Theine

“ One second's yielding of courage and strength, And the daylight between us has doubled its length. The first mile is covered, the race is mine—no! For the blue blood of Tenny responds to a blow; [Pg 120] He shoots through the air like a ball from a gun, And the two lengths between us are shortened to one. My heart is contracted, my throat feels a lump, For Tenny's long neck is at Salvator's rump; And now with new courage grown bolder and bolder, I see him once more running shoulder to shoulder. With knees, hands and body I press my grand steed; I urge him, I coax him, I pray him to heed! ”

“ In entering into the region of Tennyson's poetry you enter one of sun and calm. The land of romance, of dream, of fairy; the land of beauty, glory, and repose, stretching on through all the regions of the earth, wherever genius has alighted in any age, wherever mind has put forth its forms of divinest grace. It belongs to what may be termed the romantic school, yet it is often purely classical. You see in such poems as the Lotus Eaters, Œnone, Ulysses, etc., that Tennyson loves to sit by the immortal wells of Homer; to wander amid the godlike habitants of the Greek Elysium. ”

“ It is equally true that no lover of Tennyson's poetry could admit Taine's scornful account of the In Memoriam as the mourning of a correct gentleman, wiping away his tears with a cambric pocket-handkerchief. I can subscribe, on the contrary, without hesitation, to the commonplace British opinion that no poet has ever shown such depths of tenderness or such skill in interweaving the most delicate painting of nature with the utterance of profound emotion. ”

“ But no one who has ever looked on these smoky reaches of the Tyne with a seeing eye, or steamed down the river on a day either of gloom or sunshine, can refuse to acknowledge that it has a certain grandeur, a stern beauty of its own, that can stir the heart and the imagination more deeply than any mere prettiness. ”

“ Come thou to us with thy attributes:
Let those among us who travel not thy path be embraced by thee:
Beautiful of face and greatly beloved is the image of Tenen, [4] male lord of love, adored when he exhibiteth himself.
His limbs fail from his being bound;—
Come thou in peace, oh thou lord of those among us who behold the two goddesses united!
Afflictions and evils exist not for thy members, for they are not of thy creation.
Oh thou, our chief, turn again thy face toward us,—thou mighty one, great one among the gods! ”

“ Life TERENCE.
Terence was born probably at Carthage, reached Rome as a slave-boy, and passed there into the possession of a rich and educated Senator, P. Terentius Lucanus, by whom he was educated and manumitted, taking from him the name of Publius Terentius the African. ‘A small literary circle of the Roman aristocracy admitted young Terence to their intimate companionship; and soon he was widely known as making a third in the friendship of Gaius Laelius with the first citizen of the Republic, the younger Scipio Africanus. ”

“ While backward, still backward, falls Tenny beside.
We are nearing the turn, the first quarter is past—
’Twixt leader and chaser the daylight is cast.
The distance elongates, still Tenny sweeps on,
As graceful and free-limbed and swift as a fawn;
His awkwardness vanished, his muscles all strained—
A noble opponent, well born and well trained.
I glanced o’er my shoulder, ha! Tenny, the cost
Of that one’s second flagging, will be—the race lost.
One second’s weak yielding of courage and strength,
And the daylight between us has doubled its length. ”

“ It has all the beautiful precision and accurate propriety of detail which distinguish the finest idyls of Theocritus or Tennyson, with a fervor of pathetic and imaginative emotion which Theocritus never attained, and which Tennyson has attained but once. All the horror of death, all the trouble and mystery of darkness, seem as we read to pass into our fancy with the breath of pervading night, and to vanish with the husband's entrance at sunrise before the smile with which the wife draws back the curtains of the cradle. ”

“ Such a man would appeal to the whole history of Terence; he would show that he was a diligent translator of the Greek writers of the middle comedy, that his language in every other line betrayed a Grecian origin, that the plot was not Roman, that the scene was not Roman, that the customs were not Roman; he would say, if he had patience to reason with his antagonist, that a fashionable rake, a grasping father, an indulgent uncle, a knavish servant, an impudent ruffian, and a timid clown, were the same at Rome, at Thebes, and at Athens, in London, Paris, or Madrid. ”

