And once at least we see in a lovely verse of the poem to F. D. Maurice, the Channel and the ships :

Where, if below the milky steep
Some ship of battle slowly creep,

And on thro' zones of light and shadow
Glimmer away to the lonely deep.

One other sea-piece, amid all these collected aspects of observant truth, I myself saw realised. I used to think that the phrase "wrinkled sea," in the fragment called The Eagle, was too bold. But one day I stood on the edge of the cliff below Slieve League in Donegal. The cliff from which I looked down on the Atlantic was nine hundred feet in height. Besides me the giant slope of Slieve League plunged down from its summit for more than eighteen hundred feet. As I gazed down on the sea below which was calm in the shelter, for the wind blew off the land, the varying puffs that eddied in and out among the hollows and juttings of the cliffs covered the quiet surface with an infinite network of involved ripples. It was exactly Tennyson's wrinkled sea. Then, by huge good fortune, an eagle which built on one of the ledges of Slieve League, flew out of his eyrie and poised, barking, on his wings; but in a moment fell precipitate, as their manner is, straight down a thousand feet to the sea. And I could not help crying

out:

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.

A

YLMER'S FIELD seems from one point of

view to have been written as a contrast to Enoch Arden. Enoch Arden was a tale of humble life and of a fisherman's self-sacrifice. Aylmer's Field is a tale of a life on a higher social level, and of the other than self-sacrifices hag-ridden persons in it sometimes make. Enoch sacrificed himself for the sake of those he loved. Sir Aylmer sacrificed his daughter and his friend for the sake of his sickly pride. Enoch dies, Sir Aylmer dies, but the one leaves tenderness and happiness behind him and the other bitterness and desolation. The law of Love with its sanctions is embodied in these two quiet tales; is gathered round. simple circumstances, and is woven in and out with common human passions made mean or exalted in various characters. The stories are set in carefully painted scenery, and are lit and warmed by a steadily burning fire of imagination.

But though this doctrine of love arises from both

poems (in one of which its fulfilment is shown and in the other its negation) the poems themselves cannot be accused of a conscious ethical aim. Their driving

power is not morality, but the love of human nature and the desire not to make beautiful its outgoings. Moreover, if Tennyson had aimed at the truth that self-forgetfulness is the mother of Life and self-remembrance the mother of Death, he would still have done his work within an artist's sphere. For that truth is spiritual, not moral. Its doings belong to impulses of love arising freely from within, not to laws of conduct imposed from without. As such, it is a subject fitted for art, and the fact is that the impression made by both these poems is first and foremost an art-impression.

The next thing to say is that Aylmer's Field is not so good a piece of art as Enoch Arden. It is not so much at unity with itself. It ranges too quickly from simplicity to sensationalism, and the sensational elements become more and more sensational. And Tennyson was entirely out of his element in this realm of writing. The sensational was not native to his character, and when an artist steps outside of his character into a kind of art for which he is naturally unfitted, he is sure to overstrain the effort he makes. The art of a flamboyant writer has its native limits, its native rules. When a writer who has nothing flamboyant (and I apologise for this term) in his nature, attempts that kind of literary architecture, he exceeds its limits and he breaks its rules. This is the case in Aylmer's Field. The dagger business is too

like a novel. The wrath of Sir Aylmer when he drives out Leolin is more violent than even the weakness of his character permits. The sermon, though just possible, is quite improbable. The scene in the church is more than the poetic stage on which the tale is written is capable of bearing. The suicide is feebler than the hero, feeble as he is. In fact, the hero is too light a person to choose for a poem of this kind, but if he be chosen, he ought to be made more worthy of manhood, and of the girl he loves. He should have at least one parenthesis of strength in his life. It is not that the characters are out of nature, their conduct is fully possible. But from the point of view of art, they just overstep the edge of the natural-a little too violent, a little too solemn, a little too weak for their characters as drawn at the beginning, a little more extreme than the motives permit.

In Enoch Arden a strong character dominates the piece, and the prevalent overshadowing of this one character (even during his ten years of absence) binds the whole poem into unity. In Aylmer's Field, no character is dominant, and only circumstances connect the personages. The girl alone, and she passes through the action almost like a painted dream, leaves much impression on the heart. But separately, the portraiture is effective. Since the characters do not weave themselves together, we are the more forced to look at them apart from one another, like pictures on a wall. From that point of view they are full of interest, worthy of study, and real

ised here and there in single lines with a master's pencil. When it is said of Edith that she was

bounteously made,

And yet so finely that a troublous touch

Thinn'd, or would seem to thin her in a day,

we are made, in a word, to feel the girl through and through. Not less subtle and clean-edged are the portraits of Sir Aylmer, of his wife, of the Indian cousin who flashes in and out of the hall, of Leolin himself in his petulant love, his foaming wrath, and his shrill suicide, of the parson prophesying against the world to relieve his own indignant misery, and of the parents smitten at last to the quick of their pride, and staggering home to die. These are admirable, but they would have been more admirable had they all been wrought together.

No

And the result, the emotional impression left behind by this work of art, is not of humanity rising above the fates of life by dint of love, but of humanity crushed by the fates of life because of self-thought. The impression we receive is one of human weakness and nothing else, and it belongs to every one of the characters. doubt, an artist can feel such a subject, but is it worth his while to take it? It does not purify the imagination from fear of life, from contempt of humanity, or from petty anger with the common destinies of man. It does not set free high emotion. We are left in the common not the exalted world, in the sphere of social ethics, not in the spiritual sphere of art.

I cannot help thinking that Tennyson was half-con