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ALDWORTH 33

TENNYSON'S MEMORIAL, BEACON HILL, FRESHWATER 34

ALFRED TENNYSON 35

TENNYSON

It was merely the accident of his hour, the call of his age, which made Tennyson a philosophic poet. He was naturally not only a pure lover of beauty, but a pure lover of beauty in a much more peculiar and distinguished sense even than a man like Keats, or a man like Robert Bridges. He gave us scenes of Nature that cannot easily be surpassed, but he chose them like a landscape painter rather than like a religious poet. Above all, he exhibited his abstract love of the beautiful in one most personal and characteristic fact. He was never so successful or so triumphant as when he was describing not Nature, but art. He could describe a statue as Shelley could describe a cloud. He was at his very best in describing buildings, in their blending of aspiration and exactitude. He found to perfection the harmony between the rhythmic recurrences of poetry and the rhythmic recurrences of architecture. His description, for example, of the Palace of Art is a thing entirely victorious and unique. The whole edifice, as

described, rises as lightly as a lyric, it is full of the surge of the hunger for beauty; and yet a man might almost build upon the description as upon the plans of an architect or the instructions of a speculative builder. Such a lover of beauty was Tennyson, a lover of beauty most especially where it is most to be found, in the works of man. He loved beauty in its completeness, as we find it in art, not in its more glorious incompleteness as we

find it in Nature. There is, perhaps, more loveliness in Nature than in art, but there are not so many lovely things. The loveliness is broken to pieces and scattered: the almond tree in blossom will have a mob of nameless insects at its root, and the most perfect cell in the great forest-house is likely enough to smell like a sewer. Tennyson loved beauty more in its collected form in art, poetry, and sculpture; like his own "Lady of Shalott," it was his office to look rather at the mirror than at the object. He was an artist, as it were, at two removes: he was a splendid imitator of the splendid imitations. It is true that his natural history was exquisitely exact, but natural history and natural religion are things that can be, under certain circumstances, more unnatural than anything in the world. In reading Tennyson's natural descriptions we never seem to be in physical contact with the earth. We learn nothing of the coarse good-temper and rank energy of life. We see the whole scene accurately, but we see it through glass. In Tennyson's works we see Nature indeed, and hear Nature, but we do not smell it.

But this poet of beauty and a certain magnificent idleness lived at a time when all men had to wrestle and decide. It is not easy for any person who lives in our time, when the dust has settled and the spiritual perspective has been restored, to realise what the entrance of the idea of evolution meant for the men of those days. To us it is a discovery of another link in a chain which, however far we follow it, still stretches back into a divine mystery. To

many of the men of that time it would appear from their writings that it was the heart-breaking and desolating discovery of the end and origin of the chain. To them had happened the most black and hopeless catastrophe conceivable to human nature; they had found a logical explanation of all things. To them it seemed that an Ape had suddenly risen to gigantic stature and destroyed the seven heavens. It is difficult, no doubt, for us

with--it was as powerful as a cannonade and as enchanting as a song. But in this struggle he had always had Nature on his side. He might be polluted and agonised, but the flowers were innocent and the hills were strong. All the armoury of life, the spears of the pinewood and the batteries of the lightning, went into battle beside him. Tennyson lived in the hour when, to all mortal appearance, the whole of the physical world deserted to the devil. The universe, governed by violence and death, left man to fight alone, with a handful of myths and memories. Men had now to wander in polluted fields and lift up their eyes to abominable hills. They had to arm themselves against the cruelty of flowers and the crimes of the grass. The first honour, surely, is to those who did not faint in the face of that confounding

cosmic betrayal; to those who sought and found a new vantage-ground for the army of Virtue. Of these was Tennyson, and it is surely the more to his honour, since he was the idle lover of beauty of whom we have spoken. He felt that the time called him to be an interpreter. Perhaps he might even have been something more of a poet if he had not sought to be something more than a poet. He might have written a more perfect Arthurian epic if his heart had been as much buried in prehistoric sepulchres as the heart of Mr. W. B. Yeats. He might have made more of such poems as "The Golden Year" if his mind had been as clean of metaphysics and as full of a poetic rusticity as the mind of William Morris. He might have been a greater poet if he had been less a man of his dubious and rambling age. But there are some things that are greater than greatness; there are some things that no man with blood in his body would sell for the throne of Dante, and one of them is to fire the feeblest shot in a war that really awaits decision, or carry the meanest musket in an army that is really marching by. Tennyson may even have forfeited immortality: but he and the men of his age were more than immortal; they were alive.

