A WORD ABOUT TENNYSON
Beautiful as the song was, the original "Locksley Hall" of half a century ago was essentially morbid, heart-broken, finding fault with everything, especially the fact of money's being made (as it ever must be, and perhaps should be) the paramount matter in worldly affairs;
Every door is barr'd with gold, and opens but to golden keys.
First, a father, having fallen in battle, his child (the singer)
Was left a trampled orphan, and a selfish uncle's ward.
Of course love ensues. The woman in the chant or monologue proves a false one; and as far as appears the ideal of woman, in the poet's reflections, is a false one—at any rate for America. Woman is not "the lesser man." (The heart is not the brain.) The best of the piece of fifty years since is its concluding line:
For the mighty wind arises roaring seaward and I go.
Then for this current 1886-7, a just-out sequel, which (as an apparently authentic summary says) "reviews the life of mankind during the past sixty years, and comes to the conclusion that its boasted progress is of doubtful credit to the world in general and to England in particular. A cynical vein of denunciation of democratic opinions and aspirations runs throughout the poem in mark'd contrast with the spirit of the poet's youth." Among the most striking lines of this sequel are the following:
Envy wears the mask of love, and, laughing sober fact to scorn,
Cries to weakest as to strongest, 'Ye are equals, equal born,'
Equal-born! Oh yes, if yonder hill be level with the flat.
Charm us, orator, till the lion look no larger than the cat:
Till the cat, through that mirage of overheated language, loom
Larger than the lion Demo—end in working its own doom.
Tumble Nature heel o'er head, and, yelling with the yelling street,
Set the feet above the brain, and swear the brain is in the feet,
Bring the old dark ages back, without the faith, without the hope.
Beneath the State, the Church, the Throne, and roll their ruins down
the slope.