English literature owes him gratitude for this clearness. At a time when we are running close to the edge of all the errors of the later Elizabethans, Tennyson never allowed himself to drift into obscurity of thought or obscurity of expression, and showed (as those did not who restored clearness to English song in the time of Dryden) that simplicity of words, as well as jewelled brightness of thought and description, might be also compact of imagination. The lamp of language which he held in his hand burnt with a bright, keen, and glowing flame. The debt we owe Tennyson for this is not owed by English literature alone; it is personal also. Every writer should acknowledge the debt and follow the example. Clearness in thought and words ought to be a part of a writer's religion; it is certainly a necessary part of his morality. Nay, to follow clearness like a star, clearness of thought, clearness of phrase, in every kind of life, is the duty of all. But the poets are most bound to feel and fulfil that duty, and it is not one of the least which belong to their art and their influence. Tennyson felt it and fulfilled it.

One other thing I may briefly add to these judgments concerning his simplicity. It is that (after his very earliest work) his stuff is of almost an equal quality throughout. I do not mean that all the poems are equally good, but that the web on which their pattern was woven kept, with but a few exceptions, the same closeness and fineness throughout. The invention, the pictures, the arrangement, and the colouring of the things wrought

on the web were variable in excellence, but the stuff was uniform. This is an excessively rare excellence in a poet, and it continued to the close. The workmanship is curiously level from youth to age; and that kind of simplicity has also its root in character.

Mingled with this simplicity, which was due to the unconscious entrance of his character into his art, there was also in all his poetry, as I have said with regard to his death, a certain stateliness entirely conscious of itself, and arising out of a reverence for his own individuality. The personality of Tennyson, vividly conscious of itself and respecting itself, pervades his poetry, is part of his art, and gives it part of its power. I have called it selfrespecting to distinguish it from the personality of those poets who, like Byron, spread out their personality before us, but whom we cannot suspect of reverencing themselves. "Reverencing themselves" seems an invidious term, but in the case of poets like Tennyson, and there is a distinct class of such poets, it means that they look upon themselves as prophets, as endowed with power to proclaim truth and beauty, as consecrated to do work which will delight, console, and exalt mankind. It is, then, rather their high vocation which they reverence than anything in themselves; and this bestows on all their work that stateliness which is self-conscious, as it were, in all their poems. They are never seen in undress, never without their singing and prophetic robes, never unattended by one or other of the graver Muses.

We have had two great examples of this type of poet

in the past. Milton was one, Wordsworth was another. Milton never moved his verse unconscious of Urania by his side. Wordsworth never lost the sense that he was a consecrated spirit. And Tennyson never forgot that the poet's work was to convince the world of love and beauty; that he was born to do that work, and to do it worthily. This is an egotism (if we choose to give it that term) which is charged with power and with fire. Any individuality, conscious of itself, respecting itself because of its faith in a sacred mission entrusted to it, and beneath which it may not fall without dishonour, lifts and kindles other individualities, and exalts their views of human life. It does this work with tenfold greater force when it is in a poet, that is, in one who adds to its moral force the all-subduing power of beauty.

This conviction, which cannot belong to a weak poet, but does (when it is consistent throughout life) belong to poets whose nature is hewn out of the living rock, enters as stateliness into all their verse, gives it a moral virtue, a spiritual strength, and emerges in a certain grandeur or splendour of style, more or less fine as the character is more or less nobly mixed. This sense of the relation the poet bears to mankind, this sense he has of his office and of the duty it imposes on him, was profoundly felt by Tennyson, became a part of him as an artist, and was an element in every line he wrote. Personal it was, but it was personal for the sake of humanity; and dignity, stateliness in subjects, in thoughts and in style, issued naturally from that conviction.

These are things which belong to a poet's art, but by themselves they would not, of course, make him an artist. The essential difference of an artist is love of beauty and the power of shaping it. The greatness of an artist is proportionate to the depth and truth of his love of beauty; to his faithfulness to it, and to his unremitting effort to train his natural gift of shaping it into fuller ease, power, and permanence. As to beauty itself, men talk of natural beauty, of physical, moral, and spiritual beauty, and these term-divisions have their use; but at root all beauty is one, and these divided forms of it are modes only of one energy, conditioned by the elements through which it passes. They can all pass into one another, and they can all be expressed in terms of one another.

To define, then, what beauty is in itself is beyond our power, but we can approach a definition of it by marking out clearly its results on us. What is always true of beauty is this, that, wherever it appears, it awakens love of it which has no return on self, but which bears us out of ourselves; it stirs either joy or reverence in the heart without bringing with it any self-admiration or vanity; and it kindles the desire of reproducing it, not that we may exult in our own skill in forming it, but that our reproduction of it may awaken emotions in others similar to those which the original sight of beauty stirred in our own heart—that is, it more or less forces the seer of it into creation. This creation, this representation of the beautiful, is art; and the most skilful representation of

the ugly—that is, of anything which awakens either repulsion, or base pleasure, or horror which does not set free and purify the soul, or scorn instead of reverence, or which does not kindle in us the desire of reproduction of it that we may stir in others similar emotions to our own is not art at all. It is clever imitation, it is skill, it is artifice, it is not art. It is characteristic of an age which is writhing under the frivolous despotism of positive science that the accurate and skilful representation of things and facts which are not beautiful is called art; and it belongs to all persons who care for the growth of humanity, not to denounce this error, for denunciation is barren of results, but to live and labour for the opposite truth. Far more rests on that effort than men imagine. A third at least of the future betterment of mankind, to which we now look forward with more hope than we have done for years, depends on this effort, on all that it involves, on all that it will create in the imaginative and spiritual life of the human race.

With a few exceptions, into which this tendency to scientific representation carried him-poems of dissection and denunciation, like Despair, and worse still, The Promise of May, Tennyson was faithful through his whole life to beauty, writing always of what was worthy of love, of joy, of solemn or happy reverence; and by this, and in this sphere, was the steady artist. The manifestation of these things, his creation of them, for the love and pleasure and veneration of himself and men, was his unbroken delight.