Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson Part 14

Writes his _Welcome to Alexandra_, 1863.

Publishes _Enoch Arden_, 1864; _The Holy Grail_, 1869.

His mother dies, 1865.

Purchases land at Haslemere, Surrey, 1868, and begins erection of Aldworth.

Publishes _Queen Mary_, 1875; the drama successfully performed by Henry Irving, 1876.

Publishes _Harold_, 1876.

His drama _The Falcon_ produced, 1869.

Seeks better health by a tour on the Continent with his son Hallam, 1880.

Publishes _Ballads and Other Poems_, 1880.

His drama _The Cup_ successfully performed, 1881.

His drama _The Promise of May_ proves a failure, 1882.

Raised to the peerage as Baron Tennyson of Aldworth and Farringford, 1884.

Publishes _Becket_, 1884.

His son Lionel dies, 1885.

Publishes _Tiresias and Other Poems_, 1885. This volume contains _Balin and Balan_, thus completing his _Idylls of the King_.

Publishes _Demeter and Other Poems_, 1889.

Dies at Aldworth, October 6, 1892, and is buried in Westminster Abbey.

The _Death of Oenone_ is published, 1892.

APPRECIATIONS

"Since the days when Dryden held office no Laureate has been appointed so distinctly pre-eminent above all his contemporaries, so truly the king of the poets, as he upon whose brows now rests the Laureate crown. Dryden's grandeur was sullied, his muse was venal, and his life was vicious; still in his keeping the office acquired a certain dignity; after his death it declined into the depths of depredation, and each succeeding dullard dimmed its failing l.u.s.tre. The first ray of hope for its revival sprang into life with the appointment of Southey, to whom succeeded Wordsworth, a poet of worth and genius, whose name certainly a.s.sisted in resuscitating the ancient dignity of the appointment. Alfred Tennyson derives less honor from the t.i.tle than he confers upon it; to him we owe a debt of grat.i.tude that he has redeemed the laurels with his poetry, n.o.ble, pure, and undefiled as ever poet sung."--_Walter Hamilton_.

"Tennyson is many sided; he has a great variety of subjects. He has treated of the cla.s.sical and the romantic life of the world; he has been keenly alive to the beauties of nature; and he has tried to sympathize with the social problems that confront mankind. In this respect he is a representative poet of the age, for this very diversity of natural gifts has made him popular with all cla.s.ses. Perhaps he has not been perfectly cosmopolitan, and sometimes the theme in his poetry has received a slight treatment compared to what might have been given it by deeper thinking and more philosophical poets, but he has caught the spirit of the age and has expressed its thought, if not always forcibly, at least more beautifully than any other poet,"--_Charles Read Nutter_.

"In technical elegance, as an artist in verse, Tennyson is the greatest of modern poets. Other masters, old and new, have surpa.s.sed him in special instances; but he is the only one who rarely nods, and who always finishes his verse to the extreme. Here is the absolute sway of metre, compelling every rhyme and measure needful to the thought; here are sinuous alliterations, unique and varying breaks and pauses, winged flights and falls, the glory of sound and color everywhere present, or, if missing, absent of the poet's free will. The fullness of his art evades the charm of spontaneity. His original and fastidious art is of itself a theme for an essay. The poet who studies it may well despair, he can never excel it; its strength is that of perfection; its weakness, the ever-perfection which marks a still-life painter."--_Edmund Clarence Stedman_.

"A striking quality of Tennyson's poetry is its simplicity, both in thought and expression. This trait was characteristic of his life, and so we naturally expect to find it in his verse. Tennyson was too sincere by nature, and too strongly averse to experimenting in new fields of poetry, to attempt the affected or unique. He purposely avoided all subjects which he feared he could not treat with simplicity and clearness. So, in his shorter poems, there are few obscure or ambiguous pa.s.sages, little that is not easy of comprehension. His subjects themselves tend to prevent ambiguity or obscurity. For he wrote of men and women as he saw them about him, of their joys and sorrows, their trials, their ideals,--and in this was nothing complex. Thus there is a homely quality to his poems, but they are kept from the commonplace by the great tenderness of his feeling. Had Tennyson been primarily of a metaphysical or philosophical mind all this might have been different.

