BOOKS.

TENNYSON'S "NORTHERN FARMER.'5

IN noticing the principal poem in Mr. Tennyson's new volume last week we had room to say but a passing word of one which, though its inferior no doubt as a poem, affords quite a new test of the Poet Laureate's powers, and is in some respects more in Mr. Brown- ing's school than in Tennyson's. The dying reflections of the Northern Farmer (Old Style) are thoroughly dramatic, and full of that poetic humour which concentrates the vital essence of character into a few words or stanzas. Such monologues Mr.

Tennyson has given us more than once before, not only in "Maud" and " Locksley Mill," but at considerable length in the "Idylls of the Ring," and—perhaps in greatest perfectiqn of all—in 'the finest of Mr. Tennyson's shorter poems the "Ulysses." Still in all these cases the monologue has had in it more of imaginative substance than actual experience. In the Northern Farmer all the elements of tile picture are taken literally, which is very unusual with Mr. Tennyson, from what would generally be thought the most prosaic and limited form of human existence in the world, or at least in Eugland ; yet the poem surpasses in the perfection of its form and the rude pathos of its homely burden all the other monologws in Mr. Tennyson's writings. The blank verse in which Ulysses describes how peril and adventure had only whetted his own insatiable hunger for fresh experience, is properly a fragment both in essence and form, not a rounded poem. It is an expression of restlessness spurning at the accomplished, peering forward into immadiate enterprise, and therefore it could not properly be in rhyme. Its whole thought, "how dull it is to pause and make an end," and how Vile it were For some three suns to store and hoard myself, And this grey spirit yearning in desire To follow knowledge like a sinking star Beyond the utmost bound of human thought," is the thought of an endless labour and ardour growing out of an unsatisfying past, and pressing into a future that could not be any- thing but a new term of equally unsatisfying experience. To that insatiable hunger of restless search—not really Greek, for Mr. Tennyson has thrown into it the warm colour of a deeper passion than any keen-eyed Herodotean curiosity, — Mr. Tennyson has now given us a wonderful pendant in the picture of the Northern English farmer. In the idealized " Ulysses " he made us see how the hungry passion for new experience despised the limited routine of common duties even in its highest form :—

"This is my son, mine own Telemachus, To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle— Well loved of me, discerning to fulfil This labour, by slow prudence to make mild • A ragged people' and by soft degrees

• Subdue them to the useful and the good.

Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere Of common duties, decent not to fail In offices of tenderness, and pay Meet adoration to the household gods When I am gone. Ho works his work, I mine."

In the Northern Farmer, however, Mr. Tennyson has found a depth of dull routine far, far beneath the tameness of Telemachus or any imaginable Greek, and yet on that very account pos- sessing a completeness in itself and admitting a rhythmical unity and a recurrent "burden" perfectly fitting it, in the hands of a great poet, for a true poem. Accordingly he has chosen a class whose dialect alone with its broad vowels and long-drawn pronunciation, gives an air of animal articulation and cloddish pertinacity to the poem ; he increases this effect by his long struggling metre ; and yet he gives us metre and rhyme too, for there is in the theme the continual beat of the same pulse of custom ; nay, more, there is also in it a genuine "burden," an underlying loyalty, such as makes the life of the old ballads or the Jacobite songs, and which lends this a sort of intensity and even pathos. This Old Style Northern farmer is filled with but one deep sense of obligatiou,—a du nib affection and faithful- ness not so much to the master he serves as to the land he tills.

Towards the "squoire" he feels something of conventional respect,

• &nods Arden, de. By Alfred Teenyeon, D.C.L. London Munn.

but chiefly compassion in the thought that " spoke " may soon have to dispense with his own invaluable services, but all his sense of duty and loyalty is towards the land itself which he has tilled so completely to his own satisfaction. The poem is in the form of a— not apology for hinuself, for he is full of pride in his career, but confidence made to his nurse on his deathbed. Ile begins with throwing off utterly the injunction of the doctor cutting off his ale, as plainly irrational, because inconsistent with the rules lie has followed for forty years,—the rules by which he has achieved all ho has achieved :—

" Doctors, they knaws nowt, for a says what's nawways true :

Naw 'wort o' koind o' use to saiiy the things that a do.

I've 'ed my point o' pantie ivry noight sin' I betin 'ere, An' I've 'ad my quart ivry market-noight for foorty year."

But from this protest against the aggressive doctor founded on the mere self-evident cogency of custom, he falls into a deeper protest against the parson who, aided by the fear of death, has awakened a slight, a very slight desire in the dying farmer to justify himself against the Church too, by appealing to duties as punctually observed as those which he has taken upon himself to the land :— " Parson's a bean loikewoise, an' a sittin 'ere o' my bed, 'The amoighty's a taiikin o' you to issoin, my friend,' a said,

An' a towd ma my sins, tufa toithe were due, an' I gied it in bond; I done my duty by un, as I a done by the load."

Moreover, he had "hallos volited wi Squoire an' Choorch an' Staate, an' i' the woost o' toimes I was niver agin the raiite." These, however, were virtues he could understand. Lip to the time of his wife's death he had complied with customs he could not understand exacted by parson, in the humility of his faith that established customs had some secret if not obvious reason for existing, and that a sermon was as much a dispensation of Providence to be submitted to, and sat out, as the whiz of the cockchafer in summer evenings :—

"An' I hallus corned to 's chooroh door moy Sally wur dead, An' eerd un a bummin' await), bike a buzzard-clock ower my yeiid, An' I niver knaw'd whet a mean'd but I thowt a'ad summut to salty, An' I thowt a said whet a owt to 'a said an' I corned awaity."

