Page:Adams - Essays in Modernity.djvu/19

Rh come, and when the first stirrings of a better state began to agitate the inert mass, they came in the sole shape of popular politics. The realms of poetry and of thought remained almost entirely unaffected.

Lord Tennyson's first appearance in literature is in the astonishing capacity of the subject of a deliberate criticism by Coleridge. Nothing could show us more clearly the dearth of all excellence than that the first literary critic of his epoch (and we may even go so far as to say both of the epoch that preceded and of that which has followed him) could treat with anything approaching seriousness such a book as the Poems, chiefly Lyrical. 'The misfortune is,' says Coleridge, 'that he has begun to write verses without very well understanding what metre is,' and he gives him quite a nice little pedagogic lecture on the way to attain 'a sense of metre.' It had got to this. The only thing you could talk about in a new poet was his mastery or want of mastery of metre. It never occurred to Coleridge to declare that the whole performance was effeminate and factitious. Virility, alas, had passed out of his own bones too long ago for him to notify the fact that it was wanting in any one else's. Opium had helped his facile temperament to relegate reality to the pleasant distance of a dream; and what fault was it in this young man to start from the point at which he was