a county
of low, large, grey hillsides, great pastures, and quiet
villages noted for their high-towered churches.
Not far away was Mablethorpe, with its wide sea-
marshes and low sand-dunes, where the long
breakers fall with a heavy clap and spread in a
curdling blanket of seething foam over the level
sands. The scene of his birth was commemorated
by the Poet in the Ode to Memory and in the Song
A Spirit haunts ; and through the whole of his works
are to be found similes and nature-pictures drawn
from the surroundings of his childhood with a luxuri-
ant precision of detail that only the undimmed faculty
of childish observation could supply. About Tenny-
son there clung to the end of his life a noble and
undefinable flavour of the soil that recalls the " rus-
ticitas " of Virgil, an impatience of towns, an ab-
sorbing passion for the open air, an independence
of weather, a love of the seclusion of wild and
woodland places. Moreover, the ceremonious dress
and the conventional usages of society oppressed
and bewildered him ; and in his stately gruffness of
address, his uncouth movements, and his rich Doric
pronunciation, the country product was unmistak-
ably to be seen.

The "legend," so to speak, of the early days is
rich in characteristic touches. We hear how the

EARLY YEARS 5

boy, on hearing of Byron's death, "a day when the
whole world seemed to be darkened for me," carved
the words, " Byron is dead," on a sandstone rock
by the secluded spring of Holywell ; how he sat at
his window to watch the golden globes of the apples
lying in the orchard grass ; how he called a young
owl to his window, and tamed it. How of Louth
School, where he went at the age of seven, and
which he hated bitterly, he retained no pleasurable
thought but the memory of the words aonus desilientis
aquae and the sight of an old wall covered with wild
weeds ; how certain phrases haunted his childish
brain with echoes of strange beauty ; how, walking
with his brother in the woods, he said, " I mean to
be famous."

What especially appealed to his sensitive spirit
was the presence of water in all its forms ; the full
stream lost in a tangle of rich water-plants, or fret-
ting over the gravel ; the welling up of silent
springs ; the face of woodland pools with their
black depths ; the sound and movement of the sea ;
and further, from his earliest days, astronomical
ideas possessed a peculiar fascination for him. His
Cambridge note-books were scrawled over with
astronomical diagrams. He fed on the thought of \
the infinite spaces sown with star-dust, even recom- >
mending the thought to a brother as a cure for
shyness.

As he wrote in a stanza which he afterwards

6 TENNYSON

rejected for the Palace of Art as a "workshop
chip," he was haunted by the thought of

Regions of lucid matter taking forms,

Brushes of fire, haz\' gleams,
Clusters and beds of worlds, and bee-like swarms

Of suns, and starry streams.

He accused himself in an early letter to a re-
lation of being volatile and fickle. But others said
of him that though abstracted and moody he
was always kind and good-tempered — " he never
quarrelled."

His education was desultory ; he was taught at
first by his father ; at school he learnt enough of
the classics to make it possible for him to read
them easily and with intense appreciation ; but he
was a scholar more in the liberal than in the
teclmical sense.

From the first he knew the sweet magic of words ;
he took delight inmelodious collocations, and musical
phrases hummed in the childish brain ; one of his
earliest attempts at ^vriting was to cover a slate with
a poem in the style of Thomson^ which was shown
to his elder brother. "Yes, you can Avrite," was
the answer, as the slate was gravely handed back.
Between the age of fifteen and seventeen he Avrote
in conjunction with his brother Charles a little
volume which was published by a bookseller, Jackson
of Louth, under the title of Poems hy two Brothers.
A few of their eldest brother Frederick's pieces were

CAMBRIDGE 7

included. They received the Hberal sum of £20,
but had to take half in books from Mr. Jackson's
shop. Some other poems of a slightly earlier date
exist, published in the Memoir. One of these, called
The Coach of Death, shows an extraordinary power
of heaping up grotes£u^_detail. As Jowett said,
when he was shown these poems, " It is wonderful
how the whelp can have known such things." On
the afternoon of publication the tAvo boys hired a
carriage, and driving over to Mablethorpe "shared
their triumph with the winds and waves."

In 1828 Alfred matriculated with his brother
Charles at Trinity College, Cambridge. The elder
brother Frederick was already in residence and had
won some reputation as a scholar.

The two brothers at first occupied rooms at 12
Rose Crescent, and afterwards in King's Parade,
nearly opposite St. Catherine's College, at No. 57
Corpus Buildings. Tennyson did not take at all
kindly to Cambridge at first sight. " The country,"
he wrote to his aunt, "is so disgustingly level, the
revelry of the place so monotonous, the studies
of the University so uninteresting, so much matter
of fact. None but dry-headed, calculating, angular
little gentlemen can take much delight in them."

Tennyson produced a great impression at Cam-
bridge from the first by his magnificent presence,
his splendid face, the nobly poised head, with dark
wavy hair, and the strong finely modelled hands.

8 TENNYSON

"That man must be a poet/' said Thompson, after-
wards Master of Trinity, on seeing Tennyson come
into Hall as an undergraduate. The circle with
whom he became intimate was a remarkable one.
There was the mild and sapient Spedding, the most
unselfish and loving of men, who was to devote his
career to the Life of Bacon, "re-editing works which
did not want any such re-edition and vindicating a
character which could not be cleared," as FitzGerald
too incisively wrote. There was Monckton Mihies,
afterwards Lord Houghton, an accomplished patron
of literature ; Trench, the poet, afterwards Arch-
bishop of Dublin ; Alford, afterwards Dean of Can-
terbury and the writer of noble hymns ; Blakesley,
a dry and caustic scholar, afterwards Dean of
Lincoln ; Merivale, the historian, afterwards Dean
of Ely ; and Arthur Hallam, son of the historian,
by universal testimony the most brilliant genius of
that brilliant group, the "master-bowman" of de-
bate. " He was as near perfection as mortal man
could be," wrote Tennyson of him. Edward Fitz-
Gerald did not know Tennyson at Cambridge,
which is to be regretted, because FitzGerald had a
genius for remembering and noting salient character-
istics ; and his later memoranda of Tennyson are the
most interesting and vivid of all the biographical
records of him.

At Cambridge Tennyson read in a desultory way
classics, history and science. He was noted among

THE "APOSTLES" 9

his friends for a certain Johnsonian gravity and com-
mon sense, a rich vein of humour, geniaUty combined
with shyness ; but he was oppressed at times with
"moods of misery unutterable." He was an early
member of a secret debating society called the
Apostles, which discussed social, political and liter-
ary topics. The tendency of thought among the
rising young men of the time was a hopeful and
idealistic Radicalism, a hatred of ignorance and
stagnation, a sympathy for the downtrodden and
miserable, a dislike of parties and sects ; and a firm
belief that the world had only to be educated and
enlightened to burst into an era of progress and
amelioration. The mistake, as Blakesley pointed
out in a letter to Tennyson in 1830, made by the
young Radicals of Cambridge, was that they thought,
with Shelley, that Society could be reformed by the
suppression of institutions that led to tyranny and
selfishness ; and only learnt later that, as Words-
worth taught, no real reformation could be arrived
at except by a guiding and transforming principle
developed from within. The society exercised a
deep influence on its members by what Carlyle in
the Life of Sterling called its "ingenuous collision." ^
Tennyson had a habit of musing intently at the
meetings, uttering oracular and judicial sayings at
intervals. He professed himself too shy to read

^ For a description of one of these meetings, v. In Memoriam,
Ixxxvii.

10 TENNYSON

papers ; and there is no doubt that his nervous
organisation was even then painfully sensitive.

In 1829 he won the Chancellor's English Medal
by a blank verse poem on Timbuctoo. It was not
even written for the prize, but was an old poem on
the Battle of Armageddon, with alterations and addi-
tions. It is a strange rhapsodical piece, with splendid
imaginative power and full of pictorial splendour and
sonorous lines ; a short passage may be quoted : —

I saw
The smallest grain that dappled the dark earth.
The indistinctest atom in deep air,
The moon's white cities, and the opal width
Of her small glowing lakes, her silver heights
Unvisited with dew of vagrant cloud.
And the unsounded, undescended depth
Of her black hollows.

It is much to the credit of the examiners that they
gave the prize to so original a poem, so removed
from ordinary academical standards and with such
scanty reference to the subject set. It was, more-
over, composed in blank verse, and not in the heroic
couplets up to that time considered de rigiieur in this
competition. There is a legend that the poem was
not really recommended for the prize, but that the
examiners' comments were misunderstood ; this,
however, rests on inadequate authority. Tennyson
was too shy to deliver his poem in the Senate House,
but entrusted the task to his friend Merivale.

Tennyson, like Dryden, did not in after life regard
Cambridge with any particular affection or gratitude.

REVOLUTIONARY SCHEMES 11

Such advantages as he had gained there he owed,
he believed, to stimulating companionship, not to
the direct academical influences of the place. In a
fine denunciatory sonnet, entitled Lines uii Cam-
bridge of 1830, he says that all the rich and ancient
beauties of Cambridge shall not avail her when "the
Daybeam " shall arise over England : —

because your manner sorts
Not with tliis age wherefrom ye stand apart,
Because the lips of little children preach
Against yon, you tliat do profess to teach
And teach us nothing, feeding not the heart.

In 1830 Tennyson undertook with Hallam a
remarkable and romantic task. A revolution had
lately broken out in the Pyrenees under Torrijos, a
high-minded revolutionist, against the Inquisition,
and the tyi-anny of King Ferdinand II. Hallam
and Tennyson went off to Spain, and held a secret
meeting on the Spanish border with the heads of
the conspiracy. A good many refugees had fled to
England, and were to be seen in London "stately
tragic figures, in proud threadbare cloaks," as Carlyle
called them. A cousin of Sterling's, Boyd by name,
joined the band and perished in 1831, when the
chief conspirators were arrested, by military execu-
tion, at Malaga. The object of Tennyson's expedi-
tion is mysterious. Probably the two friends
expressed sympathy, learnt the designs of the
rebellion, and returned to England to endeavour
to excite public interest in the movement.

CHAPTER II

IN 1831 Tennyson left Cambridge, his father
being ill and his presence at home being desired
by his mother. A month later Dr. Tennyson died
suddenly in his chair. This made a considerable
difference in the fortunes of the family. Mrs.
Tennyson was moderately well off ; but the children
were numerous and expensive. An arrangement,
however, was made by which they leased the Rectory
at Somersby from the new incumbent, and this ar-
rangement remained in force till 1837. A great
happiness resulted from Arthur Hallam's engage-
ment to .EiUttily Tennyson, and Hallam's visits to
Somersby were eagerly expected ; he cheered them
all with his bright unselfish spix'it and " his gentle
chivalrous manner."

Tennyson himself settled doAvn to a quiet family
life ; reading and writing much in solitude, and
emerging from his seclusion to join the cheerful
family group. He was devoted to his mother,
treated her with delicate and dutiful attention,
spending hours in reading to her in the voice "like
(12)

PUBLICATION OF POEMS 13

the sound of a pinewood," as Carlyle said. But he
must have been an anxiety to his practical friends.
He had published his first volume in IS.SO, and a
second in the winter of 1832 (it is dated 1833) and
now lived quietly his own life, without any attempt
to enter a profession, dreaming his dreams, invested
with the "inner central dignity" which was so
characteristic of him, without obvious care for the
future. " I drag on somewhat heavily thro' the ruts
of life " (he wrote to his aunt in 1833), "sometimes
moping to myself like an owl in an ivy-bush . . .
and sometimes smoking a pipe with a neighbouring
parson and cursing O'Connell for as double-dyed a
rascal as ever was dipped in the Styx of political
villainy." Sometimes he visited London and the
"long unlovely street" where Hallam was reading
law. Sometimes he travelled with the latter, in
England or on the continent, according to the condi-
tion of his finances. Meanwhile he worked on, as
Spedding said, "like a crocodile, sideways and
onwards."

His health at this time had begun to cause him
anxiety; in 1831 he was haunted by the thought
that he would lose his sight : " It would be a sad
thing," he wrote, "to barter the universal light
even for the power of ' Tiresias and Phineus, pro-
phets old.' " His appearance gave no hint of his
state. His eyes, as FitzGerald says, were dark,
powerful, serene. But the malady, whatever it

14 TENNYSON

was, gave way before a simple diet. It is evident
that much of his suffering was nervous and hypo-
chondriacal, and that his mode of life was probably
responsible. He was fond of strong homely foods,
was probably careless of digestion and regular exer-
cise, though always a great walker ; he was also a
continuous smoker of strong tobacco. Probably his
hours of solitude, the absence of stir and practical
activities and the monotonous tenor of his life had
to be paid for by hours of gloom. Signs, too, of
definite nervous disturbance are not lacking. He
suffered, it is known, from a curious mental obses-
sion, of the nature of catalepsy or incipient trance,
of which he himself gave in later years an accurate
account. He called it, speaking to Tyndall, " a state
of transcendent wonder, associated with absolute
clearness of mind." It seems to have been a
hypnotic state, more Oriental than Western in type,
induced by the repetition of some word, often his own
name, in which he seemed to lose his hold of external
things, and to float upon the tides of mystical con-
templation,— "out of the body," as St. Paul says.

He might have sunk into settled invalidism, but
was preserved, partly by the influences of friendship,
partly by a settled scheme of work which he laid
down for himself, — reading ancient and modem
languages, history, philosophy and science, — partly
by his intense preoccupation in social movements,
or in the deeper politics which concern the welfare

EARLY LETTERS 15

of nations. He brooded much over the unsettled
condition of the country, the misery of the poorer
classes, the possible downfall of the Church and the
confiscation of her property. A few letters of this
period are preserved, rather elaborate and pompous
in style, with a certain lofty humour penetrating
them ; his first volume had been reviewed in
Blackwood in a patronising, boisterous article by
Christopher North, which evoked from Tennyson
the well-known lines on Crusty Christopher ^ ; the
tone of this poem is hardly consistent with that of
a published letter, pose and apologetic, addressed
privately to Wilson, deprecating further cudgelling.
Perhaps it was with this and similar letters in his
mind that he wrote : —

Ye know that History is half-dream — ay even
The man's life in the letters of the man.
There lies the letter — but it is not he
As he retires into himself and is :
Sender and sent-to go to make up this,
Their offspring of this union.

But by far the most interesting correspondence of
the time, which would have given a true and inti-
mate picture of his mind — the letters to Arthur
Hallam — were destroyed after his friend's death by
Hallam's father, the historian. The friendship be-
tween the two began at Cambridge. Tennyson
had formed the highest hopes for Hallam's future.
These kindred minds were deeply interested in the

1 Published in the 1832 volume, and afterwards suppressed.

16 TENNYSON

ardent problem of opening life. Together they had
sounded the deeps of the spirit ; the sensitive and
overshadowed mind of Tennyson found in his friend
a perfect and delicate sympathy, and an antidote to
his natural gloom in the radiant gaiety and intense
zest with which Hallam approached the mysteries
of thought.

The dreadful blow fell in September, 1833.
Arthur Hallam, staying at a hotel in Vienna with
his father, to all appearances in perfect health, lay
down on a sofa in the afternoon, and died in a few
minutes from the rupture of some blood-vessel on
the brain. A medical examination showed that he
could not have lived long. He had inherited a
fragile constitution, and the ceaseless strain of
thought habitual to him told heavily upon him. It
is strange that the disappointing portrait of him at
Eton, taken a few years before, and representing a
plump, rubicund, undistinguished young man, with an
air of homely sense and virtue, gives no hint of del icacy
and still less of genius. Moreover, what is still more
strange, the existing literary remains of Arthur
Hallam afford no explanation of what the individual
peculiarity may have been which so dazzled his con-
temporaries. These writings can hardly be called
more than promising.

The event plunged Tennyson into the deepest
gloom ; it was like losing part of himself He
became to himself, as Horace says, Xcc rams aeque

MIREHOUSE 17

tiec supcrstes integer. He began, after the first shock
of grief was over, to write the immortal elegy, In
Memoriam, using a metre which had been used by
Ben Jonson and Lord Herbert of Cherbury, but of
which he believed himself to be the inventor, a simple
ti'ansposition of the common eight-syllabled quatrain.
He wrote without definite design, he says, and the
arrangement and combination of the elegies was an
afterthought.

The years flowed slowly on. In 1835 Tennyson
paid a visit to the Speddings at Mirehouse near
Bassenthwaite, the house of his friend's father.
The elder Mr. Spedding was a country gentleman
of a shrewd practical turn, a considerable mistrust
of poets and a remarkable faculty of minding his
own business. FitzGerald was there and made
very salient and interesting notes of the occasion.
Mr. Spedding the elder was, he says in a letter to
Mrs. Kemble written more than forty years later,
"a wise man who mounted his Cob after Breakfast
and was at his Farm till Dinner at two — then away
again till Tea, after which he sat reading by a shaded
lamp : saying very little, but always courteous, and
quite content with any company his Son might bring
to his house so long as they let him go his own way :
which indeed he would have gone whether they let
him or no. But he had seen enough of Poets not
to like them or their Trade : Shelley, for a time
living among the Lakes : Coleridge at Southey's
2

18 TENNYSON

(whom perhaps he had a respect for — Southey I
mean), and Wordsworth, whom I do not think he
valued."

It was here that Tennyson read to FitzGerald
late at night, in the silent house, fragments of
poems which were to form the volumes of 1 842,
out of a little red book. Spedding also was per-
mitted to read them aloud ; but Tennyson said he
read too much as if there were bees about his
mouth. Old Mr. Spedding used to object to his son
spending so much time in this friendly criticism.
"Well, Mr. FitzGerald," he used to say, "and what
is it .'' Mr. Tennyson reads, and Jim criticises ? Is
that it .'' " It was after this visit that FitzGerald
wrote the memorable letter to his friend John
Allen (23rd Maj-, 1835) :—

" I will say no more of Tennyson than that the
more I have seen of him, the more cause I have to
think him great. His little humours and grumpi-
nesses were so droll, that I was always laughing :
and was often put in mind (strange to say) of my
little unknown friend, Undine. I must, however, say,
further, that I felt what Charles Lamb describes, a
sense of depression at times from the overshadowing
of a so much more lofty intellect than my own : this
(though it may seem vain to say so) I never ex-
perienced before, though I have often been with
much greater intellects : but I could not be mistaken
in the universality of his mind. . . ."

'^'i^ppwspp'^

^kX.

m

F

SPEDDING 19

Besides these characteristic notes there exist some
highly interesting pictorial sketches of the Bard ; one
is a back view, and shows his luxuriant locks ; the
other, by Spedding, without technical excellence, but
of a convincing quality of fidelity, shows him seated
in an oak chair, wrapped in a cloak, with a book held
close to his face ; his feet are encased in slippers, and
one is thrust in front of the fire. The mouth is slightly
open, and there is a vague perplexity in the brow.

Spedding complained that at this time Tennyson
showed an " almost personal dislike of the present,
whatever it may be," and that he would not go to
Rydal though Wordsworth seemed inclined to wel-
come him there. It was probably on this occasion
that the well-known contest took place between
FitzGerald and Tennyson as to who could produce
the ideally worst Wordsworthian line. The result
was A Mr. Wilkinson, a clcrgt/maii, an achievement
to which both in later years laid claim.

In 1836 Tennyson's brother Charles married Miss
Louisa Sellwood ; her elder sister, Emily, whom
Tennyson had seen before, acted as bridesmaid, and
it fell to Tennyson's lot to escort her to church.
Then it seems entered into his mind the hope
(which after a weary waiting was to be so singularly
blest) that he might win her for his wife. At this
time it became necessary to leave Somersby. The
family moved first to High Beech, in Epping Forest,
then a few years later to Tunbridge Wells ; after

20 TENNYSON

this to Boxley, near Maidstone, and finally to Chel-
tenham.

Belonging to this period is a characteristic corre-
spondence with Monckton Milnes, which shows
Tennyson at his best and liveliest. Milnes had
extracted a promise from Tennyson to write in a
Miscellany edited by the second Marquis of North-
ampton in aid of the family of a struggling literary
man who had died without making provision for
them. On his claiming the fulfilment of the promise,
Tennyson declined, on the ground that he had sup-
posed the request to be an "elegant fiction." Per-
haps it rankled in his mind that he had lately been
described, as FitzGerald told him, in a French re-
view, as a young enthusiast of the graceful school of
Tom Moore.

Tennyson went on to say that " to write for people
with prefixes to their names is to milk he-goats ;
there is neither honour nor profit." He confesses
that he has lately written a similar piece for a titled
lady, but because she was beautiful. " But whether
the Marquis be beautiful or not, I don't much mind ;
if he be, let him give God thanks and make no boast."

Milnes was very angry, and replied, it must be
inferred, in an indignant and caustic tone. Where-
upon Tennyson, in a letter of good-humoured
bewilderment, gave way, and eventually sent to the
Marquis the lyric 0 that 't/vere possible which became
the germ of Maud.

APPARENT INDOLENCE 21

At this time Tennyson's position and prospects
must have given considerable anxiety to his friends.
He read, he smoked, he lounged, he worked at
poetry, but he gave no signs of intending to publish,
and seemed unlikely ever to make an independent
position for himself. Wordsworth said, on reading
The Two Voices, " He ought to have done greater
things by this time." G. S. Venables wrote to press
on him the advantages of living at Cambridge, evi-
dently fearing that intellectual stagnation would
ensue from his secluded life. " Do not continue
to be so careless of fame and of influence." It is
difficult not to gild the early and struggling years
of great men with some of the dignity that seems so
inseparable from their later life, and it is hard to
imagine how unsatisfactory the position must have
seemed to his friends. It really appeared as though
a man of great genius and surpassing powers might
drift into a hypochondriac and indolent life. But
with majestic independence or dignified inertia
Tennyson held on his way. He was often in London
in these years, and though he did not go into general
society, he saw much of his old friends ; he was not
a frequenter of clubs ; but he liked rambling about,
talking — we learn that he was famous for his powers
of mimicry — dining in such seclusion as was attainable
at quiet taverns, and accepting with good grace
the visits of friends at his humble lodgings in the
Strand. His tastes were simple enough. A perfect

22 TENNYSON

dinner was a beefsteak, a potato, a cut of cheese, a
pint of port followed by a pipe ; " all fine-natured
men," he said, when bantered on his homely tastes
in food, "know what is good to eat." He was in-
terested, in a deep-minded abstruse way, in social
movements and politics. He saw Carlyle, Rogers,
Thackeray, Dickens, Landor, Leigh Hunt and
Thomas Campbell, and came to be generally re-
garded as a man of high possibilities. Carlyle con-
ceived a great admiration for him, though he spoke
of him as a " life -guardsman spoilt by making
poetry." Writing to Emerson, Carlyle described
him as "a man solitary and sad, as cei-tain men are,
dwelling in an element of gloom, carrying a bit of
Chaos about him, in short, which he is manufactur-
ing into Cosmos ... he preferred clubbing with
his mother and some sisters, to live unpromoted
and Avrite Poems. . . . 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, fi"ee-and-easy, smokes infinite
tobacco. His voice is musical, metallic, fit for loud
laughter and piercing wail, and all that may lie
between ; speech and speculation free and plente-
ous ; I do not meet in these late decades such
company over a pipe ! We shall see what he will
grow to."

CARLYLE 23

Again, to his brother John, Carlyle sent another
word-portrait : " A fine, large-featured, dim-eyed,
bronze-coloured, shaggy-headed man is Alfred ;
dusky, smoky, free-and-easy ; who swims outwardly
and inwardly, with great composure, in an articulate
element as of tranquil chaos and tobacco- smoke ;
great now and then when he does emerge ; a most
restful, brotherly, solid-hearted man."

Carlyle thought and wrote scornfully as yet of
Tennyson's poetry, and described him once as seated
on a dunghill surrounded by dead dogs, which was
his delicate way of alluding to the classical subjects
at which Tennyson worked. When Tennyson
charged him with this criticism Carlyle admitted
with a grim smile that it was not a very lucid
description.

The decade ending with Tennyson's marriage
in 1850, when he was forty, was a fruitful period,
rich in work, in experience, and in hope. In 1842
he published the two volumes which contained a
selection of early poems, with a number of idylls
and eclogues, simple pictures of English life.
Tennyson felt with Wordsworth that upon the
sacredness of home life depended the greatness
and stability of a people. It was in this volume
that he came home to the heart of the nation ;
he passed from the exercise of pure imagination
into the region of humanity, of domestic and
national emotion. Whether this was an advantage

24 TENNYSON

from the purely poetic point of view may be de-
bated ; but it is not possible to doubt that it widened
and deepened his influence, and enabled him to
appeal with remarkable force to a comprehensive
circle. Even Carlyle, who thought lightly of all
English poetry, said that in this book he " felt the
pulse of a real man's heart ... a right valiant,
true, fighting, victorious heart." Such poems as
The Gardener s Daughter, The Lord of Burleigh,
Locksleif Hall, and the conclusion of The May Queen,
touched the imagination and the emotion of a class
of readers which Uli/sses, St. Agues' Eve and Sir
Galahad would have left cold.

The new poems were mostly ^vTitten in a foolscap
parchment-bound account-book of blank paper,
which went by the name of the " Butcher's Book."
FitzGerald says, "The poems were written in A.T.'s
very fine hand (he once said, not thinking of him-
self, that great men generally wrote ' terse ' hands)
towards one side of the large page ; the unoccupied
edges and corners being often stript do'vvn for pipe
lights, taking care to save the MS., as A. T. once
seriously observed. These pages . . . were one by
one torn out for the printer, and, when returned
with the proofs, were put in the fire."

Still, the destruction of these MSS. is a matter
of comparatively little moment, as the poems were
in most cases practically completed in his mind
before being written down, the corrections after-

DICKENS 25

wards being very few ; had he written rough drafts
and corrected them repeatedly in writing, then to
study the process of thought would have been
deeply interesting.

It is interesting to note the effect that the
volume of 1842 had upon Charles Dickens; he
wrote from Broadstairs in that year : " I have
been reading Tennyson all this morning on the
sea-shore. Among other trifling effects, the waters
have dried up as they did of old, and shown me all
the mermen and mermaids at the bottom of the
ocean ; together with millions of queer creatures,
half fish and half fungus, looking down into all
manner of coral caves and seaweed conservatories ;
and staring in with their great dull eyes at every
open nook and loophole." In this criticism is
finely exemplified the effect of pure suggestion
upon an imaginative mind.

It is difficult to give any connected record of the
incidents of these years ; to begin with, they were
extremely uneventful ; but there seems, too, to have
been an almost entire cessation of correspondence
between Tennyson and his friends. His mother
and sisters had settled at Tmibridge Wells, and the
Poet made his home with them ; they then moved,
as I have said, to Boxley, near Maidstone; he was
often at Park House, in the neighbourhood, where
Edmund Lushington lived, who married Tennyson's
sister Cecilia. He went to London occasionally, and

26 TENNYSON

indulged, when his funds permitted, in vague
rambhng tours. In 184,5 he was at Eastbourne,
hard at work on The Princess. The opening scene
in the latter was drawn from a Mechanics' Institute
fete held at Park House in 1 842. In Memoriam
had just been finished.

One disagreeable incident at this period pi'oved
fertile in misfortune for Tennyson; when the family
were living at Beech Hill they had made the ac-
quaintance of a certain Dr. Allen, an unpractical
enthusiastic man, of an inventive tui*n, who had
conceived the idea of wood-cai'ving by machinery.
His enthusiasm was infectious, and Tennyson sold
some land which he possessed at Grasby in Lincoln-
shire, and invested the proceeds, together with all
the other money he possessed, in the concern ; he
moreover persuaded his brothers and sisters to
follow his example to a certain extent. The project
collapsed, and the whole of Tennyson's independent
income was gone ; he had been hoping that he might
soon, if things prospered, venture to marry, and
now this seemed for ever impossible. The remorse
at having lost the money of his brothers and
sisters did not improve matters, and he was attacked
with such severe hypochondria that for a time it
was thought he could never recover. " I have
drunk," he wrote, " one of those most bitter draughts
out of the cup of life, which go near to make men
hate the world they move in." Again he wrote :

ALFKEl) TEKiNVSON

1844

Fyoin llic paiiiliiii; hy Sainiic/ I.aurence

A PENSION 27

" What with ruin in the distance and hypochondria
in the foreground, God help all ! "

The family now moved to Cheltenham, to a house
in St. James's Square ; and Tennyson himself was
obliged to undergo a course of hydropathy under
which he slowly regained his health.

In ] 845 he was offered and accepted a pension
of £200 a year from the Civil List. The intention
was communicated to him in a dignified letter from
Sir Robert Peel. It seems that the idea originated
with Carlyle, who insisted that Lord Houghton
should appeal for it ; Lord Houghton appears to
have deprecated doing so, asking, " What will my
constituents say ? "

" Richard Milnes," said Carlyle, "on the Day of
Judgment, when the Lord asks you why you didn't
get that pension for Alfred Tennyson, it will not do
to lay the blame on your constituents ; it is ijou that
will be damned."

Lord Houghton then went to Peel, who said that
there was a question whether Sheridan Knowles
should not rather receive a pension. Lord Houghton
decided the matter by inducing Peel to read
Uhisses,

Tennyson himself felt some qualms at accepting
it, as was only natural ; but in the wreck of his
fortunes it no doubt helped to lift the burden.
Peel, moreover, had told him that he need not be
hampered by it in the public expression of any

28 TENNYSON

opinion he might choose to take up. " So/' wrote
Tennyson to his old friend and relative Rawnsley,
"if 1 take a pique against the Queen or the Court
or Peel himself, I may, if I will, bully them with as
much freedom, tho' not perhaps quite so gracefully
as if I were still unpensioned. Something in that
word ' pension ' sticks in my gizzard ; it is only the
name, and perhaps would ' smell sweeter ' by some
other."

In 1846 he made a tour in Switzerland. "I was
satisfied," he wrote, " with the size of crags, but
mountains, great mountains disappointed me."

In the same year the fourth edition of the poems
came out, and Bulwer Lytton made a savage attack
upon him because of the pension, being under the
impression apparently that Tennyson belonged to a
wealthy family. Tennyson retorted in a poem of
concentrated bitterness, called The Neiv Timoii
and the Poets, in which Lytton is described as

The padded man that wears the stays.

This poem reveals in a high degree Tennyson's
power of personal invective, which as a rule he kept
severely in check. "Wretched work," he said long
afterwards, " Odium literaniim ! I never sent my
lines to Punch — John Forster did. They were too
bitter. I do not tliink that I should ever have
published them."

In 1847 The Princexs appeared. Tennyson

"THE PRINCESS" 29

never thought very highly of this graceful, light-
hearted romance. The poem underwent consider-
able alterations, the six lyrical interludes being
introduced in 1850, and in 1851 the "weird
seizures" of the prince. These lyrics, such as Ax
Through the Land and Stvecl mid Low, with the
occasional poems introduced into the narrative,
Tears, idle tears and the exquisite idyll Come down
0 Maid from yonder mountain height, belong to his
very best work. He used to indicate certain
passages in The Princess as among his best blank
verse, notably the lines from the last canto : —

Look up, and let thy nature strike on mine ;

but it is fair criticism to maintain that the simile
which comes into this passage —

In that fine air I tremble, all the past
Melts mist-like into this bright hour, and this
Is morn to more, and all the rich to-come
Reels, as tlic golden Autur/m woodland reels
Athwart the smoke of burning lueeds — •

is too literary a simile, and is like a trench dug across
the path of the simple and direct emotion which
the speech reveals.

FitzGerald, like Carlyle, gave up all hopes of
Tennyson after The Princess. He said that " none
of the songs had the old champagne flavour,"
a criticism which somewhat vitiated the worth of
the judgment. Moreover, it was noticed that

30 TENNYSON

nothing either by Thackeray or Tennyson met
with FitzGerald's approbation unless he had
seen it first in MS.

From 1846 to 1850 Tennyson Hved mainly with
his mother at Cheltenham, occupying a small dis-
ordered room at the top of the house, where papers
lay in confusion on tables, chairs and floor, where
he smoked innumerable pipes, and discoursed to an
occasional friend who penetrated to his retreat on
the deepest problems of life, mingling his talk with
abundance of high-flavoured humour. He made a
few friends at Cheltenham — Dobson, the Principal
of the College, and Frederick Robertson, the "much-
beloved" priest, of whom Tennyson said that the
first time they met he himself could talk, from
sheer nervousness, of nothing but beer, because he
felt that Robertson admired his poems and wished
"to pluck the heart from his mystery."

He was a great walker and took long rambles in
the beautiful and secluded woodland country that
lay about the little town. One interesting conver-
sation is recorded. He was on a visit to London,
and was found sitting with Thackeray, with a stack
of shag tobacco, and a Homer, and the poems of
Miss Barrett (Mrs. Browning) on the table. They
praised her work, and Tennyson went on to speak of
Catullus whom he called " the tenderest of Roman
poets," quoting the delicious picture of the baby
smiling at his father from his mother's breast, from

ALFI;EU I'KNNYSON
CIKCA 1850

/>> Ru/utrd Doyle
l-rom the sketch in the liritiih Museum

MRS. CARLYLE 31

the Epithalamium. Thackeray said, " I do not rate
Catullus highly — I could do better myself." The
next day Thackeray wrote a recantation penitently
apologising for the " silly and conceited speech " he
had made, saying, "At the time I thought I was
making a perfectly simple and satisfactory observa-
tion." Tennyson's comment on this was, " No one
but a noble-hearted man could have written such a
letter."

