Kansas University Weekly.
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the line in which she calls her dead husband a fool. Her daughter Melissa is sweet enough to need no other reason for her existence. Many reviewers have complained of a lack of color in the character of the Prince. In truth, the only thing about him worthy of remark is his attitude toward the Princess, and I complain not of a lack of color in the Prince, but of an atmosphere of unreality which surrounds them both. This unreality persists until the last canto is reached, wherein the Prince becomes a man instead of a dreamy, impossible youth, and the Princess a real though ideal woman. Mr. Dawson thinks that the Prince is in some respects a personation of the poet himself, and all critics seem to agree that Ida is a fine portrayal of a noble woman. Noble the poet certainly wishes to portrait her, but the portrait is not lifelike. Let her be compared once with Guinevere, with whom the reader lives and suffers, and we shall see that Tennyson could make a lifelike woman and that he did not so in The Princess. The Princess Ida or, such a woman as the Princess Ida, never existed and never will; and I believe the poet intended her to represent an idea, as he did the Prince. It is because of this, that they represent ideas instead of flesh and blood beings, that they seem unreal. Now, the whole poem has for its motif an answer to the so-called woman-question, and seems to me to be of a sort of a fortiori argument against the absurd and useless discussion of woman's rights. The poet said: "Nature made men and women; I think she will take care of the rights of each. Let me teach you. I will make a Princess, strong in intellect and will power; and I will make a Prince, weak, dreamy and all affection. Behold! the old, old story. If with such a man and such a woman Nature works her complete will, how much more shall she rule under normal conditions. For Nature rules the world."
And so it comes that neither the Prince nor the Princess are studies from life; neither is real or lifelike and neither is invested with that peculiar and unmistakable air by which an author makes us recognize his hero, or his heroine. But the Prince is not the hero nor is the Princess Ida the heroine. But one character is brought prominently before the reader, shielded from every accident of ridicule or defeat and carried through every conflict unscathed; but one wears that radiance which is the heorine's right. It is the little child, Lady Psyche's baby, who is the heorine.
This is easy of proof. Take the intercolary songs : the first one,—
"As through the land at eve we went,
And plucked the ripen'd ears,
We fell out, my wife and I,
O we fell out I know not why,
And kissed again with tears.
And blessings on the falling out
That all the more endears,
When we fall out with those we love
And kiss again with tears.
For when we came where lies the child
We lost in other years,
There above the little grave,
O there above the little grave,
We kissed again with tears."
The power of the child, the strength of the love that childs calls forth, is stronger than pride and lasts beyond the grave. The second is the mother's tender lullaby:—
"Sleep and rest, sleep and rest,
Father will come to thee soon;
Rest, rest, on mother's breast,
Father will come to thee soon.
Father will come to his babe in the nest.
Silver sails all out of the west
Under the silver moon:
Sleep, my little one, sleep, my pretty one, sleep."
Wife and child again, the mother sings to her badly out of her own heart while her thoughts roam away to its father on the wind of the Western Sea. Next is the well known bugle song, beautiful but less simple in conception, the real meaning being scarcely reached until we find the word grow in the last stanza.
"O love, they die in yon rich sky.
They faint on hill or field or river;
Our echoes roll from soul to soul,
And grow forever and forever."
Again a song of married love which gives "a unity for the family. In the first song a unity through the past, in the second a unity through the present, and in this a unity for the future."
The fourth song is the one which, charged with the feeling of the singer, changed the story of The Princess from burlesque to earnest.