BOOKS.

MR. TENNYSON'S NEW POEMS.*

The Hol Gr it and othe P s

By Alfred Tennyson, D.C.L., Poet Laureate

Mn. TEncreos's genius deepens and matures with every fresh year, and with every year seems to dwell more powerfully and with greater effect on the task of knitting closely together the world of spirit and of sense, and of showing their true relations. Painful as was the subject of the poem on Lucretius which he gave us last year, and which is included, of course, in this volume, —so painful that the poem can never be popular,—we doubt if he has done anything embodying a greater weight of intellect and a nobler flight of the higher imagination ; and certainly he has never done anything which leaves a profounder spiritual impression. By sheer mastery of the spell which the Epicurean philosophy had gained over the mind of the great Roman poet, both for good and for evil,—and no one shows more powerfully than Mr. Tennyson that the atheism of Lucretius was, to a very great extent, a spiritual revolt against impure religions, — and by pursuing rigidly that philosophic thread of thought, after some evil drug intended to excite the animal nature had, according to the tradition, been supposed to work its distorting effect on the brain of the passionless theorist, Tennyson manages to impress on us that even the greatest and most passion- less thinkers will find some hour in which ' nature,' as they have imagined it, is so infinitely below the highest spirit of their own lives, that their whole being is swallowed up in one in- tense yearning to escape from nature, even by outraging nature, to find a divine tranquillity' which nature cannot give them, and which they ask therefore the dissolution of nature to give instead. But as we spoke of this noble poem when it first appeared, we will not dwell further on it now ; we only return to it to show with how fresh and increasing a power the Poet Laureate's genius returns again and again to the subject of the war between spirit and flesh, as his intellectual grasp enlarges and he comprehends still more clearly the intellectual visions and problems, successes and failures of his contemporaries. Before we turn to the noble addition to the Arthurian cycle of poems which is contained in this volume, let us illustrate what we have said by the singularly grand and musical stanzas, called " The Higher Pantheism," which, as we understand their meaning, is no Pantheism at all, but a most carefully discriminate protest against Pantheism, inasmuch as the poet reserves even from the dominion of God the spiritual person- ality of man, and attributes even to God a spiritual personality like unto that of man :-

" TEE HIGHER PANTHEISM.

"The sun, the moon, the stars, the seas, the hills and the plains—

Are not these, 0 Soul, the Vision of Him who reigns ?

Is not the Vision He? tho' He be not that which He seems?

Dreams are true while they last, and do we not live in dreams ?

Earth, these solid stars, this weight of body and limb, Are they not sign and symbol of thy division from Him? Dark is the world to thee: thyself art the reason why ; For is He not all but thou, that haat power to feel am I?'

Glory about thee, without thee ; and thou fulfillest thy doom, Making Him broken gleams, and a stifled splendour and gloom.

Speak to him thou for He hears, and Spirit with Spirit can meet—

Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet.

God is law, say the wise; 0 Soul, and let us rejoice, For if He thunder by law the thunder is yet His voice. Law is God, say some: no God at all, says the fool; For all we have power to see is a straight staff bent in a pool ; And the ear of man cannot hear, and the eye of man cannot see ; But if we could see and hear, this Vision—were it not Ile ?"

There is something of the roll of the organ in the rhythm of these noble lines, which, for substance, contain, to our mind, a grand, if

somewhat darkly grand, expression of the thought that all which exists in the universe is either man or God ; that the physical world only even seems a veil upon the spiritual, through the weak- ness, errors, and revolts of our own senses, intellect, and will ; that "if we could see and hear," we should no longer make Him " broken gleams and a stifled splendour and gloom ;" but should

be all the more aware of the infinite personal life behind law, and the independent personal life to which the thunders of law appeal in us. Some might say that the poem on Lucretius suggests a limi- tation even to this doctrine which Mr. Tennyson calls "the higher pantheism," since it shows how a ' wicked broth' infused into the body, and "confusing the chemic labour of the blood," makes the world dark to a noble mind, without its having any right to say, "Thyself art the reason why." But the poet would probably

