STUDY
OF THE
PRINCESS
SECOND
EDITION
DAWSON
828
13,0
1884
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828
T3p0
1884




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A STUDY.
A STUDY;
WITH CRITICAL AND EXPLANATORY NOTES,
OF LORD TENNYSON'S POEM
THE PRINCESS.
Samuelss
dward

S. E.DAWSON.
SECOND EDITION.
MONTREAL:
DAWSON BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS.
1884. ✰
•
16633
Entered according to Act of Parliament of Canada, in the
year 1884, in the office of the Minister of Agriculture.
کو
1
ΤΟ
ALFRED TENNYSON,
Poet Laureate,
FIRST BARON TENNYSON D'EYNCOURT,
THIS ESSAY IS DEDICATED
IN GRATITUDE FOR THE BENEFIT DERIVED DURING
MANY HAPPY HOURS SPENT IN THE
STUDY OF HIS WORKS.
ハシ
​PREFACE.
Ir fell to the lot of the writer, as a member of a
small semi-social, semi-literary society, to prepare a
paper on The Princess, as a sequel to discussions
which had previously taken place upon The Idylls
of the King and In Memoriam. In studying the
poem for this purpose, many passages were found
in which the allusions seemed very recondite, and
others in which the meaning did not lie upon the
surface. Other passages were considered worthy
of note on account of some peculiarity of diction or
of versification. The paper as read and the notes
subsequently prepared were published in the
autumn of the year 1882.
The little volume attracted much more notice
than was anticipated, and it soon became evident
that an entire change of feeling with regard to The
vi
PREFACE.
Princess had been, for years, quietly going on.
From the letters and reviews received by the writer
he discovered that the epithet of "amiable en-
thusiast," applied to him by a courteous, though
dissident, critic, was applicable to a great many
people besides himself.
One letter, however, more than repaid the writer
for his labour. It was from Mr. Tennyson, and, inas-
much as it contains very little personal to the essay-
ist, and throws light upon some important literary
questions regarding the manner and method of the
poet's working, it seemed selfish to keep it from the
large number of Tennysonians in America.
Enthusiasts in sufficient number having been
found, amiable enough to buy up the first edition.
of this "Study," the writer, in preparing a new
edition, availed himself of the opportunity to cor-
rect two errors pointed out by Mr. Tennyson.
also sought and obtained permission to publish the
letter, not so much for the purpose of adding
importance to his monograph, as for the deep in-
terest with which the Laureate's own views upon
He
PREFACE.
vii
the questions discussed would be received by all
students of his poems
In
The thoughts of the great poets of former days
are the heritage of every age. It is impossible to
escape their influence. But, in reading for this
"Study," the writer became impressed with the
belief (expressed at page 2) that much injustice had
been done to our present poet by strained imputa-
tions of indebtedness to his predecessors.
Virgil, Dante, Tasso, and Milton are frequent traces
of their favourite authors. Such echoes of beautiful
thoughts or expressions, occasionally occurring, in
no degree indicate poverty of resource, but rather
that wide acquaintance with literature which every
educated man must possess, and that exceptional
perception of the beautiful in expression which is the
endowment of every poet. Many coincidences given
in commentaries on Tennyson's works disappear
upon verification and comparison; and such as
remain are far fewer than a careful study of
the works of other poets would reveal—far fewer
than reviewers and commentators led the writer
to expect. This question has been frequently dis-
viii
PREFACE.
cussed, but nowhere in so conclusive a manner as
in the following letter:
Dear Sir,
Aldworth, Haslemere,
Surrey, Nov. 21st, 1882.
I thank yon for your able and thoughtful essay
on The Princess. You have seen, amongst other
things, that if women ever were to play such freaks
the burlesque and the tragic might go hand-in-hand.
I may tell you that the songs were not an after-
thought. Before the first edition came out I
deliberated with myself whether I should put
songs in between the separate divisions of the
poem-again, I thought, the poem will explain
itself, but the public did not see that the child, as
you say, was the heroine of the piece, and at last I
conquered my laziness and inserted them. You
would be still more certain that the child was the
true heroine if, instead of the first song as it now
stands,
"As thro' the land at eve we went'
I had printed the first song which I wrote,
The losing of the child.
>>
The child is sitting on the bank of a river, and
.
PREFACE.
ix
playing with flowers-a flood comes down-a dam
has been broken thro'-the child is borne down by
the flood-the whole village distracted-after a
time the flood has subsided-the child is thrown
safe and sound again upon the bank and all the
women are in raptures. I quite forget the words
of the ballad but I think I may have it somewhere.
Your explanatory notes are very much to the
purpose, and I do not object to your finding paral-
lelisms. They must always recur. A man (a
Chinese scholar) some time ago wrote to me saying
that in an unknown, untranslated Chinese poem
there were two whole lines of mine, almost word for
word. Why not? are not human eyes all over the
world looking at the same objects, and must there
not consequently be coincidences of thought and
impressions and expressions. It is scarcely possible
for anyone to say or write anything in this late
time of the world to which, in the rest of the
literature of the world, a parallel could not some-
where be found. But when you say that this
passage or that was suggested by Wordsworth or
Shelley or another, I demur, and more, I wholly
disagree. There was a period in my life when, as
an artist, Turner for instance, takes rough sketches
"
X
PREFACE.
of landskip &c. in order to work them eventually
into some great picture, so I was in the habit of
chronicling, in four or five words or more, whatever
might strike me as picturesque in nature. I never
put these down, and many and many a line has
gone away on the north wind, but some remain
e. g.:
"A full sea glazed with muffled moonlight."
Suggestion:
The sea one night at Torquay, when Torquay was
the most lovely sea-village in England, tho' now
a smoky town. The sky was covered with thin
vapour, and the moon was behind it.
"A great black cloud
Drag inward from the deep."
Suggestion:
A coming storm seen from the top of Snowdon.
In the Idylls of the King.
"with all
Its stormy crests that smote against the skies."
Suggestion:
A storm which came upon us in the middle of the
North Sea.
?
PREFACE.
xi
"As the water-lily starts and slides."
Suggestion:
Waterlilies in my own pond, seen on a gusty day
with my own eyes. They did start and slide in
the sudden puffs of wind till caught and stayed by
the tether of their own stalks-quite as true as
Wordsworth's simile and more in detail.
A wild wind shook—
follow, follow, thou shalt win.
Suggestion:
I was walking in the New Forest. A wind did
arise and-
Shake the songs the whispers and the shrieks
Of the wild wood together.
The wind, I believe, was a west-wind but, because
I wished the Prince to go south, I turned the wind
to the south and, naturally, the wind said "follow."
I believe the resemblance which you note is just a
chance one. Shelley's lines are not familiar to me,
tho', of course, if they occur in the Prometheus, I
must have read them.
xii
PREFACE.
I could multiply instances, but I will not bore
you, and far indeed am I from asserting that books,
as well as nature, are not, and ought not to be,
suggestive to the poet. I am sure that I myself,
and many others, find a peculiar charm in those
passages of such great masters as Virgil or Milton
where they adopt the creation of a bye-gone poet,
and re-clothe it, more or less, according to their own
fancy. But there is, I fear, a prosaic set growing
up among us, editors of booklets, book-worms, index-
hunters, or men of great memories and no imagi-
nation, who impute themselves to the poet, and so
believe that he, too, has no imagination, but is for
ever poking his nose between the pages of some
old volume in order to see what he can appropriate.
They will not allow one to say "Ring the bells,"
without finding that we have taken it from Sir
P. Sydney or even to use such a simple expression
as the ocean "roars," without finding out the
precise verse in Homer or Horace from which we
have plagiarised it. (fact!)
I have known an old fish-wife, who had lost two
sons at sea, clench her fist at the advancing tide on
PREFACE.
xiii
a stormy day and cry out-"Ay ! roar, do! how I
hates to see thee show thy white teeth!" Now if
I had adopted her exclamation and put it into the
mouth of some old woman in one of my poems, I
daresay the critics would have thought it original
enough, but would most likely have advised me to
go to Nature for my old women and not to my own
imagination; and indeed it is a strong figure.
Here is another little anecdote about suggestion.
When I was about twenty or twenty-one I went on
a tour to the Pyrenees. Lying among these moun-
tains before a waterfall that comes down one
thousand or twelve-hundred feet I sketched it
(according to my custom then) in these words-
"Slow-dropping veils of thinnest lawn."
When I printed this a critic informed me that
"lawn" was the material used in theatres to imi-
tate a waterfall and graciously added "Mr. T.
should not go to the boards of a theatre but to
Nature herself for his suggestions." And I had
gone to Nature herself.
I think it is a moot point whether-if I had
known how that effect was produced on the stage—
I should have ventured to publish the line.
-
xiv
PREFACE.
·
I find that I have written, quite contrary to my
custom, a letter, when I had merely intended to
thank you for your interesting commentary.
Thanking you again for it, I beg you to believe me
Very faithfully yours
A. TENNYSON.
P.S.-By-the-bye, you are wrong about "the
tremulous isles of light": they are "isles of light,"
spots of sunshine coming through the leaves, and
seeming to slide from one to the other, as the pro-
cession of girls "moves under shade.”
And surely the "beard-blown" goat involves a
sense of the wind blowing the beard on the height
of the ruined pillar.
Mr. Ernest Myers, in Macmillan's Magazine for
April, 1883, while reviewing "The Princess," and
more particularly this "Study," has treated very
happily the question of coincidences of thought and
expression to be found in Tennyson's writings. His
remarks upon the plan and purport of the poem are
also worthy of much consideration. If, however,
he would see to what extent, despite the differences
PREFACE.
XV
in natural and social surroundings, Mr. Tennyson's
poetry is appreciated by the "transatlantic mind,"
he must look into the scholarly essays of Mr. Ed-
mund Clarence Stedman, (reprinted in England
under the title of "Victorian Poets "), and into the
writings of a number of Americans, of whom
Professor Hadley is the type, for in these will be
found reflected the general effect of the poet's works
upon the thought of this continent.
A STUDY.
TENNYSON'S poem of "The Princess" has been and
continues to be singularly underrated. Seldom, in
the universal chorus of admiration, and even adula-
tion, which for years his work has excited, do we
meet with appreciation of this his longest continu-
ous poem. A poem, moreover, published at the
age when a writer usually produces his best work.
-equally removed from the exuberance of youth
and the chill of age, and one which has been altered
and re-touched during five successive editions, until
the utmost effort has been expended, and, in literary
form at least, it stands out unsurpassed in perfect
finish by anything in modern literature. In that
respect, the "Princess" is to Tennyson's other
works what the "Elegy" is to Gray's. In the
adverse criticism it has called forth, we are re-
minded of Dr. Johnson's attack upon Milton's
A
2
THE PRINCESS.
"Lycidas;" indeed, both the "Princess" and "Lyci-
das" have continuously, and with equal justice or
injustice, been reproached for the same fault, that
of incongruity of plan. Both Milton and Tennyson,
moreover, drew their inspiration from ancient art;
but the "Lycidas" is an adaptation of Greek form
and method; while the "Princess" is a transfusion
of the Greek spirit into modern life. Every line
of the "Lycidas" breathes of Theocritus; many
are even close imitations, but while long passages
of the "Princess" are pervaded by the spirit which
inspired Theocritus, only in a few lines can an
imitation be traced.
>>
'Maud," like the "Princess," was received with
great disappointment; but in the case of "Maud
that feeling passed away, while the
Princess" con-
tinues still to be neglected, or to be disparaged -as
if it alone were unworthy of the poet's powers.
Even Mr. Peter Bayne, a devotee almost of
Tennyson, omits all reference to this poem in his
"Lessons from my Masters." The "Idylls," "In
Memoriam," "Maud," and even all the earliest
poems, the "Merman" and "Oriana," receive from
him, at the very least, their due meed of worship;
THE PRINCESS.
3
but the "Princess" is silently passed over, as if
there, in the prime of his power, the master's skill
had failed. As to adverse criticism, its nature is
well shown in the following passage from the
Edinburgh Review, written in 1855, when the
poem had received its last touches:
"The subject of the Princess,'" says the re-
viewer, "so far from being great in a poetical point
of view, is partly even of transitory interest..
This piece, though full of meanings of abiding
value, is ostensibly a brilliant serio-comic jeu d'es-
prit upon the noise about 'women's rights,' which
even now ceases to make itself heard anywhere
but in the refuge of exploded European absurdities
beyond the Atlantic. A carefully elaborated con-
struction, a 'wholeness,' arising out of distinct and
well-contrasted parts, which is another condition of
a great poem, would have been worse than thrown
away on such a subject.
In reading the
poem, the mind is palled and wearied with wasted
splendour and beauty."
It seems difficult to get further astray than this,
but the last (188o) edition of Chambers's Cyclopedia
of English Literature attempts it; thus:-
4
THE PRINCESS.
The mixture of modern ideas and manners
with those of the age of chivalry and romance, the
attempted amalgamation of the farcical with the
sentimental, renders the Princess' truly a med-
ley,' and produces an unpleasant grotesque effect."
The result of criticism is thus summed up by
Mr. Wace in the following passage of his "Study
of the Life and Works of Tennyson:
""
Although the 'Princess' was admittedly bril-
liant, it was thought scarcely worthy of the author.
The abundant grace, descriptive beauty, and human
sentiment were evident. But the medley was
thought somewhat incongruous, and the main web
of the tale too weak to sustain the embroidery
raised upon it.
D. M. Moir, the amiable 'Delta'
of Blackwood's Magazine, says :-'Its beauties and
faults are so inextricably interwoven, and the latter
are so glaring and many, nay,ften apparently so
wilful, that as a sincere admirer of Tennyson I
could almost wish the poem had remained un-
written. I admit the excellences of particular
passages, but it has neither general harmony of
design, nor sustained merit of execution.' A ver-
dict more favourable, but somewhat in the same
THE PRINCESS.
5
strain, may be said to be that now generally
accepted."
The verdict, however, was never unanimous.
There have always been a few critics with a keener
sense of appreciation. A writer in the Edinburgh
Review, in 1849, before the poem had received its
present form, and consequently without the advan-
tages of the previously quoted writer of 1855,
could see unity and purpose in it. To the re-
viewer of 1849 the true sphere of woman's activity
is not a subject to be contemptuously relegated to
America; and although the lyric interludes had
not at that time been inserted, he, in the following
passage, instinctively touches the keynote of the
poet's meaning:-
"Many passages in it have a remarkable refer-
ence to children. They sound like a perpetual
child-protest against Ida's Amazonian philosophy,
which, if realised, would cast the whole of the
childlike element out of the female character,
and, at the same time, extirpate from the soul of
man those feminine qualities which the masculine
nature, to be complete, must include."
The review is throughout appreciative, and is
THE PRINCESS.
well worth perusal even at this distance of time.
Professor Hadley of Yale College,¹ one of the
most elegant of American scholars, and the Rev.
Charles Kingsley,2 are among the few who resisted
the general unfavourable criticism, and recognised
the "Princess " as a work of art of very high
order.
As we have already remarked, the poem has
undergone great modifications since its first appear-
ance in 1847. A second edition was issued in the
following year, with a dedication to Henry Lush-
ington, and very slightly retouched.
In 1850
appeared the third edition, not re-written, as the
author of "Tennysoniana" would have us think, but
with very great additions, among which are the
six intercalary songs. Re-writing is too strong a
term for the searching revision the poem under-
went in this edition, because its scope and meaning
were not changed, although, by the substitution of
words and other minor changes, a higher artistic
polish was imparted. The artist's meaning was
more fully disengaged, and the poem became sub-
Essays, Philological and Critical, selected from the papers
of James Hadley, LL.D.
2 In Fraser's Magazine, reprinted in his "Miscellanies."
THE PRINCESS.
7
stantially what it is at the present time.
The
All
fourth edition was issued in 1851. In this all the
passages relating to the "weird seizures" of the
Prince were added; other changes were very slight.
In the fifth edition, published in 1853, a passage
of fifteen lines was added to the Prologue, com-
mencing with "O miracle of women!" and with
this edition the text was definitely settled.
these changes and additions, with the exception of
the weird seizures of the Prince, are in reality
elucidations of the initial purport of the poem.
The songs and the interlude between the fourth
and fifth books, like choruses in a Greek play,
suggest the underlying meaning, and the conclud-
ing book, which is all new but the last thirty-
eight lines, is an explanation of its form.
The great popularity of Tennyson's writings has
been a puzzle to a large number of professional
critics. Some have ascribed it to the supposed
fact that he is the only living poet, and his suc-
cess is due solely to the absence of competitors
for popular favour. Frederick W. Robertson gave
the true reason when he said¹ that Tennyson had
1 Lecture II. to Mechanics' Institute at Brighton.
8
THE PRINCESS.
7
vision" or "insight," and was the interpreter of
his age.
This idea has been pushed too far by
others, who wish to discover in his poems incessant
allusions to current events. A poet who suffers
his thoughts to drift into the eddying currents of
passing events, will soon lose his grasp upon the
inner and real relations of things. He must not
look too closely. In the mirror of his own poetic
insight, the reflections are the permanent truths
which he, like the Lady of Shalott, must weave
into the magic web of his poetry, under the penalty
of becoming warped and twisted by the transitory
influences of his surroundings. A great poet is
more than a seer of the things which are; he
Vis a prophet of the things which are beginning to
نے
be. He is the exponent of the aspirations and the
tendencies of his age. He reduces into coherent
form, and clothes with beauty, the unuttered
thoughts of which his age is dimly conscious.
