The alterations and additions in "Maud" appear to us to be about as bad as they could be. Explanatory additions were wanted, but not those flat prosaic lines, though Mr. Bayne appears to like them. On the other hand, the verse--
"I kissed her slender hand, She took the kiss sedately, Maud is not seventeen, But she is tall and stately,"
which our intelligent critic does not like, appears to us perfect--in its place. Sweeter love-poetry than the finest parts of "Maud" is not to be found in the language; the remark being confined to the more superficial kinds of love. For the "tender passion" of the poem is, after all, superficial and thin: the strongest parts being the cynical. It has always been a grief to us that so much exquisite poetry (Cantos XII., XVIII., XXII., in Part I; and IV. in Part II.) should have been framed in what is really nothing but a very poor "sensation" novel, with a moral or lesson which is poorer still. Poetry is not bound to be unintermittingly poetic; there must be flat passages,--but such second-hand phrasing as "a war in defence of the right"--"that an iron tyranny now should bend or cease"--"a cause that I felt to be pure and true"--"a giant liar"--is intolerable in a poem of which the climax is so high-pitched. Better the merest conversational familiarity, than this rhetorical magniloquence.
Before passing from Tennyson's poems, we cannot help noting a curious example of Dr. Bayne's tendency to excessive praise and admiration. In that very poor poem, "Sea-Dreams," the city clerk's wife induces her husband to forgive the just-dead man who has robbed them of their savings. Upon which Dr. Bayne remarks; "There is not a nobler heroine in literature than this wife of a city clerk, and I see no reason to believe that there are not many such to be found in London." Nor do we--six women out of ten exhibit every week of their lives "heroism" just as "noble." It is perfectly commonplace; and it is the critic's warm-heartedness which betrays him into these extravagancies of language.
The Essay on Ruskin has been nearly all rewritten, and it is a fine specimen of studious candour, and something more. All we will add is, that we hope Mr. Bayne holds, along with Mr. Ruskin--though it hardly looks as if he did--that "the destruction of beauty is a sacrilege and a sin." This is undoubtedly a fair account of what Mr. Ruskin means in certain portions of his writings, and he is not the only one who has suffered "anguish," little short of despair, at certain "works of profanation." Mr. Bayne quotes Mr. Ruskin's passionate words about the befouling and desecration of the "pools and streams" around Carshalton. Now, it would not be easy, perhaps, to prove that God made those "pools and streams," still lovely in their degradation, in a sense in which he did _not_ make the human beings who have "insolently defiled" them; but we may at least say that the human will was concerned not only in the "defiling" but in the production of the defilers, while it was _not_ concerned in the production of those "pools and streams." And we may conjecture that if Mr. Ruskin had been asked to decide whether the "pools and streams" should retain their original clearness and beauty, and the human beings remain unproduced, or whether the latter should come into existence and the "pools and streams" be defiled--he would have stood for the first alternative. But if he afterwards followed out his decision to its consequence, it would make an end of what Mr. Bayne rightly calls the "communistic" element in his writings. It is painfully certain that if Mr. and Mrs. Wordsworth had been disgusted by "people from Birthwaite" before the "Excursion" was written, that poem would have been very different here and there.