We are men of ruin'd blood; Name and fame! to fly sublime Thro' the courts, the camps, the schools, Bandied by the hands of fools. Friendship!-to be two in one- How she mouths behind my back. Virtue !-to be good and just- Mix'd with cunning sparks of hell. O! we two as well can look Whited thought and cleanly life Fill the cup, and fill the can: Have a rouse before the morn: Every moment dies a man, Every moment one is born. I have reserved to the end the three pieces which seem to me best of all,-Morte d'Arthur, Ulysses, and "Break, break, break". Morte d'Arthur, which, though not published till 1842, had been written at least as early as 1837, is substantially the latter part of The Passing of Arthur, of that great collection, which is also a great though loosely strung whole, the Idylls of the King; and it can hardly therefore be criticised now apart from the context in which it has been placed. The high position generally assigned to The Passing of Arthur in what many consider the greatest of all Tennyson's works, is evidence that in the Morte d'Arthur he had touched very nearly his highwater mark. And it, along with Ulysses, gave the first decisive proof of Tennyson's skill in the use of blank verse, a measure in the management of which he has had no superior since Milton, and certainly had no equal at that time. Coleridge, who occasionally used it with splendid effect, was dead; and Wordsworth, who, though much of his blank verse was loaded with the weight of unhappy theories unhappily followed out, could also at times write in it magnificently, had produced all his great work. Arnold, whose blank verse will bear comparison with that of any of them, had not yet begun to write, unless we insist upon counting his Rugby prize poem. "Break, break, break," contains only sixteen lines. It is a song, the expression of an emotion. The direct utterance of thought would be out of place in it; but surely the pathos of life has seldom been more touchingly expressed. The little lyric is human to the core.1 Ulysses, again, is a noble picture of the heart hungering for truth, of the Grey spirit yearning in desire To follow knowledge like a sinking star, Beyond the utmost bound of human thought. The ancient hero with his restless longing gives voice to an aspiration modern even more than ancient; for the emphasis thus laid on the desire for knowledge is clearly a nineteenth century adaptation of the Homeric tale. In a somewhat similar spirit Tennyson has modernised the Arthurian legends; for it is a feature of his work that however far he may dive into the past, he applies what he finds there to the present. This has been sometimes said of him by way of reproach, it is in reality only an answer to praise ill-judged. If it be said that Tennyson in the Idylls painted a true picture of the ancient Britons, or that in Ulysses he reproduced a Greek of the age of Homer, then indeed it is to the point to answer that the whole atmosphere of these poems is that of the nineteenth century. But they are not necessarily less perfect as poems because such is the fact, they may be even in some respects more interesting. It may be questioned if the poet ever rose higher than he rises in Ulysses. Its heroism is magnificent, and it helps whoever reads it to take "with a frolic welcome," like the mariners, "the thunder and the sunshine" of life. The style too is admirable; not a word is wasted, yet there is nowhere any suggestion of harshness or abruptness. The personal emotion under which it is said to have been written seems to glow through the perfect lines. 1 One of the most refined of critics, Dr. John Brown, says of "Break, break, break": "Out of these few simple words, deep and melancholy, and sounding as the sea, flows forth all In Memoriam, as a stream flows out of its spring, all is here." (Horae Subsecivae.) In the two volumes of 1842 there is evidence, in the first place, of great progress on the part of the poet towards technical perfection. The verse is more finished, the imagery at once richer and in more perfect taste. It is true that there still remain some marks of youth. Any one who compares Morte d'Arthur with those parts of the Idylls of the King written in the poet's maturity, must be struck with the frequency of the echoes of Homer in the former. It was always Tennyson's method, as it has been the method of many great poets, Virgil and Milton for example, to weave the thoughts and expressions of his predecessors into his verse. But there is a difference between his earlier and his later manner of doing so. In the earlier period we find direct imitation: over and over again we meet with expressions which at once strike the ear as more or less foreign to the context, and so suggest the original. It is so with the Byronic echoes of the Poems by Two Brothers, and with the Homeric echoes of Morte d'Arthur. No doubt the imitation in the latter case at least is conscious and purposed; but the matter borrowed is not so handled as to become, as similar borrowings do in Tennyson's later work, part of the very fabric of the poem in which it is placed. The Wordsworthian and Biblical echoes of Dora are another example of the same kind of immaturity. But on the other hand it must be admitted that Tennyson never used the hints he borrowed more skilfully, or more perfectly fused them with the contributions of his own mind, than in Ulysses. More important still, however, is the gain which nine years of life had brought to the poet in the substance of his poetry. We see this in the greater bulk of the more serious poetry. In the earlier volumes a search was necessary to discover anything besides elegance and prettiness: in the volumes of 1842 there are many things besides-wealth of imagination, depth of feeling, reach of thought—which at once rivet the attention. This is the truth which justifies the assertion frequently made, that it was with the poems of 1842 that Tennyson made his decisive appearance in literature. A poet's "decisive" appearance in literature is not to be determined by any temporary Vogue, but by the permanent qualities of his work. It is because the poems of 1842 had, and the earlier poems had not, in sufficient quantity, elements of lasting value, that the name of Tennyson must from that date onwards, and not earlier, be considered a fixed name in the records of poetry. Though he continued to write only short pieces, he had found a place in them for nearly all the thoughts and aspirations of the complex time in which he lived. Religion, the desires that lie beneath science and philosophy, and social problems, like marriage and the question of the value of life itself, had all occupied his mind. It may indeed be said, as it has been said of the earlier volumes, that there is a tendency to excessive discursiveness. Concentration and treatment on the great scale were still things for the future. CHAPTER III. BROWNING: 1833 TO 1846. WHILE Tennyson was slowly perfecting himself and spending his strength as much in the revision of his youthful work as in the production of new pieces, Browning was producing verse with that rapidity which always distinguished him. The whole of Tennyson's verse between 1830 and 1842 (all, that is, which he permanently retained) in Macmillan's edition of 1888 fills only part of two very moderate-sized volumes. But between 1833 and 1846 Browning published eleven long poems and over forty shorter pieces. This ratio of productiveness was characteristic of the two men, though the difference in later years was not so great. It is also characteristic that while Tennyson laboriously revised and touched up his poems, Browning made few changes. He seems indeed-to judge from the preface to Pauline-to have held peculiar notions as to the ethics of the relation between an author and his readers. In the first reprint he corrected only errors of the press, holding it "the honest course to "leave mere literary errors unaltered". Pauline bears throughout the marks of youth, but it is a youth of splendid promise. It is all the more imperative to recognise its merits because of Browning's own exaggerated, though doubtless quite sincere, depreciation. The poem is defective in construction and hazy in outline. It shows little of that intimate and masterly knowledge of human passion which the author's mature works display. He seems to be labouring at a work too great for him, while he shows by strokes here and there that he may some day be great enough for any work. But though its defects are grave they are redeemed by many fine passages, some of them beautiful with a luxuriant beauty not common in Browning's subsequent works. It is moreover always instructive to trace an author's early tastes, |