almost any other man recorded in our literature, indeed in any literature." It is rather irritating to find some neuropathic critics of our decadence asserting that Keats's really magical gift for poetic form-a gift that reminds us of that of Sappho or Theocritus-was enough to constitute him a poet of the first rank. Keats will always be to us a great "Perhaps"-one who might have been one knows not what-si qua fata aspera rumpat. Yet, whatever the wonderful promise of the hapless youth, neither his range of vision, nor his force, nor his intellect were such as to place him in the foremost rank. The large achievement, the serious thought, and the inexhaustible fancy of Tennyson are of an altogether different order and appeal to a far maturer mind.

We more easily compare Tennyson with Wordsworth. Both had very long life, wholly and solely devoted to the poetic art; they were essentially poets of Nature; both given to meditation, moral and religious musing rather than to action; both have exercised a permanent influence over the poetic ideal of their age. Wordsworth carried his love of solitary musing and of rustic simplicity to a point where they often degenerated into tiresome reiteration and even laughable banality; whilst Tennyson's unerring taste kept him free from such vexatious commonplace. The most ardent Wordsworthians agree to leave out of account no small part of Wordsworth's immense product; whilst no loyal Tennysonian would imitate their example. Though Tennyson published much which is not equal to his best, he never wearies us with truly unreadable prosing as does Wordsworth. Yet Wordsworth's best is of an order quite as high as is Tennyson's best. To say the truth, I turn more often to the Excursion than to In Memoriam; and there are sonnets, odes, and lyrics of

Wordsworth which I would not sacrifice even to save the Idylls, Maud, and lyrics of Tennyson's early and best

manner.

Neither Coleridge, nor Scott, nor Burns, nor Campbell, nor Landor belong to the first rank as poets, however ardent be our delight in their special triumphs. The Ancient Mariner, Christabel, and a few lyrics and hymns are a joy forever; but the sum of Coleridge's muse is neither full enough nor powerful enough to place him beside Byron, Shelley, or Tennyson. Burns is so exclusively national, and Scott is so entirely the romancist, that we do not count either as in the foremost roll of English poetry, with all the exquisite ring of their lovely songs and ballads. And Campbell, Landor, and some others who have left us memorable things have not given us enough in measure and in power to place them amongst the greatest names of the nineteenth century.

The twentieth century will adjudge this rank to' Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth, and Keats, and beyond question Tennyson will be held to be their peer. Their peer, I say, not their superior; or if superior to any one of the four, to Keats, on the ground that his work is fragmentary and immature. But I cannot believe that any other poet of the second half of the century will permanently be placed beside the great men of the first half. Our beloved Robert Browning belongs in a sense to the first as well as to the second half of the nineteenth century; and, though he touches at times on Byron's and on Shelley's themes, he must be counted rather of the later Victorian world. By the "later Victorian world" I mean that of subtle, psychologic, analytic conception, of elaborately minted phrase, and daring metrical experiments.

Browning had rare genius, a keen and broad view of life, masculine phil

osophy, creative power; and in these gifts he was more akin to Byron than was Tennyson. We need not deny the contention of ardent Browningites that his mental force was both deeper and more robust than that of Tennyson. But a poet needs not only mental force but unique form, melody, grace, the inevitable and unforgettable word which gives wings to his thought. Browning has given us now and then a ballad and a lyric of glorious music, apparently to show us that he could write musical verse when he deigned to humor us. But a great poet does not bury profound ideas in cryptograms that we have to unravel as if they were puzzle-locks, nor does he twist and torture the King's English into queer vocables that raise a smile. We have just lost two men of genius, both of whom were typical examples of the later Victorian world-though in quite opposite veins. Meredith was

a brilliant novelist rather than a poet; and all he had to say in poetryand he had the poetic soul-would have been more truly said in prose. Nature had denied him an ear for music in verse to which he seems insensible, just as Beethoven's deafness never permitted him to hear his own magnificent symphonies. For all its subtlety and originality, Meredith's verse is unreadable by reason of its intolerable cacophony. I doubt if he ever wrote a piece which would have satisfied Tennyson's infallible sense of harmonious rhythm.

Swinburne, on the other hand, with a marvellous gift of harmonious rhythm, seemed to regard this quality as the be-all and end-all of poetry. For my part, I cannot feel that he ever added much after he first burst upon the world with the splendid promise of his Atalanta in 1865, though for more than forty years he continued to The Nineteenth Century and After.

publish poems. His marvellous metrical agility, the melodious piping in honied words "long-drawn-out," the apparently inexhaustible fountain of harmonies at his command, all this for a time is fascinating. But erelong the flow of mellifluous epithets and of haunting rhymes begins to pall on us The verse lives in a tarantula of alliteration, assonance, consonance, and artful concatenation of sounds. It is very beautiful; but at last it becomes monotonous, cloying, a mannerism. And what does it all come to in the end? What is there to think out? What does it mean? For what is all this passion? And why do these interminable sonatas never end-or why, indeed, should they end? Only in the decadence of a silver age could Swinburne be placed in a rank with Tennyson.

