The Victorian Poets 153and colour are modernised into a baffling and disappointing
superficiality and miss all greatness and power of life. There is
no congruity between the form and symbol and the feeling and
substance. They seem solely to be used to frame a conventional
sentimentalism of Victorian domesticity and respectable social
ethics. But the wearing of the white and scentless flower of a
blameless life in a correct button-hole and a tepid sinning with-
out the least tinge of passion or conviction by decorated puppets
who are too evidently lay-figures of very modern ladies and gen-
tlemen disguised as knights and dames, was hardly a sufficient
justification for evoking the magic figures of old legend and
romance. The life so masqueraded misses reality and it does not
arrive at any great compensating imaginative or interpretative
representation; modernism and the affectation of mediaevalism,
conventional reality and the falsetto tones of pseudo-romance
destroy each other and produce a glittering incongruity. There
is a void of the true sincerity of poetic vision at the heart of the
original conception and no amount of craft and skill in language
or descriptive detail and picture can cure that original deficiency.
The poet has no meditative, no emotional or impassioned, no
close or revealing grasp on life, and on the other hand no deep
interpretative idea, and without one or other of these things
narrative poetry of the modern kind cannot succeed; it becomes
a body without soul or life-breath. Even when Tennyson confines
himself to the poetic modern tale without these disguises or any
motive but the ethically pointed telling, he arrives at the same
result, a richly coloured triviality.
This principal work of his maturity fails; its popularity
springs from its work of detail and its appeal to the superficial
sentiment of the time: but some earlier work of the kind had
a nobler success. In theMorte d’Arthurthereissomenatural
magic and vision which if it had been sustained and kept the
same delicate and mystic strain, might have made the cycle of
idylls a new poetic revelation. In other poems, in theLotos-
Eaters,Ulysses,Oenone, where set narrative is avoided and
the legend is a starting-point or support for thought, vision
and beauty, some fullness of these things is reached; but still