There was a pause before Dorothy said,—
“I suppose so; and yet was there ever anything funnier than his description of the battle in heaven?”
“Funny? Majestic, you mean?” said I, deeply shocked.
“Well, majestically funny, if you wish. The idea of those 'ethereal virtues' throwing big stones at one another, and knowing all the time that it didn't matter whether they were hit or not—the gashes closed like the gashes we loved making with our spades in the stranded jelly-fish at low tide. But I suppose you will tell me that Milton must have his joke with the rest of them. Oh, I wonder if all poetry is not a fraud.”
That is how Tennyson did for himself by not knowing where to stop. I expect that what really happened was that when he had written:—
“So past the strong, heroic soul away,”
he found that there was still room for a couple of lines on the page and he could not bear to see the space wasted.
And it was not wasted either; for I remember talking to the late Dr. John Todhunter, himself a most accomplished poet and a scholarly critic, about the “costlier funeral” lines, and he defended them warmly.
And the satisfying of Dr. Todhunter must be regarded as counting for a good deal more in the balance against my poor Dorothy's disapproval.
Lest this chapter should appear aggressively digressive in a book that may be fancied to have some-thing to do with gardens, I may say that while Alfred, Lord Tennyson had a great love for observing the peculiarities of flower and plant growths, he must have cared precious little for the garden as the solace of one's declining years. He did not pant for it as the hart pants for the water-brooks. He never came to think of the hours spent out of a garden as wasted. He did not live in his garden, nor did he live for it. That is what amazes us in these days, nearly as much as the stories of the feats of Mr. Gladstone with the axe of the woodcutter. Not many of us would have the heart to stand by while a magnificent oak or sycamore is being cut down. We would shrink from such an incident as we should from an execution. But forty years ago the masses were ready to worship the executioner. They used to be admitted in crowds to Hawarden to watch the heroic old gentleman in his shirt-sleeves and with his braces hanging down, butchering a venerable elm in his park, and when the trunk crashed to the ground they cheered vociferously, and when he wiped the perspiration from his brow, they rushed forward to dip their handkerchiefs in the drops just as men and women tried to damp their handkerchiefs in the drippings of the axe of the headsman, who, in a stroke, slew a monarch and made a martyr, outside the Banqueting House in Whitehall.