As the early illustrations of Tennyson's poems show, the Pre-Raphaelite painters penetrated to the heart of the poet's imaginative being. One thinks also of Swinburne's admiration for Maud and of Edward Fitzgerald's lifelong insistence that the best of Tennyson was to be found in his early compositions. But the real influence of Tennyson, Browning, and Arnold has operated subterraneously. If their outer awareness took undue cognizance of the surface ripples of Victorian life, they were inwardly aware of the deep ground-swells of change. The individual perceptions, whose concealed operation we have identified in their poetry, were to become the leading motifs of subsequent literary movements.
Browning anticipates the emergence of modern primitivism.
And Arnold's account of the deracinated artist continues to be an obsessive theme in contemporary writing. But such insights were alien to the pretensions of the society which gave rise to them. Because, however hard they tried, they could not simultaneously inhabit the worlds of the imagination and of Victorian society, a split opened, dividing the artistic awareness of Tennyson, Browning, and Arnold. Their failure to close this breach confirmed the alienation of the modern artist.