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Title: Tennyson's Life and Poetry
       And Mistakes Concerning Tennyson

Author: Eugene Parsons

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Language: English

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Tennyson’s Life and
Poetry: and Mistakes
Concerning Tennyson

By EUGENE PARSONS.

COPYRIGHT, 1892, By EUGENE PARSONS.

Printed by The Craig Press, Chicago.

CONTENTS.

[Pg 5]

INTRODUCTORY NOTE.

There is already an extensive Tennyson literature. Of books relating to the scenes connected with his life and works, are Walters’ In Tennyson Land; Brooks’ Out of Doors with Tennyson; also Church’s Laureate’s Country, and Napier’s Homes and Haunts of Lord Tennyson. There is a mass of material, both critical and biographical, in Shepherd’s Tennysoniana; Wace’s Life and Works of Tennyson; Tainsh’s Study of the Works of Tennyson; Jennings’ Sketch of Lord Tennyson; and Van Dyke’s Poetry of Tennyson. Besides these may be mentioned Brightwell’s Tennyson Concordance; Irving’s Tennyson; Lester’s Lord Tennyson and the Bible; also Collins’ Illustrations of Tennyson.

Valuable help for understanding and appreciating In Memoriam is afforded by the volumes on that poem written by Robertson, Gatty, Genung, Chapman and Davidson. Much interesting information is given in Dawson’s Study of “The Princess”; Mann’s Tennyson’s “Maud” Vindicated; Elsdale’s Studies in the Idyls; and Nutt’s Studies on the Legend of the Holy Grail. A collection of Tennyson’s songs, set to music by various composers, has been issued by Stanley Lucas and by Harper & Bros.

Several volumes of selections from Tennyson’s writings have appeared as follows: Ausgewählte Gedichte, with notes (in German) by Fischer, Salzwedel, 1878; Lyrical Poems of Alfred Tennyson, with notes (in Italian) by T. C. Cann, Florence, 1887; Lyrical Poems of Lord Tennyson, annotated by F. T. Palgrave; Select Poems of Tennyson, and Young People’s Tennyson, both edited by W. J. Rolfe; Tennyson Selections, with notes by F. J. Rowe and W. T. Webb; and Tennyson for the Young, edited by Alfred Ainger.

Among school editions of Tennyson’s poems, are The Princess, with notes by Rolfe, also by Wallace; Enoch Arden, with notes by Rolfe, by Webb, and by Blaisdel; Enoch Arden, with notes (in[Pg 6] German) by Hamann, Leipzig, 1890; Enoch Arden, with notes (in French) by Courtois, Paris, 1891; Enoch Arden, with notes (in French) by Beljame, Paris, 1891; Les Idylles du roi, Enoch Arden, with notes (in French) by Baret, Paris, 1886; Enoch Arden, les Idylles du roi, with notes (in French) by Sevrette, Paris, 1887; Aylmer’s Field, annotated by Webb; The Two Voices and A Dream of Fair Women, by Corson; The Coming of Arthur and The Passing of Arthur, by Rowe; In Memoriam and other poems, by Kellogg.

Innumerable papers on Tennyson and his poetry have been published in newspapers and periodicals. A large number of these reviews and some descriptive articles are contained in the following volumes: Horne’s Spirit of the Age; Howitt’s Homes and Haunts of British Poets; Hamilton’s Poets-Laureate of England; Robertson’s Lectures; Kingsley’s Miscellanies; Bagehot’s Literary Studies; Japp’s Three Great Teachers; Buchanan’s Master Spirits; Austin’s Poets of the Period; Forman’s Our Living Poets; Friswell’s Modern Men of Letters; Haweis’ Poets in the Pulpit; McCrie’s Religion of Our Literature; Devey’s Comparative Estimate of English Poets; Gladstone’s Gleanings of Past Years; Archer’s English Dramatists of To-Day; Stedman’s Victorian Poets; Cooke’s Poets and Problems; Fraser’s Chaucer to Longfellow; Dawson’s Makers of Modern English; Egan’s Lectures on English Literature; and Ritchie’s Light-Bearers.

For favorable or unfavorable estimates of Tennyson, the reader is referred to the lectures of Dowden and Ingram in the Dublin Afternoon Lectures on Literature and Art, and to the collected essays of Brimley, Bayne, Hadley, Masson, Stirling, Roscoe, Hayward, Hutton, Swinburne, Galton, Noel, Heywood, Bayard Taylor and others.

Some side-lights are thrown on the Laureate in Ruskin’s Modern Painters; Hamerton’s Thoughts on Art; Masson’s Recent British Philosophy; and Arnold’s Lectures on Translating Homer. Stray glimpses of the man in his personal relations are found in the Carlyle and Emerson Correspondence; Fanny Kemble’s Records of a Girlhood; Caroline Fox’s Memories of Old Friends; Reid’s Life of Lord Houghton; and in the Letters and Literary Remains of Edward Fitzgerald.

But with all that has been written concerning Tennyson, no monograph, so far as I am aware, has hitherto appeared which is at once comprehensive and accurate. Mrs. Ritchie’s beautiful portraiture of the Laureate, with its touch of hero-worship, lacks a great deal of being a survey of his literary career. No biography of [Pg 7]Alfred Tennyson has been published which is worthy the name. For many years students and lovers of the poet encountered difficulty in obtaining full and exact information on the chief events of his life. I undertook to supply this want in the essay entitled “Tennyson’s Life and Poetry.”

In the preparation of this paper, I had occasion to consult various periodicals and works of reference. With scarcely an exception, I found the articles on Tennyson in cyclopedias and biographical dictionaries faulty in many particulars. Even the sketches in recent compilations and journals are full of misleading and conflicting statements. I became impressed with the thought that these errors ought to be exposed and corrected. The result was the critique—“Mistakes concerning Tennyson.” I gathered my materials from a variety of sources, and always aimed to disengage the truth. I depended largely on Rev. Alfred Gatty, Mrs. Ritchie, Mr. Gosse, Prof. Palgrave, Prof. Church, Mr. C. J. Caswell, and Dr. Van Dyke as the most trustworthy authorities.

My thanks are due Dr. W. F. Poole, of the Newberry Library, for placing at my disposal an immense collection of bibliographies, catalogues and bulletins of foreign books. I desire also to express my obligations to Dr. Henry van Dyke, of New York City, for aiding me in my researches.

Eugene Parsons.

3612 Stanton Ave., Chicago,
April, 1892.

[Pg 8]

TENNYSON’S LIFE AND POETRY.

I.

Alfred Tennyson was born August 6, 1809, in Somersby, a wooded hamlet of Lincolnshire, England. “The native village of Tennyson,” says Howitt, who visited it many years ago, “is not situated in the fens, but in a pretty pastoral district of softly sloping hills and large ash trees. It is not based on bogs, but on a clean sandstone. There is a little glen in the neighborhood, called by the old monkish name of Holywell.” There he was brought up amid the lovely idyllic scenes which he has made famous in the “Ode to Memory” and other poems. The picturesque “Glen,” with its tangled underwood and purling brook, was a favorite haunt of the poet in childhood. On one of the stones in this ravine he inscribed the words—Byron is Dead—ere he was fifteen.

Alfred was the fourth son of the Rev. George Clayton Tennyson, LL.D., rector of Somersby and other neighboring parishes. His father, the oldest son of George Tennyson, Esq., of Bayons and Usselby Hall, was a man of uncommon talents and attainments, who had tried his hand, with fair success, at architecture, painting, music and poetry. His mother was a sweet, gentle soul, and exceptionally sensitive. The poet-laureate seems to have inherited from her his refined, shrinking nature.

