BOOKS.

ENOCH ARDEN.*

WE cannot help hoping that Enoch Arden may draw from Mr. Matthew Arnold an elaborate criticism on the genius of Tennyson, —not because we should be content to abide by the judgment of that most classical of English critics,—and though Mr. Arnold will take the epithet " classical " as pure panegyric, we mean it to express also the contraction and self-satisfied equanimity of his own school of criticism,—but because, discharging as he has recently explained to us, so far at least as one man can, for English literature the duties of the great French Academy, and discharging them as we admit in the limpid style and with the lucid self-centred conceptions of that great body, and bearing as he thus does upon his stately shoulders the weight and responsi- bilities of a foreign standard of art, we should have in such a criticism from Mr. Matthew Arnold the most perfect opportunity forcomparing two entirelydifferent schools of genius. Mr. Arnold's own school would prefer even to stunt itself on some sides than to admit irregular or onesided growths on any, would rather sacri- fice poetic substance altogether than depict it imperfectly through a crowd of glimmering associations, while the Poet Laureate's school, in better consonance with the English tone of imaginative literature of every age, tends to luxuriance and redundauce,—to richness of detail and the natural tangle of our intricate modern life in preference to the austere and simple outline of the classical models. Yet the Poet Laureate himself, though he appeals so much more than Mr. Arnold to the reigning tendencies of English poetic taste, is disposed, if we may judge by a little hendecasyl- lablo poem at the end of this book in imitation of Catullus, to appeal against the criticism which he expects from the English press, for he therein calls his critics by anticipation (which is scarcely fair) " irresponsible indolent reviewers," and the magazines " blatant." These " irresponsible indolent reviewers," however, will be much more likely to go into captivity to his genius and satisfy his poetic yearnings for appreciation, than the stately and pertinacious critic who agrees with him we fancy only in despising English criticism. "Non tea me turbida terrent dicta," said Mr. Arnold once to his own judges, "Dii Ins terrent et Jupiter hosti.v." But not even the Poet Laureate could say this to such a judge as Mr. Matthew Arnold, who is himself Jupiter hostis. Would he not smile on Mr. Tennyson with the same serene pity with which Virgil's Jupiter smiled on Cytherea's tangled fears,

"011i aubridens-

Vilna quo ccelum tempeatatesque serenat,"

and explain to him With calm pertinacity how many beau- ties he ought to have sacrificed, how many undergrowths to have pruned away, how many fringes of colour he should have washed out, in order to mirror more perfectly in his poetry "the pure lines of an Ionian horizon, the liquid clearness of an Ionian sky." And it is for this reason that we should so heartily welcome a criticism of Mr. Aruold's on Tennyson. We believe it would bring out more clearly than any other the striking characteristics of Tennyson's genius, sometimes, through Mr. Arnold's delicate insight, and quite as often perhaps, by offending his frigid and imperious rules.

Yet in several of the poems of this volume, certainly in its principal and most beautiful poem, there is, with all the peculiar flavour of Tennyson's unique genius, less of the rich luxuriance of the romantic style, more of simplicity of outline and whole- ness of effect, than in any of the " Idylls of the King,"—more of what the classical school call. " a great action," and less of that foliage of individual character which overgrows action. To talk of any poem of Tennyson's as " classical," in the party use of that term, would be almost contradiction in terms. If ever there were apoet whose outline of conception is richly overlaid with the intellectual vegetation rooted and watered by its springs—so that often we trace its course chiefly by these secondary signs, as we trace a stream from a distant height by the green fringe of trees which overhang it,—it is Tennyson. The classical school take the standards for their poetry from the more perfect forms of human art, for instance, from the statuesque simplicity of Greek

Enoch Arden. By Alfred Tennyson, D.C.L., Poet Laureate. Loodm Moron.

