The Press.
London, England, 1855-08-11 00:00:00

THE PRESS.

We are puppets, Man in his pride, and Beauty fair in her
flower ;
1)o we move ourselves, or are moved by an unseen hand at
a game
That pushes us off from the board, and others ever succeed ?
Ah yet, we cannot be kind to each other here for an hour;
We whisper, and hint, and chuckle, and grin at a brother's
shame;
However we brave it out, we men are a little breed.

A monstrous eft was of old the Lord and Master of Earth,
For him did his high sun flame, and his river billowing ran,
And be felt himself in his force to be Nature's crowning race.
As nine months go to the shaping an infant ripe for his

birth,
So many a million of ages have gone to the making of man :
He now is first, but is he the last ? is he not too base ?

• • • •
For the drift of the Maker is dark, an Isis hid by the veil.
Who knows the ways of the world, how God will bring

them about?
Our planet is one, the suns are many, the world is wide.
Shall I weep if a Poland fall? shall I shriek if a Hungary
fail?
Or an infant civilisation be ruled with rod or with knout?
I have not made the world, and He that made it will guide.
Reading this, we feel much in the case of
Dr. Primrose when he heard from a fellow-pri-
soner who seemed to have " a thorough know-
" ledge of human nature on the wrong side,"
the words solemnly delivered, " the worl,l is in
its dotage." We suspect, with the good vicar,
that " we have heard all this before," and that
our poet has been pilfering from the stalest
and dullest of all writers—the sceptical re-
vivalists of his day. What astonishes us is,
that Mr. Tennyson should put forth this thou-
sand-times repeated drivel with the air of a
man who gives utterance toprofoundly-original
reflection :

Do we move ourselves, or are moved by an unseen hand at

a game?
So many a million of ages have gone to the making of man.
The drift of the Maker is dark.

Our planet is one, the suns are many.

How do these sentences read when nakedly
set forth? Are we to receive them as poetry
merely because we find them in a new work
by the Poet Laureate ? There is no rational
being in the kingdom—not even excepting Mr.
" Marvels-of-Creation " Fullom—but might be
ashamed of setting forth such pompous
platitudes ; and if Mr. Tennyson were not
absolutely blinded by vanity, or if criticism
were not at so low an ebb as to nourish in him
a belief that whatever appears with his name
must instantly, and as a matter of course, be
cried up as a miracle of genius, he would surely
never have ventured to publish the " bald,
disjointed chat " of which a specimen is given
above.

But who is Maud? She is the daughter of
the old " millionaire" who owns " the Hall,"
and at first she is introduced to us as a kind
of Lady Clara Vere de Vere, with a style of
beauty,
Faultily faultless—icily regular._
The narrator has played with her in her
childhood ; first they bow—then speak--and
all the rest may be foreseen Her brother,
who appears to have been a well-dressed, gen
tlemanly person, described with poetic license
as an

Oil'd and curl'd Assyrian Bull,
surprises the lovers in one of their meetings.
There are high words first, then a blow, then
a duel, in
the red-ribb'd hollow behind the wood.
The Assyrian bull falls; and after ttis, there
is—to use one of the most tersely-expressive
lines in the book—

Nothing but idiot gabble.
That we may not. be accused of misrepre-
sentation, we must give an extract which may
be.t.a.Ren as a fair example of the greater por-
tion of the poem :
•
Virretchedest age, since Time began,
They cannot even bury a man ;
And tho' we paid our tithes in the days that are gone,
Not a hell was rung, not a prayer was read ;
It is that which makes us loud in the world of the dead;
There is none that does his work, not one ;
A touch of their office might have sufficed,
But the churchmen fain would kill their church,
As the churches have kill'd their Christ,
See, there is one of us sobbing,
No limit to his distress ;
And another, a lord of all things, praying
To his own great self, as I guess •
And another, a statesman there. betraying
His party-secret, fool, to the press;

SATURDAY,

And yonder a vile physician, blabbing
The case of his patient—all for what?
To tickle the maggot born in an empty head,
And wheedle a world that loves him not,
For it is but a world of the dead.
Nothing but idiot gabble !
For the prophecy given of old
And then not understood,
Has oome to pass as foretold ;
Not let any man think for the public good,
But babble, merely for babble.
For I never whisper'd a private affair
Within the hearing of cat or mouse,
No, not to myself in the closet alone,
But I heard it shouted at once front the top of the house
Everything came to be known ;
Who told him we were there ?
Not that grey old wolf, for he came not back
From the wilderness, full of wolves, where he used to lie;
He has gather'd the bones for his o'ergrown whelp to
crack ;
Crack them now for yourself, and howl, and die.
Prophet, curse me the blabbing lip,
And curse me the British verwin, the rat ;
I know not whether he came in the Hanover ship,
But I know that he lies and listens mute
In an ancient mansion's crannies and holes :
Arsenic, arsenic, sir, would do it,
Except that now we poison our babes, poor souls !
It is all used up for that.
Possibly this is meant for the raving of a
madman. If so, it is tolerably successful. It
is as void of sense as anything in the pamphlet
of that gentleman who signs himself " Elijah,"
and who commands us, by an authority higher
than human, not only to review his work, but to
advertise it gratis. Has Mr Tennyson such a
defence to plead as may be urged on behalf of
the unfortunate pamphleteer? And if not, is
it quite fair in him to inflict on us such a mass
of mere deceptions Bedlamite jargon ? Even
in the comparatively coherent part of the poeni
there are passages of which we can make no-
thing. The stanzas at pp. 80.31, for example,
seem to have no kind of relation with what
goes before or follows after. For all the sense
there is in them, one might as well listen to
poker and tongs being rung against each other
Perhaps some of Mr. Tennyson's admirers
will urge that we are very unreasonable in
expecting to meet with sense in poetry—that
we should be satisfied with sound, and with
such scattered gleims of meaning as may float
to us now and then when the poet chooses to
be intelligible. To this argument we demur.
We say that no writer, whether in prose or
verse, has a right to take shelter in " no-
meaning," and, further, that the minds which
Rio so, though they may possess great occa-
sional cleverness, cannot be ranked among the
highest class, but use their mystery as a cloak
for their weakness. It is an ill-office to flatter
them that they are sublime when they are
merely incomprehensible.
That there are flashes of true poetry in
" Maud " we readily recognise, but they are
rare and detached. The lines expressive of
Maud's yielding when she hears her lover's
avowal are exquisitely conceived :
Go not, happy day,
From the shining fields,
Go not, happy day,
Till the maiden yields.
Rcey is the West,
Rosy is the South,
Roses are her cheeks,
And a rose her month.
When the happy Xes
Falters from her lips,
Pass and blush the news
O'er the blowing ships.
Over blowing seas,
Over seas at rest,
Pass the happy news,
Blush it thro' the West;
Till the red man dance
By his red cedar tree,
And the red mat's babe
Leap, beyond the sea.
Blush from West to East,
Blush from East to West,
Till the West is East,
Blush it thro' the West.
Rosy is the West,
Rosy is the South,
Roses are her cheeks,
And a rose her mouth.

