It was the £300 three events were closely connected. received in advance for In Memoriam that provided a financial 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 With a faith as clear as the heights of the June-blue heaven, 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 generally incline to the opinion of Robert Louis Stevenson, who thought that the ode had "never been surpassed in any tongue or time." 1 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, Aldworth, near the summit of Black Down in Sussex, was not built until 1868. A statelier mansion, though less picturesque, its attraction as a summer home lies in the 1 Letters of R. L. Stevenson, Vol. I, p. 220. beauty of its terraced rose-garden, 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 London Examiner. 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 't were possible," in The Tribute, 1837 (p. 167). 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 1875. 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." Yet the vigour of the long This is undoubtedly true and just. 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 has now entered into Tennyson's poetry to coöperate with the æsthetic impulse and the religious impulse in the full labours of his maturity. 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 Enoch 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 66 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, Crossing the Bar." In 1892 the long list closes with The Death of Enone, Akbar's 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. The one sorrow that crossed it was the death of his younger son, Lionel, in 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, 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 in 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 bind himself to any party. His first vote was cast for the Extension of the Franchise.1 At the close of August 1892, when I saw 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 in spirit, a noble shape of manhood, massive, largebrowed, his bronzed face like the countenance of an antique seer, his scattered 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 Wellington 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, And in the vast cathedral leave him, On the 6th of October, 1892, between one and two o'clock in the morning, with the splendour of the full moon pouring in 1 See note, p. 439. 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 who assembled at the funeral — scholars, statesmen, nobles, private soldiers, veterans of the Balaclava 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. III TENNYSON'S USE OF HIS SOURCES Ein Quidam sagt, "Ich bin von keiner Schule! Kein Meister lebt mit dem ich buhle; Auch bin ich weit davon entfernt, Das ich von Todten was gelernt." Das heisst, wenn ich ihn recht verstand; GOETHE. Emerson was of the same opinion as Goethe in regard to originality. Writing of Shakespeare he says, "The greatest genius is the most indebted man,” and defends the poet's right to take his material wherever he can find it. Shakespeare certainly exercised large liberty in that respect and did not even trouble himself to look for a defence. Wordsworth wrote, "Multa tulit fecitque must be the motto of all those who are to last." Most of the men whom the world calls great in poetry have drawn freely from the sources which are open to all, not only in nature, but also in the literature of the past, and in the thoughts and feelings of men around them, the inchoate literature of the present. |