The Sun.
London, England, 1855-08-27 00:00:00

LITERATURE.

TENNYSON'S NEW POEM.
Maud, and other Poems. By Alfred Tennyson,
D.C.L., Poet Laureate. Edward Moxon.
An indifferent poem by an exquisite poet is
necessarily a source to his admirers of very grievous
disappointment. That disappointment we have
ourselves but just experienced. We have risen from
the perusal of " Maud, and other Poems," by
Alfred Tennyson, with a somewhat poignant re-
gret that one so rarely gifted as the Poet Laureate
should have rushed into print with a volume alto-
gcther so unworthy of his reputation. That repu-
tation has happily long since become firmly estab-
lished—otherwise the apparition of a ghost of a
poem like " Maud," must perforce have seriously
jeopardised its consolidation. While, however, we
are compelled to take exception thus earnestly to
the issue of a work by Mr. Tennyson, so unsatis-
factory as an emanation of his peculiar genius, it
must be confessed that we do so principally out of
the very fullness of our admiration of powers we
conceive to have been, herein, most inadequately
represented. Grateful in the recollection of those
treasures of poetry which his hand has poured forth
sounstintingly into the lap ofhis own privileged gene-
ration, we are inflamed by mingled feelings of regret
and amazement, when we find the merest pebble diop-
ped from the same honoured palm, the palm which
has so often endowed us, as with benefaction after
benefaction, with those—
" Jewels five words long,
That on the stretched forefinger of all time
Sparkle for ever,"—
gems of verse, " pearls of great price," floating to
us from the golden waters of the Pactolus of Poet-
land, each, so to speak, " one entire and perfect
chrysolite." By the memory of " Locksley Hall"
alone we might claim the privilege of protesting
against " Maud," as altogether unworthy of Alfred
Tennyson. Assuredly, then, we may be permitted
so to repudiate this poem as an illegitimate off-
spring of the intellect of our laureate, when asso-
ciated with the memory of " Locksley Hall," we
cherish in tender recollection " and the
" Lotus Eaters," and the " MilleTs Daughter,"
and " Mariairia," and Lilian," and " Eleanor,"
and "Margaret," and with those, too, " The Sleeping
Beauty," and the " Lady of Burleigh," and
" Godiva," and " CEnone," and " Dora," and the ,
fragment of " Arthur," and all those delicious effu-
sions of a rare poetic genius—a genius which may
be said to have appr ,ached its meridian upon the
appearance of " The Princess," and to have in a
manner culminated on the advent of " In Memo-
riam." Nevertheless, while protesting against the
mere supposition, for one instant, that the thin
little volume of 154 pages, entitled " Maud, and
other Poems," is to be accepted by us as a not un-
worthy sequel to productions such as those we
have just honeyed the ink in our pen by enumerat-
ing, it must be added entirely as a matter of course
and as it were by a wholly unavoidable necessity,
that the " plot" of this same " Maud" is sown
thickly, here and there, with sweetest thoughts
and daintiest expressions the frondage and
efflorescence of a luxuriant and cultivated imagi-
nation. It has been seriously suggested by a
contemporary critic, that the poem, as such,
is intended to be regarded as nothing else '
than an allegory of the war, and through that as
a satire on the present generation. According to
which fantastic hypothesis Maud herself is to be
considered as an incarnation of the age, her com-
panions in the story being symbolical, more er less
directly, of the good or evil influences and results
of our existing state of civilisation. For ourselves
we cannot but laugh to scorn any such preposte-
rous absurdities in the way of elucidation—believ-
ing them in our conscience to be entirely alien from
the more simple, and earnest, and natural aim of
the Poet Laureate ! That aim we conceive to have
been throughout the natural, and earnest, and
simple narrative of a love story, replete with pas-
sionate meaning and emotional significance—a love
story telling us how Maud was won and lost, and
how the hero of the piece, the nameless lover of
Maud, a philanthropic misanthrope at first, be-
comes at last, through varying stages of love and
madness, what might be best described, perhaps,
by a reversed antithesis of phrase, as a misanthropic
philanthropist. The poem is portioned out in six
and twenty divisions—written in all imaginable
varieties of metre, of tone, of stanza—now pathetic,
now sprightly, now graceful, now lugubrious—here
sportive quatrains, here sorrowful couplets, there
wandering off into all kinds of rhythmi gal conceits,
rhyming vagaries,and melodiousfluctuationsof style,
of measure, of thought, and even, be it said, of phra-
seology. For, at intervals the poem is rendered
as remarkable by its colloquial homeliness as at
other times by its refined elevation of language—
language then occasionally as lovely by reason of
the exquisite delicacy of its rhetorical artifice as it
unquestionably is through the adroitly-introduced,
though seeming spontaneous, influence of its dulcet
and musical intonation. aud, be it said at once,
is th offspring of an arrant old hunx, who before
the story begins, appears to have acquired con-
siderable wealth by the ruin of the father of the
youthful misanthrope, once the child-playmate and
eventually the lover and beloved of that priceless
pearl and paragon of the grim curmudgeon—" a
grey old wolf and a lean "—Maud, seen in the
daylight with her " cold and clear-cut face "
Maud, thought of by night " luminous, gem-like,
ghost-like, death-like,"—Maud, the " milk-white
fawn "—" fed on the roses and lain in the lilies of
life "—Maud, with
it her sunny hair
And smile as sunny as cold"—
Maud, cries her lover " My Delight,"—
" Maud, my bliss,
Maud, made my Maud by that long lover's kiss"—
Maud, "Queen lily and rose in one." Maud, clad—
" In gloss of satin and glimmer of pearls,
Shirung out with a head sunning over with curls,
Queen rose of the rosebud garden of girls."
Maud, in short, the exquisite, the incomparable,
the divine, and wondrously beautiful goddess of
the young dreamer's distraught imagination. Dis-
traught his imagination is, before Maud comes hack
to the hall in the flower of her perfected maiden-
hood, distraught by the remembrance of—
" The shrill-edged shriek of a mother dividing the shud-
dering night."
When the father is brought home dead—either by
suicide or murder—from—
. . . . The dreadful hollow behind the little

