Hearts of Controversy

								

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 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