Chapter 4 - Page 2

write, and wood-
carving by machinery was still deemed an enterprise at once
philanthropic and aesthetic. "My father's worldly goods were all
gone," says Lord Tennyson. The poet's health suffered extremely: he
tried a fashionable "cure" at Cheltenham, where he saw miracles of
healing, but underwent none. In September 1845 Peel was moved by
Lord Houghton to recommend the poet for a pension (200 pounds
annually). "I have done nothing slavish to get it: I never even
solicited for it either by myself or others." Like Dr Johnson, he
honourably accepted what was offered in honour. For some reason many
persons who write in the press are always maddened when such good
fortune, however small, however well merited, falls to a brother in
letters. They, of course, were "causelessly bitter." "Let them
rave!"

If few of the rewards of literary success arrived, the penalties at
once began, and only ceased with the poet's existence. "If you only
knew what a nuisance these volumes of verse are! Rascals send me
theirs per post from America, and I have more than once been knocked
up out of bed to pay three or four shillings for books of which I
can't get through one page, for of all books the most insipid reading
is second-rate verse."

Would that versifiers took the warning! Tennyson had not sent his
little firstlings to Coleridge and Wordsworth: they are only the
hopeless rhymers who bombard men of letters with their lyrics and
tragedies.

Mr Browning was a sufferer. To one young twitterer he replied in the
usual way. The bard wrote acknowledging the letter, but asking for a
definite criticism. "I do not think myself a Shakespeare or a
Milton, but I KNOW I am better than Mr Coventry Patmore or Mr Austin
Dobson." Mr Browning tried to procrastinate: he was already deeply
engaged with earlier arrivals of volumes of song. The poet was hurt,
not angry; he had expected other things from Mr Browning: HE ought
to know his duty to youth. At the intercession of a relation Mr
Browning now did his best, and the minstrel, satisfied at last,
repeated his conviction of his superiority to the authors of The
Angel in the House and Beau Brocade. Probably no man, not even Mr
Gladstone, ever suffered so much from minstrels as Tennyson. He did
not suffer them gladly.

In 1846 the Poems reached their fourth edition. Sir Edward Bulwer
Lytton (bitten by what fly who knows?) attacked Tennyson in The New
Timon, a forgotten satire. We do not understand the ways of that
generation. The cheap and spiteful genre of satire, its forged
morality, its sham indignation, its appeal to the ape-like passions,
has gone out. Lytton had suffered many things (not in verse) from
Jeames Yellowplush: I do not know that he hit back at