which must take
place successfully if one's advance be not abandoned altogether. I
remember that I saw the Tennyson directly presented as just utterly
other than the Tennyson indirectly, and if the readjustment, for
acquaintance, was less difficult than it was to prove in the case of the
realised Renan the obligation to accept the difference--wholly as
difference and without reference to strict loss or gain--was like a rap
on the knuckles of a sweet superstition. Fine, fine, fine could he only
be--fine in the sense of that quality in the texture of his verse, which
had appealed all along by its most inward principle to one's taste, and
had by the same stroke shown with what a force of lyric energy and
sincerity the kind of beauty so engaged for could be associated. Was it
that I had preconceived him in that light as pale and penetrating, as
emphasising in every aspect the fact that he was fastidious? was it that
I had supposed him more fastidious than really _could_ have been--at the
best for that effect? was it that the grace of the man _couldn't_, by my
measure, but march somehow with the grace of the poet, given a
perfection of this grace? was it in fine that style of a particular
kind, when so highly developed, seemed logically to leave no room for
other quite contradictious kinds? These were considerations of which I
recall the pressure, at the same time that I fear I have no account of
them to give after they have fairly faced the full, the monstrous
demonstration that Tennyson was not Tennysonian. The desperate sequel to
that was that he thereby changed one's own state too, one's beguiled,
one's aesthetic; for what _could_ this strange apprehension do but reduce
the Tennysonian amount altogether? It dried up, to a certain extent,
that is, in my own vessel of sympathy--leaving me so to ask whether it
was before or after that I should take myself for the bigger fool. There
had been folly somewhere; yet let me add that once I recognised this,
once I felt the old fond pitch drop of itself, not alone inevitably, but
very soon quite conveniently and while I magnanimously granted that the
error had been mine and nobody's else at all, an odd prosaic
pleasantness set itself straight up, substitutionally, over the whole
ground, which it swept clear of every single premeditated effect. It
made one's perceptive condition purely profane, reduced it somehow to
having rather the excess of awkwardness than the excess of felicity t