Nothing is easier than for one age to be shallow and arrogant about the spiritual and intellectual preoccupation of another. To active minds, even the most cynical among them, life is such an urgent and absorbing business, so desperately charged with significance, that it is easy enough to suppose that contemporary methods of approach to it are the only wisely chosen ones, and this particularly in contrast with those of an immediately preceding age. I do not know that any critic of to-day thinks that Homer was a liar or a fool because he believed, or professed to believe, in the hierarchy of Zeus and the enchantment of the Sirens, or complains that Shakespeare was a credulous ghostmonger, or that Shelley, in holding that the world could be satisfactorily governed by a quixotic political idealism, was only a little less inept than Machiavelli, who thought that it could be redeemed by political craft. We find no difficulty in accepting Homer and Shakespeare (who, by the way, is just as likely to have actually believed in the appearance of ghosts as not, and who made fairies real, when most modern writers can do nothing but make them silly) on their own terms in their relation to life. If we understand the functions of poetry we are not the less moved by Milton’s description of the creation of the world because we no longer believe that it happened in that way, and I suppose there would be none among us found with temerity enough to suggest that Milton himself did not believe it and that he was setting his story down idly without conviction. In all these instances we are willing to admit that it is not the creed that matters, but the faith and passion with which it is held, and we will allow the poets any conclusions they like so long as we are persuaded of their own imaginative good faith. And yet this generosity is not always found when the conclusions happen to be those of an age against which our own lives are partly passed in reaction, and many honest critics who would call Homer neither liar nor fool are misled into calling Tennyson both.

Among Victorian poets Tennyson is at the centre of a philosophic life against which the intellectual habit of our own time is often in active opposition. This being so, much may be excused to the excesses of self-interest, and we can make some allowance, for example, for a current mood that thinks it rather indelicate to speak about mere goodness, when it reprimands a mood of yesterday that thought goodness a very simple and natural thing to talk about. But to make allowances for it is not to approve it, and it is about time for us to stop making ourselves ridiculous by talking about the great Victorians as though they were lost in a fog of superstition and prudery and moral timidity.[16] We need not debase ourselves before them, but, also, we need not talk as though the dawn of intellectual candour had broken somewhere about 1900. It is all really such a little matter, the difference, just a change of deportment, that is all. At many modern tables, if you should speak of goodness everybody blushes or simpers, if, indeed, there is not some very bold spirit to rebuke you openly. But if you speak of the other thing every one is happily at ease and you realise how fearlessly we to-day are facing the truth about life. At our grandmothers’ table it was different. The freedom of to-day would have caused consternation there, but our own inhibitions would have been unintelligible. There have been loss and gain in both ways, and the balance remains about the same. After all, it is just as unaccountable to be discomposed by Tennyson when he makes Galahad say

as it is to be discomposed by Mr. Masefield when he makes Saul Kane say

In this study of the substance of Victorian poetry, therefore, we will dismiss at once any suggestion that we are dealing with a period of intellectual adversity. Tennyson and the group of poets who represented in some degree or another Tennyson’s mood were neither keener nor duller in the wits than the poets of other ages, and since we go to poetry not for what we can learn from it, but for an invigoration of the mind towards the establishment of our own learning, it need not trouble us that Tennyson’s point of view happened in many ways to be one that is peculiarly antipathetic to our own.