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The Homeric Competitions of Tennyson and Gladstone

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 September 2010

Gerhard Joseph
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Extract

In December 1865 the sculptor Thomas Woolner gave a memorable dinner party which, in a Victorian version of the Homeric games, generated a sportive clash between two of the age's heroes. The guests included William Ewart Gladstone, Alfred Tennyson, William Holman Hunt, and the Bristol physician John Addington Symonds. The son of this last entered later in the evening (as did F. T. Palgrave), and it is from the letters of the younger John Addington Symonds that we have a detailed, lively account of the stormy proceedings. The major feature of the evening was the persistency with which Tennyson and Gladstone gravitated toward polar attitudes whatever the topic of conversation, whether the issue under discussion was political or literary. As the younger Symonds entered the dining room, the assembled company had just begun to consider Governor Coote Eyre and his brutal suppression of the Jamaican uprising in which twenty Europeans had been killed and over 600 natives killed or executed. As Gladstone condemned the slaughter with the moral passion and oratorical skill by which he dominated Parliament, Tennyson kept interrupting not with counter-arguments but with obbligato, sotto voce prejudices: “We are too tender to savages, we are more tender to a black man than to ourselves. … Niggers are tigers, niggers are tigers.” Repeatedly the two men differed over this and other matters, “Gladstone with his rich flexible voice, Tennyson with his deep drawl rising into an impatient falsetto when put out, Gladstone arguing, Tennyson putting in a prejudice, Gladstone asserting rashly, Tennyson denying with a bold negative, Gladstone full of facts, Tennyson relying on impressions, both of them humorous, but the one polished and delicate in repartee, the other broad & coarse & grotesque.”

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 10 , Spring 1982 , pp. 105 - 115
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1982

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References

Notes

1. The Letters of John Addington Symonds, 1844–1868, ed. Schueller, Herbert M. and Peters, Robert L., 3 vols. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1967–1969), I, 591–98.Google Scholar

2. Sir Tennyson, Charles, Alfred Tennyson (New York: Macmillan, 1949), p. 479.Google Scholar

3. Martin, Robert Bernard, Tennyson: The Unquiet Heart (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), pp. 575, 582–83, and passim.Google Scholar

4. Such a characterization by Magnus, Philip in Gladstone: A Biography (London:John Murray, 1954), p. 6Google Scholar, is seconded by Motter, T. Vail in his notes to The Writings of Arthur Hallam (New York:Modern Language Association of America, 1943)Google Scholar. But as Kolb's, Jack recent edition of The Letters of Arthur Hallam (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1981)Google Scholar makes clear, the matter was more complicated. Whatever Gladstone's strong affection, Hallam's closest friend at Eton was not Gladstone but James Milnes Gaskell. And as Gladstone's tortured draft of a letter dated June 1830 (letter 90a, pp. 368–70) accusing Hallam of having abandoned whatever intimacy there was suggests, relations between the two were already strained by that time, however much Hallam in reply tried to reassure Gladstone (letter 91, pp. 371–73). Perhaps the immediate cause of Gladstone's pain, according to Kolb (p. 370, n. 1), was Hallam's sonnet entitled “To A. T.” (“Oh, last in time, but worthy to be first” ), dated May 1829 (Motter, Writings of Hallam, pp. 45–46).

5. Martin, p. 423.

6. Ward, Mrs. Humphry, A Writer's Recollections (London: Collins, 1918), p. 238Google Scholar; as quoted in Jenkyns, Richard, The Victorians and Ancient Greece (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), p. 200.Google Scholar

7. Turner, Frank M., The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), p. 160. Among the other virtues of Turner's account is a full bibliography of Gladstone's Homeric writings (p. 160, n. 38).Google Scholar

8. Jenkyns, pp. 199–204; Turner, pp. 159–70; Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age, 3 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1858).Google Scholar

9. Landow, George, William Holman Hunt and Typological Symbolism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979)Google Scholar; and Sussman, Herbert, Fact and Fiction: Typology in Carlyle, Ruskin, and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1979).Google Scholar

10. Bush, Douglas, Mythology and the Romantic Tradition in English Poetry (New York: W. W. Norton, 1963), p. 226.Google Scholar

11. For a fuller exposition, see Joseph, Gerhard, “The Idea of Mortality in Tennyson's Classical and Arthurian Poems: ‘Honour Comes with Mystery,'” Modern Philology, 66 (1968), 136–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and “Tennyson's Concepts of Knowledge, Wisdom, and Pallas Athene,” Modern Philology, 69 (1972), 314–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12. Stange, G. Robert, “Tennyson's Garden of Art: A Study of ‘The Hesperides,’” PMLA, 67 (1952), 732–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar; reprinted in Killham, JohnCritical Essays on the Poetry of Tennyson (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960), pp. 99–112Google Scholar. The quotation appears on p. 102.

13. Quotations from Tennyson's poetry follow The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Ricks, Christopher (London: Longman, Green, 1969).Google Scholar

14. Turner (p. 164, n. 49) describes notes for a long study Gladstone was working on at the end of his life which was to present his final view of the Olympian system. These notes (British Library Add. Mss. 44711–13) suggest that he was still intent upon linking Homer and primitive revelation.

15. To be sure, both Sir Charles Tennyson (p. 494) and Robert Martin (pp. 560–61) cite the political motivation of a Gladstone who felt that “Justice does not require, nay rather she forbids, that the Jubilee of the Queen be marred by tragic notes.”