True, he was somewhat of a student of philosophy and religion, and some of his poems are of these subjects, but his thought even here is always simple and plain, and he never attempted the deep study that was not characteristic of his nature. No less successful is he in avoiding obscurity in expression. There are few pa.s.sages that need much explanation. In this he offers a striking contrast to Browning, who often painfully hid his meaning under complex phraseology. His vocabulary is remarkably large, and when we study his use of words, we find that in many cases they are from the two-syllabled cla.s.s. This matter of choice of clear, simple words and phrases is very important.

For, just so much as our attention is drawn from what a poet says to the medium, the language in which he says it, so much is its clearness injured. Vividly to see pictures in our imagination or to be affected by our emotions, we must not, as we read, experience any jar. In Tennyson we never have to think of his expressions--except to admire their simple beauty. Simplicity and beauty, then, are two noticeable qualities of his poetry."--_Charles Read Nutter_.

"An idyllic or picturesque mode of conveying his sentiments is the one natural to Tennyson, if not the only one permitted by his limitations.

He is a born observer of physical nature, and, whenever he applies an adjective to some object or pa.s.singly alludes to some phenomenon which others have but noted, is almost infallibly correct. He has the unerring first touch which in a single line proves the artist; and it justly has been remarked that there is more true English landscape in many an isolated stanza of _In Memoriam_ than in the whole of _The Seasons_, that vaunted descriptive poem of a former century."--_Edmund Clarence Stedman_.

"In describing scenery, his microscopic eye and marvellously delicate ear are exercised to the utmost in detecting the minutest relations and most evanescent melodies of the objects before him, in order that his representation shall include everything which is important to their full perfection. His pictures of rural English scenery give the inner spirit as well as the outward form of the objects, and represent them, also, in their relation to the mind which is gazing on them. The picture in his mind is spread out before his detecting and dissecting intellect, to be transformed to words only when it can be done with the most refined exactness, both as regards color and form and melody."--_E.P. Whipple_.

"For the most part he wrote of the every day loves and duties of men and women; of the primal pains and joys of humanity; of the aspirations and trials which are common to all ages and all cla.s.ses and independent even of the diseases of civilization, but he made them new and surprising by the art which he added to them, by beauty of thought, tenderness of feeling, and exquisiteness of shaping."--_Stopford A. Brooke_.

"The tenderness of Tennyson is one of his remarkable qualities--not so much in itself, for other poets have been more tender--but in combination with his rough powers. We are not surprised that his rugged strength is capable of the mighty and tragic tenderness of Rispah, but we could not think at first that he could feel and realize the exquisite tenderness of _Elaine_. It is a wonderful thing to have so wide a tenderness, and only a great poet can possess it and use it well."--_Stopford A. Brooke_.

"Tennyson is a great master of pathos; knows the very tones that go to the heart; can arrest every one of these looks of upbraiding or appeal by which human woe brings the tear into the human eye. The pathos is deep; but it is the majesty not the prostration of grief."--_Peter Bayne_.

"Indeed the truth must be strongly borne in upon even the warmest admirers of Tennyson that his recluse manner of life closed to him many avenues of communication with the men and women of his day, and that, whether as a result or cause of his exclusiveness, he had but little of that restless, intellectual curiosity which constantly whets itself upon new experiences, finds significance where others see confusion, and beneath the apparently commonplace in human character reaches some harmonizing truth. _Rizpah_ and _The Grandmother_ show what a rich harvest he would have reaped had he cared more frequently to walk the thoroughfares of life. His finely wrought character studies are very few in number, and even the range of his types is disappointingly narrow."--_Pelham Edgar_.

"No reader of Tennyson can miss the note of patriotism which he perpetually sounds. He has a deep and genuine love of country, a pride in the achievements of the past, a confidence in the greatness of the future. And this sense of patriotism almost reaches insularity of view.

