LORD TENNYSON.
hollow of his hand. The subject is Flower in the Crannied Wall. There is something very characteristic of Watts in the contrast between the colossal plan of the figure and the smallness of the central object.
But while the practical nature of the friendship between Watts and Tennyson is clear enough, there is something really significant, something really relevant to Watts’ attitude in its ultimate and psychological character. It is surely most likely that Watts and Tennyson were drawn together because they both represented a certain relation towards their art which is not common in our time and was scarcely properly an attribute of any artists except these two. Watts could not have found the thing he most believed in Browning or Swinburne or Morris or any of the other poets. Tennyson could not have found the thing he most believed in Leighton or Millais or any of the other painters. They were brought together, it must be supposed, by the one thing that they had really in common, a profound belief in the solemnity, the ceremoniousness, the responsibility, and what most men would now, in all probability, call the pomposity of the great arts.
Watts has always a singular kind of semi-mystical tact in the matter of portrait painting. His portraits are commonly very faultless comments and have the same kind of superlative mental delicacy that we see in the picture of Hope. And the whole truth of this last matter is very well expressed in Watts’ famous portrait of Tennyson, particularly if we look at it in conjunction with his portrait of Browning. The head of Browning is the head of a strong, splendid, joyful, and anxious man who could write magnificent poetry. The head of Tennyson is the head of a poet. Watts has painted Tennyson with his dark dome-like head relieved against a symbolic green and blue of the eternal sea and the eternal laurels. He has behind him the bays of Dante and he is wrapped in the cloak of the prophets. Browning is dressed like an ordinary modern man, and we at once feel that it should and must be so. To dress Browning in the prophet’s robe and the poet’s wreath would strike us all as suddenly ridiculous; it would be like sending him to a fancy-dress ball. It would be like attiring Matthew Arnold in the slashed tights of an Elizabethan, or putting Mr. Lecky into a primitive Celto-Irish kilt. But it does not strike us as absurd in the case of Tennyson: it does not strike us as even eccentric or outlandish or remote. We think of Tennyson in that way; we think of him as a lordly and conscious bard. Some part of this fact may, of course, be due to his possession of a magnificent physical presence; but not, I think, all. Lord Kitchener (let us say) is a handsome man, but we should laugh at him very much in silver armour. It is much more due to the fact that Tennyson really assumed and was granted this stately and epic position. It is not true that Tennyson was more of a poet than Browning, if we mean by that statement that Browning could not compose forms as artistic and well-managed, lyrics as light and poignant, and rhythms as swelling and stirring as any in English letters. But it is true that Tennyson was more of a poet than Browning, if we mean by that statement that Tennyson was a poet in person, in post and circumstance and conception of life; and that Browning was not, in that sense, a poet at all. Browning first inaugurated in modern art and letters the notion or tradition, in many ways perhaps a more wholesome one, that the fact that a man pursued the trade or practice of poetry was his own affair and a thing apart,
THE DWELLER IN THE INNERMOST.