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He was led away by bad examples. Of all Jingoes Shakespeare is the most unashamed, and next to him are Drayton, Scott, and Wordsworth, with his "Oh, for one hour of that Dundee!" In the years which followed the untoward affair of Waterloo young Tennyson fell much under the influence of Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and the other offenders, and these are extenuating circumstances.
Talking it over, we agreed that Blake was no good because he learnt Italian at 60 in order to study Dante, and we knew Dante was no good because he was so fond of Virgil, and Virgil was no good because Tennyson ran him, and as for Tennyson well, Tennyson goes without saying. My Father and Shakespeare My father is one of the few men I know who say they do not like Shakespeare.
Before this monument are the graves of the two most famous poets of our generation, the Laureate Tennyson and Robert Browning, side by side. Above them is the beautiful bust of another Poet Laureate, Dryden, and the less artistic portrait bust of the American poet Longfellow. The walls of the Poets' Corner are literally covered with memorials of men of letters.
If you go looking for "big" things you'll come away disappointed; but if like Tennyson and Bobby Burns and Wordsworth, "the flower in the crannied wall" has as much beauty for you as the ocean or a mountain, you'll come away touched with the mystery of that Southwestern Wonderland quite as much as if you had come out of all the riotous intoxication of color in the Painted Desert.
Tennyson has somewhere also used, with equal truth, the epithet 'climbing' of the spray of breakers against vertical rock.
Those who knew him only by sight would often stop him in the streets and ask the privilege of shaking hands with him; so different was he from let us say Tennyson, who was as great an Englishman in his way as Dickens, but who kept himself aloof and saw few strangers.
In the consciousness of the average householder miracles like these formed the pattern of his belief in the perfectibility of the human race. Tennyson, who was in philosophical matters a fairly normal person, tells us that when he went by the first train from Liverpool to Manchester he thought that the wheels ran in grooves. I, p. 195.
Poetry feels it less than other arts, because there is a poetry of doubt and Tennyson is its poet. Art is expression, and to have high expression you must have something high to express.
One may remark in this connection how the merely verbal felicities of Tennyson have lost our esteem. Who will now proclaim the Idylls of the King as a masterpiece? Of the thousands of lines written by him which please the ear, only those survive of which the matter is charged with emotion. No!
An address presented to him on his eighty-third birthday celebrated his eminence in this and other ways; it bore the signatures of six hundred and fifty of the most brilliant of his contemporaries, at their head being Tennyson and Browning. All this strenuous progress, however, was for Martineau dogged by a shadow of peculiar disappointment.
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