step was taken at last with no misgiving; and, although his parents and brothers and sisters disapproved of his decision-in his father's case, desperately so there was no loosening of family ties, while from many of his most cherished friends he met with nothing but approval for what they looked upon as an act of self-deliverance.

His secession was a brave thing spiritually, and by it he sacrificed a good deal of orthodox credit and profit. He was Queen's Chaplain, and, had he served expediency, might have attained high place. But it was not an act of lonely defiance, not a going-out into the wilderness. In the Church history of the time it was a fine individual gesture, and a by no means insignificant if not widely-followed example. Nevertheless, it was no landmark in the progress of religious thought, since it meant no more than that Brooke, whose nature was really unfitted from the first for the formal subscriptions of any church, threw aside the shackles of dogmatic control a little later in life than might have been expected, and moved, without any radical change, into the free spiritual state which had always been his true vocation. The incident, in fact, though it necessarily assumes an important place in Brooke's biography, and although it created something of a sensation at the time, is of accidental significance only in his career. In all essential respects Brooke was the same spiritual entity after his secession as he had been before; and the man of eighty had grown without a moment of convulsive change from the man of twenty-five.

Here, then, was a career extraordinarily harmonious in its development-complete, prosperous, and happy. And yet there is, up to this point of our contact with it, nothing to set it above many that adorn each generation without making good their claim to commemoration on anything like the scale of these volumes. Nor are we much nearer a solution of the problem even when we consider Brooke's pioneer quality, when we remember that such a thought as that social evil and misery 'are not the judgments of God on the sins of the sufferers, who are undeserving of such chastisement; they are due to the neglect, ignorance, selfishness and injustice of man,' though familiar enough now, needed a prophet's voice to enforce it in 1850, and that his blow for a more

humane and intelligible form of religion came with the greater force from being struck, in Mr Jacks' words, at a time of great religious excitement not only among the clergy, but among the public at large.' Nor, again, does so courageous a venture as the delivery of a course of lectures on the poets as sermons from the pulpit, which must have seriously astonished a congregation of 1870, mean more than the introduction of an intellectual quality, not necessarily rare in itself, into a place where it was not at all expected. All these things are evidence of fine gifts finely used, but, if we did not go beyond these, the rarer touch of distinction would escape us.

It will be noticed that nothing has yet been said of Brooke's work as poet and critic; and it may be suggested that in that work his real eminence is to be found. It was, as we shall see, very far from being unimportant; indeed, in some respects, it was of rare accomplishment. But Brooke himself always looked upon it as something not making the chief claim on his faculties; and these are terms upon which no writer, however richly endowed, can achieve work of the highest rank. The best writers, it is true, have sometimes been compelled by circumstance to devote precious energy to work other than their writing, but it has always been with resentment and the desire for escape to undivided service of their art. But Brooke looked upon writing as an incident in a life that was for the most part otherwise concerned. When he turned to it, he brought to the task all the fertility with which he lived, and he perceived literature in the same generous and tender and genial way that he perceived life. His verse is graceful and fervent, expressive of an abundant humanity and delight in the world, but it lacks the touch of imaginative concentration that transforms these into the durable stuff of poetry. He himself, with his deep intellectual integrity, was aware of this.

'If I were not to get rid of my thoughts and excitements sometimes on paper and to one who will sympathise with them,' he says, 'I should be overwhelmed with them. I used to practise them (sic), but I have given up poetry. I did not write well enough to please myself, nor anyone else, so I concluded one phase of my life.' And again, I don't think

I am capable of writing any book on the drama of human life, save what I say in sermons. I have no invention.'

In his critical studies of poetry, of which more will be said, he went far beyond this in achievement; but even in these his aim is not so much to explore profound and universally significant principles of the poet's mind and art, as to discover for himself, through the most delightful of channels, some further expression of his vivid appreciation of the world in which he lived. Of his book on Browning he writes: You only . . . have recognised how much there is of myself in the book; and its interest to me is there, and less in that which I have said about Browning.' It may be true, in a sense, that all good criticism reveals the writer as much as it does his subject, but there is a special meaning in the claim that Brooke makes for his own work. It indicates a governing temper, the consideration of which should bring us near to the solution of our problem.