His eye is not upon the lower clouds, but, look-
ing beyond them, he tells us which way the upper
sky is passing over, for in that direction the wind
will sooner or later come down.
In this way poets
THE PRINCESS.
9
are true seers; in advance of their age, they utter
its innermost and half-conscious thought.
1
Now this poem, "The Princess," contains Tenny-
son's solution of the problem of the true position of
woman in society-a profound and vital question,
upon the solution of which the future of civilisation
depends. But at the time of its publication, the
surface thought of England was intent solely upon
Irish famines, corn-laws, and free-trade.
It was
only after many years that it became conscious of….-
anything being wrong in the position of women.
The idea was not relegated to America, but origin-
ated there in the sweet visions of New England
transcendentalists; and, long after,
England to take practical shape in
notably in collegiate education for
began in Old
various ways,
women
poles. No
fes.
doubt such ideas were at the time "in the air" in
England, but the dominant practical Philistinism
scoffed at them as ideas "banished to America, that
refuge for exploded European absurdities."
Now, however, we may say with Ida-
The little seed they laugh'd at in the dark,
Has risen and cleft the soil.
IO
THE PRINCESS.
To these formless ideas Tennyson, in 1847, gave
form, and with poetic instinct, discerning the truth,
he clothed it with surpassing beauty.
He had probably long brooded over the subject.
His earlier poems abound in studies of women.
! No
other poet, save Shakespeare, has portrayed female
types of such loveliness, purity, and dignity. His
devotion to woman is not the lip-service of Moore
and Byron, or of the amorous school of recent poetry,
but it is a real service and a reverence such as that of
a Galahad, moving on a far loftier plane of thought
and feeling Later, in the "Idylls of the King,"
he teaches us, in Guinevere, the stupendous power
of woman for good or for evil. Upon her turned
the success or failure of the king's noble aims, and
with her fall fell the world of which the Round
Table was an emblem. With such views as to the
importance of woman's function in the social order,
it was natural that the subject of this poem should
early present itself to the poet's mind-but how to
treat it? A didactic poem, an essay on woman-in
the formal style of Pope's "Essay on Man "-might
have suited the conventional notions of the reviewers
better, but would have been foreign to Tennyson's
THE PRINCESS.
II
meditative and dreamy mind. It is not his method
to cut up moral reflections into two-line lengths,
balance them, and drop them into the mouths of
hungry votaries. Clearly with him there must be
a narrative of some kind to string his pearls of
thought upon; and the teaching to be Tennysonian
must be in parable.
The
The Prologue and the Epilogue are the setting of
the poem. The place-the south of England.
occasion—a festival upon the grounds of a wealthy
baronet. The actors-a party of collegians on
vacation, who, with a few of the well-born and
cultured girls of the Hall and the neighbouring
country-seats, had made a select picnic of their own
in a ruined abbey. One of the collegians, a dreamy
youth-the poet himself-has been rummaging in
the library, and his head is full of the knightly
deeds of the medieval ancestors of the owners of
the stately Hall. He joins the party, taking a
volume with him, and keeping his finger in the
place where is told a story of a fearless dame who
defended her castle against a lawless king, and who,
sallying out at the head of her retainers, utterly
routed the king and his army.
12
THE PRINCESS.
O miracle of women, said the book;
O noble heart who, being strait besieged
By this wild king to force her to his wish,
Nor bent, nor broke, nor shunned a soldier's
death.
This is the key of the coming story, and this
"miracle of women is the prototype of the Prin-
cess Ida.
The question at once arises—are there
such women now? One of the ladies-Lilia-
answers:
There are thousands now
Such women, but convention beats them down.
Straightway, then, it is agreed that the seven
youths should transfer this medieval miracle of
womanhood to modern times in a story, to which
each should contribute a chapter. This is after-
wards shaped and polished by the poet, who in
the story assumes the character of the dreamy
Prince, and pursues his lady-love through the
seven cantos until she blossoms out, through the
awakening power of the affections, into his ideal of
perfect womanhood. Nothing can be more truth-
fully artistic than the gradual transition from the
THE PRINCESS.
13
setting to the story itself; but just before the Poet-
Prince commences, he playfully remarks upon the
incongruities of a ruined abbey and a Grecian hall;
a mediæval heroine, ladies' rights, and Mechanics'
Institute experiments: he says—
nomar's
This were a medley! we should have him back
Who told the "Winter's Tale" to do it for us.
This passage, and the second title of the poem, "A
Medley," gave a ready-made theme for critics to
dwell upon; and with wearisome iteration they
dilated upon this surface-indication, without, for
the most part, examining as to how far the word
medley really applied. A North British reviewer,
in 1848, wrote of "the utter want of interest, unity,
and purpose" of the poem, and of "its miserable
weakness and want of integrity." Others, who
could not go to that length, dilated upon the impro-
bability or impossibility of the incidents. We would
not pretend to argue with any one who declared
that he had no interest in any special work of art;
but with what show of reason can any critic re-
proach "The Princess" for improbability in its
incidents, and admire "The Tempest" and the
14
THE PRINCESS.
"Midsummer Night's Dream?" Who, in criti-
cising "The Jerusalem Delivered," ever stopped to
weigh probabilities about Armida's garden, or the
adventures of Tancred and Clorinda? Or who ever
tried to calculate the dead reckoning of Ulysses in
the Odyssey? In estimating a poem the conditions.
assumed by the poet must be taken for granted;
and we have only to inquire whether, these being
assumed, the poem possesses unity, congruity, and a
definite and worthy object. We have to demand also
that the characters are congruous with themselves,
and that the treatment of the incidents is poetical.
The moment we enter the Forest of Arden in "As
You Like It," we have no right to carry with us the
precise rules of our work-a-day world, but we should
resign ourselves to the joyous life of the inhabitants
of the forest. If we find their society agreeable and
improving-if their sentiments are lofty and ele-
vating-if their language is beautiful beyond all
usual speech-if their characters are consistent with
themselves—and if their influence upon us is in-
spiriting and ennobling-let us be thankful; let us
not trouble ourselves about the latitude and longi-
tude of the abode which has charmed us, nor about
THE PRINCESS.
เก
15
the year of our Lord when it was discovered.
We should apply to "The Princess" the same rules
as to other similar works of imagination or fancy.
To do otherwise would be as reasonable as to at-
tempt to extract the square root of a melody, or to
ascertain the cubic contents of a collection of love-
songs. On close examination we shall see that the
medley consists in the fact that the poem is serio-
comic. The first four cantos are humorous and
mock-heroic, the last three serious, touching, and
almost tragic. The first four, to suit the wishes of
the youths, the last three, to suit the ladies; and
Lilia's song and her earnest appeal call attention to
the transition.
In the first canto, the Prince is longing for the
bride affianced to him in childhood. The king, his
father, is raging because the Princess, disregarding
the betrothal, has taken up new and strange views
of the destiny of women. She has founded a uni-
versity for women in one of her father's palaces,
and from the wide domain around it men are
excluded upon pain of death. The king her father
cannot control her. The Prince, with two friends,
Cyril and Florian, steals away by night from his
пожели
16
THE PRINCESS.
:
The lives in not
a fallory!
father's court, and starts for the southern king-
dom, to appeal in person to his affianced bride,
encouraged by a mysterious voice which whispers-
Follow, follow, thou shalt win.
The two fallacies which mislead the Princess are
introduced here-that the woman is equal in all
respects to the man, and that knowledge is all in
all.
The second can to brings the three friends dis-
guised as women into the university. That insti-
tution is humorously described, and the detection
of the three friends by Florian's sister, one of the
lady-lecturers, is narrated. By promising speedy
departure, the young men persuade the fair pro-
fessor to conceal their presence.
In the third, the mock damsels pursue their
studies, and make, in the company of the Princess,
an equestrian geological excursion.
The fourth canto contains the grand crash. After
geologising, and astronomising, and metaphysicising,
the lofty lady-principal becomes hungry, like an
ordinary mortal. A banquet is spread in a silken
pavilion, and after dinner the stately Princess
THE PRINCESS.
17
calis for songs. Songs are sung by one of the
ladies and by the Prince, until, in an unlucky
moment, Cyril, the merriest and least sentimental
of the three friends, is invited to sing some song
of his northern home. He, not living in the
clouds like the Prince, is much more thirsty, and
has been enjoying the excellent vintage of the
southern kingdom. Forgetting his disguise, and
his falsetto treble, he trolls out a rollicking love-
song in mellow and melodious tenor. Upon this
the enraged Prince strikes him to the earth. The
Princess coruscates in a burst of moral fireworks,
mounts her horse, dashes off home, but, blind with
rage, falls into the river and is rescued from death
by the Prince.
At this point the story pauses. The ladies
entreat that the mock-heroic shall cease, and Lilia
claps her hands
Like one that wishes at a dance
To change the music.
The music is changed, and becomes serious and
earnest.
In the fifth canto the Northern King has marched
•
B
L
18
THE PRINCESS.
!
with his army into the southern kingdom, and,
anxious for the safety of his son, has surrounded
the Princess Ida's domain.
king her father a prisoner.
He has taken the
The young friends
escape from the university, and reach the camp in
draggled female attire. In the meantime Ida's
warlike brothers have marched their troops north-
wards to protect their sister. The two armies
face each other; but, after a parley, it is arranged
that fifty knights on each side shall decide the
matter in tournament-the hand of the Princess
to be the reward of the Prince, if his side win.
The fight takes place, the Prince is defeated, loses
his bride, and is wounded nearly to death.
In the sixth canto the full strength of the poet
is put forth.
The field of battle, the wounded
knights, the stricken Prince, the agonised father,
the slowly relenting Princess, are the themes for
powerful and pathetic description. Gradually the
mists clear away from Ida's eyes, pity touches
her heart, and all the kindly emotions crowd in
fast in its train.
The seventh canto opens with one of the
sweetest songs in the English language, "Ask
THE PRINCESS.
19
me no more." The college is turned into an hos-
pital; the ladies nurse the wounded knights. The
transforming power of love is portrayed in these
beautiful lines :
Everywhere
Low voices with the ministering hand
Hung round the sick; the maidens came, they
talked,
They sang, they read; till she not fair began.
To gather light, and she that was, became
Her former beauty double.
Through
But the Princess tends her lover in vain.
long unconsciousness he passes into the delirium
of fever, and her name is constantly on his lips.
Finally, in the still summer night, consciousness
returns, and, nearer death than life, he sees Ida
at his bedside. He murmurs—
If you be what I think you, some sweet dream,
I would but ask you to fulfil yourself;
But if you be that Ida whom I knew,
I ask you nothing; only, if a dream,
Sweet dream, be perfect. I shall die to-night,
Stoop down, and seem to kiss me ere I die.
20
THE PRINCESS.
•
The whole canto must rank with the very sweetest
and most finished productions of poetic art. Truth
of feeling, delicacy of touch, elevation of sentiment,
and absolute perfectness of diction, concur to make
a climax of beauty. Then follows the epilogue or
conclusion, in which, by gradual transition, the
reader is brought from the fairy-land of imagina-
tion into the prosaic life of the present day with-
out a jar or strain. He is brought back into the
festival crowds at the park with which the poem
commenced, and his mind is left in that state of
satisfaction and quiet repose, which it is the pro-
perty of every true work of art to bestow.
← It will, we trust, be seen by this short sketch that
the story, though it may be slight, possesses ade-
quate motive; and proceeds with unity of concep-
tion and with gradual increase of interest, to an
appropriate and satisfactory crisis and termination.
In the concluding book are several passages which
throw light upon the method of the poem. Ladies
in the world of prosaic life dislike profoundly even
the gentlest laugh at their expense. So we find
the ladies in the poem, and Lilia their spokeswoman,
objected to the banter in the four first cantos—

THE PRINCESS.
21
"They hated banter, wished for something real,
A gallant fight, a noble Princess-why
Not make her true heroic,-true sublime?
Or all, they said, as earnest as the close?
Which yet," replies the poet, "scarce could be."
It could not be-because the practical application
of extreme theories of women's rights necessarily
leads to the incongruous; and the incongruous,
combined with kindly feelings, produces the humor-
ous-in the minds of men. Women, though
quicker and wittier than men, are destitute of
humour.. They perceive the ridiculous, but never
the humorous. They never possess that outside
ness of mind by which many men can contemplat
their own absurdities, as it were from an outside
standpoint, and enjoy them with quiet and indul-
gent laughter. The advocates of women's rights
never seem to imagine that there is no ridicule, no
feeling of superiority, in the irresistible smile which
their theories provoke. They become angry, and
consequently more absurd. The Prince and his two
friends in draggled female attire upset the gravity
of grey-bearded counsellors, and convulsed with
22
THE PRINCESS.
laughter the young captains, all of whom were
loyally devoted to the son of their sovereign, and
whose attachment and respect were not shaken by
their intense appreciation of the absurdity of the
young Prince's position. In the same manner, the
light-hearted Cyril shook with inward laughter at
the lecture of the fair Doctor Psyche, in hood and
academic gown, discoursing gravely "de omnibus
rebus et quibusdam aliis," with her baby close at
hand in case of need. It is not that men wish to
belittle women. Cyril was at the very moment
falling in love with that lactiferous Doctor of Philo-
sophy. It is the incongruity of opposing functions
which excites laughter. It has pleased the Creator
to make-or, to be scientific, it has pleased the
environment to evolve a being-woman, beautiful,
lovable, and altogether admirable. Certain func-
tions are given her to fulfil, towards which the same
tyrannous environment has adapted every fibre of
her mental and physical nature. When, turning
from these, she aims to play a part to which she
has not been adapted, the moment her theories are
put into practice she necessarily becomes absurd;
and this, combined with the attractions of her sex,
THE PRINCESS.
23
excites uncontrollably the sense of humour in man.
This weakness of manhood, this incapacity for seri
ousness, ought not to excite anger in the hearts of
strong-minded ladies. 'Women's rights advocates
insist wearisomely upon what few will dispute,
that women are not inferior to men.
But they go
further, and demand the same education for both
sexes, ignoring the difference of physique and the
object of this difference, and dwelling upon the very
many points in which both are alike. Now, if
men were to argue from an undoubted anatomical
identity, and if they were to develop their neglected
lacteal potentialities, and devote themselves to the
alimentation of infants, would any woman be likely
to fall in love with a man cultivated in that direc-
tion? Would not the blue-eyed Minerva herself
burst into laughter, and would not the laughter be
mixed with contempt, although, be it observed, the
function in question is the most important and
sacred in human society? Lilia's request, then, is
easy to grant. The three following cantos are
serious; and the ladies become true-heroic, because
1 See Carpenter, "Human Physiology;" Kirke, "Physio-
logy," for identity of structure.
24
THE PRINCESS.
they resume the position for which nature has fitted
them-
And in their own clear element they move
endowed with grace, beauty, and dignity.
Gentle and chivalrous though Tennyson always
is, the early cantos of the poem abound with sly
touches of good-natured banter, and give evidence
of profound inward amusement at the weaknesses
of the fair denizens of the female university. The
good host who kept the inn on the confines of the
sacred domain, had an awestruck reverence for his
liege lady.
He always made a point to post with mares;
His daughter and his housemaid were the boys;
The land, he understood, for miles about
Was tilled by women; all the swine were sows,
And all the dogs
On entering the gates the disguised youths find the
grounds and halls full of knick-knacks and kick-
shaws-
Clocks and chimes, like silver hammers falling
On silver anvils.
THE PRINCESS.
25
The love of precise punctuality, so deeply implanted
in the female breast, has full scope at last, as far
as pretty clocks go. Everywhere are busts, and
statues, and lutes, and such like bric-a-brac aids to
knowledge-promiscuously strewed about like blue
china and crockery-ware bull-dogs in a modern draw-
ing-room. Instinctively the male reader shrinks
through this part of the poem, fearful of upsetting
something. Very properly also the path of know-
ledge, thorny to the tyrannous male, is made com-
fortable there. The ladies drink in science
Leaning deep in broidered down,
as is befitting. Everything matches in that uni-
versity. No common pine-the professorial desk.
is of satin-wood. Due attention is paid to dress
also; the doctors are violet-hooded, and the girls
all uniformly in white-gregarious, though, even
there as in the outer world. The Princess, her
hair still damp after her plunge in the river,
though sitting in indignant judgment upon the
culprits, has yet a jewel on her forehead. Then
her weakness for children is apparent-a very
dangerous one as we shall see.
26
THE PRINCESS.
We like them well,would they grew
Like field flowers everywhere!
The difficulty of replenishing the classes seems
thus early to have occurred to the Head. Difficult
also is it for the august Head to overcome minor
weaknesses. Thus, in the middle of a long meta-
physical discussion, she makes a sudden irresistible
dash to describe the prize in that subject, a golden
brooch, this being dwelt on in detail; after one
more digression, she comes back with great men-
tal agility to the subject of evolution and the rela-
tivity of time. Even the solemn and sonorous
despatch which she sends to her brother in the
sixth canto, cannot leave her hand without the
inevitable postscript. On one point, however, the
Prince fairly puzzles her. He asks about the
study of anatomy, which appears out of place in
such an æsthetic nest. She replies-
It pleased us not; in truth,
We shudder but to dream our maids should ape
Those monstrous males that carve the living
hound,
THE PRINCESS.
