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[Illustration: ALFRED TENNYSON

_Photograph by
The London Stereoscopic Co._]




                               TENNYSON


                                  BY

                           G. K. CHESTERTON

                                  AND

                       DR. RICHARD GARNETT, C.B.


                      WITH NUMEROUS ILLUSTRATIONS


                               NEW YORK

                        JAMES POTT AND COMPANY

                                LONDON

                         HODDER AND STOUGHTON


                              PRINTED BY
                     HAZELL, WATSON AND VINEY, LD.
                         LONDON AND AYLESBURY
                               ENGLAND.




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS


                                                                    PAGE

ALFRED TENNYSON                                            _Frontispiece_

THE BROOK AT SOMERSBY                                                  1

AN EARLY PORTRAIT OF TENNYSON                                          2

SOMERSBY RECTORY, LINCOLNSHIRE (where Alfred Tennyson was born)        3

LOUTH                                                                  4

SOMERSBY CHURCH                                                        4

ALFRED TENNYSON (from the painting by Samuel Laurence)                 5

TENNYSON’S MOTHER                                                      6

BAG ENDERBY CHURCH                                                     6

ALFRED TENNYSON, 1838                                                  7

OLD GRAMMAR SCHOOL, LOUTH                                              7

ARTHUR H. HALLAM (from the bust by Chantrey)                           8

ALFRED TENNYSON (from the medallion by Thomas Woolner, R.A.)           9

THE LADY OF SHALOTT                                                   10

THE PALACE OF ART                                                     11

ALFRED TENNYSON (from the bust by Thomas Woolner, R.A.)               12

MARIANA IN THE SOUTH                                                  13

STOCKWORTH MILL                                                       14

CLEVEDON CHURCH                                                       14

GERAINT AND EDYRN                                                     15

IN MEMORIAM (“Man dies: nor is there hope in dust”)                   16

IN MEMORIAM (“Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky”)                 17

LADY TENNYSON                                                         18

HORNCASTLE (the home of Emily Sellwood)                               19

GRASBY CHURCH                                                         20

CHAPEL HOUSE, TWICKENHAM (Tennyson’s first home after his marriage)   20

ELAINE                                                                21

ALFRED TENNYSON (1867)                                                22

ALFRED TENNYSON (from a portrait by G. F. Watts, R.A., 1859)          23

ALFRED TENNYSON (from the chalk drawing by M. Arnault)                24

FARRINGFORD (Tennyson’s residence at Freshwater)                      25

TENNYSON (about 1871)                                                 26

MERLIN AND VIVIEN                                                     27

FACSIMILE OF TENNYSON’S MANUSCRIPT, “CROSSING THE BAR”                28

GLADE AT FARRINGFORD (from a water-colour drawing by Mrs. Allingham)  29

FRESHWATER                                                            30

FRESHWATER BAY                                                        30

GUINEVERE                                                             31

ALFRED TENNYSON                                                       32

TENNYSON’S LANE, HASLEMERE                                            33

ALDWORTH (Tennyson’s home near Haslemere)                             33

TENNYSON’S MEMORIAL, BEACON HILL, FRESHWATER                          34

ALFRED TENNYSON (from a portrait by G. F. Watts, R.A.)                35




                               TENNYSON


[Illustration:

     _From a photo by Messrs. Carlton & Sons, Horncastle_

THE BROOK AT SOMERSBY]

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

[Illustration: AN EARLY PORTRAIT OF TENNYSON

Rischgitz Collection]

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

[Illustration:

     _From a photo by Messrs. Carlton & Sons, Horncastle_

SOMERSBY RECTORY, LINCOLNSHIRE

Where Alfred Tennyson was born, on Sunday, August 6th, 1809]

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.

[Illustration: LOUTH

(Reproduced from “The Laureate’s Country,” by kind permission of Messrs.
Seeley & Co., Ltd.)]