Dr. Tennyson married Miss Elizabeth Fytche, August 6, 1805. Their first child, George, died in infancy. According to the parish registers, the Tennyson family consisted of eleven children, viz.: Frederick, Charles, Alfred, Mary, Emily, Edward, Arthur, Septimus, Matilda, Cecilia and Horatio. They formed a joyous, lively household—amusements being agreeably mingled with their daily tasks. They were all handsome and gifted, with marked mental traits and imaginative temperaments. They were especially fond of reading and story-telling. At least four of the boys were addicted to verse-writing—a habit they kept up through life, though Alfred[Pg 9] alone devoted himself to a poetical career as something more than a pastime. Frederick Tennyson’s occasional pieces are characterized by luxuriant fancy and chaste diction; the sonnets of Charles won high praise from Coleridge, but the fame of both has been overshadowed by that of their distinguished brother.[1]

The scholarly clergyman, who was an M. A. of Cambridge, carefully attended to the education and training of his children. He turned his gifts and accomplishments to good account in stimulating their mental growth. Alfred was sent to the Louth Grammar School four years (1816-20). During this time he presumably learned something, although no flattering reports of his progress have come down to us. Then private teachers were employed by Dr. Tennyson to instruct his boys, but he took upon himself for the most part the burden of fitting them for college. Only a moderate amount of study was imposed by the rector. A great deal of the time Alfred was out of doors, rambling through the pastures and woods about Somersby and Bag Enderby. He was solitary, not caring to mingle with other boys in their sports. As a child, he exhibited the same peculiarities which characterized the man. He was shy and reserved, moody and absent-minded. Alfred and Charles were devotedly attached to each other, and frequently were together in their walks. The lads were both large and strong for their age. Charles was a popular boy in Somersby on account of his frank, genial disposition—which cannot be said of the reticent Alfred.

One incident connected with the poet’s education at home is worth repeating. His father required him to memorize the odes of Horace and to recite them morning by morning until the four books were gone through. The Laureate in later years testified to the value of this practice in cultivating a delicate sense for metrical music. He called Horace his master. Certainly no other bard has ever excelled Tennyson in the art of expressing himself in melodious verse.

From his twelfth to his sixteenth year, Alfred was apparently idle much of the time, yet he was unconsciously preparing for his life-work. He was gathering material and storing up impressions which were afterwards utilized. It was with him a formative period. The hours he spent strolling in lanes and woods were not wasted. The quiet, meditative boy lived in a realm of the imagination, and his thoughts and fancies took shape in crude poems.

This period of day-dreaming was followed by one of marked[Pg 10] intellectual activity. The thin volume—Poems by Two Brothers, printed in 1826, contained the pieces written by Alfred when he was only sixteen or seventeen. It shows that these were busy years. The Tennyson youths not only scribbled a great deal of verse—they ranged far and wide in the fields of ancient and modern literature. Their father had a good library, and they appreciated its treasures. In the footnotes of their first book were many curious bits of information, and quotations from the classics.

The Tennyson children were fortunate in having cultured parents. They were favored in another respect. Dr. Tennyson was comfortably well off for a clergyman. His means—which he shrewdly husbanded—enabled the family to spend the summers at Mablethorpe on the Lincolnshire coast. Thus Alfred’s passion for the sea was early developed. For some time it was the rector’s custom to occupy a dwelling in Louth during the school year. In this way the seclusion and monotony of Somersby life were broken. The young Tennysons saw considerable of the world. They were often welcomed in the home of their grandmother, Mrs. Fytche, in Westgate Place, and occasionally visited the stately mansion at Bayons. Especially Charles and Alfred were at times the guests of their great-uncle Samuel Turner, vicar of Grasby and curate of Caistor, who afterwards left his property and parish livings to his favorite, Charles Tennyson Turner. Such were the experiences of the Laureate’s youth and childhood, which inevitably influenced his whole life and entered into his poetry. He illustrates the truth that a poet is largely what his environment makes him.

Byron exercised a magical spell over him in his teens, and this influence is apparent in his boyish rhymes which are tinged with Byronic melancholy. Afterwards Keats gained the ascendency. As a colorist, Tennyson owes much to this gorgeous word-painter, whom he has equaled, if not surpassed, in his own field.

Alfred, in his boyhood, gave unmistakable indications of genius. During his university course at Cambridge, he was generally looked upon as a superior mortal, of whom great things were expected by his teachers and fellow-collegians. Dr. Whewell, his tutor, treated him with unusual respect.

While at Trinity college (1828-31) he formed friendships which lasted till death ended them one by one. It was indeed a company of choice spirits with whom Tennyson had the good fortune to be associated. Among them were Thackeray, Helps, Garden, Sterling, Thompson, Kinglake, Maurice, Kemble, Milnes, Trench, Alford, Brookfield, Merivale, Spedding and others. Besides these, he numbered among the friends of his early manhood Fitzgerald, Hare,[Pg 11] Hunt, Carlyle, Gladstone, Rogers, Landor, Forster, the Lushingtons and other famous scholars and men of letters.

In the companionship of such men, he found the stimulus necessary for the development of his poetical faculty. They all regarded him with feelings of warmest admiration.[2] The young poet had at least a few appreciative readers during the ten or twelve years of obscurity when the public cared little for his writings. He was encouraged by their words of commendation to pursue the bard’s divine calling, to which he was led by an overmastering instinct. He could afford to wait and smile at his slashing reviewers. Meanwhile he profited by the suggestions of his critics. In this respect he presents a striking contrast to Browning. He mercilessly subjected his productions to the most painstaking revision.[3] He attempted various styles, and experimented with all sorts of metres. Thus he served his laborious apprenticeship and acquired a mastery of his art. His eminent success has confirmed the expectations of his youthful admirers.

During his stay at Cambridge, Tennyson met Arthur Henry Hallam, a son of the historian. Hallam, who was a young man of extraordinary promise, became the dearest of his friends—more to him than brother. Their intimate fellowship was strengthened by Arthur’s love for the poet’s sister. It was his strongest earthly attachment. In 1830, the two friends traveled through France together, and stopped a while in the Pyrenees. On revisiting these mountains long afterward, the Laureate, overcome by reminiscences of other days, wrote the affecting lines entitled “In the Valley of Cauteretz”:

All along the valley, stream that flashest white,
Deepening thy voice with the deepening of the night,
All along the valley, where thy waters flow,
I walk’d with one I loved two and thirty years ago.
For all along the valley, while I walk’d to-day,
The two and thirty years were a mist that rolls away;
For all along the valley, down thy rocky bed,
Thy living voice to me was as the voice of the dead,
And all along the valley, by rock and cave and tree,
The voice of the dead was a living voice to me.

In 1833, the sudden death of Hallam, then Emily’s betrothed,[Pg 12] produced on Alfred’s mind a deep and ineffaceable impression. While brooding over his sorrow, the idea came to him of expressing his emotions in verse which might be a fitting tribute to the dead. At different times and amid widely varying circumstances, were composed the elegiac strains and poetic musings that make up “In Memoriam,” a poem representing many moods and experiences. It is a work occupying a place apart in literature. Its merits and defects are peculiar. There is no other elegy like it, and it may be doubted whether a second In Memoriam will ever be written. Tennyson erected an appropriate and imperishable monument to the memory of his lost friend. In conferring immortality upon his beloved Arthur, he gained it for himself. His best claim on the future is to be known and remembered as the author of “In Memoriam,” his masterpiece.

Equally enduring is the melodious wail—“Break, break, break,” one of the sweetest dirges in all literature. Hallam was buried (Jan. 3, 1834) at Clevedon by the Severn, near its entrance to the Bristol Channel, within sound of the melancholy waves. Singularly this exquisite song, which breathes of the sea, was not composed here, but “in a Lincolnshire lane at five o’clock in the morning,” as the Laureate himself has declared. It was written within a year after Hallam’s death, Sept. 15, 1833.

Not much has been learned of Tennyson’s early manhood. No very definite picture can be formed of his life after he left college. He seldom wrote letters. Even his most intimate friends could not succeed in carrying on a correspondence with him. What happened to him is not, however, all a blank. A few scraps relating to his history are found in the letters of Carlyle, Fitzgerald, Milnes and others. A number of autobiographical fragments are sprinkled through the poems which he wrote between 1830 and 1850, but they refer more to his spiritual development than to the outward events which constitute memoirs.

Mrs. Tennyson and her family continued to live at the Rectory after her husband died, March 16, 1831. In the autumn of 1835, she removed to High Beach, Epping Forest, (“In Memoriam,” CII., CIV., CV.), and about 1840 to Well Walk, Hampstead. Here she made her home the rest of her life with her sister, Mary Ann Fytche—nearly all of her sons and daughters having married and scattered. She died February 21, 1865, at the age of eighty-four.

Alfred’s university career was cut short by his father’s death. For some years he remained at home—a diligent student of books and a close observer of nature. He roamed back and forth between[Pg 13] Somersby and London, alternately in solitude and with his friends.[4] Fitzgerald tells of his visiting with Tennyson at the Cumberland home of James Spedding in 1835.

Here Alfred would spend hour after hour reading aloud “Morte d’Arthur” and other unpublished poems, which his scholarly friend criticized. In 1838, he was a welcome member of the Anonymous Club in London, and for several years he had rooms in this city at various intervals.[5] It was his custom to make long incursions through the country on foot, studying the landscapes of England and Wales and pondering many a lay unsung. Thus he became familiar with the natural features of the places illustrated in his poems with such pictorial fidelity and vividness, though not with photographic accuracy.

Through this long period he was unknown to the great world. He lived modestly, though not in actual want. His books brought him no substantial returns till long after 1842. There was but little left of his patrimony, if any, when he was granted a pension of £200 in 1845. This timely aid was obtained for him by Sir Robert Peel, chiefly through the influence of Carlyle and Milnes.

Henceforth fortune graciously smiled upon him and made amends for past neglect. His reputation was becoming well established, and new editions of his poems were being called for. The Queen chanced to pick up one of his earlier volumes, and was charmed with the simple story of “The Miller’s Daughter.” She procured a copy of the book for the Princess Alice; this incident, it is related, brought him into favor with the aristocracy and gave a tremendous impetus to his popularity. After the death of Wordsworth in 1850, Tennyson was appointed Poet Laureate. Since then he has been highly esteemed by the royal family, and has produced in their honor some spirited odes and stately dedications.

The poet married (June 13, 1850) Miss Emily Sellwood, of Horncastle, whom he had known from childhood. Her mother was a sister of Sir John Franklin, and her youngest sister was the wife of Charles Tennyson Turner. Two or three years they lived at Twickenham, where Hallam Tennyson was born in 1852. Together they visited Italy in 1851, and vivid memories of their travels[Pg 14] are recalled in “The Daisy,” addressed to his wife. This interesting poem, written at Edinburgh, was suggested by the finding of a daisy in a book—the flower having been plucked on the Splugen and placed by Mrs. Tennyson between the leaves of a little volume as a memento of their Italian journey. The poet’s fancy was stirred and revived the delicious hours—

In lands of palm and southern pine;
In lands of palm, of orange blossom,
Of olive, aloe, and maize and vine.

Those who are familiar with Tennyson’s poems know how exalted is his ideal of woman as wife and mother. Lady Tennyson seems to have met the poet’s exacting requirements almost perfectly. What sort of helpmeet she has been he lovingly portrayed in the “Dedication,”—a tender tribute that was fully deserved. “His most lady-like, gentle wife,” Fitzgerald called her. Of superior education and talent, she was a worthy companion for an author. A number of her husband’s songs she has set to music. She has never sought public recognition. Content with the round of duties in a domestic sphere, she has lived for husband and children. Their married life has been exceptionally harmonious.[6]

In 1852, the Laureate’s largely increasing income enabled him to purchase an estate of more than four hundred acres near Freshwater, Isle of Wight. In the lines, “To the Rev. F. D. Maurice,” dated January,[7] 1854, the poet depicts his pleasant life in this delightful retreat:

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.

You’ll have no scandal while you dine,
But honest talk and wholesome wine,
And only hear the magpie gossip
Garrulous under a roof of pine:

For groves of pine on either hand,
To break the blast of winter, stand;
And further on, the hoary Channel
Tumbles a breaker on chalk and sand.

In 1855, Tennyson received the honorary degree of D. C. L.[Pg 15] from Oxford.[8] His prosperity continued—there being considerable profits from judicious investments and immense sales of his books. In 1867, he bought an estate near Haslemere, Surrey, “for the purpose of enjoying inland air and scenery.” Here he built a fine Gothic mansion, which is an ideal residence for a poet. Aldworth House is situated far up on Blackdown Heath, and overlooks a lovely valley. It is near the northern border of Sussex. “The prospect from the terrace of the house,” says Church, “is one of the finest in the south of England.” The poet thus pictures the place which has been his summer home for more than twenty years:

Our birches yellowing and from each
The light leaf falling fast,
While squirrels from our fiery beech
Were bearing off the mast,
You came, and look’d, and loved the view
Long-known and loved by me,
Green Sussex fading into blue
With one gray glimpse of sea.

In 1883, the Laureate had amassed property estimated to be worth £200,000. He was offered and accepted a peerage during the latter part of this year, and became Baron of Aldworth and Farringford, January 24, 1884. He took his seat in the House of Lords March 11. In 1865, he declined a baronetcy offered by the Queen as a reward for his loyal devotion to the Crown. Whatever distinction may attach to the honorable name of Lord Tennyson, the majority of his numerous readers prefer to call him plain Alfred Tennyson.

It may not be widely known that Baron Tennyson has a splendid lineage, of which he has modestly kept silent, unlike Byron. According to a writer in the St. James’ Gazette, who traced his ancestry back to Norman times, Tennyson is descended from an illustrious house of “princes, soldiers, and statesmen, famous in British or European history.” Some of his remote relatives were crowned heads—one being the celebrated Malcolm III. of Scotland. In Tennyson’s descent “two lines are blended,” says Church, “the middle class line of the Tennysons, and the noble and even royal line of the D’Eyncourts.”[9]

Alfred’s uncle, the Right Hon. Charles Tennyson-D’Eyncourt of Bayons Manor in Lincolnshire, was a man of marked ability and[Pg 16] culture, who held various public offices, and represented several boroughs in parliament from 1818 to 1852. Since his death, in 1861, the family estate has successively passed to his three sons—George Hildyard, Admiral Edwin Clayton, C. B. (1871), and Louis Charles (1890), the present inheritor of the D’Eyncourt seat and dignity.

