ty is never undignified. He really did
hold a great many of the same views as Queen Victoria, though he was
gifted with a more fortunate literary style. If Dickens is Cobbett's
democracy stirring in its grave, Tennyson is the exquisitely ornamental
extinguisher on the flame of the first revolutionary poets. England has
settled down; England has become Victorian. The compromise was
interesting, it was national and for a long time it was successful:
there is still a great deal to be said for it. But it was as freakish
and unphilosophic, as arbitrary and untranslatable, as a beggar's
patched coat or a child's secret language. Now it is here that Browning
had a certain odd advantage over Tennyson; which has, perhaps, somewhat
exaggerated his intellectual superiority to him. Browning's eccentric
style was more suitable to the poetry of a nation of eccentrics; of
people for the time being removed far from the centre of intellectual
interests. The hearty and pleasant task of expressing one's intense
dislike of something one doesn't understand is much more poetically
achieved by saying, in a general way "Grrr--you swine!" than it is by
laboured lines such as "the red fool-fury of the Seine." We all feel
that there is more of the man in Browning here; more of Dr. Johnson or
Cobbett. Browning is the Englishman taking himself wilfully, following
his nose like a bull-dog, going by his own likes and dislikes. We cannot
help feeling that Tennyson is the Englishman taking himself
seriously--an awful sight. One's memory flutters unhappily over a
certain letter about the Papal Guards written by Sir Willoughby
Patterne. It is here chiefly that Tennyson suffers by that very
Virgilian loveliness and dignity of diction which he put to the service
of such a small and anomalous national scheme. Virgil had the best news
to tell as well as the best words to tell it in. His world might be
sad; but it was the largest world one could live in before the coming of
Christianity. If he told the Romans to spare the vanquished and to war
down the mighty, at least he was more or less well informed about who
_were_ mighty and who _were_ vanquished. But when Tennyson wrote verses
like--

"Of freedom in her regal seat,
Of England; not the schoolboy heat,
The blind hysterics of the Celt"

he quite literally did not know one word of what he was talking about;
he did not know what Celts are, or what hysterics are, or what freedom
was, or what re