556 Transactions. — Miscellaneous. 



lyric could be imagined more pure and serene and melodious 

 than the last I have mentioned? This, at all events, is not 

 written in that tooth-splintering jargon which disfigures so 

 much of Browning's work, and of which it might well be said 

 ■ — as De Quincey said of Bowles's verse — that it ought to be 

 boiled before it could be read. I have no hesitation in saying 

 that the seven stanzas of " Evelyn Hope " are worth the 

 whole 11,000 lines of the chaotic " Sordello." 



Tennyson, then, is a lyric and idyllic poet, the direct 

 inheritor of Keats and Wordsworth. He proceeds by the 

 pictorial method, making his scenery suggest or support the 

 central idea. Browning is more original : starting for himself, 

 he constitutes himself the poet of the soul of man. He is a 

 psychologist, but working objectively. He has the art of 

 piercing at once to the innermost soul, of arresting the master 

 passions one by one, and forcing them to reveal themselves. 

 Tennyson has to some extent tried the same method ; but his 

 "St. Simeon Stylites " and "Ulysses" and "Tithonus" 

 seem to me, fine as they are, but thin analysis compared with 

 Browning's robust and vigorous presentments. And this leads 

 us to consider another ground on which both poets meet — the 

 dramatic. 



To my mind, neither of them has been successful in the 

 drama proper. Both have failed, but not for the same reason. 

 How should Tennyson work a real drama? Whence is to 

 come, in his case, the knowledge of that mingling of action 

 and passion which gives dramatic interest ? All his years 

 have been passed aloof from the storm and stress of life ; his 

 whole nature shrinks from them. His career has been easy 

 and fortunate, his life retired. But a dramatist must know 

 men as they are, not men as they are depicted in books. 

 And therein alone, apart from temperament, Tennyson must 

 have failed as a dramatist. As a matter of fact, he has 

 carried the idyllic method on to the stage, and given us — as 

 Stedman well says — a series of tableaux, or dramatic pictures, 

 instead of dramatic action. His work is pleasant reading for 

 the study, but not really adapted for the stage. The aid of a 

 great actor, the dictates of fashion, the high reputation of the 

 author, may enable his "Cup" or " Becket " to keep the 

 stage for a time ; none the less they are intrinsically failures, 

 or, at all events, nothing more than a succl'S d'estime. 



Browning, on the other hand, though in some of his finest 

 work he pursues the dramatic method of embodiment of some 

 great passion, which he makes to pourtray itself, yet fails in 

 that portion of his work which is cast in the dramatic mould. 

 He has the necessary knowledge of mankind — not Shakespeare 

 himself had more piercing insight. Wherein, then, does he 

 fail ? In two points, as it seems to me : firstly, in that his 



