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_Among many ideas brought forward through the Theosophical Movement there are three which should never be lost sight of. Not speech, but thought, really rules the world; so, if these three ideas are good let them be rescued again and again from oblivion._

THE FIRST IDEA _is, that there is a great Cause--in the sense of an enterprise--called the Cause of Sublime Perfection and Human Brotherhood. This rests upon the essential unity of the whole human family, and is a possibility because sublimity in perfectness and actual realization of brotherhood on every plane of being are one and the same thing._

THE SECOND IDEA _is, that man is a being who may be raised up to perfection, to the stature of the Godhead, because he himself is God incarnate. This noble doctrine was in the mind of Jesus, when he said that we must be perfect even as the Father in Heaven. This is the idea of human perfectibility. It will destroy the awful theory of inherent original sin which has held and ground down the western Christian nations for centuries._

THE THIRD IDEA _is the illustration, the proof, the high result of the others. It is, that the great Helpers of Humanity--those who have reached up to what perfection this period of evolution and this solar system will allow--are living veritable facts, and not abstractions cold and distant. They are, as our old H. P. Blavatsky so often said_, LIVING MEN. _These Helpers as living facts and high ideals will fill the soul with hope, will themselves help all who wish to raise the human race._

_Let us not forget these three great ideas._

WILLIAM Q. JUDGE

THE THEOSOPHICAL PATH
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VOL. I NO. 4 CONTENTS OCTOBER 1911

Scene from _The Aroma of Athens_ _Frontispiece_
Karma, Reincarnation, and Immortality
H. T. Edge, B. A. (Cantab.) 243
Scenes from _The Aroma of Athens_ (_illustrations_)
246-247, 254-255, 266-267
Poetry and Criticism Kenneth Morris 247
"The Music of the Spheres" H. Coryn, M. D., M. R. C. S. 258
Does Nirvâna mean Annihilation? T. H. 261
Cathedrals in Ancient Crete A Student 262
The World of Womanhood Grace Knoche 264
"Magnetons," Force and Matter H. Travers 267
The Natural History Museum, London (_illustrated_) 270
Scenes in Geneva and near Champéry, Switzerland (_illustrations_) 271
Was H. P. Blavatsky a Plagiarist? H. T. Edge, B. A. (Cantab.) 271
A Farmhouse on the Norfolk Broads, England (_illustration_) 274
Buckingham Palace, London (_illustrated_) 275
The Golden Chain of Platonic Succession
F. S. Darrow, A. M., PH. D. (Harv.) 276
Classical Cyrene Ariomardes 280
Killarney, Ireland (_illustrated_)
F. J. Dick, M. INST. C. E., M. INST. C. E. I. 282
The Vrbas Defile, Bosnia (_illustrated_) F. J. B. 286
Rocking-Stone Pinnacle, Tasmania (_illustration_) 287
Astronomical Notes C. J. Ryan 287
St. Paul's Cathedral from Ludgate Hill (_illustrated_) Carolus 293
Who Made the Eucalypts? (_illustrated_) Nature-Lover 295
Australian Marsupials (_illustrated_) Nature-Lover 296
Hoa-Haka-Nana-Ia (_illustrated_) P. A. Malpas 299
Sun-Life and Earth-Life Per Fernholm, M. E. (Stockholm) 300
The Spade of the Archaeologist Ariomardes 303
The Lands now Submerged Durand Churchill 305
Scene in Amsterdam. Oil Creek Falls, Alberta, Canada
(_illustrations_) 306-307
Book Reviews: _Il est ressuscité_ (Charles Morice) H. A. Fussell 307

THE THEOSOPHICAL PATH

KATHERINE TINGLEY, EDITOR

VOL. I OCTOBER, 1911 NO. 4

HE who thinks himself holier than another, he who has any pride in his exemption from vice or folly, he who believes himself wise, or in any way superior to his fellow-men, is incapable of discipleship.--_Light on the Path_

KARMA, REINCARNATION, AND IMMORTALITY: by H. T. Edge, B. A. (Cantab.)

People habitually discuss the past and the future of the human race with a zeal and interest that clashes strangely with their professed views on the subject of immortality; for what living interest could we have in the drama and prospects of a world if our appearance on the stage were actually limited to the term of a single mortal life? This constitutes the strongest kind of argument against the conventional views, theological or otherwise. It would seem that we are really conscious, though in a dim and undefined way, of our immortality--or, rather, of the immortality of our essence. The same conviction also arises when we consider the readiness with which people will face death, sooner than sacrifice some ideal of love or duty; a readiness quite inconsistent with professed beliefs.

