Tennyson’s Idle Tears

Abstract

Tennyson said that ‘if Arthur Hallam had lived he would have been “one of the foremost men of his time, but not as a poet”’ (Mem, l, 299). We cannot know the force of emphasis suggested by the Memoir’s italics; Tennyson may have meant that Hallam would have been more or less than a poet. In Memoriam imagines him, had he survived, as doubtless ‘A potent voice of Parliament’ (cxiii, R ii, 434). Maybe it is a cynicism of our day, when we less admire, or have less to admire in, parliamentary speech, that makes us wonder whether the compliment paid Hallam there has an edge to it, the edge of Tennyson’s private reservations about his friend’s poetic gifts. That is not the only reason for wondering. A friend to both Hallam and Tennyson and one of the most vocal powers in Victorian politics, Gladstone, said, on the occasion in 1883 when he and Tennyson were together granted the freedom of Kirkwall: ‘Mr Tennyson’s life and labours correspond in point of time as nearly as possible to my own, but Mr Tennyson’s exertions have been on a higher plane of human action than my own. He has worked in a higher field, and his work will be more durable’ (Mem, ii, 280). It is greatly to Gladstone’s credit to have said that, and even more to his credit to have meant it. Questions about the respective value and reciprocal bearing of political and poetic speech are Victorian as well as current.