contended with, years of travel and hard fighting, Tristram, lying
wounded in Brittany, was tended by another, a youthful, innocent
Iseult, in whose face he seemed to see the look of that Iseult of
the past, that was, and yet could not be, his. Weary, and in his sad
despondency, Tristram wedded Iseult of Brittany, whose heart, in his
stately deep distress, he had moved to a sweet and tender affection.
The modern poem opens with the wedded knight come home again, after
other long years, and other wars, in which he had fought at King
Arthur’s side with the Roman emperor, and subdued the heathen Saxons on
the Rhine, lying once more sick and sad at heart, upon what ere long he
feels shall be his death-bed. Ere he die, he would see, once yet again,
her with whom in his youth he drank of that fatal cup:--
_Tristram._ Is she not come? the messenger was sure.
Prop me upon the pillows once again--
Raise me, my page: this cannot long endure.
Christ! what a night! how the sleet whips the pane!
What lights will those out to the northward be?
_The Page._ The lanterns of the fishing-boats at sea.
And so through the whole of Part I. of our poem lies the sick and weary
knight upon his bed, reviewing sadly, while sadly near him stands his
timid and loving younger Iseult, reviewing, half sleeping, half awake,
those old times, that hapless voyage, and all that thence ensued; and
still in all his thought recurring to the proud Cornish Queen, who, it
seems, will let him die unsolaced. He speaks again, now broad awake:--
Is my page here? Come, turn me to the fire.
Upon the window panes the moon shines bright;
The wind is down; but she’ll not come to-night.
Ah no,--she is asleep in Tyntagil----
My princess, art thou there? Sweet, ’tis too late.
To bed and sleep; my fever is gone by;
To-night my page shall keep me company.
Where do the children sleep? Kiss them for me.
Poor child, thou art almost as pale as I;
This comes of nursing long and watching late.
To bed--good night.
And so (our poet passing without notice from Tristram’s semidramatic
musings and talkings to his own not more coherent narrative)--
She left the gleam-lit fireplace,
She came to the bed-side;
She took his hands in hers; her tears
Down on her slender fingers rained.
She raised her eyes upon his face--
Not with a look of wounded pride--
A look as if the heart complained;
Her look was like a sad embrace;
The gaze of one who can divine
A grief, and sympathise.
Sweet flower, thy children’s eyes
Are not more innocent than thine.
Sleeping with her little ones, and, it may be, dreaming too, though
less happily than they, lies Iseult of Brittany. And now--
What voices are those on the clear night air?
What lights in the courts? what steps on the stair?
PART II.
_Tristram._ Raise the light, my page, that I may see her.
--Thou art come at last, then, haughty Queen!
Long I’ve waited, long have fought my fever,
Late thou comest, cruel thou hast been.
_Iseult._ Blame me not, poor sufferer, that I tarried.
I was bound; I could not break the band.
Chide not with the past, but feel the present;
I am here--we meet--I hold thy hand.
Yes, the Queen Iseult of Cornwall, Iseult that was of Ireland, of the
ship upon the dreamy seas long since, has crossed these stormy seas
to-night, is here, holds his hand. And so proceeds, through some six or
seven pages of Part II., the fine colloquy of the two sad, world-worn,
late-reunited lovers. When we open upon Part III.,
A year had flown, and in the chapel old
Lay Tristram and Queen Iseult dead and cold.
Beautiful, simple, old mediæval story! We have followed it, led on as
much by its own intrinsic charm as by the form and colouring--beautiful
too, but indistinct--which our modern poet has given it. He is obscure
at times, and hesitates and falters in it; the knights and dames,
we fear, of old North-France and Western Germany would have been
grievously put to it to make him out. Only upon a fourth re-reading,
and by the grace of a happy moment, did we satisfy our critical
conscience that, when the two lovers have sunk together in death, the
knight on his pillows, and Queen Iseult kneeling at his side, the
poet, after passing to the Cornish court where she was yesternight,
returns to address himself to a hunter with his dogs, worked in the
tapestry of the chamber here, whom he conceives to be pausing in the
pictured chase, and staring, with eyes of wonder, on the real scene of
the pale knight on the pillows and the kneeling lady fair. But
Cheer, cheer thy dogs into the brake,
Oh hunter! and without a fear
Thy golden-tasselled bugle blow,
And through the glade thy pastime take
For thou wilt rouse no sleepers here,
For these thou seest are unmoved;
Cold, cold as those who lived and loved
A thousand years ago.
Fortunately, indeed, with the commencement of Part III., the most
matter-of-fact Quarterly conscience may feel itself pretty well set at
ease by the unusually explicit statements that
A year had fled; and in the chapel old
Lay Tristram and Queen Iseult dead and cold.
The young surviving Iseult, one bright day
Had wandered forth; her children were at play
In a green circular hollow in the heath
Which borders the sea shore; a country path
Creeps over it from the tilled fields behind.
Yet anon, again and thicker now perhaps than ever, the mist of more
than poetic dubiousness closes over and around us. And as he sings
to us about the widowed lady Iseult, sitting upon the sea-banks
of Brittany, watching her bright-eyed children, talking with them
and telling them old Breton stories, while still, in all her talk
and her story, her own dreamy memories of the past, and perplexed
thought of the present, mournfully mingle, it is really all but
impossible to ascertain her, or rather his, real meanings. We listen,
indeed, not quite unpleased, to a sort of faint musical mumble,
conveying at times a kind of subdued half-sense, or intimating,
perhaps a three-quarters-implied question; is anything real?--is love
anything?--what is anything?--is there substance enough even in sorrow
to mark the lapse of time?--is not passion a diseased unrest?--did not
the fairy Vivian, when the wise Merlin forgot his craft to fall in love
with her, wave her wimple over her sleeping adorer?
Nine times she waved the fluttering wimple round,
And made a little plot of magic ground;
And in that daisied circle, as men say,
Is Merlin prisoner to the judgment-day,
But she herself whither she will can rove,
For she was passing weary of his love.
Why or wherefore, or with what purport, who will venture exactly to
say?--but such, however, was the tale which, while Tristram and his
first Iseult lay in their graves, the second Iseult, on the sea-banks
of Brittany, told her little ones.
And yet, dim and faint as is the sound of it, we still prefer this
dreamy patience, the soft submissive endurance of the Breton lady,
and the human passions and sorrows of the Knight and the Queen, to
the high, and shall we say, pseudo Greek inflation of the philosopher
musing above the crater, and the boy Callicles singing myths upon the
mountain.
Does the reader require morals and meanings to these stories?
What shall they be, then?--the deceitfulness of knowledge and the
illusiveness of the affections, the hardness and roughness and
contrariousness of the world, the difficulty of living at all, the
impossibility of doing anything--_voilà tout_? A charitable and patient
reader, we believe (such as is the present reviewer), will find in the
minor poems that accompany these pieces, intimations--what more can
reader or reviewer ask?--of some better and further thing than these;
some approximations to a kind of confidence; some incipiences of a
degree of hope; some roots, retaining some vitality, of conviction and
moral purpose:--
And though we wear out life, alas,
Distracted as a homeless wind,
In beating where we must not pass,
And seeking what we shall not find,
Yet shall we one day gain, life past,
Clear prospect o’er our being’s whole,
Shall see ourselves, and learn at last
Our true affinities of soul.
We shall not then deny a course
To every thought the mass ignore,
We shall not then call hardness force,
Nor lightness wisdom any more.
In the future, it seems, there is something for us; and for the present
also, which is more germane to our matter, we have discovered some
precepts about ‘hope, light, and _persistence_,’ which we intend to
make the most of. Meantime, it is one promising point in our author of
the initial, that his second is certainly on the whole an improvement
upon his first volume. There is less obvious study of effect; upon the
whole, a plainer and simpler and less factitious manner and method
of treatment. This, he may be sure, is the only safe course. Not by
turning and twisting his eyes, in the hope of seeing things as Homer,
Sophocles, Virgil, or Milton saw them; but by seeing them, by accepting
them as he sees them, and faithfully depicting accordingly, will he
attain the object he desires.
In the earlier volume, one of the most generally admired pieces was
‘The Forsaken Merman.’
Come, dear children, let us away
Down, and away below,
says the Merman, standing upon the seashore, whither he and his
children came up to call back the human Margaret, their mother, who had
left them to go, for one day--for Easter-day--to say her prayers with
her kinsfolk in the little gray church on the shore:--
’Twill be Easter time in the world--ah me,
And I lose my poor soul, Merman, here with thee.
