Page:Adams - Essays in Modernity.djvu/32

20 Oh, it is all right! 'Though Faith and Form be sundered in the night of fear,' you can still hear the sentinels passing the cheery watchword. My friend, you are on the eve of a great victory. You have felt it; you were born for it (he tells you so in italics). Then, to crown this barefaced sophistication, he remarks with a bland impertinence that he 'trusts he has not wasted breath,' and that he has not 'fought in vain, like Paul, with beasts.' Fought with beasts? Why, he never was once fifty yards away from his comfortable easy-chair in his cosy study the whole time! 'In Memoriam' would be one of the most dishonest works ever written by a man of ability were it not for a dozen snatches of sweet and true affection which he had in his heart of hearts for his friend. There is little or none of the passion of love, the terrible splendour of desire and renunciation, which aches and flashes in the latter half of Shakespeare's sonnets. Tennyson tells the simple truth when he says of himself:

'Mine the love that will not tire, And, born of love, the vague desire That spurs an imitative will.'

No criticism on him can better his own in that phrase of 'the imitative will.' We have him there, the intellectual side of him, complete. But this is not