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Timeline of Tennyson’s Life

   

From A Collection of Poems by Alfred Tennyson
©1972 by Christopher Ricks

 
1809

         Alfred Tennyson was born 6 August 1809, at Somersby, Lincolnshire. He was the fourth son of the Reverend George Clayton Tennyson the younger, rector of Somersby, and of Elizabeth Tennyson (née Fytche). Tennyson’s father had been virtually disinherited by Tennyson’s grandfather in favour of a younger brother, and Tennyson’s youth was overshadowed by this family feud between the Tennysons of Somersby and the grandparents with their favoured son (later Charles Tennyson
    d’Eyncourt) of Bayons Manor.

         Tennyson’s wife, Emily, was later to write in her reminiscences for her sons:

      You know how owing to some caprice on the part of your great-grandfather [George Clayton Tennyson] your grandfather [Dr. Tennyson] was disinherited and so deprived of a station which he would so greatly have adorned and put into the Church for whose duties he felt no call. This preyed upon his nerves and his health and caused much sorrow in his house. Many a time has your father [the poet] gone out in the dark and cast himself on a grave in the little church-yard near wishing to be beneath it.

1815
         Tennyson became a pupil at Louth Grammar School, where his elder brothers Frederick (born 1807) and Charles (born 1808) had started in 1814.

      TENNYSON: How I did hate that school! The only good I ever got from it was the memory of the words “sonus desilientis aquae” and of an old wall covered with wild weeds opposite the school windows.

1820
          He left Louth, to be privately educated at home by his father.

      TENNYSON: My father who was a sort of Poet himself thought so highly of my first essay that he prophesied I should be the greatest Poet of the Time.

      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.

      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.

      When I was in my very earliest teens . . . I wrote an epic in three books. It was full of furious battles à la Scott, and descriptions of lake and mountain scenery which I had never looked upon. I never felt so inspired–I used to compose 60 or 70 lines in a breath. I used to shout them about the silent fields, leaping over the hedges in my excitement.

1823-24
          He wrote a play in imitation of Elizabethan comedy, The Devil and the Lady.

1824-25
          His father’s health, physical and mental, broke down gravely.

      TENNYSON to his Uncle (August 1825): It is with great sorrow that I inform you that my poor Father is not any better than before. He had another violent attack of the same nature yesterday. Indeed no one but those who are continually with him can conceive what he suffers, as he is never entirely free from this alarming illness. He is reduced to such a degree of weakness from these repeated attacks, that the slightest shock is sufficient to bring them on again. Perhaps if he could summon resolution enough to get out more, he would be relieved, but the lassitude which the fits leave incapacitates him from undergoing any exertion. He has already had two of these since my Grandfather was here which is not much more than a week ago and some time previous to that had three each night successively.

          In April, Tennyson published Poems by Two Brothers, together with Charles (and with a few poems by Frederick). Tennyson’s contributions were written ‘between 15 and 17’; he did not include any of these poems in the later editions of his works.

      LITERARY CHRONICLE: This little volume exhibits a pleasing union of kindred tastes, and contains little pieces of considerable merit.

      GENTLEMAN’S MAGAZINE: These poems are full of amiable feelings, expressed for the most part with elegance and correctness. . . . The volume is a graceful addition to our domestic poetry, and does credit to the juvenile Adelphi.

1827
          In November, Tennyson entered Trinity College, Cambridge, together with Charles, joining Frederick there.

      Tennyson’s aunt, MRS. RUSSELL, to his Grandfather: . . . I know not how to direct to Alfred, having heard nothing of him excepting what you tell me, from which I presume he is fixed at college. I thought it had been arranged (as he would not be profited by going thither until he was a better Mathematician) that I should place him with some gentleman for previous instruction. He did not however appear to consider the place fixed upon in Lincolnshire, as one likely to make him happy, therefore just before we separated, I told him if he preferred any other, it was not my wish to fetter him, on this probably he has chosen Cambridge, but he has not informed me, and I am consequently left in ignorance.

      TENNYSON to Aunt Russell: I am sitting owl-like and solitary in my rooms (nothing between me and the stars but a stratum of tiles). The hoof of the steed, the roll of the wheel, the shouts of drunken Gown, and drunken Town come up from below with a sea-like murmur. . .I know not how it is, but I feel isolated here in the midst of society. The country is so disgustingly level, the revelry of the place so monotonous, the studies of the University so uninteresting, so much matter of fact. None but dry-headed, calculating, angular little gentlemen can take much delight in them.

1829
          In February, Tennyson’s mother separated from his father because of drunkenness and violence. Dr. Tennyson travelled abroad; the family reconciliation was to be brief and insecure.

      TENNYSON: In my youth I knew much greater unhappiness than I have known in later life. When I was about twenty, I used to feel moods of misery unutterable! I remember once in London the realization coming over me, of the whole of its inhabitants lying horizontal a hundred years hence. The smallness and emptiness of life sometimes overwhelmed me–.

         In about April, Tennyson met Arthur Henry Hallam, who had entered Trinity College the previous October. Arthur Hallam was born in 1811; the son of the distinguished historian Henry Hallam, he had been at Eton, where he had made the friendship of W. E. Gladstone. The mutual friendship, deepening into love, of Arthur Hallam and Tennyson was to be one of the most important experiences of Tennyson’s life.

         In May, Tennyson was elected a member of the Apostles, an undergraduate debating society to which most of his Cambridge friends belonged.

         In June, Tennyson won the Chancellor’s Gold Medal with his prize poem, Timbuctoo.

      ARTHUR HALLAM: The splendid imaginative power that pervades it will be seen through all hindrances. I consider Tennyson as promising fair to be the greatest poet of our generation, perhaps of our century.

      CHARLES WORDSWORTH, bishop and nephew of the poet: What do you think of Tennyson’s Prize poem (‘Timbuctoo’)? If such an exercise had been sent up at Oxford, the author would have had a better chance of being rusticated, with the view of his passing a few months at a Lunatic Asylum, than of obtaining the prize. It is certainly a wonderful production; and if it had come out with Lord Byron’s name, it would have been thought as fine as anything he ever wrote.

          In December, Arthur Hallam met Tennyson’s sister Emily, with whom he was soon to fall in love.

1830
      ARTHUR HALLAM on Tennyson: ‘Lines in Answer to a Desponding Letter’ [from R. J. Tennant]

             . . . Thou hast a friend–a rare one–
        A noble being, full of clearest insight–
        A man whom we’re beforehand with the time
        In loving and revering: but whose fame
        Is couching now with panther eyes intent,
        As who should say, “I’ll spring to him anon,
        And have him for my own!” Nor may we then
        Be all forgotten priests of his great honour . . .

          In June, Tennyson published Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, among them ‘Mariana,’ ‘Supposed Confessions of a Second-Rate Sensitive Mind,’ ‘A spirit haunts the year’s last hours,’ and ‘The Kraken.’ The volume included twenty-three poems which Tennyson did not subsequently reprint, as well as seven poems which he did not reprint in his collection of 1842 but reprinted later.

          In July, Tennyson visited the Pyrenees with Hallam.

1831
          In March, Tennyson’s father fell fatally ill.

      TENNYSON: All shadow of hope with respect to my poor Father’s ultimate recovery has vanished. Yesterday he lost the use of one side. It is evident that he cannot last many hours longer. It is a great consolation to us, however, that he is free from all suffering and perfectly mild and tranquil, seeming not to interest himself in anything that passes, which is the effect of pressure on the brain: the strength of his constitution has enabled him to resist his complaint a fortnight longer than his physician expected, during which period we have had many fluctuations of hope and fear: at one time we almost ventured to be confident that he would be restored to us: but that is all over now. We must lose him. May my end be as calm as his.

          Next day, 16 March 1831, Tennyson’s father died. Tennyson left Cambridge without taking a degree.

      ARTHUR HALLAM (July 1831) to Frederick Tennyson: Poor Alfred has written to me a very melancholy letter. What can be done for him? Do you think he is really very ill in body? His mind certainly is in a distressing state. I wish you, or somebody, would transcribe for me some of his recent poems.

          In August, Hallam published an essay, ‘On Some of the Characteristics of Modern Poetry, and on the Lyrical Poems of Alfred Tennyson’ (Englishman’s Magazine).

      ARTHUR HALLAM: The volume of “Poems, chiefly Lyrical” does not contain above 154 pages; but it shows us much more of the character of its parent mind, than many books we have known of much larger compass and more boastful pretensions. The features of original genius are clearly and strongly marked. The author imitates nobody; we recognise the spirit of his age, but not the individual form of this or that writer. His thoughts bear no more resemblance to Byron or Scott, Shelley or Coleridge, than to Homer or Calderon, Firdúsí or Calidasa.
            We have remarked five distinctive excellencies of his own manner. First, his luxuriance of imagination, and at the same time his control over it. Secondly, his power of embodying himself in ideal characters, or rather moods of character, with such extreme accuracy of adjustment, that the circumstances of the narration seem to have a natural correspondence with the predominant feeling, and, as it were, to be evolved from it by assimilative force. Thirdly, his vivid, picturesque delineation of objects, and the peculiar skill with which he holds all of them fused, to borrow a metaphor from science, in a medium of strong emotion. Fourthly, the variety of his lyrical measures, and exquisite modulation of harmonious words and cadences to the swell and fall of the feelings expressed. Fifthly, the elevated habits of thought, implied in these compositions, and imparting a mellow soberness of tone, more impressive, to our minds, than if the author had drawn up a set of opinions in verse, and sought to instruct the understanding rather than to communicate the love of beauty to the heart.

      ARTHUR HALLAM (August 1831): Alfred, not intending to go into the Church, as the grandfather who has patria potestas over him wishes, and not having yet brought himself to cobble shoes for his livelihood, is desirous of putting his wits to profit, and begins to think himself a fool for kindly complying with the daily requests of Annuals without getting anything in return.

1832
      ARTHUR HALLAM (January 1832) to Tennyson’s sister Emily: I hope you will do all you can to assist me in endeavouring to restore Alfred to better hopes and more steady purposes. It will be sweet to labour together for so holy an end. I would sacrifice all my own peace to see you and him at peace with yourselves and with God.

          In February, Christopher North mentioned Tennyson in Blackwood’s Magazine.

      CHRISTOPHER NORTH [Professor John Wilson, critic]: From what region of man’s spirit shall break a new day-spring of song? . . .The future is all darkness.
      TICKLER. . . .Are there no younkers?
      NORTH. A few–but equivocal. I have good hopes of Alfred Tennyson. But the Cockneys are doing what they may to spoil him–and if he suffers them to put their birdlime on his feet, he will stick all the days of his life on hedgerows, or leap fluttering about the bushes. I should be sorry for it–for though his wings are far from being full-fledged, they promise now well in the pinions–and I should not be surprised to see him yet a sky-soarer. His “Golden Days of good Haroun Alraschid” are extremely beautiful. There is feeling–and fancy–in his Oriana. He has a fine ear for melody and harmony too–and rare and rich glimpses of imagination. He has–genius.
      TICKLER. Affectations.
      NORTH. Too many. But I admire Alfred–and hope–nay trust –that one day he will prove himself a poet. If he do not–then am I no prophet.

         In May, Christopher North followed this up with a severe, though not indiscriminate, review of Poems, Chiefly Lyrical in Blackwood’s Magazine:

      One of the saddest misfortunes that can befall a young poet, is to be the pet of a coterie; and the very saddest of all, if in Cockneydom. Such has been the unlucky lot of Alfred Tennyson . . . The besetting sin of all periodical criticism, and nowadays there is no other, is boundless extravagance of praise; but none splash it on like the trowelmen who have been bedaubing Mr. Tennyson. . . .But the Old Man must see justice done to this ingenious lad, and save him from his worst enemies, his friends.

         In July, Tennyson visited the Rhine country with Hallam.

         In October, Tennyson’s brother Edward (born 1813) succumbed to insanity, which proved incurable.

         In December, Tennyson published Poems (the title-page was dated 1833). Among the poems were ‘The Lady of Shalott,’ ‘Mariana in the South,’ ‘Œnone,’ ‘The Palace of Art,’ ‘The Lotos-Eaters,’ and ‘A Dream of Fair Women.’ The volume included seven poems which Tennyson did not subsequently reprint, as well as seven poems which he did not reprint in his collection of 1842 but reprinted later.

1833
         Hallam’s engagement to Emily Tennyson was recognized by the Hallams.

         In April, there was a venomous review of Poems, by J. W. Croker in Quarterly Review.

         In September, Arthur Hallam died suddenly, while visiting Vienna.

      Tennyson’s Cambridge friend R. J. TENNANT: Alfred although much broken in spirits is yet able to divert his thoughts from gloomy brooding, and keep his mind in activity.

      EDWARD FITZGERALD, man of letters and poet, translator of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (October 1833): Tennyson has been in town for some time: he has been making fresh poems, which are finer, they say, than any he has done. But I believe he is chiefly meditating on the purging and subliming of what he has already done: and repents that he has published at all yet. It is fine to see how in each succeeding poem the smaller ornaments and fancies drop away, and leave the grand ideas single.

1833-341834
          In February, Tennyson replied to a request from Hallam’s father to write something for a memorial volume:

      I attempted to draw up a memoir of his life and character, but I failed to do him justice. I failed even to please myself. I could scarcely have pleased you. I hope to be able at a future period to concentrate whatever powers I may possess on the construction of some tribute to those high speculative endowments and comprehensive sympathies which I ever loved to contemplate; but at present, though somewhat ashamed at my own weakness, I find the object yet is too near me to permit of any very accurate delineation. You, with your clear insight into human nature, may perhaps not wonder that in the dearest service I could have been employed in, I should be found most deficient.

1834-35
          Tennyson fell in love with Rosa Baring (rich and socially grand), with whom he seems to have become disillusioned by 1835-36. (She married Robert Shafto in 1838.)

      H. D. RAWNSLEY quoting ROSA BARING: Often would she speak of the way in which she and her companions round Somersby, who were not too frightened of him, hung upon the words of the quaint, shy, long-haired young man, who had in his boyhood’s day made an impression of being more learned and more thoughtful than was common, and seemed wise beyond his years. She would tell of how she and one of her girl friends, in admiration of the young poet, would ride over to Somersby, just to have the pleasure of pleasing him or teasing him as the case might be. From time to time he would write a verse or two for one or other of the girls who had been with him at a picnic in the woods, or send some little verse of reconciliation after a tiff at a dance; and although she confessed that all poetry in those days seemed to her mere “jangledom” yet it was always delightful to her to believe that the “rose of the rose-bud garden of girls,” had reference to her. “Alfred, as we all called him, was so quaint and so chivalrous, such a real knight among men, at least I always fancied so; and though we joked one another about his quaint, taciturn ways, which were mingled strangely with boisterous fits of fun, we were proud as peacocks to have been worthy of notice by him, and treasured any message he might send or any word of admiration he let fall.”

1834
          In April, Tennyson wrote to Christopher North because it seemed that a blundering critic was likely to precipitate another attack by North:

      I could wish that some of the Poems there broken on your critical wheel were deeper than ever plummet sounded. Written as they were before I had attained my nineteenth year they could not but contain as many faults as words. I never wish to see them or hear of them again–much less to find them dragged forward once more on your boards. . . .

1835
          In the spring, Tennyson wrote to his friend James Spedding:

      John Heath writes me word that Mill is going to review me in a new Magazine to be called the London Review–and favourably. But it is the last thing I wish for and I would that you or some other who may be friends of Mill would hint as much to him: I do not wish to be dragged forward again in any shape before the reading public at present, particularly on the score of my old poems most of which I have so corrected (particularly ‘Œnone’) as to make them much less imperfect. . .

