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There was an odour of print and leather in the room which told me that it was full of books, and I stretched out my hand instinctively to find them. My fingers lighted upon a beautiful volume of Tennyson's poems, and when Miss Sullivan told me what it was I began to recite: Break, break, break On thy cold gray stones, O sea! But I stopped suddenly. I felt tears on my hand.
And there are perhaps few more important questions before us to-day than this whether Tennyson's prophecy is to be fulfilled, whether the individual is to be allowed to "wither," and the world to become more and more. There are those who hold that such a consummation is devoutly to be wished; there are those who regard any movement making in such a direction with something more than suspicion.
His remarkable self-discipline in excising the fantastic and superfluous, and reducing his work to its classical perfection of thought and form, is nowhere more remarkable than in this magnificent vision. Tennyson's lines are a close parallel: "His memory long will live alone In all our hearts, as mournful light That broods above the fallen sun, And dwells in heaven half the night."
I repeated to myself lines from Tennyson's poem before the glowing scenes of the Holy Grail. Before the "Prophets" in the gallery above I was mute, but echoes of the Hebrew Psalms I had long forgotten throbbed somewhere in the depths of my consciousness. The Chavannes series around the main staircase I did not enjoy for years.
Certainly the blank verse of Wordsworth's "Michael" is far different in its musical values from the blank verse, say, of Tennyson's Princess perhaps truly as different as the metre of Sigurd the Volsung is from that of The Rape of the Lock.
Irons, a neighbour of theirs, was a good Latin scholar; it was arranged that I should study under him. I remember him as a man of rare, sweet nature and of wide experience. He taught me Latin grammar principally; but he often helped me in arithmetic, which I found as troublesome as it was uninteresting. Mr. Irons also read with me Tennyson's "In Memoriam."
It is in vain that her censor replies that he only blamed her bonnet-strings or attacked the color of her shoe-tie. Woman's answer is that he has attacked woman. This folly, that absurdity, are in woman's mind herself, and their assailant is her own personal antagonist. "Love me all in all or not at all" is a woman's song, not in Mr. Tennyson's Idyl only, but all the world over.
"I see her sons the hill of glory mount, And sell their sugars on their own account; Prone to her feet the prostrate nations come, Sue for her rice and barter for her rum." Tennyson's work was not much more serious: he merely patched up an old piece, in blank verse, on the battle of Armageddon. The poem is not destitute of Tennysonian cadence, and ends, not inappropriately, with "All was night."
Wha calls this mingling o' skim milk an' treacle the wine o' the soul a poet ought to pour? 'Scott and Byron! cried Paul, amazed out of all reverence. 'Why, there's more poetry in Tennyson's little finger than in both their bodies. 'Hoots, man! hauld your silly tongue, cried his father. 'Have you read "In Memoriam"? cried Paul. 'No, returned Armstrong curtly, 'I have not.
But this is almost a boyish idea, this idea that the true poet is the slave of the passions, and that the poet who dominates them has none, and is but a staid domestic animal, an ass browsing the common, as somebody has written about Wordsworth. Certainly Tennyson's was no "passionless perfection." He, like others, was tempted to beat with ineffectual wings against the inscrutable nature of life.
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