And when she stayed, and stayed on, and it seemed a long while, and
the little ones began to moan, at last, up went the Merman with the
little ones to the shore, and so on into the town, and to the little
gray church, and there looked in through the small leaded panes of the
window. There she sits in the aisle; but she does not look up, her
eyes are fixed upon the holy page; it is in vain we try to catch her
attention:--
Come away, children, call no more,
Come away, come down, call no more.
Down, down to the depths of the sea. She will live up there and be
happy, among the things she had known before. Yet sometimes a thought
will come across her; there will be times when she will
Steal to the window and look at the sand;
And over the sand at the sea;
And anon there breaks a sigh,
And anon there drops a tear,
From a sorrow-clouded eye,
And a heart sorrow-laden,
A long, long sigh,
For the cold strange eyes of a little mermaiden,
And the gleam of her golden hair.
Come away, children, come down. We will be happy in our bright home
under the sea--happy, though the cruel one leaves us lonely for ever.
Yet we too, sometimes at midnight, when winds blow softly, and the
moonlight falls clear,
Up the still glistening beaches,
Up the creeks we will hie,
Over banks of bright sea-weed
The ebb-tide leaves dry.
We will gaze from the sand hills
At the white sleeping town,
At the church on the hill-side;
And then come back down,--
Singing, ‘There dwells a loved one,
But cruel is she,
She left lonely for ever
The Kings of the sea.’
It is a beautiful poem, certainly; and deserves to have been given at
full length. ‘The Strayed Reveller’ itself is more ambitious, perhaps a
little strained. It is a pleasing and significant imagination, however,
to present to us Circe and Ulysses in colloquy with a stray youth from
the train of Bacchus, who drinks eagerly the cup of the enchantress,
not as did the sailors of the Ithacan king, for gross pleasure, but
for the sake of the glorious and superhuman vision and knowledge it
imparts:--
But I, Ulysses,
Sitting on the warm steps,
Looking over the valley,
All day long have seen,
Without pain, without labour,
Sometimes a wild-haired mænad,
Sometimes a Faun with torches.
But now, we are fain to ask, where are we, and whither are we
unconsciously come? Were we not going forth to battle in the armour
of a righteous purpose, with our first friend, with Alexander Smith?
How is it we find ourselves here, reflecting, pondering, hesitating,
musing, complaining, with ‘A’? As the wanderer at night, standing under
a stormy sky, listening to the wild harmonies of winds, and watching
the wild movements of the clouds, the tree-tops, or possibly the waves,
may, with a few steps, very likely, pass into a lighted sitting-room,
and a family circle, with pictures and books, and literary leisure,
and ornaments, and elegant small employments--a scene how dissimilar
to that other, and yet how entirely natural also--so it often happens
too with books. You have been reading Burns, and you take up Cowper.
You feel at home, how strangely! in both of them. Can both be the true
thing? and if so, in what new form can we express the relation, the
harmony, between them? Such a discrepancy there certainly does exist
between the two books that have been before us here. We close the one
and open the other, and feel ourselves moving to and fro between two
totally different, repugnant, and hostile theories of life. Are we to
try and reconcile them, or judge between them?
May we escape from all the difficulty by a mere quotation, and
pronounce with the shepherd of Virgil,
Non nostrum inter vos tantas componere lites:
Et vitulâ tu dignus, et hic.
Or will the reader be content to bow down with us in this place, and
acknowledge the presence of that highest object of worship among the
modern Germans, an _antinomy_? (That is, O unlearned reader, ignorant,
not impossibly, of Kant and the modern German religion--in brief, a
contradiction in terms, the ordinary _phenomenal_ form of a _noumenal_
Verity; as, for example, _the world must have had a beginning_, and,
_the world cannot have had a beginning_, in the transcendental fusion
or confusion of which consists the Intelligible or unintelligible
truth.) Will you be content, O reader, to plod in German manner over
miles of a straight road, that seems to lead somewhere, with the
prospect of arriving at last at some point where it will divide at
equal angles, and lead equally in two opposite directions, where you
may therefore safely pause, and thankfully set up your rest, and adore
in sacred doubt the Supreme Bifurcation? Or do you hold, with Voltaire,
who said (_à propos_ of the question then debated among the French
wits, whether there were or were not a God) that ‘after all, one must
take a side?’