The poet’s last years have been clouded by the bereavement of many old friends and relatives. Septimus, Charles,[10] Mary,[11] Emily,[12] and Edward are dead. He suffered a severe blow in the death of his second son Lionel, while on the homeward voyage from India.[13] He mourns his loss in the touching stanzas—“To the Marquis of Dufferin and Ava.”

Lord Tennyson was the recipient of many congratulations on the occasion of his eightieth birthday, August 6, 1889. The same year was marked by the publication of a new volume of poems, which attest that his intellectual vigor is unimpaired by age or bodily weakness. A dainty little poem of his—“To Sleep”—was published in the New Review for March, 1891, and it is not improbable that others will see the light in the near future.

Tennyson’s health, though quite robust for an octogenarian, has been broken of late. In the spring of 1890, he was troubled with a grievous illness, the result of exposure to cold—he having persisted in taking his “daily two hours’ walk along the cliff” in all kinds of weather. It was expected that the poet would spend the following winter in the South to avoid the rigorous climate of the Isle of Wight, but he recovered sufficient strength to remain at Farringford House amid the scenes he loves so well.

Tennyson has always shunned publicity, living in a world apart—removed from the gaze of the profane crowd. He rarely goes into society, preferring rural retirement to social converse. As poet and man, he has gained by this voluntary seclusion. His delight is to mingle with the world of nature. The woods and skies, the streams and billows have been his comrades. How much they have contributed to his poetic greatness cannot be estimated. He is, however, a recluse with his eyes open. He has watched the progress of [Pg 17]mankind and observed the trend of the times. Realizing the needs of the age, he grandly rose to the occasion—either to lift up his voice in protest against its faults, or to sing its achievements.

For many years no strangers have been admitted to Farringford Park. Visitors, while welcome at Aldworth in the afternoon, have not been allowed to interrupt the accustomed occupations of the master of the house, who is very methodical in his habits. It has long been his custom to rise early and spend the morning hours in his study—writing and dreaming in an atmosphere laden with smoke and the odor of tobacco. He now uses the pen but little, owing to failing eyesight. The Honorable Hallam Tennyson is his secretary and constant companion.

Personally, his lordship is a man who would attract attention anywhere, with his stalwart form slightly stooping, his noble face, his long flowing hair and bushy beard. He dresses carelessly, and when out of doors wears a shocking bad hat; with his cloak and walking-stick, he makes a picturesque figure. He is a confirmed pedestrian. “Every morning,” says a newspaper correspondent, “in hail, rain or snow, the poet dons his frouzy cap and his frouzier slouch hat, and promenades for an hour or so, none daring to disturb him.”

Tennyson is taciturn and brusque before strangers, whose presence annoys him, but he is delightfully easy and spontaneous with friends. Edward Fitzgerald, in his letters to Frederick Tennyson and others, alludes again and again, in terms of enthusiastic appreciation, to Alfred’s wise and pointed conversation. One of his original “sayings, which strike the nail on the head,” was about Dante. It is well worth quoting in Fitzgerald’s concise language, taken from a letter written in 1876:

“What Mr. Lowell says of him recalled to me what Tennyson said to me some thirty-five or forty years ago. We were stopping before a shop in Regent street where were two figures of Dante and Gœthe. I (I suppose) said, ‘What is there in old Dante’s face that is missing in Gœthe’s?’ And Tennyson (whose profile then had certainly a remarkable likeness to Dante’s) said: ‘The divine.’”

From first to last Alfred Tennyson has recognized that the mission of the poet is that of an æsthetic teacher. Much has he done to educate English-speaking people in the appreciation of beauty. But he is emphatically more than this. A man of stainless reputation, his deeds and words have almost invariably been on the side of righteousness. His career has been free from the excesses which disgraced the lives of Marlowe and Shelley, of Byron and Poe. He is rather to be ranged with the Spensers and Miltons, the Wordsworths[Pg 18] and Brownings, as a defender of truth and religion. In the main he has steadfastly kept in mind the austere ideal—

Of those who, far aloof
From envy, hate and pity, and spite and scorn,
Live the great life which all our greatest fain
Would follow, center’d in eternal calm.

II.

The current of Tennyson’s genius is like a rivulet placidly flowing through meadows and groves, occasionally rippling and swirling over stones, then pursuing its even course—gradually widening and deepening; not like a mighty river proudly sweeping in a resistless flood through a wilderness, or tumbling down rocky chasms. All that he has given the world during sixty years of literary activity is contained in less than a dozen volumes of verse. Only a rapid survey of his poetical career is attempted here.

Passing by without comment Poems by two Brothers (1826), “The Lover’s Tale” (composed about 1828), and “Timbuctoo” (1829), we come to Tennyson’s first bid for fame in Poems, chiefly Lyrical (1830). This slender volume included (along with much rubbish) a few pieces which are perennial favorites with lovers of Tennyson, viz.: “Mariana,” “Recollections of the Arabian Nights,” “The Dying Swan,” “A Dirge,” “Love and Death,” and “Circumstance.” Among the poems suppressed in later editions is one in an unusual vein—“Nero to Leander”—which Emerson inserted in his Parnassus.

His second book of Poems (1833) was a more ambitious venture. Its contents, though marred by faults of crude taste, possessed in a marked degree, the characteristic qualities of the Laureate’s poetry. Nearly all of the lyrics in it have been found worthy of a permanent place in the collected editions of his poems, but most of them underwent countless changes before they were republished in 1842—being corrected and polished till they were well-nigh perfect from a critical standpoint.

The two volumes of Poems (1842) revealed Tennyson at his best—a mature singer whose dignified, harmonious verse compares favorably with the most splendid contributions to British poetry. “The Princess” (1847), “In Memoriam” (1850), and “Maud” (1855) made his position secure as the greatest of living poets.

Not satisfied to rest content as a lyrist, Tennyson essayed [Pg 19]extended narrative in Idyls of the King (1859) and “Enoch Arden” (1864). Gaining courage from the enthusiastic reception of the four Arthurian idyls, he undertook to carry out a long cherished design—which Milton and Dryden had conceived—of writing a national epic on King Arthur. He had already made several attempts at versifying incidents from the Mabinogion and Malory’s old romance Morte d’ Arthur, but they were isolated fragments. From time to time he added others, making the series of tales called the Round Table a complete cycle as follows:

The Coming of Arthur, 1869; Gareth and Lynette, 1872; Geraint and Enid, 1859; Balin and Balan, 1885; Merlin and Vivien, 1859; Lancelot and Elaine, 1859; The Holy Grail, 1869; Pelleas and Ettarre, 1869; The Last Tournament, 1871; Guinevere, 1859; The Passing of Arthur, 1842, 1869.

Then boldly entering the dangerous field of historical drama, Tennyson became a rival of Shakspeare himself in “Queen Mary”[14] (1875), “Harold” (1876), and “Becket” (1884). Besides these, he brought forth three shorter plays or dramatic sketches—“The Cup”[15] (1884), “The Falcon”[16] (1884), “The Promise of May”[17] (1886), and a lengthy idyllic drama called “The Foresters”[18] (1892).

As if to prove that his fertility was not exhausted in the province of the lyric, he made fresh incursions into fields of song long familiar to him. These winnowings of the last two decades are gathered into the following volumes:

Ballads, and Other Poems (1880); Tiresias, and Other Poems (1885); Locksley Hall Sixty Years After, etc. (1886); Demeter, and Other Poems (1889).

