Page:EB1911 - Volume 26.djvu/665

Rh plenteous; I do not meet in these late decades such company over a pipe." He was unusually tall, and possessed in advanced years a strange and rather terrifying air of sombre majesty.  But he was, in fact, of a great simplicity in temperament, affectionate, shy, still exquisitely sensitive in extreme old age to the influences of beauty, melancholy and sweetness.  Although exceedingly near-sighted, Tennyson was a very close observer of nature, and at the age of eighty his dark and glowing eyes, which were still strong, continued to permit him to enjoy the delicate features of country life around him, both at Aldworth and in the Isle of Wight.  His Life, written with admirable piety and taste by his son, Hallam, second Lord Tennyson, was published in two volumes in 1897.

At the time of his death, and for some time after it, the enthusiastic recognition of the genius of Tennyson was too extravagant to be permanent. A reaction against this extravagance was perhaps inevitable, and criticism has of late been little occupied with the poet. The reason of this is easy to find. For an unusually long period this particular poetry had occupied public and professional opinion, and all the commonplace things about it had been said and re-said to satiety. It lacks for the moment the interest of freshness; it is like a wonderful picture seen so constantly that it fails any longer to concentrate attention. No living poet has ever held England—no poet but Victor Hugo has probably ever held any country—quite so long under his unbroken sway as Tennyson did. As he recedes from us, however, we begin to see that he has a much closer relation to the great Georgian writers than we used to be willing to admit. The distance between the generation of Wordsworth and Coleridge and that of Byron and Shelley is not less—it is even probably greater—than that which divides Keats from Tennyson, and he is more the last of that great school than the first of any new one. The qualities in which he seems to surpass his immediate predecessors are exactly those which should be the gift of one who sums up the labours of a mighty line of artists. He is remarkable among them for the breadth, the richness, the substantial accomplishment of his touch; he has something of all these his elders, and goes farther along the road of technical perfection than any of them. We still look to the earlier masters for supreme excellence in particular directions: to Wordsworth for sublime philosophy, to Coleridge for ethereal magic, to Byron for passion, to Shelley for lyric intensity, to Keats for richness. Tennyson does not excel each of these in his own special field, but he is often nearer to the particular man in his particular mastery than any one else can be said to be, and he has in addition his own field of supremacy. What this is cannot easily be defined; it consists, perhaps, in the beauty of the atmosphere which Tennyson contrives to cast around his work, moulding it in the blue mystery of twilight, in the opaline haze of sunset: this atmosphere, suffused over his poetry with inestimable skill and with a tact very rarely at fault, produces an almost unfailing illusion or mirage of loveliness, so that, even where (as must sometimes be the case with every poet) the thought and the imagery have little value in themselves, the fictive aura of beauty broods over the otherwise undistinguished verse. Hence, among all the English poets, it is Tennyson who presents the least percentage of entirely unattractive poetry. In his luminous subtlety and his broad undulating sweetness, his relationship with Virgil has long been manifest; he was himself aware of it. But he was also conscious that his exquisite devotion to mere lucidity and beauty might be a snare to him, and a happy instinct was always driving him to a study of mankind as well as of inanimate nature. Few English writers have known so adroitly as Tennyson how to bend the study of Shakespeare to the enrichment of their personal style. It should be added that he was a very deep and original student of literature of every description, and that the comparatively few specimens which have been preserved of his conversation contain some of the finest fragments of modern appreciation of the great poets which we possess. This is worthy of consideration in any attempt made to sketch the mind of a man who was above all other masters of recent literature an artist, and who must be studied in the vast and orbic fullness of his accomplishment in order to be appreciated at all. (E. G.)

 TENOR (through Fr. and It. from Lat. tenor, holding on, course, sense of a law, tone), a general course or direction, the drift or general meaning of a statement or discourse, hence, in law, the true purport and effect of a deed or instrument. The most general use of the word is, in music, for the highest kind of the natural adult male voice. This use descends from the Medieval Latin tenor, which was applied first to the chief melody, the cantus firmus, and then to the male voice to which the singing of this was assigned.  TENREC (Centetes ecaudatus), one of the largest representatives of the mammalian order Insectivora, the length being from 12 in. to 16 in.; called also the tailless ground-hog of Madagascar, to which island it is restricted. The coat consists chiefly of bristles and hairs, with an admixture of flexible spines, in the adult they are limited to the back of the neck. The general hue is brown tinged with yellow. From twelve to sixteen young are produced at a birth, and twenty-one have been recorded. In habits the tenrec is fossorial and nocturnal; its home is in the brush in the mountainous regions, and in the cool season, from May or June till December, it hibernates in deep burrows. The long flexible snout is used to root up worms and grubs, and ground-insects form part of its nourishment. These animals are very fat when hibernation begins, and are then much valued for food by the natives (see also ). TENT. A tent is a portable habitation or place of shelter, consisting in its simplest form of a covering of some textile substance stretched over a framework of cords and poles, or of wooden rods, and fastened tightly to the ground by pegs. Throughout the greater part of the interior of Asia the pastoral tribes have of necessity ever been dwellers in tents—the scantiness of water, the consequent frequent failure of herbage, and the violent extremes of seasons compelling a wandering life. Tents have also been used in all ages by armies in campaign. In ancient Assyrian sculptures discovered by Layard at Nineveh the forms of tent and tent-furnishings are similar to those which still prevail in the East, and it appears that then as now it was a custom to pitch tents within the walls of a city. The ordinary family tent of the Arab nomads of modern times is a comparatively spacious ridged structure, averaging from 20 to 25 ft. in length, but sometimes reaching as much as 40 ft. Its covering consists of a thick felt of black goat hair (cp. Cant. i. 5—"black as the tents of Kedar"), or sometimes of alternate stripes of black and white disposed horizontally. The ridge or roof is supported by nine poles disposed in sets of three, the central set being loftier than those at each end, whereby a slope outward is formed which helps to carry off rain. The average height inside at the centre is 7 ft. and at the sides 5 ft., and the cloths at the side are so attached that they can easily be removed, the sheltered end being always kept open. Internally the tent is separated by a partition into two sections, that reserved for the women containing the cooking utensils and food. The jourt or tent of the Kirghiz of Central Asia is a very capacious and substantial structure, consisting of a wooden frame for sides, radiating ribs for roof, and a wooden door. The sides are made up of sections of laths, which expand and contract in lozenges, on the principle of lazy tongs, and to their upper extremities ribs are lashed at regular intervals. Over this 