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Landor's life, and his contentment with what it has brought him, is the supposed egotism of the first line. But if a man loves nature and art and devotes himself to them (warming "both hands before the fire of life") and to the expression of his love for them, he may well feel that striving with other men is silly and unworthy of him.

THE VICTORIAN AGE

THOMAS CARLYLE

SARTOR RESARTUS

Pp. 497 ff. In reading Sartor Resartus, it is well to remember that Carlyle had a Scotch temperament and that he purposely adopted German modes of thought and phrasing. The first results in a picturesque half-suppressed violence in the utterance of the emotions with which his philosophy of life was surcharged, and the second gives his style the complexity and elaboration that characterize much German philosophical writing. He chose for the vehicle of the message embodied in Sartor Resartus an imaginary German professor whom he calls Teufelsdröckh of Weissnichtwo (Don't-know-where). Under the pretence that he has met this man and become impressed with his ideas, Carlyle represents himself as translating his biography into English. The materials of this biography, he says, reached him in the following form:

"Six considerable PAPER-BAGS, carefullysealed, and marked successively, in gilt China ink, with the symbols of the Six southern Zodiacal Signs, beginning at Libra; in the inside of which sealed Bags lie miscellaneous masses of Sheets, and oftener Shreds and Snips, written in Professor Teufelsdröckh's scarce legible cursiv-schrift; and treating of all imaginable things under the Zodiac and above it. . . ."

By this device Carlyle obtains the greatest possible freedom in the expression of his ideas. He begins with the idea suggested by Swift in his Tale of a Tub (p. 248 above), choosing the title Sartor Resartus (the tailor re-tailored) to show that he meant to tear away the outward appearances of life in order to get at its real meaning. He sums up the purpose of the book thus:

"Have many British readers actually arrived with us at the new promised country; is the Philosophy of Clothes now at last opening around them? Long and adventurous has the journey been: from those outmost vulgar, palpable

Woollen Hulls of Man; through his wondrous Flesh-Garments, and his wondrous Social Garnitures; inwards to the Garments of his very Soul's Soul, to Time and Space themselves! And now does the spiritual, eternal Essence of Man, and of Mankind, bared of such wrappages, begin in any measure to reveal itself? Can many readers discern, as through a glass darkly, in huge wavering outlines, some primeval rudiments of Man's Being, what is changeable from what is unchangeable?"

He criticises its character and value as follows: "It was in this high moment, when the soul, rent, as it were, and shed asunder, is open to inspiring influence, that I first conceived this Work on Clothes: the greatest I can ever hope to do; which has already, after long retardations, occupied, and will yet occupy, so large a section of my life. . . .”

The three chapters given in this book form a thought-unit, showing Carlyle's growth from pessimism and despair to the foundation of his particular form of optimism, that the supreme need of the soul is to express itself in some sort of work.

There is much autobiography even in the details of the book, and as a spiritual history, it is entirely autobiographical.

THOMAS, LORD MACAULAY

Pp. 510 ff. The long selection from Macaulay's famous chapter on the state of England at the time of the Revolution of 1688 is out of proportion to his importance among writers of English prose; but teachers who are tired of reading over and over again his biographical sketches will doubtless welcome it as a change, and both teachers and pupils will surely find it valuable for the vivid picture it gives of the physical and social background against which so large a part of English literature must be seen if it is to be seen truly. Moreover, in style it presents Macaulay at his best, and Macaulay at his best is a triumph of clear and vivid common sense. He is, to be sure, one-sided; he was not a big enough man to have an all-round vision or a subtle enough man to observe distinctions and shades that make all the difference in the final accuracy of a picture, and he has no real philosophy of history. He is pompous, rhetorical, even blatant at times; but he is one of the first writers of history in English who gets beyond the point of stringing together and weighing events merely as events. He really constructs pictures that enable us to realize the times and the men about which he is writing.

