Kitabı oku: «Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, April 1885», sayfa 5

THE POETRY OF TENNYSON
BY RODEN NOEL

It is perhaps difficult for men of middle age to estimate Tennyson aright. For we who love poetry were brought up, as it were, at his feet, and he cast the magic of his fascination over our youth. We have gone away, we have travelled in other lands, absorbed in other preoccupations, often revolving problems different from those concerning which we took counsel with him; and we hear new voices, claiming authority, who aver that our old master has been superseded, that he has no message for a new generation, that his voice is no longer a talisman of power. Then we return to the country of our early love, and what shall our report be? Each one must answer for himself; but my report will be entirely loyal to those early and dear impressions. I am of those who believe that Tennyson has still a message for the world. Men become impatient with hearing Aristides so often called just, but is that the fault of Aristides? They are impatient also with a reputation, which necessarily is what all great reputations must so largely be – the empty echo of living voices from blank walls. “Now again” – not the people, but certain critics – “call it but a weed.” Yet how strange these fashions in poetry are! I well remember Lord Broughton, Byron’s friend, expressing to me, when I was a boy, his astonishment that the bust of Tennyson by Woolner should have been thought worthy of a place near that of Lord Byron in Trinity College, Cambridge. “Lord Byron was a great poet; but Mr. Tennyson, though he had written pretty verses,” and so on. For one thing, the men of that generation deemed Tennyson terribly obscure. “In Memoriam,” it was held, nobody could possibly understand. The poet, being original, had to make his own public. Men nurtured on Scott and Byron could not understand him. Now we hear no more of his obscurity. Moreover, he spoke as the mouthpiece of his own time. Doubts, aspirations, visions unfamiliar to the aging, breathed melodiously through him. Again, how contemptuously do Broad-church psychologists like George Macdonald, and writers for the Spectator, as well as literary persons belonging to what I may term the finikin school, on the other hand, now talk of our equally great poet Byron. How detestable must the North be, if the South be so admirable! But while Tennyson spoke to me in youth, Byron spoke to me in boyhood, and I still love both.

Whatever may have to be discounted from the popularity of Tennyson on account of fashion and a well-known name, or on account of his harmony with the (more or less provincial) ideas of the large majority of Englishmen, his popularity is a fact of real benefit to the public, and highly creditable to them at the same time. The establishment of his name in popular favor is but very partially accounted for by the circumstance that, when he won his spurs, he was among younger singers the only serious champion in the field, since, if I mistake not, he was at one time a less “popular” poet than Mr. Robert Montgomery. Vox populi is not always vox Dei, but it may be so accidentally, and then the people reap benefit from their happy blunder. The great poet who won the laurel before Tennyson has never been “popular” at all, and Tennyson is the only true English poet who has pleased the “public” since Byron, Walter Scott, Tom Moore, and Mrs. Hemans. But he had to conquer their suffrages, for his utterance, whatever he may have owed to Keats, was original, and his substance the outcome of an opulent and profound personality. These were serious obstacles to success, for he neither went “deep” into “the general heart” like Burns, nor appealed to superficial sentiments in easy language like Scott, Moore, and Byron. In his earliest volume indeed there was a preponderance of manner over matter; it was characterized by a certain dainty prettiness of style, that scarcely gave promise of the high spiritual vision and rich complexity of human insight to which he has since attained, though it did manifest a delicate feeling for nature in association with human moods, an extraordinarily subtle sensibility of all senses, and a luscious pictorial power. Not Endymion had been more luxuriant. All was steeped in golden languors. There were faults in plenty, and of course the critics, faithful to the instincts of their kind, were jubilant to nose them. To adapt Coleridge’s funny verses, not “the Church of St. Geryon,” nor the legendary Rhine, but the “stinks and stenches” of Kölntown do such offal-feeders love to enumerate, and distinguish. But the poet in his verses on “Musty Christopher” gave one of these people a Roland for his Oliver. Stuart Mill, as Mr. Mathews, in his lately published and very instructive lecture on Tennyson, points out, was the one critic in a million who remembered Pope’s precept,

 
“Be thou the first true merit to befriend,
His praise is lost who waits till all commend.”
 

Yet it is only natural that the mediocrities, who for a moment keep the door of Fame, should scrutinize with somewhat jaundiced eye the credentials of new aspirants, since every entry adds fresh bitterness to their own exclusion.

