Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/223

Rh one truer painter among the dramatists, and the best touches of both seem incidental. When Browning thinks of birds and beasts they suddenly, as in the Arabian Nights, become almost human. He reads the heart, one might say, of a bird, a horse, or a dog. This Tennyson does not do, nor does he usually give us vivid personal characters, admirably as he draws conventional types. His truth to nature is positive; he has the eye of a Thoreau, and the pastoral fidelity which befits one who is not only the pupil of Milton and Keats, but of Theocritus and Wordsworth. He can treat broadly, and imaginatively withal, "the league-long roller thundering on the reef" and "the long wash of Australasian seas;" but his frequent over-elaboration led the way to a main fault of the younger schools.

While a poet cannot be too accurate, his method, to be natural, must seem unconscious. Naturalness. The virtue of a truth is spoiled by showing it off. Tennyson, the idylist, pauses at critical moments, not perhaps to moralize on the situation, but to make a picture suggesting the feeling which the action itself ought to convey. This practice, for a time so fascinating, has been carried to extremes. Now, in a class of his poems of which "Dora" is a fine example, he has shown that nothing can be more effective than a story simply told. A direct statement, through its truth, often has exceeding Force of a direct and simple method. beauty,—the beauty, pathetic or otherwise, of perfect naturalness. You find it everywhere in the Scriptures; for example: