Page:The Dial (Volume 75).djvu/101

Rh Puccini as its musician, Pinero as its playwright, and Sargent as its painter.

I want to take advantage for the second time in this Letter of the license given me by the epistolary form, change the subject abruptly, and point out that the almost simultaneous publication of two books on Tennyson provides a suitable occasion for everyone to make up his or her mind about that poet, remembering of course that no aesthetic decision about so recent an artist is likely to be other than temporary and incomplete. Like Victor Hugo, Tennyson is a poet to whom it is at present extraordinarily difficult to be just. He has ceased to be fashionable, but is not far enough away to be romantic. His work has not yet been given patina by the indulgent hand of the merciful faker, Time. Seventeenth and eighteenth century verses, for instance, often engage our amused affection by their characteristic absurdity, by the extravagance to which minor writers especially carried the fashions of their age. Similarly Early and even Middle Victorian decoration have their charms for us: they are already "period," but it is only the most delicate dilletanti who can yet extract much enjoyment from the quaintness and typical Victorianism of such poems as The Lord of Burleigh, The Princess, In the Children's Hospital, and Locksley Hall Sixty Years After. The moral ideas also are too near, if not to our own, at least to our parents', for us to be able to regard them with the tolerant interest and sympathy which those of the old writers in- spire. Tennyson has only been dead for thirty years.

Tennyson and his family contrived to cover his tracks with remarkable success, and neither Mr Nicolson (whose book is published by Constable) nor Mr Fausset (whose book is published by Selwyn and Blount) bring any new material worth mention. But they apply a new method to the old material, and the method is inevitably Mr Lytton Strachey's. It seems impossible to touch biography now without trying this instrument, but it is dangerous to use. No one has quite such delicate taste as Mr Strachey. Both Mr Nicolson and Mr Fausset consider that most of Tennyson's poetry is best forgotten, and I do not see how it is possible to disagree with them. The Old Guard of Tennysonians has come out with surprising energy to cry "Sacrilege" at these impudent young men, but its protests have relied more upon passion than upon argument.