Born, at Somersby, Lincs., 6 Aug. 1809. Educated at Louth Grammar School, till 1820; at home, 1820–28. Matric. Trin. Coll., Camb., 1828; Chancellor’s English Prize Poem, 1829; left Cambridge, owing to death of his father, Feb. 1831. Lived at Somersby till 1835. Married Emily Sellwood, 13 June 1850. Poet Laureate, Nov. 1850. Settled at Farringford, I. of W., 1853. Hon. D.C.L., Oxford, 20 June 1855. Hon. Fellow Trin. Coll., Camb., May 1869. F.R.S. Play “Queen Mary,” produced at Lyceum Theatre, 18 April 1876; “The Falcon,” St. James’s; “The Cup,” Lyceum, 3 Jan. 1881; “The Promise of May,” Globe, 11 Nov. 1882; “The Foresters,” Daly’s Theatre, New York, 17 March 1892; “Becket,” Lyceum, 6 Feb. 1893. Created Baron Tennyson of Aldworth, Jan. 1884. Died, at Aldworth, 6 Oct. 1892. Buried in Westminster Abbey. Works: “Poems by Two Brothers” (anon.; with Charles and Frederick Tennyson), 1827; “Timbuctoo,” 1829, “Poems, chiefly lyrical,” 1830; “Poems,” 1833 [1832]; “The Lover’s Tale” (priv. ptd.), 1833; “Poems” (2 vols.), 1842; “The Princess,” 1847; “In Memoriam” (anon.), 1850 (2nd edn. same year); “Poems” (6th edn.), 1850; “Poems” (7th edn.), 1851; “Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington,” 1852; “Poems” (8th edn.), 1853; “The Charge of the Light Brigade” (priv. ptd.) [1855]; “Maud,” 1855; “Enid and Nimuë” (priv. ptd.), 1857; “Idylls of the King” (4 pts.), 1859; “A Welcome” [to Princess of Wales], 1863; “Idylls of the Hearth,” 1864 (another edn., same year, called: “Enoch Arden, etc.”); “The Victim” (priv. ptd.), 1867; “Idylls of the King” (8 pts.), 1869; “The Holy Grail,” 1870 [1869]; “The Windows,” 1871, [1870] (priv. ptd., 1867); “Gareth and Lynette,” 1872; “A Welcome” [to Duchess of Edinburgh], 1874; “The Lover’s Tale” (priv. ptd.), 1875; “Queen Mary,” 1875; “Harold,” 1877 [1876]; “Ballads and other Poems,” 1880; “The Promise of May,” 1882; “Becket,” 1884; “The Cup and The Falcon,” 1884; “Tiresias,” 1885;’ To H. R. H. Princess Beatrice” (priv. ptd.), 1885; “Poetical Works,” 1886; “Locksley Hall Sixty Years After,” 1887; “To Edward Lear,” 1889; “Demeter,” 1889; “The Foresters,” 1892; “Idylls of the King” (12 pts.), 1892. Posthumous: “The Death of Œnone,” 1892. Collected Works: 1894.

Personal

  Mrs. Clarke, Miss James, the Messrs. M——, and Alfred Tennyson dined with us. I am always a little disappointed with the exterior of our great poet when I look at him, in spite of his eyes, which are very fine, but his head and face, striking and dignified as they are, are almost too ponderous and massive for beauty in so young a man; and every now and then there is a slightly sarcastic expression about his mouth that almost frightens me, in spite of his shy manner and habitual silence. But, after all, it is delightful to see and be with any one that one admires and loves for what he has done, as I do him.

	Long have I known thee as thou art in song,
	And long enjoy’d the perfume that exhales
	From thy pure soul, and odour sweet entails
	And permanence, on thoughts that float along
	The stream of life, to join the passive throng
	Of shades and echoes that are memory’s being;
	Hearing we hear not, and we see not seeing,
	If passion, fancy, faith move not among
	The never-present moments of reflection.
	Long have I view’d thee in the crystal sphere
	Of verse, that, like the beryl, makes appear
	Visions of hope, begot of recollection.
	Knowing thee now, a real earth-treading man,
	Not less I love thee, and no more I can.

  Three of these autographs, which I send you to-day, are first-rate. A Yankee would almost give a dollar apiece for them. Entire characteristic letters from Pickwick, Lytton Bulwer, and Alfred Tennyson; the last the greatest genius of the three, though the vulgar public have not as yet recognized him for such. Get his poems if you can, and read the “Ulysses,” “Dora,” the “Vision of Sin,” and you will find that we do not overrate him. Besides he is a very handsome man, and a noble-hearted one, with something of the gipsy in his appearance, which, for me, is perfectly charming. Babbie never saw him, unfortunately, or perhaps I should say fortunately, for she must have fallen in love with him on the spot, unless she be made absolutely of ice; and then men of genius have never anything to keep wives upon!

  Alfred is one of the few British or Foreign Figures (a not increasing number I think!) who are and remain beautiful to me;—a true human soul, or some authentic approximation thereto, to whom your own soul can say, Brother!… Being a man solitary and sad as certain men are, dwelling in an element of gloom,—carrying a bit of Chaos about him, in short, which he is manufacturing into Cosmos!… One of the finest-looking men in the world. A great shock of rough dusty-dark hair; bright-laughing hazel eyes; massive aquiline face, most massive yet most delicate; of sallow-brown complexion, almost Indian-looking; clothes cynically loose, free-and-easy;—smokes infinite tobacco. His voice is musical metallic,—fit for loud laughter and piercing wail, and all that may lie between; I do not meet, in these late decades, such company over a pipe!

  Avoiding general society, he would prefer to sit up all night talking with a friend, or else to sit “and think alone.” Beyond a very small circle he is never to be met. There is nothing eventful in his biography, of a kind which would interest the public.

  I saw Tennyson, when I was in London, several times. He is decidedly the first of our living poets, and I hope will live to give the world still better things. You will be pleased to hear that he expressed in the strongest terms his gratitude to my writings. To this I was far from indifferent, though persuaded that he is not much in sympathy with what I should myself most value in my attempts, viz.: the spirituality with which I have endeavored to invest the material universe, and the moral relations under which I have wished to exhibit its most ordinary appearances.

  I dined this day with Rogers…. We had an interesting party of eight. Moxon, the publisher, Kenny, the dramatic poet…. Spedding, Lushington, and Alfred Tennyson, three young men of eminent talent, belonging to literary Young England. Tennyson, being by far the most eminent of the young poets…. He is an admirer of Goethe, and I had a long tête-à-tête with him about the great poet. We waited for the eighth,—a lady, Hon. Mrs. Norton, who, Rogers said, was coming on purpose to see Tennyson.

  We have seen a good deal of Alfred Tennyson lately, and like him quite as well as the man as the poet. He is really a noble creature, with one of the purest, kindest spirits.

  Of the subsequent haunts of Alfred Tennyson we can give no very distinct account…. It is very possible you may come across him in a country inn, with a foot on each hob of the fireplace, a volume of Greek in one hand, his meerschaum in the other, so far advanced toward the seventh heaven that he would not thank you to call him back into this nether world. Wherever he is, however, in some still nook of enormous London, or the stiller one of some far-off sea-side hamlet, he is pondering a lay for eternity:—

	“Losing his fire and active might
	In a silent meditation,
	Falling into a still delight
	And luxury of contemplation.”

That luxury shall, one day, be mine and yours, transferred to us in the shape of a third volume; so come away and don’t disturb him.

  I saw Tennyson first at the house of Coventry Patmore, where we dined together. I was contented with him at once. He is tall and scholastic-looking, no dandy, but a great deal of plain strength about him, and, though cultivated, quite unaffected. Quiet, sluggish sense and thought; refined, as all English are, and good-humored. There is in him an air of general superiority. He lives with his college set,… and has the air of one who is accustomed to be petted and indulged by those he lives with. Take away Hawthorne’s bashfulness, and let him talk easily and fast, and you would have a pretty good Tennyson…. Carlyle thinks him the best man in England to smoke a pipe with, and used to see him much; had a place in his little garden, on the wall, where Tennyson’s pipe was laid up.

	I entreat you, Alfred Tennyson,
	Come and share my haunch of venison.
	I have too a bin of claret,
	Good, but better when you share it.
	Tho’ ’tis only a small bin,
	There’s a stock of it within
	And as sure as I’m a rhymer,
	Half a butt of Rüdesheimer.
	Come; among the sons of men is none
	Welcomer than Alfred Tennyson!

  During two evenings when Tennyson was at their house in London, Mrs. Browning left T. with her husband and William and me (who were the fortunate remnant of the male party) to discuss the universe, and gave all her attention to some certainly not very exciting ladies in the next room…. I made a sketch of Tennyson reading, which I gave to Browning, and afterward duplicated it for Miss S…. He is quite as glorious in his way as Browning, and perhaps of the two even more impressive on the whole personally.

  I hardly think Tennyson has done well, as a poet, in fixing his house in such exceptional conditions. He lives, you know, about twenty miles from us along the coast. The country people are much amazed at his bad hat and unusual ways, and believe devoutly that he writes his poetry while mowing his lawn. However, they hold him in great respect, from a perception of the honor in which he is held by their “betters.” Our housewife here is a friend of his servant, and she entertained us with an account of how said servant had lately been awed. Opening to a ring at the door, when the Tennysons were out, she saw a “tall, handsome gentleman” standing there who, on learning they were not at home turned to go. “What message shall I give?” quoth the maid. “Merely say Prince Albert called.”

  I spent two days with him in June, and you take my word for it he is a noble fellow, every inch of him. He is as tall as I am, with a head which Read capitally calls that of a dilapidated Jove, long black hair, splendid dark eyes, and a full mustache and beard. The portraits don’t look a bit like him; they are handsomer, perhaps, but haven’t half the splendid character of his face. We smoked many a pipe together, and talked of poetry, religion, politics, and geology. I thought he seemed gratified with his American fame; he certainly did not say an unkind word about us. He had read my oriental poems and liked them. He spoke particularly of their richness of imagery and conscientious finish. I need not tell you that his verdict is a valuable one to me. Our intercourse was most cordial and unrestrained, and he asked me, at parting, to be sure and visit him every time I came to England. His wife is one of the best women I ever met with, and his two little boys, Hallam and Lionel, are real cherubs of children.

  A strange shaggy-looking man; his hair, moustache, and beard looked wild and neglected; these very much hid the character of the face. He was dressed in a loosely fitting morning coat, common grey flannel waistcoat and trousers, and a carelessly tied black silk neckerchief. His hair is black; I think the eyes too; they are keen and restless—nose aquiline—forehead high and broad—both face and head are fine and manly. His manner was kind and friendly from the first; there is a dry lurking humour in his style of talking.

  Tennyson is the most picturesque figure, without affectation, that I ever saw; of middle size, rather slouching, dressed entirely in black, and with nothing white about him except the collar of his shirt, which, methought might have been whiter the day before. He had on a black wide-awake hat, with round crown and wide, irregular brim, beneath which came down his long black hair, looking terribly tangled; he had a long pointed beard, too, a little browner than the hair, and not so abundant as to encumber any of the expression of his face. His frock coat was buttoned up across the breast, though the afternoon was warm. His face was very dark, and not exactly a smooth face, but worn and expressing great sensitiveness, though not at that moment the pain and sorrow that is seen in his bust. His eyes were black; but I know little of them, as they did not rest on me, nor on anything but the pictures. He seemed as if he did not see the crowd, nor think of them, but as if he defended himself from them by ignoring them altogether; nor did anybody but myself cast a glance at him…. I heard his voice,—a bass voice, but not of a resounding depth,—a voice rather broken, as it were, and ragged about the edges, but pleasant to the ear. His manner, while conversing with these people, was not in the least that of an awkward man, unaccustomed to society; but he shook hands and parted with them, evidently as soon as he conveniently could, and shuffled away quicker than before. He betrayed his shy and secluded habits more in this than anything else that I observed; though, indeed, in his whole presence I was indescribably sensible of a morbid painfulness in him,—a something not to be meddled with. Very soon he left the saloon, shuffling along the floor with short, irregular steps,—a very queer gait, as if he were walking in slippers too loose for him. I had observed that he seemed to turn his feet slightly inward, after the fashion of Indians.

  Tennyson is a grand specimen of a man, with a magnificent head set on his shoulders like the capital of a mighty pillar. His hair is long and wavy and covers a massive head. He wears a beard and moustache, which one begrudges as hiding so much of that firm, powerful, but finely chiselled mouth. His eyes are large and gray, and open wide when a subject interests him; they are well shaded by the noble brow, with its strong lines of thought and suffering. I can quite understand Samuel Laurence calling it the best balance of head he had ever seen. He is very brown after all the pedestrianizing along our south coast.

  I went to Tennyson’s by one of his approaches, returned by another, and saw his house from top to bottom; and, having now seen all, I do think it is the most beautifully situated house I ever beheld (Rydal Mount would, no doubt, be excepted by those who love mountains better than I do). His park is scarcely less in extent than Lord Clarendon’s, delightfully varied with grove and deep pasture; in one direction, the sea at a mile off, with cliff and promontory and jutting or detached masses of rock; in another, the crest of a down, covered with gorse bloom, rising at a distance and seen over a foreground of woodland; in a third, a wide plain, with the estuary of the Solent to bound it, and river craft coming and going. I saw the children again and liked them much. The younger is certainly good-looking; the other has pleasing manners, kindly and quiet, with an interested gaze. And in the midst of all this beauty and comfort stands Alfred Tennyson, grand, but very gloomy, whom it is a sadness to see, and one has to think of his works to believe that he can escape from himself and escape into regions of light and glory…. Alfred Tennyson came in the morning in an agreeable mood, though it was in the morning. His agreeable moods are generally in the evening. After I was in bed, Mrs. Cameron wrapped a shawl round her head and went down to the beach, and, finding a most magnificent state of things there, she sent for Alfred, who joined her, and whom she left to make the most of it. He seems to be independent of weather. Mrs. Cameron says that in one of the great storms of this year he walked all along the coast to the Needles, which is six miles off. With all his shattered nerves and uneasy gloom he seems to have some sorts of strength and hardihood. There is a great deal in him that is like ———. But his tenderness is more genuine, as well as his simplicity; and he has no hostilities and is never active as against people. He only grumbles.

  Alfred talked very pleasantly that evening to Annie Thackeray and L—— S——. He spoke of Jane Austen, as James Spedding does, as next to Shakespeare! I can never imagine what they mean when they say such things. Alfred has grown, he says, much fonder of you since your two last visits here. He says he feels now he is beginning to know you and not to feel afraid of you, and that he is beginning to get over your extreme insolence to him when he was young and you in your meridian splendor and glory. So one reads your simplicity. 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 was 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 of Jane Austen’s; that they had not been ripped open like pigs.

  Evening at Farringford. Tennyson read “Boadicea” and “The Lincolnshire Farmer.” The latter gains immensely by his giving the words their proper accent, and by the enormous sense of humor thrown into it by his voice and manner in reading it. I asked Tennyson which he preferred of the two poems, “Enoch Arden” and “Aylmer’s Field.” He replied “Enoch Arden,” which he thought was very perfect, and a beautiful story. “Aylmer’s Field” had given him more trouble than anything he ever did. At one time he had to put it aside altogether for six months; the story was so intractable, and it was so difficult to deal with modern manners and conversation. The Indian relative was introduced solely for the sake of the dagger, which was to be the instrument of the lover’s suicide.

  As soon as my London engagements were satisfied, I came down here [Freshwater]. After half an hour’s sail, quarter of an hour’s drive brought me to this quiet and truly English little mansion. The lady of the house received me in the most gentle, gracious manner. She is of the genuine, sweet-blooded, sweet-voiced English style, dressed in black and white, loose-flowing. By this time it was five o’clock. The poet came down-stairs from a hot bath which he had just been taking, quite in an easy unaffected style; a certain slow heaviness of motion belongs essentially to his character, and contrasts strikingly with the alert quickness and sinew energy of Kingsley; head Jovian, eye dark, pale face, black flowing locks, like a Spanish ship-captain or a captain of Italian brigands,—something not at all common and not the least English. We dined, talked, and smoked together, and got on admirably. He reads Greek readily, and has been translating bits of Homer lately in blank verse.

  Soon after came coffee. Tennyson grew impatient, moved his great gaunt body about, and finally was left to smoke a pipe. It is hard to fix the difference between the two men, both with their strong provincial accent—Gladstone with his rich, flexible voice, Tennyson with his deep drawl rising into an impatient falsetto when put out; Gladstone arguing, Tennyson putting in a prejudice; Gladstone asserting rashly, Tennyson denying with a bald negative; Gladstone full of facts, Tennyson relying on impressions; both of them humorous; but the one polished and delicate in repartee, the other broad and coarse and grotesque. Gladstone’s hands are white and not remarkable, Tennyson’s are huge, unwieldy, fit for moulding clay or dough. Gladstone is in some sort a man of the world; Tennyson a child, and treated by Gladstone like a child.

	At the Session of Poets held lately in London,
	The Bard of Freshwater was voted the chair:
	With his tresses unbrush’d, and his shirt-collar undone,
	He loll’d at his ease, like a good-humour’d Bear;
	“Come, boys!” he exclaimed, “we’ll be merry together!”
	And lit up his pipe with a smile on his cheek;—
	While with eye, like a skipper’s, cock’d up at the weather,
	Sat the Vice-Chairman Browning, thinking in Greek.

  Tennyson is remarkable for his plain, blunt way of talking, and utters his straightforward opinions in a simple deep voice somewhat surprising to those who know him by the superfine art indicated by his poems. He is especially addicted in his conversation to strong Saxon expressions, and is full of humorous anecdotes.

  Look at his photograph. Deep-browed, but not deep-lined; bald, but not grey; with a dark disappointment and little hopeful feeling on his face; with hair unkempt, heaped up in the carriage of his shoulders, and with his figure covered with a tragic cloak, the Laureate is portrayed, gloomily peering from two ineffective and not very lustrous eyes, a man of sixty, looking more like a worn and a more feeling man of fifty. His skin is sallow, his whole physique not jovial nor red like Shakespeare and Dickens, but lachrymose, saturnine; lachrymose! and yet, as regards fame and reward, what a successful man he has been! At the age at which Shakespeare was holding horses, he was a pensionary of the Court. When he was very young the critics killed a far greater poet, John Keats, so that they might shower down repentant and self-recalcitrant praise on the successor. When he was but young, an old worn-out poet—a true prose man, but a poet still—contended for the Laureateship after years of toil and pen labor, but the young singer was crowned, and received the Laureate’s wreath, the Laureate’s fame and pension—the glory of which wreath was made purer and higher from that of his predecessor, Wordsworth.

