Class £l£ Book n -^ Copyright N^. COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. (t^c Jb^de anb tfje Jtgee \->L ;a IJaluatton of Cennp-- 0on'0 3JD?>U0 of tliie mtng a ilo0ue to ?Dramat<6 "Ptrii Bonx *'The very God! think, Abib; dost thou think? So, the All-Great, were the All- Loving too — So through the thunder comes a human voice Saying, ' O heart I made, a heart beats here I Face, my hands fashioned, see it in myself! Thou hast no power nor mayst conceive of mine, But love I gave thee, with myself to love. And thou must love me who have died for thee ! " Nor does he hesitate to identify this Christ fig- ure with God. The fervor with which he puts this confession into the mouth of St. John is not merely dramatic; there is enough of the same strain in his other poetry to warrant us in calling it his own personal conviction : **I say, the acknowledgement of God in Christ Accepted by thy reason, solves for thee All questions in the earth and out of it. And has so far advanced thee to be wise." Nay, when, in the Epilogue to Dramatis Per- sonam, he speaks in his own person, after hav- ing sounded the minds of David and Renan, to give supreme answer to the question "how heaven's high with earth's low should inter- twine," his conclusion, drawn from data of pure individualism, is: "That one Face, far from vanish, rather grows, Or decomposes but to recompose. Become my universe that feels and knows." In this, independent as was his approach to it, we cannot attribute to him any essential break with the acceptedChristology of the evangelical creed. He has thought out the problem for him- self, and arrived at the orthodox conclusion. For the rest, however, he does not reproduce or coordinate details of the historic Person- 20 age's life, nor in all the range of his portrayals (ICtje 3lb^iC6 does he essay to create a personage of his own ^j^^ ^R^ which in any comprehensive degree embodies TTyj-^g the large fulness of Christlike manhood. That ^ is not his way. Rather, he portrays individual fragments of the idea, as it were, not the drama with its mighty Protagonist but the ** Drama- tis Personae," with their varied bents and pow- ers: a David, a Pope Innocent, a Caponsacchi, a Pompilia; nor shunning the while to find re- deeming traits in many a figure of less heroic mould, a Paracelsus, a Era Lippo Lippi, a Luria, a Hohenstiel-Schwangau. Their work in the social fabric he leaves us to infer, if we will, from their spirit and fitness ; but we see them merely in situ. The social problem was not his to solve, but the endlessly varied pro- blem of the individual. It is the individual soul that counts with him, not the soul corporate ; — as he makes Tiburzio say in Luria : "A people is but the attempt of many To rise to the completer life of one ; And those who live as models for the mass Are singly of more value than they all." turia, act v. 2ed Always the poet of the individual initiative and the supreme moment,— this is what we are aware of in Browning. Just here it is that Tennyson's difference be- comes most pronounced and potent. To him too the ideal manhood was the product of a kind of voyage of discovery; but as befits a clergyman's son, bred in the establishment, the accepted Christology was taken for granted, as a point of departure, from which he would set 21 (Ude 3bv((6 ®"^ ^^ annex new realms or applications. And L . g ^ in thus cutting loose from the theological tra- ^0 trie dition he was as truly an amateur philosopher *^&^^ as Browning was an amateur theologian ; from both careers, indeed, we get the sense of a thinker invading a sphere of exploration to which he was not born. Nay, we may say their distinction as leaders comes from this fact; they give new vitality to thoughts that through perfunctory treatment were becoming steril- ized. We have just seen how Browning res- cued the concept of the ideal man from steril- ity, by emphasizing its individualized parts, en- dowments, achievements, and bringing down the divine to supplement them. But another way of rescue also was needed, an opposite ap- proach; for the concept may just as truly be- come sterile by being imprisoned in the jargon of theology or confined to a history long ago enacted in Palestine. It was to this second way that Tennyson's thoughts and temperament gravitated. To his inner vision, as to Brown- ing's, there rose early in his career a Christ figure transmuted as it were into modern linea- ments ; a concept that he carried with him full half a century before its final contour was com- plete and its finishing touch added. In one as- pect and another this concept gathered into itself the essential juices of a life's meditation, as did the Faust figure the sixty years' medita- tion of Goethe. But in orbing thus into a great type figure this idealized Personage of Tenny- son's must needs be related to an organic realm and a social world; must have united with it 22 a chapter of communal development, an era (^(jc 3[5pff$ of active principle and sentiment toned by a ^^^^ ^g^ knightly order. This Personage, which, going v^f^J back to the early traditions of the British na- *^»^^ tion, he shaped and refined from prehistoric materials, he endowed with kingliness and modern chivalry and named King Arthur; his unspoken ideal being to embody in a single figure at once the Englishman's epic hero and the Englishman's Messiah. Of the historic Christ, unlike Browning, he al- ways took the essential and typical view rather than the factual and personal ; recognizing in him, as did Mary of Bethany, the Life Indeed, and directing his prayer not to a form of man or God but to a supreme attribute in which man and God could share alike : "Strong Son of God, immortal Love, Whom we, that have not seen thy face, By faith, and faith alone, embrace, 5n iDcmoriam Believing where we cannot prove." beginning This, however, belongs, as we may say, to the hidden metaphysic of his ideal. For the flesh- and-blood realizatidn of it he sought rather a typical incarnation whom he could identify with modern motives and aims, and who should ap- pear in position as the conscience of a social order. Hence his choice of the "flos regum Ar- turus" of old Joseph of Exeter; on whom his musings began a full decade before he called on the wild New Year bells to " Ring in the Christ that is to be." ^" memoriam Thus, as we see, he takes the divine element of life the other way round from Browning. He 23 dCtje 3hv((6 sets manhood rising by evolutionary steps to- anb tde ward it by emulating in its institutions *'the ry J perfect man, the measure of the stature of the JiQ^^ fulness of Christ," instead of making it yearn down from heaven to meet a supreme human achievement, or gleam out from unsuspected places in individual humanity. From the beginning of his meditation on the Arthur story he felt, as is quoted in his Me- moir, that there was no greater subject in the world. From the beginning, too, it would seem, though his sense of its magnitude sometimes almost eclipsed it, its grand epic possibility was in his mind, germinating and growing. This feel- ing of his huge theme, in fact, generated al- most too great a degree of modesty ; the thrust of the completed epic suffers somewhat from it. For a while he plays with the idea, so to say, as in irresponsible dreams. In the epilogue af- fixed to his Morte D' Arthur, his first serious Arthurian venture, his light touch, albeit light, conveys a very earnest and essential note of his conception : "And so to bed; where yet in sleep I seem'd To sail with Arthur under looming shores, Point after point ; till on to dawn, when dreams Begin to feel the truth and stir of day, To me, methought, who waited with a crowd. There came a bark that, blowing forward, bore King Arthur, like a modern gentleman Of stateliest port ; and all the people cried, 'Arthur is come again: he cannot die.' Then those that stood upon the hills behind Repeated — ' Come again, and thrice as fair ; ' IDortc JD* ar// And, further inland, voices echo'd - * Come tl?ur, epilogue With all good things, and war shall be no more.'" 24 From this modest foregleam of his purpose, our minds travel forward nearly half a century; during which time we see him in that little at- tic room at Farringford penning the first four Idylls, or pacing the Maiden's Croft back and forth as he composes The Holy Grail ; and when in 1891 he writes the last revising line of his completed epic, inserting it lest, as he says, "perhaps he had not made the real humanity of the King sufficiently clear in his epilogue," his finished conception is "Ideal manhood dosed in real man." Thus, in his own words, we have the beginning and the end of Tennyson's most comprehensive life study : the Christlike manhood, divested of dogmatic and ecclesiastical presuppositions, and working its work in a period of history which can be symbolically identified with the English nineteenth century. How different this from Browning's attitude and ideal, yet with what fine supplementation answering thereto, like the completing arc in the same vast orbit, we cannot fail to see. anb t^c moir, tool, ii p. 12d JdflU epilogue, 3$ 25 m 3f5pff6 anb finie^cb (Bfic Cpcfe <^ I ' HE separate Idylls of the King did not vJL come before the world in a way at all favorable to revealing either their epic fibre or their epic unity. They did not lay claim to either quality ; could not well do so until the whole series was finished. Published at uncertain in- tervals and in hap-hazard order, from 1858, or more truly from 1842, to 1885, they modestly purported to be nothing more than modern- ized tales of chivalry and romance, elegantly wrought detached pictures, etSuXXta, all belong- ing to one epoch, but having only the name "the King" in the title as ostensible binding- thread. It was in genial accord with this appar- ent character that they were accepted and read ; mostly, it would seem, by youthful-minded peo- ple in whom fancies still ran high and the sense of poetic beauty was a vital passion. Tennyson's exquisite earlier work had in fact been select- ing and educating his audience ; and for the most part the Idylls were welcomed with an acclaim which our present day seldom accords to poetry. Fitzgerald, however, who in 1835 had listened to the Morte D'Arthur with hearty praise, began to growl, deeming that Tenny- son was swerving from the work that he was cut out to do. If we take this intimate friend of the poet as a kind of thermometer of apprecia- 26 tion, the question rises, was Tennyson's tern- ^g^ 3bv(($ perature advancing beyond Fitzgerald's sta- ( .^ ^ tionary mark, or was Tennyson, in real virile ^ " fibre, falling below himself? It must be con- ^Q^^ fessed, the question was an open one. The main critical verdict passed upon the poems was that they were things of finished wizard beauty, richly laden, enchanting, almost cloy- ing; while of under-knitting strength, or of any appreciable epic trend, there was little if any presage. They were read for themselves, not for their relation and coordination. Following the first lotos influence a reaction soon set in. The central personage, Arthur, came in for the main attack : he was decried as an impeccable prig, who talked like a curate. The central cul- prit, Guinevere, whose sensuous appetency for Lancelot's warmth and color was undisguis- edly sympathized with, was championed by the Morris and Swinburne school as a hapless vic- tim of royalty and diplomatic marriage, into whose embittered mind, naturally enough, "old thoughts would crowd iOorriff "Belonging to the time ere [she] was bought xi^e pcfcncc By Arthur's great name and his little love." of :6uinevere Such, in chilling measure, was the handicap- ping fate that began to overtake the Idylls be- fore they were finished enough to be called in from their detached and unordered currency among more or less casual readers. Their epic strain, if indeed they contained such, was as it were in solution, apprehensible only by a refined spirit-sense. When, however, in 1869 four more poems, added to the original four, 27 JiQce flttje 36pff0 supplied the beginning, the culmination, and anb ttfC ^^^ ^^^ ^^ ^ course of Idylls, a new critical judgment set in: the wide-spread and rather idle notion that the poems were allegorical ; a notion that Tennyson vigorously protested should not be pressed too far. They were in fact allegorical merely in the sense that every great chapter of life, read in its real meanings, is a virtual allegory, a parable, with all its deeds and events rich in second intention. No truth is more certain than this, that so far as we live inwardly we live in figure ; and the Idylls began to seem figurative simply and solely because they began to reveal their in- wardness. What call to retell these old Arthu- rian tales at all, indeed, if there did not pulsate in them something beyond the legend and the letter? This deeper something, however, was not in an arbitrary poetic shaping, fact or tra- dition turned into moralizing figure. It was in the substance. Accordingly, the allegory theory, once broached, was bound to suffer on both sides : the thing would neither go on all fours, like Bunyan's or Spenser's, nor would it cease to steal in between the lines as a haunting and elusive suggestion. With all their transparent clarity of tissue, in truth, the Idylls contained a subtle element of enigma, which would not down. Nor was it until 1885, when the last- written of them, Balin and Balan, was pub- lished, and the whole series was put into con- secutive order and divided into the conven- tional twelve books, that the general public became aware of a larger and weightier inten- 28 tion on the part of the poet; the intention, (C0e 3f5pff6 namely, that the series should be read not as ^^5 jg^ many poems merely but as one poem, with one tt^^^ interrelation of parts, one thread of story, one ^^^^ dominating epic idea. He used indeed, while they were growing-, playfully to call them "his epic." The time now revealed that his playful words had been dead earnest. From this uni- tary point of view it is, then, not from the ear- lier one to which the exigences of composition and publication compelled us, that we ought to compute their intrinsic and permanent values. In their completed epic form the Idylls of the King have now been before the world one-and- twenty years. The most ambitious and deeply cherished work of the poet's life, the work into which he infused the ripened meditation of half a century, has thus attained its majority. Is not the time fitting, then, to inquire what this ma- jority date brings or holds still intact : whether now we may accord to the work the rights of wise and liberal manhood and let it speak to us on deep themes as a sage ; or whether we must coldly relegate it to the nonage of outgrown fancies and dreams, or stow it away in our li- braries as a splendid monument of time-serv- ing literature. Contemplated as one tissue, one trend of vital purpose, what is its central thrust, what are its values? The question has not re- ceived its adequate answer yet. 29 XV Ji poeticad^ ^eali^cb p^Uoeoptj^ ^23r*VERY man, as Tennyson used to say, VjL imputes himself. It is so in this magnum opus of his. The very core of Tennyson's self, of the ideal which was his life, is imputed here. And it is the core of a personality which, as all who knew agree in saying, loomed much greater than the work he did. A curious dis- crepancy, in fact, and one hard to resolve, has been noted. The poetic work that we have from him is pure and polished beauty; the man was rugged massive strength. His very face and mien, like that of an old-time British king, his conversation, so wise and weighty, seemed al- most to belie that delicate artistry of his ; it was as if a Michael Angelesque sculptor had taken to carving cameos and intaglios. Yet even to popular apprehension the personality seemed dimly to show through the poetic glamour; it was not entirely undiscovered ; in the Globe edi- tion of Sir Thomas Malory's Morte D'Arthur, as a slight indication, the vignette of the title- page, representing King Arthur in robe and crown, is a portrait of Alfred Tennyson. How then, we are impelled to ask, did such a per- sonality manage— or happen— so to diffuse and disguise itself in a haze of poetic fancy and delicacy that we must needs have recourse to a penetrative spirit-sense to disentangle it? 30 ^^ee What pulsation of a personal heart of oak is (l£^e 3lhv(i6 connoted, for instance, by that feminine diathe- ^^j) jg^ sis to which his thought so inveterately gravi- tates,— the Enids and Lynettes and Ettarres and Viviens and Isolts and Elaines and Guine- veres who are always at the storm-centre of his plot? These are Idylls of the King ; and yet the first four of them were all named by women's names. Our answer to this inquiry, and therewith as I think the clue