      JOHN STUART MILL, philosopher (July 1835): Of all the capacities of a poet, that which seems to have arisen earliest in Mr. Tennyson, and in which he most excels, is that of scene-painting, in the higher sense of the term: not the mere power of producing that rather vapid species of composition usually termed descriptive poetry–for there is not in these volumes one passage of pure description: but the power of creating scenery, in keeping with some state of human feeling; so fitted to it as to be the embodied symbol of it, and to summon up the state of feeling itself, with a force not to be surpassed by anything but reality. Our first specimen, selected from the earlier of the two volumes, will illustrate chiefly this quality of Mr. Tennyson’s productions. We do not anticipate that this little poem will be equally relished at first by all lovers of poetry: and indeed if it were, its merits could be but of the humblest kind; for sentiments and imagery which can be received at once, and with equal ease, into every mind, must necessarily be trite. Nevertheless, we do not hesitate to quote it at full length. The subject is Mariana, the Mariana of Measure for Measure, living deserted and in solitude in the ‘moated grange.’

      SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE, poet and man of letters (published in 1835): I have not read through all Mr. Tennyson’s poems, which have been sent to me; but I think there are some things of a good deal of beauty in what I have seen. The misfortune is, that he has begun to write verses without very well understanding what metre is. Even if you write in a known and approved metre, the odds are, if you are not a metrist yourself, that you will not write harmonious verses; but to deal in new metres without considering what metre means and requires, is preposterous. What I would, with many wishes for success, prescribe to Tennyson,–indeed without it he can never be a poet in act,–is to write for the next two or three years in none but one or two well-known and strictly defined metres, such as the heroic couplet, the octave stanza, or the octo-syllabic measure. . . .

         In March, Tennyson’s brother Charles inherited an estate and changed his name to Turner.

      EDWARD FITZGERALD (May 1835): I will say no more of Tennyson than that the more I have seen of him, the more cause I have to think him great. His little humours and grumpinesses were so droll, that I was always laughing: and was often put in mind (strange to say) of my little unknown friend, Undine–I must however say, further, that I felt what Charles Lamb describes, a sense of depression at times from the overshadowing of a so much more lofty intellect than my own: this (though it may seem vain to say so) I never experienced before, though I have often been with much greater intellects: but I could not be mistaken in the universality of his mind; and perhaps I have received some benefit in the now more distinct consciousness of my dwarfishness.

1836
          In May, Tennyson’s brother Charles married Louisa Sellwood, and there began the love of Tennyson for Louisa’s sister, Emily Sellwood.

1837
         In May, the Tennysons moved from Somersby to High Beech, Epping.

         In September, Tennyson was persuaded by Richard Monckton Milnes (after an initial refusal which hurt Milnes’s feelings) to contribute to a charitable volume, The Tribute. Tennyson sent ‘Oh! that ’twere possible,’ the lyric around which he later created Maud. In deploring Milnes’s quickness to take offence, Tennyson sketched his own situation:

      What has so jaundiced your good natured eyes as to make them mistake harmless banter for insulting Irony. . . . Had I been writing to a nervous, morbidly-irritable man, down in the world, stark spoiled with the staggers of a mismanaged imagination and equally opprest by Fortune and by the Reviews, it is possible that I might have halted to find expressions more suitable to his case–but that you, who seem, at least, to take the world as it comes, to doff it and let it pass–that you a man everyway prosperous and talented, should have taken pet at my unhappy badinage made me–lay down my pipe and stare at the fire for ten minutes till the stranger fluttered up the chimney.

1838
         Tennyson’s engagement to Emily Sellwood was recognized by her family.

1840
         The engagement was broken off, partly because of Tennyson’s financial insecurity, but mainly because of Emily’s uneasiness as to Tennyson’s religious beliefs, which were insufficiently orthodox.

      TENNYSON to Emily Sellwood: ’Tis true, I fly thee for my good, perhaps for thine, at any rate for thine if mine is thine. If thou knewest why I fly thee there is nothing thou wouldst more wish for than that I should fly thee.

         The Tennysons moved in 1840 to Tunbridge Wells (and in 1841 to Boxley).

      EDWARD FITZGERALD (February 1840): When I got to my lodgings, I found A. Tennyson installed in them: he has been here ever since in a very uneasy state: being really ill, in a nervous way: what with an hereditary tenderness of nerve, and having spoiled what strength he had by incessant smoking &c.–I have also made him very out of sorts by desiring a truce from complaints and complainings–Poor fellow: he is quite magnanimous, and noble natured, with no meanness or vanity or affectation of any kind whatever–but very perverse, according to the nature of his illness–So much for Poets, who, one must allow, are many of them a somewhat tetchy race–There’s that great metaphysical, Doric, moral, religious, psychological, poet of the Age, W. Wordsworth, who doesn’t like to be contradicted at all: nor to be neglected in any way.

      THOMAS CARLYLE, historical, religious and political thinker (September 1840): A fine, large-featured, dim-eyed, bronze-coloured, shaggy-headed man is Alfred: dusty, smoky, free and easy; who swims outwardly and inwardly, with great composure in an articulate element as of tranquil chaos and tobacco smoke: great now and then when he does emerge: a most restful, brotherly, solid-hearted man.

1841
      TENNYSON to FitzGerald: You bore me about my book; so does a letter just received from America, threatening, tho’ in the civilest terms, that, if I will not publish in England, they will do it for me in that land of freemen. Damn! I may curse, knowing what they will bring forth. But I don’t care.

      TENNYSON (February 1841) to the American publisher, C. S. Wheeler, of Little, Brown: I am conscious of many things so exceedingly crude in those two volumes that it would certainly be productive of no slight annoyance to me, to see them repulisht as they stand at present, either here or in America. But I will tell you what I will do, for when I was wavering before, your letter has decided me. I have corrected copies of most that was worth correction in those two volumes and I will in the course of a few months republish these in England with several new poems and transmit copies to Little and Brown and also to yourself (if you will accept one) and you can then of course do as you choose with them.

      Tennyson’s friend JANE ELTON (April 1841): [She] says of Alfred Tennyson (who has been at Tunbridge) ‘very far from handsome, and his hair quite disturbed me–but after the first sight I like him–he is agreeable and clever’. I wouldn’t cut his hair for worlds, would you?

      W. M. THACKERAY (May-June 1841): Alfred Tennyson, if he can’t make you like him, will make you admire him,–he seems to me to have the cachet of a great man. His conversation is often delightful, I think, full of breadth, manliness and humour: he reads all sorts of things, swallows them and digests them like a great poetical boa-constrictor as he is . . . Perhaps it is Alfred Tennyson’s great big yellow face and growling voice that has had an impression on me. Manliness and simplicity of manner go a great way with me, I fancy.

1842
      EDWARD FITZGERALD (March 1842): Poor Tennyson has got home some of his proof sheets: and, now that his verses are in hard print, thinks them detestable–There is much I had always told him of–his great fault of being too full and complicated–which he now sees, or fancies he sees, and wishes he had never been persuaded to print. But with all his faults, he will publish such a volume as has not been published since the time of Keats: and which, once published, will never be suffered to die. This is my prophecy: for I live before Posterity.

          In May, Tennyson published Poems. The first volume selected poems from the volumes of 1830 and 1832 (many of them superbly revised), together with a few written about 1833. The second volume consisted of new poems, notably ‘The Two Voices,’ ‘St. Simeon Stylites,’ ‘Ulysses,’ ‘Morte d’Arthur,’ ‘Break, break, break,’ ‘Locksley Hall,’ ‘Audley Court,’ and ‘The Vision of Sin.

      TENNYSON to FitzGerald: Don’t abuse my book. You can’t hate it worse than I do, but it does me no good to hear it abused; if it is bad you and others are to blame who continually urged me to publish. Not for my sake but for yours did I consent to submit my papers to the herd, damn ’em, and all reproach comes too late.

      LEIGH HUNT, poet and man of letters (October 1842): We are compelled to say, then, in justice to the very respect which we entertain, and the more which we desire to entertain, for the genius of Mr. Tennyson, that the above ‘lettings out of the bag’ of his dates and alterations, are a little too characteristic of a certain mixture of timidity and misgiving with his otherwise somewhat defying demands upon our assent to his figments and his hyphens, and that we have greater objections to a certain air of literary dandyism, or fine-gentlemanism, or fastidiousness, or whatever he may not be pleased to call it, which leads him to usher in his compositions with such exordiums as those to ‘Morte d’Arthur,’ and ‘Godiva’; in the former of which he gives us to understand that he should have burnt his poem but for the ‘request of friends’; and, in the latter, that he ‘shaped’ it while he was waiting ‘for the train at Coventry,’ and hanging on the bridge ‘with grooms and porters.’ Really this is little better than the rhyming fine-ladyism of Miss Seward, who said that she used to translate an ode of Horace ‘while her hair was curling.’ And, if the ‘grooms and porters’ have any meaning beyond a superfluous bit of the graphic, not in keeping with his subject, it is a little worse, for why should not Mr. Tennyson, in the universality of his poetry, be as content to be waiting on a bridge, among ‘grooms and porters,’ as with any other assortment of his fellow-men? Doubtless he would disclaim any such want of philosophy; but this kind of mixed tone of contempt and nonchalance, or, at best, of fine-life phrases with better fellowship, looks a little instructive, and is, at all events, a little perilous. There is a drawl of Bond-street in it. We suspect that these poems of ‘Morte d’Arthur’ and ‘Godiva’ are among those which Mr. Tennyson thinks his best, and is most anxious that others should regard as he does; and therefore it is that he would affect to make trifles of them. The reader’s opinion is at once to be of great importance to him, and yet none at all. There is a boyishness in this, which we shall be happy to see Mr. Tennyson, who is no longer a boy, outgrow.

1843
          Tennyson lost his fortune (about £3000) in a wood-carving scheme, in which he had invested his money in 1840-41. He went for treatment in a hydropathic hospital near Cheltenham; for the next few years, his health–both physical and mental–was wretched.

      Tennyson’s son HALLAM TENNYSON was later to record: So severe a hypochrondria set in upon him that his friends despaired of his life. “I have”, he writes, “drunk one of those most bitter draughts out of the cup of life, which go near to make men hate the world they move in”.

1844
      THOMAS CARLYLE (August 1844): Tennyson is now in Town, and means to come and see me. Of this latter result I shall be very glad: Alfred is one of the few British or Foreign Figures (a not increasing Number I think!) who are and remain beautiful to me;–a true human soul, or some authentic approximation thereto, to whom your own soul can say, Brother!–However, I doubt h[e] will not come: he often skips me, in these brief visits to Town; skips [every]body indeed; being a man solitary and sad, as certain men are, dwelling in an element of gloom,–carrying a bit of Chaos about him, in short, which he is manufacturing into Cosmos!
           Alfred is the son of a Lincolnshire Gentleman Farmer, I think; indeed you see in his verses that he is a native of  “moated granges,” and green fat pastures, not of mountains and their torrents and storms. He had his breeding at Cambridge, as if for the Law, or Church; being master of a small annuity on his Father’s decease, he preferred clubbing with his Mother and some Sisters, to live unpromoted and write Poems. In this way he lives still, now here now there; the family always within reach of London, never in it; he himself making rare and brief visits, lodging in some old comrade’s rooms. I think he must be under forty, not much under it. One of the finest looking men in the world. A great shock of rough dusty-dark hair; bright-laughing hazel eyes; massive aquiline face, most massive yet most delicate, of sallow brown complexion, almost Indian-looking; clothes cynically loose, free-and-easy;–smokes infinite tobacco. His voice is musical metallic,–fit for loud laughter and piercing wail, and all that may lie between; speech and speculation free and plenteous: I do not meet, in these late decades, such company over a pipe!–We shall see what he will grow to. He is often unwell; very chaotic,–his way is thro’ Chaos and the Bottomless and Pathless; not handy for making out many miles upon.

1845
      EDWARD FITZGERALD (January 1845) on In Memoriam, then in progress: A.T. has near a volume of poems–elegiac–in memory of Arthur Hallam. Don’t you think the world wants other notes than elegiac now? “Lycidas” is the utmost length an elegiac should reach. But Spedding praises: and I suppose the elegiacs will see daylight, public daylight, one day.

      JANE WELSH CARLYLE, wife of Carlyle (January 1845): Carlyle went to dine at Mr. Chadwick’s the other day, and I, not being yet equal to a dinner altho’ I was asked to “come in a blanket and stay all night!” had made up my mind for a nice long quiet evening of looking into the fire, when I heard a carriage drive up, and men’s voices asking questions, and then the carriage was sent away! and the men proved to be Alfred Tennyson of all people and his friend Mr. Moxon–Alfred lives in the country and only comes to London rarely and for a few days so that I was overwhelmed with the sense of Carlyle’s misfortune in having missed the man he likes best, for stupid Chadwick, especially as he had gone against his will at my earnest persuasion. Alfred is dreadfully embarrassed with women alone–for he entertains at one and the same moment a feeling of almost adoration for them and an ineffable contempt! adoration I suppose for what they might be–contempt for what they are! The only chance of my getting any right good of him was to make him forget my womanness–so I did just as Carlyle would have done, had he been there: got out pipes and tobacco–and brandy and water–with a deluge of tea over and above.–The effect of these accessories was miraculous–he professed to be ashamed of polluting my room, “felt” he said, “as if he were stealing cups and sacred vessels in the Temple”–but he smoked on all the same–for three mortal hours!–talking like an angel–only exactly as if he were talking with a clever man–which–being a thing I am not used to–men always adapting their conversation to what they take to be a woman’s taste–strained me to a terrible pitch of intellectuality.

      EDWARD FITZGERALD (February 1845) on In Memoriam: We have surely had enough of men reporting their sorrows: especially when one is aware all the time that the poet wilfully protracts what he complains of, magnifies it in the Imagination, puts it into all the shapes of Fancy: and yet we are to condole with him, and be taught to ruminate our losses and sorrows in the same way. I felt that if Tennyson had got on a horse and ridden 20 miles, instead of moaning over his pipe, he would have been cured of his sorrows in half the time. As it is, it is about 3 years before the Poetic Soul walks itself out of darkness and Despair into Common Sense.

      ROBERT BROWNING, poet (February 1845) on Tennyson’s reviewers and his revisions: For Keats and Tennyson to “go softly all their days” for a gruff word or two is quite inexplicable to me, and always has been. Tennyson reads the “Quarterly” and does as they bid him, with the most solemn face in the world–out goes this, in goes that, all is changed and ranged. .Oh me!

      ELIZABETH BARRETT, poet, to Robert Browning (June 1845) on Tennyson’s Timbuctoo, and other poems: Yes, the poem is too good in certain respects for the prizes given in colleges. . (when all the pure parsley goes naturally to the rabbits) . . and has a great deal of beauty here and there in image and expression. Still I do not quite agree with you that it reaches the Tennyson standard any wise; and for the blank verse, I cannot for a moment think it comparable to one of the grand passages in ‘Œnone’, and ‘Arthur’ and the like. In fact I seem to hear more in that latter blank verse than you do, . . to hear not only a ‘mighty line’ as in Marlowe, but a noble full orbicular wholeness in complete passages–which always struck me as the mystery of music and great peculiarity in Tennyson’s versification, inasmuch as he attains to these complete effects without that shifting of the pause practised by the masters, . . Shelley and others. A ‘linked music’ . . in which there are no links! . . that, you would take to be a contradiction–and yet something like that, my ear has always seemed to perceive; and I have wondered curiously again and again how there could be so much union and no fastening. Only of course it is not model versification–and for dramatic purposes, it must be admitted to be bad.

          In September, Tennyson was granted a Civil List pension of £200 per annum.