With all respect for the Antinomies and Germans, and ‘most
distinguished consideration’ for Voltaire and Parisian persiflage,
still, it may not be quite necessary for us, on the present occasion,
either to stand still in transcendental doubt, or toss up, as it were,
for our side. Individuals differ in character, capacity, and positions;
and, according to their circumstances, will combine, in every possible
variety of degree, the two elements of thoughtful discriminating
selection and rejection, and frank and bold acceptance of what lies
around them. Between the extremes of ascetic and timid self-culture,
and of unquestioning, unhesitating confidence, we may consent to see
and tolerate every kind and gradation of intermixture. Nevertheless,
upon the whole, for the present age, the lessons of reflectiveness
and the maxims of caution do not appear to be more needful or more
appropriate than exhortations to steady courage and calls to action.
There is something certainly of an over-educated weakness of purpose in
Western Europe--not in Germany only, or France, but also in more busy
England. There is a disposition to press too far the finer and subtler
intellectual and moral susceptibilities; to insist upon following out,
as they say, to their logical consequences, the notices of some organ
of the spiritual nature; a proceeding which perhaps is hardly more
sensible in the grown man than it would be in the infant to refuse
to correct the sensations of sight by those of the touch. Upon the
whole, we are disposed to follow out, if we must follow out at all,
the analogy of the bodily senses; we are inclined to accept rather
than investigate; and to put our confidence less in arithmetic and
antinomies than in
A few strong instincts and a few plain rules.
Let us remark also in the minor Poems, which accompany ‘Empedocles,’
a disposition, perhaps, to assign too high a place to what is called
Nature. It may indeed be true, as the astronomers say, though after
all it is no very great piece of knowledge, that the heavenly bodies
describe ellipses; and go on, from and to all the ages, performing that
self-repeating, unattaining curve. But does it, therefore, of necessity
follow that human souls do something analogous in the spiritual
spaces? Number is a wonderful thing, and the laws of Nature sublime;
nevertheless, have we not a sort of intuition of the existence, even in
our own poor human selves, of something akin to a Power superior to,
and transcending, all manifestations of Nature, all intelligible forms
of Number and Law? We quote one set of verses, entitled ‘Morality,’ in
which our author does appear to have escaped for once from the dismal
cycle of his rehabilitated Hindoo-Greek theosophy:--
MORALITY.
We cannot kindle when we will
The fire that in the heart resides,
The spirit bloweth and is still,
In mystery our soul abides;--
But tasks, in hours of insight willed,
Can be through hours of gloom fulfilled.
With aching hands and bleeding feet
We dig and heap, lay stone on stone;
We bear the burden and the heat
Of the long day, and wish ’twere done.
Not till the hours of light return,
All we have built do we discern.
Then when the clouds are off the soul,
When thou dost look in Nature’s eye,
Ask how _she_ viewed thy self-control,
Thy struggling tasked morality--
Nature whose free, light, cheerful air,
Oft made thee, in thy gloom, despair.
And she, whose censure thou dost dread,
Whose eye thou wert afraid to seek,--
See, on her face a glow is spread,
A strong emotion on her cheek.
‘Ah child,’ she cries, ‘that strife divine
Whence was it, for it is not mine?
There is no effort on my brow--
I do not strive, I do not weep;
I rush with the swift spheres, and glow
In joy, and when I will, I sleep,--
Yet that severe, that earnest air,
I saw, I felt it once, but where?
I knew not yet the gauge of Time,
Nor wore the manacles of space,--
I felt it in some other clime,
I saw it in some other place.
’Twas when the heavenly house I trod,
And lay upon the breast of God.
It is wonderful what stores of really valuable thought may lie
neglected in a book, simply because they are not put in that form
which serves our present occasions. But if we have been inclined to
yield to a preference for the picture of simple, strong, and certain,
rather than of subtle, shifting, and dubious feelings, and in point
of tone and matter to go along with the young mechanic, in point of
diction and manner, we must certainly assign the palm to ‘A,’ in spite
of a straining after the rounded Greek form, such as, to some extent,
vitiates even the style of Milton. Alexander Smith lies open to much
graver critical carping. He writes, it would almost seem, under the
impression that the one business of the poet is to coin metaphors and
similes. He tells them out as a clerk might sovereigns at the Bank
of England. So many comparisons, so much poetry; it is the sterling
currency of the realm. Yet he is most pleased, perhaps, when he can
double or treble a similitude; speaking of A, he will call it a B,
which is, as it were, the C of a D. By some maturer effort we may
expect to be thus conducted even to Z. But simile within simile, after
the manner of Chinese boxes, are more curious than beautiful; nor is it
the true aim of the poet, as of the Italian boy in the street, to poise
upon his head, for public exhibition, a board crowded as thick as they
can stand with images, big and little, black and white, of anybody and
everybody, in any possible order of disorder, as they happen to pack.