  It was during one of his rambles with Alexander Ireland through the Manchester Exhibition rooms that Hawthorne saw Tennyson wandering about. I have always thought it unfortunate that these two men of genius could not have been introduced on that occasion. Hawthorne was too shy to seek an introduction, and Tennyson was not aware that the American author was present. Hawthorne records in his journal that he gazed at Tennyson with all his eyes, “and rejoiced more in him than in all the other wonders of the Exhibition.” When I afterwards told Tennyson that the author whose “Twice-Told-Tales” he happened to be then reading at Farringford had met him at Manchester, but did not make himself known, the Laureate said in his frank and hearty manner: “Why didn’t he come up and let me shake hands with him? I am sure I should have been glad to meet a man like Hawthorne anywhere.”… Once I remember Miss Mitford carried me on a pilgrimage to a grand old village church with a tower half covered with ivy. We came to it through laurel hedges, and passed on the way a magnificent cedar of Lebanon. It was a superb pile, rich in painted glass windows and carved oak ornaments. Here Miss Mitford ordered the man to stop, and, turning to me with great enthusiasm, said, “This is Shiplake Church where Alfred Tennyson was married!”

	DEDICATED TO
	ALFRED TENNYSON
	OF POETRY—ILLUSTRIOUS AND CONSUMMATE;
	OF FRIENDSHIP—NOBLE AND SINCERE.

  Tennyson receives from his publishers an annual income of about $20,000. In addition to this, the magazines are willing to pay fabulous prices for his poems. The verses beginning

	“What does little birdie say
	In her bed at peep of day?”

were bought by a periodical for $40 a line. The Nineteenth Century gave £300 for “The Ballad of the Revenge.” Robert Bonner, of the Ledger, paid $5000 for “The May Queen.”

  After luncheon saw the great Poet Tennyson in dearest Albert’s room for nearly an hour; and most interesting it was. He is grown very old, his eyesight much impaired. But he was very kind. Asked him to sit down. He talked of the many friends he had lost, and what it would be if he did not feel and know that there was another world, where there would be no partings; and then he spoke with horror of the unbelievers and philosophers who would make you believe there was no other world, no Immortality, who tried to explain all away in a miserable manner.

  Of course I have visited the great Tennyson at Farringford, and remember him showing me the tree overhanging his garden fence, which “Yankees” climb to have a look at him.

  Let me assume to pass verdict, or perhaps momentary judgment, for the United States on this poet—a removed and distant position giving some advantages over a high one. What is Tennyson’s service to his race, times, and especially to America? First, I should say, his personal character. He is not to be mentioned as a rugged, evolutionary, aboriginal force—but (and a great lesson is in it) he has been consistent throughout with the native, personal, healthy, patriotic spinal element and promptings of himself. His moral line is local and conventional, but it is vital and genuine. He reflects the upper-crust of his time, its pale cast of thought—even its ennui. Then the simile of my friend John Burroughs is entirely true, “his glove is a glove of silk, but the hand is a hand of iron.” He shows how one can be a royal laureate, quite elegant and “aristocratic,” and a little queer and affected, and at the same time perfectly manly and natural. As to his non-democracy, it fits him well, and I like him the better for it. I guess we all like to have (I am sure I do) some one who presents those sides of a thought, or possibility, different from our own—different, and yet with a sort of home-likeness—a tartness and contradiction offsetting the theory as we view it, and construed from tastes and proclivities not at all our own.

  I saw the poet to the best advantage under his own trees and walking over his own domain. He took delight in pointing out to me the finest and the rarest of his trees, and there were many beauties among them. I recalled my morning’s visit to Whittier at Oak Knoll, in Danvers, a little more than a year ago…. In this garden of England, the Isle of Wight, where everything grows with such a lavish extravagance of greenness that it seems as if it must bankrupt the soil before autumn, I felt as if weary eyes and over-taxed brains might reach their happiest haven of rest.

  Everybody knows by photograph the manner of man he is,—surely a beautiful face, if ever the adjective could be applied to masculine features, and never more beautiful in any stage of life than now, when age has fixed all the finer features, and lent them a new dignity and majesty. Everybody is familiar with the broad forehead, the clear, deep eyes, the strongly cut nose, and finely chiselled lips, the long hair fringing those temples,—shrines of high thought,—and the genial, massive, and commanding aspect of the poet. Albeit past his eighty-second birthday, Lord Tennyson’s figure is only weakened, not broken, by age. His hair preserves much of its old, dark color, and, excepting in places, is hardly more than “sable-silvered.” His spirit is as alert, his glance as keen and alight, as ever…. On the left side of his neck there lodges a small brown birthmark, very characteristic, as if a drop of dark wine had dropped there, and had stained the skin. His hands are manly and powerful in outline, but delicate and finely formed as those of a poet should be.

  An amusing story has been told regarding him at this stage of the movement on behalf of Tennyson. “Richard Milnes,” said Carlyle one day, withdrawing his pipe from his mouth, as they were seated together in the little house in Cheyne Row, “when are you going to get that pension for Alfred Tennyson?” “My dear Carlyle,” responded Milnes, “the thing is not so easy as you seem to suppose. What will my constituents say if I do get the pension for Tennyson? They know nothing about him or his poetry, and they will probably think he is some poor relation of my own, and that the whole affair is a job.” Solemn and emphatic was Carlyle’s response. “Richard Milnes, 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 you that will be damned.”

	Great man of song, whose glorious laurelled head
	Within the lap of death sleeps well at last,
	Down the dark road, seeking the deathless dead,
	Thy faithful, fearless, shining soul hath passed.
	Fame blows his silver trumpet o’er thy sleep,
	And Love stands broken by thy lonely lyre;
	So pure the fire God gave this clay to keep,
	The clay must still seem holy for the fire.

  No one of those to whom his poetry has been among the greatest blessings of their lives (and such are to be numbered by thousands and tens of thousands) can have failed, though his eyes never beheld the poet, to love him as a dear friend unseen. But apart from personal loss, there still remains a meaning which we understand when we say that the English-speaking world, our English race, feels the poorer for this event. It dispirits and discourages us, because we feel that the last of a long line has departed, and we are anxious and uneasy as to the possibilities of the future.

  Presently I heard a curiously marked and rather heavy footstep coming from an adjoining room, and Tennyson stood before me. I saw a tall man of curiously un-English aspect—as un-English as Lord Beaconsfield—carelessly dressed, almost slovenly, with a noble but somewhat narrow head, a domelike forehead, fine eyes and a tangled black beard streaked with gray. He advanced toward me, gave me his hand—which is, or was, a good deal for an Englishman—he sidled away to the high mantlepiece, leaned against it, and said, with the tone of a vexed schoolboy: “I am rather afraid of you Americans—your countrymen don’t treat me very well. There was Bayard Taylor—” And he went on with a long complaint of a letter which had lately appeared, one which Taylor had not meant for publication, but which an injudicious friend had printed. Strange to say, the effect of his diatribe was not merely to amuse, but to put me entirely at my ease. I had no intention of writing anything about him personally—and have never before done so—and it was evident that with this assurance he would feel that he had said his worst, and would be kind and friendly thenceforward, as proved true. He took me to his study, showed me his favorite view, led me through the garden, and was as kind as possible.

  Few among the noteworthy personages of our time more assiduously shrank from the public gaze, or shunned with a more sensitive persistency the “fierce light” which, in this prying age, beats upon the domestic concerns of eminent men. His life was essentially one of retirement, yielding little to the “literary leeches” who swarm in these “days that deal in ana.” Seldom, during a long life, to be met with in that vortex of wasted ambitions called “fashionable society”—rarely taking part in public affairs—avoiding with something of shyness all kinds of conventional ceremony and popular hero-worship, he “dwelt apart,” in a very literal sense of the words, from the hubbub and turmoil of the great world, and in his country homes, in the company of a few chosen friends, secluded from the reach of the curious, led a life of studious contemplation, shaping into imperishable verse the strivings of the poet’s soul. Although in later life the mellowing influences of age relaxed somewhat the austerity of his isolation and social reserve, he cherished for the most part an emphatic prejudice against, sometimes deepening into a great hatred of, the babbledom that dogs the heels of fame.

  Tennyson once said that anybody could write a poem, but that very few people could read one. His own reading was unique and carefully adapted to his own poetry. In the last years of his life he appeared so old and so prophetic that he might have been Merlin himself. He looked simple, rustic, almost uncouth, but every inch of him a great man. The resemblance to Shakespeare was no fancy, although Shakespeare died before he was sixty. Tennyson thanked God that neither he nor anybody else knew anything about Shakespeare except his plays and his sonnets—that Shakespeare had never been “ripped up like a pig,” a fate which it is rather to be hoped than expected that Tennyson will himself escape. Still, one likes to think of Shakespeare passing quiet years at Stratford-on-Avon, talking and drinking with his neighbours, guarding the fire within. Tennyson was a voracious consumer of books, especially of novels, with a wonderful memory for the classics, and for the great English poets. As an illustration of his delightful simplicity, it may be recorded that when the conversation turned upon the House of Lords, he suddenly exclaimed, “I was just going to say what I would do if I were a lord, and then I remembered I was one.” He was eager for new facts, delighting in converse with travellers and men of science. Metaphysical speculation fascinated him, and, like Dr. Johnson, he looked in strange places for evidence of a future life. Even psychical research interested him, and it was, perhaps, with the same side of his mind that he cared for riddles. He enjoyed his port and his tobacco, as everybody knows.

  Tennyson’s dislike to intrusions upon his solitude showed itself at times in an entire disregard of conventionalities. He allowed himself to indulge in what, in anybody else, would be called downright rudeness. One of his neighbours, with whom he was on good terms, once asked leave to bring to Aldworth a lady who was visiting him—a lady well known in society, as her husband is well known in a world much wider than society. She had, it was carefully explained, a great desire to see the poet, for whose writings her admiration was great. Tennyson assented with amiability, telling his friend to bring her to luncheon on a day named in the following week. When they arrived the poet had forgotten all about it, and, by ill-luck, was in one of his solitary moods. The lady was introduced, the poet bowed. Luncheon was announced and they went in; she sat next her host, who uttered not a word during the meal; at the end of which he rose and retired in silence to his own room. She left the house, to which she had made this pilgrimage in a spirit of hope and reverence, not having once heard so much as the sound of the poet’s voice.

  Most of Tennyson’s friends remember a small room high up at the top of the house [Farringford], formerly very bare except for books, afterwards made more comfortable, to which, when dinner was over, he retired, and, sometimes after half-an-hour’s solitude, invited his friends to join him. We either smoked with him, or, if we did not smoke, we had the privilege of hearing him talk, and of talking with him. This was his temple, or it might be termed his den, where his poems and a few favourite books were kept. It was a sign of more intimate friendship to be allowed to visit him there. At such times, if he was not deterred by shyness, he said just what came into his head. But, in general he was very free and frank; he had nothing to conceal, and he felt so keenly, that if he had, he could not have concealed it. He used to utter strong thoughts in strong language, about recent discoveries in Science, about the politics of the day, about the deeper mysteries of human life. On a few topics he would discourse again and again with undiminished energy. There was, perhaps, no political matters in which he took so deep an interest as the defence of his country.

  Tennyson’s reading of his own poems was part of his poetry. It was illuminative and suggestive, the best of all commentaries. It revealed the significance of his work, the conception which he had formed of the poet’s mission and the poet’s art, and the methods by which he accomplished certain results. Most of all it revealed the man himself behind the poems. A voice is a real thing. It has spirit and life in it. This was especially true of Tennyson’s voice, which was, as Milton says of the angels,

Vital in every part.

To hear him was to know the man; to feel how genuine, how sympathetic, how strong he was. To hear him was to think of him, not as a classic on the shelves of a library, but as a living force in the living world. Thus the voice that fell upon the outward ear became the symbol of the spiritual voice with which he has moved the heart, and expressed the ideals, of the English race in this nineteenth century.

  The little affectations and insincerities of life so troubled him, and his natural shyness, increased by his disabling short sight, so fought with his innate courtesy to all, that general society was always an effort and a burden to him. His fame increased the trouble, and he often told me how he wished he could have had all the money which his books had made without the notoriety. Even a single stranger was, as such and at first, always a trial to him, and his instinctive desire was to hide as much of himself as possible from observation until he found his companion sympathetic. Then he expanded as a flower does in the sunshine, and he never hoarded or kept back any of the profuse riches and splendour of his mind. When Frederick Robertson of Brighton—the great preacher, who had written much and admirably about his poems, and for whom he had a high regard—first called upon him, “I felt,” said Tennyson, “as if he had come to pluck out the heart of my mystery—so I talked to him about nothing but beer.” He could not help it; it was impossible for him to wear his heart upon his sleeve.

  I have always thought that Tennyson’s appearance was too emphatically that of a poet, especially in his photographs: the fine frenzy, the careless picturesqueness, were almost too much. He looked the part too well; but in reality there was a roughness and acrid gloom about the man which saved him from his over romantic appearance.

	IN LOVING MEMORY
	OF
	ALFRED LORD TENNYSON
	WHOSE HAPPIEST DAYS WERE PASSED AT FARRINGFORD IN THIS PARISH,
	BORN AUG. 6TH 1809
	DIED OCT. 6TH 1892
	BURIED IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY OCT. 12TH 1892
	Speak, living Voice! with thee death is not death;Thy life outlives the life of dust and breath.
	ALSO IN LOVING MEMORY
	OF HIS WIFE
	EMILY LADY TENNYSON
	BORN JULY 9TH 1813
	DIED AUGUST 10TH 1896
	“Dear, near and true, no truer Time himself can prove you, tho’ he make you evermore dearer and nearer.”

  When I first saw Lady Tennyson she was in the prime of life. Her two sons, boys of eight and ten years of age perhaps, were at her side. Farringford was at that time almost the same beautiful solitude the lovers had found it years before, when it was first their home…. I recall her figure at dinner as she sat in her soft white muslin dress, tied with blue, at that time hardly whiter than her face or bluer than her eyes, and how the boys stood sometimes one on either side of her in their black velvet dresses, like Millais’ picture of the princes in the tower, and sometimes helped to serve the guests. By and by we adjourned to another room, where there was a fire and a shining dark table with fruit and wine after her own picturesque fashion, and where later the poet read to us, while she, being always delicate in health, took her accustomed couch…. After this the mists of time close over! I can recall her again in the gray dress and kerchief following our footsteps to the door. I can see her graceful movement of the head as she waved her adieux; I can see the poet’s dusky figure standing by her side, and that is all. Sometimes she lives confusedly to the world of imagination as the Abbess of Almesbury; and sometimes, as one who knew her has said, she was like the first of the three queens, “the tallest of them all, and fairest,” who bore away the body of Arthur. She was no less than these, being a living inspiration at the heart of the poet’s every-day life.

  Farringford he never forsook, though he added another home to it; and assuredly no poet has ever before called two such residences his own. Both of them were sweetened by the presence there, so graciously prolonged, of her to whom the lovers of Song owe so deep a debt of gratitude. The second home was as well chosen as the first. It lifted England’s great poet to a height from which he could gaze on a large portion of that English land which he loved so well, see it basking in its most affluent summer beauty, and only bounded by “the inviolate sea.” Year after year he trod its two stately terraces with men the most noted of their time, statesmen, warriors, men of letters, science and art, some of royal race, some famous in far lands, but none more welcome to him than the friends of his youth. Nearly all of those were taken from him by degrees; but many of them stand successively recorded in his verse. The days which I passed there yearly with him and his were the happiest days of each year. They will retain a happy place in my memory during whatever short period my life may last: and the sea-murmurs of Freshwater will blend with the sighing of the woods around Aldworth, for me, as for many more worthy, a music, if mournful, yet full of consolation.

  In many days at Farringford, on this and other later occasions, I came to know your father well, and long walks with him gave me much insight into his ways of thinking and feeling. His natural shyness seemed to have been afterwards considerably mitigated by periods of residence in London, but when I first knew him it was very apparent, and it was a good deal aggravated by his great short-sightedness. I well remember in one of our first walks his alarm at a flock of sheep which he took for tourists. There always seemed to me to be a strange and somewhat pathetic contrast between his character and his position. Nature evidently intended him for the life of the quietest and most secluded of country gentlemen, for a life spent among books and flowers and a few intimate friends, and very remote from the noise and controversies of the great world. Few men valued more highly domestic privacy. But a great gift had made his name a household word among the English race. True privacy, as he bitterly complained, became impossible to him, and troops of tourists, newspaper writers and interviewers were constantly occupied with his doings.

  A great man: strong and steady of purpose, in spite of surface fluctuation; self-withdrawn, yet social and benevolent; noble and rugged and human; a figure so veritably fine that the frankest detail of its human frailties could have injured it only for sentimentalists.

  But if Freshwater has suffered somewhat since Tennyson went to live there, it is infinitely richer for the legacy he has left it. His memory exalts all that is permanent of its old beauty. The village has altered, but the beautiful swelling downs remain; the little sedge-embroidered Yar still makes seaward from Freshwater Gate, where the Channel spray mingles with its infant waters, to Yarmouth, by the Solent, as it did half a century of summers ago; and at Farringford, the poet’s home, all remains as he left it. The personal memories which still linger in the neighborhood must die out one by one as the people of his time pass away; but meanwhile his portrait hangs in most of the old cottages, the village folk still have quaint personal recollections of the great man who moved among them wrapped in a sort of mystery, and a few of those who were privileged to be his intimate friends still reside in the neighborhood.

  This garden is truly “a haunt of ancient peace.” Left there alone with the bard for some time, I felt that I sat in the presence of one of the Kings of Men. His aged look impressed me. There was the keen eagle eye; and, although the glow of youth was gone, the strength of age was in its place. The lines of his face were like the furrows in the stem of a wrinkled oak-tree; but his whole bearing disclosed a latent strength and nobility; a reserve of power, combined with a most courteous grace of manner. I was also struck by the négligé air of the man, so different from that of Browning or Arnold or Lowell.

  His personality [1878] more than satisfied me, though I had been led to anticipate much from Mrs. Cameron’s and Rejlander’s artistic photographs. “The large dark eyes, generally dreamy, but with an occasional gleam of imaginative alertness,” as De Vere describes them, still varied between haunting softness and eager brightness; “the great shock of rough dusky dark hair” that Carlyle wrote of in 1842 had been somewhat subdued, but far from subjugated by time; it revealed more of the poet’s “high-built brow,” but its raven hue was unimpaired. “The massive aquiline face” was still “most massive, yet most delicate,” and still a healthy bronze. His gestures were free and spontaneous, his voice full and musical. It was impossible to believe he was in his seventieth year. His accent and speech both surprised me. I was quite prepared for the fastidious articulation and premeditated hesitation in the choice of words to which so many distinguished English University men are prone. There was a rich burr in his accent, Lincolnshire, I suppose, and a pungent directness in his utterance which were as refreshing as they were unlooked for. Then he evidently possessed the rare knack of getting the very best out of his fellow talkers at the same time that he gave them much more than he got for it.

