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A TALK ABOUT THE PRINCESS.

CARL BENSON'S LIBRARY.

Present: CARL AND FRED PETERS.

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BENSON. It is TENNYSON'S PRINCESS. PETERS. Oh, Tennyson! Yes, I remember you always had a great admiration for him-not but what he is justly entitled to a good standing among the secondary poets.

BENSON. Perhaps you would be surprised to hear Tennyson spoken of as a greater poet than Byron.

PETERS. Ay, that should I.

BENSON. And yet such is at present the opinion of a very large number of the best educated men in England.

PETERS. Indeed! I knew that of late years Wordsworth had become the fashionable poet of his literary countrymen, but did not suspect that they had now set up a new idol in his place.

BENSON. The process is natural enough. Men grow sated with passion and excitement; they rush for relief to quiet meditation. The popular taste passes from poetry which defies theory and morality to poetry which is all theory and morality. În time the proper medium between and union of the two begins to be seen and appreciated. The literary world has its oscillations of this sort as well as the political.

PETERS. This then you are disposed to consider Tennyson's great merit, that he is a uniter and harmonizer of the two opposite schools, the Byronic and the Wordsworthian?

BENSON. I am, though well aware it is

*Fred talks Yorkshire, but writes as pure English as any of us, so that it is only doing him justice to translate his remarks into the ordinary dialect. C. B.

not the ground that most of his admirers would take. They would make him (so far as they would allow him to have any master) a follower of Wordsworth. But the passionate element is certainly very predominant in him at times, sufficiently so to have annoyed some over-proper people here. And I do consider this fusion or eclecticism, or whatever you choose to call it, as one mark of a great poet, because it gives a truer representation of man than is afforded by either of the schools which it combines. The slave of passion, on however grand a scale he may be depicted, is a low development of our nature. The meditative philosopher is a high, but an incomplete development. You would not choose as your type of government an unbridled democracy or an immovable conservatism, but one in which the two parties had room and scope to struggle. So in the man, you wish to see the play of his feelings and the supervision of his judgment, his better reason prevailing in the end amid the conflict of his passions, but only "saving him as by fire." And where in modern poetry will you find a greater example of this than in Locksley Hall?

PETERS. What is the reason then that some people complain of Tennyson's writing namby-pamby, and emasculating poetry?

BENSON. Simply because some people are dummies. I can understand a charge of this kind as applied to Mrs. Hemans, or Keats, or Wordsworth, (not meaning that I should agree with the man who makes the charge, but I can see why he makes it ;) but as applied to Tennyson it seems to me neither more nor less than absurd. There is pathos and sentiment in him: there are passages which may make those cry who are cryingly disposed. In the name of Apollo and the nine Muses, is that to be set down to his discredit? Read Locksley Hall,

I say again, and read Morte d'Arthur, and then tell me that the man who wrote them has emasculated poetry. Bulwer and Mrs. Norton, whichever it was of them that perpetrated the New Timon, might write their heads off before they could achieve two poems that will live alongside of those. Ought a man never to feel pensive? Is it a crime to be sometimes moved by the pathetic? I well remember that I used to lie on a green bank of summer mornings and read Theocritus till I was full of pity for Daphnis and the unfortunate man who "had a cruel companion;" but I never found that it unfitted me for taking a horse across country or digging up hard words out of a big lexicon at the proper time.

trial of an author's powers of versification than any rhyming metre. Read Enone or Morte d'Arthur, and you will see what I mean.

PETERS. But after all, allowing what you claim, is not this a small matter to build a poetic reputation on? You may have mere nonsense verses, like the " Song by a Person of Quality," perfect in the way of rhythm and metre: indeed it is a very common device of small poets to make sound supply the place of sense.

BENSON. It is also a very common device of people who are not poets at all to profess themselves such geniuses that they can despise the ordinary laws of versification. An every-day trick that, and a sad nuisance are these little great men who set PETERS. Yes, I remember Romano and up to write poetry without being able to you lying on that very bank you are think-write verse. Is the most correct and eleing of, between the Trinity bridge and the Trinity library, and him making his confession thus: "I acknowledge the influence of the scene. At this moment any one might do me.' BENSON. There was a man of the world who was not ashamed to be sentimental, and why should a poet be?