But really it is well for us, the poet’s elect lovers, to remember that he once had faults, however few he may now retain; for the perverse generation who dance not when the poet pipes to them, nor mourn when he weeps, have turned upon Tennyson with the cry that he “is all fault who has no fault at all” – they would have us regard him as a kind of Andrea del Sarto, a “blameless” artistic “monster, “a poet of unimpeachable technical skill, but keeping a certain dead level of moderate merit. It is as well to be reminded that this at all events is false. The dawn of his young art was beautiful; but the artist had all the generous faults of youthful genius – excess, vision confused with gorgeous color and predominant sense, too palpable artifice of diction, indistinctness of articulation in the outline, intricately-woven cross-lights flooding the canvas, defect of living interest; while Coleridge said that he began to write poetry without an ear for metre. Neither Adeline, Madeline, nor Eleanore are living portraits, though Eleanore is gorgeously painted. “The Ode to Memory” has isolated images of rare beauty, but it is kaleidoscopic in effect; the fancy is playing with loose foam-wreaths, rather than the imagination “taking things by the heart.” But our great poet has gone beyond these. He has himself rejected twenty-six out of the fifty-eight poems published in his first volume; while some of those even in the second have been altogether rewritten. Such defects are eminently present in the lately republished poem written in youth, “The Lover’s Tale,” though this too has been altered. As a storehouse of fine imagery, metaphor, and deftly moulded phrase, of blank verse also whose sonorous rhythm must surely be a fabric of adult architecture, the piece can hardly be surpassed; but the tale as tale lingers and lapses, overweighted with the too gorgeous trappings under which it so laboriously moves. And such expression as the following, though not un-Shakspearian, is hardly quarried from the soundest material in Shakspeare – for, after all, Shakspeare was a euphuist now and then —

 
“Why fed we from one fountain? drew one sun?
Why were our mothers branches of one stem, if that same nearness
Were father to this distance, and that one
Vaunt courier to this double, if affection
Living slew love, and sympathy hewed out
The bosom-sepulchre of sympathy?”
 

Yet “Mariana” had the virtue, which the poet has displayed so pre-eminently since, of concentration. Every subtle touch enhances the effect he intends to produce, that of the desolation of the deserted woman, whose hope is nearly extinguished; Nature hammering a fresh nail into her coffin with every innocent aspect or movement. Beautiful too are “Love and Death” and “The Poet’s Mind;” while in “The Poet” we have the oft-quoted line: “Dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn, the love of love.”

Mr. G. Brimley was the first, I believe, to point out the distinctive peculiarity of Lord Tennyson’s treatment of landscape. It is treated by him dramatically; that is to say, the details of it are selected so as to be interpretative of the particular mood or emotion he wishes to represent. Thus in the two Marianas, they are painted with the minute distinctness appropriate to the morbid and sickening observation of the lonely woman, whose attention is distracted by no cares, pleasures, or satisfied affections. That is a pregnant remark, a key to unlock a good deal of Tennyson’s work with. Byron and Shelley, though they are carried out of themselves in contemplating Nature, do not, I think, often take her as interpreter of moods alien to their own. In Wordsworth’s “Excursion,” it is true, Margaret’s lonely grief is thus delineated though the neglect of her garden and the surroundings of her cottage; yet this is not so characteristic a note of his nature-poetry. In the “Miller’s Daughter” and the “Gardener’s Daughter” the lovers would be little indeed without the associated scene so germane to the incidents narrated, both as congenial setting of the picture for a spectator, and as vitally fused with the emotion of the lovers; while never was more lovely landscape-painting of the gentle order than in the “Gardener’s Daughter.” Lessing, who says that poetry ought never to be pictorial, would, I suppose, much object to Tennyson’s; but to me, I confess, this mellow, lucid, luminous word-painting of his is entirely delightful. It refutes the criticism that words cannot convey a picture by perfectly conveying it. Solvitur ambulando; the Gardener’s Daughter standing by her rose-bush, “a sight to make an old man young,” remaining in our vision to confound all crabbed pedants with pet theories.

