varied and intricate influences of the forty years that followed the advent of Victoria. The future philosophic historian of the period must spend his chief energies on the poetry of Tennyson. Other writers reflect phases of development. Carlyle, Newman, Darwin represent sections of the general movement. They are out of touch with many of its prominent characteristics; but Tennyson includes them all. His work, says Professor Saintsbury, though "falling short of Chaucer and Coleridge in fresh and original gift; of Spenser in uniform excellence and grasp of a huge subject; of Shakespeare in universality, in height and depth and every other creature; of Milton in grandeur and lonely sublimity; of Wordsworth in ethical weight and grip of nature behind the veil; of Shelley in unearthliness; and of Keats in independence and of voluptuous spontaneity; yet deserves to be ranked with the best of these, except Shakespeare only, in virtue of its astonishing display of poetic art." But Tennyson was not only a supreme artist, he was a seer. A poet in the ancient sense is a maker-one who uses the materials available in his day for the production of something new. But the materials for his lofty craft are, paradoxical as it may sound, non-material. Description may be left to prose, it is a revelation of the spirit of nature and man that we expect from the poet. He is a prophet or forth-teller, a revealer of secrets, an interpreter of hidden things. "No man," said Sir Henry Taylor, "can be a great poet who is not also a great philosopher." This is a dictum often disputed, the philosophical element, it is alleged, diminishes the value of the poetry in which it is found. We want nothing more than "art for art's sake." But all great art, whether in painting, architecture or literature is a revelation, not only of beauty but of wisdom. Accepting the statement of Sir Henry Taylor as true, we find in it an explanation of the familiar fact that every supreme poet embodies and stands for the age in which he lived. It was so with Homer, Dante, Shakespeare; it was so with Wordsworth; it was so with Tennyson. He is a mirror reflecting the contents of the universal mind. An epitome of mankind. But just as no landscape can manifest more than an aspect of nature, so no particular age can manifest more than an aspect of man. Whatever differentiates it from another age is local and transitory, the mutable elements are the froth on the sea, churned up by collision with circumstances. As in music, all the wonderful complexities, and apparently inexhaustible capacities of harmony, are evolved from a few simple notes, so it is in man. He is not a harp of a thousand strings, a dozen pregnant words suffice to express the fundamental elements-such words as birth, life, death, love, hate, mind, heart, soul. And a great poet lives and moves and has his being among these primary conceptions. His fingers are on the keyboard. If he is the mirror of his age, he is also something more. He is a mirror of man. He belongs to all time. Reflections on the prophetic and philosophical character of the greatest poetry, its capacity for revealing and unveiling, its penetrative quality plumbing the abyss and probing the deep-lead naturally to Browning. It has been denied that he was a philosopher, but by general consent he is the most philosophical of all modern poets. If by this it were meant that in him artistic feeling was sacrificed to the exigencies of an attempt to convey by the medium of verse solid instruction in technical philosophy, the denial would be just. But assuming the soundness of the belief that to be a great poet one must live in intimacy of closest relationship with all the springs of life and thought, and be able to make manifest the otherwise invisible sources of the panoramic scene passing before our eyes, then Browning was pre-eminently a philosophical poet. He claimed to be essentially a dramatist, and people smile as they think of his play-" Strafford '' and then of "Hamlet" or "King Lear." But he was unquestionably right in his conviction. The useful words objective and subjective, which irritated Carlyle so much in his recollection of the conversation of Coleridge, serve us here. The age of Elizabeth was not introspective like the age of Victoria. Its problems were different. A new world of thought had been opened out by the renaissance. A new world of action by the discoveries of Columbus and his successors. "The world went very well then." Man had come of age, and was entering upon the enjoyment of his estate. And in Shakespeare is reflected that breezy, vigorous, healthy, hopeful spirit. As Bacon took all learning to be his province, Shakespeare took all humanity. His empire was universal. He summoned a myriad types upon the stage, and made them live, move, act in our presence. What they thought and felt is manifested just as the ideas and feelings of our acquaintances and friends are discovered, in the course of events, by their action and conduct, by what they say and do. The subjective in Shakespeare is revealed through the objective. He is a world in miniature. Browning's claim to the dramatic faculty was not based upon an illusory assumption of preeminence of this kind. He is a subjective dramatist. There is very little scenic effect. There are few characters at once upon the stage. It would make very little difference to the audience if the performance went on behind the curtain. We could close our eyes with no diminution of enjoyment of the play. We sit as beholding things invisible, apparent to the mind's eye, not to the physical organ of sense. To the mental vision are laid bare the springs of action, the secret motives, feelings, thoughts, the dim, uncertain, half-formed wishes, the hardly acknowledged fears, all the subtle processes that underlie the conduct of life. Two men are sitting after dinner over their wine. All you want on the stage are a few items of dining-room furniture, a couple of chairs, a table, some indications of a recent repast, a decanter, glasses; there is no action, the figures never move; one of them is talking; we close our eyes and listen, and what a drama is presented to the mental gaze, what thoughts, feelings, emotions come and go; we are in a spiritual surgery, watching the dissection of a soul. Introspection is often morbid, a too engrossing application to the mental states and processes of ourselves or others is apt to issue in pessimism. After the disillusionment of the revolutionary era, when man turned his attention to an exhaustive enquiry into the real meaning of nature and life with that earnestness, veracity, and determination that we have seen was characteristic of the new spirit, and the poet arose who, in the province of man, was a supreme seer, it might not unnaturally have been expected that the sad utterance of a thinker in a far off age, who made a thorough survey of human nature, its actions and motions, might have been repeated-"Vanity of vanities, all is vanity." But our modern explorer returns with grapes from Eshcol-the land is a land of promise. By a very different route Browning arrives at the same point of view as Shakespeare, the same wholesome, healthy outlook of one who Never dreamed though right were worsted wrong would Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, The early Victorian writers, if not as numerous as the leaves in Vallombrosa, or like the sand on the sea shore, or the stars of heaven for multitude, are too many for individual treatment in a brief paper. In the great men chosen for particular, but necessarily inadequate, reference, we can see, probably with sufficient clearness for our purpose, the general drift of the literary energy of the time under review; the wood might be rendered invisible by a multiplication of its trees. It is not claimed that the whole or even the greater part of the work they accomplished was achieved within the limits of a period that could be properly described as early in the queen's reign ; but if we assume that the term may legitimately include a third of its whole extent, from the accession to the deaths of Macaulay and De Quincey in 1859; within those temporal boundaries enough of the work of Carlyle and Macaulay, Newman and Darwin, Dickens and Thackeray, Tennyson and Browning, is included to justify the use of their names in illustration of the literary movement, so rich and various in genius, so profoundly influential in its effect upon national character and life which had begun by the time of the Queen's accession, and which has but lately died away. It is sound advice: "never prophesy unless you know," and, remembering such aphorisms as "distance lends enchantment to the view," bearing in mind also the apparently constitutional inability from which most of us suffer to see anything in contemporary literature that does not provoke the observation, "the old is better," we resist the temptation to strain your patience by indulging in comparisons between depth, power, and genius displayed in the middle of the nineteenth century and the modern equivalents for those epithets that might be applied without exaggeration to the, at any rate, popular literature of the present day. Better it is to close with the last word of Browning: |