27
And cram him with the fragments of the grave.
Or, in the dark dissolving human heart,
And holy secrets of this microcosm,
Dabbling a shameless hand with shameful jest,
Encarnalise their spirits; yet we know
Knowledge is knowledge, and this matter hangs..
There is a deal of quiet humour in the reports of
the lectures; the Lady Psyche's, for instance, is a
model of discursiveness and condensation combined.
She begins with the primal nebula, evolves the sun
and planets; then the monsters, then the savage,
then civilised man; glances at the Amazons, alludes
to Lycia, to the Etruscans, Persians, Romans,
Greeks; touches upon the customs of the Mahome-
tans, Chinese, and Salian Franks. Then follow
excursus into physiology and craniology. She com-
pares the Hottentot, Kaffir, and Malay with Bacon,
Homer, and others; brings in Sappho, Elizabeth,
and Joan of Arc, and winds up in a rapture of
prophecy extending to remotest ages. After this
caracole through the universe, the young men
attend the classical and mathematical lectures.
Then they
28
THE PRINcess.
dipt in all
That treats of whatsoever is, the state,
The total chronicles of man, the mind,
The morals, something of the frame, the rock,
The star, the bird, the fish, the shell, the flower;
Electric, chemic laws, and all the rest,
And whatsoever can be taught and known.
Mark the effect upon the masculine mind—
Till, like three horses that have broken fence,
And glutted all night long breast-deep in corn,
They issued, gorged with knowledge.
Nothing could have saved them from an attack of
mental indigestion but their female attire.
Gentle banter of this kind runs through the
earlier part of the poem, with an occasional light
touch only in the later books; but it does not
wound, for there is no malice or depreciation in it.
It is merely a surface drift; the real motive power
of the poem is deeper. These songs-miracles of
workmanship in which consummate art issues in
perfect simplicity! They must have a bearing,
and an important one too, upon the theme. The
THE PRINCESS.
29
young collegians, who had required that the story
should be mock-heroic, felt, not only the influence
of the ladies, but-
Something in the ballads which they sang,
which jarred with the burlesque.
What is this
something? Will it tell us of the true position.
and rights of women, and of the meaning of the
poem? Let us take them in order, one by one.
They certainly, in appearance, are foreign to the
subject-matter. The first tells of a quarrel be-
tween a man and his wife, and of the reconcilia-
tion caused by the memory of their dead child—
O there above the little grave
We kissed again with tears.
An abiding influence, this, of the little one; reach-
ing back from the grave.
In the next, commencing "Sweet and low," the
keynote is struck in the lines-
Rest, rest on mother's breast,
Father will come to thee soon.
Far over the rolling waters of the western sea
though the father may be compelled to wander,
30
THE PRINCESS.
his thoughts are ever with his babe in the nest,
his labours and privations are lightened and en-
nobled by worthy and unselfish purpose. Sweet
influence this of the babe, reaching far across the
ocean, and uniting loving hearts!
The theme of the third is a sharp antithesis,
arising out of a surface analogy between the echoes
3 of a bugle on a mountain lake, and the influ-
ences of soul upon soul through growing distances
of time. In the case of the "horns of Elfland".
They die on yon rich sky,
They faint on hill, or field, or river.
Fainter comes the echo in proportion to the receding
But how different with the influences of
distance.
the soul-
Our echoes roll from soul to soul
And grow for ever and for ever.
The stress of meaning is in the word grow. The song
is evidently one of married love, and the growing
echoes reverberate from generation to generation,
from grandparent to parent and grandchild. Once
more it is unity through the family. In the first
song a unity through the past, in the second a
$
THE PRINCESS.
31
unity in the present, and in this a unity for the
How important, then, does this relation of
future.
parentage seem to be.
The next, "Thy voice is heard through rolling
drums," is a song of the influences of home and
wedded love in nerving a man for the shocks and
conflict of life. The face of the wife-
across his fancy comes,
And gives the battle to his hands.
A moment, while the trumpets blow,
He sees his brood about thy knee,
나
​The next, like fire he meets the foe
And strikes him dead-for thine and thee.
For thine and thee-home affection the moving
spring of patriotism and heroic effort.
Such is the influence of the family-of the child,
which is the bond and final cause of the family-
upon man. The next song relates to their in-
fluence on women; for the life of a woman is not
all sunshine, and the gift of tears is too often her
only solace.
"Home they brought her warrior dead."
Leaden despair settles on the heart of the desolate
32
THE PRINCESS.
wife. The light of love is gone from her life. A
maiden with the inexperience of youth lifts the
face-cloth from the face of the loved one, but the
fountain of tears still refuses to flow; then
Rose a nurse of ninety years,
Set his child upon her knee,
Like summer tempest came her tears,
Sweet, my child, I live for thee.
to
How powerfully the influence of childhood re-
deems from despair the desert-places of the heart,
and supports the lonely mother in her sad life-
work!
Finally, comes the application of these charming
parables. Too much for the resolution of the Prin-
cess are these influences sweeping under the surface
motives of human nature with irresistible sway.
All theories are thrown aside, and in an outburst
of tenderness, self-renunciation, and faith she yields
in the final song-
Ask me no more; thy fate and mine are sealed;
I strove against the stream, and all in vain; 6
Let the great river take me to the main;
THE PRINCESS.
33
No more dear love, for at a touch I yield;
Ask me no more.
Thus, in her apparent defeat does she rise to the
supreme height of her womanhood.
Woman, as the complement of man, not his
inferior, might exercise, and does exercise, an
enormous influence upon society, independently of
her influence as mother. This is one of the domin-
ant strains of the Arthurian poems. We meet it in
the "Coming of Arthur," when he is smitten by the
peerless beauty of Guinevere, and dreams—
But, were I joined with her,
Then might we live together as one life,
And, reigning with one will in everything,
Have power in this dark land to lighten it,
And power on this dead world to make it live.
The same chord is struck in the prophecy of
Merlin, when in the helpless infant he discerned
the glory of the blameless king, and foreshadowed
also his failure; for
could he find
A woman in her womanhood as great
34
THE PRINCESS.
As he was in his manhood, then, he sang,
The twain together well might change the world.
This same strain heightens the intense pathos of
the parting scene in "Guinevere." The King dwells
not so much upon his own wrongs, but upon the
far deeper ruin following upon the faithlessness of
the Queen.
For thou hast spoiled the purpose of my life,
For now the whole Round Table is dissolved,
Which was an image of the mighty world.
While this thought largely pervades the Epic of
Arthur, the poem of the "Princess" has for its
theme another aspect of the influence of woman
upon society-her influence as mother-for she,
says the Prince-
Stays all the fair young planet in her hands.
To her, if she will take it, is committed the trust
of moulding the coming generations. In her
mainly is to be found the accumulated sum of the
moral education painfully acquired through many
generations. She is the most potent conservative
THE PRINCESS.
35
force in human society. Let her refuse to play the
part for which nature has designed her, and society
suffers in its inmost heart. To this fundamental
law all theories of blue-stockinged ladies must con-
form; and, therefore, our dear awesome Princess
yields, through her innate goodness, to the tendency
of the ages, and we kiss her feet in deep abasement
that we
ever could have laughed, even in our
sleeves, at her vagaries.
Having thus reached the central thought of the
poem, we must look for the hero or heroine of the
story; that is, for the one person who comes trium-
phant out of the turmoil. It is not either of the
kings, for they are utterly brought to nought. Nor
the battered Cyril, kissing the hem of the Princess'
garment for a boon; nor Arac, who has interest
in nothing but the tournament. It cannot be the
Prince, for he has been ignominiously thrust out of
Ida's gates in draggled female clothes. Nor is it
even the grand Princess, for she is vanquished at the
moment of triumph. The poem is a medley in this
respect, for the leading characters are all vanquished.
All, save one-Psyche's baby-she is the conquer-
ing heroine of the epic. Ridiculous in the lecture-
36
THE PRINCESS.
room, the babe, in the poem, as in the songs, is
made the central point upon which the plot turns ;
for the unconscious child is the concrete embodi-
ment of Nature herself, clearing away all merely
intellectual theories by her silent influence. Ida
feels the power of the child. The postscript of the
despatch sent to her brother in the height of her
indignation, contains, as is fitting, the kernel of the
matter.
She says:-
I took it for an hour in mine own bed
This morning; there the tender orphan hands
Felt at my heart, and seemed to charm from
thence
The wrath I nursed against the world.
Rash princess! that fatal hour dashed,
"the hopes of half the world."
Alas for these hopes! The cause, the great cause,
totters to the fall when the Head confesses-
I felt
Thy helpless warmth about my barren breast
In the dead prime.
THE PRINCESS.
137
Whenever the plot thickens the babe appears. It
is with Ida on her judgment-seat. In the topmost
height of the storm the wail of the "lost lamb at
her feet" reduces her eloquent anger into incoher-
ence. She carries it when she sings her song of
triumph. When she goes to tend her wounded
brothers on the battle-field she carries it.
Through
it, and for it, Cyril pleads his successful suit, and
wins it for the mother. For its sake the mother is
pardoned.
O fatal babe! more fatal to the hopes
of woman than the doomful horse to the proud
towers of Ilion-for through thee the walls of pride
are breached, and all the conquering affections flock
in.
We can see now that the unity, which runs
through the songs, is continuous also throughout
the poem; and that the songs are not snatches of
melody, thrown in to diversify the interest, but are
integral parts of the main motive of the piece.
The true sphere of woman is in the family. The
grand mission of woman is the conservation and
elevation of the human race through the family. For
the family is the molecule of society. It is the one
and only stable and divinely appointed institution.
^
38
THE PRINCESS.
Other creations may fade to shapeless ruin
decaying.
Tenures of land, forms of government, creeds,
thrones, republics, principalities may change and
utterly decay; but, so long as this institution lasts,
society can and will re-organise itself in other forms
suited to the varying ages. Of this one funda-
mental institution, woman is the guardian. The
hopes of society hang upon the hearth-altar tended
by the sacred mothers of every age. It is their
influence which rolls from soul to soul. They
work in the coming generation, and they mould it
to their will. Hence their seeming weakness; and
hence also their surpassing strength and glory.
Having considered the poem with reference mainly
to its unity and purpose, it remains to consider,
whether each character possesses, separately, that
consistency of conception which is demanded in a
work of art of high order. The hard old king,
rough and violent, is a type recalling the ante-historic
times, when marriage was really a capture, of which
the ring is a reminiscence and symbol to this
day-
سونی
THE PRINCESS.
39
Look you-Sir!
Man is the hunter; woman is his game;
The sleek and shining creatures of the chase,
We hunt them for the beauty of their skins;
They love us for it, and we ride them down.
He has a very hearty contempt for hen-pecked
husbands-
Look you! the grey mare
Is ill to live with, when her whinny shrills
From tile to scullery, and her small goodman
Shrinks in his arm-chair; while the fires of hell
Mix with his hearth.
He is impatient with the irresolution of Ida's
father-
The spindling king;
This Gama-swamped in lazy tolerance.
And in his practical and hard-headed manner lays
down the principle-
When the man wants weight, the woman
takes it up
And topples down the scales.
The character of the Southern King is a familiar
40
THE PRINCESS.
one in every age.
The bland smile, the deprecatory
air, the garrulous ease, the delicate hands, indicate
an ease-loving disposition, which no doubt took
much quiet satisfaction when the stormy ladies
departed to their college. By natural selection
such a character is attracted by women of strong
will, and necessarily dominated by them. He was
as helpless against the two widows, who stuffed his
daughter's head with theories, as he doubtless was
before Ida's mother in her lifetime. His absolute
powerlessness over his children, not only over Ida,
but over Arac and his brothers, is manifest when
the tournament is arranged in his presence in spite
of his timidity. He is ignored, though shrieking
Vainlier than a hen,
To her false daughters in the pool, for none
Regarded.
Upon his character the Prince meditates much—
If this be so,
The mother makes us most,
1884
inclining evidently to the opinion, now generally
THE PRINCESS.
4I
received, that character is inherited from the
mother.
The character of Florian is drawn in a vague
and colourless way. He is the companion of the
Prince, his bosom friend and almost his double.
"In Memoriam" was in manuscript when "the
Princess" appeared, although it was not published
until three years later. What Arthur Hallam was
to the poet, Florian seems to be to the Prince. He
calls him-
My other heart,
And almost my half self; for still we moved
Together; twinned as horse's ear and eye.
This passage suggests the parallel one in the later
poem-
But thou and I are one in kind,
And moulded like in nature's mint,
And hill, and wood, and field did print
The same sweet forms in either mind.
Cyril's character is strongly and clearly conceived.
He is the impersonation of clear, healthy, jovial
common sense. No dreamer-he must be beside
the Prince when the weird seizures come on
a; for
42
THE PRINCESS.
he, better than Florian, can separate the substance
from the shadow.
Good at heart, though given-
To starts and bursts
Of revel,
practical, unspeculative, full of fun, he loves the
fair young mother lecturer; and he loves her
castles-
Flatter myself that always, everywhere,
I
I know the substance when I see it. Well,
Are castles shadows? Three of them? If not,
Shall these three castles patch my tattered coat?
For dear are these three castles to my wants,
And dear is sister Psyche to my heart.
Not a very lofty character, but honest and genial.
The wooing of the mother through the baby-
The mother of the sweetest little maid.
That ever crowed for kisses,
betrays a sound knowledge of female nature; but
then his irresistible love of fun cannot be con-
trolled. The sight of the doctors, and the fair
alumnæ, almost stifle him-
THE PRINCESS.
43
O to hear
The doctors! O to watch the thirsty plants
Imbibing.
Nothing but the dinner bell checks the current of
his mirth. The stately women do not impress him.
The Lady Blanche does not awe him, and he tells
the Princess that-
Love and Nature, these are two more terrible
even than she. A manly and amiable character
whom the fair professor will instruct in serious-
ness.
Naturally we think of the Lady Psyche now-a
bright portrait in Tennyson's gallery of women—
carefully and sympathetically drawn. We see her
as the young mother, full of love for her babe, and
of attachment to the Princess, taking up the nebu-
lar hypothesis in the same way as young women
now, with only one child or none, three castles and
too much leisure, take up willow pattern china,
and ugly furniture, and dignify such pursuits with
the name of culture. The loss of the babe reveals
the true woman. What is court favour, or reputa-
tion, or blue china, or all the spindle-legged centi-
44
THE PRINCESS.
pede abortions of the unlovely age of Queen Anne
compared to her child :-
Ah me, my babe, my blossom, ah my child,
My one sweet child, whom I shall see no more!
Then follows a torrent of self-reproach-
Ill mother that I was to leave her there,
To lag behind, scared by the cry they made;
The horror of the shame among them all.
But I will go and sit beside the doors,
And make a wild petition, night and day,
Until they hate to hear me, like a wind
Wailing for ever, till they open to me
And lay my little blossom at my feet.
My babe, my sweet Aglaia, my one child.
And I will take her up, and go my way,
And satisfy my soul with kissing her.
Alas, dear Lady Psyche, that the mother-hunger
cannot be appeased by primal nebulæ !
Conspicuous by contrast, is the Lady Blanche.
She is the one thoroughly repulsive woman in all
Tennyson's works. "Of faded form and haughtiest
THE PRINCESS.
45
lineaments," she stands out as a type of unlovely
and unloving women, self-elected champions of
the cause, who are its greatest hindrances. Iden-
tifying the cause with themselves, not themselves
with the cause, they fall easy victims to the hateful
passions of envy and jealousy-
"The green malignant light of coming storm
is ever in their eyes. The Lady Blanche had
never felt that unselfishness with which love en-
dows the heart, and of which a sweet reminiscence
ofttimes adheres to the character, even when love
has departed. Her whole soul is centred on her-
self; and. hatred of her rival has extinguished any
trace of affection which she might have had for her
daughter. She pours vitriol on the memory of the
husband of her youth, whom she calls a fool; but
whose character, as we see it reflected in the truthful
and sunny-hearted Melissa, is of a higher type than
her own. Happy was he in his early escape from
her awful and transcendent capacity for " nagging."
Better, far better, for a man to be bewitched by
the woven paces and waving hands of Vivien, or to
die heart-broken by the faithlessness of Guinevere,
سا
46
THE PRINCESS.
than to live in incessant torment with a vulture
ever gnawing at his heart.
The portrait of the
Princess is drawn with a
bold and broad touch.
She is terribly in earnest.
All through the poem the author has kept his
finger in the old chronicle at the passage describing
the "miracle of women." In the noble enthusiasm
of Ida we recognise the quality which Guinevere
lacked to make her the ideal wife for Arthur.
Such a wife could have risen to his clear and lofty
aims. She could have understood him, sympathised
with him, would have clung to him, not to
Launcelot, nor another.
She could have sustained him in the loftiest
stretch of his aspirations, and, if he failed, would
have gone cheerfully with him to death in the ruin
of his hopes. The Poet-Prince never wavers in his
estimate of her-
True, she errs,
But in her owr grand way; being herself
Three times more noble than three score of men.
She sees herself in every woman else,
And so she wears her error like a crown.
THE PRINCESS.
47
Like many noble women who have taken part in
the women's rights movement, she thinks not of
herself. The richness of the unselfishness of a
loving woman has gone forth towards her own sex,
with the vehement passion of a maiden for her
lover. Lower and colder natures
know not, cannot guess
How much their welfare is a passion to us.
If we could give them surer, quicker proof-
Oh! if our end were less achievable
By slow approaches, than by single act
Of immolation; any phase of death;
We were as prompt to spring against the pikes,
Or down the fiery gulf, as talk of it,
To compass our dear sisters' liberties.
This enthusiasm of unselfishness adorns all the
vagaries of the Princess Ida. Her heart turns to
Psyche, rather than to Blanche, because the latter
has not the capacity of love even for her own child.
When her ideals are shattered, and her sanctuary is
invaded, she clings to Psyche's babe, and at last
her devoted care of the wounded Prince gradually
turned towards him her affectionate nature. The
48
THE PRINCESS.
dawning of love in her heart is told with the most
delicately artistic simplicity-
Love, like an Alpine harebell hung with tears,
By some cold morning glacier; frail at first
And feeble, all unconscious of itself,
But such as gathered colour day by day.
The last canto of the poem, which describes the
Princess in the subdued and subduing sweetness of
her womanhood, is the perfection of art and of
beauty.
The Prince is, in some respects, a personation of
the poet, expressing probably the poet's own views,
and therefore is not drawn on a grand ideal scale.
He is a foil to the Princess, necessary in order to
set forth her character in its full brilliancy. Many
reviewers have complained of the lack of colour in
the portraiture of the Prince, with very little
reason; for, to bring out the Prince more strongly,
would have detracted from the unity of the poem.
The Princess is not overcome by him or by his
merits. She is worsted by Nature-by the con-
stituted order of things. His character seems to
have given the author more trouble than any other
THE PRINCESS.
49
in the poem.
It was not until after the fourth
edition that he ceased to elaborate it. In that
edition all the passages relating to the weird seiz-
ures of the Prince were added. These additions
seem not only unnecessary and uncalled for, but
are actually injurious to the unity of the work.
They confuse the simple conception of his character
and graft on to his personality the foreign and
somewhat derogatory idea of catalepsy; for in that
light does the court doctor regard them. The poet
must have had some definite object in inserting
them. Can it be that they are to indicate the
weakness and incompleteness of the poet side of the
Prince's character until he has found rest in his
ideal? Then only can he say—
My doubts are dead,
-:)
My haunting sense of hollow shows; the change,
This truthful change, in thee has killed it.
The dreamy Prince, haunted by doubts, and living
in shadowland, by the healing influence of a happy
love, wakes up to the purpose and dignity of life. /
Such a change is perhaps not very uncommon.
Unless a man be endowed with a strong animal
D
50
THE PRINCESS.
nature, or be dominated by some selfish passion
such as ambition or avarice, life is very apt to
seem purposeless and not worth the trouble of
living. For such an unhealthy state of mind a
worthy love is the sole remedy. Possibly some
such meaning may have been in the mind of the
author; but still we must resent the least imputa-
tion of catalepsy as inartistic and unnecessary.
With regard to the main theme of the poem, the
Prince is in full sympathy with Ida. He aims at
elevating woman, but he differs as to means. He
recognises the fact that their ultimate aims must
correspond with the diversity of their natures. Ida
dreams of intellectual elevation only. The Prince
sees clearly that moral elevation is the higher of
the two; and that it is distinct and separate from
knowledge. He sees that women are strong when
men are weak.
They, he says, are—
Not like that piebald miscellany, man;
Bursts of great heart and slips in sensual mire;
But whole and one; and, take them all in all,
Were we ourselves but half as good, as kind,
As truthful, much that Ida claims as right
Had ne'er been mooted.
THE PRINCESS.
51
The poet is evidently expressing his own views in
the character of the Prince. They are, he urges-
Truer to the law within,
Severer in the logic of a life,
Twice as magnetic to sweet influences
Of earth and heaven.
When the poem was written this was strange to
English ears. The Prince sees clearly what we all
see now, that women lack-
More breadth of culture
But he is, from henceforth, enlisted with Ida.
Henceforth thou hast a helper-me--that know
The woman's cause is man's; they rise or sink
Together.
If she be small, slight-natured, miserable
How shall man grow?
Working in unison, he says-"We two "
Will clear away the parasitic forms
That seem to keep her up, but drag her down;
52
THE PRINCESS.
Will leave her space to burgeon out of all
Within her let her make herself her own,
To give or keep, to live and learn to be
All that not harms distinctive womanhood.
For woman is not undevelopt man
But diverse.
This whole passage is very beautiful, and it is one
of the cardinal passages of the poem ; but it is too
long to quote in full. He insists that, while gain-
ing mental breadth, woman must not fail in child-
ward care.
This thought is the undertone of the
poem.
It is like the strain which runs through a
grand opera. Struck in the overture it recurs again
and again, and haunts us with one dominant melody.
In No. 39 of "In Memoriam" the same thought
Occurs-
Her office there to rear, to teach,
Becoming, as is meet and fit,
A link among the days, to knit
The generations—each with each
This is the Bugle Song in another measure.
It
shows us woman's mission as the preserver of the
THE PRINCESS.
53
-1
results of civilisation hardly won by the struggles
of men. Upon her lips are the echoes of the ages;
her true happiness is to transmit them to the com-
ing generation. The Princess asks-
"What woman taught you this?"
To which the Prince replies, in language which
appeals to the heart of every man—
One
Not learned, save in gracious household ways;
Not perfect, nay, but full of tender wants;
No angel, but a dearer being, all dipt
In angel instincts, breathing Paradise,
Interpreter between the Gods and men;
Who looked all nature to her place, and yet
On tip-toe seemed to touch upon a sphere
Too gross to tread, and all male minds perforce
Swayed to her from their orbits as they moved
And girdled her with music. . Happy he
With such a mother! faith in womankind
Beats with his blood, and trust in all things high
Comes easy to him, and, tho' he trip and fall,
He shall not blind his soul with clay.
how true it
54
THE PRINCESS.
The man who professes to distrust womankind is
a traitor to the memory of his own mother and is
publishing the fact that he has gone into a great
deal of very bad society.
The poem of "The Princess," as a work of art,
is the most complete and satisfying of all Tenny-
son's works. It possesses a play of fancy, of
humour, of pathos, and of passion which give it
variety; while the feeling of unity is unbroken
throughout. It is full of passages of the rarest
beauty and most exquisite workmanship. The
songs it contains are unsurpassed in English litera-
ture. The diction is drawn from the treasure-
house of old English poetry-from Chaucer, from
Shakespeare and the poets of the Elizabethan age.
The versification is remarkable for its variety;
while the rhythm, in stateliness and expression,
is modelled upon Milton. There are passages,
which, in power over language to match sound
with sense, are not excelled by anything in "Para-
dise Lost" for strength, or in Milton's minor poems
for sweetness. The poem abounds also in evi-
dences of the prophetic insight which has already
been referred to as the mark of a true poet. In
THE PRINCESS.
55
the year 1847, long before Darwin had commenced
the present great revolution in scientific thought,
evolutionary theories were propounded by the poet
in the imaginary halls of his female university.
Huxley himself could not have sketched more
vividly than the Lady Psyche the progressive
development of the world from the primal cosmic
vapour. The Princess, with the accuracy taught
only recently by the spectroscope, calls the sun
a nebulous star." When she gets her mind off
the brooch, she becomes really profound in her
analysis of our notions of creation as stages of
successive acts. Our minds, she teaches, are so
constituted that we must of necessity apprehend
everything in the form and aspect of successive
time; but, in the Almighty fiat, "Let there be
light," the whole of the complex potentialities of
the universe were in fact hidden.
Not only is the poem satisfying in these respects.
It breathes throughout that faith and hope in the
future which make Tennyson the poet of a pro-
gressive age. For many excellent persons this
universe is moribund. They can take pleasure
in thinking that the Creator, once more foiled, is
56
THE PRINCESS.
on the eve of angrily breaking up this world and
Such is not the
beginning it all over again.
philosophy of our poet.
person in the epilogue.
He speaks in his own
He says-
For me the genial day-the happy crowd,
The sport half science, fill me with a faith,
This fine old world of ours is but a child
Yet in the go-cart. Patience! Give it time
To learn its limbs: there is a hand that guides.
This faith runs through all his works-nor is it
anywhere more beautifully expressed than in his
very latest volume, in the second and third stanzas
of "The Children's Hospital."
Still the poem of "The Princess" is not an ex-
haustive solution of the question treated.
All men
Millions of women pass
cannot or do not marry.
unwedded through life. In many cases the sweet-
ness of their nature overflows in general usefulness
to others, in some cases it sours with disappoint-
ment. Millions of women have gone to dis-
honoured graves-" even God's providence seeming
estranged "—victims to an artificial state of society.
THE PRINCESS.
57
Here are questions for more favoured ones to con-
sider of profounder import than sun-flowers or
china-pigs. Of what avail is mere knowledge be-
fore these profound social and moral problems.
The ultimate outcome of all knowledge is mystery.
The sources of being are hidden behind an im-
penetrable veil. We juggle with words and play
with them as children with counters, getting out
of them such meanings only as we ourselves first
put in. The intellect is finite, but the affections
are infinite. We know in part and we prophesy
in part. Our prophecies shall fail and our know-
ledge vanish in a clearer dawn, but Love, of which
woman is the priestess, abideth for ever.
NOTES.
4
NOTES.
PROLOGUE.
Line 63. Or steep-up spout, whereon the gilded ball
Danced like a wisp !
Steep-up as an adjective is a peculiarly Tennysonian word.
It occurs again in Queen Mary, Act iii. Sc. 4, "the steep-up
track of the true faith." Shakespeare, Othello, v. 2, has
"steep-down gulfs of liquid fire." One is precipitously up,
the other precipitously down.
Line 70.
Dislinked with shrieks and laughter.
Also in Vivien. "But she dislinked herself at once and
rose." The use of dis for un is common in Shakespeare-
discompanied for unaccompanied; discovery for uncovering ;
disnatured for unnatural. Vide Abbott's Shakespearean
Grammar, p. 322. It occurs frequently in Tennyson.
Line 80.
Pure sport.
Otherwhere,
Otherwhere has become obsolete, while somewhere has been
retained in use. It is found in Milton's writings, but not in
Shakespeare. Tennyson uses it again in The Holy Grail-
And now his chair desires him in vain,
However they may crown him otherwhere.
UorM
62
NOTES.
CANTO I
Line 34. Proxy-wedded with a bootless calf.
This is good in poetry but bad in law, as the Princess
clearly points out. The ceremony of marriage by proxy was
common in the Middle Ages, but it was a fundamental prin-
ciple of canon and civil law, that consent (intention) was
the only basis of marriage. And here we must clear our
minds of a Protestant confusion between two ceremonies,
which in ante-Reformation times were distinct; viz., Espou-
sals and Matrimony-Sponsalia et Matrimonium. The two
ceremonies are thrown together in the Anglican Prayer-
Book. Up to the giving away of the bride, the verbs are
in the future tense; it is a promise, "I will "—that is
espousals. Then the two join hands and the tense changes
to the present, that is matrimony, that is the essence of the
ceremony; the priest merely declares that God hath joined
them, and gives the benediction of the Church. Forasmuch
as they, M. and N., have consented, he says, therefore it is a
marriage. The Prince and his father are clearly wrong in
talking about proxy-wedded. It was sponsalia, espousals,
not matrimonium.
The second
If any con-
it vitiated
There were two kinds of sponsalia and only two: Spon-
salia per verba de presente, and sponsalia per verba de futuro.
The first was indissoluble, because it was virtual marriage ;
for the parties were present giving consent.
was not more binding than any other contract.
dition was attempted to be attached to the first
it, and degraded it to a contract of the second class.
reason is evident. If parties to a contract de futuro lived
together they became indissolubly married, for the consent
was implied. The maxim of the civil law was-
Ubi non est consensus, non est matrimonium.
The
Now the Church always held (and such cases were always
settled in Church courts) that espousals were not valid
matrimony in the case of children espoused to each other by
!
NOTES.
63
parents; unless both the parties consented when they grew
up. After seven years there might be sponsalia, but there
could not be matrimonium until the parties had arrived at
years of discretion. It would be tedious to state the dif-
ferent opinions as to this age, certainly not before fourteen
and twelve respectively.
The Princess is sound in her law. She says, Book v., that
at the age of eight there could be no consent, and she had
given none since. King Gama says there was a "kind of
ceremony," and the Prince even does not dare, in the pre-
sence of the Princess, to call it more than a precontract,"
that is sponsalia de futuro.
In that case the ceremony of being proxy-wedded with a
bootless calf was a very bootless ceremony; and the court
lawyers ought to have had their heads cut off for advising it.
Because at that age the Prince and Princess were not cap-
able of executing a procuration for that purpose.
To make this clear, let us follow the ceremony between
Arthur of England and Catherine of Aragon-a wedding
fraught with great events. This was an instance of espou-
sals, per verba de presente, by proxy, but we must bear in
mind both parties were of full age to contract matrimonium.
Arthur appears in person. For Catherine appears Dr.
de Puebla, retinue around them suitable to the occasion.
Dr. de Puebla produces a procuration from Catherine,
strictly worded and limited to that one thing. People could
not marry under a general power of attorney. The proxy
is examined, it is signed by Catherine herself, and is in due
form. Then Prince Arthur steps out and declares that he
consents, then Dr. de Puebla steps forward and consents for
the Princess; they join hands and accept each other. The
espousals are complete and indissoluble excepting by dis-
pensation. A few months after Catherine comes to Eng-
land. She publicly ratifies the action of her attorney and
receives the nuptial benediction, then goes to live with her
husband; and after that the Pope himself cannot legally
dissolve the marriage. The proxy in the instance in the
poem was invalid, the parties not being able to give one.
64
NOTES.
•
Of course in Prince Arthur's case there was no "bootless
calf." To elucidate that we must take another case. Maxi-
milian, king of the Romans, was espoused by proxy to Anne,
the heiress of Brittany, A.D. 1489. In this instance the
ceremony was performed at the court of the lady; and the
king's ambassador in the presence of the court put his leg,
bare to the knee, into the bed of the Princess. But the
Princess was a grown woman, and Maximilian had a mar-
riageable daughter at that time betrothed to Charles VIII. of
France. And it turned out that Charles VIII. broke his
promise and married Anne of Brittany himself, putting
double insult on Maximilian, which led to a war. This, as
Hallam points out (Middle Ages, vol. i. p. 106), was a gross
violation of ecclesiastical law, for the dispensation of the Pope
from the first betrothal was not issued until eight days after
the marriage of Anne and Charles.
This bootless calf" ceremony, we are told by some
writers, was common in England; but, as they do not quote
instances, or cite canonical authorities, the statement is
doubtful. An extract from Lord Bacon's History of Henry
VII. is appended, from which it may be gathered that the
ceremony was previously unknown in France. Possibly it
was suggested by King Henry VII., who never allowed law
to stand between him and his schemes. At that time ques-
tions of ecclesiastical law were of paramount importance in
Europe. The English Reformation ostensibly originated in
a dispute as to the canonical validity of the marriage of
Henry VIII. with Catherine of Aragon, the widow of
his deceased brother, Prince Arthur.
It must be concluded, however, that in the case of the
present Princess Ida, the ceremony was very badly advised.
"The king having thus upheld the reputation of Maxi-
milian, advised him now to press on his marriage with
Britain to a conclusion, which Maximilian accordingly did;
and so far forth prevailed, both with the young lady and
with the principal persons about her, as the marriage was
NOTES.
65
consummated by proxy, with a ceremony at that time in
For she was not only publicly contracted,
those parts new.
but stated, as a bride, and solemnly bedded; and after she
was laid, there came in Maximilian's ambassador with letters
of procuration, and in the presence of sundry noble person-
ages, men and women, put his leg stript naked to the knee,
between the espousal sheets; to the end, that the ceremony
might be thought to amount to a consummation and actual
knowledge."-Bacon, History of King Henry VII.
Line 100.
A wind arose and rushed upon the
South,
And shook the songs, the whispers, and
the shrieks
Of the wild woods together; and a
Voice
Went with it, "Follow, follow, thou
shalt win."
A passage parallel to this is quoted by Mr. Wace from
Shelley. It occurs in Prometheus Unbound, ii. I—
A wind arose among the pines; it shook
The clinging music from their boughs, and then
Low, sweet, faint sounds, like the farewell of ghosts,
Were heard; "Oh follow, follow, follow me!"
and must have, consciously or unconsciously, dwelt in Tenny-
son's memory when writing these lines.
Line 110.
And so by tilth and grange.
In this sense, of land which is being tilled, the word is
It is found in Milton, Par. Lost, xi. 430-
rare.
Beheld a field,
Part arable and tilth, whereon were sheaves
New reaped.
E
66
NOTES.
In Enoch Arden, 676, it is used again-
Or withered holt, or tilth or pasturage.
Grange-originally the barn or building in which grain
was stored; now applied to any group of farm buildings
Line III. And blowing bosks of wilderness.
Uncultivated thickets blooming with wild flowers. Milton
has "blowing banks." Bosk is an abbreviation of boscage, an
old French word (now bois). This latter word is a favourite
with Tennyson, e.g., Dream of Fair Women, 51—
Thridding the sombre boscage of the wood.