to his appraisal of supreme val- ues, lies largely in a just understanding of his intrinsic mind and art. The idiom to which Browning's art had in- stinctive recourse, as a glance makes us aware, was the psychological. "The development of a soul —little else is worth study,"— is how, in his preface to Sordello, he defines his main in- terest. Accordingly, from the beginning of his career he plunged with youthful ardor and youthful rashness into the thickets of psycho- logical activities ;— as in Pauline he said of his soul: "It has strange impulse, tendency, desire, Which nowise I account for nor explain. . . How can my life indulge them? yet they live, Referring to some state of life unknown." "pauUnc, 595 Browning was thinker first and poet after- ward; so imperatively so that his poetic art well-nigh breaks or comes near being outraged under his thick-crowding throng of headlong thoughts. Not so with Tennyson. Nay, almost the diametrical opposite was so. Tennyson was poet first, poet always. From the earliest his 31 (lERe 3f5yff6 whole career, on one side, was a strenuous ap- anb tBe prenticeship in the details of this most exqui- rj^ ' site of the fine arts. His idiom, equally instinc- *^(i^^ tive with Browning's, was the descriptive, the translation of values into terms of sight and sound. Hence, whatever of deeper and more ab- stract thought came to him, must come en- dowed with the imagery, the unerring touch, the minor graces, of masterly sense perception. He translated life as he saw it into the^'simple, sensuous, impassioned" medium which, as Mil- ton held, is essential to supreme poetic utter- ance. So, in his severe devotion to his art, he was loath to speak out of this picturing de- scriptive idiom, or to mingle with it, as Brown- ing and Wordsworth in their varying ways do, the idiom of the dialectical or philosophical. When, in the investigative course of his In Memoriam, he found his sorrow embarked on a profoundly psychological sea, he was at pains to disclaim the cerebrative logical method ; he must make his way otherwise : •* Her care is not to part and prove ; She takes, when harsher moods remit, What slender shade of doubt may flit, And makes it vassal unto love: "And hence, indeed, she sports with words, But better serves a wholesome law, And holds it sin and shame to draw The deepest measure from the chords: "Nor dare she trust a larger lay, But rather loosens from the lip 3n XOemoTUm ^^^^^ swallow-flights of song, that dip tlviii. 2//4 Their wings in tears, and skim away." 32 Nor was this all. By long habituation to this (^^^ Jibvite accurately descriptive art, which in its field ^„i. ^o^ was quite analogous to the systematic obser- r*^ ^ vation of a scientist, he developed a kind of *^^^^ sixth sense, a sense for the interrelated total- ity of things, as they act upon all our senses at once; fusing our unbidden thoughts into one web of consciousness wherein the whole man is awake in every part. It was, though less dreamy and passive, some such a state as Wordsworth had earlier described : ''that serene and blessed mood In which the affections gently lead us on, — Until, the breath of this corporeal frame And even the motion of our human blood Almost suspended, we are laid asleep In body, and become a living soul; While with an eye made quiet by the power Wordoworri? Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, Xintern Sbbef We see into the life of things. " 41 Or, to put it in more technical terms, he devel- oped an instinct not only for the imagery but for the architectonics of his thought-world, a structure wherein all parts should hang to- gether and form a cosmos, its discords resolved in harmony, and all suffused with the atmo- sphere of finished unity. As early as his first published volume Arthur Hallam had written of him : " No poet can fairly be judged of by fragments, least of all a poet, like Mr. Tenny- son, whose mind conceives nothing isolated, nothing abrupt, but every part with reference to some other part, and in subservience to the ^l^^.^^auam*^ idea of the whole." «k. p. no We can think how this attitude to his art 33 JTgee /C0C 3bviC6 would work when, leaving the smaller world of anb tfie individual sights and fancies, he entered the ' larger world of elemental energies and prin- ciples, —when, in other words, he essayed a philosophy of life. The instincts of his long- studied workmanship, his descriptive and lyric art on the one hand, his exacting sense of cos- mic order and interrelation on the other, must in like fulness be appeased. The quality of minute and inevitable finish in a great poem is in its way eminently rewarding. We cannot slight the masterful artistry which creates a full-orbed poetic world, wherein all as- pects of time and season are in their ordained place, wherein all the unnoted influences of na- ture, the undertow of general sentiment and custom, and the accurate motivation of epic event, are all moving together to one coordinate result. Such is the tissue that we note most comprehensively in the completed Idylls of the King. The work smiles with the beauty of a sunlit and harmonious landscape, yet is self- evidencing and inevitable, like a chapter of cos- mic fate. At the same time, it must be owned, we get this high quality at a sacrifice. A finely wrought portrayal like this does not bite, does not bring the reader up in a vigor of reaction. It lacks the thrust and inspiration of unique achievement, or Satanic defiance, or audacious uprise of spirit to new tracts of being. So its addition to the sum-total of manhood is not so much that of heroic individuality as of a Round Table, an era of communal order, wherein all elements must move upward together, not with- 34 out the danger that some alloy of evil may spoil (^^c 3lbvtte the whole and make the music mute. Its con- ception of vital powers is not Homeric but Vir- gilian : "Spiritus intus alit, totamque infusa per artus toirga, Meneid Mens agitat molem et magno se corpore miscet." vi. 726 Thus its very finish, if we are seeking Brown- ing's towering impulsive values, is its weak- ness. If our quest is for its strength, we must needs seek this in the tempered conservative values of another order, values which, when we find them, may prove to be no whit the less real and momentous for being less obtrusive. Tennyson's philosophy of life, coming as a kind of evolved afterthought, and having to be transmuted into terms of a concrete poetic ar- tistry, remained always essentially descriptive, a philosophy conveyed in a sensuous and pic- turesque medium, aided by his remarkable power of clean phrasing. The results must be reckoned with fairly and penetratively. To one who cannot follow the transmutation all the way to poet-land it plight look superficially like an amateur philosophy, like what our modern slang would call butting into the metaphysic preserves. And indeed, the fact that he devel- oped his large interpretation of life slowly, nat- uralizing its abstract principles only as fast as he could make them realistic in his descriptive imagination, might easily lead one to think so. A German translator of In Memoriam, who read the poem only as a hap-hazard miscellany of elegiac lyrics, spoke of its underlying generali- zations as "philosophische Griibeleien jugend- 35 (^^C 35pff6 licher Art," philosophic twiddlings of juve- anb tSc "^^^ character, — a not unnatural judgment of Jiaee ^^^ German mind. But surely, here the poet's ® personality and life-meditation rise up to give pause to such hasty judgment. We can test the peculiar character of his philosophy, its com- bination of image and abstraction, by such poems as The Higher Pantheism, written for the first meeting of the Metaphysical Society, and De Profundis, and The Ancient Sage, and Akbar's Dream. We must, however, to be fair, estimate his philosophy by his organic world of thought, not by detached and pictured details. Nor will it pay to jump to conclusions as to its depth. Its very transparency may deceive. A philosopher runs risks in translating abstrac- tions into the sensuous and concrete ; you may thereby see its principles so clearly as to miss its hidden bearings, its threads of vital connec- tion. The poet has indeed not escaped this adverse judgment. A recent writer, to whom his con- servative spirit is not truly congenial, avers that Tennyson, for all his long dominance of his England, did not really strike into the central current of the age's spiritual movement, but stranded himself in an outlying eddy; while, as representative of the main current, he would name for chief distinction such men as Zola and Ibsen and George Meredith. Well, perhaps the question of main currents and eddies is, after all, relevant only to the mind which pronounces on them ; perhaps indeed, as in the old empire, all roads of earnest ideal lead ultimately to 36 Rome. With this matter, however, I have (^(i^ 3b^Ct6 nothing here to do. Nor am I holding a brief ^„^ ^g^ for Tennyson's superiority or supremacy in rj^ ^ thought-values. My object is merely to set forth, *^»^^ as fairly as I may, what I think they are, in this crowning work of his. For the rest, when we have the data in hand, we may safely be left to judge for ourselves. 