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of them anything absolutely new, which should be at the same time true, would probably prove an all but impossible critical feat. It is certainly one which we shall not attempt; but we are consoled for foregoing it by the thought that a writer who aims at nothing but simple veracity, may in the modest attempt achieve something of freshness as well, because even if his vision be less clear, his perceptions less keen, than those of his predecessors, he at any rate observes his object from a new standpoint, reflects it in a virgin mirror. The oftenquoted saying that the eye sees nothing but what it brings with it the power of seeing, is one which should never be forgotten by either critics or their readers. No criticism can exhaustively represent the work with which it deals: the critic cannot escape from the limitations of his individuality; but then the very things which when viewed from one side we call limitations, appear from another side as special sensibilities, and a person's feeling may soon blunt in one direction simply because it is intensely acute in another. Probably no living man, howsoever catholic-minded, feels sufficient all-round sympathy with three poetic artists so different from each other in every way as Mr. Tennyson, Mr. Swinburne, and Mr. Browning to do equal and full justice to each and all of them; but if he write with simplicity and honesty he will not lead us seriously astray, for we shall readily note the point at which he fails in full fellowship of feeling, and therefore in clear apprehension of intellect.

It has been said that modern history began with the French Revolution. This may be an accentuation, if not an exaggeration of truth, for the march of events is more regular and unbroken than we are sometimes wont to suppose it; but there can be no doubt that the great upheavel of the last century has changed the world's moral and intellectual atmosphere by altering the proportions and the distribution of its constant elements. Of such a change poetry, indeed all art, is the first and most noteworthy because the most sensitive indicator. Imagination is not a conscious effort of the intellect but its instinctive and unconscious play, and the artist without knowing is a musical instrument made variously melodious by

the slightest breezes which blow around him. Mr. Tennyson's immediate poetical ancestors were Wordsworth and Keats, and both these poets were largely though very differently influenced by the great movement. We know how it was with Wordsworth. Thrilled at first by quick sympathy with the mighty rising of a great nation, Wordsworth was speedily and permanently repelled by the excesses which substituted a tyranny of lawlessness for a tyranny of law; and thenceforward the voice from the mountains was a voice raised in solemn pleading for obedience, for order, for reverence, for stable truths and firmly based tranquilities. Keats was a spirit cast in another mould. Born later than Wordsworth he was not a witness of the great catastrophe, but the years of his early manhood-and his latest manhood was early-were full of the turbulence which took long to subside, and which has not even now perhaps wholly subsided. There were, to use a now historic phrase, 'three courses' open to him. He might like Shelley throw in his lot with the party of revolution, he might with Wordsworth set himself in opposition to it, or he might quietly ignore the conflict and in a far-away world of imagination find the undisturbed calm of spirit which was denied him in the world of fact. Keats chose wisely, as all men choose when they elect to walk along the lines of their own individuality. He refused to be either a revolutionist or a reactionary, and as his present neutrality was inconsistent with the keen and eager life for which he panted, he turned his back upon the present and found his home in an ideal past, his mission in peopling that past with new shapes of beauty. Keats became not a prophet but an artist, and as the artistic element in poetry is ever the most attractive to young men of poetic sensibilities, it is not to be wondered at that Mr. Tennyson's earliest independent volume should bear obvious traces of Keats's influence. The later poet, like the earlier one, was an artist by nature, his gift of feeling things and expressing his feeling in an artistic fashion has always been and is still by far his most prominent endowment, though other endowments have been added to it: and one noteworthy poem, The Palace of Art,' seems to indicate that he has felt the prompting to which Keats

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yielded, the prompting which comes to every artist nature in an age of agitating turmoil, to fly from the crowdseen but as darkening droves of swine-and to find a "God-like isolation' in some lordly pleasure-house' of imaginative sensation. In his case the prompting has been resisted, and the resistance has its outcome in numerous poems and portions of poems bearing directly or indirectly on the thought and life of his time. Even here, however, it is the art rather than the message which is the thing of main interest; we recognise and are drawn to the sayer rather than the seer; and yet both substance and form are characteristic of the man and of the tendencies which he represents.

