Beacon Lights of History Volume Xiii Part 16

Girl never breathed to rival such a rose!

Rose never blew that equalled such a bud."

A few songs of genuine Tennysonian harmony, pitched in the keys that most fittingly suit the singer's mood, are interspersed through the drama, and serve to relieve the narratives of their gloom and plaint.

Their presence, we cannot help thinking, recalls work better done, and more within the limitations of the poet's genius, than this drama of "Queen Mary." As a dramatic representation the drama had the advantage of being produced at the Lyceum Theatre, London, with all the historic art and sumptuous stage-setting with which Sir Henry Irving could well give it,--Irving himself personating Philip, while Miss Bateman took the part of Queen Mary. "Becket," we should here add, was also given on the stage, and with much dramatic effectiveness, by Irving,--over fifty performances of it being called for. None of the dramas, however, as we have said, was a success, though each has its merit, while all are distinguished by many pa.s.sages of n.o.ble and strenuous thought.

Other dramatic compositions the poet attempted, though of minor importance to the trilogy just spoken of. These were "The Falcon," the groundwork of which is to be found in "The Decameron;" "The Cup," a tragedy, rich in action, with an incisive dialogue, borrowed from Plutarch. The former was staged by Mr. and Mrs. Kendal, and had a run of sixty-seven nights; the latter also was staged with liberal magnificence, by Irving, and met with considerable success. "The Promise of May" is another play which was staged, in 1882, by Mrs. Bernard Beere, but met with failure by the critics, owing, in some degree, to its supposed caricature of modern agnostics, and to the repellent portrayal of one of the characters in the piece, the sensualist, Philip Edgar. Later, in (1892) appeared "The Foresters," a pretty pastoral play, on the theme of Robin Hood and Maid Marian, which was produced on the boards in New York by Mr. Daly and his company, with a charming woodland setting. The later publications of the Laureate, in his own distinctive field of verse, embrace "The Lover's Tale" (1879), "Ballads and other Poems" (1880), "Tiresias and Other Poems" (1885), "Locksley Hall Sixty Years After" (1886), "Demeter and Other Poems" (1889), and "The Death of Oenone, Akbar's Dream, and Other Poems," in the year of the Poet's death (1892). In these various volumes there is much admirable work and many tuneful lyrics in the old charming, lilting strain, with not a few serious, thoughtful, stately pieces of verse, "the after-glow," as Stedman phrases it, "of a still radiant genius....

His after-song," continues this fine critic, "does not wreak itself upon the master pa.s.sions of love and ambition, and hence fastens less strongly on the thoughts of the young; nor does it come with the unused rhythm, the fresh and novel cadence, that stamped the now hackneyed measure with a lyric's name. Yet, as to its art and imagery, the same effects are there, differing only in a more vigorous method, an intentional roughness, from the individual early verse. The new burthen is termed pessimistic, but for all its impatient summary of ills, it ends with a cry of faith."

We must now hasten to a close, delightful as it would be to linger over so attractive a theme, and to dwell upon the personality of one who so uniquely represents the mind, as he has so remarkably influenced the thought, of his age. But considering the length of the present paper, this cannot be. Happily, however, the fruitage is ever with us of the poet's full fourscore years of splendid achievement with the hallowing memory of a forceful, opulent, and blameless life. To few men of the past century can the reflecting mind of a coming time more interestingly or more instructively turn than to this profound thinker and mighty musical singer, steeped as he was in the varied culture of the ages, endowed with great prophetic powers, with phenomenal gifts of poetic expression, and with a soul so attuned to the harmonies of heaven as to make him at once the counsellor and the inspiring teacher of his time.

Who, in comparison with him, has so felt the subtle charm, or so interpreted to us the infinite beauty, of the world in which we live, or more impressively deepened in the mind and conscience of the age belief in the verities of religion, while quelling its doubts and quickening its highest hopes and faith? "Tennyson was a pa.s.sionate believer in the immortal life; this was so real to him that he had no patience with scepticism on the subject. To question it in his presence was to bring upon one's head a torrent of denunciation and wrath. His great soul was intuitively conscious of spiritual realities, and he could not understand how little soulless microbes of men and women were dest.i.tute of his deep perception. Prayer was to him a living fact and power, and some of his words about it are among the n.o.blest ever written. When some one asked him about Christ, he pointed to a flower and said, 'What the sun is to that flower, Christ is to my soul.'"

