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The head master, Dr. Holden, was a very fine scholar; and it is no wonder that Groome throughout his life showed a considerable knowledge of and interest in classical literature. That he had a real insight into the structure of Latin verse is seen by a rendering of Tennyson’s ‘Tithonus,’ which Mr. Maiden has been so very good as to show me—a rendering for which he got a prize.
Tennyson’s blank verse seems at its best to combine the beauties of the Miltonic and the Wordsworthian line; while nothing is so rare in his work as a Shakespearean line. Now and then such a line as Authority forgets a dying king turns up, but very rarely. We agree with all Professor Jebb says in praise of Tennyson’s blank verse.
The wisdom of what Goethe says about the enormous importance of “subject” in poetic art is illustrated by the story of Tennyson and the ‘Idylls of the King.’ For what was there in the ‘Idylls of the King’ that brought all England to Tennyson’s feet—made English people re-read with a new seeing in their eyes the poems which they once thought merely beautiful, but now thought half divine?
We dwell upon this weakness of Tennyson’s—a weakness which, in view of his immense powers, was certainly a source of wonder to his friends—in order to show, once for all, that without the tender care of his son he could never in his later years have done the work he did.
It is needless to comment on the value of these few words and the light they shed upon Tennyson’s method.
It might almost be said, indeed, that had it not been for the ministrations, first of his beloved wife, and then of his sons, Tennyson’s life would have been one long warfare between the attitude of his splendid intellect towards the universe and the response of his nervous system to human criticism.
These two books, coming out, as far as we remember, in the very week of Tennyson’s funeral, did the good service of filling up the gap of five years until the appearance of this authorized biography by his son. Otherwise there is no knowing what pseudo-biographies stuffed with what errors and nonsense might have flooded the market and vexed the souls of Tennysonian students.
His way of work was always to illustrate a story of Hellenic myth by symbols and analogies drawn not from the more complex economies of a later world, as was Tennyson’s way, but from that wide knowledge of the phenomena of nature which can be attained only by a poet whose knowledge is that of the naturalist.
It is immediately after a national mourning for the loss of a great man that a wave of reaction generally sets in. But the eagerness with which these volumes have been awaited shows that Tennyson’s hold upon the British public is as strong at this moment as it was on the day of his death.
Ever since then Tennyson’s hold upon the British public seemed to grow stronger and stronger up to the day of his death, when Great Britain, and, indeed, the entire English-speaking race, went into mourning for him; nor, as we have said, has any weakening of that hold been perceptible during the five years that have elapsed since.
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