Kansas University Weekly.
63
LITERARY.
A Study of The Princess.
The science of criticism is even now in a somewhat chaotic state, wanting so far a clear and universal standard of excellence which shall be to it as is the law of gravitation to Physics or Astronomy. The critic who will not light his path by the glare of his own prejudice walks indeed in semi-darkness and uncertainty. When the work to be judged is poetry, for which the mind of man has not even an adequate definition, with what a double hedge of difficulties is his path beset! Mathew Arnold in his admirable essay on "The Study of Poetry," has put forward some novel and delightful tangible ideas; the methods he proposes for arriving at a true and universal estimate to what is fine in poetry are clear and surprisingly practical; yet one who attempts to handle such a poem as Tennyson's Princess with the implements he suggests may as well try to weigh moonbeams and star-dust in a grocer's scales.
The Princess, Tennyson's longest poem, was first published in 1847. Four succesive edition were given to the public, in all of which more or less important changes were made, the edition of 1853 being the text as it now stands. It is, as the author says in the Prologue, and as unfavorable critics have loved to reiterate, a medley; it is more; it is grotesque. A thin wire of Greek aesthetics, wrapped with the colors of mediæval England and galvanized with a current of modern ideas, is woven into a lattice of square and scroll and arabesque through which peep the sad eyes of Tragedy and wry-faced Comedy side by side. A bad tragedy is ridiculous and good comedy is often full of pathos, but here the two join hands. It is merely a poet's whim?
The versification of the poem, which bears the Tennysonian stamp of perfect finish throughout, has several noticeable characteristics. Tennyson's mind was permeated with the spirit of Old English poetry; as a consequence, we find alliteration used constantly with skill and splendid effect.Lines like these,
"With prudes for proctors, dowagers for deans,
And sweet girl-graduates in their golden hair"
tickle the ear, but in this,
'Sweet thoughts would swarm as bees about their queen'
or this,
"the lark
the alliteration heightens immeasurable the effect. Then there are many passages rhythmically irregular, in which the sound carries the sense, which Professor Hadley says are not excelled by Milton or Virgil. Thus—
"And in the blast and bray of the long horn And serpent throated bugle, undulated The banner."
Or,
"Myriads of rivers hurrying through the lawn, The moan of doves in immemorial elms And murmuring of the innumerable bees."
Not unlike many of Tennyson's poems, The Princess was received with disfavor by critics in general. "Delta" of Blackwood's Magazine thought its faults "so many and so glaring and often so apparently willful" that he "as a sincere admirer of Tennyson could almost wish the poem had never been written." Another reviewer of about the same time, 1855, condemned it out of hand for its subject, i.e. "the noise about womens right which even now ceases to make itself heard anywhere but in that refuge of exploded European absurdities beyond the Atlantic." Now, this harmlessly severe critic was wrong. The idea of the higher education of women originated in America, as one writer, a loyal British subject, says, "in the sweet visions of the New England Transcedentalists," and was not a scrap which fell to us from the overloaded tables of the milords and miladies of England or the Continent. The choosing of this theme was only an instance of the poet's prophetic instinct. Girton and Newnham stand to prove what a change has since come to England in its attitude toward women, and in America,—"but that," as Mr. Kipling would say, "is another story."
The theme of The Princess is the now much discussed problem of the proper sphere of woman, with all the conflicting ideas that phrase