While most of that which goes to make up a man has grown together during the period since his birth, and will fall asunder again when he dies, there is an immortal seed which was before and shall be again.

What is needed is to make our philosophy agree with our inner convictions, instead of contradicting them. If the consciousness of immortality in the young were preserved, and not destroyed by wrong teachings, the old would not have to spend so much time and energy in trying to solve problems that would never have arisen. We do not sufficiently realize what we owe to centuries of theological dogmatism and other forms of materialism; and consequently we underestimate the effect which would be produced if the rising generations were guided on higher, broader, and more generous lines of thought.

Theosophy justly claims that its philosophy enables us to interpret our own intuitions. Its teachings do not contradict our innate conviction of the justice of universal law. Theosophy may be called a science, inasmuch as it interprets nature, studying the effects and unraveling their causes, finding explanations that will account for the facts. It might also be called rationalism, since it imposes no dogmas but points out facts. But both science and reason must be understood in a vastly wider sense than the conventional one. Nature is not limited to her external manifestations; for the body is but the vesture of the soul within--whether in man or in the earth. Nor can the function of science be limited to physics.

The justice and harmony of a human life cannot be discerned if we regard that life separately--apart from its sequel and apart from that of which it is the sequel. This circumstance accounts for most of the strivings and strainings to reconcile faith with experience and to find a place for God in philosophy. But the idea of Reincarnation is so unfamiliar to Western culture and habits of thought that reasonable as it is it will take some time to win its appeal. The process of familiarizing this truth is rendered slower by the fact that much nonsense is talked about it, and reasonable inquirers thereby warned off. Yet it is possible to speak of Reincarnation in a sane and serious way.

What people most often forget is to distinguish properly between that which survives and that which does not, and this may lead them to expect proofs of a kind that cannot logically be demanded. They also confound memory with recollection, assuming, quite illogically, that where there is no recollection there can be no memory. But it is conceivable that memories may be stored up beyond our present reach, and yet be accessible to stronger efforts which we may be able to make at some future time. It may be true that we do not _recollect_ our past lives, but we are not warranted in inferring that the memory is obliterated or that there never was any such record made. The recollection of past lives is a question of memory training; but it is probably unnecessary to say that anyone who should venture on such a task in the expectation of achieving speedy results by his own unaided efforts would be liable to disappointment and delusion. For this attainment lies a long way ahead of us on the Path.

If people were habituated from birth to regard their present life as only one of a series, a great benefit would accrue. The fear of death would disappear; in time it might come to be looked upon as a mere incident. The haste to achieve disproportionate material prosperity would be seen to be needless. There could never be any ground for the philosophy, "Let us eat, drink, and be merry; for tomorrow we die!" But, more important still, confidence and courage would be restored. It would never be too late to mend; the oldest man might begin a new study or enterprise. Things left undone in this life could confidently be left for completion in the future. Failings not entirely overcome would be left behind, and a clean start would be in prospect. We do indeed already act as though we believed in Reincarnation; for old men begin new studies, and in many other ways people behave as though they were not going to die for good. Our intuitions are better than our philosophy; they tell us true, but we give them the lie; hence we marvel at our "inconsistency" or say that "God moves in a mysterious way," when it is ourselves who are moving in a mysterious way, our wonders to perform. How much more reasonable it would be, if we could give up these dogmas and mold our philosophy into harmony with our inner perceptions. And, speaking of dogmas, be it remembered that there are dogmas and dogmas; and one of the latter is that nothing is true unless it can be shown to follow from certain arbitrary rules of reason.

Another mistake made in thinking of immortality consists in regarding it merely in relation to time. Yet the Soul exists all the time; and while the personality is living its temporal life, the Soul, free from the limitations of time and sense, is living its eternal life. Hence we may truly be said to be experiencing immortality while in the flesh; and though we but faintly realize it, we do so in different degrees, some people more than others.

