Charles Lamb was so paralyzed, it is said, by Coleridge’s death, that for weeks after that event, he was heard murmuring often to himself, “Coleridge is dead, Coleridge is dead.” In such a mental condition at this moment is an entire country, I think. “Tennyson is dead! Tennyson is dead!” It will be some time before England’s loss can really be expressed by any words so powerful in pathos and in sorrow as these. And if this is so with regard to English people generally, what of those few who knew the man, and knowing him, must needs love him—must needs love him above all others?—those, I mean, who, when speaking of him, used to talk not so much about the poetry as about the man who wrote it—those who now are saying, with a tremor of the voice, and a moistening of the eye:—
There was none like him—none.
To say wherein lies the secret of the charm of anything that lives is mostly difficult. Especially
is it so with regard to a man of poetic genius. All are agreed, for instance, that D. G. Rossetti possessed an immense charm. So he did, indeed. But who has been able to define that charm? I, too, knew Rossetti well, and loved him well. Sometimes, indeed, the egotism of a sorrowing memory makes me think that outside his own most affectionate and noble-tempered family, including that old friend in art at whose feet he sat as a boy, no man loved Rossetti so deeply and so lastingly as I did; unless, perhaps, it was the poor blind poet, Philip Marston, who, being so deeply stricken, needed to love and to be loved more sorely than I, to whom Fate has been kind. And yet I should find it difficult to say wherein lay the charm of Rossetti’s chameleon-like personality. So with other men and women I could name. This is not so in regard to the great man now lying dead at Aldworth. Nothing is easier than to define the charm of Tennyson.
It lay in a great veracity of soul—in a simple-mindedness so childlike that, unless you had known him to be the undoubted author of his exquisitely artistic poems, you would have supposed that even the subtleties of poetic art must be foreign to a nature so devoid of all subtlety as his. “Homer,” you would have said, “might have been such a man as this, for Homer worked in a language which is Poetry’s very voice. But Tennyson works in a language
which has to be moulded into harmony by a myriad subtleties of art. How can this great inspired child, who yet has the simple wisdom of Bragi, the poetry-smith of the Northern Olympus, be the delicate-fingered artist of ‘The Princess,’ ‘The Palace of Art,’ ‘The Day-Dream,’ and ‘The Dream of Fair Women’?”
As deeply as some men feel that language was given to men to disguise their thoughts did Tennyson feel that language was given to him to declare his thoughts without disguise. He knew of but one justification for the thing he said, viz., that it was the thing he thought. Arrière pensée was with him impossible. But, it may be asked, when a man carries out-speaking to such a pass as this, is he not apt to become a somewhat troublesome and discordant thread in the complex web of modern society? No doubt any other man than Tennyson would have been so. But the honest ring in the voice—which, by-the-by, was strengthened and deepened by the old-fashioned Lincolnshire accent—softened and, to a great degree, neutralized the effect of the bluntness. Moreover, behind this uncompromising directness was apparent a noble and a splendid courtesy; for, above all things, Tennyson was a great and forthright English gentleman. As he stood at the porch at Aldworth, meeting a guest or bidding him good-bye—as he stood there, tall, far beyond the height of average men, his naturally
fair skin showing dark and tanned by the sun and wind—as he stood there no one could mistake him for anything but a great gentleman, who was also much more. Up to the last a man of extraordinary presence, he showed, I think, the beauty of old age to a degree rarely seen.
A friend of his who, visiting him on his birthday, discovered him thus standing at the door to welcome him, has described his unique appearance in words which are literally accurate at least:—