37 (t?ic Wtimate iSoal of Itcnnpon'e ^tubf V f V * HAT these thought-values are, —have I \jj kept this answer waiting too long? It seems to me rather that its elements, or at least its groundings, have been rising luminously to view all the while. We have but to bring out and coordinate a little more, on the basis we have, and add the aspect with which specifi- cally we can connote the idea of permanence. And one thing we may premise: he was not stranded in a side-eddy of movement. He was working at a depth so far beneath, or perhaps steering for a haven so far beyond, that the world has a good stretch of sailing yet to do, albeit on the sea which its long-established ideals have made familiar, before it catches up with him. It was not for nothing, nor for any subordinate thing, that he laid out half a cen- tury's creative thought and massive personal- ity on the theme of ** ideal manhood closed in real man," expanding his concept the while to the dimensions of a world-period and a social order. The real heart of this theme, when we find it, we shall recognize as a thing that needed setting forth, and as a thing done to stay. We have spoken of the dominating person- age of the Idylls; but to resolve the poet's me- ditation into a study of the person of Arthur, whether as ideal manhood closed in real man 38 JjQe$ or as a modern gentleman of stateliest port, is /C?e 3f6pff6 only to break ground on his real subject; only ^^^5 ^g^ to construct as it were the personal scaffolding inside of which, like a fair city built to music, a great truth of life, nay the greatest, is taking form and articulation and beauty. We must penetrate to the underworld of motive and principle whence proceeds the greatness, the rounded manhood truth, without which no com- munal order can permanently survive. When we ask what this supreme principle is, we are conducted straight to the one vital sub- ject of the world;— for all subjects that have hands and feet and will and power run up ulti- mately into one. Schopenhauer may dream of the world as will and idea, Nietszche of the world as sheer overbearing will alone, but they leave unanswered the question : Will to do and be what? and their speculations run inevitably into a chaos of pessimism. Philosophers and prophets have brooded dimly upon the problem, feeling the thrill of the one solution long before they could clarify it with words, searching what or what manner of time the spirit that was in them did signify. Poets and romancers, who stand on the shoulders of the philosophers and see more intuitively, are drawn by a kind of cosmic vibration to it, as the needle is drawn to the pole. You cannot sing a living song, can- not write a popular novel, cannot make an ac- ceptable drama, whether in earnest or sport, without paying homage to it. It holds forth the one promise of restful outlook for life. What 39 ^0e 3lbvii6 ^^^^^^ proof do we need of the reality of a thing I ^c unseen than is afforded by the multitudinous 0^0 it) c musings of men who even in darkest hours and *^^^^ dimmest prospects still 3n iDcmortam "trusted God was love indeed Ivi. 4 And love Creation's final law"? What better, unless it be the lighter thoughts and feelings with which the world is laden, and with which men play? Love is, properly speak- ing, the one universal subject about which the world cares. What is the central endeavor of romance, to say nothing of poetry and elo- quence, but a tireless exploitation, in its count- less aspects, of the psychology of love? That is its recognized province. Like the fairy-tales, it is desperately set on conducting its army of mutually infected couples, out of every conceiv- able difficulty and untowardness, to the point where in the conjugal fruition of love they can "live happily ever after." But romance has contented itself, for the most part, with one section of the vast field. Stand- ing in wonder and delight before that mysteri- ous magnetism of spiritual force which seizing on two unlike hearts makes them one, "conso- nant chords that shiver to one note," and in the twinkling of an eye transforms for them the whole universe, romance is so dazzled with the sight that it looks no farther. It is enough for it to have penetrated to the beating heart of the matter, and to have nobly appropriated the central source of life's joys and potencies. But what of love in the mind as well as in the pas- sions ? What of love in the enlightened will, deal- 40 JjQce ing with the needy affairs of a world, with law (l£fjc 3f5pff0 and social order and the rights of other united ^^^ ^a^ couples, as each moves in its divinely vitalized circle ? What of love in man's allotted sphere of work and personal power? What of love at its attained goal of conjugal fellowship, in or- dained position to reach beyond the horizon of the couple and the home and act upon the out- lying world? Is love then merely an elemental league offensive and defensive, a multiplication of selfishness by two, with an obverse of hate or exclusiveness or indifference ; or may it, from the centre where it has learned to forget its self-seeking, spread out waves of like radi- ance to all mankind? Shall we love others bet- ter for having found the love of one, or shall our hearts be imprisoned in a conjugal enclos- ure, with no warmth and blessing to spare for the needy mass outside? And if love transcends the conjugal enclosure, how shall it be guided and regulated, that its working to the farthest circumference of its power be good and not evil? Multitudes of questions like these throng into a mind of larger mould like that of Tenny- son, as soon as he moves in the idiom of the Love absolute, and realizes in its depth and breadth that love is creation's final law. And it is just such questions as these that the poet is concerned to resolve, through the medium of these twice-told tales which he names Idylls of the King. In otherwords,hisaimisto enlarge the theme of love to epic proportions, by interweaving it with the ongoings of civilization and history. To this end he starts where the romantic sen- 41 (^^e 3bpffe timent of the world leaves off, though not with- anb tRc ^^^ taking full account of its values ; namely, 7((tc6 ^^ ^^^ point where love makes transition from ^ the tether of wedded union, and the purlieu of the household, and the ties of blood and family, to work its work in the larger world as a hal- lowing spiritual power. At this point his first and ostensible appeal is to those light-hearted readers who will cherish the poems as clean wholesome Idylls, and if they will it so, as no- thing more. The epic is not forced upon them. Underneath this surface appeal, however, it re- mains for those who will dwell patiently with the inner continuity of concept, and trace its funda- mental spiritual current, to find how far-reach- ing these poems are. And so if they will receive it, this is the epic which a half century's conver- sance with men's vital interests has designed. The modesty of its demand is no index of its majesty of aim. 42 m^oote in pcteonat (Syperience O^l* O this epic undertaking of Tennyson's VJL contributed not only his poetic bent, so harmoniously compounded of the imaginative, the scientific, and the philosophical, but also some very momentous lines of his own per- sonal experience. As early as 1833 he had mused on the legends of King Arthur, and had sketched the scenario of a kind of musical masque on the subject. Just here, however, taking note of the date, which was that of his annus mirabilis , we must reckon with an event which wrought so to deepen his whole being that musical masques, or any kind of literary