Tennyson and Theocritus

SOMETHING has been done, of late, in our schools and universities, to harmonize the acts of mental discipline with the formation of a liberal taste.

Fifteen years ago, however, the pursuit of exact learning, and that of a broad and elegant culture, could not be said to follow equal paths. Straight was the line of duty, curved was the line of beauty; and as for the remainder of the apothegm, whatever may have been the instinct of an exceptional student, his guides and philosophers seemed to trouble themselves very little concerning it.

With rare variation, the classical exercises, by which a neophyte was advanced in Latin and Greek, were unlikely to breed within him any love for the glorious relics of ancient literature. Endless analysis of the first and second aorists, or of the inflections of the verbroots, is associated with certain books of the Odyssey in the recollection of many an alumnus. The curriculum of the Yale olympiad, for instance, embraced little beyond the texts of Homer and Herodotus, with a few tragedies of Æschylus and Euripides added as a propitiatory homage to the grittiness, not the grandeur, of the Greek dramatic chorus. To be sure, we had just enough exercise (of the drill-order) in Plato to give us an aversion to the Socratic method of argument and a languid sympathy with any sophist who resisted the pug-nosed inquisitor. Had one of us been asked his opinion of the baffled but resolute Gorgias, doubtless the reply would have been that of Lord Thurlow with regard to the Satan of “ Paradise Lost ” : “ He ’s a d−d fine fellow, and I hope he may win ! ” But few such questions gave us occasion for critical answers, irreverent or otherwise.

At the time of which I write we had not even the class-student’s opportunity to acquire a knowledge of the Sicilian idyls,¹ though examined, of course, in the pseudo-bucolics of Virgil, and more familiar with his dactyls and spondees than with the laws of a planetary system. Nevertheless, the Greek Reader then used for the preparatory lessons, containing an assorted lot of passages from various writers, included that wonderful elegy, “The Epitaph of Bion,” whose authorship is attributed to Moschus. The novelty, the beauty, the fresh and modern thought of this undying poem, were dimly visible even to the school-fagged intellect of a youth to whom poetry was a vague delight. Well might they be, for this elegy,− in which the pain and passion of lamentation for a brother-minstrel are sung in strains echoing those which Bion himself had chanted in artificial sorrow for the mystic Adonis, −this perpetual elegy was the mould, if not the inspiration, of Spenser’s “Astrophel,” of Milton’s “ Lycidas,” of Shelley’s “Adonais”; and, again, of Arnold’s “Thyrsis ” and Swinburne’s “ Ave atque Vale ” : laments beyond which the force of poetic anguish can no further go, and each of which is but a later affirmation that the ancient pupil of Theocritus found the one key-note to which all high idyllic elegy should be attuned thenceforth.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1871, by JAMES R. OSGOOD & Co., in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.

Having made a first acquaintance with the work of Tennyson, − and who does not remember how new and delicious the lyrics of the rising English poet seemed to us, half surfeited, as we were, with the fulness of his predecessors ?− I could not fail to observe a resemblance between certain portions of his verse and the only Greek idyl which I then knew. For example, in the use of the elegiac refrain, in the special imagery, in the adaptation of landscape and color to the feeling of a poem, and, often, in the suggestion of the feeling by the mere scenic effect. It was not till after that thorough knowledge of the English maestro’s art, which has been no less absorbing and perilous than instructive to the singers of our period, that I was led to study the entire relics of the Greek idyllic poets. Then, for the first time, I became aware of the immense obligations of Tennyson to Theocritus, not only for the method, sentiment, and purpose, but for the very form and language, which render beautiful much of his most widely celebrated verse.

Three points are distinctly brought in view : −

1. The likeness of the Victorian to the Alexandrian age.

2. The close study made by Tennyson of the Syracusan idyls, resulting in the adjustment of their structure to English theme and composition, and in the artistic imitation of their choicest passages.

3. Hence, his own discovery of his proper function as a poet, and the gradual evolution and shaping of his whole literary career.

