Chapter XX: Part II: Le Parti (4)

Of pure imitative art Scott and Wordsworth are the great modern masters. Yet we shall all acknowledge that the passages quoted exhibit a rare excellence. It would be hard to match in Theocritus the breezy freshness of the “Brook.” As we listen, we lose ourselves, and seem to penetrate the joyous heart of nature. We too are in Arcadia. It is the morning of the world, and the infant god of some slender streamlet hums his naïve song to Pan, who lies along the sward:

“I wind about, and in, and out,
With many a blossom sailing;
And here and there a lusty trout,
And here and there a grayling.

* * * * *

I slip, I slide, I gloom, I glance
Among my skimming swallows,
I make the netted sunbeams dance
Against my sandy shallows.”

We have dwelt at length on the sincerity with which Tennyson interprets nature. It is the stamp of the true poet. The dilettante, however cunning, cannot counterfeit it. He cannot keep himself out of the picture, but invests it with his own sentiment, and tricks it out in the whims and caprices of the hour. It is otherwise with Wordsworth. That high-priest of nature enters her presence reverently, with humble and candid heart. He puts off the vanities and weaknesses of man on the verge of her holy ground. From his lips her lessons fall with a simple earnestness, like oracles from the mouth of a child. Her truths he incarnates, but does not presume to clothe.

While it is false art to attribute to nature a conscious sympathy with man, it is true that she at times discovers an unconscious harmony with his moods. Our emotions are deepened by the accord. The happy are the happier for sunshine. The sad are saddest in the night and the rain. To aim at this mystic unison, to strike one note from feeling and from circumstance, is legitimate and delightful. Let us contrast an example of such treatment with the less truthful method to which we have referred. We ought always to study a theory in some felicitous expression of it, and therefore we take these graceful lines from Dr. Holmes. The stars and flowers touched by the woes of fallen man have conspired to watch and warn him. The flowers cannot bear the sight of human misery.

“Alas! each hour of daylight tells
A tale of shame so crushing,
That some turn white as sea-bleached shells,
And some are always blushing.

“But when the patient stars look down
On all their light discovers,
The traitor’s smile, the murderer’s frown,
The lips of lying lovers,

“They try to shut their saddening eyes,
And in the vain endeavor
We see them twinkling in the skies,
And so they wink for ever.”

At the first glance this moves, and pleases; because the emotion of the moment veils the extravagant hyperbole. The writer is an artist, and makes us see, as it were, through tears. But the lines do not grow upon us like the truly beautiful. As we read them a second time, there comes over us a feeling of annoyance, almost of pain, that the flowers should be misinterpreted, the stars misconstrued. We tremble before nature’s shocks and storms, and cannot afford to darken her brightest bloom or trouble her sweet serenity. Look now at this figure of “Mariana,” weeping, forsaken, “in the moated grange!” There is no pathetic prelude, no preliminary appeal to human sympathies. A neglected garden and a lonely house. A reach of level waste, colorless, silent, cold. The desolation is contagious, and just as the heart is sinking into a state of depression and despair, the moan of the stricken girl falls quivering on the ear.

“With blackest moss the flower-plots
Were thickly crusted, one and all;
The rusted nails fell from the knots
That held the peach to the garden wall.
The broken sheds looked sad and strange:
Unlifted was the clinking latch:
Weeded and worn the ancient thatch
Upon the lonely moated grange.
She only said, ‘My life is dreary!
He cometh not!’ she said;
She said, ‘I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!’”

We are very far from saying that Tennyson is everywhere free from the pathetic fallacy. But his sins of the kind occur chiefly in some vein of sportive apologue, like the “Talking Oak,” or in the mouth of Maud’s morbid lover, half distraught by temper and wholly crazed by crime. And, indeed, if any could be pardoned for beholding in all things one image, it would be, no doubt, the lover. In the old myth, love guided the hand of art; but Pygmalion was a sculptor, not a landscape painter.

The portrayal of the human form is one of the painter’s triumphs, as it is the sole province of plastic art. Poetry, for the most part, evades a description of personal beauty, and is content with a suggestion. Yet there are two or three etchings in the “Palace of Art” which seem to us not unworthy of a place in that gallery of Philostratus which a poet’s hand repeopled:

“Or sweet Europa’s mantle blew unclasped,
From off her shoulder backward borne;
From one hand drooped a crocus, one hand grasped
The mild bull’s golden horn.

“Or else flush’d Ganymede, his rosy thigh
Half buried in the eagle’s down,
Sole as a flying star shot through the sky
Above the pillared town.”

These are mere outlines. But Tennyson has drawn one figure with almost pictorial finish and force. It is Aphrodite revealing herself to Paris on Mount Ida:

“Idalian Aphrodite, beautiful,
Fresh as the foam, new bath’d in Paphian wells,
With rosy, slender fingers, backward drew
From her warm brows and bosom her deep hair
Ambrosial, golden round her lucid throat
And shoulder: from the violets her light foot
Shone rosy white, and o’er her rounded form,
Between the shadows of the vine-bunches,
Floated the glowing sunlight as she moved.”