Enough books have been named to give at least half a dozen minstrels a firm footing on Parnassus. The number of Tennyson’s meritorious performances is simply astonishing. But few poets have wrought with such unwearying patience. Not many can present as imposing a catalogue of works that are confessedly of such a high order of excellence. Browning has written more, but Browning has not taken the trouble to perfect himself in form—in short, he is not a finished artist. In literary workmanship, Tennyson stands supreme. It is universally admitted that none of his contemporaries ranks so high[Pg 20] as man of letters. He is the brightest ornament of the Victorian reign.

Without doubt the Laureate deserves his hard-won glory. In his hale old age, he has disarmed the critics of years ago who sneered at his empty lays and feminine ways. The question—Cui bono? could be asked as to many of Tennyson’s earlier efforts, such as “Oriana,” “The Lady of Shalott,” “Audley Court,” “Edwin Morris,” “Amphion,” “Lady Clare,” “The Lord of Burleigh,” “The Beggar Maid” and others. These lyrics and idyls are made up of ornate commonplaces which show the artistic instinct rather than the poetic. They abound with the ephemeral conceits of drawing-room poetry. They contain nothing that resembles vivacity or sublimity. They have not the interest which is general and universal as distinguished from the private or the unusual. They are not representative of human nature, but of individual peculiarities. They are ideal pictures, not transcripts from experience.

With a few exceptions, the minor poems published in 1855 and 1864 are of similar character; and it may be said that “The Princess,” “Maud,” “Enoch Arden,” and most of the Arthurian stories are in much the same vein. None of these works, when viewed as an organic whole, can be called great. In all of them, manliness is at a discount, and there is withal a dearth of ideas. Sentiment and ornament are overdone, and there is not enough of life. They can be described as a chaos of pretty fancies and idle reveries. Such are not the strains that shape a nation’s destiny and are treasured in its heart. In the centuries agone, such a songster would have been a first-class troubadour, much sought and praised in princely circles.

But former estimates of Tennyson must be revised. The slurs at the euphonious jingler and effeminate Alfred are in place no more. He has abandoned the domain of the legendary and the fantastic. Romance has given way to history, and dreams to reality. Sensuous effects are now subordinate. His verse no longer cloys with sweetness. It is simple, natural, impassioned.

“Queen Mary” and “Becket” certainly rank foremost among the few powerful plays that have appeared since Shelley wrote “The Cenci.” There are some Bulwer-Lyttonish passages in “Becket,” but they are more than redeemed by the imperial magnificence of other passages in the same tragedy. The ballads and other lyrics published within the last dozen years display a rugged virility that was quite foreign to the labored “Idyls of the King.” “Rizpah” and “The Revenge” have the ring of genuine metal. There is no hollow sound in the manly tributes to E. Fitzgerald and to his ancient Mantuan master. The introspective poet of “The Two Voices” has[Pg 21] grown to fuller intellectual stature in “The Ancient Sage.” The music and majesty of “Tiresias” and “Demeter” are unsurpassed in “Ulysses” and “Tithonus.” “Romney’s Remorse” excels “Sea Dreams” in portraying the better instincts of humanity on the domestic side, and its tender lullaby—“Beat upon mine, little heart!”—almost equals the incomparable “Sweet and low.” While “Vastness” and “Crossing the Bar” repeat the lyrical triumphs of his palmiest days.

Time has dealt gently with the venerable harper, whose hands sweep the strings with surer touch and greater compass than before. Age has brought more forceful speech and clearer vision. Some of his senile efforts betray less of conscious effort, as though long practice in using metrical language as a vehicle of thought and imagery had made it a pure mirror of the poet’s mind. His worn-out mannerisms appear occasionally, also his subtleties of expression and feeling. There is the same imaginative sorcery as of old, and the same consummate style, but the studied elegance and artful devices of earlier productions are less noticeable. There is less of minute finish in form and more of epic grandeur in tone and spirit. A healthier inspiration has visited him in the evening of life. His genius has gradually ripened. The full cup of advanced years was needed to bring out what was best in him, to effect his complete development.

Since the hysterical explosion of “Locksley Hall Sixty Years After,” the Laureate seems to have attained the calmness of soul which belongs to the true poetical spirit. He is no longer the fretful author of “The New Timon,” “The Spiteful Letter,” and “Literary Squabbles,” who lacked the restraint of entire self-possession. A more serious tone pervades the personal poems—“To Ulysses,” “To Mary Boyle” and others in his 1889 volume. A wiser man wrote the stately measures of “Happy” and “By an Evolutionist,” one who looked down upon past follies from spiritual heights never before reached. There is a touch of Miltonic loftiness in his “Parnassus,” and the philosophic resignation of Gœthe in “The Progress of Spring.” His is the tranquil, fruitful old age that crowns a well ordered career.

[Pg 22]

MISTAKES CONCERNING TENNYSON.

A STUDY IN CONTEMPORANEOUS BIOGRAPHY.

“Alfred Tennyson was born August 5, 1809, at Somersby, a hamlet in Lincolnshire, England, of which, and of a neighboring parish, his father, Dr. George Clayton Tennyson, was rector. The poet’s mother was Elizabeth, daughter of the Rev. Stephen Fytche, vicar of Louth. Alfred was the third of seven sons—Frederick, Charles, Alfred, Edward, Horatio, Arthur, and Septimus. A daughter, Cecilia, became the wife of Edmund Law Lushington, long professor of Greek in Glasgow University. Whether there were other daughters, the biographies of the poet do not mention.”

This is the opening paragraph of the Introduction to a school edition of “The Two Voices” and “A Dream of Fair Women,” by Dr. Hiram Corson. Here are several inaccuracies as to the Tennyson family and the poet’s birthday, and the same mistakes and others are found in nearly all the sketches of the Laureate in periodicals and works of reference.

It is generally supposed that cyclopedia articles are prepared by specialists who know what they are writing about. This is the popular conception, but this is evidently not the case in regard to Tennyson, who has fared sadly at the hands of his biographers. The brief accounts of his life given in Appleton’s, the Americanized Britannica, and other cyclopedias fairly bristle with blunders and objectionable features. As they stand, most of these articles are utterly untrustworthy. Their assertions are often misleading, or so vague as to be practically valueless. As a result, most people are more or less at sea in regard to Tennyson chronology.

 [Pg 23]

Dr. Tennyson and Family.

A multitude of errors have been perpetrated about Dr. Tennyson and family. We are told that Bayons Manor was his native place,[19] and that he was “rector of Somersby and vicar of Bennington and Grimsby.”[20] One writer uncritically imagines him a doctor of divinity.[21] According to some questionable authorities, he died “about 1830;”[22] “in 1830;”[23] “about 1831;”[24] “on the 18th of March, 1831;”[25] and in 1832.[26] Mrs. Tennyson is said to have died “in her eighty-first year;”[27] also “in her eighty-fourth year.”[28]

The number of sons and daughters in the Tennyson household is rarely given correctly. Alfred is called, in a hit-or-miss fashion, one of three, four, six, seven and eight brothers. His sisters are variously reckoned as one, three, four and five.

