From a drawing by A. Garth Jones
IN MEMORIAM
“Man dies: nor is there hope in dust”
(Reproduced from the Caxton Series Edition of Tennyson’s “In Memoriam,” by kind permission of Messrs. George Newnes, Ltd.)
as representatives of their epoch in the tidiest sense. In some instances, such as Carlyle and Browning and Thackeray, the cause may be an exceptional originality verging upon eccentricity; in others, like George Eliot, it may be allegiance to some particular scheme of thought; in others, like Ruskin and Matthew Arnold, exclusive devotion to some particular mission. In Tennyson, and in him alone, we find the man who cannot be identified with any one of the many tendencies of the age, but has affinities with all. Ask for the composition which of all contemporary compositions bears the Victorian stamp most unmistakably, which tells us most respecting the age’s thoughts respecting itself, and there will be little hesitation in naming “Locksley Hall.”
