Pond. — On Tennyson and Browning. 549 



their sublimity. To the devoted workers of science nothing is 

 too great or too small for their all-embracing scrutiny. Science 

 deals equally with the infinite and the infinitesimal. The 

 composition of far-distant suns and the life-history of the 

 parasite of a parasite are equally the subjects of her investiga- 

 tion, and the results are such as cannot fail to appeal to any 

 man who has a spark of intellect or imagination. A discourse 

 on literature, on the other hand, deals with a subject with 

 which all are more or less familiar, and so loses the advantage 

 of novelty ; it does not deal with concrete facts, but rather 

 with opinions about facts, and so, as compared with the 

 directness of science, it is apt to be somewhat vague and in- 

 tangible ; it is subjective rather than objective. To use the 

 language of science, criticism must inevitably be qualitative 

 only, and can never aspire, to be quantitative. It can detect 

 the presence of certain elements, but not accurately weigh or 

 measure the proportions in which they exist. 



At last it occurred to me, after I had examined and re- 

 jected many possible subjects, that in the noble singer whose 

 death at the close of last year was regarded as a national 

 calamity by all the English-speaking peoples I might find the 

 starting-point for the retrospect which I desired. Further 

 consideration led me to hope that by comparing and contrast- 

 ing Tennyson and Browning I might be able, without making 

 a mere enumeration of Victorian poets, to give a retrospective 

 review of Victorian poetry. The magazines of late have been 

 filled, and overfilled, with what one may call Tennysoniana — 

 anecdotal accounts of the Laureate, written, some by intimate 

 friends, others by Americans who had for once succeeded in 

 intruding on his privacy at Freshwater, or by Englishmen who 

 had once seen him at a railway- station. With these I have 

 no desire to enter into competition. I shall rather aim this 

 evening at examining Tennyson and Browning not as men, 

 but rather as the living embodiments of certain aspects of 

 poetry characteristic of the Victorian era, by discussing their 

 methods, their objects, their ideals, and their views with 

 regard to the great questions which are always present to the 

 mind of man. 



I have said the Victorian era of poetry, and I use the term 

 advisedly. For the beginning of the reign of Victoria is prac- 

 tically coincident with the rise of certain tendencies in poetry. 

 It is true that those tendencies have worked themselves out 

 before the conclusion of the reign of the royal lady from whom 

 the period takes its name, but none the less for fifty years 

 were they coextensive with it. To use a paradox, poets are to 

 a great extent at once the creation and the creators of their 

 time, and from either point of view the term Victorian poets 

 is not misapplied. 



