NOTES ON CHARACTERISTICS OF TENNYSON
By the late Master of Balliol (Professor Jowett)
Absolute truthfulness, absolutely himself, never played tricks.
Never got himself puffed in the newspapers.
A friend of liberty and truth.
Extraordinary vitality.
Great common sense and a strong will.
The instinct of common sense at the bottom of all he did.
Not a man of the world (in the ordinary sense) but a man who had the greatest insight into the world, and often in a word or a sentence would flash a light.
Intensely needed sympathy.
A great and deep strength.
He mastered circumstances, but he was also partly mastered by them, e.g. the old calamity of the disinheritance of his father and his treatment by rogues in the days of his youth.
Very fair towards other poets, including those who were not popular, such as Crabbe.
He had the high-bred manners not only of a gentleman but of a great man.
He would have wished that, like Shakespeare, his life might be unknown to posterity.
Conversation.
In the commonest conversation he showed himself a man of genius. He had abundance of fire, never talked poorly, never for effect. As Socrates described Plato, “Like no one whom I ever knew before.”
The three subjects of which he most often spoke were “God,” “Free-Will,” and “Immortality,” yet always seeming to find an (apparent) contradiction between the “imperfect world,” and “the perfect attributes of God.”
Great charm of his ordinary conversation, sitting by a very ordinary person and telling stories with the most high-bred courtesy, endless stories, not too high or too low for ordinary conversation.
The persons and incidents of his childhood very vivid to him, and the Lincolnshire dialect and the ways of life.
Loved telling a good story, which he did admirably, and also hearing one.
He told very accurately, almost in the same words, his old stories, though, having a powerful memory, he was impatient of a friend who told him a twice-repeated tale.
His jests were very amusing.
At good things he would sit laughing away—laughter often interrupted by fits of sadness.
His absolute sincerity, or habit of saying all things to all kinds of persons.
He ought always to have lived among gentlemen only.
Of his early friends (after Arthur Hallam) FitzGerald, Spedding, Sir John Simeon, Lushington—A. T. was enthusiastic about them.
Spedding very gifted and single-minded. He spent his life in defending the character of Bacon.