The learned Monsieur Janet has maintained that love is a disease like
another, and that nobody falls in love when in perfect health of mind
and body. This theory seems open to exception, but the hero of Maud
is unhealthy enough. At best and last, he only helps to give a
martial force a "send-off":-
"I stood on a giant deck and mixed my breath
With a loyal people shouting a battle-cry."
He did not go out as a volunteer, and probably the Crimean winters
brought him back to his original estate of cynical gloom--and very
naturally.
The reconciliation with Life is not like the reconciliation of In
Memoriam. The poem took its rise in old lines, and most beautiful
lines, which Tennyson had contributed in 1837 to a miscellany:-
"O that 'twere possible,
After long grief and pain,
To find the arms of my true love
Round me once again."
Thence the poet, working back to find the origin of the situation,
encountered the ideas and the persons of Maud.
I have tried to state the sources, in the general mind, of the
general dislike of Maud. The public, "driving at practice,"
disapproved of the "criticism of life" in the poem; confused the
suffering narrator with the author, and neglected the poetry. "No
modern poem," said Jowett, "contains more lines that ring in the ears
of men. I do not know any verse out of Shakespeare in which the
ecstacy of love soars to such a height.
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