Hearts of Controversy — Text and Context

Tennyson's Concurrent Sentences

Meynell argues that Tennyson is condemned 'by a couple of sentences, to run concurrently'—that is, his style and manner operate side by side, sometimes locked together in a single stanza. She illustrates this with the image of a poet who 'sheds the luminous suns of dreams upon men & women who would do well with footlights,' contrasting visionary landscape with theatrical figures. The essay repeatedly moves between the general law of poetic change and the specific 'Tennyson trick,' showing how reaction rather than genuine change has shaped critical opinion. Meynell's own prose mirrors this dual attention: she analyzes broad tendencies while grounding them in particular lines and hemistichs.

Swinburne's Prosodic Excess

In the Swinburne essay, Meynell focuses on the physical movement of verse. She praises his blank verse for its ability to 'march, pause, linger, and charge,' but warns that his later work makes a 'trick and a manner' of energetic devices. She compares his descriptive writing to 'programme-music,' arguing that it becomes 'too descriptive, too imitative of things,' straining the arts of prosody and diction. Yet she acknowledges the mastery: 'the spear, the arrow, the attack, the charge, the footfall, the pinion, nay, the very stepping of the moon, the walk of the wind, are mimicked in this enchanting verse.' The critique is precise, noting how Swinburne's vocabulary holds and uses his meaning rather than the reverse.

Dickens as a Man of Letters

Though the excerpts do not include the Dickens essay, Meynell's approach can be inferred from her method elsewhere. She likely examines Dickens's prose structure, the movement between scenes, and recurring images—such as the 'carpet knight' or 'authentic wild flowers' she mentions in the Tennyson piece. Her criticism tends to isolate a single feature (like Tennyson's concurrent style or Swinburne's imitative metre) and trace its effects across the author's work. The Dickens essay probably follows this pattern, attending to how his language constructs character and setting through rhythmic and imagistic repetition.

Charlotte and Emily Brontë: Scene and Voice

The Brontë essay, like the others, likely attends to the movement between scenes and the recurring images that define their fiction. Meynell's interest in 'the lovely that are not beloved'—a phrase she uses for Tennyson's landscapes—suggests she may apply a similar lens to the Brontës' moors and interiors. Her critical voice is itself a study in contrast: she moves from broad cultural observation to minute textual detail, from the 'herding of opinion' to the individual line. This structural habit makes her essays feel like conversations between the general and the particular, the public and the private.

Meynell's essays reward readers who attend to the movement of her own prose as much as to the poets she discusses. She builds her arguments through juxtaposition—style against manner, line against line, poet against poet—and her sentences often enact the very structures she describes. To read Hearts of Controversy is to watch a critic who thinks through form, and who expects her readers to do the same.