The grotesque vanity of the
anchorite is so remote from us, that we can scarcely judge of the
truth of the picture, though the East has still her parallels to St
Simeon. From the almost, perhaps quite, incredible ascetic the poet
lightly turns to "society verse" lifted up into the air of poetry, in
the charm of The Talking Oak, and the happy flitting sketches of
actual history; and thence to the strength and passion of Love and
Duty. Shall
"Sin itself be found
The cloudy porch oft opening on the Sun?"
That this is the province of sin is a pretty popular modern moral.
But Honour is the better part, and here was a poet who had the
courage to say so; though, to be sure, the words ring strange in an
age when highly respectable matrons assure us that "passion," like
charity, covers a multitude of sins. Love and Duty, we must admit,
is "early Victorian."
The Ulysses is almost a rival to the Morte d'Arthur. It is of an
early date, after Arthur Hallam's death, and Thackeray speaks of the
poet chanting his
"Great Achilles whom we knew,"
as if he thought that this was in Cambridge days. But it is later
than these. Tennyson said, "Ulysses was written soon after Arthur
Hallam's death, and gave my feeling about the need of going forward,
and braving the struggle of life, perhaps more simply than anything
in In Memoriam." Assuredly the expression is more simple, and more
noble, and the personal emotion more dignified for the classic veil.
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