A Character
A Character - meaning Summary
A Portrait of Hollow Pride
Tennyson satirizes a self-absorbed intellectual who pronounces on the universe, beauty, and virtue while remaining vain, aloof, and emotionally empty. The speaker exposes a man more concerned with surface—grooming, affected manners, polished phrases—than with genuine feeling or insight. The poem contrasts high-minded pronouncements with narrow, narcissistic behavior, suggesting that rhetorical display and self-regard mask impotence of real moral and spiritual depth.
Read Complete AnalysesWith a half-glance upon the sky At night he said, “The wanderings Of this most intricate Universe Teach me the nothingness of things”. Yet could not all creation pierce Beyond the bottom of his eye. He spake of beauty: that the dull Saw no divinity in grass, Life in dead stones, or spirit in air; Then looking as ’twere in a glass, He smooth’d his chin and sleek’d his hair, And said the earth was beautiful. He spake of virtue: not the gods More purely, when they wish to charm Pallas and Juno sitting by: And with a sweeping of the arm, And a lack-lustre dead-blue eye, Devolved his rounded periods. Most delicately hour by hour He canvass’d human mysteries, And trod on silk, as if the winds Blew his own praises in his eyes, And stood aloof from other minds In impotence of fancied power. With lips depress’d as he were meek, Himself unto himself he sold: Upon himself himself did feed: Quiet, dispassionate, and cold, And other than his form of creed, With chisell’d features clear and sleek.
The only authoritative light thrown on the person here described is what the present Lord Tennyson gives, who tells us that “the then well-known Cambridge orator S—was partly described”. He was “a very plausible, parliament-like, self-satisfied speaker at the Union Debating Society”. The character reminds us of Wordsworth’s Moralist
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