The various forms of the poetry of human life, and especially of the poetry of human progress, which the poets embodied from the year 1830 to the year 1870, were outlined, as it were, in the poetry of the first thirty years of this century. In what manner Tennyson developed the poetry of Nature is a fascinating subject; but it will best be treated in connection with his poems. What he did with regard to the theological shapes which emerged in his time has already received notice. What did he say of the subjects which belong to the growth of humanity towards a better society? What relation did he bear to social politics, if I may use that term?

With the impulse given by Reform in 1832, a number of questions belonging to social progress were reawakened into a fuller life, and took new forms. Was the power of government best placed in the hands of the whole people, or in the hands of great men? It is plain that Tennyson answered with Carlyle that great men (provided they had, like Wellington, a supreme sense of duty, a proviso Carlyle did not always insert) were those in whose hands power should dwell. Freedom, in his conception of it, was safer with them. The voice of the people, he thought, was a babbling voice, for the people were led by mere orators. Tennyson was never democratic at heart. He never understood what democracy in its reality meant, much less did he ever conceive its ideal. He was always an aristocrat, though he would have said, with justice, that it was a government of the best men that he desired, and not a government of rank and birth alone. Rank and birth, when they were

unworthy of their privileged position, he despised and denounced, because they were inhuman. But I do not think that he ever wished that rank should be dissolved, or privileges overthrown, or that he even conceived the idea that the people of themselves were to choose the best men. He saw (from his poetic point of view) that all men were equal in their relations to the common feelings and duties of the race; that in suffering, in love, in the desire of right and justice, in the visions and longings of youth and age, there was an eternal equality; and, like all the great poets, his work in this realm of thought has drawn men and women of all ranks and classes into a closer sympathy with one another, and placed them hand in hand on a common ground of humanity; but when it came to extending that community of human relationship into the political or the social sphere, he not only drew back, he did not understand what this meant. The Republicanism with which Wordsworth and Coleridge were at first enchanted, and from which they afterwards retreated; the revolutionary spirit of Byron and his crusade against respectability; the more deliberate wrath of Shelley with the whole of the idols and oppression of a society founded as he believed on caste and force and not on equality and love, were one and all wholly unrepresented by Tennyson, nay, they were implicitly attacked by him. His whole conception of law and government, and of freedom, excluded them from its circle. Not in his hands, then, lay the development of the seeds which Shelley had scattered in his manhood. No, nor even those which Wordsworth

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had sown in his youth. He was much more, on this side, the true successor of Keats, to whom all these political and social questions were, because of their apparent ugliness, repulsive; and who took refuge from them in the stories of the Greeks and of the Renaissance out of which time had withdrawn the coarse and left the beautiful. But Keats lived at a time when there was no national emotion, when men were really weary of the democratic ideas, and he represents that weariness. Tennyson, on the contrary, did live in a time of national emotion, and though he partly followed Keats in a retreat to the past, yet he could not altogether, even had he desired it, loosen himself from the excitement which encompassed him. His age was vividly with him, and he wrote of patriotism, of the proper conception of freedom, of the sad condition of the poor, of the woman's position in the onward movement of the world, of the place of commerce and science in that movement, of war as the remedy for the selfishness and evils of commerce, and of the future of the race. These are the main things he touched, and of them all it is true that they were questions which had been outlined in the previous poetic period, and outlined in the new forms they took after 1832.

The first of these is Patriotism.

I have said that he felt strongly the vitality of the present in which he lived. But he also brought into the present an immense reverence for the past, and that is one of the strongest foundations of his patriotism. The poem, which begins

Love thou thy land, with love far-brought
From out the storied Past,

is but one of a hundred utterances, the note of which remained the same clear sound from the

beginning to the end. It was a pity that the emotion was chiefly given to the warlike glories of England by land and sea, and but little bestowed on the long and more glorious though fameless struggle of people and towns for civic liberty; but we may well excuse the poet's preference for valour and for death in behalf of the honour of the land in the striking circumstance of war. This is more vivid for verse, and The Revenge: A Ballad of the Fleet, and The Defence of Lucknow, and The Charge of the Light Brigade, will always stir English hearts.

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Moreover, no one has better dwelt on the noble elements of English character, their long descent to us from the past, and the sacred reverence that we owe to them, than Tennyson. He has strengthened, by the expression of this reverence, love of country among this people, and the strength he has thus added to it will endure as a power in England. It will be more than a power. It will be a voice to recall us to reverence when, in the push onwards to a future liberty and in the heated atmosphere of that strife, we tend to forget how much we owe to the ancient forms and to the bygone men, the results of whose work we may put aside as unfitted for the present time. For if in our excitement for the future we lose reverence for the past, the loss of reverence will so injure the soul of the nation that when we gain our objects in the time to come, we shall not be able to keep them nobly or to use them rightly. splendid future, splendid in that just feeling for

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righteousness and love which hinders the despotism that so often succeeds a wholly irreverent revolution, can be won by a nation which has forgotten veneration for its magnanimous past. The work of Tennyson, in this point of patriotism, is altogether fine and true.

Nevertheless, it had its extreme. It ran sometimes into an English Chauvinism, and in this extreme Tennyson became, with a curious reversion to the type of the Englishmen of Nelson's time, the natural opponent, even the mocker of France and the French character. The words which, at the end of The Princess, he puts into the mouth of the Tory member's son, represent a part of his own point of view, though they are modified in the reply that follows. Phrases like

The red fool-fury of the Seine,

show how he looked on the passionate forms which political ideas had received in France, and the onesided view he took of our neighbours' character. He saw only the evil of these things, just because he was so exclusively of the solid English type. Now and again the natural variety of a poet made him attempt to see the other side, as in the answer to the Tory member's son. But it was against the grain. He saw but little of what France has done for us; he had no gratitude to her for her audacity, her swiftness, her logical expansion into form of the thoughts of progress; he did not see or feel that much of the freedom we have lately won was owing to England's calm contemplation, with a certain amount of pleasurable but base contempt, of the mistakes which France alone had the boldness and