" With these comments we may
agree, yet may fail to follow Jowett when he says, "No poem since
Shakespeare seems to show equal power of the same kind, or equal
knowledge of human nature." Shakespeare could not in a narrative
poem have preferred the varying passions of one character to the
characters of many persons.
Tennyson was "nettled at first," his son says, "by these captious
remarks of the 'indolent reviewers,' but afterwards he would take no
notice of them except to speak of them in a half-pitiful, half-
humorous, half-mournful manner." The besetting sin and error of the
critics was, of course, to confound Tennyson's hero with himself, as
if we confused Dickens with Pip.
Like Aurora Leigh, Lucile, and other works, Maud is under the
disadvantage of being, practically, a novel of modern life in verse.
Criticised as a tale of modern life (and it was criticised in that
character), it could not be very highly esteemed. But the essence of
Maud, of course, lies in the poetical vehicle. Nobody can cavil at
the impressiveness of the opening stanzas -
"I hate the dreadful hollow behind the little wood";
with the keynotes of colour and of desolation struck; the lips of the
hollow "dabbled with blood-red heath," the "red-ribb'd ledges," and
"the flying gold of the ruin'd woodlands"; and the contrast in the
picture of the child Maud -
"Maud the delight of the village, the ringing joy of the Hall.
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