wood,
Its lips in the field above all dabbled with blood-red
heath,
The red•ribbed ledges dripping with silent horror of
blood,
And Echo there, whatever is asked her, answering
Death !' "
Thither the old man, bankrupt iu fortune and hap-
piness, had wandered out in the autumnal evening—
" . . . Where the wind like a broken worldling wailed,
And the flying gold of the ruined woodlands drove
through the air."
Thence his mangled remains are brought home-
wards to be buried—there, hard by the desolated
hearth, where the son is one day, long after, startled
from his sorrowful musings, by intelligence that
the adjacent hall " the dark old place," to be "
by the touch of a millionnaire," is being madeb
ready for Maud and the Sultan (later on, so called)
her brother. Maud, remembered only as she was
a little after infancy—
" Maud, with her venturous climbing sand troubles, and
childish escapes,
Maud the delight of the village, the ringing joy of the
ball,
Maud, with her sweet purse-mouth when my father dan-
gled the grapes,
appears now to the gaze of her sometime playmate
as she is, in all the loveliness of "sweet seventeen"—
" Perfectly beautiful . . • •
Faultily faultless, icily regular,,plendidly
Dead perfection . • • • •
So that he almost longs for a 'flow somewhere—
g, For a chance of travel, a paleness, an hour's defect of
the rose,
Or an underlip, you may call it a little too ripe, too
full,
Or the least little acquiline curve in a sensitive nose."
After this fashion he speaks of Maud, and a little
later we find him thus carping and cavilling over
the Sultan, her Brother.--
" • • . . That dandy despot, he,
That jewelled mass of millinery,
That oiled and curled Assyrian Bull
Smelling of mask and of insolence."
Adding a little further on in the narrative—
" His form I grant in spite of spite,
Has a broad blown comeliness red and white,
And six feet two as I think he stands.
But his essences turn the live air sick,
And barbarous opulence jewel thick
Suns itself on his breast and hands."
Returning to the hall from abroad, Maud and her
brother arrive about the dawn of the fair spring
season, when in the little grove—
" I million emeralds break from. the ruby-budded 19ne."
Frozen back at first into himself by gent of
what he imagines to be Maud a frigidity of loveli-
ness, the young dreamer reverts for relief to his
previous solitude and meditation.
Li st
' niluj now to the tide in its broadflung, shipwrecking
roar,
Now to the scream of a maddened beach dragged down
by the wave :"
But waking up at last to the recognition of
"Mad, in 6,11 her glory," when he beholds again