A useful comparison is that between death and sleep, between a lifetime and a day. During the period of a day we pass through successive phases similar to youth, maturity, and old age. At night we cheerfully lay down our work, confident that we shall resume it. Each day is determined to a large extent by preceding days, and is in its turn the parent of following days. In every day our free initiative works amid conditions imposed by our actions on preceding days, and here we find an analogy with the workings of the law of Karma during a lifetime. If we but regard a lifetime as a longer day, the analogy will clear up many difficulties.

Continuing this analogy further, we find that as regards the successive days of our lifetime, our mind is conscious of them all; in fact our mind is in the same position with regard to the days as the Higher Mind is with regard to the successive lives. Knowing this, we do not make the mistake of scolding Providence for conditions which we know we have created ourselves. The only difference, in the case of a lifetime, is that we are not yet cognizant of the continuity of our existence, and find ourselves in circumstances whose origin we have forgotten. Yet these circumstances are the logical consequence of past actions. The opportunities we enjoy and the drawbacks under which we suffer were made by ourselves.

It is maintained by Theosophists that the doctrines of Karma and Reincarnation are perfectly adaptable to ordinary life; that they are not mere theories such as a scholar might amuse himself with; that they represent actual facts and constitute an interpretation--indeed the only logical interpretation--of things as they are. It may be regarded as certain that these tenets will eventually become generally adopted; there is great vitality behind them, and the human mind is at present in a fluid condition, during which it is rapidly assimilating new ideas. The future may be forecast by a comparison of present ideas with those of a few years ago. The important thing is to provide that the pure teachings, and not any absurd travesty of them, shall prevail.

It is a solemn and oft-repeated truth that no real reform in human circumstances can be made unless the characters of the people are reformed. And how can these be reformed so long as there is such a chaos of beliefs and non-beliefs, theological dogmas that teach us to fear ourselves, so-called "scientific" theories that magnify our animal nature and animal heredity? What is needed is views of life based upon common sense, views which dignify man and inspire him with self-confidence of the right kind. The Theosophical teachings as to Karma, Reincarnation, and the sevenfold nature of man can achieve this; but they need to be seriously studied, and above all made the basis of action. Theosophist is who Theosophy does.

POETRY AND CRITICISM: by Kenneth Morris

I

Matthew Arnold will have it that the function of Poetry is the Criticism of Life; and the work of a poet will be important, according to him, only in so far as it throws light on human life and character. But in the work of all poets there is a kind of cream that may be skimmed off (_provided that there is a cream_, and that it was not all sky-blue wretchedness from the first); and when it has been so skimmed, one may say that the poetry is the cream, and the criticism of life the skim-milk. "Such and such a lyric, by so and so," says your poet or poetry-lover, "is of equal value with Hamlet or the Odyssey, all three being absolute in their beauty." "Gammon!" says your man of the world in letters; "there is the criticism of life to be thought of. How shall ten lines be equal to ten thousand?" Which is right? The second will get all the votes; which is no great argument, perhaps. The epic took longer in the writing; but one never knows what may lie behind the lyric. The didactic or philosophic poem, the work full of this criticism, will influence the thought of the world; and if thinking is to be the judge, it will win unquestionably. But the lyric will be singing itself through thousands of minds, in the sunshine, in the mines, over the washtub, heaven knows where: without noise, it will shed its brightness through a million eyes, its sweetness on a million tempers, its clearness and magic on a million imaginations. To the writer of the most perfect lyric, I am not sure that we do not owe as much gratitude as to the writer of the greatest epic or drama: I am almost positive that we owe him more than to the best writer of criticism of life; though it be a dozen lines against a dozen volumes.

Most of the English-writing poets have been also, and many of them mainly, philosophers; writing their thought in verse form, and perhaps sprinkling it from the spice-box of pure poetry, and perhaps not. Often and often we find stories or philosophic disquisitions in verse, that might have been told as well in prose; although it has been said rather wisely that nothing should have verse form that could be told honorably without metre. There is a class of idea that journeys leisurely and step by step through the mind; this should be reserved for prose. There are other classes that have the sweep and charge of cavalry, and you build epics and all heroic poetry of them; others that soar singing like the skylark, or that wander from bloom to bloom droning out a magical and honey-laden monody, secrets of a learning incomprehensible to the minds of men. These will be the right stuff for your pure lyrics, these bees and birds in the golden regions west of thought. Their revelations are more esoteric than philosophy; they home to deeper places.

