their sublimity. To the devoted workers of science nothing is too great or too small for their all-embracing scrutiny. Science deals equally with the infinite and the infinitesimal. The composition of far-distant suns and the life-history of the parasite of a parasite are equally the subjects of her investigation, and the results are such as cannot fail to appeal to any man who has a spark of intellect or imagination. A discourse on literature, on the other hand, deals with a subject with which all are more or less familiar, and so loses the advantage of novelty; it does not deal with concrete facts, but rather with opinions about facts, and so, as compared with the directness of science, it is apt to be somewhat vague and intangible; it is subjective rather than objective. To use the language of science, criticism must inevitably be qualitative only, and can never aspire to be quantitative. It can detect the presence of certain elements, but not accurately weigh or measure the proportions in which they exist.

At last it occurred to me, after I had examined and rejected many possible subjects, that in the noble singer whose death at the close of last year was regarded as a national calamity by all the English-speaking peoples I might find the starting-point for the retrospect which I desired. Further consideration led me to hope that by comparing and contrasting Tennyson and Browning I might be able, without making a mere enumeration of Victorian poets, to give a retrospective review of Victorian poetry. The magazines of late have been filled, and overfilled, with what one may call Tennysoniana—anecdotal accounts of the Laureate, written, some by intimate friends, others by Americans who had for once succeeded in intruding on his privacy at Freshwater, or by Englishmen who had once seen him at a railway-station. With these I have no desire to enter into competition. I shall rather aim this evening at examining Tennyson and Browning not as men, but rather as the living embodiments of certain aspects of poetry characteristic of the Victorian era, by discussing their methods, their objects, their ideals, and their views with regard to the great questions which are always present to the mind of man.

I have said the Victorian era of poetry, and I use the term advisedly. For the beginning of the reign of Victoria is practically coincident with the rise of certain tendencies in poetry. It is true that those tendencies have worked themselves out before the conclusion of the reign of the royal lady from whom the period takes its name, but none the less for fifty years were they coextensive with it. To use a paradox, poets are to a great extent at once the creation and the creators of their time, and from either point of view the term Victorian poets is not misapplied.

To appreciate the characteristics of the Victorian poets we must go back to a pre-Victorian period. The eighteenth-century poetry is on the whole vapid and insincere, tainted by an artificial classicism and conventionality. Nothing in English literature is more remarkable than the sudden and vigorous onslaught on this artificiality and insincerity which begins with the closing years of the eighteenth century. There came a return to nature and simplicity; the romantic era dawned once more, and what classic influence was still found was of the spirit and not of the letter. Then came the Lake school, with its great leader, Wordsworth, the contemplative interpreter of the poetry of nature, from whom none of her secrets were hidden; and the mysticism and melody of Coleridge; Scott, with his delight in mediæval chivalry, and that heroic verse that rings like the blare of a trumpet; the sensuous and romantic beauties of Keats; the ethereal raptures of Shelley; the fervid passion of Byron. By 1837 this brilliant band of poets had disappeared. Byron had perished of fever in Greece; Shelley was drowned in Italy; Keats was dead—not, certainly, “killed by the Quarterly,” according to the not-yet-exploded legend, but carried off by consumption; Scott had overtasked to his death even his magnificent powers; Coleridge, the wreck of his former self, had lived his last few years in an opium dream, and was already dead in 1834. Wordsworth, and Wordsworth alone, remained of a band of poets second in English literature to the Elizabethans only. But Wordsworth's work was done, though even then he had not attained full recognition. The poetry of the time had died away into magazine verse, which was called Byronic, and which, while reflecting his faults and weaknesses, omitted the passion and strength which had raised Byron himself to fame.

The kings of verse were dead. Was there any to succeed them?

