Tennyson and his friends

by Unknown

Again to the same correspondent early in 1880 he says:

By far the chief incident in my life for the last month has been the reading of dear old Spedding’s Paper on the Merchant of Venice, there, at any rate, is one Question settled, and in such a beautiful way as only he commands. I could not help writing a few lines to tell him what I thought, but even very sincere praise is not the way to conciliate him. About Christmas I wrote him, relying on it that I should be most likely to secure an answer if I expressed dissent from some other work of his, and my expectation was justified by one of the fullest answers he had written to me for many a day and year.

The paper referred to was “The Story of the Merchant of Venice” in the Cornhill Magazine for March 1880. In sending a copy to Frederick Tennyson he says:

I now post you a paper by old Spedding—a very beautiful one, I think; settling one point, however unimportant, and in a graceful, as well as logical, way such as he is Master of.

A case has been got up—whether by Irving, the Stage Representative of Shylock, or by his Admirers—to prove the Jew to be a very amiable and ill-used man: insomuch that one is to come away from the theatre loving him and hating all the rest. He dresses himself up to look like the Saviour, Mrs. Kemble says. So old Jem disposes of that, besides unravelling Shakespeare’s mechanism of the Novel he draws from, in a manner (as Jem says) more distinct to us than in his treatment of any other of his Plays “not professedly historical.” And this latter point is, of course, far more interesting than the question of Irving and Co.,—which is a simple attempt, both of Actor and Writer, to strike out an original idea in the teeth of common-sense and Tradition.

And now came the end, unexpected and the result of an accident, which he maintained was entirely his own fault. In writing to tell me of the fatal result, one of his dearest friends said:

I grieve to tell you that all is over with our dear old friend.... He intended to cross before two carriages—crossed before one—found there was not time to pass before the other, and instead of pausing stepped back under the hansom which he had not seen, and which had not time to alter its course. He spent more strength in exculpating the poor driver than on any personal matter during his illness as soon as he regained memory of the circumstances.

“Mowbray Donne,” says FitzGerald, when all was over, “wrote me that Laurence had been there four or five days ago, when Spedding said, that had the Cab done but a little more, it would have been a good Quietus. Socrates to the last.”

And in another letter:

Tennyson called at the Hospital, but was not allowed to see him, though Hallam did, I think. Some one calling afterwards, Spedding took the doctor’s arm, and asked, “Was it Mr. Tennyson?” Doctors and nurses all devoted to the patient man.