Page:Adams - Essays in Modernity.djvu/47

Rh reputation? (It is a soliloquy from a play that might have been written by a Christian Evidence lecturer smitten with the letch for literary 'high falutin')—

This author, with his charm of simple style And close dialectic, all but proving man An automatic series of sensations. Has often numb'd me into apathy Against the unpleasant jolts of this rough road That breaks off short into the abysses—made me A Quietist, taking all things easily.'

The spectacle is too painful. We cannot discuss such an artistic aberration in such a man. We must 'look and pass' to the summary of the results we have laboriously arrived at elsewhere, and to the final consideration of any other aspects of the poet's work which have yet to be entertained.

Well, the simple truth is that, taken as a whole, the poetical work of Lord Tennyson contains an amount of destructible matter which, in the immemorial phrase, is quite shocking. The ship still holds together. It has stateliness, it has beauty, especially as it drifts to leeward in the sunset glow of the poet's life. But the winds and waves of time have no reverence for water-logged and rudderless barks. A wreck is imminent, and it is our business to see who and what may yet be saved of the crew and cargo. Matthew Arnold performed a duty of pious praise when he gave us, in his book of