This is genuine _painting_. There is form and color in it, and, withal, the _spirit_ of beauty bathing the whole, untainted by the faintest suggestion of wanton love.

In the temple of outward nature poetry is only the acolyte of painting. But one shrine is more exclusively her own. She is mistress of the heart. Over that ocean no other wing sustains continuous flight. There are waves of impulse which canvas cannot reflect, and currents of emotion untraced by the limner’s skill. There are dainty joys and fears that mock his grasp, and gust of passion that confound his cunning. Pictorial art must read the soul in the face, and the face is at best a clouded mirror. From the poet we hide nothing. The growth of character, the drift of habit, the pressure of inherited tendencies, springs of motive, stings of appetite--he discerns and deciphers all. But he must not speak in riddles: he is bound to make his meaning clear. He owes a duty to the humblest. They look to him to lend thought a form, shadow a substance; to explain the strange by the familiar, and flood the whole with the mellow flight of fancy. The poet is, in a certain sense, what Sidney would make him, the right popular philosopher. On the success of Tennyson in this field there is some difference of opinion. The fervor of his sympathies within a certain range and the delicacy of his intuitions are unquestioned. His style is allowed to be rich in color, and often fraught with incisive force. Let us glance at some passages which depict the finer shades of feeling, or are conspicuous for felicitous expression. We will then look at the charges, so often brought against Tennyson, of obscurity and a want of dramatic power.

It is a fact of common experience that quite opposite emotions, wrought to intensity, reach a state of fusion. They move, as it were, in converging lines, and their vanishing point is pain; or rather, they have what physicists would call a common dew-point. Thus we hear of the luxury of sorrow and of love’s sweet smart. Coleridge has touched this psychic truth with extreme tenderness in “Genevieve.” He shows us the young girl rapt in a troubled wonder before the strange feeling that storms her gentle breast. Her heart flutters like a snared bird:

“Her bosom heaved, she stept aside;
As conscious of my look she stept:
Then suddenly, with timorous eye,
She fled to me and wept.”

So in one of Tennyson’s “Idylls,” the eyes of the happy Enid are suffused with tears. It is hardly possible to read the lines without loving human nature:

“He turned his face,
And kissed her climbing; and she cast her arms
About him, and at once they rode away.
And never yet, since high in Paradise,
O’er the four rivers the first roses blew,
Came purer pleasure unto mortal kind
Than lived through her who in that perilous hour
Put hand to hand beneath her husband’s heart
And felt him hers again. She did not weep,
But o’er her meek eyes came a happy mist,
Like that which kept the heart of Eden green.”

Most persons have known those transient attachments which are born of “accident, blind contact, and the strong necessity of loving.” In the “Gardener’s Daughter” some one alludes in this playful fashion to the dethroned darling of his salad days:

“Oh! she
To me myself, for some three careless moons,
The summer pilot of an empty heart
Unto the shores of nothing. Know you not
Such touches are but embassies of love,
To tamper with the feelings ere he found
Empire for life?”

Few who have read the new “Maid’s Tragedy” have forgotten “Elaine.” There is no sweeter face in story. We trace a master’s hand in the passage where a passionate sympathy holds her from her sleep, and the deep lines of Lancelot’s countenance are mirrored in her white soul:

“As when a painter, poring on a face,
Divinely through all hindrance finds the man
Behind it, and so paints it that his face,
The shape and color of a mind and life,
Lives for his children ever at its best
And fullest: so his face before her lived.”

Lancelot is always gracious to her, and grateful for her tender care, but he is moody and absent, and instinct tells her that his love can never be hers. She bears home a heavy heart:

“She murmured, ‘Vain! in vain! it cannot be;
He will not love me! how, then, must I die?’
Then, as a little, helpless, innocent bird,
That has but one plain passage of few notes,
Will sing the simple passage o’er and o’er
For all an April morning, till the ear
Wearies to hear it; so the simple maid
Went half the night repeating, ‘Must I die?’”

One more. A song of Tristram’s, rife with the graceful gayety that masks and half-redeems a faithless heart. It might have been made by Ronsard, and sung by Bussy d’Amboise. The husband of “Isolt of Brittany” and the lover of “Isolt of Britain” gives the _rationale_ of broken vows:

“Ay, ay, O ay, the winds that bend the brier!
A star in heaven, a star within the mere.
Ay, ay, O ay, a star was my desire;
And one was far apart, and one was near!
Ay, ay, O ay, the winds that bow the grass!
And one was water, and one star was fire.
And one will ever shine, and one will pass;
Ay, ay, O ay, the winds that move the mere!”

The admirers of Byron and the poets of the Georgian era find Tennyson obscure. By obscurity they ought to mean a darkness born of confusion, the cloud of fallacy, the vagueness of incoherence. Crude thoughts, unfledged fancies, halting metaphors, are obscure. Poetasters are commonly dark, and it would be easy to show that Byron himself in his best work, the fourth canto of _Childe Harold_, is sometimes guilty of obscurity. And it must be admitted that some poems of Tennyson’s youth, and likewise “Maud,” are open to this objection. But if, as we believe, the charge is pointed at “In Memoriam,” “Love and Duty,” or the “Palace of Art,” then we deny its force. It may be that they who find enigmas in _Paradise Lost_ and “In Memoriam” mistake the source of their difficulties. We incline to depreciate what we fail to comprehend. We forget that deep waters are not necessarily turbid; that novelty is not obscurity. As we climb a mountain, we gain new views of the valley beneath, yet the novel landscape may be no less vivid than the old. There is, indeed, a dulness of the ear that detects no clue to the myriad threads of harmony. There is a myoptic disease which sees nothing but indistinctness beyond its narrow horizon. In such cases the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are mystified.

We have said that the poet owes a duty to the humblest. That duty is fulfilled when he has conjured his fancies into visible shapes, and given truth a concrete form. He is not called upon to find eyes for the blind, or learning for the ignorant. It is enough if at his banquet there is food for all stomachs. The poet owes a duty not to the humble only.

There are, for example, two methods by which poetry may illuminate history. It may invest personal character with the truth and vigor of life, and portray detached scenes in correct and brilliant colors. Or it may reveal to the imagination by exact and felicitous metaphor the sequence of events, the march of knowledge, the drift of opinion, and the “long result of time.” Thus Lucan poetized a narrative, Lucretius thinks in imagery. We recall no better illustration of the former treatment than the fine stanza from _Childe Harold_:

“When Athens’ armies fell at Syracuse,
And fettered thousands bore the yoke of war,
Redemption rose up in the Attic muse,
Her voice their only ransom from afar.
See as they chant the tragic hymn, the car
Of the o’ermastered victor stops; the reins
Fall from his hands; his idle scymitar
Starts from its belt; he rends his captive’s chains,
And bids him thank the bard for freedom and his strains.”

The anecdote is a noble one, and has gained nobility in the telling. But anecdotes after all are not the marrow of history. Something may be learned from Montesquieu as well as from Marmontel. Two lines from “Locksley Hall” exhibit the other method of interpreting history. The lines aim at nothing less than at once to condense and illumine the most pregnant epoch of modern times, the eighteenth century. This looks certainly like a preposterous abuse of that definition assigned to the drama, “an abstract and brief chronicle of the time.” Let us recall for a moment the period of Louis Quinze. The feudal system has fallen. The flowers are withered, the chains remain. The nobles have become courtiers, municipal privilege has perished, the peasant is a slave. Dishonor on the throne, bankruptcy in the treasury, the poor starving, the rich corrupt. Oppression tightening his grasp, and knowledge learning to realize the woe and to divine the remedy. On one side, despair that has begun to think of vengeance; on the other, blind arrogance that does not dream of retribution. And now, is not the whole story told with almost terrible simplicity in the compass of these lines?

“Slowly comes a hungry people, as a lion creeping nigher
Glares at one that nods and blinks behind a slowly-dying fire.”

It may be said that Byron was well-read in history; but he held that only romantic characters and striking facts were fit subjects of poetic treatment. That is not our opinion. We believe Byron gave the best he had. Moreover, it is not true that poetry may borrow nothing from history but personal traits and isolated events. That narrow view of the poet’s province was corrected for English literature by the _Paradise Regained_. Poetry is no mendicant, to be put off with the stale scraps and shallow gossip of the servants’ hall. Her seat is at the high table, beside the masters of the house.

Tennyson, we are told, has no dramatic power. It is true that he has written no drama. Does it follow that he is wanting in dramatic power?

Derivation often tells us more of words than of men. A drama is something done, not told or sung; neither narrative nor ode, but something _done_. First, then, we must have _doers_; or, if you please, actors. Our actors must prove themselves alive, they must be impelled to move. The impelling force is _incident_. But detached scenes illustrative of character do not make a drama, incident is not _plot_. The action which develops character must at the same time tend toward a certain end, the catastrophe of the piece. A drama, then, in the strictest sense is this: a development of character in situations which excite to action in a particular direction.

Where the evolution of plot is subordinate to the portrayal of character, the drama is loose and inorganic, like many of Shakespeare’s plays. Where the elaboration of personal traits is merged in the accomplishment of the event, the drama leans toward the epic, like a tragedy of Æschylus. Perfect equimarch in the development of character and plot stamps the ideal drama. Dramatic power in this sense is one of the rarest of human gifts, and perhaps has been exerted nowhere but in the plays of Sophocles. The phrase has, in English criticism, a much narrower meaning, and points simply to the exhibition of character by action.

We acknowledge that those poems of Tennyson which preceded the “Idylls of the King” gave little evidence of dramatic talent. Like the works of Byron, they are for the most part lyrical, reflective. In them the “beings of the mind” are rather analyzed than animated. The poet interprets them. They do not speak for themselves. Even dramatic insight, which is another thing than dramatic power, seems at times to be wanting. Thus his “Ulysses” is a modern soul grappling with the framework of Homeric times. “Margaret,” “Madeleine,” “Isabel,” are lovely dreams, not lovely women. In the “Princess,” if anywhere, we should look for the development of character. But as the persons of the tale pass across the stage, we incline to suspect with the prince that they are but shadows, “and all the mind is clouded with a doubt.” Indeed, little Lillia, whose burst of pretty petulance suggests the theme, is by far the most lifelike figure.

