opposite of what he meant to say. I will take only two instances of what
I mean. In the _Idylls of the King_, and in _In Memoriam_ (his two
sustained and ambitious efforts), particular phrases are always flashing
out the whole fire of the truth; the truth that Tennyson meant. But
owing to his English indolence, his English aristocratic
irresponsibility, his English vagueness in thought, he always managed to
make the main poem mean exactly what he did not mean. Thus, these two
lines which simply say that

"Lancelot was the first in tournament,
But Arthur mightiest in the battle-field"

do really express what he meant to express about Arthur being after all
"the highest, yet most human too; not Lancelot, nor another." But as his
hero is actually developed, we have exactly the opposite impression;
that poor old Lancelot, with all his faults, was much more of a man than
Arthur. He was a Victorian in the bad as well as the good sense; he
could not keep priggishness out of long poems. Or again, take the case
of _In Memoriam_. I will quote one verse (probably incorrectly) which
has always seemed to me splendid, and which does express what the whole
poem should express--but hardly does.

"That we may lift from out the dust,
A voice as unto him that hears
A cry above the conquered years
Of one that ever works, and trust."

The poem should have been a cry above the conquered years. It might well
have been that if the poet could have said sharply at the end of it, as
a pure piece of dogma, "I've forgotten every feature of the man's face: