Halleck's New English Literature · Chapter 94Alfred Tennyson, 1809-1892
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[Illustration: ALFRED TENNYSON. From a photograph by Mayall.]
Life.—Alfred Tennyson, one of the twelve children of the rector of Somersby, Lincolnshire, was born in that hamlet in 1809, a year memorable, both in England and America for the birth of such men as Charles Darwin, William E. Gladstone, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Edgar Allan Poe, and Abraham Lincoln.
Visitors to the Somersby rectory, in which Tennyson was born, note that it fits the description of the home in his fine lyric, The Palace of Art:—
"…an English home,—gray twilight pour'd On dewy pastures, dewy trees, Softer than sleep—all things in order stored, A haunt of ancient peace."
His mother, one of the beauties of Lincolnshire, had twenty-five offers of marriage. Of her Tennyson said in The Princess:—
"Happy he With such a mother! faith in womankind Beats with his blood, and trust in all things high Comes easy to him, and tho' he trip and fall, He shall not blind his soul with clay."
It is probable that Tennyson holds the record among English poets of his class for the quantity of youthful verse produced. At the age of eight, he was writing blank verse in praise of flowers; at twelve, he began an epic which extended to six thousand lines.
In 1828 he entered Cambridge University; but in 1831 his father's sickness and death made it impossible for him to return to take his degree. Before leaving Cambridge, Tennyson had found a firm friend in a young college mate of great promise, Arthur Henry Hallam, who became engaged to the poet's sister, Emily Tennyson. Hallam's sudden death in 1832 was a profound shock to Tennyson and had far-reaching effects on his poetic development. For a long time he lived in comparative retirement, endeavoring to perfect himself in the poetic art.
His golden year was 1850, the year of the publication of In Memoriam, of his selection as poet laureate, to succeed Wordsworth, and of his marriage to Emily Sellwood. He had been in love with her for fourteen years, but insufficient income had hitherto prevented marriage.
[Illustration: FARRINGFORD.]
In 1855 Oxford honored him by bestowing on him the degree of D.C.L. The students gave him an ovation and they properly honored his greatest poem, In Memoriam by mentioning it first in their loud calls; but they also paid their respects to his May Queen, asking in chorus: "Did they wake and call you early, call you early, Alfred dear?"
The rest of his life was outwardly uneventful. He became the most popular poet of his age. Schools and colleges had pupils translate his poems into Latin and Greek verse. Of Enoch Arden (1864), at that time his most popular narrative poem, sixty thousand copies were sold almost as as soon as it was printed. He made sufficient money to be able to maintain two beautiful residences, a winter home at Farringford on the Isle of Wight, and a summer residence at Aldworth in Sussex. In 1884 he was raised to the peerage, with the title of Baron of Aldworth and Farringford. He died in 1892, at the age of eighty-three, and was buried beside Robert Browning in Westminster Abbey.
Early Verse.—Tennyson published a small volume of poems in 1830, the year before he left college, and another volume in 1832. Although these contained some good poems, he was too often content to toy with verse that had exquisite melody and but little meaning. The "Airy, fairy Lilian" and "Sweet, pale Margaret" type of verse had charmed him overmuch. The volumes of 1830 and 1832 were severely criticized. Blackwood's Magazine called same of the lyrics "drivel," and Carlyle characterized the aesthetic verse as "lollipops." This adverse criticism and the shock from Hallam's death caused him to remain silent for nearly ten years. His son and biographer says that his father during this period "profited by friendly and unfriendly criticism, and in silence, obscurity, and solitude, perfected his art."
In his thirty-third year (1842), Tennyson broke his long silence by publishing two volumes of verse, containing such favorites as The Poet, The Lady of Shalott, The Palace of Art, The Lotos Eaters, A Dream of Fair Women, Morte d'Arthur, Oenone, The Miller's Daughter, The Gardener's Daughter, Dora, Ulysses, Locksley Hall, The Two Voices, and Sir Galahad.
Unsparing revision of numbers of these poems that had been published before, entitles them to be classed as new work. Some critics think that Tennyson never surpassed these 1842 volumes. His verse shows the influence of Keats, of whom Tennyson said: "There is something of the innermost soul of poetry in almost everything that he wrote."
One of Tennyson's most distinctive qualities, his art in painting beautiful word-pictures, is seen at its best in stanzas from The Palace of Art. His mastery over melody and the technique of verse is evident in such lyrics as Sir Galahad, and The Lotos Eaters. When the prime minister, Sir Robert Peel, read from Ulysses the passage beginning:—
"I am a part of all that I have met,"
he gave Tennyson a much-needed annual pension of £200.
These volumes show that he was coming into touch with the thought of the age. Locksley Hall communicates the thrill which he felt from the new possibilities of science:—
"For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see, Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be. * * * * * I the heir of all the ages, in the foremost files of time."
Hallam's death had also developed in him the human note, resonant in the lyric, Break, break, break:—
"But O for the touch of a vanish'd hand, And the sound of a voice that is still."
The Princess, In Memoriam, and Maud.—Tennyson had produced only short poems in his 1842 volumes, but his next three efforts, The Princess (1847), In Memoriam (1850), and Maud (1855), are of considerable length.
The Princess: A Medley, as Tennyson rightly called it, contains 3223 lines of blank verse. This poem, which is really a discussion of the woman question, relates in a half humorous way the story of a princess who broke off her engagement to a prince, founded a college for women, and determined to elevate her life to making them equal to men. The poem abounds in beautiful imagery and exquisite melody; but the solution of the question by the marriage of the princess has not completely satisfied modern thought. The finest parts of the poem are its artistic songs.
In Memoriam, an elegy in memory of Arthur Henry Hallam, was begun at Somersby in 1833, the year of Hallam's death, and added to at intervals for nearly sixteen years. When Tennyson first began the short lyrics to express his grief, he did not intend to publish them; but in 1850 he gave them to the world as one long poem of 725 four-line stanzas.
In Memoriam was directly responsible for Tennyson's appointment as poet-laureate. Queen Victoria declared that she received more comfort from it than from any other book except the Bible. The first stanza of the poem (quoted on page 9) has proved as much of a moral stimulus as any single utterance of Carlyle or of Browning.
This work is one of the three great elegies of a literature that stands first in elegiac poetry. Milton's Lycidas has more of a massive commanding power, and Shelley's Adonais rises at times to poetic heights that Tennyson did not reach; but neither Lycidas nor Adonais equals In Memoriam in tracing every shadow of bereavement, from the first feeling of despair until the mourner can realize that—
"…the song of woe Is after all an earthly song,"
and can express his unassailable faith in—
"One God, one law, one element, And one far-off divine event To which the whole creation moves."
With this hopeful assurance closes Tennyson's most noble and beautiful poem.
Maud, a lyrical melodrama, paints the changing emotions of a lover who passes from morbid gloom to ecstasy. Then, in a moment of anger, he murders Maud's brother. Despair, insanity, and recovery follow, but he sees Maud's face no more. While the poem as a whole is not a masterpiece, it contains some of Tennyson's finest lyrics. The eleven stanzas of the lover's song to Maud, the—
"Queen Rose of the rosebud garden of girls,"
are such an exquisite blending of woodbine spice and musk of rose, of star and daffodil sky, of music of flute and song of bird, of the soul of the rose with the passion of the lover, of meadows and violets,—that we easily understand why Tennyson loved to read these lines.
The Idylls of the King.—In 1859 Tennyson published Lancelot and Elaine, one of a series of twelve Idylls, the last of which appeared in 1855. Together these form an epic on the subject of King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table. Tennyson relied mainly on Malory's Morte d'Arthur for the characters and the stories.
These Idylls show the struggle to maintain noble ideals. Arthur relates how he collected—
"In that fair order of my Table Round, A glorious company, the flower of men, To serve as model for the mighty world, And be the fair beginning of a time."
He made his knights swear to uphold the ideals of his court—
"To ride abroad redressing human wrongs, To speak no slander, no, nor listen to it, To honor his own word as if his God's, To lead sweet lives in purest chastity, To love one maiden only, cleave to her, And warship her by years of noble deeds Until they won her."
The twelve Idylls have as a background those different seasons of the year that accord with the special mood of the story. In Gareth and Lynette, the most interesting of the Idylls, the young hero leaves his home in spring, when the earth is joyous with birds and flowers. In the last and most nobly poetic of the series, The Passing of Arthur, the time is winter, when the knights seem to be clothed with their own frosty breath.
Sin creeps into King Arthur's realm and disrupts the order of the "Table Round." He receives his mortal wound, and passes to rule in a kindlier realm that welcomed him as "a king returning from the wars."
