MAUD.

When a Mammonite mother kills her babe for a burial fee,
And Timour-Mammon grins on a pile of children's bones,
Is it peace or war? better, war! loud war by land and by sea,
War with a thousand battles, and shaking a hundred thrones.

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That war would purge the moral atmosphere, and convert knaves into heroes, was this philosopher's fixed persuasion. If an enemy's fleet " came round the hill," and a battle-bolt or two "sang" from the foam, "the smooth-faced, snub-nosed rogue would leap from his counter and till, and strike, if he could, were it but with his cheating yard-wand, home."

This climax gave great offence to the unfavorable critics of the first edition of Maud. "The author of Locksley Hall and the Palace of Art," it was said, "demands our assent to profound social and moral truths, by letting us hear a jargoning, ill-conditioned misanthrope declare that a tailor, dishonest in peace, would be brave in war." The censure, I still think, was reasonable. But exactly at this point Tennyson now adds three very noble stanzas, attuned so perfectly to the context that, unless the reader were minutely familiar with the earlier version, it could not possibly occur to him that they had been inserted, and yet admirably adapted to set the poet right with his audience. After depicting the snub-nosed man of thrums lunging with his yard-wand, the speaker pauses, rebukes himself, tacitly admits the weakness of his reasoning:

What am I raging alone as my father raged in his mood?
Must I, too, creep to the hollow and dash myself down and die,
Rather than hold to the law that I made, nevermore to brood
On a horror of shatter'd limbs and a wretched swindler's lie?

Another point is to be noted here. nature of the father's death is cleared up.

All

vaguely have fancied that he had been

obscurity as to the Formerly we might

murdered; now we

learn that he dashed himself down and died. Tennyson thus complies with what is assuredly a sound canon of criticism

that, though the artist has a right, with a view to quickening the attention, and stimulating the curiosity, of his reader, to impart or to withhold information bearing upon his plot, yet he is not at liberty to perplex the reader with mere puzzles, or to refuse definite statement of such facts as are necessary to the intellectual and imaginative appreciation of his work. One other change ought to be observed in this highly-important opening chant. The last line in the first edition was as follows:

I will bury myself in my books, and the devil may pipe to his own.

In the second version the words are, "I will bury myself in myself," etc. No change could be more expressive. Of all the graves in which a man can bury himself, self is the worst -haunted with the ghastliest visions, tormented with the loathliest worms. Accordingly, the recluse now sinks into a mood of contented and cynical Epicureanism, more venomously bad than that in which he had invoked Mars to shame Belial and Mammon. He will let the world have its way. Man preys on his weaker brother, as the swallow on the May-fly, the shrike on the sparrow; "nature is one with rapine, a harm no preacher can heal." Let Poland fall, let Hungary fail; "I have not made the world, and He that made it will guide."

Be mine a philosopher's life in the quiet woodland ways,
Where if I cannot be gay let a passionless peace be my lot,

Far off from the clamor of liars belied in the hubbub of lies;

From the long-necked geese of the world that are ever hissing dispraise,
Because their natures are little, and, whether he heed it or not,
Where each man walks with his head in a cloud of poisonous flies.

This is his point of deepest degradation; henceforward he ascends. He hears Maud singing "by the cedar-tree in the meadow under the Hall," and her song is of such regal and martial strain, so full of hope, joy, patriotism, courage, that it sounds like an appeal to the higher nature that slumbers within him. He awakes to the nobleness of self-contempt, and

could weep not only for the meanness of the time, but for himself, "so languid and base." Then they meet; she touches his hand, and smiles upon him; the thought of that blissful moment is as "a delicate spark of glowing and growing light" through the dark hours, but with morning his suspicion and cynicism return. He fancies that Maud may wish to make him the victim of her pride, nay, that she may have an eye to his vote when her brother presents himself at the hustings in the approaching election. Her brother treats him with haughty disdain, and he responds with fiercest scorn. As both her father and her mother are dead, the brother is in a position to exercise great influence over her. The notions of the loverfor now he is clearly in love with Maud-both as to the brother's character and as to the probable nature of his influence over the lady, are indicated in these lines:

