Poems of Tennyson

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Contents

INTRODUCTION page I. tennyson''s place in the nineteenth

CENTURY xix

II. AN OUTLINE OF TENNYSON^'s LIFE XXV

II AN OUTLINE OF TENNYSON's LIFE

'^' Brother of the greatest poets, true to nature, true to art. Lover of Immortal Love, uplfter of the human heart ! Who shall cheer us with high music, who shall sing if thou depart?" in lucem transitus, 1892.

Parentage and Birth. — Alfred Tennyson was born on the 6th of August^ 1809, at Somersby, a Httle village in Lincolnshire. He was the fourth child in a family of twelve, eight boys and four girls, all of whom but two lived to pass the limit of three score years and ten. The stock was a strong one, probably of Danish origin, but with a mingled strain of Norman blood through the old family of d'Eyncourt, both branches of which, according to Burke's Peerage, are represented by the Tennysons.

The poet's father, the Rev. Dr. George Clayton Tennyson, was rector of Somersby and V/ood Enderby. His wife, Ehzabeth Fytche, was the daughter of the vicar of Louth, a neighbouring town. Dr. Tennyson was the eldest son of a lawyer of considerable wealth, but was disinherited, by some caprice of his father, in favour of a younger brother. The rector of Somersby was a man of large frame, vigourous mind, and variable temper. He had considerable learning, of a broad kind, and his scholarship, if not profound, was practical, for he taught his sons the best of what they knew before they entered the university. A great lover of music and architecture, fond of writing verse, genial and brilliant in social intercourse, excitable,

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warm-hearted, stern in discipline, generous in sympathy, he was a personality of overflowing power; but at times he was subject to fits of profound depression and gloom, in which the memory of his father's unkindness darkened his mind, and he seemed almost to lose himself in bitter and despondent moods. Mrs. Tennyson was a gentle, loving, happy character, by no means lacking in strength, but excelling in tenderness, ardent in feeling, vivid in imagination, fervent in faith. It is said that ^^the wicked inhabitants of a neighbouring village used to bring their dogs to her windows and beat them, in order to be bribed to leave off by the gentle lady, or to make advantageous bargains by selling her the worthless curs." Her son Alfred drew her portrait lovingly in the poem called "Isabel" (jo. 49) and in the closing lines of The Princess (^p. 206).

Not learfied, save in gracious household ways, Not perfect, nay, but full of tender wants, No Angel, but a dearer being, all dipt In Angel instincts, breathing Paradise, Interpreter between the gods and men, Who looked all native to her place, and yet On tiptoe seenid to touch upon a sphere Too gross to tread, and all male minds perforce Sjvayd to her from their orbits as they moved, And girdled her with music.

The poet's reverent and loyal love for his father is expressed in the lines "To J. S." Both parents saw in their child the promise of genius, and hoped great things from him.

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INTRODUCTION The Imitative Impulse. — The boy grew up, if not precisely in Milton's ^^ quiet and still air of delightful studies/' yet in an atmosphere that was full of stimulus for the imagination and favourable to the unfolding of lively powers of thought and feeling. It was an obscure hamlet of less than a hundred inhabitants where the Tennysons resided, but it was a full home in which they lived, — full of children, full of books, full of music, full of fanciful games and pastimes, full of human interests, full of life. The scenery about Somersby is friendly and consoling; gray hills softly sloping against the sky; wide-branching elms, trembling poplars, and drooping ash-trees; rich gardens, close-embowered, full of trailing roses, crowned lilies, and purple-spiked lavender; long ridges of pasture land where the thick-fleeced sheep are herded; clear brooks purling over ribbed sand and golden gravel, with many a curve and turn; broad horizons, low-hung clouds, mellow sunlight ; birds a plenty, flowers profuse. All these sweet forms Nature printed on the boy's mind. Every summer brought a strong contrast, when the family went to spend their holiday in a cottage close beside the sea, on the coast of Lincolnshire, among the tussocked ridges of the sand-dunes, looking out upon

The hollow ocean-ridges, roaring into cataracts.

The boy had an intense passion for the sea, and learned to know all its moods and aspects. "Somehow," he said, later in life, "water is the element I love best of all the four."

