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 character as to be altogether ignorant of French provincialism, French practical sense, and French “convenience.”  “Convenience” is his dearest word of contempt, “practical sense” his next dearest, and he throws them a score of times in the teeth of the English.  Strange is the irony of the truth.  For he bestows those withering words on the nation that has the fifty religions, and attributes “ideas”—­as the antithesis of “convenience” and “practical sense”—­to the nation that has the fifty sauces.  And not for a moment does he suspect himself of this blunder, so manifest as to be disconcerting to his reader.  One seems to hear an incurably English accent in all this, which indeed is reported, by his acquaintance, of Matthew Arnold’s actual speaking of French.  It is certain that he has not the interest of familiarity with the language, but only the interest of strangeness.  Now, while we meet the effect of the French coat in our seventeenth century, of the French light verse in our earlier eighteenth century, and of French philosophy in our later, of the French revolution in our Wordsworth, of the French painting in our nineteenth-century studios, of French fiction—­and the dregs are still running—­in our libraries, of French poetry in our Swinburne, of French criticism in our Arnold, Tennyson shows the effect of nothing French whatever.  Not the Elizabethans, not Shakespeare, not Jeremy Taylor, not Milton, not Shelley were (in their art, not in their matter) more insular in their time.  France, by the way, has more than appreciated the homage of Tennyson’s contemporaries; Victor Hugo avers, in Les Miserables, that our people imitate his people in all things, and in particular he rouses in us a delighted laughter of surprise by asserting that the London street-boy imitates the Parisian street-boy.  There is, in fact, something of a street-boy in some of our late more literary mimicries.

We are apt to judge a poet too exclusively by his imagery.  Tennyson is hardly a great master of imagery.  He has more imagination than imagery.  He sees the thing, with so luminous a mind’s eye, that it is sufficient to him; he needs not to see it more beautifully by a similitude.  “A clear-walled city” is enough; “meadows” are enough—­indeed Tennyson reigns for ever over all meadows; “the happy birds that change their sky”; “Bright Phosphor, fresher for the night”; “Twilight and evening bell”; “the stillness of the central sea”; “that friend of mine who lives in God”; “the solitary morning”; “Four grey walls and four grey towers”; “Watched by weeping queens”; these are enough, illustrious, and needing not illustration.