It is hard from here to be patient with the Government for not taking
a bolder line all round and saying frankly what they want. They are
omnipotent if they would only lead. Now we hear that Carson has
resigned. I can't hitch that on to the conscription crisis, yet it
doesn't say it is from ill-health: it is a puzzle.
Life is as uneventful as usual here. I have nearly finished _The Woman
in White_. It is really one of the best thrillers I've read, and Count
Fosco more than fulfils my expectations: I wonder if Haldane keeps
white mice. I have also finished Tennyson. I have read him right
through in the course of the year, which is much the best way to read
a poet, as you can follow the development of his thoughts. His mind,
to my thinking, was profound but not of very wide range, and strangely
abstract. His only pressing intellectual problems are those of
immortality and evil, and he reached his point of view on those before
he was forty. He never advances or recedes from the position
summarised in the preface to "In Memoriam," d. 1849. The result is
that his later work lacks the inspiration of restlessness and
discovery, and he tends to put more and more of his genius into the
technique of his verse and less into the meaning. The versification is
marvellous, but one gets tired of it, and he often has nothing to say
and has to spin out commonplaces in rich language. One feels this even
in the "Idylls of the King," which are the best of his later or middle
long efforts: they are artificial, not impulsive; Virgil, not Homer;
Meredith calls them 'dandiacal flutings,' which is an exaggeration.
But I can quite see how irritating Tennyson must be to ardent sceptics
like Meredith and the school which is now in the ascendant. To them a
poet is essentially a rebel, and Tennyson refused to be a rebel. That
is why they can't be fair to him and accuse him of being superficial.
I think that a very shallow criticism of him. He saw and states the
whole rebels' position--"In Memoriam" is largely a debate between the
Shelley-Swinburne point of view and the Christian. Only he states it
so abstractly that to people familiar with Browning's concrete and
humanised dialectic it seems cold and artificial. But it's really his
sincerest and deepest thought, and he deliberately rejects the rebel
position as intellectually and morally untenable: and adopts a
position of aquiescent agnosticism on the problem of evil subject to
an unshakeable faith in immortality and the Love of God. This is a
red rag to your Swinburnes. That is why I asked you to send me
Swinburne, as I want to get to the bottom of his position. Shelley's I
know, and it is, in my opinion a much more obvious, easier, and more
superficial one than Tennyson's: besides being based on a distorted
view of Christianity. Shelley in fact wanted to abolish Christianity
as the first step towards teaching men to be Christian.
Of all the agnostics, Meredith is the one that appeals to me most: but
I've not read his poetry, which I believe has much more of his
philosophy in it than his novels have.
_P.S._ I have just seen your appeal in the _Hampshire Herald_ for £500
for a motor ambulance boat, in which you say the Red Cross have
already sent us two such boats. All I can say is that nobody in this
regiment has ever seen or heard of these boats: and they certainly
have not been used for transporting sick and wounded either from
Nasiriyah or from Kut. If they were in Mesopotamia at all, it is
incredible that we shouldn't have heard of them.
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