architecture. Tennyson's art can never be fairly judged by standards of this kind. Thought folds over thought, tendril over tendril of association, with all the pliancy of a rich though slow natural growth over the framework of his design,—somewhat as an arbour is covered with the leafage of creepers, and without either the conspicuous symmetry or burnished workmanlike effect of marble architecture. Still if ever Tennyson has kept this foliage of association under, and controlled the slow luxuri- ance of his imagination so as to leave a clear and single impres- sion of an heroic action on the mind, he has done so in the first of these poems, Enoch Arden. It is an old story, but never before has it been so moulded. Enoch Arden and Philip Ray are introduced as the childish lovers of Annie Lee, who play together at keeping house, Annie being the little wife

of each "turn and turn about," but Enoch having the stronger will and deeper passion, so that when he and Philip battle for her she has to pray them not to quarrel and promise to be "little wife to both." Aud so indeed it proves. For Enoch marries her, and

then in order to save money for his children's education under- takes a voyage to China, is wrecked on the way back, and lives alone some dozen years or more on an island in the tropics, whence he is at last fetched away by another ship which touches there for water,—but too late. Philip, who has been all this time educating Annie's children for her, and acting to them as a father, persuades her at last after eleven years to marry him, and Enoch arrives to find her the happy wife of his playmate. He refrains for her sake and the sake of all from making himself known, and dies in a year's time broken by the weight of pur- poseless labour. Mr. Tennyson's imagination has clothed the story with the most exquisite touches of indirect expression, and this with more self-restraint, with a less liberal use of mingled colours and clustered forms, than usual. Yet the whole method and genius is romantic, and is indeed deeper; richer, and fuller of infinite vistas than the classical art has it in its power

to be. Greek art understood, indeed, and used with marvellous power the irony which so often enters into human destiny, but it would have been contrary to its genius to make that dark irony

other than final; to the Greek poets it was the deep background of final gloom which they introduced in order to bring out upon it the sculptured yet transient beauty of their own vivid thought into full relief. In Enoch Arden Mr. Tennyson makes free use of the same sort of irony in human fate. As we have seen, he makes the infant games of his characters prefigure their sad lot. He makes the strong faith and strong sense of duty of the homely sailor the very root and cause of his terrible calamity ; he paints fearful presentiments of the truth in the mind both of husband and wife which like shadowy mockeries of providential care come to warn them of their fate without opening any path of escape from it. The wrecked sailor hears with a shudder in his lonely island a faint sound of a marriage peal from his parish bells on the day of his wife's second marriage. The wife, sick with hope deferred, sees in a dream her husband sitting under a palm tree, and mistakes it for the palms of the other world. The presentiment of the wife that she shall see her husband no more, and of the husband that he shall see his wife again, are both fulfilled. Yet all these vain echoes, as they would seem at first, of providential sign and warning, are, by Mr. Tennyson's deep spiritual art, made to heighten the impression of that per- vading and mysterious divine love whose ways are not our ways nor its thoughts our thoughts. Instead of being cruel and delusive mockeries of human weakness, these signs of destiny which seem so fruitless or misleading appear in the end to have ministered to a higher purpose than if they had been rightly interpreted and led to their most natural results. The shadowy oracles in some sense mock, but in a deeper sense are justified. The actual palm tree of the wife's vision becomes the spiritual palm tree of her thought, and her misreading of her dream directly subserves the divine purpose in preparing the rough and hardy sailor who trusts in God so deeply for the highest act of human self-denial. What we have said gives far too much effect of mysticism to the story, which, though in all its characteristic touches it is essentially of the romantic school, leading us on every side into some vista of infinite depth and pathos, is yet of the simplest possible structure in its original design. Mr. Tennyson gives in the early part of the tale a homely but most graphic picture of his hero :-

" So these were wed, and merrily rang the bells, And merrily ran the years, seven happy years, Seven happy years of health and competence, And mutual love and honourable toil; With children ; first a daughter. In him woke, With his first babe's first cry, the noble wish

To save all earnings to the uttermost, And give his child a better bringing-up Than his had been, or hers ; a wish renew'd, When two years after came a boy to be The rosy idol of her solitudes, While Enoch was abroad on wrathful seas, Or often journeying landward; for in truth Enoch's white horse, and Enoch's ocean spoil In ocean-smelling osier, and his face, Rough-redden'd with a thousand winter gales, Not only to the market-cross were known, But in the leafy lanes behind the down, Far as the portal-warding lion-whelp, And peacock-yewtree of the lonely Hall, Whose Friday fare was Enoch's ministering."