  He once very kindly offered to lend me his house in the Isle of Wight. “But mind,” he said, “you will be watched from morning till evening.” This was in fact his great grievance, that he could not go out without being stared at. Once taking a walk with me and my wife on the downs behind his house, he suddenly started, left us, and ran home, simply because he had descried two strangers coming toward us. I was told that he once complained to the Queen, and said that he could no longer stay in the Isle of Wight, on account of the tourists who came to stare at him. The Queen, with a kindly irony, remarked that she did not suffer much from that grievance, but Tennyson, not seeing what she meant, replied: “No madame, and if I could clap a sentinel wherever I liked, I should not be troubled either.”

  Great as he was as a poet, Tennyson was greater still as a man and a Christian. What leader has made so profound an impression upon his fellows or won such tribute of praise from the great men of his time!… Precious as are his poems, Tennyson’s character and career are treasures beyond all the achievement of his splendid intellect. Like his own King Arthur, he wore “the white flower of a blameless life.”

  It is to me a pleasure to recall the faces of distinguished people I have met at his house, but most of all to remember his own marked features and grand head. It has been called a “Rembrandt-like dome,” and the poet himself once told me that the greatest compliment he ever had paid him was by two working men, masons, he thought, who passed him in a street, and he heard one say to the other, “There goes a Shakespeare-like fellow!” Nor can I ever forget the pleasant talks with his son Hallam, kindest and best of sons and most unselfish of men, nor the sweet charm of the poet’s wife, always interesting, always full of affectionate kindness and wonderful feeling and good sense, a visit to whom lifted one up out of the ruts of this world on to a higher platform altogether. One felt that to her most fitly of all living people could Spenser’s lines be applied:

	“Whose sweet aspect both God and man doth move
	In her unspotted pleasaunce to delight.”

  Tennyson’s face and demeanor, which have been preserved in the fine portraits of him by Watts and Millais, were so remarkable, that at the first sight one took the impression of unusual dignity and intellectual distinction. His voice, gesture, and bearing impersonated, so to speak, his character and reputation; his appearance fulfilled the common expectation (so often disappointed) of perceiving at once something singular and striking in the presence of a celebrity. Jowett wrote of him after his death that he was a magnificent man who stood before you in his native refinement and strength, and that the unconventionality of his manners was in keeping with the originality of his figure. He enjoyed his well-earned fame and the tokens of enthusiastic admiration that came to him from near and far; he listened to applause with straightforward complacency.

  There was one salient characteristic of Tennyson that must have struck the most unobservant, and that was his direct honesty and simplicity in things small and great. On the pavement of the entrance-hall at Aldworth is the Welsh motto in encaustic tiles, “The Truth against the World.” It was not idly placed there. Such was, indeed, the spirit that informed every act and utterance of the master of Aldworth. He hated shams of every sort; and that is, in great measure, as Mr. Knowles has observed, the key to his detestation of what we call “society.” Its “small insincerities,” without which it could not exist, repelled and disgusted him. He had a quick, almost an imperious way of flashing round on one with a sudden question, somewhat embarrassing to shy folk. A downright answer, or downright confession of ignorance, would win him to most delightful and instructive talk, but pinchbeck omniscience he would exploit relentlessly. As all lovers of his poetry know, that passion for truth and fidelity of detail underlies all his poetic art…. There was the rather unusual custom at Aldworth of every one’s leaving the dinner-table, when the time came for the ladies to rise, and going into an adjoining room, where the men sat down at another table piled with fruit and flowers. On this second table, too, were placed crusty port, and Madeira that had doubled “the Cape” and here, as a special favor, and as being one of Charles Lamb’s “blest tobacco boys,” I was allowed a cigar. If the weather were at all cool, there was a bright fire of logs, and Tennyson, wearing his black velvet skullcap, as he always did indoors during the latter years of his life, sat at the board as supreme as “rare old Ben” at the “Devil in the Strand,” or John Dryden at the “Rainbow,” and poured forth such talk and reminiscences as I never expect to hear again.

  To the Max Müller house on High Street went, once for dinner, bed, and breakfast, during the Long Vacation, Mr. Tennyson. He seems to have been a little trying to his hostess, for he did not like the sauce on the salmon at dinner, and he said so frankly; while he declared, at breakfast, that “mutton chops were the staple of every bad inn in England.” This was all very true, no doubt; but not altogether polite, even for a poet. He made himself agreeable in other respects, however, and, like almost all great men, he smoked a great deal!

Poems by Two Brothers, 1826

  A few years since, a volume of poems of the greatest promise, and indeed of very exquisite performance, was published by Alfred and Charles Tennyson; but their originality was defaced by strange and motley admixtures of the subtlety of Shelley, and a pseudo-simplicity contracted from Wordsworth. Great would have been the praise due to our critics, had they warmly welcomed all that was excellent in these poems, but kindly and leniently pointed out the blemishes that deteriorated from their effect. Instead of this, however, the blemishes were far more praised than the beauties; and the affectations themselves were quoted in all the journals as the most exquisite flowers of fanciful invention. We trust, however, that these young poets will be more wise than their judges. Streams purify themselves by running on,—especially those that come direct from Castaly.

  From Grantham, Eyre went to the grammar-school of Louth, in Lincolnshire, which Charles and Alfred Tennyson had left a year or two before. Their fame as poets was still traditionary in the school, and Edward Eyre seemed to feel a kind of noble envy, at once proud of the fact that two of “our boys” had actually published a volume of poems for which a bookseller gave them ten pounds, and grieved he could not emulate them.

  These juvenilia were written from the age of fifteen upwards. The copyright was sold for ten pounds to Messrs. Jackson, booksellers and printers, of Louth. Mr. Jackson, a member of the firm, died about three years ago, and his son-in-law now has the manuscript of the book. It was published in London by Simpkin and Marshall, who were then laying the foundation of their great connection. Eyre, afterwards so well known as Governor of Jamaica, went to the grammar school a year or two after the Tennysons had left, and found the boys very proud of school-fellows who had published a volume of poems…. It commands a price of about £5 in the book market.

Timbuctoo, 1829

  The splendid imaginative power that pervades it will be seen through all hindrances. I consider Tennyson as promising fair to be the greatest poet of our generation, perhaps of our century.

  What do you think of Tennyson’s Prize Poem? If such an exercise had been sent up at Oxford, the author would have had a better chance of being rusticated—with the view of his passing a few months at a Lunatic Asylum—than of obtaining the prize. It is certainly a wonderful production; and if it had come out with Lord Byron’s name, it would have been thought as fine as anything he ever wrote.

  Why Mr. Tennyson should have only retained one exquisite line in the whole of his prize poem “Timbuctoo”—a poem full of nature and sustained beauty—is to us as great a mystery as why Mr. Ruskin seems anxious to bury for ever in oblivion all his more important writings, which the world, however, will not willingly let die.

Poems, 1830

  Looked over both the Tennysons’ poems at night; exquisite fellows. I know no two books of poetry which have given me so much pleasure as their works.

  The features of original genius are clearly and strongly marked. The author imitates nobody; we recognize the spirit of his age, but not the individual form of this or that writer. His thoughts bear no more resemblance to Byron or Scott, Shelley or Coleridge, than to Homer or Calderon, Ferdúsí or Calidasa.

  If our estimate of Mr. Tennyson be correct, he too is a poet; and many years hence may he read his juvenile description of that character with the proud consciousness that it has become the description and history of his own work.

  It was not Elliott’s billowy incursion of song that foretold the turn of the tide. A little ripple of poetry, edged with silver spray, went quivering up the sand. Some few eyes noticed it, and Triton out to seaward blew his triumphant conch. Enoch Wray was stalwart and real. The Claribels, and Adelines, and Sea Fairies of Mr. Tennyson’s volume of 1830 seem a faint impalpable troop of poetic creatures; yet it was they and their successors who were destined to call back the singing-tide with insupportable advance upon our shores. Man does not live by bread alone. We are all conscious that we have received from Mr. Tennyson something which is real, substantial, and correspondent to our needs.

  In his earliest volume indeed there was a preponderance of manner over matter; it was characterized by a certain dainty prettiness of style, that scarcely gave promise of the high spiritual vision and rich complexity of human insight to which he has since attained, though it did manifest a delicate feeling for Nature in association with human moods, an extraordinary subtle sensibility of all senses, and a luscious pictorial power. Not Endymion had been more luxuriant. All was steeped in golden languors. There were faults in plenty, and of course the critics, faithful to the instincts of their kind, were jubilant to nose them.

Poems, 1832

  Were we not afraid that our style might be thought to wax too figurative, we should say that Alfred is a promising plant; and that the day may come when, beneath sun and shower, his genius may grow up and expand into a stately tree, embowering a solemn shade within its wide circumference, while the daylight lies gorgeously on its crest, seen from afar in glory—itself a grove. But that day will never come, if he hearken not to our advice, and, as far as his own nature will permit, regulate by it the movements of his genius…. At present he has small power over the common feelings and thoughts of men. His feebleness is distressing at all times when he makes an appeal to their ordinary sympathies. And the reason, that he fears to look such sympathies boldly in the face,—and will be metaphysical…. Mr. Tennyson should speak of the sea so as to rouse the souls of sailors, rather than the soles of tailors—the enthusiasm of the deck, rather than of the board. Unfortunately, he seems never to have seen a ship, or, if he did, to have forgotten it. The vessel in which the landlubbers were drifting, when the Sea-Fairies salute them with a song, must have been an old tub of a thing, unfit even for a transport. Such a jib! In the cut of her mains you smoke the old table-cloth. To be solemn—Alfred Tennyson is as poor on the sea as Barry Cornwall—and, of course, calls him a serpent. They both write like people who, on venturing upon the world of waters in a bathing-machine, would insure their lives by a cork-jacket. Barry swims on the surface of the Great Deep like a feather; Alfred dives less after the fashion of a duck than a bell; but the one sees few lights, the other few shadows, that are not seen just as well by an oyster-dredger. But the soul of the true sea-poet doth undergo a sea-change, soon as he sees the Blue Peter; and is off in the gig,

	While bending back, away they pull,
	With measured strokes most beautiful—
	There goes the Commodore!

  I have not read through all Mr. Tennyson’s poems, which have been sent to me; but I think there are some things of a good deal of beauty in what I have seen. The misfortune is, that he has begun to write verses without very well understanding what metre is. Even if you write in a known and approved metre, the odds are, if you are not a metrist yourself, that you will not write harmonious verses; but to deal in new metres without considering what metre means and requires, is preposterous. What I would, with many wishes for success, prescribe to Tennyson,—indeed without it he can never be a poet in act—is to write for the next two or three years in none but one or two well-known and strictly defined metres; such as the heroic couplet, the octave stanza, or the octosyllabic measure of the “Allegro” and “Penseroso.” He would, probably, thus get imbued with a sensation, if not a sense, of metre without knowing it, just as Eton boys get to write such good Latin verses by conning Ovid and Tibullus. As it is, I can scarcely scan some of his verses.

  This is, as some of his marginal notes intimate, Mr. Tennyson’s second appearance. By some strange chance we have never seen his first publication, which, if it at all resembles its younger brother, must be by this time so popular that any notice of it on our part would seem idle and presumptuous; but we gladly seize this opportunity of repairing an unintentional neglect, and of introducing to the admiration of our more sequestered readers a new prodigy of genius—another and a brighter star of that galaxy or milky way of poetry of which the lamented Keats was the harbinger.

  He has lyrical ease and vigour, and is looked upon by sundry critics as the chief living hope of the Muse.

  The greater part of these poems of Tennyson’s which you have sent me we read together. The greater part of them are very beautiful. He seems to me to possess in a higher degree than any English poet, except, perhaps, Keats, the power of writing pictures. “The Miller’s Daughter,” “The Lady of Shalott,” and even the shorter poems, “Mariana,” “Eleänore,” are full of exquisite form and color; if he had but the mechanical knowledge of the art, I am convinced he would have been a great painter. There are but one or two things in the volume which I don’t like. “The little room with the two little white sofas,” I hate, though I can fancy perfectly well both the room and his feeling about it; but that sort of thing does not make good poetry, and lends itself temptingly to the making of good burlesque.

  These early editions are not in the Cambridge or Boston Libraries, and I have not been able to find them anywhere on this side of the Atlantic. An inquiry for them inserted in the Literary World proved as unavailing as the letters I had sent to friends in various parts of the country and in Canada. I did get track of the 1832 volume in several quarters; but all the “trails,” when followed up, led to a single copy belonging to Ralph Waldo Emerson, which has recently disappeared from his library and cannot be traced. He lent it, fifty years ago, to many of his friends—among them, Mr. John S. Dwight, who reviewed it in the Christian Examiner in 1833, and Mrs. Hawthorne (then Miss Peabody), who made a drawing to illustrate “The Lady of Shalott.”

Lotos Eaters

  The “Lotos eaters”—a kind of classical opium-eaters—are Ulysses and his crew. They land on the “charmed island,” and eat of the “charmed root,” and then they sing…. Our readers will, we think, agree that this is admirably characteristic, and that the singers of this song must have made pretty free with the intoxicating fruit. How they got home you must read in Homer:—Mr. Tennyson—himself, we presume, a dreamy lotus-eater, a delicious lotus-eater—leaves them in full song.

  Full of Tennyson’s excellences, no less than of early mannerisms since foregone,—while Gothic in some respects, is charged from beginning to end with the effects and very language of the Greek pastoral poets. As in “Œnone,” there is no consecutive imitation of any one idyl; but the work is curiously filled out with passages borrowed here and there, as the growth of the poem recalled them at random to the author’s mind.

  Contains passages not surpassed by the finest descriptions in the “Castle of Indolence.” It is rich in striking and appropriate imagery, and is sung to a rhythm which is music itself.

  How perfectly in Tennyson’s “Lotos Eaters” is the dreamy haze of the enchanted land he depicts reflected in the verse! How exquisitely do the refinement, the sentiment, the lazy skepticism of the age, find expression in his numbers!

  The exquisite “Lotos-Eaters,” with its wonderful melody, one of the most poetic poems Tennyson ever wrote, and one which, for suggestive beauty of thought as well as for rhythm, ranks among the masterpieces of the English language.

The Palace of Art

  A nobler allegory could not be conceived, or one more fitted to the age, and to the highest intellects of all ages. But it fails just where it ought to have been strongest; and what we have is a series of magnificent pictures in magnificent verse, followed, indeed, by a statement of the moral in very noble stanzas, but by no adequate dramatic presentation of the mode in which the great law of humanity works out its processes in the soul.

  Image comes on image, picture succeeds picture, each perfect, rich in color, clear in outline. When you first read the poem, every stanza startles you with a new and brilliant surprise. There is not a line which the most fastidious could wish away.

  The lesson conveyed in this poem is one of profound importance; and it may be taken as Tennyson’s declaration of faith on the subject of art. The soul wholly intent on the artistic interpretation of life is made to realize that life is other than beauty and its enjoyment.

  The “Palace of Art,” first published in 1833, portrays in richly ornate allegory the mental and moral disasters that are apt to overtake the dilettante who isolates himself from his fellows in the pursuit of beauty. It seems almost a prophecy of what later befell Dante Gabriel Rossetti and a poetical diagnosis of his morbidness and maladies. It may justly be taken as expressing once for all Tennyson’s unswerving conviction that an artist, in order both to preserve his normality and to give his art its widest scope and most vital power, must keep in close sympathy with the common life of his time.

The Lover’s Tale, 1833

  Shortly after the publication of his second volume, Alfred Tennyson printed a poem called “The Lover’s Tale:” this, however, he suppressed, contenting himself with giving a few copies away. It is decidedly unworthy his reputation.

  It was written apparently in 1828, though not printed till five years later; but it doubtless received many after-touches and corrections during the interval. It must have been well known to Arthur Hallam, the period of whose friendship with Tennyson embraced precisely the years between the composition and the printing of it…. With all the blemishes arising from immaturity, “The Lover’s Tale” is a work of indubitable genius and promise. In its wealth and exuberance of imagery, in the intensity of the speaker’s emotion, as well as in those defects of which the author seems at a very early age to have become sensible, it reminds us forcibly of Robert Browning’s first poem, “Pauline, a Fragment of a Confession,” a blank-verse poem of about similar length, written at about the same age, and published, by a curious coincidence, in the same year.

  Had it not been for this poem, the influence of Shelley over Tennyson would hardly have been traceable. It was soon to fade before the much more powerful influence of Keats, the one poet antecedent to Tennyson to whom he has at any time stood distinctly in the relation of a disciple…. In the poem, confused and overheated as its style may sometimes be, we have not only indubitable promise but valuable performance. It is still possible to turn with enthusiasm to this first serious production of the master and to hear in it, through all imitations, the melody of a new voice. It has been said to resemble Robert Browning’s first poem, “Pauline, a Fragment of a Confession,” which is in blank verse, of about similar length, written at about the same age, and published, by a curious coincidence, in the same year.

  As a storehouse of fine imagery, metaphor, and deftly moulded phrase, of blank verse also whose sonorous rhythm must surely be a fabric of adult architecture, the piece can hardly be surpassed; but the tale as tale lingers and lapses, over-weighed with the too gorgeous trappings under which it so laboriously moves.

Poems, 1842

  So Alfred is come out. I agree with you about the skipping-rope, &c. But the bald men of the Embassy would tell you otherwise. I should not wonder if the whole theory of the Embassy, perhaps the discovery of America itself, was involved in that very Poem. Lord Bacon’s honesty may, I am sure, be found there. Alfred, whatever he may think, cannot trifle—many are the disputes we have had about his powers of badinage, compliment, waltzing, &c. His smile is rather a grim one. I am glad the book is come out, though I grieve for the insertion of these little things, on which reviewers and dull readers will fix; so that the right appreciation of the book will be retarded a dozen years.

  It would be far from our design to charge this great writer with want of feeling. A poet without feeling! Fire without warmth and a heart without pulsation! But it is clear that his feelings are always strictly watched by his meditative conscience too strictly, not for wisdom, but for rapture…. Even in these solemn elevations of soul he does not forget to impose a scheme of toils on human life. Among streams and rocks he begins with discourse of virtue; and when he has risen on the ladder of his vision to the stars, we still hear him singing from the solar way, that it is by temperance, soberness, and chastity of soul he has so climbed, and that the praise of this heroic discipline is his last message to mankind…. He has strangely wedded his philosophic lore to the sweetness of poetry. But the poetry would have streamed out in a freer gush, and flushed the heart with ampler joy, had the moral been less obtruded as its constant aim.

  The contents of these volumes are nearly equally divided between poems hitherto unpublished and a revised edition of the main part of those which Mr. Tennyson has already given to the public. The latter are considerably shortened, and many of them much altered, too much so, perhaps, for those who have already formed an affectionate familiarity with them, however much the general effect of the whole work may be improved by some concession to temporary criticism; at any rate Mr. Tennyson will not repent having given up any small peculiarities which stood in the way of his general acceptance as a great English poet.

