"
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 dream, for a dream is the
thing 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 from a golden and learned South.
The arts, from architecture to miniature-painting, are in their
highest perfection, while knights still tourney in armour, and the
quarrel of two nations is decided as in the gentle and joyous passage
of arms at Ashby de la Zouche. Such confusions are purposefully
dream-like: the vision being a composite thing, as dreams are,
haunted by the modern scene of the holiday in the park, the "gallant
glorious chronicle," the Abbey, and that "old crusading knight
austere," Sir Ralph. The seven narrators of the scheme are like the
"split personalities" of dreams, and the whole scheme is of great
technical skill. The earlier editions lacked the beautiful songs of
the ladies, and that additional trait of dream, the strange trance-
like seizures of the Prince: "fallings from us, vanishings," in
Wordsworthian phrase; instances of "dissociation," in modern
psychological terminology. Tennyson himself, like Shelley and
Wordsworth, had experience of this kind of dreaming awake which he
attributes to his Prince, to strengthen the shadowy yet brilliant
character of his romance.
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