And again, in his last volume, in Sir John Oldcastle-
Rather to thee, green boscage-work of God.
Shakespeare's Tempest, iv. I, has-
My bosky acres and my unshrubbed down.
A passage precisely parallel occurs in Boadicca—
Fear not, isle of blowing woodland, isle of silvery
parapets!
Line 115.
But bland the smile that, like a wrink-
ling wind
On glassy water, drove his cheek in
lines.
These lines are not in the first or second editions. The
third edition reads-
But bland the smile that puckered up his checks.
Mr. Wace quotes the following parallel passage from
Shelley-Prince Athanase, part ii.-
NOTES.
67
Line 135.
O'er the vision wan
Of Athanase, a ruffling atmosphere
Of dark emotion, a swift shadow ran
Like wind upon some forest-bosomed lake
Glassy and dark.
Knowledge, so my daughter held,
Was all in all.
Some
This is the central point of the Princess' delusion.
have thought that Tennyson borrowed the idea of his Poem
from Johnson's Rassels. It is a long way from Rasselas to
The Princess. The following is the only passage upon which
this theory is based-a very slender support:
"The princess thought, that of all sublunary things, know-
ledge was the best: she desired, first, to learn all sciences,
and then proposed to found a college of learned women, in
which she would preside, that, by conversing with the old,
and educating the young, she might divide her time between
the acquisition and communication of wisdom, and raise
up for the next age models of prudence and patterns of
piety."—Rasselas.
Others suppose that the idea was suggested by Loce's
Labour's Lost, i. 1—
Our court shall be a little Academe,
Still and contemplative in living art.
This is far more probable, because the plot of that play turns
on the attempted seclusion of a king and his attendants for
three years in study, during which time no woman was to
approach the court. The disturbing influence of love upon
such a plan is the motive of the comedy. This theory is
perhaps hinted at in the lines in the Prologue-
•
We should have him back
";
Who told the Winter's Tale to do it for us.
68
NOTES.
Line 204.
Him we gave a costly bribe
To guerdon silence.
Rare as a transitive verb, but so used by Chaucer, e.g.,
Court of Love, iv. 30—
But guerdon me liche as I
may deserve.
And by Shakespeare, 2 Hen. VI., i. 4—
See you well guerdoned for these good deserts.
And again by Tennyson in Love thou thy land-
It grows to guerdon afterdays.
This word guerdon has a curious history. It originated in
the old High German widarlôn, "recompense," and was cor-
rupted, by the aid of the Latin donum, into Low Latin wider-
donum, a half Latin, half Teutonic compound. By the
usual change of w into gui this was changed into the
Romance verb guidardonare. Thence the Italian noun
guiderdone, French guerdon, from whence Chaucer took it
and made it English. Vide Diez, Romance Dictionary; Skeat,
Historical Dictionary.
Line 220.
And all about us pealed the nightingale
Rapt in her song.
It is only the male bird which sings. The functions of
the sexes are strictly defined in the land of singing birds.
But the poets, all of them, keep the old Greek myth in mind,
and while scientifically wrong, are poetically and historically
correct, for Philomela was a princess who was turned into a
nightingale which sang. Even Isaac Walton uses the pro-
noun "her." Milton, in Il Pensersoso, writes "Sweet chaunt-
ress," thinking evidently of poor Philomela. Chaucer in
the Cuckow and the Nightingale uses always the feminine
gender-
I thanked her, and was ryght wel apayed;
Yee, quoth she, and be thou not amayed.
NOTES.
69
Line 229.
Into rooms which gave
Upon a pillared porch.
So also in the Gardener's Daughter-
This, yielding, gave into a grassy walk.
And in Gareth and Lynette—
Now two great entries opened from the hall;
At one end one, that gave upon a range
Of level pavement.
The use of gave in this manner is a Gallicism adopted
from an idiomatic use of the word donner.
Line 243.
The seal was Cupid bent above a scroll,
And o'er his head Uranian Venus hung,
And raised the blinding bandage from
his eyes.
The allusion here is to a passage in Plato's Symposium :-
“And am I not right in asserting that there are two god-.
desses? The elder one having no mother, who is called the
heavenly Aphrodite-she is the daughter of Uranus; the
younger who is the daughter of Zeus and Dione-her we
call Common; and the Love, who is her fellow-worker, may
and must also have the name of common, as the other love
is called heavenly."-Jowett, Dialogues of Plato, vol. ii.
CANTO II.
Line 8.
Thro' the porch that sang
All round with laurel.
Laurel-the tree of the god of the lyre. A fragrant tree
with abundance of fragrant blossoms, the favourite resort of
This porch is suggestive of a passage in
birds and bees.
Ariosto, vi. 21—
70
NOTES.
Small thickets with the scented laurel gay,
Cedar and orange, full of fruit and flower.
Myrtle and palm, with interwoven spray,
Pleached in mixed modes, all lovely form a bower,
And breaking with their shade the scorching ray,
Make a cool shelter from the noontide hour,
And nightingales among those branches wing
Their flight, and safely amorous descants sing.
Line 14.
Enringed a billowing fountain.
The prefix en was much used by Shakespeare and the older
writers where it is now abandoned. Generally it was em-
ployed as here, in its proper sense of surrounding, but some-
times to add force or intensity to a word as the "enridged
sea," the " enchafed flood." In the Midsummer Night's
Dream, iv. I, we find-
The female ivy so
Enrings the barky fingers of the elm.
In Henry V., Prologue to Act iv., a similar word is used-
How dread an army hath enrounded him.
Line 28.
Not without redound,
Of use and glory to yourselves ye come.
The use of redound as a substantive is very rare. It does
not occur in Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer, or elsewhere in
Tennyson. It is a sonorous word for the end of a line, and
there is no reason why it should not be adopted or retained,
as rebound and many other similar words.
Line 38.
He worships your ideal.
A very peculiar sense is given to the word ideal here, and
one not found elsewhere. The ideal of the Princess, that is
her conception of the highest perfection, is not what the
NOTES.
71
Prince is worshipping. He worships the Princess herself as
his ideal, and puts one for the other with a confusion of
thought pardonable under the circumstances.
Line 65.
She
That taught the Sabine how to rule.
The second king of Rome, Numa, was a Sabine of the
city of Cures. He was believed to have received the laws,
both civil and religious, which he instituted at Rome, from
the nymph Egeria, whose society he sought in the recesses
of the forest of Aricia. After the death of Numa she be-
came inconsolable, and was changed by Diana into a foun-
tain (as related by Ovid, Meta. xv.) which may be seen to
this day near Lake Nemi.
Line 66. The foundress of the Babylonian wall.
Semiramis-the queen who is fabled to have founded
Babylon. Herodotus says very little about her, but praises
Queen Nitocris as having been much wiser, and as having
constructed greater works.
Line 67. The Carian Artemisia, strong in war.
There were two of the name, queens of Caria. This was the
first; she joined Xerxes with an admirably equipped squadron,
and fought at Salamis so bravely, that Xerxes said his women
had become men, and his men women. She escaped, but by
the discreditable stratagem of running down a friendly ship.
She afterwards fell in love with a young man who did not
return her passion, so she put out his eyes and then threw
herself into the sea at the Lover's Leap, at the promontory of
Leucate. The other Artemisia it was, who, losing her hus-
band Mausolus, built the celebrated tomb, thence called the
Mausoleum, and died of grief two years later.
2
NOTES.
Line 68. The Rhodope that built the pyramid.
3
Tennyson has followed a legend common in Greece which
has no foundation in fact. Herodotus almost loses his
temper at those who believe the story. To begin—the lady's
name is given by him as Rhodopis, not Rhodope, who was a
somewhat¹ insignificant water-nymph; but having noted the
fact we will follow 2 the pronunciation of the poem. Rho-
dope, then, was a Thracian slave-girl of great beauty, a
fellow-slave with sop, and was bought by Xanthus, a
Samian. Her master carried her to Egypt in the reign of
Amasis and sold her. She was bought by a brother of
Sappho the poetess, who became so enamoured of her that
he emancipated her to the great indignation of his sister.
She settled at Naucratis and became very rich, and the
story became current that she built the third pyramid.
Ebers, in his beautiful story of "An Egyptian Princess," re-
lates many things of this beautiful and gifted woman.
Athenæus also refers to this same person under the name
of Doricha. He thinks Herodotus wrong in supposing
Doricha and Rhodopis to be the same; but Athenæus was a
great gossip, and his authority cannot weigh against that of
the careful and accurate father of history." Pliny 5 be-
lieved the story about the pyramid and wonders how she got
so much money. Elian relates it on the authority of the
Egyptians, and he accounts for it by a very pretty story.
Rhodopis, he says, was bathing, and an eagle snatched up
one of her sandals and flying away dropped it in the lap of
King Psammeticus as he was sitting in judgment. He
wondered at the beauty of the shoe and sent all over Egypt
until he found the owner, whom he straightway married.
This accounts for the facts, and throws light on the story of
Cinderella at the same time.
6
1 Liddell & Scott, ad verbum,
2 Bayle-Dict., ad verb.
3 Athenæus, vol. iii. p. 951.
4 lbid.
5 Pliny, Nat. Hist., book 36, cap. 17.
6 Elian, Var. Hist., book 13, cap. 33.
NOTES.
73
woman.
These are pretty stories and are poetically true, but in
fact¹ Herodotus must be right. For, as he shows, it was
impossible that any private person could have built this
pyramid; and besides, as Rhodopis dedicated the tenth part
of her wealth to Apollo at Delphi, any one, he says, can see
how inadequate it was. He adds conclusively that the
pyramids were built long before the reign of Amasis.
But the glory of the third pyranid still belongs to a
This pyramid is the most carefully finished of the
three great pyramids, and is sometimes called the Pyramid
of Menkeres or Mycerinus. Manetho says that it was built
by Queen Nitocris, the sister and wife of Menkeres. Men-
keres commenced it for his own tomb, and she completed it.
This was one or two thousand years before Amasis reigned.
The time is a little vague, but Egyptologists, like geologists,
are not by any means precise people as to dates. Anyway
it was a long time before, and Nitocris reigned twelve years
-a queen of great ability and vigour, and a strong conserv-
ative, as most clever women are.
ated by the party of progress, and
to temporise with his murderers.
until she got them all quietly as guests at a banquet in the
subterranean chambers of some building, when she let the
Nile in on them and drowned them. Evidently a danger-
ously strong-minded lady.3
Her husband was assassin-
for years she was obliged
But she waited patiently
All these stories, diverse in appearance, are easily recon-
ciled, for Rhodōpis is Greek for rosy-cheeked, and Nitocris
was a woman of surpassing loveliness. Manetho calls her
the "rosy-cheeked beauty.” I add the naive conclusion of
Herodotus:- Now I have done speaking of Rhodopis."
Tennyson has followed the example of Shakespeare both
in the pronunciation of the word and the main story. See
K. Henry VI., 1st Part, Act i. Sc. 6—
1 Herodotus, ii. 134.
2 Cory's Ancient Fragments, p. 115.
3 Herodotus, book ii. cap. 100. Lenormant, Anc. Hist. of East,
vol. i. p. 211.
▲ Ibid.
NOTES.
A statelier pyramid to her I'll rear,
Than Rhodope's or Memphis' ever was.
Lines 69-71. Clelia, Cornelia, with the Palmyrene
That fought Aurelian, and the Ro-
man brows
Of Agrippina.
Cloelia, a Roman girl given with others as hostages to
Porsenna. She escaped by swimming the Tiber on horse-
back.
Cornelia, the mother of the Gracchi.
The Palmyrene, Queen Zenobia.
Agrippina, grand-daughter of Augustus.
She accom-
panied her husband Germanicus in his campaigns in Ger-
many. A noble woman in a corrupt age.
Line 73.
Makes noble through the sensuous or-
ganism
That which is higher.
The mind, though higher than the body, is ennobled
through the senses by the contemplation of noble objects.
Shelley has the saine thought in Prince Athanase—
The mind becomes that which it contemplates;
And so Zonoras, by for ever seeing
Their bright creations, grew like wisest men.
Line 98. Then Florian, but no livelier than the
dame
That whisper'd "Asses' ears" among the
sedge.
This is an outright slander. Ovid is the authority for this
story about Midas, and he distinctly says it was a barber who
NOTES.
75
was unable to keep the secret. Tennyson follows Chaucer
in charging it upon the female sex. Chaucer gives Ovid as
his authority, but in all probability he took the story indi-
rectly, as he did many others, from the Italian with which
he was very familiar. Tennyson's poetry is pervaded with
the influence of Chaucer. The passage alluded to is in the
Wife of Bath's Tale, line 113-
And sins sche dorste not tell it unto man,
Doun to a marreys faste by sche ran,
Til sche cam ther, hir herte was on fuyre;
And as a bytoure bumblith in the myre,
Sche layde hir mouth unto the water doun.
66
Bywrey me not, thou watir, with thi soun,"
Quod sche, "to the I telle it, and nomo,
Myn houshond hath long asse eeris tuo.
Now is myn hert al hool, now is it oute,
I mighte no lenger kepe it out of doute."
Pope refers probably to Chaucer also, in his Epistle to Dr.
Arbuthnot, v. 6S—
'Tis sung, when Midas' ears began to spring
(Midas, a sacred person and a king),
His very minister who spied them first
(Some say his queens was forced to speak or burst.
The fairer sex have too many stories of this sort justly attri-
buted to them to be able to bear this in addition,
Line 114. Appraised the Lycian custom-
Herodotus, i. 173, says—
They have one custom peculiar to themselves, in which
they differ from all other nations; for they take their name
from their mothers, and not from their fathers, and reckon
up ancestry in the female line.
Line 115.
Those that lay at wine with Lar and
Lucumo.
76
NOTES.
1
That is the Etruscan women. Tanaquil, the wife of Tar-
quinius Priscus was a haughty and high-spirited woman; a
manager of the first order. She in truth made her husband's
fortune by removing him to Rome. Her name was a pro-
verb in Rome for a domineering wife. In Etruria women
occupied a much superior position than in Greece, and the
Romans probably followed the Etrurian custom in this
respect. Begoe, an Etruscan woman, wrote a book on divina-
tion which became a statute book, and there were women
soothsayers and augurs. In the paintings at Volterra the
females are represented seated at banquets with their hus-
bands and mixing freely in society. From the same source,
we learn that girls were sent to school, and we may argue
from the number of rolls in the pupils' hands that the higher
education was not neglected. It would be erroneous to
suppose that Etruscan society was better than Greek or
Roman. It was distinctly worse. The women were extra-
vagantly fond of personal adornment, and Athenæus says
they were wonderful women to drink. Their husbands were
noted in Italy for being fat and idle. Altogether the less
the ladies say about the Etruscan women the better.2
Line 119.
She fulmined out her scorn of laws
Salique.
A word not much used now, having been superseded by
fulminate. Milton uses it, Paradise Regained, iv. 270—
Whose resistless eloquence
Wielded at will that fierce democratie,
Shook the arsenal, and fulmined over Greece.
Spenser also uses the word. Laws Salique were the laws.
of the Salian Franks, which still obtain in France and Ger-
many, by which females are excluded from the throne.
1 Chambers's Papers for People-Art. Sepulchres of Etruria, p. 14.
2 Athenæus, vol. iii. p. 829-Tyrrhenians he calls them. See also
Classical Dict.-Art. Tanaquil, Tarquinius I.; Virgil, Eneid, book ii.
725 et seq.; Plautus, Cistellaria, Act 3; Catullus, xxxix. 11-" Obesus
Etruscus."
NOTES.
77
Line 129.
Disyoke their necks from custom.
See note on p. 61. And also Gareth and Lynette—
Until she let me fly discaged to sweep
In ever highering eagle-circles.
And elsewhere in The Princess-disprinced, dishelmed, dis-
robed.
Line 137.
Thence the man's; if more was more.
That is, if a larger brain does really give greater mental
power (which she doubts); men have acquired larger brains
than women only by constant use, and women's brains would
increase in volume under similar conditions.
Line 183. The softer Adams of your Academe.
The female founders of your university.
Line 206.
Disrooted.
Whate'er I was
See note on p. 61, on use of dis for un
Line 203. I think no more of deadly lurks therein,
Than in a clapper clapping in a garth,
To scare the fowl from fruit.
A scare-crow in a fruit-garden. Garth, an old English
word, from which both garden and yard are derived. The
old High German word was gart, originally gard, hence
English yard, French jardin, English garden, Italian giar-
dino. Original signification, any enclosed place. The word
is uncommon. Tennyson uses it several times, e.g., Enoch
Arden-
And fast into the little garth beyond.
78
NOTES.
And in the Grandmother —
I climbed to the top of the garth, and stood by the road at
the gate.
In Yorkshire the word is in common use to signify any
enclosure adjoining a house, as kirk-garth for churchyard.
Line 226. The gaunt old Baron with his beetle
brow,
Sun-shaded in the heat of dusty fights.
Shakespeare-Romeo and Juliet, i. 4—
Here are the beetle-brows, shall blush for me.
And Hamlet, i. 4–
The summit of the cliff
That beetles o'er his base into the sea.
