pour itself on all, and summon all to the spectacle and the participation of his happiness! How all is transfigured in his eyes; and how constantly he is himself transfigured! Gaiety, then ecstasy, then archness, then satire, then disclosures, all ready movements, all sudden changes, like a crackling and flaming fire, renewing every moment its shape and color: how rich is the soul, and how it can live a hundred years in a day! The hero of the poem, surprised and insulted by the brother of Maud, kills him in a duel, and loses her whom he loved. He flees; he is seen wandering in London. What a gloomy contrast is that of the great busy careless town, and a solitary man haunted by true grief! We follow him down the noisy thoroughfares, through the yellow fog, under the wan sun which rises above the river like a "dull red ball," and we hear the heart full of anguish, deep sobs, insensate agitation of a soul which would but cannot tear itself from its memories. Despair grows, and in the end the reverie becomes a vision: "Dead, long dead, And my heart is a handful of dust, And my bones are shaken with pain, For into a shallow grave they are thrust, Only a yard beneath the street, And the hoofs of the horses beat, beat, The hoofs of the horses beat, Beat into my scalp and my brain, With never an end to the stream of passing feet, Driving, hurrying, marrying, burying, Clamour and rumble, and ringing and clatter.' O me! why have they not buried me deep enough? Is it kind to have made me a grave so rough, Me, that was never a quiet sleeper? Maybe still I am but half-dead; Then I cannot be wholly dumb; I will cry to the steps above my head, And somebody, surely, some kind heart will come To bury me, bury me Deeper, ever so little deeper." 2 However, he revives, and gradually rises again. War breaks out, a liberal and generous war, the war against Russia; and the 1 Tennyson's Maud, 1856, xxvii. 1, p. 99. 2 Ibid. xxvii. 11, p. 105. big, manly heart, wounded by deep love, is healed by action and courage. "And I stood on a giant deck and mix'd my breath Yet God's just wrath shall be wreak'd on a giant liar; And the heart of a people beat with one desire; For the peace, that I deem'd no peace, is over and done, This explosion of feeling was the only one; Tennyson has not again encountered it. In spite of the moral close, men said of Maud that he was imitating Byron; they cried out against these bitter declamations; they thought that they perceived the rebellious accent of the Satanic school; they blamed this uneven, obscure, excessive style; they were shocked at these crudities and incongruities; they called on the poet to return to his first wellproportioned style. He was discouraged, left the storm-clouds, and returned to the azure sky. He was right; he is better there than anywhere else. A fine soul may be transported, attain at times to the fire of the most violent and the strongest beings: personal memories, they say, had furnished the matter of Maud and of Locksley Hall; with a woman's delicacy, he had the nerves of a woman. The fit over, he fell again into his "golden languors," into his calm reverie. After Locksley Hall he wrote the Princess; after Maud the Idylls of the King. IV. The great task of an artist is to find subjects which suit his talent. Tennyson has not always succeeded in this. His long poem, In Memoriam, written in praise and memory of a friend who died young, is cold, monotonous, and too prettily arranged. He goes into mourning; but, like a correct gentleman, with bran new gloves, wipes away his tears with a cambric handkerchief, and displays throughout the religious service, which ends the ceremony, all the compunction of a respectful and well-trained layHe was to find his subjects elsewhere. To be poetically man. Tennyson's Mand, xxviii. 3 and 4, p. 108. happy is the object of a dilettante-artist. For this many things are necessary. First of all, that the place, the events, and the characters shall not exist. Realities are coarse, and always, in some sense, ugly; at least they are heavy; we do not treat them as we should like, they oppress the fancy; at bottom there is nothing truly sweet and beautiful in our life but our dreams. We are ill at ease whilst we remain glued to earth, hobbling along on our two feet, which drag us wretchedly here and there in the place which impounds us. We need to live in another world, to hover in the wide-air kingdom, to build palaces in the clouds, to see them rise and crumble, to follow in a hazy distance the whims of their moving architecture, and the turns of their golden volutes. In this fantastic world, again, all must be pleasant and beautiful, the heart and senses must enjoy it, objects must be smiling or picturesque, sentiments delicate or lofty; no crudity, incongruity, brutality, savageness, must come to sully with its excess the modulated harmony of this ideal