"The heart, the heart!' I kissed him, I clung to the sinking form, And the storm went roaring above us, and he—was out of the storm."

This with broken marriage vows and a deserted infant in the background. Henceforth her thoughts are divided between the dead lover and (as she hoped, though falsely) the living child; the husband did not count, nor the broken vows. What does it all mean? If the poet means to show us what a fool he may become who sets about to deceive himself, good; but he gives us no hint that he is outside the whole thing. Yet that Tennyson could mean to give any countenance to that infidelity which holds marriage vows to be binding only as long as they are agreeable—that is, not binding at all-is impossible. None could believe more firmly than he that "for better or worse" is the divine keystone of that arch of the family upon which the nobility of human character and society rests. I wondered was the poem aimed at the Roman Church and the enervating influence (real or supposed) of the Confessional. But that it could hardly be. There is a nemesis-a semi-preternatural nemesis, of which more hereafter—in the story. But that, if it were the motive, could have been put into a healthily balanced narrative. The poem remains a perplexity to me, jarring upon the truth, which the poet himself has taught us, that men and women must "live by law," whatever, in the way of pain, comes of it. This woman, because her husband had no heart to be wounded, finds herself acquitted as towards him, unmindful that she has broken law in him. And I cannot discern the attuning note struck in the poem. I trust that the vital importance of the

matter will excuse me for having dwelt so long upon it. The woman finds palliation in the fact that it was her lover's mind that attracted her. This is in the modern key that is so full of the portent of chaos. The fact really deepens the quality of the offence, for it makes it more spiritual-a more deliberate violation of "live by law "—the act of a person who could better know what she was doing.

The Ring opens with a dainty lyric, and has a pretty, though slight, idyllic framework. But the form is dramatic and the main matter is preternatural. For these reasons we shall consider it not now, but hereafter. We will only notice that the combination of the preternatural with the malignant persistence of Muriel gives a result in the highest degree painful.

We come last in this group to The Bandit's Death. In a prefatory note to it Tennyson says, "I have adopted Sir Walter Scott's version of the following story as given in his last journal (Death of Il Bizarro), but I have taken the liberty of making some slight alterations." Now I must say that against this I plead with all my heart. Either the dreadful and abnormal story is true or it is not. If it is, it may be good to tell it; but then let us have the story, and not some artistic variation upon it. If it is not, for pity's sake, why should any one invent such horrors. The only redeeming touch in the story-and that rather shames than comforts us-is

"He was loved at least by his dog: it was chained, but its horrible yell

'She has killed him, has killed him, has killed him!' rang out all down through the dell."

But perhaps this never happened.

S

So in horror end the Idylls of Lamentation. This last is in the last volume, The Death of Enone.

What, once more, is the meaning of this deep sadness and painfulness in so many of the later poems? I have no answer to offer beyond what I have suggested in the General Remarks on the Later Poems and in the comment on The Sisters.

It may help to make clear my standard of judgment in this matter if I say that I think Shakespeare deserved-what, in a case of another sort the Athenians inflicted-a fine, for writing Othello.

CHAPTER XV

POEMS OUT OF TUNE

EDWIN MORRIS, Locksley Hall, and The also have been grouped under this title.

Letters might
But these are

earlier poems, and have found their place accordingly. There stand here therefore only. four

Sea Dreams.

The Lover's Tale.
Lucretius.
Despair.

Sea Dreams is out of tune through the business arrangements that produce the situation, and the folly that believed in and so trusted such a man as the hypocrite. (Of him, and the satire upon him, I have spoken elsewhere.) But the poem seems almost to have been made to create a place for the dreams. (The title confesses as much.) Is this quite fair? Dreams from life, not life for dreams, one would say. The result is that, though containing a great deal of finished poetry, the piece, as a work of art, seems to lack a reason for existing. And it ends out of tune, spite of the word "forgive." The sweet note in it is. the woman, and she and her sayings are very sweet.

"How like you this old satire ?'

'Nay,' she said,

'I loathe it he had never kindly heart,
Nor ever cared to better his own kind,
Who first wrote satire, with no pity in it.'

And earlier, when her first appeal failed—

"Silenced by that silence lay the wife,
Remembering her dear Lord who died for all,
And musing on the little lives of men,

And how they mar this little by their feuds."

And, finally, to her we owe the dainty baby-song that ends the poem. So we will call her the poem's

wisdom.

The first part of The Lover's Tale was a youthful poem (how much, as it now stands, it has been altered, I do not know). The latter part, published originally as The Golden Supper, is mature. The first part is overwrought, as youthful poems are apt to be, though as Tennyson's early poems in the main were not. Nevertheless there is plenty of true poetry in it, and the tone is all that one could desire. In divisions II. and III. there is a superabundance of extraordinary dreaming, to which I shall refer hereafter. The fourth division-The Golden Supper, that is-I find a very painful poem indeed, discordant with the feelings in all its elements, and worthy of the unpleasant Italian from whom the story of it came. I speak of the subject of course, not of the poetry.

About Lucretius my feeling is equally strong. Whether the drawing in this is good, I do not presume to judge, though some of the poetry, as poetry, I know is very fine. But for the choice of the subject of the poem, as an art subject, I can see no