BENSON. I am, though well aware it is not the ground that most of his admirers would take. They would make him (so far as they would allow him to have any master) a follower of Wordsworth. But the passionate element is certainly very predominant in him at times, sufficiently so to have annoyed some over-proper people here. And I do consider this fusion or eclecticism, or whatever you choose to call it, as one mark of a great poet, because it gives a truer representation of man than is afforded by either of the schools which it combines. The slave of passion, on however grand a scale he may be depicted, is a low development of our nature. The meditative philosopher is a high, but an incomplete development. You would not choose as your type of government an unbridled democracy or an immovable conservatism, but one in which the two parties had room and scope to struggle. So in the man, you wish to see the play of his feelings and the supervision of his judgment, his better reason prevailing in the end amid the conflict of his passions, but only "saving him as by fire." And where in modern poetry will you find a greater example of this than in Locksley Hall?

PETERS. What is the reason then that some people complain of Tennyson's writing namby-pamby, and emasculating poetry?

BENSON. Simply because some people are dummies. I can understand a charge of this kind as applied to Mrs. Hemans, or Keats, or Wordsworth, (not meaning that I should agree with the man who makes the charge, but I can see why he makes it ;) but as applied to Tennyson it seems to me neither more nor less than absurd. There is pathos and sentiment in him: there are passages which may make those cry who are cryingly disposed. In the name of Apollo and the nine Muses, is that to be set down to his discredit? Read Locksley Hall, I say again, and read Morte d'Arthur, and then tell me that the man who wrote them has emasculated poetry. Bulwer and Mrs. Norton, whichever it was of them that perpetrated the New Timon, might write their heads off before they could achieve two poems that will live alongside of those. Ought a man never to feel pensive? Is it a crime to be sometimes moved by the pathetic? I well remember that I used to lie on a green bank of summer

mornings and read Theocritus till I was full of pity for Daphnis and the unfortunate man who "had a cruel companion;" but I never found that it unfitted me for taking a horse across country or digging up hard words out of a big lexicon at the proper time.

PETERS. Yes, I remember Romano and you lying on that very bank you are thinking of, between the Trinity bridge and the Trinity library, and him making his confession thus: "I acknowledge the influence of the scene. At this moment any one might do me.'

BENSON. There was a man of the world who was not ashamed to be sentimental, and why should a poet be?

PETERS. Thus far you have praised Tennyson's taste and judgment rather than his genius and originality, it seems to me. What peculiar and individual merits do you find in his poetry?

BENSON. In the first place, wonderful harmony of verse; in the second

PETERS. Wait a moment, and let us dispose of the first place before going further. It really surprises me to hear you make such a point of Tennyson's harmony, for he is frequently blamed on this very head. There are some violent, old-fashioned elisions, to which he is

BENSON. Such as "i' the" for "in thee."

PETERS. Exactly; and though not professing to have read his poems critically, I would engage to point you out a number of lines in them which contain weak or superfluous syllables.

BENSON. It must be confessed that occasional blemishes of the sort may be detected in him, yet it is scarce possible to read one of his poems carefully through without being struck with his exquisite sense of melody. Try it especially with his blank verse: blank verse, as every judge of verse knows, is a much greater trial of an author's powers of versification than any rhyming metre. Read Enone or Morte d'Arthur, and you will see what I mean.

PETERS. But after all, allowing what you claim, is not this a small matter to build a poetic reputation on? You may have mere nonsense verses, like the "Song by a Person of Quality," perfect in the way of rhythm

and metre: indeed it is a very common device of small poets to make sound supply the place of sense.

BENSON. It is also a very common device of people who are not poets at all to profess themselves such geniuses that they can despise the ordinary laws of versification. An every-day trick that, and a sad nuisance are these little great men who set up to write poetry without being able to write verse. Is the most correct and elegant prose translation of a passage from Homer or Dante poetry? The question seems almost absurd, but why isn't it poetry? There are all the ideas of the original. It is the vehicle of them that makes the essential difference. And any tangible and practicable definition of poetry must somehow include metrical expression; if you admit one independent of this element, you may be driven to allow that the Vicar of Wakefield is a poem, to which felicitous conclusion I once pushed a transcendentalist who was arguing the point with me.