perfection. This leads the poet to the legends of chivalry. Here is the fantastic world, splendid to the sight, noble and specially pure, in which love, war, adventures, generosity, courtesy, all spectacles and all virtues which suit the instincts of our European races, are assembled, to furnish them with the epic which they love, and the model which suits them. The Princess is a fairy tale as sentimental as those of Shakespeare. Tennyson here thought and felt like a young knight of the Renaissance. The mark of this kind of mind is a superabundance, as it were, a superfluity of sap. In the characters of the Princess, as in those of As You Like It, there is an over-fullness of fancy and emotion. They have recourse, to express their thought, to all ages and lands; they carry speech to the most reckless rashness; they clothe and burden every idea with a sparkling image, which drags and glitters around it like a brocade clustered with jewels. Their nature is over-rich; at every shock there is in them a sort of rustle of joy, anger, desire; they live more than we, more warmly and more quickly. They are ever in excess, refined, ready to weep, laugh, adore, jest, inclined to mingle adoration and jests, urged by a nervous rapture to opposite extremes. They sally in the poetic field with impetuous and ever changing caprice and joy. To satisfy the subtlety and superabundance of their invention, they need fairy-tales and masquerades. In fact, the Princess is both. The beautiful Ida, daughter of King Gama, who is monarch of the South (this country is not to be found on the map), was affianced in her childhood to a beautiful prince of the North. When the time appointed has arrived, she is claimed. She, proud and bred on learned arguments, has become irritated against the rule of men, and in order to liberate women has founded a university on the frontiers, which is to raise her sex, and to be the colony of future equality. The prince sets out with Cyril and Florian, two friends, obtains permission from good King Gama, and, disguised as a girl, gets admission to the maiden precincts, which no man may enter on pain of death. There is a charming and sportive grace in this picture of a university for girls. The poet gambols with beauty; no badinage could be more romantic or tender. We smile to hear long learned words come from these rosy lips: "There sat along the forms, like morning doves That sun their milky bosoms on the thatch, A patient range of pupils."1 They listen to historic dissertations and promises of a social revolution, in "Academic silks, in hue the lilac, with a silken hood to each, and zoned with gold, . . . as rich as moth from dusk cocoons." Amongst these girls was Melissa, a child— ... "A rosy blonde, and in a college gown The site of this university for girls enhances the magic of the scene. The words "College" and "Faculty" bring before the mind of Frenchmen only wretched and dirty buildings which we might mistake for barracks or boarding-houses. Here, as in an English university, flowers creep up the porches, vines cling round the bases of the monuments, roses strew the alleys with their petals; the laurel thickets grow around the gates, the courts pile up their marble architecture, bossed with sculptured friezes, varied with urns from which droops the green pendage of the The Princess, a Medley, 12th ed. 1864, ii. 34. 2 Ibid. ii. 46. plants. "The Muses and the Graces, group'd in threes, enring'd a billowing fountain in the midst." After the lecture, some girls, in the deep meadow grass, "smoothed a petted peacock down;" others, “Leaning there on those balusters, high Above the empurpled champaign, drank the gale And sated with the innumerable rose Beat balm upon our eyelids."1 At every gesture, every attitude, we recognize young English girls; it is their brightness, their freshness, their innocence. And here and there, too, we perceive the deep expression of their large dreamy eyes: "Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean, In looking on the happy Autumn-fields, "Dear as remember'd kisses after death, This is an exquisite and strange voluptuousness, a reverie full of delight, and full, too, of anguish, the shudder of delicate and melancholy passion which we have already found in Winter's Tale or in Twelfth Night. The three friends have gone forth with the princess and her train, all on horseback, and pause "near a coppice-feather'd chasm," "till the Sun Grew broader toward his death and fell, and all Cyril, heated by wine, begins to troll a careless tavern catch, and betrays the secret. Ida, indignant, turns to leave, her foot slips, and she falls into the river; the prince saves her, and wishes to flee. But he is seized by the Proctors and brought before the throne, where the haughty maiden stands ready to pronounce At this moment sentence. The Princess, a Medley, 12th ed. 1864. j. 60. 2 Ibid. v. 76. |