"Idylls" of Tennyson with those idylls of Theocritus
he imitated, you easily see that his pictures are not even bad copies of
the originals; they are not even paraphrases--to turn again from
painting to literature. They are fine in themselves, and the critics of
the future, more reasonable than ours and less reactionary, will give
them their true place. As for Browning, it is only necessary to read the
Italian writers of the Renascence, to find how very modern he is in his
poems that touch on that period. He is always modern. With all his
efforts he cannot understand that mixture of paganism and Catholicism
which made the Renascence possible. He seems to assume that the Catholic
Church in the time of the Renascence produced men in whom paganism
struggled with Christianity. The fact is that paganism had melted into
Christianity and Christianity had given it a new light and a new form.

It was not difficult for an artist of the Renascence to look on a
statuette of Leda and the Swan or Dana[:e] and the Descent of Jupiter as a
shower of gold, as prefiguring the Incarnation. There was nothing
blasphemous in this pagan symbolism of a pagan prophecy of the birth of
a God from a virgin. It does not follow that Browning is not powerfully
beautiful and essentially poetical, even when he reads modern meanings
impossibly into the life of older days. Nevertheless, he is
unsatisfactory, as almost all modern poets, when they interpret the
past, are unsatisfactory. A great poet may look into his heart and
write, but with Tennyson, with Browning, with Swinburne, one feels that
very often they mistake the beating of their own hearts for the sound of
the pulsations of the hearts of others.

Similarly, modern Christians who claim to be orthodox are sometimes
shocked when they are told that Saint Peter, for example, did not
believe that a man might not be both circumcised and baptized. According
to a common belief, the two could not exist together among the converted
Jews. And the modern man of letters seems to think that paganism and
Christianity were at odds at all points. A deeper knowledge of the
manifestations of religion, before the Reformation, would dissipate an
illusion which spoils so much fine modern poetry.

Another point, in applying my canons of criticism to poets whom I love
in spite of this defect, is that I find that they have no desire to be
united with God--you may call him Jehovah, Jove, or Lord, to quote Pope.
They a