Not mine (that's little), but thy laurel wear.
It would never have occurred to this great and wise man that his own death could be supposed to mark the final burning up and turning to ashes of the prophetic bays.
These are considerations, however—to return to my original parable—for the few within the Abbey. They are of no force in guiding opinion among the non-poetical masses outside. These, dangerously moved for the nonce to observe the existence of poetry, may make a great many painful and undesirable reflections before the subject quits their memory. There is always a peril in a popular movement that is not founded on genuine feeling, and the excitement about Tennyson's death has been far too universal to be sincere. It is even now not too early for us to perceive, if we will face it calmly, that elements of a much commoner and emptier nature than reverence for a man of genius have entered into the stir about the Laureate's burial. The multitude so stirred into an excited curiosity about a great poet will presently crave, of course, a little more excitement still over another poet, and this stimulant will not be forthcoming. We have not, and shall not have for a generation at least, such another sacrifice to offer to the monster. It will be in the retreat of the wave, in the sense of popular disappointment at the non-recurrence of such intellectual shocks as the deaths of Browning and Tennyson have supplied, that the right of poetry to take precedence among the arts of writing will for the first time come to be seriously questioned. Our critics will then, too late, begin to regret their suttee of the Muses; but if they try to redeem their position by praising this living poet or that, the public will only too glibly remind them of their own dictum that "poetry died with Tennyson."
In old days the reading public swept the literature of its fathers into the dust-bin, and read Horace while its immediate contemporaries were preparing works in prose and verse to suit the taste of the moment. But nowadays each great writer who passes out of physical life preserves his intellectual existence intact and becomes a lasting rival to his surviving successor. The young novelist has no living competitor so dangerous to him as Dickens and Thackeray are, who are nevertheless divided from him by time almost as far as Milton was from Pope. It is nearly seventy years since the earliest of Macaulay's Essays appeared, and the least reference to one of them would now be recognised by "every schoolboy." Less than seventy years after the death of Bacon his Essays were so completely forgotten that when extracts from them were discovered in the common-place book of a deceased lady of quality, they were supposed to be her own, were published and praised by people as clever as Congreve, went through several editions, and were not detected until within the present century. When an age made a palimpsest of its memory in this way it was far easier to content it with contemporary literary excellence than it is now, when every aspirant is confronted with the quintessence of the centuries.
It is not, however, from the captious taste of the public that most is to be feared, but from its indifference. Let it not be believed that, because a mob of the votaries of Mr. Jerome and Mr. Sims have been drawn to the precincts of the Abbey to gaze upon a pompous ceremonial, these admirable citizens have suddenly taken to reading Lucretius or The Two Voices. What their praise is worth no one among us would venture to say in words so unmeasured as those of the dead Master himself, who, with a prescience of their mortuary attentions, spoke of these irreverent admirers as those
Who make it seem more sweet to be
The little life of bank and brier,
The bird who pipes his lone desire
And dies unheard within his tree,
Than he that warbles long and loud,