David Teniers the Younger

“ In those younger days, Tennyson, possessed with a subject, and as it were floating in it, could pour out a legend with the credulity of a child and the clear convincing insight of a teacher: when he came in mature life to apply himself to the rounded work, he had more of a disposition to teach, and less of that imaginative reach which is like belief ”

“ To base conduct upon reason rather than tradition, and paternal authority upon kindness rather than fear; [29] to give up the vain attempt to coerce youth into the narrow path of age; to grapple with life as a whole by making the best of each difficulty when it arises; to live in comfort by means of mutual concession and not to plague ourselves with unnecessary troubles: such are some of the principles indicated in those plays of Menander which Terence so skilfully adapted, and whose lessons he set before a younger and more vigorous people. ”

“ And the “Dread,” a choice selection of the most brilliant among the rising men, have pronounced him to be the first poet of the day. So you see I have some to keep me company in my judgment. And at all events he is above ridicule.
Pray inform Miss D—— of all this. One of our first professors raves about him.
When I went up to Cambridge in 1860, Tennyson was the oracle poet among the younger men; but the feeling of doubt still remained among the older men. I recall a friendly dispute between the Senior and a Junior Fellow of my own College. The elder man charged Tennyson with being “misty” ”

“ It is perhaps difficult for men of middle age to estimate Tennyson aright. For we who love poetry were brought up, as it were, at his feet, and he cast the magic of his fascination over our youth. We have gone away, we have travelled in other lands, absorbed in other preoccupations, often revolving problems different from those concerning which we took counsel with him; and we hear new voices, claiming authority, who aver that our old master has been superseded, that he has no message for a new generation, that his voice is no longer a talisman of power. ”

“ To the younger generation of us, the position of Tennyson in the realm of English poetry seemed from the first to differ little, if at all, so far as its actuality went, from that of Wordsworth and Coleridge, of Byron and Shelley and Keats. He presented himself to our youthful imagination as an accomplished fact. The only difference lay in a comparative ignorance of his private life, an ignorance which was by no means ambiguous enough to prove a stumbling-block. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is easy to accuse Tennyson of being insular—to say that he is merely "the poet of England." Had he been more he would have been less. World-poets have usually been revolutionists, and dangerous men who exploded at an unknown extent of concussion. None of them has been a safe man—none respectable. Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Hugo and Whitman were outcasts.
Tennyson is always serene, sane and safe—his lines breathe purity and excellence. He is the poet of religion, of the home and fireside, of established order, of truth, justice and mercy as embodied in law. ”

“ Unlike Browning, who is generally appreciated by more mature minds, Tennyson is for enjoyment, for inspiration, rather than for instruction. Only youth can fully appreciate him; and youth, unfortunately, except in a few rare, beautiful cases, is something which does not dwell with us long after our school days. The secret of poetry, especially of Tennyson's poetry, is to be eternally young, and, like Adam in Paradise, to find every morning a new world, fresh, wonderful, inspiring, as if just from the hands of God. ”

“ There is no poet dearer to the young than Tennyson, and it was not the least of his joys to know that all over the English-speaking world children were tuning their hearts to the music of his lines, were dreaming vaguely and rapturously over the beauty he revealed. ”

“ They represent two extremes of the Tennyson temperament, the mean and perfection of which is found in Alfred. In the elder the lyric fury, in the younger the craftsman’s humility of the more perfect poet were developed to excess, and both suffered for the affection and respect in which they held him whom they knew to be their master. Yet each has left himself a monument, some part at least of which is worthy to rank with the more complete achievement of their younger brother. ”

“ IT is easy to exaggerate, and equally easy to underrate, the influence of Tennyson on his age as an intellectual force. It will be exaggerated if we regard him as a great original mind, a proclaimer or revealer of novel truth. ”

“ Nourished as on the milk of lions, on the elevating and strengthening doctrines of popular science, trained from childhood to forego hope and attend evening lectures, the young critics of our generation find Tennyson a weakling because he had hopes and fears concerning the ultimate renewal of what was more than half his life—his friendship. ”

“ And one would guess this to be a picture of two very young men, absorbed in the first joy of one of the romantic friendships of youth, did one not know that the Poet was a man of middle age and the scholar in the maturing thirties. But the artists know their way to the Fountain of youth and meet there. Tennyson, the great creative artist, retained all his life the simplicity of a child. My father was no creator, but he, too, was in his way an artist; he was the artist as scholar and teacher. ”

“ Every representative man is ahead of his age—a little, but not enough to be beyond the reach of the sympathies of ordinary people. It may be objected that Tennyson is primarily an artist, not a thinker, and that he should be judged not by his message but by his song. ”

“ Tenniel was never carried away by private feeling. His aim was to treat all public men with equality and fairness, and to be severe without being vindictive. Thus, he was always careful to make the politician, not the man, appear ridiculous, and the laugh raised is almost invariably good-natured. It is a remarkable fact that Tenniel never used models or nature for any of his drawings. In his portraits he was an idealist rather than a realist, since they were never taken from the life. ”

“ As he advanced to another stage of childhood, it was rendered still more manifest that he would be distinguished from ordinary persons, by an increasing thoughtfulness, and a fondness for a class of books, which in general are so little intelligible to boys of his age, that they excite in them no kind of interest. ”

“ Had Tennyson done either he might have been a very great and very interesting poet, but he could not have been the poet of his age; for the temper of the time, when it was not violently partisan, was liberally eclectic. There was no one great leading idea, such as that of evolution in the last quarter of last century, so ample and so characteristic of the age that a poet might become its disciple without yielding to party what was meant for mankind. ”

