OUR DEBT TO TENNYSON. T HOSE who are not yet old

have become so much • accustomed to regard Tennyson as a contemporary' that it is with something like surprise one is reminded that ` he was born a hundred years ago,—on August 6th, 1809. He came of a family which was in itself a small nest of singing-. birds. Two of his brothers, Frederic and Charles, wrote excellent poetry. The future Laureate, of course, made his first literary appearance in conjunction with his brother Charles, and those who like to trace the workings of heredity will always be concerned to remember that Dr. Tennyson, the father of these men, was not only a writer of verse, but a musician. Surely one perceives in all Tennyson's poetry the priceless heritage of a sensitive, and indeed faultless, ear. It was said by Aristotle that it is a law of Nature that remarkable men should be born in clusters, just as Nature produces from time to time exceptionally generous yields of the fruits of the earth. The year 1809 saw the birth not only of Tennyson, but of Darwin, Gladstone, Lord Houghton, and • Edward FitzGerald, as we are reminded in a delightful centenary lecture on Tennyson, compounded of learning and informality, by Dr. Herbert Warren, President of Magdalen and Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University (" The Centenary of Tennyson," Clarendon Press, is.) Yet 1809 fell in an era of melancholy for England and Europe. Sir John Moore had fallen at Corunna early in the year; Napoleon, it is true, bad withdrawn from Spain, but not before he had regained Madrid. The English had been -driven to the sea Saragossa. had been taken, and the Peninsular War had still to be fought. Nelson had bought for his countu immunity from invasion when he fell at Trafalgar ; but beyond the seas the prospect was everywhere menacing and sinister. Con- templating this medley of portents and vexations, one thinke that Tennyson as a child could have had no conception, except in a poet's dreams, of the solidifying and the development of the British Empire during a long peace. But even in his early days he acquired an ideal passion for liberty which was perhaps the chief intellectual and spiritual procesa produced in him by the passing shadow of the Napoleonic conquests. As a boy he was seized with a desire to do • honour to the memory of Byron in Greece, and fight in the Greek War of Independence of .1827; and nearly, forty years later his reception of Garibaldi in England, and hid admiration for him, will always be remembered, not only as one of the most graceful international Incidents, but as et. formal and deliberate indication of the poet's political. tendency.

When Byron died at Missaloaghi In 1824 the meaning of

the wcirld had seemed to be at an end for Alfred Tennyson, and its brightness eclipsed. He scratched upon a rock at his father's home in Lincolnshire the words "Byron is dead." But, little as he knew it, the death of Byron and the vanishing of the European ferment at the end of the French wars were only the beginning of his career. He became by right of personality and merit the unrivalled seer of the Victorian era, and all that that era implies. It has been the fashion for some time—a fashion we are glad to think already declining—to forget the amazing achievements of the nineteenth century in a priggish fluster of vexation at certain signs of Philistinism in art and a certain dowdiness and prudery in the social order. But that era also saw the ordered rise of democratic government; the securing of a Constitu- tional Monarchy and its restoration to dignity and respect ; the realisation of the meaning and mission of the Empire ; the incredible progress of science, invention, and industry ; the abolition of slavery and the final accomplishment of personal liberty at home. There is not one of these things which has not affected and illumined the verse of Tennyson.

He was a great Englishman, and even such a temperate philosophy of cosmopolitanism as we come across in his poetry

always contains the express reservation that the beginning of all sympathy with others, and understanding of them, is love of one's own country. Charity in politics, as in other things, begins at home. If the Victorian era has suffered a confused and quite undeserved disrepute, Tennyson has notoriously and not unnaturally shared it. Like the Victorian era itself, how- ever, he already emerges. The demand for a little more time in which to form a final judgment of Tennyson is due simply to a timid unwillingness, very characteristic of superior

persona, to commit themselves to a warm approval of any- thing created by their contemporaries. The scientific specula- tion which runs like a thread through so many of Tennyson's poems is, indeed, the common property to-day of every news- paper and every boy in a secondary school; but Tennyson, using of course the language of the poet, not of the man of science (with an unmistakable exactitude, nevertheless), actually set down some of the main principles of the Darwinian hypothesis in advance of Darwin. Further than that, those who have in mind the recent achievements in aerial navigation

must join in the chorus of wonder, stale though it be by now, that in "Locksley Hall" Tennyson seems to have had a clear vision of the inventions to which we are attaining. We certainly shall not argue that Tennyson's art should be judged in any final sense from " Locksley Hall," but the following lines surely illustrate the speculative side of his genius as well as that cosmopolitan aspect in which his speculation

so often culminated :—

"Men, my brothers, men the workers, ever reaping something new: That which they have done but earnest of the things that they shall do:

For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see, Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;

• Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails. Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales ; Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain'd a ghastly dew From the nations' airy navies grappling in the central blue; Far along the world-wide whisper of the south-wind rushing warm, With the standards of the peoples plunging thro' the thunder- storm; Till the war-drum throbb'd no longer, and the battle flags w,sre furl'd

In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world."

