Unfortunately, the social condition of the country was so deplorable

that this improvement in the laws conferred few or no benefits upon the

impoverished and downtrodden people. But at least there was some gain;

for if good laws do not necessarily make a people prosperous, bad laws

necessarily keep them in misery. The landed gentry and Protestant clergy

continued without shame to neglect all the duties which they owed to

their tenants, whose wretchedness increased as the fortunes of Ireland

seemed to rise. To maintain the Volunteers the rents were raised, and

the poor peasants, already sinking beneath an intolerable burden, were

yet more heavily laden. The proprietors of the soil spent their time in

riot and debauch while the people were starving. They were the

magistrates and at the same time the most notorious violators of the

law. “The justices of the peace,” says Arthur Young, “are the very worst

class in the kingdom.”

The clergy of the Established Church were little better. Like the

landlords, they were generally absentees, and employed agents to raise

their tithes, in the North from the Presbyterians, and in other parts of

the island from the Catholics. “As the absentee landlord,” says Froude,

“had his middleman, the absentee incumbent had his tithe farmer and

tithe proctor—perhaps of all the carrion who were preying on the carcase

of the Irish peasantry the vilest and most accursed. As the century

waned and life grew more extravagant, the tithe proctor, like his

neighbors, grew more grasping and avaricious. He exacted from the

peasants the full pound of flesh. His trade was dangerous, and therefore

he required to be highly paid. He handed to his employer perhaps half

what he collected. He fleeced the flock and he fleeced their shepherd.”

“The use of the tithe farmer,” said Grattan, “is to get from the

parishioners what the clergyman would be ashamed to demand, and to

enable the clergyman to absent himself from duty. His livelihood is

extortion. He is a wolf left by the shepherd to take care of the flock

in his absence.”[17]

Footnote 17:

_The English in Ireland_, vol. ii. p. 453.

In the midst of the general excitement the Catholic peasants grew

restless under this horrible system of organized plunder and extortion.

They banded together and took an oath to pay only a specified sum to the

clergyman or his agent. The movement spread, and occasional acts of

violence were committed. All Munster was organized, and a regular war

with the tithe proctors was begun. In the popular fury crimes were

perpetrated and the innocent were often made to suffer with the guilty.

Yet so glaring were the wrongs and so frightful the abuses from which

the peasants were suffering that they everywhere met with sympathy. The

true cause of these disorders was social and not political. Misery, and

not partisan zeal, had driven the Catholics to take up arms. The cry of

hungry women and children for bread resounded louder in their ears than

the shouts of the patriots. They were without food or raiment, and in

despair they sought to wreak vengeance upon the inhuman tyrants who had

reduced them to starvation. Even Fitzgibbon, afterwards Lord Clare, was

forced to admit that the Munster peasants were in a state of oppression,

abject poverty, and misery not to be equalled in the world, and that the

landlords and their agents were responsible for the degradation of these

unfortunate beings.

Ireland was still a prey to agitations, hopes, and sufferings when the

French Revolution of 1789 burst upon Europe. The cry of Liberty,

equality, fraternity sounded as revelation to the struggling patriots.

Hitherto they had contended for freedom, in the English and feudal

sense, as a privilege and a concession; they now demanded it as an

imprescriptible right of man. The American Declaration had indeed

proclaimed that all men were free and equal, or of right ought to be;

but this was merely a pretty phrase, a graceful preamble, in a charter

which consecrated slavery and inequality. In America there were no

privileged classes, and the people had not groaned beneath the tyranny

of heartless and effete aristocracies; the evils of which their leaders

complained, compared with those which weighed down the European

populations, were slight, almost imaginary. But in France Liberty and

Equality was the fierce and savage yell of men who hated the whole

social order as it existed around them, and who, indeed, had no reason

to love it. The spirit of feudalism was dead, and its lifeless form

remained to impest the earth. The nobles, sunk in debauch and sloth,

continued their exactions, upheld their privileges, and yet rendered no

service to the state. Corruption, extravagance, maladministration,

infidelity, and licentiousness pervaded the whole social system. France

was prostrate with the foot of a harlot on her neck, and the people were

starving. Little wonder, when the torch was applied, that the lurid

glare of burning thrones and altars, the crash of falling palaces and

cathedrals, should affright and strike dumb the nations of the earth—for

God’s judgment was there; little wonder that Ireland, sitting by the

melancholy sea, chained and weeping, should lift her head when the God

of the patient and the humble was shattering the whitened sepulchres

which enshrined the world’s rottenness.

In Belfast the taking of the Bastile was celebrated by processions and

banquets amid the wildest enthusiasm, and the name of Mirabeau called

forth the most deafening applause. The eyes of Ireland were fastened on

France; the cause of the Revolution was believed to be that of all

oppressed peoples who seek to break the bonds of slavery. “Right or

wrong,” wrote an Irish patriot, “success to the French! They are

fighting our battles, and, if they fail, adieu to liberty in Ireland for

one century.”[18] Even the manners and phraseology of the Revolution

became popular in Ireland. The Dublin Volunteers were called the

National Guard, the liberty-cap was substituted for the harp, and

Irishmen saluted one another with the title of citizen.

Footnote 18:

Tone’s _Memoirs_, vol. i. p 205.

Out of this French enthusiasm grew the Society of “United Irishmen,”

which soon superseded the Volunteers. The United Irishmen made no

concealment of their revolutionary principles. They demanded a radical

reform in the administration of Ireland, and threatened, if this was

denied, to break the bond which held them united with England. They

openly proclaimed their intention of stamping out “the vile and odious

aristocracy,” which was an insuperable obstacle to the progress of the

Irish people; and to accomplish this they invited the French to invade

Ireland. The landlords, they said, show no mercy; they deserve to

receive none.

However little sympathy the Catholics might feel with men who

entertained such violent opinions, they were their natural allies; and

the English government, following its old policy of doing what is right

only under compulsion, hastened to make concessions. From June, 1792,

Catholics were admitted as barristers; they were allowed to keep more

than two apprentices; and the prohibition of their marriage with

Protestants was withdrawn. In 1793, when France had declared war against

England, still further concessions were made. The penalties for

non-attendance at Protestant worship were abolished. “On the eve of a

desperate war,” said Sir Lawrence Parsons in the House of Commons, “it

was unsafe to maintain any longer the principles of entire exclusion.”

The Catholics were admitted to the franchise, but were not made eligible

to Parliament; they were at the same time declared capable of holding

offices, civil and military, and places of trust, without taking the

oath or receiving the sacrament. This is the third emancipation of the

Catholics of Ireland. The American Revolution brought about the first,

and the independence of the Irish Parliament the second.

In the meantime the crimes and excesses of the French Republicans had

cooled the zeal of the Irish patriots. The Catholics grew suspicious of

leaders who applauded the assassins of priests and the profaners of all

sacred things. A reaction had set in, and the English government seized

the opportunity to order the people to lay down their arms; and this

order was intentionally executed with such cruelty as to provoke

insurrections, which, in the lack of leaders and of any plan of action,

were easily suppressed. The agents of the United Irishmen had, however,

succeeded in interesting the French Republic in the cause of Ireland,

and in December, 1796, General Hoche set sail for Bantry Bay with

fifteen thousand men; but the fleet, scattered by a storm, was unable to

effect a landing. In August, 1798, General Humbert disembarked in

Killala Bay at the head of fifteen hundred men who had been drawn from

the armies of Italy and the Rhine, but he found the Irish people

completely disarmed, and the country in the possession of a powerful

English army. He nevertheless pushed forward into the interior of the

island, routed an army of four thousand men, and finally, when his force

had been reduced to eight hundred, capitulated to Lord Cornwallis at the

head of thirty thousand. A third expedition, sent out in the month of

September of the same year, met with no better success. The Rebellion of

'98 had blazed forth and had been quenched in blood. That it was not

unprovoked even Mr. Froude confesses.

“The long era of misgovernment,” he says, “had ripened at last for the

harvest. Rarely since the inhabitants of the earth have formed

themselves into civilized communities had any country suffered from such

a complication of neglect and ill-usage. The Irish people clamored

against Government, and their real wrong, from first to last, had been

that there was no government over them; that, under changing forms, the

universal rule among them for four centuries had been the tyranny of the

strong over the weak; that from the catalogue of virtues demanded of

those who exercised authority over their fellow-men the word justice had

been blotted out. Anarchy had borne its fruits.”[19]

Footnote 19:

_The English in Ireland_, vol. iii. p. 348.

During the violence of the conflict, and in the heat of passion, both

the rebels and the British soldiers committed crimes for which no excuse

can be offered; but the horrible and deliberate brutality of the English

after the suppression of the outbreak has never been surpassed by them

even in Ireland. When at length the appetite for torture, mutilation,

and hanging palled, the British ministry resolved to suppress the Irish

Parliament. Nothing was to be feared from the people, for their spirit

had been crushed; the lavish expenditure of money in open and shameless

bribery overcame the scruples of their Protestant representatives; and

thus, after a struggle of six hundred and thirty-one years (1169-1800),

corruption triumphed where every other means had failed. The _Union_ was

declared to exist; but Ireland was permitted to retain its name, its

institutions, laws, and customs, subject, however, to the pleasure of

the imperial Parliament.

The Rebellion of 1803, which accomplished nothing, and that of 1848,

which met with no better fate, close the fateful list of Ireland’s wars.

Men have never fought in a juster cause, and, had they triumphed, their

names would live for ever in the scroll of the world’s heroes. They have

not bled in vain, if Irishmen will but learn the lesson which their

failures teach. Not by arms, but by the force of the holiest of causes,

is Ireland to obtain the full redress of her wrongs. They only who are

her enemies or who are ignorant of her history would wish to excite her

people to rebellion. That England will grant nothing which she thinks

herself able to withhold we know; but these periodical outbreaks have

invariably given her an opportunity of strengthening the grasp which

political agitation had forced her to relax. Wars which lead only to

butcheries are criminal, and they destroy the faith of patriots in their

country’s triumph; while defeat brings divisions and feuds among those

who had stood shoulder to shoulder on the field of battle.

After the Union Ireland relapsed into a period of lethargic indifference

which might have been mistaken for healthful repose. The Protestant

ascendency entered again upon the beaten paths of tyranny and

oppression, and the Catholics suffered in silence.

The obstinate bigotry of George III. had prevented Pitt from fulfilling

the promise, made at the time of the union of the two kingdoms, to

relieve them of their civil disabilities, and the prime minister, whose

intentions were honest, withdrew from the cabinet. But this step,

however it might exonerate him from further responsibility in the

matter, brought no relief to the Catholics; and as the sad experience of

the past had taught them the hopelessness of resorting to violent

measures, they entered upon the course of peaceful agitation which,

under the wise and skilful direction of O’Connell, compelled the British

Parliament, in April, 1829, to concede to them the rights which had been

so long and so cruelly withheld.