What if tho' her eye seem'd full

Of a kind intent to me,
What if that dandy despot, he,
That jewell'd mass of millinery,
That oil'd and curl'd Assyrian Bull,
Smelling of musk and of insolence,
Her brother, from whom I keep aloof,
Who wants the finer politic sense
To mask, tho' but in his own behoof,
With a glassy smile his brutal scorn-
What if he had told her yestermorn
How prettily, for his own sweet sake,
A face of tenderness might be feign'd,
And a moist mirage in desert eyes,
That so, when the rotten hustings shake
In another month to his brazen lies,
A wretched vote may be gain'd.

"That oil'd and curl'd Assyrian Bull" I consider one of the crudest lines Tennyson ever penned. It is grotesque, without being expressive, and has neither true facetiousness, nor cutting

satire, nor imaginative appropriateness, nor fanciful aptness. The last thing the "wingèd beast from Nineveh" suggests is a dandy. Rossetti has entered into the spirit of the creature very differently:

A human face the creature wore,
And hoofs behind and hoofs before,
And flanks with dark runes fretted o'er,

'Twas bull, 'twas mitred Minotaur.

Under the auspices of the brother, a "new-made lord, whose splendor plucks the slavish hat from the villager's head," pays his addresses to Maud, and adds jealousy to the other distracting influences at work upon our hero's mind. But love gradually gains the mastery, and as love becomes strong and hopeful his better self begins to gain the ascendant. In a new verse, which greatly strengthens the poem at this point, he wishes that he could hear Maud once more singing "the chivalrous battle-song" that formerly roused him; and two lines, set by themselves, are like a jewelled clasp knitting the earlier to the later portions of the first Part

And ah, for a man to arise in me,

That the man I am may cease to be!

The process, however, of the new man's emergence into light is gradual, and immense and subtle power is displayed by the poet in tracing the hero's variations of mood. Some of those crudenesses, nevertheless, occur, which were characteristic of the poem from the first, and are now, I suppose, destined to remain in it to the last. It is crude, I think, to speak of Maud coming down from a window to meet her lover "like a beam of the seventh Heaven;" and I doubt whether, at this stage of the love-cure, he ought to have been represented as still so morbidly self-conscious as is implied in his saying, of Maud's beauty

WHY DOES MAUD LOVE HIM?

I know it the one bright thing to save

My yet young life in the wilds of Time,

Perhaps from madness, perhaps from crime,
Perhaps from a selfish grave.

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The words I have put into italics are more curiously expressive of a brooding, inward-looking habit of mind than any I know in literature. But the triumph of love now becomes complete. He is a new man, living in a new world, and as he looks up to the stars, he addresses them thus:

And ye, meanwhile, far over moor and fell
Beat to the noiseless music of the night!
Has our whole earth gone nearer to the glow

Of your soft splendors, that you look so bright?

At this point occurs the most extensive and important of all the additions made to the first draft of the poem. It had been objected, not, I think, without grounds, that, though the hero might love Maud, there was no cause why she should love him. "Why," it was asked, "does Maud love him? He is a sour, sulky, shabby, purposeless soliloquizer. By all physiological and physiognomical symptoms, he is sallow, squalid, with his skin hanging loose on his bones, with matted hair, shuffling, awfully conceited, probably squint-eyed, demonstrably a sloven. Why does she love him? He hates her kith and kin, and all men and women. He is moody, idle, given to night-walking. Worst of all, he writes such verse as this:

I kiss'd her slender hand,

She took the kiss sedately;
Maud is not seventeen,

But she is tall and stately.

Why does Maud love him? He goes about with an aggrieved, injured-looking, gingerly expression, which makes you expect. he is going to knock you down. Poe's raven is the only hero