exquisiteness, could not well be the adequate vehicle of such a theme. In 1833 his friend Arthur Henry Hallam, dying, left him to recover from one of the most notable bereavements of literary history. Here was a rare friendship invaded by death ; here, in the poet's own bosom, the purest pulsation of brother-love was ravaged and desolated, ac- cording to first seeming, by untimely Fate. Thus at one staggering stroke he was brought, in the field of his own constant spirit, to face love in its most spiritual and unmixed mani- festation, and to know by the removal of its ob- ject what a tremendous power it was in life. We get some idea of how his mind was predis- 43 JTffee flE0e JIbviCe Posed to receive the stroke by recalling that it V ^tf ^ was the first invasion by death of the circle of anp iff^ ^^^ Cambridge "Apostles," that band of young men in whom was active the finest and most forward-looking spirit of the time. "In those * dawn-golden times* of the third and fourth de- cades of the nineteenth century," says a recent reviewer,* "youth was not only seething with speculation, penetrated with a fine disdain of everything selfish, petty, false, filled to the brim with poetry, but it had the courage of its en- thusiasms, it was ebullient with the conscious- ness of its own powers. *The world is one great thought,' cried Jack Kemble, 'and I am think- ing it ! ' " If Tennyson's spirit was always as sen- sitive as an Eolian harp to every breath of his age's thought, we can think what it must have been in the centre of that brilliant circle, of which he was the acknowledged laureate and Hallam, in their debating contests, "the mas- ter-bowman." We can think, too, how the lat- ter's untimely death would naturally work to precipitate into substance and form thoughts that had long been in vague solution in the poet's mind. The result was such as to reveal the momen- tous nature of the experience. Nine years of silence, for one thing, during which time he wrought patiently and fundamentally at his poetic art ; for another, an immense deepening and enlarging of his whole attitude to life and the universe. At one sharp stroke, without at * In the New York Times Saturday Review for January 19, 1907, arti- cle on Mrs. Brookfield's book "The Cambridge Apostles." 44 all abjuring the beauty of his youthful dreams, (J£^e 3f6pff^ he found himselftransplanted from poetic non- ^^^ ^a^ age to poetic and philosophic majority. In a n^f^^J very striking figure, taken from the pheno- *^» ^ mena of cold, he conceives first of the sudden congelation of his powers induced by sorrow: " Break, thou deep vase of chilling tears, j^ iDcmoriam That grief hath shaken into frost 1" ^^ 2 and then the liberation to maturer things: " But Death returns an answer sweet : ' My sudden frost was sudden gain, And gave all ripeness to the grain, ^n iDcmoriam It might have drawn from after-heat' " \m^i' 3 How much this meant for him in the large he records in the epilogue to In Memoriam ; writ- ten just at the close of his nine silent years: "Regret is dead, but love is more Than in the summers that are flown, For I myself with these have grown To something greater than before; "Which makes appear the songs I made As echoes out of weaker times, As half but idle brawling rhymes, 5n memoriam The sport of random sun and shade." Epilogue, 5, e In the event that gave rise to the composi- tion of In Memoriam, then, we are to recog- nize the first cardinal stroke of personal expe- rience in preparing the poet for his great epic work; and In Memoriam itself may be re- garded as a kind of preliminary, or under- study, to the deep-lying and vitalizing theme of the finished Idylls. Tennyson's whole nature speaks therein, but in a somewhat more ele- 45 C0e 3lbv((6 mental and compendious utterance. Of the anb tde Idylls his son, as biographer, writes, "We may 7^ ^ perhaps say that now the completed poem, re- JiQC6 garded as a whole, gives his innermost being more fully, though not more truly, than In Memoriam." What, then, was the earlier poem's contribu- tion to the life-theme of Love, and how made? As to its ruling tone and method, as soon as we get beneath the chastened purity of its po- etic phrasing, we discern in In Memoriam a procedure which, beyond any other trait of Ten- nyson, naturalizes him in the dominant idiom of his age. It may surprise us to learn that when the poem came out, with its long-drawn almost morbid noting of all possible phases of bereaved grief, Huxley praised it for its ''insight into scientific method." The judgment was true: we have here the thoroughness, the precision, the careful observation of a scientific investiga- tion ; it is only the phenomena studied and the class of data which have kept us from count- ing it with the natural science researches which have hitherto so nearly monopolized the field that we have agreed to name science. The poem is in truth a quasi-scientific, nay let us say a thoroughly scientific study of the actual sur- vival of love, through the phenomena of associa- tion with grief, with a view to the bearingof this on the eventual survival and glorification of it in unseen tracts of being,— in other words, on the vital question of immortality. To this end, the poet has analyzed and interpreted love as it 46 makes itself felt in his own experience of be- (^^^ 3lbvi(6 reavement, which for the purpose he has made ^^^ ^g^ typical and universal. Nor is its bearing alone on r^ ' the immortality of the individual. The thought ^^^o is evolutionary. It carries up the concept of sur- viving and ennobling love from the individual to the social, the species so to say, and through that to the cosmic reference, enlarging and en- riching its purview, until at the end, address- ing his transplanted friend, he can say, " Strange friend, past, present, and to be ; Loved deeplier, darklier understood; Beliold, I dream a dream of good, Jn iDemoriam And mingle all the world with thee." cppi^. 3 Here we have all the elements of the later epic theme, only studied in more abstract form, and moving through another arc of the vast or- bit. A glance at Browning's differing attitude (for he too was a life-long student of love) is in- structive here, as still further accentuating the distinction that we have found so characteris- tic between the two poets. We recall that high- water mark of Browning's bold exploring, where he makes the minstrel David laugh with the rapture of discovery, yet curb himself with awe and for love's sake, at the thought that he, the intrepid adventurer in life-values, and if he, that "a man may o'ertake God's own speed in the one way of love." 0aul, 26t It is the exceptionally endowed individual dis- covering his highest possibility in God, nay for 47 anb t^c 3n iDemoriam cp^viii. 1 5n IDemoriam l|:)cpv. 16, 17 the moment seemingly almost beyond Him, yet sinking the pretension and by so doing mani- festing a yet finer reach of love. That is Brown- ing's individualizing way. Tennyson's, rather, is to diffuse his discovery through all the world of common weal and onward time, broadening it as fast as he deepens it, thus making it uni- versally available. His evolutionary vision is not only intensive but extensive, or as he puts the matter: ••The love that rose on stronger wings, Unpalsied when he met with Death, Is comrade of the lesser faith That sees the course of human things." Beyond the individual achievement or experi- ence both contributingand contributed to, rises always the background of an interrelated world of mankind. For this In Memoriam study of love Tenny- son chooses the sacred passion in the form of friendship, man for man, "such A friendship as had master'd Time; Which masters Time indeed, and is Eternal, separate from fears." For its transcendental involvements love can perhaps better be explored in this manifesta- tion of it:— love in its pure spiritual essence, its roots in what is likest God within the soul, its workings freed for the time from the com- plicating element of the sexual and the de- monic. But while such research of love solves the ethereal and eternal bearings of it, it does 48 not fill out the problem as this actually exists, (^fje 3lb^((6 The David and Jonathan affection, the love that mi5 (g^ is "wonderful, passing the love of women," is 7r/(00 so rarely actualized in earth that it yields light ^ on life mainly as an abstraction. Nor is it more sacred, or more free from alien and evil