Hearts of Controversy | Page 3

have all been phases of a national vanity of ours, an eager and anxious fluttering or jostling to be foremost and French. Matthew Arnold's essay on criticism fostered this anxiety, and yet I find in this work of his a lack of easy French knowledge, such as his misunderstanding of the word brutalite, which means no more, or little more, than roughness. Matthew Arnold, by the way, knew so little of the French character as to be altogether ignorant of French provincialism, French practical sense, and French "convenience." "Convenience" is his dearest word of contempt, "practical sense" his next dearest, and he throws them a score of times in the teeth of the English. Strange is the irony of the truth. For he bestows those withering words on the nation that has the fifty religions, and attributes "ideas"--as the antithesis of "convenience" and "practical sense"--to the nation that has the fifty sauces. And not for a moment does he suspect himself of this blunder, so manifest as to be disconcerting to his reader. One seems to hear an incurably English accent in all this, which indeed is reported, by his acquaintance, of Matthew Arnold's actual speaking of French. It is certain that he has not the interest of familiarity with the language, but only the interest of strangeness. Now, while we meet the effect of the French coat in our seventeenth century, of the French light verse in our earlier eighteenth century, and of French philosophy in our later, of the French revolution in our Wordsworth, of the French painting in our nineteenth-century studios, of French fiction--and the dregs are still running--in our libraries, of French poetry in our Swinburne, of French criticism in our Arnold, Tennyson shows the effect of nothing French whatever. Not the Elizabethans, not Shakespeare, not Jeremy Taylor, not Milton, not Shelley were (in their art, not in their matter) more insular in their time. France, by the way, has more than appreciated the homage of Tennyson's contemporaries; Victor Hugo avers, in Les Miserables, that our people imitate his people in all things, and in particular he rouses in us a delighted laughter of surprise by asserting that the London street-boy imitates the Parisian street-boy. There is, in fact, something of a street-boy in some of our late more literary mimicries.
We are apt to judge a poet too exclusively by his imagery. Tennyson is hardly a great master of imagery. He has more imagination than imagery. He sees the thing, with so luminous a mind's eye, that it is sufficient to him; he needs not to see it more beautifully by a similitude. "A clear-walled city" is enough; "meadows" are enough--indeed Tennyson reigns for ever over all meadows; "the happy birds that change their sky"; "Bright Phosphor, fresher for the night"; "Twilight and evening bell"; "the stillness of the central sea"; "that friend of mine who lives in God"; "the solitary morning"; "Four grey walls and four grey towers"; "Watched by weeping queens"; these are enough, illustrious, and needing not illustration.
If we do not see Tennyson to be the lonely, the first, the one that he is, this is because of the throng of his following, though a number that are of that throng hardly know, or else would deny, their flocking. But he added to our literature not only in the way of cumulation, but by the advent of his single genius. He is one of the few fountain-head poets of the world. The new landscape which was his--the lovely unbeloved--is, it need hardly be said, the matter of his poetry and not its inspiration. It may have seemed to some readers that it is the novelty, in poetry, of this homely unscenic scenery--this Lincolnshire quality--that accounts for Tennyson's freshness of vision. But it is not so. Tennyson is fresh also in scenic scenery; he is fresh with the things that others have outworn; mountains, desert islands, castles, elves, what you will that is conventional. Where are there more divinely poetic lines than those, which will never be wearied with quotation, beginning, "A splendour falls"? What castle walls have stood in such a light of old romance, where in all poetry is there a sound wilder than that of those faint "horns of elfland"? Here is the remoteness, the beyond, the light delirium, not of disease but of more rapturous and delicate health, the closer secret of poetry. This most English of modern poets has been taunted with his mere gardens. He loved, indeed, the "lazy lilies," of the exquisite garden of "The Gardener's Daughter," but he betook his ecstatic English spirit also far afield and overseas; to the winter places of his familiar nightingale:-
When first the liquid note beloved of men Comes flying over many a windy wave;
to the lotus-eaters' shore; to the outland