Tennyson. ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON, was born on August 6, 1809, at Somersby, a little village among the wolds of Mid-Copyright 1892 in U.S. by J. B. Lippincott Company. Lincolnshire; rector of which was the poet's father, Dr George Clayton Tennyson; his mother, Elizabeth Fytche, being also of a Lincolnshire family. Dr Tennyson was a man of marked physical strength and stature; accomplished in fine art, music especially, and in language; in temperament imaginative, verging at times upon gloom. These conditions, more or less, reappeared in his family. Johnson's pretty phrase about his own college, 'a nest of singing birds,' might be applied to the Somersby parsonage. Alfred was third of seven sons; amongst whom his two elder brothers, Frederick and Charles, became notable as poets. Frederick Tennyson in 1854 published Days and Hours; in 1890, the Isles of Greece; in 1891, Daphne and other Poems. A notice of Charles (Tennyson) Turner will be found in its place. To the latter Alfred was devoted with a child's warm love and reverence, which break forth tenderly in the In Memoriam, and later in the Midnight of June 30, 1879. Charles, whilst both were little, 'gave him a slate, and bade him write some verses about the flowers in the garden.' The slate was soon covered; Charles read the lines, and gave them back with a 'Yes, you can write.' Some ten years later, Poems by Two Brothers (1826) witnessed to that profound early union of heart and soul between Charles and Alfred. Of this little book it will be enough to say that it shows, even if imitatively and immaturely, wide range in subject and varied command of metre. Already in fact, at thirteen or fourteen, Alfred had written a long epic, of which Dr Tennyson, an excellent and well-read scholar, said: 'If that boy dies, one of our greatest poets will have gone;' a paternal prophecy the fulfilment of which perhaps justifies its preservation. Byron at this time was the leading modern favourite of the brothers. At the fatal news from Missolonghi (April 1824) the world seemed at an end to Alfred, who, boylike, commemorated the event by carving upon a sand-stone rock—Byron is dead.
As the landscape of Warwickshire has been traced in Shakespeare's early work, so in Tennyson's appears that of Lincolnshire; a county far more picturesque than many fancy, in its great contrasts of hill and level, wold and fen. Here was his earliest education through the most susceptible years of life. Near Somersby is Louth, where the brothers found their classical school; near also, Horncastle, where grew up meanwhile for Alfred the hope of youth, the blessing and mainstay of after years.
In February 1828 the 'two brothers' joined Frederick at Trinity College, Cambridge, finding presently a group of friends among whom many fulfilled the promise of their May: J. Spedding, J. M. Kemble, W. H. Brookfield, R. C. Trench, R. M. Milnes, C. Merivale, H. Alford, E. Lushington; and, above all (October 1828), Arthur Henry (born Feb. 1811), eldest son to Henry Hallam, the great historian. Early as he was lost (September 1833), sufficient proof exists that the commanding influence which the youthful Arthur held over his most gifted contemporaries, in that golden day of English youth; that the pictures of the past and anticipations of the future set forth by Tennyson in the famous memorial poem—all were fully justified by his singular ability, by his depth and tenderness of thought, by his beauty of nature. In this genial atmosphere Tennyson's genius rapidly advanced. To this time belong The Lover's Tale (written 1827, published 1879), a blank verse rhapsody, and Timbuctoo, the poem (also in blank verse) by which he gained the university prize of 1829. Both pieces in general colour and in single phrases anticipate the style by which Tennyson presently became (and remains) known to us: he has already left the preclusive attempts of early youth; he has fairly found himself. After the appearance of Timbuctoo, A. Hallam wrote: 'I consider Tennyson as promising fair to be the greatest poet of our generation, perhaps of our century.'
