I that rather held it better men should Than that earth should stand at gaze like Not in vain the distance beacons. For- ringing grooves of change. Through the shadow of the globe we sweep into the younger day : which he confronts nature, any poet's | method of nature and time in emanposition as a thinker, advanced or cipating man : otherwise, is perhaps difficult to find and fix. But if the greatest intelligence is that which sees clearly that many forms of civilization by exaggerating their own importance dwarf the soul, and set the edicts of some fugitive convention above the absolute sanc- Let the great world spin forever down the tions of nature -if, I say, the greatest intelligence is that which confronts with the widest eyes, not only the human drama, but the universe, may not the ideas of this kind of thinker upon man, his place in the order of things, and his final destiny be so truly wide and therefore so truly advanced as to seem reactionary in the view of many a sociologist and many a politician who so far as concerns the special social and political structure in which he himself moves is considered to be in the van? Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Whatever were Tennyson's passing moods, this seems to have been his permanent temper- the temper of Shakespeare apparently and of Goethe certainly. And no doubt the doctrine of evolution accentuated this temper within him. For to a certain degree he has become the voice of the new epoch. Although the dawn of this epoch was foreshadowed as far back as the publication of Lamarck nay, as far back as the times of Robinet and De Maillet no English poet of the great poetic revival showed any consciousness of it. That Wordsworth, after uttering the splendid prophecy given above, should have rested content with a knowledge of nature such as his writings show that Coleridge, with all his studies of and borrowings from Schelling, should never have seen that Schelling's system, like that of all the transcendentalists from Kant downwards, was one of pure evolution; that with all Coleridge's vague inquiries into the principle of life he did not see that the French biologists were moving, though along opposite paths, in the same direction as the transcendentalists, shows how difficult it is for even high genius to get beyond the accepted cosmogony of its own age. It is generally in youth that in discussing social questions we are inclined to treat society as an artificial mechanism rather than as an organic growth governed by inexorable laws and advancing to a completer organism slowly step by step. It is then that we are apt to think we can turn man suddenly into something rich and strange — turn him in a single generation even as certain ingenious experimentalists turned what nature meant for a land-salamander into a water-salamander with new ruddertail, and gills instead of lungs, and feet suppressed, by feeding him with water-food in oxygenated water, and cajoling his functions. As we get more experience we learn that man's functions are not to be so coaxed and cajoled into an unhealthy precocity. We learn as we grow older that, although man does really seem to be Nature's prime favorite among all her children (though we find it hard to These two great poets, beating the guess why) even she, with all her same foggy air in the same dark old power, finds it difficult to force him. wood, were, as regards any true knowlthat she is ever pointing to man and edge of nature- as revealed by the saying, "A poor thing, but mine own; cosmogony of growth behind ShelI shall do something with him some ley, whom, as a thinker, they despised; day, but I must not try to force him." for Shelley does seem to have had Yet it was as a comparatively young some inkling of evolution, judging man that Tennyson read the calm from the following passage, where he alludes to the immense lever power of | well as the value of his poetry, it is necarticulate speech in developing the essary to remember what in England brain of man. No doubt it is a curious was the meaning of the word "nature,' utterance, a strange mixture of the and what was the meaning of the word doctrine of man's degeneracy as being man in relation to the universe, when the result of original sin and the doc- he was a youth. trine of evolution. Although Lamarck's "Philosophie Zoologique" was published in Paris in the year of Tennyson's birth, there were very few people in England who, during many years afterwards, took it seriously; and it may, perhaps, be Having rejected the cosmogony which affirms that man's first disobedience brought death into the world, the cosmogony of Genesis and of "Paradise Lost," Shelley could still find it in his heart to charge man with having orig-affirmed that such ideas of evolution as inated for the lower animals all the ills which have flowed from the knowledge of good and evil. Still, it shows that his imagination, if not his reason, was answering to certain vibrations of thought moving in the air of his time. were blindly moving about in the air of English thought were connected, not with biology at all, but with astronomy. In the nebular theory there had been always, since Laplace's time, an interest. But it was not till 1833 that any Man and animals whom he has infected English poet, or, indeed, any worker in with his society, or depraved by his do- pure literature, saw its importance as minion, are alone diseased. The wild hog, indicating a new standpoint for human the mouflon, the bison, and the wolf are thought, or, indeed, gave it any considperfectly exempt from malady, and inva-eration at all. In a footnote to 66 The riably die either from external violence or natural old age. But the domestic hog, the sheep, the cow, and the dog are subject to an incredible variety of distempers, and, like the corrupters of their natures, have physicians who thrive upon their miseries. The supereminence of man is, like Satan's, the supereminence of pain; and the majority of his species, doomed to penury, disease, and crime, have reason to curse the untoward event that, by enabling him to communicate his sensations, raised him above the level of his fellow animals. 