In his second volume, indeed, the poet’s art was well mastered, for here we find the “Lotos-eaters,” “Œnone,” “The Palace of Art,” “A Dream of Fair Women,” the tender “May-Queen,” and the “Lady of Shalott.” Perhaps the first four of these are among the very finest works of Tennyson. In the mouth of the love-lorn nymph Œnone he places the complaint concerning Paris into which there enters so much delightful picture of the scenery around Mount Ida, and of those fair immortals who came to be judged by the beardless apple-arbiter. How deliciously flows the verse! – though probably it flows still more entrancingly in the “Lotos-eaters,” wandering there like clouds of fragrant incense, or some slow heavy honey, or a rare amber unguent poured out. How wonderfully harmonious with the dream-mood of the dreamers are phrase, image, and measure! But we need not quote the lovely choric song wherein occur the lines —

 
“Music that gentlier on the spirit lies
Than tired eyelids upon tired eyes,”
 

so entirely restful and happy in their simplicity. If Art would always blossom so, she might be forgiven if she blossomed only for her own sake; yet this controversy regarding Art for Art need hardly have arisen, since Art may certainly bloom for her own sake, if only she consent to assimilate in her blooming, and so exhale for her votaries, in due proportion, all elements essential to Nature, and Humanity: for in the highest artist all faculties are transfigured into one supreme organ; while among forms her form is the most consummate, among fruits her fruit offers the most satisfying refreshment. What a delicately true picture have we here —

 
“And like a downward smoke, the slender stream
Along the cliff to fall, and pause and fall did seem,”
 

where we feel also the poet’s remarkable faculty of making word and rhythm an echo and auxiliary of the sense. Not only have we the three cæsuras respectively after “fall,” and “pause” and “fall,” but the length, and soft amplitude of the vowel sounds with liquid consonants aid in the realization of the picture, reminding of Milton’s beautiful “From morn to noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve, a summer’s day.” The same faculty is notable in the rippling lilt of the charming little “Brook” song, and indeed everywhere. In the “Dream of Fair Women” we have a series of cabinet portraits, presenting a situation of human interest with a few animating touches, but still chiefly through suggestive surroundings. There occurs the magnificent phrase of Cleopatra: “We drank the Lybian sun to sleep, and lit lamps which outburned Canopus.” The force of expression could be carried no further than throughout this poem, and by “expression” of course I do not mean pretty words, or power-words for there own sweet sake, for these, expressing nothing, whatever else they may be, are not “expression;” but I mean the forcible or felicitous presentment of thought, image, feeling, or incident, through pregnant and beautiful language in harmony with them; though the subtle and indirect suggestion of language is unquestionably an element to be taken into account by poetry. The “Palace of Art” is perhaps equal to the former poem for lucid splendor of description, in this instance pointing a moral, allegorizing a truth. Scornful pride, intellectual arrogance, selfish absorption in æsthetic enjoyment, is imaged forth in this vision of the queen’s world-reflecting palace, and its various treasures – the end being a sense of unendurable isolation, engendering madness, but at last repentance, and reconcilement with the scouted commonalty of mankind.

The dominant note of Tennyson’s poetry is assuredly the delineation of human moods modulated by Nature, and through a system of Nature-symbolism. Thus, in “Elaine,” when Lancelot has sent a courtier to the queen, asking her to grant him audience, that he may present the diamonds won for her in tourney, she receives the messenger with unmoved dignity; but he, bending low and reverently before her, saw “with a sidelong eye”

 
“The shadow of some piece of pointed lace
In the queen’s shadow vibrate on the walls,
And parted, laughing in his courtly heart.”
 

The “Morte d’Arthur” affords a striking instance of this peculiarly Tennysonian method. That is another of the very finest pieces. Such poetry may suggest labor, but not more than does the poetry of Virgil or Milton. Every word is the right word, and each in the right place. Sir H. Taylor indeed warns poets against “wanting to make every word beautiful.” And yet here it must be owned that the result of such an effort is successful, so delicate has become the artistic tact of this poet in his maturity.¹ For, good expression being the happy adaptation of language to meaning, it follows that sometimes good expression will be perfectly simple, even ordinary in character, and sometimes it will be ornate, elaborate, dignified. He who can thus vary his language is the best verbal artist, and Tennyson can thus vary it. In this poem, the “Morte d’Arthur,” too, we have “deep-chested music.” Except in some of Wordsworth and Shelley, or in the magnificent “Hyperion” of Keats, we have had no such stately, sonorous organ-music in English verse since Milton as in this poem, or in “Tithonus,” “Ulysses,” “Lucretius,” and “Guinevere.” From the majestic overture,

 
“So all day long the noise of battle rolled
Among the mountains by the winter sea,”
 

onward to the end, the same high elevation is maintained.

