ments of his age; he possessed also the piercing vision, the direct intuition of the prophet into the constitution and needs of human nature. He felt that the mechanical philosophy offered to him in the name of physical science was utterly inadequate to life. And he turned from the macrocosm to the microcosm; from the universe without him to the universe within him. He found in the laws of man's spiritual and moral being the solution of "the riddle of this painful earth." On those laws he based his Theistic belief, his ethical code, and his political principles. Let me indicate this in the barest outline—it is all that is possible to me now-leaving you to fill in the details, if you think well to do so, by your own study of his works.

First, then, as to Tennyson's Theism. A thinker contemporary with him, but belonging to a very different school, has remarked, "It is indeed a great question whether Atheism is not as philosophically consistent with the phenomena of the physical world, taken by themselves, as a doctrine of a creative and governing power." The term Agnosticism had not been invented when these words were spoken by John Henry Newman before the University of Oxford fifty-seven years ago. The term appears to me to meet a distinct want. Littré defines an Atheist as one who does not believe in God. But the tendency of late years has been to narrow the meaning of the word; to confine it to those who expressly deny the Theistic conception. The word Agnosticism has been coined to describe the mental attitude of doubt, suspension of judgment, nescience regarding that conception. It applies more correctly than the word Atheism to a class, considerable not only from their numbers, but for their intellectual endowments and their virtues. It appeared to Tennyson that to shut us up in physical science, to confine our knowledge to matter and force, and ascertained sequences and co-ordinations of phenomena, is to doom us to Agnosticism, You remember the verses in which he has told us this. Familiar as they are,

You see he appeals to the laws of man's spiritual nature for light upon this momentous question; those first great spiritual laws the denial of which is the essence of Agnosticism. Tennyson discerned with Spinoza that the primordial law of being is being; that the fundamental want of man is to prove, affirm, augment, his own life.

"Tis life, whereof our nerves are scant, Oh life, not death for which we pant; More life, and fuller, that I want,

Man lives under the law of progress which is the striving after perfection, and of which the highest expression is the quest of the All Perfect. Hence those "æthereal hopes," as Wordsworth speaks, which are part and parcel of us; "those mighty hopes which make us men," Tennyson calls them, in words which seem to me true to the letter. The intellect, as Plato teaches, testifies that the ideas of truth, goodness, beauty, justice, belong to an order of absolute principles. anterior and superior to man, and is compelled by an architectonic law of its own being, to refer the complete realization of those principles to the Ultimate Reality, which it therefore contemplates as Το Ερῶμενον, the Althogether Lovely, the Object of all desire. Towards that

cree, by what I regard as the dominant English characteristic-reverence for duty as the supreme law of life: the subordination of all ideals to the moral ideal. You remember how in one of his earliest poems-"none"-he tells us:

may violate that law, as he may resist, and may violate any other law of his being; for the eternal hands that made and fashioned him, while:

binding nature fast in fate,

Left free the human will.

This is his princely and perilous prerogative, the very essence of his personality, in virtue of which he is "man and master of his fate;" this is:

trol,

These three alone lead life to sovereign

power.

How he indicates us the rule of life:

world.

But the law, whether obeyed or disobeyed, remains-witnessing to the Sovereign Good, the Everlasting Righteousness, the Supreme Object of Rational Desire which is the True End of man. Through "a dust of systems and creeds," this vision of this Ineffable Reality shone out for Tennyson undimmed; the light of life to him, without

which it were better:

to drop headlong in the jaws vacant darkness, and to cease. Such was Tennyson's Theism. But it is on this great spiritual law of progress that his ethical creed also rested. The surest law of man's nature we must account it, according to that saying of Plato, "I find nothing more certain than this-that I must be as good and noble as I can." "Must." Necessity is laid upon us. This is that law of which Butler speaks: "The law of virtue that we are born under." Tennyson has formulated it in his own way as being to:

move upward, working out the beast,

and let the ape and tiger die.

I find Tennyson peculiarly and completely English in his cast of thought. He is distinguished, in the highest de702

LIVING AGE.

VOL. XIV.

space and time: a law of absolute universality, as are all moral laws that are strictly such; valid for all rational beAgain, in the ings in all worlds. "Idylls of the King," this law is the Arthur, as I re dominant thought. member a famous German critic once remarked to me, is conscience made flesh and dwelling among us. And the primary precept of the heroic monarch to his glorious fellowship of the Table Round is to "reverence their conscience as their king." And, here I would remark in passing. how finely Tennyson has vindicated that higher law of the relations of the sexes, wrought into our civilization by Christianity, and embellished by chivalry, which contemporary Materialism burns to abrogate. With Tennyson the passion of sexual love, refined and idealized-humanized in a word-is a chief instrument of our ethical life: its office:—

... not only to keep down the base in

man,

But teach high thoughts and amiable words,

And love of truth, and all that makes a

man.

