J-NBLf. % -MJt^m ■■■■' m-'l) ILLUSTRATIONS OF TENNYSON PRINTED BY SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE LONDON Illustrations of Tennyson BY JOHN CHURTON COLLINS AUTHOR OF BOLINQBROKE ', A HISTORICAL STUDY ' ETC. Nullum est jam dictum quod non dictum sit prius : Quare aequum est vos cognoscere atque ignoscere Quae veteres factitarunt, si faciunt novi Terenxe : Prol. in Eunuch. What is borrowed is not to be enjoyed as our own, and it is the business of critical justice to give every bird of the Muses his proper feather — Dk Johnson And well his words become him ; is he not A fuU-cell'd honeycomb of eloquence Stor'd from all flowers? Tennyson : Eih^in Morris 'Omv- J % u b n CHATTO & WINDUS, PICCADILLY 1S91 77^ 6'/ PREFACE Why so much importance should be attaclicd to the comparative study of lanf^uages, and so httlo to t]i:> comparative study of htcratures ; why, in the interpre- tation of the masterpieces of poets, it should ho thought necessary to accumulate parallels aiid illus- trations of peculiarities of syntax and grammar, and not be thought necessary to furnish parallels and illustrations of what is of far greater interest and importance, analogies namely in ideas, sentiments, modes of expression, nnd the like, whether arising from direct imitation, unconscious reminiscence, or similarity of temper and genius — the compiler of this little volume has never been able to understand. One thing is certain. The poetry of Lord Tennyson has become classical, and is therefore becoming, and will become more and more, a subject of serious study wherever the English language is spoken. An important branch of that study must undoubtedly be an enquiry into the nature and extent of his indebtedness to the writers who have preceded him — must be to compare with their originals the VI IIJJ-STRATIOXS OF l EA'XYSON iiuitations, llie analogies, the adaptations, the simple transferences in ^Yhic•h liis poems notoriously abound. Nor is this all. No commentary on poetry is more useful, as assuredly no connnontary is more interest- ing, than that afforded by poetry itself. How greatly does the .Fjiieid gain by comparison with the Iliad, the Odyssei/, and the AnioNatitica, and how greatly do they, in their turn, gain by comparison with the ^■Eneid. The power and beauty of a particular simile in Yirgil may impress us to the full without any reference to the corresponding simile in Homer or Apollonius, but to say that our pleasure is not increased by examining them side by side is absurd. It is therefore with this double object, with the oljject partly of tracing Lord Tennyson's direct imitations and transferences to their sources, and also with the object of simply illustrating his poems by the commentary of parallel passages in writers of his own and other languages, that I have compiled this little volume. I have also had another object in view. To the disgrace of our universities, the study of the lltcvcc humaniores in the proper sense of the term has no place in their curricula, so that in the very centres of national culture, while the English and Italian classics have no recognition at all, the writings of the Greek and Latin classics are regarded so entirely as the monopoly of the philologist that they have almost ceased to have any significance as contri- butions to literature. The consequence has been that PREFACE vii in all our schools and colleges where the English classics are a subject of study, the study of them has been severed on principle from the study of the ancient classics and the classics of modern Italy. I thought, therefore, that anything which could contribute to illustrate the essential connection existing between the four leading and master literatures of the world, those namely of ancient Greece and Italy and of modern Italy and England, could not fail to be of service in showing how radically inadequate must be the critical study even of a poet so essentially modern as Lord Tennyson, without constant reference to those litera- tures which have been to him what they have been to his superiors and his peers in English poetry from the Eenaissance to the present time. It would be absurd and presumptuous to conclude that the analogies which have been traced between the ideas and expressions of Lord Tennyson and those of other poets and writers were in all, or indeed in most cases, deliberate or even conscious imitations. In his own noble words, we moderns are ' the heirs of all the ages.' We live amid wealth as prodigally piled up as the massive and myriad treasure-trove of Spenser's ' rich strond,' and it is now almost im- possible for a poet to strike out a thought, or to coin a phrase, which shall be purely original. What con- stitutes Lord Tennyson's glory as a poet, it is no part of the present volume to discuss ; it need hardly be said that had the extent of his indebtedness to his pre- viii JLI.rSTKATIOxXS OF TENNYSON dcccssors been mueli greater than it is, it would no more have detracted from that glory than Milton's similar indebtedness to his predecessors detracts from his. It ^Yas ol)served of Mrgil that he never fails to improve what he borrows, though Homer was his creditor ; and what is true of A^irgil is, as a rule, true of Tennyson — ' nihil tetigit quod non ornavit ' — ^Yhat he does still betters what is done. I offer these illustrations simply as commentaries on works which will take their place beside the masterpieces of classical literature, and which will, like them, be studied with minute and curious dili- gence by successive generations of scholars. A versatility almost without parallel among poets has enabled Lord Tennyson to appeal to all classes. His poetry is the delight of the most fastidious and the most emotional. He touches Burns on one side, and he touches Sophocles on the other. But to the scholar, and to the scholar alone, will his best and most characteristic works become in their full signifi- cance intelligible. By him they will be cherished with peculiar fondness. To him they will be like the enchanted island in Shakespeare — Full of echoes, Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight. To him it will be a never-ending source of pleasure to study his Tennyson as he studies his Yirgil, his Dante, and his Milton. It has been thought proper to affix to the passages PREFACE \x quoted from Greek, Latin, and Italian authors literal versions in English prose, though I need hardly say that the points of resemblance between the passages in Tennyson corresponding with the passages cited from authors in these languages are often necessarily lost in such versions, which can indeed preserve little more than analogies in thought, sentiment, and imagery. For this reason I have not given trans- lations of the passages cited in the chapter which compares the style of Virgil and Tennyson. It only remains for me to thank Messrs. Smith, Elder & Co. for allowing me to incorporate in the present volume the greater part of three articles con- tributed by me some years ago to the CornJiill Magazine. CONTENTS CnAPTER PAGE I. Introduction — Tennyson and Virgil . . 1 II. Group I. — Juvenilia III. „ II. — The Lady of Siialott, etc. . H IV. „ III.— English Idylls and other Toems V. „ IV. — Enoch Arden and other Poems VI. „ V. — The Princess, etc. VII. „ VI.— In Memoeiam .... VIII. „ VII.— Maud IX. „ VIII. — Idylls of the King . X. „ IX. — The Lover's Tale, Ballads, etc. XL „ X. — Later Miscellaneous Poems 24 35 53 G7 78 92 113 117 159 1G5 ILLUSTRATIONS OF TENNYSON CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION — TENNYSON AND VIRGIL Those who may happen to be acquainted with the Saturnalia of Macrobius will remember that among the most pleasing episodes in that interesting work are the two books in which Eustathius and Furius Albinus estimate the extent of Virgil's obligations to his pre- decessors. Eustathius having concluded a long and elahorate review of the passages in the Greek poets of which the great Eoman had availed himself, Furius Albinus proceeds to trace him through Latin literature. He was half afraid, he said, to produce the formidable list of passages appropriated by the poet, because he might be exposing his favourite ' to the censure of the malignant and unlearned.' Remembering, however, that such parallels as he was about to point out have been common to poets of all ages, and complacently observing that what Virgil condescended to borrow became him much more than the original owner — to say nothing of that owner becoming in some cases immortalised by the theft — Furius plunges into his theme. Between them these Langbaines of the fifth century made Conington very uncomfortable towards B 2 JLLi'STRATIONS OF TEXXVSON the end of the Jiinctecnth. Jlni if their disclosures have materially impaired Virgil's claims to originality, they have illustrated his faultless taste, his nice artistic sense, his delicate touch, his consummate literary slcill. They initiated a new bi'anch of study, they divulged a fruitful secret. Without going so far as Ilarpax in AUmmazar, when he says — Tliis poet is that poet's plagian', And li(j a third's till they all end in Homer — it is still intcrcstiiig and necessary to remember that there have appeared in all literatures, at a certain point in their development, a class of poets who are essentially imitative and reilectivc. They have usually been men possessed of great natural ability, extensive culture, refined taste, wide and minute acquaintance with the literature which preceded them ; they have occasionally Ikcu men endowed with some of the most precious attributes of original genius. The poets of Alexandria, the epic, lyric, and elegiac poets of Home, are the most striking types of this class in ancient times. Tasso, Gray, and Tennyson are, perhaps, the most striking types in the modern world. In point of diction and expression, and regarded in I'elation to the mere nutterial on which he works, Milton would also bo inchidcd in tlils class of poets. But he is separated from them by the quality of his genius and his essential originality. What he borrows is not simply modified or adapted but assimilated and transformed. In the poets who have been referred to, with the occasional exception of Virgil, what is borrowed undergoes, as a rule, no such transformation. TEA'XVSON A. YD VIRGIL 3 They may be compared indeed to skilful horticulturists. They naturalise exotics. A flower which is the beauty of one region they transplant to another ; and they call art to the assistance of nature. If a blossom be single they double it ; if its hue be lovely it is ren- dered more lovely still. The work of such poets has a twofold value : it has — to borrow an expression from the schools — not only an exoteric but an esoteric in- terest. To sit down, for instance, to the study of the Edoriucs, the Geoir/ics, and the ^Fjneid, without being familiar with the illustrative masterpieces of Greek poetry and the fragments of the older Roman literature, would be like travelling through a country, rich with historical traditions and splendid with poetical asso- ciations, without possessing any sense of either. The uncritical spectator might be satisfied with the sen- suous glory of the scenery, the simple loveliness of cloud and landscape, and the thousand effects of contrast and perspective ; but an enlightened man would feel something very like contempt for one who, with the Ilissus and the Mincio whispering at his feet, was sensible only of the natural beauties of the landscape round him. Nature has indeed made one world. Art another. Lord Tennyson has now, by general consent, taken his place among English classics ; he too will have, like Virgil and Horace, like Tasso and Gray, his critics and his commentators ; and, unless I am much mistaken, one of the most important and useful departments of their labour will be that of tracing his obligations to his prede- cessors, of illustrating his wondrous assimilative skill, his tact, his taste, his learning. John de Peyrarcde pnce observed that he knew no task more instructive 4 ILLUSTRATIONS OF TENNYSON than to compare Virgil's adaptations of Homer with the original passages — to note what details he rejected, what he added, what he softened down, what he thought proper to heighten. It was a perpetual study of the principles of good taste. In full confidence that what applies to Virgil in this case applies with equal justice to the work of our Laureate, I propose in this little hook to inaugurate, so to speak, a branch of Tennysonian research which must necessarily be gradual and cumulative, but which will sooner or later become indispensable to a proper appreciation of his services to art. Every Englishman must be quite as jealous of the fame of the Laureate as our old friend Furius Albinus was of the fame of his beloved Virgil, and I have in truth as little fear as honest Furius of these my illustrations being mis- taken for an insinuation' of plagiarism against a poet of whom we are all of us so justly proud. Tennyson, then, belongs to a class of poets whose work has a twofold value and interest — a value and interest, that is to say, dependent on its obvious, simple, and intrinsic beauties, which is its exoteric and popular side, and a value and interest dependent on niceties of adaptation, allusion, and expression, which is its esoteric and critical side. To a certain point only he is the poet of the multitude ; pre-eminently is he the poet of the cultured. Nor, I repeat, will his services to art be ever understood and justly appre- ciated till his writings come to be studied in detail, till they are, as those of his masters have been, submitted to the ordeal of the minutest critical investigation ; till the delicate mechanism of his diction shall be analysed as Bcholars analyse the TENNYSON AND VIkGiL S kindred subtleties of Sophocles and Yirgil ; till the sources of his poems have been laid bare and the original and the copy placed side by side ; till we are in possession of comparative commentaries on his poems as exhaustive as those with which Orelli illustrated Horace, and Eichhoff Yirgil. His poems must be studied not as we study those of the fathers of song — as we study those of Homer, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare — but as we study those who stand first in the second rank of poets. In dealing with him we have not to deal with a Homer, but with an Apollonius, not with an Alcajus, but with a Horace — not, that is to say, with a poet of great original genius, but with an accomplished artist, with one whose mastery lies in assimilative skill, whose most successful works are not direct studies from simple nature, but studies from nature interpreted by art. He belongs, in a word, to a school which stands in the same relation to the literature of England as the Alexandrian poets stood to the literature of Greece, and as the Augustan poets stood to the literature of Eome. To illustrate what has been said. In the works of the fathers of poetry everything is drawn directly from Nature. Their characters are the characters of real life. The incidents they describe are, as a rule, such incidents as have their counterpart in human ex- perience. When they paint inanimate objects, either simply in detail or comprehensively in groups, their pictures are transcripts of what they have with their own eyes beheld. In description for the mere sake of description they seldom indulge. The physical universe is with them merely the stage on which the tragi-comedy of life is evolving itself. Their language & ILLUSTRATIONS OF TENMYSON is as a rule plain, simple, impassioned. When they are obscure the o))scin'ity arises not from affectation but from necessity. Little solicitous about the niceties of conception and expression, they are almost free from what the Greeks called KpoKvXs'yiJios (dealing in trifles) and -^vxpoTTis (ambitious conceits). Their object was to describe and interpret, not to refine and subtilise. They were great artists not because they worked con- sciously on critical principles but because they com- muned with truth. They were true to art because they were true to Nature. In the school of which we may take Virgil and Tennyson to be the most conspicuous representatives, a school which seldom fails to make its appearance in every literature at a certain point of its development, all this is reversed. Their material is derived not from the world of Nature, but from the world of Art. The hint, the framework, the method of their most characteristic compositions, seldom or never emanate from themselves. Take their dramatis personce. The only powerful portrait in Yirgil is a study from Euripides and Apollonius ; the rest are shadows, mere outlines, suggested sometimes by Homer and some- times by the Greek dramatists. Tennyson's Arthur, Guinevere, Elaine, and Launcelot are, regarded as characters, in no sense of the term creations. De- rived from types which have long been commonplaces in fiction, they add nothing to the gallery of dramatic portraiture. His Ulysses is a study from Dante. His most subtly elaborated character, Lucretius, is the result of a minute and patient study of the Dc Ilcrum Naturd. The archetype for his most charming female creation, Edith, he found in Wordsworth, TEjVJVVSON AM) I'lKGIL 7 His minor heroes and heroines, his Eleanores, his Madehnes, his Marianas, are rather embodiments of peciiHar moods and fancies than human beings. When A'irgil sits down to write pastorals he reproduces Theocritus with servile lidelit_y. "When ho writes didactic poetry he takes Ilesiod for his model. "When he composes the .Eneid he casts the first part in the mould of the Oili/ssei/ and the second part in the mould of the Iliad. He is careful also to introduce no episode for which lie cannot point to his pattern. So with the Laureate. Tennyson's Idi/Ilsuve a series of incidents from the Arthurian Eomances. The plan of the work was suggested partly by Spenser and partly, perhaps, by Theocritus.^ His Enid is from Lady Charlotte Guest's version of the MaJnnoijiun. Of his classical studies (JEnone was modelled on the Theo- critean Idylls ; Uh/sscs and Tithonus on the soliloquies in the Greek Plan's. His Enylisli Idi/Ils are obviousl}' modelled on Theocritus, Southey, and Wordsworth. In "Wordsworth's MicJiad he found a model for Enoch Arxlen, and in Miss Procter's ILinieivanl Bound the greater part of the plot. His Lady Clare was derived from Miss S. E.Ferrier's novel. The InJieritanee. His In Memoriam was suggested by Petrarch ; his Dream of Eair Woinen by Chaucer; his Godiva by Moultrie ; ' The great work of Spenser is, like the Idylls, an ehiborate philo- sophical allegory, the central figure of which is King Arthur ; and it was, like the Idylls, to have contained twelve parts. The minor resem- blances between the two works are important and curious. What Theocritus may have suggested was the idea of substituting a series of idylls for a continuous narrative, of composing an epic on the si'.me principle as painters present history or biography, through a succession of frescoes i^ainted on separate panels. The three poems on Hercules seem to imply that he had intended to deal with the Herculean 'legends in this manner. 8 ILLUSTRATIOyiS OF TENNYSOM his CdliiDihii.'i ])}' Mv. Ellis ; the women's university in The Princess by Johnson. His Lotos-Eaters is an interpretative sketch from the Odi/sseij ; his Golden Sujijier is from Boccaccio ; his Dora is the versification of a story by Miss Mitford. His Voyage of Maehlnne is adapted from Joyce's Celtic Iio)iiattces. When Yirgil has a scene to describe, or a simile to draw, he betakes him first to his predecessors to find a model, and then proceeds to fill in his sketch. With a touch here and a touch there, now from memory, now from observation, borrowing here an epithet and there a phrase — adding, subtractmg, heightening, modifying, substituting one metaphor for another, developing what is latent in suggestive imagery, laying under contribution the wide domain of Greek and Eoman literature — the unwearied artist patiently toils on, till his precious mosaic is without a flaw, till every gem in the coronet of his genius has received the last polish. It has been the pleasing task of a hundred generations of the learned to follow this consummate artist step by step, to dis- cover his gems in their primitive state, and to compare them in that state with the state in which they are when they leave his finishing hand. Such an inves- tigation is little less than an analysis of the principles of good taste, and from such an investigation the poet has infinitely more to gain than to lose. It is the object of this little book to show that much of Tennyson's most valuable work is of a similar cha- racter, that he possesses, like A irgil, some of the finest qualities of original genius, but that his style and method are, like the style and method of the Eoman, essentially artificial and essentially reflective. With TENNYSON AND VIRGIL 9 both of them expression is the first consideration. If the matter be meagre, the form is always elaborate ; if the ideas are fine, the clothing is still finer. Their composition resembles the sculptm'e described by Ovid — matcriem superahat opus — the workmanship is more precious than the material. There is, it is true, much in the Georgics the charm and power of which cannot be resolved into the impression made on us by rhythm and style, but the charm and power of two-thirds at least of the work depend mainly on expression. So with Maud, but without reservation ; it is a mere triumph of expression, a tour de force in elaborate rhythmic rhetoric. One of the most highly finished passages Virgil ever produced w^as the description of a boy whipping his top ; one of the finest descriptive passages in all Lord Tennyson's writings is the com- parison between the heavy fall of a drunken man and the fall of a wave tumbling on the shore.' The diction of both is often so subtly elaborated that it defies analysis. Dissect, for example, the line ' discolor unde auri per ramos aui-a refulsit ' {.En. vi. 204), and you reduce it to nonsense. Dissect There with her milk-white arms and shadowy hair She made her face a darkness from the king {Gui?ievc7'e), and it becomes unintelligible. When Virgil wishes to describe a shepherd wondering whether after the lapse of a few years he will see his farm again, he writes — ' See the lines in 17ie Last Tournament, beginning — ' Down from the causeway heavily to the swamp Fell, as the crest,' &c. 10 ILLUSTRATIONS OF TENXVSON Post aliquot, mca rcgna videns, inirabor arislds ? When Tennyson has occasion to alludu to the month of March, lie speaks of the roaring moon Of daffodil and crocus. Their expressions not unfroquently resemble enigmas. A labyrinth becomes in Virgil iter, qml siu^nn seqiiendi Fallerct imlepreusus et irreiueabilis error ; and the life of Christ becomes in Tennyson's phraseo- logy the sinless years That breathed beneath the Syrian bine {In Mem. lii.), and future ages {id. Ixxvi.) ' the secular abyss to come.' Would Virgil descril)e how ' an adulterer ^vas lying in waiu for the conqueror of Asia,' expression is tortured into devictani Asiam subsedit adulter (.E??. xi. 2G8). Would Tennyson describe the chancel of a country church he racks it into where the kneeling hamlet drains The chalice of the grapes of God {In Mem. x.). Both delight in substituting subtle suggestiveness for simplicity and directness of expression. If Virgil wishes to tell us that Dido is sleepless he says — neque luiqnani Solvitur in soninos oculisve aut pcctorc noctem Accipit {Mn. iv. 52'i "tarn absumitc ferro ; the wonderful force of which epithet is, no doubt, TEAWVSON AND VIRGIL ij rightly "explained by Servius^ — if she is really to lose her son, for as yet she cannot understand that she has lost him, all on earth will — so thinks she — perish too, and therefore she prays that they will destroy her iirst. Or take, again, the M'ord ' inimicam,' A\n. x. 295 — Inimicam finclite terram — where it means not only generally the * foeman's land,' and the land which hates j'ou, but particularly the land which is in your way — in the way of the ship you are to send ploughing into it. So with Tennyson. Take such an epithet as * doubtful,' in In Mem. Ixi. — Yet turn thee to the doubtful shore, "Where thy first form was made a man. Unfold it, and we find it involving three distinct meanings. First, physically picturesque, it presents the earth as seen by glimpses through intervening clouds from an immense height, recalling Shake- speare's ' varying shore o' the world ; ' secondly, in a metaphysical sense, the earth which fills us with douljt and perplexity ; and thirdly the earth which is itself a riddle and enigma. So too the epithet ' vocal,' in In Mr 1)1. Ixiv. — • While yet beside its vocal springs He play'd at coiu^Lsellors and kings. Loth delight in employing epithets which correspond not to what is expres^^ed in the substantives to which ' ' Unusquisque in propria^ salutis desperatione credit turn uni- versa etiam posse consumi, unde est quod mode dixit " me i^rimam," quasi, niortuo Euryalo, omncs Trojaui perituri essent.' — Servjus, acl locum. i6 ILLUSTRATIONS OF TENNYSON they are attached, but to some image or idea impHed or suggested in association. Thus Yirgil's ' scelcmtas sumere ^wjms ' {.En. ii. 576), which is of course for * l^o-nas ex scelerata sumere.' So too (.-T^Jn. x. 300) * spu mantes rates,' ' through the surf,' or ' mid showers of spray,' and * cccc'is erramus in undis ' {A'ln. iii. 200), and {.En. vi. 543) 'ad imina Tartara mittit,' and again {.En. vii. 141) — • Pater omnipotens ter coelo clarus ab alto Intonuit ; and Bina die siccant ovis libera {Eel. ii. 42). It is, in fact, an habitual trick of Virgil's style. Nor is it less affected in Tennyson's. * Melissa shook her douhtful curls ' {Princess, iii.) ; * the sandy foot- print (/(/. iii.) ; ' the red fool-fury of the Seine ' {In Mem. cxxvii.) ; ' the hrhjlit death quiver 'd at the victim's throat ' {Dream of Eair Women) ; ' the nindy gleams of March' {Merlin and Vivia)t) ; 'the ]nllar''d dusk of sounding sycamores' {Audley Court); 'a hoary face Meet for the reverence of the hearth ' {Aylmers Field). But it is useless to multiply in- stances. Both are fond of employing epithets which mark and describe some local or temporary peculiarity in natural objects. Thus in .Encid, v. 308-9, Yirgil speaks of the olive as ' flava ' : — Tres priemia primi Acc\])ient, flav a que caput nectentiir oHva — and the epithet has so much puzzled the commentators, from Servius (who paraphrases it as ' viridi ') down- ward, that they have resorted to various conjectures. But none of them have noticed that the games, for one TENNYSON AND VIRGIL 17 of which this olive was to bo the prize, took place at the time of year when the olive was in flower ; ' and the epithet, taken literally, is strictly correct and proper, and signalises a very remarkable and distinctive cha- racteristic of the olive — its yellow pollen, which it sheds so copiously in the flowering season as not only to cover the leaves, trunk, and branches of the tree, but even the ground and neighbouring objects with a yellow dust ' (Henry's .Eneidra, ad locum, verse 309). So with Tennyson. In TJte Marriage of Gcraint occur the lines — Men saw the goodly hills of Somerset, Aiid white sails tiying on the yellow sea. Mr. Swinburne, in an interesting passage in his Esmij on Tennyson and Musset, tells us how greatly this description had perplexed him, as he had never seen such a phenomenon. But he adds, ' On the first bright day I ever spent on the eastern coast of England I saw the truth of this touch, and recognised once more with admiring delight the subtle and sure fidelity of that happy and studious hand. There on the dull yellow, foamless floor of dense discoloured sea, so thick with clotted sand that the water looked massive and solid as the shore, the white sails flashed whiter against it and along it as they fled, and I knew once more the truth of what I had never doubted — that the eye and the hand of Tennyson may always be trusted at once and alike to see and to express the truth.' In Pellcas and Etta r re we have another example of this recondite study of natural phenomena : — It seem'd to Pelleas that the fern without Burnt as a living lire of emeralds — • an effect which is simply unintelligible, unless we l8 JLLUSTRATIOXS OF TEXNYSON remember that Pclleas is lying on his back at sunset, with his eye running on a level with the surface of the bracken. But to pass to other points which these subtle and elaborate artists have in common : Both abound in the figures known to grammarians as hypallage, enahage, paronomasia, onomatopoeia, oxy- moron, hyperbaton. Both sedulously cultivate alli- teration and assonance. Both are fond of employing common words in uncommon senses. Virgil's use of 'mollis' {Georg.ii. 389; yEneid,ix. 817, &c.) in the sense of restless or shifting ; of ' vexasse ' (Ed. vi. 75), the force of which depends on its derivation ; of ' addita ' for 'infesta' {^E)i. vi. 90) ; of 'bipennis' {id.xi. 135), not of an axe, but in its original adjectival sense; of 'orare' for ' loqui ' {id. vii. 44G) ; of ' caducus ' for ' fallen ' {id. vi. 481), arc analogous to such expressions in Tennyson as ' glorious ' in In Mem. cxxviii. — To fool the cro->vd with glorious lies ; hnttc in id. cxxvii. — The hmtc earth lightens to the sky; as ' secret ' in Lotos-Eaters — "Where they smile in secret, looking over wasted lands ; as 'pathos ' in Love and LJntij — Shall sharpest _2Jt'(^/ios blight us; as ' forgetful ' {In Memoriam, xxv.) and ' painful ' (Pedace of Art) in the sense respectively of 'causing forgetfulness ' and ' full of pain.' Both largely affect archaisms and the revival or adoption of obsolete or provincial words. Thus Tennyson's 'bight' {Voyage of Maeldune), 'garth' {Enoeh Arden), ' poaclCd filth ' (Merlin), ' rolaj hollow ' TENXVScXV AND VIRGIL 19 (Lflsi Tourn.), 'dune' (id.), 'agaric' {Garctli and Lynettc), ' mawkin ' (Princess), 'bosks' (id.), 'byre' (The Victim), and the like, answer to Virgil's ' um- bracula' (Eel. ix. 42), 'uri,' a Gallic word {Geonj. i\. 