In 1827 there had appeared a slight volume of verse entitled “Poems by Two Brothers,” graceful and pretty in their way, if somewhat imitative. Very few of the poems contained therein are to be found in any collection of Tennyson's poems—for one of those brothers was Alfred Tennyson, at the age of eighteen—nor did they attract much notice. Soon, in 1830, appeared another volume “Poems, Chiefly Lyrical.” Accustomed as we now are to nobler and grander music from the same lyre, such poems as “The Merman” and “The Owl,” “Claribel” and “Lilian,” may be read by us now without any great enthusiasm. They are evidently over-elaborate, too full of effort, and not devoid of affectation—the poems of a young man gifted with an eye for richness of colour and harmony of detail, but not yet skilled to give adequate expression to that which he saw clearly enough. And yet, slight as they

were, they were different from preceding work, and different not in degree but in kind. Whereas the earlier poets of the century had aimed at grand general effects, here was a young poet who aimed first of all at beauty of detail only, who, recognising that poetry was truly an art, was content first to apprentice himself in order to master the technical detail of his craft, and who, as Stedman says, “wrecked himself upon expression for the expression's sake.”

It is in the volume published in his twenty-fourth year that young Tennyson seems first definitely to feel his strength, and I do not think it is altogether by accident that in that little volume the first place is given to “The Lady of Shalott.” The Lady of Shalott dare not look upon life, but only upon the shadows of life reflected in her magic mirror; and now—

“I am half-sick of shadows,” said
The Lady of Shalott.

She looks out upon the world as it is, and she dies in consequence. So with the young poet. He has hitherto dallied merely with the shadows of life, with dreams and fancies, which, for all their richness and beauty, were still nothing but dreams. He now looks forth upon the world as it is, and in doing so finds not a curse but a blessing. And if, in the same volume, he describes the land of the lotus-eaters where “slumber is more sweet than toil,” it is only resolutely to turn his face from it.

It is not my intention to trace Tennyson's poetic career by the milestones of his successive volumes. The “English Idylls,” “The Princess,” “In Memoriam”—to my mind his most characteristic work—lead up to his acceptance of the laureateship in 1850. It was then that, at the death of Wordsworth, he received, to use his own words, the

Laurel, greener from the brows
Of him that uttered nothing base.

Then, after “Maud,” comes the commencement of the “Idylls of the King,” that wonderful series of pictures which has been in hand in one way or another more than forty years, which began with the end, was continued with the beginning, and finished with the middle. They are like a series of stained-glass windows in some great cathedral, whose design the artist had in mind from the first; but in his execution he follows no order—he inserts one here and another there—and the people, while admiring the individual windows, are puzzled as to the general design. It is only when transpositions have been made, and the last two or three windows added in their proper places, that it is seen that they are not only beautiful individually, but now form an intelligible and connected series, noble in design, admirable in execution.

The rest of his works may be summed up as efforts, to my mind unavailing, on the part of Tennyson to prove that he possessed that dramatic power which his critics denied him.

The contrast which may be drawn between Browning and Tennyson on almost every point begins almost with their birth. Born as they were within three years of each other, the elder, Tennyson, was born and brought up at a quiet Lincolnshire parsonage. Browning, on the other hand, first saw the light in what was at that time a rural suburb of London—Camberwell—tolerably tranquil itself, but only some four miles distant from “streaming London's central roar.” As I have said, the first work really characteristic of Tennyson appeared in his twenty-fourth year. When Browning was of the same age there appeared his “Paracelsus”; and this, his first work, is as entirely characteristic of him as anything that he has written at any time since. For some time his work was cast in a dramatic mould. The somewhat commonplace “Strafford,” and that decidedly not commonplace, but chaotic and incomprehensible, “Sordello,” were followed by a series of less pretentious dramatic works, many of which are not without their charms. In fact, “Pippa passes” and “Colombe's Birthday” rise to a high level of literary excellence. It was in 1845 that Browning, disappointed with the reception of his dramas, bade farewell, for the time being, to the direct dramatic method. To that method he has never returned.

I said “to the direct dramatic method,” for in most of his later work the point of view is that of the dramatist, dealing, however, not with groups but with single figures. Fifty of these portraitures are contained in the “Men and Women”; “Dramatis Personæ” forms an addition, in number considerable but not great in value. It is by no means worth while to enumerate Browning's work after 1860. It contains much that is worthless, much that is singularly great, but nothing new in kind; from the beginning Browning is Browning, the most original and the most unequal of the poets of our century.

From this most inadequate sketch of the rise of the two leaders of the Victorian schools I now pass to that comparison and contrast of their art, their aims, their opinions, and their thoughts from which I hope to bring into prominence those features of Victorian poetry which seem to me most characteristic. More than a sketch I cannot attempt, but I hope that the broad outlines of the sketch will be sufficiently clear.