“ Mene. Give me your hand: and let me beg you, Chremes,
Continue to assist me!
Chrem. Willingly.
Mene. D’ye know what I would have you do at present?
Chrem. What?
Mene. Since you have found out they meditate
Some practice on me, prithee, urge them on
To execute it quickly: for I long
To grant his wishes, long to see him straight.
Chrem. Let me alone. I must lay hold of Syrus,
And give him some encouragement.—But see!
Some one, I know not who, comes forth: In, in,
Lest they perceive that we consult together! ”

“ He believed in the victory of spirit over flesh. He was a poet; and faith is easy where the imagination is strong. Tennyson knew that all religion, all peace of [52] mind, hung upon that one vital question—the Afterwards—the other world that is to give us back lost love, lost youth, lost genius, lost joy. I am not a religious man, Vera; indeed, to the Church of Rome I count as an infidel, because I cannot subject my mind to the outward forms and conventions which seem to me no more than the dry husks of spiritual things. ”

“ But what is Theonoe—a dread goddess to whom the queen of Heaven sues for aid, or a kind-hearted woman whose strong common-sense might, perhaps, in a circle like that of the dolts and poseurs who fill the stage, raise her to the repute of superhuman wisdom? She is not all playful. ”

“ That lone hill, with its humble old church, its outlook over the waste of waters, where "the stately ships go on," was, we doubt not, in Tennyson's mind, when the poem, "Break, break, break," which contains the burden of that volume in which are enshrined so much of the deepest affection, poetry, philosophy, and godliness, rose into his "study of imagination"—"into the eye and prospect of his soul." ”

“ Kings and realms that pass to rise no more.
Tennyson's genius was, indeed, akin to that of Virgil in tenderness, in "the sense of tears in mortal things," in elaborate and exquisite [Pg 573] art, and in the selecting and polishing and re-setting of jewels from the poetry of ancient Greece. We saw, in the opening of this volume, how from age to age Homer's descriptions of the Elysian land, and of the home of the gods, reached an Anglo-Saxon minstrel; and now Tennyson recasts the thoughts in his picture of "the island valley of Avilion," the Celtic paradise. ”

“ Of course, one subject wasn’t enough (this view of the limitations of Greek art as a “subject” gave me a startling idea of the rate at which a successful lecturer might exhaust the universe) ; she must find others; she had not ventured on any as yet, but she had thought of Tennyson—didn’t I love Tennyson? She worshipped him so that she was sure she could help others to understand him; or what did I think of a “course” on Raphael or Michelangelo—or on the heroines of Shakespeare? ”

“ SCENE IX. Enter Menedemus.
Mene. (to himself) . Oh son, how happy hast thou made thy father,
Convinc’d of thy repentance!
Chrem. (overhearing) . How mistaken!
Mene. Chremes! I wish’d for you.—’Tis in your power,
483
And I beseech you do it, to preserve
My son, myself, and family.
Chrem. I’ll do’t.
Wherein can I oblige you?
308 Mene. You to-day
Have found a daughter.
Chrem. True. What then?
Mene. My Clinia
Begs your consent to marry her.
Chrem. Good Heaven!
What kind of man are you?
Mene. What mean you, Chremes? ”

“ Tennelly glanced around and marveled amusedly at the serious attitude of all. Even a row of tough-looking kids on the back seats had at least one eye apiece squinted shut during the prayer, and almost an atmosphere of reverence upon them.
Tennelly prided himself upon being a student of human nature, and before he knew it he was interested in this mass of common people about him. But now and again his gaze went uneasily back to Courtland, whose eyes were fixed intently upon the preacher, as if the words he spoke were of real importance to him. ”

“ She believed in the Lord Jesus Christ. She believed He could forgive sins."
"Do you believe it?" Tenney hurled at him. "Can He forgive—that?"
Again he stretched out his hands.
"Yes," said Raven. "He can forgive that."
"An' I be," Tenney continued, in his scriptural phrasing, "whiter than snow?"
Raven found himself halting. There were, behind this vision of the symbol by which God made Himself manifest to man, reserves of strict integrities.
"Tenney," he said, "you've killed a child. Your child. You're a criminal. The only thing you can do to get back among men is to give yourself up. ”