Tennyson, when in London, used to take long
walks at night with Carlyle, who would rave against
the "jackasseries" of Government and the "acrid
putrescence " of the suburbs. He used also to attend
Rogers's breakfast parties, and had a sincere friend-
ship for the self-conscious, tender-hearted old man,
with his trick of bitter speech. " Peace be to him,"
Tennyson said long after, "often bitter but very
kindly at heart. We have often talked of death
together till I have seen the tears roll down his
cheeks." Mrs. Carlyle gives a delightful picture of
Tennyson at an evening party, where some private
theatricals were performed, arranged by Dickens
and Forster. " Passing through a long dim passage,"
she writes, " I came on a tall man leant to the wall,
with his head touching the ceiling like a caryatid,
to all appeai-ance asleep, or resolutely trying it under
the most unfavourable circumstances. 'Alfred
Tennyson ! ' I exclaimed, in joyful surprise. ' Well ! '
said he, taking the hand I held out to him, and

32 TENNYSON

forgetting to let it go again. ' I did not know you
were in town/ said I. ' I should like to know who
you are/ said he, ' I know that I know you, but I
cannot tell your name/ — and I had actually to
name myself to him. Then he woke up in good
earnest."

In 1848 he travelled in Cornwall. His journal is
full of exquisite notes of scenery, conveyed in crisp
jewelled phrases. It was here that he formed
the resolution to take up the Arthurian legends
seriously.

In May, 1850, In Memoriam was printed and
given to a few friends ; and shortly afterwards
published anonymously. It seems impossible now
that the authorship could have been doubted ; but
one review spoke of it as " much shallow art spent
on the tenderness shown to an Amaryllis of the
Chancery Bar," and another critic pronounced that
these touching lines evidently came " from the full
heart of the widow of a military man."

But the volume was warmly welcomed by
teachers such as Maurice and Robertson, who were
still trying to harmonise the exact utterances of
revelation with progressive science ; scientific men
such as Tyndall, whose natural bias Avas strongly
religious and emotional, were still more delighted
Ato welcome one who showed that the spirit of
science was alien neither to poetry nor religious
emotion. Bishop Westcott felt on reading the
I

"IN MEMORIAM" 33

poem that "the hope of man lay in the historic
realisation of the gospel," and was deeply moved by
the author's "splendid faith, in the face of the
frankest acknowledgment of every difficulty, in the
growing purpose of the sum of life, and in the noble
destiny of the individual man."

CHAPTER III

THE year 1850 was indubitably the most
memorable in Tennyson's life — the annus
mirabilis. He reached the summit ; and his life
after that date was a peaceful, prosperous progress
down the easy vale of days. He had come to the
conclusion that his books seemed likely to produce,
together with the pension and certain small property,
a sufficient income for marriage. On the 1 3th of
June, 1850, he married Emily Sarah Sellwood, sister
of Mrs. Charles Tennyson-Turner, at Shiplake, near
Henley. The bridegroom was forty, the bride a
few years younger. It was the happiest and most
fortunate act of a life that had hitherto been troubled
and vexed ; " the peace of God came into my life
before the altar when I married her," he said.

Mrs. Tennyson was a woman of extraordinary
loyalty and unfailing sweetness, with a delicate
critical taste, cheerful, wise, courageous and sym-
pathetic. She was an ideal companion for a great
lonely nature in constant need of tender love and
unobtrusive sympathy. It is the kind of marriage
(34)

LAUREATE 35

that seems to make the institution deserve the name
of a Sacrament. The rest of her life was entirely
given to her husband. She sustained, encouraged
and sheltered him ; though for many years she was
an invalid and seldom left her sofa, yet the
holy influence never diminished. It is worth quot-
ing that a few weeks after the marriage Tennyson,
sitting one evening smoking with Venables and
Aubrey de Vere, said, between puifs of his pipe, as
though pursuing a lonely train of thought, " I have
known many women who were excellent, one in one
way and one in another way, but this woman is the
noblest I have ever known."

In the same year he was offered the Laureateship,
vacant by the death of Wordsworth. The only other
poet whose claims were seriously discussed was
Rogers.

Tennyson wrote to Mr. H. D. Rawnsley, " I was
advised by my friends not to decline it. ... I
have no passion for courts, but a great love of
privacy."

After a short stay at Waminglid in Sussex, the
Tennysons took up their abode in Twickenham, in
a house called Chapel House, in Montpelier Row.
It had a fine interior with some stately carving.
Here the first years of a happy wedded life were
spent. They travelled a good deal ; but there are
occasional glimpses of a beautiful home life, Tenny-
son reading aloud to his numerous callers in the

36 TENNYSON

little quiet garden. A child was bom dead in 1851,
but in 1852 Hallam, the present Lord Tennyson,
was born. "Now I will tell you," he wrote to
Forster, "of the birth of a little son this day. I have
seen beautiful things in my life, but I have never
seen anything more beautiful than the mother's face
as she lay by the young child an hour or two after,
or heard anything sweeter than the little lamblike
bleat of the young one ... he gave out a little
note of satisfaction every now and then as he lay by
his mother, which was the most pathetic sound in its
helplessness I ever listened to." F. D. Maurice was
asked to be sponsor and accepted the honour with
tremulous responsibility. When Henry Hallam
heard that the child was called Hallam he said with
gruff amusement, "They would not name him Alfred
lest he should turn out a fool, and so they named
him Hallam."

In November, 1852, the Duke of Wellington
died. The Ode was published on the morning
of the funeral ; but not quite in its present form.
It was received, Tennyson said, with "all but
universal depreciation ... by the Press," though
it is hard to see how its great qualities of simplicity
and majesty came to be overlooked. Sometimes, it
is true, the simplicity j ust overreaches itself:

Thine island loves thee well, thoii famous man,
The greatest sailor since our world began —

is a hyperbole which is almost commonplace.

FARRINGFORD 37

And now began the steady proffer of honours and
dignities which in England still testify, as a rule, to
a certain degree of eminence. In 1853 he was
offered the Rectorship of the University of Edin-
burgh. He replied gratefully, but saying that " he
could neither undertake to come to Edinboro', nor
to deliver an inaugural address at the time speci-
fied." In 1855 came the ofl'er of the Oxford
D.C.L., suggested by the present Archbishop of
Canterbury. Tennyson accepted it and was re-
ceived with immense enthusiasm, the shout of " In
Memoriam " from the undergraduates taking pre-
cedence of the cries for "Alma" and " Inkerman,"
with which Sir John Burgoyne and Sir de Lacy
Evans were greeted.

In 1853 he had visited Bonchurch with the idea
of taking a house there : he heard of Farringford,
visited it, approved of it, occupied and eventually
bought it. It appears from a letter that he was
then making about £500 a year by his books, but
that his private means were otherwise scanty. It
was a home for over forty years.

They had found Twickenham too accessible to
droppers-in, obnoxia hospitibus. Yet the life on
which Tennyson was about to embark had its
dangers even for a man of his temperament. His
love of solitary brooding, his morbidity, his self-
absorption, were all likely to be increased rather
than diminished by the new circumstances. A

38 TENNYSON

man without strongly defined agricultural tastes
or definite duties of a local or civic kind, is in
danger, in the country, of sinking into melancholy,
or if this is successfully resisted, and tranquillity
attained, of losing intellectual stimulus and mental
liveliness, of spinning round and round like a stick
caught in an eddy, away from the stream of things.
But it must be remembered that Tennyson's life
had hitherto been chiefly lived in backwaters, that
his nervous constitution was more adapted to bear
the strain of solitude, owing to his capacity for
absorption in a train of thought, for prolonged
brooding over great ideas, than to tolerate a life
frittered by ceaseless social invasions. He had,
moreover, his wife and children ; he had his work,
which was continuous, if not daily ; he was a diligent
and loving observer of nature — and, what must not
be forgotten — he had his fame, which enabled him
practically to command the society of any one he
desired at short notice : moreover Mrs. Tennyson
not only relieved him entirely of domestic burdens,
but kept them as completely hidden as though
they existed not — a triumph of grace of which
even the most devoted housewives are hardly
capable ; she sheltered him, too, from worries
of an external kind, until her forces began to fail,
when her son slipped into her place with a noble
dutifulness as worthy of record as that of .Eneas
himself.

COUNTRY LIFE 39

The country life began at once with a deliberate
resoluteness. The happy couple looked after their
farm, visited the poor and sick of the village, swept
up leaves, mowed grass, gravelled walks, Tennyson
himself collected flowers, watched the ways of birds
through spy-glasses, and took long walks with
friends or the local geologist. All this was very
wise and philosophical ; perhaps he knew that
these are just the simple pursuits which a man,
if he once has the courage to embark upon them,
finds opening out in all sorts of imexpected channels,
and growing rather than diminishing in interest
every year. He made companions, too, of his
boys, and endeavoured to bring them up in simple
and affectionate ways. It is interesting to note
how careful Tennyson was to train the imaginative
powers of his children. His son records how the
younger boy Lionel was brought down from his bed
one night, Avrapt m a blanket, to see a comet ; the
child suddenly awaking and finding himself under
the cool starry night, asked, "Am I dead?"

Into this quiet domestic life Tennyson sank, like
a diving bird into a pool, with hardly a ripple.
When Forster complained that his friends neither
saw him nor heard from him, he replied that
he never wrote letters except in answer, adding,
" I beseech you and all my friends' most charitable
interpretation of whatever I do or may be said to
do."

40 TENNYSON

In 1854 he was working hard at Maud, morn-
ing and evening; his "sacred pipes/' as he called
them, were indulged in for half an hour after break-
fast and half an hour after dinner, when no one was
allowed to be with him, because he said that his
best thoughts came to him then. His best working
days he used to say were " in the early spring, when
Nature begins to awaken from her winter sleep."
He worked sitting in a hard high-backed wooden
chair in his little room at the top of the house. As
he sate or as he wrote he would murmur aloud his
lines or fragments of lines : as some musicians com-
pose with an instrument, while others never refer to
one ; so some poets write and correct by eye, others
by ear. Tennyson found that the spoken word
helped him greatly, and that the constant reading
aloud of his poems assisted him more than anything
else to detect faults — a fact which illustrates the
high value he set upon vowel sounds.

In the same year Millais came to stay with them.
Temiyson made an interesting criticism, and as true
as it is interesting, in conversation with the great
painter, whose early splendid fault — if it can be
called a fault — was a disproportionate insistence on
the detail of a picture, a want of subordination of
interest.

"If you have," said Tennyson, "human beings
before a wall, the wall ought to be picturesquely
painted, and in harmony with the idea pervading

THE BROWNINGS 41

the picture, but must not be made obtrusive by the
bricks being too minutely drawn, since it is the
human beings that ought to have the real interest
for us in a dramatic subject-picture." It is interest-
ing that what Tennyson saw and expressed so clearly
with reference to another art, he did not enough
apply to his own : a poem like The Princess suffers
from the very fault that he here so clearly indicates.

In 1855 came an incident which seems to have
interested and encouraged Tennyson deeply, and
to have made him feel that the poet after all
could quicken the pulse of the working and
fighting world. He was told that the English
soldiers at the Crimea were many of them greatly
excited about The Charge of the Light Brigade, and
that they would like to have it in their hands.
Tennyson had a thousand copies printed in slips and
sent out ; in this he restored the original version,
retaining the phrase "someone had blundered,"
which was the germ of the poem, but which in ac-
cordance with criticism he had altered.

In 1855 his acquaintance with Robert Browning
ripened into a true and loyal friendship. Mrs,
Browning, writing to Mrs. Tennyson on the subject,
said, on one occasion when Tennyson had been
dining with them, that she had overheard in the
next room, through the smoke, " some sentences "
(of Tennyson's) " which in this materialistic low-
talking world, it was comfort and triumph to hear

42 TENNYSON

from the lips of such a man." She went on to try
and console Mrs. Tennyson for the harsh criticisms
that were appearing on Maud, which was published
in 1855. But the publication had one tangible
result ; with the proceeds of the poem Tennyson
bought Farringford.

He now settled down to work at the Idylls j the
subject had been in his mind for twenty years, and
in 1842 the Morte d' Arthur fragment had appeared.
He began with Merlin and Vivien, which he finished
in two months, and went on with Geraint and Enid.

It is interesting to note how the little touches of
everyday life were worked into the poem ; he used
at the time to dig a good deal for exercise ; one day
as he dug, a robin hopped round him, inspecting
his work in the hope of some rich grub being
thrown out ;

As careful robins eye the delver's toil

was the result.

When the furniture from Twickenham was being
moved into Farringford and the house was in entire
confusion, the Prince Consort called, and made firm
friends with the Poet. Tennyson had met him
before only in a dream. The night before the
Laureateship was offered him he dreamed that the
Prince Consort had met him and kissed him. " Very
kind but very German," had been Tennyson's
thought.

SENSITIVENESS 43

There followed easy, prosperous years, with un-
remitting, unhurried work, a quiet country life, di-
versified by visits from congenial friends, and plenty
of leisurely travel both in England and abroad to
stir the lazy pulses ; on these tours Tennyson's
observation was much on the alert — many similes
were briefly sketched in a few salient words for
future use ; his observation seemed to have centred
almost entirely on nature and natural objects ;
there is little trace of any notes of humanity or
human talk. He was still fretful at intervals over
unintelligent critics whom he called "mosquitoes."
In 1858 he delayed the publication of the newly
written Idylls, and Jowett, who had a sincere
mission for giving trenchant advice to his intimate
friends if he saw them giving way to weaknesses,
wrote a highly characteristic letter to remonstrate
with him.

"Anyone," he wrote, "who cares about you is
deeply annoyed that you are deterred by them
('mosquitoes') from writing or publishing. The

feeling grows and brings in after years the still
more painful and deeper feeling that they have

prevented you from putting out half your powers.

Nothing is so likely to lead to misrepresentation.

Persons don't understand that sensitiveness is often

combined with real manliness as well as great

intellectual gifts, and they regard it as a sign

of fear and weakness."

44 TENNYSON

This is shrewd advice and faithfully given.

It was about this date that Mr, G. F. Watts's
great picture of the Poet was painted, now in the
possession of Lady Henry Somerset. It is the
noblest and most ideal representation of the man.
Out of the cloud of luxuriant hair towers the stately
forehead, the eyes dim with a certain trouble of
thought, but yet with an inward serenity ; the thin
moustache and beard half hide, half accentuate the
full strong lips. It is the face of a dreamer of
immortal dreams.

In December, 1861, the Prince Consort died, and
Tennyson wrote the Dedication to the Idi/lls, probably
the simplest and most sincere complimentary poem
ever penned. This led to his first interview with
Queen Victoria. Tennyson said, " There was a kind
of stately innocence about her." " I was conscious,"
he said, "of having spoken with considerable emotion
to the Queen, but I have a very imperfect recollec-
tion of what I did say. Nor indeed . . . do I very
well recollect what Her Majesty said to me ; but I
loved the voice that spoke, for being very blind I
am much led by the voice, and blind as I am and as
I told her I was, I yet could dimly perceive so
great an expression of sweetness in her countenance
as made me wroth with those imperfect cartes de
visit e. . . ."

From this interview dated a sincere friendship
between the Queen and her Laureate. In 1863

QUEEN VICTORIA 45

the Queen asked him what she could do for him,
no doubt with the idea of conferring some dignity
upon him, Tennyson's reply was, "Nothing, Madam,
but shake my two boys by the hand. It may keep
them loyal in the troublous times to come."

At this time he was much taken up with his
experiments in classical metres ; Boddicea was the
one of which he was most proud ; but he realised
the extreme difficulty of finding suitable words in
sufficient numbers to finish the lines with.

Indeed the metre of Boddicea has only a very
superficial resemblance to the metre of the Attis
of Catullus 1 which he imitated. Tennyson's metre is
in reality only a trochaic, with dactylic substitutions
in certain feet ; but this matters little, and the
poem is a magnificent cataract of rhythmical sound.

A good instance of Tennyson's superficial rough-
ness is given in a reminiscence of this period. Mr.
Thomas Wilson was staying at Farringford and saw
much of the Tennysons. He was suffering from fits
of deep melancholy ; on one of these occasions he
made some complaint to Tennyson hinting at a desire
for death. Tennyson replied, with genial grufFness,
"Just go grimly on !" — and on another occasion, "If
you wish to kill yourself, don't do it here ; go to
Yarmouth and do it decently." Mr. AUingham,
who was there at the same time, said that he talked

' A nonsense line in the metre of Catullus would run : —

For about | the space | of six | years it appeared | inimitable.

46 TENNYSON

to Tennyson about Browning. " I can't understand
how he should care for my poetry," said Tennyson.
" His new poem has fifteen thousand hnes. There's
copiousness for you ! Good-night ! "

As years went on hfe became, so to speak, less
and less eventful. One of the chief interests of Far-
ringford was the endless succession of distinguished
guests that came there. Tennyson's hours of work
were strictly respected, but it seems as though when
there were friends in the house he had little leisure
for solitary work. He still took a short time after
breakfast and a short time after dinner by himself;
but he walked with his guests in the morning, sate
to talk with them in the afternoon and evening.
His abundant geniality and sociability when he was
in the presence of those who understood him was
in curious contrast to his almost abnormal shyness,
his hatred for what he called "the humbug of
Society." He often made friends, particularly with
people of simplicity of character, with extraordinary
rapidity ; and his true hospitality was shown in his
accustomed farewell, "Come whenever you can."

For instance, in 1864 Garibaldi came to see him,
and planted a tree at Farringford ; the two great men
repeated Italian poetry together. "Are you a poet?"
Tennyson said to liim. "Yes," said the warrior.
They talked together ; Tennyson said, " I doubt
whether he understood me perfectly, and his mean-
ing was often obscure to me," Tennyson advised

"ENOCH ARDEN" 47

him not to talk politics in England. After he was
gone Tennyson praised the majestic simplicity of
his manners and said that in worldly matters he
seemed to have the "divine stupidity of a hero."

The same year he made an expedition to Brittany,
with the intention of visiting places traditionally
connected with the Arthurian legend. Tennyson
of course located his Camelot in " a land of old up-
heaven from the abyss." This was imagined to lie
to the west of Land's End, and the Scilly Isles to be
the tops of its submerged mountains.

In 1864 the Enoch Arden volume was published,
probably the most popular of all Tennyson's works.
Sixty thousand copies were sold in a very short
time. The poem of Enoch Arden itself was written
in a fortnight in a little summer-house at Farring-
ford. In 1865 he visited Waterloo, and Weimar. He
went to Goethe's houses, and found the sight of
Goethe's old boots and bottles interesting and
pathetic. In October, 1865, he was at work at the
new poem of Lucretius.

In the following year he sent his boy to Marl-
borough, where his old friend Bradley was head-
master. An interesting account of his visit is
preserved. He told many stories and read aloud
obediently. After dinner one night he was asked
by Mrs. Bradley to read The Grandmother ; he
refused, saying, " I can't read The Grandinother
properly except after breakfast when I am weak

48 TENNYSON

and tremulous ; fortified by dinner and a glass of
port I am too vigorous." He then read The Xorthem
Farmer and at the conclusion turned to a Belgian
governess who was present and asked her how
much she understood. " Pas un mot, Monsieur ! "
He went on reading, laughing, as he read, until the
tears came, and carefully explaining the points to
the governess. This gives a pleasing picture of his
simple kindliness.

He subscribed at this time to the testimonial to
Governor Eyre, whose excessive severity in Jamaica
had caused great indignation. This act of Tenny-
son's was severely commented upon. His own view
was that Governor Eyre had nipped in the bud an
outbreak that might have equalled the Indian
Mutiny in horror.

In 1867 it was thought that Mrs. Tennyson re-
quired some bracing change from the soft air of
Farringford ; and Tennyson himself began to suffer
from the curiosity and impertinence of summer
pilgrims to Farringford. Accordingly he bought a
secluded tract of ground near Haslemere, on the
headland called Blackdo\vn, which stood high and
commanded a magnificent view of the southern
plains : he named it Aldworth, from a village with
which his family had been connected ; and Mr.
Knowles, now editor of the Nineteenth Century,
then practising as an architect, built a house
there from the Poet's rough design. The house

i -i i-

ALDWORTH 49

is stately, and the details are beautiful — but it lacks
charm.

He was invited in December, 1867, by W. H.
Thompson, Master of Trinity, to stay with him at
Cambridge, and replied in a delightfully character-
istic note : —

" A smoking-room ! If I put pipe to mouth there,
should I not see gray Elohim ascending out of the.
earth, him whom we capped among the walks in
golden youth, and hear a voice, 'Why hast thou
disquieted me to bring me up ? ' I happened to
say to Clark that, from old far-away undergraduate
recollections of the unapproachable and august se-
clusion of Trinity Lodge, Cambridge, I should feel
more blown out with glory by spending a night
under your roof, than by having lived Sultan-like
for a week in Buckingham Palace. Now, you see,
I was not proposing a visit to you, but speaking as
after wine and over a pipe, and falling into a trance
with my eyes open."

In the following year, 1868, he was working at
Hebrew ; the foundation-stone of Aid worth was laid
on the 23rd of April, Shakespeare's birthday. In
the following month Lucretius was published in
Macmillans Magazine, which drew a characteristic
note from Jowett to Mrs. Tennyson : —

" I thought Lucretius a most noble poem, and
that is the universal impression. I cannot see any
reason why Alfred should not write better and better
4

50 TENNYSON

as long as he lives, and as Mr. Browning says that
he hopes and intends to do. I know that a poet is
an inspired person, who is not to be judged by
ordinary rules, nor do I mean to interfere with him.
But I can never see why some of the dreams of his
youth should not still be realised "—the last sentence
probably refers to the contemplated completion ot
the Idylls.

In September of the same year he began The
Holy Grail and finished it in about a week, " like a
breath of inspiration." He sent a proof to Mr.
Palgrave, who wrote that he had ventured to show
it to Max Miiller. Tennyson replied : —

" You distress me when you tell me that, without
leave given by me, you showed my poem to Max
Miiller : not that I care about Max M tiller's seeing
it, but I do care for your not considering it a sacred
deposit. Pray do so in futui'e ; otherwise I shall
see some boy in some Magazine making a lame
imitation of it, which a clever boy could do in
twenty minutes — and though his work would be
worth nothing, it would take away the bloom and
freshness from mine. . . .

" Please attend to my request about The Grail and
The Lover's Tale, and show them to no one, or if you
can't depend upon yourself, forward them to me."

In 1869 his old College of Trinity, Cambridge,
elected him an "Honorary Fellow," a distinction
he greatly valued.

THE "IDYLLS" 51

In 1872 he was working at Gareth and Lynette ;
he wrote to Mr. Knowles that he " found it more
difficult to deal with than anything except perhaps
Aybner's Field." With the publication of that
idyll he thought the cycle complete ; but later on,
feeling that some introduction to Merlin and
Vivien was necessary, he wrote Bali?i and Balan.

CHAPTER IV

IN 1 873 Mr. Gladstone offered the Poet a baronetcy
from the Queen. Tennyson replied that he
and Mrs. Tennyson did not desire it for themselves,
but would wish it to be assumed by his son at any
age it might be thought right to fix upon. He
added that he expected that this was outside all
precedent, and said that he hoped there was not
the least chance of the Queen's construing it into
a slight of the proffered honour. '•' I hope/' he
added, "that I have too much of the old-world
loyalty left in me not to wear my lady's favours
against all comers, should you think that it would
be more agreeable to Her Majesty that I should do
so." Mr. Gladstone replied that it would be an
innovation to confer an honour on a son in a father's
lifetime ; and Tennyson thereupon declined the
honour altogether with obvious relief.

His friendship with Mr. Gladstone grew and

deepened. In 1874, at the time of the Dissolution,

Tennyson wrote : " Care not, you have done great

work, and if even now you rested, your name would

(52)

LADY TENNYSON

From the picture by G. f. Walts, R.A.
}ly />eiiHissia/t of Lord Tennyson

MRS. TENNYSON 53

be read in one of the fairest pages of English
history." He went on to add that in some points
of policy they had differed ; as years went on they
differed still more widely. When Mr. Gladstone took
up the cause of Irish Home Rule, Tennyson wrote,
in reply to a question on the subject, " I love Mr.
Gladstone, but I hate his present policy."

In 1874 Mrs. Tennyson became seriously ill, and
was for the rest of her life, over twenty years, prac-
tically confined to her sofa. She was, according to
Jowett, " one of the most beautiful, the purest, the
most innocent, the most disinterested persons whom
I have ever known." He went on to say that
"it is no wonder that people speak of her with
bated breath, as a person whom no one would ever
think of criticising, whom every one would recog-
nise, in goodness and saintliness, as the most tinlike
any one whom they have ever met."

Jowett went on to say that she was probably
her husband's best critic ; certainly the one whose
authority he would most willingly have recognised.
He spoke of her saintliness, which had nothing
puritanical about it, her humour, her considerate-
ness, her courage. She preserved not only life but
youth under invalid conditions ; and combined with
great cp.pacity for domestic management an extra-
ordinary interest in religious, political and social
movements, with an unflinching faith, and an eye
firmly directed to what was beautiful and great.

54 TENNYSON

Many friends of the family seem to have deliber-
ately held that Mrs. Tennyson was as great as her
husband ; Jowett adds that had such a criticism
been repeated to her, she would merely have
wondered that any one could seriously have supposed
that there was any comparison possible. It must
be reckoned among the many and great felicities of
Termyson's life, the felicities which seem to have
been so deliberately bestowed upon him, that the
presence and influence of such a wife was given him
till his latest day. Probably even he himself, in-
tensely and continuously grateful as he was to her,
hardly realised how much she did for him in the
way of open sympathy and still more of deft and
uncomplaining management of somewhat difficult
and intricate household conditions.

Dear, near and true, no truer Time himself
Can prove you, tho' he make you evermore
Dearer and nearer.

In 1 874 Mr. Disraeli offered Tennyson a baronetcy
from the Queen, for the second time, in a character-
istically pompous letter, beginning, " A Government
should recognise intellect. It elevates and sustains
the spirit of a nation." He went on to say that
the Queen had shown her sympathy with science,
but that it was more difficult to recognise the
claims of literature because "the test of merit
cannot be so precise."

Tennyson replied as he had done to Gladstone,

THE METAPHYSICAL SOCIETY 55

refusing the honour for himself, and asking that it
might be conferred on his son after death. Mr.
Disraeli replied that this was contrary to precedent,
and Tennyson again acquiesced.

As a rule he was very unwilling to join any
society or club that might make claims on his
time or require his attendance. I imagine that a
definite engagement always hung heavy on the
spirits of the Poet. But he made an exception in
favour of a remarkable society, called the Meta-
physical Society, the inception of which was due to
Mr. Knowles.

The intention of the society was to discuss the
question of Christian Evidences with entire frank-
ness, and to associate with pronounced Anglicans
men of every other shade of religious thought, such
as Roman Catholics, Unitarians, Nonconformists
and even Agnostics. The lists of the society in-
cluded almost all the advanced thinkers of the day,
politicians, scientists, philosophers and literary men.
It lasted for over ten years, and Tennyson even
consented, once at least, to preside. The result of
the discussions was never made public, but Lord
Tennyson says that his father was more profoundly
convinced than ever by them of " the irrationality
of pure materialism," and thought that the theo-
logians of the present day were much more en-
lightened than their predecessors.

The society came to an end in 1880, Huxley

56 TENNYSON

asserting that it died of "too much love." Tennyson
himself said humorously that it perished because
after ten years of strenuous effort no one had suc-
ceeded in even defining the term " Metaphysics."
It seems that practically Tennyson took no part in
the discussions.

Tennyson's mind was now actively turning to
the drama, and this will perhaps be the best
place to discuss briefly the literary merits of the
plays. He published Queen Mary in 1875, which
formed with Harold and Becket what he called
his historical trilogy.

The plays had a political or rather a national
motif. They were intended to portray "the
making of England." In Queen Mary he aimed
at representing the establishment of religious
liberty for the individual, in Becket the struggle
between the Crown and the Church, in Harold
the conflict of the three rival races, Danes, Saxons
and Normans for supremacy, and the " forecast of
the greatness of our composite race." It is to be
noted how large a part the religious element plays
in all the three. In The Forester.s he tried to sketch
the state of the people during the period of the
Magna Carta, when the triumph of political liberty
over Absolutism began.

He had always taken a profound interest in the
drama, and it is interesting to note how the sub-
jects were carefully chosen to fill gaps in the

THE PLAYS 57

sequence of Shakespeare's historical or chronicle
plays. The drama was very mucli in his thoughts ;
he believed in it as a great humanising and eleva-
ting influence ; he thought that when education
should have raised the literary standard of the
people, the stage would be of enormous influence.
He even went so far as to hope that educational
and municipal bodies would take to producing
plays so as to form part of an Englishman's edu-
cation, in the same way that the drama formed
a part of the ordinary life of the Greeks at the
period of their highest greatness.

He had a strong belief, moreover, in his own
dramatic power ; he liked the analysis of human
motive and character. He was an enthusiastic
critic of the drama, and entered with interest into
the minutest details of scenic effect. His aim was
to produce plays of high poetic excellence, and to
put them into the hands of competent managers
and actors for stage production. He was en-
couraged to persevere in the task by such authori-
ties as Spedding, George Eliot and G. H. Lewes,
and was on the whole satisfied with the results. It
must be remembered that he was sixty-five when
he began this venture.

The result, however, from the point of view of
literature is, except perhaps in the case of Harold,
even lamentable. It was as though a musician
who had i-eached almost perfection on the violin,

58 TENNYSON

took up at threescore the practice of the organ.
He was at an age when his mind was fully stored
with poetical substance ; the melody of his instru-
ment was entirely under his control, his brain was
furnished with exquisite observation, and fertile
with simple emotions. Moreover, owing to his
great vitality, he had not yet outlived his power
of sympathy with youth, and he still retained
an abundance of that wondering joy in nature
and life with which things or thoughts of beauty
come home to the apprehension of the child,
and which is of the essence of all lyrical
poetry.

All this was sacrificed. He undertook instead
the practice of an art with which he was not
familiar, the painting in brief and characteristic
touches complex characters in a crowded canvas.
It is melancholy that no friend was found to tell
him that dramatic situations were precisely those in
which he had invariably failed, though it might have
proved a congenial task for Jowett. In monologue,
without the disturbing play of other influences, he
had done wonders ; his mind was of the brooding
kind that could throw itself intensely and profoundly
into a single character. Again and again he had
shown this, not only in his serious poems, but in
the humorous rustical figures whose very heart he
had laid open. He could even in a stately Hellenic
fashion contrive a slow duologue between two per-

THE PLAYS 59

sons whose characters he had fully penetrated.
Yet even here he had produced an effect of stiffness
and solemnity. But his mind was quite without
the vivacity and the minuteness which can throw
itself with instinctive rapidity into the swift give-
and-take of dramatic situation ; he was no desultor,
as the Romans said.

The consequence is that the plays, though the
execution is faultless, somehow lack interest ; the
wood is laid in order, but the fire does not kindle.
It is very difficult to say why they do not arouse
emotion, but the tragedy and the pathos have no
transporting power. They leave the heart cold.
In Shakespeare, with a far simpler outfit, a sudden
spring seems to be touched, and we are in a new
world. But it is possible to read Tennyson's plays
wondering why no emotion is awakened. The
reader feels all the time that it is like Tennyson's
description of Maud's face —

Faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null,
Dead perfection, no more.

It is remarkable that such letters as are given
in the Life praising his plays are as a rule from
historians.

J. A. Froude wrote : —

" 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

60 TENNYSON

Shakespeare has done that. . . . You have given
us the greatest of all your works."

About Becket Mr. Bryce wrote : —

"There is not, it seems to me, anything in
modern poetry which helps us to realise as your
drama does, the sort of power the Church exerted
on her ministers."

Robert Browning, it is true, was still more
laudatory, writing about Queen Marif : —

" Conception, execution, the whole and the parts,
I see nowhere the shade of a fault, thank you once
again ! "

But the view taken of Queen Mary was not
wholly favourable. Coventry Patmore wrote to
a friend : —

" I will let you have Tennyson's play shortly.
It is better than I expected — for it is not weak.
But it is quite uninteresting. Every character is
repulsive, and the sentimental themes, Mary's love
for Philip and disappointment at not bringing him
an heir, wholly unattractive. The moral is no
better, simply the ' No Popery ' cry — the straw at
which Lord John Russell's, Gladstone's and so
many other drowning reputations have clutched in
vain. I fancy it will not serve the Laureate's
purpose any better than it has served Mr. Glad-
stone's. Surely there is no passion which, when
indulged, becomes so strong and vile as the love of
popularity."

"QUEEN MARY" 6l

And again, after attending a performance, he
wrote : —

"I never saw any play nearly so dismal or in-
effective as Queen Man/. Though it has only been
out a week or two, the theatre was three parts
empty, and what audience there was seemed to be
of the most snuffy kind. So deadly stupid were
they, that when Mary said, ' We are Queen of
England, Sir, not Roman Emperor,' they did not
catch the grossly obvious applicability of the
sentence to what is now going on, until I began to
clap and beat the floor with my stick ; then it
dawned upon a few ; and at last about half the
poor people caught the idea and clapped too ; and
a gentleman behind me said to his ladies, 'That's
because of the Royal Titles Bill.' I thought of
Dr. Vaughan's experience — after going about the
whole world — that the English ranked in stupidity
next to the negroes."

Everything was done that could be done by en-
thusiastic and capable stage management. The
plays, especially Becket, enjoyed a moderate success,
a convincing proof of how deep and widespread
was the affection and admiration with which Tenny-
son was regarded by the public. " Fame is love
disguised ! "

CHAPTER V

IN 1878 the Poet's second son, Lionel, was married
to the daughter of Frederick Locker- Lampson,
and for several years about this time Tennyson took
a house in London from February to Easter "to rub
our country rust off," and to be near his son. Here
he saw on easy terms many of the great men of the
time ; and as showing how active his interest in
practical politics was, a reminiscence of a visit to
the veteran Earl Russell at Pembroke Lodge is
valuable. They shook hands over the necessity of
continuity in foreign policy.

