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ALFRED TENNYSON, the son of a country clergyman, was born at Somersby Rectory in Lincolnshire in 1809 (the same year as Mr. Gladstone). In his twelfth year he composed an epic of four or five thousand lines, — fortunately lost. He missed the doubtful blessing of rough school-boy life at Eton or Harrow, receiving instead thorough classical instruction from his father, and a thousand pleasant lessons from Nature, who unclasped for him her illuminated missal as he roamed by hill-side, brook and sea-shore. At Cambridge (18271831) he took the Chancellor's Prize for the best English poem; among his competitors were Arthur Henry Hallam and Richard Monckton Milnes (Lord Houghton). In 1830 appeared his Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, among which were many pieces now famous: Claribel, Mariana, The Poet, Oriana, Recollections of the Arabian Nights. Two years later came another volume; in this we find The Miller's Daughter, Enone, A Dream of Fair Women, The Lotus Eaters. These were written in Tennyson's twenty-third year; among our great poets only Milton and Keats have shown such maturity at such an early age. Some of the poems in this volume were not without defects; passing over their virtues, the Quarterly seized upon these defects and held them up to ridicule. Unnecessarily hurt by these strictures, Tennyson remained silent for ten years in 1842 he gave to the world another volume in which (to mention only the best) were Ulysses, Locksley Hall and Launcelot and Queen Guinevere. Emerson's criticism on this volume is wisdom in a nutshell: Tennyson, he says, 'is endowed precisely in the points where Wordsworth wanted. There is no finer ear nor more command over the keys of language. Color, like the dawn, flows over the horizon from his pencil in waves so rich that we do not miss the central form.'-Tennyson's reputation was now firmly established; The Princess, (1847), if we excise the lyrics, hardly added to it, nor did Maud (1855). In 1850, upon the death of Wordsworth, he was appointed Poet Laureate and in the same year published In Memoriam. Four Idylls of the King appeared in 1859; others were added at varying intervals, rounding the episodes into a complete Epic. The weak-motived, slow-evolving dramas that Tennyson put forth during his old age, make us feel that his reputation would have been higher had he lived no longer than did Shakespeare. In the idealizing epic, with an ornate grace all his own, he is but little below the masters; in the lyric he is unsurpassed; in the drama - in that highest form of literary art, where character is painted in with the colors of both emotion and action in this he is deficient. Tennyson was raised to the peerage in 1884 and died, full of years and honors in October, 1892.

Here is Carlyle's portrait of him in his prime: 'A great shock of rough, dustydark hair; bright, laughing, hazel eyes; massive, aquiline face, most massive, yet most delicate; of sallow brown complexion, almost Indian-looking; clothes, cynically loose, free and easy; smokes infinite tobacco. His voice is musically metallic-fit for loud laughter and piercing wail, and all that may lie between; speech and speculation free and plenteous. I do not meet, in these late decades, such company over a pipe.'-Letter to Emerson, 1847.

FRIENDS Arthur Henry Hallam, Trench, Thackeray, Dickens, Carlyle, Browning, Gladstone.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.

LIFE AND TIMES. - Tennyson's family have not yet authorized the publication of any life of the poet. Until this appears, we can find a vade mecum sufficient for our purpose in Alfred Tennyson, A Study of his Life and Work by Arthur Waugh (London, 1893). Those to whom this book is inaccessible may consult a sorry substitute in the article on Tennyson by Mrs. H. K. Johnson in Appleton's Annual Cyclopædia for 1893. Mrs. Anne Thackeray Ritchie has some interesting reminiscences in Harper's Magazine for December, 1883, while the ever-faithful Poole will unlock the flood-gates of periodical literature.

CRITICISM. Tennyson reflects so perfectly nineteenth century thought and emotion, that little help is needed to get at his meaning. Yet the following books will be found useful for illustration:

Littledale: Essays on Lord Tennyson's Idylls of the King. This gives in simple and popular form, an account of the historical sources of the Idylls and an interpretation of such allegory as Tennyson may (or may not) have intended to put into them.

