CHAPTER V.

THE DREAM OF FAIR WOMEN AND PALACE OF ART.

T is from the publication, in two volumes, in 1842, of the early poems in the form which they have since, on the whole, until quite recently, retained, and of English Idylls and additional pieces, that the world-wide range and firm establishment of Tennyson's reputation are to be dated. With great judgment and self-control, he put aside comparatively weak and questionable matter, a large portion of which had been pointed out by Christopher North-dressing his line of battle like a skilful general, for the decisive charge. When thirty years more had gone by, he was able to replace in his volumes not a little of what had, in 1842, been excluded-as troops might be admitted to a festive review, or triumphant march into the capital, which had not been trusted in the crisis of the campaign. It would have been well-I cannot help remarking as I pass-for the fame of his reviewer, if a similar process had been applied to his own works. Professor Wilson had great genius and rich culture; he impressed Scott as fitted to become the foremost man of his time, and awoke enthusiasm in the more severely critical mind of Carlyle; his writings abound with imaginative exuberance, pathetic tenderness, and picturesque beauty: but he composed with immense haste; had no idea, as is memorably evinced in his critique on

Tennyson, when he began an article, of what he might say before he got to the end; and availed himself, for the sake of present effect, of any triviality, jest, political squabble, or social fashion, which flitted across the public stage at the moment. The consequence is that the Noctes Ambrosiana, to which Wilson's contemporaries never referred save in terms of positive ecstasy, has, as a whole, become unreadable by the present generation, nor am I sure that even the selection from it by so qualified a hand as Mr. Skelton's will escape oblivion; while the critical and descriptive essays, though redolent of life and brightness, and containing "rural pictures" which, says Ebenezer Elliot, "before God, I believe have lengthened my days on earth," have many passages which weaken the general impression.

And yet Wilson was professionally a critic. So rare is the combination of a consummate critical faculty with great productive genius. Tennyson has proved himself to be possessed of both. I am far from sure, however, that his emendations of his early poems have been uniformly felicitous. He appears to me to have sometimes forgotten what was due to the feelings under which he first wrote,—the legitimate jurisdiction and authority, within limits, over the text, of that fervour of inspiration which originally gushed forth in song. In the first version of Clara Vere de Vere, for example, there is this stanza :—

Trust me, Clara Vere de Vere,

From yon blue heavens above us bent,
The grand old gardener and his wife

Smile at the claims of long descent.

These words came glowing from Tennyson's heart, and the third line took the ear of the world, and obtained domicile in current literature wherever the English tongue is spoken. In recent editions it runs thus

The gardener Adam and his wife,

a line which, formally unexceptionable though it may be,

would hardly have struck the general imagination like the other.

In the later version of A Dream of Fair Women, a much more important alteration occurs. In that poem, one of Tennyson's masterpieces, there is a description of the death. of Iphigenia. My readers may recollect that, according to the legend, or, rather, according to a particular version of the legend, Iphigenia, the daughter of Agamemnon, was offered up as a sacrifice to appease the wrath of Diana, who detained the Greek fleet, about to sail for Troy, by a dead calm. In the poem, Iphigenia, who speaks for herself, is very effectively placed face to face with Helen, the original cause of the Trojan expedition. The poet calls upon the daughter of Agamemnon to join him in admiring Helen's sovereign beauty, and the manner in which Iphigenia meets the appeal is recorded in the following verses :

But she, with sick and scornful looks averse,

To her full height her stately stature draws;
"My youth," she said, was blasted with a curse :

66

This woman was the cause.

"I was cut off from hope in that sad place,

Which yet to name my spirit loathes and fears:
My father held his hand upon his face;

I, blinded with my tears,

"Still strove to speak: my voice was thick with sighs,
As in a dream. Dimly I could descry

The stern, black-bearded kings, with wolfish eyes,
Waiting to see me die.

"The tall masts flicker'd as they lay afloat,

The temples, and the people, and the shore;

One drew a sharp knife through my tender throat,

Slowly-and nothing more."

