"Je lis avec emotion vos vers superbes; c'est un reflet de gloire que vous m'envoyez." Mr Matthew Arnold's compliment was very like Mr Arnold's humour: "Your father has been our most popular poet for over forty years, and I am of opinion that he fully deserves his reputation": such was "Mat's sublime waggery." Tennyson heaped coals of fire on the other poet, bidding him, as he liked to be bidden, to write more poetry, not "prose things." Tennyson lived much in the society of Browning and George Eliot, and made the acquaintance of Renan. In December 1879 Mr and Mrs Kendal produced The Falcon, which ran for sixty-seven nights; it is "an exquisite little poem in action," as Fanny Kemble said. During a Continental tour Tennyson visited Catullus's Sirmio: "here he made his Frater Ave atque Vale," and the poet composed his beautiful salutation to the "Tenderest of Roman poets nineteen hundred years ago."In 1880 Ballads and other Poems proved that, like Titian, the great poet was not to be defeated by the years. The First Quarrel was in his most popular English style. Rizpah deserved and received the splendid panegyric of Mr Swinburne. The Revenge is probably the finest of the patriotic pieces, and keeps green the memory of an exploit the most marvellous in the annals of English seamen. The Village Wife is a pendant worthy of The Northern Farmer. The poem In the Children's Hospital caused some irritation at the moment, but there was only one opinion as to the Defence of Lucknow and the beautiful re-telling of the Celtic Voyage of Maeldune. The fragment of Homeric translation was equally fortunate in choice of subject and in rendering.
In the end of 1880 the poet finished The Cup, which had been worked on occasionally since he completed The Falcon in 1880. The piece was read by the author to Sir Henry Irving and his company, and it was found that the manuscript copy needed few alterations to fit it for the stage. The scenery and the acting of the protagonists are not easily to be forgotten. The play ran for a hundred and thirty nights. Sir Henry Irving had thought that Becket (then unpublished)would prove too expensive, and could only be a succes d'estime.
Tennyson had found out that "the worst of writing for the stage is, you must keep some actor always in your mind." To this necessity authors like Moliere and Shakespeare were, of course, resigned and familiar; they knew exactly how to deal with all their means. But this part of the business of play-writing must always be a cross to the poet who is not at one with the world of the stage.
In The Cup Miss Ellen Terry made the strongest impression, her part being noble and sympathetic, while Sir Henry Irving had the ungrateful part of the villain. To be sure, he was a villain of much complexity; and Tennyson thought that his subtle blend of Roman refinement and intellectuality, and barbarian, self-satisfied sensuality, was not "hit off." Synorix is, in fact, half-Greek, half-Celt, with a Roman education, and the "blend" is rather too remote for successful representation. The traditional villain, from Iago downwards, is not apt to utter such poetry as this:-"O Thou, that dost inspire the germ with life, The child, a thread within the house of birth, And give him limbs, then air, and send him forth The glory of his father--Thou whose breath Is balmy wind to robe our bills with grass, And kindle all our vales with myrtle-blossom, And roll the golden oceans of our grain, And sway the long grape-bunches of our vines, And fill all hearts with fatness and the lust Of plenty--make me happy in my marriage!"The year 1881 brought the death of another of the old Cambridge friends, James Spedding, the biographer of Bacon; and Carlyle also died, a true friend, if rather intermittent in his appreciation of poetry. The real Carlyle did appreciate it, but the Carlyle of attitude was too much of the iron Covenanter to express what he felt.
The poem Despair irritated the earnest and serious readers of "know-nothing books." The poem expressed, dramatically, a mood like another, a human mood not so very uncommon. A man ruined in this world's happiness curses the faith of his youth, and the unfaith of his reading and reflection, and tries to drown himself. This is one conclusion of the practical syllogism, and it is a free country.
However, there were freethinkers who did not think that Tennyson's kind of thinking ought to be free. Other earnest persons objected to "First drink a health," in the re-fashioned song of Hands all Round.
They might have remembered a royal health drunk in water an hour before the drinkers swept Mackay down the Pass of Killiecrankie. The poet did not specify the fluid in which the toast was to be carried, and the cup might be that which "cheers but not inebriates." "The common cup," as the remonstrants had to be informed, "has in all ages been the sacred symbol of unity."The Promise of May was produced in November 1882, and the poet was once more so unfortunate as to vex the susceptibilities of advanced thinkers. The play is not a masterpiece, and yet neither the gallery gods nor the Marquis of Queensberry need have felt their withers wrung. The hero, or villain, Edgar, is a perfectly impossible person, and represents no kind of political, social, or economical thinker. A man would give all other bliss and all his worldly wealth for this, to waste his whole strength in one kick upon this perfect prig. He employs the arguments of evolution and so forth to justify the seduction of a little girl of fifteen, and later, by way of making amends, proposes to commit incest by marrying her sister.