Assuredly there have never been two contemporary poets whom a critic might more fairly examine by the method of contrast than Tennyson and Browning. Throughout their

careers we find the most curious points of likeness and unlikeness Had some mighty genius, competent for the task, attempted to embody in the characters of two poets two opposite tendencies in art and thought, he might have drawn a Tennyson and a Browning. Like in their unlikeness, unlike in their likeness, the opposition in which they stand seems the work rather of art than of nature.

Examine briefly the career of each of them. Both have lived long, both chose the office and function of the poet above all others, both were poets pure and simple, neither of them writing or publishing a word of prose. And yet the contrasts are greater. Tennyson at once attained a recognition so full, a success so complete, that every successive work which did not surpass its predecessors was regarded as a failure. Browning, long without recognition, struggled to success by a series of failures. Browning began by writing dramas, but abandoned the dramatic method for portraiture. Tennyson began as a lyric and idyllic poet, but ended as a writer of drama. And yet with neither were the dramas written good stage-plays—successful, that is, upon the stage under ordinary conditions, without the glamour of a great name to aid them. For many years no one would have thought of comparing Browning with Tennyson except to the disparagement of the former; but in the last twenty years Browning's audience, “fit though few” at first, has grown rapidly, and, if Tennyson has the larger number on his side, Browning has the finer spirits. Tennyson is admired, Browning worshipped; the followers of the one form a school, of the other a cult. To whom posterity will assign the superiority I do not know, but this I am sure will form part of the verdict: that, if Tennyson was the finer artist, Browning was the more original thinker.

I spoke of Tennyson as the finer artist. We have now to contrast them from the point of view of art. For poetry is an art, not of “sentimental caterwauling” as Huxley once said, but of giving expression, in metrical form, to any thought having relation in any way to man, in such a way as to enhance its beauty. I pointed out a few minutes ago how Tennyson's early work arrested attention because of its artistic beauty of expression. In exquisite finish no poet in any literature has ever surpassed him. As an artist in metre he is supreme; more than that, his supremacy was at once accepted. The insipid sentimentalities of the Byronics disappeared at once, and the minor poets at once began to mould themselves upon Tennyson. Henceforth, with such a master to show them how it should be done, slipshod work was impossible.

If we open a volume of Tennyson, we can hardly help noticing how one form of poem predominates. “English

Idylls and other Poems,” “Idylls of the King,” actually bear the word “idyll” on their forefront; and others, like “Enoch Arden” and “Aylmer's Field,” are not less idyllic in tone. Throughout the greater part of his career Tennyson's most important work has been cast in the form of the idyll. What, then, is an idyll, and what is meant by an idyllic poet?

The word “idyll” in its origin means “picture,” and the idyllic style was discovered by Theocritus in the second century B.C. His “idylls” are little pictures of the joys and sorrows of country life, the life of the shepherd, the hunter, the fisherman. The idyll, then, is essentially pictorial and descriptive. It does not confess the deepest secrets of the individual soul like the lyric; nor, on the other hand, does it allow the character to depict itself in action—that is the function of the drama. The idyllic style stands outside that which it pourtrays. The idyllic and the dramatic schools in poetry stand in the same relation as the landscape and portrait schools in painting.

Now, there can be no doubt that in choosing this style Tennyson accurately recognised the limitation of his own powers. It was exactly suited to him in every respect. In thought his master was Wordsworth, in art principally Keats, though at the same time in his art he was eclectic, ranging over all times and all literatures, and selecting with admirable taste that which best suited him. The poetry of passion was for the time exhausted. Tennyson is the poet of repose and restraint, mastering his subject thoroughly and never allowing it to master him. In all his work he shows the perfection of proportion and good taste. With him there is not, as there is, for example, with Byron, any hurried work, any poem begun without any definite idea as to how it is to end. Every piece of work is filed and refiled, polished and repolished, until it stands flawless, smooth to the nail. At the same time this very perfection is a limited perfection. If Tennyson's restraint and repose prevent him from falling below the level, they also prevent him from rising above it. He lacks those glorious spontaneous outbursts which electrify us in Byron. I do not in any way blame Tennyson for not attempting to transcend the limitations imposed on him by temperament. He shows his intense feeling for art in not attempting what lay beyond him. At the same time a distinction must be made. A carved gem may be a more finished work of art than a noble statue, and yet there will remain no question as to which is the grander.

