on the poor. The competition and the cheating of those capitalists who happen to desire to increase their store at any cost are increased in war-time. The selfish are made more selfish; the troubles of the poor workmen are trebled; the army suffers and starves, and dies of cold and misery—as we found out, only too well, in the Crimean war. A costly medicine it was!

This is not the way to remedy the ills of the people, nor is it the best way to develop self-sacrifice, noble thought, civic honour or justice in a people. There is another way in which the call for civic self-sacrifice enters into the daily and hourly life of every citizen; but that way, which forms now the basis of all action and prophecy towards a nobler society, did not enter into the poetry of Tennyson at all, and its absence left him no expedient for curing a selfish society but the clumsy expedient of war.

I make no complaint against Tennyson for all this. I only state the case. If he was of this temper, it was because it was mainly the temper of the time in which he grew to his maturity, the thirty years from his first volume to the end of the sixties. He represented the political and social opinions of that time very fairly, but not as a poet who had much prophetic fire and pity in him would be expected to write. Nor did he make any impetuous casts into the future when he wrote of these things, save once in Locksley Hall. In these matters, he was not before his age, nor when the age changed did he change with it. He remained for another thirty

years in precisely the same position, while the world changed round him. His poetry on other matters continued to exalt and console the world, to illuminate it with beauty and grace and tender thought. He has been a blessing to us all in a thousand ways in these last thirty years. But on the matters of which I treat of here, he was either silent or in opposition to the ideas of a higher liberty. Collectivism, for example, which began to grow up about 1866 (which, while it was in opposition to the individualism which so rapidly developed after 1832, yet holds in it a much greater opportunity for complete individuality than we have even conceived as yet) does not seem to have even dawned on the mind of Tennyson. He is behind the whole of this movement-the master movement of our time. In matters then of this kind he is not the poet of the people. He is our poet in the things which he treated poetically; and in those which have to do with Nature and God and the sweet, honest and tender life of men and women, he will remain our poet as long as the language lasts, but in these social matters not. One only subject of this kind he treated well and as a poet, and that was the question of woman and her relation to modern life; a question which was started by Shelley, and which occupied a great place in poetry after 1832. As far as he saw into that matter, he saw it with freedom and clearness and love, and The Princess is a real contribution to that subject. But that stands alone. In all other matters belonging to the progress of society, he does not

belong to the last thirty years, to our time, our hopes, or our faith; nor does he think and feel in them as a poet.

Look, in conclusion, at the faith he had concerning the future of mankind, at the hopes he entertained for it. Was he swept away, as the poets are, into high prediction? Did he realise by faith that a better time might be near at hand? No, embayed in these conservative doctrines, unable to loosen himself from their ice, he had enough of the logic of a poet to see that, supposing they were all true, the progress of society. towards a better and a perfect life must be of almost an infinite slowness; so very slow, so very far away, that man in the present is left all but hopeless. There is nothing in Tennyson in this matter of the rush or the faith of the prophet. The impulse he gives is faint, and his hope is only too like despair. The young man of Locksley Hall repents when he is old of almost all the enthusiasms of his youth:

Forward far and far from here is all the hope of eighty years.

In the very last book, the "Ghost of the brute" in men may be laid, but only in a hundred thousand years, or in a million summers away. Before the crowning age arrive in the making of man, æon after æon shall pass. "We are far from the noon of man, there is time for the race to grow."

Time! when half the world and more are in torture! It ought not to be in a poet to take things so easily. It

is true that Tennyson looks beyond this world, and sees the sorrowful made blessed there, and, indeed, I hold that to be the truest of consolations. But if it is to make us take evils easily here we especially who are comfortable-I hold that it is not unwise to put it out of our minds for a time; and it may be that the general disbelief in immortality has its deepest ground in that feeling, and perhaps its reason. For my part, I do not think we have any right to think of a heaven for others, much less of a heaven for ourselves in the world to come, until we are wholly determined to make this world a heaven for our fellow-men, and are hoping, believing, loving, and working for that, and for its realisation not in a thousand or a million years, but in a nearer and a nearer future. That is what a poet should feel and write for nowadays. That should be the passion in his heart and the fire in his verse.

IT

that the close of each school of poetry is so clearly

divided from the rise of its successor. Shelley, Byron, and Keats died within a few years of each other, between 1821 and 1824. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Landor, and Walter Scott (though they lived beyond 1824) belonged to a school which preceded that of Byron, Shelley, and Keats. They overlapped the lives of these three poets, but all the three had arisen when Wordsworth and the rest had done their best work. They represent other spheres of thought, and embody other worlds of emotion. Byron, enamoured of his own powerful personality, and rejoicing in his isolation from the crowd while he was angry with its attack upon him, proud and vain at the same time, laughed to scorn the peaceful, proper, prim, and comfortable life into which the English middle class had subsided after the peace of 1815, and held up himself as its poetic contrast-the lonely, soul-shattered wanderer whom a quiet home-life