Kubla Khan. But in Tennyson the effects were deliberately sought and secured.
One might conjecture, though Lord Tennyson says nothing on the subject, that among the suggestions for The Princess was the opening 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 Academe,
Still and contemplative in living art.
You three, Biron, Domain, and Longaville,
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 a mile of my Court:’ Hath this been proclaimed?
Long. Four 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 why we 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 women in The Princess insist on the “grand, epic, homicidal” scenes, while the men are debarred, more or less, from a sportive treatment of the subject. The tavern catch of Cyril; the laughable pursuit of the Prince by the feminine Proctors; the draggled appearance of the adventurers in female garb, are concessions to the humour of the situation. Shakespeare would certainly have given us the song of Cyril at the picnic, and comic enough the effect would have been on the stage. It may be a gross employment, but The Princess, with the pretty chorus of girl undergraduates,
“In colours gayer than the morning mist,”
went reasonably well in opera. Merely considered as a romantic fiction, The Princess presents higher proofs of original narrative genius than any other such attempt by its author.
The poem is far from being deficient in that human interest which Shelley said that it was as vain to ask from him, as to seek to buy a leg of mutton at a gin-shop. The characters, the protagonists, with Cyril, Melissa, Lady Blanche, the child Aglaia, King Gama, the other king, Arac, and the hero’s mother – beautifully studied from the mother of the poet – are all sufficiently human. But they seem to waver in the magic air, “as all the golden autumn woodland reels” athwart the fires of autumn leaves. For these reasons, and because of the designed fantasy of the whole composition, The Princess is essentially a poem for the true lovers of poetry, of Spenser and of Coleridge. The serious motive, the question of Woman, her wrongs, her rights, 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 Women, and in France George Sand was prominent and emancipated enough while the poet wrote. But, the question of love apart, George Sand was “very, very woman,” shining as a domestic character and fond of needlework. England was not excited about the question which has since produced so many disputants, inevitably shrill, and has not been greatly meddled with by women of genius, George Eliot or Mrs Oliphant. The poem, in the public indifference as to feminine education, came rather prematurely. We have now ladies’ colleges, not in haunts remote from man, but by the sedged 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 academic and becoming costume of the scarlet gown. 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 masterly position in the law of ancient Egypt. Gynæocracy and matriarchy, the woman the head of the savage or prehistoric group, were things hidden from her. She “glanced at the Lycian custom,” but not at the Pictish, a custom which would have suited George Sand to a marvel. She maligned 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 may say, with Dampier (1689), “The Hodmadods, though a nasty people, yet are gentlemen to these” as regards the position of women. Let us hear Mr Hartland: “In every Hottentot’s house the wife is supreme. Her husband, poor fellow, though 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 permission.. The highest oath a man can take is to swear by his eldest sister, and if he abuses this name he forfeits to her his finest goods and sheep.”
However, in 1847 England had not yet thought of imitating 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. “None of the songs had the old champagne flavour,” said Fitz; and Lord Tennyson adds, “Nothing either by Thackeray or by my father met FitzGerald’s approbation unless he had first seen it in manuscript.” This prejudice was very human. Lord Tennyson remarks, as to the poet’s meaning in this work, born too early, that “the sooner woman finds out, before the great educational movement begins, that ‘woman is not undeveloped man, but diverse,’ the better it will be for the progress of the world.”
But probably the “educational movement” will not make much difference to womankind on the whole. The old Platonic remark that woman “does the same things as man, but not so well,” will eternally hold good, at least in the arts, and in letters, except in rare cases of genius. A new Jeanne d’Arc, the most signal example of absolute genius in history, will not come again; and the ages have waited vainly for a new Sappho or a new Jane Austen. Literature, poetry, painting, have always been fields open to woman. But two names exhaust the roll of women of the highest rank in letters – Sappho and Jane Austen. And “when did woman ever yet invent?” In “arts of government” Elizabeth had courage, and just saving sense enough to yield to Cecil at the eleventh hour, and escape the fate of “her sister and her foe,” the beautiful unhappy queen who told her ladies that she dared to look on whatever men dared to do, and herself would do it if her strength so served her.” 6 “The foundress of the Babylonian walls” is a myth; “the Rhodope that built the Pyramid” is not a creditable myth; for exceptions to Knox’s “Monstrous Regiment of Women” we must fall back on “The Palmyrene that fought Aurelian,” and the revered name of the greatest of English queens, Victoria. Thus history does not encourage the hope that a man-like education will raise many women to the level of the highest of their sex in the past, or even that the enormous majority of women will take advantage of the opportunity of a man-like
The Lennox MSS.