[Illustration:

     _From a photo by Messrs. Carlton & Sons, Horncastle_

SOMERSBY CHURCH]

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

[Illustration: ALFRED TENNYSON

_From the painting by Samuel Laurence_

Rischgitz Collection]

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

[Illustration: TENNYSON’S MOTHER]

[Illustration:

     _From a photo by Messrs. Carlton & Sons, Horncastle_

BAG ENDERBY CHURCH]

in somewhat subtler days to understand how anybody could suppose that
the origin of species had anything to do with the origin of being. To us
it appears that to tell a man who asks who made his mind that evolution
made it, is like telling a man who asks who rolled a cab-wheel over his
leg that revolution rolled it. To state the process is scarcely to state
the agent. But the position of those who regarded the opening of the
“Descent of Man” as the opening of one of the seals of the last days, is
a great deal sounder than people have generally allowed. It has been
constantly supposed that they were angry with Darwinism because it
appeared to do something or other to the Book of Genesis; but this was a
pretext or a fancy. They fundamentally rebelled against Darwinism, not
because they had a fear that it would affect Scripture, but because they
had a fear, not altogether unreasonable or ill-founded, that it would
affect morality. Man had been engaged, through innumerable ages, in a
struggle with sin. The evil within him was as strong as he could cope

[Illustration: ALFRED TENNYSON, 1838

From an early Daguerreotype

(Reproduced from “Tennyson: a Memoir,” by kind permission of Messrs.
Macmillan & Co., Ltd.)

     _Engraved by G. J. Stodart_]

[Illustration: OLD GRAMMAR SCHOOL, LOUTH

The original building, now no longer in existence, where Tennyson was
sent to school at the age of seven

(Reproduced from “The Laureate’s Country,” by kind permission of Messrs.
Seeley & Co., Ltd.)

     _From a drawing by E. Hull_]

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

[Illustration:

     _From the bust by Chantrey_

ARTHUR H. HALLAM

(Reproduced from Hallam’s “Remains,” by kind permission of Mr. John
Murray)]

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.

[Illustration:

     _From the medallion by Thomas Woolner, R.A._

ALFRED TENNYSON

(Reproduced from “Tennyson’s Poems,” by kind permission of Messrs.
Macmillan & Co., Ltd.)]

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.

[Illustration: THE LADY OF SHALOTT

_From a drawing by W. Holman Hunt_

(Reproduced from “Tennyson’s Poems,” by kind permission of Messrs.
Macmillan & Co., Ltd.)]

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.

[Illustration: THE PALACE OF ART

_From a drawing by Dante Gabriel Rossetti_

(Reproduced from “Tennyson’s Poems,” by kind permission of Messrs.
Macmillan & Co., Ltd.)]

[Illustration: ALFRED TENNYSON

A marble bust, copied by Miss Grant from the original, sculptured from
life in 1857 by Thomas Woolner, R.A.

Rischgitz Collection]

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


[Illustration: MARIANA IN THE SOUTH

_From a drawing by Dante Gabriel Rossetti_

(Reproduced from “Tennyson’s Poems,” by kind permission of Messrs.
Macmillan & Co., Ltd.)]

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

[Illustration: STOCKWORTH MILL

(Reproduced from “The Homes and Haunts of Alfred, Lord Tennyson,” by
kind permission of Mr. George G. Napier and Messrs. James Maclehose &
Sons)]

[Illustration: CLEVEDON CHURCH

Where the remains of Arthur Hallam were finally laid to rest on January
3rd, 1834.

(Reproduced from “The Homes and Haunts of Alfred, Lord Tennyson,” by
kind permission of Mr. George G. Napier and Messrs. James Maclehose &
Sons)]

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

[Illustration:

     _From a drawing by Louis Rhead_

GERAINT AND EDYRN

(Reproduced from the Illustrated Edition of “Idylls of the King,” by
kind permission of Messrs. Macmillan & Co., Ltd.)]

[Illustration:

     _From a drawing by A. Garth Jones_

IN MEMORIAM

“Man dies: nor is there hope in dust”

(Reproduced from the Caxton Series Edition of Tennyson’s “In Memoriam,”
by kind permission of Messrs. George Newnes, Ltd.)]

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.”

[Illustration:

     _From a drawing by A. Garth Jones_

IN MEMORIAM

“Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky”

(Reproduced from the Caxton Series Edition of Tennyson’s “In Memoriam,”
by kind permission of Messrs. George Newnes, Ltd.)]

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.

