Corrected Impressions; Essays on Victorian Writers, by George Saintsbury (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: III. TENNYSON. AT the Literary Fund dinner of 1893 Mr. Arthur Balfour, in an unusually interesting speech for that occasion, hinted that he was not himself able to take quite so much pleasure in what is called Victorian Literature ? the literature of which the late Lord Tennyson in verse, and Mr. Carlyle in prose, were the unquestioned chiefs ? as some other persons appeared to do. He suggested that this might have been due to his being born a little too late. If the cause assigned is a vera causa, it is one of some interest to me. For I happen to have been born not quite three years before Mr. Balfour, and therefore I ought to have been exposed to very much the same " skiey influences " in point of time. Yet I do not think that any one can ever have had and maintained a greater admiration for the author of " The Lotos-Eaters" than I have. This admiration was born early, but it was not born full grown. I am so old a Ten- f nysonian that though I can only vaguely remem- ) ber talk about " Maud " at the time of its first I appearance, I can remember the " Idylls " themselves fresh from the press. I was, however, a little young then to appreciate Tennyson, and it must have been a year or two later that I began to be fanatical on the subject Yet there must have been a little method in that youthful madness,? some criticism in that craze. A great many years afterwards I came across the declaration of Edward Fitzgerald, one of the poet's oldest and fastest friends, to the effect that everything he had written after 1842 was a falling off. That of course was a crotchet. Fitzgerald, like all men of original but not very productive genius who live much alone, was a crotcheteer to the th. But it has a certain root of truth in it; and as I read it I remembered what my own feeling...