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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 signalization 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 recognize 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 strength—its rugged and varying rhythm will appear more defensible." Tennyson

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THE PATHETIC FALLACY."

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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,
The red-ribb'd ledges drip with a silent horror of blood,
And Echo there, whatever is ask'd her, answers "Death."

For there in the ghastly pit long since a body was found,
He who had given me life-O father! O God! was it well?—
Mangled, and flatten'd, and crush'd, and dinted into the ground:
There yet lies the rock that fell with him when he fell.

Did he fling himself down? who knows? for a vast speculation had fail'd,
And ever he mutter'd and madden'd, and ever wann'd with despair,
And out he walk'd when the wind like a broken worldling wail'd,
And the flying gold of the ruin'd woodlands drove thro' the air.

I will here digress for a few moments. The last of 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 some

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thing 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 realized 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 the transformation "just and true." But if it is just and true, why call it a fallacy at all?

After considering the matter long and carefully, I find it impossible to draw a line, with Coleridge, between fancy and imagination, or, with Ruskin, between the pathetic fallacy and

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true imaginative work; but I doubt whether there is any poem of Tennyson's in which we have more instances of what Mr. Ruskin would call pathetic fallacy than in Maud. In the first verse things so tenderly sweet as blooming heather, and so delicately beautiful as lichened rock, are bathed in blood; in the third, the falling leaves become gold, swept from the bankrupt branches by the blast of ruin; farther on, we hear the scream of a maddened beech dragged down by the wave; the gale is a ruffian, catching and cuffing "the budded peaks of the wood:" and then, as circumstances change, the birds cry, and call "Maud, Maud, Maud, Maud;" the stars look down in new brightness of sympathetic splendor; the larches and pines are "perky" about a rival's castle; and roses, lilies, larkspurs, passion-flowers, weeping, listening, crying, all become vivaciously alive in the presence or expectation of the lady. If the reader pleases, he may set down all these modifications of the actual fact of things to pathetic fallacy, and call them signs that Tennyson belongs to the "inferior school of poets;" inferior, that is, to the school of the great creative masters, Homer, Dante, Shakspeare; to my thinking, they illustrate the normal action of imagination, but not uniformly of imagination in her mood of deepest inspiration and most majestic power. Although there is a subtlety inexpressible by words in the closeness of truth to nature which may be, and perhaps generally is, preserved by imagination in her noblest action. upon things, it is, nevertheless, the splendor of the flash of irradiating, transfiguring, or even distorting and darkening color, poured by imagination over the object, rather than the mere truthfulness of delineation, which is the index of imaginative power. "Thou hast clothed his neck with thunder"

that is a more nobly imaginative description of the neck of the war-horse than if it were literally correspondent with fact. Mr. Ruskin, I presume, would say that, as the hero in Maud is a typical representative of conditions of thought in the morbid

nineteenth century, the prevalence of pathetic fallacy in his outpourings is peculiarly appropriate; the statement I should prefer is that the poem furnishes admirable illustrations of a particular kind of true imagination. The difference may, after all, be one of words. Revenons à nos moutons.

Having shown the

dreadful hollow behind the little wood, the mono-dramatic speaker adds a few touches delineative of the circumstances attending the discovery of the corpse:

I remember the time, for the roots of my hair were stirr'd

By a shuffled step, by a dead weight trail'd, by a whisper'd fright,
And my pulses closed their gates with a shock on my heart as I heard
The shrill-edged shriek of a mother divide the shuddering night.

He then launches into fierce denunciation of society. The blessings of peace have been made a curse; the lust of gain, the spirit of Cain, are abroad; "who but a fool would have faith in a tradesman's ware or his word?" Such a state of things is not peace, but civil war, and war viler than that of the sword, because underhand. Then follow four verses, which may take rank with the most picturesque invectives uttered by Hood in verse or Carlyle in prose, against our poor nineteenth century:

Peace sitting under her olive, and slurring the days gone by,

When the poor are hovell'd and hustled together, each sex, like swine,
When only the ledger lives, and when only not all men lie;
Peace in her vineyard-yes!-but a company forges the wine.

And the vitriol madness flushes up in the ruffian's head,
And the filthy by-lane rings to the yell of the trampled wife,
And chalk and alum and plaster are sold to the poor for bread,
And the spirit of murder works in the very means of life.

And Sleep must lie down arm'd, for the villanous centre-bits
Grind on the wakeful ear in the hush of the moonless nights,
While another is cheating the sick of a few last gasps, as he sits
To pestle a poison'd poison behind his crimson lights.

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