  I have just been reading the new poems of Tennyson. Much has he thought, much suffered, since the first ecstasy of so fine an organization clothed all the world in rosy light. He has not suffered himself to become a mere intellectual voluptuary, nor the songster of fancy and passion, but has earnestly revolved the problems of life, and his conclusions are calmly noble. In these later verses is a still, deep sweetness; how different from the intoxicating, sensuous melody of his earlier cadence! I have loved him much this time, and take him to heart as a brother. One of his themes has long been my favorite—the last expedition of Ulysses—and his, like mine, is the Ulysses of the Odyssey, with his deep romance of wisdom, and not the worldling of the Iliad. How finely marked his slight description of himself and of Telemachus! In “Dora,” “Locksley Hall,” “The Two Voices,” “Morte D’ Arthur,” I find my own life, much of it, written truly out.

  Tennyson’s poems have been reprinted in Boston, and the reprint is a precise copy of the English edition in size, type, and paper, so that it is difficult to distinguish the two editions. It is reprinted for the benefit of the author, to whom the publisher hopes to remit some honorarium. Emerson and his followers are ardent admirers of Tennyson, and it is their enthusiastic unhesitating praise that induced a bookseller to undertake the reprint. There are some things in the second volume which I admire very much. “Locksley Hall” has some magnificent verses, and others hardly intelligible. “Godiva” is unequalled as a narrative in verse, and the little stories of Lady Clare and the Lord of Burleigh are told in beautiful measure. I am struck with the melody of his verse, its silver ring, and its high poetic fancy; but does it not want elevated thought and manliness? And yet, in its way, what can be more exquisite than Œnone making Mount Ida echo with her complaints? Was her story ever told in a sweeter strain in any language?

  The decade during which Mr. Tennyson has remained silent has wrought a great improvement. The handling in his later pieces is much lighter and freer; the interest deeper and purer;—there is more humanity with less imagery and drapery; a closer adherence to truth; a greater reliance for effect upon the simplicity of nature. Moral and spiritual traits of character are more dwelt upon, in place of external scenery and circumstance. He addresses himself more to the heart, and less to the ear and eye.

  At the present day were this volume to be lost, we possibly should be deprived of a larger specific variety of Tennyson’s most admired poems than is contained in any other of his successive ventures. It is an assortment of representative poems. To an art more restrained and natural we here find wedded a living soul. The poet has convictions: he is not a pupil, but a master, and reaches intellectual greatness.

Ulysses

  Of the “Ulysses” we would say that the mild dignity and placid resolve—the steady wisdom after the storms of life, and with the prospect of future storms—the melancholy fortitude, yet kingly resignation to his destiny which gives him a restless passion for wandering—the unaffected and unostentatious modesty and self-conscious power—the long softened shadows of memory cast from the remote vistas of practical knowledge and experience, with a suffusing tone of ideality breathing over the whole, and giving a saddened charm even to the suggestion of a watery grave—all this, and much more, independent of the beautiful picturesqueness of the scenery, render the poem of “Ulysses” one of the most exquisite (as it has hitherto been one of the least noticed) poems in the language.

  For virile grandeur and astonishingly compact expression, there is no blank-verse poem, equally restricted as to length, that approaches the “Ulysses:” conception, imagery, and thought are royally imaginative, and the assured hand is Tennyson’s throughout.

  One of the healthiest as well as most masterly of all Tennyson’s poems.

Locksley Hall

  Is not this a noble poem, a rich fruit of the imagination and the understanding, full of high and plain thoughts, of fancies crystallising into solid truth, and of truth breaking up into sparkling fancies?

  In saying that “Locksley Hall” has deservedly had so great an influence over the minds of the young, we shall, we are afraid, have offended some who are accustomed to consider that poem as Werterian and unhealthy. But, in reality, the spirit of the poem is simply anti-Werterian. It is man rising out of sickness into health,—not conquered by Werterism, but conquering his selfish sorrow, and the moral and intellectual paralysis which it produces, by faith and hope,—faith in the progress of science and civilization, hope in the final triumph of good.

  Later still, in the 11th century, appeared Toghrai, who in his “Lameyyah,” the title of his principal piece, entered the lists against Shanfarah, the most brilliant of pre-Islamitic poets, and, it seems, furnished our own Tennyson with the model of his “Locksley Hall.”

  To a large portion of the English-speaking race, perhaps to the larger portion of it, Tennyson is pre-eminently the poet of “Locksley Hall.” There are others of his productions which commend themselves with far more effectiveness to minds of a certain order. There are others of them which will be conceded to display more varied if not greater power. But there is no other that has appealed to so wide a circle of sympathies, and, as a result, there is no other that has been so generally read and admired and quoted. Its popularity has never been fitful. The rank which it took at the very outset it has held since with not the slightest abatement.

  To praise the poem in detail would be impossible here, even if fifty years of praise had not made praise something like presumption. It will be enough to say that “Locksley Hall” is one of Tennyson’s greatest successes; one of the most original, most fascinating, most popular short poems of our time.

The Two Voices

  No argument was ever conducted in verse with more admirable power and clearness than that of the “Two Voices.” The very poetry of it magnifies itself into a share of the demonstration: take away the poetry and the music, and you essentially diminish the logic.

  Perhaps, however, the crown of all Tennyson’s verse is “The Two Voices.”… In this poem there is no person who has passed through the searching, withering ordeal of religious doubts and fears as to the spiritual permanence of our existence—and who has not?—but will find in these simple stanzas the map and history of their own experience. The clearness, the graphic power, and logical force and acumen which distinguish this poem are of the highest order. There is nothing in the poems of Wordsworth which can surpass, if it can equal it.

  Up at 6 A.M. and began the day by reading Tennyson. I am acquainted with no spirit so strong, pure, and beautiful. Every line sparkles with empyreal fire, so that it is difficult to make a selection. I will, however, notice “The Two Voices,” simply because Tom [Hirst] has not placed upon it his prize mark. In this poem the tempter to despair is furnished with his best weapons, and foiled though armed cap-à-pie.

  It would be difficult to find another poem in which a conception so purely intellectual is clothed with such richness of imagination and imagery.

  Tennyson, in “The Two Voices,” has solved the problem by giving us in a philosophical poem sublime poetry. While sounding the deeps of personality, and showing the conflict of soul with direst doubt and tormenting fear, his music never falters, but flows on until it falls into peaceful triumph.

The Princess, 1847

  I am considered a great heretic for abusing it; it seems to me a wretched waste of power at a time of life when a man ought to be doing his best; and I almost feel hopeless about Alfred now.

  Fields came out in the afternoon, and brought me an English copy of Tennyson’s new poem, “The Princess.” F. read it in the evening. Strange enough! a university of women! A gentle satire, in the easiest and most flowing blank verse, with two delicious unrhymed songs, and many exquisite passages. I went to bed after it, with delightful music ringing in my ears; yet half disappointed in the poem, though not knowing why. There is a discordant note somewhere.

  His “Princess,” a gorgeous piece of writing, but to me new melancholy proof of the futility of what they call “Art.” Alas! Alfred too, I fear, will prove one of the sacrificed, and in very deed it is pity.

  I had the misfortune to be deeply intoxicated yesterday—with Tennyson’s new poem, “The Princess,” which I shall bring to thee when I return home. I dare not keep it with me. For the future, for a long time at least, I dare not read Tennyson. His poetry would be the death of mine, and, indeed, a pervadence of his spirit would ruin me for the great purposes of life. His intense perception of beauty haunts me for days, and I cannot drive it from me.

  So vividly and clearly does the poet delineate the creatures of his fancy that we cannot help viewing them as actual existences. We find ourselves sympathizing with the Prince, and wishing him success in his arduous suit. We feel the rush of breathless expectation in the hot mêlée of the tourney. We wait anxiously the turn of fate beside the sick-bed of the wounded lover. We give him our heartiest congratulations on his eventual recovery and success. It is only when we set ourselves to criticising, that we are struck with the improbability of that which moved us, and become ashamed of our former feelings.

  A medley of success, failure, and half-success—not even an attempt towards a whole.

  The poem being, as the title imports, a medley of jest and earnest, allows a metrical license, of which we are often tempted to wish that its author had not availed him; yet the most unmetrical and apparently careless passages flow with a grace, a lightness, a colloquial ease and frolic which perhaps only heighten the effect of the serious parts, and serve as a foil to set off the unrivaled finish and melody of these latter.

  In his “Princess,” which he calls a “medley,” the former half of which is sportive, and the plot almost too fantastic and impossible for criticism, while the latter portion seems too serious for a story so slight and flimsy, he has with exquisite taste disposed of the question which has its burlesque and comic as well as its tragic side, of woman’s present place and future destinies. And if any one wishes to see this subject treated with a masterly and delicate hand, in protest alike against the theories that would make her as the man, which she could only be by becoming masculine, not manly, and those which would have her to remain the toy, or the slave, or the slight thing of sentimental and frivolous accomplishment which education has hitherto aimed at making her, I would recommend him to study the few last pages of “The Princess,” where the poet brings the question back, as a poet should, to nature; develops the ideal out of the actual woman, and reads out of what she is, on the one hand, what her Creator intended her to be, and, on the other, what she never can nor ought to be.

  We need hardly say that there are many graceful flights of fancy, many pleasing bits of description, many happy epithets, many fine thoughts, scattered over “The Princess;” but the prosaic so predominates over the poetic element, that it fairly passes our comprehension how it ever passed muster as a whole. Byron certainly contrived to mix up an extraordinary variety of heterogenous subjects in “Don Juan;” but “Don Juan” was composed in a mocking, laughing spirit: it runs over with wit and humor; and we should feel much obliged to any one who would point out either wit or humor in “The Princess.”

  Other works of our poet’s are greater, but none is so fascinating as this romantic tale: English throughout, yet combining the England of Cœur de Lion with that of Victoria in one bewitching picture…. “The Princess” has a distinct purpose,—the illustration of woman’s struggles, aspirations, and proper sphere; and the conclusion is one wherewith the instincts of cultured people are so thoroughly in accord, that some are used to answer, when asked to present their view of the “woman question,” you will find it at the close of “The Princess.”

  Perhaps [“Come down O Maid”] the most beautiful and splendid of all his shorter poems.

  I may tell you that the songs were not an after-thought. Before the first edition came out I deliberated with myself whether I should put songs in between the separate divisions of the poem—again, I thought, the poem will explain itself, but the public did not see that the child, as you say, was the heroine of the piece, and at last I conquered my laziness and inserted them…. Your explanatory notes are very much to the purpose, and I do not object to your finding parallelisms. They must always recur. A man (a Chinese scholar) some time ago wrote to me saying that in an unknown, untranslated Chinese poem there were two whole lines of mine, almost word for word. Why not? are not human eyes all over the world looking at the same objects, and must there not consequently be coincidences of thought and impressions and expressions? It is scarcely possible for anyone to say or write anything in this late time of the world to which, in the rest of the literature of the world, a parallel could not somewhere be found. But when you say that this passage or that was suggested by Wordsworth or Shelley or another, I demur, and more, I wholly disagree.

  “The Princess,” with all her lovely court and glowing harmonies, was born in London, among the fogs and smuts of Lincoln’s Inn, although, like all works of true art, this poem had grown by degrees in other times and places. The poet came and went, free, unshackled, meditating, inditing. One of my family remembers hearing Tennyson say that “Tears, idle Tears,” was suggested by Tintern Abbey: who shall say by what mysterious wonder of beauty and regret, by what sense of the “transient with the abiding?”

  Tennyson’s poem of “The Princess” has been and continues to be singularly underrated. Seldom, in the universal chorus of admiration, and even adulation, which for years his work has excited, do we meet with appreciation of this his longest continuous poem. A poem, moreover, published at the age when a writer usually produces his best work—equally removed from the exuberance of youth and the chill of age, and one which has been altered and retouched during five successive editions, until the utmost effort has been expended, and, in literary form at least, it stands out unsurpassed in perfect finish by anything in modern literature. In this respect, the “Princess” is to Tennyson’s other works what the “Elegy” is to Gray’s. In the adverse criticism it had called forth, we are reminded of Dr. Johnson’s attack upon Milton’s “Lycidas;” indeed, both the “Princess” and “Lycidas” have continuously, and with equal justice or injustice, been reproached for the same fault, that of incongruity of plan…. The poem of “The Princess,” as a work of art, is the most complete and satisfying of all Tennyson’s works. It possesses a play of fancy, of humor, of pathos, and of passion which give it variety; while the feeling of unity is unbroken throughout. It is full of passages of the rarest beauty and most exquisite workmanship. The songs it contains are unsurpassed in English literature. The diction is drawn from the treasure-house of old English poetry—from Chaucer, from Shakespeare and the poets of the Elizabethan age. The versification is remarkable for its variety; while the rhythm, in stateliness and expression, is modelled upon Milton. There are passages, which, in power over language to match sound with sense, are not excelled by anything in “Paradise Lost” for strength, or in Milton’s minor poems for sweetness.

  Is like a piece of Renascence poetry born out of due time. It has the tone of the Elizabethans without their extravagances; though, we must add, without the cause of that extravagance—their Titanic force. It is bright, glowing, and most fascinating.

  Through all emendations and additions, chiefly interesting to the bibliographer, the spirit and intention of the poem remain unchanged. While it served, on the one hand, as a piece to be staged with all the refinement of the poet’s taste, backed by richly-coloured and harmonious scenery, it carried at its heart the poet’s invariable creed.

  A more glorious-seeming but utterly impossible ideal would have won for him unstinted praise, but what was Tennyson if not a plain dealer? He abhorred woman’s wrongs without subscribing fully to the modern programme of woman’s rights. He had the candour to combat some of her claims and the courage to deny some of her pretensions. Less as a matter of principle than as a matter of propriety and expediency he showed where the impulsive Ida would fail…. When revised and rewritten, and with the delicious lyrics interspersed, “The Princess” exhibited so much of the poet’s power that, despite the pervading sense of disappointment, a future of great achievement was confidently predicted for its author.

  “In Memoriam” is the most complete, most rounded to a polished sphere, of the larger poems of Tennyson; the “Idylls of the King” is the most ambitious; “Maud” is the loveliest, most rememberable; and “The Princess” is the most delightful. Holiday-hearted, amazingly varied, charming our leisured ease from page to page, it is a poem to read on a sunny day in one of those rare places in the world where “there is no clock in the forest,” where the weight and worry of the past, the present, or the future, do not make us conscious of their care. There is no sorrow or sense of the sorrow of the world in it. The man who wrote it had reached maturity, but there is none of the heaviness of maturity in its light movement. It is really gay, as young as the Prince himself who is its hero; and the dreams and desires of youth flit and linger in it as summer bees around the honied flowers.

  “The Princess” was both a history and a prophecy. While it lacked nothing of the lyric and picturesque qualities of the earlier poems, it contained the germs of that political and ethical philosophy which we now consider as the distinctive contribution of Tennyson to the thought of the century.

  To a few modern admirers, it is true, this work appeals as the poet’s most satisfying product; but the most of us are content to see in it what Dr. Van Dyke has seen, “one of the minor poems of a major poet.” It pleases us better than it pleased its earlier audience, not because we find in it so much more, but because we expect so much less, of the highest poetic value. If, as those first critics did, we attempt to square the poem with classic standards of narrative and dramatic excellence, or if, like certain later enthusiasts, we claim a place for it as a didactic masterpiece, we must find ourselves committed to the consideration of some difficult problems.

  “The Princess” is undoubtedly Tennyson’s greatest effort, if not exactly in comedy, in a vein verging towards the comic—a side of which he was not so well equipped for offence or defence as on the other. But it is a masterpiece. Exquisite as its author’s verse always is, it was never more exquisite than here, whether in blank verse or in the (superadded) lyrics, while none of his deliberately arranged plays contains characters half so good as those of “The Princess” herself, of “Lady Blanche” and “Lady Psyche,” of “Cyril,” of the two “Kings,” and even of one or two others. And that unequalled dream-faculty of his, which has been more than once glanced at, enabled him to carry off whatever was fantastical in the conception with almost unparalleled felicity.

  The different motives in the poem are not harmonized into any unity of total effect. The pretty extravaganza which forms its central story makes no clear impression upon us. It is too strange to admit our belief; it is not strange enough to enthrall our wonder. It ought to be either more romantic or less so. The songs which fill the pauses of the story and many of the longer passages, if taken separately, are exquisitely beautiful or pathetic; but their effect as they stand in the poem is much diminished by the setting of purely fanciful or half-playful circumstance in which they are placed and by the obvious unreality of all the action. In a word, the whole is, as Tennyson called it, a Medley. There is a great deal of most charming poetry in “The Princess;” but “The Princess” is not a great poem.

In Memoriam, 1850

  I know not how to express what I have felt. My first sentiment was surprise, for, though I now find that you had mentioned the intention to my daughter, Julia, she had never told me of the poems. I do not speak as another would to praise and admire; few of them indeed I have as yet been capable of reading, the grief they express is too much akin to that they revive. It is better than any monument which could be raised to the memory of my beloved son, it is a more lively and enduring testimony to his great virtues and talents that the world should know the friendship which existed between you, that posterity should associate his name with that of Alfred Tennyson.

  His poem I never did greatly affect: nor can I learn to do so: it is full of finest things, but it is monotonous, and has that air of being evolved by a Poetical Machine of the highest order. So it seems to be with him now, at least to me, the Impetus, the Lyrical œstrus, is gone.

  Have you read Tennyson’s “In Memoriam?” It is a wonderful little volume. Few—very few—words of such power have come out of the depths of this country’s poetic heart. They might do much, one would think, to lay the dust in its highways and silence its market towns. But it will not be felt for a while, I suppose; and just now people are talking of the division of last Friday.

  In my opinion it is the first poem which this generation has yet produced. God bless him for the worthy consecration of a true friendship!

  I am thoroughly tired of Oxford, and hope I shall feel jollier again when we sit together on your tower and smoke a weed; but no “In Memoriam,” rather something about airy, fairy Lilians and other sweet creatures without a soul. However, I do not mean to say that Tennyson’s last poems are not very beautiful, yet I do not like those open graves of sorrow and despair, and wish our poets would imitate the good Christian fashion of covering them with flowers, or a stone with a short inscription on it.

  I have just received your kind present of “In Memoriam;” many thanks. What treasure it will be, if I can but think of it and feel about it as you do, and as Mr. T—— does! You said, “The finest strain since Shakespeare;” and afterwards that you and Mr. T—— agreed that it set the author above all modern poets, save only W. W. and S. T. C. My impression of the pieces you recited was that they expressed great intensity of feeling,—but all that is in such poetry cannot be perceived at first, especially from recitation…. But the poems, as a whole, are distinguished by a greater proportion of thought to sensuous imagery, than his old ones; they recede from Keatsland into Petrarchdom, and now and then approach the confines of the Dantescan new hemisphere.

  I have read Tennyson’s “In Memoriam,” or rather part of it; I closed the book when I had got about halfway. It is beautiful; it is mournful; it is monotonous. Many of the feelings expressed bear, in their utterance, the stamp of truth; yet, if Arthur Hallam had been somewhat nearer Alfred Tennyson—his brother instead of his friend—I should have distrusted this rhymed, and measured, and printed monument of grief. What change the lapse of years may work I do not know; but it seems to me that bitter sorrow, while recent, does not flow out in verse.