inva- sion than is the love that begins with sex. Ar- thur and Lancelot, fighting the world's battles together, felt the divine pulsation of it ; "Whereat the two, For each had warded either in the fight, Sware on the field of death a deathless love. And Arthur said, * Man's word is God in man : Xl^e Comins of Let chance what will, I trust thee to the death.'" Brtljur, 12e Yet it is one of the most poignant notes of the Idylls that this sacred trust was treacherously belied ; and Lancelot; captive to a lower allure- ment of love, went under. The great problem of love must be worked out by more intricate computation, and with resolving of the ele- ments that obtain in universal society. What- ever maybe true of a supersensual world where they neither marry nor are given in marriage, here on earth there is the love of sex to be reckoned with, a fundamental element of the problem. Then too, just beyond the elemental sway of passion and the enclosure of the united pair, there is the vital problem of love and duty; for Duty too, in a divinely ordered universe, must be listened to and obeyed as the ** stern Daugh- ter of the Voice of God." To one with Tenny- son's prevailing sense of a universe which, to 49 anb t^e JJqc6 3n iDcmoriam "prologue, 4 Ode ro Ptttf , 47 WordJiworrl? Ode to IDutf , 6 be true, must move to ** music in the bounds of law," this ethical element must not be ignored. If to Love he could say, "Our wills are ours, we know not how ; Our wills are ours, to make them thine," none the less he must say to Duty, with Words- worth, "Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong; And the most ancient heavens, through Thee, are fresh and strong." And in looking over the world of affairs he can- not be unaware, as a fact to be resolved, that "There are who ask not if thine eye Be on them ; who, in love and truth, Where no misgiving is, rely Upon the genial sense of youth." Such as these, the great light-hearted body of "those who eddy round and round" must find their place in a love-governed world ; it is not a question, for them, of love or duty but of love and duty. In this part of his theme, as in the other, I am persuaded, we come in contact again with a deeply ploughing personal experience of Ten- nyson's. I cannot help concluding that his ear- lier poem of that title had its clarifying share in the history of his life-study of love. In its way this experience was perhaps as crucial as the one to which we refer the creation of In Memoriam. Tennyson's marriage, when at length it took place, was an ideally blessed one ; but are we aware that he was then nearly forty years old, and that his long engagement to Emily Sellwood had been ten years broken off? 50 The records of his life are very reticent about (j^fj^ 3l5«ff0 it; but the fact was that duty, the prosaic duty ^^v ^g ^ of getting an income to warrant marriage, ^ ^ urged an inexorable prior claim. The poem ^Q^^ Love and Duty does not read like a merely dramatic putting of a case. "For Love himself took part against himself To warn us off, and Duty loved of Love — O this world's curse, — beloved but hated — came Like Death betwixt thy dear embrace and mine, And crying, * Who is this? behold thy bride,' She push'd me from thee." cove and JDutf The poem, a small-minded critic says, rings false ; it goes on to talk priggishly to the wo- man in the case, like a curate. But just this same thing, and on precisely similar grounds, the pagan school says of Arthur's farewell speech to Guinevere in the Idylls; which latter indeed, according to the size of the occasion recognized in it, is either the highest or the most vulnerable passage in the whole epic. It is the touchstone of his great theme; set, as it were, **for the fall and rising again of many," according to their harmony with the spirit of the poem. And in fact Tennyson's experience yielded him a strange repetition of deep in- sight. He was brought to confront the immi- nent stroke of a virtual new bereavement; nay, for ten years he was doomed to go on alone, the divided half of a conjugal relation, as he had long felt himself the divided half of a hallowed friendship. Was he not in position to test the problem of love at first hand? And just as in the case of Arthur Hallam's death, he coined his 51 fC6e 3lbvti6 ^^ys"^^l experience into a new contribution to anh f fi^ ^^^ question : Shall love therefore be mourned ano tl^e ^^^ buried as an unvital thing, or shall it sur- JlQce vive, and gather strength, and rise as a per- manent ennoblement of life to higher things? Shall not so divine a pulsation, even though benumbed by frost and hard fate, pluck good from its ruins? The question is no idle or theo- retical one with him : "Of love that never found his earthly close, What sequel? Streaming eyes and breaking hearts? Or all the same as if he had not been ? Not so: Shall Error in the round of time Still father Truth ? O shall the braggart shout For some blind glimpse of freedom work itself Thro' madness, hated by the wise, to law System and empire? Sin itself be found The cloudy porch oft opening on the Sun ? And only he, this wonder, dead, become Mere highway dust? or year by year alone Sit brooding in the ruins of a life, cove and JDutf Nightmare of youth, the spectre of himself?" It cannot be that love alone, among the passions that die only to pass into something rich and strange,— that love alone, highest of all, is inca- pable of resurrection. But how shall it rise? Its object cruelly thrust away by fate, its ''faith thro' form" ruthlessly denied him, the shock must needs be diffused through all his life ; in other words, it must be transferred from the sphere of a sweet and crowned passion to the sphere of will and work and healing hallowing time. * Wait, and Love himself will bring The drooping flower of knowledge changed to fruit Of wisdom. Wait: my faith is large in Time, Cove and JDutf And that which shapes it to some perfect end." 52 A hard sacrificial road, a veritable crucifixion, f^a^ Jlbvde opens before him ; to be met only by answering *^ . ^^ obedience and tensity of resolution : ^ " "Live -yet live- ^^^^ Shall sharpest pathos blight us, knowing all Life needs for life is possible to will — Live happy." Cove and JDutf That he has in mind, however, not merely an exotic experience but a larger truth for all his kind, is evident from the following lines, which, warning against subsiding on a lower passion and accepting the loathly alternative of sense, touches on the very rock on which the society of the Round Table so sadly split: "Will some one say, Then why not ill for good? Why took ye not your pastime? To that man My work shall answer, since I knew the right And did it ; for a man is not as God, But then most Godlike being most a man." ^^^^ »"'* ^"^^ To bend his quivering wounded heart to duty, and to tell his lady so,— have we not here, in essence, the critic's note of the "impeccable prig"? It is the point of all his writings, per- haps, where the note of his philosophy comes nearest to being flattened to the note of the homiletic. But we cannot deny a fibre of strength in it. And so it is. You come always upon strength, the strength of deep-laid founda- tions, when you get below the delicate modu- lations of Tennyson's music. We shall get the echoes of the same austere bass note, in the Holy Grail and Guinevere, and indeed in all the poems that concern themselves with the high meanings and ends of the epic action. 