One's memory flutters unhappily over a
certain letter about the Papal Guards written by Sir Willoughby
Patterne. It is here chiefly that Tennyson suffers by that very
Virgilian loveliness and dignity of diction which he put to the service
of such a small and anomalous national scheme. Virgil had the best news
to tell as well as the best words to tell it in. His world might be
sad; but it was the largest world one could live in before the coming of
Christianity. If he told the Romans to spare the vanquished and to war
down the mighty, at least he was more or less well informed about who
_were_ mighty and who _were_ vanquished. But when Tennyson wrote verses
like--
"Of freedom in her regal seat,
Of England; not the schoolboy heat,
The blind hysterics of the Celt"
he quite literally did not know one word of what he was talking about;
he did not know what Celts are, or what hysterics are, or what freedom
was, or what regal was or even of what England was--in the living Europe
of that time.
His religious range was very much wider and wiser than his political;
but here also he suffered from treating as true universality a thing
that was only a sort of lukewarm local patriotism.
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