There is but one touch approaching to the classical style throughout the tale, and that is where Enoch is persuading his wife that pure good must come out of his voyage, and fortifying his argument with " roughly sermonizing on Providence and trust in Heaven." In this passage are three lines which might,— so rounded, complete, and self-satisfying is the image,—have almost been found in Mr. Matthew Arnold's own poems :— " Him running on thus hopefully she heard, And almost hoped herself ; but when he turn'd The current of his talk to graver things In sailor fashion roughly sermonizing On providence and trust in Heaven, she heard, Heard and not heard him ; as the village gir4 Who sets her pitcher underneath the spring, Musing on him that used to fill it for her, Hears and not hears, and lets it overflow. At length she spoke, '0 Enoch! you are wise ; And yet for all your wisdom well know I That I shall look upon your face no more.' " This is a melons instance of a lapse into that classical style of imagery, whose essence it is to come like an island of pictorial beauty standing 83 complete and self-centred in its place that one passes back almost by an effort to the thought which suggested it. Such, for example, is Homer's imagery ; he compares the Trojan army to a flight of cranes, and one remembers the image long after one has forgotten the occa- sion of it ; he compares Ulysses, emerging with the branching foliage before him from the thicket on Nausicaa and her scared maidens, to a lion sallying from the wood, and the lion remains on the imagination when Ulysses has vanished. But this kind of imagery is very rare iudesd with Mr. Tennyson, who, profuse as he is in depositing layer after layer of new association on his theme, makes each connect itself even more closely in feeling than in appearance with the theme to which it relates ; indeed he saturates his very landscapes, real as they are, with emotion, so that you cannot realize his pictures without sharing his mood. What, for instance, can paint more magnificently at once the real scenery of a tropical island and the desolate mood of the solitary man who dwelt in it than the following marvellously fine lines ?— " The mountain wooded to the peak, the lawns

And winding glades high up like ways to Heaven, The slender coco's drooping crown of plumes, The lightning flash of insect and of bird, The lustre of the long convolvulasea That coil'd around the stately stems, and ran Ev'n to the limit of the land, the glows And glories of the broad belt of the world, All these he saw ; but what he fain had seen He could not see, the kindly human face, Nor ever hear a kindly voice, but heard The myriad shriek of wheeling ocean-fowl, The league-long roller thundering on the reef, The moving whisper of huge trees that branch'd And blossom'd in the zenith, or the sweep Of some precipitous rivulet to the wave, As down the shore he ranged, or all day long Sat often in the seaward-gazing gorge, A shipwreck'd sailor, waiting for a sail ; No sail from day to day, but every day The sunrise broken into scarlet shafts Among the palms and ferns and precipices ; The blaze upon the waters to the east ; The blaze upon his island overhead ; The blaze upon the waters to the west ; Then the great stars that globed themselves in Heaven, The hollower-bellowing ocean, and again The scarlet shafts of sunrise—bat no sail..

There often as he watch'd or seem'd to watch, So still, the golden lizard on him paused, A phantom made of many phantoms moved Before him haunting him, or he himself Moved haunting people, things and places, known Far in a darker isle beyond the lino; The babes, their babble, Annie, the small house, The climbing street, the mill, the leafy lanes, The peacock-yewtree and the lonely Hall, The horse he drove, the boat he sold, the chill November dawns and dewy-glooming downs, The gentle shower, the smell of dying leaves, And the low moan of leaden-coloured seas."

The description of the tropical dawn, " the sunrise broken into scarlet shafts, among the palms, and ferns, and precipices," and the inexorable succession of the hours day by day,—

" The blaze upon the waters to the cut,

The blaze upon his island overhead, The blaze upon the waters to the west,

Then the great stars that glqbed themselves in heaven,

The hollowor-bellowing ocean, and again The scarlet shafts of sunrise,—but no sail !"

is the perfection at once of painted vision and painted feeling. The "great stars that globed themselves in heaven " are magni- fied, half by the clear tropical nights, half by the passion of im- ploring eyes as they are turned upwards in nightly despair ; and the splendours of the scene are evidently discerned half by the eye, half by that passionate loathing which yearns for a homelier and more familiar scene, even for " the low moan of leaden- coloured seas."

Again, the touches, few as they are, which delineate the cast- away's inward state, both during his exile and after his still more desolate return, are of a school of beauty far deeper than the classical

" and when the beauteous hateful isle Returned upon him, had not his poor heart Spoken with That which being everywhere, Lets none who speak with Him seem all alone, Surely the man had died of solitude ;"

where the mare use of the pronoun " That," instead of the more personal pronoun used in the following line, is a touch of the deepest pathos, indicating the vaguer and almost pantheistic feeling with which a perfectly solitary soul would shrink before the unbroken ocean of the Divine presence. Still finer is the description of Enoch's feeling after the last anguish which passes over him when he sees his wife happy and content in the love of another :-

" He was not all unhappy. His resolve Upbore him, and firm faith, and evermore Prayer from a living source within the will, And beating up through all the bitter world Like fountains of sweet water in the sea, Kept him a living soul."

Perhaps, however, the finest touch is the last one, which de- scribes his death, the "loud calling of the sea," the stir of rapture in his heart deeper than that with which he had wel- comed the ship in his long desolation, and the cry with which he met its approach :—

—" then the third night after this,

While Enoch slumber'd motionless and pale, And Miriam watch'd and dozed at intervals,

There came so loud a calling of the sea,

That all the houses in the haven rang.

He woke, he rose, he spread his arms abroad Crying with a loud voice A sail! a sail !

I am saved' ; and so fell back and spoke no morn."

Even' now we have omitted to dwell on many of the most deli- cate beauties of this fine poem. Enoch Arden is one of the very finest of Mr. Tennyson's works, greater in its scope than perhaps any of them but "In lifemortam,"—equal to almost any in execution, and eschewing more carefully than any other the natural redun- dance of a school which, though it is far higher than the classical, would often gain by something more of classical severity and purity of taste.

Aylmer's Field seems to us, though it is full of beauties, to be much less perfect in general conception, much more leafy in expres- sion, and consequently much more in need of the pruning knife. It is not easy to enter heartily into the feeling of the poem for the young suicide's fate, and the tone of the sermon in which the sterile pride of the Aylmers is scathed seems to us in parts not a little florid and even turgid,—far too reflective for that outpour- ing of impetuous feeling for which it is given us,—too extravagant for the result of calm reflection. For example, Averill preaching, after Edith's death and his brother's suicide, against Aylmer's fatal pride is made to say (he is speaking, we should say, in 1793,,at the time of the French Revolution) :— " I wish'd my voice

A rushing tempest of the wrath of God

To blow these sacrifices thro' the world— Sent like the twelve-divided concubine

To inflame the Tribes: but there—out yonder—earth Lightens from her own central Hell-0 thero

The red fruit of an old idolatry—

The heads of chiefs and princes fall so fast,

They cling together in the ghastly sack—

The Land of all shambles—naked marriages Flash from the bridge, and over-murder'd Franco, By shores that darken with the gathering wolf, Runs in a river of blood to the sick sea.

Is this a time to madden madness then ?

Waa this a time for those to flaunt their pride."

There is much in this, especially the Biblical image we have italicized, which to our ears sounds a spurious kind of wrath lashing itself into a rage it does not feel, and pressing forced metaphor and allusions into its service. And this is only one out of many instances we could give of what seem to us redun- dancies and overgrowths in this poem. It is a poem of many beauties rather than of much beauty.

Of the others, " Tithonus " which appeared in the Corn- hill Magazine, and is a wonderful and splendid conception of the burden of an immortality conferred upon a fading and aging mind,—and of the contrast between classical and ro- mantic conceptions, of a perpetual collision between infinite yearnings and finite powers, seems to us the finest. " Sea Dreams," which appeared in Macmillan, is a little obscure and exceedingly deficient in wholeness of effect, while the piece called a " Northern Farmer, Old Style," is full both of humour and power. But Mr. Tennyson is perfectly right in naming his new volume from its first poem. It will live among his noblest works. On that, fairly and deeply criticized by so delicate and candid a classical critic as Mr. Arnold, we should be content to see the controversy between the classical and romantic schools fought out, and should have no question as to the issue.