how will future generations look on the literature of to-day and yesterday? To a generation wholly untrained in theological, metaphysical and dualistic modes of thought how much meaning will there be in the poetry of Tennyson and Browning? For my part, I never read Browning now without being unpleasantly reminded of the aphorism Nietzsche put into the mouth of Zarathustra: "Alas, it is true I have cast my net in their (poets') seas and tried to catch good fish; but I always drew up the head of some old God."
But I am glad to believe that the matchless melody and the chiseled beauty of Tennyson's verse will charm the senses of men to whom his curious mixture of pantheism and Broad Church theology, which the middle classes of England and America in the latter decades of the nineteenth century welcomed as the ultimate massage of philosophy, will not be ridiculous only because it will be meaningless. But I am unable to think of the men of the future deriving any pleasure from our greatest poet, Browning. On the other hand it is not impossible that the fame of Swinburne will stand higher in the twenty-first century than it does in this opening decade of the twentieth.