Perhaps no words were ever written which engrave so deeply on the imagination the lubberly acquiescence of the clodhopper in the right and might of unintelligible customs. The farmer looks upon the Sunday service as he does on the quarters of the inoon,—as an event that ought to occur every seven days in the order of nature, and the omission of which might bring down some serious catastrophe. But though he would be far too cau- tious to sanction any experimental change, he has no more con- ception how this weekly apparition of people in church and of the preacher in the pulpit works any good, or how its omission would work any evil; than he has as to the probable ill effects of the discontinuance of the moon. The parson in his efforts to pierce beneath this stolid acquiescence in Church duties as a seventh-day crop of custom has cast up" against him an in- dividual sin such as it may be thought he could appreciate— his having been the father of "Busy Marria's barn," or bairn, as the more Northern dialect pronounces it :—

" Bessy Marris's barn tha knawa she laiiid it to melt.

Mowt 'a beam, maylinp, for she wur a bad un, shot'.

'Slyer, 1 kap un, I kep un, my lass' tha understond ; I done my duty by un as I 'a done by the lend."

And, though dying, he cannot see anything more in it than the doubt whether he was the real father or not, and the certainty that, if he was, he has done the uttermost any law could demand by " keeping " the child. He has done his duty by the child just as ha has 'one his duty by the land by keeping its physical powers in working order.

Custom lie respects as something impressive yet unintel- ligible, but he has one deep sense of obligation that really comes home to him,—the labour due to the land ; and for human beings and institutions he cannot conceive more to be due than the concession of a certain tithe or fraction of the produce of this labour. Though he respects " parson"— much as Mr. King- lake says the Turks respect Englishmen or Englishmen respect a snowstorm, "as a mysterious, unaccountable, uncomfortable work of God which may have been sent for some good purpose, to be revealed hereafter,"—he cannot suppress a certain amount of contempt for him when he compares the divine's labour and his own, the labour of the pulpit and the labour which has rooted up all the furze bushes and carted away the stones on a great piece ofbarren waste, and turned it into grazing or corn land :—

" A reads wean sarmin a wealth, an'I a' stubb'd Thornaby Waiiste," —certainly not a comparison at all favourable to the parson if it were a true measure of the comparative labour of the two men, and if they were to be judged by works. The farmer is not,. superstitious, though he believes there was a ghost attached to Thornaby Waste, the ghost of a gamekeeper slain by poachers,— " But I. stubbl an oop wi' the lot, an' raiived an' rembled un oot--" just as he did the furze and bracken and stones. Neither is he religious, though he acknowledges and complains of the divine interference with his plans for completing the redemption of Thor uaby Waste "if godamoighty an' parson 'ad nobbut let ma aloha." He even warns Providence solemnly of the responsibility He will incur by thus taking the right man from the right place,—

" Do godamoighty knaw what a's doin a-taiikin' o' moil?" Even He—thinks the farmer—has a duty" to the lond " and a duty quite incon4stent with robbing the estate of its only efficient manager. "A mowt 'a taiiken Joilnes," he suggests, or even Robins, and he does not hesitate—in a tone very unlike that of Job--to dispute with Heaven :—

"But godamoighty at-moost taiike Inch an' taake ma now Wi 'auf the cows to cauve an' Thomaby holms to plow !"

The dying man has but one comfort,—to die before any one comes to supersede the human labour spent upon the land, his only idol, with the new-fangled heartless power of steam :—

0 But summon 'all come star meii mayhap wi' is kittle o' steam Huzzin' an' maiizin' the blessed fealds wi tho Divirs oan team. Gin I mun doy I mun cloy, an' loife they says is sweet, But gin I mun doy I man doy, for I couldna bear to see it."

What a picture it is—not of brutal selfishness (for the man has a far higher value for labour than for his own gross pleasures, and puts his duty to the land at the basis of his whole life), but of idolatry to the clods he turns, ranking the welfare of the land far abeve that of its human inhabitants. What a mar- vellous picture of limitation so complete and unconscious of any- thing beyond it that the man is really, and not merely desires to think himself, perfect in his own sight, even on his dying bed, and believes that Ile is held to be so by all above him :—

" L)oiik 'ow quoloty smoiles when they sees ma a passim' by, Says to thessen flaw doot what a mon a belt sewer-ly !' For they knaws what I bean to Squoire sin fust a corned to the 'All; I done my duty by Squoire an' I done my duty by all."

Yet it is a picture true to the life, we believe, of thousands even in this generation ; and is not without that coarse sense of duty at the bottom—as contrasted with the sense of rights and claims from others into which the more educated classes so soon grow—which is the essential strength in the fibre of the English character. The coarse raw material of England's greatness has never been painted in such rude and masterly simplicity. The mere fidelity which can cleave to so true though cloddish a sense of duty towards "real estate,"—nay, which perhaps finds it easier to be dutiful to the soil itself because it makes, or seems to make, no demand on the mind for elasticity and willingness to admit new thoughts and new claims, than it would be to feel the same sense of duty to a God who is always disturbing our limited English nature with some new ray of His infinite wisdom,—is a picture of rugged narrowness such as we scarcely thought it lay in Mr. Tennyson's rich nature to draw. We believe a deeper lesson on the essential strength and essential narrowness of the English national character reduced to its rudest elements, has never yet been taught by an English poet.