and excellence.

When, however, these outside disturbers kept quiet, as they very often did, Thackeray’s criticism is astonishingly catholic and sound, and sometimes he was able to turn the disturbers themselves out. He had a most unhappy and Philistine dislike of the High Church movement: yet the passage in Pendennis on The Christian Year is one of the sacred places of sympathetic notice. The well-known locus in The Newcomes, as to the Colonel’s horror at the new literary gods, shows how sound Thackeray’s own faith in them was: yet he, least of all men, could be accused of forsaking the old. He had that generous appreciation of his own fellow-craftsmen by which novelists have been honourably distinguished from poets: though not all poets have been jealous, and though, from Richardson downwards, there have been very jealous novelists. If there were more criticism like the famous passage on Dumas in the Roundabouts, like great part of the solid English Humourists, like much elsewhere, our poor Goddess would not be liable to have her comeliness confounded with the ugliness of her personators, as is so often the case. And his is no promiscuous and undiscriminating generosity. He can “like nicely,” and does.

Still, though he has sometimes escaped the disadvantages of his temperament, he has often succumbed to those of his time; and what those disadvantages were cannot be better shown than by an instance to which we may now turn.

Blackwood, in 1849, on Tennyson.

When, in writing a little book upon Mr Matthew Arnold,[[941]] the present writer spoke severely of the state of English criticism between 1830 and 1860, some protests were made, as though the stricture were an instance of that “unfairness to the last generation” which has been frequently noticed, and invariably deprecated and condemned here. I gave, on that occasion, some illustrative instances;[[942]] I may here add another and very remarkable one, which I had not at that time studied. In April 1849 there appeared in Blackwood’s Magazine an article of some length on Tennyson’s work, which at the time consisted of the revised and consolidated Poems of 1842 (still further castigated in the one-volume form, so familiar to the youth of my generation), and of The Princess. This article[[943]] is not in the least uncivil—“Maga” had now outgrown her hoydenish ways: but we do not find the maturer, yet hardly less attractive, graces of the trentaine. The writer proclaims himself blind and deaf at every moment. He misses—he positively blasphemes—the beauty of many things that Wilson had frankly welcomed. He selects for praise such second—or third-rate matter as The Talking Oak. Claribel, not Tennyson’s greatest thing, but the very Tennyson in germ, “leaves as little impression on the living ear as it would on the sleeper beneath.” The exquisite Ode to Memory, with all its dreamy loveliness, is “an utter failure throughout,” it is a “mist” “coloured by no ray of beauty.” But the critic is made most unhappy by the song “A spirit haunts the last year’s bowers.” It is “an odious piece of pedantry.” Its admirable harmony, at once as delightful and as true to true English prosody as verse can be, extracts from him the remark, “What metre, Greek or Roman, Russian or Chinese, it was intended to imitate, we have no care to inquire: the man was writing English, and had no justifiable pretence for torturing our ears with verse like this.” The Lady of Shalott is “intolerable,” “odious,” “irritating,” “an annoyance,” “a caprice”: anybody who likes it “must be far gone in dilettanteism.” Refrains are “melancholy iterations.” With a rather pleasing frankness the critic half confesses that he knows he ought to like the Marianas, but wholly declares that he does not. He likes the Lotos-Eaters, so that he cannot have been congenitally deprived of all the seven senses of Poetry; but he cannot even form an idea what “the horse with wings kept down by its heavy rider” means in the Vision of Sin, and he cannot away with the Palace and the Dream, now purged, let it be remembered, of their “balloons” and Groves-of-Blarney stanzas, and in their perfect beauty. “Giving himself away,” in the fatal fashion of such censors, he does not merely in effect pronounce them both with rare exceptions “bad and unreadable,” but selects the magnificent line—

“Throb through the ribbed stone”—

for special ridicule. “To hear one’s own voice throbbing through the ribbed stone is a startling novelty in acoustics,” which simply shows, not merely that he had never heard his own or any other voice singing under a vaulted roof, but that he had not the mite of imagination necessary for conceiving the effect. With The Princess, as less pure poetry—good as it is—he is less unhappy; but he is not at all comfortable there.

To do our critic justice, however, though it makes his case a still more leading one, he is not one of the too common carpers who string a reasonless “I don’t like this” to a tell-tale “I can’t understand that,” until they can twist a ball (not of cowslips) to fling at a poet. He has, or thinks he has, a theory: and in some respects his theory is not a bad one. He admits that “the subtle play of imagination” may be “the most poetical part of a poem,” that it may “constitute the difference between poetry and prose,” which is good enough. But he thinks you may have too much of this good thing, that it may be “too much divorced from those sources of interest which affect all mankind”; and he thinks, further, that this divorce has taken place, not merely in Tennyson, but in Keats and in Shelley. Yet, again, as has been indeed already made evident, he has not in the least learnt the secret of that prosodic freedom, slowly broadened down from precedent to precedent of early Middle English writers, and Chaucer, and the Balladists, and Spenser, and Shakespeare, and Milton, and Coleridge, which it is the glory of the nineteenth century to have perfected. And he detests the new poetic diction, aiming at the utmost reach of visual as well as musical appeal, which came with this freedom. His recoil from the “jingling rhythm” throws him with a shudder against the “resplendent gibberish.” In other words, he is not at focus: he is outside. He can neither see nor hear: and therefore he cannot judge.

But others’ eyes and ears were opening, though slowly, and with indistinct results, at first.