But this very picturesqueness of treatment has been urged against Tennyson as a fault in his narrative pieces generally, from its alleged over-luxuriance, and tendency to absorb, rather than enhance, the higher human interest of character and action. However this be (and I think it is an objection that does apply, for instance, to “The Princess”), here in this poem picturesqueness must be counted as a merit, because congenial to the semi-mythical, ideal, and parabolic nature of Arthurian legend, full of portent and supernatural suggestion. Such Ossianic hero-forms are nearly as much akin to the elements as to man. And the same answer holds largely in the case of the other Arthurian Idylls. It has been noted how well-chosen is the epithet “water” applied to a lake in the lines, “On one side lay the ocean, and on one Lay a great water, and the moon was full.” Why is this so happy? For as a rule the concrete rather than the abstract is poetical, because the former brings with it an image, and the former involves no vision. But now in the night all Sir Bedevere could observe, or care to observe, was that there was “some great water.” We do not – he did not – want to know exactly what it was. Other thoughts, other cares, preoccupy him and us. Again, of dying Arthur we are told that “all his greaves and caisses were dashed with drops of onset.” “Onset” is a very generic term, poetic because removed from all vulgar associations of common parlance, and vaguely suggestive not only of war’s pomp and circumstance, but of high deeds also, and heroic hearts, since onset belongs to mettle and daring; the word for vast and shadowy connotation is akin to Milton’s grand abstraction, “Far off His coming shone” or Shelley’s, “Where the Earthquake Demon taught her young Ruin.”

It has been noted also how cunningly Tennyson can gild and furbish up the most commonplace detail – as when he calls Arthur’s mustache “the knightly growth that fringed his lips,” or condescends to glorify a pigeon-pie, or paints the clown’s astonishment by this detail, “the brawny spearman let his cheek Bulge with the unswallowed piece, and turning stared;” or thus characterizes a pun, “and took the word, and play’d upon it, and made it of two colors.” This kind of ingenuity, indeed, belongs rather to talent than to genius; it is exercised in cold blood; but talent may be a valuable auxiliary of genius, perfecting skill in the technical departments of art. Yet such a gift is not without danger to the possessor. It may tempt him to make his work too much like a delicate mosaic of costly stone, too hard and unblended, from excessive elaboration of detail. One may even prefer to art thus highly wrought a more glowing and careless strain, that lifts us off our feet, and carries us away as on a more rapid, if more turbid torrent of inspiration, such as we find in Byron, Shelley, or Victor Hugo. Here you are compelled to pause at every step, and admire the design of the costly tesselated pavement under your feet. Perhaps there is a jewelled glitter, a Pre-Raphaelite or Japanese minuteness of finish here and there in Tennyson, that takes away from the feeling of aërial perspective and remote distance, leaving little to the imagination; not suggesting and whetting the appetite, but rather satiating it; his loving observation of minute particulars is so faithful, his knowledge of what others, even men of science, have observed so accurate, his fancy so nimble in the detection of similitudes. But every master has his own manner, and his reverent disciples would be sorry if he could be without it. We love the little idiosyncracies of our friends.

I have said the objection in question does seem to lie against “The Princess.” It contains some of the most beautiful poetic pearls the poet has ever dropped; but the manner appears rather disproportionate to the matter, at least to the subject as he has chosen to regard it. For it is regarded by him only semi-seriously; so lightly and sportively is the whole topic viewed at the outset, that the effect is almost that of burlesque; yet there is a very serious conclusion, and a very weighty moral is drawn from the story, the workmanship being labored to a degree, and almost encumbered with ornamentation. But the poet himself admits the ingrained incongruity of the poem. The fine comparison of the Princess Ida in the battle to a beacon glaring ruin over raging seas, for instance, seems too grand for the occasion. How differently, and in what burning earnest has a great poet-woman, Mrs. Browning, treated this grave modern question of the civil and political position of women in “Aurora Leigh!” Tennyson’s is essentially a man’s view, and the frequent talk about women’s beauty must be very aggravating to the “Blues.” It is this poem especially that gives people with a limited knowledge of Tennyson the idea of a “pretty” poet; the prettiness, though very genuine, seems to play too patronizingly with a momentous theme. The Princess herself, and the other figures are indeed dramatically realized, but the splendor of invention, and the dainty detail, rather dazzle the eye away from their humanity. Here, however, are some of the loveliest songs that this poet, one of our supreme lyrists, ever sung: “Tears, idle tears!” “The splendor falls,” “Sweet and low,” “Home they brought,” “Ask me no more,” and the exquisite melody, “For Love is of the valley.” Moreover, the grand lines toward the close are full of wisdom —

 
“For woman is not undeveloped man,
But diverse: could we make her as the man
Sweet love were slain,” &c.
 

