ulties, and not only suffers
from them but cries out under the suffering, and shows us the grimace of
the pain of it, than I have lighted upon in the critical article of a
recent quarterly. Reviewing the book of a "poet" who manifestly has an
insuperable difficulty in hacking his work into ten-syllable blocks, and
keeping at the same time any show of respect for the national grammar,
the critic gravely invites his reader to "note" the phrase "neath cliffs"
(apparently for "beneath the cliffs") as "characteristic." Shall the
reader indeed "note" such a matter? Truly he has other things to do.
This is by the way. Tennyson is always an artist, and the finish of his
work is one of the principal notes of his versification. How this finish
comports with the excessive ease of his prosody remains his own peculiar
secret. Ease, in him, does not mean that he has any unhandsome slovenly
ways. On the contrary, he resembles rather the warrior with the pouncet
box. It is the man of "neath cliffs" who will not be at the trouble of
making a place for so much as a definite article. Tennyson certainly
_worked_, and the exceeding ease of his blank verse comes perhaps of this
little paradox--that he makes somewhat too much show of the hiding of his
art.

In the first place the poet with the great welcome style and the little
unwelcome manner, Tennyson is, in the second place, the modern poet who
withstood France. (That is, of course, modern France--France since the
Renaissance. From medieval Provence there is not an English poet who
does not own inheritance.) It was some time about the date of the
Restoration that modern France began to be modish in England. A ruffle
at the Court of Charles, a couplet in the ear of Pope, a _tour de
phrase_ from Mme. de Sevigne much to the taste of Walpole, later the
good example of French painting--rich interest paid for the loan of our
Constable's initiative--later still a scattering of French taste, French
critical business, over all the shallow places of our literature--these
have all been phases of a national vanity of ours, an eager and anxious
fluttering or jostling to be foremost and French. Matthew Arnold's essay
on criticism fostered this anxiety, and yet I find in this work of his a
lack of easy French knowledge, such as his misunderstanding of the word
_brutalite_, which means no more, or little more, than roughness. Matthew
Arnold, by the way, knew so little of the French characte