The design of this paper is to exhibit some of the evidences on which these points are taken. They may interest the student of comparative minstrelsy, as an addition to his list of “ Historic Counterparts ” in literature, and are worth the attention of that host of readers, so wonted to the faultless art of Tennyson that each trick and turn of his verse, his every image and thought, are more familiar to them than were the sentimental ditties of Moore and the romantic cantos of Scott and Byron to the cruder poetic taste of an earlier generation. I do not say weaker, but cruder; there is no question as to the superiority of the laureate’s art, however opinions may differ concerning the quality which lies beneath. The blank-verse of Byron is often without form, and void; the dithyrambic music of Shelley runs on without apparent purpose, ending we know not how, like some magical mist-hung river which at last loses itself in the sands. The blank-verse of the “Morte d’Arthur” and “Guinevere” is the perfection of English rhythm ; nor has Tennyson, of late years, uttered a poem without that objective foresight which sees the end from the beginning, and makes the whole work round and perfect. A great artist. A strong, conscientious singer, holding his imagination quite in hand. How few of his pieces could we spare ! so few, indeed, that when he does trifle with his art (as not long since), the critics laugh like school-boys delighted to catch the master tripping for once ; not wholly sure but that the matter may be noble, because, forsooth, he composed it. Yet men, wont to fare sumptuously, will now and then leave their delicate viands untasted, and hanker with lusty appetite for ruder and more sinewy fare. We turn again to Byron for sweep and fervor, to Coleridge and Shelley for the music that is divine ; and it is through Wordsworth that we commune with the very spirits of the woodland and the misty mountain winds.

It will not harm the noble army of verse-readers to be guided for a moment to the original fountain of that stream from which they take their favorite draughts. The Sicilian idyls were very familiar to the dramatists and songsters of Shakespeare’s time, and a knowledge of them was affected, at least, by the artificial jinglers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. How little is thought or known of them in our own period! We have Homer and Horace by heart; but Theocritus, to most of us, is but the echo of a melodious name. He was, none the less, the creator of the fourth great order of poetry, the Composite, or Idyllic, to which he bears the relation of Homer to epic, Pindar to lyric, Æschylus to dramatic verse; and if he had not sung as he sang, in Syracuse and Alexandria, two thousand years ago, it is doubtful whether modern English fancy would have been under the spell of that minstrelsy by which it is now so justly and delightfully enthralled.

I do not know that any extended references to the present topic have been printed heretofore ; although, within the last decade, during a revival of the study and translation of the Greek poets, allusions to it have been made, and parallel passages occasionally noted, − as by Thackeray, in his Anthology, and by Snow, in his appendix to the Clarendon school edition of Theocritus, − such waifs confirming me in my recognition of the evidence on which the foregoing statements are adventured.²

In a review, printed some years ago, of the “ Late English Poets,” I wrote more fully upon the first of the three points above named, to wit, the resemblance between the Alexandrian and Victorian periods in their general literary phenomena ; but I will now, briefly, again touch upon this likeness, for the purpose of illustrating what shall follow.

What was the Alexandrian period ? It covered the time wherein the city, by which Alexander marked the splendor of his Western conquests, was the capital of a new Greece, and had grouped within it all that was left of Hellenic philosophy, beauty, and power. Latin thought and imagination were still in their dawning, and Alexandria was the centre, the new Athens, of the civilized world. But the intellect, if not that of a decadence, was reflective, critical, scholarly, rather than creative ; a comfortable era, in which to live and enjoy the gathered harvests of what had gone before. All the previous history of Greece led up to the high Alexandrian refinement. Her literature had completed a round of four hundred years, of which the first three centuries, in the slower progress of national adolescence, comprised an epic and lyric period, reaching from Homer and Hesiod to Anacreon and Pindar. The remainder was the golden Attic age, the time of the Old, Middle, and New Comedy, of the dramatists from Æschylus to Aristophanes. Greek poetry then passed its noontide ; the Alexandrian school arose, flourishing for two centuries before the birth of Christ.