“The Duke of Wellington,” said Lord Palmerston, “found that he could not

carry on the government of the country without yielding the Catholic

question, and he immediately surrendered that point”; and George IV.

signed the act of Catholic Emancipation with a shudder.

This great victory, important in itself and its immediate results, was

yet more important as an evidence of a radical change in the policy

henceforward to be followed in seeking redress of Irish grievances.

For seven hundred years England had been busy in efforts to form a

government for Ireland, and the result was the most disgraceful failure

known in history. For seven hundred years Ireland had rebelled, plotted,

invoked foreign aid, in the hope of throwing off the galling yoke; and

after centuries of bloodshed she found herself more strongly bound to

England. In the presence of this great historical teaching both nations

seemed prepared to pause and deliberately to examine their mutual

relations, and both seemed to feel that the special objects at which

each had been aiming were unattainable. The geographical position of the

two countries renders their union inevitable so long as either is able

to subjugate and hold the other in the bonds of a common government. Had

Ireland been in condition to maintain her independence, England,

surrounded by enemies, could never have risen to the position which she

has held for centuries. The national aspirations for power and dominion

could not be realized while Ireland was permitted to retain her separate

existence, and her conquest was therefore inevitable the moment England

felt herself strong enough to undertake it; nor can the wildest

visionary seriously believe that there is the faintest hope that the

connection between them will ever be dissolved except in their common

ruin. So long as England’s power remains, so long will she hold Ireland

with the unerring instinct with which a vigorous people clings to its

national life; and should England’s downfall come, there is no good

reason for thinking that it would not be the knell of Ireland’s doom.

They have the same language, the same fundamental principles of

government, the same commercial and political interests; and under these

common influences the differences and antagonisms which still exist are

likely to become more and more inactive. The English people are not

without their own grievances, which, in some respects, are more serious

than those of the Irish—the consequences of feudalism, which in England

has been able to resist more successfully than elsewhere the social

movements of modern times. Henceforward Ireland is the natural and

necessary ally of the more liberal and fair-minded portion of the

English people, and she will co-operate most efficiently in helping them

to bring about the reforms which are so much needed.

For the perfect religious liberty which can exist only after the

disestablishment of the Anglican Church England will be indebted to

Ireland, whose people have already compelled the British Parliament to

admit principles and adopt measures which will inevitably lead to the

dissolution of the union between church and state throughout the whole

extent of the empire. The Irish land system must be sacrificed as the

Irish Church has been sacrificed; and this will be the first step

towards a complete revolution in the system of land tenure throughout

Great Britain. The growing influence and increasing number of English

Catholics will help greatly to create a more cordial and genuine

religious sympathy between the two races of these sister islands; and

this sympathy will be still further strengthened when the church in

England, through the disestablishment and disintegration of Anglicanism,

shall have gained a position and power which will give to her special

weight in forming public opinion. As the community of interests of the

two countries becomes more manifest, political parties will cease to be

influenced by national or religious prejudice, and will be constituted

upon principles which relate to the social interests of the people.

England has already confessed the radical error of her Irish policy, and

her leading statesmen have admitted that the cause of its failure lay in

its viciousness—in the fact that it wantonly violated the rights and

interests of the people because they belonged to a different race and

held a different religious faith. Her legislation was unjust because it

was narrow and exclusive—favored a class and a creed, and, in order to

favor these, repressed and crushed the national energies. The government

believed, whether truly or falsely, that it could rule Ireland only by

fostering divisions and feuds among her people; and to do this it sought

by every means to intensify and embitter the prejudice which separated

the English from the Irish, the Protestant from the Catholic. With this

view Scotch and English colonies of Protestants were planted in Ireland,

and, lest the intercourse and amenities of life should soften the

asperity of religious bigotry, the government took special care to

encourage the hatred which kept them aloof from the natives, first by

local separations, and afterwards by the social distinctions which arose

from the enforced poverty and ignorance of the Catholic population. The

American Revolution taught England, if not the iniquity, the folly of

this conduct; and from 1778 to the present day she has been slowly

receding from a course in which she had grown old. She has receded

unwillingly, too, and with hesitation, and has thus often increased the

discontent which she sought to allay. Nations, like individuals, find

that it is hard to recover from inveterate habits of wrong-doing. The

wages of sin must be paid; repentance can save from death, but not from

humiliation and punishment. Nor has England repented, but she has

entered in the way of penitence; she has made some reparation, but has

not by any means done all that must be done before Ireland can be

content. For nearly half a century now—that is, since 1829—there has

been, we believe, a sincere desire to govern Ireland fairly, chiefly, no

doubt, because English statesmen had come to see that it was not

possible to govern her in any other way; but these good intentions have

been thwarted by the constitutional repugnance of the English people to

apply strong and efficacious remedies to social disorders. Nowhere else

among civilized nations are ancient abuses guarded and protected with

such superstitious veneration. Hence the government thought to satisfy

Ireland by half-measures of redress, and these it took so ungraciously

that they seemed to be wrung from it, and not conceded with good-will.

Men are not grateful for favors which are granted because they can no

longer be withheld.

Englishmen still forget that Ireland has the right to be treated by them

not merely with justice, but with generous indulgence. So long as the

root of the evil is left untouched little will be accomplished by

pruning the branches. Ireland’s curse is the system of land tenure,

founded on confiscation and organized to perpetuate a fatal antagonism

between the proprietors and the tillers of the soil. Irishmen will be

disaffected and rebellious so long as the national prosperity is

blighted by a state of things which leaves their country in the hands of

men who are happy only when they are away from it.

Parliament has passed several land acts, but it would seem that they had

been purposely so framed as to produce no good results. That it is

possible to change the land system of Ireland radically, without doing

injustice to any one, is admitted, and various projects by which this

might be done have been laid before Parliament. This is not a question

of tenant-rights; it lies far deeper. Nor is there any parity in this

respect between England and Ireland. In England the land is owned by the

people’s natural leaders; in Ireland it is owned by the people’s natural

enemies. This land question is far more important than any question of

Home Rule; and if Parliament will but give a proper solution to this

problem, Home Rule will no longer be seriously thought of.

When landlordism vanishes from Ireland, the day of final reconciliation

will be at hand. With it will disappear the filibusters, revolutionists,

and Fenians, whose disturbing influence in Irish politics is made

possible by the wrongs which the English government has not the will or

the courage to redress. There are other grievances than the land system,

but it will not be difficult to do away with them when the country shall

have been given back to the people. With a free press, free speech, and

an organized public agitation sustained and increased by the sympathies

and interests of the masses of the people of England, it will be found

impossible to withhold much longer from Ireland full and complete

justice; and nothing less will satisfy her people.

TENNYSON AS A DRAMATIST.[20]

Footnote 20:

_Harold_: A Drama. By Alfred Tennyson. Boston: James R. Osgood & Co.

1877.

_Queen Mary_: A Drama. By Alfred Tennyson. Boston: James R. Osgood &

Co. 1875.

Alfred Tennyson is to-day one of the household gods of English-speaking

peoples. He has a place in every library, a niche in every memory, an

echo in every heart. He has unquestionably added a new and brilliant

page to the great book of English literature. He has set there something

that was not there before, and that is not likely to fade away with

time. Doubtless there are men who would deny this. There are literary

Gorgons who would, if they could, stare every man into stone. There are

critics whose nature seems to distil venom, and who find no sweetness

save in their own gall. To men of this class the very fact of a man

being praised is in itself sufficient cause for condemnation. Over and

above these there are probably some who honestly dislike or do not care

for Tennyson. For such we do not speak, but for the great mass of

English readers in whose estimation Tennyson occupies a very

conspicuous, if somewhat undefinable, position. By them he is liked, and

liked better than any living poet; and, indeed, he has given excellent

reasons for being so liked.

That there have been greater English poets, even his most enthusiastic

admirers must allow; that there have been few sweeter, all who have read

him and others will admit. Indeed, sweetness, with its twin-sister

purity, is one of the marked characteristics of Tennyson’s verse. No man

ever mistook Tennyson for a Pythoness, a Cassandra, a Jeremiah. He is

not heroic like Homer. Much of the idyllic grace, but little of the real

massiveness, of Virgil he has. He cannot scoff like Horace, or Byron, or

Shelley. He cannot scourge like Dante, observe with the luminous

philosophy, the high inspiration of Shakspere, or build up a mighty

edifice like Milton. He can do none of these things. In some respects he

is perhaps less than the least of these poets. He is a sweet singer,

made for sunshine and peace and harmony; the poet of the happy household

over whose threshold passes from time to time the sad shadow of a quiet

sorrow; not the poet of despair, of wrath, of agony, of the fiercer

passions or tumultuous joys, whose very excess is pain.

True it is that, as he sang in his earlier days,

“The poet in a golden clime was born,

With golden stars above;

Dower’d with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn,

The love of love.”

But he is not such a poet. Never has he given voice to the hate of hate,

the scorn of scorn, or to that of which both of these are born—the love

of love. Whenever he has attempted it he has failed. He is too retiring,

too domestic. “With an _inner_ voice” his river runs, and we have to

listen with ears nicely attuned to catch its whisper and its meaning. So

inner is it, indeed, that it is often obscure and quite escapes the dull

hearing of ordinary men. His first volume, published in 1830, is almost

fulsomely dedicated to Queen Victoria, who is certainly not a heroic

figure, whatever else she may be. It is a picture gallery filled with

Claribels and Lilians, and Isabels and Madelines, and Marianas and

Adelines—all very sweet and delicate and dainty, but not inspiring. He

sings to “the owl,” he dedicates odes “to memory,” he lingers by “the

deserted house,” chants the dirge of “the dying swan,” and so on. In

1832 he enlarges his gallery by the addition of the lovely “Lady of

Shalott,” “Mariana in the South,” “Eleänore,” and we come nearer to the

poet’s heart in “The Miller’s Daughter,” whom he evidently prefers to

the haughty and much-abused “Lady Clara Vere de Vere.” Something, too,

of his more marked peculiarities show here in the “Palace of Art” and

that dreamy, delicious poem, “The Lotos-Eaters.” He is intensely

English—an admirable quality, be it remarked _sotto voce_, in an English

poet laureate. He closes the volume with some strong verses:

“You ask me, why, tho’ ill at ease,

Within this region I subsist,

Whose spirits falter in the mist,

And languish for the purple seas?

“It is the land that freemen till,

That sober-suited Freedom chose,

The land, where girt with friends or foes

A man may speak the thing he will;

“A land of settled government,

A land of just and old renown,

Where Freedom broadens slowly down

From precedent to precedent....”

