Borrowed from the divine passage in Shelley's He is made one with Nature; there is heard He is a presence to be felt and known In darkness and in light, from herb and stone And touch with shade . . . (Adonais, xlii.). With tender gloom the roof (Epilogue): An exquisite expression adapted perhaps from Thom may be compared with a not less magnificent passage in the fragments of Cicero's De Republicâ : Nec erit alia lex Romæ, alia Athenis, alia nunc, alia posthac ; sed et omnes gentes, et omni tempore, una lex et sempiterna et immutabilis continebit; unusque erit quasi magister et imperator omnium-Deus (Fragments of De Republicâ, lib. iii.) (And there shall not be one law at Rome, another at Athens, one law now, another afterwards, but the same law everlasting and unchangeable will bind all nations at all times, and there will be one common Master and Ruler of all— God). 113 CHAPTER VIII GROUP VII.-MAUD AND now we come to Maud. In Dryden's Miscellanies there is a very remarkable experiment in broken rhythm, describing the meeting of two lovers in Bedlam. The verse is so modulated as to express, and express it does with exquisite skill, exalted emotion under various phases, surging now in climactic fury, now calmed and tempered, as images, terrible or placid, present themselves to minds rolling rudderless as it were on the waves of passion. It seems more than probable that this fragment suggested to Tennyson the more elaborate rhythmic scheme of Maud. And this is the more likely, as the rhythm and metric mechanism of the garden song in Maud is little more than an echo with certain minor variations of a stanza here employed. Compare with stanzas i., ii., iii., v., vi., vii., ix., the following stanza of Dryden's : Shall I marry the man Ĭ love? And shall I conclude my pains? I feel the blood leap in my veins, I Compare the whole fragment-it is entitled 'Of a Scholar and his Mistress, who, being crossed by their friends, fell mad for one another' (Dryden's Works, Globe Edit. p. 384). It need hardly be said that to institute any serious comparison between Dryden's fragment and Maud would be as absurd as to institute any serious comparison between Milton's Comus and George Peele's Old Wives' Tale. But it is assuredly worth noticing that in a rhythmic experiment of singular interest Tennyson has been anticipated by a brother poet in his own language. In Maud the reminiscences from other poets are very few indeed, fewer than in any of his longer poems. Do we move ourselves, or are moved by an unseen hand at a game That pushes us off from the board (Part I. iv. 5): These lines appear to have been suggested by Mr. Fitzgerald's version of the Rubaiyât of Omar, where men are described as Impotent pieces of the game He plays Upon this chequer-board of nights and days; Brought to understand A sad astrology, the boundless plan That makes you tyrants in your iron skies, &c. The sad grand note of Lucretius: (I. xviii. 4): Nam cum suspicimus magni cælestia mundi Illa quoque expergefactum caput erigere infit, (For when we gaze up at the celestial regions of the great universe, and ether firm fixed above the glittering stars, and turn our thoughts to the courses of the sun and moon, then into our hearts, bowed with other ills, that fear also begins to rear up its awakened head, namely that we may haply find the power of the Gods to be without limit, &c.). Ah Christ, that it were possible For one short hour to see The souls we loved, that they might tell us The aspiration of the Duchess in Webster :- But hold some two days' conference with the dead; I never shall know here (Duchess of Malfi, act iv. sc. 2). may have been suggested by Bacchylides, who enumerates among the signs of peace the cobwebs in the handles of the shields : ἐν δὲ σιδαροδέτοις πόρπαξιν αἰθαν (And in the iron-woven shield-handles are the looms of tawny spiders); or more likely by Theocritus, xvi. 96: ἀράχνια δ' εἰς ὅπλ' ἀράχναι λεπτὰ διαστήσαιντο (And over armour may spiders spin fine their webs). A comparison between the section (II. ii.) describing the shell, and the beautiful epigram in Callimachus (Epig. v.) describing the shell of the nautilus, is worth suggesting as an illustration of interesting points of similarity and difference between Alexandrian poetry and our own, between Callimachus and Tennyson. Both have in common a certain daintiness and grace of style and touch, and both affect sedulously the same artificial simplicity. Both appear to regard natural objects, and to regard them deliberately, as material out of which, if such an expression may be used, poetical capital may be made. But the modern poet has what the ancient has not, a penetrating sense of the mystery of this, as of every other natural phenomenon, and a power of suffusing the presentation of such phenomena with sentiment. It is, however, in their treatment of flowers that the difference, not simply between Callimachus and Tennyson, but between the Greek poets generally and poets of the Wordsworthian and Tennysonian schools, is most strikingly illustrated. Of a Greek poet it may, in a sense, be said, as it was said of Peter Bell, that A primrose by a river's brim A yellow primrose was to him, Even in the elaborate passages cited by Athenæus (xv. 30, 31) from the Cyprian Poems and the Georgics of Nicander, there is the same absence of fancy and sentiment as there is in Homer and Theocritus. When Wordsworth wrote To me the meanest flower that blows can give he enabled us to estimate the distance which in this respect separates the moderns from the Greeks. |