sary factor will be more profoundly appreciated, and the Christian consciousness will demand its rightful place in the play of forces in the realization of the kingdom of God in earth.1

HAVERHILL, N. H.

J. Q. Bittinger.

1 "The process of history is a development in the realization of the moral order of the world. . . . The nation is not of itself a righteous power, but the realization of its being through its vocation in a moral order is in righteousness; not only the law of its being, but the condition of the realization of its being, is in righteousness. In its necessary being it moves toward this end.” -Mulford, The Nation, p. 355.

EDITORIAL.

TENNYSON'S SPIRITUAL SERVICE TO HIS GENERATION.

TENNYSON'S eightieth birthday, which came last month, has called out many appreciative words regarding his poetry. These find their appropriateness in the fact that, although not addressed to the aged poet, they are spoken as it were in his presence, and audible to him so far as it pleases him to have them so. This makes them an informal acknowledgment of moral help and intellectual pleasure received from the work of the long career now closing. Each sincere and hearty word may be regarded as expressing in some true sense the feeling of many of Tennyson's readers, and to reveal the personal relation in which they stand towards the poet who has touched their life with the fire of his "He gave the people of his best," is his own account of the work he was called to do. It is for the people to say before he leaves them, that they appreciate the gift.

own.

We wish to take such part in this pleasant service of acknowledgment as belongs to us, and believe that we speak for many of our readers when we express our sense of the value of Tennyson's work in one of its functions, in our view its highest one, its enlarging and quickening influence upon the spiritual life of his generation.

Every true poet does a spiritual work of some sort and is a benefactor in doing it. The kindled imagination, the clearer perception of ends higher than carnal ones, the more vivid sense of an ideal world which poetry always gives those who feel its influence, make the spirit richer. But poetry has nobler benefits than these to confer. It can lend itself to moral forces, and so become a factor in the renovation and perfection of character. It can do this by vividly presenting moral and spiritual truth to the imagination, thus teaching by object-lesson the beauty and the controlling power of goodness. The greatest poetry has thus taught religion and morals. God's being and the moral order seem more real to men since Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton have written. Right motives have more power in the world than if the Inferno, Macbeth, and Paradise Lost had not been.

Poetry may also help moral forces (unless the poet's gift be the dramatic one and that of the supreme order) by the poet's sympathy with and rapt utterance of the highest ethical truths. It is true that his work and that of the preacher are distinct. Poetry is more than the inculcation of religion and morals in glowing verse. The Hebrew prophets may perhaps be called great poets. But it is not as prophets that they are called so. A prosaic mind might prophesy. Poetry is art. Its immediate end is not persuasion but representation.

The poet professes, not to persuade men to do or to be something, but to help them see something. He puts his story into music to remind those

who read it that it addresses, not the executive faculties with which men earn their bread, but the imagination. Nevertheless the story which he tells may contain ethical facts, and he may show in telling it such sympathy with goodness as shall make it seem winsome. Milton's "Comus," for example, is exquisite poetry, and poetry aglow with moral feeling. The delight which a healthy mind feels in its imaginative beauty must be accompanied with sympathy with the moral feeling it breathes. The Spirit's closing words

"Mortals, that would follow me,

Love virtue; she alone is free;
She can teach you how to climb
Higher than the sphery chime;
Or, if virtue feeble were,

Heav'n itself would stoop to her,"

are perceived to be the noblest truth in being recognized as the highest poetry.

Tennyson is entitled to a place among those poets whose work is directly linked with moral and spiritual forces. His imagination is like Spenser's in its elevation and purity, although, of course, not comparable in wealth and force to that of the "poet's poet." Its home is among spiritual things. Its congenial task is that of clothing truth and beauty with shining form. When its artistic purpose requires it to set forth wickedness, it gives it its proper blackness. The "Idylls of the King" is an exquisite work of art, and it is also a high moral achievement. King Arthur's purity and tenderness set off against the foil of Guinevere's sin is a contribution to English manhood as well as to English literature. We do not say that Tennyson takes a higher rank among poets from the fact that his genius allies itself so readily to ethical truth. It is perhaps true that a greater imagination obeying a more earthly spirit would write greater poetry than his. It is certainly true that Tennyson's genius has, because of its moral elevation, served ends higher than those of art, high as these are, and that this nobler usefulness does not lessen at all its artistic value.