Van Dyke: The Poetry of Tennyson: An excellent exposition of Tennyson's poetic development from 1827 to 1889. Contains also a Bibliography that separates the slag from the gold, and a List of Biblical Quotations and Allusions Found in the Works of Tennyson.

7. Churton Collins: Illustrations of Tennyson. Traces Tennyson's imitations and transferences to their sources, with the object of illustrating the connection of English Literature with the Literatures of Greece, Rome, and Modern Italy.

Bagehot: Literary Studies; Vol. II. Wordsworth, Tennyson and Browning; or Pure, Ornate and Grotesque Art in English Poetry. A most subtle and delicate piece of criticism: within the field to which it confines itself, by far the best thing that has been written on Tennyson.

CENONE.

Enone was the wife whom Paris deserted for Helen. - Notice with what delicate art, in this poem, the landscape is set to reflect the feeling. This landscape-setting is a poetical device almost unknown to the ancients; Tennyson has had many imitators, but no equals in this method of treating classical subjects.

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I-21. Ida. A mountain-range near Troy. Clough writes in a letter from the Pyrenees, Sept. 1, 1861: 'ŒŒnone, he [Tennyson] said was written on the inspiration of the Pyrenees, which stood for Ida.' topmost Gargarus: a Latinism, on the model of summus the top of the mountain. See Allen and Greenough, Latin Grammar, § 193. Gargarus was the highest peak of Ida. forlorn of Paris: another Latinism; a kind of genitive of specification, like integer vitæ upright in life. A. and G., § 218 (c). 22-32. many-fountained Ida. 'So fared he [Zeus] to manyfountained Ida, mother of wild beasts, even unto Gargaros, where is his demesne and fragrant altar.' - Iliad, viii, 47-48. noon-day quiet held the hill.

the

The noon-day quiet held the
The lizard, with

hill.'- Callimachus, Lavacrum Palladis, 72.1 his shadow on the stone. 'When, indeed, the very lizard is sleeping on the loose stones of the wall' - Theocritus, vii. 22. Mine eyes are full of tears, my heart of love. 'Mine eyes are full of tears, my heart of grief.' 2 Henry VI. ii. 3. 17. 33-51. a River-God:

Cebren. as yonder walls Rose slowly to a music slowly breathed. According to a legend in Ovid (Epistulæ, xv. 179–180) the walls of Troy rose to the music of Apollo's lyre. Simois : a river of the Troad.

52-74. Hesperian gold. The Hesperides (Daughters of the West) guarded the golden apples which Ge (the Earth) gave to Heré on her wedding. To obtain possession of these apples was the eleventh labor of Hercules. See Tennyson's poem, The Hesperides. Mountain-nymphs.

Oread

=

75-88. For the details of this story, see Cl. Myths, § 167.

89-100. The original of this lovely passage is to be found in Iliad, xiv. 347-351: 'And beneath them the divine earth sent forth fresh new grass, and dewy lotus, and crocus, and hyacinth, thick and soft, that raised them aloft from the ground. Therein they lay, and were clad o'er with a fair golden cloud, whence fell drops of glittering dew.'

101-130. champaign. See note on Horatius, line 100.

this word in Macaulay's

131-167. The character of Pallas, as portrayed here, is in admirable keeping with Homer's conception of her, in the Odyssey, as

the friend of Odysseus.

168-190. Italian Aphrodité.

Idalium or Idalia was a mountain

Paphian.

Paphos was

(also a city) in Cyprus, sacred to Venus.

another city in Cyprus sacred to Venus.

1 For this and for the illustration from Theocritus, I am indebted to Mr. Churton Collins' book.

The

191-225. plume (205); trembling. Notice the picture in this first word, and the accuracy of observation in the second. Abominable: the goddess Eris (Discord).

226-264. Cassandra : one of the daughters of Priam. Apollo gave her the gift of prophecy, but with it the penalty that her prophecies should never be believed.

In his old age Tennyson continued this subject in his Death of Enone. The sequel is not worthy of the original: Enone is depicted as embittered and revengeful; she loses that sweet womanliness and despairing tenderness that make her so pathetic a figure in the first poem.