Literary accomplishments now were widely diffused. There was a mob of gentlemen who wrote with ease. Tact and scholarship so abounded, that it was difficult to draw the line between talent and genius. We see a period of scholia and revised and annotated editions of the elder writers ; wherein was done for Homer, Plato, the Hebrew Scriptures, what is now doing for Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe. Philology came into being, and criticism began to clog the fancy. Schoell says that “the poets were deeply read, but wanting in imagination, and often also in judgment.” It was impossible for most to rise above the influence of the time. Science, however, made gigantic strides. In material growth it was indeed a “ wondrous age,” an era of inventions, travel, and discovery: the period of Euclid and Archimedes ; of Ptolemy with his astronomers ; of Hiero, with his galleys long as clipperships ; of academies, museums, theatres, lecture-halls, gymnasia; of a hundred philosophies ; of geographers, botanists, casuists, scholiasts, reformers, and what not; − all springing into existence and finding support in the luxurious, speculative, bustling, newsdevouring hurly-burly of that strangely modern Alexandrian time.

It is unnecessary to dwell upon the analogy which my readers already have drawn for themselves. It is not an even one. There is no parallel between the Greek and English languages. The former is copious, but simple, and a departure from the Attic purity was in itself a decline to vagueness and affectation. Our own tongue grows richer and stronger every year. Again, though England has also passed through great dramatic and lyric periods, our modern cycles are not of antique duration, but are likely to repeat themselves again and again. Our golden year is shorter, and the seasons in their turns come often round. Nevertheless, at the close of the poetical renaissance which marked the first quarter of the nineteenth century, English literature drifted into a chaotic, transition period, bearing a resemblance to that of Alexandria when Ptolemy Philadelphus commenced his reign.

That liberal and ambitious monarch confirmed the structure of an empire, and made the capital city attractive and renowned. The wisest and most famous scholars resorted to his court, but not even imperial patronage could restore the lost spirit of Greek creative art. There was a single exception. A poet of original and abounding genius, nurtured in the beautiful island of Sicily, where the sky and sea are bluer, the piny mountains, with Ætna at their head, more kingly, the breezes fresher, the rivulets more musical, and the upland pastures greener, than upon any other shores which the Mediterranean borders, − such a poet felt himself inspired to utter a fresh and native melody, even in that over-learned and bustling time. Disdaining any feeble variations of worn-out themes, he saw that Greek poetry had achieved little in the delineation of common, everyday life, and so flung himself right upon nature, which he knew and reverenced well ; and erelong the pastoral and town idyls of Theocritus, with their amœbeanic dialogue and elegant occasional songs, won the ear of both the fashionable and critical worlds. Although his subjects were entirely novel, he availed himself, in form, of all his predecessors’ arts ; composing in the new Doric, the most liquid, colloquial, and flexible of the dialects ; and thus he fashioned his eidullia,−little pictures of real life upon the hillside and in the town, among the high and low, − portraying characters with a few distinct touches in lyric, epic, or dramatic form, and often by a combination of the whole. It is not my province here to show who were his immediate teachers, or from what rude island ditties and mimes he conceived and shaped his art ; only, to state that Theocritus found one field of verse then unworked, and so availed himself of it as to make it his own, capturing the hearts of those who still loved freshness and beauty, and forthwith attaining such excellence, that the relics left us by him and two of his pupils are even now the wonder and imitation of mankind. A few sentences from Charles Kingsley’s reference to the father of idyllic poetry tell the truth as simply and clearly as it can be told : −

“One natural strain is heard amid all this artificial jingle, − that of Theocritus. It is not altogether Alexandrian. Its sweetest notes were learnt amid the chestnut groves and orchards, the volcanic glens and sunny pastures of Sicily ; but the intercourse between the courts of Hiero and the Ptolemies seems to have been continual. Poets and philosophers moved freely from one to the other and found a like atmosphere in both. . . . . One can well conceive the delight which his idyls must have given to the dusty Alexandrians, pent up forever between sea and sand-hills, drinking the tank water and never hearing the sound of a running stream ; whirling, too, forever, in all the bustle and intrigue of a great commercial and literary city. To them and to us also. I believe Theocritus is one of the poets who will never die. He sees men and things in his own light way, truly; and he describes them simply, honestly, with little careless touches of pathos and humor, while he floods his whole scene with that gorgeous Sicilian air, like one of Titian’s pictures ; . . . . and all this told in a language and a metre which shapes itself almost unconsciously, wave after wave, into the most luscious song.”

It was in this wise that Theocritus founded and endowed the Greek idyllic school. Let us see how Tennyson, living in a somewhat analogous period, may be compared with him. How far has the representative idyllist of the nineteenth century profited by the example of his prototype ? To what extent is the one indebted to the other for the structure, the manner, it may be even the matter, of many of his poems ?

