the theology was balanced, however, by a few more glimpses of his lighter interests, such as we find in the passage:  “Never take an iambus for a Christian name.  A trochee, or tribrach, will do very well.  Edith and Rotha are my favourite names for women.”  What we want most of all in table talk is to get an author into the confession album.  Coleridge’s Table Talk would have stood a worse chance of immortality were it not for the fact that he occasionally came down out of the pulpit and babbled.

XIII.—­TENNYSON:  A TEMPORARY CRITICISM

If Tennyson’s reputation has diminished, it is not that it has fallen before hostile criticism:  it has merely faded through time.  Perhaps there was never an English poet who loomed so large to his own age as Tennyson—­who represented his contemporaries with the same passion and power.  Pope was sufficiently representative of his age, but his age meant, by comparison, a limited and aristocratic circle.  Byron represented and shocked his age by turns.  Tennyson, on the other hand, was as close to the educated middle-class men and women of his time as the family clergyman.  That is why, inevitably, he means less to us than he did to them.  That he was ahead of his age on many points on which this could not be said of the family clergyman one need not dispute.  He was a kind of “new theologian.”  He stood, like Dean Farrar, for the larger hope and various other heresies.  Every representative man is ahead of his age—­a little, but not enough to be beyond the reach of the sympathies of ordinary people.  It may be objected that Tennyson is primarily an artist, not a thinker, and that he should be judged not by his message but by his song.  But his message and his song sprang from the same vision—­a vision of the world seen, not sub specie aeternitatis, but sub specie the reign of Queen Victoria.  Before we appreciate Tennyson’s real place in literature, we must frankly recognize the fact that his muse wore a crinoline.  The great mass of his work bears its date stamped upon it as obviously almost as a copy of The Times.  How topical, both in mood and phrasing, are such lines as those in Locksley Hall:

  Then her cheek was pale, and thinner than should be for one so young. 
  And her eyes on all my motions with a mute observance hung. 
  And I said “My cousin Amy, speak, and speak the truth to me,
  Trust me, cousin, all the current of my being sets to thee.”

One would not, of course, quote these lines as typical of Tennyson’s genius.  I think, however, they may be fairly quoted as lines suggesting the mid-Victorian atmosphere that clings round all but his greatest work.  They bring before our minds the genteel magazine illustrations of other days.  They conjure up a world of charming, vapid faces, where there is little life apart from sentiment and rhetoric.  Contrast such a poem as Locksley Hall with