From the unnumbered host-to shine o'erhead, Soul quakes with reason (Mihrab Shah, xvi. p. 37). The same principle explains moral evil. The Puritanical explanation, that evil is allowed to exist in order to test man's obedience, is too crude for the nineteenth century: we have outgrown it and must seek for another. Browning finds it in the view that resistance, of which moral evil is one form, is indispensable to all progress. This doctrine permeates Browning's thought from youth to age. Already in Sordello evil is "the scheme by which, thro' ignorance, good labours to exist". It is the whole motive of the poem Rephan, the changeless star, where The wise and the foolish, right and wrong, where, just for that reason, life is stagnation; and whence advance means removal to earth. For earth is higher, not in spite but because of its limits and doubts, its hopes and fears. Illustrations might be multiplied indefinitely, for there is no thought in Browning more frequently recurrent. Throughout he is firm in accepting evil as a result no less natural than good. Nay, it is necessary. All the highest virtues are linked to evil as their negative condition. It is through strife that the moral being rises to peace: if the peace is reached without strife, it is not moral in kind. The "rebuffs" and "stings" of earth are to be welcomed as impulses to higher progress. Even temptation is a blessing to those who are able to face it: Pray, "Lead us into no such temptations, Lord!" Yea, but, O Thou whose servants are the bold, Lead such temptations by the head and hair, (The Ring and the Book: The Pope, 1187-1192.) Here is the most courageous and thoroughgoing application possible of the idea of evolution. Just as the forms of life are evolved through the stress of conflict with material circumstances, so the moral being grows to the fulness of his stature through conflict with evil. It must not be supposed that Browning's theory hangs upon a distinction between physical and moral evil. His language in the passage quoted above is perfectly clear, and it is too often repeated to leave room for the supposition of inadvertence. He tells us even that we are "by hate taught love"; and though it is Bishop Blougram he causes to speak of "the blessed evil," we feel that he would himself use the same adjective. He finds therefore in a scientific principle the groundwork of his whole scheme of morals, that without which the world he lives in is to him inexplicable. CHAPTER XI. THE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL ASPECTS OF THE POETS. IN turning from science to social and political life we approach nearer to the essence of poetry. What the pure intellect can give, so long as its end is knowing rather than living, is only certain regulative ideas. These may indeed be of almost incalculable importance, but they become poetical only in relation to life in the concrete. The poet therefore is apt to view with comparative unconcern the waxing and waning of theories. "Our little systems have their day," he thinks; and though during that day they may influence him more perhaps than he knows, he waits with calmness for another morning after it has set. To some extent the same is true even of changes directly affecting life. The particular social forms in which its needs have found expression are not essential to the poet, and the silent changes they undergo may therefore pass unnoticed by him. But he can hardly remain unmoved by those great revolutions which seem to alter every feature of life. They may lift him into a heaven such as no purely intellectual triumph could open, or plunge him into a gulf to which intellectual failure could not sink him. It is a commonplace of criticism that the former was the fate of the poets during the closing years of last century and the beginning of the present one. I have already said that in a modified degree the latter was the state in which the poets at the end of the first quarter of the century found themselves. The bitterness of their disappointment was proportioned to the eagerness and extravagance of the previous hopes, and it led to a lassitude which only by slow degrees passed away. Browning, it is true, never sank under the influence of this lethargy. The question why he escaped it must remain for consideration in a later part of this chapter. Tennyson, it is also true, was never wholly subject to it. Still, as we have already seen in part, its brand is stamped deep upon his early work. I have in an earlier chapter referred to the sense of loss left upon him and others by the death of Byron. With Byron seemed to die a great generation with its hopes and aspirations; and there was no young leader of thought who at the moment saw what was to take their place. But Tennyson almost, as Browning wholly, deserved the praise reserved by the old Romans for those who in troublous times had not despaired of the Republic. The horizon of his hopes was narrowed indeed, and the fact, as we have seen, showed itself both in his choice of subjects and in his manner of treating them. But we have seen also that even in those early days he had formed his own political ideals and given them noble expression. There is no more characteristic note in his poetry than that which rings in his political pieces. The fact has been already pointed out that Tennyson held opinions in this respect widely different from those of the revolutionary poets. It remains to show wherein precisely the difference consisted at the beginning, and how it was affected by the course of events and by the poet's gradual development. If we take Byron as representative of the poetry of the revolutionary period, we may say broadly that in all his poetry Byron speaks for man; Tennyson in his political pieces writes as an Englishman for Englishmen. The barriers levelled by the Revolution had been built up again; and the sense of division overpowered once more the sense of unity. Tennyson's three early political pieces, already noticed, are a glorification of English ideals of freedom and English political methods. The sense of full satisfaction with the practical results of these methods, and the poet's mode of presenting them, were both modified with advancing years; but the same spirit animated him throughout. It found forcible expression again in the beginning of the middle period, and the events of the revolutionary year, 1848, deepened the sense of opposition to France with which it was accompanied. God bless the narrow seas, I wish they were a whole Atlantic broad, is the exclamation of "the Tory member's elder son in The Princess. The comparative narrowness of view here implied is far from being purely matter for regret. Bacon condemned as one of the errors to which the human mind is prone the tendency to grasp prematurely at universality. The Revolutionists had certainly fallen victims to this tendency. In their revolt against false divisions they asserted a unity impossible in the time and circumstances, and by doing so provoked a reaction hardly less exaggerated than their own revolt. If Wordsworth answers at all to Browning's Lost Leader, it is because he fell under the influence of this reaction, as Tennyson did after him. But Tennyson was right in believing the differences between nation and nation to be, not perhaps as vital as the points of agreement, but here and now the more immediate and practical business. He was at least not wholly wrong in postponing the unity to a distant future. The point in which he is really open to criticism is that he is grudging and half-hearted wherever he goes much beyond his own time and country. There was a strain of conservatism deep in his nature. His habit was to rest in the view of the day, modified as a rule, if the view was at all a gloomy one, by a vague and undefined trust in the future. This is the keynote of his utterances on religion; it is the keynote too of his political pieces. The extraordinary interest of his poetical development lies in the opportunity it affords of observing how circumstances without, acting upon native powers within, gradually undermined this disposition to accept what is. The observation of this habit of mind is important because, though it does not fix Tennyson's place in literature, it helps to determine the sphere within which that place must be found. He does not belong intellectually to the class of which Shakespeare is the head, a class distinguished by a width of range and a flexibility not to be found in Tennyson. In Tennyson we always have the sense of an intellectual "beyond"; in Shakespeare we have not. He may not have settled, or even tried to settle, the subject with which he is dealing, for he is singularly free from dogmatism. But he invariably leaves the impression that he has seen all round it. Tennyson on the contrary belongs to the class of which we may take Milton for the type,-the class of minds intense and strong, but comparatively narrow; and he nowhere shows this more clearly than in his political references, which have both, on the one hand, a Miltonic |