ART. VI.-ALFRED TENNYSON-THE MAN AND THE POET. Never alone into this "NEVER alone come the immortals." transitory world come those souls whose words and deeds outlive a generation and are held by mankind in lasting remembrance. Whenever a great genius has appeared in any quarter of the world, others nearly as great have manifested the same spirit, proclaimed the same truths, and exercised the same quickening power. The age of Pericles, the Augustan age, the Renaissance, the Elizabethan age were epochs in which the immortals came in troops and breathed new truths and sympathies upon their fellow-men. A glorious company of immortals came into this world with Alfred Tennyson, in the year 1809. There were Mendelssohn, a name forever memorable in musical annals; Charles Darwin, whose epoch-making books still give "form and pressure" to scientific investigations; Lincoln, the emancipator and martyr President; Elizabeth Barrett Browning, a priestess of song; Oliver Wendell Holmes, one of the greatest of America's poets and humorists; and Gladstone, conspicuous as statesman, orator, and scholar. Scott, Southey, and Coleridge were in the zenith of their fame as poets; Byron and Shelley were rising in splendor and entering upon careers of dazzling brilliancy; Longfellow was two years old, and Victor Hugo seven; Wordsworth was writing his best poetry. Three years after the birth of Tennyson came Robert Browning. These names are destined to be associated more and more as time goes on. For nearly sixty years they cultivated their art, retaining through this long stretch of years the uninterrupted exercise of their faculties, even the gift of inspiration. In a skeptical, scientific, materialistic, money-getting age, they taught the great spiritual truths of human life, flashing light upon the mysteries of mind and the world, the immortal destinies of the soul and humanity. Dickens was born the same year with Browning, and Thackeray the year before--the novelists who dominated Victorian prose fiction much as Tennyson and Browning did Victorian poetry. There were few striking events in Tennyson's quiet life; 27-FIFTH SERIES, VOL. XI. there were few salient characteristics other than those mirrored in his poems. The real Tennyson-his dominant ideas, the emotion that thrilled his life, the texture of his mind, the quality of his spirit-can be known only by a study of his works. His great, though isolated, life was consecrated to poetry; and it is in his poetry that his real self is revealed. Never did anchorite with more consuming zeal pursue righteousness than Tennyson did poetic perfection. He lived in its atmosphere, longed for it with all his soul, and during a period of more than sixty years produced work of a high order in his efforts to attain it. Tennyson's poetry, like all true poetry, was vitally connected with the life of his age. Though living apart from its rush and strife, he had a poet's sensitiveness to its movements and keen appreciation of what was beautiful and what was ugly. He idealized the thoughts of his contemporaries, their beliefs, their doubts, their hopes and miseries, clothing their virtues in beautiful forms and exposing their vices. It was a rich and stirring life that Tennyson beheld coursing through the activities of his age. Such a manifold and varied energy no poet had ever before contemplated. Its quickening impulses were felt in every part of man's nature and throughout society. It was an age of great popular uprisings and agitations, followed by severe repressive measures on the part of the ruling classes. There was the weight of a despotic government bearing down from above; there were the conscious rights of man as man, irrespective of rank, class, or condition, rousing the people from beneath. The opposing forces were joined; and out of the struggle came the Reform Act of 1832, which, though far from ideal, contained the nearest approximation to a "government of the people, by the people, and for the people" of any legislative action previously known in English history. The Reform Bill marks the transition from government by an individual or a class to government by the people, or, more strictly, by that portion of the people known as the middle classes, the poorest people not being embraced in its provisions. Prior to 1832, legislation had been notorious for its favoritism. The landlord, the manufacturer, the shipowner, and others were accorded special privileges and preyed upon the rest of society, especially upon the working classes. But, with the passage of the Reform Bill and the wider distribution of power, legislation was shaped more by a determination to consider the interests of the nation as a whole and to right the wrongs that had been visited upon the working classes. This significant legislative triumph was vitally connected with a movement of which the French Revolution was the most conspicuous manifestation-a movement that originated in the conviction of the essential equality of all men, as children of a common Father, and the belief that there should be equality of opportunity in all the varied activities of religious, political, industrial, and social life. This democratic movement would have culminated sooner in England had it not been for the excesses of the French Revolutionists and the distractions of the Napoleonic wars. From the peace of 1815, however, to the present time, this movement for equality of opportunity has steadily grown in volume, gathering strength and breadth in every decade and continually enacting new laws for the realization of its beneficent purpose. The