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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.
I love things that yearn toward far seas: the singing Tennysonian brooks that flow by "Philip's farm" but "go on forever"; the little Ik Walton rivers, where one may "study to be quiet and go a-fishing"! The Babylonian streams by which we have all pined in captivity; the sentimental Danube's which we can never forget because of "that night in June"; and at a very early age I had already developed a decent respect for the verbose manner in which the "waters come down at Lodore."
Nay, there is never a passage of manner but a great passage of style rebukes our dislike and recalls our heart again. The dramas, less than the lyrics, and even less than the "Idylls," are matter for the true Tennysonian.
After the prose writers prance the versifiers, and Sir Edward Arnold is first in the motley procession. Sir Edward Arnold's Light of Asia was a fairly good piece of work. He had caught the trick of Tennysonian blank-verse, and he put some of the best features of Buddhism before the English public in a manner that commanded attention.
A crowd of suitors would sigh around her, like the loves and graces round that fair Belinda whose story she had read so often; and it would be her part to choose the most worthy. The days are gone when a girl would so much as look at such a fribble as Sir Plume. Her virgin fancy demands the Tennysonian ideal, the grave and knightly Arthur.
"The varied earth, the moving heaven, The rapid waste of roving sea, The fountain-pregnant mountains riven To shapes of wildest anarchy, By secret fire and midnight storms That wander round their windy cones." These lines are already Tennysonian. There is the classical transcript, "the varied earth," daedala tellus. There is the geological interest in the forces that shape the hills.
Masefield from The Everlasting Mercy and The Widow in the Bye Street, it would have been safe to prophesy in advance that his own Enoch would not show the self-restraint practised by the Tennysonian hero. Reserve and restraint were the trump cards of the Typical Victorian, just as the annihilation of all reserve is a characteristic of the twentieth-century artist.
He expected to find him a poet signed and stamped, and found him only a booming bard. Not only was Tennyson not Tennysonian: he was not quite real. His conversation came as a shock to his guest: He struck me as neither knowing nor communicating knowledge.
It is very unlikely that you will escape as did Narcissus, for though, indeed, 'He swept a fine majestic sweep Of toga Tennysonian, Wore strange soft hat, that such as you Would tremble to be known in, nevertheless, he somehow won happier fates, on which, perhaps, it would be unbecoming in so close a friend to dilate.
These are difficult things to do either in poetry or prose, and people with easy, flowing Addisonian or Tennysonian styles cannot do them. I seem to overhear a still, small voice asking, But are they worth doing? or at all events is it the province of art to do them? The question ought not to be asked. It is heretical, being contrary to the whole direction of the latter half of this century.
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