Lang Andrew
Alfred Tennyson
In March 1831 Tennyson lost his father. “He slept in the dead man’s bed, earnestly desiring to see his ghost, but no ghost came.” “You see,” he said, “ghosts do not generally come to imaginative people;” a remark very true, though ghosts are attributed to “imagination.” Whatever causes these phantasms, it is not the kind of phantasia which is consciously exercised by the poet. Coleridge had seen far too many ghosts to believe in them; and Coleridge and Donne apart, with the hallucinations of Goethe and Shelley, who met themselves, what poet ever did “see a ghost”? One who saw Tennyson as he wandered alone at this period called him “a mysterious being, seemingly lifted high above other mortals, and having a power of intercourse with the spirit world not granted to others.” But it was the world of the poet, not of the “medium.”
The Tennysons stayed on at the parsonage for six years. But, anticipating their removal, Arthur Hallam in 1831 dealt in prophecy about the identification in the district of places in his friend’s poems – “critic after critic will trace the wanderings of the brook,” as, – in fact, critic after critic has done. Tennyson disliked – these “localisers.” The poet’s walks were shared by Arthur Hallam, then affianced to his sister Emily.
II.
POEMS OF 1831–1833
By 1832 most of the poems of Tennyson’s second volume were circulating in MS. among his friends, and no poet ever had friends more encouraging. Perhaps bards of to-day do not find an eagerness among their acquaintance for effusions in manuscript, or in proof-sheets. The charmed volume appeared at the end of the year (dated 1833), and Hallam denounced as “infamous” Lockhart’s review in the Quarterly. Infamous or not, it is extremely diverting. How Lockhart could miss the great and abundant poetry remains a marvel. Ten years later the Scorpion repented, and invited Sterling to review any book he pleased, for the purpose of enabling him to praise the two volumes of 1842, which he did gladly. Lockhart hated all affectation and “preciosity,” of which the new book was not destitute. He had been among Wordsworth’s most ardent admirers when Wordsworth had few, but the memories of the war with the “Cockney School” clung to him, the war with Leigh Hunt, and now he gave himself up to satire. Probably he thought that the poet was a member of a London clique. There is really no excuse for Lockhart, except that he did repent, that much of his banter was amusing, and that, above all, his censures were accepted by the poet, who altered, later, many passages of a fine absurdity criticised by the infamous reviewer. One could name great prose-writers, historians, who never altered the wondrous errors to which their attention was called by critics. Prose-writers have been more sensitively attached to their glaring blunders in verifiable facts than was this very sensitive poet to his occasional lapses in taste.
The Lady of Shalott, even in its early form, was more than enough to give assurance of a poet. In effect it is even more poetical, in a mysterious way, if infinitely less human, than the later treatment of the same or a similar legend in Elaine. It has the charm of Coleridge, and an allegory of the fatal escape from the world of dreams and shadows into that of realities may have been really present to the mind of the young poet, aware that he was “living in phantasy.” The alterations are usually for the better. The daffodil is not an aquatic plant, as the poet seems to assert in the first form —
“The yellow-leavèd water-lily,
The green sheathed daffodilly,
Tremble in the water chilly,
Round about Shalott.”
Nobody can prefer to keep
“Though the squally east wind keenly
Blew, with folded arms serenely
By the water stood the queenly
Lady of Shalott.”
However stoical the Lady may have been, the reader is too seriously sympathetic with her inevitable discomfort —
“All raimented in snowy white
That loosely flew,”
as she was. The original conclusion was distressing; we were dropped from the airs of mysterious romance: —
“They crossed themselves, their stars they blest,
Knight, minstrel, abbot, squire, and guest;
There lay a parchment on her breast,
That puzzled more than all the rest
The well-fed wits at Camelot.”
