Tennyson as a Dramatist [pp. 118-131]

Teiziyson ats a Dramatist.
terrible invasion of Harold Hardrada and''ostig, braved his own
sovereign, seized on the English
throne with a grasp that only death
could shake off,and died so gloriously on Hastings-never "played the
woman with his eyes and the braggart with his tongue " in this poor
fashion. Here again speaks the
reader of modern infidel literature in
the mouth of the unspeculative soldi.er of the eleventh century:
" I cannot help it, but at times
They seem to me too narrow, all the faiths
Of this grown world of ours, whose baby eye
Saw them sufficient."
"AVC the faiths!" WAVe wonder hoow
,many " faiths " Harold knew of or
contemplated. Indeed, it seems to
us that Mr.'Tennyson here speaks
for himlself, and in a mannaer that
causes some suspicion of his having
lost something of his own earlier
and more robust belief. Harold
continues:
"But a little light! And on it falls the shadow of the priest;
Heaven yield us more! far better Woden, all
Our cancel'd warrior-gods, our grint Wal hallo,
.Eternal war, than /that the Saints atfieace;
The IIolivst of our Holiest one should be
T7'his kVilliam''s fellow-tricksters; better die
Than credit this, for death is death, or else
Lifts us beyond the lie."
'Which is heathenism and athleism
beautifully combined. He goes on,
still in his atheistic vein, when
,Edithl bids him listen to the nightingales:
" Their anthems of no church, how sweet they are!
Nor kingly priest, nor priestly king to cross
Their billings ere they nest."
And again, when Gurth brings
enews of the pope's favoring Williami's cause, Harold laughs and
says of it:
This was old human laughter in old Rome
BJ3efore a Pope was born, when that which reign'd
(CaU'd itself God- a kingly rendering
Of' Render unto Cwesar.'"
. Harold must have lately risen
from a perusal of Mr. Gladstone's
pamplhlet on Vaticanism when
he spoke thus, so we pardon his
aberration.'That pamphlet is too
strong for weak intellects.
"The Lord was God and came as man-the Pope
Is man and comes as God,"
hle continues, still in the Gladstonian vein. He reminds Editl
that love "remains beyond all
chances and all churches"-a dictutm and doctrine that would be
strange even in a Protestant Harold. "I ever hated monks," he
says in another place, which may
account for his having founded
Waltham Abbey. He grows more
and more Protestant towards tie
end, and the saintly relics over
whlichl. he was so terrified at having
sworn a false oath he terms the
" gilded ark of mummy-saints."
And here is his final legacy to England:
".. And this to England,
My legacy of war against the Pope
From child to child, from Pope to Pope, from age to
age,
Till the sea wash her level with her shores,
Or till the Pope be Christ's."
This is Tennyson's legacy, not
Harold's. It seems strange that it
should have fallen into careless
hands; not ours, but those of tihe
poet's coreligionists. The fact is
that the world is growing wearyv
of little anti-papal tooters. Great
enemies of the papacy it applauds
and tries to excuse; but at the
mouthings of the little people it
yawns. If T''ennyson has shown
anything in this as in his other antiCatholic effusions, it is that when
moved by rancor he can descend
to all the small bitterness of a common and weak order of mind. We
cannot go further into an examination of Harold, and, indeed, the
task is not worth while. He has
failed in the one character which,
13o