poetry of Tennyson and influenced that poetry from 1830 to 1892. They were part of the elements of the soil out of which his poetry grew, and by them, and by the way in which he held them, carefully keeping them apart from all intellectual definition and in the realm of faith alone, he is separated on the one side from all those poets who either ignore these things like Keats or profess disbelief in them like Shelley, and on the other side from all those poets who like Milton, Byron, or Browning have a definite theology in their poetry. These things, then, may justly be said with regard to the religious elements in the poetry of Tennyson, and they are all contained in In Memoriam; nay more, they are the very basis of that poem. But the assertion of them does not answer the question: What relation does Tennyson's poetry bear to Christianity? For all these beliefs might be held by a Theist-even by one who ignored or depreciated the teaching of Jesus. If Tennyson is then to be claimed as a Christian poet it must be shown that he considered Jesus to be the great proclaimer of these truths, the one who concentrated into Himself the religious truths which before Him had been in man, re-formed them in His own thought, and issued them with new power and charged with new love, to claim the belief of men. This certainly was Tennyson's position.* So far as that goes, Tennyson was distinctly Christian, and this is the position of a great * In Memoriam, xxxvi. 66 number of persons at the present day. But if that be all, then a great number of persons will deny him the right to call himself a Christian. In their mind a Christian man must have a distinct faith in Jesus as God, as the unique Saviour of man, and as a revealer of God in a way different in kind from that in which we can call any other person a saviour or revealer. Is that view contained in Tennyson's poetry? We cannot take the phrases concerning Christ used in the Idylls of the King, or such phrases as Him who died for me" in The May Queen, as any proof of his views, for these might be said to be only local colour; but when we come to In Memoriam we have before us a poem exceedingly personal and distinctly theological; and Christ is called there" The Life indeed"; His power to raise the dead is confessed; He is the receiver of the souls of the dead into the world beyond this world; He is the Word of God that breathed human breath and wrought out the faith with human deeds. This is not enough to make Tennyson, as a poet, an orthodox Christian in the doctrinal sense, but it is enough to place him among those who confess Jesus as the Light of the world, as their spiritual Master, their Life; and that with a distinctness which does not belong to any other of the great poets of this century, so far as their poetry is concerned. This position becomes a certainty if the introduction to In Memoriam-beginning "Strong Son of God, immortal Love"-be an address to Jesus. I think it is, and that this is the most natural explanation; but nevertheless it is left vague. On the whole, there is no clear doctrinal What is not left vague, what is quite clear, is that Tennyson is more Christian than Theist; that no mere Theist could have said the things that he has said in In Memoriam. This absence of definite doctrine, which is the reason many persons say that Tennyson was not a Christian (holding the amusing theory that the Nicene Creed rather than the teaching of Jesus is the test of Christianity) is, first of all, necessitated by his art; secondly, it is in itself Christian. Definite doctrinal statements are, as I said, abhorrent to poetry. They belong to the world of the understanding, to the world of analysis—a world in which the artist cannot breathe at ease, and in which, if he continue, his art decays and dies. They take him out of the illimitable sky in which the imagination flies towards the unknown, the yet unconceived, and the ever-varying unchangeable. Had Tennyson defined his view of Jesus, he would never have said "Ring in the Christ which is to be." In that line the idea of Christ and his Gospel in mankind is given an infinite extension. We may give the phrase fifty meanings, and we shall not exhaust it; and a hundred years hence it will have totally different meanings allotted to it by the gentlemen who wish to define. Secondly, this absence of propositions invented by the intellect, in which ideas like the immanence of God in man are limited to one meaning, in which the Fatherhood of God or the brotherhood of man is rendered particular instead of being left universal, is in harmony with the teaching of Jesus. He proclaimed truths which He believed to be universal-God's Fatherhood, man's brotherhood, love as the absolute life of God and of man, personal immortality in God, the forgiveness of sin-but He never put these into any fixed intellectual form; He never attempted to prove them by argument; He never limited them by a prosiac statement of their import; He never took them out of the realm of love and faith; He never gave them a special shape or organised them into a body of belief. He left them free, left them as spirit and life; and as to their form, every nation and kindred and tongue, every kind of society, nay, every person, could give them whatever intellectual shape each of them pleased. If they were loved and felt, and the love at the root of them expressed in the action of a life, I do not believe that Jesus cared at all what form they took in the understanding, or how they were organised into ritual and creed-provided only the form or the organisation did not contradict the universality of the love of God, or the universality of the love between man and man which was contained in them. Theological creeds were nothing to Jesus, but their limitations which produced hatreds and cruelties and quarrels, these, to this hour, He looks upon with the pity and the indignation of love. The absence then of definite opinions about infinite truths, which is the necessary position of the poet, which was the position of Tennyson in his poetry, is the position of Christ Himself. 66 Again, Christianity does not take the same ground as ethics, nor was Christ, primarily, a moral teacher. “This do and thou shalt live," the moralist says, and it is a good thing to say. "When you have done all," says Jesus, carrying the whole matter of life into boundless aspiration," say, We are unprofitable servants, we have done only what it was our duty to do." "Lord, how oft shall I forgive my brother? Unto seven times? Surely there must be some definition." Unto seven times?" answered Christ, in astonishment at any limit to forgiveness—“ nay, any number of times-to seventy times seven!" "All these things," cried the young moralist, "all these duties, I have kept from my youth up. What lack I yet?" That was the cry of the ideal in him the inward longing for something more than conduct for the unknown perfection. And Jesus, answering this aspiration to the ideal, to those unreached summits of love which transcend duty-said, “Sell what thou hast, and give to the poor, and come and follow me." "Whom shall I love," they asked; my relations, my friends, my own nation, the members of my Church? Where is the limit ? ” There is no limit, was the teaching of Jesus; the infinitude of God's love is your true aim. "Love your enemies, do good to them that hate you; so you will be like your Father in heaven, whose sun shines on the evil and good alike." "Shall I be content with the duties which I can do, with the love I can certainly give to my fellow-men, with the plain things which lie before me in this world, with the 66 |