"I sit as God holding no form of creed,
But contemplating all,"

and which so escapes from the practical obligations of any.

There is, however, one beautiful passage that would be tonic enough if taken to heart

"To pray, to do

To pray, to do according to the prayer,
Are, both, to worship Alla, but the prayers,
That have no successor in deed, are faint
And pale in Alla's eyes, fair mothers they
Dying in childbirth of dead sons."

If, now, the poem be considered as an historical picture, the question arises, " Is it true?" Was Akbar, circumstanced as he was, such a man as the poem pictures? If."yes," the fact is not merely a fact, but a joy-inspiring truth and a fear-inspiring rebuke. Joy-inspiring in that, under such circumstances, God could so prevail in man; and a rebuke in that Christians could be such as to so little commend their faith to him that he should still need to be eclectic. But if the picture is not true, then a false argument is implied the argument, I mean, involved in the assertion that in such circumstances such characters can arise, not to say result. The same demur is called up by Lessing's beautiful (if true) Nathan the Wise, and by some humbler modern books in which an agnostic hero, the sum of all the virtues, is surrounded by moral reptiles calling themselves Christians. The very least that one has a right to demand in such a case is that the portrait be guaranteed as from the life. The very least, but by no means the most. For, first of all, the guarantee is impossible; no person

is competent to portray another in the fundamental manner necessary for this purpose. And were the thing possible, the speculative belief and the character in any individual person may have no vital connection -they may grow from quite different roots. Yet a large proportion of readers in these days, seeing a noble-minded agnostic or eclectic or what not, are disposed to credit the belief with the generation of the character, and of course to argue so far in favour of the belief. Therefore an artist is bound to select his subjects in view of the inferences that may be drawn from them-that is, he is bound not only to make his portraits true to the particular, but to choose such subjects as shall teach what is true fundamentally and in the general. The historian of course is not so bound, though he, in proportion to his greatness, desires to exhibit not merely fact but nature. But in the case of the artist, the poet, this desire is his raison d'être.

Kapiolani implies the doctrine that the overthrow of superstition is the preparation for the entrance of true religion. Perhaps; but I should think the converse to be more deeply true.

St. Telemachus is, I must confess, an historical picture; but as its region is that of spiritual working, I place it here. No one who believes in the direct relations between God and the human soul could feel it to be incredible that the saint was inspired to such an act. The picture of the physical mechanism by which the inspiration is supposed to have been accompanied and introduced is more dubious. (I assume that it is not part even of the legend; the poet's reference to Theodoret does not imply that it is.)

In such matters there ought to be no conscious fiction. Once give way to this, and you may say anything. Matthew Arnold in his Sohrab and Rustram made a background of elemental wonders for the fight between father and son, when he himself had, I suppose one may safely assert, no belief in the actuality of anything of the kind. Fiction in science no one would justify why, then, fiction in religion, where truth

matters most of all?

CHAPTER XVII

THE SUPERNATURAL OR PRETERNATURAL IN TENNYSON

I Do not attempt to define the terms supernatural and preternatural, nor to distinguish precisely between them. The reader will see that, for the purposes of this chapter, I do not need to do so.

The supernatural in literature may be visionalsuch as it is in Mrs. Browning's Drama of Exile -of which no one supposes that it is to be taken literally.

Or it may be legendary-believed by the makers of the legend to be real, but not so believed in by the reproducers of the legend.

Or it may be actualistic, if I may use such a wordrealistic is appropriated to a technical use—a part of a narrative otherwise posing as representing things as they are.

Now the supernatural so used is bound by the obligations resting upon the containing narrative. It must be true to fact-concretely historical—or true to nature, the like of that which is historical. Or, as no narrator is infallible, it must be believed by him to be according to fact or to nature—that is, to the actual order of things. If, however, he believes things to be

true which are not true, though he is justified by his belief, his work is condemned by his error.

I am aware that in saying that the supernatural must be true to nature, I am using an apparent contradiction in terms. But we have two meanings to the term nature: (a) the total order of things; (b) a part of the total order of things which we distinguish from another part called the supernatural. What is demanded above, then, is that if a writer depicts the supernatural, what he sets down shall be believed by him to be either a record of historical fact, or fiction the like of that which historically happens, and which is, so, true to nature, in the wider sense of the term.

Now Tennyson was a religious poet. As such he believed that there is a supernatural in man, and that man has supernatural as well as natural relations with the Divine. So, explicitly or implicitly, his poetry must necessarily be pervaded by the supernatural. When, for instance, in Enoch Arden he says—

"Had not his poor heart

Spoken with That, which being everywhere

Lets none, who speaks with Him, seem all alone,
Surely the man had died of solitude,"

he is putting into his picture an element of the supernatural.

But now in this same poem we have introduced supposed examples of super- or preternaturalism of quite another order. On Annie's marriage-day with Philip it is said of Enoch that

"Though faintly, merrily, far and far away

He heard the pealing of his parish bells."

And before that, when Annie, seeking for a sign con