When he was seven years old he was sent to the [ xxvii ]

house of his grandmother at Louth, to attend the grammar-school. But it was a hard school with a rough master, and the boy hated it. After three years he came home to continue his studies under his father.

His closest comrade in the home was his brother Charles, a year older than himself. (^See In Memoriam, Ixocix, and "Prefatory Poem to My Brother's Sonnets," jd. 337.) The two lads had many tastes in common, especially their love of poetry. They read widely, and offered the sincerest tribute of admiration to their favourite bards. Alfred's first attempt at writing verse was made when he was eight years old. He covered two sides of a slate wdth lines in praise of flowers, in imitation of Thomson, the only poet whom he then knew. A little later Pope's Iliad fascinated him, and he produced many hundreds of lines in the same style and metre. At twelve he took Scott for his model, and turned out an epic of six thousand lines. Then Byron became his idol. He wrote lyrics full of gloom and grief, a romantic drama in blank verse, and imitations of the Hebrerv Melodies.

Some of the fruitage of these young labours may be seen in the volume entitled Poems by Two Brothers, which was published anonymously by Charles and Alfred Tennyson, at Louth, in 1827, and republished in 1893, with an effort to assign the pieces to their respective authors, by the poet's son, the present Lord Tennyson. The motto on the title-page of the plump, modest little volume is from Martial : Hcec nos novimus esse nihil. It is because of this knowledge that the book has value as a document in the history of Tennyson's development. It shows a receptive mind, a quick, [ xxviii ]

immature fancy, and considerable fluency and variety in the use of metre. It marks a distinct stage of his growth, — the period when his strongest poetic impulse was imitative.

The Esthetic Impulse. — In 1828 Tennyson, with his brother Charles, entered Trinity College, Cambridge. Almost from the beginning he was a marked man in the undergraduate world. His personal appearance was striking. Tall, large-limbed, deep-chested ; with a noble head and abundance of dark, wavy hair; large, brown eyes, dreamy, yet bright; swarthy complexion ("almost like a gypsy," said Mrs. Carlyle); and a profile like a face on a Roman coin; he gave the immediate impression of rare gifts and power in reserve. "I remember him well," wrote Edward Fitzgerald, "a sort of Hyperion." His natural shyness and habits of solitude kept him from making many acquaintances, but his friends were among the best and most brilliant men in the University: Richard Monckton Milnes, Richard Chenevix Trench, W. H. Brookfield, John Mitchell Kemble, James Spedding, Henry Alford, Charles Buller, Charles Merivale, W. H. Thompson, and most intimate of all, Arthur Henry Hallam. This was an extraordinary circle of youths; distinguished for scholarship, wit, eloquence, freedom of thought ; promising great things, which most of them achieved. Among these men Tennyson's strength of mind and character was recognized, but most of all they were proud of him as a coming poet. In their college rooms, with an applauding audience around him, he would chant in his deep, sonorous voice such early poems as "The Hesperides," "Oriana," "The Lover's Tale." [ xxix ]

He did not neglect his studies, the classics, history, and the natural sciences; but his general reading meant more to him. He was a member of an inner circle called the "Apostles/* a society devoted to ^religion and radicalism.' (See In Memoriam, Ixxxvii.) The new spirit, represented in literature by Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, took possession of him. He went back to the Elizabethan age, to Milton's early poems, as the fountain-heads of English lyrical poetry. Not now as an imitator, but as a kindred artist, he gave himself to the search for beauty, freedom, delicate truth to nature, romantic charm.

His poem of "Timbuctoo," which won the Chancellor's gold medal in 1829, was only a working-over of an earlier poem on "The Battle of Armageddon," and he thought little of it. But in 1830 he published a slender volume entitled Poems, Chiejly Lyrical, which shows the quality of his work in this period when the aesthetic impulse was dominant in him. Ten of these poems are among the selections in this book. They are marked by freshness of fancy, melody of metre, vivid descriptive touches, and above all by what Arthur Hallam, in his thoughtful review of the volume, called "a strange earnestness in his worship of beauty."