reply that in some higher sense—if this were, according to the tradition, the end of Lucretius—he was himself the true reason of this tragical close to his life, inasmuch as the whole course of the blind gropings of his great intellect may have pointed to some final struggle of this sort with the animal side of his nature, as the best mode of finally releasing him from his dream that there is no higher ' nature' in man beyond what a chance concourse of atoms could cause and crush But the greatest, if not in every respect the most perfect, of Mr. Tennyson's works will undoubtedly prove to be that in which he illus- trates the lusting of the flesh against the spirit, and the spirit against the flesh, in his treatment of the noble cycle of Arthurian legends. It is a misfortune for the perfect comprehension of this great poem by Mr. Tennyson's own contemporaries that he has communi- cated it in fragments of which not many of us had caught the true connecting thought till now. We regret that the publisher has not kept the promise given us in the fly-leaf, of a simultaneous republication of the whole series of Arthurian poems in the order in which their author wishes them to be read. Had he done so, many would have re-read the other idylls before seizing on the new ones, and would so have gained an immense advantage for the understanding of the whole. To the present writer, at least, the Arthurian idylls have risen from a very exquisite series of cabinet pictures, into a great tragic epic, from this re-reading of the series in

order, with the new and wonderfully vivid introduction, and the new books which just precede the close. "The Coming of Arthur," and the new opening of " The Morte d'Arthur," contain in some sense the key to the whole. Mr. Tennyson himself made it the original recommendation of his " Morte d'Arthur," read on Christ- mas Eve to the party at " Francis Allen's," that it had a modern treatment,–.- "Perhaps some modern touches here and there Redeemed it from the charge of nothingness."

Now that it has grown bole by bole into a stately tree of song, we know none of his poems more thoroughly modern in spirit, though always in a way that does not jar with the legendary form into which that modern spirit is poured. The ideal ruler of the poem, who makes his knights swear

*To reverence the King, as if he were Their conscience, and their conscience as their King,"

combines a strangely modern tolerance, a deep reverence for the individual nature of every one under his rule, with that "great authority " by virtue of which he reigns. But then this happens to fit in well with the reverence and courtliness of the chivalric system of life, better perhaps than it could with that laissez-faire which is the root of so much of our modern tolerance,— a tolerance rooted less in reverence than iu self-sufficiency. How fine is the conception of the King as given in "The Coming of Arthur," in the testimony adduced by his half-sister, Bellicent, the Queen of Orkney, to the King of Ctameliard, while the latter is still doubting whether or not to give his daughter Guinevere to Arthur :- "' 0 king!' she cried, and I will toll thee : few,

Few, but all brave, all of one mind with him ; For I was near him when the savage yells Of Uther's peerage died, and Arthur sat Crown'd on the dais, and his warriors cried, 'Be thou the king, and we will work thy will Who love thee.' Then the king in low deep tones, And simple words of great authority, Bound them by so strait vows to his own self.

That when they rose, knighted from kneeling, some Were pale as at the passing of a ghost, Some Ilush'd, and others dazed, as one who wakes Half-blinded at the coming of a light.

"But when he spake and cheer'd his Table Round With large divine and comfortable words Beyond my tongue to tell then—I beheld From eye to eye thro' all their Order flash A momentary likeness of the king: And ere it left their faces, thro' the cross And those around it and the Crucified, Down from the casement over Arthur, smote Flame-colour, vert and azure, in three rays, One falling upon each of three fair queens, Who stood in silence near his throne, the friends Of Arthur, gazing on him, tall, with bright Sweet faces, who will help him at his need."

The theme of the whole series of poems is the process of the partial dethronement of Arthurfrom his spiritual rule over his order, through

the disloyalty and shame of Guinevere and Lancelot ; of the spread of this infectious guilt in larger and larger circles till it breaks up the oneness of the realm altogether, and the Order of the Round Table is shattered, and the ideal king, deserted by many of his own knights, and deeply wounded in the last great battle with the traitor and the heathens, vanishes into the world beyond, not without leaving a loud rumour and ever-springing hope of his return. Yet, as in all the higher tragedy, the failure is itself a success. The dissolution of the order he created yet leaves be- hind it the image of a true king, grander, higher than any realm he could rule, and grander and higher precisely because he himself had been greater even in failure than in success. How fine is the forecast of this,—that his realm shall disappear, but that the image of the King shall remain, even when the earth beneath it vanishes away,—in Leodogran's dream :— " She spake and King Leodogran rejoiced,

