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I'd hoped your nicely argued and almost persuasive post would have concluded the thread, Patricia. But as you see, those who want to support you are forced to willfully misunderstand Tennyson to do so. As if the whole point of Tennyson's passage was not to emphasise "the ubiquitousness of loss in the human condition"!
And of course, Overton does not want to console Ernest and insinuate "there are plenty of loves to be had and the more the merrier." He's a misogynist who's just observed that Ernest's been "inoculated" against marriage, and earlier that "A man's friendships are, like his will, invalidated by marriage," and said "As soon as I found that he no longer liked his wife I forgave him at once." The idea of "playing the field" is preposterously not available to this Victorian; the alternative is actually to go to prostitutes, for which Ernest has already served jail time.
Observe that everyone taking the "lost" position assumes Butler is speaking in universals to the world, whereas in fact, it is Overton, in a bizarrely specific case (a misogynist joyful over a case of bigamy) who is speaking to Ernest. Yet all you've accomplished is to "invert" Tennyson back into itself -- a banality. This is why it was a mistake for Butler to try add "extra irony" to a passage that's ironic simply by virtue of being spoken by Overton. He'd have been better off inventing, to put in Overton's mouth, some Victorian equivalent of "Women -- can't live with 'em, can't shoot 'em."
I don't know whether in this case it's more generous to assume dhbailey has or has not read the work in question, but he's just done the equivalent of arguing that Shakepeare was in favor of "killing all the lawyers."
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