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Both lovers are gloomy, though the Master has better cause, for the Tennysonian hero is more comfortably provided for than Edgar with his "man and maid," his Caleb and Mysie. Finally, both The Bride of Lammermoor, which affected Tennyson so potently in boyhood and Maud, excel in passages rather than as wholes.
He has helped to take away poetry from its conventional "elevation" and bring it everywhere poignantly in contact with throbbing life. Thus he is emphatically apart from so-called traditional poets who brilliantly follow the Tennysonian tradition, and give us another kind of enjoyment. But although Mr.
"We're not in the good old Tennysonian days. There's precious little chivalry now! Men don't idealize women as they used. They're grown far more suspicious and harder. Perhaps because women have grown so critical of them! Anyway something's gone what is it? Poetry? Illusion?
But does it live in the memory as one of the rare great Tennysonian lines? It does not. It has charm, but the charm is merely curious or pretty. A whole poem composed of lines with no better recommendation than that line has would remain merely curious or pretty. It would not permanently interest. It would be as insipid as a pretty woman who had nothing behind her prettiness. It would not live.
Two poems in particular came in for much revision: "The Lay of an Exiled Englishman," and "Friends on the Astrachan Ranch," pleased him with their lines here and there, yet the general and final effect seemed disappointing to his fine critical side; like many another he saw and felt better than he could perform. "A Tennysonian ring, I fear. Yet what man alive and writing now can resist it?
This humanity in poetry is distinctly, first of all, Shakespearian; but if this quality should seem to any reader not also Tennysonian, let him re-read "Guinevere," in the "Idylls of the King," and reverse his decision. The hearts of men were largely attuned by Tennyson, and taught to understand the affinities and symbolisms of nature.
Just reflect for a minute what Genevieve's George was. He was her knight, her Bayard, her thoroughly Tennysonian King Arthur. The basis of her adoration was that he should remain like that. You can see then what a staggering experience it was to have caught herself, even for a minute, in the act of smiling over him as sulky and absurd. And think of George's Genevieve!
The Tennysonian poet does indeed mention trivialities, but he mentions them when he wishes to speak trivially; Browning mentions trivialities when he wishes to speak sensationally. Now this sense of the terrible importance of detail was a sense which may be said to have possessed Browning in the emphatic manner of a demoniac possession.
He dishes up Jesus Christ in it, and Pontius Pilate and Mary Magdalene and the Wise Men of the East, as freely as Tennyson dishes up Arthur and Launcelot and Guinevere and the rest of that famous company. His style, too, is Tennysonian, to a certain degree.
It is refreshing to lose the moony Tennysonian sensuousness which induced, with Lowell's vigorous imagination, the blank artificiality of style which was visible in several of his early poems.
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