In town Tennyson met his
friends at The Cock, which he rendered classic; among them were
Thackeray, Forster, Maclise, and Dickens. The times were stirring:
social agitation, and "Carol philosophy" in Dickens, with growls from
Carlyle, marked the period. There was also a kind of optimism in the
air, a prophetic optimism, not yet fulfilled.
"Fly, happy happy sails, and bear the Press!"
That mission no longer strikes us as exquisitely felicitous. "The
mission of the Cross," and of the missionaries, means international
complications; and "the markets of the Golden Year" are precisely the
most fruitful causes of wars and rumours of wars:-
"Sea and air are dark
With great contrivances of Power."
Tennyson's was not an unmitigated optimism, and had no special
confidence in
"The herd, wild hearts and feeble wings
That every sophister can lime."
His political poetry, in fact, was very unlike the socialist chants
of Mr William Morris, or Songs before Sunrise. He had nothing to say
about
"The blood on the hands of the King,
And the lie on the lips of the Priest."
The hands of Presidents have not always been unstained; nor are
statements of a mythical nature confined to the lips of the clergy.
The poet was anxious that freedom should "broaden down," but
"slowly," not with indelicate haste. Persons who are more in a hurry
will never care for the political poems, and it is certain that
Tennyson did not feel sympathetically inclined towards the Iberian
patriot who said that his darling desire was "to cut the throats of
all the cures," like some Covenanters of old.
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