Corrected Impressions - 1895 Author:George Saintsbury Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: III. TENNYSON. AT the Literary Fund dinner of 1893 Mr. Arthur Balfour, in an unusually interesting speech for that occasion, hinted that he was not himself... more » able to take quite so much pleasure in what is called Victorian Literature — the literature of which the late Lord Tennyson in verse, and Mr. Carlyle in prose, were the unquestioned chiefs — as some other persons appeared to do. He suggested that this might have been due to his being born a little too late. If the cause assigned is a vera causa, it is one of some interest to me. For I happen to have been born not quite three years before Mr. Balfour, and therefore I ought to have been exposed to very much the same " skiey influences " in point of time. Yet I do not think that any one can ever have had and maintained a greater admiration for the author of " The Lotos-Eaters" than I have. This admiration was born early, but it was not born full grown. I am so old a Ten- f nysonian that though I can only vaguely remem- ) ber talk about " Maud " at the time of its first I appearance, I can remember the " Idylls " themselves fresh from the press. I was, however, a little young then to appreciate Tennyson, and it must have been a year or two later that I began to be fanatical on the subject Yet there must have been a little method in that youthful madness,— some criticism in that craze. A great many years afterwards I came across the declaration of Edward Fitzgerald, one of the poet's oldest and fastest friends, to the effect that everything he had written after 1842 was a falling off. That of course was a crotchet. Fitzgerald, like all men of original but not very productive genius who live much alone, was a crotcheteer to the th. But it has a certain root of truth in it; and as I read it I remembered what my own feeling...« less