e are amusing persons, who practically say,
"We alone understand him, therefore he is great."

Yet a phrase like "apartness makes greatness," when justly applied to a
poet, marks, not his superiority of rank, but his inferiority. It
relegates him at once to a lower place. The greatest poets are loved by
all, and understood by all who think and feel naturally. Homer was
loved by Pericles and by the sausage-seller. Vergil was read with joy by
Maecenas and Augustus, and by the vine-dressers of Mantua. Dante drew
after him the greatest minds in Italy, and yet is sung to-day by the
shepherds and peasants of the hill-villages of Tuscany. Shakespeare
pleases the most selected spirits of the world and the galleries of the
strolling theatres.

And though Tennyson and Browning are far below these mightier poets, yet
when we apply to them this rule, drawn from what we know to be true of
the greatest, Tennyson answers its demand more closely than Browning.
The highest work which poetry can do is to glorify what is most natural
and simple in the whole of loving human nature, and to show the
excelling beauty, not so much of the stranger and wilder doings of the
natural world, but of its everyday doings and their common changes. In
doing these two things with simplicity, passion and beauty is the finest
work of the arts, the eternal youth, the illimitable material of poetry,
and it will endure while humanity endures in this world, and in that
which is to come. Among all our cultivated love of the uncommon, the
remote, the subtle, the involved, the metaphysical and the terrible--the
representation of which things has its due place, even its necessity--it
is well to think of that quiet truth, and to keep it as a first
principle in the judgment of the arts. Indeed, the recovery of the
natural, simple and universal ways of acting and feeling in men and
women who love as the finest subjects of the arts has always regenerated
them whenever, in pursuit of the unnatural, the complicated, the
analytic, and the sensational, they have fallen into decay.

Browning did not like this view, being conscious that his poetry did not
answer its demand. Not only in early but also in later poems, he
pictured his critics stating it, and his picture is scornful enough.
There is an entertaining sketch of Naddo, the Philistine critic, in the
second book of _Sordello_; and the view I speak of is expressed by him
among a huddle of criticisms--

"Would y