Among Victorian poets Tennyson is at the centre of a philosophic life against which the intellectual habit of our own time is often in active opposition. This being so, much may be excused to the excesses of self-interest, and we can make some allowance, for example, for a current mood that thinks it rather indelicate to speak about mere goodness, when it reprimands a mood of yesterday that thought goodness a very simple and natural thing to talk about. But to make allowances for it is not to approve it, and it is about time for us to stop making ourselves ridiculous by talking about the great Victorians as though they were lost in a fog of superstition and prudery and moral timidity.[16] We need not debase ourselves before them, but, also, we need not talk as though the dawn of intellectual candour had broken somewhere about 1900. It is all really such a little matter, the difference, just a change of deportment, that is all. At many modern tables, if you should speak of goodness everybody blushes or simpers, if, indeed, there is not some very bold spirit to rebuke you openly. But if you speak of the other thing every one is happily at ease and you realise how fearlessly we to-day are facing the truth about life. At our grandmothers’ table it was different. The freedom of to-day would have caused consternation there, but our own inhibitions would have been unintelligible. There have been loss and gain in both ways, and the balance remains about the same. After all, it is just as unaccountable to be discomposed by Tennyson when he makes Galahad say My strength is as the strength of ten Because my heart is pure.... as it is to be discomposed by Mr. Masefield when he makes Saul Kane say I’ll bloody him a bloody fix, I’ll bloody burn his bloody ricks.... In this study of the substance of Victorian poetry, therefore, we will dismiss at once any suggestion that we are dealing with a period of intellectual adversity. Tennyson and the group of poets who represented in some degree or another Tennyson’s mood were neither keener nor duller in the wits than the poets of other ages, and since we go to poetry not for what we can learn from it, but for an invigoration of the mind towards the establishment of our own learning, it need not trouble us that Tennyson’s point of view happened in many ways to be one that is peculiarly antipathetic to our own. Chapter II _Subjective and Objective Poetry--Narrative Poetry--Macaulay--Morris--Poetic Drama_