2)14),^ camuris sub cornibus ' {Geonj. iii. 55), ' cujum ' {Eel. iii. 1). As Virgil employ's extensively idioms and phrases from the Greek, so Tennyson emjiloys as exten- sively idioms and phrases from both the Greek and tho Latin. Virgil's ' scnsit medios delapsus in hostes ' {.En. ii. 377), ' dederatqnc comam dijfiindere ventis ' {id. i. 319), 'ventis maria omnia recti' {id. 524), ' addiderat socium, non inferiora secutus ' {id. vi. 170), ' et nunc nequidquam /a///.s c/ca ' {J']n. xii. G34), and the like answer to Tennyson's ' strike a sudden, hand in mine ' {In Mem. xiv.) ; ' roar from 3'onder dropping day ' {id. XV.), 'learns Iter (jone and far from home' {id. viii.) ; 'and come icliatever loves to iceep' {In Mem. xviii.) ; ' / see thee icliat thou art ' {Mortc d'Artliur) ; So may whatever tempest mars Mid-ocean, spare thee {In Mem. xvii.) ; just as phrases like ' finish'd to the finger nail ' {Edwin Morris), 'stood foursquare' {Ode on Wel- lington), ' Sneeze out a full God-bless-you right and left' {Edwin Morris), 'ccok'd his spleen' {Princess, i.), ' laugh'd with alien lips ' {id. iv.), are analogous to Virgil's frequent attempts to transplant phrases from the Greek poets into Latin, such as the famous mistranslation from Theocritus (if mistranslation it was) in Eclogue viii. 58, ' omnia vel medium fiant mare,' his similarly ambiguous ' cratera coronant ' {Georg. ii. 528), his ' ut vidi, ut peril' {Eel. viii. 41), his ' clamorc incendunt ccelum ' {.En. x. 894), and his c 2 20 iLLb'sjRA'/'h)Xs OF TFyyyso.v frequent Homeric analogues. How Yirgil attempted to enrich his language by giving Latin conjunctions the peculiar force and function of Greek, by employ- ing every device of verbal collocation to supply the \vant of particles, by habitually making the Latin passive serve the place of the Greek middle, and the Latin perfect the place of the Greek aorist, is notorious.^ Tennyson has done exactly the same for English. Thus he makes our word ' for ' correspond to the Greek epexegetic i' fMf\fdr]fxa, ai fiev KvTrpis d t' uyavofj\i(f)upos YlfcGw poStotaiu ev livBiaiv Bpi-^av, fivpra Te, kch ta Ka\ iXlxpvaos /M«X(i re K(ii pu8a kch repetva dufjjva, Tup.os ("iJTTi'os kXvtus opBpus f'yetprjaLV ar]86ras (Fragments of Ibycus) 32- ILLUSTRATIONS OF TENNYSON (Euryalus, nurseling of tlic sweet Graced, care of the fair- haired ones, thee Cypris and mild-eyed Persuasion nonrished amid rose-llowers . . . myrtles, and violets and helichryse, and apples, and roses, and smooth bay- treo, what time the wakeful noisy dawn rouseth up the nightingales). The beautiful expression in Adeline — Those dew-lit eyes of thine — is apparently borrowed from Collins's Ode to Pity : - And cj^es of dcioi/ light. How the merry blue-bell rings To the mosses underneath : This conceit, hardly worth the stealing, seems to have been appropriated from Shelley : — And the hyacintli, piu'ple and white and blue, Which flung from its bells a sweet peal anew Of music {T]ic Sensitive Plant, i.). In May(jaret — The morn Moving through ajleccij night — reminds us of Milton, who describes the moon as Stooping through & fleecy cloud. The ballad of Or'uina was evidently suggested by the old ballad oi Helen e)f Kirheonnel, both poems being based on a similar incident, and both being the passionate soliloquy of the bereaved lover, though Tennyson's treatment of the subject is all his own. The expression tears of Hood — I feel the tears of blood arise — JUVENILIA 33 recalls Ford, who more cautiously qualifies it, 'Tes Vihj she's a Whore (act i. sc, 1) : — "Wash every word thou utterest In tears (and if "t be possible) of blood. The ' full-sail'd verse ' in Eleiinore recalls Shake- speare's eighty-sixth sonnet — T^he full sail of his great verse; while the image in the passage describing love — His bow-string slaclccn'd, languid Love Leaning his cheek upon his hand — was no doubt suggested by Horace, Odes, III. xxvii. CG-8 :— Aderat querenti Perfidum ridens Venus et re^nisso Filius arcu (And as she complained she saw Venus there treacherously smiling, and Venus's son, too, with unstrung bow). The yellow-handed bees : Cf. Keats's ' ycUoir-fiirted hecs ' {Endtjmion, [.). The whole of the passage beginning My heart a charmed shuubcr keeps— is little more than an adaptation of Sappho's incom- parable ode, filtered, perhaps, through the version of Catullus. The incident related in the sonnet on Alexander is taken from Arrian, De Exped. Alcxandri, lib. iii. chap. iii. and iv. The allusion to the naphtha-pits shows that the poet had been reading Plutarch's Life of Alexander. This brings us to the end of the first group, a series of very slight studies, in which the influences D 34 ILLUSTRATIONS OF TENNYSON most perceptible are, perhaps, the Greek lyric poets, Keats, and Coleridge,^ though they prove how decidedly, even in these early days, Tennyson had formed those habits of careful study and wide reading which ever afterwards distinguished him. As we go on to consider the poems in Group II. we shall see how, as his genius developed, his studious learning and his powers of assimilation grew in proportion. Wider and wider grows the range of his reading, more and more exquisite and consummate the skill with which he uses his materials. ' Coleridge was, so far as I know, tlie first English poet who dis- covered the strange effect produced by a Hash of prosaic definiteness of detail in the midst of vague and dreamy pomp. Thus in Kubla Khan : — Five miles meandering with a mazy motion, Through wood and dale the sacred river ran. So Tennyson in Elednorc : — Thou wert born, on a summer morn, A mile beneath the cedar-wood ; and it is employed habitually in these early pooms. It became after- wards, notably in Rossetti, a mere trick. CHAPTER III GnorP II. — THE LADY CF SIIALCTT, ETC. The Ladji of Shalott. — A study in fancy from the Arthurian Romances, Shalott being a form, through the French, of Astolat. According to Sir Francis Palgrave {Selections from the Li/ric Poems of Lord Tennyson, p. 257) the poem was suggested by an Itahan romance upon the Donna di Scalotta. On what authority this is said I know not, nor can I identify the romance referred to.^ It seems to owe as much to Coleridge as to any one. ' Tirra, lirra ' by the river Sang Sir Lancelot : A charming onomatopoeia, not coined by Tennyson but by Shakespeare as a variant on the French : — The lark that tirra, lirra chants {Winter's Talc, act iv. sc. 2). ' It is possible that the novel which is referred to by Sir F. Palgrave is Novella LXXXI., in a collection of novels entitled Libra di Novclle, printed at Milan in 1804, which tells but very briefly the story of Elaine's love and death. ' Qui conta,' so runs the heading, ' come la Damigella di Scalot mori per amore di Lancialotto di Lac' And thi3 is the more likely as Sir Francis says that the poem was suggested by a novel ' in which Camelot, unlike the Celtic tradition, was placed near the sea.' In this novel it is placed near the sea : ' II mare la guido a Camalot, e ristette alia riva.' If this be, as it appears to be, the novel referred to, Tennyson's poem owes nothing to it. D 2 36 ILLUSTRATIONS OF TEXNYSON Mariana in the South has an interesting parallel, so far at least as a lyric poem can be parallel with a poem cast in narrative form, in La Pia, a poem of great power and beauty written by Benedetto Sestini. Sestini founds his poem on the famous passage in the Pinyjatorio which alludes to the story of La Pia {Parg. v. 133), and he gives us the picture of this hapless wife pining forlorn amid the torrid horrors of the Maremma. The points of resemblance between Tennyson's poem and Sestini's lie in the position of the two women and in the graphic power with which the sultry landscape surrounding them is described. The singularly beautiful expression — Large Hesper glittered on her tears — reminds us of Keats's No light Could gllinmcv on their tears {Hijjicr. bk. ii.). In 'Jltc Tu-o Voices the dialogue, or rather the part fdled in it by the voice persuading death, seems to have been suggested by Lucretius (lib. iii. 931-1052) : — Or will one beam be less intense When thy peculiar difference Is cancell'd in the world of sense ? Cf. Byron's Lara, canto ii. sect, i., the passage begin- ning, 'And grieve what may,' &c., also West's Ad Arnicas towards the end, Mitford's Grajj, quarto ed. vol. ii. p. liJ. The lines describing the insonsil)iUty of the dead man to the world and all that he left in it — His sons grow up that bear his name, Some grow to honour, some to shame, — But he is chill to praise or blame — THE LADY OF SHALOTT, ETC. 37 recall Job xiv. 21 — His sous come to honour, and he knoweth it not ; and they are brought low, but he perceiveth it not of them ; just as the lines — He will not hear the north-wind rave, Nor, moaning, household shelter crave From winter rains that beat his grave. High up the vapours fold and swim : About him broods the twiliglit dim : The place he knew forgetteth him^ recall the weird and powerful lines of Henry More : — Their rotten relics lurk close underground ; With living wight no sense nor sympathy They have at all : nor hollowing thundering sound Of roaring winds that cold mortality Can wake, ywrapt in sad Fatality. To horse's hoof that beats his grassie dore He answers not : the moon in sileney Doth pass by niglit, and all bedew him o'er "With her cold humid rayes : but he feels not Heaven's power {Psi/c]io::oia, canto ii. st. 20). Again, the lines — Moreover, something is or seems, That touches me with mystic gleams, Like glimpses of forgotten dreams — Of something felt, like something here ; Of something done I know not where (cf. the parallel passages in Tennyson's first sonnet and in IVie Ancient Scifjc) — embody what has often found embodiment before. "Wordsworth's lines in the Ode on the Intimations of Innnortalitij furnish an interesting illustration : — 38 ILLUSTRATIOXS OF TENNYSON But there's a tree, of many, one, A single field which I have look'd upon ; Both of them speak of something that is gone. The pans,y at my feet Doth the same tale repeat. Sir Walter Scott in Gmj Mannennfj has described the same phenomenon in a more homely way in prose. ' How often,' says Henry Bertram, ' do we find our- selves in society which we have never before met, and yet feel impressed with a mysterious and ill-defined consciousness that neither the scene, the speaker, nor the sul)ject are entirely new — na}', feel as if we could anticipate that part of the conversation which has not yet taken place ' {Gu]} JManncrinr/, ch. xli.). See, too, Shelley's Prose IJ^jrks for a very remarkable illustration of this {Sjx'cnlations on Metaphysics, v. 4). Human nature must be the same in all ages, and yet I have never met with any allusion to this phenomenon — and I can speak from somewhat extensive reading among the Greek mystics and philosophers — in ancient writers. He owns the fatal gift of eyes : Cf. Plato, Plucdo, X. :— apa fX^'- a^ijOei^av Tiva o\j/ii re Kai cKnij toIs di'SpuiTrois, *] Til ye Toiavra Koi ol TTOir]Ta\ i]p.'iv aa. Opv^uvaii; on ovt UKOvop.(v (iKpifies oiibev ovre opcofiev ; (Have sight and hearing any truth in them ? are they not, as poets are always telling us, inaccurate witnesses ?) It is hardly necessary to say that the proper com- mentary on the whole of this passage in Tennyson's poem is Plato i^assim, but the Phado particularly ; cf. especially from marginal p. 65 to G8, and again p. 79 ; cf. too Rejjuhlic, VH. vii. and X, iv.-v. THE LADY OF SHALOTT, ETC, 39 But to proceed. The beautiful line — You scarce coiild see the grass for flowers— is an eclio of Peek's Ye may no see for peeping flowers the grass _ _ {Arraignment of Paris, i. 1). In The Miller's Daiiqhfer the prraceful song begin- ning at is the miller's daughter,' is, for the most part, almost an adaptation of a portion of an ode of Eonsard {Odes, bk. iv. ode 20). Compare ' I would be the girdle ' and ' I would be the necklace, &c., with — . . ■, -1 Je voudrois estre le nban Qui serre ta belle poitrino Je voudrois estre le carquan Qui orne la gorge yvoirine, Je voudrois estre tout autour Le coral qui tes levres toucho, Afin de baiser nuict et jour Tes belles levres et ta bouche. ' ■ But the original of both is the pretty ode m the Pseudo-Anacreon, 22 (20) : — eyco S' ej-onrpov (1.r]v, OTTCOS a{\ B\€TTr]S /if e'yw X''"'^" yei'om.r]v, OTTO)? del (popfjs pe- Ka\ TOLvlrj Se pacrTwv, K.a\ (TOLvhoKov yevolnrjv' UOVOV TTOCrlV 77nT€l /Xc (Would that I were a mirror, that thou mightest be ever gazing at me; would that I were a tumc, that thou mightest always wear me ; and thy breast-band ; and would I were a sandal; only trample mo with thy feet). Compare also the two charming epigrams in the 40 ILLUSTRATIONS OF TENNYSON Paliilinc A)it]ioI(>fi!/,\. 83, 84, and the scholion quoted in AthenfEUS, Deip. xv. c. 50. In Fatiina we have another reminiscence of Sappho's great ode, though it owes, perhaps, more to the magni- ficent fragment of Ibycus (Frag, i.) ; but there is one passage which bears a singularly close resemblance to one in the second book of Achilles Tatius's Clitophon and Lcnc'qypCy bk. ii. : — O Love ! O fire ! once he dreiv With one long kiss my ivliole soul ihrd' My lips. r;Sf [4^'-'X'l\ '''nj'>nx6('i(Ta rw (piXtj^ari TTtiAAfrnt, d Se jii) Tots (mXayxt'oi-S >]" fief5f/iei'>j, ijKoXovBrjrreu tiv eXKVcrdc'iaa "ivoi roii (Her soul, distracted by the kiss, throbs, and, had it not been close bound by the flesh, wonld have followed, drawn upward by the kisses). This brings us to Tennyson's first important poem, (Enonc ; and here, as might be expected, he draws largely on the classics. It is hardly necessary to say that the poem is in form modelled partly on the Alexandrian idyll — such an idyll, for example, as the second idyll of Theocritus or the Mer/ara or Europa of Moschus — and partly, perhaps, on the narratives in the MctavioipJioscs of Ovid, to which the opening bears a typical resemblance.' It is possible that the poem may have l^een suggested by Beattie's Judfpnent of Paris, which tells the story, and tells it with power and eloquence, on the same lines on which it is told here, though it is not placed in the mouth of (Enone. Beattie's poem opens with an elaborate description of Ida and of Troy in the distance. Paris, the husband ' Cf. for example Piana's valley and cave, Met. iii- 155, THE LADY OF SHALOTT, ETC. 41 of ffinone, is one afternoon confronted with the three goddesses, who are, as in the present idyll, elaborately delineated as symbolising what the}^ here symbolise ; each makes her speech and offers what each has to offer — worldly dominion, wisdom, sensual enjoyment. The speeches made by them will not, of course, bear comparison with the speeches of Tennyson's goddesses, but the general resemblance between Beattie's work and Tennyson's is certainly striking. The scene is described, more suo, by Apuleius {Met. lib. x. 30-32). But to come to detail : — \ _ ' "" ^,: many-fountain'd Ida : The epithet is of course Homer's TroXvirlSa^, his stock epithet for Ida. Cf. Iliad, viii. 47 ; xiv. 283 ; xx. 59, 218. The line— For now the noonday quiet holds the hill — is a curiously literal translation of a line inCallimachus, Lavacrum Palladis, 72 — fiecrafx'^pii'o. 5' ei;^' opoi do"v;^ia (The noonday quiet held the hill) — a poem on which Tennyson again draws in his Tire- sias. So The lizard with his shadow on the stone Bests like a shadow is a detail in the sultry summer day, suggested, no doubt, by Theocritus (/(///// vii. 22)— avLKa bi] Ka\ aavpos ecp'' alfj.r.cria'Liri Kadev^d (When, indeed, the very lizard is sleeping on the loose stones of the wall). A little later on the line — Mine eyes are full of tears, my heart of love — 42 ILLUSTRATIONS OF TENNYSON is taken almost witliout alteration from Ilcnrij VI, Part II. act ii. scene 8 : — Mine eyes are full of tears, my heart of grief. The charm of married brows : This is the crvvoi^pvs Kopa, ' the maid of the meeting eyehrows,' of Theocritus {hlijU viii. 72), and the avi'ocj)!)^ ^\e(j}i'tpaiv iTV'^ KeXaunju (Pscudo-Anacrcotl, XV.) (The dark arch of brows that meet). The ^Yhole of the beautiful passage — And at their feet the crocus brake like fire, Violet, amaracus, and asphodel, Lotiis and lilies. , And o'er him flow'd a golden cloud, and lean'd Upon him, slowlij drojtping fragrant dew — is taken, Avith one or two additions and alterations in the names of the flowers, from Iliad, xiv. 347-52 (with a reminiscence, no doubt, of the gorgeous lines in rar. Lost, bk. iv. 695-702) :— roTcrt S' vnu xda)!) 8'ia cfyvev leo^i/Ae'a ttoi'tji', XcoTov 6' epcrrjfVTa, I8e KpuKOV, 7^6' iniKivdov TTVKVOV Koi fl(l\aK(Jl' eni 8e vefpeXrjv eacravTO KaKyjii xRVcre'iriv ' aTiXni'ai S' uniTniTTOv eepaai (And beneath them the divine earth caused to spring up fresh new grass, and dewy lotus, and crocus, and hyacinth, thick and soft ; and they were clothed over with a cloud beauteous, golden ; and from it kept falling glittering dew- drops). Nor is the happy touch about the crocus breaking like fire original, being little more than an inter- THE LADY OF SHALOTT, ETC, 43 pretative version of Sophocles's ')(pv6rj S' c!)fJ.oi(Ti TTtTrXny [Idi/Il ii. 121-5) (Then, seated on the back of the divine bull, with one hand did she grasp the bull's long horn, and with the other she was catching up the purple folds of her garment, and the robe on her shoulders was swelled out). See too the beautiful picture of the same scene in AchiHes Tatius's CUtopJion and Lcucippe, Hb. i. ad initiam. The picture of Homer bears some resemblance to Pope's picture of him in The Temple of Fame, and should be compared ^Yith it {Temple, 184-7). The expression ' the first of those who know ' is obviously from Dante — Vidi il maestro di color die sanno (Inferno, iv. 131) (I saw the master of those who know). The fine expression — God, before whom ever lie bare The abysmal deeps of Personality- Was borrowed evidently from young Hallam's Tlieo- diccsa Novissima : — That, indeed [i.e. Redemption], is in the power of God's election, with whom alone rest the ahysvial secrets of jiersonality (Hallam's Bemains, edit. 1834, p. 132). The sentiment in Lady Clara Verc de Verc — 'Tis only noble to be good— recalls a line in a famous poem — And, to be noble, we'll be good — (Lines usually attributed to J. G. Cooper. Lewis's Misccll. p. 58), THE LADY OF SHALOTT, ETC. 45 and has of course been repeated frequently but it may be worth comparing the following passage in Menander : — Of av (V -yfyoi'tof ;/ r/; (pvaei TTpos t ayaua Kuv Xidiiji^fi ij, fji]Tep, foTii' evyevi'js (Menander, ed. Meineke, p. 191) (Whoever has by nature been well disposed to virtue, even though he be an Ethiopian, mother, he is a gentleman). See, too, the fragment of the Cnidia (Meineka, p. 98), Juvenal, Sat. viii. 20, and Dante, Convito (Canzone opening 'Trat. Quart. 101-2) : — ■ E gentilezza dovunque virtute ; Ma no virtute ov' ella. In The May Queen the phrase — and weirdly vivid it is — There came a sweeter token when the yiight and morninj meet — is transferred from Mallet's William and Margaret : — The silent solemn hour When flight and morning meet. The Lotos-Eaters is of course founded on the Odt/sseif, ix. 82 sqq. But the poet has laid other poets under contribution for his enchanting poem, notably Bion, Moschus, Spenser (description of the Idle Lake, Faerie Queene, bk. ii. canto vi.), and Thomson {Castle of Indolence). Spenser and Thomson are the most potent influences in the poem. Compare, for example, the following verses : — "Was nought aromid but images of rest. Sleep-soothing groves, and quiet lawns between, And flowery beds that slumberous influence kest From poppies breathed and beds of pleasant green. 46 ILLUSTRATIONS OF TEXXYSON Meanwhile unnuinber'cl glittering streamlets play'd And hurled everywhere their water's sheen, That as they bickcr'd through the sunny glade, Though restless, still themselves a lulling murnu;r made. A pleasant land of drowsihed it was, Of dreams that wave before the half-shut eye, And of gay castles in the clouds that pass For ever Jlusliing round a summer sky {Castle of Indolence, canto i. st. 3-G). Turning to Bion and Mosclins, how exactly parallel arc the following passages : — All things have rest, whv should we toil alone ? Death is the end of life ; ah, wh}' tShould life all labour be ? els TToaov a 8ei\ol KafiaTas k' els epya TTOveviJ.es ' "^vxav S' lixpi- tIvos TTori Kep^ea Ka\ ttotI re';(i'af ^itWofifs, ifxeipovTes ae\ ttoXv ttAijovos oA,3co ; Xa6ope6' 7] t'lpa TTUvres ort, Ofarin ■yei'upecrda X^ttiS {ipa)(vv €K MoLpas 'kdx"p(v xpf^^'ov (UiON, Idyll V. 11-15) (For how long, wretched that we are, are we to toil and labour ? How long are we to throw our souls away on greed and toilsome arts, ever yearning after more wealth ? Surely, surely we have all forgotten that w^e are mortal and liow short is the span allotted us by Fate). Is there any peace In ever climbing iip the climbing wave '? How sweet it were, hearing the downward stream. To watch the emerald-colour'd water falling Through many a woven acanthus-wreath divine ! Only to hear were sweet, strctch'd out beneath the pine. THE LADY OF SHALOTT, ETC. 47 r) KOKuv u yfunevs ^uxi (iiov, w Su'juoj u vavs Ka\ novns ecrrl daXcKTcra avTcip e^ol y'KvKvs vttvos vtto TrAnrdt'O) /3a^u0(;XXco, Kai Trayas (piXeoifii tuv iyyvdev tJ)(ov UKOveiv a Tipnn \l/^o(pioLcra tov dypiov, ov)(l Tapacrrrfi. (MOSCHUS, Idljll v.). (Evil surely is the fishennan's life, wliose home is his ship and the sea his toilin.c^-place. But to me sweet is sleep Lencath the broad-leaved plane-tree, and may it he my pleasure to hearken to the murmur of the fountain near, which as it murmurs deliyhts the husbandman, and does not harass him). His voice was thin as voices from the grave'. Cf. Theocritus of the voice of Hylas — cipaui o' 2k€To (puud {IclijU xiii.) (Thin came the voice) ; and YirgU's ghost-voices — pars tollere voccm Exiguam (/En. vi. 4'J2) ; and Ovid of the voice of the ghost of Eemus — umbra . . . visa est . . . , , . hsec cxigno murDiiorc verba loqui (Fasti, v. 457). See, too, Keats's Isahdla, xxxvi., of the voice of the ghost of Lorenzo. The hnes — Hateful is the dark blue sky, Vaulted o'er the dark blue sea — remind us of Virgil's Ticdet coeli convexa tueri {Mn, iv. 451) (Heaven's vault is weariness to look upon). Is there any peace In ever cUmhing up the climbing wave ? 48 /LLC'S 7 A\4 770 AS OF T7LNNYS0N AVo have here an interesting illustration of Tenny- son's exact scholarship ; tliis touch \Yas no doubt suggested by Yirgil's consceiuli luivibus irquor (.2?«. i. 881), ^vhich does not mean, as it is usually explained, ' I embarked upon,' but ' I cliinhrd up the sea ' — a splen- didly graphical touch, as Tennyson has seen. Cf. Shakespeare's And let the labouring barque climb hills of seas {Oihcllo, act ii. sc. 1), though the passage in Shakespeare is not really parallel. The conclusion of the poem — the picture of the gods of Epicurus — was imnic(hately suggested by Lucretius (iii. 15 sqq.). If the poet has not drawn on the Icaroinenipjius of Lueian, that inimitable dialogue from chapter xxv. to the end furnishes an excellent conniientary on Tennyson's picture of those gods and what they see. The Dream of Fair Women was, as the poet himself tells us, inspired by Chaucer's Legend of Good Women, though the scheme of the poem bears a close resemblance to the Tr'wnji of Petrarch. The lines — As when a great thought strikes along the brain And flushes all the cheek — would certainly seem to have been suggested by a passage in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes : — avf/jof' al 8e re hi.vr)6iJcnTiv utt' uipdi.Xj.iiiv (ijjLapvyiu .