Skeat, in his Etymological Dictionary, states that Shake-
speare coined the verb to beetle, i.e., to project, from the word
bitelbrowed, a Middle English word signifying having pro-
jecting or sharp brows. It is from the Anglo-Saxon bitel,
"the biting insect," and really means with biting brows, that
is, with brows which project like the upper jaw. The word
beetle, a heavy mallet, comes from another Anglo-Saxon verb
beatan, to beat.
Line 270.
The Lucius Junius Brutus of my kind.
The Brutus who expelled the Tarquins, and subsequently
condemned his sons to death for treason.
Line 312.
And all her thoughts as fair within her
eyes,
As bottom agates seen to wave and
float
In crystal currents of clear morning
seas.
NOTES.
79
+
Fair in the sense of clear, evident, as Shakespeare, King
John, iv. I-
Can you not read it? is it not fair writ?
A parallel passage occurs in Moore-Loves of the Angels—
I soon could track each thought that lay,
Gleaming within her heart, as clear
As pebbles within brooks appear.
And also in Beaumont and Fletcher, The Two Noble Kins-
men, i. I—
You cannot read it there; there through my tears,
Like wrinkled pebbles in a glassy stream,
You may behold them.
Line 326.
For fear
This whole foundation ruin.
A very unusual use of ruin as an intransitive verb.
CANTO III.
Line 35. You need not set your thoughts in rubric
thus
For wholesale comment.
A very odd use of a modern mercantile word.
Line 69. And still she railed against the state of
things.
Still in the sense of continually, habitually. As Canto
i. 57-
For still we moved
Together, twinned as horses' ear and eye.
A use common in the poets and early writers.
80
NOTES.
Line 75.
Consonant chords that shiver to one
note;
One mind in all things.
A similar thought is found in Shelley-Epipsychidion—
Are we not formed, as notes of music are,
For one another, though dissimilar?
But Tennyson's simile is more full of meaning. The notes
are not only made for one another, but, being chords, blend
into one musical note, and the ear cannot separate the two
sets of vibrations.
Line 91.
But I
An eagle clang an eagle to the sphere.
And again, Canto iv., line 416—
The leader wild-swan in among the stars
Would clang it.
This use of clang as a transitive verb is peculiar to Tenny-
son. It is the far-sounding scream of the eagle soaring sun-
wards which is contrasted with the chatter of the crane in
the preceding lines. It is a very expressive word, and its
present use is an adaptation of the Greek and Latin use of
the same root-verb.
Line 105. And leaning there on those balusters high.
Bulúster, accented on the penult: from French balustre,
now corrupted into bannister.
Line 106.
Drank the gale
That, blown about the foliage underneath,
And sated with the innumerable rose,
Beat balm upon our eyelids.
NOTES.
SI
A parallel passage occurs in Shelley-Epipsychidion-
The light clear element, which the isle wears,
Is heavy with the scent of lemon flowers,
Which floats like mist laden with unseen showers,
And falls upon the eyelids like faint sleep.
Line 113,
Better to clear prime forests.
For primeval, as Shakespeare, Rich. III., iv. 3-
That from the prime creation.
Or in the original sense of primus, first.
Line 122.
I fabled nothing fair
But your example pilot, told her all.
That is, I did not invent a plausible story; fair for fair-
seeming, plausible. Used in that sense in the proverb "fair
and false."
Line 161. Beyond the thick-leaved platans of the
vale.
Platanus, the plane-tree.
Line 181. Went forth in long retinue, following up
The river as it narrowed to the hills.
Retinue-accented on the penult-also in Aylmer's Field—
The dark retinue reverencing death.
So Milton, Par. Lost, v. 355-
On princes, when their rich retinue long.
And Shakespeare, Lear, i. 4-
But other of your insolent retinue.
F
82
NOTES.
But Chaucer follows the French retenue, accenting on the
last syllable, Frere's Tale, 57-
And he had wenches at his retenue.
This is an instance of the constant tendency in English to
throw back the accent.
Line 217.
"Alas! your Highness breathes full
East," I said.
Referring to the dry unpleasant east-winds prevalent in
England, supposed by the hypochondriac islanders to parch
up everything.
Line 249.
Who learns the one Pou Sro whence
after-hands
May move the world.
The Princess is quoting the celebrated saying of Archi-
medes to King Hiero. That philosopher was a master of
all the arts of applied mechanics, and dwelling on the enor-
mous mechanical powers of the lever he exclaimed, "Give
me where I may stand (pou sto), and I will move the world."
Line 264. Cramped under worse than South-sea
isle taboo.
This word was brought home by Captain Cook's expedi-
tion. The South Sea islands were under the domination of
a priesthood, which reserved to its own use anything which
any of the members of its class might fancy, by marking it
and calling it taboo, or devoted to religious uses.
Line 283.
"Dare we dream of that," I asked,
Which wrought us, as the workman
and his work,
"That practice betters."
NOTES.
83
Dare we suppose that the Being who created us is like a
human workman who improves by practice?
Line 288.
Diotima teaching him that died
Of hemlock.
Diotima was a wise woman of Mantinea who instructed
Socrates in many things. Lucian¹ twice mentions her name
in company with that of Aspasia, but we should have known
nothing about her had it not been that Plato in the Sympo-
siun makes Socrates call her his instructress. She was
evidently in Athens when Socrates learned of her, for he
calls her, "O thou stranger woman. He describes her as
wise in many branches of knowledge, and says that the plague
at Athens was deferred ten years by a sacrifice she made.
She was his teacher in the art of love, and that of the loftiest
kind, for he makes her define love as the "love of the ever-
lasting possession of the good."
""
Line 296. These monstrous males that carve the
living hound,
And cram him with the fragments of
the grave.
Referring to the practice of vivisection and the brutal
irreverence which is charged against those who practise it, as
shown by the custom sometimes asserted to exist of feeding
dogs with the fragments of the dissecting room.
The poet
still retains his horror of vivisection. Tide "In the Chil-
dren's Hospital" in his last volume-
I could think he was one of those who would break their
jests on the dead,
And mangle the living dog that had loved him and
fawned at his knee-
Drenched with the hellish oorali-that ever such things
should be!
1 Lucian-The Eunuch; The Portrait.
84
NOTES.
In one of Hogarth's series of The Four Stages of Cruelty
is a print which may have suggested this passage.
It repre-
sents a dissecting-table at Surgeons' Hall, upon which a
subject is stretched out, and dogs are eating the intestines,
which are falling upon the floor.
Line 328.
"For indeed these fields
Are lovely, lovelier not the Elysian
lawns,
Where paced the demigods of old, and
saw
The soft white vapour streak the
crowned towers
Built to the sun."
The reference here is evidently to the city and plains of
Troy, as will appear on reading the first fourteen lines of
Enone. In the same poem the walls of Ilion are pictured
as rising and taking shape to the sound of music.
As yonder walls
Rose slowly to a music slowly breathed,
A cloud that gathered shape.
The poet has followed Ovid (Heroides, xv. 179), who makes
the walls and lofty towers of Ilion rise to the potent melody
of Apollo's lyre. Virgil ascribes the building of Ilion to
Neptune, but the complete story relates that both these
deities assisted. Troy was afterwards taken by Hercules,
and the hero demigods his companions. Virgil, x. 469, is
suggested by this passage. Jupiter, implored by Hercules
to rescue Pallas from the spear of Turnus, replies—“Be-
neath the tall towers of Troy how many of the sons of the
gods fell? Yea, there fell too Sarpedon, my own son."
NOTES.
85
་
This myth would seem to be a favourite one with Tenny-
son.
In Tithonus is another reference to it—
Like that strange song I heard Apollo sing
While Ilion like a mist rose into towers.
In like manner rose the city of Camelot. See Gareth and
Lynette, where it is said of the Fairy Queens, that
They came from out a sacred mountain-cleft
Toward the sunrise, each with harp in hand,
And built it to the music of their harps.
Line 335.
A tent of satin elaborately wrought
With fair Corinna's triumph.
Corinna was a Theban poetess, who took the palm five
times from Pindar, who is
The bearded victor of ten thousand hymns
in the following lines. She was very beautiful, and some
say, so beautiful that Pindar had no chance of success with
the too susceptible judges. Ælian (xiii. 45) says she suc-
ceeded because the auditors were ignorant. Pausanias saw
a picture of her binding her head with laurel.
CANTO IV.
Line 21 Tears, idle tears, I know not what they
mean.
It is difficult to write without enthusiasm of this
exquisitely perfect lyric. The rhythm and cadence are so
absolutely faultless that the absence of rhyme is not noticed
in reading. The thoughts of women naturally dwell much
more on the past than in the future; and Violet the singer
86
NOTES.
1
has not much sympathy with the radical reforms dreamed of
by the Princess. Her song is a sweet utterance of uncon-
scious feminine protest against the new revolutionary
doctrines, and jars on the Princess, who resents it at once.
The idea of this lyric had been resting in the poet's mind
since 1831. Then at the age of twenty-two he published in
The Gem, one of the annuals at that time in fashion, the
following poem omitted from all the recent editions of his
works-
O sad No more! O sweet No more!
O strange No more!
By a mossed brookbank on a stone
I smelt a wildwood flower alone
There was a ringing in my ears,
And both my eyes gushed out with tears,
Surely all pleasant things had gone before,
Low-buried fathom deep beneath with thee,
No more!
" has
The melancholy melody of the refrain "No more
evidently haunted the poet's mind, and he has taken the
poem which he justly suppressed as unworthy of him, and
after long years reproduced it in this glorified form. There is
nothing like it in English save Keats's Ode to a Nightingale.
In that poem the word "forlorn" has evidently charmed the
ear of the poet in the same manner.
Edgar Allan Poe, in his Philosophy of Composition, has
explained how a poem may grow up round a musical refrain,
and would have us to believe that his poem The Raven
grew up around the word "Nevermore." The Raven is not
a poem to be compared with either of the two above men-
tioned, nor is Poe a writer to be trusted when a theory has
once possessed him, but the passage we quote is curious as
throwing some light on the possible growth of "Tears, idle
tears."
Poe says "Having made up my mind to a refrain,
the division of the poem into stanzas was, of course, a corollary,
That such a
the refrain forming the close to each stanza.
NOTES.
87
close, to have force, must be sonorous and susceptible of
protracted emphasis, admitted no doubt; and these considera-
tions inevitably led me to the long o as the most sonorous
vowel, in connection with r as the most producible con-
sonant.
'The sound of the refrain being thus determined, it became
necessary to select a word embodying the sound, and at the
same time in the fullest possible keeping with that melan-
choly which it had predetermined as the tone of the poem.
In such a search it would have been absolutely impossible
to overlook the word 'Nevermore.' In fact it was the very
first which presented itself."
It is not credible that poets work consciously in so mechan-
ical a way; or that o and should have been the nucleus
of a poem; but it is credible, that the associations clustering
round an organised and musical word such as no more or
nevermore should suggest the idea of a poem.
Line 59.
Let be
Their cancelled Babels; tho' the rough
hex break
The starred mosaic, and the beard-
Uown goat
Hang on the shaft, and the wild fig-
tree split
Their monstrous idols.
Kex-the rough dry husk or stalk of rampant growing
weeds. Beard-blown-blown by the wind, as the goat stands
on some ruined column. Sce Preface, xiv.
The Princess is combating the vague regretful sentiment
which Violet's song, "Tears, idle tears," has stirred in the sus-
ceptible minds of her students. She is saying in effect, let the
dead past bury its dead-let throne after throne, system after
88
NOTES.
system, melt away in the ocean like icebergs from the North.
All things have their day, and it is foolish to moan for them.
Act! act in the living present-let the past be past. Let
the old unjust world crumble like the buildings of Babel
once so lofty. Let the rank weeds break the gay mosaics of
the floors-let the goats clamber over the ruined arches-
let the fig-tree split the marbles with its vigorous roots-
unmourned by me; for they tell of a monstrous system of
injustice. We will look forward towards that great year
of equal mights and rights when woman will be the equal
of man.
The rending power of the wild fig-tree-Caprificus-was a
trite theme of Roman poets. Martial (x. 2.) thinks his fame
will last through his writings while the wild fig splits the
monument of Messalæ.
Marmora Messalæ findit caprificus.
In Horace (Ep. v. 17) Canidia makes use of fig-trees
plucked from tombs-"Jubet sepulcris caprificos erutas."
Juvenal (x. 147), speaking of the vanity of ambition, says-
Vain rage-the roots of the wild fig-tree rise,
Strike through the marble, and their memory dies.
Ramage in his Nooks and By-ways of Italy (p. 69) is
reminded of this passage by noticing a wild fig springing out
of, and splitting a rock in the Apennines.
The goat hanging on the shaft suggests, or has been
suggested by, Shelley's Preface to Prometheus Unbound. He
says, "This poem was chiefly written upon the mountainous
ruins of the baths of Caracalla among the flowery glades
and thickets of odoriferous blossoming trees which are ex-
tended in ever-winding labyrinths upon its immense plat-
forms and dizzy arches suspended in the air." The passage
is very suggestive of these ruins, the mosaic floors are riven
by rank weeds, and the lofty arches break the blue sky with
fragile and giddy bridges which only a goat dare tread upon.
NOTES.
89
Wace¹ says "Kex" is the provincial word for hemlock.
Skeat (Etymological Dictionary) gives-Kex, hemlock; a
hollow stem (Celtic); Provincial English, kecksies. Kex is
itself plural = kecks; and kecksies is a double plural. The
precise meaning of the word in this passage is given in
Shakespeare, Henry V. v. 2—
Such savagery;
The even mead, that erst brought sweetly forth
The freckled cowslip, burnet, and green clover,
Wanting the scythe, all uncorrected rank,
Conceives by idleness; and nothing teems,
But hateful docks, rough thistles, kecksies, burs,
Losing both beauty and utility.
A picture of the wasted land of France after the long war.
Kex-pl kecksies does not mean hemlock here, for the
third line previous reads--
The darnel, hemlock, and rank fumitory.
In the country parts of England the word kecks is still in
use. In Leicestershire it means the dry stalks of almost
any worthless weed. "As dry as kecks is a common
phrase in Wiltshire.
Line 69.
Not a Death's head at the wine.
Allusion is here made to a custom of the ancient Egyp-
tians recorded by Herodotus (i. 78): "At their convivial
banquets, among the wealthy classes, when they have
finished supper, a man carries round in a coffin the image of
a dead body carved in wood, made as like as possible in
colour and workmanship, and in size generally about one or
two cubits in length; and showing this to each of the com-
pany, he says, 'Look upon this, then drink and enjoy your-
self; for when dead you will be like this.' This practice
they have at their drinking parties."
1 Alfred Tennyson; his Life and Works, p. 120.
90
NOTES.
1
Line 84.
Oh were I thou, that she might take
me in,
And lay me on her bosom, and her heart
Would rock the snowy cradle till I died.
This is evidently a reminiscence of Shakespeare-Venus
and Adonis, last stanza but one-
Lo, in this hollow cradle take thy rest,
My throbbing heart shall rock thee day and night.
Line 100.
Like the Ithacensian suitors in old time,
Stared with great eyes and laughed with
alien lips.
The reference is to the Odyssey, xx. 347. The suitors at
the court of Penelope feel the occult influence of the unseen
goddess Pallas causing their thoughts to wander. They fail
to recognise Ulysses in his disguise, and their laughter is
constrained and unnatural, they know not why. They
laugh with alien lips, which is the nearest possible poetical
translation of the Greek idiomatic expression, "They laughed
with other men's jaws."
Line 103.
"Not for thee," she said,
"O Bulbul, any rose of Gulistan
Shall burst her veil; marsh-divers,
rather, maid,
Shall croak thee sister, or the meadow-
crake
Grate her harsh kindred in the grass.
>>
The nightingale is the Bulbul in Persia, and Persian poets
feign that he is the constant lover of the rose, to whom he
NOTES.
91
pours out his passionate melodies. Gulistan is Persian for
rose-garden. Saadi calls his book of poems-Gulistan. The
Princess does not think that any rose-bud would open at
the singing of such a nightingale as the Prince. Marsh-
divers-probably the water-rail, is meant. Meadow-crake-
the corn-crake or land-rail. Says Wood, "The cry of the
corn-crake may be exactly imitated by drawing a quill or a
piece of stick smartly over the large teeth of a comb, or by
rubbing together two jagged strips of bone." The Princess
is severe on the singers. Neither the matter of the one, or
the manner of the other, pleases her.
Line 130.
Whole in ourselves, and owed to none.
As an intransitive verb in the sense of, to be bound; a
rare use, but found in Chaucer.
Line 185. Of open-work in which the hunter rued
His rash intrusion, manlike, but his
brows
Had sprouted.
The allusion is to the hunter Actæon, who, having come
upon Diana and her nymphs when bathing, was turned into
a stag.
Line 236.
He has a solid base of temperament ;
But as the water-lily starts and slides
Upon the level in little puffs of wind
Tho' anchor'd to the bottom, such is he.
A very similar passage occurs in Wordsworth-Excursion,
book v., where it is said of Moral Truth that it is-
92
NOTES.
A thing
Subject, you deem, to vital accidents,
And, like the water-lily, lives and thrives,
Whose root is fix'd in stable earth, whose head
Floats on the tossing waves.
Wordsworth's is the more familiar picture. This parallel
passage has been noticed by Mr. Wace.
Line 243.
But I began
To thrid the musky-circled mazes, wind
And double in and out the boles.
Musky-circled mazes, garden walks with fragrant borders.
