e. Space forbids
dwelling on this longer, though the theme is fascinating to any lover
of letters. The thought in this paper (and that goes without the
saying) is, not to discuss thoroughly these various phases of literary
iconoclasm, but rather to call attention to them and to co-ordinate
them.

I desire to show that these phases of criticism are not difficult of
explanation. These are natural, and are the outgrowth of an
image-making age. Study the age, understand it thoroughly, and the
literature of that period can hardly be a puzzling question. The
nineteenth century will stand in history as the chiefest iconoclast
which has arisen in the world's first six thousand years. And its
science, statecraft, art, and literature will be looked upon as
segments of the one circle, and that circle the century.

VII

Tennyson the Dreamer

My earliest recollections of Alfred Tennyson are associated with the
old Harper's volume, green-bound, large-paged, and frontispieced with
two pictures of the poet--one of them, a face bearded, thoughtful, with
eyes seeming not to see the near, but the remote; a head well-poised
and noble, with hair tangled as if matted by the wind; the face, as I a
lad thought, of a dreamer and a poet; and my first impressions, I
think, were right, since the years are confirmatory of this first
conviction. The second portrait pictured the poet wrapped in his
cloak, standing, lost in thought, alone upon a cliff, gazing solitary
at the sea, and listening. If I do not mistake, these pictures caught
the poet's spirit in so far as pictures can portray spirit. Tennyson
was always alone beside a sea, looking, listening, dreaming; and as
dreamer this article purposes portraying him.

Tennyson was, his life through, a recluse. He dwelt apart. He was as
one who stands afar oft and listens to the shock of battle, hears the
echo of cannon's roar, and so conceives a remote picture of the tragedy
of onset. English poetry began with Chaucer, outrider to a king,
associate with State affairs, participant in those turbulencies
recorded in Froissart's voluble "Chronicles." He was a courtier. Camp
and king's antechamber and embassage and battle made the arsis and
thesis of his poetry, and his poems are a picture of Edward III's age,
accurate as if a king's pageant passing flung shadow in a stream along
whose bank it marched. Spenser was a recluse, looking on the world's
movement as an Oriental woman wa