^^ THE LADY OF SHALOTT, ETC. 49 (As when a thought passes swiftly through the breast of a man, and the sparkles flash from his eyes). With Tennyson's picture of the sacrifice of Iphi- genia should of course be compared the picture of the same scene by ^schykis {Agamemnon, 225-49) and Lucretius (i. 85-100). The brirjfhf death quiver' d : With this may be compared a precisely similar ex- pression (for surely there can be no doubt of the true interpretation, with the parallel afforded by Virgil's use oi vulnus) in the Eleetra of Sophocles, 1395 — veaKuvrjTov uljxa xc-po'if e^uii' (^Yith the newly-whetted blood [i.e. instrument that will draw blood] in his hand). I would the white cold heavy-plunging foam, Whirl'd by the wind, had roll'd me deep below: She expresses a similar wish in Iliad, iii. 73-4. The skill with which the poet has, in the picture of Cleopatra, given us, as it were in quintessence, Shakespeare's superb creation needs no commentary. One illustration may suffice : — And the wild kiss, when fresh from war's alarms, My Hercules, my Roman Antony, My mailed Bacchus leapt into 1113- arms : Cf. Anton, and Cleopatra, act iv. sc. 8 : — ■ O thou day 0' the world ! Chain mine arm'd neck, leap thou, attire and all, Through proof of harness, to my heart, and there Eide on the pants triumphing. How like a glow-worm in the sun is Tennyson's stanza to this ! It is worth noticing that the passage — E 50 ILLUSTRATIONS OF TEXXYSON I died a Queen. The Roman soldier found Me lying dead, uiy crown about ni^' brows, is a splendid transftisiun of the last lines in Horace's Odes, I. xxxvii. : — Invidens Privata deduci superbo Non humilis inulier triumph o (Disdaininu; to be escorted unqueened, in proud triumph, no grovelling woman she). Once, like the moon, I made The ever-shifting currents of the blood According to my hiimour ebb and flow: This appears to have been suggested by Susan Carter's ^Yords in Ford's Witch of Edmonton, act ii. sc. 2 : — You are the powerful moon of my blood's sea, To make it ebb and flow into my face As your looks change. \Vith that she tore her robe apart, and half The polish'd argent of her breast to sight Laid bare is an almost literal translation from the Hecuha, 55G :— e/'/";^f jniiTTovi t' edfi^f aripvu b\ wf uyiiKjiaTO';, KiiAXitrrit (She took her robes and tore them right from the shoulder, and bared her breasts and bosom, most lovely, as of a statue), the ' polish'd argent ' exactly and most happily inter- 2)retinKr and Julia : — The galaxy display 'd Her fires, that like mysterious pulses beat Aloft, momentous but uneasy bliss : To their full hearts the universe seem'd hung On that brief meeting's slender filament. The lines about the hours — The slow sweet hours that bring us all things good, The slow sad hours that bring us all things ill, &c. — were of course suggested by Theocritus, Id. xv. 10-1-5 : — ^apSiorat fxaKc'ipa>i> 'Sli^ai (f)iXat, dWu nadeLvai (pXovrai TTUvTicrcn, jSporois aui ri 0epotcr>it (Tardiest of the Happy Ones arc the beloved Hours, but greatly yearned for do they come, ever bringing some gift for all men). The very fine image, which concludes the poem, of Morning driving her plough of pearl Far furrowing into light the mounded rack, an image repeated with variation in TJtc Princess, iii. — Morn in the white wake of the morning star Came furrowing all the oi'ient into gold — S8 ILLUSTRATIONS OF TENNYSON appears to Lave been suggested by Greene : — Seest thou not Lycaon's son, The h&vdy j^^ough-stvain unto mighty Jove, Hath traced his silver furroius in the heaven? (Greene's Orlando Furioso, act i. sc. 3.) We now come to Uh/sscs. The germ, the spirit, and tlie sentiment of this poem are from the twenty- sixth canto of Dante's Infenio. Tenn3-son has in- deed done httle but iill in the sketch of the great Florentine. As is usual with him in all cases where he l)orrows, the details and minuter portions of the work are his own ; he has added grace, elaboration, and symmetry ; he has called in the assistance of other poets. A rough crayon draught has been meta- morphosed into a perfect picture. As the resem- blances lie not so much in expression as in the general tone, we will in this case substitute for the- original a literal version. Ulysses is speaking: — Neither fondness for my son, nor reverence for my aged sire, nor the due love which ought to have gladdened Penelope, could conquer in me the ardour which I had to become experi- enced in the world, and in human vice and worth. I put out into the deep open sea with but one ship, and with that small company which had not deserted me. ... I and my companions were old and tardy when we came to that narrow pass where Hercules assigned his landmarks. ' brothers,' I said, ' who through a hundred thousand dangers have reached the West, deny not to this the brief vigil of your senses that remain, ex- perience of the unpeopled world beyond the sun. Consider your origin ; ye were not formed to live like brutes, but to follow virtue and knowledge.' . . . Night already saw the other pole with all its stars, and ours so low that it rose not from the ocean floor {Inferno, sxvi. 94-120). Now compare the key verses of Tennyson's poem. Ulysses speaks : — ENGLISH IDYLLS, ETC. 59 I cannot rest from travel : I will drink Life to the lees : all times I have enjoy'cl Greatl}', have suffer'd greatly, both with those That loved me, and alone. ... How dull it is to pause, to make an end ! and vile it were For some three suns to store and hoard myself. And this gray spirit yearning in desire To follow knowledge There lies the port : the vessel puffs her sail : Tliere gloom the dark broad seas. My mariners. Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me — That ever with a frolic welcome took The thunder and the sunshine. . . • you and I are old. Death closes all : but something ere the end, Some work of noble note, may yet be done. Come, my friends, 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world. Push off . . . for my purpose holds To sail beyond the siinset, and the baths Of all the western stars, imtil I die. In the poem the imitations from Homer and Yirgil are too obvious to need specifying. One may be noted : — Sitting well in order, smite The sounding furroA^s, from Odi/ssc)/, iv. 580, and ix. 104 : — e^j/f 8' e^i'ifievni 7io\ir)v ci\a tvtttoi' iper-ion (And sitting in order they kept smiting the hoary brine wit their oars). The reminiscences from Horace, Tencer's speech to his comrades, Odes, I. vii. 24-32, are equally unmis- takable. So too Virgil's idnvias Hijadas, .'En. i. 748, and iii. 516. Co ILLUSTRATIONS OF TENNYSON The style of Tithohu>i, In diction, tone, and colour alike, is obviously modelled on the soliloquies in the Greek plays, but particularly on those in Sophocles ; its exact counterpart in point of style would probably be the soliloquy of Ajax {Ajax, G45-G92 and 815-865), the colour of course being richer, and the rhythm softer and more plaintive. The story is told in the Homeric Ilijmn to AplinxJitc, 218-239. Here at the quiet limit of the world : valf Trap' wKtavolo pojis, eVl Treipaai yaitjs (IIOM. Ilijmn, 227) (He dwelt by the ocean stream, at the limits of the earth), A white-hair'd shadow roaming like a dream is a transfusion of the Homeric (TKifj (ixeXof ij KiH ui'dpcp {Odijss. xi. 208) (Like to a shadow or even a dream). The superb image, applied to the horses of Aurora's car, that shake the darkness from their loosen'd manes, And beat the twilight into flakes of lire has been anticipated by Marston : — See the dajiple grej' coursers of the morn Beat tip the ligld ivitli iJicir bright silvc?- hoofs (Antonio (Did Mcllida, Part II. act i. sc. 1). The ' saying learnt,' namely that The Gods themselves cannot recall iheir gifts, is of course an allusion to the well-known couplet of Agathon quoted by Aristotle {Ethics X. vi. 2) : — ENGLISH IDYLLS, ETC. 6i fiovnv yap nurov kch Beos crrfpirrKfTni, ayiprjra tthulv autr' tiv ij mrrfiayiiiva (Of this thin.i:^: alone is even God dcpri\ecl — to make undone whatsoever hath been done). Cf. too Horace, Odes, III. xxix. 45-48. ^Yhen IHon Vihc a mist rose into toivcrs is a reminiscence of MiUon's Pandemonium :^ Ont of the earth a fabric huge Bosc JiJic an exhalation. I earth in earth forget these empty courts : So Stephen Hawes, Pastime of Pleasure , xlv. : — "When cartli in earth hath ta'en his corrupt taste. In Loekslei/ Hall the poet seems to have laid many of his brethren under contribution. Early in the poem there is a parallel worth noting perhaps : — Love took up the glass of Time, and turn'd it in his glowing hands ; Every moment, lightly shaken, ran itself in golden sands. In the poems of that elegant writer of haj^py trifles, W. R. Spencer, we find a verse — What eye with clear account remarks The ebbing of his glass, "When all its sands are diamond sparks, That dazzle as thej- pass ? (Spencer's Poons, p 106.) The magnificent line — And our spirits rush'd together at the touching of the lips looks like a reminiscence of Guarini's Pastor Fido, act ii. scene 6 : — 62 ILLUSTRATIONS OF TENNYSON Ma i col]}i ill duo labbro innamorato, Qaando a forlr si va hocca con bocca, ove r lai alma c V altra Carre (The clivsh of two cnamonrcd lips when month strikes mouth where the one soul and the other meet). He will hold thee, when his passion shall have spent its novel force, Something better than his dog, a little dearer than his horse finds a curious parallel in John Ilall Stevenson's stanza (Works, vol, i. p. 39) : — As when a squire sees a maiden coy, He makes a jointm-e. And in a fit of joy Prefers Iter to a pointer. To decline On a range of lower feelings : So the ghost in Hamlet, commenting on Gertrude's similar degradation : — To decline Upon a wretch whose natural gifts were poor To those of mine (Hamlet, act v. sc. 5). The many-wintered crow : Horace — Annosa comix {Odes, III. xvii. 13). The beautiful expression — Such a one do I remember wJtom to looJc at was to love — is Burns's more beautiful — T>nt to see her was to love her, Love but lier and Live for vwv (To Nancy). A sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembering happier things is, of course, Dante's— ENGLISH IDYLLS, ETC. 63 Nessun maggior dolore Che ricordarsi del tempo felice Nella miseria {Inferno, v. 121-3). It has also been appropriated by Chaucer : — • For of misfortune's sharpe adversite The worste kind of infortune is this : A man to have been in prosperite iVnd it remember when it passed is (Troilus and Crcseide, iii, 1G25, sqq.) ; by Occlevc, Proem to l)e Begimine Princijnnn ; by Marini, L'Adonc, canto xiv. st. 110 — Che non ha dogUa il misero maggiore Che ricordar la gioia entro il dolore ; and by Fortiguerra, Ricciardctto, c. xL st. 83. It is interesting to trace the history of the expression. Dante got it directly from Boethius {Dc Consul. PMlos. II. Prosa iv.) : — In omni adversitato fortmwe, infelicissimum genus est jnfortunii fuisse felicem et non esse. But no one has expressed it more clearly than Pindar, who, curiously enough, implies that even in his time the sentiment had passed into a proverb : — (pavT'i S' ijiyiiv toit'' avuipuTaTOV, KciXii yivuxTKcivT' avtiyKO. sKTus ('xeiv TToSa [Pythian, iv. 510-12) (Thej' say that this is most grievous, when acquainted with what is good, to be compelled to stand outside it). It has found crjually precise expression in Thucydides, II. xliv. 5 : — Kai \vrrr] ov\ oii' ai' rig /lu) —etpaaunepni nyaCSii' (TTfplrrKrjTai, oX\' oil tiv €6us yevofiivo^ acjiinpedij (And sorrow is felt not for the blessings of whieli one is deprived without full experience of them, but of that which one loses after becoming acciistomed to it), 64 ILLL'STRATIOXS OF TEXNYSON The weird and graphic use of the \Yord * ej'e ' in — And an cijc shall vex tlico, looking ancient kindness, &c. — forcibly recalls the similarly strange and felicitous use of 6^[xa in Sophocles' Elect m, 902 : — (fXTTCIKl TL fXOl (There strikes u^ion my soul a familiar eye). The cynical aspiration of the young hero in Lochsley Hall, that he might ' burst all links of habit,' ' take some savage woman who should rear his dusky race,' be ' mated with a squalid savage,' and so get more enjoy- ment than he could hope for ' in this march of mind,' finds a curious parallel in Beaumont's Pldlastcr, act iv. scene 2 : — Oh, that I had been nourish'd in the woods, and not known The right of crowns, nor the dissembling trains Of women's looks And then had taken me some movmtain girl, Beaten with winds, that might have strew'd my bed With leaves and reeds, and have borne at her big breasts My large coarse issue. This had been a life Free from vexation. The fine image of the storm wind — Cramming all the blast before it, in its hrcast a thundcrhuU — recalls Tasso's Kuova nube di polvo ecco vicina C\\G fidfjorl in gronbo ticnc (Gcrus. ix. st. 91) (Lo, a fresh cloud of dust is near, which carries in its breast thunderbolts). Godxva should be compared with Moultrie's beau- ENGLISH IDYLLS, ETC. 65 tiful poem on the same subject ; it appears to have suggested Tennyson's. A very graphic expression in the next poem, 27/ c Sleeping Beauty — The silk, star-broiiler'd coverlid Unto her limhs itself doth mould — ■ has evidently been transferred from Homer {Iliad, xxiv. 163), where he speaks of Priam — (VTVT7US iv )(\ali';] KeKaXvfifiivos (Wrapped up in his mantle so closely as to show the contour of his limbs). The couplet in the Envoi of Tlte Day Dream — For we are Ancients of the earth, And in the morning of the times — is obviously merely a version of Bacon's famous — Antiquitas saeculi, juventus mundi. And waves of shadow went over the wheat {Poet's Sonj) : Cf. Thomson's fresher gale Sweeping with shadowy giists the fields of corn {Sumvier, 1G55). The Lord of Burlciyh tells the well-known story of Sarah Hoggins, who married, under the circumstances related in the poem, the Earl of Exeter. She died in 1797, sinking, so it was said, under the burden * of an honour unto which she was not born.' See for more the Times for August '22, 1844. The Beggar Maid was suggested either hyPiomco and Juliet, act ii. scene 1, or by the line ballad in Percy's Reliqucs, First Series, book ii. bahad vi. ¥ 66 ILLCSTRATIOXS OF TENNYSON The Vinion of Sin was evidently suggested by Shelley's Triumph of Life, from which the leading ideas and much of the imagery have been derived, though Tennyson has narrowed the allegory. In his hands it simply becomes the history of the serement of a human soul through the effects of unbridled profligacy, and finds its best commentary in Byron's lyric ' There's not a joy the world can give.' 67 CHAPTER V GROUP IV. — ENOCH ARDEN AND OTHER POEMS Enoch Ardeii bears the same relation to its proto- types, Southey's Englisli Eclogues, as Wordsworth's Michael bears— the connecting hnk, so to speak, be- tween the English Idylls and this work being Dora. It is interesting to compare Enoch Arden, and particu- larly the part describing Enoch's return home, with Crabbe's touching story, Tlic Parting Hour. But the framework of a portion, at all events, of the story was evidently suggested by a poem in Miss Adelaide A. Procter's Legend's, and Lyrics, entitled Homeward Bound. Tennyson has, indeed, often done little more than fill in the sketch given by her. Compare, for example, the passage describing Enoch on the island — The mountain wooded to the peak, &c. As down the shore he ranged, or all day long Sat often in the seaward-gazing gorge— with the passage in which her hero sits brooding on the shore, over memories of his wife and child : — Gaunt and dreary ran the mountains "With hlack gorges up the land, Up to where the lonely desert Spreads her burning dreary sand, F 2 68 ILLUSTRATIONS OF TENNYSON In the pforp;cs of the mountains On the plain beside the sea. Tlien I gazed at the great ocean. Nor has he forgotten the touch about the largeness of the stars in a tropical sky : — And the gUmmering stars thoujJo larger, which appears as — Then the great stars that globed themselves in heaven. Compare, too, the return home and the anticipation of again meeting his ^vifo and child : — ■ I would picture my dear cottage, See the crackly firewood burn And the two beside it seated. The journey, too, through the autumn landscape to his cot tag?, and the picture of Annie with her little family and husband seen in the glow of the ruddy fire — in all this Tennyson simply fills in j\riss Procter's sketch : — It was evening in late autumn And the giisty wind blew chill, * Autumn leaves were falling round me * And the red sun lit the hill. She was seated by the fire, In her arms she held a child. Smiled on him who stood beside her. • • • .^ He had been an ancient comrade ; Not a single word we said ■• •> While we gazed upon each other. He the living, I the dead. The beautiful and pathetic touch about the dead child ENOCH ARDEN, ETC. ■ 69 ^Yas also suggested by Miss Procter's poem, so also the angelic character of Enoch : — Nothing of farewell I utter'd, Save in broken words to pray That God in His great love would bless her ; Then in silence pass'd away. So, broken-hearted and uncomplaining, in the very sublimity of resignation and self-sacrifice. Miss Procter's hero sets forth and leaves them, consoling himself that the end must come before long : — I too shall reach home and rest, I shall find her waiting for me, With our baby on her breast. Plainly it was on this poem and not on Mrs. Gaskell's Sylvia's Lovers^ that Enoch Arden was founded. In the details of the poem there are no reminiscences or parallels sufficiently striking to be worth pointing out. The general cast and style of the idyll of The Brook remind us closely of Wordsworth's Brothers. In the charming lyric inserted there are two interesting little parallels, one with Burns's Halloivcen, and the other with the well-known Italian inscription on a sun-dial. Burns's lines are as charming as Tennyson's : — Whyles owre a linn the bnrnie plays And thro* the glen it wimpl't, Whyles romid a rocky scaxir it strays, Whyles in a well it dimpl't ; 'Wliyles glitter'd to the niglitly rays Wi' biclierin dancin dazzle, Whyles cookit underneath the braes Below the spreading hazel {Halloween, st. 25). ' Though, curiously enough, the name of the ship in which Enoch sailed, the Good Fortune, is identical witli the name of the ship ip which Mrs. Gaskell's mariner makes his voyage. yo ILLUSTRATIONS OF TEXNYSON Men may come and men maj- go But I go on for ever : lo vado e vengo ogni giorno, Ma tu andrai senza ritorno. In Aylmcr's Field the line — Pity, the violet on the tyrant's grave — is, of course, an allusion to the passage in which Suetonius tells us that there were those who placed flowers on Nero's grave, hated though he was : — Et tamen non defuerunt qui per longum tempus vernis aestivisque lloribus tumuhuii ejus ornarent (hb. vi. ad fin.) (Nevertheless there were not wanting people who continued for a long time to deck his grave with flowers of the spring and summer). In Sea Dreams, the lines — ■ my poor ventiTrc but a fleet of glass Wreck'd on a reef of visionary gold — may be compared with Pindar (Fragment 136, edit. Schneidewin) : — nuvres itra veojieu \|/euSj; rrpos uktuv (And on a sea rich in golden wealth we all alike go sailing towards a beach of delusion) — which is indeed a commentary on the whole passage in Tennyson's poem. A useful and indeed necessary commentary on Lucretius, which stands next, will be a collection of the passages in the T>e Berum Natu7'a itself, and in the other Greek and Eoman classics on which the poet has drawn. The anecdote, sufficiently horrible and repulsive, on which the poem is founded, is to be ENOCH ARDEN, ETC. 71 found in Jerome's additions to the Eiischian Chronicle under the year b.c. 94 — Titiis Lucretius poeta nascitur ; postea amatorio poculo in furorem versus, cum aliquot libellos per intervalla insaniae con- scripsisset, quos postea Cicero emendavit, propria se manu interfecit anno aetatis xliii. (Titus Lucretius the poet is born : afterwards when driven mad by a love philtre, and after he had composed, in the intervals of his insanity, several books, which Cicero after- wards revised, he committed suicide in the forty-third year of his age). That the name of the ^Yoman who administered the philtre ^Yas Luciha, and that she was the poet's wife, rests, I beUeve, on the authority of a single sentence ascribed to Seneca, but not to be found in the works of either of the Senecas : — Livia virum suum occidit quern nimis oderat, Lucilia suum quern nimis amaverat (Livia murdered her husband whom she hated excessivelj', and Lucilia murdered hers whom she had loved exces- sively). See Bayles's Dictionary, a,i'tiG\e Lucretius. None of the editors of Lucretius whom I have consulted, not even Monro, throw any light on this mysterious quota- tion of Bayles's.' It seem'd A void was made in Nature ; all her bonds Crack'd ; and I saw the flaring atom-streams An.d torrents of her myriad universe Ruining along the illimitable inane : • This distinguished scholar has plenty to say about the use of is or cs in the accusative jDlural of words ending in ium in the genitive plural, but not one word does he say about the legend which inspired Tennyson's poem. 72 ILLUSTRATIONS OF TENNYSON The possibility, or rather ultimate certainty, of this dissolution is repeated over and over again in Lucretius. vSee lib. i. 1101-1110, the passage Tennyson was here thinking of (cf. too Hb. ii. 47-48). The magnificent word ' ruining ' in this sense is from Milton : — ■ Hell saw Heaven ruining from Heaven {Par. Lost, vi. 8G7). Milton in using it thus anglicised it from the Italian ' ruinando.' Marini, L'Adonc, cant. i. st. 36, employs it in this sense : — Uuinando dal etorea mole. Fly on to clash together again, and make Another and another i'rame of things For ever : ; For this doctrine of the perpetual reciprocity of analysis and synthesis, of dissolution and re-creation, see ii. 999-1022, v. 828-880. As the dog With inward yelp and restless fore-foot plies His function of the woodland : •This was suggested by a passage in lib. iv. 990-5 : — Venantnmqne canes in molli sfepe (p;iete Jactant crura tamen subito, vocesque repente Mittunt, et crebro redducunt naribus aiu-as (And the dogs of hunters often in soft repose throw about their legs and suddenly utter cries and repeatedly snuff the air with their nostrils). Tennyson has omitted one graphic touch, the 're- peatedly snuffing the air,' but he has substituted another not less graphic, the ' inward yelp.' ENOCH ARDEN, ETC. '73 The . . . genial heat Of Nature, when she strikes thro' the thick blood Of cattle, and lif,4it is lart^e, and lambs are glad Nosing the mother's udder, and the bird Makes his heart voice amid the blaze of flowers : In these lines Tennyson has caught the one joj'ous note of Lucretius, his intense and keen dehght in Nature, as rapturous as Shelley's. The passages which here find their echo are in lib. i. 6-20 ; id. 252- 261, the particular touches being — Perculsap corda tua vi (13) ("With their hearts smitten by thj' power) ; Placatumque nitet diffaso Iiunine ca-lum (0) (And propitiated heaven gleams with outspread light) ; \ ^,, Per pabula la^ta Corpora deponunt, et candens lacteus humor Uberibus uianat distentis : hinc nova proles Artubus infirinis teneras lasciva per herbas Ludit, lacte mero mentes perculsa novellas ^257-261) ([The cattle] lay their bodies down about the joy-giving pastures, and the white milky moisture streams from the distended lulders : and so a new brood with weakly limbs sports playfidly over the soft grass, their young minds smitten with the love of pure milk). The Gods, who haunt The lucid interspace of world and world, ^Vhere never creeps a cloud, or moves a wind, Nor ever falls the least white star of snow : Apparet divum numen sedesque quietae Quas neque concutiimt venti nee nubila nimbis Aspergunt neque nix, acri concreta pruina, Cana cadens violat, semi)erque innubilus aether Integit (iii. 18-22) (The divinity of the Gods is revealed and their peaceful seats, 74 ILLUSTRATIONS OF TENNYSON which neitlicr winds shako nor clouds drench with rain, nor snow, hardened hy piercing frost, hnrtswith its hoary fall; but ever does a cloudless sky invest theni). Lucretius was, of course, himself drawing on Odyssey, vi. 42 sqq. My master held That Gods there are, for all men so believe : The reference here is to Diogenes Lacrtius, TAfc of Epicurus, ch. xxvii., which is the letter of Epicurus to Menceceus. I prost my footsteps into his : Literally from Lucretius : — Inque tuis nunc Ficta pedum pono pressis vestigia signis (iii. 3-4) (And in thy traces I now plant my own footsteps firmly fixed). Since he never sware, Except his wrath were wreak'd on wretched man, That he would only shine among the dead Hereafter ; tales ! for never yet on earth Could dead flesh creep, or bits of roasting ox Moan round the spit : The references are to Odyssey, xii. 383 sqq. and id. 394-G. And here he glances on an eye new-born, And gets for greeting but a wail of pain : Miscetur funere vagor Quern pueri tollunt visentes luminis oras (lib. ii. 57G-7) (With the Anieral wail is blended the cry which young children raise when they enter the borders of light). Cf. too King Lear, act iv. scene 6 : — When we are born we cry that we are come To this great stage of fools. ENOCH ARDEN, ETC. 75 Not thankful that his troubles are no more : The allusion is to lib. iii. 900-905. Or lend an ear to Plato where he says, That men like soldiers may not qiiit the post Allotted by the Gods : Plato, Phado, vi. : — U)S eV Tii'i 01 (ii'djcowoi koI nv Sei S;) (avTov (K ravTTjs \veiv oiS' anooibpdaKeiv (We men are as it were on f;:uard, and a man ought not, indeed, either to free himself from it nor ought he to rim away), though ^povpd is here generally taken as meaning a prison.^ Cf. with this passage Spenser, Faerie Quecnc, I. ix. 41 : — The term of life is limited, Ne may a man prolong, nor shorten it ; The soldier may not move from watchful sted Nor leave his stand untill his captaine bed. The lines — How should the mind, except it loved them, clasp These idols to herself? — contain with the passage that follows an allusion to the images or emanations which, according to Lucretius, matter is always throwing off. The proper commentary on the passage is nearly the whole of the fourth book of the original. • So Professor Jowett takes it {Translation of Plato, vol. i. p, 434) ; but, with due deference to so great an authority, I cannot but think that Tennyson's interpretation is the correct one. Plato seems to be ahuding to a saying of Pythagoras to which Cicero refers, De Sencctutc, sect. 73, ' Vetatque Pythagoras injussu imperatoris, id est Dei, de pr;csidio et statione vitae decedere.' See too Tiisc. Disp. i. 74. And Plato's own expression toS 5e 6eo5 rirTovToj, Apology, xxviii., may certainly be cited in corroboration. It is diliicult to see the propriety of the word O7ro5(5pi(r/c€tf if the word (ppovpd means a prison. 76 ILLUSTRATIONS OF TEXNYSON But who \vas he that in the garden snared Picns and Fannus, rustic Gods ? This is a singular illustration of the various learning which Tennyson so often displays. The allusion is plainly to Ovid's Fasti, iii. 291-328, where Egeria instructs Numa to ensnare Picus and Faunus, that they may show him how the thunderbolts of Jupiter may be averted. And here an Oread — how the sun dehghts To ghxnce and shift about her slippcru sides : It is impossible not to notice here the felicity with which the poet, in adopting, has interpreted a singular epithet in Horace. The line ' Vultus nimium Inhricus aspici ' {Odes, I. xix. 8) has been interpreted by many generations of commentators as a face too dangerous to be gazed upon. But there is surely no reason why the epithet should not be explained as meaning a face volup- tuously symmetrical, a face over which the eyes slip and wander, as it were, because in its rounded smooth- ness they find no particular feature on which to pause. Dante, it may be noticed, uses a similar expression, but with reference to dazzling {Purg. viii. 34-5) : — Ben discerneva in lor la testa bionda, Ma nelle facce V occhio si sinarria (Quite clearly did I discern in them the fair head, but in their faces the eye wandered about [or went astray]).' Tennyson's lines enable us to understand the force and propriety of the expression. A poet is, after all, the best commentator on a poet. A satyr, a satyr, see, Follows ; but him I proved impossible : ' This may be fanciful ; perhaps the word only means ' was be- wildered * or ' got lost,' like ' smarrito VQlto/ Purg. \i\. 14, ENOCH ARDEN, ETC. 77 See lib. ii. 700 sqq. for the proof alluded to. No larger feast than under plane or pine, &c. : Almost a translation of lib. ii. 29-33. Heliconian honey in living words : An allusion to the beautiful passage lib. i. 934 sqq. These blind beginnings : The inirnordia cccca (i. 110-3). For the whole of this passage see ii. 999-1032 quoted above, and ii. 872-885, and id. 1048-lOGG. The very sides of the grave itself shall pass, Vanishing : Denique non monimenta virum delapsa videmus ? (v. 311) (Then, too, do we not see the monuments of men crumbling to pieces ?) A touch in the description of the suicide of Lucretius was evidently suggested by Virgil's description of the suicide of Dido : — Thus — thus : the soul flies out and dies in the air : Sic, sic, juvat ire sub umbras (^Ew. iv. CCO) — • the repetition of the ' thus ' and the ' sic ' marking the infliction of the successive stabs. 78 ILLUSTRATIONS OF TENNYSON CHAPTER VI GROUP V. — THE PRINCESS, ETC. The suggestion of the idea of The Prbicess may have come from Johnson's Ilasselas, chap. xHx. : — The Princess thought that of all sublunary things knowledge was the best : she desired first to learn all sciences, and then purposed to found a college of learned women in which she would preside. It may have heen suggested as a sort of reversed counterpart to Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost, or as an allegory corresponding to Spenser's Artegal and Radigund, Faerie Qtieene, bk. v. cantos iv.