1865] Co Rome. had adopted a violent animosity against Rome, in which he Secessions could not induce Pusey to join, and, eventually, after years of doubt and hesitation, passed, when he had become more and more suspected by English statesmen and cut off from preferment, into the Roman communion. While this controversy harmed the Church in one direction it was indirectly a source of benefit. It made Churchmen see the absolute necessity for some definite expression of Church life, and it thus greatly aided the revival of Convocation and the restoration of its powers, warmly advocated by Bishop Wilberforce and Bishop Phillpotts. Church. Meanwhile a new school (of which more will be said here- The after) was rising. It represented on the one hand those who Broad distrusted all formularies and valued comprehension rather than cohesion in the Church, on the other those whose studies of German theology had led them to proceed far beyond most Englishmen of their day in the direction of criticism of the Bible and of Church principles. In 1860 a volume of " Essays Essays and Reviews. [1846 of several and Reviews" was published. It was the work writers who were in not a few matters in far from close agreement with each other, but who wished to see a more liberal interpretation of the Church's formularies and a fuller appreciation of the results of modern investigation, scientific and historical. Among them were men so unlike each other in opinion and in tone of mind as Mark Pattison, a learned but somewhat crabbed scholar who had undergone a violent BENJAMIN JOWETT, BY GEORGE RICHMOND, R.A. reaction from Tractarianism, Benjamin Jowett, a shrewd and 1865] views of important theological questions questions It caused great excitement, was condemned by bishops, answered by an archbishop, and forgotten. The long discussion to which it gave rise served only, in the end, to show the breadth of the English Church. The Broad Church, or Latitudinarian, School flourished in spite of the persecution of some of its members. It afforded a resting place to those who had neither time nor inclination to study deep theological or philosophical questions, or whose charity abhorred the restraints of definition. Above all, in practical philanthropy on an "unsectarian" footing, and in warm welcome of the democratic movement of the age, it filled an important place in the history of the time. As the Tractarian school lost its weaker disciples by secessions to Rome, so the Latitudinarians, though for obvious reasons less readily, lost several members who became Unitarians. The strength of this sect was due to a number of powerful minds which directed it, and not least to the eminent philosopher and devout philanthropist, James Martineau. Bishop Colenso. Church H. D. [1846 The storm raised by "Essays and Reviews" was felt outside England. It was complicated by a serious trouble in the Church of South Africa, where Bishop Colenso, of Natal, well known as a mathematician and as a friend of the native races, but of whom Disraeli said that his theological studies had begun "after he grasped the crozier," was excommunicated for persistence in opinions in regard to the Bible which were adjudged heretical by the Bishop of Cape Town, whose action was approved by the Convocation of Canterbury. While questions such as these profoundly agitated the Church there was grave discontent with the unsatisfactory and unconstitutional position of ecclesiastical judicature. The Convocations were allowed to sit again from 1850, and did extremely valuable work; but from 1833 the powers of the Court of Delegates, which had enjoyed the appellate jurisdictions in ecclesiastical cases since the Reformation, were in the hands of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, a lay court which was in several respects unfit, even if competent, to try such cases as were now being brought before it. The Church, it seemed, was allowed to speak for herself, though she was not often listened to, but her laws must be interpreted by laymen. The position was sure to lead to acute difficulties. FOR the first ten years of the period on which we are now entering, the poetic stage was not only dominated but almost exclusively filled by the great figure of Alfred Tennyson. Though he was now verging upon forty, and had long since acquired and displayed the highest mastery of his artistic instrument, yet his recognised eminence in the world of letters was not yet equalled, or nearly equalled, by his popularity in the Tennyson's larger world outside. Had his career been cut short at that date his place as a poet of the first rank would have been secure to him in the history of English literature; but he would not have gone down to posterity as pre-eminently the national poet of the Victorian Age. For though perfection of form can be no less, perhaps even more, commandingly brought home to the critical appreciation in short than in long poems, it is only on the larger scale of composition that the matter of great poetry ever impresses itself on the mind of that vast majority of man Second Period. 1865] kind to whom poetic form is an indifferent, if not an unintelligible, thing. In 1846, Tennyson had written no single poem of more than a few hundred lines in length. Between that year and 1858 he had published four volumes, each containing a separate and substantive poem, three out of the four numbering several thousand lines, and two of them containing some of the poet's most serious, most deeply-felt, and for the mass of his countrymen, therefore, his most memorable work. These four are "The Princess" (1847), "In Memoriam" (1850), "Maud" (1854), and "The Idylls of the King" (1858). The first, a work of pure fantasy, so far as regards the plot of the "Medley," to use its author's name for it, but with a thread of now somewhat outworn social satire interwoven with its romantic fable, is hardly to be ranked as a whole among the strongest of Tennyson's performances. He is never, indeed, at his best in poetry of the lighter order. "Alfred, whatever he may think, cannot trifle," said his friend Fitzgerald of him; and there was a certain amount of truth, which "The Princess" illustrates, in the criticism. The poem nevertheless abounds in descriptive passages of exquisite beauty, and is starred with lyrics which the poet has nowhere excelled. "Maud" divided opinion even more, and, perhaps, even more justly. Its tone is somewhat jarring; its hero, always unsympathetic, at times almost declines into a mere sulky lout; and although it contains at least one unsurpassed utterance of passion, the passage beginning: "I have led her home, my love, my only friend," a lyric which would alone rank its singer among the great love poets of the world, the poem as a whole must be admitted to contain a larger alloy of rhetoric to a smaller amount of the pure gold of poetry than any other equal number of Tennysonian lines. It was with "In Memoriam" and "The Idylls of the King," that the Laureate (for in the year of the publication of the former of these poems he succeeded Wordsworth in that dignity) touched his highest point of achievement during this period of his career. Too long for an elegy-nay, too long, perhaps, for artistic perfection, if considered as a single continuous poem-" In Memoriam" abounds with detached passages of the finest poetry, giving final and monumental expression to some of the deepest emotions of the universal human heart. And modernised though they are from the Arthurian Epic, |