The thought and the words appealed to me from the first. Then, how I know not, we became familiar with part, at least, of “In Memoriam.” Its phrases caught our fancy, and some of our early attempts at versification were cast in the same metre. Then came the “Idylls of the King,” and I remember how, when the rest of the party went out one holiday afternoon, I stayed indoors and read the “Idylls” at one sitting. Thus in our youth Tennyson became poet and hero to us. Any one who had seen him or known him became for us invested with a kind of sacred and awful interest; my uncle who lived at Cheltenham grew greater in our eyes when we learned that he had corresponded with him.
Thus our hero-worship grew. We knew indeed that there were those who did not welcome the coming Poet with ardour; we lived, in fact, through the age of his disparagement to the time of his unchallenged supremacy. It will be interesting, I think, to many to read the following letter written by Rev. Frederick W. Robertson when he was experiencing the freer and fresher intellectual atmosphere of Oxford after the stifling oppressiveness of Cheltenham:
I had nearly forgotten to tell you that Tennyson is deeply admired here by all the brilliant men. Stanley, our first genius, rates him highly; Hannah, who has guided nearly all the first and double-first class men for the last three years to honours, told me he considers his poetical and psychological powers more varied than any poet he knows. And the “Dread,” a choice selection of the most brilliant among the rising men, have pronounced him to be the first poet of the day. So you see I have some to keep me company in my judgment. And at all events he is above ridicule.
Pray inform Miss D—— of all this. One of our first professors raves about him.
When I went up to Cambridge in 1860, Tennyson was the oracle poet among the younger men; but the feeling of doubt still remained among the older men. I recall a friendly dispute between the Senior and a Junior Fellow of my own College. The elder man charged Tennyson with being “misty”; the younger man defended: the elder man cited a passage from “In Memoriam,” and challenged the younger to say what it meant. The elder man was so far successful that he drove the younger man to declare that though he could not explain it then, he hoped to enter into its meaning later on. It was a typical conflict; the older generation could not understand; the younger was under the spell of the Poet, and though unable to interpret everything, believed in Tennyson’s message to his own age.
There were charges levelled against Tennyson more serious and more absurd than that of obscurity. The words Scepticism, Pantheism, and even Atheism were heard. One newspaper in a review of “In Memoriam” exclaimed: “Here the poet barely escapes Atheism and plunges into the abyss of Pantheism.” Another foolish writer, commenting on the lines:
But what am I?
An infant crying in the night,
An infant crying for the light,
And with no language but a cry,
remarked, with superb naïveté, “May we remind Mr. Tennyson that the darkness is past and that the true light now shineth?” I remember, as late as 1867 or 1868, an evening party at Blackheath when the question was started—“Who is the greatest living poet?” To my amazement and amusement a self-satisfied, but very good man, instantly and oracularly replied, “Bonar—without doubt—Bonar.” He meant that excellent and devout-minded man, the Rev. Horatius Bonar, the hymn-writer. These were, no doubt, extreme cases, but stupidity is always extreme. I recall these incidents because they are parts of the story which tells of the difficulties through which Tennyson fought the way to his throne. They serve to recall the prejudices which provoked the resentment and stimulated the attachment of those who, like myself, were brought early under the spell of his enchantment. His story repeated familiar features; he had at first a select circle of studious admirers; by degrees the general public became aware of the existence in their midst of a true poet. Then timid partisans awoke and demanded credentials of orthodoxy. Persons of this type did not like to be told that—
There lives more faith in honest doubt,
Believe me, than in half the creeds.
But meanwhile he had drawn the younger generation to his side: they believed in him, and they were right. In spite of misunderstanding and misinterpretation, Tennyson followed the gleam: he would not stoop to make his judgment blind or prevaricate for popularity’s sake. He beat his music out, and those who knew him, as I was privileged to do, during the later years of his life, could realize how truly he had made a larger faith his own.