-vi. In any case it should be carefully compared with the latter, as the moral and the teaching are identical ; both being refutations of the theory advanced in the fifth book of Plato's riepiihlie. As might be expected in a work so exquisitely elaborated in point of style, we find an unusual number of reminiscences and adapta- tions. SECTION I And cook'd his si^lecn ', This is an Homeric phrase : — (Vt irjv(j\ -^oXov dvfxciXyea ntcrcrfc {It. iVt 513) (At the ships he cooks his heart-grieving spleen). THE PRINCESS, ETC. 79 Cf., too, Iliad, i. 81, and Aristotle, Ethics, IV. V. 10 : — (V avTM 8e T7t\j/ai Tt)u opyi-jv xpofov Sei (To digest internally one's wrath takes time). The lines — A wind arose and rusli'd upon the Sonth, And shook the songs, the whispers, and the shrieks Of the wild woods together ; and a Voice \Vent with it, ' Follow, follow, thou shalt win ' — • are like an echo of Shelley's lines — A wind arose among the pines and shook The clinging music from their boughs, and then Low, sweet, faint sounds like the farewell of ghosts "Were heard, ' follow, follow, follow me ! ' [rromctJicus Unbound, ii. 1). So, too, the lines — But bland the smile that like a wrinkling wind On glassy water ch'ove his cheek in lines — appear to be a reminiscence of O'er the visage wan Of Athanase, a ruflling atmosphere Of dark emotion, a swift shadow ran Like wind upon some forest-bosom'd lake, Glassy and dark. The simile — As v/hen a field of corn Bows all its cars before the roaring East — is, with the substitution of East for West, from Homer, //. ii. 147-8: — ojy S' VT€ KLVijar] Zt(pvpos I3a6u Xrfioi', f\6ibv X(l/3/jns', enaLyi^cov, ini t' rjjxvei dcrTa^iiecr(nu (As when the west-wind tosses a deep cornfield, rushing down with furious blast, and it bows with all its ears). The beauty of this simile had struck Milton, ^Yho has also borr0^Yed it {Par. Lost, iv, 980-1). So ILLUSTRATIONS OF TENNYSON SECTION II In shining tlrapcrics, headed UJiC a star, Her maiden babe : So Homer of Astyanax : — 'Y,KTopi.^r]v aynnrjTov itXlyKiov aarepi k(i\(3 (Hector's loved son, like unto a beautiful star). It is worth noticing that the only beauty in Hobbes's translation of the Iliad is his version of this passage : — And, like a star, upon her bosoni lay His beautiful and shining golden head. The Lady Psyche's lecture reminds us of the discourse of the learned lady in Prior's AIiiki : — • This world was once, &c. then the monster, then the man. Thereupon she took A bird's-eye- view of all the ungracious past, Glanced at the legendarv Amazon, . . . Appraised the Lycian custom, . . . Ran down the Persian, Grecian, lioman lines Of empire, till warming with her theme She fulmined out her scorn of laws Salique And little-footed China, touch'd on Mahomet \Yith much contempt, and came to chivalry. Now let US listen to Prior's learned dame : — She kindly talk'd at least three hours .. Of plastic forms and mental powers, ■' ' Described our pre-existing station Before this vile terrene creation, r And, lest I should be wearied, madam, To cut things short, came down to Adam. THE PRINCESS, ETC. 8i From whence, as fast as she was able, She drowns the world, and builds up Babel. Through Syria, Persia, Greece she goes, And takes the Eomans in the close {Alma, canto i. 891). The Lady Psyche has the advantage of having a particular purpose in view, but Prior's satire is as fine as Tennyson's, and much less wearisome than Tenny- son's strained artificiality. The ingenious simile in which the sudden collapse of a speaker is compared to the sudden collapse of a sail — till as when a boat Tacks, and the slacken'd sail flaps, &c. — may be compared to an image something similar in Dante : — Quali dal vento le gonfiate vele Caggiono avvolte, poiche 1' alber fiacca {Inferno, canto vii. 13-14) (As sails swelled by the wind fall entangled when the mast gives way). The incident of the wounded stag — In gentler days, your arrow-wounded fawn Came flying while you sat, &c.— seems to be a reminiscence of Silvia's wounded staf in the beautiful passage in Yirgil's seventh .Eneid, 483-504. SECTION III In the song with its burden — Sleep, my little one, sleep, my pretty one, sleep — we have, of course, a reminiscence of Alcmena's lullaby in Theocritus, xxiv. 7-9 : — 83 ILLUSTRATIONS 01' TENNYSON fuSer' i\i.a (Spicjxa yXvKfpou kul fyepaijiov vnuof, (Sleep, my little ones, a sweet and lightsome sleep. Sleep, soul of mine). Morn in the white wake, &c. : Sec illustration in note on Love and Dtifi/. The tliicTx-leavcd nlatans : Cf. Moschus, Idijll V. : — (Under the thick-leaved plane). Onr weakness somehow shakes the shadow, Time : The expression is from "Wordsworth — Death, the skeleton, And Time, the shadow (Yew Trees). Consonant chords that shiver to one note : Cf. Izaak Walton's Life of Donne: — It is most certain that two lutes, heing both strung and tuned to an equal pitch, and then one beuig plaj^ed upon, the other that is not touched, being laid upon a table at a fit distance, will, like an echo to a trumpet, warble a faint, audible harmony in answer to the same tune. The crane, I said, may chatter of the crane, The dove may nmrnnir of tlie dove, but I, An eagle, clang an eagle to the sphere : An obvious imitation of Theocritus, IJijll ix. 31 : — TtTTl^ /it;' TtTTiyi f/jlXof, llVjIfiriKl Si i-ivpp.:!^, (Cicala is dear to cicala, and ant to ant, and hawks to hawks, but to me the Muse and song). Cf., too, id., Idijll X, 30-31; and Virgil, Eclog. ii, THE PRINCESS, ETC. 83 She speaks A Memnon smitten with the morning sun : The allusion is to Pausanias, lib. i. 42, ad med. Settled in her eyes The green malignant ligld of coming storm : Nothing could form a better commentary than this on the real meaning of Homer's yXavKiowu as applied to an angry lion : — ■ yXavKiuciiv 6' Wi's (peperai fiepei {Iliad, XX. 172), and the Psendo-Hcsiod's — yXnuKtocor S' octctols deivuv (Sciitum AcJiillis, 4.30), also of an angry lion ; and possibly of Pindar's yXavKol dpuKovres {Ohjmp. viii. 49) ; and so, too, Oppian, Cynegetica, iii. 70, of the ej^es of the pard. In all these passages the word '^/'XavKoshn.'s, not, I submit, its ordinary meaning of simply ' gleam- ing ' or ' flashing ' as of the sea, or of ' blue ' or ' grey,' or ' blue-grey,' nor has it any connection with its ordi- nary application to the eyes of Pallas Athene ; it is the peculiar v.hity green glint flashing from the eye of an enraged animal — lion, tiger, cat, or pard — and Tenny- son exactly expresses its meaning. For the precise shade of colour see Nonnus, Dionys. v. 178, ^\'ho applies it to the grccji gleam of the smaragdus or emerald : — y/Vdvcr^S' Oe XlOoi )^\oJuvaa [lOfAiybuv. SECTION lY The casement slowly gi'ows a glimmering square : Qt Leigh Hunt, Hew and Leander, canto ii. adfin.-^ o 2 84 ILLUSTRATIONS OF TENNYSON And when the casement at the dawn of light Began to show a square of ghastly white. The line- Dear as remember'd kisses after death — is obviously suggested by Mosclius, IdjiJl iii. G9-70. Stared with great eyes and laujli'd ivith alien lij^s is literally, of course, from OdijHSci/, xx. 347 : — o( fi' )j5i] yi'aQmncri yeXwco;^ (iWoTpLuiai. Horace lias forestalled Tennyson in borrowing the same phrase, Sat. II. iii. 72. And play the slave to gain the tyranny : So Tacitus of Otho :— Omnia servilitev pro dominationo [Hist. i. ch. 30) (Doing all things like a slave for the sake of dominion). He has a solid base of temperament, But as the water-lily starts and slides Ujjofi the level in little puf's of wind Though anchored to the bottom — sueh is he: This felicitous and picturesque simile is one of Tennyson's many debts to Wordsworth : — A thing Subject . . . to vital accidents ; And, U];c the irater-lilij, lives and thrives, Whose root is fix'd in stable earth, wlwse head Floats on the tossing waters {Excursion wad vied.). Wliose hraii/s air in their hands and in iJieir Jieels: This very vigorous expression is from Longinus, or from the author of the J >(' llaloncso, from whom Longinus apparently quotes it : — (I fii] rui> fyK(:(pa\ov iv reus iTTfpvms KaTimc!TaTi]ix.ivov (popelre (De Suh, xxxviii.) THE PRINCESS, ETC. 85 (Unless 3'ou carry yoi;r brains next to the ground in your heels). The words of the author of the Be Ilaloncsn arc — firrfp Vfjieli tov eyKiCpaXou iv Tin's KporacPois, Ka\ fi!j iv reus TTTfpvais KaTaiT(naTrjp.ivov (pope'iTf (Dc Hal.) (If you have a brain in your temples and not next to the groimd in your heels). It was probably a proverb, and Libanius {Arfi. ad Orat.) censures it for its sihiness {svrjOss n vo/it^srai) ; and as an ilhistration of this it was probably cited by Longinus. SECTION V Their morions, wash\l with, morning : A beautiful expression in which Tennyson had been anticipated by Browning, who describes Florence as — Washed by the morning water-gold {Old Pictures at Florence). The fine simile in which Ida's unshaken firmness is compared to a pine vexed and tried by storm was evidently suggested by the simile in which Yirgil com- pares J^neas under similar circumstances to an oak {.En. ii. 441 scjq.). As comes a pillar of electric cloud : With this graphic description of the progress of a thunderbolt compare Lucan's equally graphic descrip- tion of the same thing, PJiarsalia, i. 152-158. SECTION VI In the song ' Home they brought her warrior dead,' which opens this section, we have a very in- teresting illustration of the skill with which Tennyson 86 ILLUSTRATIONS OF TENNYSON transmutes into his own precious metal the less re- fined ore of other jjoets. It is just possible that the suggestion for this song came from Thorpe's version of the First Lay of Gmlrun, prepared for the press in 185G, but not pubhshed till ISOG. In this lay it is told how Gudrun sat over the corpse of Sigurd, burst- ing with sorrow but unable to weep. No sigh she uttered, nor with her hands beat, nor wailed as other women. Jarls came forward of great sagacity, from her sad state of mind to divert her. Gudrun could not shed a tear. Sat there noble wives of jarls, adorned with gold, before Gudrun ; each of them told her sorrows, the bitterest she had known. . . . But Gudrun could not shed a tear, such was her attliction for her dead consort. . . . Then said Gullrond, Giuki's daughter, ' Little canst thou, my fosterer, wise as thou art, with a young wife fittingly talk.' The king's body she forbade to be longer hidden. She snatched the sheet from Sigurd's corse, and turned his cheek towards his wife's knees. ' Behold thy loved one, lay thy mouth to his lip as if thou would' st embrace the living prince.' Gudrun upon him cast one look. . . . And a flood of tears fell to her knees (Thorpe's Edda of Samund the Learned, pp. 89-91). It will be seen that Tennyson has altered the legend : what in his version brings tears to Gudrun is not the eight of her lord's dead face, but the sight of her child. For this suggestion he seems to have been indebted to Sir Walter Scott. Compare the following passage from The Lay of the Last Minstrel (canto i. stanza 9) : — O'er her warrior's bloody bier The ladye dropp'd nor flower nor tear, • Until, amid her sorrowing clan, Her son lisp'd from the nurse's knee THE PRINCESS, ETC. ^7 Then fast the mother's tears did seek To dew the infant's kindhng cheek. Curiously enough, the climax of the piece — the sudden and passionate resolve on the part of the bereaved parent to live for the child — closely resembles a passage in Darwin's once celebrated episode of Eliza in the Botanic Garden. There the mother has been slain in war, and the young husband, distracted with grief, has abandoned himself to despair ; but on his two little children being presented to his sight, exclaims, like Tennyson's hei'oine — These bind to earth — for these I pray to Hve {Loves of the Plants, canto iii. '2G9-326). SECTION VIT The magnificent simile — As one that chnibs a peak to gaze O'er land and main, and sees a great black cloud Drag inward from the deeps, a wall of night Blot out the slope of sea from verge to shore. And quenching lake by lake, and tarn by tarn Expunge the world — is taken literally from Iliad, iv. 275 : — coy 6' or' LiTto (TKmrirjs ci8e I'tf^os alrroXos nvr^p, ep^ofj.fi'DV Kara ttovtov vtto Zecf^vpoio IcorjS, rep 8e t' dvevBiv iovri, fifXavTepov, T]VTe nicrcra, (palver' tuu Kara ttovtov, ayet Se t'-. Xa'CKmra noWrju (As when a goatherd from some hill peak sees a cloud coming across the deep with the blast of the West wind behind it ; and to him, being as he is afar, it seems blacker, even as pitch, as it goes along the deep, bringing a great whirlwind). Compare, too, Lucretius (vi. 256 sqq.), who has imi- 88 ILLUSTRATIONS OF TENNYSON tated the same simile ; it is curious that Monro should not have noticed this. The passage beginning — ■ Come down, maid, from yonder mountain height — is a splendid illustration of Tennyson's method. Taking the framework from Theocritus, he wreathes round, beneath, and over it such a wealth of original ornament that it is barely discernible ; but barely discernible it sui)ports the work. The passage on which this ' small sweet Idyl ' is modelled is the Cyclops' invocation to Galatea (Idijll xi. 20-79) ; but in the details one touch only has been directly imitated from the original : — Leave The monstrous ledges there to slope : rav yXavKxw hi. duXaacmu e'a ttotI ;^fpcroi' opex^f'^f (!• 43) (Leave the blue sea to roll against the land). But it is the note of Theocritus, not of this idyll alone, but of /(/. iii., of the song of Battus in Id. x,, just as the repetition of ' sweet ' is precisely the dSfi (i (pcopa rds rropTins, a8v to Trvevpa' adv 8e )((1} fioaxos yapvfTai, &G. (Idyll viii.) (Sweet is the voice of the heifer, sweet her breath, sweet, too, the voice of the calf). The moan of doves in immemorial chns is Yirgil's Nee gemere aeria cessabit turtur ah iihno {Ed. i. 58). The whole passage is a marvellous illustration of Tennyson's power of catching and rendering in English the charm of the best and sweetest Greek pastoral poetry — of preserving the very bouquet — THE PRINCESS, ETC. 89 as having clasj:)'^ a rose "Within the palui, the rose being ta'en away The hand retains a little breath of sweet, Holding a full perfume of his sweet guest. In the miscellaneous poems wliicli follow The Princess there are not many reminiscences and parallels. The vigorous phrase in The Third of February — to dodge and palter with a public crime — is Shakespeare's Dodge And palter in the shifts of baseness (Antony and Cleopatra, act ili. so. 9). In the Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington it is impossible not to feel that the poet owes something to the fine panegyrics of Claudian — particularly the De Laudihus Stilielionis. There is one curious co- incidence in this poem with a passage about StilicJio in Claudian's De Bello Geiico : — good gray head which all men knew : Sideris instar Emicuit Stilielionis apex, et cognita fulsit Canities (De Bello Get. 458-g6). The beautiful expression ' apple-cheek'd ' in The Islet — A bevy of roses apple-cliccVd — is from Theocritus — ■^^ a fxciknndpjjns Wyava (Idyll xxvii.) (And apple-cheeked Agave) ; and the lines — For Saxon or Dane or Norman we, Teuton or Celt, or whatever we be, We are each all Dane in our welcome of thee — 90 ILLUSTRATIONS OF TENNYSON recall the exquisite adulation of Martial enumerating the various nations which welcome Cffisar home : — Vox diversa sonat popnloruni, est vox tamen una Cum verus patriie diceris esse pater {Dc SjiectacuUs, epig. iii.). The exquisitely felicitous expression in The Daisij — By hays, iJtc j^cacocJi's neck in hue — ■ if not suggested hy Southey's lines in Madoc, finds in them an excellent illustrative commentary : — One glowing green expanse Pave where along the bending line of shore Such hue is thrown, as ivheii the peacock's neck Assumes its jjroudest tint of amethyst Emhathcd in emerald glory {Madoc in Wales, xiii.). Tlie rich Yirgilian rustic measure Of Lari Maxuiue : An allusion, of course, to Genrgics (lib. ii. 159 sqq.). In the two magnilicent stanzas entitled ]Vill we are strongly reminded both of Horace and Virgil, as well as of Daniel. For him nor moves the loud world's random mock, Nor all Calamity's hugest waves, &c., were plainly suggested by the famous lines which begin the third ode of the third book of Horace's Odes, and perhaps owe something to the grand poem of Daniel, addressed to the Countess of Cumberland. The verses which follow — Wlio seems a promontory of rock, That, compass'd round with turbulent soimd In middle ocean meets the surging shock Tempest-buffeted — THE PRIXCESS, ETC. 91 are obvioufly imitated from Yirgil {JEn. x, G93) : — Ille vehit rapes vastum quae proclit in sequor Obvia ventonuii furiis, expostaqne ponto Vim ciinctaui atque rninas perfert ccelique niarisqiie Ij^sa immota manens (He like a rock which juts out into the mighty deep, exposed to the rage of the wind and braving the sea, bears all the violence and menace of heaven and ocean, itself all mi- paoved). See, too, the parent simile (Iliad, xv. 618 -s^^.)- The idea in the little poem (a metaphysical plati- tude) — Flower in the crannied wall, if I could understand AVhat you are, root and all, and all in all, I should know what God and man is — is expressed by Donne {ScDiions, Alford edit. vol. iv. p. 61) :- Every worm in the grave, lower, every weed upon the grave is an ahridgmcnt of all. But the best commentary is Plotinus (Ennead. III. ii. 1):- TO p.epns T7ap(\€Tai oXoi", kcu nav uvtm (p'lKov ov ;(copto"a€V aXXo an LWov, oiSe irepov ycyevrjyiivov p.uvov kui tcov aWoov aire^tvco- (A part exhibits the whole and the whole is friendlj' to itself, not separated one part from the other nor become another alone and estranged from others). 02 ILLUSTRATIONS 01' TEAWYSON CHAPTER VII GROUP YI. — IN MEMOKIAM With the exception of Grcay's poems there is prohably no poem in our language so loaded with reminis- cences so skilfully and exquisitely assimilated as In Mcmoriam. If ever there was a poet who might say with Horace — Ego apis Matiiifc More modoque Grata carpentis thyma per laborem I'lurimmu . . . operosa . . . Carmina fingo (Like tlie bee of Matina feeding with endless toil on the sweet thyme, what I compose I compose with elaborate care) — it would surely be the poet of In Mcmoriam. In illustrating this work it may be well to com- ment first on the general scheme of the whole com- position, secondly on the versification, and thirdly to illustrate it in detail. The general scheme of the work appears to have been suggested by the series of sonnets and canaoni dedicated by Petrarch to the memory of Laura de Sade. Tennyson, it is true, strikes deeper chords, and embraces a far wider range of subjects than Petrarch ; his themes and his treat- ment alike are at once more subtle, more profound, and IN ME MORI A Af 93 more complex. But the main lines on ■^hich his work runs are the lines on which Petrarch's sonnets and canzoni run. In ninety-eight short poems the Italian poet reiterates, now in tones of tempered grief, now of rapturous gratitude or pensive grateful retrospect, the truth so well put hy his English pupil— 'Tis better to have loved ainT lost Than never to have loved at all. He tells how his ^rtlil)' love for an earthly object, fertile with temporal blessings though it was, has by death become iransformed and puritietl. The poems, composing In 'Mcmonam appear to fall into four) cycles — the first extending from Section i. to Section' XXX. ; the second from xxxi. to Ixxviii. ; the third from Ixxix. to cv. ; and the fourth from cvi. to the end. In the first the note is simple elegy, the \ expression of grief and the sense of loss, and has its direct counterpart in Petrarch. The poems in the second cycle are occupied for the most part in specu- lations on the solemn and awful problems which death and life, the Creator and the world, present and suggest to a thoughtful man of the present day. Of this there is nothing in Petrarch, who, being a devout Catholic, sees all clear in the light of Ilevelation. The poems in the third cycle, for the most part lyric expressions of personal feeling, records of happy memories of the dead friend, and of the consciousness of his spiritual presence, have their exact counterpart in Petrarch. In the fourth cycle there is much of course which has nothing corresponding in the sonnetti and canzoni, but there is much also which does correspond, as in such sections as cxv., cxvi., 94 ILLUSTRATIONS OF TENNYSON cxxi., cxxx., which .are purely Potrarchian. But the similarity really consists in the identity of the central truth, that in Love's hands are the keys of Paradise. The ohject of Petrarch's affection and sorrow, etherealisod hy death, hecomes identified with the Madonna, and the canzone to her who Di sol vestita, Coronata di stelle, al sommo Solo Piacesti si clio 'n te sua luce ascosc closes the poems. So with the work of Tennyson it opens with mere threnody, it closes with the vision of That God, wliicli ever lives and loves, One God, one law, one element. And one far-off divine event, To which the whole creation moves. The influence of Petrarch indeed suffuses the whole poem as it suffuses the Elcrjij of Gray. Much has been written about the peculiar stanza form emplo_yed in In Meinoiiain, and it has usually been stated that the scheme of its metre; was borrowed from Ben Jonson, Underivoods, xxxix., or Catiline, chorus in act XX. I am not aware whether any poet in our language prior to Ben Jonson has employed this stanza in octosyllabics, but it was certainly not Jonson's inven- tion, as it is commonly employed l)y the French poets of the fifteenth century, and Puttenham (1589) includes it in his scheme of metres, Art of Enf/Iislt Poesie (edit. Arber), pp. 90 and 101. However this may be, it must be obvious to any one who has any ear that the rough and jolting verses of Jonson, so singularly deficient in rhythm and cadence, supposing they did suggest the stanza, could have suggested nothing but the bald QutUne, Jonson's rhythm holds about the same relatiou IN MEMORIAM 95 to the matchless mechanism of Tennyson's stanza, as the hexameters of the Iliad hold to the hexameters of The Courtship of Miles Standislt. It is not unlikely that the peculiarly beautiful caesura effect and fall of cadence, which characterise Tennyson's measure, are to be numbered among his many debts to Wordsworth — see The Affliction of Margaret. This poem, though not in the quatrain employed by Tennyson, has exactly the same cadence and the same peculiar rhythmic effect. Take for example these verses : — Alas ! the fowls of heaven have Tvings, Aiid blasts from heaven will aid their flight. Again : — My apprehensions come in crowds, I dread the rustling of the grass, The \ery shadows of the clonds Have power to shake me as they pass. But it seems probable that the measure, the hint of the cadence, and indeed the whole cast of the metre, have been taken from a very rare volume,' scarcely known even to professed students of our early poetry — the occasional verses of Lord Herbert of Cherbury, the brother of George Herbert. Some of Herbert's stanzas are so similar to In Memoriam, that even a nice ear might excusably mistake one or two of them for the Laureate's. They occur in a piece entitled A 71 Ode ujjon the Question, u-ltctJier Love sJiould continue for ever : — Oh ! no, beloved, I am most sure These virtuous habits we acquire, As being with the soul entire. Must with it evermore endure. ' These poems have been edited by the present writer for Messrs, Qliatto iSi Windus, 96 ILLUSTRATIONS OF TENNYSON Else should our souls in vain elect, And vainer yet were Heaven's laws, When to an everlasting cause They give a perishing effect. Not here on earth, then, nor above, Our good affections can impair ; For where God doth admit the fair, Think you that He excludeth love ? These ej'es again thine eyes shall see. These hands again thine hands enfold, And all chaste blessings can be told Shall with us everlasting be. For if no use of sense remain AVhen bodies once this life forsake, Or they could no delight partake. Why should they ever rise again ? Let then no doubt, Celinda, touch, Much less your fairest mind invade ; Were not our souls immortal made. Our equal loves can make them such. In illustrating In ^lemovlam in detail, it may be well to group the sections according to the cycles indicated above. CYCLE I. : PROLOGUE TO XXX The noble verses which open In Mcmonani arc obviously a transfusion, so to speak, of some verses of Lord Herbert's brother, George Herbert, who appears to be a favourite with the Laureate. A comparison of Herbert's first stanza with the opening of Ten- nyson's poem will at once illustrate the line art of the latter poet and the peculiar manner in which he has, more or less unconsciously no doubt, availed himself of his predecessor's poem. 2N ME MORI AM cj-j Strong Son of God, Immortal Love, Thinft are these orbs of liglit and shade ; Thou m.adest life in man and brixte ; Thou niadest Death ; and lo, thy foot Is on the skull Avhich thou hast made : Immortal Love, Author of this great frame, Sprung from that beauty which can never fade, How hath man parcell'd out Thy glorious name, And thrown it on the dust which Thou hast made (Herbert Liove) ; "Wliether I fly with angels, fall with dust, Thy hands made both, and I am there. (Id,, Tlie Temper, 26, 27). And thou hast made him : thou art just {In Mem.) : And God has promised : He is just (Herbert, The Discharge). Om- little systems have their day, And Thou, Lord, art more than they (/;; Mein.) : Lord, though we change, Thou art the same (Herbert, Whit -Sunday). The lines, applying to Love— "Whom we, that have not seen thy face. By faith, and faith alone, embrace, Believing where we cannot prove — recall Byron: — O Love, no habitant of earth thou art. An unseen seraph, we believe in thee {Childe Harold, canto iv. st. cxxi.). That mind and soul according well May make one music : ^ That so thy favours granting my request. They and my mind may chime (HcriBEr.T, Denial). 11 9$ JLLl'STRATJONS OF TEN AYS ON Our wills are ours, we know not how; Our wills are ours, to make them thine : The best commentary on this is the whole of the third canto of Dante's Paradiso. Confusions of a wasted youth : This curious use of the word has been anticipated by Vaughan the Sihtrist : — These dark covfuslous that within me nest (Dressing). Ilim who sings To one clear harp in divers tones : The poet alhided to is Goethe/ though there is no reference to any particular passage, but to his general teaching. But compare St. Augustine : — De vitiis nostris scalam nobis faeimus si vitia ipsa calcamus (Serm. clxxvi. in edit. Migne, tom. xxxviii. p. 2082). Cf., too, Longfellow's well-known poem The Ladder of St. Augustine. 0, not for thee, the glow, the bloom, Who changest not in any gale (ii.) of the yew tree ; cf. Pliny, Xat. Hist. lib. xvi. c. 40 : — Non enim omnes florent et sunt tvhtes qaxdi\,in,qua;qucnon scntiunt gaudia annorum ' Lord Tennyson, in a letter addressed to a Mr. Baron in July 18S0, and published by that gentleman in the Christian Worlch August 17, 1882, writes : ' As far as I can recollect, I referred to Goethe.' The compiler of this volume has been informed by friends who have the honour of knowing Lord Tennyson, that he is in the habit of giving the same reply to those who ask him to explain the reference, IN ME MORI AM 99 ■ (For they do not all bear flowers, and some are sombre, and such as have no experience of the joys of the years). But perhaps ' gaudia annorum ' mean only flowers. A use in measured language lies ; The sad mechanic exercise, Like dull narcotics, numbing pain (v.) : Cf. Donne, Triple Fool : — I thought if I could draw my j)ams Through rhyme's vexation I should them allay, Grief brought to numbers cannot be so fierce. One writes, that ' Other friends remain,' That 'Loss is common to the race.' That loss is common would not make My own less bitter (vi.) : The alhision is to Hamlet, act i. scene 2, and how admh-ably has Tennj-son expressed in this poem all that Hamlet implied without expressing : — Queen. Thou know'st 'tis common ; all that live must die, Passing through nature to eternity. Hamlet. Ay, madam, it is common. Never morning wore To evening, but some heart did break (id.): Nee nox ulla diem ne(jue noctem a;;rora secuta est Quae non audierit mixtos vagitibus segri Ploratus {Liicictin.s, ii. 578-80) (Nor did any night ever follow day nor moining night that heard not wailings mingled v>ith tlie sickly infant's cries). Drops in his I'cst and n-aitdcring grave (id.) : To seek the empty vast and wander in r/ air (Shakespeare, Bich. III. act i. sc. 3). H 3 loo ILLUSTRATIONS OF TENNYSON With Section viii. may be compared Crabbe's Lover's Journc]!, and the magnificent Hnes in Young's Night lltnufiltts, i. : — The clisenclianted earth Lost all her lustre. "Where her glittering,' towers, Her golden mountains where ? — All darken'd down To naked waste, a dreary vale of tears. The great magician's dead. With Section ix. should be compared Horace, Ode iii. lib. i., and Theocritus, Idi/ll xiii. 53 sqq., \Yhich plainly inspired it. The fine epithet applied to a cloud, that onward drags a lahonring breast (xv.) has been anticipated by Marlowe {Dr. Faustus, ad Jinem) : — Into the entrails of yon lahouring cloud. In xvi. the lines about the unhappy bark — That strikes by night a craggy shelf And staggers blindly ere she sink — find an interesting illustration in Napier's description of the Battle of Albuera, Hist, of the Pen. War, Book xii. : — The Fusileer battalions struck by the iron tempest reeled and staggered like sinkiug shijjs. In xvii. again may be traced the inspiration of Theocritus, Horace, and perhaps Petrarch. And from his ashes may be made The violet of his native land (xviii.) : Cf. Persius, Sat. i. 39 :— Nunc non c tumulo fortunataque favilla Nascentur violae ; and Shakespeare, Ilamlct,\. 