Hearts of Controversy

								

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
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