JOHN HENRY NEWMAN

Pp. 518 ff. In 1851 the Catholics of Ireland founded a University in Dublin. Newman was called upon to speak on the occasion, and delivered nine lectures which were published under the title The Idea of a University. He himself was chosen as rector of the newly-founded university; but it was a failure from the first, partly through lack of government support, and partly because Newman himself lacked executive ability.

The lectures themselves may, perhaps, be summed up, in a phrase used by Newman himself in the passage chosen for this book, as inspired by "clear, calm, accurate vision." And it was largely this clearness, this poise, this precision, that made Newman such a power in his day.

ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

THE LADY OF SHALOTT

Pp. 523 f. Like Keats's La Belle Dame Sans Merci, this poem seems to have been suggested by its title. In this case, as in the other, the piece from which the title was taken bears little relation to the poem suggested by it. The curious may read the story of La Donna di Scalotta in the old Italian Cento Novelle Antiche, where it is No. 81 (tr. Roscoe, Italian Novelists, Vol. I). This is Tennyson's first attempt to deal with a theme taken from the stories that clustered about King Arthur and his knights. Here the interest lies not in the story as such, but in the mood of the poet and the suggested but indefinite symbolism of the poem. The key to the symbolism of the poem is said by Tennyson's son to lie in ll. 69-72 and to consist in the entrance of human interests into the world of shadows in which the Lady had lived. It is hardly possible, and certainly unnecessary, to attempt to find a definite symbolic meaning for every detail of the situation and narrative.

The poem is divided into four parts, each devoted to a single phase of the theme. Part I sets before us the lonely situation of the Lady in the gray-walled island tower beside the thronged road to Camelot. Part II emphasizes her isolation from the world of realities and her contact with life only through the shadows in the magic mirror, which apparently she reproduces in her magic web as her fragment of the dream of human life. In Part III, half-sick of shadows as she has become, she sees the brilliant figure of Sir Lancelot in the mirror, and, in spite of the curse that will

come upon her, she leaves her web and for the first time sees in direct vision the world of nature, represented by the water lily, and the world of mankind, represented by Lancelot, whom she has loved at first sight. In Part IV the curse has come upon her, and real life is broken for her, as was the mirror in which she saw the world of shadows. When the boat bearing her body floats down the stream to Camelot, Lancelot, though all unaware of her love for him, is touched by admiration and pity, and breathes a prayer for her.

A DREAM OF FAIR WOMEN

Pp. 524 ff. The style of this poem is rich and elaborate in three ways. In the first place Tennyson's imagination is largely pictorial; he visualizes the scenes and persons and objects of his story, and the reader who would perfectly recreate in his own mind the poet's conception must try to catch every hint given by the words of the poem and reconstruct the pictorial images. This is true not only of such striking figures as Cleopatra with her wild exotic beauty or Jephthah's daughter, the embodiment of maidenly sweetness and filial submission until, at the thought of the victory over Ammon, her face glows with a light that would be savage if it were not Biblical; it is true, also, of such incidentals as the dim red morn lying dead and pale across the threshold of the sun, and the bizarre emphasis given to the dark silent forest by the red anemone that burned among the lush green grasses. Everywhere, in almost every stanza, the reader must move slowly, must read carefully, must let every word play its due part in the elaborate and highly colored pictures that hovered in the poet's vision.

The second element of richness and elaborateness of effect is due to the fact that in the poet's mind many of the rich pictures of the poem itself exist in a very atmosphere of beauty and pathos created for him by poets and painters and sculptors who have treated these same things before him. As he sees in his vision Helen and Iphigenia, his memory is filled with the music of the Iliad and the choral measures of Eschylus and Sophocles, and he sees not only these women and the vivid picture of the death of one of them, but all the heroes who went out from Greece to battle on the windy plains of Troy, the fatal return of Agamemnon to his dishonored home, and the vengeance of Electra and Orestes. The disconnected pictures of ancient strife and wrong that pass before his eyes before he fully falls asleep the lances in ambush, the attack on the walled

