MAUD. Tennyson called (Maud) a °mono drarna,)) a drama told in a series of lyric solilo quies. His explanation of its unique form is this: °The peculiarity of this poem is that dif ferent phases of passion in one person take the place of different characters.) To tell the story of (Maud) is to follow these phases of passion. The beginning shows the hero cut off from life by his heritage of hate and wrong, crying for war to kill the greed and cruelty of peace. With the coming of Maud, the child of his enemies, begins his new life of love that embraces mankind. His joy is shattered at its climax; a hopeless exile, he seeks only escape from the phantoms of the past. From this death in life, he is saved by the outbreak of war sin defence of the right.° The ending, written to the sound of cannon booming froin British battleships before the Crimean War, is a wan of battle. It was this militant strain in 'Maud' that shocked Tennyson's admirers and still provokes criticism. Yet read, not as
a defence of any one war, but as an indict ment of the materialistic peace that is war and that causes war, the poem shows something of that larger vision that is prophetic.
As a monodrama, (Maud) fails to achieve dramatic unity. Many of the separate lyrics are genuine bits of inner action, of soul-drama, set forth with keen psychological analysis, with skilful variation of meter to express fluctuation of feeling. But sequence of action, the law of drama, is sacrificed to singleness of mood, the essence of the lyric. In