_Rien n’est sacré_ for this cynic, who thinks himself a Stoic. Thus _Maud_ was made to be unpopular with the author’s countrymen, who conceived a prejudice against Maud’s lover, described by Tennyson as “a morbid poetic soul, . . . an egotist with the makings of a cynic.” That he is “raised to sanity” (still in Tennyson’s words) “by a pure and holy love which elevates his whole nature,” the world failed to perceive, especially as the sanity was only a brief lucid interval, tempered by hanging about the garden to meet a girl of sixteen, unknown to her relations. Tennyson added that “different phases of passion in one person take the place of different characters,” to which critics replied that they wanted different characters, if only by way of relief, and did not care for any of the phases of passion. 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.” 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.