COUSIN AMY'S VIEW.
SCENE—The neighbourhood of Locksley Hall.
Enter Lady AMY HARDCASH (ætat. forty), with a book of poems and several children.
LADY AMY loquitur.
CHILDREN, leave me here a little; don't disturb me, I request;
For Mamma is very tired, and fain would take a little rest.
'Tis the place, the same old place, though looking somewhat pinched and small.
Ah, 'tis many and many a day since last I looked on Locksley Hall!
Then 'twas in the spring of life and love—ah, Love, the great Has-been!
Love which, like the year's own Spring, is very nice—and very green!
In the Spring the new French fashions come the female heart to bless,
In the Spring the very housemaid gets herself another dress;
In the Spring we're apt to feel like children just let loose from school;
In the Spring a young girl's fancy's very apt to play the fool.
On the moorland, by the waters he was really very nice;
There was no one else at hand, and I—forgot Mamma's advice.
He indulged in rosy raptures, heaved the most suggestive sighs,
Said the very prettiest things about my lips and hazel eyes.
All his talk was most poetic, all his sentiments were grand,
Though his meaning, I confess, I did not always understand.
So that, when he popped the question, I did blush and hang my head,
And,—well, I dare say the rest was pretty much as he has said.
* * * *
LOCKSLEY'S famous—yes, and married, notwithstanding his fierce curse,
To a dame with lots of gold and very little taste for verse.
Nice to be a Lion's Lady in Society, no doubt!
Not so nice to smooth his mane at home when Leo is put out.
Talk of tantrums! Read these lines he published after—well, the jilt,
Pitching into poor Mamma, and charging me with nameless guilt!
Dear Mamma! I thought her hard—but I'm a mother now myself,
And, I know what utter nonsense is the poet's scorn of pelf.
* * * *
"Woman is the lesser man!" I hold that false as it is hard.
The most womanish of creatures surely is an angry bard.
Yet, sometimes, when, as at present, Spring is brightening all the land,
Comes that longing for the fields, SIR RUFUS cannot understand;
Comes a ghostly sort of doubt if e'en Society can give
All, quite all, for which a well-loved woman might desire to live;
Comes a memory of his voice, a recollection of his glance,
Thoughts of things which then had power to make my maiden pulses dance;
Comes,—but I'm extremely stupid. Well, I know if our dear FAN
Took a fancy for a poet, I should soon dismiss the man.
Here she comes! She'll wed, I hope, rich Viscount VIVIAN ere the fall.
She ne'er had had that chance, had I espoused the Lord of Locksley Hall!
Punch, June 1, 1878.
In a magazine entitled The Train, published in 1856, there was a poem called The Three Voices, written by Mr. Lewis Carroll, who has since become famous for his quaintly humorous works. This was a parody of the obvious truisms, the muddled metaphor, and vague reasonings contained in Tennyson's Two Voices, and Mr. Carroll has wisely inserted it in his last collection of poems (Rhyme? and Reason? Macmillan and Co.), it is somewhat altered from its original form, and is much heightened in its effect by the intensely comic, and ably drawn, illustrations of Mr. Arthur B. Frost.
Unfortunately, this clever parody is too long to quote entire, and an extract gives but a faint idea of its terribly grotesque sorrows, and its whimsical burlesque of the Laureate's reasoning in The Two Voices:—
THEY walked beside the wave-worn beach,
Her tongue was very apt to teach,
And now and then he did beseech,
She would abate her dulcet tone,
Because the talk was all her own,
And he was dull as any drone.
She urged "No cheese is made of chalk;"
And ceaseless flowed her dreary talk,
Tuned to the footfall of a walk.
Her voice was very full and rich,
And when at length she asked him "Which?"
It mounted to its highest pitch.
He a bewildered answer gave,
Drowned in the sullen moaning wave,
Lost in the echoes of the cave.
She waited not for his reply,
But, with a downward leaden eye,
Went on as if he were not by.
Then, having wholly overthrown
His views, and stripped them to the bone,
Proceeded to unfold her own.
* * * *
"Shall Man be Man? And shall he miss
Of other thoughts no thoughts but this,
Harmonious dews of sober bliss?
"What boots it? Shall his fevered eye
Through towering nothingness descry
The grisly phantom hurry by?
"And hear dumb shrieks that fill the air;
See mouths that gape and eyes that stare,
And redden in the dusky glare?
"Yet still before him, as he flies,
One pallid form shall ever rise,
And bodying forth in glassy eyes.
"The vision of a vanished good,
Low peering through the tangled wood,
Shall freeze the current of his blood."
Till, like a silent water-mill,
When summer suns have dried the rill,
She reached a full stop, and was still.
To muse a little space did seem,
Then like the echo of a dream,
Harped back upon her threadbare theme.
Still an attentive ear he bent,
But could not fathom what she meant:
She was not deep, nor eloquent.
But, in truth, Tennyson has never failed so signally as when he has attempted to be metaphysical, and although his admirers have written many essays to explain the profundity of his ideas, and the beauties of his philosophy, their explanations seem to require some explaining, whilst it also seems that general readers fail to discern the charm in his would-be philosophical writings.
The Higher Pantheism may be taken as an instance. It commences thus:—
The sun, the moon, the stars, the seas, the hills and the plains—
Are not these, O Soul, the vision of Him who reigns?
Is not the vision He? tho' He be not that which he seems?
Dreams are true while they last, and do we not live in dreams?
Dark is the world to thee; thyself art the reason why;
For is He not all but thou, that hast power to feel "I am I!"
There are several other couplets which do not tend to unravel the poet's tangled web of thought, whereas if we turn to The Heptalogia (Chatto and Windus, 1880), we find the whole mystery treated with much greater lucidity of expression in The Higher Pantheism in a Nutshell.
ONE, who is not, we see; but one, whom we see not, is:
Surely this is not that; but that is assuredly this.
What, and wherefore, and whence? for under is over and under:
If thunder could be without lightning, lightning could be without thunder.
Doubt is faith in the main; but faith on the whole is doubt:
We cannot believe by proof; but could we believe without?
Why, and whither, and how? for barley and rye are not clover:
Neither are straight lines curves; yet over is under and over.
* * * *
God, whom we see not, is; and God who is not, we see;
Fiddle, we know, is diddle: and diddle we take it is dee.
The clever little work, from which the above is an extract, was published anonymously, but has been ascribed by the Athenæum, and other authorities, to a no less distinguished poet than Mr. A. C. Swinburne. Its full title is—