loud laughter and piercing wail, and all that may lie between speech and speculation free and plenteous. I do not meet in these late decades such company over a pipe! We shall see what he will grow to. He is often unwell; very chaotic-his way is through Chaos and the Bottomless and Pathless; not handy for making out many miles upon.
Carlyle does not even notice that Tennyson was tall and well-made, but he saw distinctly the want of brains in him or he would hardly have emphasized that 'chaotic' or shown contempt for his speculative activities. A great part of Tennyson's popularity was undoubtedly due to his Victorian religious belief, for he was an aristocrat by nature and would never even issue a cheap edition of his works. To mention him with Shakespeare, the supremest intellect England has produced, seems to me a crime of lese majeste: he wasn't even a thinker, but a sentimentalist.
I saw Tennyson twice: first in a house in London where he sat enthroned like a god and surrounded by worshipers, male and female. In spite of the incense of unmeasured praise, he said nothing of any value, but I caught a phrase or two that may be worth recording. Speaking of morality, he said, 'Moral good is the crown of life. But what value is it,' he added, 'without immortality? If I knew my life was coming to an end in an hour, should I give anything to a starving beggar? Not a penny, if I didn't believe myself immortal… At the same time, I can't believe in Hell; endless punishment seems stupid to me.'
The whole talk appeared to me simply brainless, but he was remarkably handsome, and at the request of his hostess he chanted several stanzas of Maude in a fine deep voice that brought out all the music of the verse. But I really formed no definite opinion of him till John Addington Symonds took me with him to Haslemere in this year, 1892. Tennyson then talked of Symonds' Renaissance in Italy, which he had been reading with his son Hallam, and the two had a long discussion about Bruno, in the course of which Tennyson declared that Huxley's belief that we were descended from apes had nothing in it to shock him. 'It may be God's way of creation,' he said.
But soon he got upon Gladstone, whom he recognized as an evil influence. I could not understand why, till he came upon Irish Home Rule, when he asserted that the Irish were more incapable of self-government than any other people in the world. 'Really,' I interjected, 'perhaps better than niggers!' He turned sharply on me: 'Niggers are hardly higher in the scale than animals, indeed I prefer dogs-very much.'
There was nothing more to be said; all the while I felt I was listening to mere temper, not to intellect, much less genius, which is the intelligence of the heart. Half a dozen men in this last decade of the nineteenth century were his superiors in mind: Matthew Arnold, Browning, Russel Wallace, and Huxley in England, and of course Lord Kelvin; and in France, Hugo, Renan, Flaubert and Taine were altogether on a higher level. Yet he was apotheosized even in his life and before he reached maturity. His semi-religious sentimentality and his narrow jingoism were the sources of his astounding popularity in England.
'It is understood,' wrote one well-informed critic about him, 'that he believed he wrote many of the best and truest things he ever published under the direct influence of higher intelligences, of whose presence he was directly conscious.' Writing on March 7th, 1874, to a gentleman who had communicated to him some strange experience which he had had under anaesthetics, Tennyson said, 'I have never had any revelations through anaesthetics, but a kind of waking trance (this for lack of a better name) I have frequently had, quite up from boyhood, when I have been all alone. This has often come upon me through repeating of my own name to myself silently till, all at once, as it were, out of the intensity of the consciousness of individuality, the individuality itself seemed to dissolve and fade away into boundless being, and this not a confused state, but the clearest of the clearest, the surest of the surest, utterly beyond words, where death was an almost laughable impossibility, the loss of personality (if so it were) seeming no extinction, but the only true life.'
As if conscious of the significance of the statement thus detailed, he adds:
'I am ashamed of my feeble description. Have I not said the state is utterly beyond words?'
The poet repeating his own name in order to pass from the consciousness of individuality into 'boundless being, the only true life' is surely calculated to make one smile. Yet this letter is a prose explanation by the poet of one of the mysterious passages of In Memorlam.
So word by word, and line by line,
The dead man touch'd me from the past,
And all at once it seem'd at last
The living soul was flashed on mine.
And mine in this was wound and whirl'd
About empyreal heights of thought,
And came on that which is and caught
The deep pulsations of the world.
Aeolian music measuring out
The steps of Time-the shocks of Chance-
The blows of Death. At length my trance Was cancell'd, stricken thro' with doubt.
Vague words! but ah! how hard to frame
Or ev'n for intellect to reach
In matter-moulded forms of speech
Thro' memory that which I became.
There are many allusions in the Idylls of the King and elsewhere in his work to these same visions of the night or of the day, but all confirming the belief in his own immortality, which he sets forth finally in superb verse: … And he, shall he, Man, her last work, who seem'd so fair, Such splendid purpose in his eyes, Who roll'd the psalm to wintry skies, Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer, Who lov'd, who suffer'd countless ills, Who battled for the True, the Just, Be blown about the desert dust, Or seal'd within the iron hills?
Curiously enough, Hugo, as we learn from his Journal de l'Exile, was even more superstitious than Tennyson: he believed in table-turning and rappings, and in a spirit he called 'The White Lady,' who made her presence known in the most trivial ways. This superstition seems to belong to the time. In mature manhood, Hugo declares that he never lies down 'without a certain terror,' and 'When I awake in the night, I awake with a shudder! I hear rapping spirits in my room'; and the 'White Lady' he calls 'an accursed horror.' Yet he writes of all this much more reasonably than Tennyson: he says, 'The world is still in its infancy: we require ruts and religions; it is doubtful if the average human being has arrived at even a moderate degree of reason: man still has need of written revelation'; and then we get the true reason of his superstition. 'All great men have had revelations-all superior minds.
Socrates had his familiar genius. Zoroaster, too, and Shakespeare saw phantoms'; and, as if to atone for this nonsense, he adds finely: 'In this century I am the first who has spoken not only of the souls of animals, but also of the soul of things. All my life I have constantly said when I saw a tree branch broken or a leaf torn off-'Leave that branch or leaf. Do not disturb the harmony of nature!' '
Another interesting fact about Hugo is that he always refused to publish as his own the poetry he believed was dictated to him by some table-rapping spirit. Here are two verses which Moliere is supposed to have dictated to him, though I think them curiously characteristic of Hugo himself:
Quand Moliere te dit: Femme, prends tes aiguilles, Fiere pensee, apprends que je te fais honneur, Toute main qui recoud, dans l'ombre, des guenilles Erode le manteau du Seigneur.
Ton autre fonction, pensee, est la science, Pour elle, rien n'est vil et rien n'est importun, L'homme materiel est le vase; elle est 1'anse, La poesie est le parfum.
The great social movement in favor of the poor and disinherited, which is the glory of the nineteenth century, never touched Tennyson; in this, as indeed in every domain of thought, he was far inferior to Victor Hugo, though in the Frenchman, too, the gift of musical speech could not mask the poverty of new ideas and lack of creative power.
When we think of Victor Hugo's constant appeals to reason and justice in all international disputes, and contrast them with Tennyson's wild ravings against Russia or France or Ireland, we are almost compelled to admit that the French habit of mind is higher than the English.
Anecdotes of Victor Hugo are legion, and some of them are very interesting.
During the worst days of the siege of Paris, the poet gave away a great deal of money, making use of Madame Paul Meurice-who did not long survive that terrible time-as his almoner. She told him one day of a poor woman without clothes, food or fuel, whom she thought very deserving. Victor Hugo gave her a hundred francs, which were gratefully accepted. Two days afterwards, Madame Meurice found the woman in the same state of