  There is no excessive or misplaced affection here; it is all founded in fact: while everywhere and throughout it all, affection—a love that is wonderful—meets us first and leaves us last, giving form and substance and grace, and the breath of life and love, to everything that the poet’s thick-coming fancies so exquisitely frame. We can recall few poems approaching to it in this quality of sustained affection. The only English poems we can think of as of the same order, are Cowper’s lines on seeing his mother’s portrait:—

“O that these lips had language!”

Burns to “Mary in Heaven;” and two pieces of Vaughan—one beginning

“O thou know’st for whom I mourn;”

and the other—

“They are all gone into the world of light.”

  In the series of monodies or meditations which compose it, and which follow in long series without weariness or sameness, the poet never moves away a step from the grave of his friend, but, while still circling round it, has always a new point of view. Strength of love, depth of grief, aching sense of loss, have driven him forth as it were on a quest of consolation, and he asks it of nature, thought, religion, in a hundred forms which a rich and varied imagination continually suggests, but all of them connected by one central point, the recollection of the dead.

  He has written the poem of the hoping doubters, the poem of our age, the grand minor-organ-fugue of “In Memoriam.” It is the cry of the bereaved Psyche into the dark infinite after the vanished Love. His friend is nowhere in his sight, and God is silent. Death, God’s final compulsion to prayer, in its dread, its gloom, its utter stillness, its apparent nothingness, urges the cry. Moanings over the dead are mingled with profoundest questionings of philosophy, the signs of nature, and the story of Jesus, while now and then the star of the morning, bright Phosphor, flashes a few rays through the shifting cloudy dark. And if the sun has not arisen on the close of the book, yet the Aurora of the coming dawn gives light enough to make the onward journey possible and hopeful: who dares say that he walks in the full light? that the counsels of God are to him not a matter of faith, but of vision?

  Is cold, monotonous, and often too prettily arranged. He goes into mourning; but, like a correct gentleman, with bran new gloves, wipes away his tears with a cambric handkerchief, and displays throughout the religious service, which ends the ceremony, all the compunction of a respectful and well-trained layman.

  His [M. Taine] impeachment of Lord Tennyson’s great monumental poem as the cold and correct work of a “perfectly gentleman-like” mourner, who never can forget to behave himself respectably and carry his grief like a gentleman conscious of spectators, may be classed for perfection of infelicity with Jeffrey’s selection of the finest lines in Wordsworth’s finest ode for especially contemptuous assault on the simple charge of sheer nonsense.

  The purport of some of the passages is so obscure, one might suspect that even the author himself could not exactly determine what he meant when he wrote them. He might possibly require the associations to recur which then affected him; just as Napoleon, when asked whether he would repeat a certain cavalry charge, if he had to fight the battle over again, replied, that he must be placed in the same circumstances to decide.

  The greatness of “In Memoriam” is the greatness of its delineation of faith and aspiration struggling under the chill shadow of profound doubt. Without its deep gloom, the gleams of light would lose all their special beauty, and any poem that could be less happily described as the reflection of confident optimism, I cannot even imagine. That a certain steady gain in the force of the brighter visions of the human heart, is perceptible towards the close of “In Memoriam,” no one will deny, nor that the conclusion and the prelude may be regarded as the expression of triumphant faith; but even they are the expressions, not of faith unclouded but of faith that has attained a difficult triumph over grave misgivings, faith that no longer perhaps “faintly,” but certainly not in any dogmatic or positive attitude of mind “trusts the larger hope.”

  Has embalmed the memory of his friend in tears more precious than those which were shed by Moschus over the tomb of Bion.

  A study of Tennyson’s “In Memoriam,” in order adequately to fulfil its object, must be as truly a study of the age as of the poem. For the poem stands inseparably related to what is deepest and most vital in the thought of its time; of an age whose devout minds are confessedly eager and earnest in the quest of eternal truth it is preëminently the poetical exponent. This is evident in the fact that ever since its first publication in 1850 it has been the treasure-house from which all reverent thinkers have drawn copiously not only for felicitous expression of truths not easily crystallized in words, but, what is more significant, often for the very spirit and mould of their deepest thoughts.

  The “In Memoriam,” may almost be said to be the poem of nineteenth century scepticism.

  In several of the stanzas of this poem the third and fourth lines may change places without detriment to the sense. But if this change be made, the rhymes at the end of the first and fourth lines are brought nearer together, thus increasing the effect of rapidity as well as the emphasis at the end of the latter line. Moreover, all four lines are then heard at regular intervals, thus increasing also the effect of regularity. The consequence is, that the slow and therefore judicial, the unemphatic and therefore hesitating impression conveyed by the thought of the poem, as arranged in its present form, almost disappears, giving place to the easy and even flow of unwavering assurance.

  Though I have been familiar with the poem from boyhood, it is only in the last few years that the full import of that problem and of the noble solution offered by the poet has become clear to me. The work, as I now understand it, seems to me not only the greatest English poem of the century,—which I have always believed,—but one of the great world-poems, worthy to be placed on the same list with the “Oresteia,” the “Divina Commedia,” and “Faust.” If my brief essay contribute to bring home this conviction to other persons, I shall feel that I have done them a service.

  It is possible that “In Memoriam” is the greatest poetical work produced in England during the last half century; and, in the subject-matter of its thoughts, it rises to a height and penetrates to a depth which Dryden never approached. But even this great poem cannot be read from one end to another without an occasional stop to climb some poetical stile, or fathom some obscure riddle. And the effect of this is that our attention is concentrated upon the parts, until it becomes difficult to form a proper estimation of the whole. We do not conceal our opinion that this is a defect in art.

  “In Memoriam,” viewed from the ground upon which we now stand, is a highly finished expression of the heart-hunger of a soul groping after the fulfilment of its desires and aspirations, searching into science and art, and challenging heaven and earth to yield up the secret of happiness and contentment, and in the primitive instincts of human nature together with the essential truths of the Christian religion—in these alone interpreted in the light of faith—discovering the meaning of life and answers to the questionings of doubt and materialism. In this fact lies the claim of the poem to rank with “Faust” and the “Divina Commedia,” not indeed in degree of greatness and fulness of expression, but in kind. “In Memoriam” is also a world-poem.

  The melodious languors of Tennyson’s early poems soon gave way to the deep-centered activities of thought which were every-where rending men’s lives apart, and the golden clime in which the poet was born was speedily vexed with the rolling cloud and tempest of the great upheaval. The “In Memoriam” is the nineteenth century’s Book of Job, and is inseparably inwoven with the history of the century because it is woven out of the sentiment of the century.

  Of “In Memoriam” it is no more than just to say that it is the best-loved and the most-quoted religious poem of the present age. It is a monumental work of true and noble art, in which the style is worthy of the substance, and the highest thoughts have fashioned for themselves a form of beauty and a voice of music.

  Of necessity this poem is morbid, the product of a mind partly unbalanced by sorrow, and expressing this sorrow to the world as no writer had ever done before. It is the rule of originality that a writer must put something of himself in his work; but Tennyson turned himself spiritually inside out, so that people witness the contortions of his mind much as the accident to Alexis St. Martin a generation ago exposed his digestive organs and enabled curious doctors to note the hidden processes of digestion. It was a sight fit only for doctors to see. In Tennyson’s case, too, there was much doubt at the last whether what was recorded was the normal process, unaffected by the exposure. The doctors generally agreed that the process of digestion was probably interfered with by exposing the digestive organs to unnatural conditions. Certainly thousands have borne as great sorrow as did Tennyson, and have come through suffering to greater strength and clearer faith than did the author of “In Memoriam.”

  “In Memoriam” is a typical product of his art, but it is even more representative of his attitude towards the problems and mysteries of human life; it is the poem which best reveals the secret of his largest popularity. It might have seemed hopeless to expect general favour for an elegy of such unprecedented length on a youth who had “miss’d the early wreath,” leaving a memory cherished by a few friends, who alone could measure the unfulfilled promise. Never, perhaps, has mastery of poetical resources won a more remarkable triumph than in Tennyson’s treatment of this theme.

  “In Memoriam” appeared in 1850. It is the central poem of the century, not only in date, but in scope and character. In its complexity and inwardness, its passion pulsing through every vein of thought, its faltering inconsistencies and slow approaches, it has caught the very movement of the age. In structure it is organic and vital. Supreme among elegies, it is more than an elegy: it is the epic of a soul, rendered not symbolically, as in the “Divine Comedy,” but with a directness native to a scientific age. More than Clough’s “Dipsychus” or Arnold’s “Empedocles,” the poem lays bare to us the interior life of the typical modern mind.

  The broad treatment of the great theme of immortality in “In Memoriam,” based as it was on profound knowledge and insight, has made the poem one of the most significant utterances of the century, while its deep and searching beauty has given it place among those few and famous poems of philosophic quality which are not only admired as classics, but loved as intimate confessions of the spirit.

  I regard “In Memoriam” as the greatest poem of our century, both for substance and for form. It is the most representative poem of the age.

  Tennyson is probably the greatest poet of the Victorian era; without doubt “In Memoriam” is his greatest poem, “most weighted with thought, most varied in feeling” and most perfect in form.

  “In Memoriam” is the most expressive monument which has ever been erected to the memory of a man. It is also one of the most remarkable pieces of self-revelation which can be found in literature. So natural is it, however, and so true to the experience of man, that it will always be read while the English language is spoken. The time must come in the experience of almost every one who speaks our language when this poem becomes his chief counsellor and guide. It reveals to us the nature of our own experiences, and shows us the only path by which we may escape from the anguish of bereavement.

  No books of consolation can console except by sympathy; and in “In Memoriam” sympathy and relief have been found, and will be found, by many. Another, we feel, has trodden our dark and stony path, has been shadowed by the shapes of dread which haunt our valley of tribulation: a mind almost infinitely greater than ours has been our fellow-sufferer. He has emerged from the darkness of the shadow of death into the light, whither, as it seems to us, we can scarcely hope to come. It is the sympathy and the example, I think, not the speculations, mystical or scientific, which make “In Memoriam,” in more than name, a book of consolation: even in hours of the sharpest distress, when its technical beauties and wonderful pictures seem shadowy and unreal, like the yellow sunshine and the woods of that autumn day when a man learned that his friend was dead.

  To take the view taken here is not to bring a charge against Tennyson or to cast doubts on his originality. Indeed, to doubt his originality in the creation of poetic phrases would be to show the extreme of critical incapacity. It is quite possible to hold that in respect of thought and inventive imagination he was not among the most original of our poets; but if ever poet were a master of phrasing he was so, and the fact that he was so is quite unaffected by the further fact that he was sometimes unconsciously indebted to his predecessors.

  It resembles the “Divine Comedy” in that it takes us into the darkest regions, carries us through realms and times of self-conquest, and out again into a place of joy and gladness. We hear the sad dirge of the region of deepest sorrow: sorrow seems to petrify: the Old Yew becomes a symbol of a changelessness which knows no spring…. The poem is a tale of spiritual experience—the record of a soul’s agony; in its earliest stages we might call it tragedy; but the glory of the close transforms it into comedy. It is dramatic, if by that we understand the story of the discipline and development of a man’s character. It is a spiritual drama, the triumphant close of which is the victory of the man who emerges from his lower bondage into the glorious liberty of the children of God.

  Its purely poetic merit is small, and it is easy to understand that a dirge in 129 stanzas cannot fail to weary us in the long run.

Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington, 1852

  Thanks, thanks! I have just returned from Reading and found your letter. In the all but universal depreciation of my ode by the Press, the prompt and hearty appreciation of it by a man as true as the Duke himself is doubly grateful.

  The hero of Waterloo ended his long life in 1852, and a nation was in mourning. Then, if ever, poets, whether laureled or leafless, were called to give eloquent utterance to the popular grief; and Tennyson, of all the poets, was looked to for its highest expression. The Threnode of the Laureate was forthcoming. The public was, as it had no right to be, disappointed. Tennyson’s Muse was ever a wild and willful creature, defiant of rules, and daringly insubordinate to arbitrary forms. It could not, with the witling in the play, cap verses with any man. The moment its tasks were dictated and the form prescribed, that moment there was ground to expect the self-willed jade to play a jade’s trick, and leave us with no decent results of inspiration. For odes and sonnets, and other such Procrustean moulds into which poetic thought is at times cast, Tennyson had neither gift, nor liking. When therefore, with the Duke’s death, came a sudden demand upon his Muse, and that in shape so solemn as to forbid, as the poet conceived, any fanciful license of invention, the Pindaric form seemed inevitable; and that form rendered a fair exhibition of the poet’s peculiar genius out of the question. Strapped up in prescription, and impelled to move by official impulse, his Pegasus was as awkward as a cart-horse. And yet men did him the justice to say that his failure out-topped the success of others.

  The greatest of the laureate poems is the “Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington.” The writing of this was evidently no mere duty work; it was a labour of love, the poem being written very rapidly (it was published within a few days of the Duke’s death), and having all the rush of genuine enthusiasm about it. Not many a hero has had his praises sung in a nobler ode.

  Noble verse, perhaps the noblest he has ever written.

  The “Dirge of Wellington” was a more magnificent monument than any or all of the histories that record that commander’s life.

  This noble poem, the first draught of which was written probably in some haste, and was originally published on the day of the Duke’s funeral, has since been subjected to more than the usual amount of alteration…. In the “Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington” he has soared to lyric heights to which, perhaps, even Pindar never attained. The tolling of the Bell, the solemn and slow funeral march, the quick rush of battle, and the choral chant of the cathedral all succeed each other, and the verse sinks and swells, rises and falls to every alternation with equal power.

  One of the noblest elegiac odes in our language.

Maud, 1855

  I am delighted with Tennyson’s “Maud.” In this poem how much higher and fresher is his laurel than the dipt and stunted ones of the old gardeners in the same garden! Poetry and philosophy have rarely met so cordially before. I wish he had not written the Wellington ode. He is indeed a true poet. What other could have written this verse, worth many whole volumes: “the breaking heart that will not break?” Infinite his tenderness, his thought, his imagination, the melody and softness as well as the strength and stateliness of his verse.

  Tennyson’s “Maud,” which I think wonderfully fine—the antiphonal voice to “In Memoriam.” I tried to read it aloud, but broke down in the middle in a subdued passion of tears.

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

  If an unintelligible or even, for Mr. Tennyson, an inferior work, is still a work which no inferior man could have produced.

  “Maud” is not a world-poem; it is not even a poem of great imaginative range or far-reaching power, but it finds the vulnerable points in modern civilisation, and has its place with those true works of art which will not leave us at rest with ourselves until we know our minds and sound the real depth of our feelings.

  One does not truly enjoy the works of Tennyson who has no appreciation of their artistic beauty, and in a large part of “Maud” the art of the poet is as clearly manifested as in any of his other works. One who cannot take delight in the beauty of this poem can know nothing of the real charm of Tennyson. There are few English poets, perhaps few poets of any land, the music of whose songs is as perfect as that which is found in the verse of Tennyson, and in “Maud” the music is at its sweetest.

  He [Tennyson] held a volume of “Maud” in his hands, and was talking about it, as he loved to do: “I want to read this to you because I want you to feel what the poem means. It is dramatic; it is the story of a man who has a morbid nature, with a touch of inherited insanity, and very selfish. The poem is to show what love does for him. The war is only an episode. You must remember that it is not I myself speaking. It is this man with the strain of madness in his blood, and the memory of a great trouble and wrong that has put him out with the world.”

  “Maud” seems to mark the central point in Tennyson’s development: the period when a complete equilibrium between his plastic powers and his imagination—not so uniformly maintained in his earliest and latest years—had established itself. This was also the most passionate moment of his poetry; no landscape in our literature—perhaps in any literature—is so transfused and empurpled with love overmastering, whilst tinged with approaching madness.

  Its tone is somewhat jarring; its hero, always unsympathetic, at times almost declines into a mere sulky lout; and although it contains at least one unsurpassed utterance of passion, the passage beginning: “I have led her home, my love, my only friend,” a lyric which would alone rank its singer among the great love poets of the world, the poem as a whole must be admitted to contain a larger alloy of rhetoric to a smaller amount of the pure gold of poetry than any other equal number of Tennysonian lines.

  Tennyson never wrote with greater force or with more perfect dramatic and lyric art, and his poem is as striking and effective to-day as at the time of its publication in 1855.

  “Maud,” I fancy, will be remembered for the surpassing beauty of the love lyrics, and not from any lively interest in a hero who is not only morbid but silly.

  The poem in its development strikes all the lyrical chords, although it cannot be said that all of them are touched with equal skill. Probably the sustained and perfect execution of such a varied composition would be too arduous a task for any artist, since it is no easy matter to substitute, dramatically, different phases of passion in one person for different characters. Some considerable mental agility is needed to fall in with the rapid changes of mood and motive which succeed each other within the compass of a piece that is too short for the delineation of character: ranging from melodramatic horror in the opening stanzas to passionate and joyous melodies in the middle part, sinking into a dolorous wail, rising into frenzy, and closing with the trumpet note of war.

Idylls of the King, 1859–92

  The Duke of Argyll called, and left me the sheets of a forthcoming poem of Tennyson. I like it extremely;—notwithstanding some faults, extremely. The parting of Launcelot and Guinevere, her penitence, and Arthur’s farewell, are all very affecting. I cried over some passages; but I am now ἁρτίδακυς as Medea says.

  Get from the publisher Tennyson’s new poem, Four Idyls of the King. Eagerly devour the first of them, which is charming,—reminding one of Chaucer’s “Griselda.”… Finished the Four Idyls. The first and third could have come only from a great poet. The second and fourth do not seem to me so good.

  Will you forgive me if I intrude upon your leisure with a request which I have thought some little time of making—viz., that you would be good enough to write your name in the accompanying volume of your “Idylls of the King?” You would thus add a peculiar interest to the book containing those beautiful songs, from the perusal of which I derived the greatest enjoyment. They quite rekindle the feeling with which the legends of King Arthur must have inspired the chivalry of old, while the graceful form in which they are presented blends those feelings with the softer tone of our present age.—Believe me, always, yours truly.

  “In Memoriam,” “Maud,” “The Miller’s Daughter,” and such like will always be my own pet rhymes, yet I am quite prepared to admit this to be as good as any, for its own peculiar audience. Treasures of wisdom there are in it; and word-painting such as never was yet for concentration, nevertheless it seems to me that so great power ought not to be spent on visions of things past but on the living. For one hearer capable of feeling the depth of this poem I believe ten would feel a depth quite as great if the stream flowed through things nearer the hearer.