Musky is used by Milton in the sense of fragrant in Comus-
And west winds with musky wing,
About the cedarn alleys fling
Nard and Cassia's balmy smells.
Bole, the stem of a tree; a word much used by Tennyson,
but not found in Shakespeare, Milton, or Chaucer. It is
frequently heard in the northern and central districts of
England, sometimes spelt boll, as thorn-boll, but usually pro-
nounced bool.
Line 255.
Above her drooped a lamp,
And made the single jewel on her brow
Burn like the mystic fire on a masthead,
Prophet of storm.
When the atmosphere is in a state of electrical tension,
brush-shaped or star-like flames are seen on the masts of
ships, or on pointed objects on land. Mariners call them
St. Elmo's fires. The real name of the saint was Erasmus
of Formia. He is venerated in Southern Italy under the
NOTES.
93
corrupted name of St. Elmo. Sailors invoke his aid in time of
storm, and the appearance of St. Elmo's fires is thought to
be of good omen. The Greeks and Romans ascribed these
appearances to Castor and Pollox. So Macaulay, Battle of
Lake Regillus--
Safe comes the ship to haven,
Through billows and through gales,
If once the Great Twin Brethren
Sit shining on the sails.
Line 260. Huge women blowzed with health, and
wind, and rain.
Blowsed, swarthy. Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, iv. 2-
Sweet blouse, you are a beauteous blossom sure.
Said of a swarthy child-the son of the Moor Aaron and
the Queen of the Goths. In the Kentish dialect a great
blowze means a red-faced wench.
Line 420. Sphered up with Cassiopeia, or the en-
throned
Persephone in Hades.
Cassiopeia, queen of Ethiopia, now one of the chief con-
stellations in the northern sky. Persephone or Proserpine,
the daughter of Ceres, and queen of Hades.
Line 424.
Not in this frequence can I lend full
tongue.
Frequence is the older and original meaning of throng, as
in Milton, Par. Reg. i. 128-
Who in full frequence bright,
Of angels, thus to Gabriel smiling spake.
94
NOTES.
Line 427.
That many a famous man and woman,
town,
And landskip, have I heard of.
This is the old and correct spelling. The word, says Skeat,
is undoubtedly derived from the Dutch painters, and answers
nearly to the word background. It is a Dutch word, land-
schap, and means a province or extent of land. Schap
answers to the Anglo-Saxon ship in friendship, lordship.
Sch is harder in Dutch than in English, hence the sk in
landskip. Milton usually spells the word thus, as in Par.
Lost, v. 142-
Line 475.
Discovering in wild landskip all the East.
Fixt like a beacon tower above the
waves
Of tempest, when the crimson rolling
eye
Glares ruin, and the wild birds on the
light
Dash themselves dead.
The same simile occurs in Enoch Arden—
Allured him as the beacon-blaze allures
The bird of passage, till he madly strikes
Against it, and beats out his weary life.
The description in the first passage is far more vivid.
lofty tower, the tempest, and the red revolving light intensify
the picture. A parallel passage occurs in Longfellow-The
Lighthouse-
The
The sea-bird wheeling round it, with the din
Of wings and win ls and solitary cries,
NOTES.
95
Blinded and maddened by the light within,
Dashes himself against the glare and dies.
But Longfellow's poem was published in 1849, two years
after The Princess.
INTERLUDE BETWEEN CANTOS IV. AND V.
Thy voice is heard thro' rolling drums.
Another version of this song is given in a volume of selec-
tions made by Tennyson, although not published in his
collected works.
Lady, let the rolling drums.
Beat to battle where thy warrior stands
Now thy face across his fancy comes,
And gives the battle to his hands.
Lady, let the trumpets blow,
Clasp thy little babes about thy knee:
Now their warrior father meets the foe,
:
And strikes him dead for thine and thee.
The version finally adopted is by far the better of the
two.
CANTO V.
Line 2. We stumbled on a stationary voice.
The voice of one stationed at a post-a sentinel. In
French, soldats stationnaires are guards detached singly ;
from the post-classical stationarii milites. This use of the
word is a Latinism.
96
NOTES.
Line 26.
Mawkin.
Or a draggled maukin thou
That tends her bristled grunters in the
sludge.
Used in the country parts of England to mean
a cloth tied to the end of a pole for sweeping out the bottom
of an oven,
and thence applied to any slovenly woman.
Used also in this sense in The Last Tournament-
For when had Lancelot uttered aught so gross
Ev'n to the swineherd's malkin in the mast?
Mawkin and malkin would appear to be different forms of
the same word, as Shakespeare— Coriolanus, ii. 1–
The kitchen malkin pins
Her richest lockram 'bout her reechy neck.
It is, however, asserted by some that malkin is a diminutive
of Mary, like Molly, and means a wench—a servant-girl.
Line 39. Away we stole, and transient in a trice.
A Latinism, transient is used as a present participle, signi-
fying passing from one condition to another.
Line 93.
Ill in the sense of bad, as used by Shakespeare and re-
tained in a few common expressions, as ill luck, ill health.
Ill mother that I was to leave her there.
Line 193.
My mother looks as whole as some
serene
Creation.
The word whole is used throughout the poem, and gene-
rally by Tennyson in the sense of complete and entire.
NOTES.
97.
Line 250.
Like those three stars of the airy
Giant's zone,
That glitter burnished by the frosty
dark.
The three stars in the Belt of Orion. In the winter months
this constellation with its many brilliant stars, and Sirius,
the brightest of the fixed stars, are the chief ornaments of
the southern heavens at night.
Line 263. And as the fiery Sirius alters hue,
And bickers into red and emerald, shone
Their morions, washed with morning,
as they came.
Fiery Sirius--the dog-star. Sirius ardor ille.-Virgil,
Eneid, x. 273. Fervidus ille Canis.-Aratus in Cicero, Nat.
Deorum, 11-44. It is described as a red star by Ptolemy and
Seneca. Aratus calls it many-coloured. Lockyer, Elem.
Lessons, p. 24, says it is green, but in his work entitled Star-
gazing, p. 351, he says it is white. When highest in the
heavens it unquestionably appears white, but its altitude is
never very great, and when low down on the horizon sailors
notice the change of colour referred to by the poet, and
ascribe it correctly to atmospheric influences. Sirius has
always been remarkable for scintillation, due probably to its
great brightness. Sailors in ancient times observed all such
things very closely, and Tennyson is following Homer, as
will appear by some remarks on this passage in Proctor's
Myths and Marvels of Astronomy, p. 166:–
""
Every bright star when close to the horizon shows these
colours, and so much the more distinctly as the star is the
brighter. Sirius, which surpasses the brightest stars of the
northern hemisphere full four times in lustre, shows these
changes of colour so conspicuously that they were regarded
G
98
NOTES.
as specially characteristic of this star, insomuch that Homer
speaks of Sirius (not by name, but as the 'Star of Autumn')
shining most beautifully 'when laved of ocean's wave '—that
is, when close to the horizon."
The expression "laved of ocean's wave
laved of ocean's wave" explains the
"washed with morning" of our poet. The glitter of the
early morning sun on the bright helmets of the brothers,
and the glance of light upon their armour as they rode, are
vividly realised in this beautiful simile.
The passage of Homer referred to is Iliad, v. 5, and is
thus rendered by Merivale-
Flashed from his helm and buckler a bright incessant
gleam,
Like summer's star, that burns afar, new bathed in
ocean's stream.
And by Lord Derby -
Forth from his helm and shield a fiery light
There flashed, like autumn's star, that brightest shines
When newly risen from his ocean bath.
The rendering summer star is beyond question the more
correct. It is the star which is in the ascendant at the time
of ripening, that is, during the dog-days. The autumn is the
time of harvesting the corn which has been ripened.
Line 294.
Her that talked down the fifty wisest
men;
She was a princess too.
St. Catherine of Alexandria, the Catherine usually painted
with a wheel, or with a book, or disputing with philosophers.
The patron saint of philosophy, a legendary saint, the
daughter of King Costis, who was the son of Constantius
Chlorus, the father of Constantine by a first marriage.
NOTES.
99
Costis married Sabinella, Queen of Egypt, and on his death
Catherine became Queen. She devoted herself to learning,
and would not marry, but was espoused in a vision to Jesus
Christ. Maxentius during his persecution sent fifty of the
wisest philosophers to convert her, but she converted them
out of the Law and Prophets, Plato, Aristotle, and the
Sibylline books. Unable to kill her with the wheel, Max-
entius cut off her head, and the angels carried her body to
heaven. The French say she is the patron saint of old
maids, because it requires so much philosophy to remain an
old maid.
Line 377. Of lands in which at the altar the poor
bride
Gives her harsh groom for bridal-gift a
Scourge ;
Of living hearts that crack within the
fire
Where smoulder their dead despots.
Allusion is made in the first two lines to Russian customs in
the seventeenth century. One was that the bride, on her
wedding day, should present her husband, in token of submis-
sion, with a whip made by her own hands. Another was, that
on arriving at the nuptial chamber the bridegroom ordered the
bride to pull off his boots. In one was a whip, in the other
a trinket. If she pulled off the one with the whip first the
groom gave her a slight blow. It is worthy of note, that
according to Bracton a wife is sub virga, under the rod, and
Blackstone says that moderate correction with a stick is
lawful.
The last two lines refer to the Hindoo Suttee, now abol-
ished, in conforinity with which widows were burned upon
the funeral pyres of their husbands.
Uor M
100
NOTES.
3
Line 445.
When the man wants weight, the wo-
man takes it up,
And topples down the scales.
The hard old king has stated a fact known to all observers
of the genus homo; but he has also uttered a scientific
truth, which, according to an eminent scientific lady, Dr. An-
toinette Brown Blackwell, is applicable to all the animal
kingdom. She says (Sexes throughout Nature, p. 85):-
(6
Conversely, among a few species of birds in several
orders, the males take upon themselves the duties of incuba-
tion and the feeding of the young, and, as it should be upon
our hypothesis, the sexes in these cases effect a complete ex-
change of many characters. In an Australian species of
the Turnix, the females are nearly twice as large as the
males. In an Indian species the male wants the black on
the throat and neck, and the whole tone of the plumage is
lighter and less pronounced than that of the female. The
females are more vociferous, more pugnacious, and it is they,
and not the males, who are kept like game-cocks for fighting.
After laying their eggs, the females associate in flocks and
leave the males to sit on them." In the case of these birds.
it is the females who go to the club.
The learned lady goes on translating the old king's senti-
ments into evolutionary language thus (p. 96) :—
Whenever brilliantly-coloured male birds have acquired
something of maternal habits, tastes and impulses, conversely,
the females seem always to have acquired some counter-
balancing weight of male character." (How precise our poet
was his very words!) 'They are large in relative size, are
brilliantly coloured, are active and quarrelsome, or are a
little of all these together. The large majority of birds
illustrate this law."
Decidedly an unpleasant prospect this, seeing that in a
ball-room the fact is evident that already the male portion
of our species have lost the gay attire they used to wear in
former centuries. The soberly-dressed hum-drum business
MOU
NOTES.
IOI
man, furrowed with care of shop and stocks, is outshone
everywhere by his partner of the other sex. In truth males
of the human species are tending to follow the sad-coloured
males of the cassowaries who hatch the eggs their gadding
spouses lay. Mrs. Blackwell seems to be right, but then the
dreadful result of the law! "The females are active, quarrel-
some, and pugnacious." This reconciles one to the "ap-
proaching end of the age."
Line 503.
He rode the mellay, lord of the ringing
lists.
Mellay for the more usual melée, from the verb to mell,
i.e., to meddle, to mix, used by Spenser. The confused crowd
of combatants after the first charge at a tournament.
CANTO VI.
The opening song,
Home they brought her warrior dead,
is probably a later version or adaptation of a song first
published in a volume of selections issued in 1865, and
which is not found in most of the editions of Tennyson's
collected works.
Home they brought him slain with spears.
They brought him home at even-fall;
All alone she sits and hears
Echoes in his empty hall,
Sounding on the morrow.
The sun peeped in from open field,
The boy began to leap and prance,
Rode upon his father's lance,
Beat upon his father's shield,
"Oh hush, my joy, my sorrow."
102
NOTES.
This song may have been suggested by a passage in Scott
-Lay of the Last Minstrel, canto i.—
But o'er her warrior's bloody bier
The Ladye dropped nor flower nor tear!
Vengeance deep-brooding o'er the slain
Had locked the source of softer woe,
And burning pride and high disdain
Forbade the rising tear to flow;
Until, amid his sorrowing clan,
Her son lisped from the nurse's knee-
"And if I live to be a man,
My father's death revenged shall be."
Then fast the mother's tears did seek
To dew the infant's kindling cheek.
The result is the same, but the motive ascribed by Tenny-
son is more natural and womanly. This passage is an in-
stance of unconscious imitation.
Line 15.
But high upon the palace Ida stood
With Psyche's babe in arm.
The same expression is used in The Palace of Art—
Or the maid-mother by a crucifix,
In tracts of pasture sunny warm,
Beneath branch-work of costly sardonyx
Sat smiling babe in arm.
The reviewers of Tennyson's earlier poems ridiculed this
expression unmercifully, comparing it with the "lance in
rest" of the romances of chivalry. Some of their criticisms
the poet seems to have accepted as just, for he modified the
passages complained of, but this phrase he not only retained
but has repeated.
Line 16. Like that great dame of Lapidoth she
sang.
NOTES.
103
Judges iv. 4: Deborah the prophetess who judged Israel,
and who delivered the chosen people from the army of
Sisera.
Line 65. And over them the tremulous isles of light
slided.
Spots of sunlight through overarching trees-tremulous by
the movement of the leaves. See Preface, xiv.
Line 122.
And reach its fatling innocent arms
And lazy lingering fingers.
Fatling, a diminutive of fat, as suckling of suck. The
word is rare as an adjective. Shakespeare uses the older
form of the verb to fat. It is also met with in Luke xv. 23,
the fatted calf. To fatten is a later form.
Line 126.
Ceased all on tremble; piteous was the
cry.
An early English form. The a in the words alive, afoot,
asleep, is a contraction of the Anglo-Saxon on, as on line, on
foot. In Chaucer's Dream we find on sleep—
Not all wakyng, we fall on sleepe;
and in Acts xiii. 36 is another instance-"For David, after
he had served his own generation by the will of God, fell on
sleep."
Line 185.
When I felt
Thy helpless warmth about my barren breast
In the dead prime.
The hour of prime is at sunrise. If infants have any
regular hour of waking it is with the first dawn; but pro-
bably the word here means any hour after midnight.
104
NOTES.
Line 194.
With an eye that swum in thanks.
Shakespeare writes swam and even has swam, but Milton
always swum. Par. Lost, ii. 753-
In darkness.
Dim thine eyes and dizzy swum
And Par. Lost, xi. 743-
The floating vessel swum
Uplifted, and secure with beaked prow
Rode tilting o'er the waves.
Line 206.
The woman is so hard
Upon the woman.
This unamiable trait results from woman's mission as the
conservator of society. In this respect, woman's character
is very narrow, but she feels instinctively that she cannot
afford to be lax in offences against social laws. Psyche's
weakness had in fact broken up Ida's university, and sins
against the family tend to break up society.
Line 286.
Yourself and yours shall have
Free adit.
Access. A rare use of the word. As a mining term it
is common.
CANTO VII.
Opening Song. I strove against the stream, and all
in vain.
See Shakespeare, l'enus and Adonis, for a similar line-
And all in vain you strive against the stream.
NOTES.
105
There is a song by Thomas Carew, consisting of four
stanzas, and commencing with "Ask me no more." That
is, however, the only point in common with this poem, as
may be seen from the first stanza
Ask me no more where June bestows,
When June is past, the fading rose ;
Nor in your beauties, orient deep,
These flowers, as in their causes, sleep.
Line 16.
But oft
Clomb to the roofs, and gazed alone for
hours.
The old form of the past of climb: Chaucer, House of
Fame-
Line 19.
But I clomb with all payne.
up
Void was her use.
Deprived of her customary occupation. A similar expres-
sion occurs in Aylmer's Field :-
So that the gentle creature, shut from all
Her charitable use, and face to face
With twenty months of silence, slowly lost,
Nor greatly cared to lose her hold on life.
Line 108.
The women up in wild revolt, and
stormed
At the Oppian law.
This was a sumptuary law passed during the time of the
direst distress of Rome, when Hannibal was almost at the
gates. It enacted that no woman should wear a gay-coloured
dress, or have more than a half an ounce of gold ornaments,
and that none should approach within a mile of any city or
106
NOTES.
town in a car drawn by horses. The war being concluded,
and the emergency over, the women demanded the repeal of
the law. They gained one consul, but Cato, the other one,
resisted. The women rose, thronged the streets and forum,
and harassed the magistrates until the law was repealed.
Line 112. Hortensia spoke against the tax.
it;
A heavy tax imposed on Roman matrons by the second
triumvirate. No man was found bold enough to oppose it ;
but Hortensia, daughter of Hortensius, the celebrated orator,
spoke so eloquently against it, that her oration was preserved
to receive the praise of Quintilian. She was successful.
Line 147.
And left her woman, lovelier in her
mood,
Than in her mould that other, when
she came
From barren deeps to conquer all with
love.
Left her more attractive in the restored sweetness of her
womanly moral nature than was Aphrodite rising from the
sea in all the splendour of her merely physical perfection.