53 vn (Svofuttonarp ^ta^ee in t^c (Sptc (ttjctne I HAVE dwelt on these poems that con- nect themselves with Tennyson's per- sonal experiences because they stake out in a way the whole inner situation of the Idylls. In the Idylls too the vision of love in its sacred- ness and glory is the inspiring object; but with a change and enlargement of venue. Not now love rising from death and sorrow, as in In Memoriam ; not love rising from stern repres- sion to richer ends, as in Love and Duty ; but love already in possession of all the elements of fruition, and working its work in the world. It is the very roomiest conceivable field that he thus lays out for it ; a ifield that taxes to the utmost his descriptive metaphysic, taking in as it does the elements of body and spirit ; love shed abroad not only in the passions of the flesh, but in the work and the wisdom and the will of holiest manhood. Because, then, it is conceived not alone in the domestic relations but in all the powers and activities that make a man large and kingly, the theme can be worked out only on the kingly scale, the scale of Arthur conceived as ideal manhood closed in real man. Nor can so comprehensive a theme well be laid down as a proposition and urged upon the brain, in the terms of Browning's dia- lectics; it must come to men as a luminous at- 54 mosphere, an environment of beauty, a music, and then most potent perhaps when least di- rectly realized by the reader. When therefore we consider the scope of his field of thought, we cannot say that Tennyson erred in his choice of a conveying medium. Arthur is the centre and soul of the action, in every componenttaleoftheseries. What Arthur embodies is the real propaganda that Tennyson has at heart. The love that suffuses such a kingly nature as Arthur's is the supreme ideal for humanity as it exists in organized civiliza- tion and society. But it is not Arthur who is directly portrayed. Rather he is the hallowing presence of the place ; and in the semi-detached stories which make up the epic we read his manhood as reflected in a chivalric order of knights and ladies, or as sinned against by heedlessness and self and earthly passion. A touch of his great manhood is smitten into every knight who takes his vows upon him : ** But when he spake, and cheer'd his Table Round With large, divine, and comfortable words. Beyond my tongue to tell thee — I beheld From eye to eye thro' all their Order flash A momentary likeness of the King" ; and this likeness, so long as they remain undi- vorced from his will, they never wholly lose, however imperfect a reflection they may make of it according to their personality : " For good ye are and bad, and like to coins. Some true, some light, but every one of you Stamp'd with the image of the King." And so, each in his way, they set out to be the 55 anb ttfc jC1?c ComiriQ of artl?ur, 266 »rail, 25 fT^-ti 'Ti^.yeeit instruments of his ideal, the ideal of ennobled N f fi Love making a realm in the earth. ano tt}C 3ut in the actualized social order this regen- J^Qce erate passion must begin where the social or- der begins. It must begin with the pair, the couple, lover and mate ; and from the conjugal love and union there nucleated must radiate outward until its vital influence fills society full. It cannot ignore the social unit, that pri- mal segmentation by fission, as it were, from which the whole corporate tissue is engen- dered. The ideal love can neither leap to the highest by celibate asceticism like Galahad's and Percivale's, nor prosper in the lowest by shameless passion like Vivien's or bold con- tempt of conjugal faith like Tristram's or secret undermining of it, however varnished by brav- ery and courtesy, like Lancelot's and Guine- vere's. Each of these by-ways of love, or the lower instinct on which it is prone to subside, is followed out by some group of characters, in a chain of inexorable consequence, leaving the one ideal so much the more clearly delimited and defined. No: there is one, and but one, free and open way before it : the austere yet spiritually luminous road wherein love and faith, lover and friend, self and neighbor, home and hu- manity, flesh and spirit, law and liberty, each alike gets its harmonious measure of due, and neither suffers from the other. And this way be- gins with the sacred marriage of hearts. From this centre it is, the conjugal centre, that all the high and creative potencies of life and society radiate. 56 Such is the initial ideal that opens before Arthur, on his way to that battle in which he earns crown and realm ; an ideal the vision of which transfigures the world for him : "the world Was all so elear about him that he saw The smallest rock far on the faintest hill, And even in high day the morning star." For such conjugal ideal the pure friendship of Lancelot and the flush of knightly glory, much as they enrich the manly life of achievement, can in no wise compensate. "Shall I not lift her from this land of beasts Up to my throne and side by side with me? What happiness to reign a lonely king, . . . Vext with waste dreams ? for saving I be join'd To her that is the fairest under heaven, I seem as nothing in the mighty world. And cannot will my will nor work my work Wholly, nor make myself in mine own realm Victor and lord. But were I join'd with her. Then might we live together as one life. And reigning with one will in everything. Have power on this dark land to lighten it. And power oh this dead world to make it live." Faithfulness to this ideal, and consistent speech and act in the idiom of it, are just what makes Arthur the remote perfection, the impeccable prig, of the critics ; nothing else. We may take the poet's conception or leave it; but this it is. And in truth this is what Arthur would be if these poems were only idle twice-told tales, are- hash of Malory; that is, if the Idylls contained no deeper story within the story. According to the eyes and standard by which men judge him anb tffc XI?e Comirijg of Hrtlpur, 96 X\ic CominQ of flrtl?ur, 79 57 imjc 3l5pff6 he is the touchstone of hearts: either an aus- anb tfie ^^^^ Puritan binding men to impossible vows rw and out of touch with human nature ; or what ^ Guinevere, when it is too late to mend the broken plan, confesses him to be: "Ah great and gentle lord, Who wast, as is the conscience of a saint Guinevere f 63 S Among his warring senses, to thy knights." In fact, his fate among men is just the poet's reproduction of the Messianic way among men ; they do to him as they list, and in the long run he has to die as witness to the truth. It is in the light of this concept that we must read Arthur's last tender yet doomful address to the fallen queen. As I have intimated, this speech of Arthur is either the supreme point of a vast epic idea or the most vulnerable point of a series of second-hand idylls, according to the size and bent of the reader; it either sounds sanctimoni- ous, like the homily of a curate, or in majestic character, as it were the eternal manhood ideal pronouncing doom. To determine which it shall be, in our large interpretation of the epic action, we must not omit also to take fair note of the other thread of motive that he has interwoven with the ini- tial love motive, the ever-vital motive of love and duty. The king who could so speak of out- raged love at the failure point of his plan, was also carrying a greater than domestic burden, a spiritual passion which all along wrought with the passion of the flesh to broader nobler ends; and so at the close of The Holy Grail, 58 which in the same idiom marks the true cul- mination of the ideal, he could say : "the King must guard That which he rules, and is but as the hind To whom a space of land is given to plow, Who may not wander from the allotted field Before his work be done, but, being done. Let visions of the night or of the day Come as they will ; and many a time they come, Until this earth he walks on seems not earth, This light that strikes his eyeball is not light. This air that smites his forehead is not air But vision — yea, his very hand and foot — In moments when he feels he cannot die. And knows himself no vision to himself. Nor the high God a vision, nor that One Who rose again." As we see him thus going steadily through duty to doom, how we are reminded of that idealized Being who in old scripture days cried, ** I have trodden the wine-press alone, and of the people there was none with me" ! So it must be, in our times as in the older, until our hearts are enlarged to see things as they are. Here speaks the king in every man who will let his v/hole manhood speak, and who will not follow wandering fires, as did the Holy Grail knights who would patch up their broken vows by religious sentiment. And to this ideal their hearts return, when the false fires are burnt out and they awake to life as it is ; as the noblest and most responsible culprit of them all her- self confesses, when only heaven is left her for amends : "Ah my God, What might I not have made of thy fair world. anb t^e JJsce *raU, 901 59 fttje 3fbpffe anb tfje Guinevere, 64d a Ocatl? in tljc TDeffcrt, 632 Had I but loved thy highest creature here? It was my duty to have loved the highest ; It surely was my profit had I known ; It would have been my pleasure had I seen. We needs must love the highest when we see it, Not Lancelot, nor another." There, in a word, where at last we see