(“A merry merry bridal,
A merry merry day”),
and Maud, excel in passages rather than as wholes.
The hero of Maud, with his clandestine wooing of a girl of sixteen, has this apology, that the match had been, as it were, predestined, and desired by the mother of the lady. Still, the brother did not ill to be angry; and the peevishness of the hero against the brother and the parvenu lord and rival strikes a jarring note. In England, at least, the general sentiment is opposed to this moody, introspective kind of young man, of whom Tennyson is not to be supposed to approve. We do not feel certain that his man and maid were “ever ready to slander and steal.” That seems to be part of his jaundiced way of looking at everything and everybody. He has even a bad word for the “man-god” of modern days,—
“The man of science himself is fonder of glory, and vain,
An eye well-practised in nature, a spirit bounded and poor.”
Rien n’est sacré for this cynic, who thinks himself a Stoic. Thus Maud was made to be unpopular with the author’s countrymen, who conceived a prejudice against Maud’s lover, described by Tennyson as “a morbid poetic soul, . . . an egotist with the makings of a cynic.” That he is “raised to sanity” (still in Tennyson’s words) “by a pure and holy love which elevates his whole nature,” the world failed to perceive, especially as the sanity was only a brief lucid interval, tempered by hanging about the garden to meet a girl of sixteen, unknown to her relations. Tennyson added that “different phases of passion in one person take the place of different characters,” to which critics replied that they wanted different characters, if only by way of relief, and did not care for any of the phases of passion. The learned Monsieur Janet has maintained that love is a disease like another, and that nobody falls in love when in perfect health of mind and body. This theory seems open to exception, but the hero of Maud is unhealthy enough. At best and last, he only helps to give a martial force a “send-off”:—
“I stood on a giant deck and mixed my breath
With a loyal people shouting a battle-cry.”
He did not go out as a volunteer, and probably the Crimean winters brought him back to his original estate of cynical gloom—and very naturally.
The reconciliation with Life is not like the reconciliation of In Memoriam. The poem took its rise in old lines, and most beautiful lines, which Tennyson had contributed in 1837 to a miscellany:—
“O that ’twere possible,
After long grief and pain,
To find the arms of my true love
Round me once again.”
Thence the poet, working back to find the origin of the situation, encountered the ideas and the persons of Maud.