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With the appearance of his Paolo and Francesca in 1899, the poetic drama seemed phoenix-like to arise from its ashes. Tennyson and Browning had failed to write successful plays. In fact, since the death of Dryden, poetry and drama had seemed to be afraid to approach each other. Phillips effected at least a temporary union.
"Instead of the stuccoed houses in the West End, this is the place where I should like to live," Tennyson would say. During his early days he lodged in Norfolk Street close by, dining with his friends at the Cock and other taverns, but always having a preference for the room "high over roaring Temple-bar."
Nay, they went so far as to dress up a sailor to look like Tennyson, and the result was that, after their trick had been found out, the tourists would walk up to Tennyson and ask him, "Now, are you the real Tennyson?"
In the original, we hear how the elfin harper could No doubt there was. But while the new poetaster informs you of the abstract notion, the ancient poet gives you the concrete fact; as Mr. Tennyson has done with wonderful art in his exquisite "St. Agnes," where the saint's subjective mysticism appears only as embodied in objective pictures: Sir Walter Scott's ballads fail just on the same point.
Artist and man, Tennyson was invariably true to himself, or rather, in Wordsworth's phrase, he "moved altogether"; his nature and his poetry being harmonious aspects of the same soul; as botanists tell us that flower and fruit are but transformations of root and stem and leafage. We read how, in mediaeval days, conduits were made to flow with claret. But this was on great occasions only.
"Yes, Vaura, dear, Tennyson says truly, 'we men are a little breed." But a warmer light deepens in Vaura's eyes as a vision of a handsome face, wearing at times a weary look, flashes across her memory, and she thinks some men are worth loving, and are not of the "little breed." "What a bold-looking woman; I wonder who she is," said Lady Esmondet.
She played me one of Mendelssohn's songs, translated by Liszt, a beautiful piece, one of F.R.'s, and spoke more sensibly of music than any girl I have met. By-the-way, yesterday I bought the January number of the Democratic Review to read Mrs. Fanny Kemble Butler's review of Tennyson, when, to my great surprise, I found your "Haydn." O'Sullivan I have met a great deal, but made no acquaintance.
He dishes up Jesus Christ in it, and Pontius Pilate and Mary Magdalene and the Wise Men of the East, as freely as Tennyson dishes up Arthur and Launcelot and Guinevere and the rest of that famous company. His style, too, is Tennysonian, to a certain degree.
"The old order changeth, giving place to the new ... lest one good custom should corrupt the world" you will read in the Tennyson I gave you last Christmas. Let's hope it won't be when I return: "Change and Decay in all around I see" ... as the rather dismal hymn has it. Sometimes change is a good thing.
He was her only boy, and she would have chosen for him the profession of his father and grandfather. Clara and I graduated in our white dresses and blue ribbons, like other girls, and came home to mother, crochet-work, and Tennyson. And then something happened, as the veriest little things which, unnoticed and uncomprehended, hold the destinies of lives in their control will happen.
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