There are problems and problems; those which poetry may specifically handle, are, I think, the same yesterday, today and forever. Who is to hinder her handling what problems she likes; will you set down rules for her? Heaven forbid! it were more profitable to build a fence about the cuckoo. But the fact remains that she will touch these, and will not touch those others. Charm you never so wisely, she will not come from her own ground. For all your birdlime of earnestness, of enthusiasm, of excellent purpose, it is some masquerading jackdaw you will have captured, not the Bird of Paradise; unless it is the trees of Paradise you have limed. Poetry hardly deals with any historic period, old or new; she leaves those to the historians, and has a period of her own, which is eternal. What then, you say, of those "New Forcers of Conscience in the Long Parliament?" This! that that parliament is so long that it has been sitting any time this two thousand years, and is sitting now, in all our towns and villages. "New Presbyter is but old Priest writ large"; A. S. and Rutherford, Shallow Edwards and Scotch What-d'ye-call—they all preach in a thousand pulpits every Sunday. For they are prototypal figures, and plot and persecute wherever there is bigotry or ecclesiastical dominance. Against them, and, so far as one has been able to discover, against them only, does poetry ever come forth armed, enangered, utterly ruthless. It is she that has pity and pardon for the Magdalene and the publican; but a whip of bitter small chords for those that have made her Father's house into a den of thieves. Do you doubt it? Then find some passage where anger is expressed, not in rhetoric, not in mere fustian bombast, but with the sublime music and undertone, the ring of genuine poetry; perhaps an anger without mercy, a declaration of utter war; and see whether it is not directed always against this same ecclesiasticism.
But we set out to discuss the epic; and here we have wandered off to consider a sonnet with particular gusto; a grave digression, surely? I think not. You shall not judge a poem's right to the epic name by its length. This little sonnet is an epic too, with Milton on Pegasus for hero; and A. S., Rutherford, Edwards, and What-d'ye-call for four-headed Chimaera. I think the very archaeus of the epic is the eternal battle of the world; and that all epics have their root in that, and are great and regal in proportion to their nearness, inwardly and spiritually speaking, to it. Tennyson knew it when he set out to write in his Idylls of the King a record of the Soul at war with sense; only perhaps he knew it too personally and consciously; and lost the grand epic symbolism in his quest after actual criticism of life.
II
But to return to The Princess. Here, the objective is not to set forth eternal verity, but to discuss, perhaps throw light on, a problem of our own day; a social, in a sense, rather than a spiritual problem. What figure can stand for the battling soul, and what for the principle of evil? There are epic places in the Idylls of the King, where this symbolism stands forth majestically, and style and glory correspond. We have the story of that "last, dim battle in the west" and the passing of Arthur thereafter; clean, antique, touched with the infinite and with eternity; therein, if you will, is the epic atmosphere. But here it is the benevolent, thoughtful Tennyson that is speaking, troubled by the evils that he sees around him; not Tennyson the great Bard on fire with ultimate and secret truth. You see, there was the duality there; and both sides of it are honorable, to be revered and loved. If criticism has a work to perform in discriminating between the two, she does no dishonor to the thinker in separating him from the poet. We have to ask what there is in this work, The Princess, that might entitle it to be considered poetry, in the highest sense.
The style? Style is there, undoubtedly. Every line has been molded, heightened, shaped, polished, chiseled. But let us compare it with the style of poetry, and we shall see the difference. Here is one of the most fiery passages; one in which you can feel that the invitation was to the supreme, super-personal compassion to enter in:
"O brother, you have known the pangs we felt,
What heats of indignation when we heard
Of those that iron-cramp'd their women's feet;
Of lands in which at the altar the poor bride