CHAPTER VII. "MAUD": TENNYSON ON WAR AND PEACE. "I would the old God of war himself were dead, Forgotten, rusting on his iron hills, Rotting on some wild shore with ribs of wreck, -The Princess. "I would that wars should cease, From War with kindly links of gold, -Epilogue (to the Charge of the Heavy Brigade). IN the preceding chapter I have given an analysis of In Memoriam, touching in turn upon the personal parts, the vein of philosophy, and the religious teaching, and showing the synthetical character of the whole poem. The year which saw its publication was the year of the poet's marriage and of his appointment to the Laureateship. Shiplake Church was the scene of his wedding-" a large and beautiful pile," wrote Mary Russell Mitford, "the tower half-clothed with ivy, and standing with its charming vicarage and pretty vicarage-garden on a high eminence overhanging one of the finest bends of the river Thames. A woody lane leads from the church to the bottom of the chalk-cliff, one side of which stands out from the road below like a promontory, surmounted by the laurel-hedges and flowery arbours of the vicarage garden, and crested by a noble cedar of Lebanon." While in this neighbourhood the poet composed Riflemen, form, for the Berkshire Volunteers; but directly after his marriage he went abroad, and the record of his enchanted journey with his wife “in lands of palm and southern pine," may be read in that most delightful of picture-poems, The Daisy. Returning home, and having to mourn the loss of his first child, Tennyson took up his residence in London, his house being in Montpelier Row, Twickenham. There he stayed until November 1853, seeing in that time his Poems pass through an eighth edition, The Princess through a fifth edition, and In Memoriam through a fourth edition. All these were still being subjected to rigid revision, while additions were made or former pieces omitted at the poet's discretion. He contributed a number of miscellaneous poems to the papers, writing them more as Laureate than as poet compelled to utterance, and few of these he afterwards deemed worthy of preservation. The note struck in such verses as Hands all Round, the Ode on Wellington, The Charge of the Light Brigade, and The Third of February 1852, was to ring through the greater work then in preparation. The Fifties were a time of mad excitement. Everywhere was heard the clamour of arms. The European nations were locked in a deadly struggle. All thoughts were of war, and all eyes were fixed upon the battle-ground of the Crimea, where the destiny of England and Russia was to be decided by cannon and sabre. In 1855 the Laureate published Maud, little thinking perhaps of the torrent of vituperation which would be poured upon him from some quarters in consequence. Whether anticipated or not, the powerful drama, showing the curse of a corrupting peace, excited a controversy which will never entirely subside as long as the old question remains unanswered—“Is war a cause or a consequence?" So far back as 1836, Tennyson, then known only as the author of the Poems, chiefly Lyrical which had failed to produce any sensation beyond his own circle of friends, had been petitioned by the Marquis of Northampton to contribute to an Annual, which was to be published for charitable purposes. A copy of this publication, which I have by me, bears the title of The Tribute: a Collection of Miscellaneous unpublished Poems by Various Authors. The proceeds of the sale were to be devoted to assisting the Rev. Edward Smedley, and "spare him the necessity for those arduous literary labours which threatened his sight or his life." Before the book came out in 1837, Smedley had died, but the volume was prepared and sold to relieve the wants of his family. In response to Lord Northampton's application, Tennyson wrote-(and the letter casts a side-light upon this obscure portion of his life)" Three summers back, provoked by the incivility of editors, I swore an oath that I would never again have to do with their vapid books, and I broke it in the sweet face of Heaven when I wrote for Lady What's-her-name Wortley. But then her sister wrote to Brookfield, and said she (Lady W.) was beautiful; so I could not help it. But whether the Marquis be beautiful or not, I don't much mind; if he be, let him give God thanks, and make no boast. To write for people with prefixes to their names is to milk he-goats; there is neither honour nor profit." This ungracious letter (addressed to Monckton Milnes) did not, in the end, prevent Tennyson's contributing those exquisite stanzas beginning "Oh that 'twere possible After long grief and pain." The poet was in fairly good company, for though among the crowd there were some whom we have willingly forgotten, there were also those who deserve