1 : — IN ME MORI AM lol Ami from her fair and unpolluted flesh May violets spring. My lighter moods are like to these, But there are other griefs within (xx.) (and cf., too, Section xlix.) : apparently suggested by Shakespeare : — My grief lies all within, And these external manners of lament Are merely shadows to the unseen grief That swells with silence in the tortured soul {liiclu IL). Section xxii. has an exact counterpart in Petrarch's forty-seventh sonnet (In Morte). The Shadow cloak'd from head to foot, Who keeps the keys of all the creeds (xxiii.) : Cf. Milton, Par. Lost, ii. 6G5 sqq. for a commentary on the first line, and Pope's — Wait the Great Teacher Death {Essay on Man, Epist. i. 92) for an illustration of the second. But it is the re- petition of an idea which Sir Thomas Browne has in his llcligio Medici thrown into many forms. And Thought leapt out to wed with Thought Ere Thought could wed itself with Speech {ib.) : More simply Pope : — When thought meets thought ere from the lips it part (Eloisa to Ahelard). No lapse of moons can canker Love, Whatever fickle tongues may say (xsvi.): Love's not Time's fool (Shakespeake, Sonnet cxvi.). 102 ILLUSTRATIONS OF TENNVSOM 'Tis better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all (xxvii.) : Of tliG many illustrations of this sentiment let two suffice : — 'Tis better to have been left than ne\cr to have been loved (CoNGREVE, Way of the World, ii. 2) ; and Thackeray, Pcndcnuls, vol. i. ch. vi. : — It is best to love wi?ely, no doubt, but to love foolishly is better than not to be able to love at all. CYCLE IT. : XXXI.-LXXVIII An admirahle commentary on the teaching em- bodied in Section xxxiii. will be found in Bishop Butler's Durham. CJiarf/e, in which he points out the necessity of ' the keeping up as well as we are able the form and face of religion with decency and reve- rence. The form of religion may, indeed, be where there is little of the thing itself, but the thing itself cannot be preserved among mankind without the form.' The moanings of the homeless sea (xxxv.) : This beautiful line is partly from Horace, Odes, II. XX. — Visani gcmcntis littora Eospori (I shall go to see the shores of the moaning Eosiiorus), and partly from Shelley — The thunder and the hiss Of Jiovielcss streams {Alastor). The sound oiihdX forgetful shore (xxxv,) : This unusual use of the word is found in Milton : — IN ME MORI AM 103 The sleepy drench Of that forgetful lake {Par. Lost). An excellent commentary on xxxvi. is found in Cran- mer's v>-or(ls in his Vvcfacc to his Bible : — For the Holy Ghost hath so ordered and attempered the Scriptures that m them as ■well publicans, fishers, shepherds, may lind their ediiication as p;reat doctors their erudition. The very pretty expression — Make April of her tender eyes (xl.) — • appears to have been suggested by Shakespeare :— The April's in her eyes, it is love's spring, And these the showers to bring it on (Anton!/ and Cleopatra, act iii. sc. 2). In Section 1. it may be remarked that nothing could better illustrate the essential differences between the poetry of the post-Eevolution time and that of the eighteenth century, than to compare these verses with Tickell's invocation to the spirit of Addison, Elcfii/ un the Death of Addison; see the passage l)eginning ' Oh if sometimes thy spotless form descend.' My words are only words, and moved Upon the topmost froth of thought (Iii.) : From Persius — Summa delumbe saliva, Hoc natat in labris (Sat. i. 104) (This emasculate stuff floats on the topmost froth of the lix^s). The lines in Section liv. — Tlaat nothing walks with aimless feet ; That not one life shall be destroy'd, &c. — embody one of Wordsworth's great doctrines ; — 104 ILLUSTRATIONS OF TEXXVSON 'Tis Nature's law Tliat none tlio uicanost of created tliini^s, Or forms created the most vile and brute, The dullest or most noxious, should exist Divorced from good, a spirit and pulse of good, A life and soul, to every mode of being Inseparably link'd {The Old Cumberland Beggar). And ' Ave, ave, avc,' said, ' Adieu, adieu ' for evermore (Ivii.) : The funeral adjuration of the Eomans — Atque in perpetuum frater ave atque vale {Catullus, ci. 10) — • and so frequently in inscriptions ; see Orelli's collection jiassim. There is an expression in section Ivi. which deserves commentary : — Dragons of the prime, That tare each other in their sUnie. This is, or might be, an excellent illustration of Tennyson's careful learning, though possibly the poet had no notion of the singular propriety of his expression. The ' slime ' is the TrpoTsprj l\vs — Horace's 'princeps limus ' {Odes, I. xvi. 13), the primeval mud out of which all things were formed at the beginning, when all was fluid and unconcocted. See Apollonius Ehodius, Argon, iv. 675 : — roLuvs Kcu npnTipi]s i^ l\vos fjSXacrTrjaev ■X^duiV CWTt], ovTTOi ^ly^cikecc pdX vtt^ 7;fpt 7riKr]6eicra ov 8c TTCU a^ciXioio jBoXals riiaov rjeXioio LKixaSas alvvixivt] (Such creatures Earth herself produced out of the primeval mud, when as yet she was not made solid by the thirsty air, and had not as yet got moisture from the rays of the scorching sun). AV MEMORIAM 105 Thy marble hr'ujlil in durJ.- iippcavs (Ixvii.): Cf. Shakespeare, So)nict xliv. : — Are darkly bright, are hriglit in ilarT; du'ectecl. Sleep, Death's twin-brother (Ixviii.) : So Il'uul, xiv. — ivB' 'Ynvci crvfXt^Xt]To Ka(TiyvijTu> Qam'iToio (Where he met with Sleep, Death's brother) ; SO Virgil, .En. vi. 278 — Leti consanguineus Sopor ; and Shelley — Death and his brother, Sleep {Queen Mab, 2). In shadowy thoroughfares of thought (Ixx.) was obviously suggested by that \Yeird and pregnant line in Sophocles, CEd. Tijr. 67 — TToXAaj S' ohoiii i\d6vTa (ppovriSos nXdvois (Having traversed many paths in the wanderings of thought), on which Shelley so admirably comments in a note quoted by Mrs. Shelley in her prefatory remarks on the Prometheus Unbound. Death has made His darkness beautiful with thee (Ixxiv.): Exactly Petrarch's — Non pu6 morte il dolce viso amaro ; Ma '1 dolce viso, dolce puo far morte {Sonnet Ixxx.). The breeze of song (Ixxv.): Pindar's phrase— ovpoi vfivav {Pythian, iv. 5) (The breeze of songs). lo6 ILLUSTRATIOXS OF TEN XY SON With the whole of Ixxvi. slioukl be compared the magnificent passage in Dante's Ptirnatorio, 91-117, ■svhich plahily inspired this fine section as well as the third stanza, one of the grandest Tennyson ever wrote, in Section Ixxiii. The opening words — Take winj^'s of fancy, and ascend — are from Petrarch, Sonnet Ixxxii, : — Volo con r ali dc' pcnsicri al ciclo. A good commentary on Where all the starry heavens of space Are sharpen'd to a needle's end will be found in Shakespeare, Ci/nthrline, act i. scene 4 : — till the diniinntion Of space had j^oiiitcd lain us sJitirj} us a needle. Section Ixxviii. exactly answers in its general pur- port to Petrarch's twenty-fifth sonnet {In Mortc di Donna Laura). Cf. especially E certo o^^^ni mio stndio in qnel temp' era Pur di sfogare il doloroso core In qualche modo, non d' acquistar fama. Pianger ccrcai, non gia del pianto onore (And certainly all my desire at that time was merely to case in any way my troubled heart, not to win fame. I sought to weep, not at all the glory of weeping). In memo Rt am 107 CYCLE III.: LXXIX.-CV Laburniuus, dropi^ing-ivclls of fire (Ixxxiii.) : Cf. Co^Ypcl•^s simpler expression — ■ Labiirnuni rich In streaming gold {Tasli, vi. 149); compare too a similarly vivid picture of tlic arbiite in Calpnrnins Sicnlus, a poet to whose exquisite touches of natural description no critic, so far as I know, has done justice : — Ab isdem ss'pe cavernis Aurca cum crocco crcvcrant arbuta iiinibo {Eclog. vii. 71-2). In Ixxxv. we have one of the most purely Petrarchian of Tennyson's poems ; compare it with Sonnet xlii. But Summer on the steaming lloocis : Compare the whole passage, again purely Petrarchian, with Sonnet xi. So too the latter part of the section corresponds exactly in ton?, spirit, and sentiment, with the divine sixth canzone. While the lines — The great IntelHgeuces fair That range above our mortal state — find their commentary in Dante's Convito, ii. 5 : — Li movitori di quello (Cielo) sono sustanze separate da materia, cioe Intelhgenze, le quah la volgare gente chiamano Angeli (The movers of that third (heaven) are substances separated from matter, that is Intelhgences, which the common people call angels). Section Ixxxvi. is purely Petrarchian. Section Ixxxviii. is as nearly the counterpart of a very beautiful lo8 ILLUSTRATIONS OF TENNYSON sonnet attri])iito(l to Dante as it is possible for a poem, not a mere translation, to be. Sec the sonnet com- mencing * Ora clie '1 mondo s' adorua,' Fraticelli's O^ere viinori di Dante, vol. i. p. 22G. The dust and din and steam of town (Ixsxix.) ; Cf. Horace's Fumum et opes strepitumquc Roniic {Odes, III. xxix. 12). In Section xc. compare the beautiful story in Lord Lytton's Pihjrims of the lihine (ch. viii. ' The Soul in Purgatory '). Flits by the sca-hlue hird of March (xci.) : Compare, in one of the most beautiful fragments of Greek poetry extant — aXin6p(f)vpos (tipns upvis (Fragments of Alcjian, 2G) (The sea-pnrple bird of spring). Section xciv. gives as it were in essence Jeremy Taylor's sermon on the Iictuni rideis TTvp, iv Se Ktpvaa oivov a(f)nhi(jii ji4\iXpnv (Zeus is raining ; and from the heaven mighty is the storm, and the running streams have frozen : away with the winter, pile on the fire, and (mix) in the mixing-bowls, and unsparingly too, the hone^'-sweet wine) ; and of Horace's imitation, Odes, I. ix. 1-8. In cxiv. for the distinction betAveen knowledge and wisdom — a favourite one with the poet, see Tjovc and iJiitji (' The drooping flower of knowledge changed to fruit Of wisdom'), and Lod^iilcii Hall ('Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers ') — compare Cowper, Tasky vi. 88-1)9 :— Knowledge and wisdom, far from being one, Have ofttimes no connection : knowledge dwells In heads replete with thoughts of other men ; AVisdom in minds attentive to their own. Knowledge, a rude unprofitable mass, The mere materials with which Wisdom builds, Till smootli'd, and squared, and fitted to its place. Does but cncmnber when it should enrich. Knowledge is proud that he has learn'd so nuich ; "Wisdom is humble that he knows no more. Cf. too the saving of Hcraclitus — TTO^VfJiaOu] ^'oo^' ou di^iCTKCL (DlOCi. LaERT. ix. 1). Compare also an interesting chapter in Aulus GelliuSj IN MEMO KI AM iir Nodes Att. lib. xiii. c. 8, and Milton, Par. Ilcrj. iv. 320 sqq. See too Quarles, Job Militant, Meditation xi. 7-42. In Section exv. we have the pure Petrarchian note again, though it recalls directly Dante's sonnet re- ferred to before. In exxii. the lines — To feel once more, in placid awe, The strong imagination roll A sphere of stars about my sonl — find an interesting commentary in George Fox's Journal, where, describing one of his ecstasies, he says- One morning, as I was sitting by the fire, a great cloud came over me. . . . And it was said, ' All things come by nature : ' and the elements and stars came over me, so that I was in a moment quite clouded with it {Journal sub ann. 1G48, Leeds edit. vol. i. p. 104). The hnitc earth lightens to the sky (cxxvii.) : Horace's — Bruta teUus [Odes, I. xxxiv. 9). The epithet had been transferred into English before by Milton {Comus, 797): And the lynitc cartlt would lend her nerves. To fool the crowd with gtorious lies (cxxviii.) ; Transferred apparently from Crashaw — Gilded dunghilLs, ijloriotts tics (2\j 2Iisti-css M. E.). Thy voice is on the rolling air ; .... I seem in star and llower To feel thee some diffusive power , . . mix'd with God and Nature thou (cxxx.) : 112 JLLUSTRATIOXS OF TEXNVSON Borrowed from the divine passage in Shelley's Adonais : — He is made one with Nature ; there is heard His voice in all her music He is a presence to be felt and known In darkness and in light, from herb and stone Spreadin.g itself wliere'er that Power may move ^Vhich has withdrawn his being to its own {Adonais, xlii.). And touch with shade . . . ^Yith tender rjloom the roof (Epilogue) : An exquisite expression adapted perhaps from Thom- son : — A certain tender gloom o'erspread [Castle of Indcl. canto i. st. Ivii.). The magnificent stanza which concludes the poem — That God which ever lives and loves, One God, one law, one element, And one far-off divine event. To which the whole creation moves — may be compared with a not less magnificent passage in the fragments of Cicero's I)c liepuhlicd :— Nee erit alia lex Komsr, alia Athenis, alia nunc, alia posthac ; sed et omnes gentes, et omni tempore, una lex et senipiterna et immutabilis continebit; unusque erit quasi magister et imperator omnium — Deus (Fragments of Dc licpuhlicd, lib. iii.) (And there shall not be one law at Eome, another at Athens, one law now, another afterwards, but the same law ever- lasting and unchangeable will bind all nations at all times, and there will be one common Master and Kuler of all — God). "3 CHAPTEK VIII GROUP VII. — MAUD And now we come to Maud. In Dryden's JMisccllanies there is a very remarkable experiment in broken rhythm, describing the meeting of two lovers in Bedlam. The verse is so modulated as to express, and express it does with exquisite skill, exalted emo- tion under various phases, surging now in climactic fury, now calmed and tempered, as images, terrible or placid, present themselves to minds rolling rudder- less as it were on the waves of passion. It seems more than probable that this fragment suggested to Tennyson the more elaborate rhythmic scheme of Maud. And this is the more likely, as the rhythm and metric mechanism of the garden song in Maud is little more than an echo with certain minor varia- tions of a stanza here employed. Compare with stanzas i., ii., iii., v., vi., vii., ix., the following stanza of Dryden's :— Shall I many the mfm I love ? And shfiU I conclude my pains ? Now bltiss'd be the powers above, I feel the blood leap in my veins, With a lively leap it began to move And the vapours leave my brains. ii4 ILLUSTRATIOKS OF TENNYSON Compare the whole fragment — it is entitled •' Of a Scholar and his Mistress, who, being crossed by their friends, fell mad for one another ' (Dryden's Works, Globe Edit. p. 384), It need hardly be said that to institute any serious comparison between Dryden's fragment and Maud would be as absurd as to insti- tute any serious comparison between Milton's Comns and George Peele's Old Wives'' Talc. But it is assuredly worth noticing that in a rhythmic experi- ment of singular interest Tennyson has been antici- pated by a brother poet in his own language. In island the reminiscences from other poets are very few indeed, fewer than in any of his longer poems. Do we move ourselves, or are moved by an unseen hand at a game That pushes us off from the board (Part I. iv. 5) : These lines appear to have been suggested by Mr. Fitzgerald's version of the Buhaiijdt of Omar, where men are described as — Impotent pieces of the pjame He plays Upon this chequer-board of nights and days ; Hither and thither moves and checks and slaj^s, And one by one back in the closet laj's. Brought to understand A sad astrology, the boundless plan That makes you tyrants in j'our iron skies, &c. (I. xviii. 4) : The sad grand note of Lucretius : — Nam cimi suspicimus magni ctelestia mundi Templa, super stellisque micantibus sethera fixum, Et venit in mentem solis lunaeque viarum, Tunc aliis oppressa malis in pectora cura MA CD 115 Ilia quoquc oxporgoi'actum caput eri.i^ore infit, Xe quae forte deuiu nobis imiuensa potestas Sit, &c. {Dc Ber. Nat. v. 1204 sqq.) (For when we gaze up at the celestial regions of the great universe, and ether lirm fixed above the glittering stars, and turn our thoughts to the courses of the sun and moon, then into oiu' hearts, bowed with other ills, that fear also begins to rear uj) its awakened head, nameW that we may haply find the power of the Gods to be without limit, &c.). Ah Christ, that it were pcsiible For one short hour to see The souls we loved, that they might tell us What and where they be (Part II. iv. 3) : The aspiration of the Duchess in Webster : — that it were possible we might But hold some two days' conference with the dead; From them I should learn somewhat, I am sure, 1 never shall know here (Duchess of Malfi, act iv. sc. 2). In the picture of peace in Part III. 2, one touch — ■ And the cobweb woven across the cannon's throat — may have been suggested by Bacchyhdes, ^Yho enume- rates among the signs of peace the cobwebs in the handles of the shields : — (V bi aL8apo8eT(iis TTopTva^Li' alSav ajia\vuv LtiTOL niXovTciL (And in the iron-woven shield-handles are the looms of tawny spiders) ; or more hkely by Theocritus, xvi. 9G : — dpa^via fi' els ottX' upa^vai XeTrru dLaarrjcraiPTo . (And over armour may spiders spin fine their webs). A comparison bet^Yeen the section (II. ii.) de- Bcribing the shell, and the beautiful epigram in I 2 ii6 /ILrSTRATI()A'S OF TENNYSON Callimachiis {Epni. v.) describing the shell of the nautilus, is worth suggesting as an illustration of interesting points of similarity and difference between Alexandrian poetry and our own, between Callimachus and Tennyson. Both have in common a certain daintiness and grace of style and touch, and both affect sedulously the same artificial simplicity. Both appear to regard natural objects, and to regard them deliberately, as material out of which, if such an ex- pression may be used, poetical capital may be made. But the modern poet has what the ancient has not, a penetrating sense of the mystery of this, as of every other natural phenomenon, and a power of suffusing the presentation of such phenomena with sentiment. It is, however, in their treatment of flowers that the difference, not simply between Callimachus and Tenny- son, but between the Greek poets generally and poets of the Wordsworthian and Tennysonian schools, is most strikingly illustrated. Of a Greek poet it may, in a sense, be said, as it was said of Peter Bell, that A primrose by a river's brim A yellow primrose was to him, And it was nothing more. Even in the elaborate passages cited by Athenaeus (xv, 30, 31) from the Cyprian Poems and the Georgics of Nicander, there is the same absence of fancy and sentiment as there is in Homer and Theocritus. "When Wordsworth wrote — To me the meanest flower that blows can give Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears — he enabled us to estimate the distance which in this respect separates the moderns from the Greeks. 117 CHAPTER IX GROUP VIII, — IDYLLS OF THE KING Of all popular poets Tennyson most needs a com- mentator. He has had the good fortune to be a favourite with the crowd, but it may be doubted whether half his beauties are either relished or per- ceived by them. They read him as intelligeiit school- boys read Yirgil. They follow the story, they are struck by particular passages, which they learn by heart and think very tine ; they admire what they suppose to be the simplicity of his diction ; and they dwell with pleasure on such of his touches of natuial description as may happen to ai)peal to them. But they go no further, and in going no further they are losers themselves, and the poet loses too. It has been already said — and what has been said has been illustrated at length — that the poetry of Tenn^'soii is, even in its minutest details, of an essentially reflective character ; that his great achievements lie, not in original conceptions, but in elaborate work- manship, in assimilative skill. To discover what he has assimilated, on what he has worked, is the first duty of one who would properly appreciate his poetry. Qf ggsthetic priticism as applied to the Laureate's iiS ILLUSTRATIONS OF TENNYSON poetry, the world has ah-cady had more than enough, and {esthetic criticism is, perhaps, in the present state of Tennysonian study, of infinitely less value than analytical. In the following section it is no part of my purpose to enter into a comparative study of the Idylls and of the sources from which they have been drawn, but simpl}^ to illustrate the nature and extent of Tennyson's indebtedness to his predecessors. Of the eleven Idylls, Knbl, Elaine, Gureih and Lyuette, and Tlie Passiny of ArtJiur, are simply adaptations from Malory's Eomance and the Mahinoylon, while of the remaining seven, the Ilobi Grail and Pclleas and Ettarre draw largely on Malory ; the Cominy of Arthur was suggested by him; so were Balin and Balan, ^lerlin and Vivien. The Last Tournament and (ruinerere have nothing corresponding to them in IMalory. In the Dedication to the Queen, the fine image in the lines — thro' all this tract of years Wearing the white tiosver of a blameless life, III that fierce light icliich beats hjjoh a throne, And blachctis every blot — appears to have been suggested by a passage in Alexandre Dumas, Yicomte de Bragelonne, where, speaking of Louis XIY., he says — II a du soufri" toxites ses humiliations, toutes ses genes au grand jour, an soleil imjntoyablc de la royaute, place noyee de lumiere, oil toute tdche parait line fange sordide {Vicomte de Bragelonne, edit. Masque et Cie., p. 398, chapter entitled ' La Tentateur '). IDYLLS OF THE KING 119 The Coming of ^iiiJtnr is moulded, though with important additions, alterations, and modification, out of the first three hooks of the Morte (V Arthur. Garcth and Lijnettc is, with certain additions and alterations, pieced together from Malory's seventh hook. The introduction, however, as far as the jDassage where Gareth asks his hoon, is the poet's own invention. From that point the narrative follows with more or less fidelity the prose story. As it advances diver- gences appear. The history hecomes complicated with an elaborate allegory within an allegory, much darker and more troublesome than the darkest and most troublesome in Spenser's epic. In the poem we have four combats for the deliverance of the lady in the Castle Perilous, in the prose story seven. In the prose story the knights who engage in fight figure respectively as the Black, Green, Eed, and Blue Knights : in the poem they become the Morning Star, the Noonday Sun, the Evening Star ; the Blue Knight having no counterpart. Malory's Bed Knight of the Eed Lands, who is the last to be encountered, appears in the poem as Death. For the semi-comic incident which results in the apparition of the blooming boy, the reader has to thank the poet. Of reminiscences of other poets there are not many in this Idyll. The picture of Old Lot — - Lo, where thy father Lot beside the hearth Lies hke a log, and all but smonlder'd out — was no doubt suggested by that of old Laertes in the Odyssey. The blaze-bickering shield of the Knight of the Noonday Sun — As if the flower. That blows a globe of after arrowlets, I20 ILLUSTRATIONS OF TENNYSON Ten thousand fold had grown, flash'd the fierce shield, All sun ; and Gareth's eyes had Hying blots Before them : This was of course suggested by Ariosto's Scudo mortal che, coma pria Si scopre, il suo splendor si gli occhi assalta, La vista tolls e tanto occupa i sensi, Che come morto rimaner conviensi {Orland. Fur. iii. st. 67) (The deadly shield which, as soon as it is imcovered, its splendour so assails the eyes, takes away the sight, and so seizes the senses that one must needs become as dead) ; but it owes something to Virgil, A'Jn. x. 271 — Vastos umbo vomit aureus igncs (The shield's golden boss vomits mighty flames). But as the cur Pluckt from the cur he fights with, ere his cause Be cool'd with fighting, follows, being named, His owner, but remembers all, and gi-owls Eemembering : Graphic, but how inferior to Ariosto's simile of the fighting curs : — Ccme soglion talor dui can mordcnti, O per invidia, o per alto odio mossi, Avvicinarsi digrignando i denti, Con occhi biechi, e piu che bracia rossi; Indi a' morsi venir, di rabbia ardenti Con aspri ringhi e rabbuffati dossi {Orl. Fur. ii. 5) (As sometimes two vicious curs, incited cither by envy or deep-seated hate, will draw nigh one another, snai'ling and grinning, with e3es asquint and burning redder than a live coal, afterwards on fire with rage will come to biting, grin- ning savagely and with backs all ruffled up). IDYLLS OF THE KING 121 The fine touch — Up like fire he started — recalls Milton, Var. Lost, iv. 813 : — Up he starts, as when a spark Lights on a heap of nitrous i)o\vder ; or perhaps more immediately by the line — Sprang upward, hke a pyramid of fire [id. ii. 1013). The fine simile where Gareth's adversary is com- pared to a buoy at sea, which dips and springs, but never sinks in spite of winds and waves rolling over it, may possibly have been suggested by a simile in Ljxophron, where Ulysses is compared to a cork in the sea with the winds and waves rolling over but not sinking it : — ecrrat, Trap' aXXov 5' ("AXor, wf nevKrjs AcXd'Soj ^VKTTjs aTpoj3)]Tls (ieXXoJ' ivdpuicrK'jiv tvvoius {Cassandra, edit. Potter, x. 755-G). Arthur's harp tho' summer-wan, In counter motion to the clouds : The same phenomenon was noticed and described by Lucretius : — Splendida signa videntur Labier advcrsum nuhes (iv, 445-G). But one of the most interesting illustrations of Tennyson's method of dealing with his raw material is to be found in Enid. Here we can follow him step by step; here we can study in detail the dis- tinctive features of his art. The story itself is to be found in the Mahiiiogion. That charming collection of tales was translated in 1838 by Lady Charlotte Guest, and it is of Lady Charlotte's translation that 122 JLLL'STRATIOXS OF TEXXVSO.Y Tennyson has availed himself. To give something of an allegorical significance to the character of Geraint and to make the story bear on the main action of his epic, Tennyson assigns the departure of Geraint from Arthur's Court, not to any anxiety on the part of the young man to return to his aged father and his troubled realm, l)ut to a desire to sever Enid from communication with Guinevere, whose guilty love for Launcelot was no;v bpginning to bo suspected. And many there were who accompanied Geraint, and never was there seen a fairer host journeying towards the Severn. . . . And for a long lime he abode at home, and he began to shut himself up in the chamber of his wife, and he took no delight in anything besides, insomuch that he gave up the friendship of his nobles together with his hunting and his amusements. In Tennyson's versification of this the effect of the iwQ repetitions of the word ' forgetful ' — Forgetful of the falcon and the hunt, Forgetful of the tilt and tournament, , Forgetful, &c. — has often been deservedly admired. We may notice, Jiowever, that it would seem to be an echo from a similarly effective iteration in Keats's IsaheUa: — And she forgot the stars and moon and sun, And she forgot the blue above the trees, And she forgot the dells where waters run, x\.nd she forgot the chilly autumn breeze. And there was murmuring and scoffing concerning him among the inhabitants of the palace on account of his relinquish- ing so completely their companionship for the love of his wife. And when Erlin heard these things he spoke unto Enid, and inquired of her whether it was she that had caused Geraint to act thus. ' Not I,' said she; 'there is notlimg moi'e hateful to me than this.' And she was very sorrowful ; IDYLLS OF TLIE KING 123 And by and by the pco])le, when they met , , In twos and threes, or fuller companies, Began to scoff and jeer and babble of him As of a prince whose manhood was all gone, And molten down in mere xixoriousness. And this she gathcr'd from the people's eyes : This too the women who attired her head, To please her, dwelling on his boundless love, Told Enid, and they sadden'd her the more. This last is one of those cleHcate and thoughtful touches which Tennyson seldom misses an opportu- nity for introducing. And one morning in the snnnuer time they were upon their couch. And Enid was without sleep in the ai:)artment, which had windows of glass. And the sun shone upon the couch ; and the clothes had slipped from off Geraint's arms and breast, and he was asleep. Then she gazed upon the marvellous beauty of his appearance, and she said, ' Alas, and am I the cause that these arms and this breast have lost their glory ? ' And as she said this the tears dropped from her eyes. And the tears she shed and the words she had spoken woke him. In this clear and beautiful picture the only feature which awaited development lay in the figure of Ge- raint ; here and here only expansion was needed ; here and here only expansion is found : — At last it chanced that on a summer morn (They sleeping each by either) the new sun Beat through the blindless casements of the room And heated the strong warrior in his dreams, Who moving cast the coverlet aside And bared the knotted column of his throat. The naassive square of his heroic breast, And arms on which the standing muscle sloped. And Enid woke and sat beside the couch, Admiring him, and thought within herself, Was ever man so grandly made as he ? 