Although the Idylls of the King are uneven in quality and sometimes marred by overprofusion of ornament and by deficiency of dramatic skill, their limpid style, many fine passages of poetry, appealing stories, and high ideals have exerted a wider influence than any other of Tennyson's poems.
Later Poetry.—Tennyson continued to write poetry until almost the time of his death; but with the exception of his short swan song, Crossing the Bar, he did not surpass his earlier efforts. His Locksley Hall Sixty Year After (1886) voices the disappointments of the Victorian age and presents vigorous social philosophy. Some of his later verse, like The Northern Farmer and The Children's Hospital, are in closer touch with life than many of his earlier poems.
He wrote also several historical dramas, the best of which is Becket (1884); but his genius was essentially lyrical, not dramatic. Crossing the Bar, written in his eighty-first year, is not only the finest product of his later years, but also one of the very best of Victorian lyrics.
[Illustration: FACSIMILE OF MS. OF CROSSING THE BAR.]
General Characteristics.—Tennyson is a poetic interpreter of the thought of the Victorian age. Huxley called him "the first poet since Lucretius who understood the drift of science." In these four lines from The Princess, Tennyson gives the evolutionary history of the world, from nebula to man:—
"This world was once a fluid haze of light. Till toward the center set the starry tides, And eddied into suns, that wheeling cast The planets: then the monster, then the man."
Tennyson's poetry of nature is based on almost scientific observation of natural phenomena. Unlike Wordsworth, Tennyson does not regard nature as a manifestation of the divine spirit of love. He sees her more from the new scientific point of view, as "red in tooth and claw with rapine." The hero of Maud says:—
"For nature is one with rapine, a harm no preacher can heal; The Mayfly is torn by the swallow, the sparrow spear'd by the shrike. And the whole little wood where I sit is a world of plunder and prey."
The constant warfare implied in the evolutionary theory of the survival of the fittest did not keep Tennyson from also presenting nature in her gentler aspects. In Maud, the lover sings—
"…whenever a March-wind sighs, He sets the jewel-print of your feet In violets blue as your eyes,"
and he tells how "the soul of the rose" passed into his blood, and how the sympathetic passion-flower dropped "a splendid tear." As beautiful as is much of Tennyson's nature poetry, he has not Wordsworth's power to invest it with "the light of setting suns," or to cause it to awaken "thoughts that do lie too deep for tears."
The conflict between science and religion, the doubts and the sense of world-pain are mirrored in Tennyson's verse. The Two Voices begins:—
"A still small voice spoke unto me, Thou art so full of misery Were it not better not to be?"
His poetry is, however, a great tonic to religious faith. The closing lines of In Memoriam and Crossing the Bar show how triumphantly he met all the doubts and the skepticism of the age.
Like Milton, Tennyson received much of his inspiration from books, especially from the classical writers; but this characteristic was more than counterbalanced by his acute observation and responsiveness to the thought of the age. Locksley Hall Sixty Years After shows that he was keenly alive to the social movements of the time.
Tennyson said that the scenes in his poems were so vividly conceived that he could have drawn them if he had been an artist. A twentieth century critic[16] says that Tennyson is almost the inventor of such pictorial lyrics as A Dream of Fair Women and The Palace of Art.
The artistic finish of Tennyson's verse is one of its great charms. He said to a friend: "It matters little what we say; it is how we say it—though the fools don't knew it." His poetry has, however, often been criticized for lack of depth. The variety in his subject matter, mode of expression, and rhythm renders his verse far more enjoyable than that of the formal age of Pope.
Tennyson's extraordinary popularity in his own time was largely due to the fact that he voiced so clearly and attractively the thought of the age. As another epoch ushers in different interests, they will naturally be uppermost in the mind of the new generation. We no longer feel the intense interest of the Victorians in the supposed conflict between science and religion. Their theory of evolution has been modified and has lost the force of novelty. Theories of government and social ideals have also undergone a gradual change. For these reasons much of Tennyson's verse has ceased to have its former wide appeal.
Tennyson has, however, left sufficient work of abiding value, both for its exquisite form and for its thought, to entitle him to be ranked as a great poet. We cannot imagine a time when Crossing the Bar, The Passing of Arthur, and the central thought of In Memoriam—
"'Tis better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all,"
will no longer interest readers. To Tennyson belong—
"Jewels five words long That on the stretch'd forefinger of all Time Sparkle forever."