The intense difference between the spirit here expressed and that of his

more immediate and brilliant predecessors and countrymen, Byron and

Shelley and Keats, may possibly account in some degree for the hold

which Tennyson has taken on the English heart. He was a man, too, who

felt the throbbings of the age and touched with skilful fingers the

pulse of Time. Though anxious for the future, he was troubled with no

“Dreams of Darkness,” or hollow-eyed despair, or morbid imaginings. He

realizes change; he has hopes for a world over which he sees a God

ruling. He sings boldly of “immortal souls,” and knows no “first dark

day of nothingness.” He warns the intelligence of his countrymen to—

“... pamper not a hasty time,

Nor feed with crude imaginings

The herd, wild hearts and feeble wings,

That every sophister can lime.

“Deliver not the tasks of might

To weakness, neither hide the ray

From those, not blind, who wait for day

Tho’ sitting girt with doubtful light.

“Make knowledge circle with the winds;

But let her herald, Reverence, fly

Before her to whatever sky

Bear seed of men and growth of minds.”

These lines are noble, true, and Christian; and again:

“Meet is it changes should control

Our being, lest we rust in ease.

We all are changed by still degrees,

_All but the basis of the soul_.

“So let the change which comes be free

To ingroove itself with that which flies,

And work, a joint of state, that plies

Its office, moved with sympathy.

“A saying, hard to shape in act;

_For all the past of Time reveals

A bridal dawn of thunder-peals,

Wherever Thought hath wedded Fact_.

“Ev’n now we hear with inward strife

_A motion toiling in the gloom—

The Spirit of the years to come

Yearning to mix himself with Life_.

“A slow-develop’d strength awaits

Completion in a painful school;

Phantoms of other forms of rule,

New Majesties of mighty States—

“The warders of the growing hour,

But vague in vapor, hard to mark;

And round them sea and air are dark

With great contrivances of Power.”

This was published in 1832, a period when agitations about the suffrage,

and the Corn Laws, and Catholic Emancipation—questions that shook

England to its foundations, only to fix them deeper than before—were

rife or looming up like awful spectres in the dim mist of the future.

Tennyson did not dread them, though he realized their vastness and

importance. Most certainly the verses just quoted stamp him as a close

observer of events in those days and a man of right moral balance, to

whom might with some measure of truth be applied his own words:

“He saw thro’ life and death, thro’ good and ill,

He saw thro’ his own soul.

The marvel of the everlasting will,

An open scroll,

Before him lay....”

Still, these nobler passages are only fragments. He prefers his quiet

mood. In 1842 appeared the first of his idyls, the “Morte d’Arthur.”

Here again the better nature of the poet—a nature that we are grieved to

see apparently soured and crossed, not softened and made more venerable,

by the hand of Time—breaks forth in the grand prayer of the dying king:

“If thou shouldst never see my face again,

Pray for my soul. More things are wrought by prayer

Than this world dreams of. Wherefore, let thy voice

Rise like a fountain for me night and day.

For what are men better than sheep or goats

That nourish a blind life within the brain,

If, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer,

Both for themselves and those who call them friend?

For so the whole round earth is every way

Bound by gold chains about the feet of God.”

It was the Catholic instinct breaking through the wall of prejudice and

false teaching which, in centuries of separation from the truth, have

grown up around the English heart, that gave voice to this beautiful

conception. Many are the instances where non-Catholic poets have leaped

up to truths of this kind which the whole force of their training and

education ran counter to. It is, as it were, the flash of inspiration

coming on them in spite of themselves and issuing in music. The divinity

of their art has lifted them above all prejudice into the sun-bright

heaven. Thus Byron sings to the Blessed Virgin in strains that a saint

might envy. Unfortunately, the instances are many also where men lifted

up on the heights of inspiration, or by the deep yearnings of their own

soul, have, as it were, glanced into heaven and seen the face of Truth,

only to fall back again to their lower level, dazed and blinded by the

very glimpse that was revealed to them. And we find them deny with their

own lips and actions what their greater selves had announced.

It is not our purpose to enter into an elaborate criticism of Tennyson.

That task has been done time and again, and by pens infinitely better

fitted for it than ours. We are only taking touches here and there to

bring out the poet in his truest colors, in his best and his worst

lights, in order to add point to the main purport of this article, which

is to show that Tennyson has mistaken himself and his powers in the

_rôle_ which he has thought fit to assume in his later years. In his

earlier dreams he is full of high thoughts and large aspirations. “My

faith is large in Time, and that which shapes it to some perfect end,”

he tells us. He looks forward longingly to “the golden year.” He is

possessed with the spirit of Christian purity, and gives constant

expression to it, notably in “St. Agnes” and “Sir Galahad.” In “The Two

Voices” he argues down atheism. He lays bare the grinning savagery of a

wasted intellect and debauched life, only to punish it with the power of

a man who knows what virtue is and feels it in his soul. He sometimes

catches those inarticulate murmurs of the heart which breathe in

feelings rather than in words, where feeling is too deep for words, and

they well out in song, as in the

“Break, break, break,

On thy cold gray stones, O sea!”

while in the “In Memoriam” the poet, stricken to the heart, has given

voice to that sorrow, and the effect it has on our life, which most of

us have felt when some bright intelligence has been taken from our side,

whose young years were blossoming fair with promise of a great and good

future.

In all this he is excellent, perhaps unsurpassed; in all that is sad, or

sweet, or picturesque, or naïvely joyous our hearts are with him. He

stands alone in his dainty pictures of scenery, of women, of certain

men. He touches the commonplaces of the time with a magic pencil. He

beguiled the hard and stubborn Saxon, which yielded reluctantly even to

the greatest masters of English verse, into a music it had never known

before. He built up fairy castles, and galleries and cities of old time,

and peopled them with a fair array of Arthurs and Launcelots, of

Guineveres and Elaines, of Merlins and Gawains, whose very names were

music, and whose deeds were just such as befitted scenes of witchery. He

is, moreover, a man of marked personality and nationality in his

writings. He is an Englishman and nothing else. He does not care to be

anything else or more; for he can see nothing greater. All his scenery

is English; his characters are English; his thoughts, feelings, and

aspirations English. Byron’s corsairs and giaours and Childe Harolds

would fight as fiercely, frown as darkly, sin as deeply, in any

civilized language as in English—in warmer languages even better,

perhaps; Shakspere’s profound observations and reading of character

would have reached the world through any other channel as surely as,

perhaps more readily than, through the English; some would doubt whether

Milton ever wrote English at all. But all Tennyson is English or

nothing. His dawns, his gloamings, his sunrises, his sunsets, his

landscapes, his fens, his fogs, his smoke, his moonlight and moonlight

effects, his winds, his birds, his flowers, his reeds and rushes, his

trees, his brooklets, his seas, his cliffs, his coloring, his ruins, his

graveyards, his walks and rides, his love of good cheer, his hums of

great cities, his profound respect for the respectable, are all English.

He has the sturdy English common sense and no small share, as will be

seen, of English prejudice; and, though he feels something of the

movements of the outer world, he has all the English narrowness of

vision. So that, while his works will probably never become a part of

any other literature than the English—for they would not be understood

elsewhere—they have won their way into the English heart for their very

_homeliness_, if for no higher reason. So long as this English poet was

content to sing to us, we were content to listen, were his lay sad or

gay. He had been singing all our life, and we were not weary of his

music, even though the music was all pitched in much the same key. We

never tire of a familiar voice that we love. But when we would be roused

and wrought up by some martial strain, by some great event, by one of

those movements that catch the heart of a people and sway it and hold it

captive, by the “thoughts that breathe and words that burn,” Tennyson

fails. Surely, for such an Englishman as he, the death of the Duke of

Wellington ought to have proved an inspiring theme. It is true that as

the years went on, and the memory of Waterloo faded, and the hero of

Waterloo moved about and took his part in civic affairs, people (and

people are ever ready to weary of their gods, if their gods are too near

them and live too long) began to clip and cut down the gigantic

proportions of the Iron Duke’s colossal figure. Indeed, before he died

it is safe to say that half England regarded England’s hero as rather an

ordinary sort of person and a worthy but extremely fortunate soldier.

Still, death generally brings back the liveliest memories of deeds that

are, or are thought to be, great and good, and a true poet’s song who

believed all of Wellington that Tennyson’s poem expresses might well

have been tipped with fire when Wellington died. Yet Tennyson’s funeral

ode is poor, tame; where not tame, forced; and, like all such

compositions, indefinitely strung out. All his readers know the opening:

“Bury the Great Duke

With an empire’s lamentation,

Let us bury the Great Duke,

To the noise of the mourning of a mighty nation,

Mourning when their leaders fall,

Warriors carry the warrior’s pall

And sorrow darkens hamlet and hall!”

It is plain from the start that he is writing for a public. This great

duke needs a capital G and a capital D to impress duly that public, the

British (which is always ready to be awed by capitals attached to

titles), with the great duke’s immensity. There is something of the

heavy English undertaker about this—a display, a forced solemnity, a

measured tread, a sense of sham. The great duke is lost sight of in the

funereal trappings, the crowd, and accompaniment. See how Byron seizes

on the very heart of an event, and in a few lines pictures for us the

whole, the before and after. He is describing the greater man by whose

fall the great duke rose to fame:

“Tis done—but yesterday a king!

And arm’d with kings to strive—

And now thou art a nameless thing:

So abject—yet alive!

Is this the man of thousand thrones,

Who strew’d our earth with hostile bones,

And can he thus survive?

Since he, miscall’d the Morning Star,

Nor man nor fiend has fallen so far.”

This indeed is “the scorn of scorn,” and the entire ode is replete with

it. Byron, who had been a great admirer of Napoleon, could not consent

to his idol lowering himself so far as to receive his life from England.

He could not forgive himself for yielding to

“That spell upon the minds of men

* * * * *

That led them to adore

Those Pagod things of sabre-sway,

With fronts of brass, and feet of clay.”

“O civic muse,” cries Tennyson,

“To such a name,

To such a name for ages long,

To such a name

Preserve a broad approach of fame,

And ever-ringing avenues of song.”

Here lies the whole secret of the ode’s comparative poverty. Tennyson is

by position, if not by profession, “a civic muse,” and the civic muse is

never heroic or great. It is more apt, like Turveydrop, to be “a model

of deportment,” especially when it follows the advice of Mrs. Chick and

“makes an effort.” This, for instance, is eminently civic:

“Where shall we lay the man whom we deplore?

Here, in streaming London’s central roar.

Let the sound of those he wrought for,

And the feet of those he fought for,

Echo round his bones for evermore.