But one cannot deal with all poetry or all life in one article; and it is the intention here to consider narrative poetry alone. Narrative poetry, when it is anything more than a ballad, is epic: and epic is heroic poetry; not by any convention, I believe, but in accordance with deep-seated law. There is room for nothing personal or limited here; for no dissection of personal characteristics, no consideration or criticism of problems of exterior life. Those things all belong to prose; poetry proclaims the actions and perceptions of the soul. Heroic or epic poetry tells of the soul as hero, warrior, redeemer; as Sigurd going out against Fafnir, Arthur ferried in a dark barge to The Island of the Apples; as Satan unconquered in the lake of flame; as Christ on Golgotha, or Prometheus on Caucasus. It has to show forth the glory, the indomitableness, the magnanimity of the soul, dwelling in those lofty regions and letting who will come to it for general strength and inspiration. It is the Mountain; it will not descend from itself for any Mohammed. For this reason is its aloofness, its tendency to concern itself with periods _apparently_ in the far past, but really in the eternal. That atmosphere all narrative poetry must retain, under penalty of sinking into berhymed or bemetred prose; or into the ballad--which, indeed, can be good, at its best, but not supremely good. Yet how many stories there are, beautifully written in verse, which are neither epic in spirit nor ballad in form; which are, if the truth should be told, novels strayed from their proper fold of prose, valley wanderers by no means at home on the mountain.

One thinks, for example, of such a work as Mrs. Browning's _Aurora Leigh_. If she had only written it in prose! With that faultlessness of expression, that delicate insight and unerring justness of criticism which mark it, it would have become a classic; we should have said, "Why, this is a prose poem, a literary treasure among novels." But being in verse, it remains, however beautiful, only versified prose; and it is to be feared that we neglect it; to be feared, but hardly to be wondered at. If she had only written it in prose!

Or one thinks of nearly all Tennyson's narrative poetry. The aim, one feels, was nearly always criticism of life, the life of all these myriads of personalities; not poetry, which is the illumination of the hidden life of the soul. It was for this reason that _Idylls of the King_, although flaming up here and there with such poetry as has not been excelled in any known literature, perhaps--yet fails as a whole to be a great poem. The Nineteenth Century was too insistent, and the troubles and problems of the day. Milton, dealing with matters beyond the crystalline and the brink of time, achieved the epic; but even Milton, coming down to Eden, heaven, and the familiar things of dogmatic theology, attained only to be ... Well, well, all honor to him; he deserves that all that should be lost and forgotten. Poetry and personality cannot be blended; they are a veritable God and Mammon.

Then there are those charming stories of Tennyson's: _Dora_, _Enoch Arden_, _Almer's Field_, _The Princess_. He dignified them all with his own high gift of style; stamped on every line his own noble and melodious manner; adorned them all richly, and with consummate taste, with the best color of English rural life. Yet they remain essentially of the nature of prose; and we should not have been lured into thinking them poetry, but for the wonderful genius with which Tennyson handled them. The matter is the matter of the novel; and the style--what a wonderful style it is!--is rather the polished style that reflects light, the style of prose, than the white-hot luminosity of the genuine epic.

Let us take, for example, _The Princess_, perhaps the most romantic and beautiful of this series, the one it takes the greatest temerity to speak of as not really poetic. Its aim is to throw light on, or to consider, or discuss, a certain present-day problem, that of the "emancipation of women"; and who shall say that that might not be done in prose? Is poetry to throw no light on our modern problems, or on contemporary problems, then? Turn to your Milton for an answer:

Dare ye for this adjure the civil sword
To force our consciences that Christ set free,
And ride us with a classic hierarchy
Taught ye by mere A. S. and Rutherford?
Men whose life, learning, faith, and pure intent
Would have been held in high esteem with Paul
Must now be named and printed heretics
By shallow Edwards and Scotch What-d'ye-call!
But we do hope to find out all your tricks.

Poetry? By heaven, yes! And on a contemporary problem? Look at the title of it: "On the New Forcers of Conscience under the Long Parliament"; and the date given, too; 1646. But does he discuss? Does he consider? Indeed he does not. He flames forth from the standpoint of the soul; he is still God's Warrior, and you dare not mention truce to him. So those prosaic names, that "mere A. S. and Rutherford," "shallow Edwards," and above all the ridiculous "Scotch What-d'ye-call," become flaming and terrible poetic utterances on his lips; he blasts with them the fools that dare stand up against the liberty and supremacy of the soul. But suppose, instead of this terse, burning sonnet so entirely free from the atmosphere of argumentation, he had written a long story designed to thrash the matter out from the standpoint of pure reason? Some one might do so; and the work might be one of great value; but it would not be poetic; it could not be Miltonic; it would be a novel with a purpose, not an epic poem.