1846
      EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON, novelist (January 1846), in The New Timon:
        Not mine, not mine, (O Muse forbid!) the boon
        Of borrowed notes, the mock-bird’s modish tune,
        The jingling medley of purloin’d conceits,
        Outbabying Wordsworth, and outglittering Keats,
        Where all the airs of patchwork-pastoral chime
        To drowsy ears in Tennysonian rhyme!
            .  .  .  .  .
        Let School-Miss Alfred vent her chaste delight
        On “darling little rooms so warm and bright!”
        Chaunt, “I’m aweary,” in infectious strain,
        And catch her “blue fly singing i’ the pane.”
        Tho’ praised by Critics, tho’ adored by Blues,
        Tho’ Peel with pudding plump the puling Muse,
        Tho’ Theban taste the Saxon’s purse controuls,
        And pensions Tennyson, while starves a Knowles,
        Rather, be thou, my poor Pierian Maid,
        Decent at least, in Hayley’s weeds array’d,
        Than patch with frippery every tinsel line,
        And flaunt, admired, the Rag Fair of the Nine!

      ELIZABETH BARRETT (January 1846) on The Princess: But the really bad news is of poor Tennyson . . . He is seriously ill with an internal complaint and confined to his bed . . . Which does not prevent his writing a new poem–he has finished the second book of it–and it is in blank verse and a fairy tale, and called the “University”, the university-members being all females . . . I don’t know what to think–it makes me open my eyes. Now isn’t the world too old and fond of steam, for blank verse poems, in ever so many books, to be written on the fairies?

      AUBREY DE VERE, man of letters (July 1846): On my way in, paid a visit to Tennyson, who seemed much out of spirits, and said that he could no longer bear to be knocked about the world, and that he must marry and find love and peace or die. He was very angry about a very favourable review of him. Said that he could not stand the chattering and conceit of clever men, or the worry of society, or the meanness of tuft-hunters, or the trouble of poverty, or the labour of a place, or the preying of the heart on itself. . . He complained much about growing old, and said he cared nothing for fame, and that his life was all thrown away for want of a competence and retirement. Said that no one had been so much harassed by anxiety and trouble as himself. I told him he wanted occupation, a wife, and orthodox principles, which he took well.

          In August, Tennyson visited Switzerland with his publisher, Edward Moxon.

      JANE ELTON (December 1846): Mr. Moxon said [that] Alfred one day while travelling said to him, “Moxon, you have made me very unhappy by something you said to me at Lucerne”, the unfortunate speech having been “Why Tennyson you will be as bald as Spedding before long”. Poor Alfred brooded over this till on his return to England he put himself under a Mrs. Parker (or some such name) who rubs his head and pulls out dead hairs an hour a visit, and ten shillings an hour, besides cosmetics ad libitum. Your father’s hair would bristle up at the idea of the Queen’s pension being spent in this manner, but really his hair is such an integral part of his appearance it would be a great pity he should lose it–and they say this woman does really restore hair, and she is patronised by Royalty itself! Can I say more in her favour or in extenuation for A.T.

1847
      TENNYSON on In Memoriam, then in manuscript: With respect to the non-publication of those poems which you mention, it is partly occasioned by the considerations you speak of, and partly by my sense of their present imperfectness; perhaps they will not see the light till I have ceased to be. I cannot tell but I have no wish to send them out yet.

         In December, Tennyson published The Princess.

      FREDERICK LOCKER-LAMPSON: He told me that he was moved to write “Tears, idle tears” at Tintern Abbey; and that it was not real woe, as some people might suppose; “it was rather the yearning that young people occasionally experience for that which seems to have passed away from them for ever.”

      SIR JAMES KNOWLES quoting Tennyson: It is in a way like St. Paul’s ‘groanings which cannot be uttered’. . . It is what I have always felt even from a boy, and what as a boy I called the ‘passion of the past’. And it is so always with me now; it is the distance that charms me in the landscape, the picture and the past, and not the immediate to-day in which I move.

      J. W. MARSTON, dramatic poet, on The Princess: The grand error of the story is the incoherency of its characteristics. Its different parts refuse to amalgamate. They are derived from standards foreign to each other. The familiar and conventional impair the earnestness of the ideal:–and what might else have been appreciated as genial satire loses its force from its juxtaposition to tragic emotion. Nor are these opposite elements used as contrasts to each other. It is sought to identify them; but in the attempt to fuse both, each parts with its distinctiveness . . . It is true that the author has anticipated our exceptions. His very title-page declares The Princess to be a ‘Medley’. In the Prologue we have this avowal in detail . . . But this consciousness of an eccentric plan can scarcely excuse it.

      THOMAS CARLYLE (December 1847): Tennyson has been here for three weeks; dining daily till he is near dead;–setting out a Poem withal. He came in to us on Sunday evening last, and on the preceding Sunday: a truly interesting Son of Earth, and Son of Heaven,–who has almost lost his way, among the will-o’wisps, I doubt; and may flounder ever deeper, over neck and nose at last, among the quagmires that abound! I like him well; but can do next to nothing for him. Milnes, with general cooperation, got him a Pension; and he has bread and tobacco: but that is a poor outfit for such a soul. He wants a task; and, alas, that of spinning rhymes, and naming it “Art” and “high Art” in a Time like ours, will never furnish him.

1848
      RALPH WALDO EMERSON, American man of letters (May 1848): I do not know whether I told you that I saw Tennyson in London twice, and was content with him. He has a great deal of plain strength about him, and, though cultivated, is quite unaffected. Take away Hawthorne’s bashfulness, and let him talk easily and fast, and you would have a pretty good Tennyson. There is an air of general sanity and power in him that inspires confidence. He was very good humoured, and, though he affected to think that I should never come back alive from France, which he, in common with all his countrymen, distrusts and defies, yet . . .

      EDWARD FITZGERALD (November 1848): Tennyson is emerged half-cured, or half-destroyed, from a water establishment: has gone to a new Doctor who gives him iron pills; and altogether this really great man thinks more about his bowels and nerves than about the Laureate wreath he was born to inherit. Not but he meditates new poems; and now the Princess is done, he turns to King Arthur–a worthy subject indeed–and has consulted some histories of him, and spent some time in visiting his traditionary haunts in Cornwall. But I believe the trumpet can wake Tennyson no longer to do great deeds; I may mistake and prove myself an owl; which I hope may be the case. But how are we to expect heroic poems from a valetudinary? I have told him he should fly from England and go among savages.

          In 1848, Tennyson visited Ireland and Cornwall, taking up again a projected Arthurian epic.

1849
          Tennyson renewed correspondence with Emily Sellwood, asking her advice about two versions of a song to be inserted in The Princess.

1850
      EDWARD FITZGERALD (January 1850): I found A. Tennyson in chambers at Lincoln’s Inn: and recreated myself with a sight of his fine old mug, and got out of him all his dear old stories, and many new ones. He is re-publishing his Poems, the Princess with songs interposed. I cannot say I thought them like the old vintage of his earlier days, though perhaps better than other people’s. But, even to you, such opinions appear blasphemies. A.T. is now gone on a visit into Leicestershire: and I miss him greatly.

      EMILY SELLWOOD (April 1850), thanking Tennyson for letting her read the manuscript of In Memoriam: Katie told me the poems might be kept until Saturday. I hope I shall not have occasioned any inconvenience by keeping them to the limit of time; and if I have I must be forgiven, for I cannot willingly part from what is so precious. The thanks I would say for them and for the faith in me which has trusted them to me must be thought for me, I cannot write them. I have read the poems through and through and through and to me they were and they are ever more and more a spirit monument grand and beautiful, in whose presence I feel admiration and delight, not unmixed with awe. The happiest possible end to this labour of love! But think not its fruits shall so soon perish, for they are life in life, and they shall live, and as years go on be only the more fully known and loved and reverenced for what they are.
           So says a true seer. Can anyone guess the name of this seer? After such big words shall I put anything about my own little I?–that I am the happier for having seen these poems and that I hope I shall be the better too.

         In May, Tennyson published In Memoriam anonymously.

      TENNYSON: The sections were written at many different places, and as the phases of our intercourse came to my memory and suggested them. I did not write them with any view of weaving them into a whole, or for publication, until I found that I had written so many. The different moods of sorrow as in a drama are dramatically given, and my conviction that fear, doubts, and suffering will find answer and relief only through Faith in a God of Love. “I” is not always the author speaking of himself, but the voice of the human race speaking through him. After the Death of A.H.H., the divisions of the poem are made by First Xmas Eve (Section xxviii), Second Xmas (lxxviii),Third Xmas Eve (civ and cv etc.).

      It is rather the cry of the whole human race than mine. In the poem, altogether private grief swells out into thought of, and hope for, the whole world. It begins with a funeral and ends with a marriage–begins with death and ends in promise of a new life–a sort of Divine Comedy, cheerful at the close. It is a very impersonal poem as well as personal. There is more about myself in ‘Ulysses’, which was written under the sense of loss and that all had gone by, but that still life must be fought out to the end. It was more written with the feeling of his loss upon me than many poems in In Memoriam . . . It’s too hopeful, this poem, more than I am myself . . . The general way of its being written was so queer that if there were a blank space I would put in a poem . . . I think of adding another to it, a speculative one, bringing out the thoughts of ‘The Higher Pantheism’, and showing that all the arguments are about as good on one side as the other, and thus throw man back more on the primitive impulses and feelings.

      CHARLES KINGSLEY, novelist and man of letters (September 1850): In every place where in old days they had met and conversed; in every dark wrestling of the spirit with the doubts and fears of manhood, throughout the whole outward universe of nature, and the whole inward universe of spirit, the soul of his dead friend broods–at first a memory shrouded in blank despair, then a living presence, a ministering spirit, answering doubts, calming fears, stirring up noble aspirations, utter humility, leading the poet upward step by step to faith, and peace, and hope. Not that there runs throughout the book a conscious or organic method. The poems seem often merely to be united by the identity of their metre, so exquisitely chosen, that while the major rhyme in the second and third lines of each stanza gives the solidity and self-restraint required by such deep themes, the mournful minor rhyme of each first and fourth line always leads the ear to expect something beyond, and enables the poet’s thoughts to wander sadly on, from stanza to stanza and poem to poem, in an endless chain of ‘Linked sweetness long drawn out.’ There are records of risings and fallings again, of alternate cloud and sunshine, throughout the book; earnest and passionate, yet never bitter; humble, yet never abject; with a depth and vehemence of affection ‘passing the love of woman’, yet without a taint of sentimentality; self-restrained and dignified, without ever narrowing into artificial coldness; altogether rivalling the sonnets of Shakespeare.–Why should we not say boldly, surpassing–for the sake of the superior faith into which it rises, for the sake of the poem at the opening of the volume–in our eyes, the noblest English Christian poem which several centuries have seen?

         In June, Tennyson married Emily Sellwood.

      EDWARD LEAR artist and nonsense writer: I should think computing moderately, that 15 angels, several hundreds of ordinary women, many philosophers, a heap of truly wise and kind mothers, 3 or 4 minor prophets, and a lot of doctors and school-mistresses, might all be boiled down, and yet their combined essence fall short of what Emily Tennyson really is.

      AUBREY DE VERE: Her great and constant desire is to make her husband more religious, or at least to conduce, as far as she may, to his growth in the spiritual life. In this she will doubtless succeed, for piety like hers is infectious, especially where there is an atmosphere of affection to serve as a conducting medium. Indeed I already observe a great improvement in Alfred. His nature is a religious one, and he is remarkably free from vanity and sciolism. Such a nature gravitates towards Christianity, especially when it is in harmony with itself.

      THOMAS CARLYLE: Alfred looks really improved, I should say; cheerful in what he talks, and looking forward to a future less “detached” than the past has been. Poor fellow, a good soul, find him where or how situated you may! Mrs. T. also pleased me; the first glance of her is the least favourable. A freckly round-faced woman, rather tallish and without shape, a slight lisp too.

      EDWARD FITZGERALD: A Lady of a Shakespearian type, as I think A.T. once said of her: that is, of the Imogen sort, far more agreeable to me than the sharp-witted Beatrices, Rosalinds, etc. I do not think she has been (on this very account perhaps) so good a helpmate to A.T.’s Poetry as to himself.

         In November, Tennyson was appointed Poet Laureate, Wordsworth having died in April.

      TENNYSON: The night before I was asked to take the Laureateship, which was offered to me through Prince Albert’s liking for my In Memoriam, I dreamed that he came to me and kissed me on the cheek. I said, in my dream, “Very kind, but very German”. In the morning the letter about the Laureateship was brought to me and laid upon my bed. I thought about it through the day, but could not make up my mind whether to take it or refuse it, and at the last I wrote two letters, one accepting and one declining, and threw them on the table, and settled to decide which I would send after my dinner and bottle of port.

      EDWARD FITZGERALD (December 1850): As to Alfred, I have heard of his marriage, etc., from Spedding, who also saw and was much pleased with her indeed. But you know Alfred himself never writes, nor indeed cares a halfpenny about one, though he is very well satisfied to see one when one falls in his way. You will think I have a spite against him for some neglect, when I say this, and say besides that I cannot care for his In Memoriam. Not so, if I know myself: I always thought the same of him, and was just as well satisfied with it as now. His poem I never did greatly affect: nor can I learn to do so: it is full of finest things, but it is monotonous, and has that air of being evolved by a Poetical Machine of the highest order. So it seems to be with him now, at least to me, the Impetus, the Lyrical œstrus, is gone. . . .

l851
         In April, Emily gave birth to a still-born baby boy.

      TENNYSON: Dead as he was I felt proud of him. Today when I write this down, the remembrance of it rather overcomes me; but I am glad that I have seen him, dear little nameless one that hast lived tho’ thou hast never breathed, I, thy father, love thee and weep over thee, tho’ thou hast no place in the Universe. Who knows? It may be that thou hast . . . God’s will be done.

      WILLIAM ALLINGHAM, poet (June 1851): I was admitted, shown upstairs into a room with books lying about, and soon came in a tall, broad-shouldered swarthy man, slightly stooping, with loose dark hair and beard. He wore spectacles, and was obviously very near-sighted. Hollow cheeks and the dark pallor of his skin gave him an unhealthy appearance. He was a strange and almost spectral figure. The Great Man peered close at me, and then shook hands cordially, yet with a profound quietude of manner. He was then about forty-one, but looked much older, from his bulk, his short-sight, stooping shoulders, and loose careless dress. He looked tired, and said he had been asleep and was suffering from hay-fever. Mrs. Tennyson came in, very sweet and courteous, with low soft voice, and by and by when I rose to take leave she said, ‘Won’t you stay for dinner?’ which I was too happy to do. Mr. Tennyson went out, and returning took me upstairs to his study–a small room looking out to the back over gardens and trees. He took up my volume of poems, saying, ‘You can see it is a good deal dirtier than most of the books.’ Then turning the pages, he made critical remarks, mostly laudatory . . .
           At dinner there was talk of Wordsworth, etc. T. spoke of George Meredith’s poems, lately sent to him, author only twenty-three; ‘I thanked him for it and praised it–“Love in the Valley” best.’ I said I also knew the book and had bought it. T. gets enough poetry without buying: ‘They send me nothing but poetry!’–‘As if you lived on jam,’ I said.
           T.–‘And such jam! Yes, I did lately receive a prose book, Critical Strictures on Great Authors, “a first hastily scribbled effusion,” the writer said. There was this in it, “We exhort Tennyson to abandon the weeping willow with its fragile and earthward-tending twigs, and adopt the poplar, with its one Heaven-pointing finger.”’ ‘A pop’lar poet,’ says I.
           After Mrs. Tennyson had gone upstairs, Patmore was announced. T. said, ‘You didn’t know Allingham was here’, and it rejoiced me to hear the familiar mention of my name. Over our port we talked of grave matters. T. said his belief rested on two things, a ‘Chief Intelligence and Immortality.’–‘I could not eat my dinner without a belief in immortality. If I didn’t believe in that, I’d go down immediately and jump off Richmond Bridge.’ Then to me, rather shortly, ‘Why do you laugh?’ I murmured that there was something ludicrous in the image of his jumping off Richmond Bridge. ‘Well,’ he rejoined, ‘in such a case I’d as soon make a comic end as a tragic.’ I went out to the garden, where were Mrs. Tennyson with Mrs. Patmore and her sister. Returning to the house there was tea, to which Tennyson came in, muttering as he entered the room, ‘we exhort Tennyson.’–I smiled. He said, ‘What are you laughing at? You don’t know what I’m saying.’ I said ‘O yes, I do.’

