Set the maiden fancies wallowing in the troughs of Zolaism,Forward, forward, ay and backward, downward too into the abysm.

Do your best to charm the worst, to lower the rising race of men;

Have we risen from out the beast, then back into the beast again?

ment.

That is what caps the climax; that is the worst feature that Tennyson sees in the modern life which he denounces with all the bitterness of disappointThere is, however, no want of other accusation; the maiming of brute beasts, dynamite and revolver, "menace, madness, spoken lies"; lies of democracy, equalizing the unequal, seeking upon matters of imperial import "the suffrage of the plough"; ruling the simple masses through the cunning of words.

So the Higher wields the Lower, while the Lower is the Higher.

Never was there a fiercer rhetoric of denunciation

Chaos, Cosmos! Cosmos, Chaos! once again the sickening game;

Freedom, free to slay herself, and dying while they shout her

name.

Step by step we gain'd a freedom known to Europe, known to

all;

Step by step we rose to greatness,—thro' the tonguesters we may fall.

You that woo the Voices-tell them "Old Experience is a fool", Teach your flatter'd kings that only those who cannot read can rule.

Pluck the mighty from their seat, but set no meek ones in their place;

Pillory Wisdom in your markets, pelt your offal at her face.

Tumble Nature heel o'er head, and, yelling with the yelling

street,

Set the feet above the brain and swear the brain is in the feet.

This is the very madness of reaction, and any fairminded person looking at the indictment will allow that it does not correspond with facts. And indeed neither of the Locksley Hall poems is to be taken as fitly representative of Tennyson's mind. Each poem has in it a fire, almost a frenzy, that sets it apart from the rest of his work, or rather in a class with the rhapsodies that open and close Maud; and each, with all the marvel of its eloquence, is marred by a sort of falsetto note. The voice rises almost to a shriek. For Tennyson's real mind upon politics I would look rather to the poems, calm in their balance of phrasing and their stately self-contained measure, which praise the equipoise of the constitution, and the freedom which restrains

Loather of the lawless crown

As of the lawless crowd.

And if one compares the later and less-known poem on Freedom from which I quote these lines with the magnificent stanzas written half a century earlier, one sees a perfect harmony of thought-the same love of fearless truth, the same hatred of "the falsehood of extremes". Nothing is gone but the dew of the morning; and with that is vanished perhaps also something of the triumphant confidence in truth, something of the unalloyed pride in the English race; and instead there lurk in the background sombre apprehensions. Tennyson grew older he began to be haunted by a new thought, instilled into him with the teachings of science; that if selection and progress was everywhere in nature, so also were degeneration and decadence; and he watched with anxious, unavailing eyes for a sign of a backward swing of the pendulum-for

Reversion, ever dragging Evolution in the mud.

1

As

He saw it plainly there in Paris, and his minute scrutiny for signs of it in England blinded him, I think, to the more hopeful features in the political and social order. But politics are not like religion; they cannot be fairly studied in retreat; and the utterances of a man who lived in voluntary seclusion from the movement of affairs, judging acts and actors from a distance, can never be regarded as trustworthy guides. In the rub and bustle of affairs men learn tolerance. Your recluse, like Carlyle, is apt to fulminate damnation against what is merely distasteful to his own prepossessions.

Chapter VI.

Tennyson's Outlook upon Nature.

I have tried to show that Tennyson's whole conception of the spiritual universe was profoundly coloured by the evolutionist theory. Not in this matter alone, but in his outlook upon life and the physical world, he sees and thinks and speaks like a poet who is also a man of science. The truths of astronomy are for ever present to his mind, not as mere formulæ, but realized with all the intensity of a poet's imagination. Against the claim of man to spiritual significance he is for ever setting man's physical insignificance. One finds it first in The Two Voices:

I said, "When first the world began,
Young Nature thro' five cycles ran,
And in the sixth she moulded man.

"She gave him mind, the lordliest
Proportion, and, above the rest,
Dominion in the head and breast."

Thereto the silent voice replied;
"Self-blinded are you by your pride:
Look up thro' night: the world is wide.

"This truth within thy mind rehearse,
That in a boundless universe

Is boundless better, boundless worse.

"Think you this mould of hopes and fears
Could find no statelier than his peers

In yonder hundred million spheres?"

And the same thought is put with far more power in Vastness:

Many a hearth upon our dark globe sighs after many a vanish'd face,

Many a planet by many a sun may roll with the dust of a vanish'd race.

Raving politics, never at rest—as this poor earth's pale history

runs,

What is it all but a trouble of ants in the gleam of a million million of suns?

In Despair, the tragedy of creation that "groaneth and travaileth in pain" extends far beyond human ken:

And the suns of the limitless Universe sparkled and shone in the sky,

Flashing with fires as of God, but we knew that their light was a lie

Bright as with deathless hope—but, however they sparkled and shone,

The dark little worlds running round them were worlds of woe like our own—

No soul in the heaven above, no soul on the earth below,
A fiery scroll written over with lamentation and woe.

But by far the finest example of an imagination fed with the facts of astronomy is in a really great passage of Locksley Hall Sixty Years After, where the poet takes up from the earlier poem the theme of a warless earth which his young mind held in

vision, and comments upon it with the experience of a life. Sixty years has seen the reign of science, and how much nearer are we to the vision? "Warless earth", he cries

Warless? when her tens are thousands, and her thousands millions, then

All her harvest all too narrow-who can fancy warless men?

Warless? War will die out late then. Will it ever? late or soon?

Can it, till this outworn earth be dead as yon dead world the moon?

Life on the moon is dead, the new astronomy tells us, worn out in anguish; but across the worlds who knows of that anguish? From across space that theatre of desolation looks a perpetual peace. And then, by a noble reach of thought, he shows us the littleness of our own destiny-"the trouble of ants" -that, seen across space, may look like utter tranquillity:

Dead, but how her living glory lights the hall, the dune, the grass!

Yet the moonlight is the sunlight, and the sun himself will pass. Venus near her! smiling downward at this earthlier earth of ours,

Closer on the Sun, perhaps a world of never-fading flowers.

Hesper, whom the poet call'd the Bringer home of all good things.

All good things may move in Hesper, perfect peoples, perfect kings.

Hesper-Venus-were we native to that splendour or in Mars, We should see the Globe we groan in, fairest of their evening

stars.

Could we dream of wars and carnage, craft and madness, lust and spite,

Roaring London, raving Paris, in that point of peaceful light?

Might we not in glancing heavenward on a star so silver-fair, Yearn, and clasp the hands and murmur, “Would to God that we were there"?