The last stanza I quote from memory. Its second, third, and fourth lines have not appeared thus in any edition published within the last twenty years, and I am not aware of having seen them in this form since boyhood; but they stamped themselves upon my imagination at once

His Emendations.

249

and ineffaceably. The picture, as drawn by the poet, is perfectly in keeping with itself, perfectly complete. With a force of dramatic sympathy which it would be quite reasonable to compare with Shakespeare's, Tennyson enters into the person of the girl that is about to die, and enables the imaginative reader to see through her eyes, to gasp and sigh with her in her swooning anguish. All is intensely real; no pathetic fallacy modifies the dreadful fact. The light glimmers on her through blinding tears; she strives, as one has so often striven in a nightmare dream, to speak, but cannot; the actual kings are there, not phantoms or spectres, but stern men with black beards and wolfish eyes. Dimly, through burning tears, the whole scene quivers before her," the temples, and the people, and the shore," and then, real as everything else is real, the knife is drawn slowly through her throat. The altered version of the stanza runs thus:

66

The high masts flicker'd as they lay afloat;

The crowds, the temples, waver'd, and the shore;
The bright death quiver'd at the victim's throat;
Touch'd and I knew no more."

This is not merely inferior to the former, but, what by no means necessarily follows, is capable of being demonstrated to be inferior, by reference to simple and irrefragable principles of criticism. Is it permissible that Iphigenia should begin her narrative in such a fervour of imaginative passion, that she no longer speaks of the scene or of herself, but sees the whole in vision; and should thus carry it on until it reaches its most agitating point; and should then sink back into the infinitely colder and less imaginative mood of one who speaks from memory, who coolly separates her present self from her past, and talks of herself as "the victim"? She passes from poetic vision -"I strove to speak, I could descry "- to prosaic recollection. If criticism has any principles at all, such a

declension ruins the passage. The "bright death" is due to the same unparalleled error. Seeing, as Tennyson originally saw, through the eyes of the swooning girl, the wolfish kings and flickering crowd, he had no leisure to think of "bright death," no idle ingenuity of spirit to hit upon such a conceit. Bright death" means nothing in particular, and would probably suggest a flash of lightning if the knife had not been mentioned in the earlier version.

66

I am entirely at a loss to conjecture how Tennyson could have been led to substitute the second form of the stanza for the first, unless he allowed his better judgment to be overruled by some critic,* learned, perhaps, but devoid of imagination. Is it possible that skill in the use of words may occasionally produce in readers a vividness of imaginative perception greater than that of the poet when he wrote them down? If I live for a hundred years, I shall always see, with my mind's eye, those wolfish kings, those quivering masts, that shore, that crowd, and most clearly of all that knife, as they flashed on me when Tennyson showed me them in my boyhood; and it amazes me beyond

* After the publication of this conjecture in the Literary World, I received a letter from Mr. Edward Taylor, of 90, Isledon Road, Finsbury Park, containing this pertinent and interesting passage :

In the Literary World for October 25, you very naturally inquire, What could have induced Tennyson to make such an unfortunate alteration as he has introduced into the speech of Iphigenia, in the Dream of Fair Women? Perhaps the following may furnish a clue to the mystery.

Tennyson's second volume was reviewed, shortly after its first appearance, in the Quarterly, in an article that, in its way, is a masterpiece of mock respect ---full of sardonic praise and spiteful depreciation most dexterously insinuated. On coming to the Dream of Fair Women, after promising the reader a touch of pathos that will throw into the shade every previous device of ancient or modern poets, the reviewer quotes the lines,—

"The tall masts flicker'd as they lay afloat;

The temples, and the people, and the shore;

One drew a sharp knife through my tender throat,
Slowly-and nothing more!"

And then adds, "What touching simplicity! What genuine pathos! He cut my throat-nothing more! One might indeed ask, What more she would have?"

I suppose this was too much for the youthful poet, and he altered the poem regardless of all consequences.