We are uninformed of the year in which the boy Tennyson was entered at Trinity College, Cambridge, but find him there in 1829, taking the chancellor’s gold medal for English verse ; this by the poem “ Timbuctoo,” a creditable performance for a lad of nineteen, and favored with the approval of the “Athenæum.” It was thought to show traces of Milton, Shelley, and Wordsworth. In the years 1826-1829 a Cambridge reprint was made of the Kiessling edition of Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus, including a Doric Lexicon, the whole in 2 vols. 8vo ; an excellent text and commentary, and altogether the most noticeable English edition of the Sicilian poets, since that superb Oxford Theocritus, edited by the laureate, Warton, which appeared in 1770. The publication of a Cambridge text must have directed unusual attention to the study of these classics, and if Tennyson did not place them upon his list for the public examinations, there can be little doubt that he at this time familiarized himself with their difficult and exquisite verse. His present admiration of them is well known.

In 1830 he made his first independent venture for public favor ³ with a thin volume, “ Poems, chiefly Lyrical,” not more than one third of which he has chosen to preserve in later collections of his works. The book contains such pieces as “ Claribel,” “ Lilian,” “ Mariana,” “ Recollections of the Arabian Nights,” and the “ Ode to Memory,” all breathing distinctly of a new and delicate genius, but varied in character, and with a purpose as yet somewhat ill-defined. The poet was trying his wing for the pleasure of flight, and hardly certain of his future course.

In these, as in some of his later works, one finds an open loyalty to Wordsworth’s canon of reliance upon nature, and occasionally Wordsworth’s mannerism and language, with something of the vague and wandering music of Shelley and the sensuous beauty of Keats. A study of old English ballad-poetry is also apparent. The influence of the great Italian poets is quite marked ; whether by reflection from the Chaucerian and Elizabethan periods (which owed everything to the Italian school), or by more direct absorption, it is difficult to pronounce. The truth was, that the poet began his career at an intercalary, transition period. To quote from a book-note by E. A. Poe : "Matters were now verging to their worst ; and, at length, in Tennyson, poetic inconsistency attained its extreme. But it was precisely this extreme which wrought in him a natural and inevitable revulsion ; leading him first to contemn, and secondly to investigate, his early manner, and finally to winnow from its magnificent elements the truest and purest of all poetical styles.”

In all that concerns form, the young poet soon found himself in sympathy with the Greek idyllic compositions. He saw the opportunity for work after these models, and willingly yielded himself to their beautiful influence. It has never left him, but is present in his latest and most sustained productions. But there is a difference between his maturer work, which is the adjustment of the idyllic method to native, modern conceptions, with a delightful presentation of English landscape and atmosphere, and the manners and dialects of English life, and the experimental, early poems, which were written upon antique themes. Of these “ Œnone ” and “ The LotosEaters ” appeared in the collection of 1833, and in the same volume are other poems, appealing more directly to modern sympathies, which show traces of the master with whom Tennyson had put his genius to school.

There are two modes in which the workmanship of one poet may resemble that of another. The first, while not subjecting an author to the charge of direct appropriation, in the vulgar sense of plagiarism, is detected by critical analogy, and, of the two, is more easily recognized by the skilled reader. It is the mode which involves either a sympathetic treatment of rhythmical breaks, pauses, accents, alliterations ; a correspondence of the architecture of two poems, with parallel interludes and effects ; correspondence of theme, allowing for difference of place and period ; or, a correspondence of scenic and metrical purpose ; in fine, general analogy of atmosphere and tone. The second, more obvious and commonplace, mode is that displaying immediate coincidence of structure, language, and thought ; a mode which, in the hands of men not “ entirely great,” leaves the users at the mercy of their dullest reviewers.

A citation of passages, exemplifying these two kinds of resemblance between the Sicilian idyls and the poetry of Tennyson, will confirm and illustrate the statements upon which this article is based. The instance first set forth is that of a general, and not the special, likeness ; but no subsequent attempt is made to classify the obligations of our modern poet to the ancient, as it is believed that the reader will easily distinguish for himself the significant analogies in each collection.

