models.  That in as far as the prevailing taste has put these models before him, he is neither to take much blame to himself, nor to be in anywise disheartened for the future.  That in as far as he shall utterly reverse his whole poetic method, whether in morals or in aesthetics, leave undone all that he has done, and do all that he has not done, he will become, what he evidently, by grace of God, can become if he will, namely, a lasting and a good poet.

TENNYSON {103}

Critics cannot in general be too punctilious in their respect for an incognito.  If an author intended us to know his name, he would put it on his title-page.  If he does not choose to do that, we have no more right to pry into his secret than we have to discuss his family affairs or open his letters.  But every rule has its exceptional cases; and the book which stands first upon our list is surely such.  All the world, somehow or other, knows the author.  His name has been mentioned unhesitatingly by several reviews already, whether from private information, or from the certainty which every well-read person must feel that there is but one man in England possessed at once of poetic talent and artistic experience sufficient for so noble a creation.  We hope, therefore, that we shall not be considered impertinent if we ignore an incognito which all England has ignored before us, and attribute “In Memoriam” to the pen of the author of “The Princess.”

Such a course will probably be the more useful one to our readers; for this last work of our only living great poet seems to us at once the culmination of all his efforts and the key to many difficulties in his former writings.  Heaven forbid that we should say that it completes the circle of his powers.  On the contrary, it gives us hope of broader effort in new fields of thought and forms of art.  But it brings the development of his Muse and of his Creed to a positive and definite point.  It enables us to claim one who has been hitherto regarded as belonging to a merely speculative and peirastic school as the willing and deliberate champion of vital Christianity, and of an orthodoxy the more sincere because it has worked upward through the abyss of doubt; the more mighty for good because it justifies and consecrates the aesthetics and the philosophy of the present age.  We are sure, moreover, that the author, whatever right reasons he may have had for concealing his own name, would have no quarrel against us for alluding to it, were he aware of the idolatry with which every utterance of his is regarded by the cultivated young men of our day, especially at the universities, and of the infinite service of which this “In Memoriam” may be to them, if they are taught by it that their superiors are not ashamed of faith, and that they will rise instead of falling, fulfil instead of denying the cravings of their hearts and intellects, if they will pass upwards with their teacher from the vague though noble expectations of “Locksley Hall,” to the assured and everlasting facts of the proem to “In Memoriam”—­in our eyes the noblest Christian poem which England has produced for two centuries.