Hearts of Controversy

Hearts of Controversy, by Alice
Meynell

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Meynell
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Title: Hearts of Controversy
Author: Alice Meynell
Release Date: March 14, 2005 [eBook #1243]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HEARTS OF
CONTROVERSY***

Transcribed from the 1918 Burns & Oates edition by David Price,
email [email protected]

HEARTS OF CONTROVERSY
Contents:
Some Thoughts of a Reader of Tennyson Dickens as a Man of Letters
Swinburne's Lyrical Poetry Charlotte and Emily Bronte Charmian The
Century of Moderation

SOME THOUGHTS OF A READER OF TENNYSON
Fifty years after Tennyson's birth he was saluted a great poet by that
unanimous acclamation which includes mere clamour. Fifty further
years, and his centenary was marked by a new detraction. It is
sometimes difficult to distinguish the obscure but not unmajestic law of
change from the sorry custom of reaction. Change hastes not and rests
not, reaction beats to and fro, flickering about the moving mind of the
world. Reaction--the paltry precipitancy of the multitude--rather than
the novelty of change, has brought about a ferment and corruption of
opinion on Tennyson's poetry. It may be said that opinion is the same
now as it was in the middle of the nineteenth century--the same, but
turned. All that was not worth having of admiration then has soured
into detraction now. It is of no more significance, acrid, than it was,
sweet. What the herding of opinion gave yesterday it is able to take
away to-day, that and no more.
But besides the common favour-disfavour of the day, there is the
tendency of educated opinion, once disposed to accept the whole of
Tennyson's poetry as though he could not be "parted from himself," and
now disposed to reject the whole, on the same plea. But if ever there
was a poet who needed to be thus "parted"--the word is his own--it is
he who wrote both narrowly for his time and liberally for all time, and
who--this is the more important character of his poetry--had both a
style and a manner: a masterly style, a magical style, a too dainty
manner, nearly a trick; a noble landscape and in it figures something
ready-made. He is a subject for our alternatives of feeling, nay, our
conflicts, as is hardly another poet. We may deeply admire and wonder,

and, in another line or hemistich, grow indifferent or slightly averse. He
sheds the luminous suns of dreams upon men & women who would do
well with footlights; waters their way with rushing streams of Paradise
and cataracts from visionary hills; laps them in divine darkness; leads
them into those touching landscapes, "the lovely that are not beloved;"
long grey fields, cool sombre summers, and meadows thronged with
unnoticeable flowers; speeds his carpet knight--or is that hardly a just
name for one whose sword "smites" so well?--upon a carpet of
authentic wild flowers; pushes his rovers, in costume, from off
blossoming shores, on the keels of old romance. The style and the
manner, I have said, run side by side. If we may take one poet's too
violent phrase, and consider poets to be "damned to poetry," why, then,
Tennyson is condemned by a couple of sentences, "to run
concurrently." We have the style and the manner locked together at
times in a single stanza, locked and yet not mingled. There should be
no danger for the more judicious reader lest impatience at the peculiar
Tennyson trick should involve the great Tennyson style in a sweep of
protest. Yet the danger has in fact proved real within the present and
recent years, and seems about to threaten still more among the less
judicious. But it will not long prevail. The vigorous little nation of
lovers of poetry, alive one by one within the vague multitude of the
nation of England, cannot remain finally insensible to what is at once
majestic and magical in Tennyson. For those are not qualities they
neglect in their other masters. How, valuing singleness of heart in the
sixteenth century, splendour in the seventeenth, composure in the
eighteenth; how, with a spiritual ear for the note--commonly called
Celtic, albeit it is the most English thing in the world--the wild wood
note of the remoter song; how, with the educated sense of style, the
liberal sense of ease; how, in a word, fostering Letters and loving
Nature, shall that choice nation within England long disregard these
virtues in the nineteenth-century master? How disregard him, for more
than the few years of