the end of the nineteenth. But if their disclosures have materially impaired Virgil's claims to originality, they have illustrated his faultless taste, his nice artistic sense, his delicate touch, his consummate literary skill. They initiated a new branch of study, they divulged a fruitful secret.

Without going so far as Harpax in Albumazar, when he says

This poet is that poet's plagiary,

And he a third's till they all end in Homer—

it is still interesting and necessary to remember that there have appeared in all literatures, at a certain point in their development, a class of poets who are essentially imitative and reflective. They have usually been men possessed of great natural ability, extensive culture, refined taste, wide and minute acquaintance with the literature which preceded them; they have occasionally been men endowed with some of the most precious attributes of original genius. The poets of Alexandria, the epic, lyric, and elegiac poets of Rome, are the most striking types of this class in ancient times. Tasso, Gray, and Tennyson are, perhaps, the most striking types in the modern world. In point of diction and expression, and regarded in relation to the mere material on which he works, Milton would also be included in this class of poets. But he is separated from them by the quality of his genius and his essential originality. What he borrows is not simply modified or adapted but assimilated and transformed. In the poets who have been referred to, with the occasional exception of Virgil, what is borrowed undergoes, as a rule, no such transformation,

They may be compared indeed to skilful horticulturists. They naturalise exotics. A flower which is the beauty of one region they transplant to another; and they call art to the assistance of nature. If a blossom be single they double it; if its hue be lovely it is rendered more lovely still. The work of such poets has a twofold value: it has to borrow an expression from the schools-not only an exoteric but an esoteric interest. To sit down, for instance, to the study of the Eclogues, the Georgics, and the Eneid, without being familiar with the illustrative masterpieces of Greek poetry and the fragments of the older Roman literature, would be like travelling through a country, rich with historical traditions and splendid with poetical associations, without possessing any sense of either. The uncritical spectator might be satisfied with the sensuous glory of the scenery, the simple loveliness of cloud and landscape, and the thousand effects of contrast and perspective; but an enlightened man would feel something very like contempt for one who, with the Ilissus and the Mincio whispering at his feet, was sensible only of the natural beauties of the landscape round him. Nature has indeed made one world, Art another. Lord Tennyson has now, by general consent, taken his place among English classics; he too will have, like Virgil and Horace, like Tasso and Gray, his critics and his commentators; and, unless I am much mistaken, one of the most important and useful departments of their labour will be that of tracing his obligations to his predecessors, of illustrating his wondrous assimilative skill, his tact, his taste, his learning. John de Peyrarède once observed that he knew no task more instructive

than to compare Virgil's adaptations of Homer with the original passages-to note what details he rejected, what he added, what he softened down, what he thought proper to heighten. It was a perpetual study of the principles of good taste. In full confidence that what applies to Virgil in this case applies with equal justice to the work of our Laureate, I propose in this little book to inaugurate, so to speak, a branch of Tennysonian research which must necessarily be gradual and cumulative, but which will sooner or later become indispensable to a proper appreciation of his services to art. Every Englishman must be quite as jealous of the fame of the Laureate as our old friend Furius Albinus was of the fame of his beloved Virgil, and I have in truth as little fear as honest Furius of these my illustrations being mistaken for an insinuation of plagiarism against a poet of whom we are all of us so justly proud.

Tennyson, then, belongs to a class of poets whose work has a twofold value and interest-a value and interest, that is to say, dependent on its obvious, simple, and intrinsic beauties, which is its exoteric and popular side, and a value and interest dependent on niceties of adaptation, allusion, and expression, which is its esoteric and critical side. To a certain point only he is the poet of the multitude; pre-eminently is ! he the poet of the cultured. Nor, I repeat, will his services to art be ever understood and justly appreciated till his writings come to be studied in detail, till they are, as those of his masters have been, submitted to the ordeal of the minutest critical investigation; till the delicate mechanism of his diction shall be analysed as scholars analyse the

kindred subtleties of Sophocles and Virgil; till the sources of his poems have been laid bare and the original and the copy placed side by side; till we are in possession of comparative commentaries on his poems as exhaustive as those with which Orelli illustrated Horace, and Eichhoff Virgil. His poems must be studied not as we study those of the fathers of song-as we study those of Homer, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare -but as we study those who stand first in the second rank of poets. In dealing with him we have not to deal with a Homer, but with an Apollonius, not with an Alcæus, but with a Horace-not, that is to say, with a poet of great original genius, but with an accomplished artist, with one whose mastery lies in assimilative skill, whose most successful works are not direct studies from simple nature, but studies from nature interpreted by art. He belongs, in a word, to a school which stands in the same relation to the literature of England as the Alexandrian poets stood to the literature of Greece, and as the Augustan poets stood to the literature of Rome.

To illustrate what has been said. In the works of the fathers of poetry everything is drawn directly from Nature. Their characters are the characters of real life. The incidents they describe are, as a rule, such incidents as have their counterpart in human experience. When they paint inanimate objects, either simply in detail or comprehensively in groups, their pictures are transcripts of what they have with their own eyes beheld. In description for the mere sake of description they seldom indulge. The physical universe is with them merely the stage on which the tragi-comedy of life is evolving itself. Their language

is as a rule plain, simple, impassioned. When they are obscure the obscurity arises not from affectation but from necessity. Little solicitous about the niceties of conception and expression, they are almost free from what the Greeks called крокνλɛуuós (dealing in trifles) and yuxpóτns (ambitious conceits). Their object was to describe and interpret, not to refine and subtilise. They were great artists not because they worked consciously on critical principles but because they communed with truth. They were true to art because they were true to Nature.

In the school of which we may take Virgil and Tennyson to be the most conspicuous representatives, a school which seldom fails to make its appearance in every literature at a certain point of its development, all this is reversed. Their material is derived not from the world of Nature, but from the world of Art. The hint, the framework, the method of their most characteristic_compositions, seldom or never emanate from themselves. Take their dramatis persona. The only powerful portrait in Virgil is a study from Euripides and Apollonius; the rest are shadows, mere outlines, suggested sometimes by Homer and sometimes by the Greek dramatists. Tennyson's Arthur, Guinevere, Elaine, and Launcelot are, regarded as characters, in no sense of the term creations. Derived from types which have long been commonplaces in fiction, they add nothing to the gallery of dramatic portraiture. His Ulysses is a study from Dante. His most subtly elaborated character, Lucretius, is the result of a minute and patient study of the De Rerum Natura. The archetype for his most charming female creation, Edith, he found in Wordsworth,