But the judgment passed upon living poets is at best provisional, and subject to reversal on appeal. The writer of pastorals will perhaps produce an _Æneid_ in his riper years; “L’Allegro” and “Lycidas” may be succeeded by an epic. In the cluster of poems which embodies the Arthurian legends, there is much discrimination of character. The courtly flippancy of “Gawain” is distinguished from Tristram’s joyous levity. “Etarre” is vicious, “Vivien” is base. “Enid” is not a gentler being than “Elaine,” yet her meekness is finely contrasted with the latter’s emotional nature. In “Lancelot” we have a noble spirit in the toils of a great crime. In “Arthur,” the perfect equipose of _character_, illumined by a sublime resolve.

Nor are the foremost persons of the poems mere portraits. They are actors as well. They approach for the most part unheralded. Their temper and motives are self-betrayed, or hinted with a wise reserve. Their personal traits are evoked by incident or emphasized in dialogue. Here certainly is dramatic power of a certain kind. Not the highest which creates a drama--is it high enough for an epic? We incline to doubt. At least, it has produced none. We cannot allow that the “Idylls” which are grouped around the figure of the king constitute an epic poem.

The epic--we speak of the _Æneid_--is distinguished from the drama by this, that the development of character is subordinate to the evolution of plot, the actors are merged in the action. And as the drama may lean toward the epic, so the epic may lean toward history. That the poet unites in his own person the functions of scene-painter, machinist, and _chorēgus_, is only a difference of form.

Now, it is not so much grasp of character as _nexus_ of plot that we miss in the “Idylls.” Scott’s _Rokeby_ is an epic, yet Bertram Risingham is not more lifelike than “Lancelot.” But in _Rokeby_ the story grows; one event generates another, the catastrophe is inevitable. Episodes are admitted in the epic, but they must be natural growths, or at least successful grafts. For example, “Elaine” and “Guinevere” stand in true organic relation, but “Enid” and “Vivien” have nothing in common with the rest of the cycle but their social atmosphere and casual reference to familiar names. In the poet’s mind, no doubt, the old Arthurian romances have been fused into a kind of unity. They present to him a coherent picture; discover a central thought. It is the soul at war with flesh, aspiration foiled by appetite, the eagle stung by the serpent. But he has conveyed the idea by short and random strokes. We catch only glimpses of it, and are not permitted to watch the progressive development. In the “Idylls of the King” there is the matter of an epic, but not the form. We should prefer to place them in a class apart, which might include the _Faerie Queen_.

On the range, finish, and accuracy of Tennyson’s diction, we need not dwell. But no view of a poet’s artistic powers would be complete without a glance at his command of melody and rhythm. For sweetness and clearness of tone, the choral hymn in the “Lotus-Eaters,” and the “Bugle” and “Cradle” songs which beguile _entr’actes_ in the “Princess” are excelled by few English lyrics. In grasp of rhythm Tennyson yields to no recent poet, except Shelley. There is a striking instance of rhythmic effect in the “Palace of Sin.” A strain of music floats in upon the ear, deepens, swells, and at length bursts forth in an orchestral symphony.

Most of Tennyson’s later poems have been written in unrhymed pentameter, and his management of the verse suggests a comparison with his master. In dignity of movement, Milton has never been equalled by any English poet. It seems that no line but his could express the lost archangel, or embody that vision of imperial Rome where sonorous names load as with cloth of gold the march of the stately iambics. Yet nothing could stoop more awkwardly to the quiet talk and joys of the married pair in Eden. While Tennyson’s blank verse falls short of his model in majesty and serried force, we must allow it to be more flexible. We cannot imagine the little novice using the Miltonic line. Her gentle thoughts would have been drowned in the mighty current, whereas Tennyson’s tripping vocables deliver with easy grace her artless prattle.

We can only allude to those experiments in metre which amuse the leisure of an artist, although one of them deserves attention. It is an ode to Milton:

“O mighty-mouthed inventor of harmonies,
O skilled to sing of time and eternity,
God-gifted organ-voice of England,
Milton, a name to resound for ages!”

Let the reader compare these lines with some familiar model of Alcaics like “Vides ut altâ,” and then ask himself whether _quantity_ has hitherto had fair play in English verse.

II.

What has art to do with morals? With what propriety shall a poet play the moralist? His purpose is distinct, his method is radically different, is his object ever identical? We know that it is not always so. In the face of outward nature the truthful artist is forbidden to read humanity. Hardly is Wordsworth suffered to discover here divinity. The Greek sculptor sought beauty, not goodness, in the daughters of men, and the lines that grew beneath his fingers breathe the harmony of grace, not the harmony of character. Does the application of these rigorous principles bound the sphere of genuine art? Do the good and the beautiful nowhere cohere and interfuse? They may--in the _ideal_. For what is beauty in things which disclose design but the reflex of perfection? And what is goodness but the perfection of the heart? In the scheme of ethics, vice is ugliness, error a discord, and weakness disproportion, character means equipoise, and virtue expresses harmony. But how shall art or ethics discern a moral symmetry, and crown a spiritual perfection, without a right conception of man’s nature, of his place and purpose, his relation to the universe and to God? So far as he portrays the heart, the poet must be a moralist. Within this domain the truest art will utter the purest morals.

