CHAPTER VIII.

CENONE, THE LOTOS EATERS, ULYSSES, SIMEON

I

STYLITES.

HAVE dwelt so long upon a few poems that I must

guard myself against being supposed to overlook or to under-rate a number of pieces which I may not have been able to consider. Many of these are of the very highest excellence, and would repay analysis line by line. Enone, The May Queen, The Gardener's Daughter, Tithonus, Godiva, The Lotos Eaters, Ulysses, Lucretius, St. Simeon Stylites, Galahad, The Day Dream, are all, in their widelyvarying fashions, masterly.

Enone was a Nymph of Ida loved by Paris, the son of Priam and Hecuba, King and Queen of Troy, before he decided between the rival goddesses in their strife about the golden apple. Aphrodite, to whom he adjudged the prize, having promised to give him the most beautiful woman in the world to wife, he deserted Enone, and went to Greece to woo Helen. Tennyson shows us Enone among the crags of Ida musing upon her sad history and faithless lover. Consummately beautiful as is the poem, it nevertheless illustrates the extreme difficulty, if not impossibility, of effecting a genuine resuscitation of antiquity in modern literature. The same remark applies to Goethe's Iphigenie auf Tauris, a work which, in the serenity and tenderness of its tone, recalls Enone, though its much larger extent and

dramatic form preclude minute resemblance. Goethe's heroine is a wise, gentle, blue-eyed, golden-haired German girl; Tennyson's is an English young lady; in both poems the vein of sentiment is distinctively modern. Enone wails melodiously for Paris without the remotest suggestion of fierceness or revengeful wrath. She does not upbraid him for having preferred to her the fairest and most loving wife in Greece, but wonders how any one could love him better than she does.

Most loving is she?

Ah me, my mountain shepherd, that my arms
Were wound about thee, and my hot lips prest
Close, close to thine in the quick-falling dew
Of fruitful kisses, thick as Autumn rains
Flash in the pools of whirling Simois.

A Greek poet would have used his whole power of expression to instil bitterness into her resentful words. The classic legend, instead of representing Enone as forgiving Paris, makes her nurse her wrath throughout all the anguish and terror of the Trojan War. At its end, her Paris comes back to her. Deprived of Helen, a broken and baffled man, he returns from the smoking ruins of his native Troy, and entreats Enone to heal him of a wound which, unless she lends her aid, must be mortal. Enone gnashes her teeth at him, refuses him the remedy, and lets him die. In the end, no doubt, she falls into remorse, and kills herself this is quite in the spirit of classic legend; implacable vengeance, soul-sickened with its own victory, dies in despair. That forgiveness of injuries could be anything but weakness-that it could be honourable, beautiful, brave is an entirely Christian idea; and it is because this idea, although it has not yet practically conquered the world, although it has indeed but slightly modified the conduct of nations, has, nevertheless, secured recognition as ethically and socially right, that Tennyson could not hope to enlist the sympathy and admiration of his readers

Modern Classicism.

291

for his Enone, if he had cast her image in the tearless bronze of Pagan obduracy.

It is not impossible that our newest school of classical renaissance, guiltless as it is of any tincture of Christian sentiment or sympathy, may restore certain tones of the Pagan mind more successfully than poets who, like Goethe and Tennyson, have been ethically and emotionally in tune with Christendom. Such restoration seems to me superfluous, for we have the actual tones of classic Paganism, fresh, perfect, indestructible, in the books of Homer and Sophocles, of Virgil and Horace; and, though correct in certain traits of Paganism, the modern imitation is sure to be false in others, for no modern poet, however intense may be his rejection of Christ, believes, as Homer did, in Zeus or Apollo; and the atheistic cynicism which spurns at Christianity is not likely to sympathise vividly with religion in any form. I wish English poets were not so proud, or perhaps I should rather say so conceited. Goethe and Schiller, when their fame filled Europe, did not think themselves too gifted for translation; but young English poets, whose familiarity with the classics and superb command of their own language point them out as the men to give us in English an exact reproduction of the masterpieces of ancient poetry, seem to think nothing worthy of their talents except to enter the lists as actual rivals of the Greeks, and try to produce original English poems in their manner. Mr. Browning has of late given welcome proof that these remarks do not apply to him, and I trust that his example as a translator will be followed by younger poets. One perfectly translated drama from Sophocles would be worth a hundred tinselly imitations.