PETERS. But metrical excellence is, to a certain extent at least, a matter of study and practice.

BENSON. What then?

PETERS. Why, you know, poeta

BENSON. Nascitur to be sure. Which means that unless a man has a genius for poetry he can never be made a poet. And the very same thing is true of the painter or the mathematician. A man requires education for everything, even for the proper development of his physical powers.

PETERS. Of course you except political wisdom and statesmanship, which in a democracy come to every man by nature, like Dogberry's reading and writing.

BENSON. Of course. But no man can afford to despise the rudiments of art, I don't care what his natural genius is. What would you say to a young painter who should refuse to study anatomy and perspective?

PETERS. Then you think it as necessary for a poet in posse to study metre, as for a painter in posse to study anatomy?

BENSON. Rem acu.

PETERS. You were going to mention another excellence of Tennyson.

BENSON. Yes, his felicity of epithet. You may go through his two volumes without finding a single otiose

adjective. Now it is the happy employment of adjectives that especially makes descriptive writing, whether in prose or poetry, picturesque; and therefore in Idylls - dha

poems which are little pictures, or each a series of pictures, Tennyson has no equal since his master in that branch of poetry, Theocritus.

PETERS. You seem to have studied your man well, and therein you would have the advantage of me in a discussion. But let me ask you one question. Do you honestly think, to say nothing of this country, that Tennyson will ever have the same continental reputation that Byron has?

BENSON. I do not, for a very good reason. Tennyson is decidedly a more national poet than Byron. Indeed, there is nothing national in the latter. There is nothing in him that a Frenchman or an American cannot appreciate as well as an Englishman; nay, there are many things which a Frenchman can appreciate better than an Englishman, because they are more in accordance with his feelings and sympathies. Whereas

PETERS. You must make an exception in favor of Byron's satires on contemporary English poets.

BENSON. To be sure; but they are certainly not the poems on which his continental reputation in any way depends. Tennyson, on the other hand, is eminently an English poet. He likes to take his subjects from English country life, or English popular stories; and some of his shorter poems are simply and distinctly patriotic, embodying the liberal conservatism of an enlightened English patriotism.

PETERS. I remember one beginning

"Love thou thy land with love far brought
From out the storied Past."

BENSON. There is a finer one than that:

"Of old sat Freedom on the heights,
The thunders breaking at her feet;
Above her shook the starry lights.
She heard the torrents meet."

PETERS. Yes, I recollect; and how she gazes down from her isle-altar, and turns to scorn with lips divine the falsehood of extremes. There is nothing violently or offensively national in that.

BENSON. He began with a great deal more spice. In one of his earlier volumes there is a sort of warsong conceived in a spirit of magnificent national conceit. It starts with this satisfactory assumption:

"There is no land like England
Where'er the light of day be;
There are no men like Englishmen,
So true of heart as they be."

And there is a pious and benevolent refrain or chorus, after this fashion:

"For the French, the pope may shrive them,

For devil a whit we heed them;

As for the Fench, God speed them
Unto their heart's desire,

And the merry devil drive them

Through the water and the fire."

After all, I like a man to stand up for his country. We don't do it half enough.

PETERS. Whom do you mean by we?

BENSON. You and I, Whigs and Locos, and everybody. But to return to our Tennyson. There is another reason for his being "caviare to the general," even in his own country. His mind is classically moulded, and his poems full of classical allusions. The influence of Homer and Theocritus especially is constantly traceable in his writings; and his felicitous imitations and suggestive passages constitute one of his greatest charms to the liberally educated. Sometimes he is harsh, if not unintelligible to the uninitiated, as when he says that Sir Bedivere stood with Excalibur,

"This way and that dividing the swift mind

In act to throw;"

which reads very stiff till you recollect the Homeric δαιζόμενος κατὰ θυμὸν

διχθάδι.

PETERS. I would go farther yet, and say that a man, to appreciate Tennyson fully, must be artistically educated and be familiar with Claudes, and Raphaels, and Titians. That was what struck me some time ago, on reading his Palace of Art, (at the recommendation