It is a blessed law by which he who aims to please is constrained to edify. For reason is a disinherited prince, and the estate is too often squandered before he comes to his own. Pride rears the head against precept. The imagination flutters and beats her bars, until experience has clipped her wings. The ideal republic could ill afford to dispense with poets, for there is no lesson like the modest lesson of a lovely life. To our gaze perhaps the influence seems wholly lost, and yet may be only latent. This is sure, that virtue has still a foothold in the heart that keeps an altar to the beautiful. We know how many seeds of goodness, what germs of aspiration, are flung broadcast by the poet’s hand. Who will say that his random sowings may not stir in a genial hour, strike root in the depths of motive, and blossom in act and life? No thoughtful mind has failed to recognize the insight of Sidney’s words in his _Defence of Poesy_: “For even those hard-hearted evil men who think virtue a school name, and know no other good but _indulgere genio_, yet will be content to be delighted, which is all the good-fellow poet seems to promise, and so steal to see the form of goodness, which, seen, they cannot but love ere themselves be aware, as if they had taken a medicine of cherries.”

The ethical standard is sensitive to the influence of climate and of race. The Italian and the German recognize the same virtues, but write them in different scales referred to a national key-note. The growth of knowledge and the expansion of sympathy determine a deeper change. From the age of Pericles to the age of Napoleon, the ideal of character has undergone alterations which have penetrated the essence and affected the type. Of certain virtues which fired the heart of an Athenian, we have kept nothing but the names, and we have canonized others of which he had no conception. The attitude of the individual man toward nature and society is constantly shifting under the pressure of ideas. The wave of inquiry which rose in civic revolution has swept in widening circles over the whole surface of opinion, and now dashes on the primal verities which declare the origin and destiny of man. The mind is active, but the heart of the age is perplexed and sad. She ponders painfully the riddle of the painful earth. She is lost in the great forest, the new paths are uncertain, the old to her seem overgrown. She is troubled with a vague unrest, beset with dark misgivings, by results she loathes to accept, doubts which she longs to silence, and hopes she dare not forego. Her mood is too grave and earnest for blithe and heedless carol. She cannot pause to hear the idle singer of an empty day. The music which holds her ear must be attuned to serious sympathy, must echo her own self-questionings, and breathe her aspirations. She puts aside from her lip the cup of distilled water, and turns to the mineral spring that savors of the rugged earth.

De Musset is not more essentially a child of the age than Tennyson. Both inherited in rare perfection the exquisite sensibility and high tension of the nervous system which are developed by modern life. In both the violence of emotion is succeeded by prolonged depression. Their joy is often rapture, and their sorrow anguish, but the prevailing tone is a dreamy languor that betrays fatigue. Their intellects were plunged in the same bath of learning, and tempered in the furnace of the time. They unite in regretting the trustful past, and complain that they were born too late into a sick and decrepit world. They pace together the shore of life, and gaze with wistful eyes over the expanse of ocean. But here the parallel ends. Their roads diverge in youth. Each obeys a different impulse, and learns a different lesson. The one hears a growing harmony in the voices of science, and perceives an increasing purpose in the movement of mankind. The other bows the head in stupor before the howling storm. Tennyson has a kindly glance and a cheery word for his fellow-men, they are his brothers, his co-workers, ever reaping something new. De Musset loads the heart with a sense of utter misery, and paralyzes the will by the infusion of his self-contempt. He is half-indignant that his spirit should be still haunted by a sublime aspiration, and confesses almost with a groan:

“_Une immense espérance a traversé la terre._”[60]

It is in another mood that Tennyson hails the promise which he sees in the aspiration of the soul:

“What is it thou knowest, sweet voice? I cried,
A hidden hope, the voice replied.”

There are few words more painful to read than the prayer in “L’Espoir en Dieu.” The passionate queries are wrung from a breaking heart. We offer a rude but passably close translation of two stanzas. The poet demands:

“Wherefore in a work divine
So much of discord tarrieth?
To what good end disease and sin?
O God of justice! wherefore death?

“Wherefore suffer our unworth
To dream, and to divine, a God?
Doubt hath laid desolate the earth,
Our view is too narrow or too broad.”

Compare the rooted faith and serene calm of the poem to “In Memoriam:”

“Thine are these orbs of light and shade,
Thou madest life in man and brute,
Thou madest death, and, lo, thy foot
Is on the skull that thou hast made.

“Thou wilt not leave him in the dust,
Thou madest man, he knows not why,
He thinks he was not made to die,
And thou hast made him, thou art just.”