Once more. Those great ethical laws which dominate private life should, Tennyson held, be the laws of public life also: a truth much dimmed just now

in the popular mind; nay may we not say, well-nigh effaced from it? I was mentioning to an accomplished friend, a short time ago, that I had it in intention to write a book on "First Principles in Politics;" a sort of sketch of, or introduction to, the laws of human society. He replied, "My dear fellow, there are no first principles in politics, there are no laws of human society, it is all a matter of expediency, of utility, of convention, of self-interest." This is an expression of that lawlessness, that loss of the idea of law, that I spoke of just now. And its last development in the public order is the doctrine which substitutes the caprice of the multitude for what Shakespeare calls "the moral laws of nature and of nations." Tennyson discerned, clearly enough, that this doctrine of the absolute and indefeasible authority of what is called "the people," that is, of the numerical majority of the adult males of a country, is really a doctrine of anarchy; that it means the triumph of the passions over the rational will; whereas the true theory of the state whatever its form, means the triumph of the rational will over the passions. I cannot go into this matter further on the present occasion; but, I may observe that, from first to last, Tennyson's political teaching seems to me perfectly consistent. know of no difference of principle between "Locksley Hall" and "Locksley Hall Sixty Years After." At the end, as at the beginning of his career, Tennyson was the loyal worshipper of Freedom, which he justly terms:

I

loather of the lawless crown As of the lawless crowd: Freedom, the very first condition of which is servitude to law. The years as they went by stripped him of many of his illusions. But they strengthened his grasp upon his principles.

This then, was, as it seems to me, the mission of Tennyson: to bring home to us the supremacy and universality of law. The exaltation of the materialist and positive element in life, the depreciation of the spiritual and moral element, is the special danger of our age;

a danger arising out of its special greatness. There is one and only one antidote to this danger, the apprehension of law issuing from the nature of things which is rational; the first fact in the universe, though invisible, impalpable, imponderable: most real, indeed, because most spiritual. It seems to me that Tennyson has given us the groundwork of a philosophy of life which will never be overthrown, because it is based upon this eternal adamant. And his stately verse is a fitting vehicle for his august message. The dignity of his diction corresponds with the dignity of his doctrine. He possesses, in ample measure, that charm to quell the commonplace which we find in the great classics, and notably in the foremost poets of Greece and Rome. His poetry is a perpetual Sursum Corda-ever elevating our thoughts to what is noble and pure, and to the Eternal Source of all nobleness and all purity. He has told us in lines unsurpassed, as Taine thought, by any writer since Goethe for calm and majesty, how "The old order changeth, giving place to the new." Yes: the old order changeth. We live amid "a dust of systems and of creeds.” Much has gone during the last hundred years that men once thought durable as the world itself. Much more is going. What is the prospect? To Tennyson one thing at all events was clear: that neither worthy life for the individual, nor social health for the body politic, is possible, unless we live by something higher than ascertained sequences and co-ordinations of phenomena; unless we appeal to some holier spring of action than the desire of a remembered pleasure. "This ever changing world of changeless law," he sings in one of his poems. Amid the constant flux of all things, the law of the universe does not change. It is necessary, immutable, absolute and eternal. Nor does the power of man's will change:

From The Revue des Deux Mondes.

A SWISS TOURIST. What is a tourist? According to the French Academy it is “One who enjoys travel, and travels for his own pleasure and instruction." But explorers, too, enjoy travel. They enjoy it very much indeed, and they travel for their own instruction, and for ours as well. They delight in seeing what no one else has seen before them; and they delight yet more in measuring their own strength, energy and courage, and in doing what the common run of mankind cannot do. Yet who would presume to say that the Mungo Parks, the Cailliés, the Barths and the Bingers were merely tourists.

If the Academy has done the tourists more than justice in attributing to them a desire for improvement which they do not always possess, Littré, who was a stay-at-home body, seems unduly to have depreciated them. He defines them rather disdainfully as "persons who visit foreign countries out of mere idleness and curiosity." But all tourists are not idle. Sometimes they are exceedingly busy people who get only occasional vacations of a few months which they improve by stretching their legs. On the other hand all manner of tourists are curious. The geologist who goes through the Alps, for the purpose of studying the formation of glaciers, is animated by a far more vivid curiosity than the chance tourist who ascends Mt. Blanc merely because he wishes to say that he has done so; that upon a given day a certain small man found himself perched upon a peak in the sky where he discovered nothing. Littré adds that the tourist goes a certain round in the countries habitually visited by his compatriots. Now I know some who prefer to go where no one else goes; their humor is solitary; they have a taste for novelties. But they are none the less tourists. The explorer, the missionary, the commercial traveller, and the scientific traveller find their account in travelling. The tourist is essentially a wanderer only, and this is his distinctive mark. Nowadays, thanks to railways and transatlantic steamers, it only depends upon him to go a long

way in a very short time. But however long and laborious his excursion may be the excursion itself is all. The trav eller has no concern save that of abandoning himself to the pleasure, the exercise, and the slight inevitable discomfort of travel, of beguiling his fatigue by getting all the amusement he can out of the chance distractions of the route. For the explorer the world is a place where discoveries are to be made. For the savant it is a study. The missionary sees souls to be saved in every place; the "drummer," customers to be beaten up. For the genuine tourist the world is a promenade.

