the evils which have been, and will yet be, caused to England by the Union. We have never received one particle of advantage from our association with Ireland. . . . Mr. Pitt has received great credit for effecting the Union; but I believe it will sooner or later be discovered that the manner in which, and the terms upon which, he effected it made it the most fatal blow that ever was levelled against the peace and prosperity of England. From it came the Catholic Bill. the Catholic Bill has come this Reform Bill! And what next?

From

When one thinks of the injury that the subjection of Ireland has done the English name in America, in Russia, in Australia, and elsewhere in quite recent times, one can hardly deny that Coleridge was a sound prophet, though for other reasons than he thought.

It is the literary rather than the political opinions, however, that will bring every generation of readers afresh to Coleridge's Table Talk. No man ever talked better in a few sentences on Shakespeare, Sterne, and the tribe of authors. One may not agree with Coleridge in regarding Jeremy Taylor as one of the four chief glories of English literature, or in thinking Southey's style "next door to faultless." But one listens to his obiter dicta eagerly as the sayings of one of the greatest minds that have interested themselves in the criticism of literature. There are tedious pages in Table Talk, but these are, for the most part, concerned with theology. On the whole, the speech of Coleridge was golden. Even the leaden parts are interesting because they are Coleridge's lead. One wishes the theology was balanced, however, by a few more glimpses of his lighter interests, such as we find in the passage: "Never take an iambus for a Christian name. A trochee, or tribrach, will do very well. Edith and Rotha are my favourite names for women." What we want most of all in table talk is to get an author into the confession album. Coleridge's Table Talk would have stood a worse chance of immortality were it not for the fact that he occasionally came down out of the pulpit and babbled.

XIII. TENNYSON: A TEMPORARY CRITICISM

IF Tennyson's reputation has diminished, it is not that it has fallen before hostile criticism: it has merely faded through time. Perhaps there was never an English poet who loomed so large to his own age as Tennyson—who represented his contemporaries with the same passion and power. Pope was sufficiently representative of his age, but his age meant, by comparison, a limited and aristocratic circle. Byron represented and shocked his age by turns. Tennyson, on the other hand, was as close to the educated middle-class men and women of his time as the family clergyman. That is why, inevitably, he means less to us than he did to them. That he was ahead of his age on many points on which this could not be said of the family clergyman one need not dispute. He was a kind of “new theologian." He stood, like Dean Farrar, for the larger hope and various other heresies. Every representative man is ahead of his age-a little, but not enough to be beyond the reach of the sympathies of ordinary people. It may be objected that Tennyson is primarily an artist, not a thinker, and that he should be judged not by his message but by his song. But his message and his song sprang from the same vision-a vision of the world seen, not sub specie æternitatis, but sub specie the reign of Queen Victoria. Before we appreciate Tennyson's real place in literature, we must frankly recognize the fact that his muse wore a crinoline. The great mass of his work bears its date stamped upon it as obviously almost as a copy of The Times. How topical, both in mood and phrasing, are such lines as those in Locksley Hall:

Then her cheek was pale, and thinner than should be for one so young,

And her eyes on all my motions with a mute observance hung. And I said "My cousin Amy, speak, and speak the truth to me, "Trust me, cousin, all the current of my being sets to thee."

One would not, of course, quote these lines as typical of Tennyson's genius. I think, however, they may be fairly quoted as lines suggesting the mid-Victorian atmosphere that clings round all but his greatest work. They bring before our minds the genteel magazine illustrations of other days. They conjure up a world of charming, vapid faces, where there is little life apart from sentiment and rhetoric. Contrast such a poem as Locksley Hall with The Flight of the Duchess. Each contains at once a dramatization of human relations, and the statement of a creed. The human beings in Browning's poem, however, are not mere shadows out of old magazines; they are as real as the men and women in the portraits of the masters, as real as ourselves. Similarly, in expressing his thought, Browning gives it imaginative dignity as philosophy, while Tennyson writes what is after all merely an exalted leading article. Tennyson is more representative of the age of Lytton than is generally realized. Both were fond of windy words. They were slaves of language to almost as great an extent as Swinburne. One feels that too often phrases like "moor and fell" and "bower and hall" were mere sounding substitutes for a creative imagination. I have heard it argued that the lines in Maud:

