Part 3 (2/2)
It appears that at last the poet had ”beat his h his friends ”still tried to cheer hirief was fresh could not be suspected of declining into a hypochondriac ”If I mean to make my mark at all, it must be by shortness,” he said at this time; ”for the s, except King Arthur, had been done” The age had not la tete epique: Poe had announced the paradox that there is no such thing as a long poe with Arthur, Tennyson followed the exa, not an epic, but epic idylls Long poeinally composed, or of leisure and few books At present epics are read for duty's sake, not for the only valid reason, ”for human pleasure,” in FitzGerald's phrase
Between 1838 and 1840 Tennysonfroement with Miss Sellwood seemed to be adjourned sine die, as they were forbidden to correspond
By 1841 Tennyson was living at Mablethorpe on the Lincolnshi+re coast; working at his volued by FitzGerald and Ah E of a poet; but early in 1842 he had not yet received the MS Perhaps E, ”said more in your praise than in any one's except Cromwell, and an American backwoodsman who has killed thirty or forty people with a bowie-knife” Carlyle at this time was much attached to Lockhart, editor of the Quarterly Review, and it may have been Carlyle who converted Lockhart to admiration of his old victim Carlyle had very little more appreciation of Keats than had Byron, or (in early days) Lockhart, and it was probably as uards poetry,” and the unaffected companion over a pipe, as the poet, that attracted him in Tennyson As hen the two triu to reviehatever book he pleased ( may seem lukewar in the Edinburgh But Sterling, and Lockhart too, were obliged to ”gang warily” Lockhart had, to his constant annoyance, ”a partner, Mr Croker,” and I have heard from the late Dean Boyle that Mr Croker was much annoyed by even the mild applause yielded in the Quarterly to the author of the Morte d'Arthur
While preparing the volumes of 1842 at Boxley, Tennyson's life was divided between London and the society of his brother-in-law, Mr Edreat Greek scholar and Professor of Greek at Glasgow University There was in Mr Lushi+ngton's personal aspect, and noble sily rese their cohton (Monckton Milnes), Mr Lear of the Book of Nonsense (”with such a pencil, such a pen”), Mr Venables (who at school modified the profile of Thackeray), and Lord Kelvin In town Tennyson met his friends at The cock, which he rendered classic; a them were Thackeray, Forster, Maclise, and dickens The tiitation, and ”Carol philosophy” in dickens, with growls from Carlyle, marked the period There was also a kind of optimism in the air, a prophetic optimism, not yet fulfilled
”Fly, happy happy sails, and bear the Press!”
That er strikes us as exquisitely felicitous ”The mission of the Cross,” and of the missionaries, means international complications; and ”the markets of the Golden Year” are precisely the most fruitful causes of wars and rureat contrivances of Power”
Tennyson's was not an unated optimism, and had no special confidence in
”The herd, wild hearts and feeble wings That every sophister can lime”
His political poetry, in fact, was very unlike the socialist chants of Mr Willia to say about
”The blood on the hands of the King, And the lie on the lips of the Priest”
The hands of Presidents have not always been unstained; nor are statey
The poet was anxious that freedom should ”broaden down,” but ”slowly,” not with indelicate haste Persons who are more in a hurry will never care for the political poems, and it is certain that Tennyson did not feel sympathetically inclined towards the Iberian patriot who said that his darling desire was ”to cut the throats of all the cures,” like some Covenanters of old ”Mais vous connaissezTennyson
So cautious in youth, during his Pyrenean tour with Hallam in 1830, Tennyson could not become a convinced revolutionary later We must accept him with his limitations: nor must we confuse him with the hero of his Locksley Hall, one of the most popular, and es and ”confusions of a wasted youth,” a youth draraphical
In so s as the volumes of 1842, perhaps none is more splendid, perfect, and perdurable than the Morte d'Arthur It had been written seven years earlier, and pronounced by the poet ”not bad” Tennyson was never, perhaps, a very deep Arthurian student A little cheap copy of Malory was his coone deeply into the French and German ”literature of the subject” Malory's colish sources, with the Mabinogion of Lady Charlotte Guest, sufficed for him as materials The whole poem, enshrined in the memory of all lovers of verse, is richly studded, as the hilt of Excalibur, with classical ilian echo, but the absolute voice of old roht have been chanted by
”The lonely ht it, sitting in the deeps, Upon the hidden bases of the hills”
Perhaps the most exquisite adaptation of all are the lines from the Odyssey -
”Where falls not hail nor rain, nor any snow”
”Softly through the flutes of the Grecians” cah Lucretius, then through Tennyson's own Lucretius, then in Mr Swinburne's Atalanta in Calydon:-