M. Paul Seippel is a Swiss tourist, who, after having gone up and down the earth a great many times, has, at last, been round it, beginning at America. He crossed the Atlantic in the Bourgogne, saw Canada and the river St. Lawrence in flood, saw Montreal and Quebec under melting snows. He visited sundry cities of eastern America, whose numbered blocks, and buildings twelve stories high, inspired him with no wish to settle there. He enjoyed, as he says, "the enchanting spectacle of vast plains where the vir gin forests have been replaced by millions of advertising boards, celebrating in gigantic letters the virtues of Castoria, and the surprising efficacy of Bechman's Purgative Pills." He made a tour in California, sailed up the Pacific coast, and saw the salmonfisheries of the river Columbia. At Victoria he embarked for Yokohama and passed two months and a half in Japan. He then took ship again, gave a passing look at Shangai Hongkong, Canton, Macao, Saigon and Singapore, and passed the winter at Cexton in the sanatarium of Nuwara Ellixa. All he had to do after that was to return to Geneva; but he stopped over, both at Bombay and Cairo, and arrived home exactly a year, to a day, from the time of his departure.

This was surely a tremendous tour. But the traveller is modest. He calls himself a simple tourist or globe-trotter. Nevertheless, it is undeniable that he saw a great deal and saw it well. The

principal episodes of his excursion have supplied him with the materials for a handsomely illustrated quarto volume, which is very good reading. Not only has he good eyes. He has gaiety and humor and he does not lack philosophy, Now cheerful philosophers are rare at the present time. Yet you might almost think, to hear M. Seippel talk, that he regretted having journeyed so far. He protests that the most amusing and profitable of journeys are, after all, those which a man may make without leaving home; and that if travellers were only honest and told the whole truth, -if they recounted their sufferings, their misadventures, their attacks of melancholy, the incessant packing and unpacking of valises, the arrival in tiresome and dismal hotel bedrooms, the bad beds, the loathly table d'hôte, "with its vague viands, swimming in that famous international sauce which is the same in all latitudes," the people who stay at home would realize that they had chosen the better part—and Cook's Agency would fail. He has discovered that this big world is, after all, very little, and that one soon gets to the other side of it. He brought back from Japan a Bouddha in bold-lacquer sitting with closed eyes and crossed legs, on an open lotus-flower. He often talks with this deity, who is at once lofty and compassionate and who enjoys telling him that the universe is only a vain appearance, a dream, a foam-bubble. One of the vignettes in his book represents the painted wood-work ornamenting the stable of a horse which is consecrated to the service of a temple of Nikko, Here are depicted three apes, convinced disciples of Cakia-Mouni, all sitting under the same tree which is full of fragrant blossoms. One of them is stop ping his eyes, another his nose, the third his ears. To see, to smell, to hear nothing-herein is supreme wisdom!

After discoursing with Cakia-Mouni, M. Seippel meditates a little on the twentieth chapter of the first book of the "Imitation." "What can you see elsewhere which you do not see where you now are? Here are the sky, the earth, the elements, and it is from these that

all things are made. . . . Leave vain things to vain men. Close your own door behind you. Had you never gone out, and heard the uproar of the world, you would have remained in the sweet peace of this place. It is because you love to hear new things, that you have now to support a troubled spirit. . . . And M. Seippel resolves that he will close his door, and avoid trouble of mind and the uproar of the world, by simply staying at home. He declares that he has passed the best years of his youth in incessantly roaming the earth, only to discover, one fine day, that after all he dislikes travelling. Do not believe him; he is fibbing. To-morrow he will feel the need of beholding yellow, brown or black faces, and will strap his trunks with a light heart. "The cell which is rarely quitted," says the "Imitation" "becomes very sweet. Frequently abandoned it is wearisome." This is not the wisdom of the tourist. If he have a healthy mind he will enjoy quitting his cell just as much as he enjoys returning to it with a "Here I am again!" and M. Seippel has a peculiarly healthy mind.

But there are tourists and tourists. The larger number are incapable of recounting their recollections for the excellent reason that they have seen nothing, and remember nothing. “At the Grand-Hotel of Yokohama," says M. Seippel, "I met two young globetrotters from Chicago, who were passing a month in Japan. They literally spent their whole time in the billiardroom playing 'pyramid' and drinking various kinds of 'cocktails.' Others, more enterprising, had pushed on as far as Mianosita, where, in a barren valley, the most melancholy in all Japan, there is an hotel, which is, for some inscrutable reason, very fashionable. One may always count upon meeting there a choice collection of international snobs, entirely absorbed in astonishing one another, by the renown of their titles, the splendor of their millions, or the elegance of their cravats. In their character of free citizens of a great and impartial democracy, a good many American tourists adore this sort of