66 was In Germany there was Goethe, to be sure, who, while Wordsworth struggling in the meshes of what John Sterling called a High Church Pantheism," and Coleridge was intoning marvellous sermons on the logos, was catching glimpses of the morning that has since dawned. While, superficially, the poetry of the great German often seems informed by the spirit of dead mythologies, it has only to be probed beneath the surface and the budding of the new epoch is seen, as underneath the loosened leaves of autumn may be seen the germs of the coming spring, even before the winter has set in. Such was the state of things when Tennyson began to write. Hence, to gauge the virility of his intellect, as Palace of Art," published in that year, appeared the superb stanzas which, owing to the idle gibes of an "indolent reviewer," have disappeared from Tennyson's poems : Hither, when all the deep unsounded skies Shuddered with silent stars, she clomb, swarms Of suns, and starry streams. That marvellous round of milky light Is circled by the other, etc. No poet having the littérateur's knowledge, and nothing beyond, would have written these stanzas; and yet for mere poetic beauty they may be compared with those stanzas of Victor Hugo's in "Les Contemplations,” beginning: Nuits, serez-vous pour nous toujours ce que vous êtes ? which are almost as divine as Dante's own whenever he talks of the stars. It is not surprising, therefore, that | review of the second volume of Lyell's from this time forward sigus appear" Principles" reproducing those stricnow and again in Tennyson's poetry of tures upon the "Philosophie Zoothe deep and skilled attention he was logique" which Lyell lived to repent, giving to this science. This is never says that the great Frenchman has obtruded, but it appears in such lines “given us a history of the gradations by which nature has ascended from the lowest step of organic life to the production of man, which it is not easy to repeat with a grave face." as There sinks the nebulous star we call the If that hypothesis of theirs be sound. Those three stars of the airy Giant's zone. Many a night from yonder ivied casement, ere I went to rest, Did I look on great Orion sloping slowly to the West. Many a night I saw the Pleiads, rising thro' the mellow shade, Glitter like a swarm of fire-flies tangled in a silver braid. The image of the fire-flies in the last of these lines, recalling that of the "bee-like swarms" in the "Palace of Art," is as wonderful for its accuracy of description as for its beauty. Indeed, Tennyson's allusions to the starry heavens have the beauty of poetry and the beauty of scientific truth. No doubt in Dante's allusions we get the same blending of poetry with knowledge, but then the knowledge at his command, was ignorance. Years went on, and Lamarck's speculations in biology began, by the aid of the two Saint-Hilaires and the author of the " Vestiges," to spread in this country, but against angry opposition. Lyell's "Principles of Geology," unconsciously to its author, or rather, judging from certain passages in the book, against the author's wish, had no doubt aided the French biologists in filling the atmosphere of England, not so much with ideas of a new cosmogony, as with a nebulous feeling that must needs crystallize into ideas. That a poet should have read a meaning into a great geologist's treatise the true meaning which the geologist who wrote the book failed to read, is quite as marvellous as the case of Goethe, where the poet gave the biologists lessons in their own science. The Quarterly Review for March, 1832, in a Indeed, in the history of English thought there is no more suggestive chapter than that which deals with this period. Sometimes on a spring morning, when the sun is trying to declare himself, and the earth seems covered with a kind of golden mist, in which his baffled beams are arrested and held in suspense, the leaves of a tall tree here and there will seem to catch and condense the floating particles of luminous vapor and glitter with the coming light of day. Wonderful to me as indicating the capri- | Man, her last work, who seem'd so fair, cious stupidity of mankind; never could read a page of it, or waste the least thought upon it. But among all the workers in pure literature who lived in England at that time, Tennyson and George Eliot were the only two among writers who were prominently before the public who grasped its tremendous human import. Tennyson did not use it as a foundation for artistic work, but his consciousness of the new epoch is always apparent. Pascal tells us that there are two extremes, "to exclude reason and to admit only reason." Passing into the latter extreme George Eliot's fine intellect became baffled. Tennyson's became strengthened. The greatness of Tennyson is seen not merely in the readiness with which he confronted the teaching of science, but also in the temper with which he received it. For at first it is hard indeed for a poet to accept any theory that seems (as the doctrine of