Apart as he stood from the tumult and the frivolities of his age, he was yet of it, and sensibly and beneficently influenced it for its higher and n.o.bler weal. In politics, as we know, he was a liberal conservative,--a conserver of what was best in the present and the past, and an advancer of all that tended to true and harmonious progress. His knowledge of men and things was wide and deep; in the philosophic thought and even in the science of his time he was deeply read; while he was lovingly interested in all nature, and especially in the common people, whom he often wrote of and touchingly depicted in their humble ways of toil as well as of joy and sorrow. Above all, he was a man of high and real faith, who believed that "good" was "the final goal of ill;" and in "the dumb hour clothed in black" that at last came to him, as it comes to all, he confidingly put his trust in Loving Omnipotence and reverently and beautifully expressed the hope of seeing the guiding Pilot of his life when, with the outflow of its river-current into the ocean of the Divine Unseen, he crossed the bar. For humanity's sake and the weal of the world in a coming time this was his joyous cry:--

"Ring in the n.o.bler modes of life, With sweeter manners, purer laws.

"Ring in the love of truth and right, Ring in the common love of good.

"Ring in the valiant man and free, The larger heart, the kindlier hand; Ring out the darkness of the land, Ring in the Christ that is to be!"

What our formative, high-wrought English literature has suffered in Tennyson's pa.s.sing from the age on which he has shed so much glory those can best say who are of his era, and have been intimate, as each appeared, with every successive issue of his works. To the latter, as to all thoughtful students of his writings, his has been the supreme interpreting voice of the past century, while his influence on the literary thought of his time has been of the highest and most potent kind. Especially influential has Tennyson been in carrying forward, with new impulses and inspiration, the poetic traditions of that grand old motherland of English song to which our own poets in the New World, as well as the younger bards of the British Isles, owe so much. If we except the Laureate, there have been few who have worn the singing robe of the poet who, in these later years at least, have spoken so impressively to cultured minds on either side of the ocean, or have more effectively expressed to his age the high and hallowing spirit of modern poetry. It is this that has given the Laureate his exalted place among the great literary influences of the century, and made him the one indubitable representative of English song, with all its tuneful music and rare and delicate art. To a few of the great choir of singers of the past Tennyson admittedly owed something, both in tradition and in art,--for each new impulse has caught and embodied not a little of the spirit and temper, as well as the culture and inspiration, of the old,--but his it was to impart new and fresher thought and a wider range of harmony and emotion than had been reached by almost any of his predecessors, and to speak to the mind and soul of his time as none other has spoken or could well speak. From the era of Shakespeare and Milton and their chief successors, it is to Tennyson's honor and fame that he has given continuity as well as high perfection to the great coursing stream of n.o.ble British verse.

AUTHORITIES.

Brooke, Stopford A. Tennyson: his Art and Relation to Modern Life.

Van d.y.k.e, Henry. The Poetry of Tennyson.

Bayne, Peter. Tennyson and his Teachers.

Brimley, George. Essays on Tennyson.

Tainsh, Ed. C. Study of the Works of Tennyson.

Waugh, Arthur. Tennyson: A Study of his Life and Work.

Stedman, E. C. Victorian Poets.

Buchanan, R. Master Spirits.

Forman. Our Living Poets.

Dowden, Ed. Tennyson and Browning.

Tennyson, Hallam. Memoir of the Poet (by his Son).

Kingsley, C. Miscellanies.

Thackeray-Ritchie, Anne. Records of Tennyson and Others.

Robertson, F. W. In Memoriam.

Dawson, Dr. S. E. Study of the Princess, annotated.

Genung, J. F. In Memoriam, its Purpose and Structure.

Woodberry, G. E. The Princess, with Notes and Introduction.

Farrand, Wilson. The Princess, with Notes and Introduction.

Gatty, Alfred. Key to In Memoriam.

Harrison, Frederic. Tennyson, Ruskin, and Mill.