And one of the manifold beauties of this exquisite poem, and which is another characteristic of true poetry, is that, piercing through all the sophistries and over refinements of speculation and the lifeless skepticism of science, it falls back upon the grand, primary, simple truths of our humanity-those first principles which underlie all creeds, which belong to our earliest childhood, and on which the wisest and best have rested through all ages-that all is right; that darkness shall be clear; that God and time are the only interpreters; that love is king; that the immortal is in us; that, which is the keynote of the whole,

All is well, though faith and form

Be sundered in the night of fear.

In the many and varied aspects of Tennyson's poetry there is one that ever shines resplendent-the artistic. This is organic and vital. It is revealed in the consecrating purpose of his life, in the schooling of his activities to attain poetic perfection, in the shaping and coloring given his ideas, and in the living garment of beauty with which he has clothed his characters. The artistic in Tennyson was made, as truly as it was born. It was as certainly the fruit of hard work as of fortunate endowment, of the "infinite capacity for taking pains as of inspiration. He composed with laborious and almost painful slowness. With Horace, he might say, "Like the Matinian bee, feeding with endless toil on the same sweet thyme, what I compose I compose with elaborate care." His ideal was so high and his passion for perfection so strong that he subjected what he had written to the most careful and constant revision. Recasting and polishing his verse, heightening, modifying, developing its latent beauty, he fashioned it from "well to better, daily self-surpast." No poet has rewritten so much as Tennyson or shown such excellent critical insight in his revisions. His early shortcomings were obvious, his faults were palpable. Swinburne, who is himself a consummate metrist, says:

There are whole poems of Lord Tennyson's first period which are no more properly to be called metrical than the more shapeless and monstrous part of Walt Whitman; which are lineally to be derived, as to their form-if form that can be called where form is none-from the vilest examples set by Cowley, when English verse was first infected and convulsed by the detestable duncery of sham Pindarics. At times, of course, his song was then as sweet as ever it has sounded since; but he could never make sure of singing right for more than a few minutes or stanzas. The strenuous drill through which since then he has felt it necessary to

put himself has done all that hard labor can do to rectify this congenital complaint by dint of stocks and backboard he has taught himself a more graceful carriage.*

Similar criticisms were made by Coleridge, Poe, Lockhart, and others. These criticisms were grievous for Tennyson to bear and left an agonizing smart; but he profited by them. Like Disraeli, in Tancred, he seems to have thought: "Failure is nothing. It may be deserved, or it may be remedied. In the first instance, it brings self-knowledge; in the second, it develops a new combination, usually triumphant." About two fifths of the poems that appeared in his first volume Tennyson has suppressed, and he has retouched for the better many of the others.

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Tennyson's art was rooted in a deep and multifarious knowledge. In him the saying, "Best bard, because the wisest," finds significant illustration. Thackeray, his old college friend, once said, "Tennyson is the wisest man I know." He was "a linguist, naturalist, geologist, astronomer, theologian, and skilled in the sciences." With the remotest discoveries" of scientists Tennyson was well acquainted. His mind loved to dwell upon the wonders of the universe, to interrogate the secrets of nature, to look into the mysteries. To the "science thus familiarized" to him he gave," as it were, a form of flesh and blood," "lending his divine spirit to aid the transfiguration." Tennyson did not love Nature for her own sake, as Shelley and Keats and Wordsworth did. Shelley waited upon Nature like an enraptured lover, breathing her very spirit; Keats burned with sensuous delight at the contemplation of her beauties; Wordsworth stood before her, like a veritable priest, in rapt contemplation, with a soul full of worship, and listened for her revelations. Tennyson's love was for natural objects, rather than nature; he combined the reverent scrutiny of the scientist for truth with the poet's search for beauty. There is little love for nature. apart from man, in Tennyson's poetry. His descriptions of natural objects are full of human interest and reflect some particular mood or emotion. In that beautiful lyric, "Come into the garden, Maud," Nature seems to be lyrical, glowing with the love that burns in the lover's soul. How beautiful and appropriate is the scenery that serves as a setting for "The Gar

*Swinburne, Miscellanies, p. 255.

dener's Daughter!" Contrast with the beauty and bloom of this poem the picture of desolation and gloom presented in "Mariana in the South." In the former we have the gardener's daughter, a "miracle of symmetry," a "miniature of loveliness," in a garden "of flowery squares," which smells "of the coming summer;" in the latter,

With one black shadow at its feet,

The house through all the level shines,
Close-latticed to the brooding heat,
And silent in its dusty vines ;
A faint blue ridge upon the right,
An empty river bed before,

And shallows on a distant shore,
In glaring sand and inlets bright.