_Tanquam scopulum, insolens verbum_, says the precept of ancient taste,
which our author seems to accept freely, with the modern comment of--
In youth from rock to rock I went
With pleasure high and turbulent,--
Most pleased when most uneasy.
The movement of his poem is indeed rapid enough; there is a sufficient
impetus to carry us over a good deal of rough and ‘rocky’ ground; there
is a real continuity of poetic purpose;--but it is so perpetually
presumed upon; the attention, which the reader desires to devote to the
pursuit of the main drift of what calls itself a single poem, _simplex
et unum_, is so incessantly called off to look at this and look at
that; when, for example, we would fain follow the thought and feeling
of Violet and of Walter, we are with such peremptory and frequent
eagerness summoned to observe how like the sky is to _x_ and the stars
are to _y_, that on the whole, though there _is_ a real continuity
of purpose, we cannot be surprised that the critic of the ‘London
Examiner’ failed to detect it. Keats and Shelley, and Coleridge,
perhaps, before them, with their extravagant love for Elizabethan
phraseology, have led to this mischief. Has not Tennyson followed
a little too much in their train? Coleridge, we suppose, would have
maintained it to be an excellence in the ‘myriad-minded’ dramatist,
that he so often diverts us from the natural course of thought,
feeling, and narrative, to see how curiously two trifles resemble each
other, or that, in a passage of deep pathos, he still finds time to
apprise us of a paronomasia. But faults which disfigure Shakspeare are
not beauties in a modern volume.
I rot upon the waters when my prow
Should _grate_ the golden isles,
may be a very Elizabethan, but is certainly rather a vicious
expression. Force and condensation are good, but it is possible
to combine them with purity of phrase. One of the most successful
delineations in the whole poem is contained in the following passage,
which introduces Scene VII.:--
[_A balcony overlooking the sea._]
The lark is singing in the blinding sky,--
Hedges are white with May. The bridegroom sea
Is toying with the shore, his wedded bride,
And in the fulness of his marriage joy,
He decorates her tawny front with shells--
Retires a space to see how fair she looks,
Then proud, runs up to kiss her. All is fair,--
All glad, from grass to sun. Yet more I love
Than this, the shrinking day that sometimes comes
In winter’s front, so fair ’mongst its dark peers,
It seems a straggler from the files of June,
Which in its wanderings had lost its wits,
And half its beauty, and when it returned,
Finding its old companions gone away,
It joined November’s troop, then marching past;
And so the frail thing comes, and greets the world
With a thin crazy smile, then bursts in tears--
And all the while it holds within its hand
A few half-withered flowers;--I love and pity it.
It may be the fault of our point of view; but certainly we do not find
even here that happy, unimpeded sequence which is the charm of really
good writers. Is there not something incongruous in the effect of the
immediate juxtaposition of these two images? We have lost, it may be,
that impetuosity, that _élan_, which lifts the young reader over hedge
and ditch at flying leaps, across country, or we should not perhaps
entertain any offence, or even surprise, at being transferred _per
saltum_ from the one field to the other. But we could almost ask, was
the passage, so beautiful, though perhaps a little prolonged, about the
June day in November, written consecutively, and in one flow with the
previous, and also beautiful, one about ocean and his bride? We dare
say it was: but it does not read, somehow, in the same straight line
with it--
Tantum series juncturaque pollet.
We venture, too, to record a perhaps hypercritical objection to ‘the
_blinding_ sky’ in this particular collocation. Perhaps in the first
line of a scene, while the reader has not yet warmed to his duty,
simplicity should be especially observed--a single image, without any
repeated reflection, so to speak, in a second mirror, should suffice.
The following, which open Scene XI., are better:--
Summer hath murmured with her leafy lips
Around my home, and I have heard her not;
I’ve missed the process of three several years
From shaking wind flowers to the tarnished gold
That rustles sere on Autumn’s aged limbs.