"I would give all my poetry to have made one song
like that," said Tennyson of Lovelace's Althea. But Noll would have
disregarded them all alike, and Carlyle was full of the spirit of the
Protector. To conquer him was indeed a victory for Tennyson; while
Dickens, not a reading man, expressed his "earnest and sincere
homage."
But Tennyson was not successful in the modern way. Nobody
"interviewed" him. His photograph, of course, with disquisitions on
his pipes and slippers, did not adorn the literary press. His
literary income was not magnified by penny-a-liners. He did not
become a lion; he never would roar and shake his mane in drawing-
rooms. Lockhart held that Society was the most agreeable form of the
stage: the dresses and actresses incomparably the prettiest. But
Tennyson liked Society no better than did General Gordon. He had
friends enough, and no desire for new acquaintances. Indeed, his
fortune was shattered at this time by a strange investment in wood-
carving by machinery. Ruskin had only just begun to write, and wood-
carving by machinery was still deemed an enterprise at once
philanthropic and aesthetic. "My father's worldly goods were all
gone," says Lord Tennyson. The poet's health suffered extremely: he
tried a fashionable "cure" at Cheltenham, where he saw miracles of
healing, but underwent none. In September 1845 Peel was moved by
Lord Houghton to recommend the poet for a pension (200 pounds
annually).
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