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For the future such pseudo-biographies will be impossible. Notwithstanding the apparently fortunate circumstances by which Tennyson was surrounded, the record of his early life produces in the reader’s mind a sense of unhappiness. Happiness is an affair of temperament, not of outward circumstances. Happy, in the sense of enjoying the present as Wordsworth enjoyed it, Tennyson could never be.
This is not only elegant, but affectionate, beyond almost any other phrase except the foregoing. It is, in a sense, somewhat different from that in which the philosophical poet has used it, a beautiful comment upon the sentiment of "the child's the father of the man," uttered by the great, we might almost say, the glorious, Wordsworth.
Goethe and Schiller were in the prime of early manhood; Kant and Klopstock elderly, but with years yet to live; Scott was just laying down his poet's pen and preparing to take up the immortal quill with which he wrote his first "Waverley;" Moore was singing his sweet melodies; Wordsworth had yet to lay the foundations of the "Lake Poetry;" and the fair boy, Byron, was chanting his early songs, not yet for many a year to die at Missolonghi.
Middleton was inclined to think him, however, an old man, one of those itinerants, such as Wordsworth represented in the "Excursion," who smooth themselves by the attrition of the world and gain a knowledge equivalent to or better than that of books from the actual intellect of man awake and active around them.
Poe and Wordsworth and Scott he liked, but Tennyson was his favorite. Such happiness could not last. One afternoon when Virginia was sitting in the summer house alone, her thoughts wandering back, as they sometimes did, to another afternoon she had spent there, it seemed so long ago, when she saw Mammy Easter coming toward her. "Honey, dey's comp'ny up to de house. Mister Hopper's done arrived.
Scott does this still better than Wordsworth, and a very second-rate landscape does it more effectually than any poet. What made Wordsworth's poems a medicine for my state of mind, was that they expressed, not mere outward beauty, but states of feeling, and of thought coloured by feeling, under the excitement of beauty. They seemed to be the very culture of the feelings, which I was in quest of.
Moreover, to say that Nelson and Napoleon won victories because they were great men is to invert the order of nature and of truth. They are recognised as great men because of the mastery of their business which they manifested in action. That mastery was due primarily to knowledge. Wordsworth hit the mark when, in answer to the question "Who is the Happy Warrior?" he replied that it was he
The unknown singers of the Vedic hymns, Homer, Sophocles, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe, Wordsworth, and in our days, Tennyson and Browning in them all the religious sense, the instinct of communion with the unseen world, is a distinguishing mark and characteristic.
But Wordsworth to-day is reverenced by the nation that could barb no arrow sharp enough to shoot at him. The evening sky that bends above Warsaw is red with the watch-fires of her old warfare bursting anew from their smouldering ashes. And the oaks that doughty Paine fancied himself to have levelled show not so much as a scratch upon their sturdy trunks.
How perfect is that vignette of Raveloe "a village where many of the old echoes lingered, undrowned by new voices" with its "strange lingering echoes of the old demon-worship among the grey-haired peasantry"! The entire picture of the village and its village life a hundred years ago, is finished with the musical and reserved note of poetry, such as we are taught to love in Wordsworth and Tennyson.