There are problems and problems; those which poetry may specifically handle, are, I think, the same yesterday, today and forever. Who is to hinder her handling what problems she likes; will you set down rules for her? Heaven forbid! it were more profitable to build a fence about the cuckoo. But the fact remains that she will touch these, and will not touch those others. Charm you never so wisely, she will not come from her own ground. For all your birdlime of earnestness, of enthusiasm, of excellent purpose, it is some masquerading jackdaw you will have captured, not the Bird of Paradise; unless it is the trees of Paradise you have limed. Poetry hardly deals with any historic period, old or new; she leaves those to the historians, and has a period of her own, which is eternal. What then, you say, of those "New Forcers of Conscience in the Long Parliament?" This! that that parliament is so long that it has been sitting any time this two thousand years, and is sitting now, in all our towns and villages. "New Presbyter is but old Priest writ large"; A. S. and Rutherford, Shallow Edwards and Scotch What-d'ye-call--they all preach in a thousand pulpits every Sunday. For they are prototypal figures, and plot and persecute wherever there is bigotry or ecclesiastical dominance. Against them, and, so far as one has been able to discover, against them _only_, does poetry ever come forth armed, enangered, utterly ruthless. It is she that has pity and pardon for the Magdalene and the publican; but a whip of bitter small chords for those that have made her Father's house into a den of thieves. Do you doubt it? Then find some passage where anger is expressed, not in rhetoric, not in mere fustian bombast, but with the sublime music and undertone, the ring of genuine poetry; perhaps an anger without mercy, a declaration of utter war; and see whether it is not directed _always_ against this same ecclesiasticism.

But we set out to discuss the epic; and here we have wandered off to consider a sonnet with particular gusto; a grave digression, surely? I think not. You shall not judge a poem's right to the epic name by its length. This little sonnet is an epic too, with Milton on Pegasus for hero; and A. S., Rutherford, Edwards, and What-d'ye-call for four-headed Chimaera. I think the very archaeus of the epic is the eternal battle of the world; and that all epics have their root in that, and are great and regal in proportion to their nearness, inwardly and spiritually speaking, to it. Tennyson knew it when he set out to write in his _Idylls of the King_ a record of the Soul at war with sense; only perhaps he knew it too personally and consciously; and lost the grand epic symbolism in his quest after actual _criticism_ of life.

II

But to return to _The Princess_. Here, the objective is not to set forth eternal verity, but to discuss, perhaps throw light on, a problem of our own day; a social, in a sense, rather than a spiritual problem. What figure can stand for the battling soul, and what for the principle of evil? There are epic places in the _Idylls of the King_, where this symbolism stands forth majestically, and style and glory correspond. We have the story of that "last, dim battle in the west" and the passing of Arthur thereafter; clean, antique, touched with the infinite and with eternity; therein, if you will, is the epic atmosphere. But here it is the benevolent, thoughtful Tennyson that is speaking, troubled by the evils that he sees around him; not Tennyson the great Bard on fire with ultimate and secret truth. You see, there was the duality there; and both sides of it are honorable, to be revered and loved. If criticism has a work to perform in discriminating between the two, she does no dishonor to the thinker in separating him from the poet. We have to ask what there is in this work, _The Princess_, that might entitle it to be considered poetry, in the highest sense.

The style? Style is there, undoubtedly. Every line has been molded, heightened, shaped, polished, chiseled. But let us compare it with the style of poetry, and we shall see the difference. Here is one of the most fiery passages; one in which you can feel that the invitation was to the supreme, super-personal compassion to enter in:

"O brother, you have known the pangs we felt,
What heats of indignation when we heard
Of those that iron-cramp'd their women's feet;
Of lands in which at the altar the poor bride
Gives her harsh groom for bridal-gift a scourge;
Of living hearts that crack within the fire
Where smoulder their dead despots; and of those--
Mothers--that, all prophetic pity, fling
Their pretty maids in the running flood, and swoops
The vulture, beak and talon, at the heart
Made for all noble motion; and I saw
That equal baseness lived in sleeker times
With smoother men: the old leaven leaven'd all:
Millions of throats would bawl for civil rights,
No woman named: therefore I set my face
Against all men, and lived but for mine own.
Far from all men I built a fold for them."

