Sweet Love were slain: his dearest bond is this,
Not like to like, but like in difference.

Yet in the long years liker must they grow;

The man be more of woman, she of man;

He gain in sweetness and in moral height,
Nor lose the wrestling thews that throw the world;
She mental breadth, nor fail in childward care,
Nor lose the child-like in the larger mind:
Till at the last she set herself to man

Like perfect music unto noble words;

And so these twain, upon the skirts of Time,
Sit side by side, full-summed in all their powers,
Dispensing harvest, sowing the To-be.

Finally, we may say of Tennyson's view of womanhood that it is not easy to exaggerate the immense service he has rendered to society by his constant insistence on the nobility of purity, the divine grace of chastity. He has never glorified the wanton or clothed evil with a golden mist of glowing words. He has kept his moral sense acute and sensitive, and has never confused the

limits of right and wrong. With a clear and steady eye he has gazed upon the acts of unchaste passion, but not with sympathy, not with delirious yearning, not with any voluptuous quickening of the pulse; but always with loathing, with hatred, with the strenuous abhorrence of a noble heart, strong in its virgin purity. He has known where the secret of strength lay

His strength was as the strength of ten,
Because his heart was pure.

There is no taint upon his page. He has followed a high ideal, and has been consistent to it through a long life. For him vice has had no seduction; a jealous virtue has sat enthroned in the heart of his genius and preserved

his mind unsullied. When we consider the bulk of his work, the multitude of his readers, the greatness of his influence, and when we contrast with him the influence and work of such a poet as Byron, we begin to understand how vast a service Tennyson has rendered to the cause of righteousness by the reverent ideal of womanhood he has maintained and the great example of purity which he has set.

QUESTIONS FOR REVIEW

1. Compare Tennyson's general attitude toward women with that of some of the greater English poets.

2. How is Tennyson's purity of mind illustrated in his treatment of Guinevere and of Godiva?

3. Why did Tennyson's view of woman come to the world as a new doctrine?

4. What was his idea of woman's sphere?

5. Why is it not easy to exaggerate Tennyson's influence upon the social life of his time?

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Tennyson: His Art and Relation to Modern Life. Stopford A. Brooke.

The Poetry of Tennyson. Henry Van Dyke.

Three Great Teachers of Our Time-Carlyle, Tennyson, Ruskin. A. H. Japp.

Lessons from My Masters (Carlyle, Tennyson, Ruskin). Peter Bayne.

CHAPTER X

TENNYSON'S VIEW OF LIFE AND SOCIETY

It is hardly to be expected of a poet that he should be required to define his views on sociology, or that he should begin his work in imaginative literature with any cut-anddried social creed, which it is his mission to propagate. No great poet has ever set out with any such propaganda. Wordsworth and the Lake poets did profess a definite creed, and drew up a statement of their principles, but they were purely literary principles. There was nothing in these principles to lead the Lake poets toward any common view of human life or human society. Each took his own course apart from the literary principles they professed in common, and it was inevitable that he should. Training, idiosyncrasy, environment, the social status of the poet, the methods of his education, the opportunities he may have of knowing the world, or the reverse-all these, and a thousand other causes, contribute to the shaping of his thought and the consequent attitude of his mind toward human life. But though a poet may have no definite intention of drawing up any philosophic interpretation of life, he usually succeeds in doing so. He cannot help himself. He is bound to furnish himself with some answer to the great problems that press upon him hungrily, with a dreadful insistence, a voice that cannot be silenced. Some ideal of human society he must have, and he cannot help comparing things as they are with things

as he would make them. It is the ideal which he ponders in his heart which gives utterance to his tongue. His ideal rules him. It is ever before him. He may be himself unconscious of the persistence of its influence, but not the less that influence is always with him and is clearly traceable. It is like a colored glass through which the light of the mind streams: every thought comes to us tinged with the ideal conceptions of the thinker. When at last the finished work of a poet lies before us, then we perceive, and perhaps he also perceives for the first time, that there is a unity and sharpness of outline in his thought which is clear and distinctive. A hint there, a phrase here, a verse yonder-and silently the underlying thought of the poet emerges. Bone comes to its bone, till at last, with every reticulation complete, the skeleton rises clothed in flesh, and the ideal of human life which was jealously hidden in the poet's heart stands before us complete and undisguised.

Now, perhaps the first thing that occurs to the reader who approaches Tennyson from this point of view is his sense of order. The tendency of his mind is distinctly conservative. He hears, indeed, "the roll of the ages, and he is not unconscious of the revolutionary elements which seethe in society; but he hears, if not with unsympathetic stoicism, at least with an equanimity too settled for disturbance. He is full of reverence for antiquity, he is filled with an all-sufficing sense of the perfection and indestructible stability of all English institutions. His mind is too calm and steady to be sympathetic toward the passionate revolts and despairing heroisms of those who seek an immediate reform of society; he is, indeed, too cool in temper to catch the glow of such movements as

these.

The place in which he habitually walks and meditates is like that pathway which he has described in the "Gardener's Daughter"

A well-worn pathway courted us

To one green wicket in a privet-hedge;
This, yielding, gave into a grassy walk
Thro' crowded lilac-ambush trimly pruned;
And over many a range

Of waving limes the gray cathedral towers,
Across a hazy glimmer of the west,
Reveal their shining windows.

Now, what are the details of this picture? What is the effect it produces on the imagination? The chief idea it conveys is a sense of perfect order. The pathway is wellworn with the feet of generations; the green wicket is framed in a perfectly neat and symmetrical privet-hedge; the lilac-bush, in its utmost joy of burgeoning and blossom, must be allowed no license-it is "trimly pruned"; and finally, as if to complete the sense of well-established use, of absolute propriety, of faultless order and reverent conservatism, the gray cathedral walls bound the view, and the shining windows seem to reflect the glory of the past. In this passage we have a not inapt illustration of the strongest tendency of Tennyson's mind. It is from such a neat and quiet bower of peace he looks out upon the world. He is a recluse, shut up with his own thoughts, and weaving the bright thread of his fancy far from the loud commotions of the world. He loves to surround himself with influences which minister to this studious calm. In the garden where he walks no leaf is out of place, no grass-blade grows awry. If the world he looks upon hardly matches the spotless propriety of his retreat,