His father's death broke off Tennyson's Cambridge residence early in 1831. In the autumn he made that visit to the Pyrenees recorded in the beautiful All along the valley. Meantime his first published volume, Poems, chiefly Lyrical, had appeared (1830), followed by a similar small series in 1833. 'That greatest of persecutions, Silence,' has never been our poet's fate; he was now pelted and praised, misjudged and rightly judged—the common lot. But he turned to profit friend and enemy, dropping many less mature pieces, steadily studying and practising an art in which supreme excellence is never dissociated from intensity of labour: poor, and under the cloud of grief for the friend who had passed away in Vienna, 'and beloved of the gods.' To these nine years, spent partly in Lincolnshire, mostly in London, we owe many of his most lovely lyrics; some, the subjects of which were reworked or much expanded in later years. Together with the best of his earlier work, these were published in 1842. Henceforth his place was secure. 'He is decidedly the first of our living poets,' wrote Wordsworth in 1845, 'and I hope will live to give the world still better things.' 1847 brought The Princess: a Medley, or melodrama, we might say, written in blank verse, almost lyrical in its music; gay and fanciful as The Midsummer Night's Dream in plot, yet with the seriousness of life in its underlying chivalrous moral.
Should we say that to 1850 Tennyson might look back as his Annus Mirabilis? This year, at least, in succession to Wordsworth, brought him the laureateship; and in this fell the publication of In Memoriam, that elegiac treasury in which the poet has stored the grief and the meditation of many years after his friend's death; a series of lyrics which in pathos, melody, range of thought and depth of feeling may stand with the Canzoniere of Petrarch and the Sonnets of Shakespeare. But that early widowhood of love was now happily closed (June 13) by the marriage—to which the poet, and we with him, may we not add? owe so much—with Emily Sellwood, in Shiplake Church, Oxfordshire.
Tennyson and his wife now settled at Twickenham. In 1851 they went through the Riviera to Florence, returning by Milan. In 1852 Hallam, his eldest son, was born; the great funeral Ode upon Wellington was written. By the close of 1853 the passion for his old country life, freedom and peace, and fair English scenery, carried him to Farringford in Freshwater. There Lionel was born (1854); and there, with Sir John Simeon as his highly prized neighbour, and frequent brief journeys interspersed, Tennyson lived uninterrupted till 1870; having built meanwhile a house for summer and autumn residence (Aldworth), high up on the farther side of Blackdown by Haslemere: at once nearer London, and farther from that intrusion which is one of the penalties paid for fame. Some of these journeys may be recorded; they form no unimportant part of a poet's tranquil life. They included the Western Highlands, Staffa and Iona (1853); Inveraray (1858), to visit the Duke of Argyll, another much-valued friend; Portugal (1859); Cornwall (1860); the Pyrenees again (1861); Derbyshire and Yorkshire (1862); Weimar and Dresden (1865); Dartmoor and Salcombe (1867); North Wales (1869).
Lyrical poetry pure—free from divergence down those 'two byways' (as Schiller named them), the didactic and the rhetorical—in perhaps every one of its forms, had been now set forth by the poet: the lyric of melody, of passion, of description, of travel, of incident, of reflection; the ballad, the personal song, the elegy, the national ode. And the idyll—'that little picture' which has a natural but not exclusive affinity with country life and narrative gently suffused with passion—was also included. It remained for the poet to carry further these modes of song, and to add in particular the drama proper, with the humorous monodramatic presentation of character in rustic forms of speech.
In Maud: a Monodrama (1855), Tennyson has given to the personal lyric (for In Memoriam, strictly speaking, is elegiac in movement) its deepest and widest extension. As with Hamlet, a taint of mental distraction is supposed to affect the narrator and hero of the drama; leading him to over-colour, through the light of personal feeling, his pictures of the world about him, the politics and manners of the time; whilst the same stress of nature has raised the songs which paint his love-story, in its triumph and its despair, to a sevenfold fire of passionate melodious beauty. Lyrical poetry, unless it were among the Æolic singers of early Greece (so far as the writer knows), has attempted no such scheme as that presented by Maud; and the poem may perhaps in popular estimate have suffered the penalty which thoroughly original treatment seldom escapes.
