Puslapio vaizdai
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which are as absolutely fitted to the emotions they illustrate as the glove to the hand. Her angry and scornful smile is compared-and the Nature picture is superb-to

A stroke of cruel sunshine on the cliff,

When all the glens are drown'd in azure gloom

Of thunder-shower.

When she is compassed by two armies and the noise of arms, she stands like a stately pine on an island, on each side of which a great cataract divides, "when storm is on the heights," and the torrents roll,

Suck'd from the dark heart of the long hills

a splendid concentration of natural truth. When she knows that all her purpose is overthrown, Tennyson uses what he must often have himself seen from the downs of Freshwater to express her pain:

As one that climbs a peak to gaze

O'er land and main, and sees a great black cloud
Drag inward from the deeps, a wall of night,
Blot out the slope of sea from verge to shore,
And suck the blinding splendour from the sand,
And quenching lake by lake and tarn by tarn,
Expunge the world.

This and the equally fine description of the whirlwind tell of Nature in giant effort. But he can

see the delicate, minute things of Nature just as clearly and describe them with equal force. There is an image of a maiden's thoughts and ways which is as new as it is lovely. Not a thought, a touch,

But pure as lines of green that streak the white

Of the first snow-drop's inner leaves.

And when he wishes to reveal how two young hearts slid into love, he says it was no more strange

Than when two dew-drops on the petal shake

To the same sweet air, and tremble deeper down,
And slip at last all-fragrant into one.

A perfect image-but to what minute observation it bears witness ! In these examples alone what a range of vision! How many things and sights were noted and stored up before these were chosen to use! In what a lucid light they were seen! With what truth, and, more difficult still to do, with what clearness, fitness, finish, and choice expressed! This is the artist's keen eye, observant love and trained capacity, working together, and it is a pleasure to be led by it to observe more lovingly the world of Nature. From point to point this method of illustrating-a method he learned from Homerenlightens and expands the poem.

These belong to the qualities of Tennyson's mind, but in the Prologue and Epilogue of The Princess, as well as in the poem itself, we have a picture of some points in his character. He feels that he is of the North rather than of the South.

And dark and true and tender is the North,

is a line in which he paints what he wished to be. His Prince is of the North, and has that special mysticism of the North which appears in the dreams so constantly told in the Icelandic Sagas. He frequently loses consciousness of

the outward, or rather he loses the consciousness of its reality. All around him becomes visionary, or the visionary world becomes the real world, till he is not able to distinguish between both.

On a sudden in the midst of men and day,
And while I walk'd and talk'd as heretofore,
I seem'd to move among a world of ghosts,
And feel myself the shadow of a dream—

He talks of it as a

"weird

That is Tennyson. seizure," but it is a common experience. The sudden unsubstantialising of the outward world, of all events and places, was Wordsworth's frequent feeling. It is not, indeed, the unique property of the poets, but it brings before us the half-pantheistic idealism which dwelt in Tennyson's nature side by side with his sturdy realism. The same experience is alluded to in The Holy Grail, and is put in the mouth of Arthur :

Let visions of the night or of the day

Come, as they will, and many a time they come,
Until this earth he walks on seems not earth,
The light that strikes his eyeball is not light,
This air that smites his forehead is not air,
But vision-yea, his very hand and foot-

Right opposite to this is that rough forcibleness, that downright squareness which in him called a spade a spade, and which is at the root of so many of the poems. Both opposites were well represented in his figure the great-boned, loose-limbed, gigantesque man, with his domed head—and the soft dark hair, the gentle eyes, and the white, smooth, finelined brow, covered with delicate skin through which the blue veins shone. Force and fineness

were married in his face and form as well as in his verse.

Then in this Prologue and Epilogue there, are other characteristics of what he had become. /His fancy for science, and for the age in which he lived being made great by science, which springs to light in Locksley Hall, has grown in this poem. His Princess's favourite study is the Natural Sciences. She thinks that learning and philosophy will be the salvation of women. The holiday-makers in the Prologue are taught by facts; electricity, steam, hydraulics go hand-in-hand with the rustic sports. We have somewhat too much of this. An artist cannot introduce Physical Science into his art-work without introducing trouble into it. Now and again he may play with its results, but it must be play. Tennyson did not always play with it, and he sometimes seemed to feel that Science was more important than Art. Whenever he did, his poetry suffered. However, there are traces enough, especially in his later poems, that he was weary of the claim of Science to be greater than Art, and that he feared it might stifle poetry:

Let Science prove we are, and then,
What matters Science unto men,

At least to me?

And he speaks still more particularly in a poem, the Parnassus of 1889:

What be those two shapes high over the sacred fountain, Taller than all the Muses, and huger than all the mountain? On those two known peaks they stand ever spreading and heightening;

Poet, that evergreen laurel is blasted by more than lightning!

Look, in their deep double shadow the crown'd ones all disappearing!

Sing like a bird and be happy, nor hope for a deathless hearing!

"Sounding for ever and ever"? Pass on! the sight confuses

These are Astronomy and Geology, terrible Muses!

It makes me happier to read that poem, for I know then that he was saved from the impertinent despotism which claims that the reasoning intellect is higher than the imagination, and the work of Science of more importance to man than the work of Art. We see then, that, in his old age, Tennyson felt that beauty and the representation of it were being crowded out of the world by Science. But we also see in the end of that poem how he consoles himself. "If the poets," he answers,

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are crushed here, they need not greatly care. They sing their songs for ever, and other worlds listen."

Then, too, his political judgments appear; and though I have already alluded to them in the introduction to this book, it seems needful to touch on them again in connection with this Prologue. We find the honest Whig views of 1840, modified from their universal aims by a cherished insularity; a fancy for the squirearchy as the backbone of England; a sense that the English temper, of which he knew nothing below the middle class, is the only temper in which freedom grows straight. With this there is a steady contempt for France, modified by the thought which seems at some odd moments to have made a lodgment in his mind, that social theories and dreams and the wild popular storms that follow them may be of more

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