Page:Adams - Essays in Modernity.djvu/21

Rh a sovereign artist because his ideal is on a lower level where realisation is well within reach. Care, taste, 'the graceful tact, the Christian art,' as he calls it, never yet attained to magic. You must look at things with all your eyes before you can hope to render their shapes and beings to us, and this Juvenis will never look at anything longer than will give him its superficial picturesqueness. 'The form, the form,' he says, 'alone is eloquent,' and this is what, just at present, he means by 'the form.' Presently, however, he struck higher, but not yet with a secure flight. 'The Lotus Eaters,' as we have it now, is almost a new poem, and it is praised for its lovely landscape.

A land of streams! Some like a downward smoke, Slow-dropping veils of thinnest lawn, did go.'

Do you call that 'natural magic'? Clearly, it is nothing of the kind. It is the daintily but ever superficially picturesque—the sort of thing that satisfies the sensitive book-reader who sees this for the first time, and wants to become familiar with it. Or again: in 'A Dream of Fair Women,' where for the first time he succeeds, though only transiently, in attaining to the note of reality, take one of his best descriptions:

Enormous elm-tree boles did stoop and lean Upon the dusky brushwood underneath, Their broad curved branches, fledged with clearest green, New from its silken sheath.'