Chapter 3 - Page 2

annoyed by even the mild applause
yielded in the Quarterly to the author of the Morte d'Arthur.

While preparing the volumes of 1842 at Boxley, Tennyson's life was
divided between London and the society of his brother-in-law, Mr
Edmund Lushington, the great Greek scholar and Professor of Greek at
Glasgow University. There was in Mr Lushington's personal aspect,
and noble simplicity of manner and character, something that strongly
resembled Tennyson himself. Among their common friends were Lord
Houghton (Monckton Milnes), Mr Lear of the Book of Nonsense ("with
such a pencil, such a pen"), Mr Venables (who at school modified the
profile of Thackeray), and Lord Kelvin. In town Tennyson met his
friends at The Cock, which he rendered classic; among them were
Thackeray, Forster, Maclise, and Dickens. The times were stirring:
social agitation, and "Carol philosophy" in Dickens, with growls from
Carlyle, marked the period. There was also a kind of optimism in the
air, a prophetic optimism, not yet fulfilled.

"Fly, happy happy sails, and bear the Press!"

That mission no longer strikes us as exquisitely felicitous. "The
mission of the Cross," and of the missionaries, means international
complications; and "the markets of the Golden Year" are precisely the
most fruitful causes of wars and rumours of wars:-

"Sea and air are dark
With great contrivances of Power."

Tennyson's was not an unmitigated optimism, and had no special
confidence in

"The herd, wild hearts and feeble wings
That every sophister can lime."

His political poetry, in fact, was very unlike the socialist chants
of Mr William Morris, or Songs before Sunrise. He had nothing to say
about

"The blood on the hands of the King,
And the lie on the lips of the Priest."

The hands of Presidents have not always been unstained; nor are
statements of a mythical nature confined to the lips of the clergy.
The poet was anxious that freedom should "broaden down," but
"slowly," not with indelicate haste. Persons who are more in a hurry
will never care for the political poems, and it is certain that
Tennyson did not feel sympathetically inclined towards the Iberian
patriot who said that his darling desire was "to cut the throats of
all the cures," like some Covenanters of old. "Mais vous connaissez
mon coeur"--"and a pretty black one it is," thought young Tennyson.
So cautious in youth, during his Pyrenean tour with Hallam in 1830,
Tennyson could not become a convinced revolutionary later. We must
accept him with his limitations: nor must we confuse him with the
hero of his Locksley Hall, one of the most popular, and most
parodied, of the poems of 1842: full of beautiful images and
"confusions of a