Hitherto we have been “puzzled,” but as with the sublime incoherences of a dream. Now we meet well-fed wits, who say, “Bless my stars!” as perhaps we should also have done in the circumstances – a dead lady arriving, in a very cold east wind, alone in a boat, for “her blood was frozen slowly,” as was natural, granting the weather and the lady’s airy costume. It is certainly matter of surprise that the young poet’s vision broke up in this humorous manner. And, after all, it is less surprising that the Scorpion, finding such matter in a new little book by a new young man, was more sensitive to the absurdity than to the romance. But no lover of poetry should have been blind to the almost flawless excellence of Mariana in the South, inspired by the landscape of the Provençal tour with Arthur Hallam. In consequence of Lockhart’s censures, or in deference to the maturer taste of the poet, The Miller’s Daughter was greatly altered before 1842. It is one of the earliest, if not the very earliest, of Tennyson’s domestic English idylls, poems with conspicuous beauties, but not without sacrifices to that Muse of the home affections on whom Sir Barnes Newcome delivered his famous lecture. The seventh stanza perhaps hardly deserved to be altered, as it is, so as to bring in “minnows” where “fish” had been the reading, and where “trout” would best recall an English chalk stream. To the angler the rising trout, which left the poet cold, is at least as welcome as the “reflex of a beauteous form.” “Every woman seems an angel at the water-side,” said “that good old angler, now with God,” Thomas Todd Stoddart, and so “the long and listless boy” found it to be. It is no wonder that the mother was “slowly brought to yield consent to my desire.” The domestic affections, in fact, do not adapt themselves so well to poetry as the passion, unique in Tennyson, of Fatima. The critics who hunt for parallels or plagiarisms will note —
“O Love, O fire! once he drew
With one long kiss my whole soul thro’
My lips,”
and will observe Mr Browning’s
“Once he kissed
My soul out in a fiery mist.”
As to Œnone, the scenery of that earliest of the classical idylls is borrowed from the Pyrenees and the tour with Hallam. “It is possible that the poem may have been suggested by Beattie’s Judgment of Paris,” says Mr Collins; it is also possible that the tale which
“Quintus Calaber
Somewhat lazily handled of old”
may have reached Tennyson’s mind from an older writer than Beattie. He is at least as likely to have been familiar with Greek myth as with the lamented “Minstrel.” The form of 1833, greatly altered in 1842, contained such unlucky phrases as “cedar shadowy,” and “snowycoloured,” “marblecold,” “violet-eyed” – easy spoils of criticism. The alterations which converted a beautiful but faulty into a beautiful and flawless poem perhaps obscure the significance of Œnone’s “I will not die alone,” which in the earlier volume directly refers to the foreseen end of all as narrated in Tennyson’s late piece, The Death of Œnone. The whole poem brings to mind the glowing hues of Titian and the famous Homeric lines on the divine wedlock of Zeus and Hera.
The allegory or moral of The Palace of Art does not need explanation. Not many of the poems owe more to revision. The early stanza about Isaiah, with fierce Ezekiel, and “Eastern Confutzee,” did undeniably remind the reader, as Lockhart said, of The Groves of Blarney.
“With statues gracing that noble place in,
All haythen goddesses most rare,
Petrarch, Plato, and Nebuchadnezzar,
All standing naked in the open air.”
In the early version the Soul, being too much “up to date,”
“Lit white streams of dazzling gas,”
like Sir Walter Scott at Abbotsford.
“Thus her intense, untold delight,
In deep or vivid colour, smell, and sound,
Was flattered day and night.”
Lockhart was not fond of Sir Walter’s experiments in gas, the “smell” gave him no “deep, untold delight,” and his “infamous review” was biassed by these circumstances.
The volume of 1833 was in nothing more remarkable than in its proof of the many-sidedness of the author. He offered mediæval romance, and classical perfection touched with the romantic spirit, and domestic idyll, of which The May Queen is probably the most popular example. The “mysterious being,” conversant with “the spiritual world,” might have been expected to disdain topics well within the range of Eliza Cook. He did not despise but elevated them, and thereby did more to introduce himself to the wide English public than he could have done by a century of Fatimas or Lotos-Eaters. On the other hand, a taste more fastidious, or more perverse, will scarcely be satisfied with pathos which in process of time has come to seem “obvious.” The pathos of early death in the prime of beauty is less obvious in Homer, where Achilles is to be the victim, or in the laments of the Anthology, where we only know that the dead bride or maiden was fair; but the poor May Queen is of her nature rather commonplace.
“That good man, the clergyman, has told me words of peace,”
strikes a note rather resembling the Tennysonian parody of Wordsworth —
“A Mr Wilkinson, a clergyman.”
The Lotos-Eaters, of course, is at the opposite pole of the poet’s genius. A few plain verses of the Odyssey, almost bald in their reticence, are the point de repère of the most magical vision expressed in the most musical verse. Here is the languid charm of Spenser, enriched with many classical memories, and pictures of natural beauty gorgeously yet delicately painted. After the excision of some verses, rather fantastical, in 1842, the poem became a flawless masterpiece, – one of the eternal possessions of song.
