'Not only cunning casts in clay

Let Science prove we are, and then
What matter Science unto men,

At least to me? I would not stay.'

His love of freedom is temperate; like Shakespere, he cannot put trust in the shouts of the mob,

'A love of freedom, rarely felt,

Of freedom in her regal seat

Of England; not the schoolboy heat,
The blind hysterics of the Celt.'

With the scientific and the democratic movements, Tennyson went joyfully a little way, hymning their praises; but he did not give himself unreservedly to one or to the other. It is impossible for any great poet to rest wholly satisfied with the things of the body, with mechanical advantages and an increase of earthly happiness. Holding firmly by tradition with one hand, he could only give the other to the pioneers of the progressive schools of thought; and when it came to be necessary to relinquish one or other, he made choice of the older friend, tradition, the long witness of mankind to facts of a spiritual world of which they had no scientific evidence, but from which they have never been able, and never will be able, to part. To these noble traditions he remained loyal, and to them, as interpreted by the Broad Church party; but without, even in 'In Memoriam,' falling back upon the support offered by Transcendentalism. Nevertheless, Tennyson is not unreservedly an exponent or a representative of Christian, but of classic He held by Plato, perhaps, as firmly as he held by Christian revelation. Arnold was the representative of the later culture which held by Plato more firmly than by Christian revelation; held by his ethics, at least, and those

art.

of Marcus Aurelius and of Epictetus and of Spinoza. Browning alone of the poets of the latter half of the century remained unshaken by the revelations of Science, disdainful of the mere mechanical progress of the raceremained true to Christianity, to the new readings of it given by Transcendentalism, to the sacredness of individual life, to the principle that the realisation of an ideal like that of the 'Parliament of man, the federation of the world,' is as small dust in the balance, compared with the awakening to life of a single soul; and he is therefore the only representative of Christian art in an era of classical revival.

Tennyson's classic spirit as opposed to any spirit of mysticism comes out in this, that just as the Greek artists, although they recognised the impossibility of satisfaction with the attainment of finite ideals, but out of the obscure longings of the heart for some infinitely enduring affection, for some eternal rock unmoved amid the waves of change— out of these, or out of the unutterable desires that from their secret sources well up in every human breast, desires for infinite love, passions for infinite perfection, could forge no weapon to storm a higher height, and for the purposes of art remained deliberately at a point whence all that was seen was seen sharply and fully, so the Tennyson of the early poems admitted to his verse only those conceptions that are capable of complete realisation, and may be adequately expressed. Life, as it is conditioned by space and time and things seen, was accepted by him without suggestion as to its sufficiency or insufficiency to satisfy the whole nature of man, mind and heart and soul. As already noticed, the first principles of classic art are involved in this to treat only of the known: and while Tennyson insists on a future life as necessary to make this life in

telligible, to save us from permanent intellectual confusion, that other life is rarely brought into any close relationship with the present. It is a necessary hypothesis, but one which does not to any degree affect the present life. Meanwhile an ideal of this world will be helpful. Let it consist in the progress glorified by the Evolutionist, and an eventual Millennium; let it here and now, in this life, consist in a determination to acquire an universal dominion over the powers of Nature, that vast reservoir of forces that may be fettered and worked, the giant slaves of man who has hit upon the great open secret that knowledge is power; let us band together that we may have the very best bread that can be made from wheat, both for ourselves and for our descendants. Such is the definite ideal which must encourage

'Men our brothers, men the workers, ever reaping something new, That which they have done but earnest of the things they yet shall do.'

In the contemplation of such an ideal Tennyson rested he was inspired and aroused by these splendid glimpses as neither Arnold nor Browning could have been. For him it would be sufficient happiness to rise-not to return from some other sphere of activity-but to rise once in every hundred years

And learn the world and sleep again,

And wake on science grown to more
On secrets of the brain, the stars

As wild as aught of fairy lore;

And all that else the years will show.'

Compare with this the world-weariness of the poet of the later culture. To him it seems that for one who has served

men nobly and acceptance found, nothing is to be preferred to rest, lasting rest.

'Why should he pray to range

Down the long age of truth that ripens slow,
And vex his heart with all the baffling change
And all the tedious tossing to and fro ?'

Compare with it also the feeling of insufficiency in things seen, however gratifying to ordinary human senses, displayed all through the poetry of Browning. His is indeed an unwearied delight in beauty, in all that the world holds fair and good and great, in all that Nature offers of colour or form; but it is a delight merely in passing, a delight on the way to grander, more subtile, more complex delight in the ardours and loves and enthusiasms of the soul which are the instruments of its ever-renewed awakening, of its expansion and infinite growth, a feeling that may be compressed into one line—

'How inexhaustibly the spirit grows !'

Tennyson, closing an epoch, gathers to himself something from all the movements of thought that have preceded him. He is the poet of generalisations, who sums up the intellectual and moral gains of humanity, all that it has learned through experience, and is the supreme representative in English of the poetry of culture, the poetry that is a criticism of life.' We see in him what may be accomplished by pure art joined to wide knowledge; his poetry is in this no less classic in form than in spirit, that he was even a more careful student of his expression than of his substance.

We may trace yet another classic tendency in Tennyson's sustained interest in the history of the race rather than in

that of the individual soul, in his anticipation of a definite end of all men's labours, of the 'toil co-operant to an end.' It is not so much, even in the later poems of wider grasp and deeper meaning, a man's duty to himself, to his higher spiritual nature, as his duty to the state, to his fellow men, that occupies his attention. Looking back, as we have seen, upon the history of the world, he feels and expresses a natural joy in all that man has done; looking forward, he contemplates with hope what the race may yet in the future do; but he has concerned himself little with the marvellous inner world, the complexities of man's emotional and spiritual nature, of the soul battling with itself, rising by repeated and continued effort, or ruined by a failure of will or contentment with the attainment of some mean or sordid ambition. Tennyson, concerned with large social and political results, takes no note of the crises in the development or deterioration of the individual. The suffering and failure which each man undergoes are not conceived as throughout educative, or brought into place as a necessary step towards the perfect life. He is indeed conscious that

'Men may rise on stepping-stones

Of their dead selves to higher things;'

but he nowhere encourages noble ventures that may lead to earthly failure, but which may also lead to magnificent recompense in heart and spirit. This life of restraint, of 'self- reverence, self-knowledge, self-control,' is the ideal of Stoicism, and the ideal of the Greek philosophers who were not Stoics, like Plato or Epicurus; it fears failure in obedience, confusions and disorders; the Christian life, as interpreted by Browning, fears ignoble satisfactions,