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PETERS. Thus far you have praised Tennyson's taste and judgment rather than his genius and originality, it seems to me. What peculiar and individual merits do you find in his poetry?

BENSON. In the first place, wonderful harmony of verse; in the second

PETERS. Wait a moment, and let us dispose of the first place before going further. It really surprises me to hear you make such a point of Tennyson's harmony, for he is frequently blamed on this very head. There are some violent, old-fashioned elisions, to which he is over-prone

BENSON. Such as "i' the" for "in thee." PETERS. Exactly; and though not professing to have read his poems critically, I would engage to point you out a number of lines in them which contain weak or superfluous syllables..

BENSON. It must be confessed that occasional blemishes of the sort may be detected in him, yet it is scarce possible to read one of his poems carefully through without being struck with his exquisite sense of melody. Try it especially with his blank verse:-blank verse, as every judge of verse knows, is a much greater

gant prose translation of a passage from
Homer or Dante poetry? The question
seems almost absurd; but why isn't it
poetry? There are all the ideas of the
original. It is the vehicle of them that
makes the essential difference.
And any
tangible and practicable definition of poe-
try must somehow include metrical expres-
sion; if you admit one independent of this
element, you may be driven to allow that
the Vicar of Wakefield is a poem, to which
felicitous conclusion I once pushed a trans-
cendentalist who was arguing the point
with me.

PETERS. But metrical excellence is, to a certain extent at least, a matter of study and practice.

BENSON. What then? PETERS. Why, you know, poetaBENSON. Nascitur to be sure. Which means that unless a man has a genius for poetry he can never be made a poet. And the very same thing is true of the painter or the mathematician. A man requires education for everything, even for the proper development of his physical powers.

PETERS. Of course you except political wisdom and statesmanship, which in a democracy come to every man by nature, like Dogberry's reading and writing.

BENSON. Of course. But no man can afford to despise the rudiments of art, I don't care what his natural genius is. What would you say to a young painter who should refuse to study anatomy and perspective?

PETERS. Then you think it as necessary for a poet in posse to study metre, as for a painter in posse to study anatomy? BENSON. Rem acu.

PETERS. You were going to mention another excellence of Tennyson.

BENSON. Yes, his felicity of epithet. You may go through his two volumes without finding a single otiose adjective. Now it is the happy employment of adjectives that especially makes descriptive writing, whether in prose or poetry, picturesque; and therefore in Idyllsἐιδύλλια-poems which are little pictures, or each a series of pictures, Tennyson has no equal since his master in that branch of poetry, Theocritus. PETERS. You seem to have studied your man well, and therein you would have the advantage of me in a discussion. But let me ask you one question. Do you honestly think, to say nothing of this country, that Tennyson will ever have the same continental reputation that Byron has?

BENSON. I do not for a very good reason. Tennyson is decidedly a more national poet than Byron. Indeed, there is nothing national in the latter. There is nothing in him that a Frenchman or an American cannot appreciate as well as an English man; nay, there are many things which a Frenchman can appreciate better than an Englishman, because they are more in accordance with his feelings and sympathies. Whereas

PETERS. You must make an exception in favor of Byron's satires on contemporary English poets.

BENSON. To be sure; but they are certainly not the poems on which his continental reputation in any way depends. Tennyson, on the other hand, is eminently an English poet. He likes to take his subjects from English country life, or English popular stories; and some of his shorter poems are simply and distinctly patriotic, embodying the liberal conservatism of an enlightened English patriotism.

PETERS. I remember one beginning

"Love thou thy land with love far brought From out the storied Past."

PETERS. Yes, I recollect; and how she gazes down from her isle-altar, and turns to scorn with lips divine the falsehood of extremes. There is nothing violently or offensively national in that.

BENSON. He began with a great deal more spice. In one of his earlier volumes there is a sort of war-song conceived in a spirit of magnificent national conceit. It starts with this satisfactory assumption :— "There is no land like England

Where'er the light of day be;
There are no men like Englishmen,
So true of heart as they be.”

