Part 5 (1/2)
The ”small sweet Idyll” from
”A volume of the poets of her land”
pure Theocritus It has been admirably rendered into Greek by Mr Gilbert Murray The exquisite beauties of style are not less exquisitely blended in the confusions of a drea most akin to The Princess Time does not exist in the realm of Gama, or in the ideal university of Ida We have a bookless North, severed but by a frontier pillar froolden and learned South
The arts, frohest perfection, while knights still tourney in arentle and joyous passage of arms at Ashby de la Zouche Such confusions are purposefully drea, as dreams are, haunted by the lorious chronicle,” the Abbey, and that ”old crusading knight austere,” Sir Ralph The seven narrators of the scheme are like the ”split personalities” of dreareat technical skill The earlier editions lacked the beautiful songs of the ladies, and that additional trait of dreas fros,” in Wordsworthian phrase; instances of ”dissociation,” in y Tennyson himself, like Shelley and Wordsworth, had experience of this kind of dreathen the shadowy yet brilliant character of his ro of norestion, touched as with the otten phantasion of brilliant vision that passage of Purchas which Coleridge was reading before he dreamed Kubla Khan But in Tennyson the effects were deliberately sought and secured
Oneon the subject, that a of Love's Labour's Lost Here the King of Navarre devises the College of Recluses, which is broken up by the arrival of the Princess of France, Rosaline, and the other ladies:-
King Our Court shall be a little Acade art
You three, Biron, Doaville, Have sworn for three years' term to live with me, My fellow-scholars, and to keep those statutes
Biron That is, to live and study here three years
But there are other strict observances; As, not to see a woman in that term
[Reads] 'That no woman shalt come within aFour days ago
Biron Let's see the penalty [Reads] 'On pain of losing her tongue'
The Princess then arrives with her ladies, as the Prince does with Cyril and Florian, as Charles did, with Buckingham, in Spain The conclusion of Shakespeare is Tennyson's conclusion -
”We cannot cross the cause e are born”
The later poet reverses the attitude of the sexes in Love's Labour's Lost: it is the women who make and break the vow; and the worand, epic, homicidal” scenes, while the men are debarred, more or less, from a sportive treathable pursuit of the Prince by the feled appearance of the adventurers in fearb, are concessions to the huiven us the song of Cyril at the picnic, and coe It ross eirl undergraduates,
”In colours gayer than themist,”
went reasonably well in opera Merely considered as a roinal narrative genius than any other such atte deficient in that human interest which Shelley said that it was as vain to ask froin-shop The characters, the protagonists, with Cyril, Melissa, Lady Blanche, the child Aglaia, King Ga, Arac, and the hero's mother--beautifully studied from the mother of the poet--are all sufficiently huolden autumn woodland reels athwart the fires of autuned fantasy of the whole composition, The Princess is essentially a poee The serious hts, her education, her capabilities, was not ”in the air” in 1847 To be sure it had often been ”in the air” The Alexandrian Platonists, the Renaissance, even the age of Anne, had their emancipated and learned ladies Early Greece had Sappho, Corinna, and Erinna, the first the chief of lyric poets, even in her fragments, the two others applauded by all hellas The French Revolution had begotten Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and her Vindication of the Rights of Woe Sand was proh while the poet wrote But, the question of love apart, George Sand was ”very, very wo as a doland was not excited about the question which has since produced so reatly e Eliot or Mrs Oliphant The poem, in the public indifference as to feminine education, caes, not in haunts reed banks of Cam and Cherwell There have been no revolutionary results: no boys have spied these chaste nests, with echoing romantic consequences The beauty and splendour of the Princess's university have not arisen in light and colour, and it is only at St Andrews that girls wear the acadeown The real is far below the ideal, but the real in 1847 seemed eminently remote, or even impossible
The learned Princess herself was not on our level as to knowledge and the past of womankind She knew not of their ypt Gynaeocracy and roup, were things hidden frolanced at the Lycian custom,” but not at the Pictish, a custoned the Hottentots
”The highest is the measure of the man, And not the Kaffir, Hottentot, Malay”
The Hottentots had long ago anticipated the Princess and her shrill modern sisterhood If we take the Greeks, or even ourselves, we h a nasty people, yet are gentleards the position of women Let us hear Mr Hartland: ”In every Hottentot's house the wife is supreh he may wield wide power and influence out of doors, at home dare not even take a mouthful of sour-milk out of the household vat without her perhest oath a man can take is to swear by his eldest sister, and if he abuses this naoods and sheep”
However, in 1847 England had not yet thought of i the Hodmadods Consequently, and by reason of the purely literary and elaborately fantastical character of The Princess, it was not of a nature to increase the poet's fame and success ”My book is out, and I hate it, and so no doubt will you,” Tennyson wrote to FitzGerald, who hated it and said so ”Like Carlyle, I gave up all hopes of him after The Princess,” indeed it was not apt to conciliate Carlyle