There is, too, another side to this matter. If these burdens are to be thrust on the national purse, and (should the buccaneers have their way) if the permanent war expenditure must be doubled, and little wars at ten and twenty millions each are inevitable as well, then in all fairness the classes who make these wars and profit by them must pay for them. We have taken a great stride towards democracy, and two of the first taxes with which the new democracy will deal are the income-tax and the land-tax. The entire revision of taxation is growing inevitable. It is a just and sound principle that the main burden of taxation shall be thrown on the rich, and we have yet to see how the new democracy will work out that just principle. A graduated income-tax is a certain result of the movement. The steady pressure against customs duties and the steady decline in habits of drinking must combine to force the taxation of the future more and more on income and on land. A rapid rise in the scale of taxing incomes, until we reach the point where great fortunes cease to be rapidly accumulated, would check the wasteful expenditure on war more than any consideration of justice. Even a China merchant would hardly promote an opium war when he found himself taxed ten or twenty per cent. on his income.
One of the first things which will occur to the new rural voters is the ridiculous minimum to which the land-tax is reduced. Mr. Henry George and the school of land reformers have lately been insisting that the land-tax must be immensely increased. At present it is a farce, not one-tenth of what is usual in the nations of Europe. I entirely agree with them, and am perfectly prepared to see the land-tax raised till it ultimately brings us some ten or even twenty millions, instead of one million. If the result would be to force a great portion of the soil to change hands, and to pass from the rent receivers to the occupiers, all the more desirable. But one inevitable result of the new Reform Act must be a great raising of the taxes on land, and when land pays one-fifth of the total taxation, our wars will be fewer and our armaments more modest.
One of the cardinal facts of our immediate generation is the sudden revival of Socialism and Communism. It was not crushed, as we thought, in 1848; it was not extinguished in 1871. The new Republic in France is uneasy with it. The military autocracy of Germany is honeycombed with it. Society is almost dissolved by it in Russia. It is rife in America, in Italy, in Denmark, in Austria. Let no man delude himself that Socialism has no footing here. I tell them (and I venture to say that I know) Socialism within the last few years has made some progress here. It will assuredly make progress still. With the aspirations and social aims of Socialism we have much in common, little as we are Communists and firmly as we support the institution of private property. But if Socialism is in the ascendant, if the new democracy is exceedingly likely to pass through a wave of Socialist tendency, are these the men, and is this the epoch to foster a policy of imperial aggression? With the antipathy felt by Socialists for all forms of national selfishness, with their hatred of war, and their noble aspirations after the brotherhood of races and nations, we as Positivists are wholly at one. Let us join hands, then, with Socialists, with Democrats, with Humanitarians, and reformers of every school, who repudiate a policy of national oppression; and together let us appeal to the new democracy from the old plutocracy to arrest our nation in its career of blood, and to lift this guilty burden from the conscience of our children for ever.
So let us begin the year resolved to do our duty as citizens, fearlessly and honestly, striving to show our neighbors that social morality is a real religion in itself, by which men can order their lives and purify their hearts. Let us seek to be gentler as fathers, husbands, comrades, or masters; more dutiful as sons and daughters, learners or helpers; more diligent as workers, students, or teachers; more loving and self-denying as men and as women everywhere. Let us think less about calling on Humanity and more about being humane. Let us talk less about religion, and try more fully to live religion. We have sufficiently explained our principles in words. Let us manifest them in act. I do not know that more is to be gained by the further preaching of our creed – much less by external profession of our own conviction. The world will be ours, the day that men see that Positivism in fact enables men to live a more pure and social life, that it fills us with a desire for all useful knowledge, stimulates us to help one another and bear with one another, makes our homes the brighter, our children the better, our lives the nobler by its presence; and that on the foundation of order, and in the spirit of love, and with progress before us as our aim, we can live for others, live openly before all men. —Fortnightly Review.
THE POETRY OF TENNYSON
BY RODEN NOEL
It is perhaps difficult for men of middle age to estimate Tennyson aright. For we who love poetry were brought up, as it were, at his feet, and he cast the magic of his fascination over our youth. We have gone away, we have travelled in other lands, absorbed in other preoccupations, often revolving problems different from those concerning which we took counsel with him; and we hear new voices, claiming authority, who aver that our old master has been superseded, that he has no message for a new generation, that his voice is no longer a talisman of power. Then we return to the country of our early love, and what shall our report be? Each one must answer for himself; but my report will be entirely loyal to those early and dear impressions. I am of those who believe that Tennyson has still a message for the world. Men become impatient with hearing Aristides so often called just, but is that the fault of Aristides? They are impatient also with a reputation, which necessarily is what all great reputations must so largely be – the empty echo of living voices from blank walls. “Now again” – not the people, but certain critics – “call it but a weed.” Yet how strange these fashions in poetry are! I well remember Lord Broughton, Byron’s friend, expressing to me, when I was a boy, his astonishment that the bust of Tennyson by Woolner should have been thought worthy of a place near that of Lord Byron in Trinity College, Cambridge. “Lord Byron was a great poet; but Mr. Tennyson, though he had written pretty verses,” and so on. For one thing, the men of that generation deemed Tennyson terribly obscure. “In Memoriam,” it was held, nobody could possibly understand. The poet, being original, had to make his own public. Men nurtured on Scott and Byron could not understand him. Now we hear no more of his obscurity. Moreover, he spoke as the mouthpiece of his own time. Doubts, aspirations, visions unfamiliar to the aging, breathed melodiously through him. Again, how contemptuously do Broad-church psychologists like George Macdonald, and writers for the Spectator, as well as literary persons belonging to what I may term the finikin school, on the other hand, now talk of our equally great poet Byron. How detestable must the North be, if the South be so admirable! But while Tennyson spoke to me in youth, Byron spoke to me in boyhood, and I still love both.
Whatever may have to be discounted from the popularity of Tennyson on account of fashion and a well-known name, or on account of his harmony with the (more or less provincial) ideas of the large majority of Englishmen, his popularity is a fact of real benefit to the public, and highly creditable to them at the same time. The establishment of his name in popular favor is but very partially accounted for by the circumstance that, when he won his spurs, he was among younger singers the only serious champion in the field, since, if I mistake not, he was at one time a less “popular” poet than Mr. Robert Montgomery. Vox populi is not always vox Dei, but it may be so accidentally, and then the people reap benefit from their happy blunder. The great poet who won the laurel before Tennyson has never been “popular” at all, and Tennyson is the only true English poet who has pleased the “public” since Byron, Walter Scott, Tom Moore, and Mrs. Hemans. But he had to conquer their suffrages, for his utterance, whatever he may have owed to Keats, was original, and his substance the outcome of an opulent and profound personality. These were serious obstacles to success, for he neither went “deep” into “the general heart” like Burns, nor appealed to superficial sentiments in easy language like Scott, Moore, and Byron. In his earliest volume indeed there was a preponderance of manner over matter; it was characterized by a certain dainty prettiness of style, that scarcely