         In July, Tennyson visited Italy with Emily, returning in October.

1852
      Tennyson’s friend FRANKLIN LUSHINGTON (February 1852) on the invasion scare from France: Among the most enthusiastic national defenders are Alfred Tennyson and Mrs. A.T. At least they have been induced by Coventry Patmore to subscribe five pounds apiece for the purchase of rifles to teach the world to shoot–which appears to me a rather exaggerated quota for the laureate to contribute out of his official income, his duty being clearly confined to the howling of patriotic staves.

         In April, his son Hallam Tennyson was born.

1853
         The Tennysons moved to Farringford, Isle of Wight, which they rented and then bought in 1856.

      MRS. E. C. GASKELL, in her novel Cranford (1853): When Mr. Holbrook returned, he proposed a walk in the fields; but the two elder ladies were afraid of damp and dirt; and had only very unbecoming calashes to put on over their caps; so they declined; and I was again his companion in a turn which he said he was obliged to take, to see after his men. He strode along, either wholly forgetting my existence, or soothed into silence by his pipe–and yet it was not silence exactly. He walked before me, with a stooping gait, his hands clasped behind him; and, as some tree or cloud, or glimpse of distant upland pastures, struck him, he quoted poetry to himself; saying it out loud in a grand sonorous voice, with just the emphasis that true feeling and appreciation give. We came upon an old cedar-tree, which stood at one end of the house:–

        ‘The cedar spreads his dark-green layers of shade.’

      ‘Capital term–“layers!” Wonderful man!’ I did not know whether he was speaking to me or not; but I put in an assenting ‘wonderful,’ although I knew nothing about it, just because I was tired of being forgotten, and of being consequently silent.
           He turned sharp round. ‘Ay! you may say “wonderful.” Why, when I saw the review of his poems in “Blackwood,” I set off within an hour, and walked seven miles to Misselton (for the horses were not in the way) and ordered them. Now, what colour are ash-buds in March?’
           Is the man going mad? thought I. He is very like Don Quixote.
           ‘What colour are they, I say?’ repeated he, vehemently.
           ‘I am sure I don’t know, sir,’ said I, with the meekness of ignorance.
           ‘I knew you didn’t. No more did I–an old fool that I am!–till this young man comes and tells me. Black as ash-buds in March. And I’ve lived all my life in the country; more shame for me not to know. Black: they are jet-black, madam.’ And he went off again, swinging along to the music of some rhyme he had got hold of.
           When we came back, nothing would serve him but he must read us the poems he had been speaking of; and Miss Pole encouraged him in his proposal, I thought, because she wished me to hear his beautiful reading, of which she had boasted; but she afterwards said it was because she had got to a difficult part of her crochet, and wanted to count her stitches without having to talk. Whatever he had proposed would have been right to Miss Matty; although she did fall sound asleep within five minutes after he had begun a long poem, called ‘Locksley Hall,’ and had a comfortable nap, unobserved, till he ended; when the cessation of his voice wakened her up, and she said, feeling that something was expected, and that Miss Pole was counting:
           ‘What a pretty book!’
           ‘Pretty, madam! it’s beautiful! Pretty, indeed!’

1854
         In March, his son Lionel Tennyson was born.

      TENNYSON to Coventry Patmore, Poet: Many thanks for your congratulations, if the births of babes to poor men are matters of congratulation. When you call me such a happy man you err: I have had vexations enough since I came here to break my back. These I will not transfer to paper, tho’ I can yet scarcely repeat with satisfaction the proverb of let bygones be bygones; for most of these troubles have not gone by . . . Happy, I certainly have not been. I entirely disagree with the saying you quote of happy men not writing poetry. Vexations (particularly long vexations of a petty kind) are much more destructive of the “gay science”, as the Troubadours (I believe) called it.

1855
         In June, he received the honorary degree of D.C.L. at Oxford.

         In July, he published Maud, and Other Poems.

      TENNYSON: This poem of Maud or the Madness is a little Hamlet, the history of a morbid, poetic soul, under the blighting influence of a recklessly speculative age. He is the heir of madness, an egoist with the makings of a cynic, raised to a pure and holy love which elevates his whole nature, passing from the height of triumph to the lowest depth of misery, driven into madness by the loss of her whom he has loved, and, when he has at length passed through the fiery furnace, and has recovered his reason, giving himself up to work for the good of mankind through the unselfishness born of a great passion. The peculiarity of this poem is that different phases of passion in one person take the place of different characters.

      GEORGE ELIOT [MARY ANN EVANS], novelist (October 1855), on Maud: Its tone is throughout morbid; it opens to us the self revelations of a morbid mind, and what it presents as the cure for this mental disease is itself only a morbid conception of human relations.

      GOLDWIN SMITH, historian and political thinker (November 1855): To rely on external sensations instead of internal efforts for a moral cure, is natural to that character which, whether dramatically or otherwise, is presented to us throughout Mr. Tennyson’s poems–sometimes directly as in Maud and ‘Locksley Hall’, everywhere as the medium through which the world is viewed. It is the character of a man of high intellect and exquisite sensibility, keenly alive to all impressions, but wanting in the power of action and active sympathies, dependent on the world without him for happiness, and cynical because it is not afforded. Not once throughout the poems is active life painted with real zest. Not once are we called to witness the happiness or the moral cures which result from self- exertion. Everywhere we feel the force of circumstances, nowhere the energy of free will. The meditated suicide in the ‘Two Voices’ is arrested, not by an effort of reason or an act of faith, but by the sound of the church bells, and the sight of happy people going to church. Women seem to have no function but that of casting out the demon of hypochondria from the breast of the solitary, and relieving him of the melancholy which flows to him from all around him–from his home and history, from nature, from philosophy, from science. They are the ‘counter-charms of space and hollow sky’, without active life or interests of their own; we can scarcely think of them as wives, much less as daughters or as mothers. Marriage itself, though painted as the gate of virtue and happiness, seems to lead, not from melancholy listlessness into activity, but only from an unhappy dream into a happy one. We see the visionary and his wife in ‘The Miller’s Daughter’, leading the life of lotus eaters. Even children would bore them. They have had one, which has died, and become a pensive reminiscence, adding the luxury of melancholy to their happy thoughts, as they sit at evening looking into each other’s eyes, or wander out to see the sunset.
           You may trace the hues of this character tinging everything in the poems. Even the Homeric Ulysses, the man of purpose and action, seeking with most definite aim to regain his own home and that of his companions, becomes a ‘hungry heart’, roaming aimlessly to ‘lands beyond the sunset’, in the vain hope of being ‘washed down by the gulf to the Happy Isles’, merely to relieve his ennui, and dragging his companions with him. We say he roams aimlessly–we should rather say, he intends to roam, but stands for ever a listless and melancholy figure on the shore.

1856
      DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI, artist and poet (January 1856): I never was more amused in my life than by Tennyson’s groanings and horrors over the reviews of Maud, which poem he read through to us, spouting also several sections to be introduced in a new edition. I made a sketch of him reading, which I gave to Browning, and afterwards duplicated it for Miss S. His conversation was really one perpetual groan, and I am sure, during two long evenings I spent in his company, he repeated the same stories about anonymous letters he gets, etc.–at the very least six or eight times in my hearing, besides an odd time or two as I afterwards found, that he told them over to members of the company in private. He also repeated them to me again, walking home together.
           All this to the intense wonder of Browning, who as you know, treats reviewers in the way they deserve. T. actually insisted that for twelve years after his first publication, no notice whatsoever was taken of him, and seemed rather annoyed at anyone recollecting to the contrary. Of course there was something most delightful in the genuineness of all this, and he is quite as glorious in his way as Browning in his, and perhaps of the two even more impressive on the whole personally.
           One of his neverended stories was about an anonymous letter running thus (received since Maud came out)–‘Sir, I used to worship you, but now I hate you. I loathe and detest you. You beast! So you’ve taken to imitating Longfellow. Yours in aversion,–’ and no name, says Alfred, scoring the table with an indignant thumb, and glaring round with suspended pipe, while his auditors look as sympathising as their view of the matter permits. . . .
           But the idea of literary cabals, under which he is destined to sink one day, never seemed to leave his mind. As we walked home we passed the Holborn Casino before which cabs were driven up. ‘What’s that place’ asks A.T. and on my telling him –‘Ah!’ he says, ‘I’d rather like to go there, but la!’ (a minute afterwards) ‘there’d be some newspaper man, and he’d know me.

      Tennyson’s friend JANE [ELTON] BROOKFIELD: One of these mornings Tennyson came into breakfast rather late, with a perturbed expression of face, his watch in his hand, saying with great gravity: ‘My watch has stopped; what am I to do?’ We all felt concerned for a moment, then Mr. Fairbairn, with equal gravity, rose from his chair, took the watch from Alfred’s hand, asked for his key, wound it up, and silently returned it to its owner.

      RALPH WALDO EMERSON, from English Traits: There is no finer ear, nor more command of the keys of language. Colour, like the dawn, flows over the horizon from his pencil, in waves so rich that we do not miss the central form. Through all his refinements, too, he has reached the public,–a certificate of good sense and general power, since he who aspires to be the English poet must be as large as London, not in the same kind as London, but in his own kind. But he wants a subject, and climbs no mount of vision to bring its secrets to the people. He contents himself with describing the Englishman as he is, and proposes no better. There are all degrees in poetry, and we must be thankful for every beautiful talent. But it is only a first success, when the ear is gained.

      ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH, poet (November 1856): I like him personally better than I do his manner in his verses; personally he is the most unmannerly simple big child of a man that you can find.

1857
      NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, American novelist: Soon, Mr. Ireland returned to tell me that he had found the Poet Laureate; and going into the saloon of Old Masters, we saw him there, in company with Mr. Woolner, whose bust of him is now in the Exhibition. Tennyson is the most picturesque figure, without affectation, that I ever saw; of middle-size, rather slouching, dressed entirely in black, and with nothing white about him except the collar of his shirt, which methought might have been clean the day before. He had on a black wide-awake hat, with round crown and wide, irregular brim, beneath which came down his long black hair, looking terribly tangled; he had a long, pointed beard, too, a little browner than the hair, and not so abundant as to incumber any of the expression of his face. His frock coat was buttoned across the breast, though the afternoon was warm. His face was very dark, and not exactly a smooth face, but worn, and expressing great sensitiveness, though not, at that moment, the pain and sorrow which is seen in his bust. His eyes were black; but I know little of them, as they did not rest on me, nor on anything but the pictures. He seemed as if he did not see the crowd nor think of them, but as if he defended himself from them by ignoring them altogether; nor did anybody but myself cast a glance at him. Mr. Woolner was as unlike Tennyson as could well be imagined; a small, smug man, in a blue frock and brown pantaloons. They talked about the pictures, and passed pretty rapidly from one to another, Tennyson looking at them through a pair of spectacles which he held in his hand, and then standing a minute before those that interested him, with his hands folded behind his back. There was an entire absence of stiffness in his figure; no set-up in him at all; no nicety or trimness; and if there had been, it would have spoilt his whole aspect. Gazing at him with all my eyes, I liked him well, and rejoiced more in him than in all the other wonders of the Exhibition.
           Knowing how much my wife would delight to see him, I went in search of her, and found her and the rest of us under the music-gallery; and we all, Fanny and Rosebud included, went back to the saloon of Old Masters. So rapid was his glance at the pictures, that, in this little interval, Tennyson had got half-way along the other side of the saloon; and, as it happened, an acquaintance had met him, an elderly gentleman and lady, and he was talking to them as we approached. I heard his voice; a bass voice, but not of a resounding depth; a voice rather broken, as it were, and ragged about the edges, but pleasant to the ear. His manner, while conversing with these people, was not in the least that of an awkward man, unaccustomed to society; but he shook hands and parted with them, evidently as soon as he courteously could, and shuffled away quicker than before. He betrayed his shy and secluded habits more in this, than in anything else that I observed; though, indeed, in his whole presence, I was indescribably sensible of a morbid painfulness in him, a something not to be meddled with. Very soon, he left the saloon, shuffling along the floor with short irregular steps, a very queer gait, as if he were walking in slippers too loose for him. I had observed that he seemed to turn his feet slightly inward, after the fashion of Indians. How strange, that in these two or three pages I cannot get one single touch that may call him up hereafter! . . .
           He is exceedingly nervous, and altogether as un-English as possible; indeed, an Englishman of genius usually lacks the national characteristics, and is great abnormally, and through disease.

      LEWIS CARROLL [THE REVEREND C. L. DODGSON], mathematician and nonsense writer (September 1857): After I had waited some little time the door opened, and a strange shaggy-looking man entered: his hair, moustache and beard looked wild and neglected: these very much hid the character of the face . . . Both face and head are fine and manly. His manner was kind and friendly from the first: there is a dry lurking humour in his style of talking. . . .

1859
      LEWIS CARROLL (May 1859): I had to introduce myself, as he is too short-sighted to recognise people, and when he had finished the bit of mowing he was at, he took me into the house to see Mrs. Tennyson, who, I was very sorry to find, had been very ill and was then suffering from almost total sleeplessness. She was lying on a sofa, looking rather worn and haggard, so that I stayed a very few minutes . . . Up in the smoking room the conversation turned upon murders, and Tennyson told us several horrible stories from his own experience: he seems rather to revel in such descriptions–one would not guess it from his poetry.

         In July, Tennyson published Idylls of the King, namely ‘Enid,’ ‘Vivien,’ ‘Elaine’ and ‘Guinevere.’

      TENNYSON: When I was twenty-four I meant to write a whole great poem on it, and began it in the ‘Morte d’Arthur’. I said I should do it in twenty years; but the Reviews stopped me.

      ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING: But the Idylls. Am I forced to admit that after the joy of receiving them, other joys fell short, rather?–That the work, as a whole, produced a feeling of disappointment?–It must be admitted, I fear. Perhaps we had been expecting too long–had made too large an idea to fit a reality. Perhaps the breathing, throbbing life around us in this Italy, where a nation is being new-born, may throw King Arthur too far off and flat. But, whatever the cause, the effect was so. The colour, the temperature, the very music, left me cold. Here are exquisite things, but the whole did not affect me as a whole from Tennyson’s hands.

      THOMAS CARLYLE: We read, at first, Tennyson’s Idylls, with profound recognition of the finely elahorated execution, and also of the inward perfection of vacancy,–and, to say truth, with considerable impatience at being treated so very like infants, tho’ the lollipops were so superlative.

      GEORGE ELIOT: I had seemed in the unmanageable current of talk to echo a too slight way of speaking about a great poet. I did not mean to say Amen when ‘The Idylls of the King’ seemed to be judged rather ‘de haut en bas’. I only meant that I should value for my own mind ‘In Memoriam’ as the chief of the larger works, and that while I feel exquisite beauty in passages scattered through the Idylls, I must judge some smaller wholes among the lyrics as the works most decisive of Tennyson’s high place among the immortals.

