152 The Future Poetry
which succeeds in being immediately received and accepted. The
art with which the subject matter is dressed up is of the same
kind; a restrained elaborateness, a curious picturesqueness of
presentation, a taking, sometimes opulent and effective form.
The refinement and felicity are not of a kind which call for
any unusual receptive power or aesthetic fineness to meet it and
feel all its beauty; there is enough and to spare to attract the
cultured, nothing to baffle or exceed the ordinary mind. This art
is that of a master craftsman, a goldsmith, silversmith, jeweller
of speech and substance with much of the decorative painter
in his turn, who never travels beyond general, well-understood
and popular ideas and forms, but gives them by his fineness
of manner and felicity of image a charm and distinction which
belong more properly to rarer and greater or lovelier motives.
The achievement is of a kind which would hardly be worth doing
more than once, but done that once and with such mastery it
takes its place and compels admiration. The spirit is not filled
and satisfied, much less uplifted, but the outer aesthetic mind is
caught and for a time held captive.
But it is doubtful whether the future will attach to Ten-
nyson’s poetry anything at all near to the value it assumed for
the contemporary English mind. When we try to estimate the
substance and see what it permanently gives or what new thing
it discovers for the poetic vision, we find that there is extraordi-
narily little in the end. Tennyson wrote much narrative poetry,
but he is not a great narrative poet. There is a curious blending
of incompatible intentions in all his work of this kind and even
his exceptional skill could not save him from a brilliant failure.
He has on the one side a will to convey some high spiritual
and ethical intention of life through the imaginative use of tale
and legend, and that could give a scope for a very noble kind of
poetry, but he has not the power to lay a great hold on the ancient
figures and recreate them to be symbols of a new significance.
TheIdylls of the Kingmiss both the romantic and the idyllic
beauty and arrive only at a graceful decorated effective trivial-
ity. The grand old Celtic myths and traditions already strangely
mediaevalised by Malory, but full still of life and large humanity