He looks out upon the larger world with a gentle commiseration, and surveys its un-English habits and const.i.tution with sympathetic contempt.

The patriotism of Tennyson is sober rather than glowing; it is meditative rather than enthusiastic. Occasionally indeed, his words catch fire, and the verse leaps onward with a sound of triumph, as in such a poem as _The Charge of the Light Brigade_ or in such a glorious ballad as _The Revenge_. Neither of these poems is likely to perish until the glory of the nation perishes, and her deeds of a splendid chivalrous past sink into oblivion, which only shameful cowardice can bring upon her. But as a rule Tennyson's patriotism is not a contagious and inspiring patriotism. It is meditative, philosophic, self-complacent. It rejoices in the infallibility of the English judgment, the eternal security of English inst.i.tutions, the perfection of English forms of government."--_W. J. Dawson_.

"Tennyson always speaks from the side of virtue; and not of that new and strange virtue which some of our later poets have exalted, and which, when it is stripped of its fine garments, turns out to be nothing else than the unrestrained indulgence of every natural impulse; but rather of that old fas.h.i.+oned virtue whose laws are 'self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control,' and which finds its highest embodiment in the morality of the _New Testament_. There is a spiritual courage in his work, a force of fate which conquers doubt and darkness, a light of inward hope which burns dauntless under the shadow of death. Tennyson is the poet of faith; faith as distinguished from cold dogmatism and the acceptance of traditional creeds; faith which does not ignore doubt and mystery, but triumphs over them and faces the unknown with fearless heart. The effect of Christianity upon the poetry of Tennyson may be felt in its general moral quality. By this it is not meant that he is always preaching. But at the same time the poet can hardly help revealing, more by tone and accent than by definite words, his moral sympathies. He is essentially and characteristically a poet with a message. His poetry does not exist merely for the sake of its own perfection of form. It is something more than the sound of one who has a lovely voice and can play skilfully upon an instrument. It is a poetry with a meaning and a purpose. It is a voice that has something to say to us about life. When we read his poems we feel our hearts uplifted, we feel that, after all it is worth while to struggle towards the light, it is worth while to try to be upright and generous and true and loyal and pure, for virtue is victory and goodness is the only fadeless and immortal crown. The secret of the poet's influence must lie in his spontaneous witness to the reality and supremacy of the moral life. His music must thrill us with the conviction that the humblest child of man has a duty, an ideal, a destiny. He must sing of justice and of love as a sure reward, a steadfast law, the safe port and haven of the soul."--_Henry Van d.y.k.e_.

REFERENCES ON TENNYSON'S LIFE AND WORKS

_Alfred, Lord Tennyson: A Memoir_ by Hallam Tennyson. Toronto: The Macmillan Company of Canada, Limited. Price $2.00.

_Tennyson and his Friends_ edited by Hallam, Lord Tennyson. Toronto: The Macmillan Company of Canada, Limited.

_Alfred, Lord Tennyson: A Study of his Life and Works_ by Arthur Waugh.

London: William Heinemann.

_Tennyson_ by Sir Alfred Lyall in _English Men of Letters_ series.

Toronto: The Macmillan Company of Canada, Limited.

_Alfred Tennyson_ by Arthur Christopher Benson in _Little Biographies_.

London: Methuen & Co.

_Alfred Tennyson: A Saintly Life_ by Robert F. Horton. London: J. M.

Dent & Co.

_Alfred Tennyson_ by Andrew Lang. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company.

_Tennyson: His Art and Relation to Modern Life_ by Stopford A. Brooke.

London: William Heinemann.

_A Study of the Works of Alfred, Lord Tennyson_ by Edward Campbell Tainsh. Toronto: The Macmillan Company of Canada, Limited.

_The Poetry of Tennyson_ by Henry Van d.y.k.e. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.

_A Tennyson Primer_ by William Macneile Dixon. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company.