Not philosophy,
after all, not humanity, just sheer joyous power of song, is the
primal thing in poetry. Ideas, and flesh and blood, are but reserves
to be brought up when the poet's youth is going. When the bird can no
longer sing in flight, let the nest be ready. After the king has
dazzled us with his crown, let him have something to sit down on. But
the session on throne or in nest is not the divine period. Had
Swinburne's genius been of the kind that solidifies, he would yet at
the close of the nineteenth century have been for us young men
virtually--though not so definitely as in fact he was--the writer of
`Atalanta in Calydon' and of `Poems and Ballads.'
Tennyson's death in '98 had not taken us at all by surprise. We had
been fully aware that he was alive. He had always been careful to keep
himself abreast of the times. Anything that came along--the Nebular
Hypothesis at one moment, the Imperial Institute at another--won
mention from his Muse. He had husbanded for his old age that which he
had long ago inherited: middle age. If in our mourning for him there
really was any tincture of surprise, this was due to merely the vague
sense that he had in the fullness of time died rather prematurely: his
middle-age might have been expected to go on flourishing for ever.
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