The melody of some of these lines is deli-
cious, but they are marred by extravagance.
" Blowing ships" is unpardonable—we might
as well use sailing seas, or travelling railways;
the impulse communicatel to the red man's
babe is not poetic, but ludicrous; and the
jingle of East and West perplexes ear and
sense alike, and refusea to dwell on Ole Intia

AuG. 11, 1855.

Yet it is pitiable that the writer who could
produce the charming opening lines of this
little lyric should have penned so much stale,
flat, unprofitable stuff as we find in " Maud." It
is noteworthy that in conclusion the narrator
represents his " old hybterical mock diseas3"
dying as he breathes the air of battle :
And I stood on a giant deck and mix'd my breath
With a loyal people shouting a battle cry,
Till I saw the dreary phantom arise and fly
,Far into the North, and battle, and seas of death.

Let it go or stay, so I wake to the higher aims
Of a land that has lost for a little her lust of gold,
And love of a pea ie that was full of wrongs and shames,
Horrible. hateful, monstrous, not to be told ;
And hail once more to the banner of battle unroll'd !

Tho' many a light shall darken, and many shall weep
For those that are crusli'd in the clash of jarring claims,
Yet God's just doom shall be wreak'd on a giant liar;
And many a darkness into the light shall leap,
And shine in the sudden making of splendid names,
Aud noble thought be freer under the sun,
And the heart of a people beat with one desire ;
For the lung, long canker of peace is over and done,
And now by the side of the Black and the Baltic deep,
And deathful-griuning mouths of the fortress, flames
The blood•red blossom of war with a heart of fire.

All that can be said of this feeble rant is,
that it appropriately concludes one of the
most extravagant poems that ever came before
us with the recommendation of a respectable
name. Mr. Tennyson has often trodden
dangerous ground. He has hovered on the
line which separates genius from charlatanry.
In " Maud " he has advanced a step too far
We predict that the good sense of the reading
world will detect and laugh at the absurdities
of " Maud," and that its publication will open
the eyes of the rational portion of his admirers
to the faults and follies of their idol. May he
fall gently from his pedestal.
The " Other Poems " are very slight. The
" Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington "
has been published before, and the " Charge
of the Light Brigade " only makes us the more
regret that we have no Campbell to celebrate
the gallant achievements of our Sebastopol
heroes.

The Spanish Conquest in America, and its Rela-
tion to the History of Slavery and to the
Government of Colonies. By Arthur Helps.
Vols. I. and 11. London :J. W. Parker and
Son.

THE province of history selected by Mr.
Helps has already been thoroughly explored
by some of the ablest of modern historians.
Very little can be added to their facts, and it
is impossible to improve on the spirit and
ease of their narrative. But Mr. Helps has
sought to give a distinctive character to his
work by specially directing attention to the
origin and growth of what he terms " com-
mercial slavery" in the Modern World. A
much less ,bulky work would have better
elucidated this single subject. But the
author argues that the story of slavery alone
would lack dramatic interest for a history, and
that, as it is naturally connected with some of
the most striking events in human annals,
it is better to retain it as a thread in the
annals of modern discovery, and especially in
the conquest of America, than attempt to
present it in the meagre shape it would
assume if separated from surrounding circum-
stances On the other hand, it cfiranot be
concealed that as Mr. Helps has worked out
his design his original principle is almost
entirely lost sight of. In these two volumes
of " The Conquest of America," extending no
farther than the capture of Mexico by Cortes,
the history of slavery occupies so little space
as to be quite insignificant. It is positively
smothered by the throng of glittering adven-
tures which the author has to relate. For
this reason it is simply as an historian of the
conquest of America that Mr. Helps must be
regarded, so far, at least, as we can judge
from this first portion of his work.

His narrative is. full, and he has availed
himself of some sources of information not
noticed by his predecessors in the same field.
But he speaks too slightingly of their works
when he says :—" Other men have written,
" and I believe successfully, of the various
" conquests and discoveries made in Atnerinii,,"
Put:ely Robertson, Washington Irving..,a4ol
rescott deserved 1129 Te reepeet4l inOntsio;4*