Hearts of Controversy | Page 2

reaction, for the insignificant reasons of his
bygone taste, his insipid courtliness, his prettiness, or what not? It is no
dishonour to Tennyson, for it is a dishonour to our education, to
disparage a poet who wrote but the two--had he written no more of
their kind--lines of "The Passing of Arthur," of which, before I quote
them, I will permit myself the personal remembrance of a great

contemporary author's opinion. Mr. Meredith, speaking to me of the
high-water mark of English style in poetry and prose, cited those lines
as topmost in poetry:-
On one side lay the ocean, and on one Lay a great water, and the moon
was full.
Here is no taint of manner, no pretty posture or habit, but the simplicity
of poetry and the simplicity of Nature, something on the yonder side of
imagery. It is to be noted that this noble passage is from Tennyson's
generally weakest kind of work--blank verse; and should thus be a sign
that the laxity of so many parts of the "Idylls" and other blank verse
poems was a quite unnecessary fault. Lax this form of poetry
undoubtedly is with Tennyson. His blank verse is often too easy; it
cannot be said to fly, for the paradoxical reason that it has no weight; it
slips by, without halting or tripping indeed, but also without the friction
of the movement of vitality. This quality, which is so near to a fault,
this quality of ease, has come to be disregarded in our day. That Horace
Walpole overpraised this virtue is not good reason that we should hold
it for a vice. Yet we do more than undervalue it; and several of our
authors, in prose and poetry, seem to find much merit in the manifest
difficulty; they will not have a key to turn, though closely and tightly,
in oiled wards; let the reluctant iron catch and grind, or they would
even prefer to pick you the lock.
But though we may think it time that the quality once over-prized
should be restored to a more proportionate honour, our great poet
Tennyson shows us that of all merits ease is, unexpectedly enough, the
most dangerous. It is not only, with him, that the wards are oiled, it is
also that the key turns loosely. This is true of much of the beautiful
"Idylls," but not of their best passages, nor of such magnificent heroic
verse as that of the close of "A Vision of Sin," or of "Lucretius." As to
the question of ease, we cannot have a better maxim than Coventry
Patmore's saying that poetry "should confess, but not suffer from, its
difficulties." And we could hardly find a more curious example of the
present love of verse that not only confesses but brags of difficulties,
and not only suffers from them but cries out under the suffering, and

shows us the grimace of the pain of it, than I have lighted upon in the
critical article of a recent quarterly. Reviewing the book of a "poet"
who manifestly has an insuperable difficulty in hacking his work into
ten-syllable blocks, and keeping at the same time any show of respect
for the national grammar, the critic gravely invites his reader to "note"
the phrase "neath cliffs" (apparently for "beneath the cliffs") as
"characteristic." Shall the reader indeed "note" such a matter? Truly he
has other things to do. This is by the way. Tennyson is always an artist,
and the finish of his work is one of the principal notes of his
versification. How this finish comports with the excessive ease of his
prosody remains his own peculiar secret. Ease, in him, does not mean
that he has any unhandsome slovenly ways. On the contrary, he
resembles rather the warrior with the pouncet box. It is the man of
"neath cliffs" who will not be at the trouble of making a place for so
much as a definite article. Tennyson certainly worked, and the
exceeding ease of his blank verse comes perhaps of this little
paradox--that he makes somewhat too much show of the hiding of his
art.
In the first place the poet with the great welcome style and the little
unwelcome manner, Tennyson is, in the second place, the modern poet
who withstood France. (That is, of course, modern France--France
since the Renaissance. From medieval Provence there is not an English
poet who does not own inheritance.) It was some time about the date of
the Restoration that modern France began to be modish in England. A
ruffle at the Court of Charles, a couplet in the ear of Pope, a tour de
phrase from Mme. de Sevigne much to the taste of Walpole, later the
good example of French painting--rich interest paid for the loan of our