DEATH OF JASON.
115
"O sickle cutting harvest all day long,
That the husbandman across his shoulder hangs,
And going homeward about evensong,
Dies the next morning, struck through by the fangs!"[1]
—all these points and phases of passion are alike truly and nobly rendered. I have not read the poem for years, I have not the book at hand, and I cite from memory; but I think it would be safe to swear to the accuracy of my citation. Such verses are not forgetable. They are not, indeed,—as are the "Idylls of the King"—the work of a dexterous craftsman in full practice. Little beyond dexterity, a rare eloquence, and a laborious patience of hand, has been given to the one or denied to the other.[2] These are good gifts and great; but it is better to want clothes than limbs.
The shortcomings of this first book are nowhere traceable in the second now lying before us. A nine
- ↑ Perhaps in all this noble passage of poetry there is nothing nobler than this bitter impulse of irony, this fiery shame and rage of repentance, which here impels Guenevere to humiliate herself through her lover, and thus consummate the agony of abasement. "False and fatal as banner, or shield, or sword, wherein is he better than a peasant's dangerous and vulgar implement, as fatal to him it may be, by carelessness or chance, as a king's weapon to the king if handled amiss?" And yet for all this she cannot but cleave to him; through her lover she scourges herself; it is suicide in her to slay him; but even so his soul must needs be saved—"so as by fire." No poet about to start on his course ever saw for himself or showed to others a thing more tragic and more true than this study of noble female passion, half selfless and half personal, half mad and half sane.
- ↑ The comparison here made is rather between book and book than between man and man, Both poets have done better elsewhere, each after his kind; and except by his best work no workman can be fairly judged. A critic who should underrate either would be condemnable on both hands.