7.  Tennyson became fully original, but he always admitted, and sometimes encouraged in himself, a certain vein of conventionality.  He kept the opinions of the past in the matter of caste.  He clung to certain political and social maxims, and could not see beyond them.  He sometimes expressed them as if they were freshly discovered truths or direct emanations from the Deity of England.  He belonged to a certain type of English society, and he rarely got out of it in his poetry.  He inhabited a certain Park of morals, and he had no sympathy with any self-ethical life beyond its palings.  What had been, what was proper and recognised, somewhat enslaved in Tennyson that distinctiveness and freedom of personality which is of so much importance in poetry, and which, had it had more liberty in Tennyson, would have made him a still greater poet than he was.

Browning, on the other hand—­much more a person in society than Tennyson, much more a man of the world, and obeying in society its social conventions more than Tennyson—­never allowed this to touch his poems.  As the artist, he was quite free from the opinions, maxims, and class conventions of the past or the present.  His poetry belongs to no special type of society, to no special nationality, to no separate creed or church, to no settled standard of social morality.  What his own thought and emotion urged him to say, he said with an absolute carelessness of what the world would say.  And in this freedom he preceded and prophesied the reaction of the last years of the nineteenth century against the tyranny of maxims and conventions in society, in morals, and in religion.  That reaction has in many ways been carried beyond the proper limits of what is just and beautiful.  But these excesses had to be, and the world is beginning to avoid them.  What remains is the blessing of life set free, not altogether from the use of conventions, but from their tyranny and oppression, and lifted to a higher level, where the test of what is right and fitting in act, and just in thought, is not the opinion of society, but that Law of Love which gives us full liberty to develop our own nature and lead our own life in the way we think best independent of all conventions, provided we do not injure the life of others, or violate any of the great moral and spiritual truths by obedience to which the progress of mankind is promoted and secured.  Into that high and free region of thought and action Browning brought us long ago.  Tennyson did not, save at intervals when the poet over-rode the man.  This differentiates the men.  But it also tells us why Browning was not read fifty years ago, when social conventions were tyrannous and respectability a despot, and why he has been read for the last fifteen years and is read now.