I feel myself a somewhat similar incongruity in the poet’s treatment of his more homely, modern, half-humorous themes, such as the introduction to the “Morte d’Arthur,” and “Will Waterproof;” not at all in the humorous poems, like the “Northern Farmer,” which are all of a piece, and perfect in their own vein. In this introduction we have “The host and I sat round the wassail bowl, then half-way ebb’d;” but this metaphorical style is not (fortunately) sustained, and so, as good luck would have it, a metaphor not being ready to hand, we have the honester and homelier line, “Till I tired out with cutting eights that day upon the pond;” yet this homespun hardly agrees with the above stage-king’s costume. And so again I often venture to wish that the Poet-Laureate would not say “flowed” when he only means “said.” Still, this may be hypercriticism. For I did not personally agree with the critic who objected to Enoch Arden’s fish-basket being called “ocean-smelling osier.” There is no doubt, however, that “Stokes, and Nokes, and Vokes” have exaggerated the poet’s manner, till the “murex fished up” by Keats and Tennyson has become one universal flare of purple. Beautiful as some of Mr. Rossetti’s work is, his expression in the sonnets surely became obscure from over-involution, and excessive fioriture of diction. But then Rossetti’s style is no doubt formed considerably upon that of the Italian poets. One is glad, however, that, this time, at all events, the right man has “got the porridge!”

In connection with “Morte d’Arthur,” I may draw attention again to Lord Tennyson’s singular skill in producing a rhythmical response to the sense.

 
“The great brand
Made lightnings in the splendor of the moon,
And flashing round and round, and whirled in an arch.”
 

Here the anapest instead of the iambic in the last place happily imitates the sword Excalibur’s own gyration in the air. Then what admirable wisdom does the legend, opening out into parable, disclose toward the end! When Sir Bedevere laments the passing away of the Round Table, and Arthur’s noble peerage, gone down in doubt, distrust, treachery, and blood, after that last great battle in the West, when, amid the death-white mist, “confusion fell even upon Arthur,” and “friend slew friend, now knowing whom he slew,” how grandly comes the answer of Arthur from the mystic barge, that bears him from the visible world to “some far island valley of Avilion,” “The old order changeth, yielding place to new, and God fulfils Himself in many ways, Lest one good custom should corrupt the world!” The new commencement of this poem, called in the idyls “The Passing of Arthur,” is well worthy of the conclusion. How weirdly expressive is that last battle in the mist of those hours of spiritual perplexity, which overcloud even strongest natures and firmest faith, overshadowing whole communities, when we know not friend from foe, the holiest hope seems doomed to disappointment, all the great aim and work of life have failed; even loyalty to the highest is no more; the fair polity built laboriously by some god-like spirit dissolves, and “all his realm reels back into the beast;” while men “falling down in death” look up to heaven only to find cloud, and the great-voiced ocean, as it were Destiny without love and without mind, with voice of days of old and days to be, shakes the world, wastes the narrow kingdom, yea, beats upon the faces of our dead! The world-sorrow pierces here through the strain of a poet usually calm and contented. Yet “Arthur shall come again, aye, twice as fair;” for the spirit of man is young immortally.

Who, moreover, has moulded for us phrases of more transcendent dignity, of more felicitous grace and import, phrases, epithets, and lines that have already become memorable household words? More magnificent expression I cannot conceive than that of such poems as “Lucretius,” “Tithonus,” “Ulysses.” These all for versification, language, luminous picture, harmony of structure have never been surpassed. What pregnant brevity, weight, and majesty of expression in the lines where Lucretius characterizes the death of his namesake Lucretia, ending “and from it sprang the commonwealth, which breaks, as I am breaking now!” What masterly power in poetically embodying a materialistic philosophy, congenial to modern science, yet in absolute dramatic keeping with the actual thought of the Roman poet! And at the same time, what tremendous grasp of the terrible conflict of passion with reason, two natures in one, significant for all epochs! In “Tithonus” and “Ulysses” we find embodiments in high-born verse and illustrious phrase of ideal moods, adventurous peril-affronting Enterprise contemptuously tolerant of tame household virtues in “Ulysses,” and the bane of a burdensome immortality, become incapable even of love, in “Tithonus.” Any personification more exquisite than that of Aurora in the latter were inconceivable.

