Page:Tennyson - Walter Irving (1873).djvu/29

 most matured production of the poet, we are told, on the first page,

The conceit lies, first of all, in putting a large P to pine; and then instead of saying, like an ordinary mortal, that it had lost its hold of the ground because the soil had been washed away from its roots, Mr Tennyson says it "lost footing." Of course it is to be understood that "lost footing" is poetical. But "lost footing" is not poetical. It does not elevate the accident which befell the pine. The idea suggested by "lost footing," originates from one of the simplest and most common place mishaps which occurs to all people alike. And the washing away of the soil about the roots of a tree is as common an event as the other. What gain is there therefore, in a poetical point, in describing a common natural occurrence, in the phraseology of another common natural occurrence, when the one will set in motion a different train of ideas from the other? Such art, if art it be, simply makes description unnatural, forced, affected, and ineffective. There is hardly a page of the Idylls of the King which is free from similar absurdities.

We have heard also of Mr Tennyson's verse. It has all the beauties of all the poets. The delicate rhythm of Christabel is exceeded by it; it is fuller than Johnson's; it is more musical, and flows easier than Pope's; and its numbers are richer than Dryden's—more elastic and resonant. Of the utter folly of this, any one who has the slightest acquaintance with poetry, must be aware. It is impossible to single out any poem of note in which there is less cadence than in the Idylls of the King. It is unequal and dissonant. The cadence is not "suited to the flood:" the numbers are not "wildly great;"