evolution at first seemed) to be materialistic. The finer the nature the more certain is it to be rendered miserable by a materialistic theory of life, as we see in the case of George Eliot. The materialistic cosmogony she received, or thought she received, from the earlier evolutionists acting upon a nature so generous and sympathetic as hers was sure to induce pessimism, but sure to induce a pessimism finer and nobler than the optimism of most other people. Walking side by side with Tennyson towards the new epoch, she halted hopeless while Tennyson walked on. She stood appalled before that apparent wickedness of nature which Tennyson boldly confronted. "So careful of the type? " but no, "Thou makest thine appeal to me : Such splendid purpose in his eyes, Who roll'd the psalm to wintry skies, Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer, Who trusted God was love indeed, And love Creation's final law - With ravin, shriek'd against his creed Who loved, who suffer'd countless ills, No more? A monster then, a dream, Yet it was George Eliot's peculiar glory that, accepting the fact, so terrible at first to the idealist's mind, that the heart-thought of the universe is war, she was not driven thereby to noisy revolt against those sanctities of the soul which are truer than all sci ence; she devoted herself to that "relief of man's estate " which, according to Bacon, is the goal of all man's best endeavor, she simply felt impelled to illuminate the teaching of science by the halo of that great religion of benevolence upon which is based all which is of worth in all the creeds. She felt and she taught that, even if nature is indeed as immortal and pitiless as she seems, our one defence against that wickedness is to band together against the common enemy, and that, in order to band together, we must be good. In a word, she passed into the temper of Buddhism, the temper which impels the thinker to say, There is no God to love and watch over you; therefore love and watch over each other. But of the new cosmogony George Eliot knew at once too much and too little. Had she lived either in the time of Wordsworth and Coleridge, or at the present moment, when Tennyson's larger hope is taking shape in the public mind, it might have been well for her. But, like James Thomson, she was without Tennyson's indomitable faith in a spiritual force in nature, "He He took the doctrine that the Principium hylarchicum of the universe is what the greatest poet now among us calls "the rhythmic anguish of growth,” and with it confronted, or nobly tried to confront, the great enigma of being, the problem of problems, to solve which all mythologies, all cosmogonies, constructed, the existence of that spiritual force which physical sci-_This, then, is the special glory of ence herself seems now to be uncon- Tennyson as a poetical thinker, sciously revealing. For let it never be spiritualized Evolution and brought it forgotten that, although Tennyson con- into Poetry." fronted evolution before ever Darwin and Wallace had spoken, nay, even before that famous note to Spencer's Westminster Review essay, "The Social Organism," which seems to have been the bud of so magical a blossom, he had sturdy views of his own upon it. He never did confront the question from the standpoint of Darwin, nor were scarcely even from that of the sub- evil. What Pascal said about the danDarwinians, who are in some degree revising Darwin's system, but from a standpoint entirely his own. He spurned the materialism which at first seemed to all thinkers inseparable from the idea of evolution; he found for himself the hope which science seems within the last decade to be disclosing; the hope that the spiritual force called life the maker of organism, and not the creature of organism, as the earlier evolutionists except Wallace supposed No doubt the following words "by an Evolutionist " are to be taken drait to be may, after all, be a something outside the material world, a matically, as are certain other such something which uses the material utterances: ger of proving to man too plainly how nearly he is on a level with the brute creation without also showing him his greatness, is what Tennyson put concretely in "In Memoriam," when he said: Arise and fly The reeling Faun, the sensual feast; Move upward, working out the beast, And let the ape and tiger die. world as a means of phenomenal ex- The Lord let the house of a brute to the pression. And this was before our English biologists in their noble passion for truth declined to follow Haeckel and the Germaus; before they, by refusing to burke the fact that biogenesis is the law, placed materialism further back than ever by showing by positive experiment that organism is the result of life, not life of organism. He saw as clearly then as when he wrote "Crossing the Bar" that what is real is the noumenon, that what is false and illusory is the phenomenon - that poetry and love, and beauty and noble endeavor, have never been evolved from fire-mist molten granite or that, notwithstanding all apparent contradictions, the universe without a preponderance of good over evil could not work at all; that in the deepest sense soul of a man, And the man said "Am I your debtor ?" And the Lord-"Not yet but make it as clean as you can, And then I will let you a better." OLD AGE. goodness and absolute life are indeed Done for thee? starved the wild beast that synonymous terms; and that if this is not fully shown now, it must be fully shown some day. was linkt with thee eighty years back, Less weight now for the ladder-of-heaven that hangs on a star. |