“ Hylas,” the celebrated thirteenth idyl of Theocritus, is one of the most perfect which have come down to our time. It is not a bucolic poem, but classified as narrative or semi-epic in character, yet exhibits many touches of the bucolic sweetness ; is a poem of seventy-five verses, written in the honey-flowing pastoral hexameter, so distinct, in cæsura and dactylic structure, from the verse of Homer, and commencing thus : −

As a counterpart to this, and directly modelled upon it in form, take the “ Godiva” of Tennyson, − that lovely and faultless poem, whose rhythm is full of the melodious quality which gives specific distinction to the laureate’s blank-verse ; a “ flower,” of which so many followers now have the “ seed ” (to use his own metaphor), that it has taken its place as the standard idyllic measure of our language.

“Godiva” is a narrative or semiepic idyl, which contains − after a didactic prelude, divided from the story proper−just seventy-five verses, and commences thus : −

But it is in the “ Œnone ” that we discover Tennyson’s earliest adaptation of that refrain, which was a striking beauty of the pastoral elegiac verse.

is the analogue of (Theocr., II.),

of the refrain to the lament of Daphnis, [Theocr., I.),

and of the recurrent wail in the “ Epitaph of Bion” (Mosch., III. ),

Throughout the poem the Syracusan manner and feeling are strictly and nobly maintained; and, while we are considering “ Œnone,” a few points of more exact resemblance may be noted: −

The Thalysia (Theocr., VI,T. 21-23).

The Enchantress (Theocr., II. 38-41).

The Young Herdsman (Theocr., XX. 19, 20 ; 30, 31).

Œnone.

“ The Lotos-Eaters,” another imaginative presentment of an antique theme,−full of Tennyson’s excellences, no less than of early mannerisms since foregone, − while Gothic in some respects, is charged from beginning to end with the effects and very language of the Greek pastoral poets. As in “ Œnone,” there is no consecutive imitation of any one idyl ; but the work is curiously filled out with passages borrowed here and there, as the growth of the poem recalled them at random to the author’s mind. The idyls of Theocritus often have been subjected to this process ; first, by Virgil, in several of whose eclogues the component parts were culled from his master, as one selects from a flowerplot a white rose, a red, and then a sprig of green, to suit the exigencies of color, while the wreath grows under the hand. Pope, among moderns, has followed the method of Virgil, as may be observed in either of his four “ Pastorals.” The process used by Pope is tame, artificial, and avowed ; in “ The Lotos-Eaters ” it is subtile, masterly, yet of a completeness which only parallel quotations can display.

The Argonauts (Theocr., XIII.) come in the afternoon unto a land of cliffs and thickets and streams ; of meadows set with sedge, whence they cut for their couches sharp flowering-rush and the low galingale. “ In the afternoon ” the Lotos-Eaters “ come unto a land” where

All this, except the landscape, is after Homer, from the ninth book of the Odyssey. The “ Choric Song ” follows, of them to whom

“ Evermore
Most weary seemed the sea, weary the oar,
Weary the wandering fields of barren foam ” ;

and in this, the feature of the poem, are certain coincidences to which I refer: —

Europa (Mosch., II. 3, 4).

The Wayfarers (Theocr., V. 50, 51).

Ibid. (45-49).

Ibid (31, 34).

The Choice (Mosch., V. 413).