[Illustration:

     _From the portrait at Aldworth by G. F. Watts, R.A._

LADY TENNYSON]

[Illustration:

     _From a drawing by E. Hull_

HORNCASTLE

The home of Emily Sellwood, afterwards Lady Tennyson

(Reproduced from “The Laureate’s Country,” by kind permission of Messrs.
Seeley & Co., Ltd.)]

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 (though most curiously anticipated by a few blank-verse
lines of William Blake), 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.

[Illustration: _From a photo in the possession of the Rev. A. W.
Workman, Vicar of Grasby_

GRASBY CHURCH]

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.

[Illustration: CHAPEL HOUSE, TWICKENHAM

Tennyson’s first settled home after his marriage

Rischgitz Collection]

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

[Illustration:

     _From a drawing by Gustave Doré_

ELAINE

(Reproduced from “Illustrations to Tennyson’s ‘Idylls of the King,’” by
kind permission of Messrs. Ward, Lock & Co.)]

[Illustration: _From a photograph in 1867 by Mrs. Julia Margaret
Cameron_

ALFRED TENNYSON

(Reproduced by permission of Mr. J. Caswall Smith)]

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

[Illustration: _From the portrait in the possession of Lady Henry
Somerset, painted by G. F. Watts, R.A., in 1859_

ALFRED TENNYSON]

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
mediæval 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 mediæval and a modern
man; but he uses mediæval 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,

[Illustration:

     _From the chalk drawing by M. Arnault in the National Portrait
     Gallery_

ALFRED TENNYSON

Rischgitz Collection]

[Illustration:

     _From a photo by Messrs. F. Frith & Co., Reigate_

FARRINGFORD

Tennyson’s residence at Freshwater]

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 mediæval 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.

[Illustration:

     _From a photo by Mrs. Julia Margaret Cameron_

TENNYSON (ABOUT 1871)

(Reproduced by permission of Mr. J. Caswall Smith)]

By virtue of this golden mean Tennyson remained at an equal distance
from revolution and reaction in his ideas, and equally remote from
extravagance and insipidity in his work. He is essentially a man of the
new time; he begins his career steeped in the influence of Shelley and
Keats, without whom he would never have attained the height he did--a
height nevertheless, in our opinion, appreciably below theirs, if he is
regarded simply as a poet. But he is a poet and much else; he is the
interpreter of the Victorian era--firstly to itself, secondly to the
ages to come. Had even any poet of greater genius than himself arisen in
his own day, which did not happen, he would still have remained the
national poet of the time in virtue of his universality. Some personal
friends _splendide mendaces_ have hailed him as our greatest poet since
Shakespeare. This is absurd; but it is true that no other poet since
Shakespeare has produced a body of

[Illustration:

     _From a drawing by George W. Rhead_

MERLIN AND VIVIEN

(Reproduced from the Illustrated Edition of “Idylls of the King,” by
kind permission of Messrs. Macmillan & Co., Ltd.)]

[Illustration: A FACSIMILE TENNYSON’S MANUSCRIPT, “CROSSING THE BAR”

(Reproduced from “Tennyson: A Memoir,” by kind permission of Messrs.
Macmillan & Co., Ltd.)]

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.

[Illustration:

     _From a water-colour drawing by Mrs. Allingham_

THE GLADE AT FARRINGFORD

(Reproduced by kind permission of the Artist)]

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

[Illustration:

     _From a photo by Messrs. F. Frith & Co., Reigate_

FRESHWATER]

[Illustration:

     _From a photo by Messrs. F. Frith & Co., Reigate_

FRESHWATER BAY]

day. Not that he is a fusion of conflicting tendencies, but that he
occupies a central position, equally remote from the excesses of
scepticism and the excesses of devotion. This position he is able to
fill from his relation to Coleridge, the great exponent of the _via
media_: not, as in former days, between Protestantism and Romanism, but
between orthodoxy and free thought. Tennyson cannot, indeed, be termed
Coleridge’s intellectual heir. As a thinker he is far below his
predecessor, and almost devoid of originality; but as a poet he fills up
the measure of what was lacking in Coleridge, whose season of
speculation hardly arrived until the season of poetry was past. Tennyson
was but one of a band of auditors--it might be too much to call them
disciples--of the sage who, curiously enough, had himself been a
Cambridge man, and who, short and unsatisfactory as had been his
residence at that seat of learning,

[Illustration:

     _From a drawing by Gustave Doré_

GUINEVERE

(Reproduced from the “Illustrations to Tennyson’s ‘Idylls of the King,’”
by kind permission of Messrs. Ward, Lock & Co.)]

