Moderation is _not_ a compromise; moderation is a
passion; the passion of great judges. That Tennyson felt that lyrical
enthusiasm could be devoted to established customs, to indefensible and
ineradicable national constitutions, to the dignity of time and the
empire of unutterable common sense, all this did not make him a tamer
poet, but an infinitely more original one. Any poetaster can describe a
thunderstorm; it requires a poet to describe the ancient and quiet sky.
I cannot, indeed, fall in with Mr. Morton Luce in his somewhat frigid
and patrician theory of poetry. "Dialect," he says, "mostly falls below
the dignity of art." I cannot feel myself that art has any dignity
higher than the indwelling and divine dignity of human nature. Great
poets like Burns were far more undignified when they clothed their
thoughts in what Mr. Morton Luce calls "the seemly raiment of cultured
speech" than when they clothed them in the headlong and flexible patois
in which they thought and prayed and quarrelled and made love. If
Tennyson failed (which I do not admit) in such poems as "The Northern
Farmer," it was not because he used too much of the spirit of the
dialect, but because he used too little.
Tennyson belonged undoubtedly to a period from which we are divided; the
period in which men had queer ideas of the antagonism of science and
religion; the period in which the Missing Link was really missing. But
his hold upon the old realities of existence never wavered; he was the
apostle of the sanctity of laws, of the sanctity of customs; above all,
like every poet, he was the apostle of the sanctity of words.
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