134 ILLUSTRATIONS OF TENNYSON and bowing over him, Low to her own heart piteously she said : ' Am I the cause, I the poor cause that men Eeproach you, saying all yom* force is gone ? me, I fear that I am no true wife.' Half inwardly, half audibl3- she spoke, And the strong passion in her made her weep True tears upon his broad and naked breast, And these awoke him. The words which raise Geraint's susi^icion are not found in the Eomance. In the Eomance — and we are not quite sure that the poet has in this case improved upon it — Geraint is represented as reahsing the ignohle state into which he had sunk, and as thinking it not improbable therefore that his wife might have her eyes on a worthier mate. He resolves to show her that he still is what he was when he won her love. Abruptly ordering her to clothe herself in her meanest dress, and after making a few necessary preparations, the two set out in quest of adventures. In the Laureate's version this meanest dress is defined. It is the dress in which Geraint iirst found her apparelled when he raised her from poverty to splendour. This happy touch enables the poet to relate by waj^ of epi- sode the history of his hero and heroine — their court- ship and marriage, their early happy days with Arthur and Guinevere.' At this point, then, which is in the Eomance the middle portion, we must, in tracing the story as represented by Tennj'son, turn to what are, in the Eomance, the opening pages, for the poet has in true epic fashion begun in mediis rchns. The ' Compare the space tilled by the episode in the Pclciis and Thetis of CatuUus. IDYLLS OF THE KING 125 story as told in the Mahmogion and as told by Tennyson is substantially the same. Occasionally he follows the prose story with minute fidelity of detail, as for example in the description of Geraint : — The rider was a foir-lieaded youth, and a f^olden-hilted sword was at his side, and round him was a scarf of bliie purple, at each corner of which was a golden apple : For Prince Geraint, Late also, wearing neither hunting-dress Nor weapon, save a golden-liilted brand, A purple scarf, at either end whereof There swung an apple of the purest gold, Sway'd round about him ; or in the meeting with the surly dwarf, where he merely versifies the prose paragraph. One happy touch the poet has introduced which is worth noticing. When the Eomance tells how the dwarf struck Geraint 'so that the blood coloured the scarf he wore,' it adds : ' Then Geraint put his hand upon the hilt of his sword, but he took counsel with himself and con- sidered that it would be no vengeance for him to slay the dwarf, and to he attacked unarmed hy the armed knight.' This becomes in Tennyson's poem — • His quick instinctive hand Caught at the liilt as to abolish him, But he, from his exceeding vianfulness And pure nobility of temperament, Wroth to he ivroth at such a tvorm, refrained. It would be tedious to follow the story step by step, but it may not be uninteresting to note how careful the poet is, as he treads closely in the tracks of his original, to seize every opportunity for introducing a picturesque touch. Thus, 126 /LLrs7'A\iT/0A'S OF TENNYSON Thc.v went along a fair and even and lofty ridge of ground becomes They clinib'd upon a fair and even ridge And sliow'd themselves against tlie shy. The simple statement ' and they were poHshing shields and burnishing swords, and washing armour and shoeing horses,' reappears as Everywhere Was hammer laid to hoof, and the hot hiss And bustling whistle of the youth who scour'J His master's armour. The ' tattered {garments ' of old Yniol become ' fray'd magnificence. Once fit for feasts of ceremony.' The ' when the dawn arose ' of the Eomance becomes * When the pale and bloodless east began To quicken to the sun.' The words ' And at a little distance from the town he saw an old palace in ruins, wherein was a hall that was falling to decay ; and when he came near the palace he saw but one chamber, and a bridge of marble leading to it,' have been expanded into one of the most extpiisite pieces of descriptive writing we ever remember to have met with. In the account of Geraint's visit to Yniol the Ln urcate has occasionally departed slightly from the story. For Enid's song he had of course no hint ; nor, again, is the speech in which Yniol relates the injuries he has received from the Sparrow-hawk translated from any corresponding speech in the prose story. Both of these additions are undoubtedly improvements. But there is one addition which might surely have been spared. ' " I will engage if I escape from the tournament to love the maiden as long as I live, and if I do not escape she shall remain unsuhied as before." " Gladly will I IDYLLS OF THE KING 127 permit theo," said the hoary-headed man.' This is simple and natural, and this Tennyson versifies, but carefully adds that old Yniol went to consult his wife on the subject. !Mother, a maiden is a tender thinpf, And best by her tliat bore her understood. ero thoii go to rest, Tell her, and prove her heart toward the jirince. This certainly trembles on bathos, and bathos of a peculiarly repulsive kind. It degrades Yniol and it degrades Enid. It disenchants us. It transfers us suddenly from the poetry of the past into the flattest prose of the present ; it conjures up in Enid the image of a conventional English young lady, it conjures up in Yniol a conventional English father — both of them, no doubt, in real life, very estimable per- sonages, but both of them entirely out of place in heroic poetry, or, indeed, in poetry of any kind. These concessions to petty conventionality are un- fortunately only too common in the Laureate's writings. We find him, for example, in Elaine going out of his way to inform us that when his heroine visited Sir Launcelot she was escorted by her brother, and that regularly, as the night approached, she re- tired to her friends in the neighbouring town. How much more natural, how much more manly, is honest Malory : — So this maiden never went from Sir Launcelot, but watched him day and night, and did such attendance there was never woman did more kindlier for man than she. Nothing is so coarse as false delicacy. , It is very rarely that Tennyson allows his prose 128 ILLUSTRATIONS OF TENNYSON original to excel his poetical version in picturcsqueness, but in Geraint's contest with the Sparrow-hawk the prose narrative is certainly superior to the Idyll. The hues— Then each, dishorsecl and drawlnf^, lash'd at eacli So often and with siich blows, that all the crowd Wonder'd And twice they breathed, and still The dew of their j^reat laboiu-, and the blood Of their strong bodies flowing, drain'd their force — are graphic and are Virgilian ; but the original — And they fought on foot with their swords nntil their arms struck sparks of fire like stars from one another, and thus they continued fighting until the blood and sweat obscured the light from their eyes — is far more spirited. For what follows — Enid's trouble about her faded dress, her dream, Geraint's long speech to the mother of his betrothed — the poet has drawn on his own invention. This brings us to the second part, and here the Idyll again closely follows the liomance, taking it up at the point where the episode broke it off : — And he desired Enid to mount her horse and to ride forward and to keep a long way before him. ' And whatsoever thou niayest see, and whatsoever thou mayest hear,' said he, 'do thou not turn back. And imless I speak to thee, say not thou one word : ' ' I charge thee ride before, Ever a good way on before; and this I charge thee, on thy duty as a wife, "Whatever happens, not to speak to me, No, not a word.' And they set forward. And he did not choose the pleasantest and most frequented road, bi;t that which was the wildest and most beset by thieves and robbers and venomous animals : IDYLLS OF THE KING jz^ They past The marches and by bandit-haimted holds, Gray swamps and pools, waste places of ilie hern, And wildernesses, perilous paths, they rode. These and the lines which follow — let the reader turn to them — are fine illustrations of Tennyson's power of expanding a rough sketch into a finished picture. And they saw foitr armed horsemen come forth from the forest. When the horsemen had beheld them, one of thena said to the others, ' Behold, here is a good occasion for us to caj)ture two horses and armour and a lady likewise : for this we shall have no difficulty in doing against yonder single knight who hangs his head so pensively and heavily : ' But when the fourth part of the day was gone. Then Enid was aware of three tall knights On horseback, wholly arm'd And heard one crying to his fellow, ' Look, Here comes a laggard hanging down his head, Wlio seems no bolder than a beaten hound. Come, we will slay him and will have liis horse And armour, and his damsel shall be ours.' And Enid heard this discourse. ' The vengeance of Heaven be upon me if I would not rather receive my death from liis hand than from the hand of any other, and though he should slay me, yet will I speak to him.' So she waited for Geraint until he came near her. ' Lord,' said she, ' didst thou hear the words of these men concerning thee ? ' Then he lifted up his eyes and looked at her angrily : ' Thou hadst only,' said he, ' to hold thy peace, as I bade thee ; I wish but for silence, and not foi- warning. And though thou should'st desire to see my defeat and my death, yet do I feel no dread : ' Then Enid ponder'd in her heart, and said : ' I will go back a little to my lord. And I will tell him all their caitiff talk ; For, be he wroth even to slaying me, K I30 ILLUSTRATIONS OF TENNYSON Far liofor by his dear hand had I die Tlian that my lord should suffer loss or shame.' He made a wrathful answer : ' Did I wish Your warning or yoiu- silence ? One command I laid upon yoii, not to speak to me. Well then, look— for now, Whether ye wish me victory or defeat. Long for my life, or hunger for my death, Yourself shall see my vigour is not lost.' Then the combat ensues, in which Geraint is vic- torious. Geraint dismoimted from his horse and took the arms of the men he had slain and placed them upon their saddles, and tied together the reins of the horses. ' Behold thou what thou must do,' said ho ; ' take the four horses and drive them before thee : ' Ho bound the suits Of armoi;r on their horses, each on each, And tied the bridle-reins of all the three Together, and said to her, ' Drive them on Before you : ' and she drove them through the waste. In the adventure which is next described, the only noticeable additions in the Idyll are the two line similes in which the bandit transfixed by Geraint is compared to the ' great piece of a promontory That had a sapling growing on it,' and the simile in which Geraint's war- cry echoing distinctly through the confused roar of a battlefield is compared to the ' drumming thunder of the huger fall ' heard by a listener who is standing amid the crash of nearer cataracts — two similes worthy of the Iliad, and not to be found in it. In the Eomance a third combat with five other horsemen is narrated, but the poet, probably thinking that poor Enid had already enough to do with the six horses entrusted to her, very IDYLLS OF THE KING 131 judiciously omits this, and passes on to the meeting with the youth on his way to the mowers. For a while the Idyll and the Romance continue to move parallel. With the visit of the Earl they diverge. In the Eomance the Earl is Dwyrm, a stranger both to Enid and Geraint. On hearing of their arrival in his dominions he seeks their aquaintance, entertains them, and endeavours to induce Enid to leave her husband. For Dwyrm, Tennyson has, with admirable tact, substituted Limours, a young nobleman ' femi- ninely fair and dissolutely pale,' who had formerly been Enid's suitor. With this alteration, he again takes up the prose story. ' Have I thy permission ' (said the Earl to Geraint) ' to po and converse with 3'onder maiden, for I see that she is apart from tliee ? ' ' Thou hast it gladly,' said he : ' Your leave, my lord, to cross the room, and speak To your good damsel there who sits apart. And seems so lonely ? ' ' My free leave,' ho said. He then makes his suit. And Enid considered that it was advisable to encourage him in his request. ' Come hei'e to-morrow, and take me away as though I knew nothing thereof : ' But Enid fear'd his eyes, And answer'd with such craft as women use. ' Come with morn And snatch me from him as by violence.' And at the usual hour they (Geraint and Enid) went to sleep, and at midnight she arose and placed all Geraint's armour to- gether, so that it might be ready to put on. And, altliough fear- ful of her errand, she came to the side of Geraint's bed, and she spoke to liim softly, saying, ' My lord, arise, for these were the words of the Earl to me.' So she told Geraint all that had passed: 132 ILLUSTRATIOXS OF TENNYSON But Enid, left alone with Prince Geraint, Held commune with herself. Anon she rose, and stepping lightly, hcap'd The pieces of his armour in one place. All to be there against a sudden need. Tlicn breaking his command of silence given, She told him all that Earl Limours had said. ' Desire the man of the house to come here ; ' and the man of the house came to him. ' Dost thou know how much I owe thee ? ' asked Geraint. ' I think thou owest but little.' ' Take the eleven horses and the eleven suits of armour.' ' Heaven reward thee, Lord,' said he, ' but I spent not the value of one suit of armour upon thee.' ' For that reason,' said he, ' thou wilt be the richer : ' ' Call the host, and bid him bring Charger and palfrey.' ' Thy reckoning, friend ? ' And ere he learnt it, ' Take rive horses and their armours ; ' and the host. Suddenly honest, answer'd in amaze, ' My lord, I scarce have spent the worth of one.' ' Ye will be all the wealthier,' said the Prince. After the subsequent combat with the Earl and his followers the poet again breaks from the legend. In the legend Geraint meets with other adventm-es. Among them he engages with some giants. In one of these engagements, though victorious, he faints from loss of blood, and sinks down by the wayside. At this point the story is again taken up in the Idyll, though, curiously enough, Tennyson now substitutes Doorm for Limours as he had before substituted Limours for Doorm. The picture of this brawny hero, 'broad-faced, with under-fringe of russet beard,' as IDYLLS OF THE KING I3J well as the ^YOl■ds put in his month when ho first sees Enid, belong to the poet, as there is nothing in the Komance to suggest them. For the introduction of the band of courtesans in Doorm's court he is also responsible. For the rest the Piomance is followed closely : the carrying of Geraint on a shield into Doorm's hall — the sorrow of Enid — the rude requests of Doorm that she should eat — her declining to do so * till the man that is upon yonder bier shall eat like- wise ' — her refusal to share Doorm's earldom with him — her refusal to dress herself in fine clothes, are transcribed from the prose story. How closel}^ may be judged from one or two samples. ' Truly,' said the Earl, ' it is of no more avail for me to be gentle with thee, than ungentle,' and he gave her a box on the ear : In his mood Crying, ' I count it of no more avail, Dame, to be gentle than ungentle with you ; Take my salute,' unknightly with flat hand. However lightly, smote her on the cheek. Thereupon she raised a loud and piercing shriek, and her lamentations were much greater than they had beeii before, for she considered ua her mind that had Geraint been alive he durst not have struck her thus : Then Enid, in her utter helplessness, And since she thought, ' He had not dared to do it, Except he surely knew my lord was dead,' Sent forth a sudden sharp and bitter cry, As of a wild tiling taken in a traj), Wliich sees the tra-ppcr coming through the ivood. These are the touches in which Tennyson has no rival save Dante alone. 134 ILLUSTRATIONS OF TENNYSON But, behold, at the sound of her cry, Geramt revived from his swoon, and he sat up on the bier, and finding his sword in the hollow of his shield, he rushed to the place where the Earl vvas, . . . and clove him in twain until his sword was stayed by the table. Then all left the board and fled away. And this was not so much through fear of the living as through the dread they felt at seeing the dead man rise up to slay them : This heard Geraint, and grasping at his sword (It lay beside him in the hollow shield). Made but a single bound, and with a sweep of it Shore through the swarthy neck And all the men and women in the hall Rose when they saw the dead man rise, and fled Yelling as from a spectre. The beautiful speech which is put into Geraint's mouth when the two are left alone in the hall has no counterpart in the Eomance, which merely says : ' And Geraint looked upon Enid and was grieved for two causes : one was to see how Enid had lost her colour, and the other to know that she was in the right.' By a very happy stroke Tennyson represents the knight who meets them on their way, and who but for Enid's entreaty would have borne down on Geraint — now ill able for loss of blood to defend himself — to be Edyrn, the Sparrow-hawk, the insolent knight with whom Geraint had in the first part of the poem con- tended. He thus connects the Idyll immediately with Arthur, for Edyrn is now Arthur's knight, and to the power of Arthur is attributed the change which has transformed an insolent minion into a noble and chivalrous soldier. This connection with Arthur is also emphasised by the poet representing his hero and heroine terminating their wanderings at Caerleon, IDYLLS OF THE KING 135 and not, as in the Eomancc, proceeding at once to Geraint's dominions. Many poets have been laid under contribution in Enid. Ai-ms on which the standing muscle sloped, As slopes a wild brook o'er a little stone, Rimning too vehemently to break npon it : This is taken with an ingenious and happy turn from Theocritus, lihjll xxii. 48 sfiq. : — (V 8e fives crrepeoiai ^pa)(iov Xfi-P-uppovi TTOTOfios ixeydXais Trepie'^eo-e fitVatj (And the muscles on his brawny arms close under the shoulder stood out like boulders v.-hich the wintry torrent has rolled and worn smooth in the mighty eddies). The Virgilian parallel for — noble breast and all puissant arms — in jEh. iv. 11 is obvious. The burden of Enid's song — Turn, Fortune, turn thy wheel — is from Dante : — Peru giri fortima la sua ruota, Come la place {Inf. xv. 95) ; cf. too King Lear, act ii. scene 2. O purblind race of miserable men . . . Here, thro' the feeble twilight of this world Groping : Almost literally from Lucretius, lib. ii. 14-16 : — miseras hominum mentes, pectora cseca, Qualibus in tenebris vitae, quantisque periclis Degitur hoc £evi quodcumquest 136 ILLUSTRATIOiXS OF TEXNYSON ' (0 miserable minds of men, O purblind breasts, in wliat darkness of life and in how great dangers is passed all this term of life, ■whatever be its dm-ation). lie soru'd a slaiidcr in the connnon ear : Bumorcsquc scrit varies (Virgil, ^n. xii. 228) (And sows various rumours). On either shining shoulder laid a hand : Homer's epithet for the shoulder, Odyssey, xi. 128 — uva (jiaiblfxu) cojj-U) — ■which Mr. Lang wrongly translatc's, ])ut perhaps rightly interprets, as ' stout.' The beautiful expression — ever fail'd to draw The quiet niglit into her blood — is transferred from Virgil, .En. iv. 530: — Xeque unquam Solvitur in soninos ocniisxe aut 2)ectorc noctcm Accipit (And she never relaxes into sleep ^ or receives the night in eyes or bosom). A shell That keeps the wear and polish of the wave : No doubt a mere coincidence, but a curiously exact translation of a line in Lycophron, Cassandra, 790 :— (As a shell on all sides worn smooth by the sea). The vivid touch in the line — She fear'd In every wavering brake an ambuscade — • ' Or possibly sovinl may mean dreams. IDYLLS OF THE KING I37 recalls Juvenal's timid traveller : — Et mota; ad hiuniii trepidabis arundinis nmhram (S(xf. x. 21) (And you will ticinblc at the shadow of the reed as it waves to the moon). Compare too the vivid picture of a timid traveller at niglit, given by that inexplicabl}' neglected poet Valerius Flaccus : — Ac velut ignota captns regione viariim Noctivagiuii qui carpit iter ; non aure quiescit, Non oculis ; noctisqiie metiis niger auget utrimqne Campus, et occurrens umbris majoribus arbor {Argon, ii. 43-7). ^Vhich was the red cock slioutlng to the light : This singularly bold and vivid expression appears to have been suggested by the author of the Batracho- inijomaclna : — ecos' (^urjcrev aXiKTrup {Bat. 192) (Until the cock shoiited). She saw Dust, and the j'oiiits of lances hiclx-cr in it : Compare the fine passage in Xcnophon's Anabasis, in which the approach of an army at a distance is described : — ((pcivr] KovLopros . . . Tc'i^a 5/) Kai ^aXKus tis ijaTpaTTTe {Anah. I. viii. 8) (And a dust cloud was seen, and very soon, indeed, too, bronze Hashed [from out of it]). And all in passion uttering a clnj sJiricJi : This singularly expressive word is the sicca, vox of the Latin poets. Cf. Ovid, Met. ii. 278, and cf. also Wordsworth, Peter Bell, part i. : — 1 38 ILLUSTRATIONS OF TENNYSON The ass did lengthen out The long (Irij sce-saw of his horrible bray. But the use of the word in Tlic Passing of Arthur — Dry clash'd his harness — brings us to its real source, Homer. Cf. Kopvdfs 5' «/^'/>' avov axjTfvv {II, xii. IGO) and Kap(j}ii\iov Se ol a(Tn\i uiJaev {II. xiii. 409) ; cf. also Virgil's aridus fragor {Georg. i. 357). Like a shoal Of darting fish, that on a summer morn Come slipping o'er their shadows on the sand, But if a man who stands i;pon the bi'ink But lift a shining hand There is not left the twinkle of a fin : Compare this with Iveats's less finished but equally graphic picture : — Where swarms of minnows ever nestle Their silver bellies on the pebbly sand, If you but scantily hold out the hand That very instant not one will remain {Poem entitled ' I stood tip-toe ). And we will live lilie two birds in one nest : So the lover in Theocritus : — TTOLTjaaL KoXiav piav eti> ei't devbpitJ {Id. XXIX. 12) (Make one nest in one tree). Passing by Balin and Balan, which owes very little either to Malory or to other writers, we come to Merlin IDYLLS OF THE KlXG 139 an(l Vivien. The hint, but nothing more than the hint, for this poem was derived from Malor3^ All, little rat that borest in the dyke Thy hole by night to let the boundless deep Down upon far-off cities recalls S}' dney Smith's humorous simile : — I do not attack him from love of glory, but from love of utihty, as a burgomaster hunts a rat in a dyke for fear it should flood a province. The hliiid ivave feeling round his long sea hall In silence; An idea evolved out of a hint from Homer, his Kv/xa Kwc^ov {Iliad, xiv. 16), where it means a wave dumb or noiseless, not sufficiently swelled to break. Alcman (Frag. iv. 6) uses the same epithet in application to a wave. May this hard earth cleave to the Nadir hell, Down, down, and close again, and nip me flat If I be such a traitress : From Homer, 11. iv. 182, &c., through Yirgil {.En. iv. 24) :— Sed milii vel tellus optem prius ima dehiscat. He dragg'd his eyebrow lashes down, and made A snowy penthouse for his hollow eyes : Suggested by Homer : — TTau 5/ r' fTncTKvviov khtcl) eXKfrat, ocrae kciXvtttcov {Iliad, xvii. 136) (And drags down all his brow, covermg his eyes). For in a wink the false love turns to hate : More bluntly Milton :— Lust, hard by hate {Pa7: Lost, i. 417). 140 ILLUSTRATIONS OF TENNYSON We now come to the poem which is perhaps the most popular of the Idyhs — Laioicclot and Elaine. Ahnost aU the details of this beautiful episode are taken from the eighteenth book of Malory's work. A minute comparison with the prose tale will, indeed, leave Tennyson little but graces of diction and con- summate skill as a story-teller in verse. We are, however, indebted to him for the legend of the diamonds, for Elaine's song and dream, and for the fine portrait of Launcelot. The action of the piece opens, as in EnUJ, at a central point. Yve find Elaine in the possession of her hero's shield, and already under the spell of that pr.ssion which was to bring her to the grave. The poet then takes us back, telling us by way of episode under what circumstances she obtained the shield — under what circumstances she lost her young heart. Launcelot, having resolved to joust in disguise in a great tournament which was about to be held at Oamelot, presents himself before the Lord of Astolat. ' Fair Sir,' said Sir Launcelot to liis host, ' I woiild pray you to lend nie a shield that were not openly known.' ' Sir,' said his host, ' ye shall have j'oiir desire, for me scemeth ye to be one of the likeliest knights of the world, and therefore I will show you friendship. Sir, wit yo well that I have two sons but late made knights, and the eldest hight Sir Tirro, and he was hurt that same day that he was made a knight, and his shield you shall have.' This old baron had a daughter that was called that time the Fair Maid of Astolat. And ever she beheld Sir Launcelot wonderfully. How dramatically the Laureate has set this scene will be familiar to every one ; and familiar to every one will also be the singularly graphic picture of Launcelot IDYLLS OF THE KING 141 which he has taken the opportunity of giving us. The lines — Marr'd as he was, he seem'd the p^oocUiest man That ever among ladies ate in hall, And noblest — are transferred from Sir Ector's lament over Launcelot in chapter clxxvi. of the Eomance : — Thou wert the goodliest person that ever came among press of knights, and thou wert the meekest man and the gentlest that ever ate in hall among ladies. In the portrait of Lavaine — rapt By all the sweet and sudden passion of youth Towards greatness in its elder, ' you have fought. O tell us — for we live apart — you know Of Ai-thur's glorious wars ! ' — • who will not call to mind Virgil's description of the young and generous Pallas ? The haunting beauty of these three lines {.Eneid, x. 160-162), so simple, so magically picturesque, is not likely to have escaped a reader like Tennyson : — Pallasque sinistro Affixus lateri jam quaerit sidera, opacas Noctis iter, jam quce ixissus tcrrdque mariquc. And Elaine besought Sir Launcelot to wear upon him at the justs a token of hers. ' Fair damscd,' said Sir Launcelot, ' and if I grant you that, ye may say I do more for your love than ever I did for lady or damsel.' And then he said, ' Fair maiden, I will grant you to wear a token of yours, and therefore what it is show it me.' ' Sir,' she said, ' it is a red sleeve of mine, of scarlet well embroidered with great pearls.' So Sir Launcelot received it, and said, ' Never did I erst so much for no damsel.' And then Sir Launcelot betook the fair maiden his shield in keeping, and prayed her to keep that until that he came again : 143 ILLUSTRATIONS OF TENNYSON Siiddcnly flash'd on her a wild desire, That he should wear her favour at the tilt. SliG hravcd a riotous heart in asking for it. ' Fair Lord will you wear My favour at this tourney ? ' ' Nay,' said he, ' Fair lady, since I never yet have worn Favour of any lady in the lists. Well, I will wear it, fetch it out to me ; "What is it ? And she told him, ' A red sleeve Broider'd with pearls,' and brought it ; then he bound Her token on his helmet, with a smile, Saying, ' I never yet have done so nmch For any maiden living,' a7ul the blood S^irang to her face • Do me this grace, m^' child, to have my shield In keeping till I come.' Then follow the tournament — the victory — the woundmg of Launcelot. The slight cliiTerences of detail between the incidents as given in the Eomance and as given in the Idyll, we shall not stop to consider, as they are of little moment. But in the visit of Sir Gawain to Astolat there is in the Idyll an interesting variation. In the Eomance he appears as the loyal friend of Launcelot. In the Idyll he appears as a treacherous trifler, attempting to estrange Elaine from her lover, and hinting that, even after she has become Launcelot's bride, they may, if she will * learn the courtesies of the Court,' learn to ' know each other.' This is no doubt introduced to illustrate the increasing corruption of the Eound Table — to mark the growth of that canker which, originating with Launcelot and Gui- nevere, was now rapidly pursuing its destructive course. Meanwhile Launcelot is l.ying wounded and grievously sick at a hermitage to which he has been carried, IDYLLS OF THE KING 143 So Sir Lavaine brought her in to Lanncelot, and when she saw him Ho so sick and pale in his bed, she might not speak, but suddenly she fell to the earth down suddenly in a swoon. . . . And when she came to herself Sir Launcelot kissed her, and said ' Fair maiden, why fare ye thus ? ' And her Lavaine across the poplar grove Led to the caves Then she that saw him lying misleek, mishorn, Gaunt, as it were the skeleton of himself, Utter'd a little tender dolorous cry. The sound not wonted in a place so still Woke the sick knight Her face was near, and as we kiss the child That does the task assign'd, he kiss'd her face. At once she slipp'd like water to the floor. AVhether the Laureate has in this case improved upon his original, whether a sudden shock of surprise as in the Eomance, or a sudden kiss from a lover as in the poem, would be most likely to make a maiden faint away, I must leave to critics more experienced than myself in such matters to decide. Elaine never went from Sir Launcelot, but watched him night and day, and there was never woman did more kindlier for man than she : And never woman yet since man's first fall Did kindlier mito man ; but her deep love Upbore her. And now the plot deepens. Launcelot has re- covered, and is about to take his departure, ' My Lord Launcelot, now I see ye will depart. Now, fair knight and coi;rteous knight, have mercy upon me and suffer me not to die for thy love.' ' "What would ye that I did '? ' said Sir Launcelot. ' I would have you to my husband,' said Elaine. ' Fair damsel, I thank you,' said Sir Launcelot, ' but truly,' said he, ' I cast me never to be a wedded man.' ' Then, fair knight,' said she, ' will ye be my love ? ' ' Jesu defend me,' said Sir 144 ILLUSTRATIONS OF TENNYSON Laiincelot, ' for then I rewarded to your father and your brother full evil for their great goodness.' ' Alas ! ' said she, ' then must I die for your love.' ' But because, fair damsel, that ye love me as you say you do, I will for your goodwill and kindness show you good goodness. Whensoever ye shall set yoiir heart upon some knight that will wed you, I shall give you together a thousand pounds yearly.' ' Of all this,' said the maiden, ' I will none, but if ye will not wed me, or else be my lover, ■wit ye well, Sir Launcelot, my good da^^s are done.' In Tennyson's version of this — there is no neces- sity for quoting it — Elaine, though as fervidly em- phatic, is less indelicately importunate. The struggle between the uncontrollable passion which has made her speak, and the maiden modesty ^Yhich would seal her lips — a struggle of which there are no traces in the Piomance — is depicted with great skill. But not so powerfully or subtly, I cannot forbear adding, as the same struggle has been depicted by Apollonius Ehodius. Let any one who would compare the modern with the ancient poet, in this, surely a crucial test of a poet's power, read side by side with this portion of Elaine the Arcjoiumtica from line G43 of the third book to line 709 — and he will read further. Tennyson has been careful to soften Launcelot's refusal by the paternal air he makes him assume in assuring the poor maid that her love is mere sudden fancy ; that he is thrice her age ; that she would be throwing herself away upon him. The promise of ' a thousand pounds " in the event of her marriage, is magnified into ' broad land and territory,' and enhanced by the assurance that the donor would 'be her knight for ever. But all is in vain — She shrieked shrilly and fell down in a swoon, and then women bare her into her chamber, and there she made overmuch IDYLLS OF THE KLNG 145 sorrow, . . . And she matle such sorrow clay and night that she never slept, eat, nor drank. There is no need for us to comment on Tennyson's exquisite expansion of these simple words. It may be noticed in passing that the fine Hne— hidicrously out of place in the mouth of a child like Elaine — Never yet Was noble man but made ignoble talk — is the precise equivalent of a line in iEschylus— 6 6' a-^QovT]Tl)% y' oIk (TTiCq^os neXfi {Agamemnon, 908) (He who is not an object of envy is not an object of emula- tion). So when she had thus endured a ten days that she feebled so that she must needs pass out of the world, then she shrived her clean and received her Creator. . . . And then she called her father and her brother, and heartily she prayed her father that her brother might write a letter like as she did endite it. Ar.d when the letter was written word by word like as she divised, then she prayed her father that she might be watched until slie were dead. All this Tennyson has of course exactly reproduced, as all that follows belongs likewise to Malory — the black-draped barge, the gorgeous coverlet, the dumb servitor, the fair corpse with the letter in her hand, the picture of Launcelot and Guinevere standing in the oriel, the knights thronging round. Two par- ticulars the poet has added to the picture, one of a somewhat commonplace character suggested by Byron, the other suggested perhaps by Virgil — the lily, and ' the silken case with braided blazonings' — the exuvice dnlces dam fata Deiisque sinchant. The lily was of course meant as a type of purity, but it was scarcely L ■146 ILLUSTRATIONS OL TENNYSON needed. The remark in the letter that the dead writer had come to say a last farewell to the cruel lover who had never said farewell to her in life, is also a touch of the Laureate's. To the poet also belong the concluding lines — Launcelot's soliloquy, perhaps the finest passage in the whole poem, one of the finest Tennyson has ever written. The poem has several reminiscences from the works of other poets and writers, particularly, as might Ue expected, from the fourth A\nvid. In me there dwells No greatness, save it be some far-off touch Of greatness, to know well I am not great : Gf. the well-known remark of Socrates in Plato's Ai)o]o(j}j, ch. ix : — oiiTos ao({)o}TaTo<; eariv uaris tyrcoKev un ovSevui a^ius eari rrj xik'qOda TTpos ao(plav (That man is the wisest who knows that he is in reality of no worth at all with respect to wisdom). The fine simile — All together down upon him Bare, as a wild wave in the wide North-sea, Green-glimmering toward the summit, bears, with all Its stormy crests that smoke against the skies, Down on a bark — is obviously borrowed from the Iliad, where it draws on three different similes. ol 8' coare [J-tya Kviia BaXaaar]! fvpVTTOpoio vrjoi VTTfp rni}(^oov KaTa(3i](T(Tni, ottttut' (Trtlr} Is di'epov {II. XV. o81-4) (As when a great wave of the wide-waved sea sweeps down oyer the bulwarks of a ship when the might of the wind is on it). CL, too, IluiJ, XV. G2-i sqq. IDYLLS OF THE KIXG 147 For the * stormy crests ' see IWad, iv. 42-56. The ' green-ghmmering toward the summit ' is Tennyson's own fine touch. Faith unfaithful kept him falsely true : Cf. AndociJcs for a similar oxymoron : — fi(Tr]yr]aafXii'0) fitv Ef 0tX?;rW7ri(Trti' toji' iu dvdpoiitoi^ uiriaTOTaT'qv ijvavTicoOr]!' {De Mijst., Bekker edit. Orat. Alt, p. ix. 3o). The owls Wailing liatl power upon her, and she mixt Her fancies with the sallow-rifted glooms Of evening, and the moanings of the wind : This passage is an admirable illustration of Tenny- son's power of transfiisinij the very essence of Virgil into English. Nothing could be more completely the counterpart of the verses in j-Eneid, iv. 4G0, where Dido, with the shadow of her fate falling on her, seems to hear the phantom voice of Sichtx'us and ' mixes her fancies ' with the glooms of night and the owd's lonely wail : — Hinc exaudiri voces ct verha voeantis Visa viri nox quiini terras obscura teneret; Solaque culmiuibus ferali carmine bubo ya'pe queri, et longas in fletum ducere voces (From it she thought she clearly heard a voice, even the accents of her husband calling her, when night was wrapping the eanh with darlaiess ; and on the roof the lonel}^ owl in funereal strains kept oft complaining, drawing out into a wail its protracted notes). It is interesting to compare the beautiful picture of the dead Elaine with Byron's equally beautiful pic- ture of the dead Medora {Corsair, iii. 19). The points of resemblance make it difficult to think that .148 ILLUSTRATIONS OF TP.XiWSON Tennyson has not borrowed from it, as a comj)arative extract \Yill show. Compare — In licr iMLjlit hand tlic lily All her ljii.L(ht hair streainint? down .... And she herself in white, All but her face, and that clear-featured face Was lovely, for she did not seem as dead, But fast asleep, and lay as tho' she smiled — with In life itself she was so still and fair That death with gentler aspect wither'd there. And the cold flowers her colder hand contain'd In that last grasp as tenderly were strain'd As if she scarcely felt, but feign'd, a sleep. Her lips .... seem'd as they forbore to smile, But the white shroiid and each extended tress, Long, fair, &c. The hues — To doubt her fairness were to want an eye. To doubt her pureness were to want a heart — sound hke an echo from Shakespeare. The Hob/ (irdil is a series of adaptations, with more original touches than are usual with the Laureate, from those portions of Malory's Eomance which deal with this sublime legend, namely book xiii. ch. vi. to the end of book xvii. Occasionally the prose story is followed very closely, as in the revelation of the Grail : — And all at once, as there we sate, we heard A cracking and a riving of the roofs, &c. — which should be compared with the seventh chapter of Malory's thirteenth book ; as, again, in the adven- ture of Launcelot, which should be compared with IDYLLS OF THE KIXG 149 the fourteenth and llfteenth chapters of hook seven- teen. In this poem Tennyson's highest praise is, the skiU with which he has grouped his details into a series of elaborate allegorical symbols, the ingenuity with which he has connected the story with the sin of Launcelot, with the failure of Arthur's life-purpose, witli the dissolution of the Round Table. To him belong also beauties of diction, felicitous touches, felicitous symbolism. But to Malory, or rather to his predeces- sors, belongs the palm of invention, belong the pictu- resqueness and grandeur, the pathos, the weird and unearthly beauty of this divine legend. The moral of the poem, which is summed up in the concluding words of Arthur, finds an admirable commentary in the concluding stanzas of the tenth canto of the first book of Spenser's Faerie Qiieene. Pelleas and FJtarre is the versification of a story told in the twentieth, twenty-first, and twenty-second chapters of the fourth book of the Morte cVArtliur. The commencement and setting of the Idyll — the portion, that is to say, which describes young Pelleas and his meeting with Ettarre in the forest, as well as the portion which connects her sensual frivolity with the sin of Guinevere, and the treachery of Gawain with the treachery of Launcelot — are due to the poet. The concluding pages narrating the frenzy of Pelleas and his encounter with Launcelot are also additions. We have no space for extending quotations, but it may be interesting to compare the passage in which Malory relates the incident of the sword vritli the Laureate's poetical rendering : — And when he had ridden nigh half a mile, he tnrned again and thought to slay them both, and when he saw them both ISO ILLUSTRATIONS OF TENNYSON sleepinj^ fast .... he said thus to liimself : ' Thongh this knight bo never so false, I ^vill never slay him sleeping, for I will never destroy the fair order of knighthood.' And ere he had ridden half a mile, he returned again .... and pulled out his sword naked in his hand, and went to them there as they lay ; and yet he thought it were a shame to slay them sleeping, and laid the naked sword overthwart botii their thi'oats, and so took his horse and rode away : ' I will go back and slay them where they lie.' And so went back, and seeing them yet in sleep Said, ' Ye that so dishallow the holy sleep, Yoixr sleep is death,' and drew the sword, and thought, ' What ! slay a sleeping knight ? The King hath bound And sworn me to this brotherhood.' . • . Then tiu-n'd, and so return'd, and groaning laid The naked sword athwart their naked throats, Then left it, and them sleeping. . . . And forth he pass'd. This poem contains a simile, the history of which is pei'haps AYorth tracing : — As when A stone is flung into some sleej^iug tarn The circle widens till it lip the marge : This simile appears fn-st, I believe, in Silius Italicus, ^Yho gives us the follo^ving exquisitely finished cameo : Sic, ubi jierrupit stagnantem calculus undam, Exiguos format per prima volumina gyros, Mox, tremulum vibrans, motu gliscente, li(juorem Multiplicat crebros sinuati gurgitis orbes ; Donee postremo laxatis circulus oris Contingat geminas patulo curvamme ripas {Punica, xiii. 24 sqq.) (So, when a pebble has broken up still water, small are the rings that it forms at first by its circling motions. And then as motion gathers it sends vibrations through the tremulous li(|uid and multiplies the thick coming circlets of IDYLLS OF THE KIXG 151 . ■ . the curving flood, until at last, as the rims relax, the circle spreading widely reaches both hanks). See, too, for a less elaborate description Seneca Q\at. Qiuest. i. 8). Chaucer employs it in a description not less elaborate than that of Silius {House of Fame, ii. 283) ; and Shakespeare {llcnrji VI. Pt. I. act i. so. 2). So, too, Phineas Fletcher (Purple Ishind, canto v. st. 47)^ -Parnell rivals Silius in his highly finished picture (Hermit, 13-20), so also does Pope {Temple of Fame, 436-440) . He employs it again in Fssaij on Man, Epist. iv. 3G4. , i.j Till the sweet heavens have fill'd it (so again Maiiatia — She could not look on the siveet heavens) ; The epithet is Shakespeare's : — Is there not rain enough in the sweet Jieavcns To wash it white as snow '? [Hamlet, iii. 3.) The Last Tournament has nothing which exactly corresponds to it in the original Piomance, and "the chief incidents in the work appear to be the poet's in- vention. The catastrophe, the murder of Tristram, is founded on the following passage in the Morte _d' Arthur:— ' That is hard to do,' said Sir Launcelot, 'for by Sir Tristram I may have a warning. For when, by means of treaties, Sir Tristram broxight again La Beale Isoud unto King Mark from Joyeus Gard, look what befell on the end, how shamefully that false traitor Mark slew him as he sat harping afore his lady La Beale Isoud : with a grounden glaive he thrust him in behind to the heart' {Morte d' Arthur, xx. ch. G). 152 ILLUSTRATIOXS OF TEXNVSON In (inincverr, Tennyson (lra^YS to some very slight extent on the nineteenth and twentieth books of the Mortc (V Arthur, l)nt in no instance has he followed his original closely. Guinevere, like most of Tenny- son's earlier poems, proves the diligence with which he sought materials for enriching his work. In his description of the genii and faerie spirits which in earlier and happier ages haunted Britain, as legends say, he has drawn on Crofton Croker's Fuiri/ Legends. The story which suggested the amusing ghost inci- dent in WalkiiKj to the Mail, supplies him here with one of his most pleasing pictures : — Down in the cellars merry bloated things Shoulder'd the spigot, straddling on the butts "While the wine ran. This is taken almost literally from Crofton Croker: — On advancing into the cellar, he perceived a little figure, about six inches in height, astride upon the pipe of the oldest port, and bearing a spigot upon his shoulder {Fairij Legends, edit. 1802, p. 70). It is possible too that the lines — The flickering fair^'-circle wheel'd and broke Flying, and link'd again, and wheel'd and broke Flying, for all the land was full of life — may have been suggested by the concluding verses of Addison's charming mock heroic the Pygmceogerano- junehia : — Lffititia penitus vacat, indulgetque Choreis Angustosque terit calles,. viridesque per orbes Turba levis salit, In the linesrr- IDYLLS OF THE KIXG 153 And in thy bowers of Camelot or of Usk Thy shadow still would glide from room to room, Aiid I should evermore be vext with thee In hanging robe or vacant ornament, Or ghostly footfall echoing on the stair — \C we have an admirable expansion and interpretation of two pregnant lines in the A^iajucinnon of iEsch3'liis : — (pcicTfj-a 8ij^(i Sufioiv nucKTo-eiv [Again. 404-5) (And, in his j-carning for her who is over the sea, a phantom will seem to reign over his palace). What are Tennyson's lines but the simple unfolding of what is latent here ? The Shakespearian reminiscence {King John, act iii. sc. 4) is too obvious to be noticed. The Passing of Arthur follows closely the original Romance, and is contained in the third, fourth, and fifth chapters of the twenty-first book. The opening is original, and in the commencement there are one or two alterations in the original story. Thus : — And then the King Arthur drew with his host down by the seaside westward towards Salisbury. Tennyson makes Lj'onesse the scene of the battle. The Eomance describes it as being fought * on a Monday after Trinity Sunday,' Tennyson on the last day of the year. Most of the details of the battle, the mist, &c. are Tennyson's ; his fine description being evolved for the most part out of the words — And never was seen a dolefuUer battle in no Christian land. For there was but rushing and riding, foining and striking, and many a griin word was there spoken either to other, and many a deadly stroke (chap. iv.). It is not necessary to institute any minute com- 154 ILLUSTRATIONS OF TEXXYSON parison between tlie exact minor details given in the Romance and the poem, hut it will suffice to illustrate the leading and important points. ' Thei-efore,' said Arthur, ' take thou my pjood sword Excalibur, and go with it to yonder water-side. And when thou comest there I charge thee throw my sword on that water, and come again and tell me what thou thei'c seest.' ' My Lord,' said Bedivere, ' j'our commandment shall be done, and lightly will I bring you word again.' So Sir Bedivere departed, and by the way he beheld that noble sword, that the pommel and the haft were all of precioiis stones, and then he said to himself, ' If I throw this rich sword in the water, thereof shall never come to good, but harm and loss.' And then Sir Bedivere hid Excalibur under a tree. In the poem the bare statement ' So Sir Bedivere departed ' is expanded into a beautiful picture. He steps athwart the place of tombs, Wliere lay the mighty bones of ancient men, Old knights, and over them the sea-wind sang Shrill, chill; we see him passing by ' zig-zag paths and juts of pointed rock,' till he comes to ' the shining levels of the lake.' The line which simply tells how ' the pommel and the haft were of precious stone ' re^ appears as All tlie haft twinkled with diamond sparks, ' Myriads of topaz-lights, and jacinth work Of subtlest jewellery; and the effect is still more heightened by their being seen in the light ' of the winter moon, Brightening the skirts of a long cloud.' The ' under a tree ' becomes tlie many-knotted waterflags That wliistled stiff and dry about the marge. IDYLLS OF THE KING 155 In the This w.iy and that dividing the swift mind we have of course a literal version of Yirgirs line — AtquG animum nunc hue celercm nunc dividit ilhic {ALn. iv. 285). A few lines further on, the sentence ' I saw nothing but the waters wap and the waves wan ' is transmuted into two lines containing tv,o of the finest onomatopoeic effects in our language : — I heard the ripple washing in the reeds And the wild water lapping on the crag. Again : — Then Sir Bedivere departed and went to the sword, and lightly took it up and went to the waterside, and then he bound the girdle about the hilts, and theii he threw the sword as far into the water as he might, and then came an arm and a hand above the water, and met it and caught it, and so shook it thrice and brandished, and then vanislied a-way the hand with the sword in the water. In the poem we have the ' Ijrand making lightnings in the splendour of the moon ; ' we have also the magnificent simile which compares its flashing flight to ' the strea^mers of the northern morn, Seen where the moving isles of winter shock By night ; ' the hand is * cloth'd in white samite, mystic, wonderful.' We may notice, in passing, that Arthur's words to Bedivere — Woe is mc ! Authority forgets a dying king — may have been suggested by an anecdote of Queen Elizabeth. ' Cecil intimated that she must go to bed, if it were only to satisfy her people. "Must!" 156 ILLUSTRATIOXS OF TENNYSON she exclaimed ; "is nuint a word to be addressed to princes ? Little man, little man, thy father if he had been alive durst not have used that word, Jnd thou hast f/roiru 2))rsiniipti(()iiH because thou hnowest that I shall die" ' (Lingard, vol. vi. p. 31G.) But perhaps the Laureate was as unconscious that he was recalling Elizabeth as Elizabeth was doubtless ignorant that she was recalling Marlowe. The coincidence is worth pointing out : — Leicester. Your Majesty must go to Killingwortli. K. Edward. Must ! It is somewhat hard when kings must go (Marlowe, Edward II.). To continue : — And when they were at the water-side, even fast by the banJi hoved a little barge with many fair ladies in it, and among them all was a Queen, and all they had black hoods, and all they wept and shrieked when they saw King Arthur. ' Now put me into the barge,' said the King ; and so they did softly. And there received him three Queens with great mourning, and so they set him down, and in one of their laps King Arthur laid his head ; and then that Queen said, ' Ah ! dear brother, why have ye tarried so long from me ? ' He would be a bold critic who should pronounce that Tennj'son has improved this. He would be a still bolder critic who should wish to see a touch or letter of Tenn3^son's version altered. The truth is that in this case there is no parallel between the poet and the romancist. Each had to tell a story in itself so wondrously beautiful, so touching, so suggestive, so picturesque, that it mattered little how it was narrated provided only that it were narrated with fidelity. Malory told it as Herodotus w^ould have told it ; the Laureate tells it as Sophocles or Virgil might have IDYLLS OF THE KLYG 157 done. Tennyson's elaborate beauties command our admiration. Malory's simple words go straight to the heart. In the one case we dwell upon the eloquence of the speaker ; in the other Ave are lost in the story he tells. ^Ye must, however reluctantly, acknowledge that in Tennyson's version much of the pathos of the riomance disappears. ' And called him by his name, complaining loud,' is, if one may ven- ture to say so, a poor substitute for ' Ah ! dear brother, why have ye tarried so long from me '? ' though it has the attraction of beirg an echo from Homer. On the noble lines — The old order changeth, j-ielding place to new, And God fulfils himself in many ways, Lest one good custom should corrupt the world — a passage in Greene's James IV. (act v. sc. 4) fur- nishes an interesting commentary : — Should all things still remain in one estate, Should not in greatest arts some scars be found, Were all upright nor changed, what world were this '? A chaos made of quiet, yet no world, Because the parts thereof did still accord : This matter craves a variance. For the phrase — Looking wistfidly . . . As in a picture — see Agamemnon, 230 : — f'liaXk €Ka(jTov 6vTr]poii> utt' ofxiiaTos jSeXfi (piKuLKTco, TvpiTTovaa d' u>s iv ypa(f)ais (And each of her slayers she smote with the eye's pity- wooing dart, standing out conspicuous as in a picture). The germ of the two fine lines — 15S ILLUSTRATIONS OF TENNYSON For so the whole rountl world is every way Boimd by gold chains about the feet of God — is of course to be found in Homer (Iliad, viii. 25-G). Cf. too Plato, Thc(('t('tns, cliii. 