On the other hand, the opening of The Dream of Fair Women was marred in 1833 by the grotesque introductory verses about “a man that sails in a balloon.” Young as Tennyson was, these freakish passages are a psychological marvel in the work of one who did not lack the saving sense of humour. The poet, wafted on the wing and “pinion that the Theban eagle bear,” cannot conceivably be likened to an aeronaut waving flags out of a balloon – except in a spirit of self-mockery which was not Tennyson’s. His remarkable self-discipline in excising the fantastic and superfluous, and reducing his work to its classical perfection of thought and form, is nowhere more remarkable than in this magnificent vision. It is probably by mere accidental coincidence of thought that, in the verses To J. S. (James Spedding), Tennyson reproduces the noble speech on the warrior’s death which Sir Walter Scott places in the lips of the great Dundee: “It is the memory which the soldier leaves behind him, like the long train of light that follows the sunken sun, that is all that is worth caring for,” the light which lingers eternally on the hills of Atholl. Tennyson’s lines are a close parallel: —
“His memory long will live alone
In all our hearts, as mournful light
That broods above the fallen sun,
And dwells in heaven half the night.”
Though Tennyson disliked the exhibition of “the chips of the workshop,” we have commented on them, on the early readings of the early volumes. They may be regarded more properly as the sketches of a master than as “chips,” and do more than merely engage the idle curiosity of the fanatics of first editions. They prove that the poet was studious of perfection, and wisely studious, for his alterations, unlike those of some authors, were almost invariably for the better, the saner, the more mature in taste. The early readings are also worth notice, because they partially explain, by their occasionally fantastic and humourless character, the lack of early and general recognition of the poet’s genius. The native prejudice of mankind is not in favour of a new poet. Of new poets there are always so many, most of them bad, that nature has protected mankind by an armour of suspiciousness. The world, and Lockhart, easily found good reasons for distrusting this new claimant of the ivy and the bays: moreover, since about 1814 there had been a reaction against new poetry. The market was glutted. Scott had set everybody on reading, and too many on writing, novels. The great reaction of the century against all forms of literature except prose fiction had begun. Near the very date of Tennyson’s first volume Bulwer Lytton, as we saw, had frankly explained that he wrote novels because nobody would look at anything else. Tennyson had to overcome this universal, or all but universal, indifference to new poetry, and, after being silent for ten years, overcome it he did – a remarkable victory of art and of patient courage. Times were even worse for poets than to-day. Three hundred copies of the new volume were sold! But Tennyson’s friends were not puffers in league with pushing publishers.
Meanwhile the poet in 1833 went on quietly and undefeated with his work. He composed The Gardener’s Daughter, and was at work on the Morte d’Arthur, suppressed till the ninth year, on the Horatian plan. Many poems were produced (and even written out, which a number of his pieces never were), and were left in manuscript till they appeared in the Biography. Most of these are so little worthy of the author that the marvel is how he came to write them – in what uninspired hours. Unlike Wordsworth, he could weed the tares from his wheat. His studies were in Greek, German, Italian, history (a little), and chemistry, botany, and electricity – “cross-grained Muses,” these last.
It was on September 15, 1833, that Arthur Hallam died. Unheralded by sign or symptom of disease as it was, the news fell like a thunderbolt from a serene sky. Tennyson’s and Hallam’s love had been “passing the love of women.” A blow like this drives a man on the rocks of the ultimate, the insoluble problems of destiny. “Is this the end?” Nourished as on the milk of lions, on the elevating and strengthening doctrines of popular science, trained from childhood to forego hope and attend evening lectures, the young critics of our generation find Tennyson a weakling because he had hopes and fears concerning the ultimate renewal of what was more than half his life – his friendship.
“That faith I fain would keep,
That hope I’ll not forego:
Eternal be the sleep —
Unless to waken so,”
wrote Lockhart, and the verses echoed ceaselessly in the widowed heart of Carlyle. These men, it is part of the duty of critics later born to remember, were not children or cowards, though they dreamed, and hoped, and feared. We ought to make allowance for failings incident to an age not yet fully enlightened by popular science, and still undivorced from spiritual ideas that are as old as the human race, and perhaps not likely to perish while that race exists. Now and then even scientific men have been mistaken, especially when they have declined to examine evidence, as in this problem of the transcendental nature of the human spirit they usually do. At all events Tennyson was unconvinced that death is the end, and shortly after the fatal tidings arrived from Vienna he began to write fragments in verse preluding to the poem of In Memoriam. He also began, in a mood of great misery, The Two Voices; or, Thoughts of a Suicide. The poem seems to have been partly done by September 1834, when Spedding commented on it, and on the beautiful Sir Galahad, “intended for something of a male counterpart to St Agnes.” The Morte d’Arthur Tennyson then thought “the best thing I have managed lately.” Very early in 1835 many stanzas of In Memoriam had taken form. “I do not wish to be dragged forward in any shape before the reading public at present,” wrote the poet, when he heard that Mill desired to write on him. His Œnone he had brought to its new perfection, and did not desire comments on work now several years old. He also wrote his Ulysses and his Tithonus.