The Rev. George Clayton Tennyson was born at Market Rasen, December 10, 1778. He graduated at St. John’s College, Cambridge, in 1801; he received the degree of M. A. in 1805, and of LL.D. in 1813. He married (August 6, 1805) Miss Elizabeth Fytche of Louth. He moved to Somersby in 1808, where he was rector till his death. If the inscription on his tomb is to be trusted, Dr. Tennyson was rector of two neighboring parishes—Benniworth and Bag Enderby—and was vicar of Great Grimsby;[29] and died March 16, 1831. The poet’s mother died February 21, 1865, in her eighty-fifth year.

Alfred Tennyson was the fourth of eight sons—George (who died in infancy), Frederick, Charles, Alfred, Edward, Arthur, Septimus, and Horatio. The sisters were Mary, Emily, Matilda, and Cecilia. Excepting George and Frederick, all of the children were born at Somersby.

Alfred’s Birthday.

The discussion as to the poet’s birthday is now practically at rest—his lordship himself having authoritatively settled the matter.[Pg 24] Would that he would enlighten us on some other perplexing points in his history! Mrs. Tennyson kept August 6 as Alfred’s birthday. Tourists who have hastily examined the parish registers of Somersby have mistaken the figure 6 for a 5, owing to the fading of the ink “at the back, or left, of the loop.”[30] But careless hackwriters, depending upon the compilations published decades ago, continue to assert that the Laureate was born August 5;[31] April 9,[32] or April 6.[33]

Year of Tennyson’s Birth.

In Welsh’s English Literature is a “biography” of Tennyson which says, amid various other slips, that he was born in 1810. Allibone’s Dictionary of Authors (p. 2371) is a year out of the way. When this ponderous work was first published, not much was definitely known of the poet, but Alden’s Cyclopedia of Literature (1890), and other unreliable authorities put 1810 or 1811 as the year of his birth.

In the parish registers of Somersby, Dr. Tennyson’s handwriting records Alfred’s birth and baptism among the entries of 1809. Here is an instance where one can put to flight a host—for the names of those who assign 1810 as the year of the poet’s birth are legion.[34]

Tennyson’s Schooldays.

There is a want of precision in many of the statements that have been made by Tennyson’s biographers concerning his school days. In the Encyclopedia Americana (1889), vol. iv., p. 660, Dr. C. E. Washburn says Alfred “attended for a time Cadney’s village school, and for a brief period the grammar-school at Louth,”—which is partly true, but curiously misrepresents the matter. He was a pupil in Louth Grammar School four years (1816-20)—not a very “brief period.” Howitt and others make the length of time “two or three years,” and some have the mistaken impression that he passed some time in Cadney’s school before he went to Louth. Cadney came to Somersby about 1820, and, in the autumn of the next year, he instructed the Tennyson boys in arithmetic at the rectory. Cook [Pg 25]erroneously supposes that Charles and Alfred were at Louth in 1827.[35]

There has been considerable guessing as to the time when Tennyson went to Cambridge. He is said to have entered Trinity College in 1826;[36] in 1827;[37] about 1827;[38] in 1829;[39] and “early in 1829.”[40] There is no occasion for such indefiniteness. To be exact, Alfred became a student of Trinity in October, 1828.[41] He left college without graduating, at the time of his father’s death. His brothers, Frederick and Charles, finished the course in 1832.

COINCIDENCES.

The cyclopedias also present numerous examples of coincidences as well as variations—some of the incorrect details being repeated almost verbatim, as though successive compilers had copied over and over the mistakes of their superficial predecessors. This ought not to go on forever.

The sketches of Tennyson in Lippincott’s Biographical Dictionary (1885) and in the Americanized Britannica (1890) may be taken as samples. In the following sentence from Lippincott’s the writer manages to make five or six misstatements:

“In 1851 he succeeded Wordsworth as poet-laureate, and about the same time he married, and retired to Faringford, in the Isle of Wight, where he resided until 1869, when he removed to Petersfield, Hampshire.”

In the biographical supplement of the Americanized Britannica, this becomes two or three sentences, viz.:

“He was made poet-laureate in 1851. It was about this time, too, that Tennyson married, returning to Faringford, in the Isle of Wight, where he lived until 1869.... It was in this year the poet moved from the Isle of Wight and took up his residence in Petersfield, Hampshire.”

[Pg 26]There are similar passages in Appleton’s and Johnson’s cyclopedias. It is perfectly plain that there was not much independent investigation in these unscholarly performances.

MISTAKES.

Mistake No. 1: Tennyson received the Laureateship in 1850, the year of Wordsworth’s death. Mistake No. 2: he was married June 13, 1850. Mistake No. 3: Farringford is misspelled. Mistake No. 4: Tennyson lived at Twickenham three years after his marriage. Mistake No. 5: in 1853, he first took possession of Farringford, which is still his winter residence. Mistake No. 6: in 1867, the poet built a house near Haslemere in Surrey—not at Petersfield, Hampshire—where he spends the summer months. According to Prof. Church, the Laureate bought the Aldworth estate in 1872. The latter date is manifestly wrong.[42]

The story of Tennyson’s Petersfield establishment may be classed as a myth, though supported by several monuments of research called cyclopedias.[43]

Nothing is said of a Hampshire home in Jennings’ Life of Tennyson, in Church’s Laureate’s Country, or in Van Dyke’s admirable book on the Poetry of Tennyson; no reference to it is found in the essays on Tennyson by Mr. Edmund Gosse and Mrs. Anne Thackeray Ritchie. Nor is Lord Tennyson’s name found in the list of land owners of Hampshire, in Walford’s County Families of the United Kingdom. One is puzzled to understand how such a report started.

TENNYSON’S ELEVATION TO THE PEERAGE.

It is rather surprising to read in the People’s Cyclopedia, Johnson’s, Lippincott’s and elsewhere, that Tennyson was raised to the peerage in 1883 as “Baron d’Eyncourt,” etc. This he cannot[Pg 27] properly be called, though a descendant from the ancient house of D’Eyncourt—which long ago ceased to be a barony. The pedigree of Alfred’s grandfather, who belonged to the Lincolnshire gentry, is traced through ten generations to Edmund, Duke of Somerset, and two centuries further back to Edward III.’s fourth son, John of Gaunt. Dr. Tennyson died in the lifetime of his father, and the D’Eyncourt seat and dignity passed to his younger brother Charles. The poet’s cousin Louis Charles is the present possessor of the family estate at Bayons. England’s noble Laureate (according to Burke’s Peerage, ed. of 1888, p. 1361) was created a peer of the realm Jan. 24, 1884, with the new title—Baron of Aldworth, Surrey, and of Farringford, Isle of Wight. He took his seat in the House of Lords, Mar. 11, 1884.[44]

LAPSES IN ENGLISH GEOGRAPHY.

A common mistake is that of locating Aldworth in Sussex. Mr. Frederick Dolman, in the Ladies’ Home Journal (August, 1891), carelessly speaks of “the poet’s residences in the fair Isle and sunny Sussex.” According to Murray’s Handbook for Surrey (ed. of 1888, p. 182), and other excellent authorities,[45] Aldworth is in the county of Surrey—not far from the northern borders of Sussex. In Walford’s County Families of the United Kingdom, p. 1203, Lord Tennyson’s name occurs among the land owners of Surrey—not with those of Sussex.

