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tried, unhappily as I think, to get this view into poetry.

Through the whole of Tennyson's poetry about the problem of man's progress, this view of his does damage to the poetry; lowers the note of beauty, of aspiration, of fire, of passion; and lessens the use of his poetry to the cause of freedom. If the poet take the unpoetic side of any question, he gives no help to mankind, so far as the question concerns mankind. The same things said in prose are very good sense, and in harmony with their vehicle. But, said in poetry, they sound wrong; they seem unnatural; and they harm the cause they intend to support. It had been far more right and natural, had Tennyson taken up the other side—a side just as necessary, even more necessary, for the advance of human freedom than the side of cautious and lawful development of liberty-the side of the rushers, of the enthusiastic seekers, of the wild warriors, of the sacrificers whom the world calls insane, of the indignant men whose speech and action Tennyson thought were "the blind hysterics of the Celt." That way poetry lies: and that way lies the permanent influence of a poet on humanity, so far as this question is concerned.

This unfortunate position-not in itself, for I have maintained it as quite a true position for one-half of the army of freedom to support, but unfortunate for a poet-threw his poetry on matters related to the full and free development of mankind out of gear. He sometimes got curiously in the wrong, as on the subject of war. He became unpoetically hopeless with regard to the future, wavering to

and fro without any fixed or luminous faith in progress; having a distant and half laissez-faire sympathy with the sorrows of the people, and seeing and this is the strangest of all-a remedy for their sorrows in the greater growth of commerce as it exists at present, and in the further development of practical science hand in hand with commerce, When we read these things in poetry we 66 say: Why, this is wondrous

strange!"

When he does express indignation for the miseries of the poor and against the cause of them—the unbridled competition of commerce he puts that indignation into the mouth of the half-hysterical and morbid lover of Maud, or into the mouth of the lover in Locksley Hall, when he has grown old. Moreover, he does not speak from himself, but in the voice of the characters he draws, men wanting in "self-reverence, self-knowledge, selfcontrol." A false light is thus thrown on the sorrows of the poor It is as if half of them existed only in the morbid fancies of men. At least, there is no vital sympathy expressed for them and, indeed, Tennyson lived apart from this suffering world and knew nothing about it. He vaguely sees that ruthless competition is at the bottom of these evils, but he looks for the extension of that system of commerce which is based on and makes competition as one of the main elements in the fully developed happiness of mankind. He vaguely sees that mechanical science has been made the slave of competition, and has increased, through this unhappy union, the troubles at the bottom of society, but he looks for the fuller development of

the present system by science as one of the means of redeeming these evils. He sees plainly that the world is wrong, but he seems to think that it is to be cured by the slow and steady improvement of the present social and commercial system, tempered, when it gets too bad, by wars. He sees, or Maud's leads to organised

lover sees, that this system selfishness; that men become, under it, materialised; that the higher qualities of the heart and soul are crushed by it-and this is the subject of the beginning of Maud, and of a few other poems. What is his remedy? Not the abandonment of the system, not a crusade against the causes of these evils, not even any legislative attempt to lessen them, but a war, in which "commerce should not be all in all, and noble thought · be freer under the sun," in which men should “feel with their native land, and be one with their kind,” in which the desire of self-sacrifice should again awake in the country. Of all means of cure suggested for the evils of competition, war is the most foolish, and it doubles the misfortunes of the poor, Those who are sacrificed the most in battle, and tortured to death by thousands, and who get none of the personal glory, are the poor. The taxes are doubled, and the doubling falls heaviest on the poor. The competition and the cheating of those capitalists who happen to desire to increase their store at any cost are increased in war-time. The selfish are made more selfish; the troubles of the poor workmen are trebled; the army suffers and starves, and dies of cold and misery--as we found out, only too well, in the Crimean War. A costly medicine it

was!

This is not the way to remedy the ills of the people, nor is it the best way to develop selfsacrifice, noble thought, civic honour or justice in a people. There is another way in which the call for civic self-sacrifice enters into the daily and hourly life of every citizen; but that way, which forms now the basis of all action and prophecy towards a nobler society, did not enter into the poetry of Tennyson at all, and its absence left him no expedient for curing a selfish society but the clumsy expedient of war.

I make no complaint against Tennyson for all this. I only state the case. If he was of this temper, it was because it was mainly the temper of the time in which he grew to his maturity, the thirty years from his first volume to the end of the sixties. He represented the political and social opinions of that time very fairly, but not as a poet who had much prophetic fire and pity in him would be expected to write. Nor did he make any impetuous casts into the future when he wrote of these things, save once in Locksley Hall. In these matters he was not before his age, nor when the age changed did he change with it. He remained for another thirty years in precisely the same position, while the world changed round him. His poetry on other matters continued to exalt and console the world, to illuminate it with beauty and grace and tender thought. He has been a blessing to us all in a thousand ways in these last thirty years. But on the matters which

I treat of here, he was either silent or in opposition to the ideas of a higher liberty. Collectivism, for example, which began to grow up about 1866

(which, while it was in opposition to the individualism which so rapidly developed after 1832, yet holds in it a much greater opportunity for complete individuality than we have even conceived as yet) does not seem to have even dawned on the mind of Tennyson. He is behind the whole of this movement-the master movement of our time. In matters then of this kind he is not the poet of the people. He is our poet in the things which he treated poetically; and in those which have to do with Nature and God and the sweet, honest and tender life of men and women, he will remain our poet as long as the language lasts, but in these social matters not. One only subject of this kind he treated well and as a poet, and that was the question of woman and her relation to modern life; a question which was started by Shelley, and which occupied a great place in poetry after 1832. As far as he saw into that matter, he saw it with freedom and clearness and love, and The Princess is a real contribution to that subject. But that stands alone In all other matters belonging to the progress of society, he does not belong to the last thirty years, to our time, our hopes, or our faith; nor does he think and feel in them as a poet.

Look, in conclusion, at the faith he had concerning the future of mankind, at the hopes he entertained for it. Was he swept away, as the poets are, into high prediction? Did he realise by faith that a better time might be near at hand? No, embayed in these conservative doctrines, unable to loosen himself from their ice, he had enough of the logic of a poet to see that, supposing they

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