The subject of "Emendations" interests Mr. Bayne more than it does us, and we decidedly disagree with him in his general apology for the digging up of early writings which the writers may be presumed to wish kept dark. The alteration in the words of Iphigenia in the "Dream of Fair Women" is not as good as it might be, and Mr. Bayne most justly condemns "the bright death," but it is quite clear that the lines as they originally stood—
"One drew a sharp knife through my tender throat
Slowly—and nothing more—"
did not, grammatically considered, express the poet's meaning; and are certainly open to ridicule on other grounds. The words, "And I knew no more," do express the meaning.
The alterations and additions in "Maud" appear to us to be about as bad as they could be. Explanatory additions were wanted, but not those flat prosaic lines, though Mr. Bayne appears to like them. On the other hand, the verse—
"I kissed her slender hand,
She took the kiss sedately,
Maud is not seventeen,
But she is tall and stately,"
which our intelligent critic does not like, appears to us perfect—in its place. Sweeter love-poetry than the finest parts of "Maud" is not to be found in the language; the remark being confined to the more superficial kinds of love. For the "tender passion" of the poem is, after all, superficial and thin: the strongest parts being the cynical. It has always been a grief to us that so much exquisite poetry (Cantos XII., XVIII., XXII., in Part I; and IV. in Part II.) should have been framed in what is really nothing but a very poor "sensation" novel, with a moral or lesson which is poorer still. Poetry is not bound to be unintermittingly poetic; there must be flat passages,—but such second-hand phrasing as "a war in defence of the right"—"that an iron tyranny now should bend or cease"—"a cause that I felt to be pure and true"—"a giant liar"—is intolerable in a poem of which the climax is so high-pitched. Better the merest conversational familiarity, than this rhetorical magniloquence.
Before passing from Tennyson's poems, we cannot help noting a curious example of Dr. Bayne's tendency to excessive praise and admiration. In that very poor poem, "Sea-Dreams," the city clerk's wife induces her husband to forgive the just-dead man who has robbed them of their savings. Upon which Dr. Bayne remarks; "There is not a nobler heroine in literature than this wife of a city clerk, and I see no reason to believe that there are not many such to be found in London." Nor do we—six women out of ten exhibit every week of their lives "heroism" just as "noble." It is perfectly commonplace; and it is the critic's warm-heartedness which betrays him into these extravagancies of language.
The Essay on Ruskin has been nearly all rewritten, and it is a fine specimen of studious candour, and something more. All we will add is, that we hope Mr. Bayne holds, along with Mr. Ruskin—though it hardly looks as if he did—that "the destruction of beauty is a sacrilege and a sin." This is undoubtedly a fair account of what Mr. Ruskin means in certain portions of his writings, and he is not the only one who has suffered "anguish," little short of despair, at certain "works of profanation." Mr. Bayne quotes Mr. Ruskin's passionate words about the befouling and desecration of the "pools and streams" around Carshalton. Now, it would not be easy, perhaps, to prove that God made those "pools and streams," still lovely in their degradation, in a sense in which he did not make the human beings who have "insolently defiled" them; but we may at least say that the human will was concerned not only in the "defiling" but in the production of the defilers, while it was not concerned in the production of those "pools and streams." And we may conjecture that if Mr. Ruskin had been asked to decide whether the "pools and streams" should retain their original clearness and beauty, and the human beings remain unproduced, or whether the latter should come into existence and the "pools and streams" be defiled—he would have stood for the first alternative. But if he afterwards followed out his decision to its consequence, it would make an end of what Mr. Bayne rightly calls the "communistic" element in his writings. It is painfully certain that if Mr. and Mrs. Wordsworth had been disgusted by "people from Birthwaite" before the "Excursion" was written, that poem would have been very different here and there.
Mr. John Addington Symonds writes much, and he writes with absorbing pains. When he called his new book Sketches and Studies in Italy (Smith, Elder, & Co.), had he forgotten a previous title of his, Sketches in Italy and Greece? In any case there is a wide difference between the two volumes; in the former we had more of the traveller, in the latter we have more of the scholar, though the traveller is still present; for instance, in the Essay, "Amalfi, Pæstum, Capri," and in the "Lombard Vignettes." In the Essay on the "Orfeo" of Poliziano, and that on the "Popular Italian Poetry of the Renaissance," we are again glad to recognize the author's masterly power in certain kinds of translation; and those the kinds in which the labourers are few, though the harvest is so large. In about seventy pages, close pages it is true, Mr. Symonds presents us with a sketch of Florentine history, the like of which, for compactness and minuteness of information, one knows not where to seek. Mr. Symonds is a striking example of the modern school of "culture"—using that word in its more special sense. Unwearied in the pursuit of detail, it occasionally tires the reader. There is a want of emphasis—not to say a shamefaced avoidance of it; there is the want of grasp which comes of the absence of hearty controlling emotion, or of any purpose beyond what may belong to the monograph before you. There is too much colour, and too little motion—the reader would even be glad of a jolt now and then; almost anything rather than this eternally grave gliding manner, in which the end is like the beginning, the beginning like the middle, and the quorsum hæc? seldom answered with anything like energy. If we take an Essay like that on "Lucretius," we become conscious, indeed, of an effort, but it seems rather an effort to lift a weight, than the effort of a living mind in free movement over a large subject. Inevitably we have much that is true, very much of refinement and accomplishment, and of course a good aperçu now and then; but such interest as there is appears a little forced, as if the author only half-believed in his own points, and too often endeavoured to give an air of breadth to literary stippling by mere largeness of phrase. These hints apply (in our opinion) with peculiar force to the paper on "Lucretius;" but they are not wholly inapplicable to that entitled "Antinous," which does not fall far short of being tedious. But no apology was necessary for reprinting the essays on blank verse, &c., which are contained in the Appendix, though in those also there seems an excessive tendency to make small "points," and force large meanings on trifles. The volume has a finely-executed steel engraving of the Ildefonso group (Antinous) in the museum at Madrid.