As Maud extends the domain of Tennyson's lyrical work in depth of feeling, variety of subject, and area traversed by the narrative, so that 'small picture,' the idyll, epic and historic, tale and character-picture, was treated by him henceforth. To this enlargement witness first the
Enoch Arden and Aylmer's Field of 1864. The poet's power had reached full maturity; his art was perfect. He now took up seriously that Celtic legend which, lacking adequate Teutonic material, England for eight centuries has welcomed as her national epic—our old Arthurian story, to which he had preluded already by a few beautiful sketches; and in 1859 appeared the first four of the twelve Idylls of the King, completed by instalments in 1870, 1872, 1885.
Spread thus over more than a quarter of a century, this is the poet's most important, probably his greatest work. Space fails here to do more than indicate the misty, much-debated origin, and development of the romance of Arthur. At first the real Prince, or Gwledig, defeating his foes in the old Welsh kingdom of Strathclyde, perhaps about 500 A.D.; his figure then goes through some centuries of obscurity, reappearing by the middle of the 12th, first as a European conqueror in Geoffrey of Monmouth; then presently in his mythical aspect, possibly confused with some pagan divine hero, Lord of the Round Table; finally passing to Avalon, rex futurus. From that time the tale spread like wildfire over Europe, and soon after 1200 Arthur's name and deeds were celebrated in many romances, English, Welsh, French, German, even Icelandic; collecting about him other scattered Celtic legends, notably that of the Grail (see note at end of this article). Malory lastly, that 'most unintelligent compiler' (A. Nutt, Studies on the Legend of the Holy Grail, 1888), but gifted with an admirable style, selecting from the vast mass of material, framed, treating it freely in the manner of his day, the Morte Darthur (published by Caxton 1485); whence Tennyson has taken, again varying them, most of his legends: that of Geraint and Enid, from Lady C. Guest's admirable translation of the Welsh Mabinogi, being the chief exception.
Picturesque as the old story however became, throughout its many modifications of five centuries and more, it could hardly have been lifted above a poetic-antiquarian interest for Englishmen generally, were its early tone and quality and adventures repeated in modern verse, however skilful. This difficulty has been felt before with regard to our own and other medieval romances. Ariosto by skilful serio-comic treatment gave a vitality which is now well-nigh exhausted to the legends of Charles. Spenser turned Arthur and his knights into an allegory, with constant allusion to Elizabethan times. And similarly that quidlibet audendi potestas which Horace with absolute right claimed for the poet has been everywhere exercised by Tennyson in the Idylls. Throughout they are interfused with the vital atmosphere of the Victorian age; and by no other mode could the king return, as it were, and live again in the hearts and souls of men. The fitness of this great change, which presents Arthur not as noble, guilty, and repentant, but as noble, blameless, self-restrained, and far-sighted, is of course fairly debatable. Tennyson has throughout imaged the king as he appeared to the old Welsh historian: 'God has not made, since Adam was, the man more perfect than Arthur.' Nor is it easy to see how the needful central figure for the Arthurian epic, as imagined in its unity by Tennyson, a figure at once human and ideal, could otherwise have been presented; although whether in his picture the delicate balance has or has not been kept may perhaps long remain a fit subject for critical declamation.
The noble Dedication (as indeed was already noted in the prelude to the Morte d'Arthur of 1842) sets forth the main underlying intention of the Idylls. They are a 'new-old' tale, 'shadowing
Sense at war with Soul;’ the individual conscience with its innate aim towards truth and purity; its temptations, falls, and conquests; its final victory, discovered only in the true life which follows our brief breathing space upon earth. This inward conflict is displayed under the guise of the legend how Arthur, through the Round Table (that late mediæval picture of imagined chivalry), the knights and ladies of the court, tries to lead a crusade on behalf of a perfect civilised Christian state; how also, through the sins and selfishness of his followers, the fair Utopia is here never realised. It is a tale, not a mere allegory, although allegory be occasionally introduced; the persons, each in turn, are the mixed human characters of all times, whilst one clearly defined quality figures some bias or aim which dominates the life of each, working evil or good for himself and his fellow-creatures. Jealousy marks Geraint; woman’s longsuffering patience, Enid; in Elaine we have pure passionate devotion, cast away by Lancelot in favour of guilty love for Guinevere; in Percivale and Galahad, ideals of a devoted holiness, souls of whom the world is not worthy, and who have little place in its struggles, yet whose example the world could not afford to miss. But we narrow and harden by such definitions the rich flexible vitality of Tennyson’s Titianic picture, with its endless touches of light and shadow, its breadth and liberality of varied palpitating colour; the modulations (to take another figure) through every key of passion and character, the ever-present yet ever-appropriate melody of the metre. But, more fortunate than the musician, the score of the poet’s symphonies is not only in the reader’s hands, but, according to his faculty, he may reproduce the music for himself:
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter.
