I asked if he knew the "Day's Estival," by our Scottish poet Alexander Hume, and quoted a stanza from it on the effect of sunrise: For joy the birds with boulden throats In woods and gardens green. He said he preferred Lord Surrey's way of putting it The Sun, when he hath spread his rays, And shew'd his face ten thousand ways; Ten thousand things do then begin, To shew the life that they are in. We talked much of the sonnet. He thought the best in the language were Milton's, Shakespeare's, and Wordsworth's; after these three those by his own brother Charles. He said, "I at least like my brother's next to those by 'the three immortals.'" "The sonnet arrests the free sweep of genius, and if poets were to keep to it, it would cripple them; but it is a fascinating kind of verse, and to excel in it is a rare distinction." I ventured to refer He spoke of the diseased craving to have all the trifles of a man of genius preserved, and of the positive crime of publishing what a poet had himself deliberately suppressed. If all the contents of a poet's waste-basket were taken out and printed, and issued in a volume, one result would be that the things which he had disowned would be read by many to whom the great things he had written would be unknown. He said that he himself had suffered in that way. I told him of a poem which Wordsworth wrote when he lived at Alfoxden-an unworthy record of a revolting crime-which he had the good sense never to publish. I had not seen the original, but only a copy, which I threw in the fire as soon as I had read it. Tennyson was greatly pleased, and said, "It was the kindest thing you could have done." He then spoke of the folly of fancying that all that a poet says in his verses must have some local meaning, or a personal reference. "There are some curious creatures who go about fishing for the to the metrical and structural necessity people, and searching for the places, that its last line should form the climax,-both of thought and of expression,-in a sonnet; and that the whole should be like a wave breaking on the shore. He said, "Not only so; the whole should show a continuous advance of thought and of movement, like a river fed by rillets; as every great poem, and all essays and treatises, should." Going back to Milton, he said that he had caught the spirit of his blank verse from Virgil, the long sonorous roll, of which he is such a master. He quoted two passages from each in illustration. He had no great liking, he said, for arranging the poets in a hierarchy. He found so much that surpassed him in different ways in all the great ones; but he thought that Homer, Eschylus, Sophocles, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe,-these seven,-were the greatest of the great, up to the year 1800. They are not all equal in rank; and, even in the work of that heptarchy of genius, there were trivial things to be found. which they fancy must have given rise to our poems. They don't understand, or believe, that we have any imagination of our own, to create the people or the places. Of course we often describe, but we generally let that be known easily enough." He quoted in this connection The seven elms, the poplars four That stand beside my father's door. These things are returned to us by the "great artist memory," but when critics and commentators search for subterranean meanings they generally lose themselves in fancies. We then went on-I do not remember what the link of connection was-to talk of spiritualism, and the Psychical Society, in which he was much interested, and also of the problems of theism. He spoke of the great realm of the unknown which surrounds us as being also known, and having intelligence at the heart of it; and he told more stories than one of spirit manifestations as authentic emanations re from the unknown, and as proof that out of darkness light could reach us. Just at this stage of our talk Mrs. Hallam Tennyson, Mrs. Douglas Freshfield, and her daughter came up the garden-walk to the summer-house. Miss Freshfield wore a hat on which was an artificial flower, a lilac branch. It at once caught Tennyson's eye. There was a lilac tree in bloom close at hand, and he said, "What is that you are wearing? It's a flowery lie, it's a speaking mendacity." He asked how she could wear such a thing in the month of May! We rose from the bower, and all went down the gardenwalk to see the fig-tree at the foot of it, and sundry other things at the western entrance-door, where Miss Kate Greenaway was painting. We turned along a twisting alley under the rich green foliage of elms and ilexes. He spoke much of the ilex, a tree which he greatly admired. We heard both the cuckoo and the nightingale. "Rosy plumelets" were on the larch. He said the finest larches he had ever seen were at Inveraray. "What grand trees you have in Scotland! It's nonsense to