Tennyson had not a special talent for being a philosophic poet, but he had a special vocation for being a philosophic poet. This may seem a contradiction, but it is only because all the Latin or Greek words we use tend endlessly to lose their meaning. A vocation is supposed to mean merely a taste or faculty, just as economy is held to mean merely the act of saving. Economy means the management of a house or community. If a man starves his best horse, or causes his best workman to strike for more pay, he is not merely unwise, he is uneconomical. So it is with a vocation. If this country were suddenly invaded by some huge alien and conquering population, we should all be called to become soldiers. We should not think in that time that we were sacrificing our unfinished work on Cattle-Feeding or our hobby of fretwork, our brilliant career at the Bar or our taste for painting in water-colours. We should all have a call to arms. We should, however, by no means agree that we all had a vocation for arms. Yet a vocation is only the Latin for a call.

In a celebrated passage in "Maud," Tennyson praised the moral effects of war, and declared that some great conflict might call out the greatness even of the pacific swindlers and sweaters whom he saw around him in the Commercial age. He dreamed, he said, that if--

... The battle-bolt sang from the three-decker out on the foam, Many a smooth-faced, snub-nosed rogue would leap from his counter or till, And strike, were it but with his cheating yard-wand, home.

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 snub-nosed 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 influence on poetry may, for a time, be modified. This is the fate of every man who throws himself into his own age, catches the echo of its temporary phrases, is kept busy in battling with its temporary delusions. There are many men whom history has for a time forgotten to whom it owes more than it could count. But if Tennyson is extinguished it will be with the most glorious extinction. There are two ways in which a man may vanish--through being thoroughly conquered or through being thoroughly the Conqueror. In the main, the great Broad Church philosophy which Tennyson uttered has been adopted by every one. This will make against his fame. For a man may vanish as Chaos vanished in the face of creation, or he may vanish as God vanished in filling all things with that created life.

G. K. CHESTERTON.

TENNYSON AS AN INTELLECTUAL FORCE

It is easy to exaggerate, and equally easy to underrate, the influence of Tennyson on his age as an intellectual force. It will be exaggerated if we regard him as a great original mind, a proclaimer or revealer of novel truth. It will be underrated if we overlook the great part reserved for him who reveals, not new truth to the age, but the age to itself, by presenting it with a

miniature of its own highest, and frequently unconscious, tendencies and aspirations. Not Dryden or Pope were more intimately associated with their respective ages than Tennyson with that brilliant period to which we now look back as the age of Victoria. His figure cannot, indeed, be so dominant as theirs. The Victorian era was far more affluent in literary genius than the periods of Dryden and Pope; and Tennyson appears as but one of a splendid group, some of whom surpass him in native force of mind and intellectual endowment. But when we measure these illustrious men with the spirit of their age, we perceive that--with the exception of Dickens, who paints the manners rather than the mind of the time, and Macaulay, who reproduces its average but not its higher mood--there is something as it were sectarian in them which prevents their being accepted

as representatives of their epoch in the tidiest sense. In some instances, such as Carlyle and Browning and Thackeray, the cause may be an exceptional originality verging upon eccentricity; in others, like George Eliot, it may be allegiance to some particular scheme of thought; in others, like Ruskin and Matthew Arnold, exclusive devotion to some particular mission. In Tennyson, and in him alone, we find the man who cannot be identified with any one of the many tendencies of the age, but has affinities with all. Ask for the composition which of all contemporary compositions bears the Victorian stamp most unmistakably, which tells us most respecting the age's thoughts respecting itself, and there will be little hesitation in naming "Locksley Hall."