“Lead out the pageant: sad and slow,

As fits an universal woe,

Let the long procession go,

And let the sorrowing crowd about it grow,

And let the mournful martial music blow;

The last great Englishman is low.”

We hope that Wellington was not “the last great Englishman.” If so,

English greatness must indeed be “low.” But the thought is irresistible:

Is not the undertaker’s hand again visible in all this? How different is

it from the sad, simple, manly beauty of the lament of a poet, whose

name scarcely stands in the list of English authors, for one of those

soldiers who gloriously failed! Here is how Wolfe sings of the burial of

Sir John Moore:

“Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note,

As his corse to the rampart we hurried;

Not a soldier discharged his farewell shot

O’er the grave where our hero we buried.

“We buried him darkly at dead of night,

The sods with our bayonets turning,

By the glimmering moonbeam’s fitful light

And the camp-fires dimly burning.”

Again, is this a worthy echo of “a people’s voice”?

“And thro’ the centuries let a people’s voice

In full acclaim,

A people’s voice,

The proof and echo of all human fame,

A people’s voice, when they rejoice

At civic revel and pomp and game,

Attest their great commander’s claim

With honor, honor, honor to him,

Eternal honor to his name.”

What wearisome and forced repetition, what commonplace allusions! This

is not Tennyson. The very verse is burdened with its vulgar prose, and

halts and stumbles in clumsy confusion meant for art. And here is his

description in the same poem of the battle of Waterloo:

“Dash’d on every rocky square

Their surging chargers foam’d themselves away;

Last, the Prussian trumpet blew;

Thro’ the long-tormented air

Heaven flash’d a sudden jubilant ray,

And down we swept and charged and overthrew.

So great a soldier taught us there,

What long-enduring hearts could do

In that world’s earthquake, Waterloo!”

The best expression in it, the last, is borrowed from Byron’s wonderful

description of the same battle:

“Stop! for thy tread is on an Empire’s dust!

_An Earthquake’s spoil_ is sepulchred below!”

Again in Byron these two lines tell the whole story, as does that other,

“The grave of France, the deadly Waterloo!”

So with Tennyson’s “War Songs” and “National Songs,” published in the

edition of 1830 and wisely omitted in later editions. They are not much

above the level of many fledglings’ performances in a like strain. They

fall dull on the heart:

“There standeth our ancient enemy,

Hark! he shouteth—the ancient enemy!

On the ridge of the hill his banners rise;

They stream like fire in the skies;

Hold up the Lion of England on high

Till it dazzle and blind his eyes.

_Chorus_: Shout for England!

Ho! for England!

George for England!

Merry England!

England for aye!”

Here are the chorus and full chorus of his “National Song”:

“For the French, the Pope may shrive ’em.

For the devil a whit we heed ’em:

As for the French, God speed ’em

Unto their heart’s desire,

And the merry devil drive ’em

Through the water and fire.

Our glory is our freedom,

We lord it o’er the sea;

We are the sons of freedom.

We are free.”

As Mr. Tennyson has been wise enough—for shame’s sake, presumably—to

omit these and similar sorry pieces from his later editions, it may seem

unfair to quote them against him now. We quote them, however,

intentionally, to show that there is a strong streak of English

narrowness and Protestant bigotry in his nature which we were happy to

think dead, until within the last few years it has cropped out again. In

1852 there were probabilities of war between England and France, then

under Louis Napoleon. Tennyson thought to rouse his countrymen, and the

strongest appeal he can make is to religious bigotry:

“Rise, Britons, rise, if manhood be not dead;

The world’s last tempest darkens overhead;

The Pope has bless’d him;

The Church caress’d him;

He triumphs; may be we shall stand alone.

Britons, guard your own.

“His ruthless host is bought with plunder’d gold,

By lying priests the peasants’ votes controll’d.

All freedom vanish’d,

The true men banish’d, etc.

“Rome’s dearest daughter now is captive France,

The Jesuit laughs, and reckoning on his chance,

_Would unrelenting,

Kill all dissenting_,

Till we were left to fight for truth alone.

Britons, guard your own.”

And this is the gentle Tennyson! But we forbear from comment other than

the verses themselves suggest, and turn at last to our more immediate

object.

Whatever fault may be found here and there with Tennyson, one thing is

certain: his renown was great and his fame established chiefly by his

earlier and better works and by the peculiar characteristics which we

have attempted to point out. The poet, however, seems not to have been

satisfied. He was weary of the graceful path by which he ambled gently

up to fame, and would seek by a new and rugged road a higher place than

he already occupied in that temple where are gathered the mighty men who

have wrought with the pen monuments more enduring than marble. In an

evil hour he tempted fate, and fate gave him a severe warning. Weary of

the minstrel's lute which had charmed the world, he would be what the

poets of old were thought to be—a _vates_, an inspired prophet-and his

vaticination was _Queen Mary_.

As that drama has been dealt with in these pages by another pen, we

shall not touch on it here more than to say that never were the minds of

Tennyson’s countrymen better prepared to receive and applaud a work

intended, as this plainly was, to be an outcry against Rome and a

picture of one of the fierce struggles between England and Rome. Mr.

Gladstone had prepared the way and set all the world warring on

“Vaticanism.” Tennyson could not have chosen a better time for the

publication of his drama, and, were it a work of power and passion, it

could not have failed to catch the heart of the people. Never, on the

other hand, could he have chosen a better time for a higher duty: that

of, in the words of his great master, still in his right hand carrying

gentle peace “to silence envious tongues.” If the drama failed, it

failed in the face of every incentive to success.

Fail it did. It was plain, even to friendly critics, that the author of

_Queen Mary_ was not a dramatist, and so it was hinted generally in the

mildest possible terms. What was the reason of the failure?

We have shown, we believe sufficiently, that Tennyson failed wherever he

attempted to yoke the passions. His hand was too weak to curb them. His

genius is reflective, introspective, descriptive. It has not the flash,

the white heat of inspiration. It is always Tennyson who is singing,

talking to, arguing with us, describing for us. He is a person, not a

voice—a very pleasing, scholarly, refined, and in the main right-minded

person—but he is for ever giving utterance to his own peculiar thoughts

in his own peculiar style. The highest form of poetry, as of oratory, is

not this. It is that undefinable and truest expression of feeling, of

hope, of agony, of despair, of wrath, of courage, of any of the passions

that lie dormant in the human breast, which at once elicits a responsive

echo from the heart of humanity, so that we do not say, How sweet, how

tender, how strong is this man, but, How true to nature is this thought!

Thus it is that the greatest poets are the voices of all the world;

their works the inheritance of all the world. In their highest heights

they belong to humanity, and to no nation.

The dramatic we believe to be the highest form of poetry, because it

alone attempts to portray life itself, life in action; it is not a

description, however magnificently done, of life. There lies between it

and all other forms of poetry the difference that exists between the

painting of a hero and the hero himself. The one is the man, thinking,

living, moving, breathing, speaking his thoughts, doing his deeds; the

other after all is only an image, more or less vivid, of him on canvas.

It may catch the color of the eye, the expression of the countenance,

the texture of the dress, the shape, the form; but at the very best it

is a picture, no more, infinitely removed from the reality.

If this be a right conception of the difference between dramatic and all

other kinds of poetry—and it seems to us to be, although it might need

more elaboration to impress it upon the reader’s mind—it will be plain

that the dramatic poet needs nothing short of the highest inspiration in

order to make him catch the very breathings of men’s souls and throw

them into living forms, as truly as the master actor loses his own

personality and lets it sink or become absorbed utterly in the various

characters he portrays. No mere change of costume will effect the

metamorphosis needed to impress the spectator with the reality of the

change in character. In the same way no clipping of a poem into acts and

scenes, and no allotting of certain lines to certain different names,

will convert a descriptive poem into a drama. All the world will at once

detect the fraud or the inherent defect.

A not uncommon phase of an exasperated mind is to refuse to recognize

failure. Tennyson tried again, rather hastily, and in the same

direction, with the satisfactory result of making a more disastrous

failure than before. The blunder of _Queen Mary_ has been emphasized in

_Harold_. The first named may have left some minds in doubt whether or

not its author could construct a drama; the production of the second has

effectually set all such doubts at rest. The critics who in the first

instance were kind are in the second cruel. We have rarely seen a more

general and resolutely contemptuous dealing with the pretensions of any

writer at all than in the treatment which _Harold_ has received at the

hands of critics of every shade of opinion, English as well as American.

_Harold_ is simply narrative throughout—spoken narrative, indeed. A

drama must be _act_. Scenes prior to and leading up to the Norman

Conquest of England are depicted with more or less beauty of limning,

but they are loose, shifting, independent of each other. There is no

secret thread to link the whole and give it a unity of purpose and of

plan, without which there is no drama. There are five acts. There might

have been fifty, or only two, or only one, so far as the slow working of

the whole up to the catastrophe at the conclusion goes. The first act

opens in London at King Edward’s palace. Almost the first twenty pages

are occupied by various characters in discussing the appearance,

meaning, and portent of a comet. This is, of course, the old stage trick

used to knit the coming horror with troubles in the air. Shakspere uses

it often, notably in _Julius Cæsar_, but with him the troubled elements

obey the magic wand of Prospero and minister to man, and are but the

accompaniment of great events. Tennyson’s comet is too much for his

characters. They puzzle themselves about it until we grow tired of it

and its three tails.

After the comet has run its course, the characters being brought

together to discuss it, Harold intimates to the king his intention to go

to Normandy; the king warns him not to go; then follows a lively

discussion on personal matters between the queen, Harold, and his

brothers, which almost ends in a fight; the comet or “grisly star” is

introduced again, and the scene ends apropos of nothing in particular,

unless a hint of a coming plot on the part of Aldwyth. The second scene,

the best in the drama, is a very sweet piece of love-making between

Harold and Edith, upon which Aldwyth again throws her shadow, and the

act ends. The second act wrecks Harold at Ponthieu, whence his

transition to the power of Count William of Normandy—or Duke William, as

we are more in the habit of calling him—is easy. Indeed, to a dramatist

there was no reason whatever for the first scene of this act, as the

story of Harold’s capture might, if it were necessary, have been told in

a line or two while Harold was actually in the power of William. The

rest of this long act is taken up with William’s compelling Harold to

swear, on the relics of the saints, to help him to the crown of England.