Much, no doubt, of the peculiar spirit that pervades the work of either poet may be traced to the social atmosphere in which he moved. Much also is only to be explained by the history of his life. Behind the “In Memoriam,” an unselfish and ennobling sorrow weeps and prays above a cherished grave. “In Rolla,” remorse sobs bitterly amid the ruins of a wasted life. The song has betrayed the singer. The one is the laureate of hope: the other, a prophet of despair. Tennyson is a night-worn pilgrim whose kindling eye has caught the glimmer of a lovely dawn; De Musset, a tired swimmer whose drowning cry leaps toward us from the gates of death. The poetry of De Musset is a convex lens which draws to a fiery focus the doubts and longings of the time; Tennyson’s, a stained rose-window, that subdues the flaring sunlight to a mild and tender radiance.

While man’s moral nature is developed and determined by his attitude toward society and his Maker, it is also profoundly affected by his attitude toward women. The relative position of woman has been rather raised than lowered by the movement of modern thought. Much has been deciphered by speculation, and much dissected by science, but the deep significance of the female character remains intact. In the fine atmosphere which nourished the musings of Richter, two earthly forms move freely, the maiden and the wife. In the long process of comparative anatomy, the beautiful first reveals itself in the sweet instinct that binds a mother to her offspring. Then first does the fire of Prometheus fairly catch the clay. The noblest instinct and the noblest aspiration have one element in common--the abnegation of self. Perhaps the one is but a reflex of the other. It is certain that the highest art has done the fullest justice to women. Let us measure Byron and Tennyson by this standard. To Byron, woman was an exquisite instrument which responds in perfect tune to the master-touch of passion. To Tennyson, she is an embodied spirit, who inspires and tempers man while she seems to obey his impulse. It is a shallow criticism which would excuse Byron’s low conception by an unfortunate experience. If personal experience be narrow, why not look beyond it? If the feet stumble in the mire, the eyes may still be lifted. The fact is, an irresistible instinct compels a genuine artist to discern and to preach the truth. His life may prove a rebel, but his work will pay tribute to Cæsar.

The author of “Godiva,” of “Enid” and “Elaine” is eminently the poet of woman. It is especially worthy of remark that he should have maintained a distinct and lofty ideal throughout the Arthurian cycle. In the mediæval myths, the lineaments of the female character were sometimes clouded by the admixture of masculine traits. Through the Carlovingian romance that lives in Ariosto’s verse, there roves an unsexed and warlike virgin, whom the poet means us to admire; at whom we smile in secret. Tennyson has read woman’s nature with an insight too fine and delicate to place her in so false an attitude. There is no Bradamant in the “Idylls of the King.”

The unswerving justice of true genius finds consummate expression in the treatment of “Guinevere.” The wrong-doing of imperial beauty was a dangerous theme, and we may guess how it would have been handled by the author of “Parasina.” In the original legend the queen commanded sympathy, but she is now positively degraded by her preference for a meaner soul. It is Arthur’s doom, and no merit of hers, that he loves her still. There is little likelihood that a modern Francesca will borrow impulse or pretext from her story. It is amusing to find the lovers of Haidee and Gulnare scandalized by “Vivien.” If ever a vile nature was scorched and shrivelled by the flame of an honest wrath, that poem affords the spectacle. In wily Vivien, vice is neither condoned nor glozed, but simply stripped and gibbeted. The pure air which breathes throughout the “Idylls” is condensed in the lines of “Guinevere,” which declare the great purpose of the king. We may say with assurance that no other English poet, except Wordsworth, would have written them.

Tennyson has spoken words of comfort to many English hearts, and inspired with a noble purpose many English lives. His spirit has crossed the seas. To him and Wordsworth the youth of America owe much that they will not speedily forget. Other benefactors may receive some form of recompense, but how shall we repay a poet? It is not praise, but thanks we would offer Alfred Tennyson. Rare artist, and high teacher, sweet voice, pure heart, there are many who admire, and not a few who love him.

FOOTNOTES:

[59] _The Last Tournament._ Boston, 1871. J. R. Osgood & Co. _The Poetical Works of Alfred Tennyson, Poet-Laureate._ We have already printed in this magazine a review of Tennyson’s poems which aimed to indicate the Catholic aspects of his mind. The following article covers different ground.

[60] “A vast hope has passed over the earth.”

HOW THE CHURCH UNDERSTANDS AND UPHOLDS THE RIGHTS OF WOMEN.

SECOND ARTICLE.

AGES OF THE FATHERS OF THE CHURCH.

When the Christian religion had triumphed over idolatry, the principle of evil took refuge in heresy, and vigorously began a new attack upon the church. As women had once sealed their faith with their blood, so now they came eagerly forward to preach it by their learning. The centuries which produced the fathers of the church produced women also, to whom these great lights of the true faith were mainly indebted for their early education. The same circumstances also created women who, on the throne and in the council-chamber, governed turbulent nations and guided fierce passions, according to the rules of justice, honesty, and religion.