complain, as some do, of the want of them. Doctor Johnson was either very unfortunate, or very inaccurate, or incorrectly reported by Boswell on this point." I spoke of the vast destruction of our pine forests, of noble birches and other trees, in our great gales. He lamented it, for, he said, "Your Scotch fir is a magnificent tree, next to the oak in stateliness, and how glorious the color!" He said he bewailed the loss of all old things,-old trees, old historic places, the old creatures of the forest, and of the air. "Aren't your eagles getting scarce? and I hear that even the kingfisher is less common that it was." I replied that both eagle and kingfisher were becoming almost extinct. Walking up the lane outside the grounds at the back of Farringford, he pointed out the view beyond Freshwater to the east, where, as he says in a well-known poem,— The hoary channel Tumbles a breaker on chalk and sand. This led him to speak of prehistoric things, and of the wonders which geology had brought to light. He referred to the period of the Weald, when there was a mighty estuary, like that of the Ganges, where we then stood; and when gigantic lizards, the iguanodon, etc., were the chief of living things. As we afterwards walked to and fro on the lawn under the shade of the cedars, sheltered by the "groves of pine" (to which he refers in his poem addressed to Maurice), he told me without the slightest touch of vanitythat, when he was between thirteen and fourteen years of age, he wrote an epic of several thousand lines. His father was proud of it, and said he thought "the author would yet be one of the great in English literature" (good prophet of the future, thought I); "but," he added, "I burned it, when I read the earliest poems of Shelley." "I don't care a bit for various readings from the poets," he said, "although I have changed my own text a good deal. I like to enjoy the book I am reading, and footnotes distract me. I like to read, and I just read straight on." "What do you do with the books which are sent to you?" he asked, "and do you get many? I have several every day, chiefly books of poetry or rhyme. I wish they would rather send me prose. I calculate, by the number of verses which the books contain, that I get a verse for every three minutes of my life; and the worst of it is that nearly all the writers expect me to answer and acknowledge them!" He handed to me Doctor Kynaston's Latin version of "Demeter," a copy of which, type-written, he had received that morning. It was excellent, and he said he had thought of getting a typewriter to answer those correspondents who sent him their verses! He then spoke of the labor necessary to produce the best things in poetry, and of the recasting of verses. He said he thought that almost every poet did this habitually. It was very rarely that the simplest song came into the writer's mind in a rush of melody all at once. He mentioned some one saying of a poet, "Oh! he didn't revise his verses; his manuscripts are all unblotted." "How do you know?" I replied to him. "No one knows what the poets have done with their verses, as they revise them in their mind before they are written down." He added that his chief work was done, not as Wordsworth's was in the open air, but in his library, in the evenings. It seemed as if he needed the quiet of the close of day, and the meditative reverie to which it led, to start him productively. As we were going toward the house, a nightingale was singing loud and ceaselessly. He told me that, while sitting in a grove, on a still evening, one of these birds was close beside him. "I was as near it as I am to you, and it did not cease to sing. We were so close that I felt the very air move by its wings (I thought it was by its voice), and it did not stop singing, or seem to notice me." Next day we walked along the "ridge of the noble down" towards The Needles. To begin with, our talk was chiefly on the problems of philosophy, and his conversation on the great questions of belief was quite as significant as his remarks on poetry, or even as his poems themselves. We spoke of the "Metaphysical Society," of which he was one of the original promoters, along with Doctor Martineau, Dean Stanley, Huxley, and Doctor Ward. He did not often attend, being seldom in London, but he thought their meetings very useful. For himself he did not get much good from debating problems, especially ultimate ones; but the confederacy, and the exchange of views which took place in such a society, was good for all its members. He raised the question, How should philosophy be defined? the "love of wisdom" was all very well, but to love it and seek it, and yet not find it, was mere vanity and vexation of spirit; and the question was, could we find it? I said that philosophy was both a search and a discovery; at once a process and a product. "Yes," he