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Tennyson has here evinced for the familiar and the ideal, regarded separately, it is much to be deplored that by their unskilful combination he has produced simply-the grotesque."

This judgment stands. Yet, such is the beauty and power of the poem, we can endorse the high praise awarded it by Charles Kingsley, whose brief analysis of the poet's scheme and whose expounding of his meanings have done so much to make The Princess acceptable and admired among a larger class of readers.

"The idyllic manner," he said, "alternates with the satiric, the pathetic, even the sublime, by such imperceptible gradations and continual delicate variations of key, that the harmonious medley of his style becomes the fit outward expression of the bizarre and yet harmonious fairyland in which his fancy ranges. In this work, too, Mr Tennyson shows himself more than ever the poet of the day. In it more than ever the old is interpenetrated with the new-the domestic and scientific with the ideal and sentimental. He dares, in every page, to make use of modern words and notions, from which the mingled clumsiness and archaism of his compeers shrinks as unpoetical. Though, as we have just said, his stage is an ideal fairyland, yet he has reached the ideal by the only true method-by bringing the Middle Age forward to the present one, and not by ignoring the present to fall back on a cold and galvanised Mediævalism; and thus he makes his Medley a mirror of the nineteenth century, possessed of its own new art and science, its own new temptations and aspirations, and yet grounded on, and continually striving to produce, the forms and experiences of all past time. The idea, too, of The Princess is an essentially modern one. In every age women have been tempted, by the possession of superior beauty, intellect, or strength of will, to deny their own womanhood, and attempt to stand alone as men, whether on the ground of political intrigue, ascetic saintship, or philosophic pride. Cleopatra and St Hedwiga, Madame de Staël and the Princess, are merely different manifestations of the same self-willed and proud longing of woman to unsex herself, and realise, single and self-sustained, some distorted and partial notion of her own as to what the 'angelic life' should be. Cleopatra acted out the pagan ideal of an angel; St Hedwiga, the mediæval one; Madame de Staël hers, with the peculiar notions of her time, as to what 'spiritual' might mean; and in The Princess Mr Tennyson has embodied the ideal of that nobler, wider, purer, yet equally fallacious, because equally unnatural, analogue, which we may meet too often up and down England now.

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He shows us the woman, when she takes her stand on the false masculine ground of intellect, working out her own moral punishment, by destroying in herself the tender heart of flesh: not even her vast purposes of philanthropy can preserve her, for they are built up, not on the womanhood which God has given her, but on her own self-will; they change, they fall, they become inconsistent, even as she does herself, till, at last, she loses all feminine sensibility; scornfully and stupidly she rejects and misunderstands the heart of man; and then falling from pride to sternness, from sternness to sheer inhumanity, she punishes sisterly love as a crime, robs the mother of her child, and becomes all but a vengeful fury, with all the peculiar faults of woman and none of the peculiar excellences of man.

"The poem, being, as its title imports, a medley of jest and earnest, allows a metrical licence, of which we are often tempted to wish that its author had not availed himself; yet the most unmetrical and apparently careless passages flow with a grace, a lightness, a colloquial ease and frolic, which perhaps only heighten the effect of the serious parts, and serve as a foil to set off the unrivalled finish and melody of these latter. In these come out all Mr Tennyson's instinctive choice of tone, his mastery of language, which always fits the right word to the right thing, and that word always the simplest one, and the perfect ear for melody which makes it superfluous to set to music poetry which, read by the veriest schoolboy, makes music of itself."

When revised and re-written, and with the delicious lyrics interspersed, The Princess exhibited so much of the poet's power that, despite the pervading sense of disappointment, a future of great achievement was confidently predicted for its author. What form his next work would take was wholly problematical, but the power of the man was not to be questioned. His admirers waited and were confident.

CHAPTER V.

POET LAUREATE: PATRIOTISM AND POLITICS.

"For some cry 'Quick' and some cry 'Slow,'

But, while the hills remain,

Up hill 'Too-slow' will need the whip,

Down hill 'Too-quick' the chain."

-Politics.

WORDSWORTH died in 1850, and the question of his successor as Poet Laureate aroused considerable interest. The office was either created under a misconception of a poet's powers, or it was abused. Its actual origin is uncertain. Kings in old days had their minstrels just as they had their fools, and probably the one was esteemed no higher than the other. Skelton was the first actually to bear the title "Laureate," but he used the word simply in the sense of meaning that he had been crowned with bays at the University. Edmund Spenser heads the list of Laureates who had an office and duties assigned to them, and who received payment for writing to order. Samuel Daniel succeeded him, and thereafter came Ben Jonson, whose salary was a hundred marks and a tierce of wine.

