should signalise the father of three children.  It is not so splendid or delightful as the appearance of a young clerk in an insurance office decorated with those three long crimson plumes which are the well-known insignia of a gentleman who is just engaged to be married.  Nor can it compare with the look of a man wearing the magnificent green and silver armour by which we know one who has induced an acquaintance to give up getting drunk, or the blue and gold which is only accorded to persons who have prevented fights in the street.  We belong to quite as many regiments as the German Kaiser.  Our regiments are regiments that are embattled everywhere; they fight an unending fight against all that is hopeless and rapacious and of evil report.  The only difference is that we have the regiments, but not the uniforms.

Only one obvious point occurs to me to add.  If the Kaiser has more than any other man the sense of the poetry of the ancient things, the sword, the crown, the ship, the nation, he has the sense of the poetry of modern things also.  He has one sense, and it is even a joke against him.  He feels the poetry of one thing that is more poetic than sword or crown or ship or nation, the poetry of the telegram.  No one ever sent a telegram who did not feel like a god.  He is a god, for he is a minor poet; a minor poet, but a poet still.

TENNYSON

Mr. Morton Luce has written a short study of Tennyson which has considerable cultivation and suggestiveness, which will be sufficient to serve as a notebook for Tennyson’s admirers, but scarcely sufficient, perhaps, to serve as a pamphlet against his opponents.  If a critic has, as he ought to have, any of the functions anciently attributed to a prophet, it ought not to be difficult for him to prophesy that Tennyson will pass through a period of facile condemnation and neglect before we arrive at the true appreciation of his work.  The same thing has happened to the most vigorous of essayists, Macaulay, and the most vigorous of romancers, Dickens, because we live in a time when mere vigour is considered a vulgar thing.  The same idle and frigid reaction will almost certainly discredit the stateliness and care of Tennyson, as it has discredited the recklessness and inventiveness of Dickens.  It is only necessary to remember that no action can be discredited by a reaction.

The attempts which have been made to discredit the poetical position of Tennyson are in the main dictated by an entire misunderstanding of the nature of poetry.  When critics like Matthew Arnold, for example, suggest that his poetry is deficient in elaborate thought, they only prove, as Matthew Arnold proved, that they themselves could never be great poets.  It is no valid accusation against a poet that the sentiment he expresses is commonplace.  Poetry is always commonplace; it is vulgar in the noblest sense of that noble word.  Unless a man can make the same