      WALTER BAGEHOT, economist and man of letters: We have said enough of the merits of this poem to entitle us to say what ought to be said against it. We have not, indeed, a long list of defects to set forth. On the contrary, we think we perceive only one of real importance; and it is very probable that many critics will think us quite wrong as to that one. It appears to us that the Idylls are defective in dramatic power. Madame de Staël said that Coleridge was admirable in monologue, but quite incapable of dialogue. Something analogous may perhaps be said of Mr. Tennyson. His imagination seems to fix itself on a particular person in a particular situation; and he pours out, with ease and abundance, with delicacy and exactness, all which is suitable to that person in that situation. This was so with ‘Ulysses’ in former years; it is so in his ‘Grandmother’s Apology’, published the other day. Unnumbered instances of it may be found in the Idylls. But the power of writing a soliloquy is very different from that of writing a conversation; so different, indeed, that the person who is most likely to wish to write one, is most likely not to wish to write the other. Dialogue requires a very changing imagination, ready to move with ease from the mental position of one mind to the mental position of another, quick with the various language suited to either. Soliloquy–prolonged soliloquy, at any rate–requires a very steady imagination, steadily accumulating, slowly realising the exact position of a single person. The glancing mind will tend to one sort of composition; the meditative, solitary, and heavy mind to the other. All Mr. Tennyson’s poems show more of the latter tendency than of the first. His genius gives the notion of a slow depositing instinct; day by day, as the hours pass, the delicate sand falls into beautiful forms–in stillness, in peace, in brooding.

          In August, Tennyson visited Portugal with F. T. Palgrave, whom in 1860 he was to assist in selecting poems for The Golden Treasury.

      WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE, statesman (October 1859): Mr. Tennyson is too intimately and essentially the poet of the nineteenth century to separate himself from its leading characteristics, the progress of physical science and a vast commercial, mechanical, and industrial development. Whatever he may say or do in an occasional fit, he cannot long either cross or lose its sympathies; for while he elevates as well as adorns it, he is flesh of its flesh and bone of its bone. We fondly believe it is his business to do much towards the solution of that problem, so fearful from its magnitude, how to harmonise this new draught of external power and activity with the old and more mellow wine of faith, self-devotion, loyalty, reverence, and discipline.

1860
      SIR HENRY TAYLOR, poet and dramatist: And in the midst of all this beauty and comfort stands Alfred Tennyson, grand, but very gloomy, whom it is a sadness to see, and one has to think of his works to believe that he can escape from himself and escape into regions of light and glory. . . . With all his shattered nerves and uneasy gloom, he seems to have some sorts of strength and hardihood. . .

      He was very violent with the girls on the subject of the rage for autographs. He said he believed every crime and every vice in the world were connected with the passion for autographs and anecdotes and records,–that the desiring anecdotes and acquaintance with the lives of great men was treating them like pigs to be ripped open for the public; that he knew he himself should be ripped open like a pig; that he thanked God Almighty with his whole heart and soul that he knew nothing, and that the world knew nothing, of Shakespeare but his writings; and that he thanked God Almighty that he knew nothing of Jane Austen, and that there were no letters preserved either of Shakespeare’s or of Jane Austen’s, that they had not been ripped open like pigs. Then he said that the post for two days had brought him no letters, and that he thought there was a sort of syncope in the world as to him and to his fame.

      EDWARD LEAR (June 1860): A.T. was most disagreeably querulous and irritating and would return, chiefly because he saw people approaching. But Frank Lushington would not go back, and led zigzagwise toward the sea–A.T. snubby and cross always. After a time he would not go on–but led me back by muddy paths (over our shoes,) a short cut home–hardly, even, at last avoiding his horror,–the villagers coming from church . . . I believe that this is my last visit to Farringford–nor can I wish it otherwise all things considered.

      MATTHEW ARNOLD, poet, educationalist and man of letters (December 1860): The fault I find with Tennyson in his Idylls of the King is that the peculiar charm and aroma of the Middle Age he does not give in them . . . The real truth is that Tennyson, with all his temperament and artistic skill, is deficient in intellectual power; and no modern poet can make very much of his business unless he is pre-eminently strong in this.

1861
      MATTHEW ARNOLD (1861-2): If blank verse is used in translating Homer, it must be a blank verse of which English poetry, naturally swayed much by Milton’s treatment of this metre, offers at present hardly any examples. . . It must not be Mr. Tennyson’s blank verse.

        Yet all experience is an arch, wherethrough
        Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades
        For ever and for ever when I move.

      It is no blame to the thought of those lines, which belongs to another order of ideas than Homer’s, but it is true, that Homer would certainly have said of them, ‘It is to consider too curiously to consider so’. It is no blame to their rhythm, which belongs to another order of movement than Homer’s, but it is true that these three lines by themselves take up nearly as much time as a whole book of the Iliad.

      . . . When Mr. Spedding talks of a plainness of thought ‘like Homer’s’, of a plainness of speech ‘like Homer’s’, and says that he finds these constantly in Mr. Tennyson’s poetry, I answer that these I do not find there at all. Mr. Tennyson is a most distinguished and charming poet; but the very essential characteristic of his poetry is, it seems to me, an extreme subtlety and curious elaborateness of thought, an extreme subtlety and curious elaborateness of expression. In the best and most characteristic productions of his genius, these characteristics are most prominent. They are marked characteristics, as we have seen, of the Elizabethan poets; they are marked, though not the essential, characteristics of Shakspeare himself. Under the influences of the nineteenth century, under wholly new conditions of thought and culture, they manifest themselves in Mr. Tennyson’s poetry in a wholly new way. But they are still there. The essential bent of his poetry is towards such expressions as–

        Now lies the Earth all Danaë to the stars;

            O’er the sun’s bright eye
        Drew the vast eyelid of an inky cloud;

        When the calmed mountain was a shadow, sunned
        The world to peace again;

        The fresh young captains flashed their glittering teeth,
        The huge bush-bearded barons heaved and blew;

        He bared the knotted column of his throat,
        The massive square of his heroic breast,
        And arms on which the standing muscle sloped
        As slopes a wild brook o’er a little stone,
        Running too vehemently to break upon it.

      And this way of speaking is the least plain, the most Un-Homeric, which can possibly be conceived. Homer presents his thought to you just as it wells from the source of his mind: Mr. Tennyson carefully distils his thought before he will part with it. Hence comes, in the expression of the thought, a heightened and elaborate air. In Homer’s poetry it is all natural thoughts in natural words; in Mr. Tennyson’s poetry it is all distilled thoughts in distilled words. Exactly this heightening and elaboration may be observed in Mr. Spedding’s

          While the steeds mouthed their corn aloof,

      (an expression which might have been Mr. Tennyson’s) on which I have already commented; and to one who is penetrated with a sense of the real simplicity of Homer, this subtle sophistication of the thought is, I think, very perceptible even in such lines as these,–

          And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
          Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy,–

      which I have seen quoted as perfectly Homeric. Perfect simplicity can be obtained only by a genius of which perfect simplicity is an essential characteristic.

         In June, Tennyson visited the Pyrenees with his family.

1862
         In January, he wrote the verse-dedication for a new edition of Idylls of the King, in memory of Albert, Prince Consort (who had died in December 1861).

         In April, Tennyson had his first audience with Queen Victoria, at Osborne, Isle of Wight:

      QUEEN VICTORIA (April 1862): I went down to see Tennyson who is very peculiar looking, tall, dark, with a fine head, long black flowing hair and a beard–oddly dressed, but there is no affectation about him. I told him how much I admired his glorious lines to my precious Albert and how much comfort I found in his ‘In Memoriam.’ He was full of unbounded appreciation of beloved Albert. When he spoke of my own loss, of that to the Nation, his eyes quite filled with tears.

      HENRY TAYLOR (May 1862): As to his reading, he is a deep-mouthed hound, and the sound of it is very grand; but I rather need to know by heart what he is reading, for otherwise I find sense to be lost in sounds from time to time; and, even when I do know what the words are, I think more of articulation is wanted to give the consonantal effects of the rhythm; for without these effects the melodious sinks into the mellifluous in any ordinary utterance; and even when intoned by such an organ as Alfred’s, if the poetry be of a high order, the rhythm so sounded loses something of its musical and more of its intellectual significance. In the best verse not every word only but every letter should speak. Nevertheless, his reading is very fine of its kind, and it is a very rare thing to hear fine reading of any kind.

1863
      QUEEN VICTORIA (May 1863): Walking with Alice and then driving 4 little ponies. Ernest and Marie came to luncheon.
           Afterwards saw Mr. and Mrs. Tennyson and their 2 sons. Had some interesting conversation with him and was struck with the greatness and largeness of his mind, under a certainly rough exterior.
           Speaking of the immortality of the soul and of all the scientific discoveries in no way interfering with that, he said, ‘If there is no immortality of the soul, one does not see why there should be any God,’ and that ‘You cannot love a Father who strangled you’, etc.

      EDWARD FITZGERALD (August 1863): I was told that Tennyson was writing a sort of Lincolnshire Idyll: I will bet on Miss Ingelow now: he should never have left his old County, and gone up to be suffocated by London Adulation. He has lost that which caused the long roll of the Lincolnshire Wave to reverberate in the measure of Locksley Hall. Don’t believe that I rejoice like a Dastard in what I believe to be the Decay of a Great Man: my sorrow has been so much about it that (for one reason) I have the less cared to meet him of late years, having nothing to say in sincere praise. Nor do I mean that his Decay is all owing to London, etc. He is growing old: and I don’t believe much in the Fine Arts thriving on an old Tree.

1864
         In April, Garibaldi visited Farringford.

         In August, Tennyson published Enoch Arden.

      MATTHEW ARNOLD (September 1864): I am much tempted to say something about the Enoch Arden volume. I agree with you in thinking “Enoch Arden” itself very good indeed–perhaps the best thing Tennyson has done; “Tithonus” I do not like quite so well . . . I do not think Tennyson a great and powerful spirit in any line–as Goethe was in the line of modern thought, Wordsworth in that of contemplation, Byron even in that of passion; and unless a poet, especially a poet at this time of day, is that, my interest in him is only slight, and my conviction that he will not finally stand firm is high.

      GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS, Jesuit priest and poet (September 1864): . . . I think then the language of verse may be divided into three kinds. The first and highest is poetry proper, the language of inspiration. The word inspiration need cause no difficulty. I mean by it a mood of great, abnormal in fact, mental acuteness, either energetic or receptive, according as the thoughts which arise in it seem generated by a stress and action of the brain, or to strike into it unasked. This mood arises from various causes, physical generally, as good health or state of the air or, prosaic as it is, length of time after a meal. But I need not go into this; all that it is needful to mark is, that the poetry of inspiration can only be written in this mood of mind, even if it only last a minute, by poets themselves. Everybody of course has like moods, but not being poets what they then produce is not poetry. The second kind I call Parnassian. It can only be spoken by poets, but is not in the highest sense poetry. It does not require the mood of mind in which the poetry of inspiration is written. It is spoken on and from the level of a poet’s mind, not, as in the other case, when the inspiration which is the gift of genius, raises him above himself. For I think it is the case with genius that it is not when quiescent so very much above mediocrity as the difference between the two might lead us to think, but that it has the power and privilege of rising from that level to a height utterly far from mediocrity: in other words that its greatness is that it can be so great. You will understand. Parnassian then is that language which genius speaks as fitted to its exaltation, and place among other genius, but does not sing (I have been betrayed into the whole hog of a metaphor) in its flights. Great men, poets I mean, have each their own dialect as it were of Parnassian, formed generally as they go on writing, and at last,–this is the point to be marked,–they can see things in this Parnassian way and describe them in this Parnassian tongue, without further effort of inspiration. In a poet’s particular kind of Parnassian lies most of his style, of his manner, of his mannerism if you like. But I must not go farther without giving you instances of Parnassian. I shall take one from Tennyson, and from ‘Enoch Arden’, from a passage much quoted already and which will be no doubt often quoted, the description of Enoch’s tropical island.

            The mountain wooded to the peak, the lawns
        And winding glades high up like ways to Heaven,
        The lightning flash of insect and of bird,
        The lustre of the long convolvuluses
        That coil’d around the stately stems, and ran
        Ev’n to the limit of the land, the glows
        And glories of the broad belt of the world,
        All these he saw.

      Now it is a mark of Parnassian that one could conceive oneself writing it if one were the poet. Do not say that if you were Shakespear you can imagine yourself writing Hamlet, because that is just what I think you cannot conceive. In a fine piece of inspiration every beauty takes you as it were by surprise, not of course that you did not think the writer could be so great, for that is not it,–indeed I think it is a mistake to speak of people admiring Shakespear more and more as they live, for when the judgment is ripe and you have read a good deal of any writer including his best things, and carefully, then, I think, however high the place you give him, that you must have rated him equally with his merits however great they be; so that all after admiration cannot increase but keep alive this estimate, make his greatness stare into your eyes and din it into your ears, as it were, but not make it greater,–but to go on with the broken sentence, every fresh beauty could not in any way be predicted or accounted for by what one has already read. But in Parnassian pieces you feel that if you were the poet you could have gone on as he has done, you see yourself doing it, only with the difference that if you actually try you find you cannot write his Parnassian. Well now to turn to the piece above. The glades being ‘like ways to Heaven’ is, I think, a new thought, it is an inspiration. Not so the next line, that is pure Parnassian. If you examine it the words are choice and the description is beautiful and unexceptionable, but it does not touch you. The next is more Parnassian still. In the next lines I think the picture of the convolvuluses does touch; but only the picture: the words are Parnassian. It is a very good instance, for the lines are undoubtedly beautiful, but yet I could scarcely point anywhere to anything more idiomatically Parnassian, to anything which I more clearly see myself writing qua Tennyson, than the words

            The glows
        And glories of the broad belt of the world.

      What Parnassian is you will now understand, but I must make some more remarks on it. I believe that when a poet palls on us it is because of his Parnassian. We seem to have found out his secret. Now in fact we have not found out more than this, that when he is not inspired and in his flights, his poetry does run in an intelligibly laid down path. Well, it is notorious that Shakespear does not pall, and this is because he uses, I believe, so little Parnassian. He does use some, but little. Now judging from my own experience I should say no author palls so much as Wordsworth; this is because he writes such an ‘intolerable deal of’ Parnassian.
           If with a critical eye and in a critical appreciative mood you read a poem by an unknown author or an anonymous poem by a known, but not at once recognizable, author, and he is a real poet, then you will pronounce him so at once, and the poem will seem truly inspired, though afterwards, when you know the author, you will be able to distinguish his inspirations from his Parnassian, and will perhaps think the very piece which struck you so much at first mere Parnassian. You know well how deadened, as it were, the critical faculties become at times, when all good poetry alike loses its clear ring and its charm; while in other moods they are so enlivened that things that have long lost their freshness strike you with their original definiteness and piquant beauty.
           I think one had got into the way of thinking, or had not got out of the way of thinking, that Tennyson was always new, touching, beyond other poets, not pressed with human ailments, never using Parnassian. So at least I used to think. Now one sees he uses Parnassian; he is, one must see it, what we used to call Tennysonian. But the discovery of this must not make too much difference. When puzzled by one’s doubts it is well to turn to a passage like this. Surely your maturest judgment will never be fooled out of saying that this is divine, terribly beautiful–the stanza of In Memoriam beginning with the quatrain

        O Hesper o’er the buried sun,
          And ready thou to die with him,
          Thou watchest all things ever dim
        And dimmer, and a glory done.

      EDWARD LEAR (October 1864): I would he were as his poems. I suppose it is the anomaly of high souled & philosophical writings combined with slovenliness, selfishness & morbid folly that prevents my being happy there.

