Renan was the enemy of the Catholic Church; but who can imagine
Renan writing of it as Kingsley or Dickens did? Taine was the enemy of
the French Revolution; but who can imagine Taine talking about it as
Tennyson or Newman talked? Even Matthew Arnold, though he saw this peril
and prided himself on escaping it, did not altogether escape it. There
must be (to use an Irishism) something shallow in the depths of any man
who talks about the _Zeitgeist_ as if it were a living thing.
But this defect is very specially the key to the case of the two great
Victorian poets, Tennyson and Browning; the two spirited or beautiful
tunes, so to speak, to which the other events marched or danced. It was
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.
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