present generation is so eager to indulge the curiosity, and flatter the
mediocrity, of the public. The public, like the big baby it is, is
continually crying 'to see the wheels go round,' and for a time the
exhibition of, so to say, the 'works' of poet and novelist is profitable.
But a time will come when, with its curiosity sated, the public will turn
upon the poet, and throw into his face, on his own authority, that he is
but as they are, that his airs of inspiration and divine right are humbug.
And in that day the poet will block his silk hat, will shave away the
silken moustache, will get him a bottle of Mrs. Allen's Hair Restorer,
and betake himself to the sombrero of his ancestors--but it will be all
too late. The cat will have been irrecoverably let out of the bag, the
mystery of the poet as exploded as the mysteries of Eleusis.

Tennyson knew better. To use the word in its mediævalsense, 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