When in the night he wakes again and hears Ida reading a song that strikes the note of that which is to be their life, they speak together of all that has been. "She was wrong," she says, " she had failed, had sought less for truth than power in knowledge, but something wild within her breast,

A greater than all knowledge, beat her down."

For the moment, no doubt the moment of her passionate yielding-she does not surrender too much. But she surrenders too much if she speaks as a woman for women. And the Prince, with all his views of pure equality, accepts too much of masterhood. There is a certain lordliness in his lecture on the woman and the man which belongs to Tennyson's attitude on the subject, and which makes me dread that Ida in after years lost a good deal of her individuality. This might be a gain for the comfort of the palace, but it would be a loss to womanhood and to the world. But what the Prince says, independent of his attitude of mind, is true, for the most part, to the heart of the question, and remains true, even though fifty years have passed away.

But we have now far more data to go upon than Tennyson possessed. The steady work of women during these fifty years, and the points they have so bravely won, have added element after element to our experience. But all that has been gained has made more plain that

The woman's cause is man's: they rise or sink
Together.

One is the equal half of the other; the halves are

diverse for ever, each complements each; both united in diversity make the perfect humanity; their work must be together, in difference. These are the vital truths which Tennyson expresses in the famous lines of the Prince's speech, and they govern, or ought to govern, the whole question of the future position of womanhood in a better society than that in which we live. They do not govern the position or the life of womanhood at present. The prejudices both of men and women are against their full development. Nor do I think that Tennyson himself (save on a wind of prophecy) saw clearly to what conclusions his own views would lead. We could not expect he should, but men and women will in the end grasp with proper largeness of thought what this

means:

And so these twain, upon the skirts of Time,
Sit side by side, full summ'd in all their powers,
Dispensing harvest, sowing the To-be,
Self-reverent each and reverencing each,

Distinct in individualities,

But like each other ev'n as those who love.

These verses assert far more for women than that they should find their only perfect life in marriage and in home; their only exercise of sacrifice in motherhood, in nursing the sick, in tending on the poor, or their only career in personal devotion to those they love. Tennyson, sometimes seeing farther, comes back to circle round these things of home alone; and most men and women, even now, think that these exhaust all the womanly work of women. It is not so. We have gained To be, indeed, a true wife, such as

a wider view.

Tennyson has drawn on the lips of the Prince; or to be a sweet and noble mother, one

Not learned, save in gracious household ways,
Not perfect, nay, but full of tender wants,
No angel, but a dearer being, all dipt
In angel instincts, breathing Paradise,
Interpreter between the gods and men,
Who look'd all native to her place, and yet
On tiptoe seem'd to touch upon a sphere
Too gross to tread, and all male minds perforce
Sway'd to her from their orbits as they moved
And girdled her with music. Happy he,

With such a mother!

-to be these noble creatures at home, and to build up children into noble life-this, indeed, is the work of womanhood done not only at home, but for the State and for humanity at large. No higher work in the world exists than that of motherhood forming children into true and loving men and

women.

But this does not cover all. In our complex and crowded society, there are thousands of women who have no home, who are not wives and mothers, but who are hungry to become themselves, to realise themselves in work, to live outside of themselves in the life and movement of the whole. These scarcely come into Tennyson's outlook at the end of The Princess. For these, the education in knowledge and the training of their powers to all kinds of work which Ida established in her college are necessary, but with a clear consideration of sexual difference. This work is, however, to be carried out on other principles than those which Ida laid down-in union with man, with as large a training in the just use of the

emotions, in the just expansion of the imagination, in a true sight of the beautiful, and in the wise development of the ideal and the spiritual, as in the accurate knowledge of science and history, of law and literature. And then, the work of the world lies open to woman, to do in a different way from man, but with the same ends, and in the same cause the cause of the happiness, the goodness, and the love of humanity.

When that is possible-when we shall have applied to all the problems of society the new and as yet unused elements which exist in womanhood-all results will be reached twice as quickly as they are now reached, all human work will be twice as quickly done. And then, perhaps, some new poet will write a new Princess.

THE

CHAPTER VII

IN MEMORIAM

HE history of the writing of In Memoriam is well known. If an immortal fame can comfort Arthur Hallam, who was so soon bereft of the brightness of the earth, then he is consoled in his high place for the loss of human life; for surely while the language of England lasts, so long will In Memoriam be read and Arthur Hallam be remembered. Thirty years ago, I made a pilgrimage to the little church near Clevedon, where the Hallams rest, and saw the graveyard, the yews, and the marble tablet glimmering in the church. It was then a lonely quiet place, in a furrow of the sandy slopes, not a house standing near it; and fifty yards from it, but hidden from view, the broad estuary of the Severn filled with the tide. I heard the water wash the feet of the low cliffs as it passed by. Sorrow and death, peace that passeth understanding, the victory of the soul, seemed present with me; and the murmuring of the Severn became, as I dreamed, the music of eternal love, into whose vast harmonies all our discords are drawn at last.

I felt, it seemed, the impression of the place. I knew afterwards that it was the impression of the poem that I gave to the place. And this indeed is