If neither Browning nor Swinburne will hereafter take rank with Tennyson, surely no others of his contemporaries or successors will do so. Let us have done with cliques, and schools, and fads! For my part I honor and enjoy them all in turn; but I will not let my honor or my delight blind me to defects in those I love; nor will a balanced judgment suffer me to exalt a favorite for some conspicuous charm. Shakespeare and Milton stand apart in a world of their own, without rival or peer-hors concours-for they are the poets not of English literature but of all literature. Chaucer and Spenser

are more honored than read; the men of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are more read than honored. And we now feel sure that Tennyson will hold an honored place with the great names of the nineteenth century-not above them, hardly below them, but finally enrolled in their glorious company.

Frederic Harrison.

Life, on the whole, is governed by certain great commonplaces which at our peril we forget. In previous articles I have drawn attention to the fact, constantly disregarded by men who write "Progress" on their banners, that our civilization comes from the South, and that the adventurous Northern races found in Greeks and Romans the masters by whom they were educated. Athens will ever be the school of philosophy and science; Rome has never ceased to be the representative of law. But religion, however closely in touch with Plato by its theology, or with Justinian by its canons of discipline, is, and must remain, Hebrew till the world's end. "The Hebrew," says De Quincey, "by introducing himself to the secret places of the human heart, and sitting there as incubator over the awful germs of the spiritualities that connect man with unseen worlds, has perpetuated himself as a power in the human system; he is coenduring with man's race, and careless of all revolutions in literature or in the composition of society." And St. Paul -the reconciler of East and West"Israelites, to whom pertaineth the adoption, and the glory, and the covenants, and the giving of the Law, and the service of God, and the promises; whose are the Fathers, and of whom, as concerning the flesh, Christ came." Whether we like it or no, therefore, we speak and think about religion in an Oriental language, not akin to the Teuton, most foreign in structure and movement to Latin, the antithesis of Greek by its essential form. It is curious to reflect that, whereas the Jew became our teacher and thereby planted his very idioms in the heart of Europe, there had been a day when

1 "Works," vol. x, 250, "On Language.". * Romans, ix, 4, 5.

2

his cousin, the Phoenician, might have got the start of him. What would have happened after the defeat of Cannæ if Hannibal had marched on Rome? Livy tells the tale of his refusing to follow fortune, and how Maherbal exclaimed in despair, "Vincere scis, Hannibal; victoria uti nescis." That day's delay, concludes the historian, was looked upon as the salvation of the city and the empire.3 Hannibal, whose name is pure Hebrew, signifying "God be gracious," lost his opportunity; and the Phoenician dialect, which might have grown into an imperial language, spoken from Sicily to the Shetlands, dwindled away, leaving an inscription here and there, with some eighteen corrupt lines as its epitaph in the Pœnulus of Plautus.*

Undoubtedly, between the sons of Tyre and those who went out to subdue the world from the mountain fastness of Salem there was a difference as of life and death. The Carthaginian was a trader and nothing more. His "factories" were places of exchange on the coast; the only shadow of a real dominion which he established lay across the Pillars of Hercules; neither religion nor civilization owed an idea to the middleman of classic antiquity. Suppose Hannibal had triumphed in Rome; it is hard to imagine that his people would have welcomed or spread the Hebrew revelation, in which their man-devouring god Baal is termed their shame and an unclean idol. Rome put down Carthage; and, in the three centuries following, Israel was given time to develop from the prophetic scrolls that New Testament which is its spiritual legacy to mankind, while a "holy remnant" made proselytes in all the great cities, and

Livy, xxii, 51.

"Pœnulus," Act v, sc. i, 2.

the preparation for the Gospel was completed. Few pages in history stir up deeper thoughts than this rejection of one branch of the Semites, aspiring to be cosmopolitan by virtue of their Oriental turn for trading, and the choice of another, driven into exile by a long train of misfortunes. The outcome is that we are familiar with Hebrew life and literature as though it were our own; but the word "Punic" is confined to our Latin schoolbooks, "Ut pueris placeas et declamatio fias."

England's chief treasure, it has been said, is the Bible. I think that witness true, even now amid the smoke and conflict of so many modern ideas. If a common language binds together races not of the same stock, as Latin created the empire that was to become Christendom, then the tongue of Shakespeare and Milton, and of Holy Writ as known to them, may well have been chosen by Providence for some large design, the scope of which is not yet fully disclosed, but analogous as regards the English-speaking millions to that whereby the Rome of the Cæsars was transformed into the Western Zion. There is no accident in the march of events. Joseph de Maistre felt in his prophetic way that even the Bible Societies, of which London is the headquarters, would take their share in carrying out this divine purpose, undesirable as might be the methods of their propaganda. He likened the translations into all dialects, which they were promoting, to the Septuagint, in which Hebrew genius received the universal stamp that only a Greek rendering could bestow on it; and he foresaw consequences without end as the Farther East and Africa and the Ocean Isles arrived at a knowledge of the inspired Word.