      WALTER BAGEHOT (November 1864) on Enoch Arden: Nothing, too, can be more splendid than the description of the tropics as Mr. Tennyson delineates them, but a sailor would not have felt the tropics in that manner. The beauties of nature would not have so much occupied him. He would have known little of the scarlet shafts of sunrise and nothing of the long convolvuluses. As in Robinson Crusoe, his own petty contrivances and his small ailments would have been the principal subject to him. ‘For three years,’ he might have said, ‘my back was bad, and then I put two pegs into a piece of driftwood and so made a chair, and after that it pleased God to send me a chill.’ In real life his piety would scarcely have gone beyond that.
           It will indeed be said, that though the sailor had no words for, and even no explicit consciousness of, the splendid details of the torrid zone, yet that he had, notwithstanding, a dim latent inexpressible conception of them: though he could not speak of them or describe them, yet they were much to him. And doubtless such is the case. Rude people are impressed by what is beautiful–deeply impressed–though they could not describe what they see, or what they feel. But what is absurd in Mr. Tennyson’s description–absurd when we abstract it from the gorgeous additions and ornaments with which Mr. Tennyson distracts us–is that his hero feels nothing else but these great splendours. We hear nothing of the physical ailments, the rough devices, the low superstitions, which really would have been the first things, the favourite and principal occupations of his mind. Just so, when he gets home he may have had such fine sentiments, though it is odd, and he may have spoken of them to his landlady, though that is odder still,–but it is incredible that his whole mind should be made up of fine sentiment. Beside those sweet feelings, if he had them, there must have been many more obvious, more prosaic, and some perhaps more healthy. Mr. Tennyson has shown a profound judgment in distracting us as he does. He has given us a classic delineation of the ‘Northern Farmer’ with no ornament at all–as bare a thing as can be–because he then wanted to describe a true type of real men: he has given us a sailor crowded all over with ornament and illustration, because he then wanted to describe an unreal type of fancied men,–not sailors as they are, but sailors as they might be wished.
           Another prominent element in ‘Enoch Arden’ is yet more suitable to, yet more requires the aid of, ornate art. Mr. Tennyson undertook to deal with half belief. The presentiments which Annie feels are exactly of that sort which everybody has felt, and which everyone has half believed–which hardly anyone has more than half believed. Almost everyone, it has been said, would be angry if anyone else reported that he believed in ghosts; yet hardly anyone, when thinking by himself, wholly disbelieves them. Just so, such presentiments as Mr. Tennyson depicts, impress the inner mind so much that the outer mind–the rational understanding–hardly likes to consider them nicely or to discuss them sceptically. For these dubious themes an ornate or complex style is needful. Classical art speaks out what it has to say plainly and simply. Pure style cannot hesitate; it describes in concisest outline what is, as it is. If a poet really helieves in presentiments, he can speak out in pure style . . . But if a poet is not sure whether presentiments are true or not true; if he wishes to leave his readers in doubt; if he wishes an atmosphere of indistinct illusion and of moving shadow, he must use the romantic style, the style of miscellaneous adjunct, the style ‘which shirks, not meets’ your intellect, the style, which as you are scrutinising, disappears.

1865
         In January, Tennyson published A Selection from the Works of Alfred Tennyson. He refused the offer of a baronetcy.

         In February, his mother died.

      WILLIAM ALLINGHAM (October 1865): Barnes [the poet William Barnes] has been invited to go with me to Farringford, and we cross to Yarmouth, nearly fouling a collier on the way.
           B.’s old-fashioned ways, his gaiters, his long knitted purse which he ties up in a knot, broad brimmed hat, homely speech.
           We drive in a fly to Farringford, where T., Mrs. T., Miss T. meet us in the hall. T. and B. at once on easy terms, having simple poetic minds and mutual goodwill. Talk of Ancient Britons, barrows, roads, etc. I to upper room and dress, T. comes in to me and we go down together. Dinner: stories of ghosts and dreams. To drawing-room as usual, where T. has his port, B. no wine. T. says: ‘modern fame is nothing: I’d rather have an acre of land. I shall go down, down! I am up now.’ T. went upstairs by himself.
           Tea: enter Mrs. Cameron (in a funny red openwork shawl) with two of her boys. T. reappears, and Mrs. C. shows a small firework toy called ‘Pharaoh’s Serpents,’ a kind of pastile, which, when lighted, twists about in a worm-like shape. Mrs. C. said they were poisonous and forbade us all to touch. T. in defiance put out his hand.
           ‘Don’t touch ’em!’ shrieked Mrs. C. ‘You sha’n’t, Alfred!’ But Alfred did. ‘Wash your hands then!’ But Alfred wouldn’t and rubbed his moustache instead, enjoying Mrs. C.’s agonies. Then she said to him: ‘Will you come to-morrow, and be photographed?’ He, very emphatically, ‘No.’. . .
           T. and I went out to the porch with Mrs. C., where her donkey-chaise was waiting in the moonlight.
           Tennyson now took Barnes and me to his top room. Darwinism–‘Man from ape–would that really make any difference?’ Huxley, Tyndall.
           ‘Time is nothing,’ said T., ‘are we not all part of Deity?’ ‘Pantheism?’ hinted Barnes, who was not at ease in this sort of speculation. ‘Well!’ says T., ‘I think I believe in Pantheism, of a sort.’ Barnes to bed, T. and I up ladder to the roof to look at Orion. Then to my room, where more talk. He likes Barnes, he says, ‘but he is not accustomed to strong views theologic.’

      JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS, historian and man of letters (December 1865): My father came to us this afternoon. He is going to dine with Woolner, to meet Tennyson, Gladstone and Holman Hunt. I am to go in the evening at 9.30.
           When I arrived at Woolner’s, the maid said she supposed I was “for the gentlemen.” On my replying “Yes”, she showed me into the dining-room, where they were finishing dessert. Woolner sat of course at the bottom of the table, Tennyson on his left, my father on his right hand. Gladstone sat next Tennyson and Hunt next my father. I relapsed into an armchair between Woolner and my father.
           The conversation continued. They were talking about the Jamaica business–Gladstone bearing hard on Eyre, Tennyson excusing any cruelty in the case of putting down a savage mob. Gladstone had been reading official papers on the business all the morning and said, with an expression of intense gravity, just after I had entered, “And that evidence wrung from a poor black boy with a revolver at his head!”. . .
           Tennyson did not argue. He kept asserting various prejudices and convictions. “We are too tender to savages; we are more tender to a black then to ourselves.” “Niggers are tigers; niggers are tigers,” in obbligato, sotto voce, to Gladstone’s declamation. “But the Englishman is a cruel man–he is a strong man,” put in Gladstone. My father illustrated this by stories of the Indian Mutiny. “That’s not like Oriental cruelty,” said Tennyson; “but I could not kill a cat, not the tomcat who scratches and miawls over his disgusting amours, and keeps me awake,”–thrown in with an indefinable impatience and rasping hatred. Gladstone looked glum and irate at this speech, thinking probably of Eyre. Then they turned to the insufficiency of evidence as yet in Eyre’s case, and to other instances of his hasty butchery–the woman he hung, though recommended by court-martial, because women had shown savageness in mutilating a corpse. “Because women, not the woman–and that, too, after being recommended to mercy by court-martial, and he holding the Queen’s commission!” said Gladstone with the same hostile emphasis. The question of his personal courage came up. That, said Gladstone, did not prove his capability of remaining cool under and dealing with such special circumstances. Anecdotes about sudden panics were related. Tennyson said to my father, “As far as I know my own temperament, I could stand any sudden thing, but give me an hour to reflect, and I should go here and go there, and all would be confused. If the fiery gulf of Curtius opened in the City, I would leap at once into it on horseback. But if I had to reflect on it, no–especially the thought of death–nothing can be weighed against that. It is the moral question, not the fear, which would perplex me. I have not got the English courage. I could not wait six hours in a square expecting a battery’s fire.” Then stories of martial severity were told. My father repeated the anecdote of Bosquet in the Malakoff. Gladstone said Cialdini had shot a soldier for being without his regimental jacket. Tennyson put in, sotto voce, “If they shot paupers, perhaps they wouldn’t tear up their clothes,” and laughed very grimly.
           Tennyson all the while kept drinking glasses of port and glowering round the room through his spectacles. His moustache hides the play of his mouth, but as far as I could see, that feature is as grim as the rest. He has cheek-bones carved out of iron. His head is domed, quite the reverse of Gladstone’s–like an Elizabethan head, strong in the coronal, narrow in the frontal regions, but very finely moulded. It is like what Conington’s head seems trying to be.
           Something brought up the franchise. Tennyson said, “That’s what we’re coming to when we get your Reform Bill, Mr. Gladstone; not that I know anything about it.” “No more does any man in England,” said Gladstone, taking him up quickly with a twinkling laugh, then adding, “But I’m sorry to see you getting nervous.” “Oh I think a state in which every man would have a vote is the ideal. I always thought it might be realized in England, if anywhere, with our constitutional history. But how to do it?” This was the mere reflector. The man of practice said nothing. Soon after came coffee. Tennyson grew impatient, moved his great gaunt body about, and finally was left to smoke a pipe. It is hard to fix the difference between the two men, both with their strong provincial accent–Gladstone with his rich flexible voice, Tennyson with his deep drawl rising into an impatient falsetto when put out; Gladstone arguing, Tennyson putting in a prejudice; Gladstone asserting rashly, Tennyson denying with a bald negative; Gladstone full of facts, Tennyson relying on impressions; both of them humorous, but the one polished and delicate in repartee, the other broad and coarse and grotesque. Gladstone’s hands are white and not remarkable. Tennyson’s are huge, unwieldy, fit for moulding clay or dough. Gladstone is in some sort a man of the world; Tennyson a child, and treated by him like a child. . . .
           Woolner gave Gladstone a MS. book, containing translations of the “Iliad” by Tennyson, to read. Gladstone read it by himself till Tennyson appeared. Then Woolner went to him and said, “You will read your translation, won’t you?” And Palgrave, “Come you! A shout in the trench!” “No, I shan’t,” said Tennyson, standing in the room, with a pettish voice, and jerking his arms and body from the hips. “No, I shan’t read it. It’s only a little thing. Must be judged by comparison with the Greek. Can only be appreciated by the difficulties overcome.” Then seeing the MS. in Gladstone’s hand, “This isn’t fair; no, this isn’t fair.” He took it away, and nothing would pacify him. “I meant to read it to Mr. Gladstone and Dr. Symonds.” My father urged him to no purpose, told him he would be f?????ta s??et??s??; but he cried, “Yes, you and Gladstone, but the rest don’t understand it.” “Here’s my son, an Oxford first-class man.” “Oh, I should be afraid of him.” Then my father talked soothingly in an admirable low voice to him, such as those who have to deal with fractious people would do well to acquire. He talked to him of his poems–“Mariana in the Moated Grange.” This took them to the Lincolnshire flats–as impressive in their extent of plain as mountain heights. My father tried to analyse the physical conditions of ideas of size. But Tennyson preferred fixing his mind on the ideas themselves. “I do not know whether to think the universe great or little. When I think about it, it seems now one and now the other. What makes its greatness? Not one sun or one set of suns, or is it the whole together?” Then to illustrate his sense of size he pictured a journey through space like Jean Paul Richter’s, leaving first one galaxy or spot of light behind him, then another, and so on through infinity. Then about matter. Its incognisability puzzled him. “I cannot form the least notion of a brick. I don’t know what it is. It’s no use talking about atoms, extension, colour, weight. I cannot penetrate the brick. But I have far more distinct ideas of God, of love and such emotions. I can sympathise with God in my poor way. The human soul seems to me always in some way, how we do not know, identical with God. That’s the value of prayer. Prayer is like opening a sluice between the great ocean and our little channels.” Then of eternity and creation: “Huxley says we may have come from monkeys. That makes no difference to me. If it is God’s way of creation, He sees the whole, past, present, and future, as one” (entering on an elaborate statement of eternity à la Sir Thomas Browne). Then of morality: “I cannot but think moral good is the crown of man. But what is it without immortality? ‘Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.’ If I knew the world were coming to an end in six hours, would I give my money to a starving beggar? No, if I did not believe myself immortal. I have sometimes thought men of sin might destroy their immortality. The eternity of punishment is quite incredible. Christ’s words were parables to suit the sense of the times.” Further of morality: “There are some young men who try to do away with morality. They say, ‘We won’t be moral.’ Comte, I believe, and perhaps Mr. Grote too, deny that immortality has anything to do with being moral.” Then from material to moral difficulties: “Why do mosquitoes exist? I believe that after God had made His world the devil began and added something.” (Cat and mouse-leopards.) (My father raised moral evil-morbid art.) The conversation turned on Swinburne for the moment, and then dropped.
           In all this metaphysical vagueness about matter, morals, the existence of evil, and the evidences of God there was something almost childish. Such points pass with most men for settled as insoluble after a time. But Tennyson has a perfect simplicity about him which recognises the real greatness of such questions, and regards them as always worthy of consideration. He treats them with profound moral earnestness. His “In Memoriam” and “Two Voices” illustrate this habit. There is nothing original or startling–on the contrary, a general commonplaceness, about his metaphysics; yet, so far as they go, they express real agitating questions–express, in a poet’s language, what most men feel and think about.
           A move was made into the dining-room. Tennyson had consented to read his translations to Gladstone and my father. I followed them and sat unperceived behind them. He began by reading in a deep bass growl the passage of Achilles shouting in the trench. Gladstone continually interrupted him with small points about words. He has a combative, House of Commons mannerism, which gives him the appearance of thinking too much about himself. It was always to air some theory of his own that he broke Tennyson’s recital; and he seemed listening only in order to catch something up. Tennyson invited criticism.
           Tennyson was sorely puzzled about the variations in Homeric readings and interpretations. “They change year after year. What we used to think right in my days I am told is all wrong. What is a poor translator to do?” But he piqued himself very much on his exact renderings. “These lines are word for word. You could not have a closer translation: one poet could not express another better. There! those are good lines.” Gladstone would object, “But you will say Jove and Greeks: can’t we have Zeus and Achaeans?” “But the sound of Jove! Jove is much softer than Zeus-Zeus-Zeus.” “Well, Mr. Worsley gives us Achaeans.” “Mr. Worsley has chosen a convenient long metre; he can give you Achaeans, and a great deal else.” Much was said about the proper means of getting a certain pause, how to give equivalent suggestive sounds, and so on. . . .
           At about one we broke up. Gladstone went off first. My father and I walked round the studio, then shook hands with Tennyson and got home.

1868

         In April, there was laid the foundation stone of his second home, Aldworth, at Blackdown, Haslemere.

1869

         In April, Tennyson attended the meeting to organize a Metaphysical Society, which he joined and which flourished till 1879.

         In December, he published The Holy Grail and Other Poems (title-page dated 1870).

1870

         In December, Tennyson reluctantly published his song-cycle The Window (title-page dated 1871), with music by Arthur Sullivan.

1871

      EDWARD FITZGERALD (June 1871) on Samuel Laurence’s portrait of Tennyson, painted about 1840: Very imperfect as Laurence’s portrait is, it is nevertheless the best painted portrait I have seen; and certainly the only one of old days. ‘Blubber-lipt’ I remember once Alfred called it; so it is; but still the only one of old days, and still the best of all to my thinking. I like to go back to days before the beard, which makes rather a Dickens of A.T. in the photographs–to my mind.