Many visits were paid by Tennyson, when he was
in London, to Carlyle. The last words recorded as
having passed between them are touching. Tenny-
son had said that he would like to get away from
all the turmoil of civilisation and go to a tropical
island.

"Oh ay," said Carlyle, who was sitting in his
dressing-gown, " so would I, to India or somewhere.
But the scraggiest bit of heath in Scotland is more
to me than all the forests of Brazil. I am just

(62)

CHARLES TENNYSON-TURNER 63

twinkling away, and I wish I had had my Dimittis
long ago."

In 1879 Tennyson's brother, Charles Tennyson-
Turner, died. There had always been a great
affection between the two, and Alfred often spent
part of the summer at his brother's Lincolnshire
vicarage ; that Mrs. Tennyson-Turner and Mrs. A.
Tennyson were sisters drew the bond still closer.

The Laureate had a great admiration for his
brother's sonnets, to a volume of which, published
in 1880, he contributed some prefatory verses; it
is interesting to note that almost the only form of
poetical writing that Alfred Tennyson did not to
any great extent attempt was the sonnet ; and the
sonnets he wrote are written in a half-hearted way
and do not rank among his best work. There is
little doubt that the recognition of his brother's
superior skill in sonnet- writing deterred him from
that form of composition ; just as Charles himself
confessed that Alfred's lyric skill made him feel for
some years that it was hopeless to attempt to write
poetry, from no petty jealousy, but from the dis-
couragement which in sensitive minds attends on
the contemplation of superior skill.

The bereavement made Alfred Tennyson very
unwell, and he was afflicted by the hallucination
of hearing perpetual ghostly voices. Sir Andrew
Clark, who had become his doctor, ordered change,
and Venice laid the ghosts.

64 TENNYSON

It was on this tour that Tennyson made his Frater
Ave, a poem in which the theme is not developed,
which has no particular thought struck out, and
contains but one felicitous descriptive epithet, of
the twin-fruited kind that he loved — but which
remains one of the most perfect and purest pieces
of vowel music in the language, like a low sweet
organ-prelude, a snatch of magical sound.

In 1880, in his seventy-first year, he published a
volume of Poems and Ballads, which contains little
of permanent value except The Revenge. This
volume illustrates in a striking manner the decay
of his poetical faculty. In the earlier poems it is
noticeable how sweet, simple and even common-
place were the themes that aroused his emotion ;
tender idyllic subjects of love and life were his
favourite inspirations, and even where the motive is
tragical all violent action is instinctively avoided,
and the scene is given through the haze of pro-
spect or retrospect. He worked in the spirit of the
Horatian maxim — Ne coram populo pueros Medea
trucidet — or else pictorially and luxuriantly, with
abundant dwelling upon the details of the picture,
as in The Lady of Shalotl. As he got older he
seemed to require more definite, strong, dramatic
situations, of horror or tragedy, or poignant emo-
tion, to stir the slower current of his blood. Such
a poem as Rizpah, though it may be admired as
powerful, depends quite as much upon the forceful-

"THE PROMISE OF MAY" 65

ness of the matter as upon the beauty of manner.
The Children's Hospital is another of the same class
— touchmg in its intention, but yielding to unworthy
prejudice, and not exhibiting the magical quality.
The Cup and The Falcon were also completed,
melancholy monuments.

All this time we have pleasant touches of the
serene home-life. William Allingham, who was stay-
ing with him, told him that Dr. Martineau at the
age of seventy-five had just climbed a mountain
4,000 feet high. Tennyson's answer is character-
istic of the simple vanity which so often appeared
in his talk, " When I was sixty-seven I climbed a
mountain 7,000 feet high : the guide said he never
saw a man of my age si leger."

In 1881 he sate to Millais for the portrait, which
the artist said was the finest he ever painted, be-
longing to Mr. Knowles. In November, 1882, the
unlucky play, The Promise of May, was produced.
It was supposed to be an attack on Free Thought
and Socialism, and attracted considerable attention
from the fact that the late Marquis of Queensberry
rose in his place in the middle of one of the perfor-
mances and protested in the name of Free-thinkers
against " Mr. Tennyson's abominable caricature."
It seems to the ordinary reader a piece of senti-
mental melodrama, but Tennyson wrote of the play
that he had striven to bring the true drama of
character and life back again. " I gave them one
5

66 TENNYSON

leaf out of the great book of truth and nature."
The idealist may humbly hope that similar leaves
are comparatively rare.

In these days he often stayed at the Deanery,
Westminster, with his old friends the Bradleys,
where he felt entirely at home. One day he
wandered about the Abbey and climbed up into a
chantry during service, which sounded sweetly
along the aisles. Tennyson said to his son, " It
is beautiful — but what empty and awful mockery if
there were no God."

In 1883 he had a long interview with the Queen
and talked quietly of death and immortality. The
close of the interview may be given in the Queen's
own simple words : —

" When I took leave of him, I thanked him for his
kindness, and said I needed it, for I had gone
through much, and he said, ' You are so alone on
that terrible height ; it is temble. I've only a
year or two to live, but I shall be happy to do any-
thing for you I can — send for me whenever you
like.' I thanked him warmly."

"He was very kind," was the Queen's touching
impression of his attitude towards her.

In September, 1883, he went a cruise with Sir
Donald Carrie on the Pembroke Castle. Mr. Glad-
stone was of the party. At Kirkwall Tennyson
and Mr. Gladstone received the freedom of the
burgh, and Mr. Gladstone returned thanks for both

OFFER OF PEERAGE 67

in a speech of graceful humility. The conversation
between the two seems to have been interesting
and to have brought out the fact that Gladstone
talked as a rhetorician, with complicated analogies
and with exquisitely complete parentheses, while
Tennyson was incisive, brief and pointed. At
Copenhagen a distinguished party came on board
to luncheon. The Kings of Denmark and Greece
with their Queens, and the Czar and Czarina.
Tennyson read a couple of poems by request, and
when the Czarina complimented him, he took her
for a Maid of Honour, patted her on the shoulder,
and said, "Thank you, my dear ! "

It was on the Pernbroke Castle that Mr. Glad-
stone offered Tennyson a peerage. His view was
that a baronetcy, which in Sir Walter Scott's days
represented the respectful homage of a Govennnent
for literature, was inadequate ; he went on to say
that he believed greatly in Tennyson's political
wisdom.

It is amusing that Mr. Gladstone should have
said gravely to Hallam Tennyson that he had one
fear — that the Poet might insist on wearing his
wide-awake in the House of Lords.

Tennyson himself was not very much in favour
of accepting the peerage, but he undoubtedly had
a great and increasing interest in national politics,
and was not averse to taking a hand in them in a
dignified way ; he was also anxious that his son

68 TENNYSON

should eventually have a chance of playing a part
in the political world — and he was^ moreover, quite
sensible of the fact that it meant a high recognition
of the practical power of literature. " Why should I
be selfish," he wrote to a friend, "and not suffer an
honour . . . to be done to literature in my name ? "
He therefore reluctantly consented. " By Glad-
stone's advice," he said, " I have consented to take
the peerage, but for my own part I shall regret
my simple name all my life."

He took his seat in March, 1884, and sate on the
cross-benches. He gave a vote for the Extension
of the Franchise in July, 1884, but his attendances
were very few, though it is evident from the records
that the incident stirred his active interest in politics
very greatly. He wrote several dignified and sen-
sible letters on points mostly connected with the
Franchise ; and he was interested in the question
of Disestablishment, and measures affecting agri-
culture.

In 1885 was published Tiresias and other poems :
it contained an idyll Balm and Balan, which was
written soon after Gareth and Lynette, a painful and
tragic story, and not of marked technical excellence.

The Ancient Sage, a very personal and auto-
biographical poem, is perhaps the most interesting
of the poems — but mainly from a biographical point
of view. Here also were included the musical
lines. To Virgil, which are on the old level.

PESSIMISM 69

In 1886 a great grief fell on him; his son
Lionel, a young man of high promise, great mi-
selfishness and vigour of character, with both
literary and administrative ability, died, while
returning from India, from fever, and was buried
at sea. Tennyson was in his seventy-seventh year
and felt the blow more acutely than is common
with the old.

"The thought of Lionel's death tears me to
pieces," he said, " he was so full of promise and
so young." Tennyson was working at the sequel
to Locksley Hall, and though the poem will be
considered separately, it may be said that the
reflex of his melancholy mood is only too plainly
visible throughout.

The disabilities of age came gently upon him ;
he was often obliged to drive instead of walking,
but his observation, in spite of failing eyesight,
his sense of beauty and his interest in homely
things continued wonderfully strong.

It is painful to see to what an extent, in
these later years, he was overshadowed by pessi-
mism. The faith in development, in the huge
design of God which is so nobly defined in In
Metnonam, seems to have to a great extent de-
serted him. The signs of the tiines alarmed and
disquieted him. He felt as if the nation were on
the brink of a great catastrophe. " You must not
be surprised at anything that comes to pass in the

70 TENNYSON

next fifty years," he said, "all ages are ages of
transition, but this is an awful moment of transi-
tion. It seems to me as if there were much less
of the old reverence and chivalrous feeling in the
world than there used to be."

Again he said solemnly, "When I see Society
vicious and the poor starving in great cities, I feel
that it is a mighty wave of evil passing over the
world."

This last is an essentially unreal utterance — it is
the " fear of that which is high" — the shadow of age,
when the grasshopper becomes a burden. Tennyson
had no means of knowing whether Society was
vicious or not ; less indeed than when he was
young, because he lived so entirely remote from
it ; and as to the starving of the poor in great
cities, there can be little doubt that the condition
of the poor had altered only for the better since
the Poet's youth. These broodings are mainly the
depressed reveries of age, which cannot throw off
melancholy reflection. Tennyson lacked the endur-
ing optimism so characteristic of Robert Browning.
Still, in spite of his pessimistic fear of widespread
corruption and impending revolution, there was
much that was tender, reverent and hopeful in his
talk. "The better heart of me beats stronger at
seventy- four than ever it did at eighteen," he once
said.

There was xnuch wisdom too in many of his

SERIOUS ILLNESS 71

sociological talks : speaking of the sense of unity
in Society he used to acknowledge that it had
greatly increased since his own youth.

" The whole of Society," he said, " is at present
too like a jelly ; when it is touched it shakes from
base to summit. As yet the unity is of weakness
rather than of strength. . . . Our aim therefore
ought to be not to merge the individual in the !
community, but to strengthen the social life of the
community, and foster the individuality."

In 1888 he had a serious illness — rheumatic gout
brought on by walking in rain and getting drenched.
For a time he was very ill, and bore his illness with
great patience and even cheerfulness, making an
epigram when he was at his worst about the pain
killing the devil born in him eighty years before.
To his doctors he talked politics and said many
practical and sensible things, such as, " Every
agitator should be made to prove his means of s/
livelihood." For a time his life was despaired of;
when he was lying thus, Jowett wrote Lady Tenny-
son a fine letter, evidently intended to be read to
the Poet : —

"... Give my love to him and tell him that I
hope he is at rest, knowing that we are all in the
hands of God. I would have him think sometimes
that no one has done more for mankind in our own
time, having found expression for their noblest
thoughts and having never written a line that he

72 TENNYSON

would wish to blot ; and that this benefit which he
has conferred on the English language and people
will be an everlasting possession to them, as great
as any poet has ever given to any nation, and
that those who have been his friends will always
think of him with love and admiration, and speak
to others of the honour of having kno^vn him. He
who has such record of life should have the comfort
of it in the late years of it : there may be some
things which he blames, and some which he laments,
but as a whole he has led a true and noble life,
and he need not trouble himself about small matters.
He may be thankful for the great gift which he has
received, and that he can return an account of it.
It seems to me that he may naturally dwell on such
thoughts at this time, although also, like a Christian,
feeling that he is an unpi'ofitable servant, and that
he trusts only in the mercy of God."

This letter is written in a high and noble vein,
like the consolations of an ancient philosopher
touched by a larger hope, — although the self-satis-
faction which it recommends is perhaps more natural
for others to read into the thoughts of a great man
than for the great man to indulge in himself.

In April Sir Andrew Clark came to see him, in
spite of the fact that he had been summoned to see
the Shah. Sir Andrew had replied that he could
not obey his Majesty as he had promised to visit
his friend the old Poet. The Shah received this

CROSSING THE BAR 73

refusal very graciously and sent Sir Andrew a Persian
Order.

Sir Andrew said that though Tennyson had been
as near death as a man could be without dying, he
was perfectly healthy and sound, adding that " he
could not see where the door would open for his
exit from life."

After his recovery he went for a cruise in the
Simbeam, lent him by Lord Brassey ; he was in high
spirits and told many stories. Aubrey de Vere was
mentioned, and Tennyson said that Aubrey de Veres
idea of eternal punishment would be to listen to
Huxley and Tyndall disputing eternally on the non-
existence of God.

On his eightieth birthday many letters of admira-
tion and love came to him. After reading one he
said, " I don't know what I have done to make
people feel like that towards me, except that I
have always kept my faith in Immortality."

In December, 1889, appeared Demeter and
other poems ; these were wonderful productions for
a man of his age, though not particularly memorable
in themselves.

In October, 1889, he had written Crossing the Bar
on a day when he went from Aldworth to Far-
ringford ; he made it in his mind, and wrote it out
after dinner. It is traditionally related that the poem
was read aloud to an old servant, a nurse, who had
asked him " to write a hymn ". On hearing it read,

74 TENNYSON

she burst into tears and said, " It isn't a hymn, it's a
psalm ! " — a simple tribute. A few days before his
death he told his son that it was always to come at
the end of all editions of his poems. It is a lyric
which is on a level with his best work — such lines as

But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
Too full for sound and foam —

are of the eternal stamp.

He had felt Robert Bro^vning's death in December,
1889, deeply, but with something of the quiet re-
signation of age. At this time he amused himself
by cai'ving and painting in water-colours. He still
went walks and entertained callers, reading many
novels, and still working ; of Clarissa Harlowe,
which he read at this time, he said, " I like those
great still books : " the whole record of his last
days is full of quiet interesting talk, not great,
but showing a lofty and active mind.

At eighty-two he was still extraordinarily vigorous
in body : he would defy his friends to rise twenty
times in quick succession from a low chair without
touching it with their hands as he could do — he
even danced with a child.

Again in 1891 he went a cruise in a yacht and
visited Exmouth. He had with him a number of
books dealing with the East and Oriental modes of
thought which he studied for Akhar's Dream.

When he was pressed to write on any particular

ALFRED, LORD TKNNYSON

From the f'ortmit by Mr. G. F. Halts, R.A. 'iSgi)
presented by the painter to Trinity College, Cambrielge

CLOSING DAYS 75

subject he used to say, " I cannot : I must write on
what I am thinking about, and I have not much
time." It is strange how sensitive he still was
about little points. He received a complimentary
poem from Mr. William Watson, which he acknow-
ledged, adding : —

"If by 'wintry hair' you allude to a tree whose
leaves are half gone, you are right, but if you mean
white, you are wrong, for I never had a grey hair
on my head."

In 1892 he again went for a cruise, and visited
Jersey, where his eldest brother was living ; the
two old poets said their last good-bye.

Good-night, true brother, here, good-morrow there.

On the 29th of June, at Farringford, he received
the Communion in his study, from the Rector of
Freshwater, and the following day left the Isle of
Wight never to return. He went to Aldworth,
and on to London, where he visited the Academy
and the Natural History Museum. In September
he was feeling ill, and when the Master of Balliol
came to stay with him he begged that he would
not consult him or argue with him on points of
philosophy and religion. Jowett answered memor-
ably, " Your poetry has an element of philosophy
more to be considered than any regular philosophy
in England." Still he was deeply interested in
politics and talked with animation and interest.

76 TENNYSON

On the 29th of September he was evidently very
ill, and Sir Andrew Clark was telegraphed for ; he
drove out the same day and said to his son as they
passed an accustomed haunt, " I shall never walk
there again."

The end drew on with stately tranquillity. On
Sunday, 3rd October, he was sinking ; but on
Monday, very early, he sent for a Shakespeare and
some passages were read to him. The same night,
with the tender consideration which he always
showed, he said to his son, " I make a slave of
you."

On Tuesday he wandered a good deal, talked of
a journey he was to take, asked if he had not been
walking with Gladstone and showing him trees.
" Where is my Shakespeare ? " he said. " I must
have my Shakespeare," and again, " I want to see
the sky and the light."

On the Wednesday the fatal tendency to syncope
set in, and he lay still, occasionally saying a word
or two, and at every sound opening his eyes, look-
ing round the room,*and closing them again. Late
in the day he gathered himself together, and said
one word to the doctor who was attending him :
"Death?" The doctor bowed his head — and he
said, "That is well." His last words were a bless-
ing to his wife and son. The full moon flooded the
room with light, and the watchers waited silently,
with awe and love, for the end. He passed away

DEATH AND BURIAL 77

quietly, with one hand clasping his Shakespeare
and with the other holding his daughter-in-law's
hands — and so he drifted out on the Unknown.

The following day the old clergyman of Lurga-
shall came to see the peaceful form ; the lines of
thought were smoothed out of the face by the quiet
touch of death The old man raised his hands and
said, " Lord Tennyson, God has taken you who made
you a prince of men — farewell."

He was buried in Westminster Abbey on the 1 2th
of October, the pall being borne by twelve of the
most eminent men in England, many of them his own
intimate friends. He lies next to Robert Browning,
and in front of the Father of English song.

Lady Tennyson survived him until I896, having
entered her 84th year.

CHAPTER VI

THERE is no need of complex analysis in
attempting to draw the character of the
great Poet. One of his friends said of him that he
was the most transparent human being it is possible
to conceive. In ordinary cases it may be roughly said
that the child is father of the man, but of Tennyson
it may be truly affirmed that the child was the man ;
he was, in fact, the " iynpcrishahle child;" his simpli-
city, his modesty, were childish virtues, matured but
always childlike ; his very faults, his self-absorption,
his sensitiveness, his shyness were the faults of
childhood. A lady has told me how she once went
to call on the Tennysons, whom she hardly knew,
and sate for a quarter of an hour with Mrs. Tenny-
son, during which time Tennyson came three times
into the room, as though oblivious of her presence,
to grumble over a can of water which he had put
out for himself having been poured away by one of
the servants. As a rule, advancing years, if they
teach a man nothing else, teach hira to dissemble ;
but Tennyson was always himself. He was, said
(78)

CHARACTER 79

a friend, the only man he knew who habitually
thought aloud ; he never appears to have suffered
from the temptation, the force of which is in-
definitely increased by the conditions of modern
society, by the rapid circulation of fashion, by the
searching glare of public opinion — the temptation to
conform oneself, superficially at all events, to the
ordinary type. The circumstances of Tennyson's
life made it easy for him to follow the bent of his
own individuality, and it may be doubted whether
his aloofness from ordinary aims and his freedom
from the sordid cares which beset humanity were
altogether wholesome influences : it must be re-
membered, however, that though unworldly he was
not unpractical. He was a remarkably good man
of business, and exacted his due with stern common-
sense ; so that it may be said that the practical
faculties were more in abeyance than absent.

Coventry Patmore gives an interesting description
of him : —

"Tennyson is like a great child, very simple
and very much self-absorbed. I never heard him
make a remark of his own which was worth repeat-
ing, yet I always left him with a mind and heart
enlarged. In any other man his incessant dwelling
upon trifles concerning himself, generally small
injuries — real or imaginaiy — would be very tire-
some. He had a singular incapacity for receiving
at first hand, and upon its own merits, any new

80 TENNYSON

idea. He pooh-poohed my views on architecture
when I first put them before him ; but some time
afterwards Emerson praised them to him very
strongly, and the next time I saw Tennyson he
praised them strongly too, but without any allusion
to his former speech of them."

Two characteristics which appear at first sight
inconsistent certainly existed side by side in
Tennyson ; the first a superficial vanity and self-
absorption combined with a true and deep modesty
of nature.

He combined, I believe, the modesty of a child
with the vanity of a child. He was proud of his
accomplishments, never of himself. He had no
objection to praising his own poetry. " Not bad
that, Fitz ?" he used to say to Fitz Gerald after
reading or quoting some favourite line of his o^vn.
The truth was that this vanity was more superficial
than real. He was so simple-minded that it did
not occur to him not to praise his own work if he
approved of it, where a more calculating man
would have hesitated to say what he was feeling.
And he undoubtedly took a modest view of his
own powers. " I am a modest man," he said to
Thackeray, " and always more or less doubtful of
my efforts in any line;" — and his deference to
criticism proves this.

On the other hand, he resented deeply and
bitterly any depreciation of his work. Even

INTELLECT 81

his most intimate friends did not dare to hint
disapproval of his works ; the deepest affection
would not have stood the strain of such a demand.

But he was truly and innately modest about his
own character ; deeply conscious of imperfection and
weakness and sin, for all his honours, he might have
said sincerely, to the end of his life, " I am small
and of no reputation," for this was what he felt in
the sight of God.

As he wrote once to a friend who asked him to
be godfather to a child, " I only hope that he will
take a better model than his namesake to shape his
life by."

I do not imagine that Tennyson's intellectual
force was pre-eminently great or that his know-
ledge was very profound ; of technical philosophy,
for instance, he said, " I have but a gleam of Kant,
and have hardly turned a page of Hegel." The
high results that he achieved were largely due to
the fact that his interests were limited, and that he
was able to devote himself, without any sense of
monotony or tedium, entirely to his creative work.
Most capable natures require a certain change of
intellectual work ; the impulse for such natures to
labour in new fields is strong, and is increased by
the difficulty that men of active intellectual power
often feel in keeping closely to one particular species
of composition. But this seems not to have been
the case with Tennyson. From first to last he

6

82 TENNYSON

never faltered ; he realised early in life that his
work was to be poetry, and though he passed
thi'ough moods of dark discouragement, almost
eclipse, yet he never suspended his ideal, and,
moreover, he subordinated all his other work to his
poetical work.

He possessed the poetical temperament almost
to perfection. He had, first, the wholesome in-
sight of genius. Carlyle said of him that " Alfred
had always a grip at the right side of any question."
He had no strong metaphysical grasp, and the sub-
tleties that are so apt to trip the feet of the eager
minute intellect on the threshold were practically
non-existent for him. He saw right to the heart of
a matter, and with a common-sense that was in itself
of the nature of genius, he was able to detect the
typical human view of greater problems, to antici-
pate the precise angle at which the ray of a great
thought strikes the average human mind. The re-
sult was that he had a unique power of saying
things that seemed to sum up and consecrate the
deeper experiences of man. An attempt will be
made later to estimate his religious position ; but
it will be enough here to say that it was from the
first a simple one and grew simpler every year. He
had a supreme power of seeing the point, and of dis-
entangling., what is accidental and superficial from
what is permanent and essential. In his treatment
of nature this is particularly observable.

VIEW OF NATURE 83

Professor Sidgwick pointed out that Words-
worth's view of nature is in one respect a
superficial one ; that he interpreted the external
aspects of nature, the way in which tree, flower,
river and plain strike on the eye, the way in which
the bird's song, the ripple of the stream, or the
querulous wind, appeal to the ear, and through the
avenue of sense touch the heart ; but, though
acutely alive to sensorial impressions, Tennyson
went deeper, and approached Nature through her
scientific aspects as well. He discerned, beneath
the smiling surface of plain and hill, the unplumbed
depths of the molten tides. Where Wordsworth
saw the bountiful lavishness of Nature in the leafy
forest gemmed with life, the meadow starred with
daifodils, Tennyson found material for dark and
troubled thought in the desperate waste of Nature,
her heedless profusion, the capacity of humanity to
multiply itself, — "the torrent of babies," as he said
with grim humour. Where Wordsworth saw the
stars as parts of the human environment, the lamps
of night, the sentinels of dewy peace, Tennyson's
thought climbed dizzily into the vast ti*acts of space,
among the " brushes of fire, beelike swarms " of
worlds. Science and especially astronomy were sub-
jects of perennial attraction to Tennyson ; to Words-
worth they were a profanation, a materialising of
ethereal thoughts. The latter drew strong fortifica-
tions round the province of poetry and feared the

84 TENNYSON

invasion of science as he might have feared the
attack of a ruthless foe. Tennyson boldly crossed the
frontier and annexed for ever the province of
science to the domains of poetry.

Hence came the extraordinary influence of Tenny-
son over the more active intellects of his era. New
thoughts of bewildering intensity, new prospects of
intense significance were opening on every side. The
danger to be feared was the seclusion of poetry in
a world of unreal emotion and elementary sensation.
But Tennyson by his courageous attitude proved that
there is no danger to poetry in the awakening of
wider vision, in the more accurate definition of the
scientific law. Science, he showed, could touch the
chords of deeper mysteries, and, far from defining
the mind of God and confining it within narrower
limits, it brought the reverent spirit no nearer to
the solution of the eternal riddle, but only made
the data richer and more complex.

The Greeks represented Iris, the rainbow mes-
senger of the gods, as the daughter of wonder ;
and to Tennyson the patient investigation of the
principles and conditions of life, instead of diminish-
ing the divine wonder, deepened and intensified it.

It was the same with his treatment of humanity.
Termyson, unlike most poets, felt a deep and absorb-
ing interest in the details of practical politics.
The defence of his country, the extension of the
franchise, were not to him mere hard distasteful

POLITICS 85

facts, things likely to disturb the balance of the
poetical faculty, but problems on which he thought
deeply and spoke eagerly. For instance, he said
once fiercely that he could almost wish England to
be invaded by France that he might have the pleasure
of tearing an invader limb from limb.

It seems clear that his acceptance of his peerage
was in part at all events dictated by a deep-seated
desire to have a hand in practical politics ; and thus
though in the poems in which he touched directly
on politics — a fault into which in later life he some-
times fell — he mistakes the quality of poetical
substance, yet in the earlier utterances on freedom,
and in those poems where he indicates political
principles, there is nothing fantastic or unpractical
in his grip ; he does not vaguely flounder in a region
where he felt bound to have views, but speaks out
of the fulness of the heart on matters which were
not to him questions of academical opinion but of
deep and vital enthusiasm.

But all this might have been ineffective if it had
not been for his magical power of language. His
technical mastery of his art will be discussed else-
where, but from the point of view of a conversational-
ist Tennyson had an extraordinary faculty of finding
the mot propre, of summing up a situation in the
tersest and most expressive fashion. His friends
thought him one of the most impressive of talkers,
and there is hardly a story about him, where the

86 TENNYSON

ipsissima verba are given, whether it is a humorous
comment, or a dignified reflection, or a picturesque
statement, which does not possess a pecuUar and
weighty quahty, a homely appropriateness, an un-
expected juxtaposition which could only be attained
by one who had a forcible vocabulary at his com-
mand, and, what is more, within his reach.

For instance, he said to his friend Locker- Lampson,
as they sate together, miserably cramped in the top
gallery of a small blazing and glaring Parisian
theatre : " Locker, this is like being stuck on a
spike over hell." Another story may be given in
the words of his old friend FitzGerald : " We were
stopping before a shop in Regent Street where were
two figures of Dante and Goethe. I (I suppose) said,
' What is there in old Dante's Face that is missing in
Goethe's .'' ' And Tennyson (whose profile then had
certainly a remai'kable likeness to Dante's) said,
'The Divine.' "

Again, when in The Lotos-Eaters he wrote, de-
scribing the infinite variety of streams in the island,
of the stream that leaps from a precipice so high
that it is entirely disintegrated in its fall and
reaches the ground like fine rain, —

A land of streams ! some, like a downward smoke,
Slow-dropping veils of thinnest lawn. . . .

some critic found fault with him for going to the
stage for his descriptions, saying that a revolving
wreath of loose lawn was the device used in theatres

DIRECTNESS 87

to produce the illusion of a waterfall. Tennyson
of course had not the least idea that this was so.
But the anecdote shows that he had an extraordinary
power of catching a resemblance and fixing an
impression by the one appropriate word.

There is an amusing story, related by the
Rev. H. Fletcher of Grasmere, who accompanied
Matthew Arnold and Tennyson on a walk in the
Lake country. They came out on a high brow ; at
their feet far below lay a great expanse of yellow
mountain pasture, in which a flock of brown-
fleeced sheep were feeding. Matthew Arnold
made several interesting but far-fetched comparisons
of an elaborate kind. "No," said Tennyson, "it
looks like nothing but a great blanket, full of fleas."

To illustrate his forcible directness of speech we
may quote an incident recorded in the Life.
Some girl in his presence spoke of a marriage, lately
arranged between two acquaintances of her own, as
a " penniless " marriage. Tennyson glared, rum-
maged in his pocket, produced a penny and slapped
it down before her saying, " There, I give you that !
for that is the god you worship."

Again, to J. R. Green, after a stimulating con-
versation, the Poet said solemnly, " You're a jolly,
vivid man — and I'm glad to have known you ;
you're as vivid as lightning."

Again he was reading Li/cidas aloud to some
friends in 1870. When he had done, a girl present said

88 TENNYSON

that she had never read Paradise Lost. " Shame-
less daughter of your age," said the Bard.

The above stories, though the thoughts are not
exactly conspicuous for brilliance, show a marked
power of expressing vivid thought in a salient
image.

His impressiveness of speech was no doubt as-
sisted by the undoubted majesty and stateliness
of the Poet's personal appearance. It was not only
the lofty stature, the domed head, in which he
resembled Pericles and Walter Scott, the dark com-
plexion, the eloquent eye, the noble lines drawn by
age and experience in the face, but there was a
certain pontifical solemnity, a regal deliberation,
a rough-hewn dignity, in no sense assumed, which
lent weight and majesty to all he said and
did. He possessed the natural kingliness that
Aristotle attributed to the magnanimous man. In
whatever rank of life Tennyson had been born,
however grotesque a calling he had pursued, he
would have had this unconscious weight in all that
he did or said. It is hard to give instances of this
particular quality, because by overawing those who
passed under its influence it is apt to be subtly felt,
and to compel a deference willingly given, rather
than to create situations where it is specially evoked.
The dignified man has seldom need to defend himself
against indignity.

One who knew him well tells me that in later

DIGNITY 89

years it was impossible to deny that, in spite of his
obvious desire to be courteous to strangers, he was
yet undeniably formidable to a preternatural degree.
It was not only the prestige of his fame, because
there have been abundance of great men whom in
private life it has been impossible to fear. But a
sort of awful majesty enveloped Tennyson. His
enormous size, the stateliness of his walk, his slow
sonorous voice, his noble head with its mass of
hair, and the strange peering look, slowly brought
to bear upon his interlocutor, all heightened the
feeling of personal awe. He was in manner sim-
plicity itself; but in his case this simplicity did not
make him more accessible ; it only gave the feeling
that he would express exactly what he felt whether
it was approval or disapproval, encouragement or
censure ^ ; his greatness made it impossible to meet
him on the equal terms which he no doubt expected
and assumed to exist ; and he was consequently ex-
tremely disconcerting to people of shy or highly
strung temperament.

Even Jowett, the subtle fencer with words, the
refrigerator of timid conversationalists, was by no
means at his ease with Tennyson ; or rather he
was very much on his good behaviour, like a school-
boy with a master who is mainly good-tempered

1 Mrs. Oliphant relates that Tennyson, in his own house, after
listening in silence to an interchange of amiable compliments be-
tween herself and Mrs. Tennyson, said abruptly, " What liars
you women are ! "

90 TENNYSON

but of uncertain mood ; he was tentative, amiable,
nervous under the genial but highly flavoui-ed banter
with which the Bard plied him ; he was complimen-
tary, anxious to avert a social crisis — and if this was
the case with an old and valued friend, what must it
have been with younger and more sensitive admirers.
The Poet possessed in a remarkable degree the
power of attachment in friendship not less than in
love. But he rather demanded affection than gave
it ; and it is plain that his absorption in his work
and his active interest in the details of life saved
him from much suffering. It is strange that the
Avriter of one of the greatest and completest of
elegies should not, in respect to his relations with
human beings, give the impression of being a "man
of sorrows and acquainted with grief." His affec-
tions were essentially of a tranquil kind. His
friends found him invariably the same, but it may
be doubted whether in their absence he thought
very much about them. The story of his rupture
with Coventry Patmore will illustrate this. When
Coventry Patmore's first wife died, the two poets
being close friends — indeed Coventry Patmore
divided his friends into two classes, of which one was
" Tennyson " and the other was " the rest " — Temiy-
son neither went to see him, nor wrote him a single
line of sympathy on the sad event. Mrs. Tennyson,
indeed, thinking that Mrs. Patmore's illness must
have entailed heavy expense on Patmore, and that

AFFECTIONS 91

he was a poor man, arranged an application to the
Premier for some bounty or pension to assist him at
a crisis so sad. This Temiyson signed, and it is the
only indication of interest that he manifested.
Coventry Patmore wrote and asked him to come and
see him ; of which letter Tennyson took no notice,
saying many years after that it had never reached him.

For nearly twenty years there was a complete
rupture of relations which had been extraordinarily
intimate. Tennyson seems occasionally to have
expressed a mild wonder that Patmore had given
him up, but it did not extend so far as to induce
him to write a letter asking if anything was amiss.
Patmore is perhaps to blame for not having unravelled
the matter further, but he certainly had reason for
thinking that Tennyson's conduct was unfeeling.

In any case the two attached friends, the poet of
Friendship and the poet of Domestic Love, fell into
an entire silence which lasted for twenty years, for
a misunderstanding which a letter from either might
have dispelled.

