Pride and Desolation. Then the great Hall was wholly broken down, The hedgehog underneath his plaintain bores, The slow-worm creeps, and the thin weasel there 231 "The two contrived their daughter's good!"—the irony of that is tremendous in its calmness. In this poem Tennyson has reaped the highest honour man can attain, namely, that of adding to the Scripture of his country; nor should I think it a much less dark or pernicious error than the pride which caused all this woe, to hold that the Almighty could speak only through or to Jewish seers, and that there is no true inspiration in such writing as this. CHAPTER IV. THE TWO VERSIONS OF MAUD. AUD has a particular interest for me; I reviewed it MA long since; and with that post-prandial freedom which I craved liberty to take, I have to inform my readers that my old criticism now seems to me unsatisfactory. The poem appeared in 1855, the year when I first got into journalistic harness, and I was one among many ardent admirers of Tennyson who expressed disappointment with the production. In my essay on Tennyson and his Teachers, published (along with others) in America in 1858, and in this country in the following year, I devoted several pages to a notice of Maud, reiterating my unfavourable judgment, declaring the work deficient in beauty, and pronouncing it, on the whole, a failure. That estimate I still look upon as not altogether wrong or unreasonable; and I have the comfort of believing that it was much less wrong in 1855 than it would be, if first put forward in 1879. When Maud appeared, Tennyson's reputation rested upon the early poems and In Memoriam, and the difference between these and the new work was hardly more startling than the inferiority of the new to the old seemed to be conspicuous. But now that Tennyson has written as much again as he had then given to the world, and when it has been proved that the somewhat crude realism of Maud was but a passing variation in his manner of composition, the right of such a poem to take its place in the totality of his works-to play its part in the general Tennysonian orchestra-is much more easily recognisable. What is still more important, the Maud of 1879 is a much more excellent poem than the Maud of 1855. With a massive sense and a profound geniality of temper, that do him infinite credit, setting him on a pedestal of marked superiority to those authors who, when sharply criticised, have hugged their defects and shrieked out asseverations of their infallibility, Tennyson listened to reasonable criticism, and mended his work. The man who can do that must be rarely free of egotism, and have a command of his own spirit entitling him to Solomon's signalisation as greater than one that taketh a city. To retouch a poem without destroying it is, besides, one of the most difficult operations that a poet can undertake, and I do not know that I have ever been more struck by any display of literary skill than I am by the consummate power and the supreme felicity of Tennyson's improvement of Maud. First of all, it is now announced as a Monodrama. We are thus taught to expect that the hero will speak throughout for himself. If it is improbable that he should do so in real life, still we are bound to recognise the right of an artist, within certain limits, to adopt what artistic machinery he pleases, every possible arrangement involving more or less of improbability. In the next place, the work is now divided into three Parts. This is an important circumstance. It leaves us at liberty to suppose, if it does not actually suggest, that some change in the position or state of the hero has taken place in the interval between Part and Part. That bewilderment which we naturally felt in listening to a speaker who at one moment was sane, and at another mad, at one moment at large, and at another in confinement, is thus obviated. The changes in melody, also, are thus rendered more appropriate. "If," I remarked in my earlier criticism, "we suppose the poem written by its hero at four or five different periods of his life,—a period of silly juvenile raving, a period of joyous love, a period of melancholy but tranquil madness, a period of raging insanity, and a period of new life and reviving strengthits rugged and varying rhythm will appear more defensible." Tennyson has now marked off the great divisions of the poem. Part I. contains the period of restless, unhappy, cynical youth, and also that of accepted and exultant love; Part II. is occupied with successive phases of anguish and madness; in Part III. the rage has passed away, the fires of madness have ceased to burn into the heart and brain, and the meaning and result of the whole are summed up in words of mature and lofty wisdom. By this arrangement, and by the stanzas-extending in one instance to so many as a hundred lines-deftly added here and there, that atmosphere of stormy tumult and distraction, which flickered over the poem, is penetrated with shafts of light; the brooding cloud lifts; and though the air continues electric, we can perceive with entire distinctness the direction of the road and the articulation of the landscape. The opening lines contain a description, by the sole speaker, of the scene of a catastrophe which has a determining influence on the whole course of the poem. I hate the dreadful hollow behind the little wood, Its lips in the field above are dabbled with blood-red heath, Death." For there in the ghastly pit long since a body was found, Did he fling himself down? who knows? for a vast speculation had And ever he mutter'd and madden'd, and ever wann'd with despair, The "Pathetic Fallacy." 235 The last of I will here digress for a few moments. these lines is quoted by Mr. Ruskin as an exquisite example of the "pathetic fallacy." The true imagination, he holds, works with nature as nature is; the fancy imputes to nature something which is not there, as prodigality to the crocus, cruelty to sea-foam, speech to lilies and roses. The sere leaves of autumn woodland are not gold, and in calling them gold, Tennyson (thinks Mr. Ruskin) indulges in the pathetic fallacy. Though, however, the temperament which admits the pathetic fallacy is "that of a mind and body in some sort too weak to deal fully with what is before them or upon them, borne away, or over-clouded, or over-dazzled by emotion," there is "a point beyond which it would be inhuman and monstrous" for a man to push the government of his feelings, "a point at which all feverish and wild fancy becomes just and true." This point was reached, for example, by a Hebrew prophet when he contemplated the destruction of the Kingdom of Assyria. The thought of so tremendous an occurrence "dashed him into a confused element of dreams," and filled the world with strange voices. A similar effect was produced when he realised the presence of the Deity. "The mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands." If Mr. Ruskin intends to maintain that these last words, though a noble instance of pathetic fallacy, are inferior to truly imaginative work, I can only say that I have never met with and cannot conceive any purer or nobler exertion of imaginative power. The "pathetic fallacy" which the great critic points out in the last of Tennyson's lines is pronounced by him exquisite, chiefly, I presume, because whether it is to the son musing distractedly on his virtually murdered father, or whether it is to the father himself, rushing about the woods in frantic despair, that the leaves take the semblance of flying gold, the excitement in either case was great enough to render |