The Lotos-Eaters-

Dismissing these two poems, the earlier of Tennyson’s experiments upon classical myths, let us look at another class of idyls, wherein the Theocritan method is adapted to modern themes ; where the form is Dorian, but the feeling, color, and thought are thoroughly and naturally English. Of “ Godiva ” I have already spoken, and the laureate’s rural compositions in blank-verse are directly in point, reflecting every feature of the socalled “pastoral idyls” of Theocritus. “The Gardener’s Daughter,” “ Audley Court,” “ Walking to the Mail,” “ Edwin Morris, or the Lake,” and “ The Golden Year ” are modelled upon such patterns as “ The Thalysia,” “ The Singers of Pastorals,” “The Rival Singers,” and “ The Triumph of Daphnis.” In all of them, cultured and country-loving friends are sauntering, resting, singing, sometimes lunching in the open air among the hills, the waters, and the woods ; in all of them there is dialogue, healthful philosophy, a wealth of atmosphere and color ; and in nearly all we see for the first time successfully handled in English and made really melodious the true isometric song as found in Theocritus. The effects of this are not produced by any change to a strictly lyrical measure, but it is composed in the metre of the whole poem ; the Greek, of course, in hexameter, the English, in unrhymed iambic-pentameter verse. Still, it is a song, with stanzaic divisions into distiches, triplets, quatrains, etc., as the case may be. As in Theocritus, so in Tennyson, two songs by rival comrades sometimes are balanced against each other : a love-ditty against a proverbial or worldly-wise lyric, − the latter, in the modern idyl, frequently rising to the height of modern faith and progress. These “ blank-verse songs,” as they are termed, are a special beauty of the laureate’s verse. Where each stanza has a refrain or burden, as in “ Tears, idle tears,” "Our enemies have fallen, have fallen,” etc., they partake both of the bucolic and elegiac manner ; but elsewhere Tennyson’s personages discourse against each other as in the eclogues proper. For example, the two songs in “Audley Court,”

are the Doppelgänger, so to speak, of the ditties sung respectively by Milo and Battus, in “ The Harvesters ” (Theocr., X.). Thirteen of these songs, many of them in “ riddling triplets of old time,” are scattered through “ Audley Court,” “ The Golden Year,” “ The Princess,” and the completed “Idyls of the King.” And where Tennyson’s rustic and civic graduates content themselves with jest and debate, it is after a semi-amœbean fashion, which no student of the Syracusan idyls can fail to recognize.

Even in “ The Gardener’s Daughter ” there are passages which respond to the verse of Theocritus. That simply perfect idyl, “ Dora,” and such pieces as “ The Brook ” and “ Sea-Dreams,” are more original, yet the legitimate outgrowth of the antique school. The blank-verse idyls of Tennyson, though connecting him with Theocritus, do not establish a ratio between the relations of the ancient and the modern poet to their respective periods. The laureate is a more genuine, because more independent and English, idyllist and lyrist, in “ The May Queen,” “The Miller’s Daughter,” “ The Talking Oak,” “ The Grandmother,” and “Northern Farmer, Old Style.” Theocritus created his own school, with no models except those obtainable from the popular mimes and catches of his own region ; just as Burns, availing himself of the simple Scottish ballads, lifted the poetry of Scotland to an eminent and winsome individuality. Lowell, in the most perfect of American bucolics, “ The Courtin’,” has done for New England precisely what Theocritus did for Sicily. In a rough way, Bret Harte’s “Jim” is a true idyl; yet there seems to have been more music in the voice of an Ætnean herdsman than we find in that of Mr. Harte’s “ Dow’s Flat” digger. The latter carries his music in his soul.

The co-relations of Theocritus and Tennyson lie in the fact that our poet discovered years ago that a period had arrived for poetry of the idyllic or composite order; and that much of the manner, form, and language of the latter is directly taken from the former. Mr. Tennyson’s maturer poems, “ The Princess ” and “ The Idyls of the King,” are written Dorian-wise. “The Holy Grail” and its associate legendary pieces occupy the same position in his life-work which those semicpic poems, “The Dioscuri,” “The Infant Heracles,” and “ Heracles the Lion-Slayer” hold in the relics of Theocritus. The “ Morte d’Arthur " is written as he would have translated Homer, judging from his version of a passage in the Iliad, and was composed years before other “ Idyls of the King,” and in a noticeably different style. For all this, — especially in the speech of the departing Arthur,—it is semi-idyllic, to say the least ; a grand poem, a chant without a discord, strong throughout with ringing, monosyllabic Saxon verse.

The Swallow Song, in “The Princess,” is modelled upon the isometric songs in the third and eleventh idyls of Theocritus, bearing a special likeness to the lover’s serenade in Idyl III., as divided by Ahrens and others into stanzas of three verses each. There is also some correspondence of imagery : —

The Serenade (Theocr., III. 12-14).

Cyclops (Theocr., XI. 54-57).

The Princess (Book IV.).

