Page:Adams - Essays in Modernity.djvu/30

18 was Lazarus. He had been dead four days. Where was he? 'There lives no record of reply,' says the poet, 'which, telling what it was to die, had surely added praise to praise.' What brought about this regrettable suppressio veri? Lazarus 'revealed nothing; he told it not'—

'Or something sealed The lips of that Evangelist!'

Can he be serious? He provokes the smile. Does Lord Tennyson still hold to that explanation—still in December, 1892? Truly the note of insincerity and fatuity is struck so often in 'In Memoriam' that one cannot tell. To begin with, he tried to make a tenth-rate person into an ideal type that should yet remain real, and as a pedestal for this impossible figure he must needs try to give us a statement of what he took to be Christian philosophy revised and amended up to date. We have some literary remains of Arthur Hallam, and can judge of him. His friend tells us he 'had heart affluence in discursive talk from household fountains never dry'; he was the best literary critic of his time, especially of poetry; he had 'seraphic intellect and force' as a polemist; 'impassion'd logic,' and all the graces and charms of the perfected creature. His converse compelled all men, and made the weak