Towering Grandfather

ALFRED TENNYSON (579 pp.)--Charles Tennyson--Macmillan ($7.50).

The story of Tennyson's vast Victorian lifetime is like the story of a civilization in Toynbee: the whole age is embodied in it. Born in 1809, he was descended from the yeomanry and the county families that together bred England's great middle class. The north-country parsonage of his childhood tumbled with ten brothers & sisters; at seven he had to be able to chirp from memory the four books of Horace's Odes.

In his own family were those classic victims of the 19th Century--the father who took to drink and violence, the brother who went mad, the brother who took opium. There were also such delights of life in the hills and lanes of Lincolnshire that at Cambridge in 1827 the poet wrote a homesick set of lines complaining that the smoke of the university town besmirched the pure stars.

Fumes of Tobacco. Industry dismayed him, and so did London with its "leagues of lights"; he roamed the streets in horror that the seething crowds he found there would soon be lying horizontal underground. Like the middle class whose poet he became, Tennyson spent most of his life in a vague struggle to soften, to disavow the harsh materialism of mines and factories that made the wealth of England and killed her poor in slums; to cling to the beauty of the spirit and to belief in God.

"A fine, large-featured, dim-eyed, bronze-coloured, shaggy-headed man is Alfred," wrote Carlyle in 1840, "dusty, smoky, free and easy; who swims outwardly and inwardly, with great composure, in an articulate element as of tranquil chaos and tobacco smoke." Seasoned in the fumes of his own shag, he was also, before he was 35, the veteran of a personal hell from which almost nothing was lacking: a torn and distressful home; the shock and grief of losing his best friend, Arthur Hallam; the cruelty of a sneering review in the Quarterly Review that drove him into nine years of public silence; poverty; a long and apparently hopeless engagement.

On these early years, the new biography by the poet's grandson, Charles Tennyson, supplies much material never published before; Alfred hated to talk about them and his son, Hallam, had to scant them in his standard memoir of 50 years ago. Nothing, however, could so testify to Tennyson's magnetic power as this veneration by the second and third generations of his family. Charles, a distinguished lawyer and civil servant who is now 70 himself, remembers his towering grandfather in old age, shuffling downstairs in the morning and extending his great withered brown hand to the children to kiss.

Clouds of Faith. In 1850, all England wept over In Memoriam, Emily Sellwood consented, after twelve years, to marry him, and Queen Victoria made him Laureate. Thereafter until his death in 1892, Alfred Tennyson gave the profession of poetry a public dignity that it has never had since.

Yet he was aware of the gifts he did not have; he once said he would have given everything he had done for the spontaneous lyric quality of Suckling or Lovelace. As a philosophical poet he almost never crystallized the clouds of theistic faith that filled his head. The great Lord Acton spoke of "the airiness of his metaphysics, the indefiniteness of his knowledge, his neglect of transitions." His criticism was put more gaily by Algernon Swinburne in his parody of Tennyson's Higher Pantheism:

God, whom we see not, is: and God, who is not, we see:

Fiddle, we know, is diddle: and diddle, we take it, is dee.

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