following acts indicate the principal stages of its progress: the Criminal Law Reform of 1823; the laws of 1824-25 regulating the employment of children and the combinations of workmen; the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts of 1828; the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829; the Reform Bill of 1832; the abolition of slavery in the British colonies in 1833; the first Factory Act of 1833; the first grant, in 1833, by Parliament, of twenty thousand pounds annually for the building of schoolhouses (this was the first grant for educational purposes ever made by Parliament, and was increased in 1839 to thirty thousand pounds annually); the new Poor Law of 1834; the factory acts of 1842-47; the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 and the introduction of free trade; the reform legislation of 1867 and 1868, called sometimes the second Reform Act; the disestablishment of the Irish Church and the disendowment of the Protestant Churches in Ireland in 1869; the Irish Land Act in 1870; the abolition of army purchase in 1871; and the third Reform Act of 1884. The consideration of the provisions of these acts reveals the widening application of this growing democratic movement to the interests of humanity. Tennyson believed in progress. No idea is more prominent in his poems. But he was conservatively progressive. The freedom that he loved to contemplate was a "sober-suited freedom," who moved in a slow, dignified fashion, breaking no precedents and shocking no conventionalities. His ideal country of progress was England: A land of settled government, A land of just and old renown, Where freedom slowly broadens down From precedent to precedent. He deprecated "raw haste," which he styled "half sister to delay." He derided France, torn by revolution in her struggles for freedom, and wrote scornfully of "the red-fool fury of the Seine." It is difficult to conceive how a poet of Tennyson's intelligence could have written such words as he did respecting the French Revolution. He seems to be either strangely bereft of the historic sense or blind to the real significance of the most momentous movement in modern history. When France in wrath her giant limbs upreared, And, with that oath, which smote air, earth, and sea, she became the champion of downtrodden humanity everywhere, she bore its burdens, embodied its aspirations, fought its battles, and in her fall precipitated "the crisis of modern reconstruction." Society, after the Revolution, revealed more plainly than ever before the presence of a renovating power. Higher political and social ideals were at work, and humanity entered upon a new era in government, industry, morals, and religion. The steady and orderly progress of freedom in England, which Tennyson so glorifies, owes much of its propulsion to the French Revolution. Freedom would never have broadened from "precedent to precedent" in England had not France dared to break with all precedents and establish, by her own martyrdom, a new and diviner precedent, from which alone a broadening principle of human progress could be evolved. France made the experiment, and England profited by the martyrdom of the young republic. Byron's attitude toward the French Revolution was very different from that of Tennyson. Byron caught the mighty passion of the Revolution, largely in its destructive workings, and carried its fiery energy all over Europe, stimulating similar uprisings and revolts against the conventional order of things. Shelley, like Byron, championed the cause of human freedom when it was unpopular. The finer spirit of the Revolution, its glowing visions and aspirations, as well as its shallower sophisms, lived again in new and beautiful forms in Shelley's poetry and stirred the hearts of his readers to new struggles in behalf of liberty. Tennyson shared the fears felt by the conservative classes of putting increased power in the hand of the masses. He was afraid of that "many-headed beast"-the people. He hated the popular agitators—" the tonguesters," "the dogs of faction," as he calls them. The Duke of Wellington, who' steadily opposed every movement for the extension of the elective franchise" the great Duke"-is idolized in the "Commemorative Ode" as one of those statesmen who keep England "from brute control," who Drill the raw world for the march of mind, Till crowds at length be sane and crowns be just. In one of his last published letters Tennyson styles himself "a friend of Mr. Gladstone, but opposed to Mr. Gladstone's policy." No sympathetic or adequate reference to Ireland or the struggle for home rule appears in the laureate's poetry. He had no disposition to lead a forlorn hope or espouse an unpopular cause, and he lagged behind the great humanitarian movement of his age. As Stopford Brooke justly says: His was the view of the common-sense, well-ordered Englishman— of Whiggism in her carriage, with a very gracious smile and salute for Conservatism in hers; and he tried, unhappily, as I think, to get this view into poetry. Through the whole of Tennyson's poetry about the problem of man's progress this view of his does damage to the poetry, lowers the note of beauty, of aspiration, of fire, of passion, and lessens the use of his poetry to the cause of freedom.* Tennyson contemplates human progress in a calm, dispassionate way, much as one regards the succession of geological epochs: Where is one that, born of woman, altogether can escape From the lower world within him, moods of tiger or of ape? -The Making of Man. * Tennyson: His Art and Relation to Modern Life, p. 42. |