the high- est as it is and in spite of all lower preemp- tions love it when we see it,— there, with arms outspread in forgiveness and blessing, stands the deathless ideal which is both our con- science and our redemption. Nothing less than Arthur, the ideal incarnate and working con- sistently to right wrongs and survive short- sightedness, could be the adequate expression of this. Parts of it could be given, broken lights, the smaller and glamouring parts, otherwise. Guinevere wanted the warmth and color of it, and for a time subsided on the lower, under secret protest of law and truth. But when at last, her eyes opened and the elemental fires burned to ashes, she was aware that "that pure severity of perfect light" was the blending of all the primary colors and the harmonious diffu- sion of all manhood warmth, her supreme no- bility of nature woke and turned to it like the needle to the pole. A parable this, we say. Rather it is life become literal and real, the truth at the bottom of the well. Nor are we at issue here with Browning. At the heart of it, though reached by a different way, is the same thing that we have noted in his ideal, that au- dacious notion of " Indulging every instinct of the soul There where law, life, joy, impulse are one thing." 60 At the frontier of the angel's land, whether we (Cf}e Jlb^Ke have travelled with Tennyson or Browning, anb t^e this ** ultimate, angels' law " comes in sight, and Jf ^ j>^ the soul finds its peace. But it was not in Tennyson's cautious nature to indulge instincts ; no, not for a moment. For him, as for Wordsworth, they were too rudi- mental to be accepted blindly or made the self- sufficient law of life. They must be subjected to the control of moral order and of the idealizing spirit. Besides, in this world wherein we live, this world of sensuous beauty and energy and glamour, we cannot ignore the existence of "Lancelot, nor another." With such men it is, men in whom the blood pulses warm and sense is strong, that the braveries and courtesies, the conventions and refinements of life, are inti- mately associated. An epic action of such scope as this must needs reckon with them. The so- cial order is bound up with them; cannot sur- vive without them. Their "high instincts" must be directed and regulated. So, true to the im- pulse of his realistic metaphysic, Tennyson strikes for the primal germs of action, as these are at work in the corporate heart. If conjugal love is the divinely ordained unit of social in- tegrity, none the less the unit of conjugal love itself, its elemental throb, is sexual passion, that magnetic pulsation sense and soul in one, charged positively and negatively with such sweet and awful power. This mystic thing, this wonder, as in the lightly touched romance of the day so in the Idylls, is the spring of the whole epic study before us. What shall this 6i (^tjc 3r5pff6 passion be, oh, what shall it be, in the teleo- anb tBe logic world-order,— a union of instincts or a JJdce union of spiritual ideals, or both, hallowed and hallowing, in one ? When out of twain emerges through its fateful power one heart and will, what shall the one be? This was the crux of Ten- nyson's problem, on which his mind fastened with a sureness of insight at once creative and scientific. On the solution hung untold issues, broad as the world, yet inevitable as the pro- cesses of natural law and evolution. It was in the same scientific spirit and method which Huxley praised in In Memoriam that Tenny- son approached the great subject. It was at bottom a psychological and biological investi- gation. For its solution he must lay things out on a large scale, the scale not of the individual but of the species ; and as he saw the species not crude and animal, but refined and spirit- ualized, to fit his research he must needs create a poetic world, and people it, and endow it with a round of seasons and weathers, burgeoning spring and full flower and withered leaf and icy winter, suffusing it all with an endlessly re- sponsive yet limpid atmosphere. In his sense of completeness no minutest element of the process, in nature or spirit, could be over- looked. The large course of this poetic world of his was marked out by his apprehensive sensitive nature. It could hardly have been other than in the negative direction. The Idylls of the King, as has been remarked, are a modern Paradise Lost. From the first "little rift within the lute," the 62 first unguarded moment of giving that primal (^^e 3ibv((6 instinct free course or one smallest advantage ^^5 ^r^ of upper hand, this nineteenth century epic Tf/*^^ traces the subtle accumulative results, through ^ ® all the bliss and woe of it, traversing "The slow sweet hours that bring us all things good, The slow sad hours that bring us all things ill," cove and puty until, as by inevitable fate, the fair Round Table goes under in mist and gloom. Yet by that very means, with its inexorable concatenation of cause and effect, the truth stands out at last all the clearer, that it ought not so to have been. Arthur passes, but he cannot die ; and the world of ideal can never again be as if he had not lived. By the very ruins in which the old order is left weltering the air of truth is immensely cleared. And this latter-day Christ, the ideal manhood closed in real man, like the ancient one, is obe- dient even unto death, and the road that opens there is the road of resurrection. Such was Tennyson's way, marked out by tem- perament and by tender depth of insight. A paradise with such subtly disintegrating ele- ments at work in it could hardly be other than a Paradise Lost. He could not solve and dis- miss the matter with the aggressive noncha- lance of Browning ; could neither cut the knot of the problem and leap to the intuitive ideal height, nor accept the splendid instinct and ensue it — could not leave the mastery of the problem either with a Galahad, supinely ascetic and saintly, or with a Gawayne, the puppet of the moment ''whom men call Light-of-Love." 63 (^^e Jb^i(6 Browning cuts the knot ; and when only indi- anb t^e vidual souls are in the balance, with what ease ! JJnee ^^s Ottima and Sebald, in the very apogee of sinful passion and crime, are in a moment brought to their holier selves by the casually overheard song of the silk-winder Pippa. Ten- nyson was not made of such lightly optimistic stuff. There were too many tangles and ten- drils in the corporate life to be disengaged and straightened, too much that usage and custom had burned into the communal blood, too com- plex laws of interactive being calling for ap- peasement, to make the enigma an easy one. All this, as we see, consorts accurately not only with Tennyson's temperament but with that huge life-theme of his, broader than Brown- ing's, which could not deem the individual soul evolved to the height until there was interwoven with its powers a social function satisfied, a ful- filled relation to its heritage of law and custom and sentiment,— in a word, the coordinate ele- ments of a world vitalizable by the holiest po- tencies of love. The man and the characteristic problem make the difference. In thus following from its beginnings the subtle course of a modern Paradise Lost, the poet strikes, quite naively, for the very storm-centre of the social problem, "the woman in the case" ; it is this fact, largely, which imbues his story with an undeniable feminine and as it were pas- sive tone. This, however, not in airy lightness, as does the general tissue of modern romance, but in almost too abysmal seriousness.The kingly and initiative halfof the ideal, Arthur, is already 64 an era-filling presence before him ; what now of (^fjc 3Ibpff6 thequeenlyandresponsivehalf, so ordained and atxb t^C typified in the conjugal marvel of love? Untold JJqc^ things depend on the answer she makes to the high purpose laid upon her, on the way she ac- cepts and ensues the huge responsibility. As the spiritual arbitratrix of society, she must be not only a woman but a queen. As the wandering bard had sung of Arthur at the beginning, "and could he find A woman in her womanhood as great As he was in his manhood, then, he sang, The twain together well might change the world," :6uincvcrc, 29(5 so Arthur, single-hearted in his large kingly design, entered the sacred sacrament of mar- riage as to a consecration, "Believing, ' Lo, mine helpmate, one to feel My purpose and rejoicing in my joy. ' '* *u