sible for criticism, while the latter portion seems too serious for a story so slight and flimsy, he has with exquisite taste disposed of the question which has its burlesque and comic as well as its tragic side, of woman's present place and future destinies. And if any one wishes to see this subject treated with a masterly and delicate hand, in protest alike against the theories which would make her as the man, which she could only be by becoming masculine, not manly, and those which would have her to remain the toy, or the slave, or the slight thing of sentimental and frivolous accomplishment which education has hitherto aimed at making her, I would recommend him to study the last few pages of The Princess, where the poet brings the question back, as a poet should, to nature; develops the ideal out of the actual woman, and reads out of what she is, on the one hand what her Creator intended her to be, and on the other, what she never can nor ought to be.

[STEDMAN, Victorian Poets, pp. 164-7.]

There comes a time in the life of every aspiring artist when, if he be a painter, he tires of painting cabinet pictures, — however much they satisfy his admirers; if a poet, he says to himself: 'Enough of lyrics and idyls; let me essay a masterpiece, a sustained production, that shall bear to my former work the relation which an opera or oratorio bears to a composer's sonatas and canzonets.' It may be that some feeling of this kind impelled Tennyson to write The Princess, the theme and story of which are both his own invention. At that time he had not learned the truth of Emerson's maxim that 'Tradition supplies a better fable than any invention can'; and that it is as well for a poet to borrow from history or romance a tale made ready to his hands, and which his genius must transfigure. The poem is, as he entitled it, A Medley,' constructed of ancient and modern materials, show of medieval pomp and movement, observed through an atmosphere of latter-day thought and emotion; so varying, withal, in the scenes and language of its successive parts, that one may well conceive it to be told by the group of thoroughbred men and maidens who, one after another, rehearse its cantos to beguile a

a

festive summer's day. I do not sympathize with the criticisms to which it has been subjected upon this score, and which is but the old outcry of the French classicists against Victor Hugo and the romance school. The poet, in his prelude, anticipates every stricture, and to me the anachronisms and impossibilities of the story seem not only lawful, but attractive. Like those of Shakespeare's comedies, they invite the reader off-hand to a purely ideal world; he seats himself upon an English lawn, as upon a Persian enchanted carpet, hears the mystic word pronounced, and, presto! finds himself in fairyland. Moreover, Tennyson's special gift of reducing incongruous details to a common structure and tone is fully illustrated in a poem made

To suit with time and place,

A Gothic ruin and a Grecian house,
A talk of college and of ladies' rights,
A feudal knight in silken masquerade.

This were a medley! we should have him back
Who told the Winter's Tale' to do it for us.

But not often has a lovelier story been recited. After the idyllic introduction, the body of the poem is composed in a semiheroic verse. Other works of our poet are greater, but none is so fascinating as this romantic tale: English throughout, yet combining the England of Cœur de Leon with that of Victoria in one bewitching picture. Some of the author's most delicately musical lines'jewels five words long'—are herein contained, and the ending of each canto is an effective piece of art.

The tournament scene, at the close of the fifth book, is the most vehement and rapid passage to be found in the whole range of Tennyson's poetry. By an approach to the Homeric swiftness, it presents a contrast to the laborious and faulty movement of much of his narrative verse. The songs, added in the second edition of this poem, reach the high-water mark of lyrical composition. Few will deny that, taken together, the five melodies: As through the land,' 'Sweet and low,' 'The splendor falls on castle walls,' 'Home they brought her warrior dead,' and Ask me no more!' that these constitute the finest group of songs produced in our century;

and the third, known as the 'Bugle Song,' seems to many the most perfect English lyric since the time of Shakespeare. In The Princess we also find Tennyson's most successful studies upon the model of the Theocritan isometric verse. He was the first to enrich our poetry with this class of melodies, for the burlesque pastorals of the eighteenth century need not be considered. Not one of the blank-verse songs in his Arthurian epic equals in structure or feeling the 'Tears, idle tears,' and 'O swallow, swallow, flying, flying south!' Again, what witchery of landscape and action, what fair women and brave men, who, if they be somewhat stagy and traditional, at least are more sharply defined than the actors in our poet's other romances! Besides, The Princess has a distinct purpose, the illustration of woman's struggles, aspirations, and proper sphere; and the conclusion is one wherewith the instincts of cultured people are so thoroughly in accord, that some are used to answer, when asked to present their view of the 'woman question,' 'You will find it at the close of The Princess.' Those who disagree with Tennyson's presentation acknowledge that if it be not true it is well told. His Ida is, in truth, a beautiful and heroic figure :

Not peace she looked, the Head; but rising up
Robed in the long night of her deep hair, so

To the open window moved.