city, the heated blasts bursting in the doors of defiled sanctuaries - all these come with a thousand recollections of wild tales in mediæval romances and chronicles. And the praise of Chaucer and of the great literature of the Elizabethan age are the echoes of hundreds of hours of delight spent in reading. There is no method, as has been said, of supplying the reader suddenly with all this experience of literature, with all these associations, with all this richness of emotional life. An editor may cite examples to explain every line, may pile up instance upon instance until the intellect is thoroughly convinced that such things were common, but not in this way can the reader gain those associations and memories which alone give significance and power to the great figures of history and romance and myth or the scenes and manners of past ages. The only method is to do as the poet himself has done, read these poems and histories, and amass the associations and emotions of this experience with literature.

The third element is the rich and elaborate diction. Here, as with the first element, we are on easier ground; we are dealing with matters which the intellect and imagination can compass immediately by knowledge and native vigor. Such lines as,

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reveal their meanings at once to any one who has imagination. But sometimes Tennyson substitutes the ornate and elaborate for the simple and imaginative, and produces lines that require some ingenuity for interpretation. How many a reader has not beaten his brains to find out what is meant in 1. 1 by "before my eyelids dropt their shade"! It is, indeed, a rather elaborate way of saying, "before I closed my eyes to sleep," and the feeling that it must mean more is so strong that some will still strive vainly for a more mystical interpretation, in spite of the fact that the poem obviously narrates the events of one night, when the poet, after reading Chaucer, passes through that stage of visions which precedes sleep, into a sleep of dreams and finally

wakes and tries to recall his dreams. "The crested bird that claps his wings at dawn" (11. 179 f.) has also shed much ink. If Tennyson meant the cock and took this method of slipping that brilliant but rather prosaic fowl into his bediamonded poetry, we may be glad that it is possible to rescue him by arguing in favor of the crested lark of Theocritus and insisting that no modern student of poetry, as Tennyson was, could write

"That claps his wings at dawn,"

without remembering those exquisite lines of John Lyly's:

"Now at heaven's gates she claps her wings, The morn not waking till she sings."

Tennyson's poem, though obviously suggested by Chaucer's Legend of Good Women, bears only superficial and unessential resemblances to it. It is true that both poems deal with ill-fated fair women, that in both the poet dreams, and it is even possible that Tennyson has taken from other of Chaucer's poems the thoroughly conventional device of falling asleep after reading a book that determines the subject of his dream. But aside from the fact that Chaucer's style is simple and his mood relaxed and easy, while Tennyson's style is ornate and his mood one of the utmost intensity, the purely external features are very different. The scene of Chaucer's dream is a meadow filled with all the gladness of a May morning, — singing birds and blossoming flowers and "softe, swote, greene grass"; the scene of Tennyson's is an ancient wood, oppressive with huge elms, hanging vines, dark walks, a deadly silence, and a pale chill light from the dying dawn. Chaucer meets in his dream the brilliant God of Love and his queen, accompanied by a group of charming maidens, and for sufficiently valid reasons promises to write each succeeding year the story of some fair woman who had been faithful though unfortunate in love; Tennyson meets and converses for a few vivid moments with women, fair and unfortunate, but by no means chiefly "Love's martyrs." It seems not improbable that Tennyson may have been, consciously or unconsciously, influenced by the procession of noble ladies with whom Odysseus spoke in Hades (Odyssey, Bk. XI).

The structure of the poem is very simple and clear:

11. 1-13. What the poet had been reading and the immediate effect of it.

11. 13-52. He muses on what he has read, and

visions of ancient strife and wrong pass in vivid pictures before his eyes as he is falling asleep.

11. 53-84. He then dreams he is in a great forest, made gloomy by its huge trees, its dank festoons. of jasmine, its long, dark, dew-drenched walks, its uncanny silence, and the cold pale light that followed the fading of the first dim flush of morn. His melancholy is increased by the odor of hidden violets bringing memories of happier times, and a voice within him tells him he will always stay in this dark wood.

II. 85-260. There come before him in his dream women like those of Chaucer's Legend, beautiful heroines of tragic story- Helen of Troy, Iphigenia, Cleopatra, Jephthah's daughter, and the illfated Rosamond.

11. 261-272. Then as he slowly awakes, he catches glimpses of certain other ill-starred heroines, Margaret Roper, Joan of Arc, and Eleanor, wife of Edward I.

--

11. 273-288. With difficulty he recalled his dream and often vainly strove to strike again into the same dream.

Details that may deserve explanation or comment are the following:

P. 525. ll. 17-52. The vividness of these hypnagogic figures approaches nearly to hallucination. Every one has, at times, in falling asleep slowly, had more or less vivid images pass before his eyes. Some persons have them constantly. Tennyson may have been more than usually sensitive to them. See the remarks on St. Agnes' Eve for what he says of his experiences of trance-like seizures, and compare also De Quincey, p. 438.

11. 73-76. Apparently the poet makes the unblissful wood of his dream one which he had known in real life under happier circumstances. Dante's famous lines:

"Nessun maggior dolore

Che ricordarsi del tempo felice
Nella miseria,"

it will be remembered, had impressed him when he was a boy of twelve, long before he so tawdrily translated them as

"A sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembering happier things,"

and it may be that here and in II. 77-80 he shaped his poem in accordance with them.

P. 526. 1. 87. The beauty and self-sufficingness of this line sometimes make us forget, what the poet remembered, that Helen was, according to the myth, the daughter of Zeus, and therefore divinely tall.

H. 100-116. In his picture of Iphigenia, Tennyson apparently follows the story as told in the first Chorus of the Agamemnon of Eschylus, with perhaps recollections of the Electra of Sophocles, but there are also expressions which indicate that the touching scenes of Iphigenia in Aulis were in his mind, though he necessarily rejected the vicarious sacrifice narrated by Euripides. There is no way to obtain the full effect of this passage but to read these plays.

ll. 118-120. These words of Helen's are almost a transcript of what she says in the Iliad, VL, 345 ff., to Hector when Paris seems slow to prepare for battle:

"My brother, even mine, that am a dog mischievous and abominable, would that on the day when my mother bare me at the first, an evil storm-wind had caught me away to a mountain or a billow had swept me away before all these things came to pass."

11. 127-128. Critics have chided Tennyson for forgetting that Cleopatra was a Greek, fair and blue-eyed; but he saw the Cleopatra of romance, not her of history. And this one must be swarthy and bold-eyed, as Tennyson saw her; a "gypsy” with a "tawny front" as she appeared to Shakespeare's Mark Antony.

P. 527. 1. 174. Clearly Tennyson did not visualize this image, or he would have cancelled it. It is neither beautiful nor possible as a picture.

II. 177-242. The story of Jephthah's daughter, in Judges, xi, should be read, even if it is already familiar.

P. 528. II. 249-260. The romance of Rosamond and Henry II of England and her death at the hands of his queen, Eleanor, are told in almost every history of England.

1. 259. Some of the commentators seem to have missed the point of Cleopatra's mention of Fulvia. As she counsels Rosamond to use the dagger, her own rival, Fulvia, comes to her mind, as in Shakespeare's play, and, forgetting Rosamond and Eleanor, she herself becomes heroine and prime actor in the imagined event.

1. 266. The devotion of Margaret Roper to her father, Sir Thomas More, is one of the fine incidents of history. To feel it as Tennyson did, one must know, as perhaps one may from Green's History of the English People, the power and charm of Sir Thomas More and his tragic fate.

1. 268. This line, with its reticence and moderation, suggests to one familiar with the wonderful story of the Maid of Orleans all the glamour and

beauty that attach to one of the most romantic and mysterious figures the world has ever seen.