The Princess is perhaps the most striking instance of the boldness which Tennyson is often said to want ; it is unique,—

original, constructive, filled with graceful fancy, and yet stable in its good sense. It is a complete treatise on the rights of women, and might be studied very profitably throughout the kingdom to-day. Tennyson was a master of an extra- ordinary variety of forms, and it astonishes us now to notice how the world has borrowed all from him and yet is unconscious of the debt. As he himself has said, "All can raise the flower now, For all have got the seed."

Just as the world takes this dower of metrical models for granted, so does it often assume the scientific foresight of Tennyson to be nothing wonderful, dully judging it in the light of its own ready-made knowledge. Again, it is the fashion to turn for an embodiment of the mediaeval spirit to the work of William Morris and Rossetti, and naturally so as these poets stand almost for that alone. But let us not forget that Tennyson before them took this medium, so to speak, in his stride, employed it for one poem (" The Lady of Shalott") superlatively well, and then left it for others and for ever.

His lyrics have a beauty which at places touches the Shake- spearean standard. Many of these lyrics are, of course, as full of "quotations" as Hamlet. Surely an ear is incapable of judging melody which does not thrill at the exceptional beauty of these lines from the famous unrhymed song in The Princess: "Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail, That brings our friends up from the underworld, Sad as the last which reddens over one That sink-s with all we rove below the verge; So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more."

Or the immortal :— "Break, break, break, On thy cold gray stones, 0 Sea!

And I would that my tongue could utter

The thoughts that arise in me.

0 well for the fisherman's boy, That he shouts with his sister at play ! 0 well for the sailor lad, That he sings in his boat on the bay And the stately ships go on To their haven under the hill;

But 0 for the touch of a vanish'd hand, And the sound of a voice that is still!"

In those lines, as again in "Side by side beneath the water Crew and Captain lie ; There the sunlit ocean tosses O'er them mouldering, And the lonely seabird crosses With one waft of the wing," Tennyson suggests with a kind of pious restraint the sublime indifference of Nature which sweeps, inexorable, like a triumphal car over the emotions of man. No one has done this quite so well, though we can never forget the passage in which Matthew Arnold leaves the dead body of Solirab between the lines at the culmination of the great tragedy, to turn immediately to an unforgettable description of the river, serene, masterful, and perfectly beautiful, flowing onwards to the sea.

Let us admit that Tennyson, certainly in his earlier poems, had not the great vision of, say, Wordsworth. Several of his characters come to our memory more by reason of their decorative names than of their personalities, which are wan and shadowy. But what a lesson and encouragement that he grew step by step with the age in which he lived, and deserved to become its most musical interpreter ! He was always willing to learn; he profited by criticism, though he bated it by nature, and allowed it to burn into his sensitive soul, as many anecdotes relate. He shunned notoriety, but he did desire to be understood by his generation; and his verse does meet every condition he framed for it It is great art, yet it can be understood by any one who can read; his radiant images are never magnified by over-sensuous tricks of language ; they are contained within surprisingly severe limits. The "Idylls" and "The Lotos-Eaters " may be read in particular proof. He has been decried as a too pliant and urbane reconciler of the contradictory convictions of the brain and the soul. But this signifies to us that lie was a man of a truly Greek temperance. He loved his country, its ideals, its temper, its moderation, and its methods, and he sang their praises. There are many critics, destructive and sceptical in character, who suppose that nothing good can come out of a mind which is not in revolt. Tennyson was a

disciplined citizen, not a revolutionary. We like him the better and trust him the more. He is said to have been intolerant of the mob, arrogant, and really and by consequence, as it were, happier in the company of Norman blood than of simple faith. We do not know; some people may be alienated by his special amenities, but at all events it is safe to say, in the words which were used, we believe, by Burne-Jones, that "if a thing is a work of art it does not matter what its defects are, and if it is not a work of art it does not matter what its merits are." All Tennyson's work was art. It is a marriage of sense and sound, "understandable of the people," and yet making no conscious concessions to them. That is chiefly why the English people are deeply in Tennyson's debt.