Arthur, rex quondam, rexque futurus (as we may believe) for many generations, has been thus set before us in our British epic. Small, however, is the element of probable fact in that ancient legend. It was hence, perhaps, natural that a poet-laureate, who, like his great predecessor, feels for England ‘as a lover or a child,’ should attempt to deal with the realities of our magnificent history. Add that in many pieces, monodramatic in form, Tennyson has shown brilliant power to create character, seriously presented or with admirable humour, and that he has also been ever bold to enlarge the bounds of his art. Thus three plays, spread in subject over some four centuries, have been the result—Queen Mary (1875), Harold (1877), Becket (1884). And with these, certain less important dramas may be named: The Cup, founded on a Græco-Roman tale; The Promise of May, a modern domestic piece; The Foresters (1892), the poet’s own version of the Robin Hood legend.
Dramatic art is, however, hampered by many peculiar laws and limitations; nor is the close air of modern civilisation favourable as that of the 16th and 17th centuries to the poetical drama. Nor, again, does the highest gift for character or incident-drawing carry with it necessarily the power to put incident into dialogue, or to make the most of dramatic situations suitable to the theatre. Even Scott, with his Shakespearian invention, and also eminently effective when the persons in his novels speak together, yet failed when he attempted the stage; nor can Goethe or Byron be credited with better success. And, similarly, no play of Tennyson’s hitherto acted (unless with exception of The Cup) has (in England, at least) reached definite popular acceptance. The time, in truth, to estimate their spectacular value has not yet arrived. But that they form a noble contribution to our history may, we hold, be considered certain.
A few more volumes, idylls, lyrics, ballads, remain (1880, 1885, 1886, 1889, 1890). Compared with much of Tennyson’s earlier work, these, in general, reveal a more mature and certain art, a greatly wider range. History (mostly English); tales in dialect, chiefly that of Lincolnshire; a few beautiful classical pieces; narratives, idyllic and lyrical, of the profoundest pathos; poems treating great problems in religion and morality, philosophy and science—all, with other ‘fresh fields’ which we have not space to name, are included. The more decoratively imagined art, frequent in the poet’s youthful verse, has now, by natural law, given place to art, not less finished, but deeper, often darker, in thought. If, compared with In Memoriam, a gloomier scepticism is allowed to speak, faith reaches a sweeter and surer creed. Titian, in a word (and our last), has made way for Rembrandt.
A few personal notes, however, must be added. Before advancing years restrained, without seriously injuring, his activity, Tennyson, in 1876, once more visited the Pyrenees; in 1878, Ireland; 1882, Lombardy; 1883, Copenhagen; 1887, St Davids and the Channel Islands; 1891, Devonshire.—The losses and the gains of prolonged life he was called on to experience. Besides many among the band of earlier friends, his brother Charles was taken in 1879; his younger son Lionel, after an honourable career in the public service, in 1886. Hallam, the elder, married Audrey Boyle, grand-daughter to Admiral Hon. Sir Courtney Boyle, one of Nelson’s captains, in 1884. And several children of the brothers renewed the charm and sunshine of youth to Aldworth and Farringford. In 1884 Her Majesty, recognising even more than conferring honour, created a barony of the United Kingdom by the style of Tennyson of Freshwater and Aldworth, in favour of her poet-laureate. Lord Tennyson died at Aldworth on the 6th October 1892, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.
