INTRODUCTION The Princess, the most elaborate and subtly-finished of all Tennyson's longer poems, is, in its present state, the result of successive revisions, two of which involved little less than the remodelling of the whole work, and of a series of minute alterations extending, edition after edition, to the latest text of his collected poems. The first edition, which appeared in 1847, was, in the third edition published in 1850, completely remodelled. The six songs introducing the several cantos, with all the passages connected with them, were added; additions, excisions, and alterations made havoc of the intervening text; and the Conclusion was so altered and expanded as to be practically new. Again, in the fourth edition of 1851, the addition of the passages describing the "weird seizures" of the Prince involved a second remodelling of the work. In the fifth edition of 1853, eighteen lines (35-48) were added to the Prologue, and there were other minor alterations. Since then the alterations have not extended beyond single words and clauses, punctuation and spelling, but such variants have been incessant. The Princess has obviously to be regarded from two points of viewas a poem and work of art, and as a didactic treatise; as a charming extravaganza, like the Orlando Furioso or The Rape of the Lock, and as a grave contribution to the solution of an important social problem. And of all Tennyson's achievements as an artist there is nothing to compare with the exquisite ingenuity and tact with which he has here blended and harmonised aims and purposes so opposite and so distinct. The true relation of woman to life and society is one of those questions which admits of an easy solution in primitive communities, but which, as civilisation advances, becomes more and more complicated, Plato appears to have been the first who declined to recognise what everyone else had recognised actually and theoretically, that there was an essential distinction between the idiosyncrasies, functions, and duties of the sexes. But the monstrous paradox which he supports in the fifth book of the Republic was regarded by the Ancients pretty much as Ruskin's economical theories would be regarded at our own Stock Exchange; and the wildest fancy of Aristophanes could, in the estimation of the Greeks, devise nothing more ridiculously improbable than the realisation of what Plato seriously propounded. Neither Christianity nor Chivalry practically affected the question-so far as its social application was concernedof the mutual relation of the sexes. And when Spenser,1 who discusses the problem allegorically in the fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh cantos of the fifth book of the Faerie Queene, came to the conclusion that woman should regard herself as altogether subordinate to man, and to her duties to man, and when Milton (Paradise Lost, iv. 295–99) wrote, speaking of the typical man and the typical woman, Though both Not equal, as their sex not equal, seem'd; adding (Ibid. ix. 232–34), Nothing lovelier can be found In woman, than to study household good, 1 See the episode of Artegall and Radigund. they may be said to have summed up the conventional view of the subject. But another note was struck in 1693 by De Foe. Among the schemes suggested in his Essay on Projects is an Academy for the higher education of women, providing instruction in all those subjects which should qualify them for being the intellectual companions of men. De Foe was followed by Steele, who in several papers in the Tatler and Spectator urges the importance of this question, expressing it as his opinion that "the great happiness or misfortune of mankind depends upon the manner of educating and treating that sex."1 But the work which initiated the modern history of the movement was Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Women, which appeared in 1792. The contentions of Mary Wollstonecraft are precisely those of Tennyson's heroine, with this important difference, that she very properly considers that, though women should not be excluded from any of the posts open to men, the duties of the wife and the mother should be paramount. Between 1830 and the appearance of this poem the " woman question," as it was called, had been brought into prominence by many writers. An article in the Westminster Review for July 1831 had sounded a trumpet note. Bentham had expressed himself strongly on the subject. Miss Martineau and Mrs. Jamieson took up the question. In 1840 a work entitled Woman's Mission had extraordinary vogue, and very soon ran through six editions. In the same year Lady Morgan fulminated a wild and intemperate philippic against "the oppressors of her sex" in Woman and her Master. Then, in April 1841, the Westminster Review, in an able and vigorous article, again entered the arena as Champion of Woman's Cause. In America, two or three years after 1 Tatler, No. 141. In 1846 wards, Mrs. Amelia Jenks Bloomer had begun to proclaim the equality and practical identity of the sexes. and in 1847 the first steps were taken in England to provide what De Foe had suggested, “an Academy" for the higher education of women, and the result was the foundation of Queen's College, in Harley Street. It was founded in 1848 by Tennyson's friend, the Rev. F. D. Maurice. Such is a brief sketch of the history of the question when Tennyson took it up. We learn from the Life (vol. i. p. 248) that the subject had engaged his attention as early as 1839, and that even then he had talked over the plan of The Princess. The question had no doubt been brought prominently before him in conversations with Maurice, and indeed he is reported to have said, about this time, that "the two great social questions impending in England were the housing and education of the poor man before making him our master, and the higher education of women" (Life, vol. i. p. 249). It was Tennyson's habit to study exhaustively every subject with which he dealt, and he brought to its consideration not merely the sympathy of the poet, but refined good sense, sobriety, and shrewd insight. In the literature which has been referred to, and in the efforts and aims of his friend Maurice and his coadjutors, if there was very much which every philanthropist would support and further, there was also some danger. If nothing could be more desirable than the vindication and realisation of woman's right to develop herself morally and intellectually to the fullest measure of her capacities, nothing could be more disastrous than for her to consider that her functions and duties as a woman should be subordinated to that end. Tennyson saw the danger of exciting intellectual ambition in women, as it might easily lead to all that it had led to in the theories of such fanatics as Lady Morgan and Mrs. Bloomer-to |