In the summer of 1 830, Hallam and Tennyson made a journey together to the Pyrenees, to carry some funds which had been raised in England to the Spanish insurgents who were fighting for liberty. Tennyson was not in sympathy with the conservatism which then, as in Wordsworth's day, made Cambridge seem narrow and dry and heartless to men of free and ardent spirit. In 1831 the illness and death of his father made it

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necessary for him to leave college and go home to live with the family at Somersby, where he remained for six years. In 1832 he published his second volmne of Poems, dated 1833.

The tone and quality of this volume are the same that we find in its predecessor, but the manner is firmer, stronger, more assured. There is also a warmer human interest in such poems as "The Miller's Daughter" and "The May Queen"; and in "The Palace of Art" there is a distinct intimation that the purely aesthetic period of his poetic development is nearly at an end. Six of these poems are among the selections in this book.

The criticism which these two volumes received, outside of the small circle of Tennyson's friends and admirers, was severe and scornful. Blackwood's Magazine called the poet the pet of a Cockney coterie, and said that some of his lyrics were "dismal drivel." The Quarterly Review sneered at him as ^'^ another and a brighter star of that galaxy or milky rvay of poetry, of which the lamented Keats was the harbinger." Tennyson felt this contemptuous treatment deeply. It seemed to him that the English people would never like his work. His aesthetic period closed in gloom and discouragement.

The Religious and Personal Impulse. — But far heavier than any literary disappointment was the blow that fell in 1833 when his dearest friend, Arthur Hallam, to whom his sister Emilia was promised in marriage, died suddenly in Vienna. This great loss, coming to Tennyson at a time when the first joy of youth was already overcast by clouds of loneliness and [ xxxi ]

despondency, was the wind of destiny that drove him from the pleasant harbour of dreams out upon the wide, strange, uncharted sea of spiritual strife and sorrow, — the sea which seems so bitter and so wild, but on whose farther shore those who bravely make the voyage find freedom and security and peace and the generous joy of a larger, nobler life. The problems of doubt and faith which had been worked out with abstract arguments and fine theories in the Apostles' society at Cambridge, now became personal problems for Tennyson. He must face them and find some answer, if his life was to have a deep and enduring harmony in it, — a harmony in which the discords of fear and selfwill and despair would dissolve. The true answer, he felt sure, could never be found in selfish isolation. The very intensity of his grief purified it as by fire, made it more humane, more sympathetic. His conflict with 'Hhe spectres of the mind" was not for himself alone, but for others who must wrestle as he did, with sorrow and doubt and death. The deep significance, the poignant verity, the visionary mystery of human existence in all its varied forms, pressed upon him. Like the Lady of Shalott in his own ballad, he turned from the lucid mirror of fantasy, the magic web of art, to the real world of living joy and grief. But it was not a curse, like that which followed her departure from her cloistered tower, that came upon the poet, dr^wn and driven from the tranquil, shadowy region of exquisite melodies and beautiful pictures. It was a blessing : the blessing of clearer, stronger thought, deeper, broader feeling, more power to understand the world and more energy to move it.

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Tennyson's personal sorrow for the loss of Hallam is expressed in the two lyrics, "Breaks break, break " and "In the Valley of Cauteretz" (^p. 302), poems which should always be read together as the cry of grief and the answer of consolation. His long spiritual struggle with the questions of despair and hope, of duty and destiny, which were brought home to him by the loss of his friend, is recorded in In Memoriam. The poem was begun at Somersby in 1833 and continued at different places and times, as the Interwoven lyrics show, for nearly sixteen years. Though the greater part of it was written by 1842, it was not published until 1850. Mr. Gladstone thought it "the richest oblation ever offered by the affection of friendship at the tomb of the departed." It is that and something more: it is the great English classic on the love of immortality and the immortality of love. Tennyson said, " It was meant to be a kind of Divina Commedia, ending with happiness." The central thought of the poem is

' T is better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all.

Wherein it is better now, and why the poet trusts it will be better still in the long future, — this is the vital question which the poem answers in music.

But apart from these lyrics of personal grief, and this rich, monumental elegy, there are other poems of Tennyson, written between 1833 and 1842, which show the extraordinary deepening and strengthening of his mind during this period of inward crisis. For ten years he published no book. Living with his mother and sisters at Somersby, at High Beech in Epping Forest, [ xxxiii ]

at Tunbridge Wells, at Boxley near Maidstone ; caring for the family, as the eldest son at home, and skilfully managing the narrow means on which they had to live ; wandering through the country on long walking tours; visiting his friends in London now and then; falling in love finally and forever with Miss Emily Sellwood, to whom he became engaged in 1836, but whom he could not marry yet for want of money; he held fast to his vocation, and though he sometimes doubted whether the world would give him a hearing, he never wavered in his conviction that his mission in life was to be a poet. The years of silence were not years of indolence. Here is a memorandum of a week's work: "Monday, History, German. Tuesday, Chemistry, German. Wednesday, Botany, German. Thursday, Electricity, German. Friday, Animal Physiology, German. Saturday, Mechanics. Sunday, Theology. Next week, Italian in the afternoon. Third ?veek, Greek. Evenings, Poetry." Hundreds of lines were composed and never written ; hundreds more were written and burned. So far from being "an artist long before he was a poet," as Mr. R. H. Hutton somewhat vacuously says in his essay on Tennyson, he toiled terribly to make himself an artist, because he knew he was a poet. The results of this toil, in the revision of those of his early poems which he thought worthy to survive, and in the new poems which he was ready to publish, were given to the world in the two volumes of 1842.

The changes in the early poems were all in the direction of clearness, simplicity, a stronger human interest. The new poems included "The Vision of Sin," "Two Voices," "Ulysses," "Morte d' Arthur," the con- [ xxxiv ]

elusion of "The May Queen/' "Lady Clara Vere de Vere/' "Dora," "The Gardener's Daughter/' "Locksley Hall/' "St. Agnes' Eve/' "Sir Galahad." With the appearance of these two volumes, Tennyson began to be a popular poet. But he did not lose his hold upon the elect, the ^fit audience, though few.' The Quarterly Review, The Westminster Review, Dickens, Landor, Rogers, Carlyle, Edward Fitzgerald, Aubrey de Vere, and such men in England, Hawthorne, Emerson, Lowell, and Poe in America, recognized the charm and the power of his verse. In 1845 Wordsworth wrote to Henry Reed of Philadelphia, " Tennyson is decidedly the first of our living poets, and I hope will live to give the world still better things."

Such was the liberating and ennobling effect of the deeper personal and spiritual impulse which came into his poetry with the experience of sorrow and inward conflict.

The Social Impulse. — From 1842 onward we find the poet, now better known to the world, coming into wider and closer contact with the general life of men. Not that he ever lost the unconventional freedom of his dress and manner, the independence of his thought and taste, the singular frankness (almost brusquerie) of his talk, which was like thinking aloud. He never became what is called, oddly enough, a "society man." Hie was incapable of roaring gently at afternoon teas or literary menageries. He was unM'illing to join himself to any party in politics as Dryden and Swift and Addison, or even as Sou they and Wordsworth, had done. But he had a sincere love for genuine human intercourse, in which real thoughts and feelings are

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uttered by real people who have something to say to one another; a vivid sense of the humourous aspects of life (shown in such poems as the two pictures of the "Northern Farmer/' "The Spinster's Sweet- Arts/' "The Church- Warden ") ; and a broad interest in the vital questions and the popular movements of his time. If I am not mistaken, this period when his poetry began to make a wider appeal to the people is marked by the presence of a new impulse in his work. We may call it, for the sake of a name, the social impulse, meaning thereby that the poet now looks more often at his work in its relation to the general current of human affairs and turns to themes which have a place in public attention.

There was also at this time an attempt on Tennyson's part to engage in business, which turned out to be a disastrous mistake. He was induced to go into an enterprise for the carving of wood by machinery. Into this he put all his capital ; and some of the small patrimony of his brothers and sisters was embarked in the same doubtful craft. In 1 843 the ship went down with all its lading, and the Tennysons found themselves on the coast of actual poverty. To add to this misfortune, the poet's health gave way completely, and he was forced to spend a long time in a watercure establishment, under treatment for hypochondria.

