“A perverse generation seeking after a sign,” he said rather grimly, “and there is no sign forthcoming except the old sign, that has been there for centuries!  I don’t care,” he added, “about the sign of the thing.  It is the quality that I want; and these new poets of whom I have been speaking have got the quality.  That is all I ask for.”

“No,” I said, “I want a great deal more than that!  Browning gave us the sense of the human heart, bewildered by all the new knowledge, and yet passionately desiring.  Tennyson—­”

“Poor old Tennyson!” he said.

“That is very ungracious,” I said.  “You are as perverse as I was about Byron when the old banker quoted him with tears.  I was going to say, and I will say it, that Tennyson, with all his faults, was a great lord of music; and he put into words the fine, homely domestic emotion of the race—­the poetry of labour, order, and peace.  It was new and rich and splendid, and because it seems to you old-fashioned, you call it mere respectability; but it was the marching music of the world, because he showed men that faith was enlarged and not overturned by science.  These two were great, because they saw far and wide; they knew by instinct just what the ordinary man was thinking, who yet wished his life to be set to music.  These little men of yours don’t see that.  They have their moments of ecstasy, as we all have, in the blossoming orchard full of the songs of birds.  And that will always and for ever give us the lyric, if the skill is there.  But I want something more than that; I, you, thousands of people, are feeling something that makes the brain thrill and the heart leap.  The mischief is that we don’t know what it is, and I want a great poet to come and tell us.”

“Ah,” he said, “I am afraid you want something ethical, something that satisfies the man in Tennyson who

     Walked between his wife and child
     And now and then he gravely smiled.

But we have done with all that.  What we want is people who can express the fine, rare, unusual thoughts of highly organised creatures, and you want a poet to sing of bread and butter!”

“Why, yes,” I said, “I think I agree with Fitz-Gerald that tea and bread and butter are the only foods worth anything—­the only things one cannot do without.  And it is just the things that one cannot do without that I want the new great poet to sing of.  I agree with William Morris that art is the one thing we all want, the expression of man’s joy in his work.  And the more that art retires into fine nuances and intellectual subtleties, the more that it becomes something esoteric and mysterious, the less I care about it.  When Tennyson said to the farmer’s wife, ‘What’s the news?’ she replied, ’Mr. Tennyson, there’s only one piece of news worth telling, and that is that Christ died for all men.’  Tennyson said very grandly and simply, ’Ah, that’s old news and good news and new news!’ And that is exactly what I want the poets to tell us.  It is a common inheritance, not a refined monopoly, that I claim.”