her " exquisite face," and hears her voice in the
meadow, and sees—

" . . the treasured splendour her hand,
Come sliding out of her sacred glove,
And the sunlight break from her lips,"
As he recalls to remembrance—
"Whom but Maud should I meet
Last night, when the sunset burned
On the blossomed gable-ends
At the head of the village street,
Whom but Maud should I meet ?'
And she touched my hand with a smile so sweet,
She made me divine amends
For a courtesy not returned."
He is conquered—her slave—her worshipper
" Her lion rolled in a silken net"—
" Lord of the pulse that is lord of her breast,
Ind dreams of her beauty with tender dread,
From the delicate Arab arch of her feet
o the grace that bright and light as the crest
Of a peacock, sits on her shining head,
And she knows it not : 0, if she knew it,
To know her beauty might half undo it."
It is the most siveet and exquisite picture in the
volume—suggestive of limnings tinted with the de-
licate water dyes of Edward Corbould, in illustra-
tion. The dreaming lover, although despised by
the relatives of Maud, is accepted by Maud her-
self. He saunters with her under the shadow of
twilight through her " high Hall-garden," as
though he trod the golden gravel and perfumed
lawns of Paradise. He sits over against her in the
village church—more her votary almost than God's.
He has a chance meeting with her a mile from the
shore on horseback, where the waving of her hand as
nhe flits by him is as a star-spark in the darkness.
When he first wins her word of betrothal he never
tires of repeating to himself as it were in an under-
tone of rapture—

" There is none like her, none."

Sighing to her with an almost childish iteration of
tender epithets after their trysting pledge of mu-
tual fondness—

" My bride to be, my evermore delight,
My own heart's heart, and ownest own farewell."
His passion breaks forth in musical numbers, num-
bers " most musical, most melancholy," snatches
of erotic verse beginning, one of them—
" A voice by the cedar tree, &c."
Another—

Another—

" Go not, happy day," &c.

" Come into the garden, Maud, &c."

And perhaps the most impassioned—
" I have led her home, my love, my only friend."
Tenderest of all, however, to our thinking, section

xii. :-

" Birds in the high Hall•garden
When Twilight was falling,
Maud, Maud, Maud, Maud,
They were crying and calling.
I kissed her slender hand,
She took the kiss sedately ;
Maud is not seventeen,
But she is tall and stately.
Birds in the high Hall-garden
Were crying and calling to her,
Where is Maud, Maud, Maud,
One is come to woo her ?
Look, a horse is at the door,
And little King Charles is gnarling,
Go hack, my lord, across the moor,
You are not her darling."
This refers, of course, to the partially favoured
suitor, the suitor favoured by the Sultan, Maud's
brother :

- "a lord, a captain, a padded shape,
A bought commission, a waxen face,
A rabbit mouth that is ever a•gape."
It is in this twelfth sectien of the poem from which
we have extracted these exultant ejaculations
that the poet sings with an unconscious remem-
brance of rare old Ben Jonson, who had carolled
thus exquisitely three centuries back (we have to
thank our weekly illustrated contemporary for the
reminiscence) :
" Here she was wont to go ! and here ! s.nd here
Just where those daisies, pinks, and violets grow ;
The world may find the spring by following her,
For other print her airy steps ne'er left.
Her treading would not bend a blade of grass,
Or shake the downy blow-ball from his stalk.
But like the soft west wind she shot along,
And where she went the flowers took thickest root,
As she had sown them with her odorous foot."
It is, we say, with a possibly unconscious recollec-
tion of these delicious verses of Ben Jonson, and
perhaps also with a no less unthinking remembrance
of that almost equally delicious fancy of Walter
Scott—

" E'en the slight harebell raised its head
Elastic from her airy tread :"
that Alfred Tennyson sings thus at page 42, of his
peerless Maud—
"l know the way she went
Home with her maiden posy,
For her fret have touched the meadows,
And left the daisies rosy :"
as in a kindred strain he afterwards sings at page
69

