ABSTRACT

In some respects the two greatest imaginative poets of our day are striking contrasts. Browning is careless and impatient in execution; Tennyson careful and elaborate. Browning is rough and ungainly; Tennyson smooth and stately. Browning trots or gallops; Tennyson walks or canters. Browning almost gasps out his meaning, omitting half the articles and particles which weave speech into a flexible texture; Tennyson touches and retouches the form till it is no less perfect, or even more perfect, than the thought or emotion to be expressed, so that the artistic workmanship sometimes attracts even more attention than the imaginative substance on which it is expended. Again, Tennyson studies either beauty or grace or majesty of form in almost all his poems; Browning, we might almost say, studies the neglect of these qualities, or, if that be exaggeration, at least ignores them altogether, and hews away right and left, like a pioneer in a jungle, instead of shaping anxiously and lovingly as a sculptor shapes his marble. Tennyson treats words and all their associations with the utmost sympathy and reverence; Browning tumbles them about and rolls them over almost as a tempest does the rocks of an Alpine valley, sometimes producing very weird effects with them, but effects which have a great deal of the appearance of rough play about them, like the casts in some giant’s game at bowls. Tennyson not unfrequently wears the graceful negligence of manner appropriate to one who is on easy terms with the Muses; Browning is apt to play them tricks, and indulge in familiarities with them which suggest that he does not revere them as Muses at all. Yet, in spite of all these marked contrasts, there are points of resemblance which are due partly to the common interests of the social world in which both these poets have lived, partly to the intellectual tendencies of the time. Both are at

orders his tomb at St. Praxed’s Church. Both have given the most anxious attention to provincial and vernacular peculiarities,—Tennyson in his two ‘Northern Farmers’, his ‘Grandmother’, and just now in his ‘Owd Roä’; Browning in his Yorkshire Halbert and Hob, and his study of Bunyan’s coarse converts, Ned Bratts and his wife. And both, with a very strong desire to master the religious attitude of a world far removed from our own,—Tennyson the mysticism of the age of chivalry, Browning the peculiarities of mediaeval or modern superstition,—have been intensely modern; modern in their faith and in their sympathies, in their confidence that they are ‘heirs of all the ages,’ and that they stand on a summit of knowledge and experience higher than that of even the greatest of their predecessors.