Somersby and Somerby have been mixed by many people who are not familiar with English geography. The latter village is in the western part of Lincolnshire, near Grantham—a considerable distance from Alfred Tennyson’s birthplace. Duyckinck, in his Eminent Men and Women, recklessly says he was born at “Somerby, a small parish in Leicestershire.”[46]

If Europeans are guilty of crass ignorance of the United States, Americans too are open to criticism for their hazy notions of foreign places. An inexcusable blunder is that in Phillips’ Popular[Pg 28] Manual of English Literature, vol. II., p. 497, where Blackdown is loosely referred to as “a hill in the vicinity of Petersfield, Hampshire.” Another writer is remiss in accepting statements implicitly and without question. A footnote in Kellogg’s school edition of “In Memoriam,” p. 23, says “Hallam was buried in Cleveland Church on the Severn, which empties into British Channel.” If he had looked up the town for himself on the map of England, he would have discovered that Clevedon, the birthplace of Hallam, is situated on the bank of the Severn near its entrance to the Bristol Channel.

VARIOUS ERRORS.

It is not my purpose to enumerate all the errors that I have come across in my reading relating to Tennyson and his works. For the sake of brevity, I merely correct a few of them without giving full particulars in every case. Tennyson first visited the Pyrenees in 1830—not in 1831; the second visit was in 1862. He received the degree of D. C. L. in 1855—not in 1859. His son Hallam was born at Twickenham, Aug. 11, 1852; Lionel, at Freshwater, Mar. 16, 1854.

Tennyson did not write “Break, break, break” at Clevedon or Freshwater. The intercalary lyrics of “The Princess” were first published in the third edition—not in the second. The plot of “The Cup” is taken from Plutarch’s treatise De Mulierum Virtutibus; this work has been confused by Archer and Jennings with Boccaccio’s De Claris Mulieribus.

Many unpardonable mistakes have been made in dating Tennyson’s published writings, also in wording and punctuating their titles. It has been said that “The Princess” first appeared in print in 1846 and 1849; “In Memoriam,” in 1849 and 1851; “Idyls of the King,” in 1855, 1858, and 1861; “Enoch Arden,” in 1865; “The Holy Grail, and Other Poems,” in 1867 and 1870; “Harold,” in 1877; “Becket,” in 1879 and 1885; “Tiresias, and Other Poems,” in 1886; and “Demeter, and Other Poems,” in 1890. In Hart’s Manual of English Literature, one of Tennyson’s poems is named “The Vision of Art,” and a recent German cyclopedia makes him the author of “Tristam and Iseult.” A newspaper account of the sale of Tennysoniana in London contains the queer bit of misinformation that Poems by Two Brothers “was published by Louth in 1826.” These slips could have been easily avoided. The mystery hanging about the Laureate’s life does not involve his works.

It is believed that the following list, which has been carefully[Pg 29] verified, is correct both as to the titles and the dates of first publication of all of Tennyson’s books, viz:

[Pg 30]

[Pg 31]

TRANSLATIONS OF TENNYSON’S WORKS.

Footnotes:

[1] Three volumes of verse by Frederick Tennyson have appeared, viz.: Days and Hours (1854); Isles of Greece; Sappho and Alcæus (1890); Daphne, and Other Poems (1801). The published works of Charles Turner are as follows: Sonnets and Fugitive Pieces (1830); Sonnets (1864); Small Tableaux (1868); Sonnets, Lyrics and Translations (1873); Collected Sonnets, Old and New (1880). Edward Tennyson (1813-1890) achieved something of a reputation as a versifier; he contributed a sonnet to the Yorkshire Annual for 1832.

[2] Edward Fitzgerald, in a letter written in 1835, says: “I will say no more of Tennyson than that the more I have seen of him, the more cause I have to think him great. His little humours and grumpinesses were so droll, that I was always laughing.... I felt what Charles Lamb describes, a sense of depression at times from the overshadowing of a so much more lofty intellect than my own.”—Letters and Literary Remains, vol. i.

[3] “Tennyson has been in town for some time: he has been making fresh poems, which are finer, they say, than any he has done. But I believe he is chiefly meditating on the purging and subliming of what he has already done: and repents that he has published at all yet. It is fine to see how in each succeeding poem the smaller ornaments and fancies drop away, and leave the grand ideas single.”—Letters of Edward Fitzgerald, vol. i., p. 21.

Extract from a letter dated October 23, 1833.

[4] “Alfred Tennyson dined with us. I am always a little disappointed with the exterior of our poet when I look at him, in spite of his eyes, which are very fine; but his head and face, striking and dignified as they are, are almost too ponderous and massive for beauty in so young a man; and every now and then there is a slightly sarcastic expression about his mouth that almost frightens me, in spite of his shy manner and habitual silence.”—Fanny Kemble’s Records of a Girlhood, pp. 519-20.

This entry in Fanny Kemble’s journal is dated June 16, 1832.

[5] Fitzgerald, in a letter written in London (April, 1838) says: “We have had Alfred Tennyson here; very droll, and very wayward: and much sitting up of nights till two and three in the morning with pipes in our mouths: at which good hour we would get Alfred to give us some of his magic music, which he does between growling and smoking.”—Letters and Literary Remains, vol. i., pp. 42, 43.

[6] Milnes, in a letter dated July 20, 1856, gives this glimpse of the Laureate’s domestic life: “He is himself much happier than he used to be, and devoted to his children, who are beautiful.”—Reid’s Life of Lord Houghton, Vol. I.

[7] The time of Tennyson’s removal from Twickenham to Farringford can be fixed with tolerable definiteness. Fitzgerald writes (Oct. 25, 1853): “I am going to see the last of the Tennysons at Twickenham;” and again (in December, 1853): “I hear from Mrs. Alfred they are got to their new abode in the Isle of Wight.”—Letters and Literary Remains, vol. i., pp. 225-6.

[8] In 1865, Alfred Tennyson was elected a member of the Royal Society; in 1869, an honorary fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge; and, in 1884, president of the Incorporated Society of Authors. He is also president of the London Library.

[9] “An interesting fact relating to the poet’s descent may here be mentioned. His mother’s mother (Mrs. Fytche) was a granddaughter of a certain Mons. Fauvelle, a French Huguenot, who was related to Madame de Maintenon.”—Church’s Laureate’s Country, p. 10.

[10] Edward Fitzgerald, in a letter written soon after Charles Turner’s death (April 25, 1879), says: “Tennyson’s elder, not eldest, brother is dead; and I was writing only yesterday to persuade Spedding to insist on Macmillan publishing a complete edition of Charles’ Sonnets: graceful, tender, beautiful, and quite original little things.”—Letters and Literary Remains, vol. i., p. 437.

[11] Mary Tennyson (1810-1884) married the Hon. Alan Ker, Puisine Judge of the Supreme Court of Jamaica.

[12] Emily Tennyson (1811-1887), who was betrothed to Arthur Hallam about 1830, became the wife of Capt. Richard Jesse, R. N.

[13] The Hon. Lionel Tennyson was attacked by jungle fever during a visit to India, and died on board the Chusan, near Aden, April 20, 1886, aged thirty-two. He was a profound student of dramatic poetry, and would have won a name for himself in literature. For several years he was connected with the India office, and prepared a masterly report on “The Moral and Material Condition of India,” for 1881-82. In 1878, he married the accomplished daughter of Frederick Locker. The eldest of their three sons is the “golden-haired Ally” who inspired the well-known verses of his grandfather.

[14] “Queen Mary” was produced at the Lyceum Theatre, London, in April, 1876—Miss Bateman as Mary and Irving as Philip.

[15] “The Cup” was played at the Lyceum in January, 1881—Irving taking the part of Synorix and Miss Terry that of Camma.