Tennyson returns to his times and what he has received from them, but in an exquisitely embellished and purified condition; he is the mirror in which the age contemplates all that is best in itself. Matthew Arnold would perhaps not have been wrong in declining to recognize Tennyson as "a great and powerful spirit" if "power" had been the indispensable condition of "greatness"; but he forgot that the receptive poet may be as potent as the creative. His cavil might with equal propriety have been aimed at Virgil. In truth, Tennyson's fame rests upon a securer basis than that of some greater poets, for acquaintance with him will always be indispensable to the history of thought and culture in England. What George Eliot and Anthony Trollope are for the manners of the period, he is for its mind: all the ideas which in his day chiefly moved the elect spirits of English society are to be found in him, clothed in the most exquisite language, and embodied in the most consummate form. That they did not originate with him is of no consequence whatever. We cannot consider him, regarded merely as a poet, as quite upon the level of his great immediate predecessors; but the total disappearance of any of these, except Wordsworth, would leave a less painful blank in our intellectual history than the disappearance of Tennyson.

Beginning, even in his crudest attempts, with a manner distinctly his own, he attained a style which could be mistaken for that of no predecessor , and which no imitator has been able to rival. What is most truly remarkable is that while much of his poetry is perhaps the most artificial in construction of any in our language, and much again wears the aspect of bird-like spontaneity, these contrasted manners evidently proceed from the same writer, and no one would think of ascribing them to different hands. As a master of blank verse Tennyson, though perhaps not fully attaining the sweetness of Coleridge or the occasional grandeur of Wordsworth and Shelley, is upon the whole the third in our language after Shakespeare and Milton, and, unlike Shakespeare and Milton, he has made it difficult for his successors to write blank verse after him.

Tennyson is essentially a composite poet. Dryden's famous verses, grand in expression, but questionable in their application to Milton, are perfectly applicable to him: save that, in making him, Nature did not combine two poets, but many. This is a common phenomenon at the close of a great epoch; it is almost peculiar to Tennyson's age that it should then have heralded the appearance of a new era; and that, simultaneously with the inheritor of the past, perhaps the most original and self-sufficing of all poets should have appeared in the person of Robert Browning. A comparison between these illustrious writers would lead us too far; we have already implied that Tennyson occupies the more conspicuous place in literary history on account of his representative character.

The first important recognition of Tennyson's genius came from Stuart Mill, who, partly perhaps under the guidance of Mrs. Taylor, evinced

about 1835 a remarkable insight into Shelley and Browning as well as Tennyson. In the course of his observations he declared that Tennyson needed to be a great poet was a system of philosophy, to which time would certainly conduct him. If he only meant that Tennyson needed "the years that bring the philosophic mind," the observation was entirely just; if he expected the poet either to evolve a system of philosophy for himself or to fall under the sway of some great thinker, he was mistaken. Had Tennyson done either he might have been a very great and very interesting poet, but he could not have been the poet of his age; for the temper of the time, when it was not violently partisan, was liberally eclectic. There was no one great leading idea, such as that of evolution in the last quarter of last century, so ample and so characteristic of the age that a poet might become its disciple without yielding to party what was meant for mankind. Two chief currents of thought there were; but they were antagonistic, even though Mr. Gladstone has proved that a very

exceptional mind might find room for both. Nothing was more characteristic of the age than the reaction towards medieval ideas, headed by Newman, except the rival and seemingly incompatible gospel of "the railway and the steamship" and all their corollaries. It cannot be said that Tennyson, like Gladstone, found equal room for both ideals in his mind, for until old age had made him mistrustful and querulous he was essentially a man of progress. But his choice of the Arthurian legend for what he intended to be his chief work, and the sentiment of many of his most beautiful minor poems, show what attraction the mediaeval spirit also possessed for him; nor, if he was to be in truth the poetical representative of his period, could it have been otherwise. He is not, however, like Gladstone, alternately a mediaeval and a modern man; but he uses mediaeval sentiment with exquisite judgment to mellow what may appear harsh or crude in the new ideas of political reform, diffusion of education, mechanical invention, free trade, and colonial expansion. The Victorian, in fact,