The mother of St. Gregory Nazianzen, Doctor of the Church, was Nonna, and is honored as a saint. Butler, in his _Lives of the Saints_, says: “She drew down the blessing of heaven upon her family by most bountiful and continual alms-deeds; ... yet, to satisfy the obligation of justice which she owed to her children, she, by her prudent economy, improved at the same time their patrimony.”

Here, therefore, in the fourth century, we find a woman commended for her practical knowledge of business and her skill in managing property. Ventura relates that, as soon as her son Gregory came into the world, she placed the Scriptures in his infant hands, and ever after inculcated in her teaching the greatest love and reverence for sacred learning. Nonna’s other children were both canonized, one of them, Gorgonia, having led the most exemplary life in the holy state of matrimony. (_La Donna Cattolica_, vol. i. pp. 431, 432.) St. Basil, who counted among his ancestry many martyrs of both sexes, was the son of St. Emelia, and the great-nephew of St. Macrina the Elder, of whom he says himself that he “counts it as one of the greatest benefits of Almighty God, and the truest of honors, to have been brought up by such a woman.” His elder sister, also named Macrina, was greatly instrumental in conducting his education. When after his death his brother, St. Gregory of Nyssa, went to visit their sister, and open his heart to her concerning their common sorrow, he found her dying, it is true, but so vigorous in mind that her discourse on the providence of God and the state of the soul after death was no less striking than comforting. He could hardly believe, says Ventura, that it was not a doctor of the church, a learned theologian, who was speaking to him; and so much did he treasure his sister’s words that he compiled his admirable _Treatise of the Soul_ and _The Resurrection_ chiefly from the matter furnished by her discourse. Macrina’s funeral was an ovation, and the bishop of the diocese held it an honor to be present thereat.

Olympias, the widow of Nembridius, the treasurer of the Emperor Theodosius the Great, flourished about the end of the fourth century, and was the friend and helper of St. John Chrysostom. His letters to her are part of his published works, and Nectarius, his predecessor in the Patriarchal chair of Constantinople, often consulted her on matters of ecclesiastical importance. When Chrysostom was persecuted and banished, she did not escape vexatious notice from heathen and heretical rulers; but through all, her fortitude would have done credit to the bravest man. The great patriarch charged her to continue, during his absence, “to serve the church with the same care and zeal” (Ventura, _Donna Cattolica_, p. 443), and elsewhere in his works says emphatically that “women, as well as men, can take part in any struggle for the cause of God and of the church.” (_Epistle 124, to the Italians._) In a letter to her, he says that her presence was _required_ at Constantinople to encourage the persecuted brethren, and in another he bids her exert all her resources to _save_ the Bishop Maruthas from the abyss (he having given signs of yielding to heresy). Further on, in the same letter, he gives her instructions, almost amounting to a diplomatic and official mission, with regard to the request of the King of the Goths for a bishop and missionary in place of Aubinus the Apostle, who had just died, after converting many thousand of these barbarians. When St. Chrysostom sent a messenger to the Pope St. Innocent, at the beginning of the persecutions at Constantinople, he gave him letters of recommendation to none but a few Roman ladies--Proba, Juliana, and Demetrias.

The influence of Monica, the mother of St. Augustine, upon her wayward son, is so well known that it is almost superfluous to dwell on it; and St. Jerome, eminently a learned saint, was scarcely less connected with holy and well-taught women. He himself tells us that it was especially his friend and spiritual daughter Paula who engaged him in the study of the Old and New Testaments, and who induced him to translate the former from the original Hebrew. Rohrbacher, in his _Ecclesiastical History_, corroborates this statement; and Capefigue, in his _Four First Ages of the Church_, says that “the pure society of women had imparted to Jerome a heartfelt exaltation, a deep enthusiasm for all purity and nobility in themselves.” We learn from Butler (_Lives of the Saints_) that Marcella, one of the many matrons under St. Jerome’s instruction in Rome, made great progress in the critical learning of the Holy Scriptures, and learned in a short time many things which had cost him abundance of labor (vol. ix.). Other women, of whom we shall speak hereafter, were collected under his guidance; almost all are now canonized saints, and were celebrated even in their own day for their skill and erudition. The great Paula was the most illustrious among them, and he tells us of her as also of five or six others that they were as well acquainted with Hebrew as with Latin and Greek. To the daughter-in-law of St. Paula, Jerome wrote a letter full of minute and seemingly trivial details, concerning the education of her little daughter, who afterwards became St. Paula the Younger. It is of such quaint interest, and so calculated to give a high idea of the importance attached by the great doctor of the church to the minutiæ of a little girl’s daily life, that we cannot resist the temptation of quoting a few extracts from it:

“Let her be brought up as Samuel was in the temple, and the Baptist in the desert, in utter ignorance of vanity and vice; ... let her never hear bad words nor learn profane songs; ... let her have an alphabet of little letters made of box or ivory, the names of all which she must know, that she may play with them, and that learning may be made a diversion. When a little older, let her form each letter in wax with her finger, guided by another’s hand; then let her be invited, by prizes and presents suited to her age, to join syllables together.... Let her have companions to learn with her, that she may be spurred on by emulation.... She is not to be scolded or browbeaten if slower, but to be encouraged that she may rejoice to surpass, and be sorry to see herself outstripped and behind others, not envying their progress, but rejoicing at it while she reproaches herself with her own backwardness. Great care is to be taken that she conceive no aversion to studies, lest their bitterness remain in after-years. A master must be found for her, a man both of virtue and learning: nor will a great scholar think it beneath him to teach her the first elements of letters.... That is not to be contemned without which nothing great can be acquired. The very sounds of letters and the first rudiments are very different in a learned and in an unskilful mouth. Care must be taken that she be not accustomed by fond nurses to pronounce half-words, as it would prejudice her speech. Great care is necessary that she never learn what she will have afterwards to unlearn. The eloquence of the Gracchi derived its perfection from the _mother’s_ elegance (of speech). No paint must ever touch her face or hair.” He is no less sensible and moderate in physical instructions than strict in things of the spiritual order. He says: “She should eat so as always to be hungry, and to be able to read or sing psalms immediately after meals. The immoderate long fasts of many displease me. I have learned by experience that the ass, much fatigued on the road, seeks rest at any cost. In a long journey, strength must be supported, lest, by running the first stage too fast, we should fall in the middle. In Lent, full scope is to be given to severe fasting.” He advises the young girl, when old enough, to read the works of St. Cyprian, the epistles of St. Athanasius, and the writings of St. Hilary. These are grave and abstruse studies, requiring much time and application, and as fully up to the standard of a modern _male_ education as any woman could desire. St. Jerome himself was living at Bethlehem when he wrote this letter, and while recommending her mother to send little Paula to St. Paula the Elder for her later education, he himself promises to instruct her, adding that “he should be more honored by teaching the spouse of Christ than the philosopher [Aristotle] was in being preceptor to the Macedonian King.” It was the elder Paula who built St. Jerome the monastery of Bethlehem, in which he spent a great part of his life. She governed a monastery of women not far from it. St. Jerome, in his panegyric of her life, addressed to her daughter Eustochium, expresses himself in the following unequivocal language: “Were all the members of my body to be changed into tongues, and each fibre to utter articulate and human sounds, even then I could not worthily celebrate the virtues of the holy and venerable Paula.” As soon as her husband’s death left her the free use of a magnificent fortune, she liberated all the numerous retinue of slaves that formed not only her household but her possessions. Hundreds of Christian masters and mistresses did the same, and treated their freed retainers as brethren and sisters in the faith, long before the philanthropy of modern times had begun to envelop in a halo of unusual heroism the sacrifice of slave property. From a noble Roman matron, placed by her birth in an assured position of great prominence, she became a voluntary exile and wanderer for the sake of planting the faith more firmly in the East. St. Jerome describes, in words full of sympathetic admiration, her pious visits to the Holy Places of Judea. She also made a pilgrimage to the home of monasticism, the Thebaïd and the Lybian desert. Humble as she was, fame followed and surrounded her. Pilgrims to Jerusalem counted her as one of the most consoling and admirable of the objects that claimed their devotion. Macarius, Arsenius, Serapion, famous lights of the church and patriarchs of the eremitical life, came from long distances and inaccessible solitudes to confer with her. At Jerusalem, she founded places of shelter and entertainment for the many pilgrims who flocked there; both at Rome and in the East, she was the mother and the idol of the poor, whose wants she relieved untiringly, and for whose sake she was often not only penniless, but in debt. Her last illness was like a royal levee, and bishops and patriarchs hastened to her bedside; her funeral, says Ventura, was almost a canonization. Bishops carried her body to its tomb, and for seven days sacred hymns and psalms echoed ceaselessly in the church of the Holy Grotto at Bethlehem, where the funeral service was performed in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. Capefigue calls her the “most remarkably erudite woman of her age,” and her instincts of faith and learning alike made her intuitively aware of the artifices of the heretic Palladius, whose well-concealed Origenism she unmasked and denounced in presence of St. Jerome, when the wolf would have put on sheep’s clothing and deceived her simple nuns. Paula’s daughters--Blesilla, the learned and accomplished widow; Eustochium, the celebrated virgin to whom many of St. Jerome’s works are addressed or dedicated; Paulina, the model wife to whose influence over her saintly husband the first hospitals in the West are due--and their sister-in-law, Læta, the happy mother of the younger St. Paula, are all canonized saints of the church, and each of them the just pride of their sex in the respective walks of life to which they were destined. Fabiola, another of St. Jerome’s scholars, was the foundress of the first hospital absolutely established in Rome.

The church has never been chary of tendering graceful homage to the influence and ability of woman, and perhaps no more singular or flattering proof of this can be found than the pictorial honor which, Ventura assures us (_Donna Cattolica_, vol. i. p. 466), was offered by St. Gregory the Great to St. Sylvia, his mother. She was represented as sitting by his side, robed in white, and crowned with the mitre worn by doctors of theology, while the left hand held an open Psalter, and the right was raised with two fingers extended, in the attitude of benediction.