[Illustration:

     _From a photo by Barraud_

ALFRED TENNYSON]

[Illustration:

     _From a photo by the Graphotone Co._

TENNYSON’S LANE, HASLEMERE]

[Illustration:

     _From a photo by the Graphotone Co._

ALDWORTH

Tennyson’s home near Haslemere]

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 mediævalism, 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.

[Illustration: _From a photo by Messrs. F. Frith & Co., Reigate_

TENNYSON’S MEMORIAL, BEACON HILL, FRESHWATER]




                           BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE


[Sidenote: =Somersby Rectory, the birthplace of Alfred Tennyson=

_see page 3_]

     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.

[Illustration:

     _From a portrait by G. F. Watts, R.A._

ALFRED TENNYSON

Rischgitz Collection]

[Sidenote: =Somersby Brook=

_see page 1_]

He always spoke with affectionate remembrance of his early home: of the
woodbine trained round his nursery window; of the mediæval-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.

[Sidenote: =Tennyson’s Mother=

_see page 6_]

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.

[Sidenote: =Somersby Church=

_see page 4_]

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.

[Sidenote: =Bag Enderby Church=

_see page 6_]

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.

[Sidenote: =Louth=

_see page 4_]

[Sidenote: =The Grammar School, Louth=

_see page 7_]

At the age of seven Tennyson was sent to school at Louth, a market-town
which may fairly lay claim to having been a factor of some importance in
his early life. His maternal grandmother lived in Westgate Place, her
house being a second home to the young Tennysons. The old Grammar School
where Alfred received the early portion of his education is now no
longer in existence. Tennyson’s recollections of it and of the Rev. J.
Waite, at that time the head-master, were not pleasant. “How I did hate
that school!” he wrote later. “The only good I got from it was the
memory of the words _Sonus desilientis aquæ_, and of an old wall covered
with wild weeds opposite the school windows.”

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 (nothing between me and the stars but a stratum of tiles).
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.”

[Sidenote: =Arthur Hallam (from the bust by Chantrey)=

_see page 8_]

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.”

[Sidenote: =The Lady of Shalott=

_see page 10_]

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.”

“Well I remember this poem,” wrote Fitzgerald, with reference to “The
Lady of Shalott,” “read to me, before I knew the author, at Cambridge
one night in 1832 or 3, and its images passing across my head, as across
the magic mirror, while half asleep on the mail-coach to London ‘in the
creeping dawn’ that followed.”

    There she weaves by night and day
    A magic web with colours gay.
    She has heard a whisper say,
    A curse is on her if she stay
          To look down to Camelot.
    She knows not what the curse may be,
    And so she weaveth steadily,
    And little other care hath she,
          The Lady of Shalott.

The idea of “Mariana in the South” came to Tennyson as he was

[Sidenote: =“Mariana in the South”=

_see page 13_]

travelling between Narbonne and Perpignan. Hallam interpreted it to be
the “expression of desolate loneliness.”

    Till all the crimson changed, and past
      Into deep orange o’er the sea,
    Low on her knees herself she cast,
      Before Our Lady murmur’d she;
    Complaining, “Mother, give me grace
      To help me of my weary load,”
      And on the liquid mirror glow’d
    The clear perfection of her face.

[Sidenote: =Stockworth Mill=

_see page 14_]

Of these earlier poems none added more to Tennyson’s growing reputation
than “The Miller’s Daughter.” It was probably written at Cambridge, and
the poet declared that the mill was no particular mill, or if he had
thought of any mill it was that of Trumpington, near Cambridge. But
various touches in the poem seem to indicate that the haunts of his
boyhood were present in his mind.

Stockworth Mill was situated about two miles along the banks of the
Somersby Brook, the poet’s favourite walk, and might very well have
inspired the setting of these beautiful verses.

    I loved the brimming wave that swam
      Thro’ quiet meadows round the mill,
    The sleepy pool above the dam,
      The pool beneath it never still.
    The meal-sacks on the whiten’d floor,
      The dark round of the dripping wheel,
    The very air about the door
      Made misty with the floating meal.

