Part 14 (2/2)
New and clipping couplets of Pope, the Elizabethan fantasies of Chapman But Mr Arnold's hexameters were neither musical nor rapid: they only exhibited a new form of failure As the Prince of Abyssinia said to his tutor, ”Enough; you have convinced me that no man can be a poet,”
so Mr Arnold went some way to prove that no man can translate Homer
Tennyson had the lowest opinion of hexalish metre for serious purposes
”These la'd music of Homer!”
Lord Tennyson says, ”Gerlish” Indeed there is not much room for preference Tennyson's Alcaics (Milton) were intended to follow the Greek rather than the Horatian model, and resulted, at all events, in a poehty-mouth'd inventor of harmonies” The specimen of the Iliad in blank verse, beautiful as it is, does not, somehow, reproduce the music of Homer It is entirely Tennysonian, as in
”Roll'd the rich vapour far into the heaven”
The reader, in that one line, recognises the voice and trick of the English poet, and is far away from the Chian:-
”As when in heaven the stars about the moon Look beautiful, when all the winds are laid, And every height co peak And valley, and the ihest, and all the stars shi+ne, and the Shepherd gladdens in his heart: So many a fire between the shi+ps and stream Of Xanthus blazed before the towers of Troy, A thousand on the plain; and close by each Sat fifty in the blaze of burning fire; And eating hoary grain and pulse the steeds, Fixt by their cars, waited the golden dawn”
This is excellent, is poetry, escapes the conceits of Pope (who never ”wrote with his eye on the object”), but is pure Tennyson We have not yet, probably we never shall have, an adequate rendering of the Iliad into verse, and prose translations do not pretend to be adequate When parents and do, it see which even Tennyson could not restore in English He thought blank verse the proper equivalent; but it is no equivalent
One even prefers his own prose:-
Nor did Paris linger in his lofty halls, but when he had girt on his gorgeous arlorying in his airy feet And as when a stall-kept horse, that is barley-fed at the er, breaketh his tether, and dasheth thro' the plain, spurning it, being wont to bathe hi, and reareth his head, and his lorieth in his beauty, and his knees bear hiallop to the haunts and meadows of the aht-heartedness, and his swift feet bare him
In February 1865 Tennyson lost theenskied and sainted”
In the autumn of 1865 the Tennysons went on a Continental tour, and visited Waterloo, Weimar, and Dresden; in September they entertained Emma I, Queen of the Sandwich Islands The months passed quietly at home or in town The poet had written his Lucretius, and, to please Sir George Grove, wrote The Song of the Wrens, for music Tennyson had not that positive aversion to o, Theophile Gautier, and soher in the musical scale than Scott, who did not rise above a Border lilt or a Jacobite ditty The Wren songs, entitled The Windoere privately printed by Sir Ivor Guest in 1867, were set to music by Sir Arthur Sullivan, and published by Strahan in Dece-book, ”whose only merit is, perhaps, that it can dance to Mr Sullivan's instrument I am sorry that my puppet should have to dance at all in the dark shadow of these days” (the siege of Paris), ”but the music is now completed, and I am bound by my promise” The verses are described as ”partly in the old style,” but the true old style of the Elizabethan and cavalier days is lost
In the summer of 1867 the Tennysons moved to a farmhouse near Haslemere, at that time not a centre of literary Londoners ”Sandy soil and heather-scented air” allured the of Aldworth, Mr Knowles being the architect In autuis, and, like all other travellers thither, rove The poet now began the study of Hebrew, having a mind to translate the Book of Job, a vision unfulfilled In 1868 he thought of publishi+ng his boyish piece, The Lover's Tale, but delayed An anonymously edited piracy of this and other poems was perpetrated in 1875, lifellow visited Tennyson ”The Longfellows and he talked reatly interested in that subject, but he suspended his judght that, if in such , 'Pucks, not the spirits of dead estion, as regards the celebrated disturbances in the house of the Wesleys ”Wit ht have much to say, wisdom, little,” said Salas Houe, led to the discussion of ”spiritualism” We do not hear that Tennyson ever had the curiosity to see Ho so firun: it was finished ”in about a week It came like a breath of inspiration” The subject had for many years been turned about in the poet's mind, which, of course, was busy in these years of apparent inactivity At this tiust 1868) Tennyson left his old publishers, the Moxons, for Mr Strahan, who endured till 1872 Then he was succeeded by Messrs H S King & Co, who gave place (1879) to Messrs Kegan Paul & Co, while in 1884 Messrs Macmillan became, and continue to be, the publishers A few pieces, except Lucretius (Macazine, May 1868) unimportant, appeared in serials
Very early in 1869 The Co Browning's The Ring and the Book He and his great conteh Tennyson, perhaps, appreciated less of Browning than Browning of Tennyson Meanwhile ”Old Fitz” kept up a fire of unsy and all his works ”I have been trying in vain to read it” (The Ring and the Book), ”and yet the Athenaeum tells me it is wonderfully fine” FitzGerald's ply had been taken long ago; he wanted verbal , car was Tennyson's rival, affected the judgment of the author of Omar Khayyam We may almost call him ”the author”
The Holy Grail, with the smaller poems, such as Lucretius, was published at the end of 1869 FitzGerald appears to have preferred The Northern Farh-spun nature I knew,” to all the visionary knights in the airy Quest To co) with Tennyson, was ”to compare an old Jew's curiosity shop with the Phidian Marbles” Tennyson's poe clear to the bottom as well as beautiful, do not seem to cockney eyes so deep as muddy waters”
In Noveun; it was finished in May 1871 Conceivably the vulgar scandals of the last days of the French Iime may have influenced Tennyson's picture of the corruption of Arthur's Court; but the Ein, like the Round Table, with aspirations after the Ideal In the autumn of the year Tennyson entertained, and was entertained by, Mr Huxley In their ideas about ultihted in the other's society In the spring of 1872 Tennyson visited Paris and the ruins of the Louvre He read Victor Hugo, and Alfred de Musset, whose comedies he adreat poet runs to this effect, ”Victor Hugo is an unequal genius, sometimes sublime; he reminds one that there is but one step between the sublime and the ridiculous,” but the example by which Tennyson illustrated this was derived from one of the poet's novels In these we es which leave us in soory One would have expected Hugo's lyrics to be Tennyson's favourites, but only Gastibelza is mentioned in that character At this time Tennyson was vexed by