Alfred Tennyson | Page 5

Wordsworth, wisdom and self-control directing the course of a
long, sane, sound, and fortunate existence. The great physical strength
which is commonly the basis of great mental vigour was not ruined in
Tennyson by poverty and passion, as in the case of Burns, nor in forced
literary labour, as in those of Scott and Dickens. For long he was poor,
like Wordsworth and Southey, but never destitute. He made his early
effort: he had his time of great sorrow, and trial, and apparent failure.
With practical wisdom he conquered circumstances; he became
eminent; he outlived reaction against his genius; he died in the fulness
of a happy age and of renown. This full-orbed life, with not a few years
of sorrow and stress, is what Nature seems to intend for the career of a
divine minstrel. If Tennyson missed the "one crowded hour of glorious
life," he had not to be content in "an age without a name."
It was not Tennyson's lot to illustrate any modern theory of the origin
of genius. Born in 1809 of a Lincolnshire family, long connected with

the soil but inconspicuous in history, Tennyson had nothing Celtic in
his blood, as far as pedigrees prove. This is unfortunate for one school
of theorists. His mother (genius is presumed to be derived from
mothers) had a genius merely for moral excellence and for religion. She
is described in the poem of Isabel, and was "a remarkable and saintly
woman." In the male line, the family was not (as the families of genius
ought to be) brief of life and unhealthy. "The Tennysons never die,"
said the sister who was betrothed to Arthur Hallam. The father, a
clergyman, was, says his grandson, "a man of great ability," and his
"excellent library" was an element in the education of his family. "My
father was a poet," Tennyson said, "and could write regular verse very
skilfully." In physical type the sons were tall, strong, and unusually
dark: Tennyson, when abroad, was not taken for an Englishman; at
home, strangers thought him "foreign." Most of the children had the
temperament, and several of the sons had some of the accomplishments,
of genius: whence derived by way of heredity is a question beyond
conjecture, for the father's accomplishment was not unusual. As Walton
says of the poet and the angler, they "were born to be so": we know no
more.
The region in which the paternal hamlet of Somersby lies, "a land of
quiet villages, large fields, grey hillsides, and noble tall-towered
churches, on the lower slope of a Lincolnshire wold," does not appear
to have been rich in romantic legend and tradition. The folk-lore of
Lincolnshire, of which examples have been published, does seem to
have a peculiar poetry of its own, but it was rather the humorous than
the poetical aspect of the country-people that Tennyson appears to have
known. In brief, we have nothing to inform us as to how genius came
into that generation of Tennysons which was born between 1807 and
1819. A source and a cause there must have been, but these things are
hidden, except from popular science.
Precocity is not a sign of genius, but genius is perhaps always
accompanied by precocity. This is especially notable in the cases of
painting, music, and mathematics; but in the matter of literature genius
may chiefly show itself in acquisition, as in Sir Walter Scott, who when
a boy knew much, but did little that would attract notice. As a child and

a boy young Tennyson was remarked both for acquisition and
performance. His own reminiscences of his childhood varied somewhat
in detail. In one place we learn that at the age of eight he covered a
slate with blank verse in the manner of Jamie Thomson, the only poet
with whom he was then acquainted. In another passage he says, "The
first poetry that moved me was my own at five years old. When I was
eight I remember making a line I thought grander than Campbell, or
Byron, or Scott. I rolled it out, it was this -
'With slaughterous sons of thunder rolled the flood' -
great nonsense, of course, but I thought it fine!"
It WAS fine, and was thoroughly Tennysonian. Scott, Campbell, and
Byron probably never produced a line with the qualities of this
nonsense verse. "Before I could read I was in the habit on a stormy day
of spreading my arms to the wind and crying out, 'I hear a voice that's
speaking in the wind,' and the words 'far, far away' had always a
strange charm for me." A late lyric has this overword, FAR, FAR
AWAY!
A boy of eight who knew the contemporary poets was more or less
precocious. Tennyson also knew Pope, and wrote hundreds of