Mr. Tennyson's most important hero is described as the blameless king; and, the epithet being used in an artistic sense, Mr. Tennyson himself might be described as the blameless poet. Were he not a master of that most difficult of arts, the ars celare artem, he would impress us as being like his own Maud, or rather like Maud's face-'faultily faultless;' we should praise him as Pope was praised in the last century, for his correctness; and though correctness is an admirable quality in a world where there is so much that is incorrect, it has the disadvantage of inducing a feeling of monotony. Now Mr. Tennyson is never monotonous, because his blamelessness or correctness-call it what we will-consists simply in the exquisite adaptation of fitting means to varied ends, in the definiteness with which he conceives the object he has to describe, the thought he has to express, the emotion he has to render, and the satisfying perfection of the description, expression, or rendering. He is not afraid of rhetorical exuberance which might strike us as florid were it not clearly demanded by the main intention, nor does he shrink from a direct simplicity which would seem bald were it not so imaginatively adequate. He is, in short, a craftsman with an absolute control over his implements; but the thing to be taken note of is that it is not an irresponsible control. In every poem, in every line, the poet seems to be saying 'I also am a man under authority' pledged to obey every law of beauty, of harmony, and fitness.

These qualities of manner are reflections and manifestations of qualities of matter. In one of the most profound and penetrative of recent critical studies Professor Dowden has shown that in the worlds of thought and fact, as well as in the world of art, Mr. Tennyson's natural instincts or acquired habits of emotion are all on the side of law, order, obedience, and are sternly set against license, disorder, and revolt. He regards the life of the world not as a speculative thinker who craves for logical consistency between ideas and facts, or as a practical worker who fixes his gaze on certain definite evils to be removed or definite advantages to be achieved, but as an artist who demands that it shall justify itself to the receptive imagination—the faculty which craves for restful harmony, and is disconcerted by breaks and discords because they result in a confusing disintegration. There is, of course, a higher imagination which is not thus daunted-which can delight itself even in confusion and chaos when it can find therein the material out of which it can construct a new order which shall be at once fairer and more stable than the old-but the imagination of Mr. Tennyson is not of this creative kind. It is rather the faculty which enables him to accept the present as satisfying for the present because it is discovered to be quick with the life of a richer future, and which forbids him to sacrifice the dignity of an ordered progress even for the sake of the most precious gains of a convulsive and disturbing upheaval. He is as truly an anti-revolutionary as Wordsworth was; but he treats the spirit of revolution as it might be treated by a politician trained in the traditions of Whiggism, while Wordsworth was driven by violent re-action into Toryism of the most rigid type. Mr. Tennyson might indeed be described as the Whig of the modern imaginative world, and he is such not only in the sphere of politics alone, but in every realm of thought and activity. Professor Dowden quotes and makes a very just comment upon the stanza in which Mr. Tennyson declares it to be the special praise of England that she is

ever

'A land of settled government,

A land of just and old renown,

Whose freedom broadens slowly down
From precedent to precedent,'-

and the lines are certainly very characteristic and splendidly Whiggish; but the distinguished critic passes with a mere mention the poem 'Love thou thy land,' which is even more interesting as an exposition of the poet's habit of thought. From it we learn that the true wisdom is to 'pamper not a hasty time;' to keep the word free from 'crude imaginings;' to see that reverence is not merely the companion but the herald' of knowledge; to escape from the dominion both of the ancient saw' and the modern term,' in order that the fitting season may bring the fitting law; above all, to regard gradation,' and to entertain a proper horror of raw haste, half-sister to delay.'

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We speak of the judicious Hooker,' but we might with even a finer appropriateness speak of the judicious Tennyson. A poet of this order speaks so accurately and adequately the sentiments of people of comfort and culture, living amid embryonic influences which threaten the one and offend the other, that we cannot wonder at the wide acceptance of his utterances. We who are at ease in our respectable Zion are so satisfied to hasten slowly that we may not care much for the low but by no means inaudible voice of the herd,' who have become rather tired of gradation, and who do not feel repelled from 'raw Haste,' even by her alleged objectionable relationship to Delay; but, comfortable as we are, the herd is there; and its voice is something more than a vox et præterea nihil. For a time the Whiggish optimism which proclaims that the golden year is ever at the doors,' and is content with the somewhat dilatory march of freedom from precedent to precedent,' may be accepted without too curious questioning; but if Mr. Tennyson were the only spokesman of the people, some of us would certainly feel that the last, word of progress has yet to be said.

It is natural that a poet whose attitude is one of firm trust in the all-sufficing beneficence of the law of ordered advance, who believes that whatever is, is best for to-day, because the

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