Who would be a Laureate bold,

With his cask of sherry
To keep him merry?

asked Sir Theodore Martin in the "Bon Gaultier" parody of Tennyson's poem on The Merman. As a matter of fact, the cask of sherry is now a myth, for in the time of the "poet Pye" the allowance of wine was commuted for £27 a year. Part of the duty of the Laureates was to write an ode on the monarch's natal day, "his quit-rent ode, his peppercorn of praise," as Cowper scoffingly termed it;

but in the time of George III. this absurd practice fell into abeyance. Looking down the list of Laureates one comes across names quite forgotten, and the inevitable conclusion is reached that the office, ridiculous in its inception, has been disgraced by many who held it. Who cares for Whitehead, Pye, Laurence Eusden, Nahum Tate, or Thomas Shadwell?-who respects Colley Cibber or Thomas Warton ?—who reads any of their works save in a spirit of curiosity? Yet these are the men who were crowned Laureate. Men like Spenser, Jonson, Dryden, Southey, and Wordsworth, were too great for the office, and the others were too mean. A poet who is willing to sing to order is in truth no poet at all, and if he is unwilling he ought not to have the task forced upon him. Prince Albert's letter to Rogers offering him the Laureateship very cleverly explained why, and under what circumstances, the office was to be retained.

"MY DEAR MR ROGERS,-The death of the lamented Mr Wordsworth has vacated the office of Poet Laureate. Although the spirit of the times has put an end to the practice (at all times objectionable) of exacting laudatory odes from the holder of that office, the Queen attaches importance to its maintenance from its historical antiquity and the means it affords to the Sovereign of a more personal connection with the poets of the country through one of their chiefs. I am authorised, accordingly, to offer to you this honorary post, and can tell you that it will give Her Majesty great pleasure if it were accepted by one whom she has known so long, and who would so much adorn it ; but that she would not have thought of offering it to you at your advanced age if any duties, or trouble were attached to it.-Believe me always, my dear Mr Rogers, yours truly, ALBERT."

"BUCKINGHAM PALACE,

"8th May 1850."

To this letter Rogers replied-" How can you forgive me, Sir, for having so long delayed to answer a letter which I have had the honour to receive from your Royal Highness? But I was so affected by it as to be utterly unable to do justice to my feelings." In the end he declined the honour.

Sir G. C. Lewis proposed that Sir Henry Taylor should be

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appointed Laureate, on the ground that Tennyson was "but little known." Rogers himself deprecated the appointment of Tennyson and advocated the claims of Charles Mackay. Leigh Hunt, "Barry Cornwall," and Browning all had the suffrages of a section; but the first-named wrote in his Journal—“ With regard to the Laureateship, the editor of this journal has particular reasons for wishing to give his opinion on the subject in his own person; and his opinion is, that if the office in future is really to be bestowed on the highest degree of poetical merit, and on that only (as being a solitary office it unquestionably ought to be, though such has not hitherto been the case), then Mr Alfred Tennyson is entitled to it above any other man in the kingdom, since of all living poets he is the most gifted with the sovereign poetical faculty-Imagination. May he live to wear his laurel to a green old age, singing congratulations to good Queen Victoria and human advancement long after the writer of these words shall have ceased to hear him with mortal ears."

This noble tribute of a brother-bard may have assisted to bring about the final result; but Tennyson had an admirer also in the Queen, whose heart he had won with The Miller's Daughter, and Prince Albert himself took a conspicuous part in urging Tennyson's claim by merit to the office. Sydney Dobell told the story that a servant, opening the door to a visitor when the poet was out, asked what message she should give. "Merely say Prince Albert called," was the reply. So far as the Laureateship was concerned, however, it seemed likely that Tennyson would have been completely overlooked by the Premier, Sir Robert Peel, who, on learning from Monckton Milnes that "Tennyson was certainly the man," replied, "I am ashamed to say that, busied as I have been in public life, I have never read a line of Tennyson's. Send me two or three of his poems." Milnes selected Locksley Hall and Ulysses. Peel was delighted with both, but especially with Ulysses, and promptly made the appointment. On March 6th, 1851, "Mr Tennyson was presented" at Buckingham Palace.

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