social conventions more than Tennyson--never allowed this to touch his
poems. As the artist, he was quite free from the opinions, maxims, and
class conventions of the past or the present. His poetry belongs to no
special type of society, to no special nationality, to no separate creed
or church, to no settled standard of social morality. What his own
thought and emotion urged him to say, he said with an absolute
carelessness of what the world would say. And in this freedom he
preceded and prophesied the reaction of the last years of the nineteenth
century against the tyranny of maxims and conventions in society, in
morals, and in religion. That reaction has in many ways been carried
beyond the proper limits of what is just and beautiful. But these
excesses had to be, and the world is beginning to avoid them. What
remains is the blessing of life set free, not altogether from the use of
conventions, but from their tyranny and oppression, and lifted to a
higher level, where the test of what is right and fitting in act, and
just in thought, is not the opinion of society, but that Law of Love
which gives us full liberty to develop our own nature and lead our own
life in the way we think best independent of all conventions, provided
we do not injure the life of others, or violate any of the great moral
and spiritual truths by obedience to which the progress of mankind is
promoted and secured. Into that high and free region of thought and
action Browning brought us long ago. Tennyson did not, save at intervals
when the poet over-rode the man. This differentiates the men. But it
also tells us why Browning was not read fifty years ago, when social
conventions were tyrannous and respectability a despot, and why he has
been read for the last fifteen years and is read now.

8. There is another contrast between these poets. It is quite clear that
Tennyson was a distinctively English poet and a patriotic poet; at times
too much of a patriot to judge tolerantly, or to write fairly, about