"I see!" cries a one-legged veteran of Froschweiler: "we drink to la Revanche."
In fact, the whole party drank the toast heartily, each interpreting it to his liking.
In the hands of a Swift even so trivial an incident might be made to point a moral on the facility with which alike in theology and politics—from Athanasian Creed to Cincinnati or Philadelphia Platform—men comfortably interpret to their own diverse likings some doctrine that "begins with an R and ends with an e," and swallow it with great unanimity and enthusiasm.
Possibly the death of Mr. Greeley, after a prolonged delirium induced in part by political excitement, may add for Americans some fresh interest to the theory of a paper which just previous to that pathetic event M. Lunier had read before the Paris Academy of Medicine. The author confessed his statistics to be incomplete, but regarded them as ample for the decisive formulation of the proposition that great political crises tend to increase the number of cases of mental alienation. The leading point of his elaborate argument appears to be the classification of fresh cases of insanity developed since the beginning of the late French war. The strongest comparison is one indicating an excess of seven per cent, in the number of such cases, proportioned to the population in the departments conquered and occupied by the Germans, over those which they did not invade. Finally, M. Lunier reckons the cases of mental alienation induced by the late political and military events in France at from twelve hundred to fifteen hundred. Politics without war may, it is considered, produce the same results—results not at all surprising, of course, except as to their extent. As to this last, if M. Lunier's figures and deductions be correct, the mental strain of exciting politics is even more destructive than has been generally supposed.
[!-- H2 anchor --] LITERATURE OF THE DAY.
Gareth and Lynette. By Alfred Tennyson, D.C.L., Poet-Laureate. Boston: J.R. Osgood & Co.
"With this poem the author concludes the Idyls of the King." The occasion is a tempting one to review the long series of Arthurian lays written by Tennyson, from the Mort d' Arthur, and the pretty song about Lancelot and Guinevere, and the first casting of "Elaine's" legend in the form of The Lady of Shallot, down to the present tale, flung like a capricious field flower into a wreath complete enough without it. The poet's first adventure into the subject—the mysterious, shadowy and elevated performance called the Mort d' Arthur—will probably be always thought the best. Tennyson, when he wrote it, was just trying the peculiarities of his style: he was testing the quality of his cadences, the ring of his long sententious lines repeated continually as refrains, and the trustworthiness of his artful, much-sacrificing simplicity. He put as it were a spot or two of pigment on the end of his painting-knife, and held it up into the air of the vaporous traditions of the Round Table. It stood the test, it had the color; but the artist, uncertain of his style, his public and his own liking, made a number of other tentatives before he could decide to go on in the manner he commenced with. He tried the Guinevere, laughing and galloping in its ballad-movement; he tried the Shallot, with a triple rhyme and a short positive refrain, like a bell rung in an incantation, and brought up every minute by a finger pressed upon the edge. Either of these three—although the metre of the first was the only one endurable by the ear in the case of a long series of poems—either of these had, it may be positively said, a general tone more suitable to the ancient feeling, and more consistent with the duty of a modern poet arranging for new ears the legends collected by Sir Thomas Malory, than the general tone of the present Idyls. Those first experiments, charged like a full sponge with the essence and volume of primitive legend, went to their purpose without retrospection or vacillation: each short tale, whether it laughed or moaned, promulgated itself like an oracle. The teller seemed to have been listening to the voice of Fate, and whether, Guinevere swayed the bridle-rein, or Elaine's web flew out and floated wide, or Lancelot sang tirra-lirra by the river, it was asserted with the positiveness of a Hebrew chronicle, which we do not question because it is history. But we hardly have such an illusion in reading the late Idyls. We seem to be in the presence of a constructor who arranges things, of a moralist turning ancient stories with a latent purpose of decorum, of an official Englishman looking about for old confirmations of modern sociology, of a salaried laureate inventing a prototype of Prince Albert. The singleness of a story-teller who has convinced himself that he tells a true story is gone. That this diversion into the region of didactics is accompanied, on our poet's part, with every ingenuity of ornament, and every grace of a style which people have learned to like and which he has made his own, need not be said. The Tennysonian beauties are all there. The work takes its place in literature, obscuring the Arthurian work of Dryden, as Milton's achievement of Paradise Lost obscured the Italian work on the same subject which preceded it. The story is told, and the things of the Round Table can hardly be related again in English, any more than the tale of Troy could be sung again in Greek after the poem of Homer. But beauties do not necessarily compose into perfect Beauty, and the achievement of a task neatly done does not prevent the eye from wandering over the work to see if the material has been used to the best advantage. So, the reader who has allowed himself to rest long in the simple magic evoked by Malory or in the Celtic air of Villemarque's legends, will be fain to ask whether a man of Tennyson's force could not have given to his century a recasting which would have satisfied primitive credulity as well as modern subtility. There is an antique bronze at Naples that has been cleaned and set up in a splendid museum, and perhaps looks more graceful than ever; but the pipe that used to lead to the lips, and the passage that used to communicate with the priest-chamber, are gone, and nothing can compensate for them: it used to be a form and a voice, and now it is nothing but a form.
We have just observed that in our opinion the first essays made by the Laureate with his Arthurian material had the best ring, or at least had some excellences lost to the later work. Gareth and Lynette, however, by its fluency and simplicity, and by not being overcharged with meaning, seems to part company with some of this overweighted later performance, and to attempt a recovery of the directness and spring of the start. It is, however, far behind all of them in a momentous particular; for in narrating them, the poet, while able to keep up his immediate connection with the source of tradition, and to narrate with the directness of belief, had still some undercurrent of thought which he meant to convey, and which he succeeded in keeping track of: Arthur and Guinevere, in the little song, ride along like primeval beings of the world—the situation seems the type of all seduction; the Lady of Shallot is not alone the recluse who sees life in a mirror, she is the cloistered Middle Age itself, and when her mirror breaks we feel that a thousand glasses are bursting, a thousand webs are parting, and that the times are coming eye to eye with the actual. In those younger days, Tennyson, possessed with a subject, and as it were floating in it, could pour out a legend with the credulity of a child and the clear convincing insight of a teacher: when he came in mature life to apply himself to the rounded work, he had more of a disposition to teach, and less of that imaginative reach which is like belief; and now he is telling a story again for the sake of the story, but without the deeper meaning. Lynette is a supercilious damsel who asks redress of the knights of the Round Table: Gareth, a male Cinderella, starts from the kitchen to defend her, and after conquering her prejudices by his bravery, assumes his place as a disguised prince. It is a plain little comedy, not much in Tennyson's line: there are places where he tries to imitate the artless disconnected speech of youth; and here, as with the little nun's babble in Guinevere, and with some other passages of factitious simplicity, the poet makes rather queer work:
Gold? said I gold?—ay then, why he, or she,
Or whosoe'er it was, or half the world,