All night have the roses heard
The flute, violin, bassoon

introduce a curiously inappropriate instrument into a ballroom orchestra merely for the sake of euphony. The mistake about the bassoon is a small one, and is, I suppose, borrowed from Coleridge, but it is characteristic.

Tennyson was by no means the complete artist that for years he was generally accepted as being. He was an artist of lines rather than of poems. He seldom wrote a poem which seemed to spring full-armed from the imagination as the great poems of the world do. He built them up haphazard, as Thackeray wrote his novels. They are full of sententious padding and prettiness, and the wordiness is not merely a philosopher's vacuous babbling in his sleep,

as so much of Wordsworth's is; it is the word-spinning of a man who loves words more than people, or philosophy, or things. At the same time, when Tennyson is word perfect he takes his place beyond dispute among the immortals. One may be convinced that the bulk of his work is already as dead as the bulk of Longfellow's. But in his great poems he awoke to the vision of romance in its perfect form, and expressed it perfectly. He did this in Ulysses, which comes nearer a noble perfection, perhaps, than anything else he ever wrote. One can imagine the enthusiasm of some literary discoverer many centuries hence, when Tennyson is as little known as Donne was fifty years ago, coming upon lines hackneyed for us by much quotation :

The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:

The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down;
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

There, even if you have not the stalwart imagination which makes Browning's people alive, you have a most beautiful fancy illustrating an old story. One of the most beautiful

lines Tennyson ever wrote:

The horns of Elfland faintly blowing,

has the same suggestion of having been forged from the gold of the world's romance.

Tennyson's art at its best, however, as in these two instances, is art founded upon art, not art founded upon. life. We used to be asked to admire the vivid observation shown in such lines as:

More black than ashbuds in the front of March;

and it is undoubtedly interesting to learn that Tennyson had a quick eye for the facts of nature. But such lines,

however accurate, do not make a man a poet. It is in his fine ornamental moods that Tennyson means most to our imaginations nowadays-in the moods of such lines as:

Now droops the milk-white peacock like a ghost.

The truth is, Tennyson, with all his rhetoric and with all his prosaic Victorian opinions, was an æsthete in the immortal part of him no less than were Rossetti and Swinburne. He seemed immense to his contemporaries, because he put their doubts and fears into music, and was master of the fervid rhetoric of the new gospel of Imperialism. They did not realize that great poetry cannot be founded on a basis of perishable doubts and perishable gospels. It was enough for them to feel that In Memoriam gave them soothing anchorage and shelter from the destructive hurricanes of science. It was enough for them to thrill to the public-speech poetry of Of old sat Freedom on the Heights, the patriotic triumph of The Relief of Lucknow, the glorious contempt for foreigners exhibited in his reference to "the red fool-fury of the Seine." Is it any wonder that during a great part of his life Tennyson was widely regarded as not only a poet, but a teacher and a statesman? His sneering caricature of Bright as the "broad-brimmed hawker of holy things" should have made it clear that in politics he was but a party man, and that his political intelligence was commonplace.

He was too deficient in the highest kind of imagination and intellect to achieve the greatest things. He seldom or never stood aloof from his own time, as Wordsworth did through his philosophic imagination, as Keats did through his æsthetic imagination, as Browning did through his dramatic imagination. He wore a poetical cloak, and avoided the vulgar crowd physically; he had none of Browning's taste for tea-parties. But Browning had not the tea-party imagination; Tennyson, in a great degree, had. He preached excellent virtues to his time; but they were respectable rather than spiritual virtues. Thus, The Idylls of the King have become to us mere ancient fashion