with rapid and clear pencil the great wars till the day

of Waterloo.

beginning

I wish the division of the poem (vii.)

A people's voice! we are a people yet—

were excluded from the poem. But that would be to wish away one of Tennyson's most characteristic utterances as a patriot. Nevertheless, it is too exclusively English, too controversial, too much an attack on France, too contemptuous of the people whom he sees only as the mob; too fond of the force of great men to the exclusion of the force of the collective movements of the nation. A great artist should not overstep so much the limits of temperance; or, to put this otherwise, he should not lose his sympathy with the whole of humanity in his sympathy with his own country.

The metrical

it ought to rush, delays Were the poem set by

This is, however, as great a poem as the character was which it celebrated. movement rushes on where where it ought to delay. Handel, its rhythmical movements could scarcely be more fit from point to point to the things spoken off, more full of stately, happy changes. Moreover, the conduct of the piece is excellent. It swells upwards in fuller harmony and growing thought till it reaches its climax in the division (vi.) about Nelson and Wellington. Then it slowly passes downwards in solemn strains like a storm dying in the sky, and at the end closes in soft spiritual passages of ethereal sound, like the lovely clouds about the setting sun when the peace of evening has fallen on a tempestuous day. Its conduct is then the conduct of one form of the true

lyric, that whose climax is in the midst, and not at the close.

During the years which followed this poem Tennyson's mind was kept close to the subject of war, though his dislike to France had to be placed in abeyance, for these were the years of the Crimean war. In 1854 the news of the splendid and foolish charge of the Light Brigade reached the country, and set it all on fire. When it was made, and a petulant mistake had all but annihilated the Brigade, we forgot the folly in the glory of those who rode so steadily to all but certain death. Steady obedience, cool self-sacrifice, disbelief in the impossible, courage which rises higher the nearer death is at hand, are some of the things which have made England. They made her glory in this deed of war. It was more the glory of

the troopers than of the leader, and Tennyson has felt that throughout his song. And since he felt it, I wish that he had celebrated Inkerman rather than this isolated and splendid blunder. Nevertheless, it was a fine thing done in the face of the whole world, and it has handed down so great a tradition of mortal courage and magnificence that it was well worthy of song, and Tennyson could hardly help taking it as a poetic theme. He did it well; but the weakness inherent in the subject ("some one had blundered ") prevented him from doing it very well.

In after years he took another subject of the same kind, and out of the same battle-The Charge of the Heavy Brigade at Balaclava. The poem has its own force, but it is too like its predecessor. It first appeared in 1882, and was published with

a prologue and epilogue in 1885. The prologue is addressed to General Hamley, and contains a charming description of the view from his Sussex home, and an allusion to the glory of the war in Egypt against Arabi. But it is the epilogue which it is right to notice in this place, for it contains his defence of his war-poems against Irene, who stands, I suppose, for Peace, but who is with all a poet's love of the personal, made into a delightful girl.

You wrong me, passionate little friend.

I would that wars should cease,

I would the globe from end to end

Might sow and reap in peace.

Yes, Tennyson loved peace, and has sung of it with grace and loveliness; but the objection men have taken to the praise of war in Maud is none the less. War is held in Maud to be the proper cure for the evils of peace, and it is not a cure, but an additional disease. In this defence also, he still clings to the notion that Trade, "with kindly links of gold," may refrain the Powers from war, when Trade, as at present conducted, is the most fruitful cause of war. Moreover, he sees, in this defence, no way of making true peace but fighting, meeting force by force. A poet might have thought of other ways; yet it was scarcely possible that Tennyson, with his character, should have seen those other ways. We must not expect from a man that which is beyond his nature; and therefore we accept with gratitude his declaration in this epilogue

And who loves War for War's own sake
Is fool, or crazed, or worse.

There is no one also who will not agree with the view expressed at the end of the epilogue—that it is right, even though the realm be in the wrong in the war, "to crown with song the warrior's noble deed."

And here the Singer for his Art

Not all in vain may plead

"The song that nerves a nation's heart,
Is in itself a deed."

This is truth he sings, and it makes us wish that he had written more war-lyrics on the noble gests of Englishmen. He did write two extraordinarily fine things-The Fight of the Revenge and The Defence of Lucknow, but the latter is a little too detailed, a little too historical.

The Charge of the Light Brigade was written in 1854. In the year following, Maud appeared. /The war element continues to live in this poem, and its presence does not improve, but injures it. War presides at its conception, is inwoven with it, and directs its end. The beginning of the poem, which attacks, in the mouth of a nervous, slothful man, the evils of a world whose only god is commerce and whose goddess is competition, is written with apparently the direct purpose of holding up, at the close, war as the remedy for those evils.

For I trust if an enemy's fleet came yonder round by the hill,

And the rushing battle-bolt sang from the three-decker out of the foam,

That the smooth-faced, snub-nosed rogue would leap from his counter and till,

And strike, if he could, were it but with his cheating yardwand, home.

This is said in the character of the spleenful hero, but yet the verse is Tennyson's own. The war waged then would be in defence of hearth and home-a just war. But the Crimean war was not in that category. And the poem ends with that war as the cure for the evils of peace. There is too little distinction made between war and war.

Further on, the death of Maud's brother in a duel at the hand of Maud's lover, which dissolves the love story in catastrophe, contrasts the sin of private war with the nobility of public war for a worthy cause. The madness caused by this private revenge is healed by the lover joining in the national effort to right a wrong, The social war of competition is to be also healed by the spirit of sacrifice in the nation which is aroused by a public war. The whole of this, as I have said before, is a great pity. Moreover, this part of the subject is artistically unfortunate, for the Crimean war was the most foolish, the most uncalled for, and the least deliberate of all our wars. It mixed us up with the Emperor of the French, a miserable companionship for a country which desired honour and freedom. Its management at first was a disgrace to the War Office of England. The subject, then, of the poem was radically bad so far as the war-element in it was concerned, and this acted not only on those parts of the poem which belonged to the war, but also, even without the artist's consciousness of it, disturbed the beauty of the whole, and weakened the emotional impression he desired his work to make. An element, troubling to art, underlies the handling and the conduct of the poem.