[16] “The Falcon” was presented at St. James’ Theatre, London, in December, 1879—Mr. Kendal playing the rôle of Count Federigo and Mrs. Kendal that of Lady Giovanna.

[17] “The Promise of May” was performed at the Globe Theatre, London, (Nov. 11-Dec. 16, 1882), with Mrs. Bernard-Beere as Dora, Miss Emmeline Ormsby as Eva, Mr. Hermann Vezin as Edgar and Mr. Charles Kelly as Dobson.

[18] “The Foresters” was produced at Daly’s Theatre, New York, (Mar. 17-April 22, 1892),—Mr. John Drew in the rôle of Robin Hood and Miss Ada Rehan as Maid Marian.

[19] Walter’s In Tennyson Land, p. 62.

[20] Appleton’s Cyclopedia, vol. xv., p. 651.

[21] Johnson’s Cyclopedia, vol. vii., p. 755.

[22] Ibid.

[23] J. H. Ward, in Atlantic Monthly, Sept., 1879.

[24] Encyclopedia Americana, vol. iv., p. 660.

[25] J. A. Graham, in Art Journal, Feb., 1891.

[26] Lodge’s Peerage (1888), p. 597.

[27] Art Journal, Feb., 1891.

[28] Atlantic Monthly, Sept., 1879.

[29] A full transcript of the inscription on the rector’s tomb is given in Church’s Laureate’s Country (p. 27), a work that is simply invaluable to students of Tennyson.

“Somersby and Bag Enderby are hamlets about one quarter of a mile apart,” says Gatty, “and are held by one Rector, who now resides at the latter place.”—Key to “In Memoriam.” Preface.

“Not far from the south-eastern extremity of this Wold country is the little village of Somersby. The nearest town to it is Horncastle, which is six miles to the south-east.... Somersby is something less than fifteen miles from the sea.”—Church’s Laureate’s Country.

[30] C. J. Caswell, in Notes and Queries, March 14, 1891. Van Dyke’s Poetry of Tennyson, p. 323.

[31] Dawson’s Makers of Modern English, p. 169.

[32] The Graphic, (Chicago), Nov. 14, 1891.

[33] The Tribune, (Chicago), March 26, 1892, p. 14.

[34] Jenkins’ Handbook of British and American Literature, p. 400. Emerson’s Parnassus, p. xxxiii. Friswell’s Modern Men of Letters, p. 152. Collier’s History of English Literature, p. 472. Angus’ Handbook of English Literature, p. 274. Fogh’s Nordish Con.-Lex., vol. v., p. 665. Hoefer’s Nouvelle Biog. Gen., vol. 44. Lorenz Cat. Lib. Fran., vol. vi., p. 607. Bleibtreu’s Geschichte Eng. Lit., p. 364. Fischer’s Ausgewählte Gedichte v. A Tennyson, p. 1. Waldmüller Duboc’s Freundes-Klage, p. 6. Faccioli’s A. Tennyson—Idilli Liriche, etc., p. ix.

[35] Poets and Problems, p. 73.

I am indebted to Mr. C. J. Caswell for his thorough investigations of Tennyson’s boyhood. See Pall Mall Gazette, June 19, 1890.

[36] Brockhaus’ Conversations-Lex., vol. xv., p. 559.

[37] Lives of English Authors (1890), p. 308.

[38] Johnson’s Cyclopedia, vol. vii., p. 755.

[39] Cook’s Poets and Problems, p. 73.

[40] Cassell’s Lib. Eng. Lit., Shorter Poems, p. 465.

[41] Church’s Laureate’s Country, p. 74. Van Dyke’s Poetry of Tennyson, p. 323.

Frederick Tennyson (a co-heir of the Earls of Scarsdale) was born June 5, 1807. He was educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he distinguished himself by writing Greek verse—winning the prize for a Sapphic ode on “Egypt.” He married an Italian lady, Maria Guiliotta, now dead, by whom he had two sons—Julius and Alfred,—and three daughters—Elise, Emily, Matilda. For many years he lived at Tenby in South Wales; at present he resides in Jersey, and devotes himself to his favorite Hellenic studies and to poetry.

Charles Tennyson Turner (born July 4, 1808, died April 25, 1879) attended Louth Grammar School (1815-21), and then was fitted for college at home. At Trinity, he did admirable work in the classics—obtaining a Bell scholarship. In 1836, he became vicar of Grasby, where he passed the greater part of his life, well-known for his good works. In 1838, he acquired property left him by his great-uncle, Rev. S. Turner, and assumed the name of Turner by royal license. He married Louisa Sellwood, youngest sister of Lady Tennyson; he died at Cheltenham.

[42] “In 1872, Mr. Tennyson purchased a small estate on the top of Blackdown.”

Laureate’s Country, ch. XVI. On the other hand, Every Saturday, for Jan. 1, 1870, says:

“Mr. Tennyson has recently built himself a second residence, in a picturesque valley in Surrey.” “In 1867,” says Jennings in his Lord Tennyson (p. 190), “it was announced that Tennyson had purchased the Greenhill estate on the borders of Sussex.”

This statement is corroborated by a letter of Milnes, dated July 30, 1867:

“Our expedition to Tennyson’s was a moral success, but a physical failure.... The bard was very agreeable, and his wife and son delightful. He has built himself a very handsome and commanding home in a most inaccessible site, with every comfort he can require, and every discomfort to all who approach him. What can be more poetical?”

Reid’s Life of Lord Houghton, Vol. II, p. 176

Here the circumstances point to only one conclusion—that Tennyson was living at Aldworth in the summer of 1867. It is a satisfaction to get down to a solid substratum of truth.

[43]

Johnson’s Cyclopedia, Vol. VII., p. 755.

Appleton’s Cyclopedia, Vol. XV., p. 652.

Meyer’s Kon-Lex., vol. XV., p. 589.

Hart’s Manual of English Literature, p. 509.

Jenkins’ Handbook of British and American Literature, p. 401.

[44] London Times, March 12, 1884. An item in the Chicago Herald, April 5, 1892, refers to Tennyson as “Baron d’Eyncourt.” Thus he is called in Lives of English Authors (1890). His title is given as “baron Tennyson d’Eyncourt d’Aldworth,” by Larousse (Dictionnaire Universel, 2d. Supplement, p. 1914); and as “Baron Tennyson von Altworth,” by Brockhaus (Con-Lex., vol. xv., p. 559), and by Meyer (Kon-Lex., vol. xv., p. 589). The Illustrirtes Kon-Lex. says he was offered a Baronetcy in 1875. The International Cyclopedia says he was made a baron in 1883, as does Alden’s Cyc. of Univ. Lit. and other compilations. From this showing it would appear that French and German erudition is about on a par with English and American.

[45] Mrs. Ritchie on “Alfred Tennyson,” in Harper’s Magazine (Dec., 1883), and Alice Maude Fenn on “The Borderlands of Surrey,” in The Century (Aug., 1882).

[46] Of the numerous works of reference which give Somerby as the poet’s birthplace, are the following: Vapereau. Dictionnaire des Contemporains; Larousse. Dictionnaire Universel du XIXe Siècle, 2e. Supplement; Schem. Conversations-Lexicon; Meyer. Conversations-Lexicon. Brockhaus, etc.

[47] Selections from Tennyson’s “Queen Mary.”

[48] “The First Quarrel.”

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