MR TENNYSON AND MR BROWNING.

A COMPARATIVE STUDY.

I.

AMONG the Literary Portraits of Sainte-Beuve are two placed side by side, and distinguished by more than a common portion of that critical artist's pureness of colour, and graceful animation of outline. The portraits are those of Mathurin Regnier and André Chénier. .They are brought together, not to suggest a series of skilful antitheses, not to form the subject of a parallel of the academic kind, but because the comparison rests on an essentially logical basis, the two poets being admirable types of two poetical spirits, or systems of thought and feeling, the one of which, as soon as it is thoroughly possessed, demands the other and forms its complement.

For a similar reason, two names may be brought together, which it is our good fortune to meet with often and almost inevitably side by side at the present day-the names of Mr Tennyson and Mr Browning. As Regnier and Chénier, separated by a long interval of time, stood over against one another, according to the view taken by their critic, the types of two poetical spirits or tendencies, so in some important respects do our own contemporary poets. Each presents a type of character

which is the counterpart of the other. Each reminds us of truths, which, if we listened to the other alone, we should be not indisposed to forget.

Criticism commonly occupies itself, when surveying an artist's works, with a study of his special powers, instincts and aptitudes; or a study of the subjects, towards which, by blind attraction or deliberate choice, he turns; or a study of that fine effluence of the whole artistic nature which can hardly be analysed and which we term style. The method pursued by Sainte-Beuve in his comparative study of Mathurin Regnier and André Chénier is somewhat different from each and all of these. "Taking successively the four or five elementary themes of all poetry-God, nature, genius, art, love, human life-let us see how they revealed themselves to the two men we are now considering, and under what aspects they endeavoured to reproduce them." Such was the method of Sainte-Beuve; he did not simply record personal impressions of delight; he did not attempt to express in terms of the intellect those characteristics of form which refuse to incarnate themselves in so pure a work of thought as the language of criticism; his method surprised and laid hold of certain portions of the artist's work which escape the other methods. It is that which I purpose to adopt in the following study; but before attempting to apply it, an explanation is necessary.

We are about to enquire into what we may term the philosophy of a poet, we are about to consider the poet as a thinker; but let it be observed, as a thinker who is before all else an artist. Now the conclusions of all men on those subjects which chiefly occupy the artist

on God, and nature, and our relations to them, on human character and life and the struggle of will with circumstances, are the outcome of much beside pure logic. The very materials of thought which this or that man possesses on such subjects are dependent, in a great degree, on his moral temperament and emotional tendencies. And the processes by which these materials are dealt with, and shaped, and turned out by the intellect, depend in no less a measure on the character of the individual, and his habitual currents of feeling. It is true of every man that his nature is a living organism, each function of which is affected by all the others. But this is true in a special degree of the artist. The conclusions of the speculative intellect hardly become available for artistic purposes till they have ceased to be conclusions, till they have dropped out of the intellect into the moral nature, and there become vital and obscure. For obscure all great art is, not with the perplexity of subtle speculation, but with the mystery of vital movement. How complex soever the character of some dramatis persona, for instance, may be, if it has been elaborated in the intellect, another intellect can make it out. How simple soever it be, if the writer has made it his own by a complete sympathy, it is real and therefore inexhaustibly full of meaning. It seems very easy to understand Shakspere's "Miranda" or Goethe's "Clärchen," they appear quite simple conceptions; yet we never entirely comprehend them, any more than we do the simplest real human being, and so we return to them again and again ever finding something new. They are as clear as the sea, which tempts us to look down

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and down into its unresisting depths, but like the sea they live and move, and their pure abysses baffle the eye. Hence it is that the artistic product, the work of art,—is far richer than any intellectual gift the artist or even the philosopher can offer. It rests not so much

on any view of life (all views of life are unfortunately one-sided) as on a profound sympathy with life in certain individual forms; and in proportion as the whole nature of the artist is lost in his work, his perceptive powers, his sensuous impulses, his reason, his imagination, his emotions, his will, the conscious activity and unconscious energy interpenetrating one another — his work comes forth full, not of speculation, but what is so much better, of life, the open secret of art.

Are we then justified in speaking of the philosophy of a poet? Yes, certainly. In the first place the poet is a seeker for truth, though not of the speculative kind. He has his own vision of life; but we shall discover this in his work not in views and opinions, so much as in the forms and colours and movement of life itself. Into "Faust" entered the quintessence of fifty years' experience and meditation of the most wideranging modern mind; "Wilhelm Meister" is fuller of profound suggestion than most of the treatises on ethics, but the suggestion is of that unbroken, that deep and pregnant kind, which real action and suffering whisper to him who has ears to hear. Again, it is a strange mistake to regard the philosopher as a mere intellectual machine for the manufacture of systems. In the deep region of active and moral tendencies lie the profoundest differences between the masters of the schools. Here

we have a right to compare speculative and artistic natures, and to separate the two into corresponding groups. There is a Zeno hidden behind one poet, there is an Epicurus hidden behind another; one artist is born an optimist, another is born a pessimist; one cried as a baby for the moon, and all of life darkened because it was unattainable; another needed nothing for his happiness but the rudiments of an idealistic philosophy contained in his own infantile crowings.

II.

Let us start in our study, a partial study made from a single point of view,-with what may be an assumption for the present, but an assumption which will lead to its own verification. Let us start by saying that Mr Tennyson has a strong sense of the dignity and efficiency of law,-of law understood in its widest meaning. Energy nobly controlled, an ordered activity delight his imagination. Violence, extravagance, immoderate force, the swerving from appointed ends, revolt, these are with Mr Tennyson the supreme manifestations of evil,

Under what aspect is the relation of the world and man to God represented in the poems of Mr Tennyson? Surely, it will be said, one who feels so strongly the presence of law in the physical world, and who recognises so fully the struggle in the moral nature of man between impulse and duty, assigning to conscience a paramount authority, has the materials from which arises naturally a vivid feeling of what is called the personal relation of God to his creatures. A little