Line 165. Now
Now droops the milk-white peacock
like a ghost.
Darwin, in his Animals and Plants under Domestication,
vol. i. p. 305, speaks of a white variety of peacock. This
is not a sport, but a permanent variety white from the shell.
The peacock always roosts high at night, and preferably in
covert places. The drooping tail of a white peacock would
look very uncanny on a dark night. The simile is not a
happy one, however.

NOTES.
107
Line 188.
Or fox-like in the vine.
"Take me the
A reminiscence of the Song of Solomon.
foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines." Or of Theocritus
more probably, Idyll I., "Two foxes, one is roaming up
and down the rows spoiling the ripe grapes."
Line 189.
Walk
With death and morning on the silver
horns.
This small sweet Idyll commencing "Come down, O
maid," is one of the most finished passages of the poem.
"It transfers," says Symonds (Greek Poets, vol. ii.), "with
perfect taste, the Greek Idyllic feeling to Swiss scenery; it
is a fine instance of new wine being successfully poured into
old bottles, for nothing could be fresher, and not even the
Thalysia is sweeter." The shepherd is calling his love from
the chill and barren, though lofty and beautiful heights,
down into the fruitful and smiling valleys of practical life,
where she may find happiness by imparting it, and by
sharing its duties. The meaning of this line is not clear;
but it seems to be a description of the appearance of those
lofty Alpine peaks (Matter-horn-Aar-horn-Forister-horn
-Alatsch-horn), called in Switzerland "horns" in the early
morning before the sun lights them with a ruddy glow. In
the early light they have a chill ashen hue as of deathly
pallor. The line may be paraphrased into "On the high
Alpine summits when they look chill in the early morning."
Morning, as portrayed by the poets, is usually rosy or ruddy;
but the very earliest dawns of fine mornings are of cool grey
tints. Shakespeare and Milton so describe them. As in
Il Penseroso-
Or in Hamlet, i. I—
Civil suited morn.
Morn in russet mantle clad.
108
NOTES.
And in Romeo and Juliet, iii. 5—
I'll say yon grey is not the morning's eye.
And in Julius Cæsar, ii. 1—
Yon grey lines
That fret the clouds are messengers of day.
These cold tints on the snowy Alpine peaks when, as in
E'none-
Far up, the solitary morning smote
The streaks of virgin snow;
have suggested the words silver horns and death in an early
morning landscape.
Line 249. Stays all the fair young planet in her
hands.
It is difficult to discover the astronomical allusion here, or
what the precise appropriateness of the word planet may be
when used to signify the young generation of mankind.
Evidently the poet means to say that the influence of the
mothers of any given generation of men shape the course of
the world during that generation.
Line 256. Will leave her space to burgeon out of
all
Within her.
From the French bourgeonner, to put forth buds or young
shoots. Found in Middle English, as borjoune, a bud.
NOTES.
109
Line 76.
THE EPILOGUE.
Fill me with a faith ;
This fine old world of ours is but a child
Yet in the go-cart.
This strong faith runs through all of Tennyson's poems,
causing them to be true "medicines for the mind." It is
met in the earlier poems, especially in the Golden Year,
and in the conclusion of Locksley Hall, in the poems of
middle age as here, and in No. 125 of In Memoriam, and in
the very last published volume-as Stanza iii. of the Chil-
dren's Hospital, and the Sonnet to Victor Hugo. This health-
ful hope pervading all his writings is one of the secrets of the
poet's popularity and influence.
CHANGES AND OMISSIONS.
It has been stated in the preliminary essay that great
changes were made in the poem of The Princess in the
way of additions; and, of these, the most important were
noticed. There are, however, some omissions which are
worthy of note. In the following passages the lines in italics
have been entirely omitted from the final edition.
Canto V., Line 116.
You have spoilt the child; she laughs at you and man;
She shall not legislate for Nature, king.
Line 135.
More soluble is the knot,
Like almost all the rest if men were wise.
IIO
NOTES.
A
Line 138.
Your cities into shards with catapults
And dusted down your domes with mangonel's.
Line 151.
Tut, you know them not, the girls,
They prize hard knocks and to be won by force.
Line 418.
With claim on claim, from right to right, till she
The woman-phantom, she that seemed no more
Than the man's shadow in a glass.
Canto VI., Line 316.
Rang ruin, answered full of grief and scorn.
What! in our time of glory when the cause
Now stands up, first, a trophied pillar—now
So clipt, so stinted in our triumph-barred
Ev'n from our free heart-thanks, and every way
Thwarted and rext, and lastly catechised
By our own creature! one that made our laws !
Our great she-Solon! her that built the nest
To hatch the cuckoo ! whom we called our friend!
But we will crush the lie that glances at us
As cloaking in the larger charities
Some baby predilection; all amazed !
We must amaze this legislator more.
Fling our doors wide!
Line 325.
But shall not. Pass and mingle with your likes
Go, help the half-brained dwarf Society,
To find low motives unto noble deeds,
To fix all doubt upon the darker side;
NOTES.
III
Go, fitter there for narrowest neighbourhoods,
Old talker, haunt where gossip breeds and seethes.
And festers in provincial sloth! and you,
That think we sought to practise on a life
Risk'd for our own and trusted to our hands,
What say you, Sir! you hear us; deem ye not
'Tis all too like that even now we scheme,
In one broad death confounding friend and foe,
To drug them all? revolve it : you are man,
And therefore no doubt wise; but after this
We brook no further insult, but are gone.
These two last omissions are the only important ones.
They occur in the Princess Ida's speech before she opens her
college as an hospital for the wounded knights. The char-
acter of Ida gains by the omission, for it did not become her
to enter into a scolding match with such a mistress of tongue-
fence as Lady Blanche.
The Epilogue has been much altered. All the matter re-
lating to the French Revolution was inserted. The Poet's
mind was no doubt full of the turmoil in France which
broke out shortly after the publication of the first edition,
but the poem is not improved as a work of art by the inser-
tion of what must be called extraneous matter. Some lines
omitted at the very beginning throw a little light on the
plan of the poem.
Here closed our compound story, which at first
Had only meant to banter little maids
With mock heroics and with parody:
But slipt in some strange way, crost with burlesque,
From mock to earnest, even into tones
Of tragic and with less and less of jest
To such a serious end.
The Epilogue is, however, in reality re-written and ex,
panded so much as to be practically new work. The Pro-
logue, also, is largely expanded. The Interlude is entirely
112
NOTES.
new,
but omissions seldom occur in the poem; the changes
made are substitutions of words, insertions of lines, or of
passages to bring out the meaning, and innumerable minute
touches to impart finish to the style and rhythm to the
verse.
THE VERSIFICATION OF "THE PRINCESS."
Professor Hadley's essay upon this poem contains some
remarks upon its versification which are not only excellent
of themselves, but valuable as stimulating to further study
in the same direction. He says:-
"Mr. Tennyson has evidently taken extraordinary pains
with the construction of his verse. He seems to have felt
that a single measure running through a long poemn must of
necessity become monotonous and wearisome, unless great
care can be taken to diversify its rhythm.
•
Certain
it is that in affluence of means and in variety of effects, the
blank verse of The Princess surpasses all its author's
previous attempts in the same kind of measure; nor would
it be easy to find its equal in these respects since the time
of Milton. To the versification of the Paradise Lost, the
greatest exemplar of versification in the English language,
Mr. Tennyson, it is clear, has given no little attention ;
and from this poem, and from the older English poetry in
general, he has adopted many rhythmical and metrical expe-
dients-liberties or licenses, as they are sometimes called-
which the too finical taste of later times, and the undue
passion for uniformity, have generally discarded. Among
these we mention the so-called elision-more truly, the
blending of a final vowel with the vowel initial of a following
word into a single syllable, or at least what passes for such
in the rhythm. Thus we have-
That made the old warrior from his ivied nook
Glow like a sunbeain.
NOTES.
113
The violet varies from the lily as far
As oak from elm.
O Swallow, Swallow, if I could follow and light
Upon her lattice.
So, too, where the second word begins with a weak conso-
nant easily elided in pronunciation :-
Fly to her, and pipe and woo her, and make her mine.
You must not slay him; he risked his life for ours.
The same fusion occurs often in a single word, and not
only in such forms as lovelier, sapience, &c., where all our
poets have employed it, but in many instances where the
last two centuries have renounced its use. Thus in the
following lines the words seeing, crying, highest, go for
monosyllables in the rhythin
And Cyril seeing it, pushed against the prince.
Some crying there was an army in the land.
And highest among the statues, statue-like.
The combinations in the, of the, &c., are often treated as
filling but one rhythmical place—
Better have died, and spilt our bones in the flood.
Poets, whose thoughts enrich the blood of the world.
When the man wants weight, the woman takes it up.
In
In many instances a short syllable is neglected—that is,
does not count as forming by itself a place in the metre.
the following quotation, the words enemy, general, soluble,
are treated as dissyllables-
Now she lightens scorn
At the enemy of her plan, but then would hate
The general foe. More soluble is the knot.
Especially does this occur when a short final syllable is
followed by a word beginning with a vowel-
H
114
NOTES.
A palace in our own land, where you shall reign.
A tent of satin elaborately wrought.
We could distinguish other cases, in which a reader
unfamiliar with the earlier English rhythms might be
offended by supernumerary syllables; but to enter upon long
details would perhaps be more tedious than profitable. In
none of these instances, if we may judge of Mr. Tennyson's
pronunciation from his way of writing, would he omit a
syllable in reading; nor does the rhythm of the verse (let
metrical doctors, like Mr. Guest, say what they please about
it) require of us the use of any such expedient."
Many passages also occur of irregular rhythm in which, as
in the Paradise Lost, the sound is suited to the sense to a
degree not excelled by Milton or Virgil. Such are-
Palpitated, her hand shook, and we heard
In the dead hush the papers that she held
Rustle;
And in the blast and bray of the long horn
And serpent-throated bugle, undulated
The banner;
The dark, when clocks
Throbbed thunder thro' the palace floors.
Brake with a blast of trumpets from the gate.
While the great organ almost burst his pipes,
Groaning for power, and rolling thro' the courts
A long melodious thunder to the sound
Of solemn psalms, and silver litanies.
And up we came to where the river sloped
To plunge in cataract, shattering on black blocks
A breadth of thunder. O'er it shook the woods,
And danced the colour.
NOTES.
115
And the flood drew, yet I caught her, then
Oaring one arm, and bearing in my left
The weight of all the hopes of half the world,
Strove to buffet to land in vain.
Myriads of rivulets hurrying through the lawn,
The moan of doves in immemorial elms,
And murmuring of innumerable bees.
6
Who,' asks Kingsley, after three such lines, will talk
of English as a harsh and clumsy language, and seek in the
effeminate and monotonous Italian for expressive melody of
sound? Who cannot hear in them the rapid rippling of the
water, the stately calmness of the wood-dove's note, and in
the repetition of short syllables and soft liquids in the last
line, the
murmuring of innumerable bees ?
>
It will be observed at once, on reading these and similar
passages aloud, that much of their power depends upon
alliteration. This, which in the old Saxon poetry stood for
modern rhyme, adds a charming variety to the versification
of The Princess. It abounds throughout all Tennyson's
writings, for his mind is steeped in the older literature of
England, but especially in this poem, e.g.-
With prudes for proctors, dowagers for deans,
And sweet girl-graduates in their golden hair.
And died
Of fright in far apartments.
Sweet thoughts would swarm, as bees about their queen.
The lark
Shot and shrilled in flickering gyres.
up
It is useless to multiply instances. They pervade the
whole poem."
116
NOTES.
TENNYSON AS A WORD-PAINTER.
Philip Hamerton, in his Thoughts about Art, has written
well upon the advantages and limitations of word-painting
compared with colour-painting. He places the best modern
word-painters in verse in the following order of excellence :
Tennyson, Shelley, Byron, Scott, Wordsworth, and Keats.
Tennyson he places first, and he quotes Ruskin as saying
that no description of his is worth four lines of Tennyson.
He shows that word description is infinitely limited in its
power over form and colour as compared with the pictorial
art, and he thinks that Tennyson understands these limits
better than any other modern poet, and therefore never
becomes tedious by straining after fidelities unattainable by
verbal art. That is no doubt true, but the poet is compen-
sated for these limitations by the superior power he possesses
of expressing sound and motion. Many passages occur in
The Princess, in which both kinds of descriptive power are
shown; for instance-
All about his motion clung
The shadow of his sister, as the beam
Of the east, that play'd upon them, made them glance
Like those three stars of the airy giant's zone,
That glitter burnished by the frosty dark;
And as the fiery Sirius alters hue,
And bickers into red and emerald, shone
Their morions, washed with morning as they came.
Fixt like a beacon-tower above the waves
Of tempest, when the crimson rolling eye
Glares ruin, and the wild birds on the light
Dash themselves dead.
And spill
Their thousand wreaths of dangling water smoke,
That like a broken purpose waste in air.
NOTES.
117
And then to bed, where half in doze I seemed
To float about a glimmering night, and watch
A full sea glazed with muffled moonlight, swell
On some dark shore just seen that it was rich.
Reels as the golden autumn woodland reels
Athwart the smoke of burning leaves.
Morn in the white wake of the morning star
Came furrowing all the Orient into gold.
Compare the sunset—
Till the Sun
Grew broader toward his death, and fell, and all
The rosy heights came out above the lawns,
And she, as one that climbs a peak to gaze
O'er land and main, and sees a great black cloud
Drag inward from the deeps, a wall of night,
Blot out the slope of sea from verge to shore,
And suck the blinding splendour from the sand,
And quenching lake by lake, and tarn by tarn,
Expunge the world!
The poem contains many such pictorial descriptions, which,
if excelled by painting in preciseness of colour, are full of
movement unattainable upon canvas. It is impossible to
resist giving a few more descriptive passages.
Sees the midsummer midnight, Norway sun
Set into sunrise.
Woman's love unworthily bestowed is vividly described-
Their sinless faith
A maiden moon that sparkles on a sty,
Glorifying clown and satyr.
The three friends early on the first morning in the
college-
118
NOTES.
High
Above the empurpled champaign, drank the gale
That, blown about the foliage underneath,
And sated with the innumerable rose,
Beat balm upon our eyelids.
THE POET AS INTERPRETER OF THE AGE.
The following extract from F. W. Robertson is perhaps
the most justly appreciative criticism of Tennyson which
has ever appeared. It is from a lecture upon English poetry,
delivered to the working-men of Brighton in 1852:-
"I ranked Tennyson in the first order, because with great
mastery over his material-words, great plastic power of
versification and a rare gift of harmony, he has also vision
or insight; and because feeling intensely the great questions
of the day, not as a mere man of letters, but as a man, he is
to some extent the interpreter of his age, not only in its
mysticism, which I tried to show you is the necessary reac-
tion from the rigid formulas of science and the earthliness
of an age of work, into the vagueness which belongs to in-
finitude, but also in his poetic and almost prophetic solution
of some of its great questions.
"Thus in his Princess, which he calls a 'medley,' the
former half of which is sportive, and the plot almost too
fantastic and impossible for criticism, while the latter portion
seems too serious for a story so light and flimsy, he has with
exquisite taste disposed of the question which has its bur-
lesque and comic as well as its tragic side, of woman's present
place and future destinies. And if any one wishes to see
this subject treated with a masterly and delicate hand, in
protest alike against the theories which would make her as
the man, which she could only be by becoming masculine,
not manly, and those which would have her to remain the
toy, or the slave, or the slight thing of sentimental and
frivolous accomplishment which education has hitherto aimed
NOTES.
119
at making her, I would recommend him to study the few
last pages of The Princess, where the poet brings the
question back, as a poet should, to nature; develops the
ideal out of the actual woman, and reads out of what she is,
on the one hand, what her Creator intended her to be, and
on the other, what she never can or ought to be."-Rev. F.
W. Robertson, Lectures and Addresses.
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF "THE PRINCESS."
It seems appropriate to close this study with a list of the
various editions of the poem, and the present prices in the
London booksellers' shops.
First Edition, pp. 164; published 1847.
Priced in original cloth binding, £1, 15s.
Second Edition, pp. 164; published 1848.
The dedication to Henry Lushington was added to this
edition, and a few verbal changes made. Priced
cloth, uncut, 163.
Third Edition, pp. 177; published 1850.
This edition was thoroughly revised. Large additions
were made in the body of the poem. The songs and the
interlude were added, and the poet's thought fully expressed.
Priced in original cloth, 7s. 6d.
Fourth Edition, pp. 182; published 1851.
In this, all the passages about the weird seizures of the
Prince were inserted. The fourth song was altered
to what it now is. The second stanza of the first
song was omitted, but restored in subsequent editions.
Priced 78. 6d.
120
NOTES.
Fifth Edition, pp. 183; published 1853.
In this, the passage in the Prologue commencing "O
miracle of woman," and ending-" So sang the
gallant glorious chronicle," was first inserted.
this edition the text was settled as we now have it.
In
In America The Princess was published by Ticknor &
Fields, of Boston, in 1848. It was reprinted from the first
edition of 1847. In 1855 the same publishers issued a
collected edition of Tennyson's works, containing this poem
reprinted from the fifth edition. At the present time the
first edition can be bought in Boston for 3s. sterling.
THE END.
I
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