In 1846 the grant of a pension of .£200 from the Civil List, on the recommendation of Sir Robert Peel, cordially approved by the Queen, relieved the pressure of pecuniary need under which Tennyson had been left by the failure of his venture in wood. In 1847 he published, perhaps in answer to the demand for a [ xxxvi ]

longer and more sustained poem. The Princess; A Medley. It is an epic, complete enough in structure, but in substance half serious and half burlesque. It tells the story of a king's daughter who was fired with the ambition to emancipate, (and even to separate,) her sex from man, by founding a woman's college extraordinary. This design was crossed by the efforts of an amourous, chivalrous, faintly ridiculous prince, who wooed her under difficulties and won her through the pity that overcame her when she saw him wounded almost to death by her brother. The central theme of the poem is the question of the higher education of women, but the style moves so obliquely in its mock heroics that it is hard to tell whether the argument is for or against. The diction is marked by Tennyson's two most frequent faults, over-decoration and indirectness of utterance. It is much admired by girls at boarding-school; but the woman's college of the present day does not regard its academic programme with favour. The poem rises at the close to a very sincere and splendid eloquence in praise of true womanhood {see p. 204). The intercalary songs, which were added in 1850, include two or three of Tennyson's best lyrics. They shine like jewels in a setting which is not all of pure gold.

In 1850 there were three important events in the poet's life: his marriage with Miss Emily Sellwood; the publication of the long-laboured In Memoriam; and his appointment as Poet-Laureate, to succeed Wordsworth, who had just died. The three events were closely connected. It was the £300 received in advance for In Memoj-iam that provided a financial [ xxxvii ]

basis for the marriage; and it was the profound admiration of the Prince Consort for this poem that determined the choice of Tennyson for the Laureateship. The marriage was in every sense happy. The poet's wife was not only of a nature most tender and beautiful ; she was also a wise counsellor, a steadfast comrade, as he wrote of her, —

With a faith as clear as the heights of the June-blue heaven,

And a fancy as summer-new

As the green of the bracken amid the glow of the heather.

Their first home was made at Twickenham, and here their oldest and only surviving son, Hallam, was born. In 1852 the "Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington" was published. It was received with some disappointment and unfavourable criticism as the first production of the Laureate upon an important public event. But later and wiser critics incline to the opinion of Robert Louis Stevenson, who thought that the ode had "never been surpassed in any tongue or time."^ In 1853, increasing returns from his books (about £500 a year) made it possible for Tennyson to lease, and ultimately to buy, the house and small estate of Farringford, near the village of Freshwater on the Isle of Wight. It is a low, rambling, unpretentious, gray house, tree-embowered, ivy-mantled, in a

careless-ordered garden, Close to the ridge of a noble down.

His other home. Aid worth, near the summit of Black Down in Sussex, was not built until 1 868. A statelier

1 Letters of R. L. Stevenson^ Vol. 7, jp. 220. [ xxxviii ]

mansion, though less picturesque, its attraction as a summer home Hes in the beauty of its terraced rosegarden, the far-reaching view which it commands to the south, and the refreshing purity of the upland air that breathes around it.

In 1854 the famous poem on "The Charge of the Light Brigade" was published in the hondon Exa7mner. It was included, with the Wellington Ode, in the volume entitled Maud, and Other Poems, which appeared in the following year. Maud grew out of the dramatic lyric beginning "O that 'twere possible," in The Tribute, 1837 (/?. 184). Sir John Simeon said to Tennyson that something more was needed to explain the story of the lyric. He then unfolded the central idea in a succession of lyrics in which the imaginary hero reveals himself and the tragedy of his life. The sub-title A Monodrama was added in 1 875. When Tennyson read the poem to me in 1892, he said "It is dramatic, — the story of a man who has a touch of inherited insanity, morbid and selfish. The poem shows what love has done for him. The war is only an episode." This is undoubtedly true and just. Yet the vigour of the long invective against the corruptions of a selfish peace, with which the poem opens, and the enthusiasm of the patriotic welcome to the Crimean war, with which it closes, show something of the way in which the poet's mind was working. This volume together with The Princess may be taken as an illustration of the force of the social impulse which had now entered into Tennyson's poetry to cooperate with the aesthetic impulse and the religious impulse in the full labours of his maturity.

