This is perhaps the keenest touch of satire in the poem: but the whole is excellent. It is clear that Mr. Tennyson prefers the simple boorishness of the old farmer to the boorishness varnished over with cleverness of the new; and he presents the reasons for his preference very forcibly. The Golden Supper' need not detain us long. It is a tale from Boccaccio; simple in conception, though, as is always the case with Mr. Tennyson, involving frequent subtlety and elaboration in the expression. It is probably this which renders the conclusion of the story somewhat disappointing: for the frequent air of mystery introduced into the earlier portions excite the reader with the expectation of some catastrophe, terrible or weird, at the end; whereas the weirdness of the poem is entirely at the beginning, and the end is quiet and peaceful—and, except that we are given to understand that the disappointed lover banishes himself from the scene, nothing even of melancholy ensues. The Victim' and 'Wages' might quite as well have been omitted from the volume. 6 The Higher Pantheism' is a poem of very different order. It is a true endeavour to grasp the unseen, and to render to men the essence of it. Opinions will always differ about such a poem for to one man the unseen is revealed in one way, to another in another way; and at one time that seems deep to a man, which at another time will seem to him shallow. But about this there can be no doubt, that the poem comes from a full and a feeling mind; it is written not because others have written on such topics and have been applauded, but because the poet was penetrated with the thought, and kindled to speak 'Earth, these solid stars, this weight of body and limb, Are they not sign and symbol of thy division from Him?' In the very music of such lines as these there breathes a solemnity which is the fit attitude by which to contemplate the Eternal; and if the sense of them is mysterious and untranslateable, so is the subject of which they speak. The last poem in the book is 'Lucretius.' Of this we are constrained to say that no poem which Mr. Tennyson has written is more inadequate to the subject. Whether Lucretius was a fit subject for another poet to write upon may perhaps be doubted. He has left his own monument; from his own works we gather what was his nature; for while he intended to expound a philosophy, the interest excited by his poem centres in himself. If his theories were his only attraction, they might indeed be looked back upon now and then by the scientific thinker for the sake of the resemblance they bear to modern researches; but, on the whole, they have been passed by in the progress of speculation, their ingenious and subtle reasoning will not help the inquirers of the nineteenth century. But the nature of humanity is more steadfast than science; and a spirit so majestic, so daring, so direct of purpose and sustained in argument, must excite in us an admiration not diminished by the nineteen hundred years that have passed since his death. Doubtless, did we know more of his personal life, this admiration might, as in other cases, be alloyed by the discovery of flaws and weaknesses. And if the legend of his suicide, incredible as it is in its circumstances, be founded on fact, then the passionless tranquillity inculcated by the philosopher Lucretius must have been sadly missed by the man. And this is not incredible; for the very sighs which he breathes after a peaceful life and untroubled mind testify, perhaps, to the want of it in himself. But still it is plain that, when in the height of his temper, he did attain what he longed for; the fortitude of his intellect was never impaired, it was only his nervous system that at times was lowered; and when he burst the physical hindrances, then he stood truly on an eminence from which to direct his fellow-men. He was a Prometheus; an erring man, perhaps, but no antagonist of Divine Love, only the resolute opponent of the superstitious fears by which the heart of man has ever been clouded. It was imperative on any poet who undertook to delineate Lucretius, not to omit as the chief element in his character his magnanimous, though sorrowful, self-confidence. To amalgamate with this any history or conjecture of his life or death bearing witness to opposite characteristics, was an attempt not entirely to be forbidden, but one that demanded the profoundest penetration. To exhibit the admixture of high and low, of noble and vulgar, in a man, is the task of a great dramatic poet. If any one has not the capacity to comprehend and represent this admixture, and still desires to portray a character, there is no doubt which side of the portrait he ought chiefly to endeavour to bring out. He ought to lay stress, not on that which the man has in common with others, or that in which he is inferior to others, but on that in which he stands out above others-on that which makes him remarkable and memorable. Errors and vices may be met with any day; high dispositions are rare and precious. Now, Mr. Tennyson has done Lucretius a double wrong; he has put into his delineation of him the lower element, which we only hear of by vague report, or imagine by con jecture; jecture; he has omitted the higher element, which we know to have been in Lucretius, and for which alone he is to be valued. He has substituted for the unwavering certainty of the philosopher an universal scepticism; he has introduced crude sensual thoughts, and