finds himself nearly in the position of the Elizabethan, who also had a future and a past; and, except in his own, there is no age in which Tennyson would have felt himself more at home than in the age of Elizabeth. He does, indeed, in "Maud" react very vigorously against certain tendencies of the age which he disliked; but this is not in the interest of the mediaeval or any other order of ideas incompatible with the fullest development of the nineteenth century. If the utterance here appears passionate, it must be remembered that the poet writes as a combatant. When he constructs, there is nothing more characteristic of him than his sanity. The views on female education propounded in "The Princess" are so sound that good sense has supplied the place of the spirit of prophecy, which did not tabernacle with Tennyson. "In Memoriam" is a most perfect expression of the average theological temper of England in the nineteenth century. As in composition, so in spirit, Tennyson's writings have all the advantages and all the disadvantages of the golden mean.

poetry which comes so near to satisfying all tastes, reconciling all tendencies, and registering every movement of the intellectual life of the period. Had his mental balance been less accurately poised, he might have been the laureate of a party, but he could not have been the laureate of the nation. As an intellectual force he is, we think, destined to be powerful and durable, because the charm of his poetry will always keep his ideas before the popular mind; and these ideas will always be congenial to the solid, practical, robust, and yet tender and emotional mind of England. They may be briefly defined as the recognition of the association of continuity with mutability in human institutions: the utmost reverence for the past combined with the full and not regretful admission that

The old order changes, giving place to new, And God fulfils Himself in many ways;

the conception of Freedom as something that "broadens down, from precedent to precedent"; veneration for "the Throne unshaken still," so long as it continues "broad-based upon the People's will," which will always be the case so long as

Statesmen at the Council meet Who know the seasons.

Philosophically and theologically, Tennyson is even more conspicuously the representative of the average English mind of his

seemed to have left behind him some invisible influence destined to germinate in due time, for all his most distinguished followers were Cantabs. Such another school, only lacking a poet, had flourished at Cambridge in the seventeenth century, and now came up again like long-buried seeds in a newly disturbed soil. The precise value of their ideas may always be matter for discussion; but they exerted without doubt a happy influence by

Turning to scorn with lips divine The falsehood of extremes.

providing religious minds reverent of the past with an alternative to mere mediaevalism, and gently curbing Science in the character she sometimes assumes of "a wild Pallas of the brain." When the natural moodiness of Tennyson's temperament is considered, the prevalent optimism of his ideas, both as regards the individual and the State, appears infinitely creditable to him. These are ideas natural to sane and reflecting Englishmen, unchallenged in quiet times, but which may be obscured or overwhelmed in seasons of great popular excitement. The intellectual force of Tennyson is perhaps chiefly shown in the art and attractiveness with which they are set forth; even much that might have appeared tame or prosaic is invested with all the charms of imagination, and commends itself to the poet equally with the statesman. Tennyson is not the greatest of poets, but appreciation of his poems is one of the surest criteria of poetical taste; he is not one of the greatest of thinkers, but agreement with his general cast of thought is an excellent proof of sanity; many singers have been more Delphic in their inspiration, but few, by maxims of temperate wisdom, have provided their native land with such a Palladium.

RICHARD GARNETT.

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Alfred Tennyson was born on Sunday, August 6th, 1809, at Somersby, a village in North Lincolnshire between Horncastle and Spilsby. His father, the Rev. Dr. George Clayton Tennyson, Rector of Somersby, married in 1805 Elizabeth Fytche, daughter of the Vicar of Louth, in the same county; and, of their twelve children, Alfred was the fourth.

