into one another, and they can all be expressed in terms of one another.

To define, then, what beauty is in itself is beyond our power, but we can approach a definition of it by marking out clearly its results on us. What is always true of beauty is this, that, wherever it appears, it awakens love of it which has no return on self, but which bears us out of ourselves; it stirs either joy or reverence in the heart without bringing with it any self-admiration or vanity; and it kindles the desire of reproducing it, not that we may exult in our own skill in forming it, but that our reproduction of it may awaken emotions in others similar to those which the original sight of beauty stirred in our own heartthat is, it more or less forces the seer of it into creation. This creation, this representation of the beautiful, is art; and the most skilful representation of the ugly that is, of anything which awakens either repulsion, or base pleasure, or horror which does not set free and purify the soul, or scorn instead of reverence, or which does not kindle in us the desire of reproduction of it that we may stir in others similar emotions to our own-is not art at all. It is clever imitation, it is skill, it is artifice, it is not art. It is characteristic of an age which is writhing under the frivolous despotism of positive science that the accurate and skilful representation of things and facts which are not beautiful is called art; and it belongs to all persons who care for the growth of humanity, not to denounce this error, for denunciation is barren of results, but to live and labour for the opposite truth. Far more rests on that effort than men imagine. A

pursued and fulfilled in the cottage as in the palace. The Laureate Odes are more lessons to royal folk than celebrations of them.

He was, then, faithful to loveliness. It is not too much to say that he saw all the universe of man and Nature and of God in their relation to ineffable beauty, and that the getting of this pervading essence out of all things, the shaping of it, and the crying of "Look there; love and worship, rejoice and reverence," was the one supreme thing in his art for which he cared. This may be said of all true poets, and it is here said of him.

It

is the mightiest debt we owe to the faithful artists, and we feel it all the more deeply at a time when art yields more than is seemly to the temptations of the world.

But the power of seeing beauty, and the love of beauty, are not all that makes the great artist. He must also have the power of shaping the beauty which he sees, and in a way peculiarly his own. There must be in the work the personal touch, the individual surprise, the unique way, the unimitated shaping which provokes imitation. We ought to feel in every artist's work the immediate pressure of an original, personal creator, who has his own. special manner with things and words. This is one of the main tests of genius. Of every great poet it is true, and it is plainly true of Tennyson. Every line is alive with his own distinction.>

On his natural gift of creating, and on his careful training of it, I need not dwell, nor yet on his practice and love of the skilfulnesses of his art, of the careful study of words and their powers in verse, of his mingled strength and daintiness and

weakness, of all that belongs to Form. These things and their like in him have been for years the food of critics. No one disputes that he touched excellence in them, or that he had the power of creation. But I maintain that all his technique was not for its own sake, but was first urged by his love of beauty. It was necessary, for the sake of his faithfulness to her, that the shape he gave to what he loved should be as perfect, as strong, as gracious, and as full of delightful surprises as he could make it; and not one of our poets has striven with a more unfailing intensity to do this honour to all the beauty he saw in Nature and in man; as eager in this at eighty as at thirty years. It is a great lesson to all artists; it is a lesson to us all.

Power, then, to see beauty, power to shape it, these were his How far he saw it, with what degrees of excellence he shaped it, how great an' artist he was-is not now the question. The question is, Did he always see it with love and joy; did he always shape it with faithfulness? And I answer that his fidelity to beauty, whenever he saw it, was unbroken.

II

The next subject I treat of in this Introduction is Tennyson's relation to Christianity.

When Tennyson passed from school to the university, religious life in England had very much decayed. The spirit which animated Wesley, and which had fallen like the prophet's mantle on the earlier Evangelicals, had now become cold. English

religion, in and out of the Church, was like the valley Ezekiel described, full of bones, and the bones were dry. And in the midst of the valley one figure, now old, who had seen the fire of religious sacrifice rise high to God in the past, who had welcomed its descent and directed it into new channels but who had outlived his enthusiasms, went to and fro, chilled at heart, and wailing for what had been. It was the soul of Coleridge, and if the voice of the Spirit asked him: "Son of Man, can these bones live?" he answered, but not in hope, "O Lord God, Thou knowest." He died before he saw the resurrection which Tennyson saw, the blowing of the wind of God, and the bones coming together, and the slain breathed upon, so that they lived and stood upon their feet, an exceeding great army. Nevertheless, the old prophet did his work, and his power moved in the two men, though in a very different fashion, who, in the same years which saw a political and poetic resurrection, awakened into a new spring, with all the promise of summer, the religious life of England. The true beginning of Tennyson's as of Browning's poetical life was coincident with the birth of the movements afterwards called the High Church and the Broad Church movements, and with the birth of a new political and social era.

Never alone

Come the immortals.

This religious awakening was felt and seized by two distinct types of character, or of human tendency, and crystallised by two representative men, by J. H. Newman and Frederick Maurice;

and it is curious for those who care for analogies to the evolution of species to trace how the one was the child of the University of Oxford and the other of the University of Cambridge. The main difference which lay between their method of presenting the faith was a time-difference, if I may be allowed to invent that term. In the matter of religion the past was the foremost thing to Newman, to Maurice the present. Newman looked back to the past (the nearer to the Apostles the nearer to truth) for the highest point to which religious life, but not doctrine, had attained, and his immense reverence for the past became part of the mind of Tennyson. But it was balanced in Tennyson by even a greater reverence for the present as containing in it an immediate inspiration and revelation from God. This foundation for poetic thought and emotion was given to him by the religious work of Maurice. The deepest thought in the mind of Maurice was that God was moving in the present as fully as He had moved in the past; and the incessant representation of this, in every form of it, was his great contribution to Theology. Of course, others before him had said similar things, but he said this in a new way, and under new conditions. Maurice could not, however, quite escape from the web of the past, and his struggle to combine the past and the present entangled him, entangled his mind, and entangled his followers. When he clung, as he did, to the ancient intellectual formulas as laid down in the Creeds and Services of the Church, and tried to weave them into harmony with his main faith, he damaged