“ In the harrowing history of the modern soul, which is in many respects a tragic history, Taine takes his place as a well-constituted and venerable type possessing many of the noblest qualities of this soul—its reckless courage, its absolutely sincere intellectual conscience, its stirring and modest stoicism amid acute privations and isolation. ”

“ Would he inculcate subjugation to the law of duty—he gives us the funeral ode on Wellington, The Charge of the Light Brigade, and Love and Duty. Would he inculcate resignationto the will of God, and the moral efficacy of conventional Christianity—he gives us Enoch Arden. Would he picture the endless struggle between the sensual and the spiritual, and the relation of ideals to life—he gives us the Idylls of the King. Would he point to what atheism may lead—he gives us Lucretius. ”

“ How, if he had his pen in hand, would he describe Israel Tenney for one of the folk tales Anne had so persistently urged him to? A thin, tall man with narrow shoulders and yet somehow giving an impression of great wiry strength. He had a boldly drawn line of profile, hair black and glossy and, as Raven saw with distaste, rather long under his hat, vertical lines marking his cheeks, lines deeper than seemed justified by his age, and, as he had noted before, his eyes were also black with a spark in them. ”

“ But now, as he mused over a bottle of lithia water, some of Tenney's past success-born confidence oozed away from him. The hopeful scientist, on the seeming verge of a great discovery, is brought to recognition of failure by the contemplation of the figures of his last test—for he knows the figures do not lie. ”

“ With the infallible instinct of Greek [Pg 328] Poetry there is a rapid lift in the style, a sudden glorious phrase ὑπερράγη ἄσπετος αἰθήρ, to suggest adequately the magnificent sight of the sudden clearance. It is this effect that is difficult to give in the translation; and it is exactly this splendid climax that Tennyson’s incomparable rendering, “And the immeasurable heavens break open to their highest,” so perfectly conveys. ”

“ Tennyson's theme, so characteristic of his age, is the reign of order,--of law in the physical world, producing evolution, and of law in the spiritual world, working out the perfect man. In Memoriam, Idylls of the King, The Princess,-here are three widely different poems; yet the theme of each, so far as poetry is a kind of spiritual philosophy and weighs its words before it utters them, is the orderly development of law in the natural and in the spiritual world. ”

“ I vowed that could I gain her, our fair Queen,
No hand but hers, should make your Enid burst
Sunlike from cloud--and likewise thought perhaps,
That service done so graciously would bind
The two together; fain I would the two
Should love each other: how can Enid find
A nobler friend? Another thought was mine ”

“ I have just been reading the new poems of Tennyson. Much has he thought, much suffered, since the first ecstasy of so fine an organization clothed all the world in rosy light. He has not suffered himself to become a mere intellectual voluptuary, nor the songster of fancy and passion, but has earnestly revolved the problems of life, and his conclusions are calmly noble. In these later verses is a still, deep sweetness ”

“ The pagan directness of Catullus’ lines, the Platonic connotations of the Nuova Vita, the Christian romanticism of Tennyson are worlds apart, not because the human being changes but because his environment does. ”

“ It is possible that the poem may have been suggested by Beattie’s Judgment of Paris which tells the same story, and tells it on the same lines on which it is told here, though it is not placed in the mouth of Œnone. Beattie’s poem opens with an elaborate description of Ida and of Troy in the distance. Paris, the husband of Œnone, is one afternoon confronted with the three goddesses who are, as in Tennyson’s Idyll, elaborately delineated as symbolising what they here symbolise. Each makes her speech and each offers what she has to offer, worldly dominion, wisdom, sensual pleasure. ”

“ Tenney began, and then pulled himself up. Raven believed that he meant it was one thing to invoke the Founder of his religion in a sacerdotal sense, but not for the comforting certainty of a real Presence. "Seems if anybody's crazed. Seems if——" Here he broke off again, and Raven took satisfaction in the concluding phrase: "It's no way to talk when a man's lamed himself so's't he can't git round the room 'thout bleedin' to death."
By this Raven understood the man was, in an hysterical way, afraid of Tira and her surprising invocation. ”