appreciation of their charm. A tree is a tree to him, a flower a flower, and nothing more. They are so and so, he says, and he describes them as lovely forms of matter, or of what seems so to us. He tells beautifully how they seem to his eyes, with great and delightful power, but that is all he does; and we desire something more, something which will leave us "less forlorn" in Nature. We want to touch life and feel it replying to our life, Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea, Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn. This is the main statement, and it seems to me true. Individual lines or short passages might be brought forward from which we might infer that he now and then touched some view which thought of a living Nature. But this is only momentary, and he drifts within a few pages into another view, and then into another view. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Keats, Shelley had each of them one clear conception of Nature; and all the natural description of each was influenced and ruled by the special view held by each of them. Tennyson wavered from view to view. Sometimes he seems to hold that God is full master of the universe. Then he slips in another place into the view that Nature may be partly in the hands of an evil power and its cruel will. Sometimes he seems to think that Nature is the image our distorted perceptions make of a divine order and beauty which may be spiritual, or may be material; sometimes that she is the form Thought takes to us, and therefore immaterial; sometimes that she is nothing but matter, nothing more than the scientific materialist declares her to be. But none of these views are fixed; no single one of them is chosen and believed. They run in and out of one another. He wavers incessantly, like the pure sceptic, and the result is that all he says about Nature by herself makes no unity of impression upon thought. What is fixed, what is clear, what does emerge in his poetry, after all these philosophic views have been played with, is Nature as she appears to the senses, the material world in all its variety, beauty, and sublimity, seen as it is on the outside. "Let me tell," he thinks, "beautifully and truly the facts. I see nothing certainly but forms, and these I will describe." And these he does describe, with an accuracy unparalleled by any other English poet, and with a wonderful beauty and finish of words. This is the influence of his scientific reading upon him, or rather of the scientific trend of thought during the years in which he wrote his chief poems. His Naturepoetry was materialised; it never suggests a life in Nature; and it is probably owing to his not feeling any- · thing in Nature which spoke to him-soul to soul-that he did not, after his earlier poems, ever appear to love Nature for her own sake, or care to live with her alone. By herself, she was not sufficient for him. In fact, I do not think that I am exaggerating when I say that the Nature-poetry of this century, which was founded either on the conception of a life in Nature, or on enjoyment of her beauty and sublimity for her own sake alone, without any admixture of humanity, is not at all represented in Tennyson. Its decay in him makes his position in the history of the modern poetry of Nature of great interest. Moreover, that he naturally took a line on this matter of Nature which was new, and which on the whole harmonised with a time given up to the scientific view of the outward world, marks out, not only his keen individuality, but his original genius. Of course this says that there is no sentiment in Tennyson's description of Nature-and this is true. when he is describing Nature alone, as she is in herself. It is not true when he introduces humanity into the scene. Then he groups Nature round the feelings of men and women, and the human sentiment is reflected on the physical world. Or he takes Nature up into the life and heart of man, and, in illustrating man by Nature, colours Nature by human feeling; or he composes a Nature in harmony with his own moods and those of his personages, and this composed Nature is really humanity. In all these ways Nature is made full of sentiment. And the work he has thus done on her is most lovely, far lovelier than his painting, beautiful as it is, of natural things by themselves in lucid words and with exquisite care. But the whole body of sentiment which then flows through the natural world is human, and only human. It is associated with the landscape. It does not come out of Nature herself—as it would have done in the writings of Wordsworth or Scott or Byron or Shelley or Keats. That distinctiveness, however, makes us only the more eager to feel the humanised Nature of Tennyson, and to get from it the pleasure that it gives. It is a different kind of pleasure from that given to us by the other poets in regard of Nature; or rather, the kind of beauty which gives that pleasure was more fully wrought out by Tennyson than by any of the others. We are charmed, then, by his Nature-poetry when it is humanised, or when we wish to remember ourselves in the midst of Nature. But when we wish to get rid of humanity and to get rid of self-consciousness, to touch a Soul in Nature, to feel her life beat on our life, to love her for herself alone, in her solitudes-we find nothing in Tennyson to help us. We are forced back by his Nature-poetry either into human life, or into the world. of mere phenomena. CHAPTER XVI THE LATER POEMS Tis not an infrequent habit of an artist to try over IT again in old age the kinds of work which pleased his youth. This is his way of re-living the days when he was young. Other men do this in the silence of memory. The artist does it in work; and I may gather within this simple framework the greater number of those later poems of Tennyson which reach a high excellence, or have a special quality. He reverted to his classical, romantic, and theological interests. He felt over again the poetic sentiment of friendship which was a characteristic mark of his youthful poetry, but he felt it with a natural difference. He felt over again in memory, and reproduced, also with the natural difference, the imaginative ardour of a youth for Nature and love When all the secret of the Spring, And, lastly, he returned, and with extraordinary force, |