And there is a pious and benevolent rerefrain or chorus, after this fashion :

"For the French, the pope may shrive them,
For devil a whit we heed them;
As for the Fench, God speed them
Unto their heart's desire,
And the merry devil drive them

Through the water and the fire."
After all, I like a man to stand up for
his country. We don't do it half enough.
PETERS. Whom do you mean by we?

BENSON. You and I, Whigs and Locos, and everybody. But to return to our Tennyson. There is another reason for his being "caviare to the general," even in his own country. His mind is classically moulded, and his poems full of classical allusions. The influence of Homer and Theocritus especially is constntly traceable in his writings; and his felicitous imitations and suggestive passages constitute one of his greatest charms to the liberally educated. Sometimes he is harsh, if not unintelligible to the uninitiated, as when he says that Sir Bedivere stood with Excalibur,

"This way and that dividing the swift mind In act to throw ;"

which reads very stiff till you recollect the Homeric

διχθάδι'.

δαιρόμενος κατὰ θυμὲν

PETERS. I would go further yet, and say that a man, to appreciate Tennyson fully, must be artistically educated and be famil

BENSON. There is a finer one than that: iar with Claudes, and Raphaels, and Titians.

"Of old sat Freedom on the heights,

The thunders breaking at her feet; Above her shook the starry lights. She heard the torrents meet."

That was what struck me some time ago, on reading his Palace of Art, (at the recommendation of an admirer, who considered it his chef d'œuvre,) and your last re

mark, together with what you said just before about his picturesqueness, reminded me of it. I certainly am inclined to think with you, that Tennyson, like Shelley, will always be "caviare to the general," and therefore but we won't quarrel. I have one more question to ask you. Don't you think that Tennyson owes some of his present reputation to clever friends? Isn't he the pet of his university? Is there not a certain club of Cambridge men that you once told me of?

BENSON. They are not all Cantabssome Oxonians like Arnold's pupil and biographer Stanley, and some non-university men like Carlyle. They comprise lions of all sorts, greater and less; humorists, with Thackeray of Punch at their head; artists; literary men of fashion; theologians, (did you ever read Maurice's Kingdom of Christ?) and plenty of reviewers. A poet who has generally one of his club in the Edinburgh and occasionally another in the Quarterly, stands a chance of having full justice done him. At the same time it is only fair to remember, Fred, that laudatory criticism is at times essential to justice, especially after unjust and onesided treatment, like the first notice the Quarterly took of Tennyson. Nor can the Tennysonians be charged with anything more than this. You cannot justly impute to them any mere puffery, or extravagant because unqualified panegyric. Take Sterling's review, (lately republished in a volume of his works;) there is no horror of fault-finding in it. When he doesn't like a poem he says so. How different from the mutual criticisms of a society of mutual admirationists!

PETERS. You are brim-full of your author, I see, and ready to lecture on him. Suppose you give me some account of his new poem there, (sotto voce,) especially as there will be more chance of getting something to drink after it.

BENSON. That will I. It is a queer thing certainly, this poem. "A medley" he calls it, and so it is- -a medley of grave and gay, where, like his own holiday rustics, he in one place pursues sport and philosophy hand in hand, in another, pure sport. The poet goes to see a jolly baronet, whose son, Walter, is one of his college friends. It is a fair summer day, and there

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Grew side by side; and on the pavement lay
Huge Ammonites, and the first bones of time;
Carved stones of the Abbey-ruin in the park,
And on the tables every clime and age
Jumbled together: Celts and Calumets,
Claymore and snow-shoe, toys in lava, fans
Of sandal, amber, ancient rosaries,
Laborious orient ivory sphere in sphere,
The cursed Malayan crease, and battle-club
From the isles of palm; and higher on the
Betwixt the monstrous horns of elk and deer,
walls,
His own forefathers' arins and armor hung."

All which is very fine; but the literary visitor is sure to make for the books, and dive into

"a hoard of tales that dealt with knights, Half legend, half historic, counts and kings That laid about them at their wills, and died;"

till Walter pulls him out, book and all, to see the grounds and the ruins and the ladies. The happy multitude are scattered about their path.

