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At some play, I think it was "The Promise of May," by Tennyson, produced at the Globe, in which atheists were condemned, he had got up in his box and denounced the play, proclaiming himself an atheist. I wanted to know the Englishman who could be so contemptuous of convention. Had he acted out of aristocratic insolence, or was he by any possibility high-minded?
I dare say I could not have been made to understand at this time that Tennyson was not so nearly the first interest of life with other people as he was with me; I must often have suspected it, but I was helpless against the wish to make them feel him as important to their prosperity and well-being as he was to mine.
In the "Passing of Arthur" Tennyson has kept mainly to the original, though he omits Arthur's command to Sir Bedevere to pray for his soul. The king, overcome by his enemies, receives his deadly wound, and sails away in the barge, with the three queens, to the island valley of Avilion. But, according to Malory, Sir Bedevere finds him on the morrow, lying dead in a little chapel on a rock:
They imagined him no great things of a poet, to be sure, but his pensive face claimed delicate feeling for him, and a graceful, sombre fancy, and they conjectured unconsciously caught flavors of Tennyson and Browning in his verse, with a moderner tint from Morris: for was it not a story out of mythology, with gods and heroes of the nineteenth century, that he was now carrying back from New York with him?
Tennyson has chosen OEnone as the subject of a short poem; but he has omitted the concluding part of the story, the return of Paris wounded, her cruelty and subsequent repentance. "Hither came at noon Mournful OENONE, wandering forlorn Of Paris, once her playmate on the hills. Her cheek had lost the rose, and round her neck Floated her hair, or seemed to float in rest.
Hughes mean by his "Christ-like purity"? Is there a reference here to the twelfth verse of the nineteenth chapter of Matthew? Purity, if properly understood, is undoubtedly a virtue. Mr. Hughes forgets, however, that his eulogy on Tennyson in this respect is a slur upon the Bible.
Suspicion and hatred will no more cower and mutter over the cottage hearth, or round the beer-house fire: the lord of the mansion will no longer be like the man in Tennyson slumbering while a lion is always creeping nearer. Lord Malmesbury is astonished at this disturbance.
While yet in sectarianism I got the impression that the devil had to be stirred before a good revival could be held. Acting on this principle, I prayed that the Lord would stir the devil in the series of meetings my brother and I were then beginning at the Tennyson schoolhouse. My prayer was answered.
With Tennyson I end my book, because my design was not to give you a history of our literature as it is now, so much as to show you how it grew to be what it is. In the beginning of this book I took the Arthur story as a pattern or type of how a story grew, showing how it passed through many stages, in each stage gaining something of beauty and of breadth.
Tennyson, though an eminent Grecian, is not related to the person you spoke of." We parted at the foot of Silver Street, with the expectation of meeting before night. Helen sent me word not to fail, as she had sent for Mr. Somers, and that Mrs. Bancroft was already preparing tea. Alice drove down there with me, to call on Mrs. Bancroft.
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