Let us now turn to the other side. I have just shown how Tennyson owed his first successes to his mastery of the technique of his art. In Browning we have a man who from the first was a rebel against form. The limitations imposed by

form in which others delighted were to him trammels and fetters. And therefore in his method he has shown himself not merely eccentric—eccentricity might be pardoned—but actually perverse. And this perversity will bring its own re-ward. To sin against a law of nature means destruction; to sin against a law of art means neglect, and to neglect a large portion of Browning's work is doomed. He possesses a mighty intellect, of a most original cast; he owes allegiance to none, and none can call themselves his sponsors in art. But he lacks that restraint which has made Tennyson's art what it is. He is mastered by his theme, and it runs away with him. In working out that theme, the thought grows and ramifies in his subtle intellect into infinite variety of detail, and not one detail will he spare us. And so he goes on involving one parenthesis in another, until we are wearied by the constant jerking of our attention from its proper track. This is one element in his undoubted obscurity. The other main element is due, I think, to his surprising alertness and quickness of thought. The problem which we might solve in five or six steps he completes in two, and is already off on another train of thought before we quite realise that the first is finished. Thus it is he offends in both ways: he is at times tediously garrulous upon nothings, at other times wearingly compressed and crabbed upon thoughts of the greatest import. Just that sense of proportion which is so eminently characteristic of Tennyson is entirely lacking in Browning. He insists upon neglecting the expression for the thought, not perceiving that it is the expression which gives, as it were, the stamp to the blank gold of the thought, and makes it once for all current coin. And yet he seems to have known this principle, but to have refused to apply it. If only he would have accepted for himself the words he addresses to another!—

Song's our art:
Whereas you please to speak these naked thoughts
Instead of draping them in sights and sounds.
* * * *
But here's your fault: grown men want thought, you think;
Thought's what they mean by verse, and seek in verse:
Boys seek for images and melody,
Men must have reason: so you aim at men
Quite otherwise!

Thus it is, I think, that Browning is at his best in his smaller pieces, where the theme is naturally limited. Here his fine gifts show themselves to their best effect. And how fine his gifts are! Look at the fun and humour of “The Pied Piper of Hamelin”; or the magnificent stride of “The Ride from Ghent to Aix”; the passionate pathos of “The Lost Leader,” or the sweet pathos of “Evelyn Hope.” What

lyric could be imagined more pure and serene and melodious than the last I have mentioned? This, at all events, is not written in that tooth-splintering jargon which disfigures so much of Browning's work, and of which it might well be said—as De Quincey said of Bowles's verse—that it ought to be boiled before it could be read. I have no hesitation in saying that the seven stanzas of “Evelyn Hope” are worth the whole 11,000 lines of the chaotic “Sordello.”

Tennyson, then, is a lyric and idyllic poet, the direct inheritor of Keats and Wordsworth. He proceeds by the pictorial method, making his scenery suggest or support the central idea. Browning is more original: starting for himself, he constitutes himself the poet of the soul of man. He is a psychologist, but working objectively. He has the art of piercing at once to the innermost soul, of arresting the master passions one by one, and forcing them to reveal themselves. Tennyson has to some extent tried the same method; but his “St. Simeon Stylites” and “Ulysses” and “Tithonus” seem to me, fine as they are, but thin analysis compared with Browning's robust and vigorous presentments. And this leads us to consider another ground on which both poets meet—the dramatic.

To my mind, neither of them has been successful in the drama proper. Both have failed, but not for the same reason. How should Tennyson work a real drama? Whence is to come, in his case, the knowledge of that mingling of action and passion which gives dramatic interest? All his years have been passed aloof from the storm and stress of life; his whole nature shrinks from them. His career has been easy and fortunate, his life retired. But a dramatist must know men as they are, not men as they are depicted in books. And therein alone, apart from temperament, Tennyson must have failed as a dramatist. As a matter of fact, he has carried the idyllic method on to the stage, and given us—as Stedman well says—a series of tableaux, or dramatic pictures, instead of dramatic action. His work is pleasant reading for the study, but not really adapted for the stage. The aid of a great actor, the dictates of fashion, the high reputation of the author, may enable his “Cup” or “Becket” to keep the stage for a time; none the less they are intrinsically failures, or, at all events, nothing more than a succès d'estime.