Such a story, though it is not inconsistent with
an affectionate temperament, gives no hint of the
intense personal devotion, the hungering eager-
ness for sight and speech which are generally
characteristic of affectionate natures. One sees the
child here as all through. A child can be truly
loving, irresistibly impelled to create and enjoy an
atmosphere of affection about itself — but without

92 TENNYSON

very deep attachment, and needing to live sur-
rounded by looks and words of love rather than to
be slow in maturing love and affection, and inconsol-
able without the presence of particular objects of
the desire of the heart.

The natural melancholy of Tennyson's tempera-
ment must here be noted. He was probably, like
most melancholy men, happier more often than he
knew ; he thawed, mostly in the evening, under the
influences of conversation, wine and tobacco, into an
irresistibly genial and sociable mood ; but it was of
the nature of distraction ; and left to himself the
spirit fell back with singular helplessness down the
rugged ascent into the dark pool. There hung a
cloud over him from day to day, say those who knew
him best. He often sighed, he often complained of
his own unhappiness. But it must often have been,
as Gray said, of his own depression, a good easy sort
of a state, and well suited for the exercise of poetical
meditation : a conscious burden, no doubt, but not
necessarily an uncongenial atmosphere for poetry
to rise and flower in.

Another characteristic trait of Tennyson was his
extraordinary sensitiveness. He used to say that
his skin was typical of his mental temperament,
that a fleabite would spread an inch over the sur-
face. His sensitiveness to criticism was abnormal.
He used to admit that he was indifferent to praise
and that he could not bear blame. An adverse

SENSITIVENESS 9S

criticism was to him a personal matter. He was
apt to attribute it to definite malignity, or to in-
tolerable ignorance. A friend tells me that he
went from the house of a dignitary of the Church
to stay with Tennyson ; and he repeated some criti-
cism that had been made by his host on Queen
Maiy, which he had pronounced to be a stately
poem but unsuitable to the stage. Tennyson swept
aside the praise and settled upon the criticism with
extraordinary persistence. Again and again he re-
verted to it with a somewhat painful iteration.
The following day when the guest departed Tenny-
son came to say good-bye, and with great solemnity
said, "Tell your friend — the Canon" (with ironical
emphasis) "that he doesn't know what the drama
is ! " Again a friend of his tells me that when she
was staying at Farringford, some one brought there
a school magazine in which there was a disparaging
allusion to the Poet. She says that it was most
painful to see how for days the words burned in his
mind like a poisoned wound ; no matter what subject
was started, no matter how much interested he
himself became in pursuing a train of thought, he
always came back to the same grievance. No
amount of influence with other minds it seemed
could atone for what " these young gentlemen"
had said. Such stories could be multiplied in-
definitely. But he was true to his principles in
the matter, treating others as he desired to be

94 TENNYSON

treated, and though a master of personal invective,
as is shown by the hnes on Bulwer Lytton, he
resolutely suppressed it in his writings, except in
an impersonal way. The picture of the pious
company promoter in Sea Dreams is sketched by
the hand of a powerful satirist. He hated spiteful-
ness above all things. He was told that the
celebrated lines in Maud, about the coal mine, had
given offence to worthy owners ; he replied with the
utmost indignation, " Sooner than wound any one
in such a spiteful fashion, I would consent never
to write again ; yea, to have my hand cut off at
the wrist."

Undoubtedly the sheltered atmosphere in which
he lived tended to increase these characteristics.
Guarded from the world by an intensely loyal and
loving wife, and by a son whose filial devotion was
more of a passion than a sentiment, he missed the
equality of criticism which might, as with a subtle
file, have worn down the angles of personality.
There was something, too, as I have said, majestic
and unapproachable about his personal dignity
which was apt to compel admiring deference.
Thus, like royal personages, he passed the later
years of his life in a somewhat unreal atmosphere
of subtle subservience. But it must be added that
there were few people who could have borne the
adulation which was so freely lavished on him
without far greater enervation of character. His

SHYNESS 95

house became a place of pilgrimage, and his natural
simplicity led him to talk easily of himself, his
tastes and prejudices. No doubt the one thing
desired by all pilgrims is that the object of their
devotion should tell them something about himself ;
and one of the reasons which makes pilgrimages to
see a great man so disappointing is that the hero
so rarely talks on the one subject that brings his
visitors to the place. But this was not Tennyson's
way. He was generally ready to read his poems
and to talk about them. Probably there is no poet
about whom so many authentic traditions exist as
to lines which he praised as "the best he ever
wrote." Carried away by the impulse of the
moment, and sincerely approving of some line which
was under discussion, the Bard, with an almost
Oriental instinct of hospitality, fell easily into a vein
which he knew would delight his hearers.

Tennyson was, in a way, extraordinarily shy ;
an eager questioner, a timorous child, a nervous
visitor would freeze him into gloomy silence ;
on the other hand with people of tranquil
and self-possessed manner, who talked easily and
naturally, and who showed decorous deference
without inconvenient curiosity, he was expansive,
humorous and natural. He alternated between
what appeared to be excessive rudeness, when he
was in fact only thinking aloud — as when he asked
a child who was introduced to him why his hand

96 TENNYSON

felt like a toad ^ — and the most tender and consider-
ate courtesy ; it all depended upon his mood ; some-
times he was a model of noble deference to old
people, whether venerable or not. Yet O. W.
Holmes, then aged nearly eighty, after a visit to
Tennyson, gently complained to a friend, " He did
not realise, I think, that I am an old man, and accus-
tomed to being treated kindly."

Speaking once of the secret of oratory he said,
" I am never the least shy before great men. Each
of them has a personality for which he or she is
responsible ; but before a crowd which consists of
many personalities, of which I know nothing, I am
infinitely shy. The great orator cares nothing about
all this. I think of the good man, and the bad man,
and the mad man, that may be among them, and
can say nothing. He takes them all as one man.
He sways them as one man."

Another characteristic demands a word. Tenny-
son had in conversation a virile freshness which
led him to speak in the plainest terms on
subjects which are seldom discussed in detail in
ordinary society. The same vigorous humanity
which made him say that any port Avhich was

^ No doubt he had a line of Herrick's in his mind from Another
Grace for a Child : —

Here a little child I stand

Heaving up my either hand

Cold as paddocks though they be, etc.

(

HUMOUR 97

"sweet and black and strong enough" was good
enough for him, made his talk on occasions
Rabelaisian from its plainness. This fact is worth
mentioning because in his poems he is like Virgil,
delicate almost to the verge of prudery ; though such
a poem as Lucretius showed plainly enough that this
delicacy was the result of deliberate theory and not
of natural temperament. There can be no better
proof that this outspoken tendency was real frank-
ness, and untainted by the least shadow of pruri-
ence, than the fact that there is no poet ancient or
modern who could be put with such supreme and
entire confidence in the hands of the most maidenly
of readers ; and that the instinct for purity was so
strong as to be held almost to emasculate his work.
When Tennyson wrote of " the poisonous honey
brought from France " a well-known writer whose
moral outlook is less austere retorted by speaking
of the "Laureate's domestic treacle."

Tennyson rated humour very high ; in a letter to
his futui'e wife he said solemnly that she would
find it in most great writers — even in the Gospel of
Christ. Among his own writings the dialect poems
show how strong and genuine a vein of humour he
himself possessed. He was fond of amusing anec-
dotes and told them well ; but he had as well a
strong vein of original and native picturesque-
ness of a humorous kind in conversation. What
could be more delightful than his comment on a novel

7

98 TENNYSON

of Miss Yonge'Sj which he read with profound
absorption, suffering nothing to distract him ? At
last he closed the book and laid it down, saying
with an air of inexpressible relief, " I see land !
Harry is going to be confirmed."

He had an immense admiration for Miss Austen
as a writer. He once made a pilgrimage to Lyme
Regis, to study the scene of Persuasion ; one
of the company, a person of well-regulated mind,
made some allusion to the Duke of Monmouth.
" Don't talk to me of Monmouth," said Tennyson
sternly, "but show me the exact spot where Louisa
Musgrove fell ! "

But the most humorous effects of his conversation
were produced by a certain mystic solemnity of
phrase or grim exaggeration, greatly enhanced by
his stateliness of enunciation.

Travelling in Switzerland he was much annoyed
by a terrible smell which prevailed at a spot from
which there was a view of a famous waterfall. He
said pathetically that he was painfully sensitive to
such impressions, and that the atrocious smell and
the magnificent prospect would be for ever insepar-
ably connected in his mind — adding sententiously,
" This is an age of lies, and it is also an age of stinks."

At the sight of the tail of a great glacier loaded
with dirty debris, he said, " That glacier is a filthy
thing ; it looks as if a thousand London seasons
had passed over it."

HUMOUR 99

When the Metaphysical Society was founded in
I869, the Poet said, apropos of a somewhat acrid dis-
cussion which had taken place, " Modern Society
ought at all events to have taught men to separate
light from heat," words which were adopted as the
motto of the society.

On one occasion, says the legend, Tennyson was
walking with a friend, and, stumbling in getting
over a stile, fell to the ground ; — it seems that
though muscularly strong he was always clumsy
— his friend, knowing his dislike both of being
helped and also of having such incidents witnessed,
walked on a few paces, and turning round saw that
Tennyson had made no effort to rise, but was lying
with his face extended over a little muddy pool by
the hedgerow, overgrown with duck-weed. Think-
ing that the Poet had dropped something in his
fall, and was looking for it, he returned. Tennyson
raised himself slowly on his hands and knees, and
turned a face, dim with rapt and serious contem-
plation, upon him, saying in a deep tone, "T ,

what an imagination God Almighty has ! " This
exclamation was drawn from him by the sight of
the little pool, with its myriad and dainty forms of
infusorial life and beauty, all fresh from the mind
of God.

In 1887 he went to see his eldest brother
Frederick, who was greatly occupied with the phe-
nomena of Spiritualism, and who tried to persuade

100 TENNYSON

the Laureate to go seriously into the question. The
Poet heard him patiently, and then said with great
emphasis, " I am convinced that God and the
ghosts of men would choose something other than
mere table-legs through which to speak to the
heart of man."

On another occasion he said with humorous sad-
ness that the sense of religion in England was of
a very precarious order. "The general English
view of God is as of an immeasurable clergy-
man."

He was very fond of the story of the Duke of
Wellington, who was piloted over a crowded
crossing by an enthusiastic stranger. The Duke
put his hand into his pocket as if about to reward
his benefactor, when the stranger said hysterically
that the only reward he desired was to be allowed
to shake the hand of the great conqueror. To

which the Duke replied, "Don't be a d d

fool ! " Commenting on this Tennyson said that
the answer was almost as great in its way as
the battle of Waterloo — adding, "A Frenchman
would have answered, ' Mais, oui ! on m'appelle le
grand ! ' "

He was always very indignant over the desire to
invade the privacy of great men. He said once to
Mr. Palgrave that if he had in his hands an auto-
biography of Horace, the only copy in existence, he
would burn it ; Sir Henry Taylor, in his Autohio-

DISLIKE OF PUBLICITY 101

graphy, quotes a delightful undated letter, written
by Mrs. Cameron about the year I860, which con-
tains a forcible diatribe of Tennyson's on the
subject : —

"He was very violent with the girls on the
subject of the rage for autographs. He said he
believed every crime and every vice in the world
were connected with the passion for autographs
and anecdotes and records ; that the desiring
anecdotes and acquaintance with the lives of great
men was treating them like pigs, to be ripped
open for the public ; that he knew he himself
should be ripped open like a pig ; that he thanked
God Almighty with his whole heart and soul that
he knew nothing, and that the world knew nothing
of Shakespeare but his writings ; and that he thanked
God Almighty that he knew nothing of Jane Austen,
and that there were no letters preserved either of
Shakespeare's or Jane Austen's, that they had not
been ripped open like pigs. Then he said that the
post for two days had brought him no letters, and
that he thought there was a sort of syncope in the
world as to him and his fame."

The unconscious transition in the last remark
to the egotistic vein is as characteristic as the
violence of the earlier words.

I have sometimes wondered whether the simile
at the beginning of Sea Dreams was dictated by a
subtle sense of humour or no. After describing

<

102 TENNYSON

the slender savings of the city clerk, so precariously
invested, he adds : —

As tlie little thrift
Trembles in perilous places o'er the deep.

Neither was he averse to practical humour. An
American visitor describes how he first saw Tenny-
son driving in a small pony- carriage with one of
his grandchildren ; they had exchanged hats ; and
the child sate with his head enveloped in the huge
black wide-awake that was so characteristic of the
Poet, while Tennyson wore perched at the top of
his great head with its flowing curls a small straw
sailor's hat. He made no attempt to change or
lay aside this head-dress, and conducted the inter-
view without embarrassment or loss of gravity.

Again, in 1879, the Laureate met the present
Queen at Mrs. Greville's in Chester Square. The
Princess asked Tennyson to read her the Welcome
to Alexandra. Tennyson did so, and when he had
finished, the fact of the reading his own compli-
mentary poem aloud to the Princess struck him as
so ludicrous, that he dropped the book and fell into
uncontrollable laughter, which was cordially re-
echoed by the Princess herself.

Such, then, was the man — simple, wise, laborious,
impressive, trenchant, outspoken, yet sensitive
withal, self-absorbed and moody ; with the heart
of a child, the vision of a poet, and the faith of a

CHARACTER 103

mystic, in a mighty, rugged, vigorous frame, full
of strong animal and human impulse ; living a
life that tended to develop both the good and the
evil of his (temperament ; for the seclusion and ease
that makes divine dreams possible is also a soil in
which the frailties, passions and vanities of human
nature burgeon and flower, " Prophecy," said
George Eliot, " is of all the mistakes we commit the
most gratuitous ; " prophecy in the pluperfect sub-
junctive— what might have been — is more gratui-
tous still. But FitzGerald, who knew and grasped
the strength and weakness of Tennyson's character,
was strongly of opinion that Tennyson's life had
not had an entirely wholesome effect upon him —
and no one had better opportunities of realising
the dangers of the sheltered life than FitzGerald.
The latter, writing in 1876 (24th October) to Mrs.
Kemble, and speaking of the captain of his sailing-
boat, a majestic and tranquil personage, whom he
much admired and respected, he said, " I thought
that both Tennyson and Thackeray were inferior
to him in respect of Thinking of Themselves.
When Tennyson was telling me of how the Quarterly
abused him (humorously too), and desirous of
knowing why one did not care for his later works,
etc., I thought that if he had lived an active Life,
as Scott and Shakespeare ; or even ridden, shot,
drunk, and played the Devil, as Byron, he would
have done much more, and talked about it much

104 TENNYSON

less. 'You know/ said Scott to Lockhart, 'that
I don't care a curse about what I write/ and one
sees he did not. I don't believe it was far other-
wise with Shakespeare. Even old Wordsworth,
wrapped up in his Mountain mists, and proud as
he was, was above all this vain Disquietude :
proud, not vain, was he : and that a Great Man
(as Dante) has some right to be — but not to care
what the Coteries say."

This is a charming and subtle piece of criticism
— but probably only contains a half-truth. It is
too much in the line of Carlyle's dictum that Tenny-
son was a life-guardsman spoiled by writing poetry.
But there are plenty of life -guardsmen, and we
cannot sacrifice a poet. A price must be paid for
everything ; and though we may not think Tenny-
son's attitude entirely manly or philosophical, we
may be thankful for the life, which at the cost of
some superficial pettiness, was at all events deliber-
ately pursued, with a high sense of vocation, and
the fruit of which was so abundant and so gracious.

CHAPTER VII

TENNYSON'S creed was a simple one, and
grew simpler as he grew older. The two
cardinal points of his faith were his belief in God,
and his belief in the immortality of man, j On these
great thoughts the life of his soul was nourished, —
the Fatherhood of God, and the Life of the World
to come.

He said once, in memorable words, to Mr.
Knowles, " There's a something that watches over
us ; and our individuality endures : that's my faith,
and that's all my faith."

He seems to have been brought up in a simple.
Christian, almost Calvinistic creed, and there is little
evidence at any period of agonising doubt, any
uprooting of the vital principles of religion. If
there was any such fuller testimony it is buried in
sacred silence ; perhaps the conflict was fought out
in his own heart. Possibly the letters to Arthur
Hallam, which were destroyed after the death of
the latter, would have contained some details of the
inner struggle, if such struggle there were ; but
(105)

106 TENNYSON

more probably there was only a gradual transition
of thought. His own feeling about the preservation
and making public of such records was so strong
that we must acquiesce in the destruction of these
valuable letters ; though we may be allowed to
regret it in no inquisitive spirit, but because it
might have helped those whose belief was less
firmly based to study reverently the processes by
which so strong and vital a faith was arrived at.

There is extant an unfinished prayer, which he
composed as a boy, which leaves no doubt that he
accepted Christian dogmas in the most mechanical
and literal way ; but when he went to Cambridge
the question was brought before him in a more
personal manner.

The most interesting autobiographical document
among the earlier poems is the Supposed Confessions,
so the somewhat cumbrous title runs, of a Second-rate
Sensitive Mind not in Unity with Itsef. This poem,
which belongs to the 1830 volume, was not re-
printed till 1872, when it appeared in the Juvenilia
with seventeen lines omitted.

We note, in the first place, that this is the most
definitely Christian poem which Tennyson ever
wrote ; it speaks of the Birth and Passion of Christ
in terms which imply if not a belief, at least a
desirous hope in the doctrines of the Incarnation
and the Atonement. Probably Tennyson would
have resented the too close application of the poem

CHRISTIAN FAITH 107

to his own case ; indeed there is a passage in the
poem in which the soliloquist speaks of his dead
mother which looks like a deliberate attempt to
give an environment not his own to the poem. But
on the other hand it has an intimite which makes it
impossible to regard it in any light but the autobio-
gx'aphical ; such a poem cannot be simply dramatic,
and indeed in Tennyson's case the dramatic impulse
had hardly even begun to flower at the time when
it was written. His suppression of the poem, too,
appears to indicate that he felt it, with his extreme
love of privacy, to be too urgent a self-revelation,
that he had allowed himself "to tear his heart
before the crowd."

The difficulty which meets the reader of the
poem at the outset is this : what is the precise
catastrophe that is indicated ? In words which
seem to deplore a loss of faith the speaker appears
to reiterate and affirm the conviction that faith is
the one thing left him in a hopeless world. Per-
haps it may be held to be a revelation of the process
by which a mechanical faith becomes vital ; the
supposed speaker seems to say that his faith is
deserting him, and that he cannot revivify it ; he
appears to be in the condition of one who has held
an unquestioning creed, which has never been put
to the supreme test, has never encountered a crisis
such as might lead the believer to find that
such a faith was not enough to meet, with ample

108 TENNYSON

reserves, the darkest experience of life. Then there
falls one of the "moods of misery unutterable,"
which sometimes beset an imaginative nature of
hitherto tranquil experiences on the threshold of
real life ; such a nature, living vividly, if not happily,
in the present, and still more in the future, realises
how rapidly both present and future become merged
in the past, how incredibly short life is when com-
pared with the infinite dreams in which the hopeful
mind has indulged ; the thought of death and the
dark after-world rises in unimagined horror ; the
world seems one gloomy necropolis — " Mixta senura
et juvenum densentur funera ; null urn Saeva caput
Proserpina fugit," as the old poet said.

Then the faith which has been tranquil, mechani-
cal, customary, rings hollow ; it cannot bear the
strain ; and the poem is a cry for a faith which may
gleam and sparkle like a sunlit sea beyond the dark
tracts of death.

Oh, teach me yet
Somewhat before the heavy clod
Weighs on me, and the busy fret
Of that sharp-headed worm begins
In the gross blackness underneath.

The mood struggles, as it were, to the very threshold
of faith and finds the door shut ; tlien the impulse
suddenly flags, the dreary cloud descends again
upon the soul.

Not only is the motive of the poem not charac-

FAITH 109

teristic of the writer, but the very scheme of rhyme
and tone of language are un-Tennysonian ; long
sentences of dubious structure shape themselves
independent of the crisp form of the metre. The
images, the expressions are sometimes characteristic,
but one cannot help wondering whether, if the
poem had been sedulously withheld from publica-
tion, and had long after appeared anonymously, the
most perspicuous critic would have traced the
authorship unhesitatingly. One can imagine indeed
a critic of the advanced theological German school
declaring emphatically against the genuineness of
the poem on both internal and external grounds.

Still it contains passages or rather expressions of
rare and singular beauty ; and as a window into the
writer's soul it is of inexpressible interest.

I think it is clear that after this date his mind
broke gradually away to a certain extent from
precise dogmatic Christian doctrine ; or rather that,
as his faith in essentials grew more vital, he rested
less in dogmatic religion than in the deepest and
simplest truths. I imagine that he looked upon a
dogmatic symbol as he might have looked upon a
piece of parliamentary drafting, as containing a
truth or a principle but involved in subtle legal
definition, and not in itself inspiring or fruitful for
the ordinary mind.

That he regarded the Person and teaching of
Christ with the deepest reverence is clear enough.

110 TENNYSON

He wrote in 1 839 to his future wife, that he was
staying with "an old friend" at Mablethorpe.
" He and his wife," he writes, " are two perfectly
honest Methodists. When I came, I asked her
after news, and she replied, ' Why, Mr. Tennyson,
there is only one piece of news that I know, that
Christ died for all men.' And I said to her : ' That
is old news and good news and new news ; ' where-
with the good woman seemed satisfied. I was half
yesterday reading anecdotes of Methodist ministers,
and liking to read them too . . . and of the teaching
of Christ, that purest light of God."

Long after he spoke of Christ as " that union of
man and woman, sweetness and strength." But
he was not a habitual attendant upon the worship
of the Church, and it is significant to note that in
his closing years (1892), when he received the
Communion in his study at Freshwater, he solemnly
quoted his own words, put into Cranmer's mouth,
before he partook : —

It is but a commuuion, not a mass :
No sacrifice, but a life-giving feast ;

impressing upon the clergyman that he could not
partake of it at all, unless it were administered in
that sense.

Once indeed a visitor ventured to ask him, as
they were walking in the garden, what he thought
of our Saviour. He said nothing at first, then he

RELIGION 111

stopped by a beautiful flower, and said, " What the
sun is to that flower, Jesus Christ is to my soul. He
is the Sun of my soul."

Tennyson said that Christianity, with its Divine
morality, but without the central figure of Christ,
the Son of Man, would become cold ; and that it
is fatal for religion to lose its warmth ; that The
Son of Man was the most tremendous title possible ;
that the forms of Christian religion would alter, but
that the Spirit of Christ would grow from more to
more " in the roll of the ages ; " that his line,

Ring ill the Christ that is to be,

"points to the time when Christianity without
bigotry will triumph, when the controversies of
creeds shall have vanished."

" I am always amazed," he said, " when I read
the New Testament at the splendour of Christ's
purity and holiness, and at His infinite pity."

The above sayings are enough to show the pro-
found reverence with which Tennyson regarded
Chi'ist, as the perfect exemplar of humanity. But
the deep mystery of the union of the human and
Divine was evidently a thought which he did not
attempt to fathom, and we may perhaps say that
his mind turned more naturally to the possibility of
the believer's direct union with God than to the
more definite Christian conception of the union
through Christ. It is of course inevitable that

112 TENNYSON

certain aspects of faith should come home with
greater force to some minds than to others, and I
think it is clear that this particular aspect of the
question was not one on which his mind dwelt
serenely and habitually.

We will turn then to the definite side of his faith,
and try to indicate the lines on which it moved.
He seems in those silent years, of which so little
record is left, to have made up his mind that a life
without faith, without religion, was impossible.
As he wrote to his future wife, " What matters it
how much man knows and does if he keep not a
reverential looking upward ? He is only the subtlest
beast in the field."

At the same time he seems to have grown to
feel that for him, at all events, the secret did not
lie in the subtleties of religious definition. " The
Almighty will not ask you," he once said, "what
particular form of creed you have held, but ' Have
you been true to yourself, and given in my Name " a
cup of cold water to one of these little ones ? " '"

Yet he sometimes seemed to hanker after a more
definite faith ; speaking of his friend and neighbour,
W. G. Ward, he said once, " If I had Ward's blind
faith, I should always be happy." He saw, more-
over, the necessity of a working system in matters
of religion, and the danger of vagueness. "An
organised religion," he once said, "is the needful
guardian of morality."

THE VISION OF GOD 11'^

Dr. Martineau said that Tennyson's poetry had
"a dissolving influence upon over-definite dogmatic
creeds:" but that he had created, or immeasur-
ably intensified, the susceptibility to religious
reverence.

He studied, particularly after his marriage, the
Bible very closely, and also made himself acquainted
with the chief systems of philosophy. His con-
clusion was a certain terror of minute scientific
analysis in matters of religion. " Nothing worth
proving can be proven, ' he said. At the same time
he had the greatest horror of the sacrifice of religion
to reason. "I hate unfaith," he said, "I cannot
endure that men should sacrifice everything at the
cold altar of what with their imperfect knowledge
they choose to call truth and reason." The whole
drift of In Memuriam is that humanity will not and
cannot acquiesce in a godless world ; and the two
principles by which Tennyson tried to guide his
life were the Fatherhood of God, implying the
possibility of the direct union of the soul with God
— and the hope of iminortality.

" My most passionate desire," he said, " is to have
a clearer and fuller vision of God," adding revei*-
ently, " I can sympathise with God in my poor
little way." Freewill, he thought, was the intimate
connection between the human and Divine.

"We see," he once said, "the shadow of God in
the world — a distorted shadow. Faith must be our
8

114 TENNYSON

guide ; " again^ "The flesh is the vision^ the spiritual
the only real and true."

Speaking of the character of Arthur in the
Idi/Us, he said, " For Arthur and for every one
who believes in the Word, however interpreted, the
question arises, * How can I in my little life, in my
small measure, and in my limited sphere reflect
this highest Ideal ? ' "

"God reveals himself," he said, "in every indi-
vidual soul, and my idea of heaven is the perpetual
ministry of one soul to another."

It was this intense belief in the Divine principle
in the world that made Jowett say of him that " he
had a strong desire to vindicate the ways of God
to man."

In his belief in the possibility of the union
between the human spirit and God, he wrote and
thought as a mystic. He believed in prayer, but
he recognised that the increasing difficulty in the
way of the scientific defining of prayer was the
extended knowledge of the laws that prevail in the
natural world. In his own life the need of prayer
became greater and more urgent, but the forms
of prayer became less definite. As Wordsworth
wrote : —

Thought was not, in emotion it espii-ed ;

No thanks he breathed, he proffered no request.

"Prayer," Tennyson said, "is the opening a
sluice between the ocean and the little channel.'

IMMORTALITY 115

No less strong was his perfect faith in personal
immortality. Praising Goethe as one of the wisest
of men, he quoted with approbation Goethe's
words : " I hope I shall never be so weak-minded
as to let my belief in a future life be torn from
me."

"I can hardly understand/" he once said, "how \
any great, imaginative man, who has deeply lived, I
suffered, thought and wrought can doubt of the
Soul's continuous progress in the after life.'' " The
instinct for another life is a presumption of its
truth," he once said.

The letters that he wrote to those suffering under
bereavements have the same fervent belief in im-
mortality expressed. To a friend who had lost a
son he wrote : —

" My own belief is that the son whom you so
loved is not really what we call dead, but more
actually living than when alive here."

To Lord Houghton, on the death of his wife, he
wrote, " I think I can see, as far as any one can
see in this twilight, that the nobler nature does not
pass from its individuality when it passes out of
this one life."

But this faith was not a vague and dreamlike
emotion, but sternly practical. He used to speak
of the war of sense and soul, the spreading poison
of sin, the transmuting power of repentance,
"Motive," he said, ''consecrates life."

116 TENNYSON

Speaking of a boy going up to the university he
said with great emphasis : —

"A young man ought not to be a bundle of
sensations ; he ought to have selfless and adven-
turous heroism, not to shirk responsibilities, to cast
aside maudlin and introspective morbidities, to use
his powers cheerfully in obedience to the dictates
of moral consciousness." "Can he," he added,
"battle against bad instincts, can he brave public
opinion in the cause of truth ? "

Again he said of himself, " I see the nothingness
of life, I know its emptiness — but I believe in Love
and Virtue and Duty."

He felt, as he grew older, the despondency caused
by decreased energy, that despondency which be-
trayed itself in the pessimism of some of his later
poems, but he said, " In my age I have a
stronger faith in God and human good even than
in youth."

This faith was accompanied by a strong sense of
the battle waged within himself with lower in-
stincts. In one of Hallam's early letters to him
occurs the passage, " You say pathetically, ' Alas
for me, I have more of the beautiful than the good.' "
Hallam goes on to say that " the fact that he should
recognise this and sorrow over it was in itself an
indication of the eventual triumph of the Divine."
And this triumph was won. It has been held by
those who teach that Art must be followed entirely

THE PURPOSE OF ART 117

and solely for its own sake, that Tennyson's art
was vitiated by the moral purpose it reveals. The
question is not one to be discussed here ; but it
may be said that Tennyson considered this view to
be almost blasphemous, and sacrificing the deeper
truth of life to the more superficial.

" Art for art — and Man's sake,' ' he said, had
always been his principle.

The humility which lay beneath a certain super-
ficial vanity is touchingly illustrated by his pathetic
words when his son Hallam, then at school, was
seriously ill : —

" God will take him," he said, " pure and good,
straight from his mother's lessons. Surely it would
be better for him than to grow up such a one as
I am."

This, then, was his faith ; not the faith that cannot
be content without parcelling out its information
into scientific sections, but a deep sense of mystery
and humility, a firm belief in the great purposes of
God for man. "There is no answer," he said, "to
these questions except in a quiet hope of universal
good." He held, too, the conviction that the one
thing needful in the world was a deeply rooted
vital faith, on which all the aspirations and pro-
gress of humanity must be based, " We cannot
give up," he said, "the mighty hopes that make us
men."

It seems to be claimed, or perhaps hoped, by the

118 TENNYSON

ardent upholders of Tennyson that he is destined
to survive as a religious philosopher and that he
has defined the attitude of Faith to Science, estab-
lished some invincible position in religion. The
hope is destined to disappointment : Tennyson's
philosophy was probably always considered ele-
mentary by the advanced school. Of course, in one
sense, his influence is permanent, as all influence
that is strongly felt at any period of the intellectual
or moral life of a nation is permanent ; because it
contained the seed of future development and is
in itself an integral link in the chain ; but the
data are different now, and the disposition of the
struggle is changed. Further, Tennyson established
nothing ; the most he did was to express with pro-
found emotion, and in language of admirable beauty,
the fact that, as Henry Sidgwick said, there is, or
seems to be, an inalienable modicum of faith which
humanity is bound to retain, and will not be per-
suaded to reject. But we must face the fact that
even if that faith is universally retained, it may be
that it will embrace a different scheme, and cling
to points which Tennyson considered unessential,
while it abandons what he held to be indubitable.
It may be, we say — for the coui"se of philosophical
discovery is impossible to predict.

But even if Tennyson's axioms should be rejected,
it still may be that his profound sincerity, his
poignant emotion in the presence of the deepest

FAITH IN GOD 119

mysteries, and above all the lucid solemnity, the
stately dignity of his language, will continue to
make his work a permanent monument of the
human spirit ; as permanent, that is, as any trophy
of the human mind can dare to claim to be.

CHAPTER VIII

IT is interesting to attempt to trace the literary
influences and to discuss the writers on which
the genius of Tennyson was nurtured. As a child he
seems to have read Byron, Thomson, Pope — whom
he called " a consummate artist in the lower sense of
the term" — and Walter Scott. It is noticeable
that many of the early poems are mere Byronic
exercises. He improvised hundreds of hues in the
style of Pope, and he ^vl•ote an early epic in the
style of Walter Scott. He was attracted by
Thomson's descriptions of nature and wrote with
facility in imitation of him. At the age of twelve
he wrote a long critical letter to an aunt on the
subject of Samson (spelt Sampson) Agonistes,
mainly composed of quotations, in which he pro-
nounces Milton a pedant. It is not recorded what
his favourite poetical reading was before he went
to the university, but he must have read Milton
carefully, and the influence of Keats is distinctly
traceable in the Cambridge prize poem on Tim-
buctoo ; there are, too, curious traces of the study
(120)

LITERARY INFLUENCES 121

of Shelley in The Lover's Tale of 1833, after which
date the direct influence of other poetry on his
style seems to have ceased ; he himself stated that
in later years nothing that he wrote was consciously
imitative.

But from that time to the end of his life a large
number of very acute and sympathetic critical dicta
on literary matters are recorded. Mr. Lecky in
the interesting reminiscences which he wrote of the
poet says that he was an admirable critic, and that
he was especially qualified for critical discriminations
by his great delicacy of ear and his retentive verbal
memory. Mr. Gladstone called him "a candid,
strict and fastidious judge " of literature, and there
is little doubt that if he had devoted himself to
critical work he would have left eminently sound,
sure-footed and discriminating judgments.

The best proof, however, of his knowledge and
taste is The Golden Treasury of 1861, edited by F.
T. Palgrave, who, it is well known, was very
largely indebted to the catholic erudition and fine
feeling of Tennyson.

It will be interesting to indicate his chief prefer-
ences in poetry and to examine his criticisms. They
were mostly delivered in conversation, but it is to
be noted that his judgment does not seem to have
varied according to his mood, but that he had a con-
stant and formed opinion which was little modified.

He approached literatux'e in the spirit of pure

122 TENNYSON

appreciation. He never professed to be a learned
student or to have made an exhaustive study of the
poetry which he admired. He wrote in 1885 to
Dr. Grosart, " I am very unlearned, not only in
Spenser but in most of our old poets, and I delight
(not being a Bibliophile) rather in the ' consummate
flower ' of a writer, than in the whole of him, root
and all, bad and good together. ..."

