JOHN LUCAShappened, two poets whose claims as poets were strong. Other considera-
tions, however, made them unthinkable.
According to Edmund Gosse, it was "reported that Queen Victoria,
discussing the matter" of Tennyson's successor with Gladstone, "said, 'I am
told that Mr. Swinburne is the best poet of my dominions.'" 8 So he was.
Yet Swinburne was hardly likely to find favor as a candidate for the vacant
post. He was a known Republican, an atheist, and his early Poems and
Ballads (1866), which had brought him to fame, had also by their sexual
transgressiveness earned him lasting notoriety. What, then, of William
Morris as a suitable candidate? By the time of Tennyson's death Morris had
come to be seen as a poet of genuine stature. But he was also a proclaimed
Marxist and active in support of exactly those forces that for Tennyson
posed threats to "the State, the Church, the Throne."
Whether Tennyson had Morris in his sights when he wrote "Locksley
Hall Sixty Years After" I rather doubt. But he probably intended his readers
to think of Swinburne as implicated in that list of "Authors - essayist,
atheist, novelist, realist, rhymester" who would play their part in painting
"the mortal shame of nature with the living hues of Art." Indeed, by paying
tribute to the abilities of those poets whom he detests - for how else can we
read the phrase "living hues of Art"? - Tennyson is candidly admitting that
it is their artistic powers that make them so dangerous. It scarcely matters
whether he is overestimating the political and social influence of such
powers. The crucial point is Tennyson's determination to block the way to
the Laureateship of those authors whom he has in mind. We must then
reflect on why, since only a "rhymester" could become Laureate, Swinburne
must surely have been the writer with whom Tennyson was most con-
cerned. We might even read Tennyson's list of "Authors" as quite specifi-
cally identifying Swinburne: he was, after all, an essayist and novelist as
well as poet. 9
"Locksley Hall Sixty Years After" was written in the months that
followed the unlooked-for death of Tennyson's son, Lionel, on 25 April
- Robert Bernard Martin quotes Tennyson's disclaimer that "there is
not one touch of biography" in the poem "from beginning to end." But
Martin rightly adds: "the assertion is surely disingenuous, for the emotions
are biographically his even if the events of the poem are not." 10 These
emotions include not only the facts of aging and death but also Tennyson's
scornful attitude to what Charles Tennyson calls the poet's "fierce disillu-
sion" with the age. It seemed, he says, "a deliberate repudiation of all the
social and economic progress of the last half-century. Mr Gladstone felt it
deeply and took up the challenge with an elaborately deferential article in
The Nineteenth Century for January, 1887."n Martin suggests that Glad-
284