But musing Shall I answer yea or nay?' Doubted, and drowsed, nodded and slept, and saw, Dreaming, a slope of land that ever grew, Field after field, up to a height, the peak Haze-hidden, and thereon a phantom king, Now looming, and now lost ; and on the slope The sword rose, the hind fell, the herd was driven, Fire glimpsed; and all the land from roof and rick, In drifts of smoke before a rolling wind, Stream'd to the peak, and mingled with the haze And made it thicker ; while the phantom king Sent out at times a voice; and here and there Stood one who pointed toward the voice, the rest Slew on and burnt, crying, 'No king of ours, No son of Other, and no king of ours;' Till with a wink his dream was changed, the haze Descended, and the solid earth became As nothing, and the king stood out in heaven, Crown'd. And Leodogran awoke, and sent Ulfins, and Brastias and Bedivere, Back to the court of Arthur answering yea."

—in other words, Arthur is -not crowned " in heaven " till he has ceased to hold the sceptre of government; and then first his authority is acknowledged by those who had till then defied it in their hearts, while admitting its right over them. We need not go over the ground of the old idyll; but would only remind our readers that in the very first of them,—" Enid,"—the true burden of the story is the distrust sown in the knightly mind of Geraint by the Queen's unfaithfulness, his reluctance to leave his wife Enid under her care, his neglect of the duties of his government in watching her, his moody self-will growing out of this jealousy and mistrust, and the wild and violent lavishing of his strength in exploits which draw down the censure of the King, who contrasts with them the sane and more obedient mind of one who had been won from a life of pride and violence to obedience. The object of the idyll is evidently to compare the moral state and danger of him who is tempted away from a noble order of life by scandals to his con- science existing in that order, with the state of him who has never lived under such a noble order at all, and to show that the shock to a mind already in the light may be even more dangerous than

an outer world of evil and ignorance to one which has never been captivated by any true conception of nobility at all. In the book of. Vivien describing her triumph over Merlin, we have the descrip-

tion of the struggle between the most sensual and the most intellec- tual nature in Arthur's Court, and see the magic charm of " woven paces and of waving hands " which the great seer had discovered to charm the senses to sleep, used by a wanton to lay the seer himself to sleep. And here, again, the motive is closely bound up with Guinevere and Lancelot's sin, for it is when Arthur, " vext at a rumour rife about the Queen," is walking moo3ily alone, that Vivien meets him, and attempts to win him by " dark, sweet hints of some who prized him more than who should prize him most ;" and her failure with the King, and the ridicule the attempt excites in the Court sets her upon the ambitious task of retrieving her defeat by a triumph over Merlin, and winning from him the secret of the spell by which she conquers him, and robs the King of his wisest and most potent subject. In " Elaine " we have the first serious threatening of the cloud which ultimately breaks over Arthur, the noble picture of Guinevere's jealousy when she hears Lancelot's name coupled, however erroneously, with Elaine's, and flings his proffered diamonds into the river ; while Elaine's innocent, simple, and hopeless love is introduced as a contrast to the guilty passion of the great Queen's heart, and Arthur is shown just dimly forecasting the coming ruin of his peace, though still absolutely trusting with a kingly trustfulness both in his wife and in his greatest knight. It is to this point in the series of the Arthurian idyll; after the degeneration of feeling from the time when Arthur and his knighthood were "all one will" had had time to spread, that the two new books, the "Holy Grail and " Pelleas and Ettarre," belong,—the first representing that fanatical reaction towards extatic holiness which, where there is a real spirit of faith, so often breaks, without preventing, a moral

descent, and the latter representing the still greater laxity of life on the very eve of the discovery, when the scandals of the time

drive hasty and passionate innocence into the belief that the whole Round Table is a whited sepulchre full of pollution, and encourage the traitor, Modred, to think within himself that the time for his conspiracy is " hard at hand." Both books are mar- vellously fine,—most of the two, perhaps, the former, which paints with the richest possible colouring the visions of enthusiasts seeking for a restoration of the age of miracle and of an opened heaven. The picture is full of skilfully disguised " modern touches."

