Hearts of Controversy | Page 3

Constable's initiative--later still a scattering of French taste, French
critical business, over all the shallow places of our literature--these
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