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As we read "The Two Voices," "Oenone," "The Palace of Art," "The Lotos Eaters," "A Dream of Fair Women," it becomes almost incomprehensible how any one who ever read them even in forms less perfect than those that we possess, should have mistaken their incomparable excellence. But the student of literary history knows better.
Critical appreciation of the volume of 1842 was happily encouraging to the poet; indeed, it was most gratifying, for its many remarkable beauties were now justly and adequately appraised, particularly such fine new themes as the volume contained 'Ulysses, 'Godiva, 'The Two Voices, 'The Talking Oak, 'Oenone, 'Locksley Hall, 'The Vision of Sin, and 'Morte D'Arthur, the germ of the future "Idylls of the King."
Little hope he had, for he knew how cruelly he had deserted OEnone, and he saw that all the birds which were disturbed in the wood flew away to the left hand, an omen of evil. At last the bearers reached the cave where the nymph OEnone lived, and they smelled the sweet fragrance of the cedar fire that burned on the floor of the cave, and they heard the nymph singing a melancholy song.
Very touching in her invocation to her "old Corneille," Mademoiselle Gontier was superb at the moment when the comedienne, knowing at last who is her rival, quotes from Racine that passage in 'Phedre' which she throws, so to speak, in the face of the patrician woman: . . . . Je sais ses perfidies, OEnone! et ne suis point de ces femmes hardies Qui, goutant dans la crime une honteuse paix, Ont su se faire un front qui ne rougit jamais.
As a child, Paris had been exposed on the mountains, because his mother dreamed that she brought forth a firebrand. He was rescued and fostered by a shepherd; he tended the flocks; he loved the daughter of a river god, OEnone. Then came the naked Goddesses, to seek at the hand of the most beautiful of mortals the prize of beauty.
For herself she could live in retirement, visit the wood, the old camp, the column, and, like OEnone, think of the life they had led there 'Mournful OEnone, wandering forlorn Of Paris, once her playmate on the hills, leaving it entirely to his goodness whether he would come and claim her in the future, or desert her for ever.
His manner, I venture to think, is more Homeric than that of the more famous and doubtless greater Alexandrian poet of the Argonautic cycle, Apollonius Rhodius, his senior by five centuries. His materials were probably the ancient and lost poems of the Epic Cycle, and the story of the death of OEnone may be from the Little Iliad of Lesches.
Dry now your tears; for when I have won the prizes in the games I will come back to you, and never leave you again. "Then the grief of Oenone waxed still greater. 'If you will go, she cried, 'then hear my warning! Long years shall pass ere you shall come again to wooded Ida, and the hearts which now are young shall grow old and feeble by reason of much sorrow.
Philoctetes was cured of his wound by Machaon, and Paris was the first victim of the fatal arrows. In his distress Paris bethought him of one whom in his prosperity he had forgotten. This was the nymph OEnone, whom he had married when a youth, and had abandoned for the fatal beauty Helen.
The silence of the veiled OEnone, as she springs into her lover's last embrace, is perhaps more affecting and more natural than Tennyson's "She lifted up a voice Of shrill command, 'Who burns upon the pyre?" The St Telemachus has the old splendour and vigour of verse, and, though written so late in life, is worthy of the poet's prime:
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