If ever the term “morbid” could have been applied to Tennyson, it would have been in the years immediately following the death of Arthur Hallam. But the application would have been unjust. True, the poet was living out of the world; he was unhappy, and he was, as people say, “doing nothing.” He was so poor that he sold his Chancellor’s prize gold medal, and he did not
“Scan his whole horizon
In quest of what he could clap eyes on,”
in the way of money-making, which another poet describes as the normal attitude of all men as well as of pirates. A careless observer would have thought that the poet was dawdling. But he dwelt in no Castle of Indolence; he studied, he composed, he corrected his verses: like Sir Walter in Liddesdale, “he was making himsel’ a’ the time.” He did not neglect the movements of the great world in that dawn of discontent with the philosophy of commercialism. But it was not his vocation to plunge into the fray, and on to platforms.
It is a very rare thing anywhere, especially in England, for a man deliberately to choose poetry as the duty of his life, and to remain loyal, as a consequence, to the bride of St Francis – Poverty. This loyalty Tennyson maintained, even under the temptation to make money in recognised ways presented by his new-born love for his future wife, Miss Emily Sellwood. They had first met in 1830, when she, a girl of seventeen, seemed to him like “a Dryad or an Oread wandering here.” But admiration became the affection of a lifetime when Tennyson met Miss Sellwood as bridesmaid to her sister, the bride of his brother Charles, in 1836. The poet could not afford to marry, and, like the hero of Locksley Hall, he may have asked himself, “What is that which I should do?” By 1840 he had done nothing tangible and lucrative, and correspondence between the lovers was forbidden. That neither dreamed of Tennyson’s deserting poetry for a more normal profession proved of great benefit to the world. The course is one which could only be justified by the absolute certainty of possessing genius.
III.
1837–1842
In 1837 the Tennysons left the old rectory; till 1840 they lived at High Beech in Epping Forest, and after a brief stay at Tunbridge Wells went to Boxley, near Maidstone.
It appears that at last the poet had “beat his music out,” though his friends “still tried to cheer him.” But the man who wrote Ulysses when his grief was fresh could not be suspected of declining into a hypochondriac. “If I mean to make my mark at all, it must be by shortness,” he said at this time; “for the men before me had been so diffuse, and most of the big things, except King Arthur, had been done.” The age had not la tête épique: Poe had announced the paradox that there is no such thing as a long poem, and even in dealing with Arthur, Tennyson followed the example of Theocritus in writing, not an epic, but epic idylls. Long poems suit an age of listeners, for which they were originally composed, or of leisure and few books. At present epics are read for duty’s sake, not for the only valid reason, “for human pleasure,” in FitzGerald’s phrase.
Between 1838 and 1840 Tennyson made some brief tours in England with FitzGerald, and, coming from Coventry, wrote Godiva. His engagement with Miss Sellwood seemed to be adjourned sine die, as they were forbidden to correspond.
By 1841 Tennyson was living at Mablethorpe on the Lincolnshire coast; working at his volumes of 1842, much urged by FitzGerald and American admirers, who had heard of the poet through Emerson. Moxon was to be the publisher, himself something of a poet; but early in 1842 he had not yet received the MS. Perhaps Emerson heard of Tennyson through Carlyle, who, says Sterling, “said more in your praise than in any one’s except Cromwell, and an American backwoodsman who has killed thirty or forty people with a bowie-knife.” Carlyle at this time was much attached to Lockhart, editor of the Quarterly Review, and it may have been Carlyle who converted Lockhart to admiration of his old victim. Carlyle had very little more appreciation of Keats than had Byron, or (in early days) Lockhart, and it was probably as much the man of heroic physical mould, “a life-guardsman spoilt by making poetry,” and the unaffected companion over a pipe, as the poet, that attracted him in Tennyson. As we saw, when the two triumphant volumes of 1842 did appear, Lockhart asked Sterling to review whatever book he pleased (meaning the Poems) in the Quarterly. The praise of Sterling may seem lukewarm to us, especially when compared with that of Spedding in the Edinburgh. But Sterling, and Lockhart too, were obliged to “gang warily.” Lockhart had, to his constant annoyance, “a partner, Mr Croker,” and I have heard from the late Dean Boyle that Mr Croker was much annoyed by even the mild applause yielded in the Quarterly to the author of the Morte d’Arthur.