But more melancholy than the house and its surroundings were Mariana and her saddening carol:

It was late in life when Tennyson, the master of the various forms of lyric and idyllic poetry, applied himself with fresh earnestness to the writing of dramas. He loved the stage. For Shakespeare he had a passionate admiration, and he longed to be such a dramatist himself. His strong dramatic tendency is manifest in his poems. His psychological power in projecting himself into other and different characters is evident in such dramatic monologues as the two "Locksley Halls," "Rizpah," the "Northern Farmer," and others. In this, the simplest form of dramatic art, the delineation of one character in one set of circumstances, Tennyson was successful in the highest degree and showed a grasp of character truly Shakespearean and a psychological power that only Browning has surpassed. But a drama is a much more complex form of art than a dramatic monologue. Man is represented in a web of complications, acting on other characters and acted upon by them, grasping the world with controlling power, and himself held in its grasp. The drama, in a word, represents characters, actions, and events as living in and through, even clashing with, one another. The dramatist, therefore, must possess constructive power of a high order to make his plays organic and vital. In

most of Tennyson's dramas there is a predominance of thought and feeling over action. There are passages of wondrous power and beauty; there is spirited dialogue; there are voices that ring with true dramatic quality; there are characters that stand out firm and clear; there are scenes of thrilling intensity; but some of his plays-for instance, "Queen Mary" and "The Promise of May "-are not well constructed. In "Queen Mary" the action is not adequately motived, the movement is so halting that it becomes tedious; scene follows scene, but the plot does not progress. This criticism, however, does not apply to "Harold" and "Becket." Both have a strong dramatic motive. The action in each grows out of the characters and is borne by fierce struggles to a catastrophe full of dramatic interest.

Mr. Lowell said of Gray that "he was the greatest artist in words Cambridge has produced." But Gray, consummate artist that he was, does not measure up to Tennyson's greatness. The best of Gray is not better than Tennyson's best, and there is much less of it. In range, power, and beauty, he does not equal the Victorian poet. The laureate came into richer. heritage of poetic art than Gray, drawing upon all the wealth the earlier poet did, only more largely; and he gained much, in addition, from such later treasures as the luscious music of Keats, the rhythm of Byron, the melodies of Coleridge and Shelley, and the pure cadences of Wordsworth.

D. Dorchester. Ir.

ART. VII.-THE NEW POLITICAL ECONOMY.

THE historical school of political economy traces its origin to three German economists. They were not the first to make use of the historical method as applied to economics, but were the first to see its great importance. Wilhelin. Roscher, in 1843, stated the principles of the new school in his Grundriss zu Vorlesungen über die Staatswirthschaft nach geschichtlicher Methode; five years later came Bruno Hildebrand's Die Nationalökonomie der Gegenwart und Zukunft; and in 1853 Karl Knies published his work entitled Die Politische Oekonomie vom Standpunkte der geschichtlichen Methode. With the works of these three German professors the historical school originated. Still, it would not be correct to give these men all the credit for the birth of the new political economy, for their work was made possible by the philosophy of Auguste Comte. Ingram, in his History of Political Economy, sums up the leading features of Comte's system of sociology as follows:

(1) It is essentially one science, in which all the elements of a social state are studied in their relations and mutual actions; (2) it includes a dynamical, as well as a statical, theory of society; (3) it thus eliminates the absolute, substituting for an imagined fixity the conception of ordered change; (4) its principal method, though others are not excluded, is that of historical comparison; (5) it is pervaded by moral ideas, by notions of social duty, as opposed to the individual rights which were derived as corollaries from the jus naturæ; and (6) in its spirit and practical consequences it tends to the realization of all the great ends which compose the popular cause; yet (7) it aims at this through peaceful means, replacing revolution by evolution.

Without a scientific social philosophy such as that founded by Auguste Comte the historical school would be impossible.

The historical school took its name to denote the similarity of its methods with the methods of the great scholars who have revolutionized the sciences of jurisprudence and politics. The deductive method of the English school, which, from a few premises, enables them to build up a system of political economy good for all times and places, is rejected. The new polit ical economy, first of all, claims to be founded on observed facts, and not on hypothetical premises. It aims to study the present as a product of the past, and to take into consideration