For Shakespeare he had the profoundest admira-
tion, as for a writer almost superhuman, classing
him with ^Eschylus, Dante and Goethe, as "the
great Sage poets, great thinkers and great artists."
He once quoted as a young man a saying of the
historian Hallam that Shakespeare was the "greatest
man." FitzGerald demurred to this, and said that
he thought such dicta rather peremptory for a
philosopher. "Well," said Tennyson, "the man
one would wish perhaps to show as a sample of
mankind to those in another planet." A little
later, "in his weaker moments," he would say
that Shakespeare was greater in his sonnets than
in his plays — "but he soon returned to the thought
which is indeed the thought of all the world."
Again he said with solemn deliberateness that
"Hamlet was the greatest creation in literature,"
and that there was one intellectual process in the
world of which he could not even entertain an
apprehension — the process by which the plays of
Shakespeare were produced.

SHAKESPEARE 123

Speaking of individual plays he said that "no
one had drawn the true passion of love like
Shakespeare ; " for inimitably natural talk between
husband and wife he would quote the scene between
Hotspur and Lady Percy (King Henry IF., Part I.),
and would exclaim, " How deliciously playful is
that

' In faith, I'll break thy little finger, Harry,
An if thoix wilt not tell me all things true.' "

He would say, "There are three repartees in
Shakespeare which always bring the tears to my
eyes from their simplicity.

"One is in King Lear, when Lear says to Cordelia,
' So young and so untender,' and Cordelia lovingly
answers, 'So young, my lord, and true.' And in
The Winter s Tale, when Florizel takes Perdita's
hand to lead her to the dance, and says, ' So turtles
pair that never mean to part,' and the little
Perdita answers, giving her hand' to Florizel, * I'll
swear for 'em.' And in Cymbeline, when Imogen
in tender rebuke says to her husband,

' "Why did you throw your wedded lady from you V
Think that you are upon a rock ; and now
Throw me again. '

and Posthumus does not ask forgiveness, but
answers, kissing her,

' Hang there like fruit, my soul
Till the tree die.'"

124 TENNYSON

"King Lear," he used to say, "cannot possibly
be acted, it is too titanic. . . . This play shows a
state of society where men's passions are savage
and uncurbed. No play like this anywhere — not
even the Agamemnon — is so terrifically human."

Again he said, " Actors do not comprehend that
Shakespeare's greatest villains, lago among them,
have always a touch of conscience. You see the
conscience working — therein lies one of Shake-
speare's pre-eminences."

" Macbeth," again he said, with fine perception,
" is not as is too often I'epresented, a noisy swash-
buckler : he is a full-furnished, ambitious man."

Commenting on Shakespeare's literary style he
said that the great yEschylean lines in Shakespeare
were often overlooked, instancing

The burning crest
Of the old, feeble, and day-wearied sun.

Shakespeare was to him the great interpreter of
life in the light of poetry. It is touching to re-
member that it was the last book he read, on his
deathbed. Three days before he died he sent
early in the morning for his Shakespeare ; his son
brought him in Steevens' edition, Leai-, Cymbeline,
and Troilus and Cressida, three of his favourite
plays ; he read a few lines, and asked that more
should be read to him. On the next day, when he
was wandering a good deal, and talking about a

MILTON 125

long journey he seemed about to take, he broke off
to say, " Where is my Shakespeare ? I must have
my Shakespeare." On the last day he begged for
the book again and lay with his hand resting on
it, open, trying to read it ; almost his last recorded
words were, " I have opened it." It was thought
that this referred to the book, which he had
opened at the lines, already quoted,

' ' Hang there like fruit, my soul
Till the tree die."

The book was buried with him, and lies next his
heart.

Milton he called " Supreme in the material
sublime," and said that he was greater than Virgil.
Lycidas, he said, was a test of poetic instinct.
He used to praise Milton's similes, especially

As when far off at sea a fleet descried
Hangs in the clouds, by equinoctial winds
Close sailing from Bengala — (Bk. ii. 634)

saying, " What simile was ever so vast as this ? "
As an instance of a liquid line he would quote

And in the ascending scale
Of Heaven, the stars that usher evening rose,

adding, " This last line is lovely because it is full of
vowels, which are all different. It is even a more
beautiful line than those where the repetition of
the same vowels or the same consonants sometimes
are so melodious."

126 TENNYSON

It is clear that he had studied closely Milton's
metrical effects, the pauses, which he greatly ad-
mired, and the bold substitution of trochees for
iambuses, instancing especially the line.

Burnt after them to the bottomless pit.

But it may be questioned whether in the word
bottomless the accent did not, in Milton's time, fall
more on the second syllable ; it seems as though it
were a modern tendency in English to throw the
accent back, in such words as contemplate, which
was certainly in former times contemplate — indeed
Tennyson himself used the word with that accent.
In such hnes as

Ruining along the illimitable inane

Tennyson was, if not consciously imitating Milton,
at least adopting Milton's metrical instinct.

For Wordsworth he had the deepest reverence,
and for his work profound admiration, though he
was by no means blind to his critical defects.

The two poets met several times, and it is in-
teresting to note that on one occasion Tennyson
complained that he could not fire Wordsworth's
imagination even by a description of a tropical
island all ablaze with scarlet flowers. It was this
absence of fire which made Tennyson say once that
he thought Wordsworth " thick-ankled," an admir-
ably humorous and penetrating criticism. He used
to complain of his want of artistic skill, and say that

WORDSWORTH 127

great as he was, he was too one-sided to be dramatic.
In the poem, Tintern Abbey, which he greatly
admired, he said that Wordsworth showed a want
of Uterary instinct.

On the other hand he called him the greatest
English poet since Milton, and said that his very
best was the best in its way that had been sent out
by the moderns. He said once that the line.

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, <

was ''almost the grandest in the English language,
giving the sense of the abiding in the transient."

But what touched him most in Wordsworth was
the high sense of consecration to the poetic vocation,
and the depth of tenderness and mystery, uniting
in the deep consciousness of the Divine. " You
must love Wordsworth," he once exclaimed, "ere
he will seem worthy of your love." And here it
will be well to quote the majestic compliment paid
by Wordsworth to Tennyson on the subject of one
of his poems. " Mr. Tennyson," said the old poet,
" I have been endeavouring all my life to write
a pastoral like your Dora and have not yet
succeeded."

Byron, he used to confess, had been the strongest
poetical influence of his early years. He was
dominated by him, he said, till he was seventeen,
and then he put him aside altogether. His " merits
are on the surface," he said. " He was not an

128 TENNYSON

artist or a thinker or a creator in the highest sense ;
but a strong personality and endlessly clever."

Yet at the same time he fully realised the debt
that literature owed to Byron in kindling the poeti-
cal spirit of the generation. " Byron and Shelley/'
he -wrote to Spedding, " however mistaken they may
be, did yet give the world another heart and new
pulses — and so are we kept going."

For Shelley, however, his admiration was less
profound ; and it is probable that the chilly and
visionary philosophy of Shelley made a deep sym-
pathy between the two minds difficult. " There is
a great wind of words," he once said, " in a good
deal of Shelley, but as a writer of blank verse he
was perhaps the most skilful of the moderns." He
admired Epipsijchidion ; but he thought that there
was a certain abandon in many of the poems which
argued a want of poetical restraint. " Shelley's Life
of Life,^' he once said, "is a flight where the poet
seems to go up and burst."

It may be inferred that Keats attracted Tennyson
in early years from the influence traceable in 7'i;«-
buctoo ; and it is evident that the two had much
in common. There is the same gorgeous profusion
of ornament, the same lavish and almost riotous
imagination, the same power of amassing luxurious
detail. In Tennyson's early work it is clear that
he was tempted at times to sacrifice the scheme of
his poem to its accessories ; and until he reached

KEATS 129

the age of thirty he did not fully realise the primary
importance of structure, the necessity of subordin-
ating ornament to design.

But it was not only the luxuriance of detail which
attracted Tennyson in Keats ; rather it was the
reverse ; he realised fully the weakness of Keats,
the uncontrolled turbulence of inspiration from
which he was beginning to free himself in his later
work. " Keats," he said, " 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 which he wrote."
Tennyson said once to Mr. Aubrey de Vere, "Com-
pare the heavy handling of my workmanship with
the exquisite lightness of touch of Keats."

For Burns he had a great admiration ; he ranked
him higher than Shelley and said that he held him
to be "an immortal poet if ever there was one."

Mr. Aubrey de Vere tells a delightful story in
this connection. He had been talking to Tenny-
son about Burns, and the latter said, with great
emotion, " Read the exquisite songs of Burns — in •'
shape, each of them has the perfection of the berry ;
in light the radiance of the dewdrop ; you forget
for their sake those stupid things, his serious pieces."
Mr. de Vere met Wordsworth the same day, and
mentioned Burns ; Wordsworth broke out into
vehement praises of Burns, as the great genius who
9

130 TENNYSON

had brought Poetry back to Nature. He ended,
" Of course I refer to his serious efforts, such as the
Cottar s Saturday Night — those foolish Httle amatory
songs of his one has to forget." Mr. de Vere told
the two criticisms to Sir Henry Taylor the same
evening, and he replied, " Burns ' exquisite songs
and Burns ' serious efforts are to me alike tedious
and disagreeable reading."

Certain of Tennyson's scattered dicta on poetry
are memorable ; of Ben Jonson he said, after
praising some of his lyrics, " To me he appears to
move in a wide sea of glue." Browning, who was
a close personal friend, was, as a poet, always a
problem to him. Tennyson said of him that he
had " a mighty intellect ; he has plenty of music in
him, but he cannot get it out." He could not
understand the apparent neglect of form going
hand in hand with such prodigality of language and
such facility of execution. He admired Matthew
Arnold as a poet, and after reading Literature and
Dogma, somewhat unkindly sent a message to him,
"Tell him to give us no more of these prose things."

Mr. Swinburne he called "a reed through which
all things blow into music." He praised the
"liquid" character of Gray's -writing, and admired
Collins and Campbell, though he objected to the
juxtaposition of sibilants in the former, and said
that he wrote " hissing " lines.

He knew something of Hebrew, and liked to

CLASSICAL READING 131

read the Psalms in the original. He said once of
the Song of Solomon that in reality it was a most
lovely, tender and delicate idyll, utterly different
from the " coarsely painted, misrepresented, unun-
derstandable story given in the Bible translation."

He read a good deal of the Classics, principally
^schylus, Euripides and Homer ; he was fond of
the tragic fragments. Of Pindar he once said that
he was "a sort of Australian poet — long tracts of
gravel with immensely large nuggets embedded."

Of Latin writers he read Virgil, Lucretius, Catul-
lus and Horace, He was fond of pointing out the
music of Virgil's lines, quoting

Dixit, et avertens rosea cervice refulsit,
Ambrosiaeque comse divinum vertice odorem
Spiravere, pedes vestis defluxit ad imos,
Et vera incessu patuit dea. Ille ubi matrem
Adgnovit, tali fugientem est voce secutus.

as giving a good specimen of his ear for pauses. In
the poem written for the nineteenth centenary of
Virgil's death, he praises his phrasing and his diction.

All the chosen coin of fancy flashing out from many a golden
phrase.

and

All the charm of all the Muses often flowering in a lonely word.

But what seems most to have dwelt in his mind
was the pathos of the poet : —

Thou majestic in thy sadness at the doubtful doom of human
kind.

132 TENNYSON

Horace he says that he did not admire till he
was thirty ; and though he respected the perfection
of finish that Horace exhibits, it may be doubted
whether the elegant worldliness of the poet, his wor-
ship of expediency and the unromantic Present can
ever have moved Tennyson very deeply ; he even
found the neatness of his metrical handling too pre-
cise ; Horace's Sapphic stanza, he used to say, " is
like a pig with its tail tightly curled."

For Catullus he had a deep and genuine love,
though the grossness of some of the poems was
inexplicable to him. "Catullus," he once said,
"says that a poet's lines may be impure provided
his life is pure. I don't agree with him ; his verses
fly much further than he does."

He read Dante, as I have said, and placed him
among the immortals ; he used to say that the
origin of his own Ulysses was not the Odyssey,
but a tradition preserved by Dante.

Though he rated Goethe very highly as an artist,
he thought him an even better critic ; and had a great
opinion of his luminous wisdom ; he used to say
admiringly of Goethe that he was an excellent
critic though he always tried to say the best he could
about an author, adding, " Good critics are rarer than
good authoi's." He had a particular admiration for
the sound of German, its great sonorous words ; but
he confessed it to be untranslatable, and held that
its music could not be rendered in English.

CRITICAL TASTE 133

French he read, but not very sympathetically.
The sense of national enmity was probably strong
in Tennyson ; and the vein of exaggeration so
natural to French heroic poetry grated on him.
He did not like the Alexandrine metre ; but he
admired French lyrists, such as Beranger and
Sully-Prudhomme. He thought some of Alfred de
Musset perfect. " I consider him a greater artist
than Victor Hugo, but on smaller lines. Victor
Hugo," he continued, " is an unequal genius, some-
times sublime ; he reminds one that there is only
one step between the sublime and the ridiculous.
' Napoleon genait Dieu ' — was there ever such an

expression

?"

The above dicta are by no means exhaustive —
and it must be remembered that they were thrown
out in easy conversation, not presented as serious
criticism — but they tend to show that Tennyson
ranged far afield in his reading, and read with a keen
discriminating taste. Occasionally he made a serious
critical mistake ; he said once that he believed that
Rogers' smaller poems might last ; and after read-
ing Fesius drew a remarkable comparison between
himself and Mr. Bailey, saying that while he was
himself a wren beating about a hedgerow, the author
of Festus was like an eagle soaring to the sun.
But even the best critics are liable to temporary
derangement; and it may be said, as a whole, that
Tennyson's judgments are both fair and forcible.

134 TENNYSON

and show a notable capacity for appreciating high
literature ; moreover, in dealing with Tennyson,
one instinctively feels that he never spoke from a
sense of duty, or from a desire to pose, or from
anything but a sincere and genuine feeling — which
gives these rugged opinions a value which the more
polished statements of a less incorruptible critic
may be held to lack.

CHAPTER IX

IT is possible to get a very clear notion of Tenny-
son's methods in writing for two reasons : he
was very regular in his habits of composition, and
he was not in the least reticent about his art. He
believed that he had developed slowly and said
once that Poela nascitur, tiofi Jit was an erroneous
statement. It should run Poeta nascitur, et Jit.
He added that he supposed he was nearer thirty
than twenty before he was anything of an artist ;
at the same time he remarked, complacently
looking at his own Juvenilia, " It seems that I wrote
them all in perfect metre." This claim, however, it
will be remembered was directly contrary to the
opinion of so excellent a judge as S. T. Coleridge.
He said once that he found the choice of subjects
always difficult, and that the difficulty increased as
he grew older. At the same time the germ of
many of his poems lay dormant in his mind for
many years ; when once embarked upon a poem he
wrote with great facility and speed. " I can
always write," he said, '' when I can see my sub-
(135)

136 TENNYSON

ject jWhole," and again, that when he once had
the subject and the framework of a poem the
actual writing cost him but httle trouble. Thus
Guinevere was finished in a fortnight, Etioch Arden
in the same time; the line, "At Flores in the
Azores Sir Richard Grenville lay," was on his desk
for years and the ballad was finished in a day or
two. He used to say that he was never so well in
health as when engaged in the actual writing of a
poem. Tobacco was a necessity to him when thus
at work, and he was at his best, he said, while
smoking his first morning pipe after breakfast. At
the same time he could not force himself to work.
He believed like Coventry Patmore in the value of
infinite leisure for a poet, and though his poetry
was seldom out of his mind, and though he always
had some work in hand, yet there were long
periods of brooding when he did no actual writing.
"I caiuiot say," he once wrote to Lushington, "that
I have been what you professors call ' working ' at
it, that indeed is not my way. I have my pipe and
the muse descends in the fume."

He had the habit of always trying to express any
sight that struck him in a few trenchant words ; many
of these impressions were never registered, and were
consequently lost, but the result was that he had an
extraordinary readiness in writing and an immense
wealth of simile and poetical illustration at his
command. It may, indeed, almost without exag-

THE IDYLLS 13?

geration, be said that the wonder ,is not that he
wrote so much, but that he did not write more ;
poetry was to him at once the serious business and
the highest pleasure of life ; he had, however, an
intense dislike to the manual labour of wi'iting, and
it is probable that if this had not been the case he
would have written even more profusely. Some
of his great poems were written without any
particular scheme. Thus In Memoriam is not in
the least a coherent and articulate whole. A
large number of the poems were written quite
independently, and it was not until he began to
review them and consider them in mass that the
idea of a great connected whole entered his mind.
He had written in 1 833 a prose sketch of the
Arthurian legend long before he began to work on
the Idylls, a scheme which is interesting because it
shows how far more mystical his original conception
of the poems was than his later execution. It seems
as though when he had once embarked upon the
Idylls his interest in the characters and the human-
ity of the poems carried him away ; and though
there is no doubt a semi-mystical allegory running
through the whole, yet the drama and the delinea-
tion of character had an increasing attraction for
him. He had a great dislike to being tied down
to an exact and definite conception of his subject.
"Poetry," he said once, "is like shot-silk with many
glancing colours. Every reader must find his own

138 TENNYSON

interpretation according to his ability, and accord-
ing to his sympathy with the poet."

He gave immense thought and care to the form
of poetry ; most of his lyrics, he used to say, owed
their origin to single lines, which took definite
shape in his mind, and in accordance with which
the whole poem was evolved. Thus The Charge of
the Light Brigade took its origin and derived its
metrical scheme from the line, "some one had blun-
dered," though in deference to criticism he omitted
the line from certain versions, ultimately replacing
it. Very early in life he said, " If I am to make any
mark at all it must be by shortness," which seems
to mean that his ambition was then to be a purely
lyrical poet ; though the conception was afterwards
greatly modified.

There is a very interesting reminiscence by Mr.
Aubrey de Vere which relates to Tennyson's con-
ception of form. " One night," says Mr. de Vere,
"after he had been reading aloud several of his poems,
all of them short, he passed one of them to me and
said, ' What is the matter with that poem ? ' I
read it and answered, ' I see nothing to complain of.'
He laid his fingers on two stanzas of it, the third
and fifth, and said, ' Read it again.' After doing
so I said, ' It has now more completeness and
totality about it ; but the two stanzas you cover are
among its best.' ' No matter,' he said, ' they make
the poem too long-backed; and they must go at

POETICAL FORM 139

any sacrifice.' ' Every short poem/ he remarked,
'should have a definite shape Hke a curve, some-
times a single, sometimes a double one, assumed by
a severed tress or the rind of an apple when fiung on
the Jluor.' "

This is among the most interesting of Tennyson's
critical dicta. It reminds one of the story of Gray
who remorselessly cut out some of the most beauti-
ful stanzas of the Elegy because he said that they
made too long a parenthesis. But it is characteristic
of the highest kind of artist. The inferior craftsman
is so enamoured of single lines and stanzas, that he
is capable of adding even unnecessary stanzas to a
poem, in order to dovetail in the image that he ad-
mires, without reference to the form of the poem.
Rossetti once said that the thing which made all the
diflFerence between a good and a bad poem was the
" fundamental brain- work " involved in the former ;
and ornament must be sternly sacrificed to construc-
tion if the workmanship is to be perfect. Tennyson
himself said that a small vessel on fine lines is
better than a log raft.

How high a value he placed on style may be
inferred from the fact that he once said to Mr.
Gosse, " It matters very little what we say ; it is
how we say it — though the fools don't know it."
He realised that the number of new thoughts that
a writer can originate must be small — if indeed it
is the province of a poet to originate thought at all

140 TENNYSON

— and the vital presentment, the crystalline con-
centrations of ordinary experience is what he must
aim at.

With regard to metre he always said that blank
verse was by far the most diffcult form to ^vrite in.
He said once that the ten-syllabled line could
contain as few as three and as many as eight beats,
and that it was essential to vary the number of
beats to avoid monotony. He also held very strong
theories about the interchange of vowel sounds ;
and believed that though for a definite effect the
same vowel sound might be repeated in close
juxtaposition, yet that the finest line contained
the largest possible variety of vowel sounds, suc-
ceeding each other in a melodious sequence. The
onomatopoeic refrain, " hn-lan-lone," which was
invented as expressive of the sound of bells, is an
instance of this.

He held no less decided views about the juxta-
position of consonants : he had a particular aversion
to the recurrence of sibilants, making what he
called a "hissing" line. He used to say that he
never put two s — s together in his life.^ The
getting rid of sibilants in a line he called in a
picturesque phrase, " kicking the geese out of the
boat."

He used to say with amusement that he was

^ Though it la true that he once wrote in an album a poem
which contains the line, "Swift stars acud over sounding seas."

METRE 141

often accused of excessive alliteration, and that it
was believed he used it deliberately. The case, as
he once said, was the exact opposite. His tendency
was to alliterate still more profusely than he did,
and he was often forced to remove an excess of
alliterated work.

He always held, as he says in his poem To
Virgil, that the hexameter was the "stateliest"
metre ever invented ; but he did not think it fit for
English ; he once said that it was only fit for comic
subjects — and he believed that Englishmen confused
accent with quantity. He indicated that quantity
had so little existence in English that for practical
purposes it was superseded by accent, and that
except for delicate effects, accent must be attended
to ; he always maintained that his experiments in
classical metres had cost him more trouble than
any of the poetry he had written.

It was strange that with his scorn of critics he
yet altered so much. Probably no great poet ever
rewrote so much in deference to criticism. Very
different was the attitude of his great contemporary,
Robert Browning, who when asked as to what omis-
sions were to be made in a new edition of his poems
answered briskly, " Leave out anything } certainly
not ! — quod scripsi, scripsi. " It is an instructive study
to take Mr. Churton Collins' volume and compare
carefully the various readings given in the footnotes.
If one reads the early reviews of Tennyson's works

142 TENNYSON

one is struck with the unfamiliarity of many of the
quotations ; the reason is that it seldom happened that
he did not alter almost ever3rthing to which critical
objection was taken. One is further inclined to say
unhesitatingly that he always altered for the better ;
but this belief depends largely upon the precise form
in which one becomes acquainted with the poems. A
modern student of Tennyson has delicious associa-
tions with so many lines, that the mere idea of
substituting some of the earlier readings seems like a
profanation ; but possibly those who made the ac-
quaintance of the poems in their earlier guise might
think differently. Great poetry sinks so soon into
the heart that the alteration of a word, even if the
alteration is better from a literary point of view, is
of the nature of a violent and blood-stained opera-
tion ; it is impossible to judge poetry from the
standpoint of severe literary judgment ; much must
be allowed for emotion ; and one cannot make a
greater mistake in reading and criticising poetry
than not to allow for the natural influence of emotion
and association.

There was a certain definite mood, if an)rthing so
intangible can be definite, which played a marked
part in the early poetical life of Tennyson. This
he called, "the Passion of the Past," and it is
described with loving minuteness in a late poem.
The Ancient Sage, which was confessedly autobio-
graphical : —

THE SHADOW OF DOOM 143

To-day ? but what of yesterday ? for oft

On me, when boy, there came what then I called,

"Who knew no books and no philosophies.

In my boy-phrase "the Passion of the Past."

The first grey streak of earliest summer-dawn,

The last long stripe of waning crimson gloom,

As if the late and early were but one —

A height, a broken grange, a grove, a flower

Had murmurs "Lost and gone and lost and gone !"

A breath, a whisper— some divine farewell —

Desolate sweetness — far and far away —

What had he loved, what had he lost, the boy ?

I know not and I speak of what has been.

He once said in a letter to his future wife that the
far future had always been his world, and, as has
been mentioned before, his friend Spedding said of
him that he had an almost personal dislike of the
present whatever it might be. But the ynood, which
is the same as Virgil's "lacrimae rerum," is not
merely the hunger of the sensitive spirit, which
finds life day by day overshadowed by some cloud
of subtle melancholy, and the imagined tranquillity
of existence fretted by the sorry and petty sting of
mundane cares. ^ It is rather the insistent pathos of
the world, the inevitable doom that waits for all
things, the pressure of mortality, the calling of
humanity out of the silent past, the cries of all
things dehita morti, the delicious sadness which the
very transitoriness of mortal things evokes. J This
is the same mood as that described by William
Johnson, so pre-eminently the poet of youth : —

\> TENNYSON

But oh, the very reason why
I love them, is because they die.

It was in this mood that two of the most soul-
haunting lyrics of Tennyson's were written/ Break,
break, break, which was the work of an early
morning in a Lincolnshire lane ; and Tears, idle
Tears, written at Tintern Abbey, and introduced
into The Piincess ; of this Tennyson said that it
was the expression not of real woe, but of the
l^iungering melancholy of youth.

When the soul has had to bear the real sorrows
of the world, and has trodden in the dark dry places,
in which the suffering spirit walks, these experiences
are apt to become, as it were, too tragic, too intense
for expression, A grief seen very close is apt to
freeze the sense of beauty at the very spring ; and
•^it is probably only in youth, before the heart has
been seared by the dreary agonies of life, that such
thoughts can be linked to sweetness at all. One
who has suffered very deeply can minister, it may
be, the consolation of faith and fortitude. The
bereaved may dare to hope and look forward ; but
few hearts that have known the weight of sorrow
can find a sense of luxurious melancholy in the
thought of the "days that are no more."

As life went forward with Tennyson, and the
thought of life, its possibilities and its failures,
became more urgent, this rapture, the 6e16v ti Tra.6o<i
of which Plato spoke, became less and less possible.

INSPIRATION 145

Before the Franco-Prussian war he had written
some little lyrics — Window Songs — which were set
to music by Sullivan and published while the two
great nations were engaged. Only the promise
that he had made, and the knowledge of the loss
and disappointment that would be caused by his
refusal, induced Tennyson tojallow the songs to be
circulated. " I am sorry," he wrote, "that my four-
year-old puppet should have to dance at all in the
dark shadow of these days."

After the publication of Maud, in 1855, there
seems a curious ebbing of the spring of inspiration.
From that time dates a certain resolute search for
poetical material, a certain husbanding of re-
sources ; frequent inquiries among his friends for
incidents and subjects — answered in the most
conscientious and philosophical spirit by Jowett —
while the old plenitude of fancy, the bubbling-over
of the fountain of beauty was more rare. Edward
FitzGerald maintained that after the 1842 volumes
there was a perceptible decline in the work of the
Poet ; indeed, though he veiled the thought in
courteous periphrasis, it is clear that he thought
Tennyson, either by reason of some warping of
judgment, or by the desire to win popular favour,
began to misuse his genius and trifle with it. ^

It is not necessary to go as far as Edward Fitz-
Gerald in these matters, but there is a great deal
of truth in what he said. Tennyson was indeed
10

i^

146 TENNYSON

•^radically affected, not in a petty way, by his
increased fame. The tremendous publicity of all
he gave to the world overshadowed him. He
became more shy of writing anything which could
/ run counter to public taste or expectation, and,
moreover, he felt impelled, by a certain conscien-
tious sense of responsibility, based upon his theory
of poetry, to keep in touch with popular move-
ments, and to direct popular sentiment. In this
way he undoubtedly increased the circle of his
readers, and his influence upon thought was im-
mensely augmented. But one misses the wild
freshness of the earlier inspiration. It is impos-
sible not to feel that the Poet is treading more
warily, and though the result was undoubtedly an
accumulation of poetical prestige, yet the clarity
of his genius was somehow impaired. Leigh Hunt
had written of one of the early volumes that he was
fearful of what Tennyson would come to by reason
of certain misgivings in his poetry and a want of
the active poetic faith. This criticism was scarcely
justified when it was made ; but it is hard to say
that it was not justified later on.

It is interesting here to note the view taken of
Tennyson by the great French critic, Taine. He
begins by saying that Enghsh men of sentiment
had begun to weary of the BjTonic school. " Men
wanted to rest after so many efforts and so much
excess." Tennyson, he says, stepped upon the stage

TAINE ON TENNYSON 147

at precisely the right moment. " His poetry was
like lovely summer evenings : the outlines of the
landscape are the same then as in the daytime ; but
the splendour of the dazzling vault is dulled."

He says that in the early poems there was too
much voluptuousness, too great refinement : " He
strayed through nature and history, with no pre-
occupation, without fierce passion, bent on feeling
and enjoying ; culling from every place, from the
flower-stand of the drawing-room and from the rustic
hedgerow, the rare or wild flowers whose scent or
beauty could charm or amuse him. Men entered into
his pleasures ; smelt the graceful bouquets which he
knew so well how to put together ; preferred those
which he took from the country."

Twice or thrice, Taine thought, in Locksley Hall
and Maud, Tennyson broke out into the passionate
utterance which his tranquil and prosperous life
tended to keep in the background. But he adds
that, discouraged by criticism and by the be-
wilderment which such poems caused to those who
loved him for his rich serenity, he "left the storm-
clouds and returned to the azure sky. He was
right ! "

Taine thought little of In Memoriarn. He
found a want of abandon in the elegy — a correct
ness, a restraint about the grief depicted, which
seemed to him essentially unreal.

He draws an elaborate picture of the easy.

^

148 TENNYSON

luxurious, sensible life of England ; he describes
the landscape : "If there is a slope, streams have
been devised, with little islets in the valley, thick-
set with tufts of roses ; ducks of select breed swim in
the pools, where the water-lilies display their satin
stars. Fat oxen lie in the grass, sheep as white as if
freshly washed, all kinds of happy and model animals,
fit to delight the eye of an amateur and a master."
He ends by saying, " Such is this elegant and
common-sense society, refined in comfort, regular in
conduct, whose dilettante tastes and moral principles
confine it within a sort of flowery border, and prevent
it from having its attention diverted." Tennyson's
poetry, he says, " seems made expressly for those
wealthy, cultivated, free business men, heirs of the
/ ancient nobility, new leaders of a new England. It
is part of their luxury, as of their morality ; it is
an eloquent confirmation of their principles, and a
precious article of their drawing-room furniture."
He concludes by an elaborate comparison of Tenny- •
json and Alfred de Musset ; Tennyson the favourite
poet of minds in which everything is rational and
comfortable, where everything is taken for granted ;
De Musset the poet for a restless nation, certain of
nothing, all alive to intellectual stimulus and new
ideas — the poet of revolt.

This is an interesting judgment, because Taine
has all through a scrupulous desire to do Tennyson
justice ; but the contempt which he felt at the

TAINE 149

bottom of his heart for a poet whose views he con-
sidered frankly bourgeois shows its head again and
again, in a certain patrician insolence of tone, a
consciousness that he is on the right side of the
water after all.

CHAPTER X

THE true and devout Tennysonian will approach
the earlier poems with a sacred reverence
and a secret delight which the later works fail to
command. As FitzGerald said in a beautiful letter,
"Alfred, I see how pure, noble and holy your work
is," and again he wrote : " When I look into
Alfred's poems I am astonished at the size of the
words and thoughts. Words so apt, full of strength,
music and dignity."

It is perfectly true that the fame of Tennyson
largely depends on the later works. In Memoriam,
Maud, the Idylls. But these form as it were
the pedestal on which the statue stands. The true
Tennyson is the Tennyson of the early l3rrics. I
do not say that he did not at a later date produce
poems which are worthy to stand with the earlier
work. But I would unhesitatingly affirm that the
two 1842 volumes are the consummate flower and
crown of Tennyson's genius. It is not unfair to say
that he attained a fame by work which was not his
best, which he fully deserved for his best work.
(150)

EARLY POEMS 151

We find Coventry Patmore writing : " Among
Tennyson's works the second of the two little
volumes published in 1 842 contains, to my thinking,
the greater part of all that is essential in his
writings. It bears to them the same relation that
Keats's little volume issued in 1820 does to all
else he wrote. In Memoriam and Maud are poor
poems, though they contain much exquisite poetry.
Probably no modern work has done so much to
undermine popular religion as In Memoriam.
Tennyson's best work, though in its way a miracle
of grace and finish, is never of quite the highest
kind. It is not finished yVo/n within. Compare the
finish of Kiibla Khan with that of The Palace of
Art." This is a hard saying, but very subtle, and
probably true, if we allow ourselves to adopt , Pat-
more's rigid standpoint.

These first poems are to the rest of his writings
what the first pale delicate foliage of spring is to
the strong metallic leaf of summer. It may be
affirmed that poets as a rule do their best work
before their thirty-fifth year. About that age a
man of even the highest genius becomes to a certain
extent a materialist. The advantages of domestic
comfort, of a stable income, of a definite place in
the world become obvious. Matrimony, in the
majority of cases, forces upon the mind the neces-
sity for making a certain provision for wife and
children ; moreover the physical constitution loses

152 TENNYSON

its spring ; chronic complaints begin to peep and
beckon ; the reserves of nervous force grow low ;
the painful brevity of human life becomes more
obvious. The limitless possibilities of youth be-
come conditioned by the actual. Moreover the
social interest of life increases. Relationships,
friendships, associations assert their claims. The
rush and movement of the world, so aloof, so
daunting in youth, begins to reveal its fascination.
Idealism grows weak, or rather is apt to fail in the
presence of the pressure of laws and averages and
material conditions.

In youth this is not so ; the world is like an
opening rose ; like a sea where each wave in the slow
procession of experience falls and breaks with a shock
of delicate surprises. The pure and ardent spirit
begins to be aware that what seemed the truisms
and abstractions of literature are real breathing
and burning facts, and half persuades itself that no
one can have felt them so poignantly, so exquisitely
before.

