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"That is very ungracious," I said. "You are as perverse as I was about Byron when the old banker quoted him with tears. I was going to say, and I will say it, that Tennyson, with all his faults, was a great lord of music; and he put into words the fine, homely domestic emotion of the race--the poetry of labour, order, and peace. It was new and rich and splendid, and because it seems to you old-fashioned, you call it mere respectability; but it was the marching music of the world, because he showed men that faith was enlarged and not overturned by science. These two were great, because they saw far and wide; they knew by instinct just what the ordinary man was thinking, who yet wished his life to be set to music. These little men of yours don't see that. They have their moments of ecstasy, as we all have, in the blossoming orchard full of the songs of birds. And that will always and for ever give us the lyric, if the skill is there. But I want something more than that; I, you, thousands of people, are feeling something that makes the brain thrill and the heart leap. The mischief is that we don't know what it is, and I want a great poet to come and tell us."
But one has to ask oneself what exactly an imaginative man means by success, and what it is that attracts him in the idea of it. Putting aside the more obvious and material advantages,--wealth, position, influence, reputation,--a man of far-reaching mind and large ideas may well be haunted by a feeling that if he had entered public life, he might by example, precept, influence, legislation, have done something to turn his ideas and schemes into accomplished facts, have effected some moral or social reform, have set a mark on history. It must be remembered that a great writer's fame is often a posthumous growth, and we must be very careful not to attribute to a famous author a consciousness in his lifetime of his subsequent, or even of his contemporary, influence. It is undoubtedly true that Ruskin and Carlyle affected the thought of their time to an extraordinary degree. Ruskin summed up in his teaching an artistic ideal of the pursuit and influence of beauty, while Carlyle inculcated a more combative theory of active righteousness and the hatred of cant. But Ruskin's later years were spent in the shadow of a profound sense of failure. He thought that the public enjoyed his pretty phrases and derided his ideas; while Carlyle felt that he had fulminated in vain, and that the world was settling down more comfortably than ever into the pursuit of bourgeois prosperity and dishonest respectability.
Living at the same time with these half-Italianized painters, and continuing later in the century, there was another group of painters in the Low Countries who were emphatically of the soil, believing in themselves and their own country and picturing scenes from commonplace life in a manner quite their own. These were the "Little Masters," the _genre_ painters, of whom there was even a stronger representation appearing contemporaneously in Holland. In Belgium there were not so many nor such talented men, but some of them were very interesting in their work as in their subjects. Teniers the Younger (1610-1690) was among the first of them to picture peasant, burgher, alewife, and nobleman in all scenes and places. Nothing escaped him as a subject, and yet his best work was shown in the handling of low life in taverns. There is coarse wit in his work, but it is atoned for by good color and easy handling. He was influenced by Rubens, though decidedly different from him in many respects. Brouwer (1606?-1638) has often been catalogued with the Holland school, but he really belongs with Teniers, in Belgium. He died early, but left a number of pictures remarkable for their fine "fat" quality and their beautiful color. He was not a man of Italian imagination, but a painter of low life, with coarse humor and not too much good taste, yet a superb technician and vastly beyond many of his little Dutch contemporaries at the North. Teniers and Brouwer led a school and had many followers.
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