" From the meadow your walks have left so sweet,
That wherever a March-wind sighs
He sets the jewel print of your
;feet
Lb violets blue as your eyes."
All this rapturous love is blurred and dashed to
the dust, however, by a sudden blow struck at the
betrothed of Maud by the hand of her brother, fol-
lowed by a duel in " the red-ribbed hollow behind
the wood," when the Sultan is killed—an event driv-
ing Maud into an early grave, her betrothed to a
hurried self-exile in Brittany, subsequently into a
mad-house on his return homewards, and ulti—
mately, on his return to reason, into a morbid kind
of vague cosmopolitan philanthropy. Behold, in
these few incidents, the gist of the plot of Maud—
a love story in verse, told through the errant man-
nerisms, and varying measures, and alternating
moods, the peculiarities of which the reader of our
remarks may now very readily conjecture through
the medium of the foregoing illustrative fragments
introduced hero by way of explanatory quotation.
lln conception, as in execution, tl -2oem
is altogether too incoherent to I,r ranked
otherwise than very low indeed among ti e laureate's
now rather numerous metrical performances. We
cannot but regret when we hear av, so strangely
melodious by nature jarring into ouch dissonant
colloquialisms as those which grate Ton our senses
when we listen to a rhyming babble about
" perky larches and pines," or about peaks of the
wood "caught and cuff'd by the ' or heark-
ening to affected diminutives " the least little
touch of spleen," diminutives kindred in character
to that senseless superlative at which we have
already directed a passing glance of (it may be cap-
tious) observation. The philosophic purpose of the
poem, for such a purpose, notwithstanding its ge-
neral incoherence, it appears to us to evidence
throughout, may be recognised, we cannot but
conjecture, clearly enough, through the thought
thus curiously expressed—
" As nine months go to shaping an infant ripe for his
birth,
So many a million of ages have gone to the making of
man : '

followed some time afterwards by that forceful
ejaculation, the reason of which, particularly at
this all-important juncture in our national desti-
nies, but few amongst us can fail to consider—
" Ah God, for a man with heart,lhead, band,
Like some of the simple great ones gone
For ever and ever by,
One still strong man in a blatant land,
Whatever they call him, what care I,
Aristocrat, democrat, autocrat—one
Who can rule and dare not lie."
A chief-of-men for the men of England, such as our
ImperiaY ally, the Third Napoleon, is at this mo-
ment for more than thirty-five millions of French-
men. Passing on, however, at last from the con-
sideration of " Maud" exclusively, we may com-
mend (in spite of occasional freaks of fancy, such
as that ludicrously quaint conceit about grass-
hoppers, in which they are spoken of as—
" High-elbow'd grigs that leap in summer grass):"
we may commend for an exceeding grace, and
sometimes for a bewitching tenderness that Idyl of
" The Brook," the refrain of which is merely the
repetition of one familiar, years ago, to the lovers
of the lyrics of Tennyson—
" But not by thee, by steps shall be
For ever and for ever."
The jewel, the flower, the glory of the little book,
howbeit, to our mind is discoverable in the six
stanzas comprised between pp. 115 and 118, en-
titled, simply enough, " The Letters." It is the
only portion of the work, we conceive, in any way
worthy of the Poet Laureate. And it is such,
briefly, as a snatch of song, throbbing with pas-
sion, full of grace and tenderness and melody.
Not thus is it with the five remaining pieces, to us
mere scraps of indifferently meritorious versifica-
tion. A hunchback bedizened with jewels—pearl,
and topaz, and amethyst, and beryl, and onyx, and
malachite, adorning his "little dorsal irregularity "
—might be regarded, indeed, as the not wholly inapt
symbol or incarnation of a book as distorted in
structure, as stunted in dimensions, as it has been
laboriously overladen, here and there, with the
rarest and loveliest, but, at the same time, the
most bizarre and incongruous of decorations.
Joredun : A Tale of the Twelve Hundred ar...;
Ten. By W. S. 3 vols. Sampson, Low, and

Son. -
Another of the Curiosities of Literature ! And,
as such, assuredly entitled to at least some passing
consideration. Imagine a fiction in throe volumes
assuming to itself the glory of having emanated
from the hand of Sir Walter Scott, coming from
the press at any time, are any shape, under any