Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/271

THE HOMELINESS OF BROWNING A CENTENARY ARTICLE Criticism being what she is, and the stir of Tennyson's hundredth birthday-party having but newly subsided, to-day's proceedings will scarcely be expected to go through without at least one complacent side-glance at the rival celebration. It has by now almost become the official opening indeed ; all through the sweltering days of the eighties and nineties, when both suns were blazing together, it was a refuge used without stint : instead of attempting to reconcile matters, explain the phenomenon, or of honestly tackling each in turn, our cunning writers used to make a labour-saving device of the difficulty — pit one giant against the other, and saunter off coolly dusting their hands as though things had been neatly cancelled out. And such comparisons can be commodious. Indulged in for a moment this morning, for instance, they would bring us sharply face to face at once with the most interesting problem now left — the sole remaining Browning conundrum. For one of the chief characteristics of the Tennysonian affair was a certain tameness and perfunctoriness : the toasts seemed tepid and formal, the old enthusiasm to have waned. But with our man — how richly the reverse ! Never has he had so many, or such hearty and lusty, admirers as to-day. The haughty Browning Society, that used to hug itself in a grim isolation, is now only a black speck in the middle of a genial 246