Page:Biographical and critical studies by James Thomson ("B.V.").djvu/281

THE POEMS OF WILLIAM BLAKE 265 Tennyson has no more of this simpHcity than had Byron : his chief youthful fault was such a young ladyish affectation as could not exist together with it. But he is fully aware of its value, and woos it like a lover, in vain, as Byron wooed it in the latter parts of "Childe Harold" and in "Manfred." Per- haps each of them should be credited with one great exception, in addition to a few short lyrics : Tennyson with the " Lotus Eaters," Byron with the " Dream." Scarcely any other artist in verse of the same rank has ever lived on such scanty revenues of thought (both pure, and applied or mixed) as Tennyson. While it cannot be pretended that he is a great sculptor, he is certainly an exquisite carver of luxuries in ivory ; but we must be content to admire the caskets, for there are no jewels inside. simply ignoring the Bumbleism and Christianity, except in so far as the Bumbleism obstructed his poetic career, unperturbed save by the first throes of creative art, developed himself in the regions from which he sprang — Pagan and Hellenic in his themes, his ideas, his perceptions, his objects. Shelley, on the other hand, started from the time and place of his birth to reach the old dominions of his ancestry. In this enterprise he had to conquer and destroy the terrible armies of fanaticism, asceticism, cant, hypocrisy, narrow-mindedness, lording it over England ; and at the same time the spirituality of the new religion, the liberty and equality and fraternity of the new political systems, all things lovely and true and holy of the modern life, he would bear with him for the re-inspiration of the antique. He aspired not to a New Jerusalem in the heavens, but to a new Hellenic metropolis on earth : he looked for redemption and victory, not to Christ on Calvary, but to Prometheus on Caucasus. These young Greeks could not live to old age. The gloom and chill of our English clime, physical and moral and intel- lectual, could not but be fatal to these children of the sun. England and France are so proudly in the van of civilisation that it is impossible for a great poet to live greatly to old age in either of them.