his political thought. But the expression of his own faith, rather than his reasoned convictions, will be found unmistakable in the verses he dictated on his death-bed, his appeal to the "Silent Voices" for a leading "on and always on"; and it stands supremely beautiful in the lines, Crossing the Bar, which have been hackneyed in quotation but often misunderstood. Yet their meaning is plain enough. Man in this life has been a sailor in port, getting and spending; the call comes and he must put out to sea; there may be trouble as he crosses the bar that divides him from the great Beyond, or there may be a full tide to bear him over it scarce knowing. But, whether rough or smooth the going, he goes to other seas and other skies, not without guidance; and beyond the bar the guide may reveal himself and the purpose of the going.

We walk by faith; that is the conclusion of the whole matter in Tennyson's eyes; and no man who reads him fairly will deny that he recognized at once the rights of reason and its limitations. You cannot look to him for the tragic force that is in FitzGerald's stanzas; the one man sees intensely what lies under his hand, the tragi-comedy of man's lot in the earth; Tennyson, seeing through and beyond it, loses its terrible distinctness. His philosophy is not tragic, it does not stir us; but, as Maeterlinck says, where there is wisdom, tragedy can scarcely come. If your mind has the singular balance of Tennyson's, and you pin your faith to hope, seeing clearly that it is a hope, and seeing also all the evidence that makes against it, you cannot proclaim your creed with any triumphant assurance, unless indeed you have the militant optimism of Browning. But if you see all pointing to the inevitable end, and hold to the symbol of the inverted wine-cup, as did FitzGerald or at least his original, that very hope and desire latent in you, upon which

Tennyson bases his faith, will give to your conclusion a poignant note of despair which must be always among the most moving things in literature. That is why many incline to rate FitzGerald high and depreciate Tennyson. Compromise is never very picturesque, and Tennyson, British in this as well as in everything else, held in religion to what was essentially a compromise.

Chapter V.

Tennyson's Political Opinions.

The first article in Tennyson's political creed was undoubtedly that it is a great matter to be an Englishman. This extreme sense of the national virtues has, perhaps, its drawbacks; but there is no question of the strength and genuineness of the poet's patriotism. Some of the best and most characteristic things that he ever wrote expressed once and for all the political faith of an intelligent Briton; and he was always ready to be stirred into enthusiasm by any national achievement, or any movement for national defence. This enthusiasm inspired one magnificent poem, the Ballad of The Revenge, and one of the most successful battle pieces ever written, The Charge of the Light Brigade; it also strangely betrayed him again and again into utterances where it is hard to trace the artist. The 1830 volume contained two patriotic lyrics, both of which were suppressed in later issues of the poems. The first began:

Who fears to die, who fears to die?
Is there any here who fears to die?

and had a chorus:

Shout for England!
Ho for England!

expressing altogether a patriotism more noisy than dignified. The other, half a century later, re-appeared as the Forester's Song in the Robin Hood play:

There is no land like England
Where'er the light of day be;
There are no hearts like English hearts,
Such hearts of oak as they be.
There is no land like England
Where'er the light of day be;
There are no men like Englishmen,
So tall and bold as they be.

And so on, da capo, for the women.

The triumphant sonnet upon Buonaparte was also an early work; another upon Poland expressed that youthful fervour on behalf of liberty, which, as we have seen, actually tempted Tennyson and Hallam to take part in the Spanish insurrection against a despot. This sympathy never wholly deserted the poet, and the most honoured guest who ever came to Farringford was perhaps Garibaldi. But Tennyson's political zeal was never like Shelley's, Byron's, or Browning's-cosmopolitan; he was British to the point of insularity. Yet certainly one cannot fairly object any want of comprehensiveness to a mind which, concentrating itself slowly on one set of phenomena, by some slow process arrived at the very heart of the matter. Tennyson never understood France, and his phrase about the "blind hysterics of the Celt" is one of those half-truths which he has denounced in a famous verse; but he understood his own country, and no account of the English political spirit was

ever given so luminous as that which he has condensed into a few lines:

You ask me, why, tho' ill at ease,
Within this region I subsist,
Whose spirits falter in the mist,
And languish for the purple seas.

It is the land that freemen till,

That sober-suited Freedom chose,
The land, where girt with friends or foes

A man may speak the thing he will;

A land of settled government,

A land of just and old renown,

Where Freedom slowly broadens down

From precedent to precedent:

Where faction seldom gathers head,

But by degrees to fullness wrought,
The strength of some diffusive thought
Hath time and space to work and spread.

This attitude towards his country lasted him through life, and it finds a more amiable expression here than in that passage of The Princess which contrasts Britain and France:

God bless the narrow sea, which keeps her off,
And keeps our Britain, whole within herself,
A nation yet, the rulers and the ruled-
Some sense of duty, something of a faith,
Some reverence for the laws ourselves have made,
Some patient force to change them when we will,
Some civic manhood firm against the crowd-
But yonder, whiff! there comes a sudden heat,
The gravest citizen seems to lose his head,
The king is scared, the soldier will not fight,
The little boys begin to shoot and stab,
A kingdom topples over with a shriek
Like an old woman, and down rolls the world
In mock heroics stranger than our own;
Revolts, republics, revolutions, most
No graver than a schoolboys' barring out;
Too comic for the solemn things they are,
Too solemn for the comic touches in them,

1

Like our wild Princess with as wise a dream
As some of theirs-God bless the narrow seas!
I wish they were a whole Atlantic broad.

But Tennyson's patriotism did not limit itself to admiration of things as they were. Seeing his country's greatness, he was jealous for it, and he preached a wise imperialism in days before the nation at large had realized the conditions under which it held its ascendency. Britain was to him the home of freedom, set by God's special mercy within barriers of "the inviolate sea and in his noble Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington, he, for the first time, urged upon his country, not only her mission in the world, but the imperative need to make the protecting barrier a true protection.

O Statesmen, guard us, guard the eye, the soul
Of Europe, keep our noble England whole,
And save the one true seed of freedom sown
Betwixt a people and their ancient throne,
That sober freedom out of which there springs
Our loyal passion for our temperate kings;
For, saving that, ye help to save mankind
Till public wrong be crumbled into dust,
And drill the raw world for the march of mind,
Till crowds at length be sane and crowns be just.
But wink no more in slothful overtrust.

Remember him who led your hosts;

He bad you guard the sacred coasts.

Your cannons moulder on the seaward wall!

That is a passage which to-day would be cheered to the echo, but the poem in which it comes was perhaps worse received than anything the poet ever wrote. Those were the days of the Manchester school, and of "peace at any price". No man could be more eloquent in praise of commerce, that link between the peoples, than was Tennyson a decade later in his Ode sung at the Opening of the International Exhibition: