(2) as Artist.

(a) His observation.

many respects greatest, poem-the spreading mischief of a moral taint-is discussed at length in the "Introduction to the Idylls" which follows this general survey. Here too Tennyson expresses one of the deepest convictions of his age.

But if Tennyson's popularity is based upon a correspondence between his own reverence for Law and the deepest foundations of English character, it is based no less upon his delicate power as an Artist. Among the elements of this power may be mentioned a minute observation of nature which furnishes him with a store of poetic description and imagery; a scholarly appreciation of all that is most picturesque in the literature of the past; an exquisite precision in the use of words and phrases; an avoidance of the commonplace; the expressive harmonies of his rhythm, and the subtle melody of his diction.

(a) For minute observation and vivid painting of the details of natural scenery Tennyson is without a rival. We feel that he has seen all that he describes. This may be illustrated by a few examples of his treestudies:

hair

In gloss and hue the chestnut, when the shell
Divides three-fold to show the fruit within

(The Brook)

those eyes

Darker than darkest pansies, and that hair
More black than ashbuds in the front of March
(The Gardener's Daughter)

With blasts that blow the poplar white

(In Memoriam)

A million emeralds break from the ruby-budded lime
(Maud)

A stump of oak half-dead,

From roots like some black coil of carven snakes,
Clutch'd at the crag
(The Last Tournament).

We may also notice the exactness of the epithets in
"perky larches," "dry-tongu'd laurels,"
"dry-tongu'd laurels," "pillar'd dusk
of sounding sycamores," "laburnums, dropping-wells of
fire."

Equally exact are his descriptions of scientific pheno

mena:

Before the little ducts began

To feed thy bones with lime, and ran

Their course till thou wert also man (The Two Voices);

Still, as while Saturn whirls, his steadfast shade
Sleeps on his luminous ring (The Palace of Art).

This accurate realization of scientific facts is often of service in furnishing apt illustrations of moral truths or of emotions of the mind :

Break, thou deep vase of chilling tears

That grief has shaken into frost

(In Memoriam);

Prayer, from a living source within the will,
And beating up through all the bitter world,
Like fountains of sweet waters in the sea

(Enoch Arden).

larship.

(b) Again the reader of Homer, Æschylus, or Theocritus, His schoand of Virgil, Horace, or Lucretius, finds one of the elements of Tennyson's charm in the echoes of classical phrase and allusion which occasionally sound through his poems: a similar delight is felt by the student of Italian

b

(c) His expres siveness.

or English poetry as he recognizes in some of Tennyson's phrases hints of the poet's wide reading and accurate knowledge of Dante, Chaucer, Shakspere, Milton, Gray, Shelley, or Keats. Often, no doubt, such pas

sages are unconscious transfusions, so to speak, of the thoughts of the poet's predecessors and unintentional adaptations of their phraseology. Occasional lines and expressions are plainly taken from the Greek or Latin poets, and in these the translation is generally so happy a rendering of the original as to give an added grace to what was already beautiful. Illustrations of this characteristic will be found scattered through the Notes at the end of this volume. There is occasionally a reconditeness about these allusions which may puzzle the general reader. For example, in the lines

And over those ethereal eyes

The bar of Michael Angelo (In Memoriam),

where the reference is to the projection of the frontal bone above the eye-brows noticeable in the portraits of Michael Angelo and of Arthur Hallam, a peculiarity of shape said to indicate strength of character and mental power. Similarly in

Proxy-wedded with a bootless calf (The Princess),

we find an allusion to an old ceremony of marriage by proxy, where an ambassador or agent representing the absent bridegroom, after taking off his boot, placed his leg in the bridal bed.

(c) We may next note Tennyson's unequalled power of finding single words to give at a flash, as it were, an

exact picture. What he has written of Virgil's art is equally true of his own, which offers us

All the charm of all the muses

often flowering in a lonely word.

This power of fitting the word to the thought may be seen in the following examples: "creamy spray"; "lily maid"; "the ripple washing in the reeds" and "the wild water lapping on the crag"; "the dying ebb that faintly lipp'd the flat red granite"; "as the fiery Sirius bickers into red and emerald"; women blowz'd with health and wind and rain."

ance of

(d) Possessing such a faculty of appropriate expression, (d) His avoidthe poet naturally avoids the commonplace: Tennyson commonplace. not only rigidly excludes all otiose epithets and stop-gap phrases, but often, where common language would use some familiar, well-worn word, he selects one less known but equally true and expressive. He has found in the writings of the older English authors a rich store-house of strong, nervous, idiomatic diction. He has a distinct fondness for good old Saxon words and expressions, and has helped to rescue many of these from undeserved oblivion. Thus, for the "skinflint" of common parlance he substitutes (in Walking to the Mail) the older flayflint"; in place of "blindman's buff" is found the older "hoodman blind" (In Memoriam); for "village and cowshed" he writes "thorpe and byre" (The Victim), while in The Brook the French "cricket" appears as the Saxon "grig." Other examples might be quoted, e.g., lurdane, rathe, plash, brewis, thrall'd, boles, quitch, reckling, roky, yaffingale. Occasionally he prefers a word of his own

66

His har

mony of

coinage, as tonguester, selfless. This tendency to avoid
the commonplace is noticeable not only in separate
words, but in the rendering of ideas, a poetic dress
being given to prosaic details by a kind of stately cir-
cumlocution: thus in The Princess the hero's northern
birthplace is indicated by his telling us "on my cradle
shone the Northern star"; and to describe the hour
before the planet Venus had sunk into the sea, the
poet writes:

Before the crimson-circled star
Had fall'n into her father's grave.

(e) His metrical characteristics. Lastly, if we examine the metrical characteristics of Tennyson's poetry, we observe that the sense of majestic order and gradual development pervading the substance of his poems is not more conspicuous than is the sense of music which governs the style of his versification. By patient study and laborious culture he has learnt all the secrets of harmonious rhythm and melodious diction; he has re-cast and polished his earlier poems with such minute and scrupulous care that he has at length attained a metrical form more perfect than has been reached by any other poet. Several illustrations of the delicacy of his sense of metre are pointed out in the Notes. A few more examples may be here quoted to show how frequently in his verse the sound echoes the sense. This is seen in his Representative Rhythms:

(a) The first syllable or half-foot of a line of blank rhythm. verse is often accented and cut off from the rest of the line by a pause, to indicate some sudden emphatic action