Perhaps we felt the popular objection that he wants
rude truth, he is too fine. In these boudoirs of damask and
alabaster, one is farther off from stern nature and human life than
in Lallah Rookh and "the Loves of the Angels." Amid swinging censers
and perfumed lamps, amidst velvet and glory we long for rain and
frost. Otto of roses is good, but wild air is better. A critical
friend of ours affirms that the vice, which bereaved modern painters
of their power, is the ambition to begin where their fathers ended;
to equal the masters in their exquisite finish, instead of in their
religious purpose. The painters are not willing to paint ill enough:
they will not paint for their times, agitated by the spirit which
agitates their country; so should their picture picture us and draw
all men after them; but they copy the technics of their predecessors,
and paint for their predecessors' public. It seems as if the same
vice had worked in poetry. Tennyson's compositions are not so much
poems as studies in poetry, or sketches after the styles of sundry
old masters. He is not the husband who builds the homestead after
his own necessity, from foundation stone to chimney-top and turret,
but a tasteful bachelor who collects quaint stair cases and groined
ceilings.
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