Tennyson by his constitution and habits of life
was able to keep this ardent feeling alive longer
than most men — and being moreover a conscientious
and absorbed worker he was able to give effect to
recollected emotion longer than many poets. But,
for all that, the earlier poems remain the true,
authentic and living expression of his genius,
written as the fancy bade him, and without any

EARLY POEMS 153

consciousness of position or influence, or any sense
of duty towards the world which waited for his
utterance.

Moreover, though money was never a conscious
factor in Tennyson's scheme of life, yet the dignified
leisure, the easy hospitality which he loved cannot
be attained without money, indeed without a
large income. He himself, too, had felt the old
impulse of the full heart flag ; the power of feeding
hour by hour in the contemplation of nature die
away. " I am not so able as in old years to commune
alone with Nature," he wrote to his future wife
before their marriage.

It is not intended here to give any close or
detailed criticism of the earlier work. The poems
of which I now speak are those included in the
volumes of 1830, 1832i and 1842.

The 1842 publication consisted of two volumes;
the former was mainly occupied by selections from
the 1830 and the 1832 volume, largely, as a rule,
recast and altered, the second volume of 1842 was
composed of original poems.

The recasting of the earliest poems is in itself
a matter of the deepest interest. Mr. Churton
Collins has done invaluable work in his book. The
Early poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson. He gives
all the poems of the three publications, subjoin-
ing in each case the earlier forms ; and any one who

^ This volume was published in 1832, and post-dated 1833.

154 TENNYSON

wishes to penetrate the technical secrets of Tenny-
son's art, so far as they can be penetrated, should
give this book the closest study. Mr. Collins gives
few and apposite comments and elucidations, and
keeps the reader intent upon the study of the
actual words of the author. The volume opens the
door, so to speak, into the poet's workshop, and not
only shows what his later critical taste rejected,
but illustrates his endless patience in correction.

In the 1830 volume appear most of the dreamy
portraits of imaginary women in which the matter
is nothing, the form ever^-thing. Of these the ex-
quisite Clarlhcl, a mere word-melody, is the most
haunting. There are several songs, conceived in
the Shakespearian manner, with an attempt to treat
a descriptive subject whimsically and with melodi-
ous originality. Such is The Owl. But the best
of these is the autumn Song, which came to him
in the garden at Somersby : —

A Spirit haunts the year's last hours,

which is of indescribable beauty, personifying the
spirit of the chill evening and the dying leaf.

To himself he talks ;
For at eventide, listening earnestly,
At his work %-ou maj- hear him sob and sigh

In the walks.

Here, too, is the Supposed Corifessions, an inter-
esting autobiographical fragment, suppressed, after

EARLY POEMS 155

its first appearance, until 1871, when it was published
in the Juvenilia, which is considered elsewhere.

Here, too, are the two poems The Poet and The
Poet's Mind, which will be examined separately ;
some sonnets which were never reprinted. The
Ballad of Oriana and the splendid Ode to M.emory,
which is probably the most typical of the early
volume. It is written in an irregular odic metre,
some of it reminiscent of the stately march of the
Lycidas, but also containing some exquisitely original
descriptive passages, such as

the waterfall
Which ever sounds and shines \/'

A pillar of white light upon the wall
Of purple cliffs, aloof descried.

And again : —

Long alleys falling down to twilight grots,
Or opening upon level plots
Of crowned lilies, standing near
Purple-spiked lavender.

The scheme is loose, and the mood follows its
wayward course : but the handling is masterly.

The general beat is iambic, with a few dactylic
lines interspersed. I know few metrical openings
so fine as that in the fourth stanza, when, the first
strophe having come to an end, with a reversion to
the original subject, the new strophe begins with
the splendid line : —

Gome forth, I ctiarge thee, arise.

156 TENNYSON

The 1832 volume contains some far more mature
work. Here are The Lady of Shalott, which was
almost entirely recast in 1842, Mariana in the South,
The Miller s Daughter, (Enone (practically rewritten
in 1842), The Palace of Art, The May Queen, The
Lotos-Eaters (much altered later), and A Dream oj
Fair Women — the very names have a potent magic
as one writes them down.

Finally in 1842 appeared the Morte d' Arthur,
Love and Duty, Locksley Hall, Break, break, break,
perhaps one of the purest and least elaborate
flashes of his genius ; and many other poems of
importance.

On the whole the 1832 volume is the most signi-
ficant; the 1830 volume was one of immense
promise, but had it stood alone, it could hardly have
done more than creep into anthologies. The 1832
volume must have given Tennyson a place among
English poets. The 1842 volume put him at the
head of all living English poets, except Wordsworth,
and profoundly affected the course of English
hterature.

What strikes any reader of these volumes is first
the extraordinary variety of the fare provided.
They do not show a point of view, they are no tenuis
vena, a secluded garden-plot sedulously cultivated —
but they are bold experiments in almost every kind
of lyrical poetry.

There are poems of pure fancy dealing with thosQ

EARLY POEMS 157

elvish and aerial creatures that the old and childish
dreams of man have originated and retained, spirits
of flood and fell, fairies and mermen. There are
English genre poems, such as The Miller's Daughter
and The May Queen, capable of touching the
simplest imaginations. Some have indeed con-
tenmed these poems as worthy only of being
included in books of popular recitations ; but to my
mind few things show more clearly the simplicity of
Tennyson's genius. No pr^cieux writer, with a care for
his reputation, could have dared to write them ; and
after all the deepest of all vulgarities is the studied
avoidance of what may be thought to be vulgar.

Then there are autobiographical poems, ballads,
sonnets, love -studies, satirical or philosophical
pieces, like The Vision of Sin, which FitzGerald
said touched on the limit of disgust without ever
falling in, and, what are perhaps more distinctly
Tennysonian than any other poems — a class which he
may be held practically to have invented — are the
pictorial poems such as The Lady of Shalott and
more particularly the Dream of Fair Women, and
The Palace of Art, which are really little galleries
of pictures. All of them, as FitzGerald wrote, com-
menting on the trend of popular taste in the direc-
tion of greater elaborateness, "being clear to the
bottom as well as beautiful do not seem to cockney
eyes as deep as muddy water."

If one must indicate a fault in these poems it is

\y\

158 TENNYSON

perhaps an excessive exuberance of detail, a pro-
fusion of richness which he learnt afterwards to
avoid ; but this is a dulce vitium after all. Tenny-
son said that he became an artist very slowly — and
we are extraordinarily happy in possessing, so to
speak, the very workshop before our eyes. The
poems which he rewrote had failed, if they can be
said to have failed, by a sort of delicious simpleness
like the talk of a child. He was never afraid in
these early days of simpleness — indeed the deliberate
inclusion of such poems as the 0 Darling Room, and
the retention of the Skipping Rope — poems of almost
rich fatuity — show that he had a consistent view
which was not affected by opinion. Of course there
are cases in the poems when he falls into what may
be called the " Early Victorian " vein— but these
are mostly genre passages which when they have
had time to grow quaint will be regarded affection-
ately as both minutely and deliciously character-
istic of the social atmosphere of the time. Such
stanzas are

She left the novel half uncut

Upon the rosewood shelf ;
She left the new piano shut :

She could not please herself.

(The Talking Oak.)

I print in an appendix the two most interesting
of the rewritten poems. The Lady of Shalott and
The Palace of A rt, that the process may be studied

EARLY POEMS 159

at leisure ^ : it will be seen that the alterations
invariably gain strength and weight without sacri-
ficing simplicity ; but there is nothing which to me
gives a stronger impression of Tennyson's critical
power than the various unpublished poems which
his son has printed in the biography throughout the
Memoir. The tact of the poet which withheld them
from being incorporated with the great works was
perfect ; and may I add that the tact which dares
to reproduce them now in the biography, where
we are dealing with the making of a poet and not
his finished work, is hardly less admirable.

Another characteristic which deserves a word in
these earlier poems is the metrical richness which
they display.

Tennyson was fond of a certain kind of informal
metre, a mixture of dactyls, trochees, anapaests and
iambics, which he gradually deserted ; his poems
became more strict and regular as his artistic sense
grew. But I believe that these irregular structures
may have a great future before them. Mr. Swin-
burne seems to have practically exhausted the
dactylic possibilities of English metres, and to
have carried the length of lines to a degree that no
one with a less absolute gift of melody could have

1 By the kindness of Mr. Churton Collins I am permitted to
print these poems from his edition of The Early Poems of Alfred
Lord Tennyson, Methuen & Co., 1900, pp. 43 to 49 and pp. 86
to 100.

160 TENNYSON

dared to do. But no one has yet developed the
irregular scansions to which Tennyson devoted so
many early experiments. There is no mere sloppi-
ness of execution here, crowding syllables into a
beat, so that it requires a kind of preliminary
practice before they can be read ; but it is a
perfectly deliberate irregularity. I give a few
lines, mere word-music, from The Sea-Fairies, as it
was published in 1830 : —

WTiither away, whither away, whither away ? Fly no more !
"Whither away wi' the singing sail ? whither away wi' the oar ?
Whither away from the high green field and the happy blossom-
ing shore?
Weary mariners, hither away,

One and all, one and all,
Weary mariners, come and play ;
We will sing to you all the day ;
Furl the sail and the foam will fall
From the prow ! one and all
Furl the sail ! drop the oar !
Leap ashore !
Know danger and trouble and toil no more.
Whither away wi' the sail and the oar ?
Drop the oar,
Leap ashore,
Fly no more !
Whither away wi' the sail? whither away wi' the oar?

This passage from the literary point of view has
obvious faults with which I am not concerned, such
as a certain feebleness of iteration. But I think
that from a purely metrical point of view it is an
astonishing performance. I would note the rapid

THE RHYTHMS OF NATURE l6]

choriambic beat slowing down, the exquisite pauses
like a ticking wheel coming slowly to rest, quicken-
ing its pace, and dropping into rest again.

Indeed I have fancied that many of these experi-
ments of Tennyson were suggested to him, not by
musical time, but by the more irregular and natural
beat of homely things, the ticking of clocks,
the thud of oars in rowlocks, the clang and
clink of hammers, the rolling of wheels, the
purring of cats, the thin song of kettles, the
drowsy hiccoughs of cisterns. All the world is
full of rhythmical noises ; and the dreaming ear of
Tennyson seems to have been peculiarly sensitive
to such things.

11

CHAPTER XI

IT is impossible within the limits of this little
book to give an exhaustive or detailed criticism
of all Tennyson's works. I can but touch a few
salient points and indicate a few characteristic
pieces.

There is one pair of poems which it is obvious
and natural to contrast, because the latter was
written as a sequel to the former, Locksley Hall
and Locksley Hall Sixty Years after.

The hero of the first Locksley Hall is a boy
of twenty, an idealist who is sore and bruised by
the envious contact of the world. His cousin
whom he had loved as a child has been torn from
him and " mated with a clown," whose only merit is
that of superior wealth. The lover tells the un-
happy story, and foresees the miserable slavery of
the union ; he thinks that the sorrow has killed
the old visions within him, but as the poem
advances he finds that the old enthusiasms still
have power over him, and that he can still take a
brave part in the march of the world.
(162)

LOCKSLEY HALL l63

The poem is full of saeva indignatio. The poverty
that in Tennyson's own case kept him from marriage
and the happy hearth lies heavily on him ; he rages
against the "social wants that sin against the strength
of youth," and cries : —

Every gate is thronged with suitors, all the markets overflow.
I have but an angry fancy ; what is that which I should do '!

But over the whole poem broods an indescribable
light — the light of romance, mystery, call it what
you will ; even Locksley Hall itself, with its wind-
swept gables overlooking the sand and the sea, has
that air of mystery and emotion that transfigures
the world.

The poem has faults ; the language in places is
thin ; the very metre halts. There is one line
which is absolutely unmetrical. Moreover there
are faults of taste ; the theory of love that makes
the maiden pine in silent observance till rewarded
by the gift of a man's heart ; the apparent arrogance
of such phrases as " having known me — to decline on
a range of lower feelings " — these are obvious
blemishes. But all is condoned — nay, the very
faults themselves become delectable — in the splen-
did sweep and passion of the poem, the purity of
the delineation of maternity, the gorgeous visions
of the future, the haunting melancholy of the
incidental touches.

It comes home to the reader of the poem that

164 TENNYSON

beauty of expression was in the writer's mind
throughout ; even in the passion of intimate feel-
ing there is room to turn aside to little touches of
exquisite beauty that thrill the spirit with music ;
and at the end, where the future opens before the
eye, there is little that is materialistic, little that is
borrowed from the coarse current of practical life,
while the emotion is not so far remote from life
as not to be able to communicate something of its
glow to material things. Not to multiply instances
I would note particularly the splendid simile, which
Tennyson took from a book of travels, which describes
the slow thickening of revolutionary tendencies
round an indolent and unconscious oligarchy : —

Slowly cornea a hungry peojjle, as a lion, creeping nigher,
Glares at one that nods and winks behind a slowly d3ang fire.

This is the truly poetical method of handUng
politics, and is by no means the only instance in
the poem. Few indeed of Tennyson's poems have
enriched life with such a treasury of stately phrase
and exquisite music.

We turn to the second Locksley Hall, and some-
how the glamour is gone ; in The Miller's Daughter,
long before, he had written words that were now
to come sadly true : —

So, if I waste words now, in truth
You must blame Love. His early rage

Had force to make me rhyme in youth,
And makes me talk too much in age.

THE SECOND LOCKSLEY HALL l65

It is not that the old man has lost the passion of
his youth, for he is infinitely more passionate ;
but where the young hero prophesied, the old man
rants, where the younger comforted his despair by
glowing hope and faith, the old man accentuates it by
peevish railings and melodramatic fury. " I never
scream," he had written to Spedding in 1834, "I
leave that to your vivid men." The case is sadly
altered now. Everything is poisonous, galling,
roaring, raving. The whole world is plunged into
vile and shameless sensuality, filthy selfishness,
hopeless anarchy. The chariot has run away and
the Master of created things sits in helpless apathy.

Even the domestic background is changed ; the
grandson has had a disappointment in love ; but
his Judith is a worldling born of worldlings ; and
the old man has nothing but the iciest contempt
for what has moved his grandson's heart.

The poem in places falls into pits of mere prose ;
words and thoughts entirely alien to the spirit of
poetry come whirling out. What could be more
pitiful than such lines as these .''

Set the maiden fancies wallowing in the troughs of Zolaism,

Poor old Heraldry, poor old History, poor old Poetry passing
hence.

The whole poem, except for a few matchless lines
that flash for an instant the old light upon the

166 TENNYSON

tumultuous flood of rhetoric, is depressing, disquiet-
ing, even revolting. One cannot but be amazed at
the extraordinary vigour, the furious energy of the
old man, with his riotous disbelief in progress, his
wild and dreary impeachment of everything and
everybody ; the workmanship of the poem is of
singular excellence as well. The late Lord Lytton
said that he admired the poem more as a work of
courage than as a work of art. Indeed the Poet
seems to have not only not lost in vigour, but to
have positively multiplied it — but what before was
tragic, dignified and pathetic courage, has now been
transmuted into insane, tempestuous, acrid violence.
One would have hoped to find a larger faith, a wider
sympathy, a more tranquil and clearer wisdom ; but
all that age seems to have conferred is a deeper
cynicism and an increased vocabulary of vituperation.

It must be borne in mind that Tennyson was
working in a depressed mood, under the shadow of
a great bereavement ; but it might have been hoped
that this would have made him lay loving hands on
the sorrows of the world, not chastise and belabour
it. The great sorrow of his life, the death of
Arthur Hallam, had never betrayed him into loss
of dignity.

We rise from the perusal of the second Locksley
Hall with astonishment at the intellectual vigour
and emotional violence of the old man, but with
neither veneration nor tenderness. The prophecies

IN MEMORIAM l69

the generous hopes of youth, absolutely untainted
by anything that can lower or enervate. So many
able analyses have been made of this complex work
that it is only necessary to indicate its scope. It is
the story of an overwhelming loss, when a soul is
confronted by the fact that a kindred spirit, to whose
touch all the chords of the survivor's being had vi-
brated, is suddenly swept, without a shadow of
warning, a hint of doom, into the unseen ; and the
bereaved stretches feeble hands into the darkness,
and finds no answer there ; such a loss freezes the
heart at the very source ; very gradually the cloud
lifts ; the healing influence of time asserts itself ;
and the grieving spirit rises out of the shadow into
a firm belief in immortality and into an absolute
trust in the great purpose of God.

The poem was not precisely planned. It had no
conscious scheme ; it is rather a garden of a sorrow-
ing spirit, set with rue and rosemary, and other
fragrant herbs of remembrance and regret, than
a single tree, branching into sombre shade from
a single stem. The mistake has often been made
of considering it to be a poem with a definite
inception and a precise form. Tennyson himself
said otherwise ; it was not till many of the poems had
been written, a plusieurs reprises, that it occurred
to him that it would form a connected whole.
Then he bridged a few gaps, put in certain con-
necting links, and welded it together. But even

170 TENNYSON

so the poem has no definite progression ; it ebbs
and flows ; it sometimes pursues a single thought
minutely, apart from the general scope of the
poem, sometimes takes up a previous thought and
enlarges it.

His own view of the poem seems to have varied
with his mood ; if the passion of the poem was
accused of being imaginary, artificially stimulated,
impossibly deep, he would say, " I have written
what I have felt and known, and I never will write
anything else." But if on the other hand it was
attempted to attach what he considered too literal
a sense to any of the stanzas, to identify scenes or
persons too closely, he would say, " The mistake
that people make is that they think the poet's
poems are a kind of catalogue raisonn^ of his very
own self and of all the facts of his life." The two
attitudes are not inconsistent.

The metre had been used before by Ben Jonson,
Lord Herbert of Cherbury and others ; but it was
new to Tennyson, and he was long under the im-
pression that he had invented it. The form of the
stanza is peculiarly adapted for reflective and
aphoristic verse. It is the common long metre,
with the second pair of rhymes inverted, so as to
make each stanza complete, like a tree beside a
still water, with its reflection at its foot.

Tennyson gave the stanza so individual a stamp
that it is one of the easiest metres to imitate, with

IN MEMORIAM 171

its emphatic fourth line rounding the stanza off.
Indeed so entirely did he set his mark upon the
metre that it is almost a forbidden one for poets,
because of the almost hopeless impossibility of
writing it except in the Tennysonian manner.

The thought is generally lucid ; but the language
is in places highly obscure, from the compression
exercised.

If the entire poem is read swiftly, as it deserves
to be, at a sitting, besides being studied minutely,
the fact which strikes the reader, which may other-
wise escape him, is the large number of absolutely
unemphatic poems ^ — poems which though of perfect
workmanship and unexceptionable sweetness, seem
to add nothing to the progress of the thought, and
indeed leave no definite impression upon the mind. I
venture to believe that these poems are in most cases
the connecting links which were afterwards inserted.

Moreover there are a considerable number of
poems 2 which contain, generally at the end, the
purest grain of gold ; these poems appear to have
been constructed to lead up to this climax, and the
effect of the concentrated close is perhaps height-
ened by the lucid simplicity of the lines which the
thought closes as with a clinching hammer-stroke ;
occasionally ^ the climax is reached before the end,
and the finale is unemphatic ; but this is rare.

^ See xviii., xlvi., Ixii., xcii.

^ See xxiv., xxxv., Ixxv., cxvii. ^See iv., Ixxxiii.

172 TENNYSON

Tennyson had what we may call the Emersonian
faculty of producing a familiar thought and by
exquisite and curious phraseology bringing it home
to a reader's mind with a glow of perceptive and
original satisfaction. Indeed it may be said that
the more familiar the thought is, the more it is part
of the common and vague stock of the reflective
mind, the more complete is the triumph. A great
poet has no call to be fantastic, or to search for
thoughts that are out of the ordinary reach. It is
for him to take a typical thought and crystallise
it — or, better still, to seize upon some half-formed
tendency of thought, such as is apt to haunt, with a
cyclic, almost epidemic contagion the minds of
men in a particular generation, and place it in a
definite light, and in a form when it becomes a
current token instead of a mere lingering, bright-
ening vision. Such a couplet as

'Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all — ■

is a supreme instance of this power. Such a
thought is not new ; but instead of being a vague
force it becomes, so to speak, a definite weapon,
with penetrative power that will hang, till super-
seded, in the armoury of thought.

Much has been said about the Christian teaching
of In Mcmoriam. Tennyson himself used to say
when he was questioned about his Christian belief

THE PRINCESS 181

Hottentots, Malays." The Princess herself is
learned in nineteenth-century astronomy and geol-
ogy ; she is acquainted with the nebular hypothesis,
rides on a mutual- improvement picnic, "to take the
dip of certain strata to the North." She abhors
vivisection ; and her girl-graduates

• chatter stony names

r„: Of shale and hornblende, rag and trap and tuff,

i j,g Amygdaloid and trachyte.

^^ '"'his, however, matters little ; Tennyson's aim was

ilace the theory of women's education in a
coun •'

ntic setting. The impression could not have

conveyed if the studies of these damsels had

^^^ confined to such science as existed in the days

'^'^^^alry ; and on the other hand the romance of

^^ ^ *^iii could hardly have been sustained had the

rougi jhjggjj fought with Maxim guns and Martini

The a

^ ^^\ son's theory of female education was a

The

one, as his theories were. His maxim was

imraCgj^j^^j, sex alone is half itself." His view is

A ft

marriage is better for the man and best for the

lan ; in the case of the latter, culture is only

aable in so far as it fits her for marital relations.

e did not face the fact that under modern con-

tions there must be an increasing number of

nwedded women ; he would have said bluntly

at they must try to get married without sacrificing

iOaidenly delicacy, or at any rate fit themselves for

182 TENNYSON

possible matrimony. The poem contains no gospel
for the virgo dcbita virginitati — nor indeed for
male celibates either ; the Prince declares that the
loveless life for men is

A drowning life, besotted in sweet self,

and that a man who loves not, either

Pines in sad experience worse than death,

Or keeps his wing'd affections dipt with crime.

The result is that the poem is lacking in dramatic
interest ; there is no character on whom the interest
centres. The Prince himself is a haunted amiable
boy, whose knightly attributes do not carry convic-
tion ; and when he had secured Ida's love he
lectures her in a strain that hardly even passion
fortified by contrition could have tolerated : —

"Blame not th3'self too much," I said,

and

dearer thou for faults
Lived over.

The Prince in his bed-pulpit, initiating her into his
superior nobility of spirit, makes no attempt to
overlook or to throw into the shadow the faults of
her ideal. And when poor Ida says, " You cannot
love me," he declares with solemn condescension
that not only is it possible, but that even he from
his serene height of perfection can anticipate distinct
benefits to himself from their union.

THE PRINCESS 183

The other characters, except Cyril and Gama, are
but puppet-shapes ; yet, though there is a want of
dramatic unity, there are many dramatic scenes and
episodes ; such is the Lady Psyche recovering her
lost child ; such is the speech of Ida, where with a
sublimity of scorn she thanks the Prince for the
havoc he has made : —

' ' You have done well and like a gentleman,
And like a prince : you have our thanks for all :
And you look well too in your woman's dress : "

the bitter self-restraint of the mood is well main-
tained, until at last the passion bursts all bounds
and breaks out into majestic rage.

Moreover the whole poem from beginning to end
is a mine of beautiful images, exquisite pictures,
delicate thoughts and admirable lines. The technical
workmanship is beyond praise, and yet the speeches
as a rule are complicated and obscure. This is
characteristic of Temiyson throughout ; the lucid
simplicity of his descriptive and lyrical passages with
their admirable elaboration of detail gives place in
his dialogue to an over-elaboration of language, and to
a complexity of thought which makes the sense diffi-
cult to follow, and forfeits dramatic interest. It is
strange that the charge of obscurity so frequently
laimched against Robert Browning has never been
hinted against Tennyson ; and yet I declare that the
speeches, both in The Prhicess and the Idylls, are
some of the most obscure reading that it is possible

184. TENNYSON

to discover in modern poetry — a strong desire for
compression, for ornateness, for coagulating a clause
into an epithet, for epigrammatic and proverbial
touches making the language like a labyrinth of
sonorous walls, even when the thought to be ex-
pressed is neither abstruse nor complicated.

If indeed there hauiit
About the moulder'd lodges of the Past
So sweet a voice and vague, fatal to men,
Well needs it we should cram our ears with wool
And so pace by : but thine are fancies hatch'd
In silken-folded idleness ; nor is it
Wiser to weep a true occasion lost,
But trim our sails, and let old bygones be,
iWhile down the streams that float us each and all
f To the issue, goes, like glittering bergs of ice,
\ Throne after throne, and molten on the waste
* Becomes a cloud : for all things serve their time
Toward that great year of equal mights and rights,

<Nor would I fight with iron laws, in the end
Found golden : let the past be past ; let be
Their cancell'd Babels : though the rough kex break
The starr'd mosaic, and the beard-blown goat
Hang on the shaft, and the wild fig-tree split
Their monstrous idols, care not while we hear
A trumpet in the distance pealing news
Of better, and Hope, a poising eagle, burns
Above the unrisen morrow.

The descriptive passages, on the other hand, in
the poem are among Tennyson's best work ; we
cannot fail to admire the art by which in a few
gorgeous lines he brings the stately palace before us
with its towers and corridors, its fountain-sprinkled

THE PRINCESS 185

lawns, its bowery thickets. No poet can raise so
magic a vision of stately splendour, or suggest such
wealth of detail by an apposite instance as Tennyson.
The great glimmering palace, when at the end the
wounded warriors are being nursed back to life,
rises before us in its solemn silence, its cool and
echoing majesty. Outside, the moonlight sleeps
on the turf, thickens the twilight of the arched
walks and dim groves, where the milk-white
peacock droops like a ghost, while the fountain
drips and rustles in its marble pool. Slowly the
night deepens and pales towards the dawn. The
morning comes freshly and serenely in

Till notice of a change in the dark world
Was lispt about the acacias, and a bird.
That early woke to feed her little ones,
Sent from a dewy breast a cry for light.

It is in such pictures as these that Tennyson shows
his art ; it is like the wave of a wand, and a magic
drawn from the depths of the forest, out of the
secret valleys of the mountain, is spread over the
senses like a cloud, and we are not what we were.
Tennyson's conception of woman is a very de-
finite one : she is emphatically the weaker vessel ;
he creates no exalted type of womanhood ; he is
deeply sensitive of her beauty and purity, and the
reverence due to her ; but it is to him an essential
thing in the perfect woman that, once wed, she
should be absolutely loyal and devoted, entirely

186 TENNYSON

forgiving and unquestioning. Thus Geraint's treat-
ment of Enid is abominable ; what can be thought
of the conduct of one who can break from pas-
sionate love into something very like brutality,
without a single question asked, a single explana-
tion attempted ? Enid, indeed, hardly preserves her
dignity. Again there is too much evidence that
the Temiysonian lover watches his mistress and
notes the signs of the devotion with which he
inspires her, finally rewarding her in a princely
manner with the gift of his love. There is little
trace of the passionate and anxious wooing of the
lover, the consciousness of the stainless purity
which he can hardly hope or dare to call his own.
There is the love, for instance, of Elaine for
Lancelot ; there is the lover of Locksley Hall, who
writes of his Amy : —

And her eye on all my motions with a mute observance hung.

There is the Lord of Burleigh who says in a royal
manner : —

" Maiden, thou hast loved me well."

There is Edward Gray who reflects not with com-
placency indeed, but with no sense of unworthiness
that

Ellen Adair was dying for me.

When Tennyson does make a stately figure like the
Princess, who tries to be independent of the lords of

MAUD 187

creation, she is not to be gently wooed from her
isolation, but sharply brought to her senses.

Even in Maud, where he comes most closely
to the desperate humility of the lover, there is a good
deal of bitter contempt for the view of Maud's brother
that a morbid and poverty-stricken squire is not to
be regarded as a particularly eligible suitor for one
so richly dowered.

It must be confessed that Tennyson's view was, if
not primitive, at least old-fashioned. He had no
real belief in the equality of the sexes. Coventry
Patmore is a far more advanced exponent of the
faith of the devout lover ; and though he too had
a strong idea of wifely subjection in marriage, yet
in the wooing time the mistress is a far more
remote and ethereal creature, tremblingly desired
and timidly demanded, a goddess to be tempted if
possible from her chaste solitudes to be the guiding
star of world-stained man.

Maud was received with much hostile criticism,
and Tennyson used to complain that unintelligent
readers persisted in considering it to be autobio-
graphical, whereas he himself called it "a little
Hamlet."

It is technically one of the most perfect of
Tennyson's great poems. He had his instrument
entirely under his command, and there is no poem
which makes a reader feel more strongly that he
produced exactly the effects he intended to produce.

188 TENNYSON

He rides in the chariot and is not di'agged behind
it.

On the other hand it illustrates I think the
beginning of the decadence of Tennyson's art, the
dying away of the divinest impulses of pure beauty,
the period at which the purely poetical impulse
began to flag, and required to be roused by a
violent situation, a tragic interest. The poem is
full of stern anger, a Carlylean impulse to find
fault, to deal heavy blows, to pierce and shatter.

We are introduced to a morbid young man, tread-
ing perilously near the confines of madness, with a
ruined inheritance, which spurs the speaker to
venomous diatribes on the subject of rotten com-
mercial morality. For a time this is suspended in
the exquisite surprise of the growing passion, which
reaches its climax in the unsurpassable lyric. Come
into the garden, Maud, where the pulse of the
lover thrills and throbs through all created things,
the hurrying streamlet, and the passionate expecta-
tion of the garden, through the fragrant dusk.
Then comes the catastrophe ; and the political
indignation gathers head again in the great war-
lyrics at the end, which expand the thought of the
social corruption indicated in the preliminary lyrics.

In spite of the nobility of much of the satire, in
spite of the fact that all human intei*ests and passion
are the property of the poet, we may be allowed to
wonder regretfully whether the bard is in his place

MAUD 189

pacing up and down the platform, and indulging in
strident tirades against the general moral slothfulness
of the world. Such exhortations do not issue very
appropriately from the secluded haunts of the muse.
FitzGerald said of Carlyle that he sate pretty
comfortably in his study at Chelsea, scolding all the
world for not being heroic, and not very precise in
telling them how to be. It is the old story over
again of the clergyman lecturing the dutiful persons
who attended his ministrations on the heinous
crime of absenting themselves. One wonders
whether such diatribes ever reach the right ears ;
whether any "broad-rimmed hawker of holy things,"
or " smooth-faced snub-nosed rogue " ever felt a
touch of honest shame at being thus held up to the
contempt of literary people. One is irresistibly
reminded of the gentleman in Mr. Mallock's New
Republic who confessed that he did not care two
straws about Liberty, but that his mind was often
set all aglow by a good ode about her.

One feels with some pain that the dreamful
youths, the enthusiastic maidens, who are the poet's
most sympathetic audience, probably only derived a
sharper sensation from the splendid rush of these
vituperative and militant rhymes. There is a fable
of some forgotten Poet Laureate being set to
translate the war-songs of Tyrtaeus to stir the martial
hearts of English soldiers ; the story goes that the
ardent strains were read aloud in a barrack-room by

190 TENNYSON

a major-general who only desisted when he found
the majority of his audience were wrapped in sleep.
We feel that perhaps the poet is better employed
when he directly serves and touches the hearts that
are alive to a craving for the beautiful ; when he
interprets the gentle secrets of the kindly earth and
the generous heart, to minds thrilling with the vague
sense of wonder and delight. To see beauty in
simple events and homely things is the real work of
the poet. It was otherwise perhaps when a nation was
all intellectually alive like the Athenians, and when
eager impulse was on the look-out for impassioned
rhetoric. But now and here, though we may be
grateful to Tennyson for his

Sonorous metal, blowing martial sounds,

our gratitude is bound to be rather of the literary
order than the ethical. In fact the poet must
convince and caress, not denounce and storm.

The germ of Maud is the poem that stands fourth
in the second part. This magnificent lyric, of
irregular metre and informal scheme,
Oh that 'twere possible,

was sent as has been related at the request of Lord
Houghton in the year 1837 as a contribution to a sort
of literary benefit — a little volume of miscellanies
sold to assist a distressed literary man.

The poem is well worth study from the metrical
point of view. Its scheme is a double beat, occasion-

MAUD 191

ally increased. It is a good instance of a poem
loosely constructed in a simple species of time,
without great exactness.

A friend of Tennyson's suggested that it wanted
expansion and elucidation ; and the lovely fragment
was expanded into the beautiful if intemperate
rhapsodical monodrama.

Maud was a poem of which Tennyson himself
was particularly fond. There was none which he
read aloud more frequently, or rather chanted, in
the great deep musical voice. It is full of original
metres, and Tennyson never displayed on such a
scale his extraordinary power of handling both long
and short rhythms. The long metres are magnifi-
cently full and sonorous, and never drag. But the
skill is even more delicately displayed in the short
metres with frequently recurring lines, where the
danger is of becoming choppy, so to speak, and
jerky, but which are models of delicate grace.

The general run of the poem is dactylic, but
irregular dactylic : that is to say the trochee is
frequently substituted for the dactyl.

I would quote as perhaps the most perfect and
characteristic example the poem which stands third
in the first part : —

Cold and clear-cut face, why come you so cruelly meek,
Breaking a slumber in which all spleenful folly was drown'd,
Pale with the golden beam of an eyelash dead on the cheek,
Passionless, pale, cold face, star-sweet on a gloom profound ;

192 TENNYSON

Woman-like, taking revenge too deep for a transient wrong
Done but in thought to your beauty, and ever as pale aa before
Growing and fading and growing upon me without a sound,
Luminous, gemlike, ghostlike, deathlike, half the night long
Growing and fading and growing, till I could bear it no more,
But arose, and all by myself in my own dark garden ground,
Listening now to the tide in its broad-flung shipwrecking roar,
Now to the scream of a madden'd beach dragg'd down by the

wave,
Walk'd in a wintry wind by a ghastly glimmer, and found
The shining daffodil dead, and Orion low in his grave.