He always spoke with affectionate remembrance of his early home: of the woodbine trained round his nursery window; of the mediaeval-looking dining-hall, with its pointed stained-glass casements; of the pleasant drawing-room, lined with bookshelves and furnished with yellow upholstery. The lawn in front of the house, where he composed his early poem, "A Spirit Haunts the Year's Last Hours," was overshadowed on one side by wych-elms, on the other by larch and sycamore trees. On the south was a path bounded by a flower-border, and beyond "a garden bower'd close" sloping gradually to the field at the bottom of which ran the Somersby Brook

That loves To purl o'er matted cress and ribbed sand, Or dimple in the dark of rushy coves, Drawing into his narrow earthen urn In every elbow and turn, The filtered tribute of the rough woodland.

The charm and beauty of this brook haunted the poet throughout his life, and to it he especially dedicated, "Flow down, cold rivulet, to the sea." Tennyson did not, however, attribute his famous poem, "The Brook," to the same source of inspiration, declaring it was not addressed to any stream in particular.

Tennyson was exceedingly fortunate in the environment of his childhood and the early influence exercised by his parents. His mother was of a sweet and gentle disposition, and devoted herself entirely to the welfare of her husband and her children. Her son is said to have taken her as a model in "The Princess"; and he certainly gave a more or less truthful description of this "remarkable and saintly woman" in his poem "Isabel":--

Locks not wide-dispread, Madonna-wise on either side her head; Sweet lips whereon perpetually did reign The summer calm of golden charity.

Tennyson's father was a man of marked physical strength and stature, called by his parishioners "The stern Doctor." In 1807 he was appointed to the living of Somersby, and that of the adjoining village of Bag Enderby, and this position he held until his death, on March 16th, 1831, at the age of fifty-two. He was buried in the old country churchyard, where "absolute stillness reigns," beneath the shade of the rugged little tower. In his time the roof of the church was covered with thatch, as were also those of the cottages in its immediate vicinity.

The livings of Somersby and Bag Enderby were held conjointly, service being conducted at one church in the morning and at the other in the afternoon. Dr. Tennyson read his sermons at Bag Enderby from the quaint high-built pulpit, Alfred listening to them from the squire's roomy pew.

Tennyson's first connected poems were composed at Louth, and in this town also his first published work saw the light, appearing in a volume entitled "Poems by Two Brothers," issued in 1827 by Mr. J. Jackson, a bookseller. The two brothers were Charles and Alfred Tennyson.

After a school career which lasted four years, Alfred returned to Somersby to continue his studies under his father's tuition. This course of instruction was supplemented by classics at the hands of a Roman Catholic priest, and music-lessons given him by a teacher at Horncastle.

In 1828 Charles and Alfred Tennyson followed their elder brother Frederick to Trinity College, Cambridge. They began their university life in lodgings at No. 12, Rose Crescent, moving later to Trumpington Street, No. 57, Corpus Buildings. Of his early experiences of life at Cambridge, Alfred wrote to his aunt: "I am sitting owl-like and solitary in my rooms . The hoof of the steed, the roll of the wheel, the shouts of drunken Gown and drunken Town come up from below with a sea-like murmur.... The country is so disgustingly level, the revelry of the place so monotonous, the studies of the University so uninteresting, so much matter of fact. None but dry-headed, calculating, angular little gentlemen can take much delight in them."

It was at Trinity College that Tennyson first made the acquaintance of Arthur Hallam, youngest son of the historian, whose friendship so profoundly influenced the poet's character and genius. "He would have been known if he had lived," wrote Tennyson, "as a great man, but not as a great poet; he was as near perfection as mortal man could be."

In February 1831 Tennyson left Cambridge without taking a degree, and returned to Somersby, his father dying within a month of his arrival. From this time onward Hallam became an intimate visitor at the Rectory, and formed an attachment for his friend's sister Emily. In July 1832 Tennyson and Hallam went touring on the Rhine, and at the close of the year appeared the volume of "Poems by Alfred Tennyson," which contained, amongst others, "The Lady of Shalott," "The Miller's Daughter," "The Palace of Art," "The Lotos Eaters," and "A Dream of Fair Women."

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