[Sidenote: =The Palace of Art=

_see page 11_]

In the volume of 1832, several stanzas of “The Palace of Art” were
omitted, because Tennyson thought the poem was too full. “‘The Palace of
Art,’” he wrote in 1890, “is the embodiment of my own belief that the
Godlike life is with man and for man.”

Amongst the “marvellously compressed word pictures” of this poem is the
beautiful one of our illustration on page 11.

    Or in a clear-wall’d city on the sea,
      Near gilded organ-pipes, her hair
    Wound with white roses, slept St. Cecily;
     An angel look’d at her.

[Sidenote: =Clevedon Church=

_see page 14_]

On the 15th of September, 1833, Arthur Hallam died suddenly at Vienna.
His remains were brought to England, and laid finally to rest in the old
and lonely church beside the sea at Clevedon, on January 3rd, 1834.

    When on my bed the moonlight falls,
      I know that in thy place of rest
      By that broad water of the west
    There comes a glory on the walls.

[Sidenote: =“In Memoriam”=

_see pages 16, 17_]

Tennyson’s whole thoughts were absorbed in memories of his friend, and
he continually wrote fragmentary verses on the one theme which filled
his heart, many of them to be embodied seventeen years later in the
completed “In Memoriam.”

[Sidenote: =The home of Emily Sellwood, at Horncastle=

_see page 19_]

In 1830 Tennyson first met Emily Sellwood, who twenty years later became
his wife. Horncastle was the nearest town to Somersby, and in the
picturesque old market-square stood the red-brick residence of Mr. Henry
Sellwood, a solicitor. The young Sellwoods being much of the same age as
the Tennysons, a friendship sprang up between the two families, which in
later

[Sidenote: =Grasby Church=

_see page 20_]

years ripened into a double matrimonial relationship. In 1836, Charles
Tennyson, the poet’s elder brother, married Louisa, the youngest
daughter of Henry Sellwood. In the previous year he had succeeded to the
estate and living of Grasby, taking the surname of Turner under his
great-uncle’s will. At his own expense he built the vicarage, the church
and the schools; and on his death, in 1879, Grasby descended to the Poet
Laureate. It was at his brother’s wedding that the bride’s sister,
Emily, was taken into church by Alfred Tennyson, but no engagement was
recognised between them until four or five years later, and their
marriage did not take place until 1850. It was solemnised at Shiplake
Church on June 13th, the clergyman who officiated being the poet’s
intimate friend, the Rev. Robert Rawnsley.

In the April of the same year, on the death of Wordsworth, Tennyson had
been offered the poet-laureateship, to which post he was appointed on
November 19th, owing chiefly to Prince Albert’s admiration for “In
Memoriam.”

[Sidenote: =Lady Tennyson=

_see page 18_]

Lady Tennyson became the poet’s adviser in literary matters. “I am proud
of her intellect,” he wrote. She, with her “tender, spiritual nature,”
was always by his side, cheerful, courageous, and a sympathetic
counsellor. She shielded his sensitive spirit from the annoyances and
trials of life and “her faith as clear as the heights of the June-blue
heaven” helped him in hours of depression and sorrow.

[Sidenote: =Chapel House, Twickenham=

_see page 20_]

Chapel House, Twickenham, was the poet’s first settled home after his
marriage, and he resided in it for three years. It was here his “Ode on
the Death of the Duke of Wellington” was written, and the birth of his
son Hallam took place in this house on August 11th, 1852.

[Sidenote: =Farringford, Tennyson’s residence at Freshwater=

_see page 25_]

In 1853, whilst staying in the Isle of Wight, Tennyson heard that the
residence called Farringford was to let at Freshwater. He decided to
take the place on lease, but two years later purchased it out of the
proceeds resulting from “Maud,” which was published in 1855, and
Farringford remained his home during the greater part of each year for
forty years, and here he wrote some of his best-known works.

“The house at Farringford,” says Mrs. Richmond Ritchie in her _Records_,
“seemed like a charmed palace, with green walls without, and speaking
walls within. There hung Dante with his solemn nose and wreath; Italy
gleamed over the doorways; friends’ faces lined the passages, books
filled the shelves, and a glow of crimson was everywhere; the oriel
drawing-room window was full of green and golden leaves, of the sound of
birds and of the distant sea.”