  By degrees we got to Guinevere, and he [Tennyson] spoke kindly of S. Hodges’s picture of her at the Polytechnic, though he doubted if it told the story very distinctly. This lead to real talk of Arthur and “Idylls,” and his firm belief in him as an historical personage, though old Speed’s narrative has much that can be only traditional. He found great difficulty in reconstructing the character, in connecting modern with ancient feeling in representing the ideal king. I asked whether Vivien might not be the old Brittany fairy who wiled Merlin into her net, and not an actual woman. “But no,” he said; “it is full of distinct personality, though I never expect women to like it.” The river Camel he well believes in, particularly as he slipped his foot and fell in the other day, but found no Excalibur. Camel means simply winding, crooked, like the Cam at Cambridge. The Welsh claim Arthur as their own, but Tennyson gives all his votes to us. Some have urged him to continue the “Idylls,” but he does not feel it expedient to take people’s advice as an absolute law, but to wait for the vision.

  The crowning work of his genius, needs the rarest voices that have been attuned on the globe to read it, and set free the melody healthy and delicate as the echoes which his own Bugle Song describes:—

	“O hark, O hear, how thin and clear,
	And thinner, clearer, farther going,
	O sweet and far, from cliff and scar,
	The horns of Elfland faintly blowing.”

So from souls on the western shore of the Atlantic, and from the borders of the Pacific, too, the echoes return of his genius.

  We read, at first, Tennyson’s “Idylls,” with profound recognition of the finely elaborated execution, and also the inward perfection of vacancy,—and, to say truth, with considerable impatience at being treated so very like infants, though the lollipops were so superlative. We gladly changed for one Emerson’s “English Traits;” and read that, with increasing and ever increasing satisfaction every evening; blessing Heaven that there were still Books for grown-up people too!

	Then cried the King, and smote the oak,
	“Love, Truth, and Beauty, one, but three,
	This is the Artist’s Trinity!”
	And lo, ’twas Tennyson who spoke.
	For this shall be through endless time
	The burden of the golden rhyme
	Of Tennyson, our Laureate.

  With admirable art, Tennyson has renewed the feelings and the language; this pliant soul takes all tones, in order to give itself all pleasures. This time he has become epic, antique, and ingenuous, like Homer, and like old trouvères of the chansons de Geste. It is pleasant to quit our learned civilization, to rise again to the primitive age and manners, to listen to the peaceful discourse which flows copiously and slowly, as a river on a smooth slope. The mark of the ancient epic is clearness and calm. The ideas were new-born; man was happy and in his infancy. He had not had time to refine, to cut down and adorn his thoughts; he showed them bare. He was not yet pricked by manifold lusts; he thought at leisure. Every idea interested him; he unfolded it curiously, and explained it. His speech never jerks; he goes step by step, from one object to another, and every object seems lovely to him; he pauses, observes, and takes pleasure in observing. This simplicity and peace are strange and charming; we abandon ourselves, it is well with us; we do not desire to go more quickly; we fancy we would gladly remain thus, and for ever.

  There are very fine childish things in Tennyson’s poem and fine manly things, too, as it seems to me, but I conceive the theory to be wrong. I have the same feeling (I am not wholly sure of its justice) that I have when I see these modern-mediæval pictures. I am defrauded; I do not see reality, but a masquerade. The costumes are all that is genuine, and the people inside them are shams—which, I take it, is just the reverse of what ought to be. One special criticism I should make on Tennyson’s new Idyls, and that is that the similes are so often dragged in by the hair. They seem to be taken (à la Tom Moore) from note-books, and not suggested by the quickened sense of association in the glow of composition. Sometimes it almost seems as if the verses were made for the similes, instead of being the cresting of a wave that heightens as it rolls. This is analogous to the costume objection and springs perhaps from the same cause—the making of poetry with malice prepense. However, I am not going to forget the lovely things that Tennyson has written, and I think they give him rather hard measure now.

  We shall discern, as we proceed, more and more clearly, that these “Idylls” constitute essentially one long study of failure. They bring before us that sad doom of vanity, of disappointment, of blighted promises and withered prospects which, here as elsewhere, is seen to await many bright hopes and noble enthusiasms. And they show us the secret of this failure, the dread working of that mystery of iniquity which mars and ruins the fairest of prospects. The Evil comes first; but, following ever upon it, with slow and tardy, as it would appear, but certain and irresistible steps, we shall recognize the noiseless and stealthy tread of the avenging Nemesis of Retribution.

  The real and radical flaw in the splendid structure of the “Idylls” is not to be found either in the antiquity of the fabulous groundwork or in the modern touches which certainly were not needed, and if needed would not have been adequate, to redeem any worthy recast of so noble an original from the charge of nothingness. The fallacy which obtrudes itself throughout, the false note which incessantly jars on the mind’s ear, results from the incongruity of materials which are radically incapable of combination or coherence. Between the various Arthurs of different national legends there is little more in common than the name. It is essentially impossible to construct a human figure by the process of selection from the incompatible types of irreconcilable ideas. All that the utmost ingenuity of eclecticism can do has been demonstrated by Mr. Tennyson in his elaborate endeavor after the perfection of this process; and the result is to impress upon us a complete and irreversible conviction of its absolute hopelessness.

  In nothing has the revival of sound critical taste done better service than in recalling us to the Arthurian Cycle, the dayspring of our glorious literature. The closing books of Malory’s Arthur certainly rank, both in conception and in form, with the best poetry of Europe; in quiet pathos and reserved strength they hold their own with the epics of any age. Beside this simple, manly type of the mediæval hero the figures in the “Idyls of the King” look like the dainty Perseus of Canova placed beside the heroic Theseus of Pheidias.

  Let it be admitted, too, that King Arthur, of the “Idyls” is like an Albert in blank verse, an Albert cursed with a Guinevere for a wife, and a Lancelot for friend. The “Idyls,” with all their beauties, are full of a Victorian respectability, and love of talking with Vivien, about what is not so respectable. One wishes, at times, that the “Morte d’Arthur” had remained a lonely and flawless fragment, as noble as Homer, as polished as Sophocles. But then we must have missed with many other admirable things the “Last Battle in the West.”

  His mannerism is great, but it is a noble and welcome mannerism. His very best work, to me, is contained in the books of “The Idyls of the King,” all of them, and all that has grown out of them.

  But fine as “The Idylls” are, they are not the poet’s finest work, for the reason that they are not of the finest genre.

  Of the “Idylls of the King” I ventured to say, ten years ago, that it was the finest piece of blank-verse since Milton; and it is certainly the only epic in our century which men have been willing to read.

  The men and women in the “Idylls of the King” want life. The personal edges and angles have been worn away in order to establish the type. Enid, Tristram, Vivien, Arthur, even Lancelot who is the most living, are often like those photographs which are made by photographing the faces of a series of politicians or philosophers or artists one on the top of another. We get the general type—or they say we get it—but we do not get a man.

  The very name, Merlin, is fascinating; his story is most romantic, and possesses strong human interest; yet it was left for Tennyson to discover its value. For centuries it lay in the quarry like a block of marble, hieroglyphs scrawled all over it by almanack makers, bits of it chipped off and carried away for doorsteps and pedestals, until the eye that could see beheld the immortal group in the forest of Broceliaunde, and liberated it from the tomb, where, like the enchanter himself, spell-bound it had slept for centuries. That Tennyson has told the story finally it would be unwise to assert. There is as yet no outstanding female embodiment of the “spirit that denies,” and in Vivien is a possible she-Mephistopheles.

  The English poet whose work is most popular in our generation is Tennyson. The popular verdict would doubtless not hesitate to name as his most characteristic achievement “The Idylls of the King.” This group of poems is the most extensive in mass and the most attractive in theme of all his works. Other poems of his have more depth and equal beauty, but they have not appealed so strongly to that innate fondness for a story which characterizes the general reader. Of “The Idylls of the King” all but one are based upon Malory’s “Morte Darthur.” The material is in some of the pieces treated very freely: “The Last Tournament,” for example, is an expansion of a few hints suggested by Malory, but in many poems the borrowing extends to words and phrases, transferred with a slight change of order to the new setting. Tennyson does indeed transform the spirit of some of Malory’s stories so that familiar acquaintances appear new and strange, but he retains enough of his original to indicate where he went for his inspiration.

  Tennyson wished to introduce a character able to furnish a contrast to the erring Lancelot and noble Arthur, typifying the vulgar and superficial life of a gay court; such a personage he found in Gawain. Accordingly, he ventured to introduce the model of chivalry in the inconsistent rôle of a tale-bearer and newsmonger. Worse still, taking a suggestion from Dante, it pleased him to parody a scene in the English mediæval poem, where the king, before his final encounter with Mordred, is visited by the ghost of Gawain. The object of the apparition is to warn the king that the battle set for the morrow must be postponed, on penalty of ruin; in his advent, Arthur’s nephew is surrounded by the blessed spirits of the lords and ladies, whom, in the course of his career as ally of the forsaken, he had been able to succor in time of need. The modern writer also brings on the scene the soul of the champion, but as a visitor from Hell rather than Paradise, blown forever “along a wandering wind,” presenting himself for no useful purpose, but arriving only to take leave of his lord and announce his own destiny, a doom befitting one described as “light in life,” and “light in death.” Had he been acquainted with his great predecessor, Tennyson might have found that Wolfram, when desirous of comparing temporal and spiritual knighthood, chose Gawain as representative of the former, without for that reason finding it necessary to disparage his worth. Surely, in view of the wanton and unnecessary nature of the libel, the spirit is entitled to his remedy, and action for defamation of character should lie before the high court of criticism.

  Because they represent the maturity of his genius and the perfection of his art, his deepest convictions and his highest wisdom, the “Idylls” would seem to form the poem upon which his fame must ultimately rest. The works of Tennyson include more than three hundred quotations from the Bible, and are pervaded with a spirit so deeply devout that men have come to feel that he is essentially our religious poet, and that it is in the realm of religious thought that his genius has found its highest expression. If the “Paradise Lost” looks backward and shows how one sin sent one man into the wilderness; if the “Divine Comedy” looks forward and shows how sins may be punished and purged away, “The Idylls of the King” form a study of the present and offer an outlook upon the great epochs and teachers of the soul.

  The special service of Tennyson to romantic poetry lay in his being the first to give a worthy form to the great Arthurian saga; and the modern masterpiece of that poetry, all things considered, is his “Idylls of the King.”

Enoch Arden, 1864

  The story of “Enoch Arden” as he has enhanced and presented it, is a rich and splendid composite of imagery and illustration. Yet how simple that story is in itself. A sailor who sells fish, breaks his leg, gets dismal, gives up selling fish, goes to sea, is wrecked on a desert island, stays there some years, on his return finds his wife married to a miller, speaks to a landlady on the subject and dies. Told in the pure and simple, the unadorned and classical style, this story would not have taken three pages, but Mr. Tennyson has been able to make it the principal—the largest tale in his new volume. He has done so only by giving to every event and incident in the volume an accompanying commentary. He tells a great deal about the torrid zone, which a rough sailor like Enoch Arden certainly would not have perceived; and he gives the fishing village, to which all the characters belong, a softness and a fascination which such villages scarcely possess in reality…. A dirty sailor who did not go home to his wife is not an agreeable being: a varnish must be put on him to make him shine. It is true that he acts rightly; that he is very good. But such is human nature that it finds a little tameness in mere morality…. The dismal act of a squalid man needed many condiments to make it pleasant, and therefore Mr. Tennyson was right to mix them subtly and to use them freely.

  Is in its author’s purest idyllic style; noticeable for evenness of tone, clearness of diction, successful description of coast and ocean,—finally, for the loveliness and fidelity of its genre scenes.

  What if this earnest, smoothly-flowing narrative in verse shall more vitally than aught else in its author’s rich bequest to the century transmit his name to far generations—and this despite the “jewels five-words-long” that dower “The Princess”—despite the noble harmonies of sound and sense that bear along the pageant chronicle of Arthur and his court? If Enoch Arden” is destined thus to preserve its author’s name as a household word, the reason is not far to seek. The poem is marvelously comprehensive. The essential whole of human life is in it. The stage is small, the mise-en-scène humble; but all the prime movers are present, and the drama is completely played.

  In all the essential features of a moderately long poem, in design, construction, finish, and impression, “Enoch Arden” is excellent. It is probably more perfect than any other of Tennyson’s poems of equal or greater length … and it is more perfect than many of his shorter poems…. Style, tone, atmosphere, feeling, humanity, all blend in one harmony of simplicity; there is also concentration of narrative, avoidance of sensation, repression of false sentiment.

  Whether “Enoch Arden” represented to its countrymen ornateness or simplicity, ethics or drama, to foreigners it represented a typical phase of English literature, and has been put down as the essentially English poem of Tennyson’s collection.

  Never for a moment in “Enoch Arden” is the reader brought into touch with real characters or with the real experiences of sailors. What the poem does is to put before the reader with exquisite deftness what such characters and such experiences become as they pass through the dreamy mind and before the visionary imagination of the poet who wrote the “Lady of Shalott” and “Tears, idle tears.” The poem has none of the savour of fact. It is lyrically falsified from first to last—qualified into grace and music through the poet’s refinement of temperament.

Locksley Hall Sixty Years After, 1886

  It is a great poem, worthy of the maturity of a great poet; and, so far from suggesting to my mind any unpleasing sense of incongruity with the first part of “Locksley Hall,” it enormously enhances the interest and spacious significance of that delightful work. In this respect it is a most felicitous exception to the generally unsatisfactory character of sequels, written in later life, by the authors of early masterpieces. Goethe’s “Helena” has no vital connection with his “Faust.” But the old lover of “Locksley Hall” is exactly what the young man must have become, without any change of character by force of time and experience, if he had grown with the growth of his age.—For that reason alone, the poem in its entirety has a peculiar historical importance as the impersonation of the emotional life of a whole generation. Its psychological portraiture is perfect—its workmanship exquisite—and its force and freshness of poetic fervour wonderful.

  For a writer who first published in the thirties to produce a great poem far on in the eighties is in itself a great achievement; but that this poem should be the continuation of one of the most popular poems of his youth is a still greater achievement. And it must be acknowledged the “Locksley Hall” of to-day is not inferior in workmanship to the poem of forty years ago. There is the same ringing rhythm, the same strength and swing, the same ease and variety that delighted our fathers.

  The nation will observe with warm satisfaction that, although the new “Locksley Hall” is, as told by the Calendar, a work of Lord Tennyson’s old age, yet is his poetic “eye not dim, nor his natural force abated.”… Now that he gives us another “Locksley Hall,” after “Sixty Years,” the very last criticism that will be hazarded, or if hazarded will be accepted, on his work will be, that it betrays a want of tone and fibre. For my own part I have been not less impressed with the form, than with the substance. Limbs will grow stiff with age, but minds not always; we find here all undiminished that suppleness of the poet which enables him to conform without loss of freedom to the stringent laws of men and verse. Lord Tennyson retains his conspicuous mastery over the trochaic metre, and even the least favourable among the instantaneous, or “pistol-graph,” criticisms demanded by the necessities of the daily press, stingily admits that the poem “here and there exhibits the inimitable touch.”

  It is little to say of “Locksley Hall Sixty Years After” that English literature presents no similar instance of a work of anything like the same grade of intellectual achievement produced by a poet at the same period of life. No allowance has to be made for it on account of the age of its author. If it lack at times the gorgeousness of diction which characterized to so marked a degree the original creation it equals it in sustained power, and in energy of expression it occasionally leaves it behind.

  The poem had too much vigor, too much truth, to please the easy-going optimist. But Truth is the test by which all literature must be tried; and “Locksley Hall Sixty Years After” will be recognized, when the verdict of many more than another sixty years has been pronounced upon it, to be one of the clearest, most unsparing pictures of its age to be found in contemporary literature. And when that recognition ripens round it, Tennyson’s sincerity will not be without its reward.

  In fact the second Locksley Hall is, despite a certain falling off of technical skill, still substantially the fulfillment of the first. Whatever unhealthiness exists in the latest poem, is in germ in the original one, and, on the whole, the new poem, notwithstanding a number of frantic opinions and of unpleasant lines, is healthier, more manly, more devout, and even more cheerful, in a deeper sense of the word cheerful, than was the first poem. Neither poem is truly sound. Both suffer from the same disease. Both illustrate Tennyson’s characteristic weakness. But of the two the old man’s poem, if artistically inferior, is ethically higher, and for this reason is far more satisfying.

Dramas

  Harold is no virgin, no confessor, no seer, no saint, but a loyal, plain, strong-thewed, truth-loving son of England, who can cherish a woman, and rule a people, and mightily wield a battle-axe.

  I cannot trust myself to say how greatly I admire the play [“Queen Mary”]. Beyond the immediate effect, you’ll have hit a more fatal blow than a thousand pamphleteers and controversialists; besides this you have reclaimed one more section of English History from the wilderness and given it a form in which it will be fixed for ever. No one since Shakespeare has done that. When we were beginning to think that we were to have no more from you, you have given us the greatest of all your works.

  Has a fold of Shakespeare’s mantle fallen upon Mr. Tennyson’s shoulders? This is the question “Queen Mary” has started in the world of criticism. What seems clear is that the author would have spared his judges much expenditure of ink if, in place of calling his work a drama, he had given it the more flexible and less compromising title of dramatic poem. If by a drama is meant, as certain critics have defined it, a definite action with a beginning, a plot, and a denouement, “Queen Mary” hardly justifies its title. Strongly to desire marriage, to espouse an unamiable prince, to live very unhappily with him, to seek in the persecution of heretics an insufficient consolation, and to die in bed of a fever, constitute a variety of things, undoubtedly, and while they may be brought well together, the result is not, properly speaking, dramatic action. There is rich enough matter for romance; but tragedy is sought in vain in this succession of events. In all dramas it must be felt, however feebly, that there is a plot, a progression in interest; in one word, a crisis. There is nothing of the kind in “Queen Mary.” Why the personages go and come, entering and departing, why they are there, even, and what they are doing, is a mystery. They are there by the poet’s wish, that is all. A series of pictures are unfolded without other connection than that of chronological succession.

  Mr. Tennyson may entertain himself by writing “Mary” and “Harold;” but they might as well have remained unwritten. They are too late. They are not good closet-plays even, which I think Horne’s tragedies are.

  The play [“Becket”] is instinct with dramatic life, and is as various as Shakespeare, and (unlike Shakespeare) nowhere is there any fine writing thrust in because it is fine, and because the poet wanted to say the fine things which arose in his mind. Prophecy has been called “the most gratuitous form of error” by my better half, so I ought to be chary in prophecy; yet I have no hesitation in saying that whatever the critics of to-day may think or say, the critics of to-morrow will unanimously declare Alfred Tennyson to be a great dramatic genius.

  “Mary Tudor,” considered as a poem, contains some passages as beautiful as any Tennyson ever penned; and a few which might well be omitted, as, for instance, the ridiculous song of the Milkmaid, which certain critics, ready to admire anything written by Tennyson, profess to consider “pretty and bucolic.”

  One cannot imagine a more vivid [“Becket”], a more perfectly faithful picture than it gives both of Henry and of Thomas. Truth in history is naturally truth in poetry; but you have made the characters of the two men shine out in a way which, while it never deviates from the impression history gives of them, goes beyond and perfects history. This is eminently conspicuous in the way their relations to one another are traced; and in the delineation of the influence on Thomas of the conception of the Church, blending with his own haughty spirit and sanctifying it to his own conscience. There is not, it seems to me, anything in modern poetry which helps us to realize, as your drama does, the sort of power the Church exerted on her ministers: and this is the central fact of the earlier middle ages.

  The first actor of England, with matchless resources for theatrical presentation, was able more than once to make the performance of a play by Tennyson a notable and picturesque event, but nothing more; nor have those produced with equal care by others become any part of the stage repertory. There are charmingly poetic qualities in the minor pieces, and one of them, “The Cup,” is not without effects,—but even this will not hold the stage,—while “The Falcon” and “The Promise of May” are plainly amateurish. They contain lovely songs and trifles, but when a great master merges the poet in the playwright he must be judged accordingly. “Harold” and “Becket” are of a more imposing cast, and have significance as examples of what may—and of what may not—be effected by a strong artist in a department to which he is not led by compulsive instinct. Their ancestral themes are in every way worthy of an English poet. “Harold,” in style and language, is much like the “Idylls of the King,” nor does it greatly surpass them in dramatic quality, though a work cast in the standard five-act mold.

  Let me add my congratulations to the many on the success of “The Foresters.” I cannot tell you how delighted I was when I felt and saw, from the first, the joy it was giving to our large audience. Its charm is felt by all. Let me thank you for myself for the honour of playing your “Maid Marion,” which I have learned to love, for while I am playing the part I feel all its beauty and simplicity and sweetness, which make me feel for the time a happier and a better woman. I am indeed proud of its great success for your sake as well as my own.

  Tennyson, the dramatist, labours under the serious disadvantage that he has always to enter the lists against Tennyson the lyrist, Tennyson the elegist, Tennyson the idyllist. He is his own most formidable rival, and perhaps in this fact lies the explanation of that respectful coldness which on the whole has marked the reception of his dramas by both the critics and the public. Then, too—though no one could think of saying that Lord Tennyson had been positively infelicitous in his selection of dramatic subjects—there has yet always been some barrier to complete surrender of one’s sympathies to his theme.

General

  He knows that “the poet’s mind is holy ground;” he knows that the poet’s portion is to be

	“Dower’d with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn,
	The love of love;”

he has shown, in the lines from which we quote, his own just conception of the grandeur of a poet’s destiny; and we look to him for its fulfilment…. If our estimate of Mr. Tennyson be correct, he too is a poet; and many years hence may be read his juvenile description of that character with the proud consciousness that it has become the description and history of his own work.

  We all lounged on the beach most peacefully, John Sterling reading some of Tennyson to us, which displays a poetical fancy and intense sympathy with dreamy romance, and withal a pure pathos, drawn direct from the heart of Nature.

  The elegance, the wit, the subtlety of this writer, his fancy, his power of language, his metrical skill, his independence of any living masters, his peculiar topics, his taste for the costly and gorgeous…. Wants rude truth, however, he is too fine…. It is long since we have had as good a lyrist, it will be long before we have his superior…. The best songs in English poetry are by that heavy, hard, pedantic poet, Ben Jonson. Jonson is rude, and only on rare occasions gay. Tennyson is always fine, but Jonson’s beauty is more graceful than Tennyson’s. It is the natural, manly grace of a robust workman.

  So, Tennyson is “pretty,” is he? Did I ever tell you that I heard a lady—a countess—by the order of St. Louis!—say, “The latter part of Homer is certainly very pretty?” These are your critics, O Israel!

  I have been sauntering for some time reading Alfred Tennyson’s poems and other light matters. Alfred’s brother lent me his poems. Beautiful they are, certainly; strong and manly often, but oftener capricious, silly, and affected. Godiva was a most difficult affair, certainly, yet treated with that perfect grace and beauty.

  The peculiarities of his style have attracted attention, and his writings have enough intrinsic merit, probably, to secure him a permanent place in the third or fourth rank of contemporary English poets.

	Not mine, not mine (O Muse forbid!) the boon
	Of borrow’d notes, the mockbird’s modish tune,
	The jingling medley of purloined conceits,
	Out-babying Wordsworth and out-glittering Keats;
	Where all the airs of patchwork-pastoral chime
	To drowsy ears in Tennysonian rhyme!
	*        *        *        *        *
	Let School-miss Alfred vent her chaste delight
	On “darling little room so warm and bright;”
	Chant “I’m a-weary” in infectious strain;
	And catch her “blue fly singing i’ the pane.”
	Though praised by Critics, though adored by Blues,
	Though Peel with pudding plump the puling Muse,
	Though Theban taste the Saxon’s purse controls,
	And pensions Tennyson while starves a Knowles.

  Of all the successors of Shelley, he possesses the most sureness of insight. He has a subtle mind, of keen, passionless vision. His poetry is characterized by intellectual intensity as distinguished from the intensity of feeling. He watches his consciousness with a cautious and minute attention, to fix, and condense, and shape into form, the vague and mystical shadows of thought and feeling, which glide and flit across it. He listens to catch the lowest whisperings of the soul. His imagination broods over the spiritual and mystical elements of his being with the most concentrated power. His eye rests firmly on an object, until it changes from film into form. Some of his poems are forced into artistical shape, by the most patient and painful intellectual processes. His utmost strength is employed on those mysterious facts of consciousness, which form the staple of the dreams and reveries of others. His mind winds through the mystical labyrinths of thought and feeling, with every power awake, in action, and wrought up to the highest pitch of intensity. The most acute analysis is followed, step by step, by a suggestive imagination which converts refined abstractions into pictures, or makes them audible to the soul through the most cunning combinations of sound. Everything that is done is the result of labor. There is hardly a stanza in his writings but was introduced to serve some particular purpose, and could not be omitted without injury to the general effect. Everything has meaning. Every idea was won in a fair conflict with darkness, or dissonance, or gloom.

  The poems of Alfred Tennyson have certainly much of the beauty of a long-past time; but they have also a life so vivid, a truth so lucid, and a melody so inexhaustible, as to mark him the poet that cannot die.

  In perfect sincerity I regard him as the noblest poet that ever lived…. I call him, and think him, the noblest of poets, not because the impressions he produces are, at all times, the most profound, not because the poetical excitement which he induces is, at all times, the most intense, but because it is, at all times, the most ethereal,—in other words, the most elevating and the most pure. No poet is so little of the earth, earthy.

  His intellect at large, though good, is not, I think, great in proportion to the imaginative and poetical elements of it, and, therefore, I do not anticipate that he will take any such place in poetry as is filled by Coleridge or Wordsworth; but I think that his poetry will be felt to be admirable in its kind, and may well displace the poetry of sensibility and beauty which has gone before it in the present age.

  Tennyson belonged to a period in English annals somewhat later than the one with which we are now engaged; but the whirl of political events will not permit a recurrence to the inviting paths of poetry and literature—and he will, perhaps, not regret being placed beside his great compeers. He has opened a new vein in English poetry, and shown that real genius, even in the most advanced stages of society, can strike a fresh chord, and, departing from the hackneyed ways of imitation, charm the world by the conceptions of original thought. His imagination, wide and discursive as the dreams of fancy, wanders at will, not over the real so much as the ideal world. The grottos of the sea, the caves of the mermaid, the realms of heaven, are alternately the scenes of his song. His versification, wild as the song of the elfin king, is broken and irregular, but often inexpressibly charming. Sometimes, however, this tendency leads him into conceit; in the endeavor to be original, he becomes fantastic. There is a freshness and originality, however, about his conceptions, which contrast strangely with the practical and interested views which influenced the age in which he lived, and contributed not a little to their deserved success.

  I have maintained in these Essays that a Theology which does not correspond to the deepest thoughts and feelings of human beings cannot be true Theology. Your writings have taught me to enter into many of those thoughts and feelings. Will you forgive me the presumption of offering you a book which, at least, acknowledges them and does them homage?

  In consequence of this unselfishness and humility, Scott’s enjoyment of Nature is incomparably greater than that of any other poet I know. All the rest carry their care to her, and begin maundering in her ears about their own affairs. Tennyson goes out on a furzy common, and sees it is calm autumn sunshine, but it gives him no pleasure. He only remembers that it is

	“Dead calm in that noble breast
	Which heaves but with the heaving deep.”

He sees a thundercloud in the evening, and would have “doted and pored” on it, but cannot, for fear it should bring the ship bad weather.

	Thy song can girdle hill and mead
	With choirs, more pure, more fair,
	Their locks with wild flower dressed and weed,
	Than ever Hellas bare:
	Theocritus, we cry, once more
	Treads his beloved Trinacrian shore!

  Tennyson, our present English King of Song, crowned as such not more by official nomination than by the general voice, has won to himself the personal attachment of his countrymen in a degree that has been rarely equalled in the history of literature. Among ourselves, Scott is the only other great writer who ever was held during his lifetime in anything like the same universal love and honor. The poetry of Tennyson has charmed all hearts by something more than its artistic qualities. It is as full of nobleness as of beauty. The laurel when he resigns it to another will again be acknowledged by all to be “greener from the brows of him that uttered nothing base.” Everywhere his verse, whether tender or lofty, whether light-hearted or sad, breathes the kindest and manliest nature.

  There came a new poet who, to the science of rhythm, the resources of expression, the gift of epic narration, the deep feeling for nature, to all the caprices of a delightful fancy, to all the favorite ideas, noble or morbid, of modern thought, knew how to join the language of manly passion. Thus, as it were summing up in himself all his forerunners, he touched all hearts; he linked together all admirations; he has remained the true representative, the last expression and final, of the poetic period to which he belongs. Tennyson reigns to-day almost alone in increasing and uncontested glory.

  I do not think Tennyson a great and powerful spirit in any line—as Goethe was in the line of modern thought, Wordsworth in that of contemplation, Byron even in that of passion; and unless a poet, especially a poet at this time of day, is that, my interest in him is only slight, and my conviction that he will not finally stand high is firm.

  Scarcely any other artist in verse of the same rank has ever lived on such scanty revenues of thought (both pure, and applied or mixed) as Tennyson. While it cannot be pretended that he is a great sculptor, he is certainly an exquisite carver of luxuries in ivory; but we must be content to admire the caskets, for there are no jewels inside. His meditation at the best is that of a good leading-article; he is a pensioner on the thought of his age. He is continually petty with that littleness of the second degree which makes a man brag aloud in avoiding some well-known littleness of the first degree. His nerves are so weak that any largish event—a Crimean War or a Volunteer movement—sets him off in hysterics. Nothing gives one a keener insight into the want of robustness in the educated English intellect of the age than the fact that nine-tenths of our best-known literary men look upon him as a profound philosopher. When wax-flowers are oracular oaks, Dodona may be discovered in the Isle of Wight, but hardly until then.

  Alfred Tennyson never seems to have cared much for the Sonnet; at least, he has very rarely clothed his own thoughts in this form. One sonnet of his, of moderate merit, I can remember; another, found in the earlier editions of his Lyrical Poems, has dropt out of the later.

  We have in the present day one grand master of blank verse, the Poet Laureate. But where would he have been if Milton had not gone before him; or if the verse amidst which he works like an informing spirit had not existed at all? No doubt he might have invented it himself; but how different would the result have been from the verse which he will now leave behind him to lie side by side for comparison with that of the master of the epic.

  Mr. Tennyson is not a great poet, unquestionably not a poet of the first rank, all but unquestionably not a poet of the second rank, and probably—though no contemporary perhaps can settle that, not even at the head of poets of the third rank, among whom he must ultimately take his place.

  Tennyson is a born poet, that is, a builder of airy palaces and imaginary castles. But the individual passion and absorbing preoccupations which generally guide the hands of such men are wanting to him; he found in himself no plan of a new edifice; he has built after all the rest; he has simply chosen amongst all forms the most elegant, ornate, exquisite. Of their beauties he has taken but the flower. At most, now and then, he has here and there amused himself by designing some genuinely English and modern cottage. If in this choice of architecture adopted or restored, we look for a trace of him, we shall find it, here and there, in some more finely sculptured frieze, in some more delicate and graceful sculptured rosework; but we shall only find it marked and sensible in the purity and elevation of the moral emotion which we shall carry away with us when we quit his gallery of art…. Without being a pedant, he is moral; he may be read in the family circle by night; he does not rebel against society and life; he speaks of God and the soul, nobly, tenderly, without ecclesiastical prejudice; there is no need to reproach him like Lord Byron; he has no violent and abrupt words, excessive and scandalous sentiments; he will pervert nobody. We shall not be troubled when we close the book; we may listen when we quit him, without contrast, to the grave voice of the master of the house, who repeats the evening prayers before the kneeling servants. And yet, when we quit him, we keep a smile of pleasure on our lips…. The people who have listened to Tennyson are better than our aristocracy of townsfolk and bohemians; but I prefer Alfred de Musset to Tennyson.

  Tennyson, to be sure, has been childishly petulant; but what have these whipper-snappers, who cry “Go up, baldhead,” done that can be named with some things of his? He has been the greatest artist in words we have had since Gray—and remember how Gray holds his own with little fuel, but real fire. He had the secret of the inconsumable oil, and so, I fancy, has Tennyson.

  Tennyson (let me not blaspheme against the Gods!) is not a musical, tho’ in other respects (particularly in that of phrase-making) a very wonderful writer.

  Tennyson’s verse is apt to be too richly dressed, too perfumed. The clothing is costlier than the thoughts can pay for. Hence at every re-reading of him he parts with some of his strength, so that after three or four repetitions he has little left for you…. Tennyson’s poetry has often too much leaf and spray for the branches, and too much branch for the trunk, and too much trunk for the roots. There is not living stock enough of thought deeply set in emotion to keep the leaves ever fresh and fragrant.

  As for Tennyson, he has, it must be owned, never failed in anything, for he has been careful not to overweight himself…. His melody is stately and rich, but not overwhelming. He delights by grace, but never swells by passion. The light of consummate art gleams forth from all he does, but his moments of high exaltation of soul are very rare.

  Tennyson, though an aristocratic poet, strikes his roots into the common soil; not into the uncultured to be sure; he demands the best tilth and a deep garden loam; but he is no hot-house plant, as Morris, and Rossetti, and Swinburne are. How easy is his touch, how broad and universal the elements with which he deals!

	Not of the howling dervishes of song,
	Who craze the brain with their delirious dance,
	Art thou, O sweet historian of the heart!
	Therefore to thee the laurel-leaves belong,
	To thee our love and our allegiance,
	For thy allegiance to the poet’s art.

  The milk and water of which his books are composed chiefly, make it almost impossible to discover what was the original nature of the materials he has boiled down in it.

  Tennyson possesses a consummate science of rhythm, the rarest resources of phrase, taste, grace, distinction, every sort of cleverness, of research, of refinement. He is the author of lyric pieces unequalled in any language, some of infinite delicacy, some of engrossing pathos, some quivering like the blast of a knightly horn. He lacks only one thing, one supreme gift, the pinion-stroke which sweeps Ganymede into the empyrean, and casts him panting at Jupiter’s feet. He sins by his very elegance; he is too civilized, too polished. He has tried every style—grave, gay, and passionate—the idyl, the ode, and the elegy, mock-heroics, epics, drama. There is no style in which he has not had brilliant success, and yet it may be said that he has explored nothing thoroughly. There are ardors in passion, troubles in thought, bankruptcies of the ideal in life, which Tennyson’s note is not equal to expressing. His poetry (whether as matter of inspiration or of determination I do not know) keeps too strictly to the region of decencies and conventions.

  I cannot say that Mr. Tennyson’s life-long tone about women and their shortcomings has ever commended itself to my poor mind as the note of a very pure or high one…. It may not be the highest imaginable sign of poetic power or native inspiration that a man should be able to grind a beauty out of a deformity or carve a defect into a perfection; but whatever may be the comparative worth of this peculiar faculty, no poet surely ever had it in a higher degree or cultivated it with more patient and strenuous industry than Mr. Tennyson. Idler men, or men less qualified and disposed to expend such length of time and energy of patience on the composition and modification, and rearrangement and rescison and reissue, of a single verse or copy of verses, can only look on at such a course of labor with amused or admiring astonishment, and a certain doubt whether the linnets, to whose method of singing Mr. Tennyson compares his own, do really go through the training of such a musical gymnasium before they come forth qualified to sing. But for one thing, and that a thing of great price, this hard-working poet had never any need to work hard. Whatever the early imperfection of his ear, no man was ever born with a truer and more perfect eye. During fifty years he has never given us a book without unquestionable evidence of this. Among his many claims and credentials as a poet, there is none more unimpeachable or more clear. Nor can any kind of study be more helpful or delightful to the naturally elect student of poetry than that which traces through the work of any poet the vein of colour or of sentiment derived from his earliest or deepest impressions of nature.

  Mr. Tennyson is, as all know, before all things an artist; and as such he has formed for himself a composite and richly-wrought style, into the elaborate texture of which many elements, fetched from many lands and from many things, have entered. His selective mind has taken now something from Milton, now something from Shakespeare, besides pathetic cadences from the old ballads, stately wisdom from Greek tragedians, epic tones from Homer. And not only from the remote past, but from the present; the latest science and philosophy both lend themselves to his thought, and add metaphor and variety to his language. It is this elaboration of style, this “subtle trail of association, this play of shooting colors,” pervading the texture of his poetry which has made him be called the English Virgil. But if it were asked, which of his immediate predecessors most influenced his nascent powers, it would seem that, while his early lyrics recall the delicate grace of Coleridge, and some of his idyls the plainness of Wordsworth, while the subtle music of Shelley has fascinated his ear, yet, more than any other poet, Keats, with his rich sensuous coloring, is the master whose style he has caught and prolonged.

  To those who enquired with open minds it appeared that things which good and learned men were doubting about must be themselves doubtful. Thus all around us, the intellectual light-ships had broken from their moorings, and it was then a new and trying experience. The present generation which has grown up in the floating condition, which has got used to it and has learned to swim for itself, will never know what it was to find the lights all drifting, the compasses all awry, and nothing left to steer by except the stars. In this condition the best and bravest of my own contemporaries determined to have done with insincerity, to find ground under their feet, to let the uncertain remain uncertain, but to learn how much and what we could honestly regard as true, and believe that and live by it. Tennyson became the voice of this feeling in poetry; Carlyle in what was called prose, though prose it was not, but something by itself, with a form and melody of its own. Tennyson’s poems, the group of poems which closed with “In Memoriam,” become to many of us what the “Christian Year” was to orthodox Churchmen. We read them, and they become part of our minds, the expression in exquisite language of the feelings which were working in ourselves.

