"No one," says Mrs Sellar, "could have been more easy, simple, and delightful," and indeed it is no marvel that in her society and that of her husband, the Greek professor, and her cousin, Miss Cross, and in such scenes, "he blossomed out in the most genial manner, making us all feel as if he were an old friend."In November Tennyson took a house at Farringford, "as it was beautiful and far from the haunts of men." There he settled to a country existence in the society of his wife, his two children (the second, Lionel, being in 1854 the baby), and there he composed Maud, while the sound of the guns, in practice for the war of the Crimea, boomed from the coast. In May Tennyson saw the artists, of schools oddly various, who illustrated his poems. Millais, Rossetti, and Holman Hunt gave the tone to the art, but Mr Horsley, Creswick, and Mulgrave were also engaged. While Maud was being composed Tennyson wrote The Charge of the Light Brigade; a famous poem, not in a manner in which he was born to excel--at least in my poor opinion. "Some one HAD blundered," and that line was the first fashioned and the keynote of the poem; but, after all, "blundered" is not an exquisite rhyme to "hundred." The poem, in any case, was most welcome to our army in the Crimea, and is a spirited piece for recitation.
In January 1855 Maud was finished; in April the poet copied it out for the press, and refreshed himself by reading a very different poem, The Lady of the Lake. The author, Sir Walter, had suffered, like the hero of Maud, by an unhappy love affair, which just faintly colours The Lady of the Lake by a single allusion, in the description of Fitz-James's dreams:-"Then,--from my couch may heavenly might Chase that worst phantom of the night! -Again returned the scenes of youth, Of confident undoubting truth;Again his soul he interchanged With friends whose hearts were long estranged.
They come, in dim procession led, The cold, the faithless, and the dead;As warm each hand, each brow as gay, As if they parted yesterday.
And doubt distracts him at the view -
Oh, were his senses false or true?
Dreamed he of death, or broken vow, Or is it all a vision now?"We learn from Lady Louisa Stuart, to whom Scott read these lines, that they referred to his lost love. I cite the passage because the extreme reticence of Scott, in his undying sorrow, is in contrast with what Tennyson, after reading The Lady of the Lake, was putting into the mouth of his complaining lover in Maud.
We have no reason to suppose that Tennyson himself had ever to bewail a faithless love. To be sure, the hero of Locksley Hall is in this attitude, but then Locksley Hall is not autobiographical. Less dramatic and impersonal in appearance are the stanzas -"Come not, when I am dead, To drop thy foolish tears upon my grave;"and "Child, if it were thine error or thy crime I care no longer, being all unblest."No biographer tells us whether this was a personal complaint or a mere set of verses on an imaginary occasion. In In Memoriam Tennyson speaks out concerning the loss of a friend. In Maud, as in Locksley Hall, he makes his hero reveal the agony caused by the loss of a mistress. There is no reason to suppose that the poet had ever any such mischance, but many readers have taken Locksley Hall and Maud for autobiographical revelations, like In Memoriam. They are, on the other hand, imaginative and dramatic. They illustrate the pangs of disappointed love of woman, pangs more complex and more rankling than those inflicted by death. In each case, however, the poet, who has sung so nobly the happiness of fortunate wedded loves, has chosen a hero with whom we do not readily sympathise--a Hamlet in miniature, "With a heart of furious fancies,"as in the old mad song. This choice, thanks to the popular misconception, did him some harm. As a "monodramatic Idyll," a romance in many rich lyric measures, Maud was at first excessively unpopular. "Tennyson's Maud is Tennyson's Maudlin," said a satirist, and "morbid," "mad," "rampant," and "rabid bloodthirstiness of soul,"were among the amenities of criticism. Tennyson hated war, but his hero, at least, hopes that national union in a national struggle will awake a nobler than the commercial spirit. Into the rights and wrongs of our quarrel with Russia we are not to go. Tennyson, rightly or wrongly, took the part of his country, and must "thole the feud" of those high-souled citizens who think their country always in the wrong--as perhaps it very frequently is. We are not to expect a tranquil absence of bias in the midst of military excitement, when very laudable sentiments are apt to misguide men in both directions.
In any case, political partisanship added to the enemies of the poem, which was applauded by Henry Taylor, Ruskin, George Brimley, and Jowett, while Mrs Browning sent consoling words from Italy. The poem remained a favourite with the author, who chose passages from it often, when persuaded to read aloud by friends; and modern criticism has not failed to applaud the splendour of the verse and the subtlety of the mad scenes, the passion of the love lyrics.
