VI

After lunch Hallam brought Walter Leaf and me up to the study again. Tennyson had changed his place and now sat on another sofa placed in the north-west corner of the room. He was much brighter and stronger and full of intellectual fire. He talked of Homer with Walter Leaf, and in a fine deep voice recited, in the Greek, whole passages—of the sea and the dawn rising from it. He spoke of Homeric song as “the grandest sounds that can be of the human voice.” He spoke very warmly of Leaf’s book, and said he would have been proud to have been quoted in it. He ridiculed the idea of any one holding that there had been no such person as Homer. He thought Ilium was a “fancy” town—the invention of Homer’s own imagination. Doubts of Homer brought up doubts as to Shakespeare, and the Bacon and Shakespeare controversy which was then raging. He ridiculed the idea:

“What ridiculous stuff!” he said. “Fancy that greatest of all love-poems, Romeo and Juliet, written by a man who wrote: ‘Great spirits and great business do keep out this weak passion!’” (From Bacon’s Essay on Love.)

I told him the story which I had heard General Horace Porter—the Ambassador of the United States to France—tell long before. It may be an old story but I venture to tell it again:

“In a hotel ‘out West’ a lot of men in the bar-room were discussing the Shakespeare and Bacon question. They got greatly excited and presently a lot of them had their guns out. Some one interfered and suggested that the matter should be left to arbitration. The arbitrator selected was an Irishman, who had all the time sat quiet smoking and not saying a word—which circumstance probably suggested his suitability for the office. When he had heard the arguments on both sides formally stated, he gave his decision:

“‘Well, Gintlemin, me decision is this: Thim plays was not wrote be Shakespeare! But they was wrote be a man iv the saame naame!’”

Tennyson seemed delighted with the story.

Then he spoke of Shakespeare, commenting on Henry VIII., which had been running all the year at the Lyceum. He mentioned Wolsey’s speech, speaking the lines:

“Cromwell, I charge thee, fling away ambition.”

Then he added in a very pronounced way:

“Shakespeare never wrote that! I know it! I know it! I know it!” As he spoke he smote hard upon the table beside him.

After a long chat we left Tennyson to have his afternoon nap, and smoked in the summer-house. Then we walked to the south-west edge of Blackdown. The afternoon was very clear and we could see the hills of the Isle of Wight, which Hallam said he had never before seen from there.