lofty to last, sees, without seeing, it slowly crumbling away beneath his touch from the very moment it appears to have gained its victory, dimly apprehends that he has in some sense injured his followers by the very loftiness of his requirements,-the grandeur of the vows which blight those by whom they are broken, and survives the ruin of all his hopes with only a faithful fool to bewail their destruction. The king is so blinded by his own great dream that to some his career seems all illusion, and the saying,

Of bygone Merlin, "Where is he who knows?
From the great deep to the great deep he goes,'

appears to such as these an adequate epitaph upon it. Yet no one who reads the series as a whole can help feeling the sense of triumph in the close, when Sir Gawaine's ghost goes shrieking down the wind, "And hollow, hollow, hollow, all delight," and Arthur passes to his isle of rest. The illusion that blinds the king is the illusion of infinite light-far more real than the 'world to which it blinds him. With George Eliot, on the other hand, the same idealism and illusion-not a whit less noble in their moral source—always come to some sad ending and partial or total quenching. The finer nature in Dinah suffers eclipse under the secular shadow of Adam Bede. Romola fails and fades in a melancholy twilight. The Spanish Gypsy succumbs to a part too hard for her. Jubal is extinguished with his song, and told to be grateful for extinction. Armgart loses all her fire and hope as she takes home her lesson of self-sacrifice; and here, in this new work of our author's, which is, I am sure, going to be a great one,—we are pretty plainly told

in the preface (why does she call it a "prelude "?) that the heroine is to be the victim of her own idealism, and to founder on the rocks of uncongenial circumstance. That the sister of little feeling is to see her way easily, and the sister of deep feeling to stray far into the wilderness, I do not complain. All true realism teaches us that so it continually is. But that we are to trace the history of a "foundress of nothing, whose loving heart-beats and sobs after an unattained goodness tremble off and are dispersed among hindrances," seems to me the fiat not so much of realism as of that deficiency in the faculties of insight which only the stimulus of faith can supply. The true idealism of life undoubtedly often leads to failure and grief and outward ruin immeasurable; but only infidelity to it, selfish recoil from it, leads to that quenching and exhaustion of spirit in which the finest characters of George Eliot's works are so often allowed to flicker out their lives.

NEWMAN AND TENNYSON

THE unveiling of Cardinal Newman's statue on Wednesday at the Oratory of St. Philip Neri was an event which I cannot help looking on as the consequence of a national mistake. Newman was no doubt a Roman Catholic, and a deserter from the Anglican communion, but he was a great Englishman before he was either, and perhaps more distinctively a great Oxonian than anything else. Oxford ought to have claimed him instead of rejecting him, as unluckily she did. His genius was full of the very essence of Oxford's great motto, "Deus illuminatio mea," and his manner was the embodiment of that "sweetness and light" which has characterised so many of the best Oxford teachers, till it has often been called the Oxford manner. The Roman Catholics saw this and generously offered the statue of their great thinker to Oxford; but Oxford was too shy of the Roman Catholic faith-though it was the faith of Oxford itself in an age when the University was more of a European than of an English institution-to accept the offer, and has thereby lost the memorial of one of the greatest and most impressive figures amongst her sons. The late Poet-Laureate, whose most characteristic aim in life was by no means

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far removed from Cardinal Newman's, seeing that both these great men confronted the deepest doubt boldly, and yet in a spirit eager to show that faith is deeper and truer than doubt, has said with something of paradox :

There is more faith in honest doubt,
Believe me, than in half the creeds.

But though Newman would hardly have said that, for he did not love paradox, and perhaps would have been more disposed to say, what is also true, "There is more doubt in shrinking faith, believe me, than in half the heresies," there never was a religious thinker, certainly a great ecclesiastic, who expressed more powerfully and more candidly the great doubts with which he grappled, or who taught his friends to face them with a calmer and a clearer glance. Mr. Wilfrid Ward, who has done so much to promote the knowledge of the great Cardinal's writings, with a complete belief in his hero's ultimate solution of those doubts which I have never been able to share,—has quite lately published in a paper in the New Review (July 1896) a study of Tennyson, which seems to me to demonstrate how much and how deep a sympathy there was between the most characteristic aim of Tennyson as a religious thinker and that of the Oxford leader who ended his days as a Cardinal of the Church of Rome. And though Cardinal Newman's name is never mentioned, so far as I remember, in Mr. Wilfrid Ward's article, I am very glad to avail myself of its drift to illustrate my contention that there was quite enough of parallelism between the religious aims of these

two very different men, with their two widely different manners, to show how ill Oxford understood her own characteristic aims, when she practically declined to recognise Newman except as a deserter from her fold. Newman, no doubt, was a far more earnest believer in the dogmas of Christianity than Tennyson, who never succeeded in reconciling himself wholly to the Christian creeds, profoundly as he revered and loved the person of Christ. But I do not scruple to say that his method was the same as Newman's, though he could not go so far as Newman went in accepting the intellectual form in which historical Christianity had embodied itself in the creeds of the Church. Mr. Wilfrid Ward's paper has been talked of as if it were an unauthorised revelation of private confidences between Tennyson and himself. Nothing can be more ridiculous than such a statement, and I doubt whether those who think so have carefully read what they so describe. It is, I venture to say, a lucid exhibition of thoughts written all over the most definitely religious of Lord Tennyson's poems, and though, with the exception of "The Two Voices," they are by no means amongst his greatest poems, they are certainly amongst the writings which most definitely express the aims dearest to Tennyson's heart, and bring him nearer to the great Tractarian leader, as regards his inmost thoughts, than I could ever have expected men so different and so widely severed in their origin and their walk in life to come.

What was certainly common to the dearest objects of Newman and Tennyson is-that while they both believed that faith is deeper than doubt, they both endeavoured to confront doubt with the