especially so of Tennyson, for a reason which raises some of the most
real problems about his poetry. Tennyson, of course, owed a great deal
to Virgil. There is no question of plagiarism here; a debt to Virgil is
like a debt to Nature. But Tennyson was a provincial Virgil. In such
passages as that about the schoolboy's barring out he might be called a
suburban Virgil. I mean that he tried to have the universal balance of
all the ideas at which the great Roman had aimed: but he hadn't got hold
of all the ideas to balance. Hence his work was not a balance of truths,
like the universe. It was a balance of whims; like the British
Constitution. It is intensely typical of Tennyson's philosophical temper
that he was almost the only Poet Laureate who was not ludicrous. It is
not absurd to think of Tennyson as tuning his harp in praise of Queen
Victoria: that is, it is not absurd in the same sense as Chaucer's harp
hallowed by dedication to Richard II or Wordsworth's harp hallowed by
dedication to George IV is absurd. Richard's court could not properly
appreciate either Chaucer's daisies or his "devotion." George IV would
not have gone pottering about Helvellyn in search of purity and the
simple annals of the poor. But Tennyson did sincerely believe in the
Victorian compromise; and sincerity is never undignified. He really did
hold a great many of the same views as Queen Victoria, though he was
gifted with a more fortunate literary style. If Dickens is Cobbett's
democracy stirring in its grave, Tennyson is the exquisitely ornamental
extinguisher on the flame of the first revolutionary poets. England has
settled down; England has become Victorian. The compromise was
interesting, it was national and for a long time it was successful:
there is still a great deal to be said for it. But it was as freakish
and unphilosophic, as arbitrary and untranslatable, as a beggar's
patched coat or a child's secret language. Now it is here that Browning
had a certain odd advantage over Tennyson; which has, perhaps, somewhat
exaggerated his intellectual superiority to him. Browning's eccentric