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So they come to the ruins, where Sister Lilia has amused herself by dressing up an old ancestor's statue in new and fashionable woman's attire, and the young men begin to "talk shop," that is, in the present case, to talk college, which brings up the old question of female rights and female capacities. At last the guest is called on for a story that shall be moral and amusing both.

PETERS. Unreasonable requisition!

BENSON. Nevertheless, with Cantab assurance, he sets about "making a shot" at it; but, says he—

"One that really suited time and place,

tearing up letter and present, and threaten

Were such a medley we should have him backing an appeal to the ultima ratio.

Who told the Winter's Tale to do it for us:
A Gothic ruin, and a Grecian house,
A talk of college and of ladies' rights,
A feudal knigh in silken masquerade,
And there with shrieks and strange experi-

ments,

For which the good Sir Ralph had burnt them all,

The nineteenth century gambols on the grass.
No matter: we will say whatever comes:
Here are we seven; if each man take his turn
We make a sevenfold story."

PETERS. Ah, each man a canto: that would afford room for some pleasant diversities of style and thought.

BENSON. Unfortunately, or fortunately, there is nothing of the kind. The seven cantos, or parts, or fyttes, or whatever you may choose to call them, are all in one continuous vein. Lilia wanted to be a Princess and have a college of her own: he therefore must be a Prince at least, and accordingly a Prince he is,—

blue-eyed and fair in face, With lengths of yellow ringlet like a girl; For on my cradle shone the northern star. My mother was as mild as any saint

PETERS. That "any" is prosaic.

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BENSON." And nearly canonized by all she knew,
So gracious was her tact and tenderness;
But my good father thought a king a king:
He held his sceptre like a pedant's wand
To lash offence, and with long arms and hands
Reach'd out, and pick'd offenders from the mass
For judgment."

This northern Prince had in his boyhood been betrothed to a southern Princess in her girlhood-a regular affair of business, as royal betrothals are.

PETERS. Only royal ones, Carl? BENSON. Don't interrupt me, Fred, for I am like one of your fast trotters, very hard to start again after breaking. So when he was coming to man's estate, his father sent after the lady to fetch her, as per agreement; but instead of the Princess

comes

"A present, a great labor of the loom," and a letter from her father to the effect that she has "a will and maiden fancies," and in short won't be married at any price. You may fancy the old warrior monarch

PETERS. The Prince resolves to go himself incognito, I suppose.

BENSON. Precisely so, as you shall hear. «Then ere the silver sickle of that month Became her golden shield, I stole from court With Cyril and with Florian".

(These were his two friends, and the latter has a sister in the Princess's court,) "With Cyril and with Florian, unperceived. Down from the bastion walls we dropt by night And flying reached the frontier; then we crost To a livelier land, and so by town and thorpe, And tilth, and blowing bosks of wilderness, We gain'd the mother city thick with towers;"

(How like a journey in Fairy land it is, with all those quaint Elizabethan words!) "And in the imperial palace found the king. His name was Gama; crack'd and small his voice,

A little dry old man, without a star,
Not like a king."

This little old king, who was as oily as one of your third-rate, shake-your-handwith-two-fingers diplomats, explained that his daughter had been put up to founding a university for maidens by two widows, (one of them Florian's sister;) whereat the Prince, chafing him on fire to find his bride, "Set out once more with those two gallant boys,

Then pushing onward under sun and stars
Many a long league back to the north,”-

(for the summer palace where this female university was founded lay on the northern frontier,) came to an inn near the place, and after a consultation with mine host, hit on the plan of turning ladies for the occasion. "We sent mine host to purchase female gear; Which brought and clapt upon us, we tweezered

out

What slender blossom lived on lip or cheek. Of manhood; gave mine host a costly bribe To guerdon silence, mounted our good steeds, And boldly ventured on the liberties."

PETERS. "And so they renished them to ride On three good renished steeds." But the thing is an absurdity already. Do you suppose three men among a little town of women, could escape detection three minutes? Do you know three of your acquaintance, that you would trust in such a position?

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