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Tennyson is remarkable for the curious felicity with which he reproduces the characteristics of other poets, at the same time adding something hard to define, yet unmistakably his own. In Enone we have the sensuousness and the coloring of Keats; in The Miller's Daughter, the thoroughly English tone and the deep joy in domestic affection that appear so often in Wordsworth, — combined with a lilt and melody that Wordsworth seldom attained to.

The lyric 'It is the miller's daughter' ing octette of Ronsard's Odes, iv. 25.

Je voudrois estre le riban Qui serre ta belle poitrine; Je voudrois estre le carquan Qui orne ta gorge yvorine;

Je voudrois estre tout autour Le coral qui tes lèvres touche, Afin de baiser, nuict et jour, Tes belles lèvres et ta bouche.

(169), is closely imitated from the clos

[Literal Translation.]

I would be the ribbon

That presses thy beautiful breast;

I would be the necklace

That graces thy ivory throat;

I would be indeed

The coral [coralline rouge] that touches thy lips

That I might kiss, night and day,

Thy beautiful lips and thy mouth.

Ronsard, in his turn, took the thought from a fragment in the Pseudo-Anacreon, thus rendered by Mr. Collins: 'Would I were a mirror, that thou mightest be ever gazing at me; would that I were a tunic, that thou mightest always wear me; and thy breast band; and would I were a sandal; only trample me with thy feet.' See note on Burns' To a Mountain Daisy, 39-54. The third stanza of Tennyson's song also contains suggestion of the sextet in Keats' Last Sonnet.

THE PASSING OF ARTHUR.

The greater part of this poem (lines 170-440) was published in 1842, under the title of Morte D'Arthur. Lines 1-169 and 441-469 were added many years later to connect this Idyll with Guinevere and to frame into one picture the scattered mosaics which the author had cut from various materials. When read in the following order - The Coming of Arthur, Gareth and Lynette, The Marriage of Geraint, Geraint and Enid, Balin and Balan, Merlin and Vivien, Lancelot and Elaine, The Holy Grail, Pelleas and Ettarre, The Last Tournament, Guinevere, The Passing of Arthur - the Idylls are seen to constitute a

kind of Epic in twelve books, - an Epic deficient, certainly, in Unity of Action, but not deficient in Spiritual Unity. In his Epilogue to the Idylls Tennyson calls his work

this old imperfect tale

New-old, and shadowing Sense at war with Soul
Rather than that gray king, whose name, a ghost

Streams like a Cloud, man-shaped, from mountain peak,

And cleaves to cairn and cromlech still;

Acting on the hint in these lines, some commentators have constructed elaborate interpretations of the Idylls as Allegories. While allegorical passages undoubtedly occur in the Idylls, any attempt to interpret them throughout as an allegory breaks down at vital points. Nor is such an interpretation either necessary or desirable: it weakens the pathetic and purifying effect which the Idylls convey when viewed in their proper light -as a work of Art.

1-8.

their march to westward. Throughout this poem Tennyson varies the incidents only slightly from those in Malory's Morte D'Arthur, Book xxi. Cap. 3-5.

9-28. These lines are a late addition of the poet's. Do they, in this place, add anything to the effect of the poem?

29-49. Gawain: according to Malory (xxi. 2) the nephew of King Arthur and, after Launcelot, his favorite knight. Tennyson characterizes him differently in Launcelot and Elaine, 542-548:

a Prince

In the mid-night and flourish of his May

Gawain, surnamed the courteous, fair and strong

And after Launcelot, Tristram and Geraint

And Lamorack a good knight, but therewithal

Sir Modred's brother, of a crafty house

Nor often loyal to his word.

like wild birds that change Their season in the night. From Dante's Inferno, v. 40-49.

And as the wings of starlings bear them on
In the cold season in large band and full,
So doth that blast the spirits maledict;
It hither, thither, downward, upward drives them;
No hope doth comfort them for evermore,
Not of repose, but even of lesser pain.
And as the cranes go chanting forth their lays,
Making in air a long line of Themselves,
So saw I coming, uttering lamentations,
Shadows borne onward by the aforesaid stress.

(Longfellow.)

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