It will be observed that the metre is one of beats
and not of strict metrical feet. But quite apart from
the melody of the lines I would instance the
perfect structure of the poem, its inimitable " curve,"
as Tennyson would have said. And, as imitative
verse, the penultimate lines describing the harsh
chatter of the shingle, as the wave ebbs back, are
surely unequalled. Nor less admirable is the quiet
close, the rounding of the vignette by the sight of
the dead flower and the sinking star.

I may perhaps say a few words about one particu-
lar idyll which seems to me to be highly characteristic
of Tennyson. This is The Brook, which appeared first
in the 1855 volume. The soliloquist is a man re-
visiting the scenes of his youth, but in a mellow and
gentle frame of mind, with no sharp sense of loss.
He speaks of a friend, a poet, whom he lost long
ago, and quotes a few opening stanzas of a lyric,
which gives its name to the idyll, and is afterwards
inwoven in little snatches with the narrative.

THE BROOK 193

The idyll itself is full of delicious lines, such as
the comparison of an old, lean, talkative farmer to
the

dry
High-elbow'd grigs that leap in summer grass.

The story is simple enough, a trickle of gentle re-
miniscence. But the lyric itself is of rare beauty,
with its prattling refrain.

It may be interesting to observe that in one highly
characteristic and picturesque couplet.

With many a silvery waterbreak
Above the golden gravel,

the word which we should at once lay a finger on as
Tennysonian, " waterbreak," is one that he took from ^y
Wordsworth.

But the whole poem is one that brings tranquillity
into the mind, like a pastoral landscape seen from
the windows of a train, all lit with golden summer
light ; while the lyric itself is in the very spirit of an
English streamlet, that sings its light-hearted song
all day among quiet fields.

The dialect poems too demand one word. Tenny-
son was always interested and delighted with char-
acteristic stories of country persons, true sons of the
soil. These genre pieces illustrate in a remarkable
degree the richness and authenticity of Tennyson's
humour. Poems of rustic life written by people of
another class have as a rule a fatal unreality about
them : but Tennyson partly from heredity, partly
13

194 TENNYSON

from experience, and partly from art, is always con-
vincingly and pungently real. The dialect itself
proves how strong was the art of mimicry for which
he was famed in earlier years.

FitzGerald wrote a delightful note about the
Northern Fm-mer : " The old brute," he says,
"invested by you with the solemn humour of
Humanity, like Shakespeare's Shallow, becomes a
more pathetic phenomenon than the knights who
revisit the world in your other verse."

CHAPTER XIII

THE Idylls of the King were regarded in Tenny-
son's lifetime as his great work, and probably
will for some time be so regarded by his less literary
readers. They are epical poems, but belong to the
class of the self-conscious epic, and are far more
Virgilian than Homeric. Homer gives us the heroes
of that early age as they were. There is no attempt
to avoid simplicity of detail ; indeed in the Odi/ssey
there is a distinct insistence on the minuter details
of domestic life. But both Virgil and Tennyson
made the background of their poems pictorial and
romantic. As a matter of fact whatever events — if
there is any rationalistic basis at all for the Mneid
— took place in the story of Mneas, must have taken
place with a sordid, savage background. But the
scene is all laid among luxurious features, a settled
and elaborate civilisation, in sunswept forest glades,
or on mysterious headlands. The voluptuous detail
of the Roman empire is freely lavished on the dwell-
ings 'of barbarous kings and chieftains. ^neas
himself bears about with him a treasure of in-

(195)

196 TENNYSON

comparable richness, vessels of gold and silver,
pictured tapestries, rich embroideries. Dido inhabits
a patrician house of the Augustan period.

Tennyson applied the same treatment to his
Arthurian legend ; the scene is laid not in barbaric
strongholds, rough fortresses, rude upland huts, but
in dim cities, castles rich with carving. His knights
ride in flashing armour or in sanguine stuffs, through
enchanted forests and delicious glades, with here
and there a cell or a monastery, with happy vil-
lages clustered at its base. The knights themselves
are models of high courtesy and distinguished con-
sideration, and speak in a way that betokens a
liberal education.

The original scheme of the poems in Tennyson's
mind seems to have been a mystical one, but in
later life he was accustomed to manifest some
impatience at any attempt to give precise alle-
gorical interpretations to the poems.

He used to say impatiently, " I hate to be tied
down to say, ' This means that,' because the thought
within the image is much more than any one inter-
pretation."

When the mystical interpretation of the Idylls
was pressed, he said, " They have taken my hobby
and ridden it too hard, and have explained some
things too allegorically, although there is an alle-
gorical, or perhaps rather parabolic drift in the
poems."

THE IDYLLS I97

He explained that the whole scheme of the
Idylls was " the dream of man coming into
practical life, and ruined by one sin. Birth is a
mystery and death is a mystery, and in the midst
lies the table-land of life, and its struggles and
performances. It is not the history of one man or.
of one generation, but of a whole cycle of gener- i
ations."

Speaking generally, then, it may be said that the
motif of the whole is to display the thought of a
noble ideal formed, and to a certain extent carried
out, but thwarted again and again by selfishness
and sin, and closing in apparent failure, but yet
sowing the seed of truth and purity through
the land. Arthur's object is to establish law and '
order, civilisation in the highest sense, a high
standard of unselfish and noble life. The attempt
fails : his knights were meant to set a noble
example of manliness, devotion and purity ; but
the court teems with scandal, and finally the evil
and seditious elements are triumphant.

The dominant note of the Idylls is of failure to
jealise great aims, and it will be noticed how many of
the Idylls turn on base and painful tragedies. Pelleas
and Ettarre depicts the sacrificing of a generous ideal
to a selfish and sensual woman. In Merlin and
Vivien age and wisdom fall a victim to a heartless
wanton. Balin and Balan is an unrelieved tragedy.
In The Last Tuurnament is the tale of the lawless

198 TENNYSON

love of Tristram and its punishment. In Lancelot
a7id Elaine, which is another version of The Lady of
Shalotl, is the hopeless waste of a maiden love. In
Guinevere is the doom of the faithless wife and the
faithless friend. On the other hand the two idylls
of Geraint and Enid give a beautiful and discon-
nected episode that bears little on the central story.
Gareth and Lyneite is a pretty romantic tale of
chivalry. The Holy Grail, without doubt the most
poetical, is the most mystical expression of the root-
idea of the Idylls. The Coming of Arthur is pre-
fatory, and the Passing, written first, where the
noblest epical writing is to be found, gives the close
of the great dream, with a hint of future triumph.

Thus it will be seen that there is no connected
scheme in the poem. It is not an epic, it is a col-
lection of episodes.

To make a general criticism of the Idylls it may
be said at once that the narrative element is through-
out better than the dramatic. The style is exquisitely
clear, the lines are melodious, the ornament is
profuse, yet not overloaded, the similes are not
patches of splendour, but genuinely enlightening and
illustrative touches.

The speeches it may be said are Virgilian — that
is to say they are rhetorical ; and here again
we note them to be in many cases so elaborate
as to be extremely obscure : occasionally, as in
Guiiievere, they are both moving and dignified;

THE IDYLLS 199

but often they are apt to hinder the action, andk
alienate the attention rather than to concentrate !
and inspire it. I have often made the experiment
of reading the Idylls aloud to boys of average intel-
ligence, and while I find that the narrative passages
enchain their attention, I have often found it neces-
sary to omit whole sections of the speeches, simply
because the meaning is so far from obvious at first
hearing, and because they require so much com-
ment and elucidation. Let a reader for instance
turn to such a speech as Geraint makes to Enid's
mother when he begs that Enid may wear her old
dress : —

" O my new mother, be not wroth or grieved."
Beautiful as it is, and full of tender and pathetic
lines, he will see that the rhetoric clouds the lim-
pidity of the thought. Take such a passage as the
following : —

and I thought
That could I someway prove such force in her
Link'd with such love for me, that at a word
(No reason given her) she could cast aside
A splendour dear to women, new to her,
And therefore dearer ; or if not so new,
Yet therefore tenfold dearer by the power
Of intermitted usage ; then I felt
That I could rest, a rock in ebbs and flows,
Fixt on her faith.

It is clear enough after a little thought what the \
passage means ; but it has not the simplicity of the

200 TENNYSON

true epic. Doubtless Tennyson shrank before the /
baldness of realistic speech.

Again, when Limours renews his suit to Enid,
the speech abounds in such lines as : —

Owe you me nothing for a life half -lost ?
Yea, yea, the whole dear debt of all you are.
My malice is no deeper than a moat,
No stronger than a wall : there is the keep ;
He shall not cross us more.

Again Arthur's speech to his knights in The Holy
Grail, when he returns and finds them aghast with
the vision, is full of superficial obscurity, as in the
lines : —

But ye, that follow but the leader's bell,

Taliessin is our fullest throat of song,

And one hath sung and all the dumb will sing.

But no praise can be too high for the rich and sober
grandeur of the narrative, the haunting magic that
transplants the mind in an instant into the ancient
world of dreams. The exquisite comparisons, such
as that where Geraint turns on the rabble rout of
knights : —

But at the flash and motion of the man
They vanish'd panic-stricken, like a shoal
Of darting fish, that on a summer morn
Adown the crystal dykes at Camelot
Come slipping o'er their shadows on the sand,
But if a man who stands upon the brink
But lift a shining hand against the sun,
There is not left the twinkle of a fin
Betwixt the cressy islets white in flower.

THE IDYLLS 201

Or such a touch as

And while he twangled, little Dagonet stood

Quiet as any water-sodden log

Stay'd in the wandering warble of a brook.

Or the novice in Guinevere describing how her
father saw the fairies : —

Himself beheld three spirits mad with joy
Come dashing down on a tall wayside flower,
That shook beneath them, as the thistle shakes
When three gray linnets wrangle for the seed.

Or such descriptive passages as are thickly sown /
throughout the Idylls, hke the following from The \
Passing of Arthur : —

But the other swiftly strode from ridge to ridge,
Clothed with his breath, and looking, as he walk'd,
Larger than human on the frozen hills.
He heard the deep behind him, and a cry
Before. His own thought drove him like a goad.
Dry clash'd his harness in the icy caves
And barren chasms, and all to left and right
The bare black cliff clang'd round him as he based
His feet on juts of slippery crag that rang
Sharp-smitten with the dint of armed heels —
And on a sudden, lo ! the level lake,
And the long glories of the winter moon.

This is the kind of writing that is pure magic, that
sends a holy spectral shiver through the blood.
And we may well read the Idylls over and over
for such delights, as we may contentedly traverse
weary leagues for the sight of some ancient tower
or crystal fountain-head. All poetry cannot thrill

202 TENNYSON

and move us equally, and even those who find
Arthur a solemn pedant, Lancelot a morbid slave
of passion, and Galahad an icy phantom, may
still put themselves within the reach of these wells
of healing. For such passages cannot be studied in
anthologies and selections ; they must be found
flashing and gleaming in the bed-rock in which
they lie.

CHAPTER XIV

" "pOETRY," Tennyson once wrote, "should be
X the flower and fruit of a man's life, in
whatever stage of it, to be a worthy offering to the
world." These simple words contain the key to
Tennyson's theory of the poetical life and charac-
ter. Many accomplished poets have allowed poetry
to be the flower and ornament of life, but have
kept their serious hours, the sulidus dies, for some-
thing more tangible and definite. Some singers,
of whom Shelley is the prince, have sung wildly,
impulsively, like an ^Eolian hai*p out of which the
winds draw music, because their heart told them
to sing, as the full-fed thrush sings on the high
bare bough at evening. Tennyson had this impulse
to sing ; thought came to him in musical words ;
but he had a great deal more than this ; he was,
like Wordsworth, a deliberate, busy, strenuous poet ;
he gave up his life to poetry as another man may
give it up to politics or commerce.

There were moods of depression, no doubt, such
as come to all devoted men, when he asked himself
(203)

204 TENNYSON

what was the end of it all ; what, when all was
said and done, did he leave behind him ? what did
it all amount to ? He must have been aware that
the large mass of humanity regards poetry as a
graceful accomplishment, as an amusement for a
vacant hour, classing it with music, with the stage,
with fiction, as the agreeable accompaniments of
leisure, — "after the banquet the minstrel."

It was in such moods as these that he felt, as is
recorded, an envy of hard practical workers, who
left a tangible result. It was with such a thought
as this in his mind that he told Dean Bradley, then
Headmaster of Marlborough, that he envied him
his life of hard, regular, useful, important work.

But there were other and higher moods in which
no such misgivings troubled him, and when he felt
that after all each man's work must be done in a
corner ; that a man must find out what part of the
great sum of human work he can do best, and set to
work quietly and soberly and diligently to do it ; it
was in this determination that Tennyson set about his
poetry. Like the man in the Gospel story, the tree
had to be dug about and nourished in a hard-handed,
practical way ; poetry was to be the fruit ; the
mellow, cool, nourishing produce of life and thought.

He looked earnestly forward, as he wrote in an
early unpublished sonnet, to

A long day's dawn, when Poesy shall bind
Falsehood beneath the altar of great Truth.

THE POETICAL IDEAL 205

The poet was after all the seer of truth ; he was
to enjoy leisure, to seclude himself from the world,
to keep his eye clear to see the works of God, and
to discern God behind them working silently, and
walking in the garden in the cool of the day. The
poet was to be the inspirer of earnest effort, he was
to add to the humble toil of daily life the thrill, the
glory that touches and consecrates all honest labour
doggedly done, that beats the laborious ploughshare
into the sword of the Spirit.

Through the silent early years a great ideal
shaped itself in Tennyson's mind. He consecrated
himself to the poetical life with strenuous aspira-
tion, in no facile or indolent spirit, with no low
appetite for personal success, but with a holy and
severe dedication of all his powers to the one great
end.

There are two poems, written with all the ex-
uberant passion of youthful genius, which indicate
the boundless possibilities that lie within the scope
of poetry. The Poet is a manifesto, so to speak,
of active poetical faith, and indicates in noble
hyperbole the claims that the poet can make upon
the outer world. The second — The Poet's Mind —
shows how these results are to be achieved, the deep
consecration, the passionate purity of life which
the poet needs. Moreover in one of the latest
volumes is included the poem — Merlin and The
Gleam — which gives the retrospect, and shows the

206 TENNYSON

old seer looking back upon life from the threshold
of the darkness, and describing the guiding light
which he has followed throughout.

It must be noted that in The Poet there is not
a trace of the theory of what has been recently
called the " self-efFectuation " of art. It is held,
and strongly held by many, that art is an end in
itself; that to express beauty, or beautifully to
express what is not in itself beautiful, so long as it
be truly felt, is sufficient ; that art, to use a
parable, should be content to flower, it may be in
the sight of men, it may be in lonely and unre-
garded places ; but that the flowering is enough.
This theory is consistent with a very high ideal of
art — indeed it is claimed that the purity of
motive implied in whole-hearted devotion to art
without collateral aim is the highest ideal possible
to the artist. But it was not Tennyson's view. In
his mind the only ideal of art was the direct
service of humanity — art with him is strictly
subordinated to its effect on character, and the
artist is only justified if by the expression and inter-
pretation of beauty he raises or attempts to raise
mankind into a higher range of feelings, a noble
ardour for things lovely and excellent, a deeper
devotion to truth, and a more reverent contem-
plation of the mysteries of God. He said once that
he had formed as he grew older the sorrowful
conviction that the English were beginning to

THE POET'S MIND 207

forget what was in Voltaire's words the glory of
English poetry — " No nation has treated hi poetry
moral ideas with more energy and depth than the
English nation." The poet, in Tennyson's view, is
the seer of pure visions : —

He saw through life and death, thro' good and ill.

He shoots abroad, like some feathery-seeded
plant, the arrows of his melodious thought,

The winged shafts of truth,
and the flowers of his dreams are Freedom and
Wisdom.

The second poem. The Poet's Mind, gives a picture
of the soul from which these seeds are sown. It
must be clear and bright ; it must be like a secluded
garden, where a bright bird sings, and where a
fountain leaps

With a low melodious thunder.

The fountain must be fed with holiest truth of
Heaven : —

It is ever drawn
From the brain of the purple mountain ^

That stands in the distance yonder.

And the mountain draws it from Heaven above.

No " dark-browed sophist " must come near the
sacred grove ; not only would he not guess at the
secret of the place, but he would blight the flowers,
and check the springing of the silvery stream.

208 TENNYSON

In The Gleam, Merlin, the old prophet, near his
end, looks back upon his earthly life. He tells
how he was called to his work by an older and wise
Magician : —

And sweet the Magic
When over the valley,
In early summers,
Over the mountain,
On human faces,
And all around me,
Moving to melody.
Floated The Gleam.

Then follows a time of discouragement, but the faith
of the seer grows stronger and purer ; through the
wilderness and the stony mountain-tracks he comes
out upon the plain and the hamlet, following the
light that guides him. Then he comes to Camelot,
and there "rested the Gleam."

By this Tennyson seems to signify that the
Idylls contained the ideal essence of his teach-
ing : for after this the Gleam passes on to the valley
of the shadow, and the words are spoken in sight
of the sea upon which he is so soon to embark.

We will now try to trace through hints given us in
the Memoir, through scattered dicta, how this ideal
was arrived at and how it was pursued. To a certain
extent it may be said that a man's life is apt to
follow the line of least resistance, and that it is apt
to be the resultant of certain forces. Tennyson's
temperament was hardly fitted for definite practical

SELF-DEVELOPMENT 209

work. His love of nature and seclusion, his shyness,
the uncertain health of the earlier years all tended
to unfit him for any active practical occupation.
Indeed it is hard to suggest what line of life he
could have followed with success. After his father's
death, too, it seemed as though it were a duty to
remain, for a time at all events, at home, and to
take as far as possible his father's place in the
bereaved household. Moreover it was not abso-
lutely necessary for him to earn a living. Although
the absence of any adequate income obliged him to
defer all thoughts of marriage for many years, it
was still possible for him to live a life which was
neither unsociable nor undignified. No doubt this
kind of life tended to develop in him a certain child-
like vanity and self-absorption ; but it is impossible
to have the light without the shadow, and probably
there was hardly any life which could have given
such opportunities for self-development to a nature
such as his. A certain amount of society was possible,
but it had to be sparingly indulged in and carefully
planned. On the other hand his life gave him
opportunities for quiet profound meditation. " I
require quiet, and myself to myself more than any
man when I write " — so he described his case in a
letter to his future wife. Moreover he needed
much silent communing with Nature : he was ob-
servant, not, I believe, with the rapid restless
glance that seems, like a photographic plate, sensi-
14

210 TENNYSON

tive to the smallest details of a scene ; but he
observed rather in a slow, tranquil and ruminative
manner, and had a remarkable faculty for seizing
upon the salient feature of a scene. He was, it
must be remembered, exceedingly near-sighted,
and what he observed was mostly detail on which,
with a strong effort, he had concentrated and
focussed his attention. Wordsworth used to say
that it was his own way to study impartially all
the details of a scene which struck his fancy ; and
that days after, when the vision had, so to speak,
run clear, the characteristic details emerged in
their true perfection in his mind ; all else was
forgotten and blurred. This was not Tennyson's
way ; he endeavoured, with the artist's instinct, to
record at once in the most trenchant words his
impressions of a scene ; many of these lines and
phrases were lost, floating away, as he once said,
up the chimney on the fumes of his pipe. But
some were preserved. In this way he not only
stored his mind with poetical images, but these
images had a precision which few poets attained.

But this was not all. It is clear that Tennyson
possessed from the first the most exuberant faculty
of imagination, and that not only was this faculty
extraordinarily rich, but it was astonishingly precise.
He said once that he could have drawn, had he the
artistic gift, every scene in his poem with the
minutest detail ; and this faculty must have received

IMAGINATION 211

some shocks from the illustrations of his poems and
notably from the work of D. G. Rossetti, whose con-
ceptions of the poems which he illustrated have
the most determined tendency to embellish and
even contradict the language of the poet. But
Rossetti would have been the last person in the
world to admit of any interference in his design. It
is impossible, again, in the illustration which another
eminent pre-Raphaelite made for The Lady ofShalott,
not to wonder how Tennyson bore the interpretation
of the "web " at which the lady was for ever weaving.
In the poem it is obviously a tapestry, in which she
weaves the sights, which reach her through the magic
mirror. But in the illustration she is engaged in
spinning on the floor a gigantic octagonal object
like a spider's web, held down by large metal pins.
For the purpose of embroidery, the lady could not
by any mechanical device have reached the centre
of this astonishing construction.

An interesting instance of the physical domin-
ance of this imaginative faculty in Tennyson's case
is given by himself in the experiences which re-
sulted from a course of vegetarianism. He tried
it, he said, for a short period, but broke down and
turned with deep satisfaction to a mutton-chop —
" I never felt such joy in my blood," he said.
" When I went to sleep I dreamt that I saw the
vines of the South with large Eshcol branches,
trailing over the glaciers of the North."

212 TENNYSON

This imaginative faculty was recognised from the
first. Arthur Hallam in the early days wrote to him :
" [Imagination is] with you universal and all-power-
ful, absorbing your whole existence, communicating
to you that energy which is so glorious." But this
faculty of pure imagination was not so strong as his
power of entering into the sweet life of nature, and
realising the sudden transient emotion that does not
reside in the scene itself but in the heart of the ob-
server. In the sensitive spirit there are chords so to
speak that are sometimes tense, sometimes loose and
languid ; in the eager mood, the sight of some natural
object, a tree, a hillside, a venerable house, a rock, a
wave, will set these strings suddenly vibrating with a
seci'et and inexplicable music. This is the mystery
of the poetical nature ; but of the thousands who
feel such a thrill — and there are thousands — not
more than one or two can give the mystic passion
words. No language can give expression to the
nature of this mysterious power ; it fills the soul
with music, it sets it afloat on a spiritual sea, which,
though remote from life seems in such moments to
lie, with Its sapphire firths and blue distances,
among the arid craggy islands of daily existence.
It is the voice of some higher power, the calling of
the soul of the world ; in such moments all is made
clear, all harmonised and forgiven ; the fact is in-
communicable, but no one who has ever felt it can
doubt of its reality, can question that it belongs to

THE OPEN EAR 213

some deeper mood, some higher plane of the spirit.
Many who in childhood and youth have felt the
beckoning of this mood, lose it in later life in con-
tact with grosser realities ; it cannot be counted
upon, it cannot be compelled ; it may desert the
soul for years ; and yet a voice, a sunset, a printed
page, a bar of music may bring it back.

These "authentic thrills " were what Tennyson set
himself resolutely to invite and cultivate. He
speaks of his " dim mystic sympathies with tree and
hill reaching far back into childhood." There was
a kind of religious sentiment in his mind about such
moments ; Mr. Palgrave tells us that it was under-
stood that when he was travelling with Tennyson,
if any scene of more than usual beauty met their
eyes, he was to withdraw for a few minutes and
allow the Poet to contemplate it in silence and soli-
tude. This was no pose, but a simple and natural
necessity of temperament ; " I hear," said Tenny-
son once, " that there are larger waves at Bude than
at any other place. I must go thither and be alone
with God."

After all, the question of whether or no a poet
fulfils the promise of his youth is not one which
admits of a decisive answer. It all depends upon
the view taken by the particular critic, the partic-
ular reader, of the function and aim of the poet.
If you think of the poet as a teacher of morals, then
the more he drifts out of the irresponsible witchery

214 TENNYSON

of song and steers into the stirring enunciation of
rhetorical principles the more you will admire him.
If your bent is towards realism, you will delight to
find him a subtle analyst of character, a deft dis-
sector of the human spirit, making its very de-
formities fascinating through the magic power of art.
If you think of him as the teller of tales, you will
deem him greater when he touches into life or
eternal pathos some chivalrous or homely range of
incident. But if you think of him as a priest of
beauty, as a weaver of exquisite word-music stir-
ring the sleeping soul into ripples of delicious sen-
sation, then you will grudge your poet to the
insistent cries of the world. You will desire for
him enough of sympathy to encourage him to keep
his lyre strung, and not so much of fame as to make
him yield to the claims of those who would enlist
his music in some urgent cause, which, however
noble it may be in itself, is not the cause of that
holy beauty of which the poet is the priest and
minister.

My own belief is that FitzGerald was mainly right,
and that Tennyson's real gift was the lyric gift.
I believe that while he continued careless of name
and fame he served his own ideal best ; I believe
that in his early lyrical poems, in In Mernoriam
and in Maud, his best work will be found ; that
in The Princess, the Idylls, the dramas, and the later
poems, he was drawn aside from his real path by the

INFLUENCES 215

pressure of public expectation, by social influences,
by the noble desire to modify and direct thought.
I do not underestimate the services he was enabled
in these popular writings to do for his generation,
but it can hardly be maintained that he was then
practising his best gift. Not that Tennyson was
consciously corrupted by fame or influence. It is
clear that he always made the quality of his work
his end, rather than any possible reward. But I
suspect that he was overshadowed by a fictitious
conscience ; he was human, though a very large
and simple character ; and the atmosphere in which
he lived was unreal and enervating. If he had not
been a man of overpowering genius and childlike
simplicity the effect upon him would have been
disastrous. He would have become pontifical, self-
conscious, elaborate. As it was his position only
acted upon him with an uneasy pressure to write
and think in ways that were not entirely consonant
with the best of his genius,

I would think of Tennyson, then, not as the man
of rank and name and fame, the associate of eminent
persons, the embarrassed fugitive from peering
curiosity, but as the lonely dreamer, lingering in
still and secret places, listening to the music of
woods, the plunge of stream and waves, the sighing
of winds, with the airy music beating in his brain.
This first ; and then as heavily conscious of the
deep and mysterious destiny of man, the bewildering

216 TENNYSON

mazes of identity, the bitter admixture of sorrow
and pain with the very draught of life. He stands
on the edge of the abyss ; he looks with faltering
eyes into the dark, and the thin voice of death,
the sobbing of despair, the cries of unsoothed pain
tell him that the dark is not lifeless, that there is
something beyond and above and around all, and
that the same eternal, awful Power which laughs
in the sunlight, which touches the flower with the
distilled flush of the heavenly ray, is as present
in darkness as in light, and bears upon his un-
wearied shoulder the infinite multitude of stars and
suns, and enfolds all things within himself.

On the one hand beauty, the beauty that
triumphs over the petty, busy handiwork of man,
and on the other mystery, the mystery from which
man comes and into which he goes.

*4f* I am enabled to print the two poems that follow, The
Palace of Art and The Lady of Shalott, with aU variations in
the text, by the kind permission of Mr. Churton Collins.

APPENDIX

[The Palace of Art and The Lady of Shalott with the
various readings ; from The Early Poems of Alfred
Lord Tennyson, text of 1857, edited by John
Churton Collins.]

THE PALACE OF ART

I BUILT my soul a lordly pleasure-house.

Wherein at ease for aye to dwell.
I said, " O Soul, make merry and carouse,

Dear soul, for all is well."
A huge crag-platform, smooth as burnish'd brass,

I chose. The ranged ramparts bright
From level meadow-bases of deep grass ^

Suddenly scaled the light.
Thereon I built it firm. Of ledge or shelf

The rock rose clear, or winding stair.
My soul would live alone unto herself

In her high palace there.
And '^ while the world ^ runs round and round," I said,

"Reign thou apart, a quiet king.
Still as, while Saturn whirls, his stedfast^ shade

Sleeps on his luminous ring." ^
To which my soul made answer readily :

" Trust me, in bliss I shall abide
In this great mansion, that is built for me.
So royal-rich and wide."

^ 1833. I chose, whose ranged ramparts bright

From great broad meadow bases of deep grass.
2 1833. ' ' While the great world. "
3 1833 and 1842. Steadfast.

* After this stanza in 1833 this, deleted in 1842 : —
"And richly feast within thy palace hall.

Like to the dainty bird that sups.
Lodged in the lustrous crown-imperial.
Draining the honey cujjs."

(217)

218 APPENDIX

Four courts I made, East, West and South and North,

In each a squared lawn, wherefrom
The golden gorge of dragons spouted forth
A flood of fountain-foam.^

And round the cool green courts there ran a row

Of cloisters, branch'd like mighty woods.
Echoing all night to that sonorous flow
Of spouted fountain-floods.^

And round the roofs a gilded gallery

Tliat lent broad verge to distant lauds.
Far as the wild swan wings, to where the sky
Dipt down to sea and sands. ^

From those four jets four currents in one swell

Across the mountain stream'd below
In misty folds, that floating as they fell
Lit up a torrent-bow.^

And high on every peak a statue seem'd

To hang on tiptoe, tossing up
A cloud of incense of all odour steam'd
From out a golden cup.^

So that she thought, " And who shall gaze upon

My palace with unblinded eyes.
While this great bow will waver in the sun.
And that sweet incense rise ? " ^

For that sweet incense rose and never fail'd.

And, while day sank or mounted higher,
The light aerial gallery, golden-rail'd.
Burnt like a fringe of fire.^

Likewise the deep-set windows, stain'd and traced.

Would seem slow-flaming crimson fires
From shadow'd grots of arches interlaced.
And tipt with frost-like spires.^

^ In 1833 these eight stanzas were inserted after the stanza be-
ginning, "I take possession of men's minds and deeds ;" in 1842
they were transferred, greatly altered, to their present position.
For the alterations on them see infra, pages 224, 225.

THE PALACE OF ART 219

Full of long-sounding corridors it was.

That over-vaulted grateful gloom/
Thro' which the livelong day my soul did pass,
Well-pleased, from room to room.

Full of great rooms and small the palace stood.

All various, each a perfect whole
From living Nature, fit for every mood ^
And change of my still soul.

For some were hung with arras green and blue.

Showing a gaudy summer-morn.
Where with pufF'd cheek the belted hunter blew
His wreathed bugle-horn.^

One seem'd all dark and red — a tract of sand.

And some one pacing there alone, ^

Who paced for ever in a glimmering land,
Lit with a low large moon.^

One show'd an iron coast and angry waves.
You seem'd to hear them climb and fall
And roar rock-thwarted under bellowing caves.
Beneath the windy wall.*

11833. Gloom,
Roofed with thick plates of green and orange glass
Ending in stately rooms.
^ 1833. All various, all beautiful.

Looking all ways, fitted to every mood.
^Here in 1833 was inserted the stanza, "One showed an
English home," afterwards transferred to its present position
as stanza 22.

* 1833. Some were all dark and red, a glimmering land

Lit with a low round moon.
Among brown rocks a man upon the sand
Went weeping all alone.

* This stanza was added in 1842.

220 APPENDIX

And one, a full-fed river winding slow

By herds upon an endless plain,
The ragged rims of thunder brooding low,
With shadow-streaks of rain.'

And one, the reapers at their sultry toil.

In front they bound the sheaves. Behind
Were realms of upland, prodigal in oil.
And hoary to the wind.'

And one, a foreground black with stones and slags,

Beyond, a line of heights, and higher
All barr'd with long white cloud the scornful crags,
And highest, snow and fire.^

And one, an English home — gray twilight pour'd

On dewy pastures, dewy trees.
Softer than sleep — all things in order stored,
A hauut of ancient Peace. ^

Nor these alone, but every landscape fair.

As fit for every mood of mind,
Or gay, or grave, or sweet, or stern, was there.
Not less than truth design' d.^

Or the maid-mother by a crucifix,
In tracts of pasture sunny-warm,

' These two stanzas were added in 1842.

2 Thus in 1833:—

One seemed a foreground black with stones and slags,

Below sun-smitten icy spires
Rose striped with long white cloud the scornful crags,
Deep trenched with thunder fires.

3 Not inserted here in 1833, but the following in its place : —

Some showed far-off thick woods mounted with towers,

Nearer, a flood of mild sunshine
Poxu'ed on long walks and lawns and beds and bowers
TreUised with bunchy vine.
* Inserted in 1842.

THE PALACE OF ART 221

Beneath branch-work of costly sardonyx
Sat smiling, babe in arm.^

Or in a clear-wall'd city on the sea.
Near gilded organ-pipes, her hair
Wound with white roses, slept St. Cecily ;
An angel look'd at her.

1 Thus in 1833, followed by the note :—
Or the maid-mother by a crucifix,
In yellow pastures sunny-warm,
Beneath branch-work of costly sardonyx,
Sat smiling, babe in arm.*

* When I first conceived the plan of the Palace of Art, I in-
tended to have introduced both sculptures and paintings into it ;
but it is the most difficult of all things to devise a statue in verse.
Judge whether I have succeeded in the statues of Elijah and
Olympias.

One was the Tishbite whom the raven fed.

As when he stood on Carmel steeps,
With one arm stretched out bare, and mocked and said,
"Come cry aloud — he sleeps."

Tall, eager, lean and strong, his cloak wind-borne

Behind, his forehead heavenly bright
From the clear marble pouring glorious scorn,
Lit as with inner light.

One was Olympias : the floating snake

Rolled round her ancles, round her waist
Knotted, and folded once about her neck,
Her perfect lips to taste.

Round by the shoidder moved : she seeming blythe

Declined her head : on every side
The dragon's curves melted and mingled with

The woman's youthful pride
Of rounded limbs.

Or Venus in a snowy shell alone.

Deep-shadowed in the glassy brine.
Moonlike glowed double on the blue, and shone
A naked shape divine.

222 APPENDIX

Or thronging all one porch of Paradise,

A group of Houris bow'd to see
The dying Islamite, with hands and eyes
ITiat said. We wait for thee.^

Or mythic Uther's deeply-wounded son
In some fair space of sloping greens
Lay, dozing in the vale of Avalon,
And watch'd by weeping queens.^

Or hollowing one hand against his ear.

