Page:Studies of a Biographer 2.djvu/248

 says that it was written soon after Hallam's death, and gave his feelings about fighting the battle of life perhaps more simply than anything in In Memoriam. Carlyle's criticism came to this, that Tennyson had declined into a comparatively sentimental and effeminate line of writing, mere 'æstheticisms' instead of inspiring a courageous spirit of confronting the spiritual crisis. The Idylls of the King could not be the epic of the future, but at best a melodious version of conventional and superficial solutions of the last problem. King Arthur had (in Carlylese) too much of the 'gigman' to be a great leader of modern men. The average critic, as we are frequently reminded in these volumes, complained that Tennyson was 'morbid.' Maud, in particular, gave that offence in spite of irresistible beauties. Tennyson himself argued that the critics confounded the author with his creature. The hero of Maud was only a dramatic personage; he was a 'morbid poetic soul' and the poem was to be taken as 'a little Hamlet.' The original Hamlet would itself be now criticised, he thought, as 'morbid.' Mr. Gladstone, who first took the poem to represent the worship of Jingo, recanted on further consideration, and discovered that Tennyson had only approved