Throughout the work of Tennyson we meet with isolated passages which also seem to be reflections or reminiscences of verses in the relics of the Syracusan triad. Where the thought or image of such a passage is of a familiar type, common to many classical writers, there is often a flavor about it to indicate that its immediate inspiration was caught from Theocritus, Bion, or Moschus. One of the following comparisons, however, can only be made between the two poets from whom it is derived. Many have been struck by the novelty, no less than the fitness, of an image which I will quote from “ Enid.” Nothing in earlier English poetry suggests it, and I was surprised to find a conceit, which, with a shade of difference, is so akin, in the semi-epic fragment of “ The Dioscuri.” The modern verse and image are the more excellent : —

The Dioscuri (Theocr., XXII. 46-50).

Enid.

Pastorals (Theocr., IX. 31, 32).

The Princess (Book III.).

The Syracusan Gossips (Theocr., XV. 102-105).

Love and Duty.

The Bridal of Helen (Theocr., XVIII. 47, 48).

The Talking Oak.

The Little Heracles (Theocr., XXIV. 7-9). (Alcmene’s Lullaby.)

Epitaph of Bion (Mosch , III. 68, 69).

Tears, Idle Tears.

Bion (III. 16).

Morte d' Arthur.

The Triumph of Daphnis (Theocr., VIII. 90, 91).

(“ A maid first parting from her home might wear as sad a face.” − Calverley’s Transl.)

In Memoriam (XXXIX.).

The Distaff (Theocr., XXVIII. 24, 25).

Elaine.

Cyclops (Theocr., XI. 25-29).

(Love at first sight.)

The Gardener’s Daughter.

There are passages of another class, in Mr. Tennyson’s verse, which bear a common likeness to the work of various classical poets, his university studies retaining their influence over him through life. In some of these, by brief touches, he reproduces the whole picture of a Greek idyl: −

Europa (Mosch., II. 125-130).

The Palace of Art.

Elsewhere, in the “ Europa,” the heroine is said to “ shine most eminent, as the Foam-Born among her Graces three.” Tennyson’s classical feeling is so strong, that, in the closing scene of “ The Princess,” at the height of his dramatic passion, he stops to draw a picture of Aphrodite coming “from barren deeps to conquer all with love,” and follows the goddess even to her Graces, who “ decked her out for worship without end.” Both the ancient and modern idyllists are mindful of the second Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite ; and the excursus of the latter poet is so beautiful, that we forgive him for delaying the action of his poem. In his other classical allusions such phrases as “the cold-crowned snake,” “ the charm of married brows,” “ like a dog he hunts in dreams,” and “sneeze out a full God-bless-you right and left,” repeat not only the language of Theocritus and his pupils, but of Homer, Anacreon, and the Latin Lucretius and Catullus.

Alliterations and rhymes within lines, graces of poetry in which Tennyson has excelled English predecessors, are a continuous excellence of his Syracusan teachers. There is a wandering melody, wholly different from the sounding Homeric rhythm, and impossible for a translator to reproduce, which the author of “The Princess ” has approached in such lines as these : −

These effects, which the laureate employs with such variation and continuance that the resultant style is known as Tennysonian, were Dorian first of all. Whole idyls of Theocritus, composed in the flexible bucolic hexameter, are a succession of melodies which are simply consonant with the genius of the new Doric tongue. The four English verses last cited above are curiously imitated from the musical passage in the first idyl (Theocr., I. 7, 8).

combined with the alliterative line, which mimics the murmuring of bees (Theocr., V. 46),

ώδε κaλòν βoμβευ̃ντι πoτι σμáνεσσι μέλισσaι.

It may he said, generally, that our poet imitates the Sicilians, and them alone, of all his classical models, in the persistent ease with which sound, color, form, and meaning are allied in his compositions. False notes are never struck, and no discordant hues are admitted.

This article has extended beyond its proposed limits, but, ere dismissing the theme, I will cite two more examples in which Mr. Tennyson has very closely followed his master. The first is that “ small sweet idyl ” in the seventh division of “ The Princess ” ; possibly, so far as objective beauty and finish are concerned, the nonpareil of the whole poem. It is an imitation of the apostrophe of Polyphemus to Galatea, and never were the antique and modern feeling more finely contrasted : the one, clear, simple, childlike, perfect (in the Greek as regards melody and tone ; the other, nobler, more intellectual, the antique body with the modern soul. The substitution of the mountains for the sea, as the haunt of the beloved nymph, is the laureate’s only departure from the material employed by Theocritus : −

Cyclops (Theocr., XI. 42-49, 6066).

