Page:Adams - Essays in Modernity.djvu/31

Rh and wicked strong and good, etc. In a word, 'he bore without abuse the grand old name of gentleman.' Such was the phoenix who proceeded from the loins of 'the judicious Hallam'! Talk like this is stupid—bête. No one who has perused the literary remains of Arthur Hallam could tolerate it for a moment. It is as bad as Mill's babble about Mrs. Taylor. As for making the poem a contribution to modern thought from the supposititiously Christian standpoint, this was obviously impossible for a man who had never given himself the trouble to seriously think at all. Tennyson had no faculty that way. We have only to consider what Browning did here to see what a terribly bad use the other made of his materials, even such as they were. He 'plays with gracious lies' right through, and, when he is tired of his amusement, falls back without a misgiving on the divine instincts which he holds in common with a hundred per cent, of the blockheads of his age and clime. But what a disgusted impatience he lays in the long run upon every earnest reader who comes to him seeing the green leaves afar off, for refreshment and repose for the teased, o'erlaboured spirit! He raises conclusion after conclusion of the most disquieting sort to the 'honest doubter,' and then, without laying one of them, or even attempting to do so, repeats his naïf premises with an air of charming conviction.