She stretched her arms and called

Across the tumult, and the tumult fell.

Of the author's shortcomings in this and other poems we have to speak hereafter. I leave The Princess, deeming it the most varied and interesting of his works with respect to freshness and invention. All mankind love a story-teller such as Tennyson, by this creation, proved himself to be.

[TRAILL, in Nineteenth Century XXV. 765-6.]

Let his sympathy once be touched, and at once the stream of humor flows bright and free. How sweetly, for instance, it ripples through the poem of The Princess! Do you not feel as you listen

to its placid murmur that already, well-nigh fifty years ago, this poet had penetrated to the heart of that great Woman Question which is agitating so many humorless minds at the present day, and that he has reached it by the aid of the only guide that knows the way to it, by the power of humorous sympathy? Critics more than one have spoken disparagingly of The Princess, and its technical faults of construction are obvious enough. But, if the design and fashioning of the work leave something to be desired, its fabric, a warp of the sweetest poetry shot with a woof of the kindliest satire,―— is of unsurpassable charm. The poem is instinct throughout with the poet's profound tenderness for the pathetic side of modern feminine aspirations and unrest, yet also alive throughout with his keen sense of the underlying comedy of it all. Let those who undervalue this exquisite piece of work consider how its subject would have fared in the hands of any one who simply brought to it a humor unsoftened by sympathy or a sympathy unchastened by humor. Let them endeavor to imagine the sour epigrams of the one and the sickly gush of the other, and they may then, perhaps, better appreciate the qualities which make The Princess what it is. For my own part, I confess to finding it, if not one of the poetically greatest, yet the most humanly complete of all the poet's works. I know no other, at any rate, which shows so many facets of his genius or gives anything like so adequate an idea of that rich matrix of natural temperament from which the precious ore was won.

[SAINTSBURY, History of Nineteenth Century Literature, pp. 261–2.] The Princess is undoubtedly Tennyson's greatest effort, if not exactly in comedy, in a vein verging towards the comic a side on which he was not so well equipped for offense or for defense as on the other. But it is a masterpiece. Exquisite as its author's verse always is, it was never more exquisite than here, whether in blank verse or in the (superadded) lyrics, while none of his deliberately arranged plays contains characters half so good as those of the Princess herself, of Lady Blanche and Lady Psyche, of Cyril, of the two Kings, and even of one or two others. And that unequaled dream-faculty of his, which has been more than once

glanced at, enabled him to carry off whatever was fantastical in the conception with almost unparalleled felicity. It may or may not be agreed that the question of the equality of the sexes is one of the distinguishing questions of this century; and some of those who would give it that position may or not maintain, if they think it worth while, that it is treated here too lightly, while their opponents may wish that it had been treated more lightly still. But this very difference will point the unbiased critic to the same conclusion, that Tennyson has hit the golden mean; while that, whatever he has hit or missed in subject, the verse of his essay is golden, no one who is competent will doubt. Such lyrics as 'The splendor falls,' and 'Tears, idle tears,' such blank verse as that of the closing passage, would raise to the topmost heights of poetry whatever subject it was spent upon.

[ ARTHUR HENRY HALLAM, Remains in Verse and Prose, pp. 440-1.1]

We have remarked five distinct excellencies of his own manner. First, his luxuriance of imagination, and, at the same time, his control over it. Secondly, his power of embodying himself in ideal characters, or, rather, moods of character, with such extreme accuracy of adjustment that the circumstances of the narration seem to have a natural correspondence with the predominant feeling, and, as it were, to be evolved from it by assimilative force. Thirdly, his vivid, picturesque delineation of objects and the peculiar skill with which he holds all of them fused, to borrow a metaphor from science, in a medium of strong emotion. Fourthly, the variety of his lyrical measures and exquisite modulation of harmonious words and cadences to the swell and fall of the feelings expressed. Fifthly, the elevated habits of thought, implied in these compositions, and imparting a mellow soberness of tone, more impressive to our minds than if the author had drawn up a set of opinions in verse and sought to instruct the understanding, rather than to communicate the love of beauty to the heart.

[1 From a review of Tennyson's poems published in the Englishman's Magazine, 1831.]