As he frankly said of himself, he was not
strong in the faculties of the artist, but perhaps Tennyson himself in
these passages was prompted much more by politics than by art. Of this
piece of retractation the poet truly said, "Nobody but a noble-minded man
would have done that."(323) Mr. Gladstone would most likely have chosen to
call his words a qualification rather than a recantation. In either case,
it does not affect passages that give the finest expression to one of the
very deepest convictions of his life,--that war, whatever else we may
choose to say of it, is no antidote for Mammon-worship and can never be a
cure for moral evils:--

It is, indeed, true that peace has its moral perils and
temptations for degenerate man, as has every other blessing,
without exception, that he can receive from the hand of God. It is
moreover not less true that, amidst the clash of arms, the noblest
forms of character may be reared, and the highest acts of duty
done; that these great and precious results may be due to war as
their cause; and that one high form of sentiment in particular,
the love of country, receives a powerful and general stimulus from
the bloody strife. But this is as the furious cruelty of Pharaoh
made place for the benign virtue of his daughter; as the
butchering sentence of Herod raised without doubt many a mother's
love into heroic sublimity; as plague, as famine, as fire, as
flood, as every curse and every scourge that is wielded by an
angry Providence for the chastisement of man, is an appointed
instrument for tempering human souls in the seven-times heated
furnace of affliction, up to the standard of angelic and
archangelic virtue.

War, indeed, has the property of exciting much generous and noble
feeling on a large scale; but with this special recommendation it
has, in its modern forms especially, peculiar and unequalled
evils. As it has a wider sweep of desolating power than the rest,
so it has the peculiar quality that it is more susceptible of
being decked in gaudy trappings, and of fascinating the
imagination of those whose proud and angry passions it inflames.
But it is, on this very account, a perilous delusion to teach that
war is a cure for moral evil, in any other sense than as the
sister tribulations are. The eulogies of the frantic hero in
_Maud_, however, deviate into grosser fol