Page:Adams - Essays in Modernity.djvu/20

8 himself leaving off? Thus, then, he spake, and died, while the subject of his criticism passed on to the elaboration of his life-work.

What impresses one in the poems which Lord Tennyson has since quite justly seen fit to label 'Juvenilia,' is just this, that so far as he was concerned the movement which preceded him might almost as well never have taken place. Everything that was permanent and progressive in it he rejected. Everything that was temporary and trumpery he assimilated. The sicklier side of the art of Byron, Keats, and Shelley was absolutely to his taste. The audacity and manly scorn of Byron, the high, clear, spiritual note of Keats, the restless, searching lamentation of Shelley, fell unregarded on his ears. Such gifts were either above and beyond him, or they troubled his 'lisping in love's delicious creeds,' whose girlish votaresses sit 'steeped in golden languors,' 'languors of love-deep eyes,' and he would have none of them. His one resolute instinct here is to look nothing in the face. He would make of life a pretty play. In after years he devoted ceaseless limæ labor to the perfection of this earlier work, but his touch bewrayeth him. It is always felicitous, but the felicity is doomed to inferiority. He has against him the inescapable difference between enamel work and painting; the exquisite artisan never can become