Browning, on the other hand, though in some of his finest work he pursues the dramatic method of embodiment of some great passion, which he makes to pourtray itself, yet fails in that portion of his work which is cast in the dramatic mould. He has the necessary knowledge of mankind—not Shakespeare himself had more piercing insight. Wherein, then, does he fail? In two points, as it seems to me: firstly, in that his

characters are creations of the intellect, instead of the sympathy of the artist; secondly, in that he cannot stand outside his characters—he cannot represent them objectively. Peasants and kings, old men and maidens, all are animated by Browning, and all, unhappily, are liable to speak Brown-ingese. With Shakespeare, one may say that Hamlet said this or that, or Othello said that but not that Shakespeare said either; but with Browning, whether the mask be Paracelsus or Pippa, it is Browning speaking through it.

There is one further point in which I desire to oppose Tennyson and Browning. I have discussed their art: now as to the materials of their art—their thought.

It is very evident that this is a question on which a volume of essays might be written. At the same time it is, I think, possible to put the fundamental differences between them into a few words. Tennyson would bring passion in all its forms under the rein of law. Browning would give the rein to passion. The one advocates control, the other free play. Of course, statements like these can be but half-truths only. They need a somewhat longer consideration.

In that volume of poems which I adduced as the first real representation of Tennyson, in the poem of “Œnone,” are the following words, which form the keynote of all Tennyson's poetry—

Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control,
These three alone lead life to sovereign power:
Yet not for power—power of herself
Would come uncalled-for—but to live by law,
Acting the law we live by without fear;
And, because right is right, to follow right
Were wisdom in the scorn of consequence.

That, as I said, seems to me to sum up the whole ethical position of Tennyson—“to live by law.” It crops up in various forms throughout the whole of his works. Thus we find it controlling his own art. His poetry is to have some moral restraint, not a merely sensuous passion for beauty—

—such as lurks
In some wild poet, when he works
Without a conscience or an aim.

“Energy nobly controlled,” says Professor Dowden, speaking of Tennyson in this aspect, “energy nobly controlled, an ordered activity, delight his imagination. Violence, extravagance, immoderate force, the swerving from appointed ends, revolt—these are with Mr. Tennyson the supreme manifestations of evil.”

Thus it is in religion: to him God is the supreme lawgiver rather than the supreme friend; with ecstasy or mysticism he has no sympathy. When the Holy Grail descends,

and the Knights of the Round Table swear to follow it, Arthur, the kingly embodiment of law and order, upbraids them with following “wandering fires.” Their vows are sacred, they must go; yet how often now, instead of “laying the sudden heads of violence flat,” and splashing “the strong White Horse with his own heathen blood”—

This chance of noble deeds will come and go
Unchallenged, while ye follow wandering fires,
Lost in the quagmire.

It is the same in politics. England, the land of law and order,

Where freedom slowly broadens down
from precedent to precedent,
is always contrasted with
—the schoolboy heat,
The blind hysterics of the Celt.

Look, too, at the close of “The Princess.” The passage is too long to quote, but the contrast between England and France is even more strongly put. So it is elsewhere. In the “Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington” the characteristic of the dead hero especially insisted on is his submission to duty. For him

The path of duty was the way to glory.

On the other hand, with Browning it is not law but passion and aspiration which are supreme. Life is to have its full and free development. It is the main idea of his first work. Paracelsus aspires to the highest pleasure, the highest knowledge, and fails. But Browning constantly insists that he does not fail. So long as a man does nothing contrary to the law of his nature his failures in lofty aspirations may be and are higher and nobler than a meaner success. This principle is always present with Browning, and it will explain, I think, the difference between the art of Browning and Tennyson. It is now seen to be a fundamental difference of principle. Tennyson, restrained by law, feeling the laws and limitations of his temperament, will do nothing beyond them. Browning, not perhaps less aware of his limitations, will aspire gloriously, even if he fail, for his failure will also be glorious. Better a noble failure than a mean success.

That low man seeks a little thing to do,
Sees it and does it;
This high man, with a great thing to pursue,
Dies ere he knows it.

To aim at a million and miss by a unit is better than to gain a hundred by adding one to one. So it is in art. With Browning,

He is all fault that hath no fault at all;