For detailed criticism this is neither the place nor the time. Natural it is, indeed, to ask what, when a century or more has gone by, will be Tennyson’s rank in the hierarchy of Parnassus? But of this ‘the days to come will be the wisest witnesses.’ Even were it possible now to estimate the absolute value of his whole work, two weighty and inevitable determinants of future fame are absolutely beyond foresight—namely, What near successors any man is fated to find—the question, whether or not, as Dante observed, a Giotto shall follow a Cimabue, and ‘have the cry’ and obscure his fame:—And what will be the career (upward or downward, folly alone would affect to decide) of the world’s civilisation. Some slight general hint, however, as resting on grounds which no one is likely to dispute, may be risked in regard to Tennyson’s general relation to his five great British predecessors during the first half of the century—Scott, Byron, Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth—remembering also that among these only the first and the last reached the ‘mezzo del cammin di nostra vita.’ And this suggestion we shall express after the terms employed by the great critic Quintilian when giving his reasons to place Virgil at the head of Latin poetry. If there be certain gifts of genius wherein Lord Tennyson yields to those illustrious contemporaries of his youth, each in his turn, it is beyond question that during his many years he has written with more constant, more equal cura et diligentia; that his mastery of his sublime art has been more perfect; that in range and command of varied subject he has been unequalled.
Among the later volumes were The Lover's Tale (1879), Ballads, &c. (1880), Tiresias (1885), Locksley Hall—Sixty Years After (1886), Demeter (1889), The Death of Enone, Akbar's Dream, and other Poems (posthumous, 1892).
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. Long before colonial federation was popular he wondered England could not see that 'her true policy lies in a close union with our colonies.' In his personal friendships, as in his literary tastes, he was unusually catholic. Amongst his friends he ranked Carlyle as well as Gladstone, and Huxley as well as Ruskin. He loved to read aloud Shakespeare, Milton, and Chaucer; he reverenced Wordsworth; said that Keats, if he had lived, 'would have been among the very greatest of us;' thought Goethe among the wisest of mankind as well as a great artist; and in his friend Browning recognised a mighty intellect, 'though he seldom attempts the marriage of sense with sound.'
The authoritative biography, by the second Lord Tennyson, appeared in 1897. See also other books on Tennyson and his works by Wace (1881), Van Dyke (5th ed. 1896), Tainsh (1868; new ed. 1893), Jennings (1884; new ed. 1892), T. Davidson (Boston, 1889), Churton Collins (1891), Eugene Parsons (Chicago, 1891), A. Waugh (1892), Ritchie (1892-93), Jenkinson (1892), Jacobs (1893), Stopford Brooke (1894), and Bellezza (Italian, 1894); besides essays and criticisms, of which a list will be found in R. H. Shepherd's Tennysonian (1866; new ed. 1879; bibliography separate, 1896). The article by Canon Ainger in the Dictionary of National Biography (1898) deserves special mention; also Mrs Richmond Ritchie's Records of Tennyson, Ruskin, and the Brownings (1892). There is an analysis of In Memoriam by F. W. Robertson (1862); a Key to it by Dr Gatty (1881; 4th ed. 1891); a Concordance to Tennyson by D. B. Brightwell (for the works up to 1869); a Tennyson Handbook by Morton (1895), and a Tennyson Primer by Dixon (1896). See also A. J. Church's The Laureate's Country (1890), J. C. Walters's In Tennyson Land (1890), G. G. Napier's Homes and Haunts of Alfred Tennyson (1892), and B. Francis's Scenery of Tennyson's Poems (1893). Many of the poems have been translated; of Enoch Arden there are nine German versions, seven French, and two Dutch, as well as Italian, Spanish, Danish, Hungarian, and Bohemian. For the basis of the Arthurian poems, see ARTHUR, GRAIL.
The second LORD TENNYSON (born 1852) was educated at Marlborough, Trinity College, Cambridge, and the Inner Temple, and acted as his father's private secretary. He contributed to the magazines in prose and verse, edited Charles Turner's Collected Sonnets, edited the Poems by Two Brothers, and wrote the definitive memoir of his father (2 vols. 1897). In 1899 he was appointed Governor of South Australia.