The lives of the poets from The Dictionary of National Biography ...

is either Benjamin Jowett or ben trovato has Jowett saying of a new poem that Tennyson recited, ‘I think I
wouldnʹt publish that, if I were you, Tennyson’; whereupon the poet retorted, ‘If it comes to that, Master, the
sherry you gave us at luncheon was beastly’ (Martin, 433). Jowettʹs ‘Notes on Characteristics of Tennyson’
cannot be bettered for their sympathetic acumen (Ricks, Tennyson and His Friends, 186–7):
Absolute truthfulness, absolutely himself, never played tricks.
Never got himself puffed in the newspapers.
A friend of liberty and truth.
Extraordinary vitality.
Great common sense and a strong will.
The instinct of common sense at the bottom of all he did.
Not a man of the world (in the ordinary sense) but a man who had the greatest insight into the world, and
often in a word or a sentence would flash a light.
Intensely needed sympathy.
A great and deep strength.
He mastered circumstances, but he was also partly mastered by them, e.g. the old calamity of the
disinheritance of his father and his treatment by rogues [Dr Allen and the wood‐carving scheme] in the days
of his youth.
Very fair towards other poets, including those who were not popular, such as Crabbe.
He had the high‐bred manners not only of a gentleman but of a great man.
He would have wished that, like Shakespeare, his life might be unknown to posterity.
In the commonest conversation he showed himself a man of genius. He had abundance of fire, never
talked poorly, never for effect. As Socrates described Plato, ‘Like no one whom I ever knew before’.
The three subjects of which he most often spoke were ‘God,’ ‘Free‐Will,’ and ‘Immortality,’ yet always
seeming to find an (apparent) contradiction between the ‘imperfect world,’ and ‘the perfect attributes of
God.’
Great charm of his ordinary conversation, sitting by a very ordinary person and telling stories with the
most high‐bred courtesy, endless stories, not too high or too low for ordinary conversation.
The persons and incidents of his childhood very vivid to him, and the Lincolnshire dialect and the ways of
life.
Loved telling a good story, which he did admirably, and also hearing one.