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Dear Francesca,—You will ere this have heard of
the death of Tennyson. I know how profoundly this will
affect you, with what a sense of loss, and the regret
that follows when we know that a great force has finally
ceased. We have that feeling of satisfaction, too, at
the rounding and due fulfilment of a perfect career,
and, as a reaper who finishes his work, we have seen
him at sundown collecting the last gleanings and going
joyfully home, "carrying his sheaves with him."
And what a glorious harvest his has been! From the commencement
how individual was his utterance, how perfectly clear
and sincere. Although in those first poems you can detect
sometimes faint echoes of Keats and Milton, yet his
accent was emphatically his own. He may have caught
from Wordsworth that desire for simplicity in narrative
which we find completed in "Dora" or "The
Gardener's Daughter," but how different is the
actual result from the simplicity of his predecessor!
He was the fountain-head of nearly all the main streams
of poetic expression in his own age. In him we find
the germs of the school in which Morris and Rossetti
were the leaders, Matthew Arnold could not escape his
influence, nor Coventry Patmore, nor anyone who has
written verse since the year 1832, when "The Lady
of Shallot," "Oenone" and "The Palace
of Art" first saw the light. In fact no poet has
ever influenced the style and aims of his contemporaries
to such an extent. And his influence was all for good.
In the mere technique of his art he set a standard which
raised the level of the verse of his time and which
made every writer strive for a similar perfection. If
it was Keats' object to "load every rift of his
subject with ore," it was Tennyson's to make every
line ring like pure gold; and, if absolute success were
not impossible for mortals, it might be said absolutely
that he had succeeded. And his generation came panting
after him, lured on by that style which seemed so easily
perfect, by that diction which seemed so simply pure.
But both were his own, and, although he has had imitators,
he has had no approach of a rival. He had a way of transfiguring
the common incidents and occupations of every-day life,
making them melt and glow, as it were, in the heat of
his imagination. I would recall to your mind those lines
in "Enoch Arden" where he tells of Enoch's
visits to the hall with the Friday's fish:—
For
in truth
Enoch's white horse, and Enoch's ocean spoil
In ocean-smelling orier, and his face,
Rough-reddened with a thousand winter gales,
Not only to the market cross were known,
But in the leafy lanes behind the down,
Far as the portal-warding lion-whelp,
And peacock-yew tree of the lonely hall,
Whose Friday's fare was Enoch's ministering.
That
is a fair example of his incomparable art. Its greatest
achievement is "In Memoriam." To have carried
a poem in a stanza which has all the elements of monotony
inherent in itself to such a splendid and amazing perfection,
so full of variety both in material and execution, abounding
in such infinite charm of description and melody and
music, is a sufficient reason upon which to base his
claim for immortality. This one poem is also evidence
of what labor he was willing to give to his art. It
is only the man who has himself written verse who can
appreciate the work which went to the making of those
lines which seem the perfection of natural ease. And
this consummate art was in the service of a lofty and
beautiful idea. The desire for and belief in the ultimate
good in human destiny, and the wish for a larger faith
and a more hopeful creed, these were the subjects of
which he naturally wrote. And with what an effect we
know, for there is hardly a public speaker either in
the pulpit or on the platform who does not enforce and
vivify his argument for liberality of thought or for
belief in the ultimate good of human pain and defeat
by quotations from Tennyson.
This year
1892 will take its place with those other dates, 1616,
1674, 1850, in the memory of mankind as marking the
close of a genius in the direct line of Shakespeare,
Milton and Wordsworth, and, in common with yourself
and that multitude of souls who have been elevated and
carried away by his spirit, I would drop a blossom of
remembrance upon the grave of Alfred Tennyson.
S.
One
would give some of his happiest hours to know what were
the thoughts of Alfred Tennyson as he lay through that
last night silent,t he autumn moonlight all across his
bed, the wind whistling in his manor oaks, and his left
hand, that blameless hand, resting upon the open pages
of "Cymbeline." Surely no man's death was
ever more beautiful; the master poet of his race and
age, gentle, "noble and sincere," passing
to sleep in the very fulness of his fame, with all the
pride and love of England at his feet! When Tennyson
was laid in Westminster Abbey by the side of Browning
the two greatest and most beloved Englishmen of their
time were laid close together. Browning was the more
robust nature. His grasp of life was more various, more
eager, more abundantly fruitful. But Tennyson was the
nobler mind and the more picturesque and dignified figure.
All the art and intellect of his country and all its
generous spirit have attached themselves to him as they
have to no other man since Dryden.
About the
circumstances and details of Tennyson's life we know
little. In his case, as in the case of Browning and
Matthew Arnold, a noble reticence has always been maintained,
which is rare and admirable in an age when a ravenous
curiosity and hunger for petty notoriety override the
sense of dignity even in those from whom we expect better.
But this at least we know, that the name of the dead
laureate has always been associated with the fairest
and loftiest impressions; that he was one of those who
never did or "uttered anything base"; that
his life was that of a poet-philosopher, wise and dignified,
a life eminently human in the distinctive meaning of
the word, the life of one who realised to the point
of practice the beauty, sacredness and deep meaning
of this earthly existence. His only fault, we are told,
was a tendency at times to be moody, abstracted, and
unsocial.
Notwithstanding
that the world has read Tennyson for more than 60 years,
his rank among English poets is not yet surely settled;
it may, however, be taken for granted that he is among
the half dozen greatest. It is a trite observation in
criticism that he is the poetic successor and inheritor
of Keats and Wordsworth in an almost equal degree. While
he has not the exquisite and unapproachable spontaneity
in beautiful creation that Keats possessed, nor that
strange simplicity of touch which in Wordsworth was
so powerfully penetrating, yet he has a kingly and triumphant
mastery of versification, a march and sweep of numbers,
a perfection and variety of phrase and cadence, in which
through the study and practice of a long life he has
far exceeded his masters. In the "Lady of Shallot"
he fathered the pre-Raphaelite school. His "Oenone"
is one of the most beautiful poems in the language—of
its kind the most beautiful; and the "In Memoriam"
the wisest and the loftiest. In blank verse he does
not compare favorably with Milton or Keats or Wordsworth,
or even with Shelley, a fact of which he was, no doubt,
conscious, inasmuch as he gave so modest a form to his
stories of Arthur, calling them idylls rather than anything
more pretentious, yet in these very tales there is a
quality of dignity and beauty and sweet human sympathy
that will be more than sufficient to render them immortal.
It were useless to go over the long list of lyrics and
meditative pieces which are belovedly familiar to every
English ear, and which assuredly can only perish with
the language.
L.
By
the death of Tennyson England loses the greatest and
undoubtedly the last of her great line of truly national
poets. He was the ideal laureate, not only of the country
but of the nation. No other English singer has sung
as he has England's heroic deeds by land and sea. The
ballad of the "Revenge," probably the most
heroic ballad ever written, may never be equalled in
any literature. And such poems as "The Charge of
the Light Brigade" and the magnificent "Ode
on the Death of Wellington" are alone in the language
for strength and beauty. As the court singer he has
also done better work than might have been expected.
His lines to the Queen "In Memoriam" are full
of depth of feeling and stately beauty, and could not
be improved upon. All through he is essentially the
great English singer. He cannot be called the laureate
of the empire, nor is he a great world-singer but by
right of his large genius. In this field it may be finally
found that Browning is the greater. But whatever judgment
the future may bring as to his lasting qualities, Tennyson's
place as the greatest English poet of the nineteenth
century, and as one of the greatest of any other century,
is well established. It is almost certain that he is
the last of the great English poets, and this fact adds
to the greatness of his loss to the English people.
And in his death we feel a sense of the gradual passing
away of that great kingdom which has ruled for so long
the modern world. There may be the great empire of the
future with its singers, or perchance a republic, for
all we know, but with Tennyson dies the last of the
grand old Saxon bards whose hearts were England's and
for England alone. All of the greater bulk of his work,
from the "Idylls of the King" down, is on
English themes, and imbued with the old English spirit.
And no one will ever be able to disassociate the name
of Tennyson from that of the historical greatness of
his native land. Like Chaucer and Spenser, he seems
a part of the soil, and his memory will ever be connected
with her—
"Castle
walls
And snowy summits old in story."
Even
in the early unrest of his young manhood, which we find
in "Locksley Hall," his nature was in close
sympathy, though unconsciously, with the great aristocratic
nationality of which he was one of the noblest developments.
Then the easy success of his work, and its sudden great
aristocratic nationality of which he was one of the
noblest developments. Then the easy success of his work,
and its sudden great popularity strangled in its infancy
the demon of unrest that would never at its worst have
made him the republican that Shelley was. With all the
majestic splendor of his lofty lyrical faculty, which
would in itself have given him a high place in the world's
literature, the close association of his best work with
all that is best in the life of England will, I think,
ever remain his most distinguishing characteristic.
Browning is decidedly un-English, and is a poet for
all the world, and Swinburne has identified his genius
less with the history of his people than with its language.
Matthew Arnold has been, and is, the poet of the higher
thought, not so much of modern England as of all English-speaking
peoples of the last part of this century and of the
immediate future. These three, Browning, Arnold and
Swinburne, have much to do with the great republic of
letters the world over, the first two for thought, and
the last in his capacity as a great political artist.
But this is not, truly speaking, so of Tennyson, though
in his prime, as a literary artist, probably no one
man ever influenced his contemporaries as he did. But
widely now as he may be read and appreciated, and for
all his great gifts, he will never be the close friend
to thinking and poetical minds that Arnold or Browning
will be. His splendid genius has covered more ground
than any other contemporary poet except Browning. But
so much of it is so artistically well done that it palls
by its very fineness of finish, and it is so like one
of his cultured English parks that we long for a ruggedness
that is more of nature. He has touched on so many subjects
that it has been said that to read him well is to acquire
a liberal education. But for all its greatness his verse
is not the poetry of the mature man of to-day, but leads
up to it. I mean as far as the inspiring thought is
concerned. "In Memoriam" is a poem of remarkable
beauty, and is perhaps as great a mirror as we have
of the modern soul in its relationship to final hope
and aspiration, and in this sense it is his greatest
poem. But in a certain way we of the latter end of this
century have outgrown this stage of the "Infant
crying in the night," though we will never outgrow
the artistic beauty of style in which it is expressed.
We, that is many of us, have accustomed our eyes to
the gloom as it is, and begin already to see beauties
and vastness of glory in the darkness that our fathers
but lately dreaded. This must be, I believe, the keynote
of the poet of the future. In creating a new religious
attitude we have made a new world with its ideals, and
our poets must, as ever, be our truest religious leaders
or else fall into disuse.
It can be
said of Tennyson that he was great as a national poet,
great as a lyrical artist, perhaps the most exquisite
song writer in the language, and almost great as a dramatic
writer. This is where he failed, and in this he failed
all through. He had the great artistic qualities, but
with too little grasp of human life outside of history
and society so-called. Noble, polished, stately, serene,
his splendid genius might be likened to a lofty table-land
high up on the slopes of Parnassus, far above the little
peaks and foothills, and yet not so high as to reach
those ethereal peaks many of whose rugged and uneven
slopes stretch far below him.
C.
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