Page:Adams - Essays in Modernity.djvu/26

14 Matthew Arnold declared that Lord Tennyson's 'decisive appearance dated from 1842,' and we are now indeed arriving at the hour of this 'golden prime.' But that early period of timorous ease had for ever saved his tranquillity. The storm and stress which had buffeted all our true moderns, strewing the shores of the European literature of the nineteenth century with the splendid wrecks of barks that have run but one or two record-breaking voyages, would have sunk this fragile, fairy skiff at its first putting out from port. Three years of what Heine or Musset or Byron or Keats bore would have annihilated Tennyson at any period of his teens or twenties. When the intellectual side of the poetical movement which preceded him, and which, as we have seen, he had so far resisted with the completest success, actually came upon him, he had had time to attain to a considerable amount of robust Philistinism. By the time the later developments of his younger contemporaries had worked the revolution of Science, and were beginning to work that of Literature, Tennyson was safely in the harbour. He was understood to say that he had gone through all this in his time, just as Coleridge had, and was as ready to die for the supposititious Church of 'the Lord Jesus' as