10 ; but it may have been directly suggested either l)y a sentence in Bacon's Adr((ii('ej>ic/it of Lein-iiinr/, book i. (id init. — According' to the allegory of the poets . . . tlie highest link of iiatiu'e's chain must needs bo tied to the foot of Jupiter's chair — or by a sentence in Archdeacon Hare's Sermon on the Lair of Sclf-Sacrijiec : — This is the golden chain of love whereby the whole creation is bound to the tlirone of the Creator. Where falls not hail or rain, &.c. : Adapted from Odyssen, vi. 42-5 : — bdi (paai Oeciiv e'Soy d(r^a)6r]vai Kai ncXacrai to) (ttI TTua-i 6(u> (Plotinus, edit. Creuzer, vol. i. Ixxvii.). Plotinus has himself described it, cf. Enncad. IV. lib. viii. cap. i. : — ni.XXaKis (ydpupevos (Is (pavrov fV tov (rcoparos, Koi yiyvopevos Tcou peu (IWwv e^o), e'pavTov 8e f'lcrco BavpaerTov ifkiKov opQiv koKKos . . . Kul TO) 6tLC0 els TOVTov yeyevrpifos, &C. (I often, awaking out of the body into mj'self and beinp; out- side all things, but within nayself, do behold a wondrous beauty, . . . having become one with the di^^ine). See, too, the whole of chapters ix., x., and xi. oi Enncad. IX. lib. ix. See too the magnificent passage, Enncad. YI. lib. ix. ch. ix. See Norris's (the Platonist) Elevation (Works, p. 53), Mrs. Bro^Yning's llhapsodij of Life's Progress, and Wordsworth's Tintern Ahhey : — That serene and blessed mood In which th' affections gently lead us on Until, the breath of this corporeal frame And e'en the motion of our human blood Almost suspended, we are laid asleep In body and become a living soul While We see into the life of things ; and Ode on the Intimations, j)assage commencing — Not for these I raise — 172 ILLUSTRATIONS OF TENNYSON and the well-known anecdote which Wordsworth has told of himself — see Wordsworth's Poems (edit. Morley), p. 358. Cf., too, Sir Thomas Browne's Hydriotcqjhia, chap. v. : — If any have been so happy as truly to understand Christian annihilation, ecstasies, exolution, liquefaction, transformation, gustation of God, and inp^ression into the divine shadow, they have already had an handsome anticipation of Heaven. It is, however, quite possible that the whole poem may have been suggested by the two speeches of Ahasuerus in Shelley's Jlcllas— in any case those speeches may be compared with the present poem : — Disdain thee ? not the worm beneath my feet ! The Fathomless has care for meaner things Than thou canst dream Talk no more Of thee and me, the future and the past : But look on that which cannot change — the One, The unborn and the undying. Earth and Ocean, Space and the isles of life or light This whole Of suns and worlds and men and beasts and flowers. With all the silent or tempestuous workings By which they have been, are, or cease to be, Is but a vision The future and the past are idle shadows Of thought's eternal flight, they have no being ; Naught is but that it feels itself to be All is contain'd in each. In Loclisley Hall Si.iiij Years After, it is needless lo say that in the millennian aspiration, when the motto is to be All for each, and each for all, the poet has appropriated the famous Swiss watchword. LATER MISCELLANEOUS POEMS 173 E'en the black Australian dying hopes he shall return, a white : Compare Sir Thomas Browne, CJiristian Morals, sec- tion vi. : — Some negroes who believe the Resurrection think that they shall rise white. Browne, in his turn, got this curious fact from Mandelso. Speaking of the tribes ' Hving between the rivers Gambea and Sanaga,' he says of them, * They beHeve the dead will rise again, but that they shall be white' (Mandelso's Travels, translated by John Davies, 1662, book iii. page 264). In Dcmcter and Persephone, Tenn3'son has, like Browning in Balaiistion's Adventure, reinterpreted an ancient legend, and this reinterpretation constitutes, of course, the life and soul of the poem. How far such reinterpretations are justifiable, especially when they involve ideas and sentiments of which the ancients could not have had the remotest conception, it is no part of this commentary to discuss. The legend on which Tennyson has worked has been elaborately told in the Homeric Hymn to Dcnieter, by Ovid in his Fasti, iv. 419-620, and again in his Metamorphoses, v. 384- 571, and by Claudian in his Dc raptii Proserphue. Tennyson follows Ovid — the Metamorphoses version — most closely. Led upward by the God of ghosts and dreams "Who laid thee at Eleusis : This is from the Homeric 11)/ mn, 335 sqq. & 384. "When here thy hands let fall the gather'd flower : Ovid prettily adds — 174 ILLUSTRATIONS OF TEXNYSON". '■ Haec quoque virgiueum luovit jactura doloreiu (Met. v. 401) (This loss also moved the virgin's woe). A gleam as of the moon "When first she peers along the tremulous deep Fled wavering o'er thy face : Ovid compares this joy to the sun breaking from rainy clouds : — Laeta dese frons est : ut sol, qui tectus aquosis Nubibus ante fuit, victis ubi nubibus exit {id. 570-1) (Glad is the face of the Goddess, as the sun, which before has been covered with watery clouds, when he comes forth from clouds now dispersed). Tennyson has not thrown away Ovid's hint, but uses it a few Hnes on, not as a simile : — And the sun Burst from a swimming fleece of winter gra^-. iVnd all at once their arch'd necks midnight-mancd Jet upward : Suggested by Ovid : — Exhortatur equos : quorum per coUa, jubasque Excutit obscm-a tinctas ferrugine habenas {id. 403-4) (He encourages his steeds, along whose necks and manes he shakes the reins dyed with the swarthy rust). The lines describing her wanderings may be compared with Ovid's diffuse description {Fasti, iv. 462 s(2q.). And set the mother waking in amaze To find her sick one whole : An allusion to the restoration of the sick child of Celeus, Triptolemus, told in Ovid {Fasti, iv. 537-544). The incident of her meeting with the Fates appears to be Tennyson's invention. LATER MISCELLANEOUS POEMS 175 I would not minf^le with their feasts, Their nectar sniack'd of hemlock : So the Homeric Iljjmn, 49-50 : — ouSe TvoT dfii3po(TLrjs km vtKTapos i]8vTroToio TTiKTcraT aKrj\(\xtvrj (Nor in her woe did she taste ambrosia and the sweet nectar). Eain-rotten died the wheat, the barley spears Were hollow-husk'd, the leaf fell, &c. : Paraphrased from Ovid, i\Ict. v. 480-486. That thon shoiddst dwell For nine whole months of each whole year with me, Three dark ones in the shadow with thy King : Tennyson here follows the Homeric Ili/nm, not Ovid: — iJTTu KfC6((Ti yalrjs oiKtjadS uipoiv TpiTaTTjv jxfpih fty eviavTov, rdahe 8v(0 ivap' epoL re Kal cihXois cidavuTOKTiv {Hymn, 397) (Under the recesses of earth shalt thou dwell for the third part of the seasons in the year, and two parts with me and the other Immortals). Ovid gives her six months above, and six months below {Met. v. 5G5-67). The shadowy warriors glide Along the silent field of aspliodel: Cf. Odijsscij, xi. 538-9 :— ^olra fxaKpa ^i[3a(ra kut da(Po8e\6v Xeipcova (And the spirit of the fleet-footed son of J^^acus passed with great strides along the field of asphodel). The silence of the world below (broken often enouf^h it is true) is what Virgil especially emphasises : — -V 176 ILLUSTRATIONS OF TENNYSON luipcrium est animaruin, niubraeque silentes loca nocte tacentla late {jEn. vi. 2G4-5) ; Per taciturn nemus (386). Among the miscellaneous poems there is one, Tlie I'hiji, which certainly appears to have been suggested by Quarles : — Act first, this earth, a stage so gloom'd with woe You all but sicken at the shifting scenes. And yet be patient. Our Play-wright may show In some fifth act what this wild Drama means. Compare — My soul, sit thou a patient looker-on, Judge not the play before the jilay is done. Its plot has many changes : ev'ry day Speaks a new scene : the last act crowns tlie play (QuARLEs's Emblems, book i. epig. 15). And now I l)ring this my humljle drudgery to a conclusion, and in doing so am anxious to repeat that the object with which I have undertaken it has simply been to illustrate the works of a classical English poet as the works of other classical poets, both in our own and in other languages, arc illustrated, and to show how indissolubly linked is the poetr}' of England with the poetry of the Greek, the Latin, and the Italian classics. How far the immense extent of Lord Tennyson's indebtedness to his predecessors in various languages may be judged to detract from his claim to originality, is a question with which I have no con- cern. Many analogies and parallels no doubt resolve themselves into mere coincidences ; many are ex- amples of those poetic commonplaces which must necessarily abound wherever poetry finds voluminous expression ; but the greater part of them as obviously LATER MISCELLANEOUS POEMS 177 represent the material on which he has worked as the Homeric parodies in the J'hwid indicate their originals. It is here that I trust my illustrations may he of service to those for whom they are intended to he of service, that is to say, to serious students of a poet who is worth serious study. From all the higher work of the critic, from all attempts at the kind of criticism which is supposed to reflect any sort of credit on a critic, I have refrained. Nobis in arcto et iufjlorins labor. But I should not like it to he supposed that because I have instituted a comparison l)etween Lord Tennyson and Virgil, I have assumed that they stand on the same level. The distance which separates the author of In ]\I('i)ioriam and the Idi/Us of the Kinr/ from the author of the Georgics and the ^Eneid, is almost as co]isiderahle as the distance which separates all other poets now living from the author of In Menioriam. It measures indeed the difference between a great classic whose power and charm will be felt in all ages, and in all regions coextensive with civilised humanity, and a poet who will be a classic intelligible to those only who speak his language and think his thoughts. In tone and temper Lord Tennyson is, to borrow an expression of M. Taine, the most ' insular ' of eminent English poets, as he is assuredly the most conventional. And it is this which explains the extraordinary fascination which for nearly half a century he has exercised over his countrymen. A gift of felicitous and musical expression which it would be no exaggeration to de- scribe as marvellous, an instinctive sympathy with what is best and most elevated in the sphere of the commonplace — of commonplace thought, of common- place sentiment and activity — with corresponding N 178 ILLUSTRATIONS OF TENNYSON representative power, a most rare faculty of seizing and fixing in very perfect form what is commonly so inexpressible because so impalpaljle and evanescent in emotion and impression, and a power of catching and rendering the charm of Nature, of meadow, wood, and mountain, of sky and stream, of tree and flower, with a fidelity and vividness which resembles magic, and lastly, unrivalled skill in choosing, re- polishing, and resetting the gems which are our common inheritance from the past : in these gifts is to be found the secret of his eminence. And these gifts will suffice for immortality. But it is well that we should not accustom ourselves to talk and judge loosely. It requires very little critical discernment to foresee that among the English poets of the present century the first place will ultimately be assigned to Wordsworth, the second to Byron, and the third to Shelley. Had the Poet Laureate fulfilled the pro- mise of the 3/orf(' (V Arilinr lie might have stood beside his master, and England might have had her .Eneid. As it is, be will probably occupy the same relative position in English poetry as De Quincey occupies in English prose. Both are Classics — immortal Classics — but they are Classics in fragments. INDEX Achilles Tatius, 44 ; quoted, 40 Addison, his Piigm(2ogeranoina- chia, quoted, 152 iEscHYLUs, quoted, 213, 145, 153, 157, 49, 166 AuATHox, quoted, 60-1 Ahasuerus, 172 Alkinus, Furius, traced Virgil through Latin literature, 1 ; jealous of the fame of Virgil, 4 Albiimazar, Taylor's, quoted, 2 Alceus, Tennyson contrasted with, 5 ; quoted, 110 Alciian, 29, laO ; quoted, 103 Amaclis de Gaul, 24 Anacreon, Psuedo, 29 ; quoted, 39, 42 Anamnesis : illustrations of psuedo- anamnesis from Wordsworth, Shelley, Scott, 38 ; curious ab- sence of, in ancients, ib. Andocides, quoted, 147 Anthology, Palatine, alluded to, 40 Apollonids Ehodius, Tennyson compared with, 5, 144 ; Virgil's indebtedness to, ; quoted, 104-5 ; meaning of ijep v in, IGl Apuleius, 41 Arabian Nights, 25 AuBER, reprints, 161 Akiosto, quoted, 120 bis Aristotle, 43, 162 ; his quotation of Agathon, 61 ; quoted, 79 Arrian. 33 Artemi.sii:-m, 1w7 Astolat, French form from wliich Shalott may have been derived, 35 Athex.5;us, 40, 116 Augustine, St., quoted, 98 Aulus Gellius, 110-1 Baccuylides, quoted, 115 Bacon, quoted, 65, 158 Baron, Mr., (note) 98 Batrachomriomachia, quoted, 137 Bayle, his Dictionary referred to, (and footnote) 71 Beatxie, James, 40, 41 Beaumont, Francis, quoted, 64, 160 Bion, 45 ; quoted, 46 Boccaccio, 8, 55, 160 boethius, 63 Browning, quoted, 85, 173 — Mrs., 171 Browne, Sir Thomas, 101 ; quoted, 172, 173 Burns, quoted, 62, 09 Butler, Bishop, quoted, 102 Byron, 25, 36, 145, 178 ; his dead Medora and Tennyson's dead Elaine comj^ared, 147-8; quoted, 56, 66, 97 C.vLLiMAcnus, quoted, 41, 159, 167; compared with Tennyson, 116 i8o ILLUSTRATIONS OF TENNYSON Calpurxius Sicdltts, quoted, 107 Camphkll, Thomas, quoted, (foot- note) 161 Carkw, quoted, 56 Catullus, H;3, 162; quoted, 104, 124 Caxtox, 165 Celeus, 174 Chaucer, study of Tennyson's work contrasted with that of, 5; Dream of Fair Women suggested by, 7, 48; quoted, 63; referred to, 151 Cicero, quoted, 48, 112 CiNNA, Helvius, quoted, 27 Claudian, quoted, 89, 173 Cleopatra, 49 Cleveland, John, quoted, 26 Cnidia, 45 CoBHAM, Lord, 163. Coleridge, Tennyson's debt to, 28 ; epithet /xvpidvous discovered by, (see footnote) 30 ; his infiuence on Tennyson's work, (and foot- note) 33 ; refeiTed to, 35 CoLLixs, William, quoted, 32 CONKUCIUS, 168 Congreve, quoted, 102 COMNGTON, 2, 13 Cooper, J. G., referred to, 44 Cowley, quoted, 170 CowPER, quoted, 107, 110 Crabbe, 67, 100 Cranmer : Preface to his Bible quoted, 103 Crasiiaw, Richard, quoted. 111 Creon, 1(56, 167 Choker, Crofton, quoted, 152 Cyprlan : Lays alluded to, 116 Daniel, Samuel : poem to the Countess of Cumberland, 90 Dante, contrasted with Tennyson, 5 ; Ulysses a study from, 6 ; his Inferno compared with Ulysses, 58-9; alluded to, 39, 98, 106, 108, 133 ; quoted, 44, 45, 63, 76, 81, 107, 109, 135 Darwin, Erasmus, 87 Davies, John, 173 Decamcronc. Boccaccio's. 160 De Haloneso, (juoted, 85 De Qui ;cey, 178 Diogenes Laertius, 74, 110 DoBELL, Sydney, 159, 160 Donna di Scalotta, Italian romance, 35 DoNNE, Dr. John, quoted, 91, 99 Drayton, Michael, quoted, 29 Dryden, quoted, 51 ; his rhythm compared with that of Maud, 113-4 Dumas, Alexandre, quoted, 118 DiDi Cow, book of the, 163 Ecci,ESLA.STES, Book of, 43 EicHHOFF, Frederic Gustave, 5 Elizabeth, Queen, anecdote of, 155-6 Ellis, Mr. Joseph, 163 Empedocles, 25 Epicurus, 4s, 74 Euripides, debt of Virgil to, 6, 25, 166 ; quoted, 50 Eusebius, Chronicle of, 71 EUSTATHIUS, 1 Exeter Book, 26 Exeter, Earl of, 65 Ferrier, Miss S. E., 7 FiTzoERALD, Mr. : his version of the Rubaiydt of Omar quoted, 114 Flaccus, Valerius, quoted, 137 ; great merits as a poet, id. Fletcher, John, 24 — Phineas, 151 Ford, John, quoted, 32, 50 Foe, George, quoted. 111 Franklin, Sir John, 165 Froude, Mr., 161 Gaskell, Mrs., (and footnote) 69 Gibbon, 56 Goethe, (and footnote) 98 Gordon, General, 165 Gray, a type of the imitative class of poets, 2 ; referred to, 29, 55, 92 ; quoted, 51 Greene, Eobert, quoted, 58, 157 Guarini, quoted, 61-2 INDEX Gudrnn, Lay of, 80 Guest, Lady Charlotte, 7, 12 ; quoted, 121, 122, 123, 125, 128 GuTCH, Kev. Charles, 162 Hallaji, Arthur Henry : quotation from his Remains, 44 Hare, Archdeacon, quoted, 158 Hmician MSS., 168 Hawks, Stephen, quoted. 61 Helen of Kirkcomiel, ballad of, 32 Henry : his JEneidca quoted, 17 Hekaclitus, quoted, 110 Herbert, George, 1)5, 96 ; quoted, 97 — Lord, of Cherbury, quoted, 95- 96 Herodotus, 156 Hesiod, Virgil's didactic poetry modelled on, 7 — Pseudo, quoted, 83 Heywood, Thomas, quoted, 26 Hob])es, Thomas, quoted, 80 Hodges, publisher of St. Cyprian'' s Banner, 162 Hoggins, Sarah : the story of her marriage with the Earl of Exeter forms the original of TJie Lord of Burleigh, 65 Homer, Tennyson contrasted with, 5 ; the ^neid modelled on, 7 ; Lotos-Eaters, a sketch from, 8 ; meaning of his y\avKi6oiv, 83 ; referred to, 41, 74, 119 ; quoted, 42, 52, 59, 60, 65, 78, 79, 80, 83, 84, 87, 105, 138, 139, 146, 158, 175 ; his hymns : to Hermes, quoted, 48 ; to Aphrodite, quoted, 60 ; to Demeter, 173 ; quoted, 175 bis. Horace, Tennyson compared with, 5 ; quoted, 27, 33, 49-50, 62, 76, 92, 102, 108, 111; alluded to, 59, 61, 84, 90, 100, 104, 110 Hume, David, quoted, 108 Hunt, Leigh, quoted, 83-4 Hutchinson, Lucy, quoted, 166 Iamblichus : his Life of Pythagoras quoted, 109 Ibycus, quoted, 31 ; referred to, 40 Iphigenia, 48 Jerome, quotation from his addi- tions to the Eusebian Chronicle, 71 Job, Book of, quoted, 37 Johnson, Samuel : the Women's University in The Princess sug- gested by, 8 ; quoted, 78 JoNsoN, Ben, 94 Joyce, Dr. P. W., Celtic Romances, 8, 163, 164 Juvenal, quoted, 45, 137 Keats, John, 24, 33, 47, 160 ; his in- fluence on Tennyson's work, 33; quoted, 36, 122, 138 KiNGSLEY, Charles, 161 KiRKE, Edmund, 24 Lang, Mr. Andrew, 136 Langb.aines, 1 Laura de Sade, 92 Lau-tze, 168 ; quotations from the Tau-Teh King, 168-9 Lec.\n, Yellow Book of, 163 Leopardi, 167 Lewis, David, reference to, 44 LiBANIUS, 85 Lingard, Dr. John, quoted, 155, 156 LivY, quoted, (footnote) 161 Lodge, Thomas, 24 Longfellow : his hexameters, 95 ; quoted, 98 Longinus, 12 ; quoted, 84, 85 Luc.AN, 85 Lucian, 48 LUCILIA, 71 Lucretius, Tennyson's use of, 6, 36, 48, 70 ; quoted, 49, 72, 73, 74, 77, 87, 99, 114-15, 121, 135 Lycophron, style of, 11 ; quoted, 121, 136 Lytton, Lord, 108 ILL US TRA TIONS OF TENX \ 'S, Mabinogion, see Guest, Lady Char- lotte Mackay, Mr. Eric, (and footnote) 163 MACEomus : his Saturnalia, 1 Mallet, David, quoted, 45 Malory, style of, 12 ; Tennyson's obliKations to, 118-9, 148- 14'.); quoted, 127, 128, 129, 130, 181, 132, 133, 134, 140, 141, 143, 144, 145, 149-50, 151, 153, 154, 156 ; referred to, 138-9 Mandelso : his Travels quoted, 173 Maremma, 36 Maeini, quoted, 63, 72 M.aelowe, quoted, 100, 156 Marston, John, quoted, 60, 89 Martlvl, quoted, 90 Massingee, quoted, 54 Meineke, 45 Menani/er, quoted, 45 Mk\(Eceus, 74, 166 Milton, included in the class of imitative poets, 2 ; onomatop(eia employed by, 22 ; referred to, 79, 101, lil, 160 ; quoted, 28, 29, 31, 32, 56, 61, 72, 102-3, 121, 139 Mitford, Miss, 8 ; comparison with Tennyson's Dora, 55 MiTFORi), John, 36 Monro, H. A. J., 71, 88 More, Henry : his Psyclwzoia quoted, 37 MoscHus, 40, 45, 84 ; quoted, 44, 46, 82 Moultrie, Eev. John, 7, G4-5 Napier, Sir W. F. P.: hK Peninsu- lar War quoted, 100 Nero, 70 NicANDER : his Gcorgics alluded to, 116 NoNNUs, extravavant diction of, 11 ; comi^ared ^vith Tennyson, 12 ; quoted, S3 NoRRis, John, the Platonist, 171 OccLEVE, Thomas, referred to, 63 Oi'PiAN, 83 Okelli, 5, 104 Otho, 84 Ovid, 40, 52, 76, 137, 162, 173, 175 ; quoted, 9, 47, 159-60, 174, 175 Palgkave, Sir Francis, on Ten- nyson's Lyric Poems, (and footnote) 35 Pallas, 141 Paknell, Thomas, 151 Pausanias, 83 Peele, George, quoted, 39 ; referred to, 114 Percy, Dr. Thomas: Ediqucs re- ferred to, 65 Persius, quoted, 100, 103 Peter Bell, 116 Petrarch, influence of, on In Menuriim, 92-4; quoted, 105, 10(; ; alluded to, 7, 48, 100, 101, 108 Peyeaekde, John de, 3 PiCKKEING, 163 Pindar, 165 ; quote.!, 63, 70, 83, 106, 168 Plato, quoted, 38, (see footnote) 75 ; influence of, seen in Tennyson's Tiro Voices, 38 ; alluded to, 78, 158, 160 Pliny, the Elder, quoted, 98-9 Plotinus, quoted, 91, 164, 169-70, 171 Plutaech, 33 Poets : distinction between those of the first and second order, 2-6 — , Ale\andei\n : their i^osition to the literature of Greece parallel to that of Tennyson's school to the literature of Eng- land, 5 ; the difference between them and our own poets, 116 — , AuGUST.vN : their position to the literature of Greece correspond- ing to that of Tennyson's school to the literature of England, 5 Pope, 25, 44 ; quoted, 29, 30, 101, 151 INDEX 183 PoKPHYRY : his Life of Plotinus quoted, 171 Piir.ciEUSES of the Hotel Kambouil- let, 11 Prior, Matthew, quoted, 80-1 Procter, Miss Adelaide A. : her HomciDcird Bound supplied the plot of Enoch Arden, 7, G7; quoted, 67, (18, GO PUTTENHAM, 94 QuAELES, Francis, 111 ; quoted, 17G RiLEiGH, Sir Walter, IGl Keucliffe, Lord Stratford de, 165 IvOGERS, Samuel, 56 UoNSARD, quoted, 39 Sappho, 20, 33, 40 ; quoted, 27 Scott, Sir Walter, quoted, 38, 8S-7 Sexeca, Lucius Annwus, quota- tion of a sentence usually ascribed to, 71, 52, 151 Servius, 18, 15, (and note) 16 Sestini, Benedetto, 36 SiJAKESPEAiiE : study of his work different from that of Tennyson, 5 ; referred to, 15, 24, G5, 151, 153; quoted, 26, 27, 28, 30, 33, 35, 42, 48, 40, 62, 74, 78, 80, 00, 101, 103, 105, 106 Shelley, 38, (iG, 73, 178 ; quoted, 24, 25, 2G, 32, 70, 102, 105, 112, 164, 172 SiLirs Italicus, quoted, 150-1 SiMONIDFS, 165, 167 S.MiTH, Alexander, 150, 160 Sydney, quoted, 130 Socrates : quotation from Plato's Apology, 146 Sophocles, subtleties of, analysed by scholars, 5 ; his apjaarent simplicity of style, 13 ; referred to, 43, 60, 167 ; quoted, 40, 64, 105, 100, 158 SouTHEY,Tennyson'si?»Y/Zis/i JfZyZZs modelled on, 7, 53, 67 ; quoted, 75 Spexcer, W. E.. iiuoted. Gl Spenser, jslan of Tennyson's Idylls suggested partly by, (see foot- note) 7 ; alluded to, 24, 45, 78, 110, 140 ; quoted, 75 Stevenson, John Hall, quoted, 62 Suetonius, quoted, 70 Swinburne, Mr. Algernon : quota- tion from his Essay on Tennyson and Mussct, 17 Tacitus, quoted, 84, 173 Taine, M., 177 Tasso, type of the imitative class of poets, 2 ; quoted, 31, 64 Tau Teh King, Chambers's version of the, quoted, 168, 160 Taylor, Jeremy, 108 Tennyson, place of, in English poetry, 1-6 ; models of leading poems, 7, 8; parallel with Vir- gil, 8 ; his elaborate diction, ; artificiality of style, 10 ; euphu- ism, 11 ; resemblance to Lyco- phron and Nonnus, 11-2 ; arti- ficial simplicity, 13 ; subtle allu- siveuess, 13-4 ; use of epithets, 15-6 ; local descriptions, 17 ; use of common words in uncom- mon senses, 18 ; compared with Virgil, 18-0 ; use of archaisms and provincial words, 18 ; idioms and phrases from Greek and Latin, 19-20; useof hyperbaton, 21; use of onomatopieia, 21, 155 ; similarity to Virgil in temper and genius, 22 ; care in selecting musical names, 24 ; early habits of careful study, 34 ; exact scholarship, 47-8 ; method of using his material, 58 ; espe- cially needs commentary, 117; fine natural touches, 133 ; false delicacy, 127 ; reinterpretations of ancient myths, 173; inferiority to Virgil, 177 ; his insularity, 177 ; his leading characteristics, 177-8 ; will probably rank be'.ow Wordsworth, Byron, and Shelley, 178 1 84 ILLUSTRATIONS OF TENNYSON His Works :— Group l.—To the Q?iecn, sug- gested by Shelley, 24 ; Claribel, 24 ; source of the name, ib. ; Nothincj will die, 25 ; All things will die, 25; Lilian, compared with Cleveland, 26; Isabel, parallels, 26 ; Mariana, paral- lels, 26; To ,28; Recollec- tions of the Arabian Nights, an echo of Coleridge, 28; Ode to Memory, illustrates the poet's care in'culling epithets from his predecessors, 29 ; Sea Fairies, 30; Dirgc^O; Elednorc, parallel inlbycus, 31; Adeline,^! ; Mar- garet, 31 ; Oriana, source of the idea, 31 ; Honnet on A lexander, source of the incident, 33 Group II.— Lady of Shalott, source, 35 ; Marianain the South, parallels, 36 ; Two Voices, by what poems suggested, 36 ; The Miller's Daughter, an adapta- tion of Eonsard, 39 ; original of, id. ; Fatima, resemblances to other poets, 40 ; (Fnone, drawn largely from the classics, 40 ; parallels, 41-2 ; Palace of Art, framework of, 43 ; compared with other authors, 44 ; Lady Clara Vere de Vere, 44; May Queen, 45 ; Lotos-Eaters, founded on Homer, 45 ; parallels, 45-8 ; Dream of Fair Women, inspired by Chaucer, 48 ; parallel pas- sages, 48-50 ; verses To J. S., passages compared with, 51 ; On a Mourner, origin of the allu- sions, 51-2 Group III.— English Idylls, their origin, 53 ; Gardener's Daughter, exterior influence on, 54 ; Dora, source of plot, 55 ; Audley Court, 55-6 ; Edioin Mor- ris, 56 ; St. Simeon Stylites, source of, 56 ; jjOvc and Duty, parallels to, 57-8 ; Ulysses, source of, 58 ; classical reminiscences, 59 ; Tithonus, whence taken, 60- 61 ; Locksley Hall, 61 ; parallels, 61-4 ; Godiva, 64-5 ; Sleeping Beauty, 65 ; Lord of Burleigh, source of the story, 65 ; TJie Beggar Maid, 65 ; Vision of Sin, suggested by Shelley, 66 Group IV. — Enoch Arden, its prototypes, 67-9 ; Tlie Brook, resemblances to other poems, 69-70; Aylmer's Field, 10; Sea Dreams, Pindar affords a com- mentary on, 70 ; Lucretius, 70 ; comparison with the original and parallel passages, 71-7 Group V. — TJie Princess, source of the suggest'on, 78 ; parallels, 79-89; The Third of February, 89; Death of the Duke of Wellington, owes something to Claudian, 89 ; The Islet, source of some of the expressions, 90 ; Will, passages illustrating, 90-1 Group VI. — In Memoriain,'d2 ; parallel with Petrarch, 92 ; how differing from Petrarch, 93 ; source of the metre, 94-6 ; parallels in Cycle I., 96-102; in Cycle II., 102-7 ; in Cycle III., 107-10; in Cycle IV., 110-2 Group Nil.— Maud, 113 ; the rhythm, 113-4 ; reminiscences of other poets, 114-6 Group VIII. — Idylls of the King, 117 ; Tennyson's indebted- ness to his predecessors, 118; parallels, 119-58 ; Tlie Coming of Arthur, relation to the Morto d' Arthur, 119; Gareth and Lynette, comparison with the original romance, 119; parallels from various jioets, 120-1 ; Geraint and Enid, compared with its original in the Ma- hinogion, 122^34; other illustra- tive i^arallels, 135-8 ; Balin and Balan, owes little to Malory, 139; Merlin and Vivian, owes little to Malory, 139. Illustrative INDEX 185 TEN . parallels from various poets : Laitncelot and Elaine, compared with the original romance, 140- 14G ; various illustrations, 145- 148 ; Holy Grail, compared with the original romance, 148- 149 ; Pelleas and Ettarrc, how far derived from Malory, 149- 150 ; other illustrations, 150- 151 ; The Last Tournament, version of the death of Tristram 151 ; Chiinevere, original and illustrations, 152-3 ; The Pass- ing of Arthur: Comparison with the original romance and Tennyson's method of com- position illustrated, 153-8 Group IX. — The Lover's Talc, 159-60; The Golden Supper, a translation from Boccaccio, IGO ; The Revenqc, source of story, 161; The Sisters, 161; Li the Children'' s Hospital, origin of the incident, 162 ; Sir John Old- castle, materials, 163 ; Columbus, theuoet charged with plagiarism, 163 ; The Voyage of Macldune, origin, 163-4 ; Dc Profundis, 164 Group X. — Sir Jolm Franklin, its inferiority, 165-6 ; Tiresias, comi^ared with Euripides, 166 ; parallels, 167-8 ; The Ancient Sage, parallels, 168-72; Lockslcy Hall Sixty Years After, 172- 173 ; Demetcr and Persephone, reinterpretation of an ancient legend, 173; parallels, 173-6; Tlie Play suggested by Quarles, 176 TiucKEEAY, quoted, 102 Theocritus, reproduced in Virgil's pastorals, 7 ; plan of Tennyson's Plylls suggested partly by, (see footnote) 7 ; Virgil's mis- translation from, 19; referred to, 40, ICO ; quoted, 41, 42, 47, 57, 81, 82, 88, 89, 115, 135, 138 WEB , Thomson,' quoted, 45, 46, 54, 65 112 Thorpe, quotation from his Edda of Samiinci the Learned, 86 Thucydides, quoted, 63 TicKELL, Thomas, 103 Tiresias, 166 Triptolemus, 174 . , VauctHan, Henry, the Silurist, quoted, 51, 98 ; alluded to, 104, 170 Virgil : indebtedness to Greek and Eoman poetry, 1, 4 ; his Dido a study from Euripides and Apollonius, 6 ; copies Theocritus, Hesiod, and Homer, 7 ; method of working, 8 ; charm of the Georgics, 6 ; subtlety of diction, 9 ; artificiality of style, 10 ; subtle suggestiveness, 10 ; euphuism not so extravagant as Tennyson's, 11 ; elaborate simplicity of diction, 13 ; pregnancy of style, 13, 14 ; elaborate epithets, 14, 15 ; indirectness of expression, 16 ; recondite epithets, 16 ; epithet flcivd, JEn. v. 389 ; explained, 16, 17 ; use of common words in uncommon senses, 18 ; use of archaisms and provincial words, 18, 19 ; Greekisms, 19 ; imports phrases from Greek poetry, 19 ; experiments in Latin, 20 ; pathetic hyperbaton, 21 ; onomatopuda, 21, 22 ; Tenny- son's style similar to that of, 9-22, passim ; similarity of temper and genius, 23 ; quoted, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 18, 19, 21, 30, 47, 59, 77, 88, 91, 105, 120, 136, 138, 141, 145, 147, 155, 176 ; alluded to, 51, 81, 82, 85, 117, 146, 156, (note on a'eviiis) 161 Waltox, Izaak, quoted, 82 Webster, John, quoted, 43, 115 1 86 ILLUSTRATIONS OF TENNYSON WES West : his Ad Am'icos, 30 Wordsworth, supplied the arche- type of Tennyson's creation * Edith,' 7 ; Tennyson's Unglish Idylls, modelled on, 7, 53, (57 ; quoted, 29, 30, 38, 43, 57, 82, 84, 95, 103-4, 116, 138, 161, 171- 172; alluded to, 25, 69, 170, 178 YOU Wordsworth, Dr. Christopher, Ecclesiastical Biograpliy re- ferred to, 163 Xenophon, quoted, 137 Young; his Night Tliouglits quoted, 100 rULVTED BY SPOTTISWOODK and CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE LONDOX PUBLISHED BY CHATTO & M^INDUS, 214, Piccadilly, London, W. 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