replied; "but how is the product produced? and I want to know how we are to unite the one with the many, and the many with the all." I said that was the great question of the ages, the radical problem of metaphysic, and that it was fundamentally an insoluble one. "For my part," he said, "if I were an old Greek I should try to combine the doctrine of Parmenides with that of Heraclitus. I find that both of them are true in part; but does not all metaphysic seek that which underlies phenomena?" "Yes; and what it finds it reaches intuitively, and at first-hand. The great beliefs are not conclusions deduced by logic, but premisses grasped by intuition. I think it is not analysis, with a view to new inductions, that we need nowadays, so much as a new philosophical synthesis." "Well," he said, "we must get to some height above phenomena. We must climb up, and we can't ascend a ladder without rungs. Isn't the ladder of analogy very useful in metaphysics?" "It is, but why not dispense with a ladder altogether? It's chief use is to enable us to leap from it, and to reach the infinite, not by a tedious process of ascent, but by seeing it everywhere within the finite." "Yes; I agree with that, and I have tried to show something like it in some of my poems; but the outward world, where the ladders and symbols are, is surely more of a veil which hides the infinite than a mirror which reveals it." "Yes; and Browning put this well Some say Creation's meant to shew Him forth; I say it's meant to hide Him all it can." He then spoke of Darwin, and of the great truth in evolution; but it was only one side of a truth that had two sides. "All things are double one against another." He also spoke of Bruno, with whom he had much sympathy. From this we passed to the subject of immortality. I ventured to say that it was a more pressing problem in our time than even that of theism, and that agnosticism had undermined it in many quarters. He said he did not require argumentative proof of a future life, and referred me to "In Memoriam." He had nothing further to say; and, although his faith was not stated dogmatically in that poem, every one could see that he believed in the survival of the individual. "Annihilation was impossible, and inconceivable. We are parts of the infinite whole; and when we die, and our souls touch the great Anima mundi, who knows what new powers may spring to life within us, and old ones awaken from sleep, all due to that touch." The subject of Free-Will was next talked of, and he referred to the way in which it had been discussed by Doctor Ward, and in the columns of the Spectator. He said he liked the Spectator. He did not always agree with its literary articles, but its philosophy was good. Here the conversation turned to the newspaper press, and to politics. In politics, as elsewhere, he strove to shun "the falsehood of extremes." He was a Liberal Conservative, and a Conservative Liberal. He had written, He is the true conservative Who lops the mouldered branch away. "But," said he, "the branch must be a mouldered one, before we should venture to lop it off." Listening to the wind in the trees, and to the sound of running water-although it was the very tiniest of rillets -led us away from philosophy, and he talked of Sir Walter Scott, characterizing him as the greatest novelist of all time. He said, "What a gift it was that Scotland gave to the world in him. And your Burns! he is supreme amongst your poets." He praised Lockhart's Life of Scott, as one of the finest of biographies; and my happening to mention an anecdote of Scott from that book led to our spending the greater part of the rest of our walk in the telling of stories. Tennyson was an admirable story-teller. He asked me for some good Scotch anecdotes, and I gave him some, but he was able to cap each of them with a better one of his own-all of which he told with arch humor and simplicity. re He then told some anecdotes of a visit to Scotland. After he had left an inn in the island of Skye, the landlord was asked, "Did he know who had staying in his house? It been was the poet Tennyson." He replied, sure I "Lor'-to think o' that! and thoucht he was a shentleman!" Near Stirling the same remark was made to the keeper of the hotel where he had stayed. "Do you ken who you had wi' you t'other night?" "Naa; but he was a pleesant shentleman." "It was Tennyson, the poet." "An' wha' may he be?" "Oh, he is a writer o' verses, sich as ye see i' the papers." "Noo, to think o' that! jeest a pooblic writer, an' I gied him ma best bedroom!" Of Mrs. Tennyson, however, the landlord marked, "Oh! but she was an angel." I have said that the conversational power of Tennyson struck me quite as much as his poetry had done for forty years. To explain this I must compare it with that of some of his contemporaries. It was not like the meteoric flashes and fireworks