While preparing the volumes of 1842 at Boxley, Tennyson’s life was divided between London and the society of his brother-in-law, Mr Edmund Lushington, the great Greek scholar and Professor of Greek at Glasgow University. There was in Mr Lushington’s personal aspect, and noble simplicity of manner and character, something that strongly resembled Tennyson himself. Among their common friends were Lord Houghton (Monckton Milnes), Mr Lear of the Book of Nonsense (“with such a pencil, such a pen”), Mr Venables (who at school modified the profile of Thackeray), and Lord Kelvin. In town Tennyson met his friends at The Cock, which he rendered classic; among them were Thackeray, Forster, Maclise, and Dickens. The times were stirring: social agitation, and “Carol philosophy” in Dickens, with growls from Carlyle, marked the period. There was also a kind of optimism in the air, a prophetic optimism, not yet fulfilled.
“Fly, happy happy sails, and bear the Press!”
That mission no longer strikes us as exquisitely felicitous. “The mission of the Cross,” and of the missionaries, means international complications; and “the markets of the Golden Year” are precisely the most fruitful causes of wars and rumours of wars: —
“Sea and air are dark
With great contrivances of Power.”
Tennyson’s was not an unmitigated optimism, and had no special confidence in
“The herd, wild hearts and feeble wings
That every sophister can lime.”
His political poetry, in fact, was very unlike the socialist chants of Mr William Morris, or Songs before Sunrise. He had nothing to say about
“The blood on the hands of the King,
And the lie on the lips of the Priest.”
The hands of Presidents have not always been unstained; nor are statements of a mythical nature confined to the lips of the clergy. The poet was anxious that freedom should “broaden down,” but “slowly,” not with indelicate haste. Persons who are more in a hurry will never care for the political poems, and it is certain that Tennyson did not feel sympathetically inclined towards the Iberian patriot who said that his darling desire was “to cut the throats of all the curés,” like some Covenanters of old. “Mais vous connaissez mon cœur” – “and a pretty black one it is,” thought young Tennyson. So cautious in youth, during his Pyrenean tour with Hallam in 1830, Tennyson could not become a convinced revolutionary later. We must accept him with his limitations: nor must we confuse him with the hero of his Locksley Hall, one of the most popular, and most parodied, of the poems of 1842: full of beautiful images and “confusions of a wasted youth,” a youth dramatically conceived, and in no way autobiographical.
In so marvellous a treasure of precious things as the volumes of 1842, perhaps none is more splendid, perfect, and perdurable than the Morte d’Arthur. It had been written seven years earlier, and pronounced by the poet “not bad.” Tennyson was never, perhaps, a very deep Arthurian student. A little cheap copy of Malory was his companion. 4 He does not appear to have gone deeply into the French and German “literature of the subject.” Malory’s compilation (1485) from French and English sources, with the Mabinogion of Lady Charlotte Guest, sufficed for him as materials. The whole poem, enshrined in the memory of all lovers of verse, is richly studded, as the hilt of Excalibur, with classical memories. “A faint Homeric echo” it is not, nor a Virgilian echo, but the absolute voice of old romance, a thing that might have been chanted by
“The lonely maiden of the Lake”
when
“Nine years she wrought it, sitting in the deeps,
Upon the hidden bases of the hills.”
Perhaps the most exquisite adaptation of all are the lines from the Odyssey—
“Where falls not hail nor rain, nor any snow.”
“Softly through the flutes of the Grecians” came first these Elysian numbers, then through Lucretius, then through Tennyson’s own Lucretius, then in Mr Swinburne’s Atalanta in Calydon: —
“Lands indiscoverable in the unheard-of west
Round which the strong stream of a sacred sea
Rolls without wind for ever, and the snow
There shows not her white wings and windy feet,
Nor thunder nor swift rain saith anything,
Nor the sun burns, but all things rest and thrive.”
So fortunate in their transmission through poets have been the lines of “the Ionian father of the rest,” the greatest of them all.
