PORARY CRITICISM

If Tennyson's reputation has diminished, it is not that it has fallen
before hostile criticism: it has merely faded through time. Perhaps there
was never an English poet who loomed so large to his own age as
Tennyson--who represented his contemporaries with the same passion and
power. Pope was sufficiently representative of his age, but his age meant,
by comparison, a limited and aristocratic circle. Byron represented and
shocked his age by turns. Tennyson, on the other hand, was as close to the
educated middle-class men and women of his time as the family clergyman.
That is why, inevitably, he means less to us than he did to them. That he
was ahead of his age on many points on which this could not be said of the
family clergyman one need not dispute. He was a kind of "new theologian."
He stood, like Dean Farrar, for the larger hope and various other
heresies. Every representative man is ahead of his age--a little, but not
enough to be beyond the reach of the sympathies of ordinary people. It may
be objected that Tennyson is primarily an artist, not a thinker, and that
he should be judged not by his message but by his song. But his message
and his song sprang from the same vision--a vision of the world seen, not
_sub specie aeternitatis_, but _sub specie_ the reign of Queen Victoria.
Before we appreciate Tennyson's real place in literature, we must frankly
recognize the fact that his muse wore a crinoline. The great mass of his
work bears its date stamped upon it as obviously almost as a copy of _The
Times_. How topical, both in mood and phrasing, are such lines as those in
_Locksley Hall:_

Then her cheek was pale, and thinner than should be for one so young.
And her eyes on all my motions with a mute observance hung.
And I said "My cousin Amy, speak, and speak the truth to me,
Trust me, cousin, all the current of my being sets to thee."

One would not, of course, quote these lines as typical of Tennyson's
genius. I think, however, they may be fairly quoted as lines suggesting
the mid-Victorian atmosphere that clings round all but his greatest work.
They bring before our minds the genteel magazine illustrations of other
days. They conjure up a world of charming, vapid faces, where there is
little life apart from sentiment and rhetoric. Contrast such a poem as
_Locksley Hall_ with _The Flight of the Duchess_. Each contains at once a
dramatization of human relations, and the statement of a cr