The third act presents the death of King Edward, who wills the crown to

Harold. The second scene gives another piece of love-making between

Harold and Edith, not so happy as the first, and announces the invasion

of Northumbria by Tostig and Harold Hardrada. The fourth act opens in

Northumbria. In the first scene of it the factions of the rival

chieftains are put an end to by the marriage of Harold with Aldwyth, and

thus the only attempt at a shadow even of a plot is summarily disposed

of. The other scenes are before and after the battle of Stamford Bridge,

and the act closes with news of the landing of the Normans. The fifth

act opens on the field of Senlac. Harold has a dream in his tent, too

like that of Richard III. in conception. Stigand describes the battle of

Hastings to Edith, and the death of Harold. Here the drama should have

closed. Anything after it on the stage would certainly come tamely. But

Tennyson cannot resist the temptation to search for the body of Harold,

and with the finding of it, the death of Edith on it, and what in

ordinary parlance would be called William’s directions for the funeral

arrangements, the play closes.

Such is _Harold_—narrative, narrative, narrative throughout; very

excellent narrative some of it, but no drama, no centre of interest

around which the whole is made to turn. The misfortune about all

historical plays is that the reader begins with a full knowledge of all

the circumstances, and to make them dramatically interesting needs a

most skilful adaptation of plot and counterplot, a slow unfolding of

events from some necessary cause, a development of character, a silent

Fate, so to say, moving in and out, and, in spite of all things, shaping

events to one great end, so that, while we feel the consummation

impending, we yet know not how, or when, or where, or by what

instrumentality it will come. There is nothing of this in _Harold_.

It has been seen that Tennyson has no great love for the Pope. Indeed,

if some of the lines quoted represent the man, he has, of late years at

least, the heartiest hatred for the Catholic Church. We cannot help

that, however much we may regret it. We must take men as they are, and,

if Tennyson hates the Pope, why let him hate him and be happy. The Pope

can exist and rule the Catholic Church, and be obeyed, revered, loved,

and honored by intellects as bright at least as Mr. Tennyson’s, for all

that gentleman’s hate. A true dramatist, however, sinks, or at least

disguises, all his private personal feelings in depicting known

characters or types of character. This is only to be true to nature, to

art, and to history. Where there is question regarding the right reading

of a character or a period, a writer is of course at liberty, after

having consulted respectable authorities, to form his own estimate. Men

who lived in the eleventh century must be true to their time. To make

such men think, argue, reflect, question, doubt on most matters,

particularly on matters of faith, just as do men of the nineteenth

century, is a gross solecism. It is absurd and self-condemnatory on the

face of it. To make eleventh-century Catholics speak of the Catholic

faith, and Rome, and the pope after the fashion of the average

Protestant or infidel journalist in these days, is absurd, not to

characterize such practice by a harsher expression. This is what

Tennyson has gone out of his way to do in _Harold_; and the only

impression with which we rise from its perusal is that the writer

detests Normans and Catholics. Between the Vere de Veres and the Pope

Tennyson has lost his temper and his right hand has forgotten its

cunning.

The drama presents no character of any special interest. Harold, Edward

the Confessor, and William of Normandy, the three principal personages,

are much the same first as last. In stage terms, William may be set down

as the “heavy villain” of the piece, and a very heavy villain he is;

Edward the Confessor as the “first old man”; and Harold as the “walking

gentleman.” Edward is made—unintentionally too, it would seem—one of the

silliest old men that ever walked the boards. As for his sanctity,

imagine a saint speaking of himself in this style:

“And I say it

For the last time, perchance, before I go

To find the sweet refreshment of the Saints.”

Saints, in the Catholic Church at least, are not, as a rule, quite so

sure about finding “the sweet refreshment of the saints.” Indeed, they

have far graver doubts on this point often than sinners. But lest some

of his courtiers might feel tempted to doubt the rapid transit to heaven

of a man so thoroughly sure of his place beforehand, the king informs

them:

“I have lived a life of utter purity:

I have builded the great church of holy Peter:

I have wrought miracles.”

True, every word of it. But it might have occurred to Mr. Tennyson that

Edward the Confessor was mindful, at least, of that admonition: “Let not

thine own mouth, but another’s, praise thee.” There never was a saint,

to our knowledge, so fond of talking about himself, his miracles, his

good deeds, his place here and hereafter. Listen to this again:

“And miracles will in my name be wrought

Hereafter. I have fought the fight and go—

I see the flashing of the gates of pearl—

And it is well with me, tho’ some of you

Have scorn’d me—ay—but after I am gone

Woe, woe to England! I have had a vision:

The seven sleepers in the cave at Ephesus

Have turn’d from right to left.”

The whole thing is incongruous. It smacks rather of a converted

“brother” giving his “experiences” and how he “got religion” before a

highly-wrought meeting of “Christian workers.” Had the “devil’s

advocate” only caught scent of any such expressions in the life of the

real Edward, it is to be feared he would never have been canonized.

Saints are not in the habit of canonizing themselves. The only thing

that occurs to us as on a par with Mr. Tennyson’s picture of a saint is

one by Mr. William Cullen Bryant in a short and remarkably silly poem

recently published by him. It is entitled “A Legend of St. Martin,” and

the saint, while still in the flesh, speaks as follows:

“Thus spake the saint: 'We part to-night;

_I am St. Martin_, and I give you here

The means to make your fortunes.’”

The author’s favorite churchman is Stigand, who, whether Catholic or

heretic, no man who had read the history of the time carefully and

honestly could by any possibility hold up for admiration. Mr. Tennyson,

however, may consider himself excused on points of historical accuracy,

inasmuch as he informs us in his dedication that “after Old-World

records—such as the Bayeux tapestry and the Roman de Rou—Edward

Freeman’s _History of the Norman Conquest_,” and Bulwer Lytton’s

historical romance treating of the same times, “have been mainly

helpful” to him “in writing this drama.” But he cannot be excused for

such culpable negligence in searching out authorities when attempting to

depict in a truthful manner a most important historical epoch. Had he

taken the easy pains of going a little deeper into history and

authorities, it would probably have been better for himself and his

drama, or perhaps, with his evident bias, he would not have written it

at all. He loves Stigand, a thoroughly bad prelate, simply because

Stigand was against the pope. If Tennyson selects his Catholic heroes

from all men who have been against the pope, he will find his hands full

of very queer characters, some of them worse than Stigand. Imagine even

Stigand saying, in the exact tone of a modern unbeliever:

“... In our windy world

What’s up is faith, what’s down is heresy.”

Certain modern Anglican prelates and ministers, or any man who

acknowledges no unchangeable deposit of divine truth, might speak in

just such a strain. The words, if they mean anything, mean simply that

there is no such thing at all as real faith or doctrine. Stigand knew

better than that. His peculiar vice was a very English one—an overdue

and unscrupulous regard for this world’s goods. This Catholic prelate

tells Harold of a sum of money which he keeps concealed at the other’s

service, to be asked for at his “most need,” in the following eloquent

style:

“Red gold—a hundred purses—yea, and more!

If thou canst make a wholesome use of these

To chink against the Norman, I do believe

_My old crook’d spine would bud out two young wings

To fly to heaven straight with_.”

Tennyson doubtless considers this very English and spirited. Stigand may

have disliked the Normans, and doubtless did. With all our hearts! But

this mode of expressing his dislike is, in the mouth of a Catholic and a

prelate, surely not in character.

Again he asks:

“... Be there no saints of England

To help us from their brethren yonder?”

As though a Catholic or Christian could dream of the saints warring in

heaven or of affixing nationality to sanctity! Tennyson’s Edward, with a

solitary gleam of intelligence, rebukes him thus:

“Prelate,

The Saints are one, ...”

yet immediately falls into the absurd blunder he rebukes by adding:

“But those (Saints) of Normanland

Are mightier than our own.”

While witnessing the battle of Hastings Stigand cries out in an ecstasy

of admiration at Harold’s prowess: “War-woodman of old Woden!” Could any

Christian man, Catholic or non-Catholic, couple a Christian warrior’s

name with the detestable deity of the pagan North?

The character of Harold, too, is incongruous. He is represented as a

most brave, wise, and honorable man, incapable of fear or falsehood:

“broad and honest, breathing an easy gladness.” He weakens in many

places. We cannot here go into a historical inquiry respecting the

alleged oath of Harold on the relics of saints to help William to the

crown of England. Much is made of it by Tennyson; so let us take all the

facts for granted. A man such as Harold is here represented to be would

rather have died than taken the oath, if he never meant to keep it. On

the other hand, once taken, and knowing it to be false, we doubt whether

the resolute Saxon soldier would have troubled himself much about the

matter. He acts as a coward throughout while in William’s power. A

strong man would not rail in secret at William for forcing him to take

an oath which the swearer knew to be a lie. He would take it or not take

it with the best grace possible. “Horrible!” exclaims Harold when the

relics on which he has sworn are exposed. Harold was sufficiently man of

the world—a man who had passed his life in camp and court—to have

uttered no such weak cry. In the first place, if he swore falsely, such

an exclamation showed at once that he never intended to keep his

promise. In the second place, it would have been perfectly plain to

William that he could place no reliance on the oath of such a poltroon.

The same failure to apprehend the character of the man is apparent in

the womanish tirade into which Harold breaks after William has left him:

“Juggler and bastard—bastard: he hates that most—William the tanner’s

bastard! Would he heard me!” A moment before he might have heard him,

but Harold dared not speak his thoughts. Certainly the man who never

lost a battle save the one in which he lost all—the man who conquered

Wales, crushed the terrible invasion of Harold Hardrada and Tostig,

braved his own sovereign, seized on the English throne with a grasp that

only death could shake off, and died so gloriously on Hastings—never

“played the woman with his eyes and the braggart with his tongue” in

this poor fashion. Here again speaks the reader of modern infidel

literature in the mouth of the unspeculative soldier of the eleventh

century:

“I cannot help it, but at times

They seem to me too narrow, _all the faiths_

Of this grown world of ours, whose baby eye

Saw them sufficient.”

“_All_ the faiths!” We wonder how many “faiths” Harold knew of or

contemplated. Indeed, it seems to us that Mr. Tennyson here speaks for

himself, and in a manner that causes some suspicion of his having lost

something of his own earlier and more robust belief. Harold continues:

“But a little light!—

And on it falls the shadow of the priest;

Heaven yield us more! _for better Woden, all

Our cancell’d warrior-gods, our grim Walhalla,

Eternal war, than that the Saints at peace;

The Holiest of our Holiest one should be

This William’s fellow-tricksters_; better die

Than credit this, for death is death, or else

Lifts us beyond the lie.”

Which is heathenism and atheism beautifully combined. He goes on, still

in his atheistic vein, when Edith bids him listen to the nightingales:

“Their anthems of no church, how sweet they are!

Nor kingly priest, nor priestly king to cross

Their billings ere they nest.”

And again, when Gurth brings news of the pope’s favoring William’s

cause, Harold laughs and says of it:

“This was old human laughter in old Rome

Before a Pope was born, when that which reign’d

Call’d itself God—a kingly rendering

Of 'Render unto Cæsar.’”