[Sidenote: =The Glade at Farringford=

_see page 29_]

The grounds of Farringford are exceedingly beautiful and picturesque. On
the south side of the house is the glade, and close by

    The waving pine which here
    The warrior of Caprera set.

Referring to Farringford in his invitation to Maurice, Tennyson wrote--

    Where far from noise and smoke of town
      I watch the twilight falling brown
    All round a careless order’d garden,
      Close to the ridge of a noble down.

The ridge of the down in question constituted the poet’s favourite walk,
and

[Sidenote: =Freshwater Bay=

_see page 30_]

the scenery which he encountered round Freshwater Bay might well have
been represented in the opening verse of “Enoch Arden”--

    Long lines of cliff breaking have left a chasm;
    And in the chasm are foam and yellow sands.

[Sidenote: =Freshwater Village=

_see page 30_]

Inland the road leads to the little village of Freshwater, in which the
erection of a number of new houses evoked from the poet the lines--

    Yonder lies our young sea-village--Art and Grace are less and less:
    Science grows and Beauty dwindles--roofs of slated hideousness!

[Sidenote: =Alfred Tennyson=

_see pages 22 and 26_]

Opposite these villas stands an ivy-clad house at that time occupied by
Mrs. Julia Cameron, the celebrated lady art-photographer, two of whose
effective portraits of Tennyson appear on pages 22 and 26.

[Sidenote: =“The Idylls of the King”=

_see pages 15, 21, 27, 31_]

[Sidenote: =Aldworth=

_see page 33_]

In the autumn of 1859, “The Idylls of the King” were first issued in
their original form, being four in number: Enid, Vivien, Elaine, and
Guinevere, and from their publication until the end of Tennyson’s life
his fame and popularity continued without a check. During the next few
years the poet spent much time in travelling, but in 1868 he laid the
foundation-stone of a new residence, named Aldworth, about two miles
from Haslemere, which became his second home--

    You came, and look’d and loved the view
      Long-known and loved by me,
    Green Sussex fading into blue,
      With one grey glimpse of sea.

[Sidenote: =Tennyson’s Lane=

_see page 33_]

On the way from Haslemere to Aldworth, it is necessary to cross a rough
common covered with whin bushes to reach the long winding lane which was
named Tennyson’s Lane. This was the poet’s favourite walk when living in
the neighbourhood.

[Sidenote: =Tennyson’s Memorial, Beacon Hill, Freshwater=

_see page 34_]

Tennyson died on Thursday, October 6th, 1892, and was buried in the
Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey, next to Robert Browning, and near the
Chaucer monument. Against the pillar close by the grave has been placed
Woolner’s well-known bust. The monument erected to the memory of the
poet on Beacon Hill, near Freshwater, was unveiled by the Dean of
Westminster on August 6th, 1897.

[Sidenote: =Alfred Tennyson (from the painting by Samuel Laurence)=

_see page 5_]

With regard to the portraits of Tennyson reproduced in these pages,
perhaps those of chief interest in addition to the Cameron photographs
already referred to are the paintings by Samuel Laurence, executed about
1838, and the three-quarter length by G. F. Watts, now in the possession
of Lady Henry Somerset. Of the former Fitzgerald wrote:

“Very imperfect as Laurence’s portrait is, it is nevertheless the _best_
painted portrait I have seen; and certainly the _only_ one of old days.
‘Blubber-lipt’ I remember once Alfred called it; so it is; but still the
only one of old days, and still the best of all, to my thinking.”

[Sidenote: =Alfred Tennyson (from the painting by G. F. Watts in 1859)=

_see page 23_]

The Watts portrait, according to Mr. Watts-Dunton, possesses “a certain
dreaminess which suggests the poetic glamour of moonlight.” The same
writer asserts that “while most faces gain by the artistic halo which a
painter of genius always sheds over his work, there are some few, some
very few faces that do not, and of these Lord Tennyson’s is the most
notable that I have ever seen among men of great renown.”





End of Project Gutenberg's Tennyson, by G. K. Chesterton and Richard Garnett