The Princess (Book VII.).

The closing example is from “The Thalysia,” or Harvest-Home, which has furnished Mr. Tennyson with the design for portions of “ The Gardener’s Daughter” and “ Audley Court.” There is no exact reproduction, but in outline and spirit the passages herewith compared will be seen to resemble each other more nearly than others already given, where the expressions of the Greek text are repeated in the English adaptation : −

The Thalysia (Theocr., VII. 1, 2, 130-147).

(After this opening follows a eulogy of the poet’s friends, Phrasidamus and Antigenes.)

The Gardener’s Daughter.

(After this opening follows a eulogy of Eustace and Juliet.)

Audley Court.

Each portion of the foregoing English Idyls, so far as quoted, is a reminiscence of some portion of the “ Thalysia’’(mutatis mutandis, with regard to theme, season, and country), and the general analogy is equally spirited and remarkable. As for the two lunches, the one is pure Sicilian, of the fruits of the orchard and the vine ; the other, pure Briton, smacking of the cook and the larder. Your true Englishman, while sensible of the beauty of the song of the lark, who can “ scarce get out his notes for joy,” appreciates him none the less when lying “ imbedded and injellied ” beneath the crust of “ a pasty costly made.” It should be remembered, however, that the bird does not appear under these differing conditions in the same idyl.

A sufficient number of analogous passages have now been cited to illustrate the homage which our laureate has paid to the example of Theocritus, and the perfection of that art by which he has wedded his master’s method to the spirit and resources of the English tongue. I have written with genuine reverence for Mr. Tennyson’s work, and with a gratitude, felt by all who take pleasure in noble verse, for the delight imparted through many years by the successive productions of his genius. In study of the Sicilian models, he has been true to his poetic instinct, and fortunate in discernment of the wants of his day and generation. Emerson, in an essay on “Imitation and Originality,” has said : “ We expect a great man to be a good reader; or in proportion to the spontaneous power should be the assimilating power ” ; and again, “ There are great ways of borrowing. Genius borrows nobly. When Shakespeare is charged with debts to his authors, Landor replies : ‘Yet he was more original than his originals. He breathed upon dead bodies and brought them to life.’ ”

It must be acknowledged that somewhat of this applies to Mr. Tennyson’s variations upon Theocritus. To him, also, may be adjudged the credit of being the first to catch the manner of the classical idyls and reproduce it in modern use and being. Before his time, Milton and Shelley were the only English poets who measurably succeeded in this attempt, and neither of them repeated it after a single trial. Other reproductions of the Greek idyllic form have been by a kind of filtration through the Latin medium ; and often, by a third remove, after a redistillation of the French product. The odious result is visible in the absurd pastorals of “standard British poets,” from Dryden himself and Pope, to Browne, Phillips, Shenstone, and Gay. Their bucolics have made us sicken at the very mention of such names as Daphnis and Corydon, soiled as these are with all ignoble use. Tennyson has revived the true idyllic purpose, adopting the form mainly as a structure in which to exhibit, with equal naturalness and beauty, the scenery, thought, manners, of his own country and time. Assuming the title of idyllic poet, he has made the term “ idyl ” honored and understood ; but has carried his method to such perfection, that its cycle seems already near an end, and a new generation is calling for work of a different order, for more realistic passion and dramatic power.

After all, the future renown of Tennyson, and in this regard most nearly approaching that of Theocritus, will lie in the fact that, during thirty years of supremacy, he has been a representative English poet. The highest modern culture and taste, the newest discovery, have found expression in his poems, and, more than either of his compeers, he has embodied in verse the doubting, yet eager, speculative, refined. æsthetic spirit of his age. We honor one contemporary for mystical, dramatic faculty, another for sentiment and sweetness, a third for spontaneity, and so through the tuneful list ; but in years to come, when asked to declare in whose work there was the most adequate presentation of all the lyrical qualities demanded by this composite era, the scholar will pronounce the name of Tennyson, somewhat as men recur to Horace for the fashion of the Augustan period, or − each after his own genius − to Pope as an epitomist of the reign of good Queen Anne.

Edmund C. Stedman.