With this apology I come to some among the dicta current in my time. I think it was the first night I happened to use the word “knowledge,” pronouncing it as I had been brought up to do with the ō long, whereupon he complimented me.[51] “You say ‘knōwledge,’” and explained that “knŏwledge” to rhyme with “college” was the only permissible exception. I felt pleased with my domestic training. Then he went on to denounce a solecism, the use of “like” with a verb, “like he did,” instead of “as he did,” and humorously he begged me to correct any one guilty of such barbarism, a pledge I undertook, and acted up to, correcting speakers right and left till it came to the superior clergy, bishops, and so forth, in the pulpit; then I desisted....
But to proceed. Apropos of Voltaire saying that to listen to English people talking was to overhear the hissing of serpents, he commented, “and to listen to German was to overhear k’s like the scrunching of egg-shells.” He had two or three pithy sayings, which came straight home to me and became part of my mental furniture, so much so that I have at times given myself the credit of innovating them. One of these was that the defect of most people—not critics only, but others, la foule in general—is “to impute themselves.” I felt this to be at the root of the matter, a profound if humorous extension of the wise man’s saw, πάντων μέτρον ἄνθρωπος. He said it often and most seriously. The other I might call the “elogium vatis” par excellence. It took the form of a caution against “mixing up things that differ,” and to this also among his sententiae I assented quod latius patet. I think I once used it incidentally to him, and he at once pulled me up. “That’s mine.” He certainly did so when I asked him his own riddle: “My first’s a kind of butter, my second’s a kind of liquor, and my whole’s a kind of charger.” Answer: “Ramrod.” And he exclaimed, “That’s my riddle.”[52] Then there is the old story how the Englishman, wishing to direct the garçon not to let the fire go out, gently growled, “Ne permettez pas sortir le fou,” whereupon the garçon locks up the other Englishman. I think it was brought up by Frank Lushington as now told against the Poet, and Tennyson gave us the correct version; originally he had invented it himself of Edmund Lushington when they were in Paris, chaffing his friend’s French. But it was a case of biter bit. In the vulgar version I find the Poet with his long hair is made to play the part of the fou. Thus far these trifles. I come to memorabilia more precious to me and of larger import. I will head the section
Tennyson and the Classics, English and Other,
and it is what you asked for. And let me make two preliminary remarks. In reference to the defect of self-imputation above mentioned, I wish to point out to any, consciously or unconsciously, critically minded person, that the striking thing to me was the wide sympathy, the catholicity of the Poet’s mind, his width of view. Thus he—I will not use the word “displayed,” as if it were an external habit of any sort—but simply and naturally he had ingrained in him the greatest generosity in his feeling for, in his criticism of, contemporary authors. And this applies to his appreciation of the great classical authors of the past. I do not say, of course, that he had not his favourites, as we all have, especially, perhaps, the smaller we are. For instance—and here other of his contemporaries, Clough, Jowett, etc., would have borne him out—his appreciation of Δ’s favourite poet Shelley was not so spontaneous nor, I venture to think, so profound as, let us say, his appreciation of Wordsworth (whom he also “criticized”[53]) or Victor Hugo, or, to take an opposite instance, his ready appreciation of Walt Whitman, or of Browning, or possibly of Clough. But all this is admirably discussed in your Memoir.[54] I only wish to add my testimony, and I take as my text a saying of his about Goethe, which I seem to recollect if I recollect rightly: “In his smaller poems, e.g. those in Wilhelm Meister, Goethe shows himself to be one of the great artists of the world. He is also a great critic, yet he always said the best he could of an author. Good critics are rarer than good authors” (cp. his own “And the critic’s rarer still”).[55]
And I must further premise that the samples given of quotations from the Classics are from the particular ones he chanced upon—the artist in him, perhaps, instinctively selecting—for the particular youth, and what he needed, or because they fitted on to things on which his mind was working at that date. Here, at all events, they are, or some of them. I omit continual references to Shakespeare, to Dante, to Virgil, to Homer. He was perpetually quoting Homer and Virgil, and to my mind there was nothing for grandeur of sound like his pronunciation of Latin and Greek as he recited whole passages or single lines in illustration of some point, of metre, perhaps, or thought, or feeling; for instance, the line from Homer:
βῆ δ᾽ ἀκέων παρὰ θῖνα πολυφλοίσβοιο θαλάσσης,
commenting on the possibility of pronouncing οι not in our English fashion like oy in boy, but like the German ö—o of “wood”—phlösböo—imitating the lisping whisper of the tideless Mediterranean on a soft summer day. Then how he rolled out his Virgil, giving first the thunder, then the wash of the sea in these lines:
Fluctus ut in medio coepit quum albescere ponto
Longius, ex altoque sinum trahit; utque volutus
Ad terras immane sonat per saxa, neque ipso
Monte minor procumbit; at ima exaestuat unda
Verticibus, nigramque alte subiectat arenam.
He used to say, “The Horatian alcaic is, perhaps, the stateliest metre except the Virgilian hexameter at its best.”
I take my samples in chance order. I suppose I knew my Catullus fairly well before, but I am sure that, in a deeper sense, I learnt to know “the tenderest of Roman poets” for the first time that day when he read to me in that voice of his, with half-sad Heiterkeit, and with that refinement of pronunciation which seemed—I am sure was—the right thing absolutely, those well-known poems about his lady-love’s pet sparrow (translated roughly here in case a reader should chance not to know Latin):