of the science of historical criticism to the New Testament stories and to the history of the Early Church, so that the outward authority for immortality passed away from the minds of multitudes, and with it that which is bound up with it-the belief in a Divine Father of mankind.

And, now, among those-the greater number, it is true who still clung to these faiths, there was no longer peace. Doubts, incessant questions troubled them; faith veiled her face for long periods. Men and women fought and still fight for the truths dearest to them, as Arthur fought with his foes in that dim, weird battle of the West, in a chill and blinding vapour, and looking up to heaven only see the mist.

.Then it was that Tennyson-and it is from his poetry alone that I gather this-shaken out of his certainty in In Memoriam, feeling all the new trouble of the world, took up again the sword against his own questionings and against the scepticism of the world in which he lived. The mystery of the pains of life, side by side with a God of love, deepened around him. No creed, no faith, seemed to completely answer it. more, he felt that the only chance of an answer was in clinging to the conviction of a life to come in which all shall be wrought into union with God. Once or twice he was carried beyond tolerance into hot indignation with those who took away what he believed to be the only reply to the problem of pain and evil.

But all the

"

In his poem of Despair he denounced the know

nothings," as he called them, as well as the liars who held eternal punishment, and with equal wrath and vigour. In The Promise of May he painted, and unfairly, the materialist as almost necessarily immoral. He need not have been so angry, and he did no good by the passages of attack in those poems. Had he believed more at the time he wrote them he would not have been so violent. He would have felt that, if all men were God's children, it mattered little whether these persons denied immortality or not. They would find out the truth in the end, and their disbelief could do no final harm to them or to mankind. However, as his life went on, his anger seemed to pass away. He resumed his old method of warfare the method of the artist-the appeal to love, the appeal to the heart of man, the appeal to the incredibility of all the glory and all the growth of man, of all the dreadfulness of his fate, being alike closed in universal death. Many are the poems in his later volumes, poems like Vastness, for example, which take up this artist-position. At last, as it seems, all his distress ceased in quiet, in a faith even more settled than that of In Memoriam. Some trouble still lives in the last volume, published while he was yet alive. Vastness still strikes a wavering note. He says in another poem that, “In spite of every creed and faith, Life is the Mystery." In the poem, By an Evolutionist, the end seems a matter of hope rather than of certainty. The last poem in the book, Crossing the Bar, is the first clear cry of happy faith-all doubt and trouble past; and it is a quiet

faith that persists through the new volume which contains his last words to the people of England. The Making of Man, while it accepts evolution, carries it onward to the perfect accomplishment of all humanity in God:

Hallelujah to the Maker. It is finished. Man is made.

The Dreamer has no uncertainty. Doubt and Prayer and Faith, the one following the other, assert that "Love is his Father, Brother, and his God," and that Death flings open the gates of all that we desire in the heart. God and the Universe, written on the threshold of death, reveals that all the fear of dissolution has gone for ever. "The face of Death is toward the Sun of Life-his truer name is Onward,'" so the poet speaks again to the mourners in the last poem of his last book.

This faithful fighter then, who stood, like Horatius, for sixty years defending the strait bridge of faith in immortal life, defending it against his own doubts and those of his time, laid down his arms at last, conscious of his victory. Time will tell whether it is a victory also for us. For my part, I have no shadow of doubt as to the conclusion the world will finally come to on this matter; and when that conclusion is reached, the long battle of Tennyson for the Christian faith, for God as the Father of all, and for the necessary inference of immortality from that primary declaration of Christ Jesus, will be acknowledged by the steady gratitude of mankind.

III

Tennyson's Relation to Social Politics.—I now turn, in this Introduction, to Tennyson's relation to the movement of Humanity.

In literature as in Nature there is continuity of development, and the germs of the subjects which the new poetry of any generation develops into full-foliaged trees are to be found in the poetry which preceded that new poetry. The poetry of Nature, as fully written by Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats, had, as it were, a child-life before their time. The theological poetry of Browning, of Tennyson, of a host of minor poets, arose out of certain tendencies of thought and emotion which were expressed, in opposition to the orthodox theology of their time, by Byron and Shelley. 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