The year of miracle begins with the vision of the Holy Cup by a uun, the sister of Sir Percivaie, and we are carefully told what it is that drives her into the life of visionary extasy. She had been disappointed in love, and thus inclined to the conventual life. Once in her convent,—

"Nun as she was, the scandal of the Court, Sin against Arthur and the Table Round, And the strange sound of an adulterous race, Across the iron grating of her cell Beat, and she pray'd and fasted all the more."

In this state of mind she sees the vision of the Holy Cup, and inspires others with her belief. As a likeness of the King had flashed from the eyes of his knights in the first glow of their fealty, so the extasy of the nun spreads to the purest and most enthusiastic of her friends, Sir Galahad, who,

"When he heard

My sister's vision filled me with amaze ; His eyes became so like her own, they seemed Hers, and himself her brother more than I."

And when she sends him on the Quest— "She sent the deathless passion in her eyes,

Thro' him, and made him hers, and laid her mind On him, and he believed in her belief."

From which it may be gathered that the miracles and visions of the poem are all more subjective than they at first might seem. Very fine is the pageantry of the Quest, as it is told by the different knights who take part in it, and who, each of them, lends his own cha- racter to the wonders and the visions through which he passes, down to Sir Gawain, the "light-of-love," who swore the vow, "and louder than the rest," but who openly ridiculed it after- wards, and superfluously swore to be

"Deafer than the blue-eyed cat, And thrice as blind as any noonday owl To holy virgins in their ecstasies Henceforward !"

—whereon the King remarks that such an oath is gratuitous in one who is already " too blind to have desire to see." Perhaps the finest story of all is that of Sir Lancelot's search in the hope of finding something which might rescue him from his own conscience ;—a story evidently tinctured with a gleam of insanity,— "'Then there remain'd but Lancelot, for the rest

Spake but of sundry perils in the storm; Perhaps, like him of Cana in Holy Writ, Our Arthur kept his best until the last; 'Thou, too, my Lancelot,' ask'd the King, my friend, Our mightiest, hath this Quest avail'd for thee ?'

Our mightiest !' answer'd Lancelot, with a groan ; 0 King!'—and when he paused, methought I spied A dying fire of madness in his eyes- 0 King! my friend, if friend of thine I be, Happier are those that welter in their sin, Swine in the mud, that cannot see for slime, Slime of the ditch ; but in me lived a sin So strange, of such a kind, that all of pure, Noble, and knightly in me twined and clung Round that one sin, until the wholesome flower And poisonous grew together, each as each, Not to be plucked asunder : and when thy knights Sware, I aware with them only in the hope

That could I touch or see the Holy Grail

They might be pluck'd asunder. Then I Spake To one most holy saint, who wept and said, That save they could be pluck'd asunder, all My quest were but in vain ; to whom I vow'd That I would work according as he will'd.

And forth I went, and while I yearn'd and strove

To tear the twain asunder in my heart,

My madness came upon me as of old, And whipt me into waste fields far away ; There was I beaten down by little men, Mean knights, to whom the moving of my sword And shadow of my spear had been enow To scare them from me once ; and then I came All in my folly to the naked shore, Wide flats, where nothing but coarse grasses grew.

I felt the boat shock earth, and looking up, Behold, the enchanted towers of Carbonek, A castle like a rock upon a rock, With chasm-like portals open to the sea, And steps that met the breaker ! there was none Stood near it but a lion on each side That kept the entry, and the moon was full.

Then from the boat I leapt, and up the stairs.

There drew my sword. With sudden-flaring manes Those two great beasts rose upright like a man, Each gript a shoulder, and I stood between ; And, when I would have smitten them, heard a voice, Doubt not, go forward ! if thou doubt, the beasts Will tear thee piecemeal.' Then with violence The sword was dash'd from out my hind, and fell.

And up into the sounding hall past ; But nothing in the sounding hall I saw Nor bench nor table, painting on the wall, Or shield of knight; only the rounded moon Thro' the tall oriel on the rolling sea.

But always in the quiet house I heard, Clear as a lark, high o'er me as a lark, A sweet voice singing in the topmost tower To the eastward : up I climb'd a thousand steps With pain : as in a dream I seem'd to climb

For ever; at the last I reach'd a door,

A light was in the crannies, and I heard, 'Glory and joy and honour to our Lord And to the Holy Vessel of the Grail.'

