as exploded as the mysteries of Eleusis.

Tennyson knew better. To use the word in its mediaevalsense, he respected
the 'mystery' of poetry. Instinctively, doubtless, but also, I should
imagine, deliberately, he all his life lived up to the traditional type of
the poet, and kept between him and his public a proper veil of Sinaitic
mist. You remember Browning's picture of the mysterious poet 'you saw go
up and down Valladolid,' and the awestruck rumours that were whispered
about him--how, for instance--

'If you tracked him to his home, down lanes
Beyond the Jewry, and as clean to pace,
You found he ate his supper in a room
Blazing with lights, four Titians on the wall,
And twenty naked girls to change his plate!'

That is the kind of thing the public likes to hear of its poets. That is
something like a poet. Inquisitive the public always will be, but it is a
mistake to indulge rather than to pique its curiosity. Tennyson respected
the wishes of his public in this matter, and, not only in his dress and
his dramatic seclusion, but surely in his obstinate avoidance of
prose-work of any kind we have a subtler expression of his carefulness for
fame. It is a mistake for a poet to write prose, however good, for it is a
charming illusion of the public that, comparatively speaking, any one can
write prose. It is an earthly accomplishment, it is as walking is to
flying--is it not stigmatised 'pedestrian'? Now, your true Bird of
Paradise, which is the poet, must, metaphorically speaking, have no
legs--as Adrian Harley said was the case with the women in Richard
Feverel's poems. He must never be seen to walk in prose, for his part is,
'pinnacled dim in the intense inane,' to hang aloft and warble the
unpremeditated lay, without erasure or blot. This is, I am sure, not
fanciful, for two or three modern instances, which I am far too
considerate to name, illustrate its truth. Unless you are a very great
person indeed, the surest way to lose a reputation as poet is to gain one
as critic. It is true that for a time one may help the other, and that if
you are very fecund, and let your poetical issues keep pace with your
critical, you may even avoid the catastrophe altogether; but it is an
unmistakable risk, and if in the end you are not catalogued as a great
critic, you will assuredly be set down as a minor poet: whereas if you had
stuck to your last, there is no telling what fame might not have been
yours. Limita