If Mr. Gosse had himself been fully imbued with such principles would he have made the statement quoted in chapter two in regard to Browning’s later books? And should we have such senseless criticism as a remark which has become popular lately, and which I believe emanated from a university in the South—namely, that Browning never said anything that Tennyson had not said better? As an illustration of this a recent critic may be quoted who is entirely scornful of the person who prefers Browning’s
“God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world”
to Tennyson’s
“And hear at times a sentinel
Who moves about from place to place,
And whispers to the worlds of space
In the deep night that all is well.”
One might reply to this that it is a matter of taste had not Courthope shown conclusively that Matthew Arnold’s criterion of criticism—namely, that a taste which is born of culture is the only certain possession by which the critic can measure the beauty of a poet’s line—is a fallacy. His argument is worth quoting:
“You have stated strongly one side of the truth, but you have ignored, completely ignored, the other. You have asserted the claims of individual liberty, and up to a certain point I agree with you. I do not deny that spiritual liberty is founded on consciousness, and hence the self-consciousness of the age is part of the problem we are considering. I do not deny that the prevailing rage for novelty must also be taken into account. Liberty, variety, novelty, are all necessary to the development of Art. Without novelty there can be no invention, without variety there can be no character, without liberty there can be no life. Life, character, invention, these are of the essence of Poetry. But while you have defended with energy the freedom of the Individual, you have said nothing of the authority of society. And yet the conviction of the existence of this authority is a belief perhaps even more firmly founded in the human mind than the sentiment as to the rights of individual liberty....
The great majority of the professors of poetry, however various their opinions, however opposite their tastes, have felt sure that there was in taste, as in science, a theory of false and true; in art, as in conduct, a rule of right and wrong. And even among those who have asserted most strongly the inward and relative nature of poetry, do you think there was one so completely a skeptic as to imagine that he was the sole proprietor of the perception he sought to embody in words; one who doubted his power, by means of accepted symbols, to communicate to his audience his own ideas and feelings about external things? Yet until some man shall have been found bold enough to defend a thesis so preposterous, we must continue to believe that there is a positive standard, by which those at least who speak a common language may reason about questions of taste.”
Armed with this gracious permission on the part of a professor of poetry, we may venture to reason a little upon the foregoing quotations from Tennyson and Browning to the effect that the person of really good taste might like each of them in its place. While Tennyson’s mystical quatrain is beautiful and quite appropriate in such a poem as “In Memoriam,” it would not be in the least appropriate from the lips of a little silk-winding girl as she wanders through the streets of Asolo on a sunny morning singing her little songs. She is certainly a more lifelike child speaking Browningese, as she has often been criticised for doing, than she would be if upon this occasion she spoke in a Tennysonian manner. That her song has touched the hearts of the twentieth century, if it was not altogether appreciated in the nineteenth, is proved by the fact that it is one of the most popular songs of the day as set by Mrs. H. H. A. Beach, and that the line is heard upon the lips of people to-day who do not even know whose it is, and herein lies the ultimate test of greatness.