Then in my madness I essay'd the door ; It gave ; and thro' a stormy glare, a heat As from a seventimes-heated furnace, I, Blasted and burst, and blinded as I was,

With such a fierceness that I swoon'd away-

0, yet methought I saw the Holy Grail.

All pall'd in crimson samite, and around

Great angels, awful shapes, and wings and eyes. And but for all my madness and my sin, And then my swooning, I bad sworn I saw That which I saw; but what I saw was veircl And cover'd ; and the quest was not for me."

This book, like almost all the rest, is closed by the Kiag, who gives his own,—the kingly,—view of the waste of power and human helpfulness the Quest had entailed.. He bad openly de- clared before it was instituted that the sign, if given from Heaven at all, was one " to maim this Order which I made," and while conceding that those who had seen visions may have had some glimpse of divine things needful for them, he exalts far above such visions the duty of redressing earthly wrongs and purifying the realm. Whether the poet's own sympathy be with this absolute preference of the practical to the visionary life, or whether he only attributes it to the king as the true faith for a king—to whom it is given to govern rather than to search for contemplative truth,—we are not sure. Perhaps the perfect kingly conscience is in this respect intended to be somewhat narrower and less awake to the thirst for spiritual vision, than the perfect human conscience. And yet Arthur is made to say,—very much like St. Paul, who boasts that he thanks God he has visions, and can speak with tongues more than all the seers among His disciples,—that he has his visions too, but counts them little compared with completing his allotted task of introducing order into his realm. On " Pelleas and Ettarre," fine as it is, we have uo space to dwell. It is a picture of the beginning of the end. Significantly enough, the gentle and wise king does not appear to bring back to the spirit of faith the maddened soul of the poor young knight, who, looking everywhere for purity and honour, finds or believes he finds nothing but lust and treachery. The book ends, cracks sharp off as it were, with the picture of jarred and desperate enthusiasm which has lost all its faith in human nature, and with no healing words of royal faith to save the wrecked spirit. The Queen shrinks from the accusing eye, the King is absent. After this book, the noble idyll of Guinevere's shame and repentance and parting from Arthur—one of the old series,—finds its natural place. And finally,—to bring our too long review to its conclusion—we have in the new passage prefixed to "The Morte d'Arthur " perhaps the finest fruit of Mr. Tennyson's genius. We know nothing of his so grand as Arthur's dream, before the final battle in the West in which he receives his mortal wound, when :— " There came on Arthur• sleeping, Gawain In Lancelot's war, the ghost of Gawain blown

Along a wandering wind, and past his ear Went shrilling 'Hollow, hollow all delight !

Hail, king! to-morrow thou shalt pass away.

Farewell ! there is an isle of rest for thee.

And I am blown along a wandering wind, And hollow, hollow, hollow all delight.'

And fainter onward, like wild birds that change Their season in the night and wail their way From cloud to cloud, down the long wind the dream ; but in going mingled with dim cries Far in the moonlit haze among the hills, As of some lonely city sack'd by night, When all is lost, and wife and child with wail

Pass to new lords ; and Arthur woke and

'Who spate ? A dream. 0 light upon the wind, Thine, Gawain, was the voice—are these dim cries Thine, or doth all that haunts the waste and wild Mourn, knowing it will go along with me ?' "

We are persuaded that the series of Arthurian poems which are now complete are destined to produce a greater and greater impression on the world, the more fully their continuity of design is apprehended. They are no allegories. But with the richest painting they combine the deepest delineations of conscience, of character, of social health and sickness, and of kingly law.

In the other poems of this volume—" The Northern Farmer," which we reviewed last week, of course excepted,—we feel no very deep interest. "The Golden Supper," and the smaller poems which have already appeared elsewhere, seem to us to want,—like all those mere poetic stories of Mr. Tennyson's which have no great thoughts to animate and permeate them,—something of backbone. His great power of colour needs the restraining power of a mastering intellec- tual purpose, to keep it from over-luxuriance. "Enoch Arden," " Aylmer's Field," "The Golden Supper," and others of his novel- lettes in verse, lack the intellectual fascination which is the true secret of Mr. Tennyson's genius. The moreellentent of the Arthurian poem, due to its slow and gradual growth, may have popularized, but has certainly hitherto disguised its unity and greatness, even from students of Tennyson. Once completed, it will be known for what it is,—one of the greatest of English works.