There is another thing to say in this connection.  The expansion of the interests of the English poets beyond England was due in Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, and partly in Byron, to the great tidal-wave of feeling for man as man, which, rising long before the French Revolution, was lifted into twice its height and dashed on the shore of the world with overwhelming volume, by the earthquake in France of 1789.  Special national sentiments were drowned in its waters.  Patriotism was the duty of man, not to any one nation but to the whole of humanity, conceived of as the only nation.

In 1832 there was little left of that influence in England among the educated classes, and Tennyson’s insular patriotism represented their feeling for many years, and partly represents it now.  But the ideas of the Revolution were at the same time taking a wiser and more practical form among the English democracy than they even had at their first outburst in France, and this emerged, on one side of it, in the idea of internationalism.  It grew among the propertied classes from the greater facilities of travel, from the wide extension of commercial, and especially of literary, intercommunication.  Literature, even more than commerce, diminishes the oppositions and increases the amalgamation of nations.  On her lofty plane nations breathe an air in which their quarrels die.  The same idea grew up of itself among the working classes, not only in England, but in Germany, Italy, France, America.  They began, and have continued, to lose their old belief in distinct and warring nationalities.  To denationalise the nations into one nation only—­the nation of mankind—­is too vast an idea to grow quickly, but in all classes, and perhaps most in the working class, there are an increasing number of thinking men who say to the varied nations, “We are all one; our interests, duties, rights, nature and aims are one.”  And, for my part, I believe that in the full development of that conception the progress of mankind is most deeply concerned, and will be best secured.

Now, when all these classes in England, brought to much the same point by different paths, seek for a poetry which is international rather than national, and which recognises no special country as its own, they do not find it in Tennyson, but they do find Browning writing, and quite naturally, as if he belonged to other peoples as much as to his own, even more than to his own.  And they also find that he had been doing this for many years before their own international interests had been awakened.  That, then, differentiates him completely from Tennyson, and is another reason why he was not read in the past but is read in the present.

9.  Again, with regard to politics and social questions, Tennyson made us know what his general politics were, and he has always pleased or displeased men by his political position.  The British Constitution appears throughout his work seated like Zeus on Olympus, with all the world awaiting its nod.  Then, also, social problems raise their storm-awakening heads in his poetry:  the Woman’s Question; War; Competition; the State of the Poor; Education; a State without Religion; the Marriage Question; where Freedom lies; and others.  These are brought by Tennyson, though tentatively, into the palace of poetry and given rooms in it.