THE INTRODUCTION HE death of Tennyson was worthy of his life. He died with the simplicity which marked his life, and yet with a certain conscious stateliness which was all his own; and these two, simplicity and stateliness, were also vital in the texture of his poetry. But his dying hour, though it has left a noble picture on the mind of England, is not the important thing. His life and poetry are the real matter of use and interest, and his death gains its best import from its being the beautiful and fitting end of all the work that had gone before it. It became an artist, it became a Christian, it became a man. To these three points this Introduction is dedicated to his relation to beauty, to his relation to the Christian faith, and to his relation to the movement of humanity. The art of his poems, his work on nature and his work on human life, as far as this immense subject can be compressed into a few hundred pages, will be treated of in the rest of this book. For more than sixty years he practised his art, and his practice of it, being original and extraordinarily careful and selfrespecting, suggests and comments on almost every question that concerns the art of poetry. For more than sixty years he lived close to the present life of England, as far as he was capable of comprehending and sympathising with its movements; and he inwove what he felt concerning it into his poetry. For many years to come that poetry-so close to modern life-will open a vast storehouse of subjects to those writers who are interested in the application of imaginative emotion to the problems and pleasures of life. Half at least of those problems and pleasures eluded Tennyson, or he did not see them. But he felt the other half all the more strongly, and he felt it for this long period of sixty years. He then who writes on Tennyson has so wide a country over which to travel, that he cannot do much more than visit it here and there. When he has finished his journey, he knows how much he has left unseen, untouched; how much more of pleasure and good he will gain in many more journeys over this varied, home-like, and romantic land. I The first characteristic of Tennyson's art-that is, of his shaping of the beauty which he saw in Nature and Humanity was simplicity, and this came directly out of his character. The way in which he worked, his choice of subjects, his style, were all the revelation of a character drawn on large and uncomplicated lines; and in this sense, in the complete sincerity to his inner being of all he did and in the manner of its doing, he was simple in the truest sense of the word. Nothing was ever done for effect; no subject in which he was not veritably involved was taken up. Nothing was even tried, save a few metrical exercises, for experiment's sake alone, much less to please the popular moment. The thing shaped was the legitimate child of natural thought and natural feeling. Vital sincerity or living correspondence between idea and form, that absolute necessity for all fine art as for all noble life, was his, and it is contained in what I have called his simplicity. His clearness is also contained in this simplicity -clearness in thought, in expression, and in representation of the outward world, one of the first and greatest things an artist can attain, It is true that Tennyson never went down into the obscure and thorny depths of metaphysics and theology; it is true that he did not attempt to express the more dreadful and involved passions of mankind, such as Shakespeare in his Tragic worked upon, nor the subtle and distant analogies and phases of human nature in which Browning had his pleasure. It was easy, then, it may be said, for him to be clear. But I think it was not from inability to try these subjects that he did not write about them, but from deliberate choice not to write about that which he could not express with lucidity of thought and form. He determined to be clear. He chose plain and easy lines of thought in philosophy and theology, but he expressed them with art-that is, in beautiful form proceeding outwards from impassioned feeling; and a poem like The Two Voices or Out of the Deep is an instance of the way this was done. The same choice of the easy to be understood presided over his human subjects. For the most part he wrote of the everyday loves and duties of men and women; of the primal pains and joys of humanity; of the aspirations and trials which are common to all ages and all classes and independent even of the disease of civilisation; but he made them new and surprising by the art which he added to them -by beauty of thought, tenderness of feeling, and exquisiteness of shaping. The main lines of the subjects, even of the classical subjects, are few, are simple, are clear. And I think all the more that this choice of clearness (of clearness as a part of simplicity) was deliberate, because of his representation of Nature. It is plain that he might have entered into infinite and involuted description; that he could, if he pleased, have expressed the stranger and remoter aspects of Nature, for he had an eye to see everything from small to large. But he selected the simple, the main lines of a landscape or an event of Nature, and rejected the minuter detail or the obscurer relations between the parts of that which he described. What was done was done in the fewest words possible, and with luminous fitness of phrase. English literature owes him gratitude for this clearness. At a time when we are running close to the edge of all the errors of the later Elizabethans, Tennyson never allowed himself to drift into obscurity of thought or obscurity of expression, and showed (as those did not who restored clearness to English song in the time of Dryden) that simplicity of words, as well as jewelled brightness of thought and description, might be also compact of imagination. The lamp of language which he held in his hand burnt with a bright, keen, and glowing flame. The |