In the variety of excellences which marks Tennyson, the new English idylls of 1842 hold their prominent place. Nothing can be more exquisite and more English than the picture of “the garden that I love.” Theocritus cannot be surpassed; but the idyll matches to the seventh of his, where it is most closely followed, and possesses such a picture of a girl as the Sicilian never tried to paint.
Dora is another idyll, resembling the work of a Wordsworth in a clime softer than that of the Fells. The lays of Edwin Morris and Edward Bull are not among the more enduring of even the playful poems. The St Simeon Stylites appears “made to the hand” of the author of Men and Women rather than of Tennyson. The grotesque vanity of the anchorite is so remote from us, that we can scarcely judge of the truth of the picture, though the East has still her parallels to St Simeon. From the almost, perhaps quite, incredible ascetic the poet lightly turns to “society verse” lifted up into the air of poetry, in the charm of The Talking Oak, and the happy flitting sketches of actual history; and thence to the strength and passion of Love and Duty. Shall
“Sin itself be found
The cloudy porch oft opening on the Sun?”
That this is the province of sin is a pretty popular modern moral. But Honour is the better part, and here was a poet who had the courage to say so; though, to be sure, the words ring strange in an age when highly respectable matrons assure us that “passion,” like charity, covers a multitude of sins. Love and Duty, we must admit, is “early Victorian.”
The Ulysses is almost a rival to the Morte d’Arthur. It is of an early date, after Arthur Hallam’s death, and Thackeray speaks of the poet chanting his
“Great Achilles whom we knew,”
as if he thought that this was in Cambridge days. But it is later than these. Tennyson said, “Ulysses was written soon after Arthur Hallam’s death, and gave my feeling about the need of going forward, and braving the struggle of life, perhaps more simply than anything in In Memoriam.” Assuredly the expression is more simple, and more noble, and the personal emotion more dignified for the classic veil. When the plaintive Pessimist (“‘proud of the title,’ as the Living Skeleton said when they showed him”) tells us that “not to have been born is best,” we may answer with Ulysses —
“Life piled on life
Were all too little.”
The Ulysses of Tennyson, of course, is Dante’s Ulysses, not Homer’s Odysseus, who brought home to Ithaca not one of his mariners. His last known adventure, the journey to the land of men who knew not the savour of salt, Odysseus was to make on foot and alone; so spake the ghost of Tiresias within the poplar pale of Persephone.
The Two Voices expresses the contest of doubts and griefs with the spirit of endurance and joy which speaks alone in Ulysses. The man who is unhappy, but does not want to put an end to himself, has certainly the better of the argument with the despairing Voice. The arguments of “that barren Voice” are, indeed, remarkably deficient in cogency and logic, if we can bring ourselves to strip the discussion of its poetry. The original title, Thoughts of a Suicide, was inappropriate. The suicidal suggestions are promptly faced and confuted, and the mood of the author is throughout that of one who thinks life worth living: —
“Whatever crazy sorrow saith,
No life that breathes with human breath
Has ever truly long’d for death.
’Tis life whereof our nerves are scant,
Oh life, not death, for which we pant;
More life, and fuller, that I want.”
This appears to be a satisfactory reply to the persons who eke out a livelihood by publishing pessimistic books, and hooting, as the great Alexandre Dumas says, at the great drama of Life.
With The Day-Dream (of The Sleeping Beauty) Tennyson again displays his matchless range of powers. Verse of Society rises into a charmed and musical fantasy, passing from the Berlin-wool work of the period
(“Take the broidery frame, and add
A crimson to the quaint Macaw”)
into the enchanted land of the fable: princes immortal, princesses eternally young and fair. The St Agnes and Sir Galahad, companion pieces, contain the romance, as St Simeon Stylites shows the repulsive side of asceticism; for the saint and the knight are young, beautiful, and eager as St Theresa in her childhood. It has been said, I do not know on what authority, that the poet had no recollection of composing Sir Galahad, any more than Scott remembered composing The Bride of Lammermoor, or Thackeray parts of Pendennis. The haunting of Tennyson’s mind by the Arthurian legends prompted also the lovely fragment on the Queen’s last Maying, Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere, a thing of perfect charm and music. The ballads of Lady Clare and The Lord of Burleigh are not examples of the poet in his strength; for his power and fantasy we must turn to The Vision of Sin, where the early passages have the languid voluptuous music of The Lotos-Eaters, with the ethical element superadded, while the portion beginning —
