Page:Literary studies by Joseph Jacobs.djvu/188

 poetic effect, except of course in the purely landscape poems, where this power gave him an advantage over every predecessor in that genre of poetry. Nature in romantic or passionate poetry must be used as a 'pathetic fallacy'—to use Mr. Ruskin's phrase—in order to give the Stimmung to the emotions the poet wishes to arouse. Minute attention to detail diverts the emotion, and at best produces only a decorative effect.

The danger was that this mastery of form and clearness of vision would lead to mere daintiness, might even result in the sugared elegance of vers de société. Tennyson was saved from this by the great chastening sorrow of his life. While he was training himself as a poetic artist with metrical experiments and coinages of five-word phrases enshrining his observations of Nature, he was also elaborating his masterpiece, In Memoriam. For twice the Horatian period he kept this series of poem-sequences by him, adding, revising, inserting, and rejecting, till the whole grew to a moving series of pictures of a soul's development, from the first overwhelming stroke till the final reconciliation of sorrow and hope. Injustice is done to Tennyson in thinking of the In Memoriam as one outburst written in somewhat cold blood immediately after Hallam's death. He is careful to mark the stages of his grief.