  Tennyson may, without extravagance, be called the poet of women. His portrait gallery is second only to that of Shakespeare in extent and splendor. His canvas is not so distinct and vivid as that of the great master, but the coloring is rich, and the outlines are drawn with a graceful pencil. Has he not created for us “The lily maid of Astolat”—“Elaine the fair, Elaine the loveable,” and Maud with her exquisite face?… and that peerless wonder in “The Princess,” who may well be matched with Wordsworth’s “perfect woman.”… He has drawn for us also the “Airy fairy, Lilian,” with her arch innocence and her simple tricksomeness, a creature who seems too dainty for the responsibilities of the wife and the mother; and the variable Madeline, with her many moods, each sweeter than the last, her “delicious spites and darling angers,” and those lovely frowns and lovelier smiles which chase one another in quick succession, like bursts of sunshine and shadow over the bosom of the purple hills. Then we have the faintly smiling Adeline, “scarce of earth nor all divine,” with more of imagination than her sportive sisters, and deeps of thought to be plumbed by no superficial observer. We seem to rise higher still, to approach a more elevated grade of womanhood in sweet pale Margaret, with her aspect of painful thought and the tearful power and pathos of her eloquent eyes.

  Certainly amongst his Peers there is no such Poet.

  When the history of the ideas of the nineteenth century comes to be written, it will be recognised that Tennyson contributed to form the national mind far more powerfully than young men can now understand.

  There were few of Tennyson’s poems which I did not know by heart without any attempt to commit them to memory.

  Like all young Englishmen thirty years ago who had any affinity for literature, I was a reader of Tennyson. He has had few warmer admirers than I have been, and I now appreciate better than ever the finish and the concentrated strength of his workmanship. But I am not aware that Tennyson has had any great influence upon me, as there is little in his art that is available as an example for a writer of prose, and the special qualities of his genius belong to himself alone.

  Tennyson has been to the last two generations of Englishmen the national teacher of poetry. He has tried many new measures; he has ventured on many new rhythms; and he has succeeded in them all. He is at home equally in the slowest, most tranquil, and most meditative of rhythms, and in the rapidest and most impulsive.

  Tennyson came just before I left college. Mr. Emerson, who was always kind to young people, brought one of the early copies from England and lent it freely. We used to copy the poems in manuscript and pass them from hand to hand. I used to say that I was the first person who ever quoted “Locksley Hall” in public address. I did so in a college part; and whether the brag is literally true or not, I know I must have been among the earliest.

  Let us attempt to get rid of every bias, and, thinking as dispassionately as we can, we still seem to read the name of Tennyson in the golden book of English poetry. I cannot think that he will ever fall to a lower place, or be among those whom only curious students pore over, like Gower, Drayton, Donne, and the rest. Lovers of poetry will always read him as they will read Wordsworth, Keats, Milton, Coleridge, and Chaucer. Look his defects in the face, throw them into the balance, and how they disappear before his merits! He is the last and youngest of the mighty race, born, as it were, out of due time, late, and into a feebler generation…. He is with Milton for learning, with Keats for magic and vision, with Virgil for graceful recasting of ancient golden lines, and in even the latest volume of his long life, “we may tell from the straw,” as Homer says, “what the grain has been.”

  Who represents the height of the Victorian period, brought poetic style again to the Miltonic or Virgilian point of finish. In him a just conception of the work as a whole, a consciousness of his aims and how to attain them, together with a high standard of verbal execution, are combined with richness of fancy and sensuous magnificence worthy of an Elizabethan poet in all his glory.

  Here is no touch [“Vastness”] of ingenuity, no trace of “originality,” no single sign of cleverness; the rhymes are merely inevitable—there is no visible transformation of metaphor in deference to their suggestions; nothing is antic, peculiar, superfluous; but here is epic unity and completeness, here is a sublimation of experience expressed by means of a sublimation of style. It is unique in English, and for all that one can see it is like to remain unique this good while yet. The impression you take is one of singular loftiness of purpose and a rare nobility of mind. Looking upon life and time and the spirit of man from the heights of his eighty years, it has been given to the Master Poet to behold much that is hid to them in the plain or on the slopes beneath him, and beholding it to frame and utter a message so lofty in style and in significance so potent that it sounds as of this world indeed but from the confines of experience, the farthest kingdoms of mortality.

  The distance which separates the author of “In Memoriam” and the “Idylls of the King” from the author of the “Georgics” and the “Æneid,” is almost as considerable as the distance which separates all other poets now living from the author of “In Memoriam.” It measures indeed the difference between a great classic whose power and charm will be felt in all ages, and in all regions co-extensive with civilised humanity, and a poet who will be a classic intelligible to those only who speak his language and drink his thoughts…. It is well that we should not accustom ourselves to talk and judge loosely. It requires very little critical discernment to foresee that among the English poets of the present century the first place will ultimately be assigned to Wordsworth, the second to Byron, and the third to Shelley. Had the Poet Laureate fulfilled the promise of the Morte d’Arthur he might have stood beside his master, and England might have had her “Æneid.” As it is, he will probably occupy the same relative position in English poetry as De Quincey occupies in English prose. Both are Classics—immortal Classics—but they are Classics in fragments.

  We may examine the series of Tennyson’s volumes with care, and scarcely discover a copy of verses in which he can be detected as directly urged to expression by the popular taste. This prime favourite of the educated masses never courted the public, nor strove to serve it. He wrote to please himself, to win the applause of the “little clan,” and each round of salvos from the world outside seemed to startle him in his obstinate retirement. If it grew easier and easier for him to consent to please the masses, it was because he familiarised them more and more with his peculiar accent. He led literary taste, he did not dream of following it.

  In regard of his poetical works, his fame already stands too high for panegyric; and times to come will surely confirm the contemporary verdict which places him in the front rank of English singers; side by side, indeed, with the greatest names. No man, with the exception of Shakespere, has wielded with greater vigor, grace, and variety that noblest metre of the English language, the blank verse, the use and value of which Lord Tennyson may almost be said to have revived…. Truly the echoes of Lord Tennyson’s song will live forever and forever, and roll from soul to soul. I do not wonder at the serene self-possession, I had almost said the intellectual complacency, of the poet. He has achieved! Behind him lies the completed task of the spirit of the nineteenth century, especially in his own land, rendered articulate. Beyond all dispute he is the representative singer of the great reign of Victoria, having no doubt for worthy contemporaries, rather than rivals, such names as Browning, Swinburne, and those of one or two others; but by the sure judgment of posterity, as well as the reverence and estimation of his day, he reigns the laurelled king of English singers.

  In spite of cliques and affectations which would exalt this or that minor favourite to a high place on Parnassus at our bard’s expense, he is, and for sane and healthy criticism he will always remain, the prince of English Victorian singers. No petty detractions can make our Tennyson less than he is; no odious comparisons can mar his kingship. We may admit, indeed, the magic music of Swinburne’s earlier voice, now, alas! grown hoarser; we may allow the broad human insight of Browning’s dramatic genius, too often spoiled by the easy optimism of the well-fed, well-clad, middle-class Englishman; we may admire the even flow of Matthew Arnold’s studied criticism of life, running calm and clear as his own beloved Isis by Godstow nunnery; but no rival can displace that many-sided Tennyson from his throne of song, or make him any less than our chief of poets. He has compassed the gamut of poesy in all its moods and passions. In this matter we need not wait for the judgment of posterity; for we are posterity: he has lived to hear after ages praise him.

	When that great shade into the silence vast
	Through thinking silence passed;
	When he, our century’s soul and voice, was hushed,
	We who,—appalled, bowed, crushed,—
	Within the holy moonlight of his death
	Waited the parting breath;
	Ah, not in song
	Might we our grief prolong.
	Silence alone, O golden spirit fled!
	Silence alone could mourn that silence dread.

	’Tis o’er; he leaves the lonely road
	Whereon he fared so long;
	The gentlest, brightest Knight of God,
	The Galahad of Song.
	The only one of all our knights
	Who wore the snow-white mail,
	And turned from strife and lewd delights,
	To seek the Holy Grail.
	His path was not where factions cry,
	Or where the fretful moan;
	Where life runs stillest he passed by,
	In maiden thought alone.
	Calm were the ways his white steed trod,
	Calm were the heavens and air;
	Where’er he rode and sang of God
	The world grew very fair.

  Akin to this clear-cut form was the accuracy and minuteness of observation which made him so successful a painter of domesticated Nature. His achievements in this direction may have been over-estimated. He is not immaculate; the songster nightingale is always with him, the female, not the male, as it is in Nature: he was probably misled by the myth of Philomela. But the minuteness and independence of his powers of observation are acknowledged on all hands, and go naturally with the clear vision of the artist in words. Yet here again the result is to impair the true poetic effect, except of course in the purely landscape poems, where this power gave him an advantage over every predecessor in that genre of poetry.

	Thy place is with the Immortals. Who shall gauge
	Thy rank among thy peers of world-wide song?
	Others, it may be, touched a note more strong,
	Scaled loftier heights, or glowed with fiercer rage;
	But who like thee could slay our modern Doubt?
	Or soothe the sufferers with a tenderer heart?
	Or dress gray legends with such perfect grace?
	Or nerve Life’s world-worn pilgrims for their part?
	Who, since our English tongue first grew, has stirred
	More souls to noble effort by his word?
	More reverent who of Man, of God, of Truth?
	More piteous of the sore-tried strength of Youth?
	Others of grosser clay might stoop to fire
	Ignoble lusts with prostituted lyre.
	Thy chaste, white Muse, loathing the Pagan rout,
	Would drive with stripes the goatish Satyr out.
	Thy love of Righteousness preserved thee pure;
	Thy lucid genius scorned to lurk obscure,
	And all thy jewelled Art and native Grace
	Were consecrate to God and to the Race.

	All ages thou hast honored with thine art,
	And ages yet unborn thou wilt be part
	Of all songs pure and true!
	Thine now the universal homage due
	From Old and New World—aye, and still the New!

	Not England’s pride alone, this Lord of Song!
	We—heirs to Shakespeare’s and to Milton’s speech—
	Claim heritage from Tennyson’s proud years:
	To us his spacious, splendid lines belong—
	We, too, repeat his praises, each to each—
	We share his glory, and we share your tears.

  Tennyson need not fear comparison with the scholarly poets who preceded him. Jonson and Milton were very learned men. Dryden was a good scholar, and may be thought to have achieved, at least once, when he translated the Twenty-ninth Ode of the third book of Horace, the feat of surpassing his own author. Samuel Johnson, a real poet at his best, knew Juvenal as well as Tennyson knew Lucretius. But not one of them, not even rare Ben himself, was more thoroughly imbued with the spirit of classical antiquity than the author of the “Lotos Eaters.” Milton is sometimes the servant rather than the master of his learning. He was not unfrequently, if one may say so without irreverence, the worse for Latin. Tennyson was the better for everything he read.

  I will remind the reader that for any estimation of Tennyson’s final opinions, the later poems are, of course, the most significant. In his last years there was inequality of poetic merit,—an inequality which admitted nevertheless of more than one masterpiece;—but there was no decline in intellectual grasp and power. Nay, I think that all will some day recognise that there was even a lifelong gain in wisdom; a lifelong maintenance of that position, in sympathy with and yet in advance of his time, which was first manifest when “In Memoriam”—now so intelligible and so orthodox—perplexed as well as charmed the reading public of its earlier day.

  Tennyson kicks the beam weighed against any of his robust predecessors. By a sort of eclectic selection he seems to have resumed in himself many of the qualities of his immediate masters, but always with a loss of their primal vigor and freshness. Compared with Keats he is Praxiteles after Pheidias; compared with Wordsworth he is a chanter in a cathedral choir beside a Druid of the dawn.

  When he separated himself from men he did not banish himself from their interests. It was an isolation for the purposes of his craft; it was not an alienation from thoughts and movements of his day. He still kept a keen eye and ready heart for the stirring interests of his time. You have only to recall how he sang, in his earliest songs warning men not to fall into subjection to the tyranny of the past. He was no vassal of the past, but the child of his age, and as a child of his age his face was set forward. As a child of his age he ripened with ripening thoughts of the men and women round about him; he realized that whatever the lavish inheritance of the past was, the future was before us, and in reverent mindfulness of it we must do our present work.

  Tennyson was not persecuted. He was not (and more honour to him for his clearness) even misunderstood. I have never met with the contention that he stood an inch ahead of the thought of his time. As for seeing through death and life and his own soul, and having the marvel of the everlasting will spread before him like an open scroll,—well, to begin with, I doubt if these things ever happened to any man. Heaven surely has been, and is, more reticent than the verse implies. But if they ever happened, Tennyson most certainly was not the man they happened to.

  The pre-Raphaelites have for twenty years exercised a great influence on the rising generation of English poets. All the hysterical and degenerate have sung with Rossetti of “damozels” and of the Virgin Mary, have with Swinburne eulogized unnatural license, crime, hell, and the devil. They have, with Morris, mangled language in bardic strains, and in the manner of the “Canterbury Tales;” and if the whole of English poetry is not to-day unmitigatedly pre-Raphaelite, it is due merely to the fortunate accident that, contemporaneously with the pre-Raphaelites, so sound a poet as Tennyson has lived and worked. The official honours bestowed on him as Poet Laureate, his unexampled success among readers, pointed him out to a part at least of the petty strugglers and aspirants as worthy of imitation, and so it comes about that among the chorus of the lily-bearing mystics there are also heard other street-singers who follow the poet of the “Idylls of the King.”

  His poetry, with its clearness of conception and noble simplicity of expression, its discernment of the beautiful and its power of revealing and shaping it with mingled strength and harmony, has become an integral part of the literature of the world, and so long as purity and loftiness of thought expressed in perfect form have power to charm, will remain a possession for ever.

  In the case of no English poet is it more important and interesting than in the case of Tennyson, considering the excellence of his own work in the first place, and altogether unparalleled extent of his influence in the second, to trace the nature and character of his poetical quality.

  Tennyson’s chief claim to fame is that, coming after so many poets who had worked in the same field, the field of nature, he is still himself—not Wordsworth, nor Shelley, nor another. To this he attained mainly by two things—brevity and precision, but mainly by precision.

  More than any other poet Tennyson has accepted the verdicts of modern science. Not in any just sense a scientist himself, he was, nevertheless, an observer of nature and a student of the teachings of the scientists. These teachings, with a fulness and clearness never before known in poetry, he gave to mankind in a literary form.

  A poet who is, as I think, the English poet of this age of ours: the poet who will, in the event, hold much the same predominant position in English literature of the nineteenth century as Pope holds in English literature of the eighteenth century. There are perhaps only two poets who could dispute that position with Tennyson—Wordsworth and Browning…. There is not a poem of Tennyson’s—or there is hardly one—which is not the outcome of prolonged meditation and prolonged labour: the result of the supreme art which veils itself in the achievement. His work is classical in the best sense of the word: classical in its “happy coalescence of matter and style.” If you take up Pope’s “Essay on Criticism”—and I know of no more valuable aid to judgment on the subject with which it deals—and test Tennyson’s work by the rules and precepts so admirably given there, you will find they bear the test singularly well…. I find Tennyson peculiarly and completely English in his cast of thought. He is distinguished, in the highest degree, by what I regard as the dominant English characteristic—reverence for duty as the supreme law of life: the subordination of all the ideals to the moral ideal.

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

  The man whom the English have been extolling, while their French neighbours have been picking his great rival to pieces, was obviously a noble and conscientious artist in verse, a poet fully impressed with the sacred nature of his calling, a critic of remarkably acute powers, a widely read and observant student of nature and of men, an intensely spiritual seeker after God, a loyal patriot and friend—in short, an ideal character of a high and attractive type. Such was the man—except perhaps in his rôle of critic—that had stood out behind the Poems; such is the man that stands out behind the Biography. But neither the poetry nor the memoir proves Tennyson to have been the profound seer that Mr. Gladstone and other contemporaries have thought him, nor does either source of information disprove the charge that he was morbidly sensitive, and hence unable to give full expression to the lyric passion that was a fundamental constituent of his nature…. If, however, Tennyson’s longer poems are to be forgotten save for selected passages, and if his reputation is to rest on the shorter poems in his early manner and on the tradition of his artistic command of rhythm and diction; if, furthermore, the world that is now sated with composite art renews its youth through some stirring crisis, and once more demands passion as a primary element of literature, will the bard of Aldworth and Farringford hold his own against the poet of the streets of Paris? Surely he will in spite of all that may be said about the suppression of his passion and about the deficiencies of his longer poems. Should the world come once more to demand passion, it will be Byron that will eclipse Tennyson, not Alfred de Musset, whose star will nevertheless rise splendidly in the poetic heavens.

  The emancipation of woman had made but little progress in Tennyson’s day. He may not have contributed much to this end, but his ideas were certainly in advance of prevailing opinion. There is one respect, however, in which his view of womankind never can be excelled; that is, his reverential regard for her, and the ennobling and glorifying enthusiasm with which he treats the mutual love of man and woman. This is only what we should expect, when we remember his affection for his mother and for his wife, as well as all the story of his relations to his family.

  Tennyson was profoundly in touch with his age. There were not many men who understood it better than he. He had his finger on its pulse, and his ear upon its breast; so that he heard its very heart beat. He was acquainted with its problems, and he knew also the tremendous issues involved in the attitude of his age toward them.

  You can get the poetry of the Alhambra only by moonlight; and to a mind so wholly poetic as Tennyson’s it seemed possible to get the poetry of conduct only by seeing it in the moonlight of departed years. To-day is matter-of-fact in dress and design; mediævalism was fanciful, picturesque, romantic. Chivalry was the poetry of the Christ in civilization; and the knight warring to recover the tomb of God was the poem among soldiers, and in entire consonance with his nature, Tennyson’s poetic genius flits back into the poetic days, as I have seen birds flit back into a forest. In Tennyson’s poetry two things are clear. They are mediæval in location; they are modern in temper. Their geography is yesterday, their spirit is to-day; and so we have the questions and thoughts of our era as themes for Tennyson’s voice and lute. His treatment is ancient: his theme is recent. He has given diagnosis and alleviation of present sickness, but hides face and voice behind morion and shield.

  Why is it that the “Idylls of the King” and the “In Memoriam” contain so many passages that the world will quite willingly let die? If the chief thing in poetry were the style, one part of these poems would be as good as another, for the style is uniform throughout. The answer, in all such cases, is that “soul is form and doth the body make.” What is wanting in the weak places of these great poems is the soul, the poetic vision and enthusiasm, the absence of which no style can compensate.

  Tennyson lived in the time of a conflict more crucial and frightful than any European struggle, the conflict between the apparent artificiality of morals and the apparent immorality of science. A ship more symbolic and menacing than any foreign three-decker hove in sight in that time—the great, gory pirate-ship of Nature, challenging all the civilisations of the world. And his supreme honour is this, that he behaved like his own imaginary snubnosed rogue. His honour is that in that hour he despised the flowers and embroideries of Keats as the counter-jumper might despise his tapes and cottons. He was by nature a hedonistic and pastoral poet, but he leapt from his poetic counter and till and struck, were it but with his gimcrack mandolin, home.

  Tennyson’s keen and abiding interest in religious and ethical problems is shown throughout his work; his fervid patriotism was conspicuous at all times, and he took his side unhesitatingly in the great political issues of the day.