to the high seriousness of his work. The isolation of the poet must have contributed to this defect: one cannot keep one's-self in cotton wool with impunity.
The epic period, 1860-1872, was succeeded by a dramatic decade even more damaging for his reputation. It is not merely that the dramas were unsuited for the stage; their fatal defect was that they were not dramatic. There is more dramatic force, for example, in the closing lines of Lucretius than in the whole of the dramas put together. It is useless to note that the character of Henry II., or of Mary, is according to the Records: dramas are not histories. Tennyson may have conceived his characters aright according to Stubbs or to Froude; he has not presented them dramatically. Here, again, as in the epic series, one felt the absence of the creative rush, the sense of a personality behind the artistic work, and greater than it. The great poet is himself greater than his work; the sense of easy mastery of their materials is given by men like Shakespeare or Homer. Tennyson's epic and dramatic studies leave a sense of the poet's struggle with an uncongenial task. Even the poet's mastery of form had declined. There are indeed many passages in the Idylls of the King, especially in The Passing of Arthur and the Guinevere, which, by their
