The horns of Elfland faintly blowing,

has the same suggestion of having been forged from the gold of the world’s romance.

Tennyson’s art at its best, however, and in these two instances is art founded upon art, not art founded upon life.  We used to be asked to admire the vivid observation shown in such lines as: 

  More black than ashbuds in the front of March;

and it is undoubtedly interesting to learn that Tennyson had a quick eye for the facts of nature.  But such lines, however accurate, do not make a man a poet.  It is in his fine ornamental moods that Tennyson means most to our imaginations nowadays—­in the moods of such lines as: 

  Now droops the milk-white peacock like a ghost.

The truth is, Tennyson, with all his rhetoric and with all his prosaic Victorian opinions, was an aesthete in the immortal part of him no less than were Rossetti and Swinburne.  He seemed immense to his contemporaries, because he put their doubts and fears into music, and was master of the fervid rhetoric of the new gospel of Imperialism.  They did not realize that great poetry cannot be founded on a basis of perishable doubts and perishable gospels.  It was enough for them to feel that In Memoriam gave them soothing anchorage and shelter from the destructive hurricanes of science.  It was enough for them to thrill to the public-speech poetry of Of old sat Freedom on the Heights, the patriotic triumph of The Relief of Lucknow, the glorious contempt for foreigners exhibited in his references to “the red fool-fury of the Seine.”  Is it any wonder that during a great part of his life Tennyson was widely regarded as not only a poet, but a teacher and a statesman?  His sneering caricature of Bright as the “broad-brimmed hawker of holy things” should have made it clear that in politics he was but a party man, and that his political intelligence was commonplace.

He was too deficient in the highest kind of imagination and intellect to achieve the greatest things.  He seldom or never stood aloof from his own time, as Wordsworth did through his philosophic imagination, as Keats did through his aesthetic imagination, as Browning did through his dramatic imagination.  He wore a poetical cloak, and avoided the vulgar crowd physically; he had none of Browning’s taste for tea-parties.  But Browning had not the tea-party imagination; Tennyson, in a great degree, had.  He preached excellent virtues to his time; but they were respectable rather than spiritual virtues.  Thus, The Idylls of the King have become to us mere ancient fashion-plates of the virtues, while the moral power of The Ring and the Book is as commanding to-day as in the year in which the poem was first published.

It is all the more surprising that no good selection from Tennyson has yet appeared.  His “complete works” contain so much that is ephemeral and uninspired as to be a mere book of reference on our shelves.  When will some critic do for him what Matthew Arnold did for Wordsworth, and separate the gold from the dross—­do it as well as Matthew Arnold did it for Wordsworth?  Such a volume would be far thinner than the Wordsworth selection.  But it would entitle Tennyson to a much higher place among the poets than in these years of the reaction he is generally given.