ignored that high disdain of sensualism which breathes in the Roman; and lastly, whereas the real Lucretius moves with a long sustained flow, the Lucretius of Mr. Tennyson breaks out in a series of spasmodic, unconnected gasps. A few beautiful descriptive lines, and one or two touches of pathos, will not atone for so fundamental a misconception as this. But, in order to give our readers the means of judging, we will conclude by quoting, first a passage from the 'Lucretius' of Mr. Tennyson, and next one from the real Lucretius Here is Mr. Tennyson, and not his worst passage: 'That was mine, my dream, I knew it For these I thought my dream would show to me, Hired animalisms, vile as those that made The mulberry-faced Dictator's orgies worse And hands they mixt, and yell'd, and round me drove Was it the first beam of my latest day?' And here is the real Lucretius, to which we subjoin Mr. Munro's prose translation: 'O genus infelix humanum, talia divis cum tribuit facta atque iras adiunxit acerbas! vertier ad lapidem atque omnis accedere ad aras, illa quoque expergefactum caput erigere infit, perpetuo possint aevi labentia tractu O hapless race of men, when that they charged the gods with such acts and coupled with them bitter wrath! what groanings did they then beget for themselves, what wounds for us, what tears for our children's children! No act is it of piety to be often seen with veiled head to turn to a stone, and approach every altar and fall prostrate on the ground, and spread out the palms before the statues of the gods, and sprinkle the altars with much blood of beasts, and nail up vow after vow; but rather to be able to look on all things with a mind at peace. For when we turn our gaze on the heavenly quarters of the great upper world and ether fast above the glittering stars, and direct our thoughts to the courses of the sun and moon, then into our breasts burdened with other ills that fear as well begins to exalt its reawakened head, the fear that we may haply find the power of the gods to be unlimited, able to wheel the bright stars in their varied motion; for lack of power to solve the question troubles the mind with doubts, whether there was ever a birthtime of the world, and whether likewise there is to be any end; how far the walls of the world can endure this strain of restless motion, or whether gifted by the grace of the gods with an everlasting existence they may glide on through a neverending tract of time, and defy the strong powers of immeasurable ages. Again, who is there whose mind does not shrink into itself with fear of the gods, whose limbs do not cower in terror, when the parched earth rocks with the appalling stroke and rattlings run through the great heaven? Do not peoples and nations quake, and proud monarchs shrink into themselves smitten with fear of the gods, lest for any foul transgression or overweening word, the heavy time of reckoning has arrived at its fulness? ' Vol. 128.-No. 255. C ART. ART. II.-1. Life Assurance Companies. Return to an Order of the House of Commons. 29th April, 1869. 2. Albert Life Assurance Company. Mr. Price's Report to the Shareholders and Policyholders. 28th August, 1869. 3. The Insurance Register. By a Fellow of the Statistical Society. 1869. was scarcely to be expected that Life Assurance would escape feature of recent Joint Stock enterprise. Railway Companies, Banking Companies, Finance Companies, Hotel Companies, Rolling Stock Companies, and Assurance Companies, have each their frightful examples' to exhibit, of undertakings begun in speculation and ending in fraud; of schemes whose prospectuses promised an easy road to fortune, but which proved, when followed, only the certain road to ruin. All sorts of Companies, limited and unlimited, have now had their turn; but whether we have yet reached the lowest deep remains to be seen. Joint Stock undertakings have either been very unfortunate, or there must be some weak point in their constitution which exposes them to the operations of the unprincipled. The most flagrant swindles of late years have certainly been those practised upon public Companies. It is enough to remind the reader of the cases of Watts of the Globe Assurance, Robson of the Crystal Palace, Redpath of the Great Northern Railway, Pullinger of the Union Bank, and Benjamin Higgs of the Central Gas Company-each a genius in his way, qualified to occupy among the loftiest niches in the Newgate Valhalla. All these persons carried on their operations in the most deliberate way, under the eyes of respectable Boards of Directors, and with the apparent sanction of the able auditors who periodically investigated and certified the accounts of the respective Companies. The facility with which such frauds are effected is doubtless attributable in some measure to the magnitude of Joint-Stock undertakings, the complicated and elaborate character of their accounts, and the difficulty of keeping the details of their operations under continuous check; but it is also due in some measure to the system itself-to divided responsibility, loose management, and inefficient supervision. The early Joint-Stock Companies were usually directed by men of special knowledge, who were largely interested in the undertakings by investment, or becausethey carried out some important scheme of public utility. They managed the Company's business as if it had been their own, and looked for their remuneration rather to the profits earned upen. |