it is; but since it tells of loss passing into love, since it describes death entering into life, it is sure to live, and would do so even if its work had been less excellent. Of course I do not mean that inartistic work, if its motive be a victorious one, will live. I write of artists and their work, not of those who are not artists. The poetic work of those that are not artists, of whatever temper it be, is bound to perish.

But In Memoriam is a work of art, done by a man whose natural gift had been polished by study, and carefully trained by steady practice till it rejoiced in its own power. Its subject impassioned its writer, and the subject was simple, close to the heart of man. As the poem moved on, the subject expanded, and the sorrow spoken of passed from the particular into the universal. The victory over the evil of sorrow made a similar passage. The poet's personal conquest of pain became the universal conquest of the human race. This expansion of the subject ennobled the poem, and the triumphant close secured and established its nobility. It will last when all its detractors and their criticisms are together dust.

It was published in 1850. The collected poems were published in 1842, The Princess in 1847; but the subject of In Memoriam and the writing of the poem had been kept in Tennyson's mind for seventeen years, from 1833 to 1849, ripening season by season into the full and perfect fruit. This is the way in which Tennyson wrought at his natural gift, and I repeat that it was partly owing to this steady slowness of his that his poetic genius retained to so great an age its clearness, its power, and its fire.

It was owing to this also that his gift gained and retained that capacity for beautiful and careful finish which, when the ardour of youth has departed from an artist, is the excellence which makes the work of his maturity delightful. This was in his character. There was that in him from his very birth which made him love to grow and work as slowly as an oak lays fibre to fibre; as firmly, as steadily, and with as enduring a vitality. His patient work on In Memoriam was of the very essence of the

man.

And now, how did In Memoriam arise into its form?

When a poet first begins to write, he writes of the motives which have excited his youth, and those motives are born out of his own life, rather than out of the life of the world without him. They are individual, not universal. His boyhood, his youth, his early loves, his pleasures at the university, his classic studies, the charm of the Greek stories; his first delight in the romantic tale such as that of Arthur, his vacation rambles and the discussions which made them vivid; the light fancies of youth, the happy pity of sad stories; the loveliness of Nature round his home, and in the wilder places of the mountain and the glen; the daily life of country folk, seen through the emotions of youthful love; and now and then such philosophy of life as belongs to the young man who argues round rather than pierces into the great problems, because they have not as yet smitten him to the heart-these are the motives of a poet's youth. Out of this experience or rather this want of experience, this personal play of only personal

emotion over circumstance and over the working of his own soul, the first poems of the artist are born, and they fill his heart to the exclusion of those greater subjects which concern the whole of humanity.

The weight and trouble of the world of men, the cry of the questioning soul of humanity, the massive problems of the whole race, have not yet sent their waves of emotion on him with sufficient force to put his individuality into the second place. There is no room for these outward and worldwide emotions until the personal emotions of youth are expressed and exhausted by expression. But when these have been expressed (as in the volumes of 1830 and 1833), then the soul is, as it were, empty. And on this void soul, waiting for new thoughts and their emotions, the great trouble of mankind flows in with a full tide, and brings with it universal tidings, deeper passions, greater ranges of thought than the poet has known as yet. It does more; it has a distinct action on the soul itself. It not only brings new things from without, but it also awakens within the poet powers of his own as yet unknown by him, as yet asleep. They are the powers by which the poet is fitted to deal with the great and universal questions, to answer which constitutes the struggle of mankind. Now and then they lift their head, and appear in the verse, but their time is not yet, and they let fall their head again in slumber. But now, at the inward rush of the vast trouble of the world of man, they spring into full life, and dwell in the place that personal feeling once occupied alone. The universal has come,

and though the particular is not destroyed, it is absorbed.

Into what shape it will first turn itself whether it will gather its questions and feelings round religion, or social movements, or war, or womanhood, or liberty, or the existence of evil, or the future advent of goodwill depend on circumstance. The circumstance which settled the first direction of Tennyson towards the universal, which brought the world-question into its special shape for him, was the death of his dearest friend. And the death was so tragic, and the circumstances so special, that it was impossible that the questions roused by it should be only personal. Arthur Hallam was as young as Tennyson; his powers seemed so exceptional that his father, who was of all literary men the most sober and balanced in his judgments, imagined him capable of the greatest things. was thought that a splendid future was before him, and his loss seemed to his friends to be a loss to all mankind. The grief of family, of all who loved him, came, in this fashion, to be representative of the sorrow of the whole world. This touched Tennyson home, and depth and poignancy were given to it because his friend was not only a friend, but a brother artist. Both were poets, both worked together at poetry, both looked forward to a long life of art together. I do not remember anything like it since the death of Girtin and the silent sorrow of Turner; but the parallel is a worthy one, it fits at almost every point.

It

Thus the outward impulse came on Tennyson's soul, now discharged of all the gathered subjects of youth, relieved of the merely individual.

The

vast question of human sorrow for the loss of those who are loved, sorrow as infinite and as varied as love, belonging to all the lovers and friends of the whole world, going back with unremitting force through the whole of time, felt as keenly by those who chipped out the flake of flint as by Tennyson himself-this, in all its universal humanity, was borne in upon him now, and filled his soul. He felt the loss of his friend; he felt the loss of all the friends of the whole world. This was Tennyson's step into manhood as a poet: and the slow, sustained and yet impassioned march by which his character forced him to advance, made it but natural for him to take seventeen years to realise and embody his progress in a work which is worthy of the time given to it, and which remains the weightiest in thought, the best in form, the most varied in feeling, and the most finished of all his longer poems.

Such is the psychical history of this poern, as I conceive it, and I think the poem bears out the analysis, even in its arrangement. Before, however, I speak of that arrangement, I wish to dwell on some characteristics of the poem and on some accusations made against it. First, it was begun immediately after the youthful poems, and youth lingers in it in lovely ways. When young Imagination rushes forward in it, he does not appear in his gaiety, in his youthful dress. He is solemnised somewhat by the subject, and wears the noble mask of tragedy. The rush is there, but its swiftness is stately. Moreover, it is quite natural that these passages of youthful fire and glow do not occur in the first part where the personal grief is