11. 285-288. This ending is weak, because it is very obscure. The difficulty is not so much with the rhetorical figures of the chosen words withering beneath the palate and the heart fainting in its own heat as with the doubt whether. these four lines are to be taken with ll. 281-284, or whether they really connect in thought, though not in syntax, with the efforts of the poet to recall and record the glimpses of his dream.

MORTE D'ARTHUR

This is Tennyson's earliest attempt at the epic treatment of Arthurian romance, and the treatment is simply epic, not allegorical, as is the case with the Idylls written after 1859. The immediate source of the poem is Sir Thomas Malory's famous Morte Darthur (Bk. XXI, Chaps. 4 and 5). It will be observed that Tennyson follows Malory very closely, though there are some interesting changes.

Tennyson himself speaks of the poem as full of faint Homeric echoes, but there are few of any significance. The most interesting is l. 105-106, which seem to echo the words of Hephaistos, Iliad, xviii, 400 ff.: "Nine years with them [the sea-nymphs Thetis and Eurynome] I wrought much cunning work of bronze, brooches and spiral arm-bands and cups and necklaces, in the hollow caves, while around me the stream of ocean with murmuring foam flowed infinite." There are also faint echoes of other classical writers, the most important being 1. 60, a close rendering of Æneid, iv, 285, viii, 20, and 1. 240, perhaps an echo of Lucretius, De Rer. Nat., iii, 976 f.: —

"Cedit enim, rerum nouitate extrusa, uetustas Semper, et ex aliis aliud reparare necesse est";

for the idea, cf. also Plato's Banquet, 207-208.

1. 1. Chapter 4 of Malory's account tells how the battle raged all day long, till all were dead in both armies except King Arthur, Syr Bedwere, and his brother Syr Lucan.

1. 8. In Malory, Arthur is borne to the little chapel by the two brothers, but Syr Lucan dies soon after. Tennyson has omitted Lucan in order to concentrate attention on Arthur and Bedivere.

P. 529. l. 38, 44. Note the epic repetition here. Collect other examples from the poem. This is, perhaps, due to the influence of Homer.

P. 530. 1. 123. Note the archaic character of the syntax here and elsewhere. It is meant to

give dignity to the language and to suggest antiquity.

Il. 169-170. The passage from the Agamemnon, 240, cited by Mustard does not seem to express the same idea as this: "She smote each of her sacrificers with a piteous glance from her eye, remarkable in her beauty as in a picture."

P. 531. 1. 255. A Platonic idea, taken over directly or indirectly by many later writers, among them Boethius (cf. Chaucer's translation of Boethius, Bk. I, Metre v, and Bk. II, Metre viii, where the chain is Love).

ll. 260 ff. The relation of Avilion to other ideal lands is uncertain. These lines may have been suggested by the description of Olympus in the Odyssey, vi, 43 ff. But they are more like the description of the Earthly Paradise in Lactantius, De Ave Phonice, 1-30, expanded into eighty-five lines in the Anglo-Saxon translation (Bright's Anglo-Saxon Reader contains both versions); for a modern English rendering see Cook and Tinker's Old English Poetry. The Celtic conception of the Otherworld is similar, and is given in several of the older poems.

1. 267. Tennyson cannot have failed to remember the beautiful passage in which Socrates argues that the dying swan does not sing for grief but as "foreseeing the blessings of the other world," Phædo, 85.

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"When I departed from Circe, who had retained me more than a year there near to Gaeta, before Eneas had so named it, neither fondness for my son, nor piety for my old father, nor the due love that should have made Penelope glad, could overcome within me the ardor that I had to gain experience of the world and of the vices of men, and of their valor. But I put forth on the deep open sea, with one vessel only, and with that little company by which I had not been deserted. One shore and the other I saw as far as Spain, far as Morocco and the island of Sardinia, and the rest which that sea bathes round about. I and my companions were old and slow when we came to that narrow strait where Hercules set up his bounds,

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