Harold must have lately risen from a perusal of Mr. Gladstone’s pamphlet

on _Vaticanism_ when he spoke thus, so we pardon his aberration. That

pamphlet is too strong for weak intellects.

“The Lord was God and came as man—the Pope

Is man and comes as God,”

he continues, still in the Gladstonian vein. He reminds Edith that love

“remains beyond all chances and all churches”—a dictum and doctrine that

would be strange even in a Protestant Harold. “I ever hated monks,” he

says in another place, which may account for his having founded Waltham

Abbey. He grows more and more Protestant towards the end, and the

saintly relics over which he was so terrified at having sworn a false

oath he terms the “gilded ark of mummy-saints.” And here is his final

legacy to England:

“... And this to England,

My legacy of war against the Pope

From child to child, from Pope to Pope, from age to age,

Till the sea wash her level with her shores,

Or till the Pope be Christ’s.”

This is Tennyson’s legacy, not Harold’s. It seems strange that it should

have fallen into careless hands; not ours, but those of the poet’s

coreligionists. The fact is that the world is growing weary of little

anti-papal tooters. Great enemies of the papacy it applauds and tries to

excuse; but at the mouthings of the little people it yawns. If Tennyson

has shown anything in this as in his other anti-Catholic effusions, it

is that when moved by rancor he can descend to all the small bitterness

of a common and weak order of mind. We cannot go further into an

examination of _Harold_, and, indeed, the task is not worth while. He

has failed in the one character which, to a true dramatic genius,

offered magnificent opportunities—William of Normandy, who was perhaps

the greatest and the wisest sovereign that England has as yet known. A

gallant soldier; a wary yet bold and successful general; an astute

statesman; a lover of learning; a resolute if severe ruler; a man who

could bide his opportunity, then move on it with the flash and fatality

of the lightning, yet withal a man of almost ungovernable passions, with

the old taint running in his blood and through all his successful

life—this was a character that it is as great a pity Shakspere did not

draw as that Tennyson should have been rash enough to attempt to draw.

In what ought to be the chief scene of the play, the battle of Hastings,

there is no battle at all. The weak device is resorted to of setting a

description of it as it proceeds in the mouth of Stigand, who watches

the field from “a tent on a mound.” Norman and Saxon, Harold and

William, are not brought together for the final death-grip. Shakspere's

battle-scenes are more vivid than those of any painter. They illuminate

history and print themselves indelibly on the mind. Cut the

battle-scenes out of _King John_, _Henry IV._, _Henry V._, _Macbeth_,

_Julius Cæsar_, _Henry VI._, and you mutilate the plays. Stigand’s

description of the battle of Hastings might be dropped from _Harold_ and

not missed. Why should not Harold die as Hotspur dies, or as Macbeth, or

Brutus, or any of the others—his face to the victorious foe, the fitting

ending of the tragedy? Mr. Tennyson was not equal to the task, either in

this scene or at Stamford Bridge. The last clash and conflict of human

passion he can only look at from afar off and reflect upon when it is

over. He cannot take it in hand and present it. He would do well to

retire from the field where empires, and men and events that make or

unmake empires, are the subjects of song, and go back to the pretty

scenery, the calm truth, and the graceful verse that have made his name

dearly loved and justly honored.

ANGLICANISM IN 1877,

AS AFFECTED BY THE PUBLIC WORSHIP REGULATION ACT.

We should feel inclined to apologize to our readers for again

introducing the English Establishment to their notice, were it not that

since, a year ago, we considered Anglicanism in connection with the “Old

Catholic” conference at Bonn, the increasing agitation within the state

church cannot but have continued to attract the thoughtful attention of

those who, from the bark of Peter, watch the weary tossing of the

Anglican craft and the mutinous condition of a portion of her crew.

Since the period to which we allude, the fact that the whole tendency of

the Alt-Catholic movement is rationalistic and anti-Christian is

beginning to be understood by all really religious Protestants, and we

now see the better part of them holding aloof from the movement, and

even the Ritualist journals condemning whatever advances were made

towards it. The cause is now advocated only by the Broad-Church party,

which distinguished itself by its emphatic encouragement of the apostate

Loyson, one of the apostles of the new sect, who went last summer to

London to enlighten the English public on ecclesiastical questions. On

the other hand, the High-Church movement is, if anything, in the

direction of the Catholic Church, while Alt-Catholicism is a distinct

counter-agitation, and thus anything like a cordial fraternization

between the two is impossible. The attempts of the High-Church party to

obtain at least as much as a recognition of the validity of their orders

from the Orientals—attempts which were renewed at the Bonn

conference—have again signally failed. One of the “Unionist” leaders

himself laments that “the Oriental Church stands entirely aloof from the

Church of England, sweepingly and roundly condemns all its members,

denies the validity of their baptisms and ordinations, and practically

refuses to aid them in any shape or form.”

There is no doubt that at the present moment a tremendous struggle has

arisen in the Establishment between the would-be Catholic and the

Protestant elements; the latter not only pleading its three centuries’

possession, but also, and truly, declaring itself to be the very basis

and _raison d’être_ of the schism. This claim is urged at the present

time with a vehemence and jealous irritation aimed ostensibly at the

“Romanizing practices” of their brethren, but the venom of which betrays

itself to be especially called forth by the ceaseless, active,

self-denying energy of these incorrigible early risers—an irritation not

difficult to comprehend on the part of those who, with all their

professions of Evangelical piety, have, generally speaking, an exceeding

shyness of hard work, detest the Counsels of Perfection in general and

the practice of self-denial in particular, take up the pen much more

readily than the cross, and prefer bridling their neighbor’s tongue

rather than their own. Nevertheless, with regard to a certain class

among the Evangelicals, and these the more earnest, it is only just to

say that their condemnation of Ritualists and their practices is

sincerely a matter of principle. They regard the one as the guides and

the other as the direct means to “idolatry”—a term which they have all

their lives been taught to consider as synonymous with the Catholic

religion.

When St. Edward the Confessor lay on his death-bed in the palace of

Westminster, he foretold to his queen, St. Edith, and to Stigand that,

in punishment for the sins of the land, God would permit the enemy of

mankind to send a mission of wicked spirits into it, who should sever

the Green Tree of Old England from its root, and lay it apart for the

space of three furlongs; but that the tree should after a due time

return to its root and revive, without the help of any man’s hand. The

traditional interpretation of this prophecy has been that the English

Church would be cut off for the space of three centuries from its parent

stem, but that, after that time, the severed church should return to its

ancient allegiance.

And what do we now see? Movement, awakening, and life where for three

centuries have reigned the gloom and chillness of the tomb.

From the time of Elizabeth downwards not only the teaching but the

general aspect of what is called the Church of England was intensely

anti-Catholic. A brighter day first dawned for England when she

hospitably received and succored the exiled priests of France. The

precious leaven of their holy teaching and example never has been lost.

Later, in 1829, the emancipation of the Catholics of the British Empire,

under George IV., marked a fresh epoch in the history of the Catholic

Church in England. The discussions which attended the passing of this

act helped to increase a knowledge of her tenets, and prepared the way

for their better appreciation; besides which, the restoration of some of

the most illustrious families of the realm to their ancient and

hereditary seats in the House of Lords, together with the admission of

Catholics into the Lower House, tended further to the removal of many

prejudices. Since Newman and Pusey, in 1833, recalled their brethren to

the study of the Fathers of the church, many steps have been taken in

the Establishment in the direction of the ancient paths—steps which

Catholics have noted with interest and hope, though they perceive that

but too often men who have been attracted towards the truth rest

apparently contented with a bad imitation of its external manifestations

and a garbled or “adapted” representation of its doctrines, forgetting

that truth distorted ceases to be truth, and often is a lie. They marvel

also that the invariable opposition of the pseudo-episcopate does not

help these men, who are the present life of their system, to see that

their imaginary “Catholicity” is wholly unauthorized and unrecognized by

their ecclesiastical superiors, and that the hierarchy of their church

is as consistently and persistently anti-Catholic as the constitution of

that body itself. They are resisted and condemned by their bishops, and

from their bishops they have no appeal except to a lay tribunal whose

interference _in sacris_ they repudiate.

By the terms of a new Appellate Jurisdiction Act, recently passed in

both Houses of Parliament, the jurisdiction of the Privy Council has

been transferred to a new Court of Appeal. It was then provided that

episcopal assessors should in future sit on the bench with the lay

judges; and though it is by the latter that the judgment is pronounced,

the bishops are allowed to make remarks on what is passing. They are to

sit in rotation in the new court. The two archbishops and the Bishop of

London are also to sit in turn, _ex officio_, and the rest in

quarternions, beginning with the junior four (Chichester, St. Asaph,

Ely, and St. David’s). It is impossible to say what may be the results

of this equivocal assessorship, with regard to which the London _Morning

Post_ disrespectfully observes that “the plan offers no security

whatever that the assessors shall be fit for their office beyond the

fact that they are bishops”; calmly adding that “since the purpose for

which their presence is required is the imparting to the judges of a

certain kind and quality of information when desired, it is a serious

defect to the scheme that it provides no guarantee that the prelates who

sit shall possess any proper aptitude for their position.”[21]

Footnote 21:

The following from the London _Weekly Register_ may tend to show

whether this doubt is reasonable or otherwise: “The vicar of St.

Barnabas, Leeds, is fatigued with parochial work and wishes to take a

little rest. He asks his Lordship of Ripon to let him name a clergyman

who shall take his duties for a few weeks or months. His lordship

replies that he cannot do so, because—but the language is too

episcopal to be misquoted: 'If there is truth in the reports which,

from time to time, appear in the public papers, you are in the habit

of breaking what you must know to be the law.’ His Lordship of Ripon

reads the papers, and, finding it inconvenient to leave his palace at

Ripon and make a call upon a clergyman in Leeds, he refuses leave of

absence to that clergyman, on account of newspaper reports.” The

church-wardens take up their vicar’s cause, and, in a very proper

“memorial,” represent the needs of his case to his paternal diocesan.

But all is useless. “The law, the law,” says the bishop, and remains

comfortably in his palace, while he forbids his hard-working vicar to

take a holiday, though he does not even condescend to specify his

offence. And yet the Anglican bishops do not apparently object to a

due amount of repose for themselves, if we may judge from the fact

that at the very time we write there are no fewer than fifteen of the

“missionary bishops” of the Establishment who, after a few years of

absence, and even these years agreeably diversified with visits to

their friends in England, have returned thither “for good,” and are

now settled with their wives and families in comfortable rectories at

home—an arrangement more convenient for croquet-parties than

“conversions.”