Apart from translation, the best way of treating classical subjects in modern verse is that which was adopted with absolute frankness by Shakespeare, and which has been

pursued less daringly by Goethe and Tennyson—namely, to trust for effect to the delineation of human nature not as specially modified by the conditions of existence in Greece, but as the poet sees and knows it in the Germany or the England in which he lives. Shakespeare, in Winter's Tale, represents messengers bringing oracles from the shrine of Apollo at Delphi and Puritans singing psalms to hornpipes. His stupendous genius can neutralise even absurdities like this, but no one could safely venture upon such liberties in our day. Goethe and Tennyson, men of academic culture, avoid offending learned readers by freaks of glaring anachronism, and even contrive, by a skilful use of classical or semi-classical colouring, to add a peculiar charm to their antique poems; but for their main interest they depend, as truly as Shakespeare depended, upon portraiture of character, exhibition of passion, and beauty of description.

Tennyson's picture of Aphrodite, when she appealed to Paris to give her the apple, is almost too rich and ruddy for a poem in the Greek manner.

Idalian Aphrodite beautiful,

Fresh as the foam, new-bathed in Paphian wells,

With rosy, slender fingers backward drew
From her warm brows and bosom her deep hair
Ambrosial, golden round her lucid throat
And shoulder; from the violets her light foot
Shone rosy-white, and o'er her rounded form,
Between the shadows of the vine-bunches,

Floated the glowing sunlights, as she moved.

The splendour of her beauty overcame Paris as if it had been a vision. The offer of empire and royal power made by Herè, the queen of Olympus; the tender of kingly wisdom, power over himself, and empire of noble manhood, made by Pallas; both these were in a moment swept from his mind by the presence and the glance of Sovereign Love. Aphrodite knew that she was victress before she opened her

lips. "A subtle smile in her mild eyes "-she could afford to be mild in the serene intensity of her satisfaction at having triumphed over her sister goddesses-announced her faith in her own irresistibility. She spoke but two or three words and laughed, when Paris handed her the apple, and Enone saw "great Here's angry eyes" vanishing into the golden cloud that was to be her chariot through the sky.

In the Lotos Eaters Tennyson dramatically embodies and expresses a mood of mind very common in the present day, a mood felicitously characterised by Mrs. Barrett Browning in the words "enchanted reverie," a mood in which the weary soul asks whether the gains of life are really worth the toil they cost, and plaintively acquiesces in the conclusion that "there is no joy but calm!" Not one crude, unmelodious, inexpressive, or-so far as I am able to detect-imperfect line occurs in this poem. The imagery is marvellous even for Tennyson, marvellous in its freshness, in its nice accuracy of truth to nature, in its beauty, in its deep appropriateness. The Lotos-land is one in which `everything proceeds languidly, pausingly, dreamily.

A land of streams! some, like a downward smoke,
Slow-dropping veils of thinnest lawn, did go.

Whoever has seen a stream in its midsummer slenderness of volume, falling down a front of rock divided into steps or ledges, will admit that no words could possibly surpass in descriptive precision these last. The Falling Foss, for example-a small cascade on one of the affluents of the Esk, near Whitby-affords a realisation so exact of the "slow-dropping veil of thinnest lawn," that it at once, when I saw it last summer, reminded me of the poem; nor could an officer of the Geological Survey, writing with purely scientific intent, devise a more literal or a more expressive description. And what imagery could convey the lulling influence of sweet, faint music more movingly than this?