to be remembered-his brother Charles, Milnes, Wordsworth, Venables, Trench, Aubrey de Vere, Henry Taylor, Landor, Doyle, Milman, Alford, Bowles, Southey, Joanna Baillie, Agnes Strickland, Montgomery, and Lord John Russell. Milnes had evidently informed Tennyson that these had promised to write for the Annual, for we find the poet asking, "How should such a modest man as I see my small name in collocation with the great ones, and not feel myself a barndoor fowl 1 He had contributed three poems to The Gem, a sonnet to The Englishman's Magazine, another to the Yorkshire Literary Annual, and a third to Friendship's Offering. among peacocks?" When the Stanzas were published, a sapient reviewer, while "not professing to understand them," decided that "amidst some quaintness, and some occasional absurdities of expression, it is not difficult to detect the hand of a true poet." Among Tennyson's friends was Sir John Simeon, who had been introduced to him by Carlyle. It is he who is referred to as the last of three loved men in the touching lines, entitled In the Garden at Swainston. We know, on the authority of Mrs Ritchie, that it was a remark of Sir John's, that "it seemed as if something were wanting to explain the story" suggested by the stanzas, which led so many years afterwards to their elaboration into the monodrama Maud. Maud is a series of songs in many metres and many keys —“a chaplet of lyric pearls," as Bayard Taylor said—songs which, with more or less change, have been sung since love was born, and will be sung until love be no more. These songs form a slight story in which an English girl, Maud, and a nameless lover, who is the speaker throughout, are the central figures. Two others, Maud's brother and his friend, flit phantom-like across the scene, but they are speedily lost. Maud is the one sacred name, and the one character, who without appearing, is a real presence, and without speaking is heard. In the poem we find combined all those charms and attributes so characteristic of Tennyson's writing. There is the beauty of woman gleaming as in the portrait of Adelaide or Eleanore; there is the purity of purpose as displayed in Sir Galahad, the passionate fervour of Fatima, the pathos and frenzy of Locksley Hall. Over all this wondrous combination is cast a magic fascinating light, while every line has a haunting rhythm, instinct with unborn melody. The witchery is complete. One seems to follow the story half in a trance, and to live in a dream of exquisite charm and mystery. It has been urged that Maud is unreal, and that the declamations are sound and fury signifying nothing. On the contrary, it is replete with sincerity, and abounds in confidences. The poet is never constrained, hesitating, and repressed. Sometimes the words seems to glow with fire, and hot anger or hot love has the intensity of madness. The parts of the poem are excellently balanced, and so far as its mechanism can be detected, it is without a flaw. Although in three divisions, the piece is really in two parts. The first is that of hope, which grows brighter and brighter until its promise is all but fulfilled: the second is that of despair, which deepens and darkens until the end comes. The hero, Maud's lover, is not as some quibblers would have us believe, a madman with long periods of rationality, but a rational man with short periods of madness. He is a man with deep emotions and of strong passions, easily moved to wrath-a man of violent extremes, alternately swayed by tempests of joy and sorrow. His life began in gloom, and his sensitiveness and embittered feeling caused him to shrink from companionship, and to bury himself in himself. Too much of introspection, too long a nursing of grief, too acute a gazing upon the disappointments of the past have made him a pessimist philosopher convinced of universal fraud and unrighteousness. Man and Nature are alike cruel, base, tormenting, working to evil ends and ultimate doom. His own life becomes inexplicable, and when reverse of fortune separates him from the only creature he loved the girl to whom he was vowed at his birth—the last light vanishes, and he resigns himself to unceasing despondency. His existence is inmeshed with perplexities. He has no refuge from himself, no relief from corroding thought. Scorned, as he imagines, shunned and shunning, restless, loveless, hopeless-what wonder that he becomes a fatalist, a Timon in his silent retreat, a social leper, a man with "neither hope nor trust"? He beholds in ghastly procession all the horrors, the crimes, the impostures, the roguery of the age which has prated of the blessings of Peace and made them a curse-when each man lusts for all that is not his own, and "when only the ledger lives, and when only not all men lie." True in his own heart, |