of Carlyle's talk, which sometimes dazzled as much as it instructed; and it had not that torrent-rush in which Carlyle so often indulged. It was far more restrained. It had neither the continuousness nor the range of Browning's many-sided conversation; nor did it possess the charm of the ethereal visionariness of Newman's. It lacked the fulness and the consummate sweep of Mr. Ruskin's talk; and it had neither the historic range and brilliance of Dean Stanley's, nor the fascinating subtlety-the elevation and the depth combined-of that of the late F. D. Maurice. But it was clear as crystal, and calm as well as clear. It was terse and exact, precise and luminous. Not a word was wasted, and every phrase was suggestive. Tennyson did not monopolize conversation. He wished to know what other people thought, and therefore to hear them state it, that he might understand their position and ideas. But in all his talk on great problems, he at once got to their a essence, sounding their depths with ease; or, to change the illustration, he seized the kernel, and let the shell and There was its fragments alone. wonderful simplicity allied to his clear vision and his strength. He was more child-like than the majority of his contemporaries; and, along with this, there was-what I have already mentioned-a great reserve of power. His appreciation of other workers belong ing to his time was remarkable. Neither he nor Browning disparaged their contemporaries, as Carlyle so often did, when he spotted their weaknesses, and put them in the pillory. From first to last, Tennyson seemed to look sympathetically on all good work; and he had a special veneration for the strong silent thinkers and workers. He was an idealist at heart. neath the realism of his nature, this other feature rose above it. He was not so much of a Platonist as a Berkeleyan, but faith in the great Kantian triad (God, Duty, Immortality) dominated his life-God being to him both personal and impersonal, duty being continuous unselfish devotion to the good of all, and immortality the survival not only of the race, but of all the units in it. If in "In Memoriam" the "wild unrest,” as well as the "honest doubt" of our nineteenth century is embodied, a partial solution of the great enigma is, at the same time, offered; and while the intellectual form of his theism found expression in such lines as Under He, they, one, all, within, without, The Power in darkness which we guess, its practical outcome was the attitude of trust and worship. Tennyson appreciated the work of Darwin and of Spencer far more than Carlyle did, and many of the ideas and conclusions of modern science are to be found in his poetry. Nevertheless he knew the limitations of science, and he held that it was the noble office of poetry, philosophy, and religion combined to supplement and finally to transcend it. WILLIAM KNIGHT. From The Speaker. OLD FICTION. No disputes or altercations are more foolish and vexatious than those about books and styles and methods, literary fashions, old and new. The ancients and the moderns, the classical and the romantic, the realistic and the fanciful -about these let professors rage in their lecture rooms. Your wise reader is a non-combatant; he will enter no lists, flourish no flag, call no man his master. His only enemies are vulgarity, blatant rhetoric, sham sentiment, the vanity that protrudes itself without amusing, and the egotism that crows without pleasing. These things he would gladly kill if he could; but knowing he cannot, he is content to leave them to the contempt and neglect which ultimately await them. All is fish that comes to the wise reader's net, provided it is edible, and if it is not he pitches it overboard; for, after all, the reader is the judge. One grows just a little sick of talk about authors, their works and ways. They are beginning to magnify their office mercilessly. They are assuming pontifical airs, and speak gracious words. They seem half to expect that you should rise when they enter the room. And yet they only exist to please us, to tickle our fancies, to while away our leisure; and for these purposes the dead author may equally serve our turn with the living ones. I say equally, for I hate the affectation that pretends that no book is worth reading unless it is a hundred years old. And so, too, to try to make out, as some do, that they have no time to read "Robert Elsmere" because "Tristram Shandy" is so fascinating is all affectation. Anybody, however busy, who has really formed the habit of reading can easily read, or try to read, all the novels likely to come his way. Nobody's life is more choked with detail than a bishop's, and yet all the more intelligent bishops are great novel-readers, and this because they are reading men. A great, a very great, number of persons have never formed the habit of reading. They |