But the fountain-head of these countless versions is King James's Bible. So long as the English tongue is spoken it

will vindicate to itself the first place as a standard of literature, religious in its contents, unrivalled in the grace and dignity of its expression. Far outside the British dominions, and in states that yet shall be, its power is destined to endure. How, then, ought Catholics to judge and deal with the Authorized Version? It is an enquiry abounding in delicate problems, insistent and clamorous. I would aim at their solution in the spirit of those passages, the last he ever wrote, which De Maistre has left us in the Soirées de St. Pétersbourg, II, 230-242. ward we must glance, forgetting the things that are behind, transcending the controversial jealousies of dead ancestors, but making our own the best of whatever kind that has come down to us from them.

For

our

Dear as to the Catholic heart is the conversion of England, which we feel sure lies among predestined things in the days to come, it may often seem as if we had scarcely touched the fringe of all that so great a revolution must involve. In these high matters one speaks under correction, nay, with stammering lips. But unless we consider them our labor will be in vain. Now the Roman tradition has this advantage over Calvin-who formulated the only genuine Protestantism and abides as its Doctor Maximus-that it never would accept the principle of man's total depravity. On the definitions of the natural order and divine grace laid down by the Fathers of Trent there is no human virtue, no exalted achievement, of any race or society, which, being good so far as it goes, the Church is unwilling to bless and consecrate. Our philosophy teaches us to baptize whatever we light upon in Adam's children that has a particle of worth, be it valor, intellect, genius for the plastic arts, for music and literature, for practical wisdom, or what you will, provided the

evil accidents that cling to it be taken away. "I came not to destroy but to fulfil," is true of the Church as of Christ who bequeathed to her that saving sentence. And if the Englishspeaking universe ever is baptized into the sacrament of unity, English it will remain as before. It will not come without its treasures. Whatever is characteristic in its make and qualities will show the added beauty of its recovered religion; it will not be stripped bare of the glorious vestures wherein this remarkable people have clad themselves from of old. Here it is that the national literature claims a place. For it stands not lower than the Greek, and in many respects as far above the Latin as Shakespeare excels Terence or Edmund Burke rises beyond Cicero. And of all that has been said or sung in English from Chaucer downwards. the Bible is chief and crown.

During nearly four centuries the process of assimilation between the people and the Book has been going on-since Tyndale printed his New Testament in 1525-until its very Hebraisms have come to sound in the ears of Englishmen like their mother tongue. We shall discover no parallel to such a story in the Romance languages; for the Vulgate has held its own among ecclesiastics, and the multitude did not get their religious training from the vernacular Scriptures. Luther's Bible, again, is, no doubt, a German classic; but we may question if it has exercised upon the native authors an influence at all comparable to that which, by quotation or allusion to Scripture, can be traced in English writings from the age of Elizabeth to our own. As the Koran is ever present in Arabic literature, as the Latin Bible dominated for well nigh a thousand years the thoughts and discourses the correspondence and teaching, of Western Europe, SO their religious "Matter of Britain" has been familiar

and has furnished household words to ten generations of this island. In substance the thing is done for ever. We cannot rewrite Macbeth or Othello; their language affords at once a stereotype and a limit; no revised version of them is conceivable. And so, in a literary point of view, does it stand as regards the Bible text, elaborated from unknown periods down to 1611. Mistakes in detail cannot overshadow its excellence; these admit of correction but to displace the old and substitute a new rendering, be the apparatus of scholarship as perfect as modern research will ever make it, lies not in man's power. The revision of 18811884, helpful in many ways to students, has failed precisely in the degree in which it moves upon uniform rules of translation. It is singularly uninspired; and whatever beauty it possesses we feel at once to be derived from the original which it has undertaken to improve.

Thus, our English problem bears little resemblance to St. Jerome's when he girded up his loins for the mighty task of which what we now term the Vulgate was to be the outcome. The Old Latin versions were in form rustic and in text largely corrupt. They had degenerated into numberless variations; a standard edition did not exist. And the result justified him by presenting a translation of the Scriptures far superior, in all that Jerome gave it of his own, to those which it supplanted. Who would now anticipate such an advance upon the "authorized" English text from any committee of modern scholars? The spirit which we have mocked as the Zeitgeist troubles us all; we suffer from it but must endure it. That mingled sense of simplicity and majesty peculiar to a creative epoch, and conspicuous in the Elizabethan, has almost wholly forsaken us. could no more equal or transcend the virile beauties of which the Old Testa

We