Изображения страниц
PDF
EPUB

value of a slandered character; an old-clothes man, a question as to the proper degree of skill in running a railway; and so on ad infinitum.

For the foregoing reasons, it is believed that it would be a great reform to abolish the jury system, and allow the judge to pass upon the facts as well as the law. It is true that he might be called upon to decide questions of which he had no previous knowledge; but it is to be remembered that, after deciding such a case, he is not dismissed, as a juryman is, but can carry the fruits of the investigation to the next case of the kind. He could not hold office very long without becoming experienced as to the questions that most frequently arise, and the advantage of a trained mind and skill and experience in weighing evidence is incalculable. Whether this reform will come in our time, quære?

ROBERT Y. HAYNE.

THE GENESIS OF TENNYSON'S "MAUD."

NOT a few among the most devout worshipers and ardent admirers of Tennyson's genius, in spite of the obloquy and abuse lavishly heaped upon it at its first appearance, have long cherished the noble poem of "Maud" as the consummate flower of his highest artistic work; standing midway, as it does, between the early efflorescence of his school-boy and under-graduate effusions and the decline and fall of his septuagenarian period.

The substance of this poem was first given to the world in the summer of 1855, while the Crimean war-fever was at its height, and the war-passages of the concluding section or part were probably an after-thought. At any rate, that section of the poem, which begins, "O that 'twere possible," and which stood in the first edition as the twenty-fourth and in the second as the twenty-sixth (the germ from which the whole poem eventually sprang), was originally published eighteen years previously, as far back as 1837, in the pages of a long-forgotten and now almost unattainable miscellany, entitled "The Tribute: a Collection of Miscellaneous Unpublished Poems, by Various Authors, edited by Lord Northampton ;" whence, as the late Mr. George Brimley remarked, it is "now recovered, and set as a jewel amid jewels." "There is nothing," he says, " that presents the incipient stage of madness, springing from the wrecked affections, with more of reality and pathos" than this poem. These stanzas elicited incidentally from the "Edinburgh Review"‡ its

It seems probable that the opening lines or key-note of these "Stanzas " may have been suggested by a passage in Webster's "Duchess of Malfi":

"O that it were possible we might

But hold some two days' conference with the dead!
From them I should learn something I am sure

I never shall learn here."

+"Cambridge Essays," 1855, p. 268..

October, 1837, p. 108.

first notice of Tennyson. "We do not profess," says the reviewer, "perfectly to understand the somewhat mysterious contribution of Mr. Alfred Tennyson, entitled 'Stanzas,' but amidst some quaintness, and some occasional absurdities of expression, it is not difficult to detect the hand of a true poet in those stanzas which describe the appearance of a visionary form, by which the writer is supposed to be haunted amidst the streets of a crowded city.". And last, but not least, Mr. Algernon Swinburne, speaking of some of the chief contributions to "that fortunate volume of miscellaneous verse," describes this one as "what seems to certain readers the poem of deepest charm and fullest delight of pathos and melody ever written even by Mr. Tennyson; since recast into new form, and refreshed with new beauty, to fit it for reappearance among the crowning passages of Maud." Instead of the concluding stanza,

"But the broad light glares and beats,"

as it now appears in "Maud," the "Stanzas," as they originally stood in the "Tribute," after

"To the regions of thy rest,"

closed as follows:

"But she tarries in her place,

And I paint the beauteous face

Of the maiden that I lost,

In my inner eyes again,
Lest my heart be overborne
By the thing I hold in scorn,
By a dull mechanic ghost
And a juggle of the brain.

"I can shadow forth my bride

As I knew her fair and kind,
As I woo'd her for my wife;
She is lovely by my side
In the silence of my life-
'Tis a phantom of the mind.

""Tis a phantom fair and good;
I can call it to my side,
So to guard my life from ill,
Though its ghastly sister glide
And be moved around me still
With the moving of the blood,
That is moved not of the will.

"Let it pass, the dreary brow,
Let the dismal face go by.
Will it lead me to the grave?

Then I lose it: it will fly.
Can it overlast the nerves?
Can it overlive the eye?
But the other, like a star,
Through the channel windeth far
Till it fade and fail and die,
To its Archetype that waits
Clad in light by golden gates—
Clad in light the Spirit waits
To embrace me in the sky."

All this was omitted when the "Stanzas" were remodeled to appear in the poem of "Maud," which appears to have grown out of a remark of the poet's friend and neighbor, the late Sir John Simeon, of Swainston, to whom Tennyson had read the lines,

"O that 'twere possible."

Mrs. Richmond Ritchie (better known as Miss Thackeray) relates that Sir John Simeon said, "it seemed to him as if something were wanting to explain the story of this poem, and so by degrees it all grew." A curious and significant anecdote, explanatory also of the sense of a verse of the poem, is told on the authority of Mr. Henry Sidgwick. Tennyson was reading the poem to a silent company, assembled in the twilight. When he came to the lines opening the twelfth section:

"Birds in the high Hall-garden

When twilight was falling,

Maud, Maud, Maud, Maud,

They were crying and calling,"

he stopped short, and asked an authoress who happened to be present what birds these were. Much embarrassed, and feeling that she must speak, and that the eyes of the whole company were upon her, the lady faltered out, "Nightingales, sir." "Pooh!" said Tennyson, "what a cockney you are! Nightingales don't say 'Maud.' Rooks do, or something like it. Caw, caw, caw, caw." Then he went on reading.

A sketch by the late Dante Gabriel Rossetti, dated 1855, of "Tennyson reading Maud," is at present in the possession of Robert Browning, the poet, who, together with his wife, was of

the party. It was exhibited at the Rossetti Exhibition of the Burlington Fine Arts Club, shortly after the painter's death; and a wood-engraving from it appeared in " Harper's Magazine," for December, 1883, accompanied by an article from the pen of Mrs. Ritchie, the daughter of Thackeray. Mr. Joseph Truman, himself one of the most noticeable of the lesser constellation of living poets, paid a visit to Farringford, the poet's home in the Isle of Wight, a quarter of a century ago, and had the privilege of hearing him read "Maud," with many passages and lines now omitted. The question as to the madness of the hero of "Maud " has been almost as much, as variously, and as fruitlessly discussed as that of the madness of "Hamlet." It will be interesting in this connection to note that a set of proof-sheets of the second edition (considerably revised and enlarged, and published in 1856) bore the title of "Maud; or, the Madness," but this second title, an after-thought, and probably intended as a sop to the critical Cerberus, was rescinded before publication. In the edition of 1859 the poem was divided into two parts, and subsequently into three. In the later editions it is entitled, "Maud : a Monodrama."

A defender of the work appeared in the person of Dr. Robert James Mann, who published an elaborate brochure of eighty pages on the spirit and purpose of the poem, entitled, "Tennyson's 'Maud' Vindicated: an Explanatory Essay." The poet appears to have approved of his commentator's interpretation, for he writes to Dr. Mann as follows:

"No one with this essay before him can in future pretend to misunderstand my dramatic poem, 'Maud'; your commentary is as true as it is full."

In a small anonymous volume of poems, entitled "Ionica," * another defender came forward with some lines of considerable merit, entitled, "After Reading 'Maud,' September, 1855." Three years ago the writer of the present paper was privileged to see the original proof-sheets of the first edition of "Maud." A long printed passage, of remarkable power and pungency, describing in scathing language the young lord-lover whom the heroine's brother desires to force on her, was scored out in these proofs and never appeared in the published poem. It begins with the second stanza of the tenth section, after the lines closing the first, as they still stand:

* Smith, Elder & Co., 1858, pp. 61-64.

« ПредыдущаяПродолжить »