“ Dying at twenty-two, the hope and pride of all who knew him, "remarkable for the early splendor of his genius," the career of this young man concentres the interest of more than his native country. Tennyson has laid upon his early grave a poem which will never let his ashes be forgotten, or his memory fade like that of common clay. ”

“ Tennyson shows himself more than ever the poet of the day. In it more than ever the old is interpenetrated with the new—the domestic and scientific with the ideal and sentimental. He dares, in every page, to make use of modern words and notions, from which the mingled clumsiness and archaism of his compeers shrinks, as unpoetical. Though, as we just said, his stage is an ideal fairyland, yet he has reached the ideal by the only true method—by bringing the Middle Age forward to the Present one, and not by ignoring the Present to fall back on a cold and galvanised Medievalism ”

“ In private life Tenniel was genial and of an equable temper. Through an exceptionally long life, in which he came into contact with all sorts and conditions of men, it is safe to say that he never made an enemy, while few men have had more friends. ”

“ Age is never so old as youth would measure it.” ”

“ It may be that the claim of Tennyson to popular sovereignty will, in the end, rest chiefly on the pleasure which he gave to many thousands of his fellow-countrymen, a pleasure to be renewed and found again in English scenes, and in thoughts which coloured grey lives and warmed cold hearts, which shed the ray of faith on those who could accept no creeds and who yet yearned for some hope of an after-life to cheer their declining days. ”

“ Such things are absent from the work of Hawthorne and Holmes, Longfellow, Dickens, Thackeray, and the rest. Such things we now treat of, greatly daring, and somehow our elders appear apt to outlaugh and outlive us as humorists, novelists, and poets. It is strange.
Into the merits of that remarkable middle age of the century we cannot enter in much detail. Tennyson holds unimperilled the throne of the poet of the time. That his thought is not especially penetrating, whether he deals with the intricacies of human character, or with the problems of the universe, may be readily admitted. ”

“ Whilst all the poems of Mr Tennyson, or his betters, maybe had for a dollar, the maiden effort of an American youth cannot be furnished for much less. Of course, his country has crushed her child, under the weight of an unnatural disadvantage; and in proportion as he is worth any thing, the chances are less that he will persevere against such odds. ”

“ They are within our reach if we will but strenuously grasp at them. If the verse of Tennyson had descended into the grave with him, the world to-day would be a grievous loser; but while we mourn the poet who gladdened and instructed our age, we rejoice to think how much he has left that our children and our children's children will prize not less highly than we, and that will extend its healthful influence through ages to come. ”

“ A vast outlying public, like that of Tennyson, may make you as many blunders as it has heads; but the accurate clear poet proved his meaning to all accurate perceptions. Where he hesitates, his is the sincere pause of process and uncertainty. It has been said that Tennyson, midway between the student of material science and the mystic, wrote and thought according to an age that wavered, with him, between the two minds, and that men have now taken one way or the other. ”

“ One cannot, if one is a quite human being, judge one’s contemporaries with the same impartial scrutiny with which one294 judges the mighty dead. The great man gives to his own age much to which posterity is indifferent, and gives to posterity much to which his own age may even be hostile. Tennyson served his age as a giant, and he was accepted as a giant by most of the fine critics of his age, from Edgar Allan Poe downwards. If an occasional critic such as Edward FitzGerald came to have doubts about Tennyson, it was because he himself stood monastically aloof from the age. ”

“ Tennyson represents more fully than any other poet this essential spirit of the age. If it be true, as has been often asserted, that the spirit of an age is to be found best in the work of lesser men, his complete identity with the thought of his time is in itself evidence of his inferiority to his contemporary, Browning. ”

“ Edward FitzGerald, though a contemporary, was not as yet known to Tennyson; but Lord Houghton seems to have been fully justified in saying that the Cambridge of those days could boast a body of young men such as had been rarely surpassed in promise. Chief among them, in Tennyson's opinion, and in that of many good judges, was Arthur Hallam. Whatever might be the dreariness of the lecture-room, a young man of genius could have no reason to complain that his lot was cast in barren places. Tennyson in later years always looked back with affection to those 'dawn-golden times' ”

“ Attractive also, if at times somewhat commonplace, is the quiet domestic sphere which Tennyson has hallowed in the many modern idylls which depict the joys and sorrows of humble life. No trait in the poet's many-sided character is more beautiful than the sympathy he has manifested in these poems with the world's toilers; while nothing could well be more touching than the pathos with which he invests their simple annals. ”

“ Browning seemed to grow through society and travel, but solitude served the needs of Tennyson.
"There must be a man behind every sentence," said Emerson. After ten years of silence, when Tennyson issued his book, the literary world recognized the man behind it. Tennyson had grown as a writer, but more as a man. And after all, it is more to be a man than a poet. All who knew Tennyson, and have written of him, especially during those early years, begin with a description of his appearance. His looks did not belie the man. In intellect and in stature he was a giant. ”

“ From the earliest years of this extraordinary young man, his premature abilities were not more conspicuous than an almost faultless disposition, sustained by a more calm self-command than has often been witnessed in that season of life. ”

“ It is this many-sidedness and large-heartedness, the intensity with which Tennyson identified himself with his country's needs and interests, her joys and griefs, that, quite as much as his purely poetic genius, has made him beloved and popular with a far larger public than perhaps any poet of the century. ”

“ At one fell swoop he, too, will have cut out nine-tenths of that portion of the poet's work on which perchance he most prided himself when alive. Tennyson's direct criticism on his age, on its social phase, on its religious phase, on its intellectual phase, will then appear to his critic as of just the same value as Wordsworth's now appears to us; and that is, candidly, nil. All the conscious efforts of 'an imitative will' to grapple with large issues will then appear as a failure, and a grievous failure only too obviously foredoomed. ”