Ne'er was dinner seen
Soapier or fishyer———”
quite equal to the best that Calverley or Seaman ever wrote, because it has that slap-dash element about it that disregards correct rimes; but I am not among those critics. Tennyson does not usually paint an impressionist picture, though he can do so when he pleases; he is rather a pre-Raphaelite; but, however he works, he produces his picture and it is a picture. Talk of Art and Nature—there never was a poet who reproduced Nature with an art so consummate; there never was a poet who used his art so graphically. Of course I am now talking of Tennyson at his best, not of Tennyson of The May Queen, which is certainly deficient enough in art to please—-as it has pleased—the despisers of the meticulous, but of Tennyson in his lyrical mood—of the garden-song in Maud, of the echo-song in The Princess—-both diamonds, not in the rough, but cut into countless facets—Tennyson in The Passing of Arthur, and countless pages of the Idylls, Tennyson of the pictorial simplicity of Enoch Arden and the full brush of Ulysses, Tithonus, Lucretius, the battle glow of The Ballad of the Revenge, the muted trumpet-notes of The Defence of Lucknow.
And yet through all are those lowering lines which somehow he would insist on introducing in the wrong places with infinite pains! It was as if he took the trouble to help us up a high marble staircase to the cupola of a tower, and to throw open before our eyes a splendid landscape, only to trip us up when we are lost in wonder of it all, and send us headlong to the dead earth below.
It was when we were looking down a gorge of tropical splendour in the island of Dominica in the West Indies opening a wide mouth to the Caribbean, that the incomparable lines from Enoch Arden came upon me in the flash of the crimson-and-blue wings of a bird—one of the many lories, I think it was—that fled about the wild masses of the brake of hibiscus, and I said them to Dorothy. Under our eyes was a tropical garden on each side of the valley—a riot of colour—a tropical sunset laid at our feet in the tints of a thousand flowers down to where the countless palms of the gorge began to mingle with the yuccas that swayed over the sea-cliffs in the blue distance.
“The league-long roller thundering on the reef,
The moving whisper of huge trees that branch'd
And blossom'd in the zenith, or the sweep
Of some precipitous rivulet to the wave,
As down the shore he ranged, or all day long