Upon this another journal asks: If it be true that Anglican bishops are

corporately incompetent as advisers of lay judges, even on the doctrines

of their own particular communion, of what use are they at all? If they

cannot, without the aid of civilians, interpret the Articles, why not

make bishops of the lay judges, instead of paying thousands a year to

each of these gentlemen, who do not apparently know their own business?

In any case, how Ritualists can remain, with satisfaction to their

consciences, in a communion whose highest arbiter is not even a

sub-deacon, is perplexing to any one who regards the church as a

divinely-instituted system. We have been reminded by _Presbyter

Anglicanus_ that it is a necessary ingredient in any system of

discipline that the superior should not be judged by the inferior, the

teacher by the taught; and that the twelfth canon of the African Code

ordains that, “if a bishop fall under the imputation of any crime, he

shall have a second hearing before twelve bishops, if more cannot be

had; a priest before six, with his own bishop; a deacon before

three—_according to the statutes of the ancient canons_.” Again: “It was

a recognized principle in the primitive church that the deposition of an

ecclesiastic required the intervention of more bishops than were needed

for his ordination. The Anglican bishops notwithstanding their

professions of regard for the primitive church, are content that a

presbyter, ordained and instituted by a 'bishop,’ should be deprived by

a layman. And they talk of apostolic order!”

The writer just quoted, who is now safe in the Catholic Church,

described, just before his conversion, the present condition of

ecclesiastical discipline in the Anglican Church as follows: “The

ecclesiastical courts which survived the Reformation and the great

rebellion have been ... abolished; the bishop of each diocese has ceased

to be the ordinary of that diocese, and the whole clergy of the Church

of England are rendered amenable to, and are even directed in their

conduct of public worship by, a layman, whose office has been created in

the year of grace 1874 by the imperial Parliament, and who, besides

playing the part of a pseudo-dean of the Arches and principal of the

Provincial Court of York, is also to be the national ordinary, the

Parliamentary vicar-general of the Establishment, exercising

jurisdiction in every parish from Berwick-on-Tweed to the Channel

Islands.” And this is the system to which unquestioning, unrepining,

absolute submission is required of the clergy by the bishops of the

Anglican communion.

Nor is this all; not only is it now the case that secular law courts

decide what may or may not be taught and practised in the Anglican

Church, but they also claim to decide who shall and who shall not be

admitted to its rites and sacraments. Lawyers are thus not only the

doctors and _ceremoniarii_ of Anglicanism, suspending or depriving

ecclesiastics at pleasure, but they are also to be, in the last resort,

the stewards of Anglican sacraments.

A case was lately pending before the Judicial Committee in which the

action of a “priest” in refusing communion was reviewed and judged by

the court. A parishioner of a Ritualist pastor having declared that he

did not find in the Bible sufficient evidence for the existence of evil

spirits to incline him to believe in the devil, the clergyman prohibited

his coming for communion until he did believe in the devil. The

parishioner wrote a complaint to the bishop, and the latter took his

part against his parish “priest” and for the devil. The matter being

referred to the Judicial Committee, the bishop’s verdict was confirmed

in favor of the sceptical parishioner and of his Infernal Majesty.

Nor can any individual cases of this kind be matter of surprise when we

reflect to what the doctrinal decisions of the supreme courts of the

Anglican Establishment have, with the consent of her entire episcopate,

as expressed in their famous “allocution” on the Public Worship Act,

pledged her clergy. According to the final and irreversible authority

acknowledged by that episcopate, the Church of England holds, 1, that

the doctrine of baptismal regeneration is an open question; 2, that it

is an open question whether every part of every book of Scripture is

inspired; 3, that there is no “distinct declaration” in the formularies

of that church on the subject of everlasting punishment, and that the

words “everlasting death” in the exposition of the Lord’s Prayer given

in the catechism “cannot be taken as necessarily declaring anything

touching the eternity of punishment after the resurrection”; 4, that

Anglican bishops are the creatures of English law and dependent on that

law for their existence, rights, and attributes.[22]

Footnote 22:

See _Christianity in Erastianism_. A letter to Cardinal Manning. By

_Presbyter Anglicanus_.

“The Church of England,” said Dr. Stanley, the Protestant Dean of

Westminster, in a sermon recently preached at Battersea, “is what she is

by the goodness of Almighty God and of his servant Queen Elizabeth.” If

he had said, “of Henry VIII. and his daughter, Queen Elizabeth,” we

could have agreed with him, particularly as the riper years of the

Establishment continue so suitably to fulfil the promise of such

parentage; but to Catholics there is a revolting profanity in classing

together the goodness of God with that of one of the most implacable

persecutors of his church—a persecutor, not from conviction of the

justice, but the iniquity, of her cause, and from a persistent

determination to extinguish in her realm the ancient faith, whose very

existence was a condemnation of the state religion arranged by her

father and Cranmer, improved by her brother and his Genevese assistants,

and re-fashioned to her own liking by herself. The sentence pronounced

by the Protestant historian Chalmers upon this powerful and unprincipled

queen is that “she was a woman without chastity, a princess without

honor, and a sovereign without faith”; and, as if by way of a satanic

parody on the vision of the Immaculate Virgin in the Book of

Revelations, we see Elizabeth, the offspring of an adulterous union,

trampling under her despotic foot the Bride of Christ.

“The Church of England,” continued the dean, “was, it is true, a

compromise,” and “he was not a true son thereof who used it as a weapon

for promoting this or that doctrine, but, _after the example of

Elizabeth_, and for the interests of the nation, used it as a broad

shield under which he might work for good,”[23] etc., etc. The sense of

which, in plain English, appears to be that the said church prefers

general indifference to doctrinal truth, the “interests of the nation”

to the glory of God, and the “example of Elizabeth” to purity of faith

and life.

Footnote 23:

Hentzner furnishes us, by the way, with a singular testimony to

Elizabeth’s “goodness” when, among other things of the same nature, he

tells us that, in the latter years of her reign, executions for high

treason (this being the term applied to denial of the royal supremacy

in the church fully as much as in the state) were so frequent that he

counted at one time on London Bridge no fewer than 300 heads. She

herself on one occasion pointed out to the French ambassador the same

ghastly trophies adorning the gates of her own palace.

But Dean Stanley represents one only of the four principal sections into

which the Church of England has divided itself; and however complacently

the “Broad” and even “Moderate High” Churchmen may regard the marshy

nature of the ground in which the foundations of their faith, if faith

it can be called, are laid, and congratulate themselves on the fact that

it is neither land nor water, but something of both, there are earnest

men who have no fancy for being amphibious, and who spare no pains and

toil to drain away the stagnant waters from their morass, in the sincere

conviction that beneath the miasma-breeding mosses there lies, for those

who dig deep enough to find it, the imperishable rock.

Of this number seems to be the Rev. Arthur Tooth, vicar of St. James’,

Hatcham, who is now in prison because he chooses to act upon the

principle of “no compromise.” We honor a man who is willing to suffer

for conscience’ sake, and to uphold the right of the church to decide in

ecclesiastical causes, but at the same time we cannot but feel that Mr.

Tooth is more conscientious than logical, and that by his present

opposition he is breaking the solemn promise and oath which, as a

clergyman of the state church, he took, at his ordination, to a

state-church bishop.

Mr. Tooth, on account of certain ritualistic practices—_i.e._, the use

of “Catholic” vestments, conducting the communion service so as to make

it resemble as much as possible Holy Mass, having “a crucifix in the

chancel, little winged figures on the communion-table, lighted candles

on a ledge where he had been ordered not to place them, etc., etc.—was,

by order of Lord Penzance and with the approval of his own bishop, Dr.

Claughton of Rochester, interdicted from officiating again in the

diocese. The writ of inhibition was served him on a Sunday morning

before the commencement of the service; he not only took no notice of

the writ, but also on the following (Christmas) day publicly resisted

his substitute. Canon Gee had been appointed by the bishop to read the

service in the place of Mr. Tooth, but, on his arriving at the church,

the latter gentleman, backed by about forty of his male parishioners,

met him at the door and refused to allow him to enter, upon which Canon

Gee, after protesting against this insubordinate proceeding on the part

of his refractory brother, was forced to retire. Having thus disposed of

the episcopal delegate, the vicar proceeded to display an unusual pomp

in the ceremonial. Six splendid banners were carried in procession, on

one of which was embroidered the monogram of Our Blessed Lady,

surrounded by the words, _Sancta Dei Genitrix_.” The church was crowded

to suffocation, partly with worshippers, and also very largely by people

who had come from curiosity, as was evident by their behavior no less

than by their murmured expressions of ridicule or indignation; a crowd,

not only of “roughs,” but numbering many well-dressed people, had

assembled outside. On one occasion, the 14th of January, in particular,

the scenes both within and without were disgraceful. “Inside,” we are

told, “there was a good deal of fighting and scuffling, especially at

the lower end,” while outside the crowd, besides breaking down the

fences, shouting “No popery,” yelling, and in various ways demonstrating

their inclination to break the laws as well as the parson did, had they

not been kept in some abeyance by a strong body of three hundred police,

joined in singing loudly the national anthem, vociferating with especial

emphasis and vigor the line “Confound their knavish tricks”—improved by

some to “popish tricks” in honor of the occasion. Some time after the

service was over, so as to give the mob time to thin, the sight of Mr.

Tooth issuing from the church under the protection of “twenty stout

policemen of the F Division” had in it something almost ludicrous to

those who reflected that all this commotion arose from the fact of his

having spurned the “secular arm.”

When, on the 20th of January, the Rev. R. Chambers, who has been

appointed curate in charge of the parish of Hatcham by the Bishop of

Rochester, went, accompanied by the bishop’s apparitor, and, producing

his license, requested Mr. Tooth to hand over to him through the

church-wardens the possession of the church, the vicar replied that he

refused to take any notice of the document or the application. He was

therefore committed for contempt of court, and is now lodged in

Horsemonger Lane jail.

It is not necessary to give more than two portions of the very temperate

explanations with which Lord Penzance has accompanied his

judgment—namely, those portions which are aimed at the delusions

supposed to be most important in the controversy. These delusions are,

in brief, 1st, that the new Public Worship Act was an innovation upon

Anglican custom, and an invasion of its rights; 2d, that obedience

should be rendered to an ecclesiastical and not to a lay superior. The

answers of Lord Penzance to these assumptions are, substantially, as

follows:

“1. It would be well if those who maintain these propositions were to

read the statutes by which the ritual of the Church of England at the

time of the Reformation was enforced—I mean the statutes establishing

the two successive prayer-books of King Edward VI. and the prayer-book

of Queen Elizabeth, which regulated the ritual of the reformed church

for the first hundred years after its establishment. They would there

find that a clergyman departing in the performance of divine service

from the ritual prescribed in the prayer-book was liable to be _tried at

the assizes by a judge and jury_ (the bishop, _if he pleased_, assisting

the judges), and, if convicted three times, was liable to be _imprisoned

for life_. The intervention, therefore, of a temporal court to enforce

obedience in matters of ritual is at least no novelty; the novelty, as

far as the Church of England is concerned, is rather in the claim to be

exempt from it.

