We who succeeded Stedman by some years loved all the beauty of Tennyson while we were not especially struck by those mediæval lay figures which he labelled "King Arthur" and "Sir Galahad" and "Sir Percival." They were too much like what the English people at that time insisted that the Prince Consort was. Even Sir Lancelot would have profited in our eyes by a touch of the fire of Milton's "Lucifer." But the lyricism of Tennyson, the music of Tennyson, is as real now as it was then. It is the desire for "independence," the fear of following a conventionality, a fear that calls itself audacity, which brushes away the delicate and scientific of this exquisite poet simply because he does not represent a Movement. And
yet all these new movements are very old movements. The result of the education given me by books was to convince me that the man of culture proclaims himself third-rate if he looks on any literary expression as really new and if he cannot enjoy the old, when the old is of all time. The beautiful and the real can never be old or new because they are the same through the movement of time. To explain what I mean, let me come suddenly down to date and permit me to quote from Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch's "On the Art of Reading." He is writing of the Bible, which is never old:
I daresay, after all, that the best way is not to bother a boy too early and overmuch with history; that the best way is to let him ramp at first through the Scriptures even as he might through "The Arabian Nights": to let him take the books as they come, merely indicating, for instance, that Job is a great poem, the Psalms great lyrics, the story of Ruth a lovely idyll, the Song of Songs the perfection of an Eastern love-poem. Well, and what then? He will certainly get less of "The Cotter's Saturday Night" into it, and certainly more of the truth of the East. There he will feel the whole splendid barbaric story for himself: the flocks of Abraham and Laban; the trek of Jacob's sons to Egypt for corn; the figures of Rebekah at the well, Ruth at the gleaning, and Rizpah beneath the gibbet; Sisera bowing in weariness; Saul—great Saul—by the tent-prop with the jewels in his turban:
"All its lordly male-sapphires, and rubies courageous at heart."
Or consider—to choose one or two pictures out of the tremendous procession—consider Michal, Saul's royal daughter: how first she is given in marriage to David to be a snare for him; how, loving him, she saves his life, letting him down from the window and dressing up an image on the bed in his place; how, later, she is handed over to another husband Phaltiel, how David demands her back, and she goes:
"And her husband (Phaltiel) went with her along weeping behind her to Bahurim. Then said Abner unto him, Go, return. And he returned."
Or, still later, how the revulsion takes her, Saul's daughter as she sees David capering home before the ark, and how her affection had done with this emotional man of the ruddy countenance, so prone to weep in his bed:
"And as the ark of the Lord came into the city of David, Michal, Saul's daughter"—
Mark the three words—