It is not as a representative poet or man of letters that Brooke has engaged, and justly engaged, the attention of his biographer on this large scale. Nor is it as a representative churchman or preacher or leader of religious thought. It was of these activities that his daily work was made up, it is true; and yet, while they contribute to the impression that we receive from Mr Jacks' volumes, they by no means dominate it. Nor is it, finally, wholly a question of character. The robust, affectionate, wise and often sparkling personality that comes before us is, indeed, striking and finely worthy of homage. Of such are the salt of the earth, and we are grateful to Mr Jacks for enabling us to share in no small measure a companionship that must have been so precious and delightful to Brooke's family and friends. But these admirable characteristics are not in any very rare way remarkable, and in themselves do not account for the deeper interest that we find the book successfully holding throughout its considerable length. It is, rather, that there was always in Brooke a really first-rate power of intuition that in itself may be said to have amounted to genius, though it was but fitful in its exercise. This power never wholly came into its own.

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There were in the habitual operation of Brooke's temperament two principal qualities-his uncompromising common sense, and his instant responsiveness to everything and everybody with whom he came into contact, or, to use the word he himself would have chosen, his love. To a first analysis these two qualities can seem to be nothing but well and fair,' and yet the whole truth is by no means so easily set down. Common sense, the gift of being able in nine cases out of ten to answer yes or no to a question, and swiftly to disentangle sophistry from truth in dealing with the problems of daily affairs, is a valuable part of character; and few if any of even the most visionary of great minds have been wholly without it on occasion. But there is always the chance, the danger perhaps, that it will breed a habit of saying yes or no when in truth neither is possible, and of confusing sophistry with honest subtlety. With no man is this more likely to happen than one whose mind, endowed with great natural force and activity, moves freely in the bustle of the world's business. Such a one is at once invested with an authority which he will almost certainly find himself often forced to maintain at the sacrifice of careful and exact deliberation. There are times when his very responsibility makes impossible that loneliness to which the mind must always be able to move if it is to achieve memorable judgment. And in the same way the unquestioning response of a man's spirit to every demand that the world makes upon it, nobly generous in intention as it is, may end by impairing in some measure his realisation of himself. The one thing that is often lacking in what passes for common sense is sense; and it is not the least of love's mysteries that until a man truly and proudly loves himself he cannot love the world.

The profounder side of Brooke's nature, the genius in him, was never in doubt about these things. Against the evidence of so long and fruitful a life it may seem temerity to question Mr Jacks' conclusion that Brooke's career was rightly chosen and directed; but it is of real psychological interest to explain, if it may be done, how it came about that a man with so much of the finest quality in him left so little of the finest achievement for the quickening of posterity. And we seem to divine, as

we read the record of his life, that the genius that was always in the background prompting him to a rarer imaginative mood, was in lifelong conflict with a hardy instinct for a rough and ready intellectual state, where rapid decisions had to be made and immediate answers given in the busy atmosphere of affairs. This is not to say that the poet (and Brooke was potentially a poet of rare divination) should be remote from affairs; it is merely to say that he cannot complete himself if he is intellectually bound to affairs by circumstance.

This instinct of Brooke's was a circumstance beyond control as much as any other; and in that respect Mr Jacks is right in saying that it is useless to discuss it. But the phenomenon before us is not a common one. Brooke's intuitive power, of which examples will be given, was of a very rare order, and throughout his life it was never wholly quiescent. For its complete realisation it needed a condition of intellectual quietness and deliberation that was impossible to a popular preacher and worldly counsellor patiently accessible to every enquirer who came along. Brooke often refers to this need of his imagination in his letters and diaries; and, with the faculty itself as powerful as it was, there was the strongest probability that it would assert itself to the point of gaining his undivided allegiance. But it did not do so; and the more obvious and work-a-day though amiable quality in his mind that so successfully disputed precedence with the rarer strain must clearly have been of altogether unusual force. We have, therefore, the curious spectacle of a man who, seeking devotedly to serve the whole world, nourished one side of his nature at the expense of another side that was, in truth, potentially his finest instrument for the very service that he so earnestly sought to do.

Of Stopford Brooke's chivalrous generosity and his indulgence of every trespasser upon his attention, I had a small but very treasurable experience. When I was floundering without any kind of guidance in the difficulties of commencing author, I sent to him, in the way of bewildered novices, a small book of the greenest immaturity. Thereafter he met every approach with the most charming patience and geniality, writing no perfunctory notes, but long and considered letters that Vol. 229.-No. 455.

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