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 Nature-poetry was materialised; it never suggests a life in Nature; and it is probably owing to his not feeling anything 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, of 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 selfconsciousness, 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.

IT

CHAPTER XVI

THE LATER POEMS

T is not an infrequent habit of an artist to try over 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
Moves in the chambers of the blood;

And, lastly, he returned, and with extraordinary force, in Merlin and the Gleam, to that pursuit of the ideal perfection, of the undiscovered land, which in ancient times he had expressed in the Ulysses.

First, then, with regard to his interest in classic subjects and the classical poets, he felt again the

impulse which long ago produced Enone and Tithonus, and shaped it now into The Death of Enone, and, perhaps, into Demeter and Persephone. I have already treated of those poems, and need not touch them again. But something yet remains to be said, in general terms, about his imitations and translations of the classic poets, and of the affection and the praise he gave them. These great masters of idea and form, that is, of intellect and beauty, were his daily companions.

The elements derived from this life-long association with the Greek and Roman poets appear in his earliest poems and move like leaven through the whole of his work. They add to the dignity of his poetry; they bring to it a clear, reflective grace; often an old-world charm, as when some pure classic phrase carries with it suddenly into an English poem a breath, an odour of Pagan loveliness. He derives from them a sculpturesque manner in verse which often reminds me of the limbs and of the drapery of the figures in the Elgin marbles; and to their influence are due his desire and his power to see clearly and to describe with lucid accuracy things as they appear, both in human life and in nature, and to trust to this for his effects, rather than to any pathetic fallacies. These, and other qualities naturally accordant with them, were not created in him by the classics, but were educated, even awakened, in him by them. The curious thing which I seem to detect in his writings, and which is quite in harmony with his unmixed English nature, is that he is much more in sympathy with Latin than with Greek poets, much more at one with the genius of Rome than of Athens.