1872

      EDWARD FITZGERALD (April 1872): I used to tell Tennyson thirty years ago that he should be a dragoon, or in some active employment that would keep his soul stirring, instead of revolving in its own idleness and tobacco-smoke; and now he is sunk in coterie worship, and (I tremble to say it) in the sympathy of his most lady-like, gentle wife. I can care nothing for his poems since his two volumes in 1842, except for the dramatic element in ‘Maud’, and a few little bits in it; but I am told this is because I have shut up my mind, &c. So it may be. But surely he has become more artist than poet ever since; and if the artist have not the wherewithal to work on? I mourn over him as once a great man lost–that is, not risen to the greatness that was in him, for he has done enough to outlast all others of his time, I think, up to 1842. As to the princesses, king’s idylls, &c., they seem to me to fail utterly in the one thing wanted–invention; to make a new and better thing of old legends, which without it are best left alone.

         In October, Tennyson published Gareth and Lynette. The Imperial Library edition of the Works (1872-73) brought together Idylls of the King (with a new Epilogue, ‘To the Queen’), virtually complete except for ‘Balin and Balan’ (written 1874, but not published till 1885).

1873

         In April, Tennyson again refused the offer of a baronetcy, as also in 1874.

      THOMAS CARLYLE (November 1873): Tennyson was distinctly rather wearisome; nothing coming from him that did not smack of utter indolence, what one might almost call torpid sleepiness and stupor; all still enlivened, however, by the tone of boylike naiveté and total want of malice except against his Quarterly and other unfavourable Reviewers.

1875

         In June, Tennyson published Queen Mary, inaugurating his career as a playwright.

      HENRY JAMES, novelist, on the concluding lines of Tithonus: In these beautiful lines from “Tithonus" there is a purity of tone, an inspiration, a something sublime and exquisite, which is easily within the compass of Mr. Tennyson’s usual manner at its highest, but which is not easily achieved by any really dramatic verse. It is poised and stationary, like a bird whose wings have borne him high, but the beauty of whose movement is less in great ethereal sweeps and circles than in the way he hangs motionless in the blue air, with only a vague tremor of his pinions. Even if the idea with Tennyson were more largely dramatic than it usually is, the immobility, as we must call it, of his phrase would always defeat the dramatic intention. When he wishes to represent movement, the phrase always seems to me to pause and slowly pivot upon itself, or at most to move backward.
1876

         In April, Queen Mary was produced on the stage.

         In December, Tennyson published another play, Harold (title-page dated 1877).

1877

      HENRY JAMES (March 1877) to William James: I sat next but one to the Bard and heard most of his talk, which was all about port wine and tobacco: he seems to know much about them, and can drink a whole bottle of port at a sitting with no incommodity. He is very swarthy and scraggy, and strikes one at first as much less handsome than his photos: but gradually you see that it’s a face of genius. He had I know not what simplicity, speaks with a strange rustic accent and seemed altogether like a creature of some primordial English stock, a thousand miles away from American manufacture.

      ALFRED DOMETT, colonial statesman and poet (April 1877): Sariana Browning describing Tennyson seemed to think he rather affected ‘the old man’; wanting help on every occasion, a little overdoing his shortsightedness and the shifts it put him to. She remarking jestingly upon the latter, as he was ‘poking into everything with eyes halfshut’ he suddenly twitched off his spectacles, put them across her nose and asked ‘what she could see with such things as those on?’ She thought his ‘helplessness’ arose a good deal from the habit of having every the least thing done for him, about his person even; formerly by Mrs. Tennyson (now laid up) and since by his son Hallam; ‘as if’ she said ‘he wanted 15 or 20 people to gather his strawberries for him, and then 5 or 6 more to put them into his mouth! But he was very amiable nevertheless’ she added. Well, he is a glorious fellow, and worth a little cossetting. As an instance of his manner, she instanced his standing by his friend Locker (who was busy filling Tennyson’s portmanteau for him) looking on with a sort of curious admiration, and drawling out ‘Why Locker you seem to have quite a ge-e-nius for packing!’

      AUGUSTUS J. C. HARE, autobiographer (October 1877): He had an abrupt, bearish manner, and seems thoroughly hard and unpoetical: one would think of him as a man in whom the direst prose of life was absolutely ingrained.

1878

         In February, Tennyson’s son Lionel married Eleanor Locker.

      HENRY JAMES, on a visit to Tennyson in 1878 (published 1917): Mrs. Tennyson’s luncheon table was an open feast, with places for possible when not assured guests; and no one but the American Minister [James Russell Lowell], scarce more than just installed, and his extremely attached compatriot sat down at first with our gracious hostess. The board considerably stretched, and after it had been indicated to Lowell that he had best sit at the end near the window, where the Bard would presently join him, I remained, near our hostess, separated from him for some little time by an unpeopled waste . . . Nothing, exactly, could have made dear Lowell more “my” Lowell, as I have presumed to figure him, than the stretch of uncertainty so supervening and which, in its form of silence at first completely unbroken between the two poets, rapidly took on for me monstrous proportions. I conversed with my gentle neighbour during what seemed an eternity–really but hearing, as the minutes sped, all that Tennyson didn’t say to Lowell and all that Lowell wouldn’t on any such compulsion as that say to Tennyson. I like, however, to hang again upon the hush–for the sweetness of the relief of its break by the fine Tennysonian growl. I had never dreamed, no, of a growling Tennyson–I had too utterly otherwise fantasticated; but no line of Locksley Hall rolled out, as I was to happen soon after to hear it, could have been sweeter than the interrogative sound of “Do you know anything about Lowell?” launched on the chance across the table and crowned at once by Mrs. Tennyson’s anxious quaver: “Why, my dear, this is Mr. Lowell!” The clearance took place successfully enough, and the incident, I am quite aware, seems to shrink with it; in spite of which I still cherish the reduced reminiscence for its connections: so far as my vision of Lowell was concerned they began at that moment so to multiply. A belated guest or two more came in, and I wish I could for my modesty’s sake refer to this circumstance alone the fact that nothing more of the occasion survives for me save the intense but restricted glow of certain instants, in another room, to which we had adjourned for smoking and where my alarmed sense of the Bard’s restriction to giving what he had as a bard only became under a single turn of his hand a vision of quite general munificence. Incredibly, inconceivably, he had read–and not only read but admired, and not only admired but understandingly referred; referred, time and some accident aiding, the appreciated object, a short tale I had lately put forth, to its actually present author, who could scarce believe his ears on hearing the thing superlatively commended; pronounced, that is, by the illustrious speaker, more to his taste than no matter what other like attempt. Nothing would induce me to disclose the title of the piece, which has little to do with the matter; my point is but in its having on the spot been matter of pure romance to me that I was there and positively so addressed. For it was a solution, the happiest in the world, and from which I at once extracted enormities of pleasure: my relation to whatever had bewildered me simply became perfect: the author of In Memoriam had “liked” my own twenty pages, and his doing so was a gage of his grace in which I felt I should rest forever–in which I have in fact rested to this hour. My own basis of liking–such a blessed supersession of all worryings and wonderings!–was accordingly established, and has met every demand made of it. . . .
           What could have partaken more of this quality [the outright] for instance than the question I was startled to hear launched before we had left the table by the chance of Mrs. Greville’s having happened to mention in some connection one of her French relatives, Mademoiselle Laure de Sade? It had fallen on my own ear–the mention at least had–with a certain effect of unconscious provocation; but this was as nothing to its effect on the ear of our host. “De Sade?” he at once exclaimed with interest–and with the consequence, I may frankly add, of my wondering almost to ecstasy, that is to the ecstasy of curiosity, to what length he would proceed. He proceeded admirably–admirably for the triumph of simplification–to the very greatest length imaginable, as was signally promoted by the fact that clearly no one present, with a single exception, recognised the name or the nature of the scandalous, the long ignored, the at last all but unnameable author; least of all the gentle relative of Mademoiselle Laure, who listened with the blankest grace to her friend’s enumeration of his titles to infamy, among which that of his most notorious work was pronounced. It was the homeliest, frankest, most domestic passage, as who should say, and most remarkable for leaving none of us save myself, by my impression, in the least embarrassed or bewildered; largely, I think, because of the failure–a failure the most charmingly flat–of all measure on the part of auditors and speaker alike of what might be intended or understood, of what, in fine, the latter was talking about.
           He struck me in truth as neither knowing nor communicating knowledge, and I recall how I felt this note in his own case to belong to that general intimation with which the whole air was charged of the want of proportion between the great spaces and reaches and echoes commanded, the great eminence attained, and the quantity and variety of experience supposable. So to discriminate was in a manner to put one’s hand on the key, and thereby to find one’s self in presence of a rare and anomalous, but still scarcely the less beautiful fact. The assured and achieved conditions, the serenity, the security, the success, to put it vulgarly, shone in the light of their easiest law–that by which they emerge early from the complication of life, the great adventure of sensibility, and find themselves determined once for all, fortunately fixed, all consecrated and consecrating. If I should speak of this impression as that of glory without history, that of the poetic character more worn than paid for, or at least more saved than spent, I should doubtless much over-emphasise; but such, or something like it, was none the less the explanation that met one’s own fond fancy of the scene after one had cast about for it. For I allow myself thus to repeat that I was so moved to cast about, and perhaps at no moment more than during the friendly analysis of the reputation of M. de Sade. Was I not present at some undreamed-of demonstration of the absence of the remoter real, the real other than immediate and exquisite, other than guaranteed and enclosed, in landscape, friendship, fame, above all in consciousness of awaited and admired and self-consistent inspiration?
           The question was indeed to be effectively answered for me, and everything meanwhile continued to play into this provision–even to the pleasant growling note heard behind me, as the Bard followed with Mrs. Creville, who had permitted herself apparently some mild extravagance of homage: “Oh yes, you may do what you like–so long as you don’t kiss me before the cabman!” The allusion was explained to us, if I remember–a matter of some more or less recent leave-taking of admirer and admired in London on his putting her down at her door after being taken to the play or wherever; between the rugged humour of which reference and the other just commemorated there wasn’t a pin to choose, it struck me, for a certain old-time Lincolnshire ease or comfortable stay-at-home license. But it was later on, when, my introductress having accompanied us, I sat upstairs with him in his study, that he might read to us some poem of his own that we should venture to propose, it was then that mystifications dropped, that everything in the least dislocated fell into its place, and that image and picture stamped themselves strongly and finally, or to the point even, as I recover it, of leaving me almost too little to wonder about. He had not got a third of the way through Locksley Hall, which, my choice given me, I had made bold to suggest he should spout–for I had already heard him spout in Eaton Place–before I had begun to wonder that I didn’t wonder, didn’t at least wonder more consumedly; as a very little while back I should have made sure of my doing on any such prodigious occasion. I sat at one of the windows that hung over space, noting how the windy, watery autumn day, sometimes sheeting it all with rain, called up the dreary, dreary moorland or the long dun wolds; I pinched myself for the determination of my identity and hung on the reader’s deep-voiced chant for the credibility of his: I asked myself in fine why, in complete deviation from everything that would have seemed from far back certain for the case, I failed to swoon away under the heaviest pressure I had doubtless ever known the romantic situation bring to bear. So lucidly all the while I considered, so detachedly I judged, so dissentingly, to tell the whole truth, I listened; pinching myself, as I say, not at all to keep from swooning, but much rather to set up some rush of sensibility. It was all interesting, it was at least all odd; but why in the name of poetic justice had one anciently heaved and flushed with one’s own recital of the splendid stuff if one was now only to sigh in secret “Oh dear, oh dear”? The author lowered the whole pitch, that of expression, that of interpretation above all; I heard him, in cool surprise, take even more out of his verse than he had put in, and so bring me back to the point I had immediately and privately made, the point that he wasn’t Tennysonian. I felt him as he went on and on lose that character beyond repair, and no effect of the organ-roll, of monotonous majesty, no suggestion of the long echo, availed at all to save it. What the case came to for me, I take it–and by the case I mean the intellectual, the artistic–was that it lacked the intelligence, the play of discrimination, I should have taken for granted in it, and thereby, brooding monster that I was, born to discriminate à tout propos, lacked the interest.
           Detached I have mentioned that I had become, and it was doubtless at such a rate high time for that; though I hasten to repeat that with the close of the incident I was happily able to feel a new sense in the whole connection established. My critical reaction hadn’t in the least invalidated our great man’s being a Bard–it had in fact made him and left him more a Bard than ever: it had only settled to my perception as not before what a Bard might and mightn’t be. The character was just a rigid idiosyncrasy, to which everything in the man conformed, but which supplied nothing outside of itself, and which above all was not intellectually wasteful or heterogeneous, conscious as it could only be of its intrinsic breadth and weight. On two or three occasions of the aftertime I was to hear Browning read out certain of his finest pages, and this exactly with all the exhibition of point and authority, the expressive particularisation, so to speak, that I had missed on the part of the Laureate; an observation through which the author of Men and Women appeared, in spite of the beauty and force of his demonstration, as little as possible a Bard. He particularised if ever a man did, was heterogeneous and profane, composed of pieces and patches that betrayed some creak of joints, and addicted to the excursions from which these were brought home; so that he had to prove himself a poet, almost against all presumptions, and with all the assurance and all the character he could use. Was not this last in especial, the character, so close to the surface, with which Browning fairly bristled, what was most to come out in his personal delivery of the fruit of his genius? It came out almost to harshness; but the result was that what he read showed extraordinary life. During that audition at Aldworth the question seemed on the contrary not of life at all–save, that is, of one’s own; which was exactly not the question. With all the resonance of the chant, the whole thing was yet still, with all the long swing of its motion it yet remained where it was–heaving doubtless grandly enough up and down and beautiful to watch as through the superposed veils of its long self-consciousness. By all of which I don’t mean to say that I was not, on the day at Aldworth, thoroughly reconciled to learning what a Bard consisted of; for that came as soon as I had swallowed my own mistake–the mistake of having supposed Tennyson something subtly other than one. I had supposed, probably, such an impossibility, had, to repeat my term, so absurdly fantasticated, that the long journey round and about the truth no more than served me right; just as after all it at last left me quite content.

1879

         In April, his brother Charles Tennyson Turner died.

      MARY GLADSTONE, Gladstone’s daughter (June 1879): He was such a funny wayward child over the game [backgammon], and when we got up for bed suddenly startled me by asking earnestly, ‘What colour are your eyes, I cannot make out’. Upstairs looking at funny old Chinese pictures he said, ‘We shall all turn into pigs if we lose Christianity and God’. He makes us a little hot sometimes, says near the wind things, but all in an odd, childlike way. . . .
           In the middle of the drive he again began harping on my eyes and said they were very remarkable. I got so stupidly red and Hallam [Tennyson] held up the rug to shield me. . . He suddenly began to stroke my nose, having discovered it was a ‘petit nez retroussé’, and declared it meant all sorts of naughty things, and then found they were counteracted by my ‘strong jaw’. . . .
           He read us the lovely Princess songs. Went to his sanctum and had some alarm. He kissed me. Played a duet each night. He always calls us ‘women’. Told us that when the Queen took him all over the Mausoleum the only thing he was conscious of was the creaking of his boots. . .
           After dinner an endless and certainly interesting discussion on what would be the result of belief in annihilation. He would commit suicide. . . would ‘eat and drink for to-morrow we die’. He told us of a plan he had of writing a satire called ‘A suicide supper’–full of bitter humour. I am disappointed in his religion. It is purely founded on the chaos and failure of a godless world, and there is a want of reverence which is a shock from one who speaks of the ‘world’s great altar stairs, that lead through darkness up to God’.

      GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS (February 1879): . . . You call Tennyson ‘a great outsider’; you mean, I think, to the soul of poetry. I feel what you mean, though it grieves me to hear him depreciated, as of late years has often been done. Come what may he will be one of our greatest poets. To me his poetry appears ‘chryselephantine’; always of precious mental material and each verse a work of art, no botchy places, not only so but no half wrought or low-toned ones, no drab, no brown-holland; but the form, though fine, not the perfect artist’s form, not equal to the material. When the inspiration is genuine, arising from personal feeling, as in In Memoriam, a divine work, he is at his best, or when he is rhyming pure and simple imagination, without afterthought, as in the ‘Lady of Shalott’, ‘Sir Galahad’, the ‘Dream of Fair Women’, or ‘Palace of Art’. But the want of perfect form in the imagination comes damagingly out when he undertakes longer works of fancy, as his Idylls: they are unreal in motive and incorrect, uncanonical so to say, in detail and keepings. He should have called them Charades from the Middle Ages (dedicated by permission to H.R.H. etc.). The Galahad of one of the later ones is quite a fantastic charade-playing trumpery Galahad, merely playing the fool over Christian heroism. Each scene is a triumph of language and of bright picturesque, but just like a charade–where real lace and good silks and real jewelry are used, because the actors are private persons and wealthy, but it is acting all the same and not only so but the make-up has less pretence of correct keeping than at Drury Lane. His opinions too are not original, often not independent even, and they sink into vulgarity: not only ‘Locksley Hall’ but Maud is an ungentlemanly row and ‘Aylmer’s Field’ is an ungentlemanly row and The Princess is an ungentlemanly row. To be sure this gives him vogue, popularity, but not that sort of ascendancy Goethe had or even Burns, scoundrel as the first was, not to say the second; but then they spoke out the real human rakishness of their hearts and everybody recognised the really beating, though rascal, vein. And in his rhetorical pieces he is at his worst, as the ‘Lord of Burleigh’ and ‘Lady Clara Vere de Vere’ (downright haberdasher). But for all this he is a glorious poet and all he does is chryselephantine.

         In December, there was a production of The Falcon.

1880

      THOMAS HARDY, poet and novelist, as recorded in Florence E. Hardy’s The Early Years of Thomas Hardy: ‘When I arrived Mrs. Tennyson was lying as if in a coffin, but she got up to welcome me’. Hardy often said that he was surprised to find such an expression of humour in the Poet-Laureate’s face, the corners of his mouth twitching with that mood when he talked; ‘it was a genial human face, which all his portraits belied’; and it was enhanced by a beard and hair straggling like briars, a shirt with a large loose collar, and old steel spectacles.

      LORD ACTON, historical and religious thinker (June 1880): The Tennysons came and went, I am sorry to say, prematurely. Even I was tamed at last. There was a shell to crack, but I got at the kernel, chiefly at night, when everybody was in bed. His want of reality, his habit of walking on the clouds, the airiness of his metaphysics, the indefiniteness of his knowledge, his neglect of transitions, the looseness of his political reasonings–all this made up an alarming cheval de frise.
           But then there was a gladness–not quickness–in taking a joke or story, a comic impatience of the external criticism of Taine and others found here, coupled with a simple dignity when reading ill-natured attacks, a grave groping for religious certainty, and a generosity in the treatment of rivals–of Browning and Swinburne, though not of Taylor–that helped me through.

         In December, Tennyson published Ballads and Other Poems.

1881

         In July, there was Henry Irving’s production of The Cup, with Ellen Terry and Irving.

1882

         In November, there was a production of The Promise of May, Tennyson’s only published work in prose.

1883

      QUEEN VICTORIA (August 1883): After luncheon saw the great Poet Tennyson in dearest Albert’s room for nearly an hour;–and most interesting it was. He is grown very old–his eyesight much impaired and he is very shaky on his legs. But he was very kind. Asked him to sit down. He talked of the many friends he had lost and what it would be if he did not feel and know that there was another World, where there would be no partings; and then he spoke with horror of the unbelievers and philosophers who would make you believe there was no other world, no Immortality–who tried to explain all away in a miserable manner. We agreed that were such a thing possible, God, who is Love, would be far more cruel than any human being. He quoted some well-known lines from Goethe whom he so much admires. Spoke of the poor Lily of Hanover so kindly–asked after my grandchildren. He spoke of Ireland with abhorrence and the wickedness in ill using poor Animals. ‘I am afraid I think the world is darkened, I daresay it will brighten again.’
           I told him what a comfort In Memoriam had again been to me which pleased him; but he said I could not believe the number of shameful letters of abuse he had received about it. Incredible! When I took leave of him, I thanked him for his kindness and said I needed it, for I had gone through so much–and he said you are so alone on that ‘terrible height, it is Terrible. I’ve only a year or two to live but I’ll be happy to do anything for you I can. Send for me whenever you like.’ I thanked him warmly.

         In September, he visited Denmark with Gladstone.

         In December, he accepted the offer of a barony, taking his seat in the House of Lords in March 1884.

      TENNYSON to Queen Victoria: This public mark of your Majesty’s esteem which recognizes in my person the power of literature in this age of the world, cannot however fail to be gratifying to my nearest and dearest.

1884

         In February, he published his plays The Cup and The Falcon.

         In June, his son Hallam married Audrey Boyle.

      WILLIAM ALLINGHAM (July 1884): I said the whole passage had an air of spontaneousness, of naivety, and this to me was the last perfection of poetry.
           T.–‘The last perfection is the wild and wonderful–

        Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam,
             Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.’

           W.A.–‘Coleridge was a great poet.–Well, he was an endless talker, but not a bothering one; ’twas like a fountain running, you went away from it when you pleased. He did not care about convincing or converting or convicting you.’
           T.–‘Ruskin’s dictum is not to be relied on.’
           W.A.–‘Especially on poetry. He printed a volume of poems of his own; but that (he wrote to me once) is “the disgrace of whatever faculty I possess.”–Recently he has republished his Oxford Prize Poem on the “Caves of Elephanta“–entirely worthless.’
           When on the upper road, looking over the gate where you see the Valewood ponds below, we still spoke of poetry.
           ‘One believes in a poet’, I said, ‘whose lines are perpetually coming into one’s mind. Yours do with me.’
           T.–‘Repeat a line.’
           W.A.–‘Dozens, if you like.’
           T.–‘I was praising one of Rogers’s poems to him once and he said, “Repeat a passage–ha, you can’t,” and I couldn’t at the moment.’
           W.A.–‘Well, that is barley, not wheat, but here’s a line it brings to my mind–

          And waves of shadow went over the wheat.

           ‘After the thunder-storm the other day, as many a time before, I repeated to myself–

        Sweet after showers, ambrosial air,
          That rollest from the gorgeous gloom
          Of evening–’

      T. interrupted me and, as he spoke, stood still and faced me (a custom of his)–
           ‘You can’t say it so sweetly as I can!’ and repeated the whole stanza, and on, to ‘the round of space.’
           I always rejoice to hear him recite.
           ‘It all goes together,’ said he.
           ‘Yes’ said I, ‘especially when you sit down to the organ. You won’t listen to me and so I hurry.’
           As we turned down Pack Horse Lane, T. spoke of Eternal Punishment as an obsolete belief.
           I said, ‘At Witley Station hangs on the wall a large book of Bible Texts, one page for each day of the month. Today I read–“All the dead shall arise, the righteous to eternal life, the wicked to everlasting damnation.”’
           T.–‘It’s not a right translation.’
           W.A.–‘But it’s the authoritative teaching of the Church.’
           T.–‘Have you read Farrar’s book?’
           W.A.–‘I never read such books.’
           T.–‘Oh, but here he proves from original sources that no such doctrine existed in the early days of Christianity.’
           I told T. that Bishop Wilberforce was very proud of having saved the Athanasian Creed when the Archbishop of Canterbury was for giving it up, which interested him.
           ‘Did he? My father (I think it was his father) would never read the Athanasian Creed.’
           As we entered the back wicket and went along the shady little walk to the house T. said, ‘You’re not orthodox, and I can’t call myself orthodox. Two things however I have always been firmly convinced of–God,–and that death will not end my existence.’
           W.A.–‘So I believe.’
           T. (stopping and turning round)–‘Do you hold these?’
           W.A.–‘I do.’
           He was going up for his usual sleep, and asked me not to go till he came down again about half-past three. So I sat and read in the middle parlour. Then went up and found him just after wakening. He came out, unloosed the dogs again, and walked with me along the road till we met Mrs. Hodgson coming to call. T. asked me to turn back, but I took leave and walked off to Witley, glad to have seen so much of the dear man, and sad not to see more.

         In December, Tennyson published his play Becket.

1885

1886

         In April, his son Lionel died, aged thirty-two, returning from India.

         In December, Tennyson published Locksley Hall Sixty Years After, which included The Promise of May.

1887

      WALT WHITMAN, American poet (January 1887): Let me assume to pass verdict, or perhaps momentary judgment, for the United States on this poet–a removed and distant position giving some advantages over a nigh one. What is Tennyson’s service to his race, times, and especially to America? First, I should say, his personal character. He is not to be mentioned as a rugged, evolutionary, aboriginal force–but (and a great lesson is in it) he has been consistent throughout with the native, personal, healthy, patriotic spinal element and promptings of himself. His moral line is local and conventional, but it is vital and genuine. He reflects the upper-crust of his time, its pale cast of thought–even its ennui. Then the simile of my friend John Burroughs is entirely true, ‘his glove is a glove of silk, but the hand is a hand of iron’. He shows how one can be a royal laureate, quite elegant and ‘aristocratic’, and a little queer and affected, and at the same time perfectly manly and natural. As to his non-democracy, it fits him well, and I like him the better for it. I guess we all like to have (I am sure I do) some one who presents those sides of a thought, or possibility, different from our own–different, and yet with a sort of home-likeness–a tartness and contradiction offsetting the theory as we view it, and construed from tastes and proclivities not at all our own.
           To me, Tennyson shows more than any poet I know (perhaps has been a warning to me) how much there is in finest verbalism. There is such a latent charm in mere words, cunning collocutions, and in the voice ringing them, which he has caught and brought out, beyond all others–as in the line,

          And hollow, hollow, hollow, all delight,

      in ‘The Passing of Arthur’, and evidenced in ‘The Lady of Shalott’, ‘The Deserted House’, and many other pieces. Among the best (I often linger over them again and again) are ‘Lucretius’, ‘The Lotos-Eaters’, and ‘The Northern Farmer’. His mannerism is great, but it is a noble and welcome mannerism. His very best work, to me, is contained in the books of The Idylls of the King, all of them, and all that has grown out of them. Though indeed we could spare nothing of Tennyson, however small or however peculiar–not ‘Break, Break’, nor ‘Flower in the Crannied Wall’ nor the old, eternally-told passion of ‘Edward Gray’:

          Love may come and love may go,
               And fly like a bird from tree to tree
          But I will love no more, no more
               Till Ellen Adair come back to me.

           Yes, Alfred Tennyson’s is a superb character, and will help give illustriousness, through the long roll of time, to our Nineteenth Century. In its bunch of orbic names, shining like a constellation of stars, his will be one of the brightest. His very faults, doubts, swervings, doublings upon himself, have been typical of our age. We are like the voyagers of a ship, casting off for new seas, distant shores. We would still dwell in the old suffocating and dead haunts, remembering and magnifying their pleasant experiences only, and more than once impelled to jump ashore before it is too late, and stay where our fathers stayed, and live as they lived.

1888

         Tennyson suffered a severe rheumatic illness, from which he did not recover till May 1889.

      R. H. HUTTON, journalist and man of letters (1888), on Break, Break, Break: Observe how the wash of the sea on the cold gray stones is used to prepare the mind for the feeling of helplessness with which the deeper emotions break against the hard and rigid element of human speech; how the picture is then widened out till you see the bay with children laughing on its shore, and the sailor-boy singing on its surface, and the stately ships passing on in the offing to their unseen haven, all with the view of helping us to feel the contrast between the satisfied and the unsatisfied yearnings of the human heart. Tennyson, like every true poet, has the strongest feeling of the spiritual and almost mystic character of the associations attaching to the distant sail which takes the ship on its lonely journey to an invisible port, and has more than once used it to lift the mind into the attitude of hope or trust. But then the song returns again to the helpless breaking of the sea at the foot of crags it cannot climb, not this time to express the inadequacy of human speech to express human yearnings, but the defeat of those very yearnings themselves. Thus does Lord Tennyson turn an ordinary sea-shore landscape into a means of finding a voice indescribably sweet for the dumb spirit of human loss.

1889

1892
         In March, there was a production of The Foresters in New York.

         In April, Tennyson published The Foresters. Irving at last agreed to produce Becket (acted February 1893).

      JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS (August 1892): He told me he was going to write a poem on Bruno, and asked me what I thought about his attitude toward Christianity. I tried to express my views, and Hallam got up and showed me that they were reading up the chapter of my Renaissance in Italy on Bruno. Tennyson observed that the great thing in Bruno was his perception of an Infinite Universe, filled with solar systems like our own, and all penetrated with the Soul of God. ‘That conception must react destructively on Christianity–I mean its creed and dogma–its morality will always remain’. Somebody had told him that astronomers could count 550 million solar systems. He observed that there was no reason why each should not have planets peopled with living and intelligent beings. ‘Then’, he added, ‘see what becomes of the second person of the Deity, and the sacrifice of a God for fallen man upon this little earth!’

         In September, Tennyson was taken ill.

         On 6 October 1892, he died at Aldworth.

      QUEEN VICTORIA (6 October 1892): A fine morning–I heard that dear old Ld Tennyson had breathed his last, a great national loss. He was a great poet, and his ideas were ever grand, noble, elevating. He was very loyal and always very kind and sympathising to me, quite remarkably so. What beautiful lines he wrote to me for my darling Albert, and for my children and Eddy. He died with his hand on his Shakespeare, and the moon shining full into the window, and over him. A worthy end to such a remarkable man.

         On 28 October, there was posthumously published The Death of Œnone, Akbar’s Dream, and Other Poems.

      W. B. YEATS, Irish poet, reviewing The Death of Œnone: As years passed over him the poet grew not less and the man grew incomparably greater, and this growth was accompanied ever by a shedding off of hopes based upon mere mechanical change and mere scientific or political inventiveness, until at the last his soul came near to standing, as the soul of the poet should, naked under the heavens.

      BENJAMIN JOWETT, Master of Balliol College, Oxford, Notes on Characteristics of Tennyson:
           Absolute truthfulness, absolutely himself, never played tricks.
           Never got himself puffed in the newspapers.
           A friend of liberty and truth.
           Extraordinary vitality.
           Great common sense and a strong will.
           The instinct of common sense at the bottom of all he did.
           Not a man of the world (in the ordinary sense) but a man who had the greatest insight into the world, and often in a word or a sentence would flash a light.
           Intensely needed sympathy.A great and deep strength.
           He mastered circumstances, but he was also partly mastered by them, e.g., the old calamity of the disinheritance of his father and his treatment by rogues in the days of his youth.
           Very fair towards other poets, including those who were not popular, such as Crabbe.
           He had the high-bred manners not only of a gentleman but of a great man.
           He would have wished that, like Shakespeare, his life might be unknown to posterity.
           In the commonest conversation he showed himself a man of genius. He had abundance of fire, never talked poorly, never for effect. As Socrates described Plato, “Like no one whom I ever knew before.”
           The three subjects of which he most often spoke were “God,” “Free-Will,” and “Immortality,” yet always seeming to find an (apparent) contradiction between the “imperfect world,” and “the perfect attributes of God.”
           Great charm of his ordinary conversation, sitting by a very ordinary person and telling stories with the most high-bred courtesy, endless stories, not too high or too low for ordinary conversation.
           The persons and incidents of his childhood very vivid to him, and the Lincolnshire dialect and the ways of life.
           Loved telling a good story, which he did admirably, and also hearing one.
           He told very accurately, almost in the same words, his old stories, though, having a powerful memory, he was impatient of a friend who told him a twice-repeated tale.
           His jests were very amusing.
           At good things he would sit laughing away–laughter often interrupted by fits of sadness.
           His absolute sincerity, or habit of saying all things to all kinds of persons.
       


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