M. Taine, in his Litterature Anglaise, represents Tennyson as an idyllic poet (a charming one), comfortably settled among his rhododendrons on an English lawn, and viewing the world through the somewhat insular medium of a prosperous, domestic and virtuous member of the English comfortable classes, as also of a man of letters who has fully succeeded. Again, either M. Taine, M. Scherer, or some other writer in the Revue des deux Mondes, pictures him, like his own Lady of Shalott, viewing life not as it really is, but reflected in the magic mirror of his own recluse fantasy. Now, whatever measure of truth there may formerly have been in such conceptions, they have assuredly now proved quite one-sided and inadequate. We have only to remember “Maud,” the stormier poems of the “Idylls,” “Lucretius,” “Rizpah,” the “Vision of Sin.” The recent poem “Rizpah” perhaps marks the high-water mark of the Laureate’s genius, and proves henceforward beyond all dispute his wide range, his command over the deeper-toned and stormier themes of human music, as well as over the gentler and more serene. It proves also that the venerable master’s hand has not lost its cunning, rather that he has been even growing until now, having become more profoundly sympathetic with the world of action, and the common growth of human sorrows. “Rizpah” is certainly one of the strongest, most intensely felt, and graphically realized dramatic poems in the language; its pathos is almost overwhelming. There is nothing more tragic in Œdipus, Antigone, or Lear. And what a strong Saxon homespun language has the veteran poet found for these terrible lamentations of half-demented agony, “My Baby! the bones that had sucked me, the bones that had laughed and had cried, Theirs! O no! They are mine not theirs – they had moved in my side.” Then the heart-gripping phrase breaking forth ever and anon in the imaginative metaphorical utterance of wild emotion, to which the sons and daughters of the people are often moved, eloquent beyond all eloquence, white-hot from the heart! “Dust to dust low down! let us hide! but they set him so high, that all the ships of the world could stare at him passing by.” In this last book of ballads the style bears the same relation to the earlier and daintier that the style of “Samson Agonistes” bears to that of “Comus.” “The Revenge” is equally masculine, simple, and sinewy in appropriate strength of expression, a most spirited rendering of a heroic naval action – worthy of a place, as is also the grand ode on the death of Wellington, beside the war odes of Campbell, the “Agincourt” of Drayton, and the “Rule Britannia” of Thomson. The irregular metre of the “Ballad of the Fleet” is most remarkable as a vehicle of the sense, resonant with din of battle, full-voiced with rising and bursting storm toward the close, like the equally spirited concluding scenes of “Harold,” that depict the battle of Senlac. The dramatic characterizations in “Harold” and “Queen Mary” are excellent – Mary, Harold, the Conqueror, the Confessor, Pole, Edith, Stigand, and other subordinate sketches, being striking and successful portraits; while “Harold” is full also of incident and action – a really memorable modern play; but the main motive of “Queen Mary” fails in tragic dignity and interest, though there is about it a certain grim subdued pathos, as of still life, and there are some notable scenes. Tennyson is admirably dramatic in the portrayal of individual moods, of men or women in certain given situations. His plays are fine, and of real historic interest, but not nearly so remarkable as the dramatic poems I have named, as the earlier “St. Simeon Stylites,” “Ulysses,” “Tithonus,” or as the “Northern Farmer,” “Cobblers,” and “Village Wife,” among his later works. These last are perfectly marvellous in their fidelity and humorous photographic realism. That the poet of “Œnone,” “The Lotus-eaters,” and the Arthur cycle should have done these also is wonderful. The humor of them is delightful, and the rough homely diction perfect. One wishes indeed that the “dramatic fragments” collected by Lamb, like gold-dust out of the rather dreary sand-expanse of Elizabethan playwrights, were so little fragmentary as these. Tennyson’s short dramatic poems are quintessential; in a brief glimpse he contrives to reveal the whole man or woman. You would know the old “Northern Farmer,” with his reproach to “God Amoighty” for not “letting him aloan,” and the odious farmer of the new style, with his “Proputty! Proputty!” wherever you met them. But “Dora,” the “Grand-mother,” “Lady Clare,” “Edward Gray,” “Lord of Burleigh,” had long since proved that Tennyson had more than one style at command; that he was master not only of a flamboyant, a Corinthian, but also of a sweet, simple, limpid English, worthy of Goldsmith or Cowper at their best.