To list a foot-fall, ere he saw
The wood-nymph, stay'd the Ausonian king to hear
Of wisdom and of law.^

Or over hills with peaky tops engrail' d,

And many a tract of palm and rice,
The throne of Indian Cama * slowly sail'd
A summer fann'd with spice.

1 Inserted in 1842.

2 Thus in 1833 :—

Or that deep-wounded child of Pendragon

Mid misty woods on sloping greens
Dozed in the vallej' of Avilion,
Tended by crowned queens.
The present reading that of 1842. The reference is, of course
to King Arthur, the supposed son of Uther Pendragon.
In 1833 the following stanza, excised in 1842, followed : —
Or blue-eyed Krierahilt from a craggy hold.

Athwart the light-green rows of vine,
Poured blazing hoards of Nibelungen gold,
Down to the gulfy Rhine.
' Inserted in 1842 thus : —

Or hollowing one hand against his ear.

To listen for a footfall, ere he saw
The wood-nymph, stay'd the Tuscan king to hear
Of wisdom and of law.
List a footfall, 1843. Ausonian for Tuscan, 1850.
* Camadev, the Hindu God of Love.

THE PALACE OF ART 223

Or sweet Europa's mantle blew unclasp'd,
From oiF her shoulder backward borne :
From one hand droop'd a crocus : one hand grasp'd
The mild bull's golden horn.^

Or else flush'd Ganymede, his rosy thigh

Half-buried in the Eagle's down,
Sole as a flying star shot thro' the sky
Above ^ the pillar'd town.

Nor ^ these alone : but every •* legend fair

Which the supreme Caucasian mind
Carved out of Nature for itself, was there.
Not less than life, design'd.^

1 In 1833 thus:—

Europa's scarf blew in an arch, unclasped,
From her bare shoulder backward borne.
"Oflf" inserted in 1842.
Here in 1833 follows a stanza, excised in 1842 : —

He thro' the streaming crystal swam, and rolled

Ambrosial breaths that seemed to float
In light-wreathed curls. She from the ripple cold
Updrew her sandalled foot.
21833. Over. n833. Not. n833. Many a.

^ 1833. Broidered in screen and blind.

In the edition of 1833 appear the following stanzas, excised
in 1842 :—

So that my soul beholding in her pride

All these, from room to room did pass ;
And all things that she saw, she multiplied,
A many-faced glass.

And, being both the sower and the seed,

Remaining in herself became
All that she saw. Madonna, Ganymede,
Or the Asiatic dame —

Still changing, as a lighthouse in the night

Changeth athwart the gleaming main,
From red to yellow, yellow to pale white,
Then back to red again.

224 APPENDIX

Then in the towers I placed great bells that swung.

Moved of themselves, with silver sound ;
And with choice paintings of wise men I hung
The royal dais round.

"From change to change four times within the womb

The brain is moulded," she began,
"So thro' all phases of all thought I come
Into the perfect man.*

' ' All nature widens upward : evermore

The simpler essence lower lies.
More complex is more perfect, owning more
Discourse, more widely wise.*

" I take possession of men's minds and deeds.

I live in all things great and small.
I dwell apart, holding no forms of creeds,
But contemplating all."t

Four ample courts there were. East, West, South, North,

In each a squared lawn where from

A golden-gorged dragon spouted forth

The fountain's diamond foam.

All round the cool green courts there ran a row

Of cloisters, branched like mighty woods.
Echoing all night to that sonorous flow
Of spouted fountain floods.

From those four jets four currents in one swell

Over the black rock streamed below
In steamy folds, that, floating as they fell.
Lit up a torrent-bow.

And round the roofs ran gilded galleries
That gave large view to distant lands.
Tall towns and mounds, and close beneath the skies
Long lines of amber sands.

Huge incense-urns along the balustrade,

Hollowed of solid amethyst,
Each with a different odour fuming, made
The air a silver mist.

* These two excised stanzas, with minute alterations, were
incorporated with the poem a few stanzas further down in 1842.
See pages 228, 229.

t See page 229.

THE PALACE OF ART 225

For there was Milton like a seraph strong.
Beside him Shakespeare bland and mild ;
And there the world-worn Dante grasp'd his song,
And somewhat grimly smiled.^

Far-o£E 'twas wonderful to look upon

Those sumptuous towers between the gleam
Of that great foam-bow trembling in the sun,
And the argent incense-stream ;

And round the terraces and round the walls,

While day sank lower or rose higher,
To see those rails, with all their knobs and balls.
Burn like a fringe of fire.

Likewise the deepset windows, stained and traced.

Burned, like slow-flaming crimson fires.
From shadowed grots of arches interlaced.
And topped with frostlike spires.

^ 1833. There deep-haired Milton like an angel tall
Stood limned, Shakspeare bland and mild.
Grim Dante pressed his lips, and from the wall
The bald blind Homer smiled.

Recast in its present form in 1842. After this stanza in 1833
appear the following stanzas, excised in 1842 : —

And underneath fresh carved in cedar wood.

Somewhat alike in form and face.
The Genii of every climate stood,
All brothers of one race :

Angels who sway the seasons by their art,
And mould all shapes in earth and sea ;
And with great effort build the human heart
From earliest infancy.

And in the sun-pierced Oriels' coloured flame

Immortal Michsel Angelo
Looked down, bold Luther, large-browed Verulam,
The King of those who know.

Cervantes, the bright face of Calderon,

Robed David touching holy strings.
The Halicarnassean, and alone,
Alfred the flower of kings.

Isaiah with fierce Ezekiel,

Swarth Moses by the Coptic sea,
Plato, Petrarca, Livy, and Raphael,
And eastern Confutzee.

15

226 APPENDIX

And there the Ionian father of the rest ;

A million wrinkles carved his skin ;
A hundred winters snow'd upon his breast.
From cheek and throat and chin.^

Above, the fair hall-ceiling stately set

Many an arch high up did lift,
And angels rising and descending met
With interchange of gift. ^

Below was all mosaic choicely plann'd

With cycles of the human tale
Of this wide world, the times of every land
So wrought, they will not fail.^

The people here, a beast of burden slow,

Toil'd onward, prick'd with goads and stings ;
Here play'd, a tiger, rolling to and fro
The heads and crowns of kings ; ^

Here rose, an athlete, strong to break or bind

All force in bonds that might endure.
And here once more like some sick man declined.
And trusted any cure.^

But over these sj[ie trod : and those great bells

Began to chime. She took her throne :
She sat betwixt the shining Oriels,
To sing her songs alone. ^

And thro' the topmost Oriels' colour'd flame

Two godlike faces gazed below ;
Plato the wise, and large-brow' d Verulam,
The first of those who know. ^

^ All these stanzas were added in 1842. In 1833 appear the
following stanzas, excised in 1842 : —

As some rich tropic mountain that infolds

All change, from flats of scattered palms
Sloping thro' five great zones of climate, holds

His head in snows and calms —
Full of her own delight and nothing else,

My vainglorious, gorgeous soul
Sat throned between the shining oriels,
In pomp beyond control ;

THE PALACE OF ART 227

And all those names, that in their motion were
Full-welling fountain-heads of change,

With piles of flavorous fruits in basket-twine

Of gold, unheap^d, crushing down
Musk-scented blooms — all taste — grape, gourd or pine —
In bunch, or single grown —

Our growths, and such as brooding Indian heats

Make out of crimson blossoms deep,
Ambrosial pulps and juices, sweets from sweets
Sun-changed, when sea-winds sleep.

With graceful chalices of curious wine,
Wonders of art — and costly jars,
* And bossed salvers. Ere young night divine
Crowned dying day with stars,

Making sweet close of his delicious toils,
She lit white streams of dazzling gas.
And soft and fragrant flames of precious oils
In moons of purple glass

Ranged on the fretted woodwork to the ground.

Thus her intense untold delight.
In deep or vivid colour, smell and sound.
Was flattered day and night.*

*If the poem were not already too long, I should have in-
serted in the text the following stanzas, expressive of the joy
wherewith the soul contemplated the results of astronomical
experiment. In the centre of the four quadrangles rose an
immense tower.

Hither, when all the deep imsoimded skies

Shuddered with silent stars she clomb,
And as with optic glasses her keen eyes
Pierced thro' the mystic dome,

Regions of lucid matter taking forms.

Brushes of fire, hazy gleams.
Clusters and beds of worlds, and bee-like swarms
Of suns, and starry streams.

She saw the snowy poles of moonless Mars,

That marvellous round of milky light
Below Orion, and those double stars
Whereof the one more bright

Is circled by the other, etc.

228 APPENDIX

Betwixt the slender shafts were blazon' d fair
In diverse raiment strange : ^

Thro' which the lights, rose, amber, emerald, blue,

Flush'd in her temples and her eyes.
And from her lips, as morn from Memnon, drew
Rivers of melodies.

No nightingale delighteth to prolong

Her low preamble all alone.
More than my soul to hear her echo'd song
Throb thro' the ribbed stone ;

Singing and murmuring in her feastful mirth.

Joying to feel herself alive.
Lord over Nature, Lord of ^ the visible earth.
Lord of the senses five ;

Communing with herself ; " All these are mine.

And let the world have peace or wars,
'Tis one to me." She — when young night divine
Crown'd dying day with stars.

Making sweet close of his delicious toils —

Lit light in wreaths and auadems.
And pure quintessences of precious oils
In hollow'd moons of gems.

To mimic heaven ; and clapt her hands and cried,

" I marvel if my still delight
In this great house so royal-rich, and wide.
Be flatter' d to the height.'

1 Thus in 1833:—

And many more, that in their lifetime were

Full-welling foimtain heads of change,
Between the stone shafts glimmered, blazoned fair
In divers raiment strange.
21833. O'.

' Here added in 1842 and remaining till 1851 when they were
excised are two stanzas : —

"From shape to shape at first within the womb

The brain is modell'd," she began,
"And thro' all phases of all thought I come
Into the perfect man.

THE PALACE OF ART 229

*' O all things fair to sate my various eyes !

0 shapes and hues that please me well !

0 silent faces of the Great and Wise,

My Gods, with whom I dwell ! ^

" O God-like isolation which art mine,

1 can but count thee perfect gain,

What time I watch the darkening droves of swine
That range on yonder plain.^

" In filthy sloughs they roll a prurient skin,
They graze and wallow, breed and sleep ;
And oft some brainless devil enters in.
And drives them to the deep." ^

Then of the moral instinct would she prate.

And of the rising from the dead.
As hers by right of full-accomplish'd Fate ;
And at the last she said :

" I take possession of man's mind and deed.
I care not what the sects may brawl,

1 sit as God holding no form of creed.

But contemplating all." ^

" All nature widens upward. Evermore

The simpler essence lower lies :
More complex is more perfect, owning more
Discourse, more widely wise. "

^ These stanzas were added in 1851.

'^ Added here in 1842 [though originally written in 1833 and
placed earlier in the poem. See page 224], with the following
variants which remained till 1851, when the present text was
substituted : —

"I take possession of men's minds and deeds.

I live in all things great and small.
I sit * apart holding no forms of creeds.
But contemplating all."

* 1833. DweU.

230 APPENDIX

Full oft ^ the riddle of the painful earth

Flash'd thro' her as she sat alone,
Yet not the less held she her solemn mirth.
And intellectual throne.

And so she throve and prosper'd : so three years

She prosper'd : on the fourth she fell ^
Like Herod, when the shout was in his ears.
Struck thro' with pangs of hell.

Lest she should fail and perish utterly,

God, before whom ever lie bare
The abysmal deeps of Personality,
Plagued her with sore despair.

When she would think, where'er she turn'd her sight.

The airy hand confusion wrought,
Wrote " Mene, mene," and divided quite
The kingdom of her thought.

Deep dread and loathing of her solitude

Fell on her, from which mood was born
Scorn of herself ; again, from out that mood
Laughter at her self-scorn.^

'•' What ! is not this my place of strength," she said,

" My spacious mansion built for me,
^VTiereof the strong foundation-stones were laid
Since my first memory } "

^ 1833. Sometimes.

^ And intellectual throne

Of full-sphered contemplation. So three'years
She throve, but on the fourth she fell.
And so the text remained till 1850, when the present reading
was substituted.
'In 1833 the following stanza, excised in 1842 : —
"Who hath drawn dry the fountains of delight,

That from my deep heart everywhere
Moved in my blood and dwelt, as power and might
Abode in Sampson's hair?"

THE PALACE OF ART 231

But in dark corners of her palace stood

Uncertain shapes ; and unawares
On white-eyed phantasms weeping tears of blood.
And horrible nightmares,

And hollow shades enclosing hearts of flame.

And, with dim fretted foreheads all,
On corpses three-months-old at noon she came,
That stood against the wall.

A spot of dull stagnation, without light

Or power of movement, seem'd my soul,
'Mid onward-sloping ^ motions infinite
Making for one sure goal.

A still salt pool, lock'd in with bars of sand ;

Left on the shore ; that hears all night
The plunging seas draw backward from the land
Their moon-led waters white.

A star that with the choral starry dance

Join'd not, but stood, and standing saw
The hollow orb of moving Circumstance
Roll'd round by one fix'd law.

Back on herself her serpent pride had curl'd.
''No voice," she shriek'd in that lone hall,
" No voice breaks thro' the stillness of this world :
One deep, deep silence all ! "

She, mouldering with the dull earth's mouldering sod,

Inwrapt tenfold in slothful shame.
Lay there exiled from eternal God,
Lost to her place and name ;

And death and life she hated equally,

And nothing saw, for her despair.
But dreadful time, dreadful eternity.
No comfort anywhere ;

1 1833. Downward-sloping.

232 APPENDIX

Remaining utterly confused with fears.

And ever worse with growing time.
And ever unrelieved by dismal tears,
And all alone in crime :

Shut up as in a crumbling tomb, girt round

With blackness as a solid wall,
Far off she seem'd to hear the dully sound
Of human footsteps fall.

As in strange lands a traveller walking slow,

In doubt and great perplexity,
A little before moon-rise hears the low
Moan of an unknown sea ;

And knows not if it be thunder or a sound
Of rocks ^ thrown down, or one deep cry
Of great wild beasts ; then thinketh, " I have found
A new land, but I die."

She howl'd aloud, " I am on fire within.

There comes no murmur of reply.
WTiat is it that will take away my sin.
And save me lest I die } "

So when four years were wholly finished.

She threw her royal robes away.
" Make me a cottage in the vale," she said,
''^VTiere I may mourn and pray.^

''Yet pull not down my palace towers, that are

So lightly, beautifully built :
Perchance I may return with others there
When I have purged my guilt."

1 1833. Or the sound

Of stoaes.
So till 1851, when "a sound of rocks" was substituted.

2 1833. " Dying the death I die ? "
Present reading substituted in 1842.

THE LADY OF SHALOTT

First published in 1833
Part I

On either side the river lie
Long fields of barley and of rye,
That clothe the wold and meet the sky ;
And thro' the field the road runs by

To many-tower' d Camelot ;
And up and down the people go.
Gazing where the lilies blow
Round an island there below.

The island of Shalott. ^

Willows whiten, aspens quiver,^
Little breezes dusk and shiver
Thro' the wave that runs for ever
By the island in the river

Flowing down to Camelot.
Four gray walls, and four gray towers,
Overlook a space of flowers.
And the silent isle imbowers

The Lady of Shalott.

By the margin, willow- veil' d
Slide the heavy barges trail'd
By slow horses ; and unhail'd
The shallop flitteth silken-sail'd

Skimming down to Camelot :

^ 1833. To many towered Camelot

The yellow leaved water lily,
The green sheathed daffodilly,
Tremble in the water chilly,
Round about Shalott.

21833. shiver.

The sunbeam-showers break and quiver
In the stream that runneth ever
By the island, etc.

(233)

234. APPENDIX

But who hath seen her wave her hand ?
Or at the casement seen her stand ?
Or is she known in all the land,

TheLady of Shalott?^

Only reapers, reaping early
In among the bearded barley.
Hear a song that echoes cheerly
From the river winding clearly,

Down to tower'd Camelot :
And by the moon the reaper weary.
Piling sheaves in uplands airy.
Listening, whispers " 'Tis the fairy

Lady of Shalott".^

Part II

Theke she weaves by night and day
A magic web with colours gay.
She has heard a whisper say,
A curse is on her if she stay ^

' 1833. Underneath the bearded barley,

The reaper, reaping late and early.
Hears her ever chanting cheerly,
Like an angel, singing clearly.

O'er the stream of Camelot.
Piling the sheaves in furrows airy,
Beneath the moon, the reaper weary
Listening whispers, " 'tis the fairy

Lady of Shalott."
2 1833. The little isle is all inrailed

With a rose-fence, and overtrailed
With roses : by the marge unhailed
The shallop flitteth silkensailed,

Skimming down to Camelot.
A pearl garland winds her head :
She leaneth on a velvet bed,
Full royally apparelled.

The Lady of Shalott.
^ 1833. No time hath she to sport and play :
A charmed web she weaves alway.
A curse is on her, if she stay
Her weaving, either night or day

THE LADY OF SHALOTT 235

To look down to Camelot.
She knows not what the curse may he,
And so ^ she weaveth steadily,
And little other care hath she,

The Lady of Shalott.

And moving thro' a mirror clear
That hangs before her all the year,
Shadows of the world appear.
There she sees the highway near

Winding down to Camelot :
There the river eddy whirls.
And there the surly village-churls,^
And the red cloaks of market girls.

Pass onward from Shalott.

Sometimes a troop of damsels glad.
An abbot on an ambling pad,
Sometimes a curly shepherd-lad.
Or long-hair'd page in crimson clad.

Goes by to tower' d Camelot ;,
And sometimes thro' the mirror blue
The knights come riding two and two :
She hath no loyal knight and true,

The Lady of Shalott.

But in her web she still delights
To weave the mirror's magic sights.
For often thro' the silent nights
A funeral, with plumes and lights.

And music, went to Camelot : ^

11833. Therefore

Therefore no other .

The Lady of Shalott.
2 1833. She lives with little joy or fear

Over the water running near,

The sheep bell tinkles in her ear,

Before her hangs a mirror clear,
Reflecting towered Camelot.

And, as the mazy web she whirls.

She sees the surly village-churls.
' 1833. Came from Camelot.

236 APPENDIX

Or when the moon was overhead,
Came two young lovers lately wed ;
" I am half-sick of shadows," said
The Lady of Shalott.

Part III

A BOW-SHOT from her bower-eaves,
He rode between the barley sheaves.
The sun came dazzling thro' the leaves.
And flamed upon the brazen greaves

Of bold Sir Lancelot.
A redcross knight for ever kneel' d
To a lady in his shield.
That sparkled on the yellow field.

Beside remote Shalott.

The gemmy bridle glitter'd free, j\

Like to some branch of stars we see ''

Hung in the golden Galaxy. ^
The bridle bells rang merrily

As he rode down to ^ Camelot :
And from his blazon' d baldric slung
A mighty silver bugle hung.
And as he rode his armour rung.

Beside remote Shalott.

All in the blue unclouded weather
Thick-jewell'd shone the saddle-leather.
The helmet and the helmet-feather
Bum'd like one burning flame together.

As he rode down to Camelot.^
As often thro' the purple night,
Below the starry clusters bright.
Some bearded meteor, trailing light.
Moves over still Shalott.^

U833. Hung in the golden galaxy. nSSS. From.

31833. From Camelot. n833. Green Shalott.

THE LADY OF SHALOTT 237

His broad clear brow in sunlight glow'd ;
On burnish'd hooves his war-horse trode ;
From underneath his helmet flow'd
His coal-black curls as on he rode,

As he rode down to Camelot-^
From the bank and from the river
He flashed into the crystal mirror,
"Tirra lirra," by the river ^

Sang Sir Lancelot.

She left the web, she left the loom ;
She made three paces thro' the room.
She saw the water-lily ' bloom.
She saw the helmet and the plume.

She look'd down to Camelot.
Out flew the web and floated wide ;
The mirror crack' d from side to side ;
" The curse is come upon me," cried

The Lady of Shalott.

Part IV

In the stormy east-wind straining.
The pale yellow woods were waning.
The broad stream in his banks complaining.
Heavily the low sky raining

Over tower'd Camelot ;
Down she came and found a boat
Beneath a willow left afloat.
And round about the prow she wrote

The Lady of Shalott*

And now the river's dim expanse —
Like some bold seer in a trance,

1 1833. From Camelot. 2 1833. < ■ Tirra lirra, tirra lirra. "

31833. Water flower.

* 1833. Outside the isle a shallow boat
Beneath a willow lay afloat,
Below the carven stern she wrote,
The Lady of Shalott.

238 APPENDIX

Seeing all his own mischance —
With a glassy countenance

Did she look to Camelot.
And at the closing of the day
She loosed the chain, and down she lay ;
The broad stream bore her far away,

The Lady of Shalott.

Lying, robed in snowy white
That loosely flew to left and right — '■
The leaves upon her falling light —
Thro' the noises of the night

She floated down to Camelot ;
And as the boat-head wound along
The willowy hills and fields among.
They heard her singing her last song.

The Lady of Shalott.^

* 1833. A cloud-white crown of pearl she dight,
All raimented in snowy white
That loosely flew (her zone in sight,
Clasped with one blinding diamond bright),

Her wide eyes fixed on Camelot,
Though the squally eastwind keenly
Blew, with folded arms serenely
By the water stood the queenly

Lady of Shalott.

With a steady, stony glance —
Like some bold seer in a trance,
Beholding all his own mischance,
Mute, with a glassy countenance —

She looked down to Camelot.
It was the closing of the day,
She loosed the chain, and down she lay,
The broad stream bore her far away,

The Lady of Shalott.

As when to sailors while they roam,
By creeks and outfalls far from home,
Rising and dropping with the foam.
From dying swans wild warblings come,
Blown shoreward ; so to Camelot

I

THE LADY OF SHALOTT 239

Heard a carol, mournful, holy.
Chanted loudly, chanted lowly.
Till her blood was frozen slowly,
And her eyes were darken'd wholly,^

Turn'd to tower'd Camelot ;
For ere she reach'd upon the tide
The first house by the water-side.
Singing in her song she died,

The Lady of Shalott.

Under tower and balcony,

By garden-wall and gallery,

A gleaming shape she floated by.

Dead-pale ^ between the houses high,

Silent into Camelot.
Out upon the wharfs they came.
Knight and burgher, lord and dame.
And round the prow they read her name.

The Lady of Shalott.^

Who is this ? and what is here ?
And in the lighted palace near
Died the sound of royal cheer ;
And they cross'd themselves for fear.

All the knights at Camelot :

Still as the boat-head wound along
The willowy hills and fields among.
They heard her chanting her death song,
The Lady of Shalott.

^ 1833. A long drawn carol, mournful, holy.
She chanted loudly, chanted lowly,
Till her eyes were darkened wholly,
And her smooth face sharpened slowly,
2 " A corse " (1853) is a variant for the " Dead-pale " of 1857.
^ 1833. A pale, pale corpse she floated by.
Dead cold, between the houses high,

Dead into towered Camelot.
Knight and burgher, lord and dame,
To the planked wharfage came :
Below the stern they read her name,
"The Lady of Shalott."

240

APPENDIX

But Lancelot ^ mused a little space ;
He said, " She has a lovely face ;
God in his mercy lend her grace,

TheLady of Shalott".2

^ 1833. Spells it "Launcelot" all through.

2 1833. They crossed themselves, their stars they blest,
Knight, minstrel, abbot, squire and guest,
There lay a parchment on her breast,
That puzzled more than all the rest,

The well-fed wits at Camelot.
" The web icas v:ovcn curiously,
The charm is broken utterly,
Draw near and fear not — this is I,
The Lady of Shalott. "

i

INDEX

Aldworth, Tennyson's bouse near

Haslemere, 48.
Alexandra, (^ueen, Tennyson's

interview with, io2.
Alfcrd, Dean, 8.
Allen, Dr., 26.
AUingham, William, 15, 65.
" Apostles," the, a society, 9.
Arnold, Matthew, 130.
Astronomy, Tennyson's love of, 5,

83-
Austen, Jane, 98.

Blakesley, Dean, 8.

Boxley, home of Tennyson family,

20.
Boyd, Mr., 11.
Bradley, Dean, 47, 66.
Brassey, Lord, 73.
Browning, Robert, 41, 60; death

of, 74 ; Tennyson's criticism of

writings, 130.
Browning, Mrs., 30.
Bryce, James, 60.
Burns, Robert, 129.
Byron, Lord, poetical influence

over Tennyson, 127.

Dante, 132.

De Musset, Alfred, 148.

Denmark, King and Queen of,

Tennyson's meeting with, 67.
De Vere, Aubrey, 35, 138.
D'Eyncourt, i.
Dickens, 22, 25.

Disraeli [Lord Beaconsfield], 54.
Dobson, Principal, 30.
Drama, the, "Tennyson's views

concerning, 56-61.

Eastbourne, 26.

Education of women, 181.

I Bog, famous men born in, i note,

Enoch A rden, 47.

Eyre, Governor, 48.

Farringford, Tennyson's home,

37. 42-
Fitz Gerald, Edward, 1 note, 8, 17;

criticisms on Tennyson's work

and character, 18, 103, 145, 150,

157. 194-
Fletcher, Rev. H., 87.
Prater Ave, 64,
Froude, J. A., 59.

Cambridge, Tennyson's life at,
7-11; elected Hon. Fellow, 50;
lines on Cambridge of 1830,
quoted, 11.

Campbell, Thomas, 22.

Carlyle, 2, 22, 27, 31, 62.

Chancellor's medal won by Tenny-
son, 10.

Cheltenham, home of Tennyson
family, 20, 30.

Clark, Sir Andrew, 63, 72.

Collins, Churton, 153.

Cornwall, Tennyson's visit to,
32.

Currie, Sir Donald, 66.

Czar and Czarina, 67.

16

(241)

Garibaldi, visit to Tennyson, 46.
Gladstone, W. E., i note, 52, 66,

67, 68.
Gleam, The, 203.
Goethe, 132.
Grasby, land owned by Tennyson,

26.
Greece, King and Queen of, 67.
Green, J. R., 87.

Hallam, Arthur, at Cambridge, 8 ;
expedition to Spain with Tenny-
son, 11; engagement to Emily
Tennyson, 12; Tennyson's
friendship for, 15 ; death of, 16.

242

INDEX

Haslemere, 4^^

High Beech, pPie of Tennyson

family, 19.
Holmes, O. W., i note; visit to

Tennyson, 96.
Houghton, Lord, 8, 20, 27.
Hunt, Leigh, 221.

Idylls, 42, 44, 50, 51, 137, 195-202,

20S.
In Memoriam, 17, 26, 32, 137, 150,

151, 168-79.

Jackson, Mr., 6.

Jonson, Ben, 130.

Jowett, Professor, 7,43,49,53,71,75.

Keats, 128.

Knowles, Mr., architect of Aid-
worth, 48, 55.

Lady of Shalott, 158, 211, 233-40.

Lampsbn, Miss Locker, marriage
with Lionel Tennyson, 62.

Landor, 22.

Laureateship conferred on Tenny-
son, 35.

Leigh Hunt, 22.

Locksley Hall, 69, 162-67.

Louth School, 5.

Lucretius, 49,

Lushington, Edmund, 25.

Lytton, Bulwer, 28.

Mablethorpe, 4.

Marlborough College, 47.

Martineau, Dr., 65.

Maud, 42, 187-92.

Maurice, F. D., 32, 36.

Merivale, Dean, 8, 10.

Metaphysical Society, 55.

Millais, Sir John, 40; portrait of
Tennyson, 65.

Milnes, Monckton. (See Hough-
ton, Lord.)

Milton, 125.

Miiller, Max, 50.

New Timon and The Poets, 28.
North, Christopher, 15.
Northampton, Marquis of, 20.

Oxford D.C.L. conferred
Tennyson, 37.

Palace 0/ Art, 158, 217-32.

Palgrave, F. T., 50, 121.

Patmore, Coventry, 90; criticism
on Tennyson's work and char-
acter, 60, 6r, 79, 173.

Peel, Sir Robert, 27.

Peerage for Tennyson, 67, 68.

Pension granted to Tennyson
27.

Poems. (See Writings under
Tennyson.)

Poems by Two Brothers, 6.

Poet, The, 205-07.

Poet's Mind, The, 207.

Politics, Tennyson's interest in,
84.

Prince Consort, visit to Tenny-
son, 42 ; death of, 44.

Princess, The, 28, 180-86.

Promise of May, 65.

Queen Mary, 56, 5o, 61.
Queensberry, Marquis of, 65.

Rawnsley, Mr., 28, 35.

Religion, Tennyson's views on,

105-19, 172-79.
Rivers, John, Earl, i.
Robertson, Frederick, 30, 32.
Rogers, Samuel, 22, 31.
Rossetti, D. G., 211.
Russell, Earl, 62.

Sea Fairies, 160.

Sellwood, Emily Sarah. (See

Tennyson, Lady.)
Sellwood, Louisa, marriage with

Charles Tennyson, 19.
Shah, the, 72.
Shakespeare, 122-25.
Shelley, 12S.
Somersby, Tennyson's birthplace

3. 4. 19-
Spain, Tennyson's sympathy with

Revolution in, 11.
Spedding, James, 8, 17.
Spiritualism, Tennyson's opinion

on, 99.
Sunbeam, the, cruise in, 73.
Switzerland, tour in, 28.

INDEX

243

Taine, criticism of Tennyson's
work, 146-49.

Tennyson —

Alfred, Lord, birth and family,
I, 3; appearance, 2, 7, 13, ig,
22, 44, 88 ; portraits by Watts
and Millais, 44, 65 ; Cambridge
life, 7-11; Chancellor's medal
won, 10 ; studies and interests,
14 ; marriage and domestic
life, 23, 34, 35, 37, 43 ; pension
granted, 27; laureateship con-
ferred, 35; Oxford D.C.L., 37;
Cambridge Hon. Fellow, 50;
offers of baronetcy and peerage,
52, 54, 67, 68 ; health, 13, 26,
71 ; death and burial, 76, 77.
Character and characteristics, 4,
5, 6, 9, 14, 18, 22, 30, 31, 43,
69 ; general criticism of, 78-104.
Waitings — critic, qualifications
as, i2i; literary influences, 120-
34, 214 ; methods and style, 24,
40, 135-49: metre, 140, 159-61,
170, 190, 191, 192. Plays, 56-61,
65. Poems — Boadicea, 45 ;
Brook, The, 192 ; Cambridge,
Lines on, 11 ; Charge of the
Light Brigade, 41 ; Coach of
Death, 7 ; Crossing the Bar, 73 ;
Crusty Christopher, 15 ; Deineter
and other Poems, 73. Early
poems compared with later ones,
150-61 ; Enoch A rden, 47 ; Frater
A ve, 64 ; Gleam, The, 208 ;
Idylls, 42, 44, 50, 51, 137, 195-202,
208; In Memoriam, 17, 26, 32,
i37i 15O1 15I1 168-79; Lady of
Shalott, 159, 211, 233-40; Locks-
ley Hall, 69, 162-67 ; Lucretius,
49 ; Maud, 42, 187-92 ; \New
Timonand the Poets, 28; Palace
of Art, 158, 217-32; Poems by
Two Brothers, 6 ; Poet, The,
205-07; Princess, The, 28, 180-
86 ; Sea Fairies, 160 ; Timbuctoo,
10 ; Tiresias and other Poems,
68 ; Ulysses, 167 ; volumes of,
published in 1830, 13, 153-55,
156, 160; in 1832, 13, 156; in
1842, 23-25, 156; in 1880, 64;
Wellington, Ode on, 36. Poetical
ideal, 203-16.

Cecilia Tennyson, 25.
Charles Tennyson, takes name
of Turner, i ; poems by, 6 ;

at Cambridge, 7 ; marriage,
19 ; death of, 63.
Emily Tennyson, engagement

to Arthur Hallam, 12.
Frederick Tennyson, i, 6, 7,

75-
George Tennyson, Rev. Dr.,

I, 2.
Mrs. G. Tennyson, 2, 12.
Hallam, Lord Tennyson, 36.
Lady Tennyson, 19, 34, 53.
Lionel Tennyson, marriage,
62 ; death of, 69.
Thackeray, incident concerning,

30.
Thomson, W. H., 8, 49.
Timbuctoo, poem, :o.
Tiresias and other Poems, 68.
Trench, Archbishop, 8.
Trinity College. (See Cam-
bridge.)
Tunbridge Wells, 19, 25.
Turner. (See Tennyson, Charles.)
Twickenham, Tennyson s home,

35-
Tyndall, Prof., 32.

Ulysses, 167.

Venables, G. S., 21.

Victoria, Queen, Tennyson's inter-
views with, etc., 44, 52, 54, 66.

Voltaire, opinion of English
poetry, 207.

Ward, W. G., 112.

Watson, William, 75.

Watts, G. F., portrait of Tenny-
son, 44.

Wellington, Duke of, ode on, 36
anecdote concerning, 100.

Westcott, Bishop, 32.

Wilson, "Thomas, 45.

Woman, Tennyson's conception
of, 185-87; education of, 181.

Wordsworth, view of nature com-
pared with Tennyson's, 83 ;
Tennyson's criticism of writ-
ings, 126 ; death of, 35.

Yonge, Miss, 97.

THE ABERDEEN UNIVERSITY PRESS LIMITED

0

PR Benson, Arthur Christopher

5581 Alfred Tennyson

B45

1905

PLEASE DO NOT REMOVE
CARDS OR SLIPS FROM THIS POCKET

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO LIBRARY

kl(^S\v\t 1^ ^"?^" '^^