The hostile manner in which ‘Maud’ was received vexed him, and would, before his marriage, have deeply disturbed him. A right view of this fine poem seems to have been taken by George Brimley, an admirable critic, who in the ‘Cambridge Essays,’ had already pointed out with great acumen many of the more subtle beauties of Tennyson.
There are few more pleasant pages in this book than those which record Tennyson’s relations with another poet who was blessed in his wife—Browning. Although the two poets had previously met (notably in Paris in 1851), the intimacy between them would seem to have been cemented, if not begun, during one of Tennyson’s visits to his and Browning’s friends, Mr. and Mrs. Knowles at the Hollies, Clapham Common. Here Tennyson read to Browning the ‘Grail’ (which the latter pronounced to be Tennyson’s “best and highest”); and here Browning came and read his own new poem ‘The Ring and the Book,’ when Tennyson’s verdict on it was, “Full of strange vigour and
remarkable in many ways, doubtful if it will ever be popular.”
The record of his long intimacy with Coventry Patmore and Aubrey de Vere takes an important place in the biography, and the reminiscences of Tennyson by the latter poet form an interesting feature of the volumes. In George Meredith’s first little book Tennyson was delighted by the ‘Love in a Valley,’ and he had a full appreciation of the great novelist all round. With the three leading poets of a younger generation, Rossetti, William Morris, and Swinburne, he had slight acquaintance. Here, however, is an interesting memorandum by Tennyson recording his first meeting with Swinburne:
“I may tell you, however, that young Swinburne called here the other day with a college friend of his, and we asked him to dinner, and I thought him a very modest and intelligent young fellow. Moreover I read him what you vindicated [‘Maud’], but what I particularly admired in him was that he did not press upon me any verses of his own.”
Of contemporary novels he seems to have been a voracious and indiscriminate reader. In the long list here given of novelists whose books he read—good, bad, and indifferent—it is curious not to find the name of Mrs. Humphry Ward. With Thackeray he was intimate; and he was in cordial relations with Dickens, Douglas Jerrold, and George Eliot. Among
the poets, besides Edward Fitzgerald and Coventry Patmore, he saw much of William Allingham. Though he admired parts of ‘Festus’ greatly, we do not gather from these volumes that he met the author. Dobell he saw much of at Malvern in 1846. The letter-diary from Tennyson during his stay in Cornwall with Holman Hunt, Val. Prinsep, Woolner, and Palgrave, shows how exhilarated he could be by wind and sea. The death of Lionel was a sad blow to him. ‘Demeter, and other Poems,’ was dedicated to Lord Dufferin, “as a tribute,” says his son, “of affection and of gratitude; for words would fail me to tell the unremitting kindness shown by himself and Lady Dufferin to my brother Lionel during his fatal illness.”
Tennyson’s critical insight could not fail to be good when exercised upon poetry. Here are one or two of his sayings about Burns, which show in what spirit he would have read Henley’s recent utterances about that poet:—
“Burns did for the old songs of Scotland almost what Shakespeare had done for the English drama that preceded him.”
“Read the exquisite songs of Burns. In shape each of them has the perfection of the berry, in light the radiance of the dew-drop: you forget for its sake those stupid things his serious poems.”