In religious verse something, and in philosophical verse much, remains to be done. The wider hope has scarcely found a singer yet, and the deeper speculation has been very imperfectly and empirically celebrated by our poets. Whether love, the very central fountain of poetic inspiration in the past, can yield many fresh variations, remains to be seen. That passion will, however, in all probability be treated in the future less objectively and with a less obtrusive landscape background. The school which is now expiring has carried description, the consciousness of exterior forms and colours, the drapery and upholstery of nature, to its extreme limit. The next development of poetry is likely to be very bare and direct, unembroidered, perhaps even arid, in character. It will be experimental rather than descriptive, human rather than animal. So at least we vaguely conjecture. But whatever the issue may be, we may be confident that the art will retain that poignant charm over undeveloped minds, and that exquisite fascination, which for so many successive generations have made poetry the wisest and the fairest friend of youth.
1891.
TENNYSON—AND AFTER
Tennyson—and After
As we filed slowly out of the Abbey on the afternoon of Wednesday, the 12th of October, 1892, there must have occurred to others, I think, as to myself, a whimsical and half-terrifying sense of the symbolic contrast between what we had left and what we emerged upon. Inside, the grey and vitreous atmosphere, the reverberations of music moaning somewhere out of sight, the bones and monuments of the noble dead, reverence, antiquity, beauty, rest. Outside, in the raw air, a tribe of hawkers urging upon the edges of a dense and inquisitive crowd a large sheet of pictures of the pursuit of a flea by a "lady," and more insidious salesmen doing a brisk trade in what they falsely pretended to be "Tennyson's last poem."
Next day we read in our newspapers affecting accounts of the emotion displayed by the vast crowds outside the Abbey—horny hands dashing away the tear, seamstresses holding the "the little green volumes" to their faces to hide their agitation. Happy for those who could see these things with their fairy telescopes out of the garrets of Fleet Street. I, alas!—though I sought assiduously—could mark nothing of the kind. Entering the Abbey, conducted by courteous policemen through unparalleled masses of the curious, we distinguished patience, good behaviour, cheerful and untiring inquisitiveness, a certain obvious gratitude for an incomprehensible spectacle provided by the authorities, but nothing else. And leaving the Abbey, as I say, the impression was one almost sinister in its abrupt transition. Poetry, authority, the grace and dignity of life, seemed to have been left behind us for ever in that twilight where Tennyson was sleeping with Chaucer and with Dryden.