We have to point out another and yet more valuable spiritual service which a poet may render to his age, and to give our reason for thinking that this, too, has been given by the English Laureate. The poet may help the spiritual life of his time by giving expression to its truest thought and its deepest feeling. He may feel in his heart that truth which God has given it to express, he may live in it and by it until it fully possesses him, and demands expression. Then he may let it command his poetic faculty for its fit utterance, and so give it, clothed in artistic beauty, to the world. So he will interpret to the best life of his time the movement of God's Spirit in it. He will help it come more quickly and fully into the lesson which this movement gives, and do better the work for which the divine teaching is a preparation. If an age has a

poet doing this work for it, some of his words will link themselves to its questioning as though expressing its perplexity and yearning, and others of them will seem to announce its spiritual discoveries, and to carry, too, the joy those discoveries brought. We think that Tennyson did this service to his generation in his "In Memoriam." This is of all his poems that which has most deeply impressed the English and American mind. Competent observers of contemporaneous intellectual life believe that it did more than any of them to make him famous. Mr. Gladstone said in the "Quarterly Review" in 1859: "By the time 'In Memoriam' had sunk into the public mind, Mr. Tennyson had taken his rank as our then first living poet." Another writer said in the same Review in 1884: "There is no question that Lord Tennyson first earned his great fame by his In Memoriam.'"

It cannot be justly said that the poet's subsequent works have added nothing to his fame, for they have illustrated other phases of his genius But it is certain that none

and so enlarged the public conception of it. of them, not even the "Idylls of the King," has been as warmly received as was "In Memoriam." Nor has any penetrated the mind of our time so deeply. A sufficient proof of this may be found in the comparative number of extracts from it in any good dictionary of quotations, and especially in the character of these extracts. They greatly outnumber those from any other poem, and have a still greater superiority in weight. The thoughts which the poet has put into the mind of his time are chiefly found here.

These quotations remind us that it was by its thought that "In Memoriam" won the poet's renown. His gifts had been fully revealed in his earlier works. "Dora," "Locksley Hall," "The Dream of Fair Women," "The Death of King Arthur," "The Princess," are worthy of him. The melody of his verse, his power to see and show the beauty and suggestiveness of nature, his lyric emotion, his historic imagination, are all adequately represented in them. One would not be very rash in saying that some of these poems are more perfect art and more likely to be read in the next century than "In Memoriam." Evidently the greater fame of the latter is due to the greater interest its content had for the mind of the time. We find it explained in these words, which Frederick Robertson (a critic rarely competent to say what literature touched the better thought of his day) wrote about it soon after it appeared: "It is the most precious work published this century-written in memory of his friend Arthur Hallam, and exhibiting the manifold phases through which the spirit passes, of rebellion, darkness, doubt, through the awful questions about personal identity hereafter, reunion, and the uncertainty whether Love be indeed the law of the universe, on to placid trust, even cheerfulness, and the deep conviction - all is well. . . . To me it has been the richest treasure I have ever had." Plainly it was the meaning of the poem which gave it its surpassing VOL. XII. NO. 69.

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power. Men read it and loved it, because it met a deep spiritual want. To see how it did this we must see the underlying truth which the poem expresses. Its teachings blend in the declaration that the heart of man finds a revelation of God in its deepest experiences. The poet's great sorrow is lifted out of egotism by being set forth in its larger aspects. His intellectual force and artistic skill unite in making all those experiences of pain and doubt and conflict which he presents seem to be not so much revelations of what came to him, as, to use Robertson's words, "phases through which the spirit passes." It is the very voice of human sorrow which says,

"That loss is common would not make

My own less bitter, rather more:
Too common! Never morning wore

To evening, but some heart did break."

Trust struggling with the doubt which sorrow brings finds expression in the familiar words,

"I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope,

And gather dust and chaff, and call

To what I feel is Lord of all,

And faintly trust the larger hope."

Faith purified and strengthened by sorrow finds expression in the

A prominent feature of the experience thus delineated is the consciousness it awakes in the soul of its own dignity, and a yearning for assurance that life is ordered to match that consciousness. Love is a mockery, if it be a thing of to-day. It promises immortality every moment of its life, and if immortality be a dream its life is one long lie. A world so made as to vindicate the right of love in its nobler forms to be and to rule is a world shaped by goodness for ends whose worthiness a future life will reveal. So when love is broken, the soul must ask what life is and whether there be a God. If its question be such as an unselfish affection begets, a love that found and chiefly cared for goodness in