“2. But suppose this claim, for the sake of argument, to be admitted;

what, then, are the ecclesiastical courts to whose judgment the

Ritualists would be willing to defer? Unless every clergyman is to

settle the form of worship for himself, and there are to be as many

forms of worship as there are parishes in the land, who is it that, in

his opinion, is to determine what the rubrics of the prayer-book

enjoin?—for we suppose him to consider himself bound by the directions

of the prayer-book. What is the court to which he is willing to render

obedience? Is it the court of his bishop? If so, he must surely be aware

that by the ecclesiastical law of this country, as well before the

Reformation as since, an appeal from the bishop’s court lies, and has

always lain, to the court of the archbishop, this Court of Arches, whose

jurisdiction he now denies. What question, therefore, is there of a

secular court, or an invasion of the rights of the Church of

England?[24]” And the judgment passed by Lord Penzance was contained in

the following words: “Applying these powers as I am bound to do, I have

no hesitation in pronouncing Mr. Tooth to be contumacious, and in

contempt for disobeying the inhibition pronounced by this court, and I

direct the same to be signified to the queen in chancery, with a view to

his imprisonment.”

Footnote 24:

A writer in the London _Times_ gives the following answer to the

ecclesiastical assumptions of Mr. Tooth: “I will enumerate some of the

acts on ecclesiastical matters which have become law without the

consent of the priesthood, and which therefore the present agitators

bind themselves to disallow and disobey: The act of Edward VI. on the

Sacrament, on Chantries, on Images, on Fasting; the Acts of

Uniformity, both of Edward VI. and Elizabeth; the Act of Toleration;

the act abolishing the burning of heretics, under William III.; the

acts, both of Charles II. and William III., for the observance of

Sunday; the various Marriage Acts of William III., George II., and

Queen Victoria; the various acts both for the repression and the

relief of Roman Catholics during the same range of time; the acts

during the late and present reigns against pluralities and against

non-residence; the acts suppressing the Irish bishoprics, suppressing

half the cathedral dignitaries in England, and, finally,

revolutionizing the Irish Church; the act for abolishing the services

drawn up by Convocation for the political anniversaries of the

seventeenth century. These and many other laws, many of them of

unquestioned beneficence, most of them of unquestioned obligation, all

of them passed by Parliament, and by it alone, must be set aside by

those who make it a point of conscience to disobey any law which has

been imposed on the church by secular authority.”

And now the strife of tongues which preceded this climax was comparative

calm to that which at present rages. All the winds of Æolus, each trying

which can blow the hardest, seem let loose at once in the distracted

Establishment. By the Ritualist party the confessor for disobedience in

Horsemonger Lane jail is already dubbed “the martyr, Tooth”; while

another party rejoices that, by the contumacy of this “parson in

revolt,” the state church is “forced into a clear, practical assertion

of her old and hitherto unquestioned right to restrain and punish

disobedient and delinquent 'clerks.’” Further, the London _Times_,

dilating after its own infallible fashion upon Mr. Tooth and “his

pranks,” dares to aver that “to parade a banner calling the Virgin Mary

the 'Mother of God’ is little less than sheer blasphemy.”

At a large meeting of the “English Church Union” it became evident that

the changes in law procedure produced by the Public Worship Regulation

Act are producing a murmur in favor of “disestablishment” within the

Church of England herself. One of the reverend speakers at this meeting

said that “the issue had now merged from one about the color of a stole

to a question of church and state,” and the honorable chairman agreed

that “establishment might cost too dear.” Archdeacon Denison declared

that this case of “dear Arthur Tooth” would prove to be “a

life-and-death struggle with Protestantism,” thus making the old mistake

of putting mere ritualism in the place of the Catholic Church. Canon

Carter moved that “the Church Union denies that the secular power has

authority in matters purely spiritual,” upon which a journal reminds him

that, from the days of the Reformation, it has been one of the

conditions on which the state church enjoyed the emoluments and

privileges of establishment that her clergy should perform certain

duties in a way laid down by law. Whether, as in the case of Mr. Tooth,

they have or have not done so is a matter which the law leaves a

particular court to decide. If Mr. Tooth does not relish the action of

these tribunals, two courses are open to him, and only two. Either he

may give up those practices which they declare obnoxious within the pale

of the Established Church, or he may leave the Establishment and

continue them elsewhere. The latter step would entail the sacrifice of

the endowment, or, as the Ritualists would say, it would involve the

guilt of schism; in which case the whole matter resolves itself into a

choice of sins: the clergyman must either commit the sin of obeying Lord

Penzance, and so retain the endowment, or he must commit the sin of

“schism” and fling the endowment away. Thus the Church Unionists are by

no means logical in comparing their present position to that of

Chalmers, Buchanan, Guthrie, Cunningham, and other leaders of the Free

Kirk of Scotland previously to 1843; for these men gave up all thought

of state endowment, or even of ministering in buildings dependent on the

state, and purchased the independence of their ministrations at the cost

of all state temporalities. This is a very different matter from

attempting to have the temporalities and the independence together.[25]

Footnote 25:

Certain evicted Ritualists, however, do not appear to be much affected

by the measures taken to repress them, if it be true that the Rev. R.

P. Dale, who has been suspended for three years, and his former parish

merged into another, takes the matter very philosophically, and, in

default of his own parish, finds every Sunday in one place or another

a complaisant brother-clergyman, who lends him his church and his

pulpit, from which he braves the pseudo-episcopal thunders.

Another observation made by Canon Carter was, though not in itself more

true, yet, for him, much more to the point—namely, that “the only

persecution now carried on in England is against the High-Church party.”

It is on this fact that the Ritualists stand triumphant. They can

honestly plead that they, the High-Church party, have done more than all

the other parties put together for the revival of faith and devotion in

England. They can also plead that they are men of education, of courage

and energy and self-denying zeal, and that to them is due whatever

residuum is left of Catholic sentiment and tradition in the

Establishment. The marvel is that any of these really earnest men should

continue so blind to their anomalous position.

On the same day that the English Church Union held its assembly a

meeting of the ultra-Protestant school took place at the Wellington

Hall, Islington, where about one hundred and twenty clergymen and laymen

partook of breakfast, after which they proceeded to deliver themselves

of a large amount of the peculiar and incoherent insipidities with which

the readers of the _Rock_ must be painfully familiar. One specimen will

suffice, which, as our readers will perceive, is not lacking in the

unctuous accusations in which the “Evangelicals” are apt to excel: “As

in Germany,” they said, “the Jesuits devoted all their self-denying

energies to opposing the spread of the true doctrines, so here in

England there was an able and resolute body of men who opposed

themselves to the true principles of religion, and who, by services

rendered attractive to the eye and ear, appealed by the senses to the

understanding. Many of these men were no doubt sincere, and were thus

unconsciously doing the work of Satan. This was the powerful opposing

force with which the Evangelical body of the Church of England had to

contend.”

Now, we must beg leave to observe that for these “Evangelical” gentlemen

to talk of Ritualists as unconsciously doing the work of Satan is simply

absurd. Did not the “beam in their own eye” blind them, we would ask

them to take a glance backward and think of forty years ago, when,

through the length and breadth of the land, they locked up their

churches from Sunday afternoon to the following Sunday morning, and

sometimes even longer; for the writer can recall three villages (there

may or may not have been many more) in Leicestershire alone where, less

than forty years ago, there was only one service on the Sunday, and that

alternately in the morning and afternoon. We have heard of the wag who

chalked on the church door of an Evangelical rector, “_Le Bon Dieu est

sorti: Il ne reviendra que dimanche prochain_.” And truly, if the good

God _did_ come back, it would not be, in many instances, to find his

house “swept and garnished.”

Forty years ago! Sitting in the old family pew in the chancel of A ...

stone church, through the long, monotonous sermons of the worthy rector,

whose favorite subjects were “saving faith” and abuse of popery, what a

help it was to patient endurance to watch the merry, loud-voiced

sparrows fluttering in and out of the broken diamond panes of the

chancel windows, through which long sprays of ivy crept and clung

lovingly up the poor old walls, bare of everything but whitewash, of the

once Catholic church—walls that the damp of many an autumn and winter

had dyed with streaks of green, deeper and brighter in hue than the

faded, ink-stained rag of moth-eaten green baize that covered the

rickety wooden table standing where, in old days, the most holy

Sacrifice had been offered upon a Catholic altar. Childhood, before

opportunities for comparison have been afforded, is not hard to please,

and we used to think that that verdant chancel might have been in the

mind of the sweet Psalmist of Israel when he sang, “The sparrow hath

found her a house, and the swallow a nest, where she may lay her young:

even thine altars, O Lord of Hosts!” And yet our worthy rector (a rich

pluralist with a large family) was a kind-hearted, easy, amiable man,

and not in any way addicted to the hunting and drinking practices of

certain of his clerical neighbors; his house was the perfection of

refined not overloaded luxury, and the well-kept gardens of that most

pleasant of rectories were a paradise of smooth lawns, gay parterres,

and shady shrubberies sloping down to the banks of the winding Soar. The

rector led a mildly studious life when in the country (for half his year

was spent in London), visited much among the “county families,” and

shyly and rarely entered the cottages of the village; but religion in

that village was well-nigh dead. If amiable clergymen of this stamp are

not “unconsciously doing the work of Satan” themselves, they at any rate

give Satan plenty of time and opportunity to do his own work himself

among their flock, and to do it very effectually, too.

Yet it is the descendants of men like these who are foremost in groaning

down and persecuting the self-denying, hard-working clergy who are

always at their posts! The preachers of sentiment are furious against

the upholders of the necessity of dogmatic truth. The idlers in family

and social circles are desperate against enthusiasts who at least _try_

to hear confessions and to be priests. We cannot admire the consistency

of the Ritualists—for unhappily it does not exist—but the inconsistency

of their “Evangelical” accusers is simply “the impeachment of energy by

twaddle.”

A correspondent of the London _Times_ calls attention to the fact that

while Mr. Tooth, who is perfectly orthodox as regards the creeds of the

church, is prosecuted for extremes in ritual, a brother clergyman is

allowed to preach open infidelity from the pulpit unmolested. “The

Public Worship Bill,” he writes, “has been passed to repress crimes so

grave as over-magnificence in the services, but does not deign to meddle

in so small a matter as that of vindicating the Divinity of our Saviour,

which is fearlessly impugned in a pulpit which the Bishop of London

himself has condescended to occupy.”