Chapter 4

--1842-848--THE PRINCESS.

The Poems, and such criticisms as those of Spedding and Sterling,
gave Tennyson his place. All the world of letters heard of him.
Dean Bradley tells us how he took Oxford by storm in the days of the
undergraduateship of Clough and Matthew Arnold. Probably both of
these young writers did not share the undergraduate enthusiasm. Mr
Arnold, we know, did not reckon Tennyson un esprit puissant. Like
Wordsworth (who thought Tennyson "decidedly the first of our living
poets, . . . he has expressed in the strongest terms his gratitude to
my writings"), Arnold was no fervent admirer of his contemporaries.
Besides, if Tennyson's work is "a criticism of Life," the moral
criticism, so far, was hidden in flowers, like the sword of
Aristogiton at the feast. But, on the whole, Tennyson had won the
young men who cared for poetry, though Sir Robert Peel had never
heard of him: and to win the young, as Theocritus desired to do, is
more than half the battle. On September 8, 1842, the poet was able
to tell Mr Lushington that "500 of my books are sold; according to
Moxon's brother, I have made a sensation." The sales were not like
those of Childe Harold or Marmion; but for some twenty years new
poetry had not sold at all. Novels had come in about 1814, and few
wanted or bought recent verse. But Carlyle was converted. He spoke
no more of a spoiled guardsman. "If you knew what my relation has
been to the thing called 'English Poetry' for many years back, you
would think such a fact" (his pleasure in the book) "surprising."
Carlyle had been living (as Mrs Carlyle too well knew) in Oliver
Cromwell, a hero who probably took no delight in Lycidas or Comus, in
Lovelace or Carew. "I would give all my poetry to have made one song
like that," said Tennyson of Lovelace's Althea. But Noll would have
disregarded them all alike, and Carlyle was full of the spirit of the
Protector. To conquer him was indeed a victory for Tennyson; while
Dickens, not a reading man, expressed his "earnest and sincere
homage."

But Tennyson was not successful in the modern way. Nobody
"interviewed" him. His photograph, of course, with disquisitions on
his pipes and slippers, did not adorn the literary press. His
literary income was not magnified by penny-a-liners. He did not
become a lion; he never would roar and shake his mane in drawing-
rooms. Lockhart held that Society was the most agreeable form of the
stage: the dresses and actresses incomparably the prettiest. But
Tennyson liked Society no better than did General Gordon. He had
friends enough, and no desire for new acquaintances. Indeed, his
fortune was shattered at this time by a strange investment in wood-
carving by machinery. Ruskin had only just begun to