Along the letters of thy name
And o’er the numbers of thy years.
It is the ghastly morbidness of this that at first arrests the reader’s attention, and a closer examination does not by any means impress him; for surely to describe a moonbeam as a “flame,” moonlight in fact, in appearance, and in the long history of poetic thought being notoriously cold and the very negation of heat, is a lapse from the rightness of things more characteristic of a poetaster seeking at any cost a rhyme to “name” than the mark of a great poet.
It has long been the fashion among those who shout with the biggest crowd to point scornfully at the critic who, discussing “In Memoriam” soon after it was published, wrote: “These touching lines evidently come from the full heart of the widow of a military man.” This has been termed “inept.” Now, if we turn to the dictionaries, we shall find the commonly received definition of that word to be “unfitting.” But was it, indeed, unfitting? The opinion of that critic did not actually fit the facts; but the morbid tone of the poem, and the singularly feminine ring of such phrases as “The man I held as half-divine,” “my Arthur,” and the like, seem to many a reader to be a perfect justification of the aptness of the critic’s views; and remind us that none other than Bulwer Lytton once referred to Tennyson as “school-miss Alfred.”
My Arthur, whom I shall not see
Till all my widowed race be run;
Dear as the mother to the son,
More than my brothers are to me.
There is the critic’s ample defence. To a healthily constituted mind, that verse is more than ordinarily revolting.
The humble little hilltop church of St. Andrew, anciently a fisherman’s chapel, has many modern rivals in suburbanised Clevedon; but in it is centred all the ecclesiastical interest of the place. It is chiefly a Transitional-Norman building, with aisleless nave and chancel, north and south transepts, and central tower of Perpendicular date, but plain to severity. The pointed Transitional arch is the finest and most elaborate part of the building and is richly moulded. Hagioscopes command views from either transept into the chancel. Near the chancel arch is a curious miniature recumbent effigy, two feet six inches in length, in the costume of the sixteenth century, representing a woman, of which no particulars are known. It is thought to be that of a dwarf. The Hallam and Elton monumental tablets are on the walls of the south transept; of plain white marble, with characteristically bald monumental-mason’s lettering; the very ne plus ultra of the commonplace and matter-of-fact, and very trying indeed to hero-worshipping pilgrims. For ornament and display of mosaic and gilding the visitor should turn to the reredos, recently placed in the chancel. Whether he will delight in it, after the severity of the tablets, is a matter for individual prejudices; but he surely will not feel delighted by being approached by a caretaker with pencil and notebook and a request for a gift towards the restoration fund—which doubtless includes the cost of this theatrical reredos. It has come to this: that the Tennysonian association has been made the excuse and stalking-horse for badgering the visitor for sixpences. The wise visitor, whether he approves of elaborate restoration or not, will leave those who called the tune to pay the piper, and will further leave to the Elton family of Clevedon Court, who draw an excellent revenue from their property here, the duty and the pleasure of footing the bills that may yet be unsatisfied.