So speaks the princess of the story; profusely, if with great dignity; bitterly, but argumentatively: it is a heightened, an exalted prose style; but it has not taken that leap into infinity which is the mark of the poetic grand manner. For a contrast, consider this; the work of another Victorian bard; one not greater than Tennyson, but here with his poet's blue mantle upon him, robed with the infinite. He, too, is smitten with compassion for certain women; and the flame leaps up from the blow in this wise:

Here, down between the dusty trees,
At this lank edge of haggard wood,
Women with labour-loosened knees,
With gaunt backs bowed by servitude,
Stop, shift their loads, and pray, and fare
Forth with souls easier for the prayer.

* * * * *

God of this grievous people, wrought
After the likeness of their race,
By faces like thine own besought,
Thine own blind helpless eyeless face,
I too, that have nor tongue nor knee
For prayer, I have a word to thee.

It was for this then, that thy speech
Was blown about the world in flame,
And men's souls shot up out of reach
Of fear or lust or thwarting shame--
That thy faith over souls should pass
As sea-winds burning the young grass?

It was for this, that prayers like these
Should spend themselves about thy feet.
And with hard overlaboured knees
Kneeling, these slaves of men should beat
Bosoms too lean to suckle sons,
And fruitless as their orisons?

It is the first and the last verses quoted that count; and I think much might be learned from a careful comparison of them with the passage from _The Princess_. Tennyson has made a catalog, in the manner of prose, of the sorrows of women; his mind traveling with passion, but with a certain artistic, conscious discrimination, from China, India, Arabia, to the hustings of Victorian England (for it is that, in reality). The style of prose we say; well, the style of rhetoric: picture by picture has been chosen with a view to make the case strong, to impress who should hear it. "Ida's answer ... Oration-like," says Tennyson, knowing well what he was writing. Swinburne, in the supreme manner of poetry, has burned upon our vision that solemn, terrible picture, bare, unornate, unforgetable, of the women at the wayside crucifix; "slaves of men" beating "bosoms too lean to suckle sons": and with the picture there is that impression of augustness, that sense as of the presence of a great avenging angel, or perhaps, of the majesty of the Law. The attitude of the Princess Ida towards the evils that she condemns, is one of personal protest; she dwells on the same plane as they do, albeit in the brighter regions of it; she is a human personality, and speaks with a human and quite personal voice. But the anger of Swinburne here, the condemnation that he deals out, is not personal: the words are such as might be spoken by a god from his throne. They come from a loftier place than the thing condemned occupies, as though they were a sentence passed from the tribunal against whose decrees there is no appeal. So they are indeed. For this is Poetry, which is the voice of the Soul; and the Soul is deific, sovereign, aloof; and it does look down and pass sentence on the things of this world--a sentence damnatory or compassionate, but based on the evidence of direct vision and certitude, never on argument and the weighing up of pros and cons.

Look at those last lines again; with what sure intensity the whole tragedy is revealed! Compassion, in her own manner loftily _disdainful_, we might almost say, is suddenly focused; nine-tenths of the story are left untold, but the one-tenth that remains has the whole cry, the whole tragedy in it of a world blighted by lies: it is "dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn," and, _mirabile dictu_, with the "love of love," or compassion, in a breath.

We get that same strange glorious blending of compassion and scorn--pride or scorn, one does not know what to call it; it is neither of those things in reality, but rather the native accent of divinity in the voice of the soul--we hear that same majestic blending of compassion and haughtiness pre-eminently in a line from the _Purgatorio_ which Arnold justly gives as one of the most perfect examples of the Grand Manner of poetry, the highest style than can be impressed on written or chanted words; the line: _Che drizza voi che il mondo fece torti_, "Which straightens you whom the world made crooked." We see here, I think, as in the passage from Swinburne, the same impatience of words and details; the same godlike aloofness; the same pity too compressed, too burning and intense, to reveal itself fully or tenderly: the feeling has passed beyond the limits of the power of tenderness, we might say, to be tender: it is such a super-passional passion of tenderness, suppressed, governed, boiling, that it must be stern, swift, momentary--or nothing. Is it not the very naked voice of the august divinity hidden within us?--the greatest fashion that can be burned and infused into the brute stuff of language; because ringing with the dominance of that hidden Master? It bears the mark of compassion, because compassion is the inevitable attitude of the soul outward from itself; and it bears the stamp of sublime titanism--that thing that would be scorn, were it bitter and hostile, and that would be mere majesty, might it remain passive and in repose--because the soul is a god, and knows itself to be a god, and breathes out the atmosphere of godhood. Here it is in Milton, again:

His form had not yet lost
All her original brightness, nor appeared
Less than archangel ruined:

and of course, it is Milton and Dante who are the supreme masters in modern literature of the Grand Manner; as poets, the greatest of the poets.

Now it will be said that there is compassion in the passage quoted from _The Princess_; and undoubtedly there is; but is not the effort all to manifest it, to make it plain to every one that it is there, to lead it from picture to picture that will feed and excite it? We may say that it is a voice from below upward, an inspiration; it has the style and atmosphere of a great endeavor of the personal self towards the soul: whereas in the other cases, it is the comment and utterance of the soul itself. _There_, there is no effort to manifest compassion; the effort is all to suppress and control it. The effort is like the metal walls of a bomb, without which the explosive would only fizzle and waste. The poet--Swinburne, Milton, or Dante--had no doubt of his dynamite; it was too mighty, too awesome a thing; all he must do is to make the bomb walls strong, strong, strong. So, in reading, we get the effect, and are blown up--to the altitudes of consciousness. Tennyson, being also a poet, and therefore knowing the nature of dynamite; but writing here, not poetry, but mere criticism of life in the guise of poetry, puts what he can, out of his memory, of dynamite into his work: infuses what he may of the atmosphere of compassion into it. Swinburne and Dante and Milton have a Niagara to deal with, and they must make the channel of it as small as they may; they must dam it as well as they can, or heaven knows where they and the world would be swept to--mere incoherence and blind fury perhaps, or silence. Tennyson (in this case) has to deal with an irrigation scheme, and must make his channels as wide and deep as he can, and coax the waters of the world into them. Then, too, see how he deals with that other quality. He knew well enough that it is integral in the Grand Manner of Poetry, and he will weave it in here, if he may. So we have:

Far from all men I built a fold for them:

* * * * *

And prospered; till a _rout of saucy boys
Brake on us at our books_.

There is no doubt what quality that is; scorn, indignation, separateness, bitterness, hostility. It is a personal imitation of loftiness, the compassionate element has quite vanished from it; there is all the difference in the world between it and the fierce pity of--

these slaves of men should beat
Bosoms too lean to suckle sons,
And fruitless as their orisons:

or the sudden stern mercy implied in--

la Montagna
Che drizza voi che il mondo fece torti:

or the serene, august luminance of compassion shining through--

His form had not yet lost
All her original brightness.

Or, since the compassion is out of it, we might compare it with those many lines from Milton that convey only the sense of the grandeur, without the compassion, of the soul; lines such as these:

An old and haughty nation, proud in arms;

or:

Standing on earth, not rapt above the pole,
More safe I sing with mortal voice, _unchanged_
To hoarse or mute, _though fallen on evil days,
On evil days though fallen, and evil tongues,
In darkness, and with dangers compassed round_;

or:

Let such bethink them, if the sleepy drench
Of that forgetful lake benumb not still,
_That in our proper motion we ascend
Up to our native seat; descent and fall
To us are adverse_:

--these speak of the majesty of the soul; but the other only of the bitterness of the personality.

But you will say, Tennyson was putting words into the mouth of a very human, limited personality; and so the piece is more artistic as it is, and would be inappropriate otherwise. These are the words she actually would have said. True. The personality does speak in prose. Prose is the language of personality; and no doubt it was first invented when first the souls rayed out personalities from themselves; no doubt poetry is the older, as it is the more august. So the style used in _The Princess_ is suitable, well-chosen, artistic; it fits the subject admirably; which proves that the subject is essentially a prose one. For prose--history, philosophy, criticism--examines and criticises life from without; but poetry illumines it from within. Prose considers and passes judgment on the external, the seeming, the current: Poetry dwells within the holy of holies and her whole burden is the story of the Soul.