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Maturity. — Tennyson was now forty-five years old. But there still lay before him nearly forty years in which he was to bring forth poetry in abundance, a rich, varied, unfailing harvest. It is true that before this wonderful period of maturity ended there were signs of age visible in some of his work, — a slackening of vigour, an uncertainty of touch, a tendency to overload his verse with teaching, a failure to remove the traces of labour from his art, a lack of courage and sureness in self-criticism. But it was long before these marks of decline were visible, and even then, more than any other English poet at an equal age, he kept, and in the hours of happy inspiration he revealed, the quick emotion, the vivid sensibility, the splendid courage of a heart that does not grow gray with years.

In 1859 the first instalment of his most important epic. Idylls of the King, appeared. It was followed in 1869, in 1872, in 1885, by the other parts of the complete poem. In 1864 E?ioch Arden was published. In 1875 Queen Mary, the first of the dramas, came out, followed by Harold in 1876, and The Cup and The Falcon and Becket in 1884. In 1880 Ballads, and Other Poems contained some of his best work, such as " Rizpah," "The Revenge," *^*^In the Children's Hospital." In 1885 Tiresias, and Other Poems appeared; in 1886 "Locksley Hall Sixty Years After"; in 1889 Demeter, and Other Poems, including "Romney's Remorse," "Vastness," "The Progress of Spring," "Merlin and The Gleam," "The Oak," "The Throstle," and that supreme lyric which Tennyson wished to have printed last in every edition of his collected works, — "Cross- [xl ]

ing the Bar." In 1892 the long list closed with The Death of (Enone, Akhars Dream, and Other Poems.

The life of the man who was producing, after middle age, this great body of poetry, was full, rich, and happy,— though shadowed by the death of his son Lionel on the voyage home from India in 1886. Secluded, as ever, from the busyness of the world, but in no sense separated from its deeper interests, Tennyson studied and wrought, delighting in intercourse with his friends and in

converse with all forms Of the many-sided mind, And those whom passion hath not blinded, Suhtle-thoughted, myriad-minded.

In 1883 he accepted from the Queen the honour of a peerage (a baronetcy had been offered before and refused), and was gazetted in the following year as Baron of Aldworth and Farringford. For himself, he frankly said, the dignity was one that he did not desire; but he felt that he could not let his reluctance stand m the way of a tribute from the Throne to Literature. When he entered the House of Lords he took his seat on the cross-benches, showing that he did not wish to bmd himself to any party. His first vote was cast for the Extension of the Franchise.

At the close of August, 1892, when I visited him at Aldworth, he was already beginning to feel the warning touches of pain which preceded his last illness. But he was still strong and mighty m spirit, a noble shape of manhood, massive, large-browed, his bronzed face like the comitenance of an antique seer, his scat- [ xli ]

tered locks scarcely touched with gray. He was working on the final proofs of his last volume and planning new poems. At table his talk was free, friendly, full of humour and common-sense. In the library he read from his poems the things which illustrated the subjects of which he had been speaking, passages from Idylls of the King, some of the songs, the "Northern Farmer (New Style)" and, more fully, Maud and the Welhngton Ode. His voice was deep, rolling, resonant. It sank to a note of tenderness, touched with prophetic solemnity, as he read the last lines of the ode: —

Speak no more of his renown.

Lay your earthly fancies down.

And in the vast cathedral leave him, God accept him, Chiist receive him.

On the 6th of October, 1892, between one and two o'clock in the morning, with the splendours of the full moon pouring in through the windows of the room where his family were watching by his bed, he passed into the world of light. His body was laid to rest on the 12th of October, in Westminster Abbey, next to the grave of Robert Browning, and close beside the monument of Chaucer. The mighty multitude of mourners assembled at the funeral, — scholars, statesmen, nobles, veterans of the Light Brigade, poor boys of the Gordon Home, — told how widely and deeply Tennyson had moved the hearts of all sorts and conditions of men by his poetry, which was, in effect, his life.