From The Fortnightly Review. THE MISSION OF TENNYSON.1

I propose to speak to you this afternoon about a poet who is, as I think, the English poet of this age of ours; the poet who will, in the event, hold much the same predominant position in English literature of the nineteenth century as Pope holds in English literature of the eighteenth century. There are perhaps only two poets who could dispute that position with TennysonWordsworth and Browning. Wordsworth, I think, rose occasionally to greater heights than Tennyson ever attained-notably in his "Ode on Immortality," and in his "Ode to Duty." But, on the other hand, he certainly often sank to depths-depths of desultory drivel I had almost said-to which Tennyson never sank. Nor are his great gifts such as to win for him a very wide circle of readers. A philosophic student of nature and of the human heart, his verse appeals to "fit audience but few." Tennyson's range-I shall have to speak of this hereafter-was much wider. Browning appears to me to sink, too frequently, much lower than Wordsworth ever sank. And a vast quantity of his poetry is hopelessly marred by want of form. I trust I shall not seem unjust to this highly endowed man. I yield to no one in admiration of such verse as that which he has given us in "Rabbi Ben Ezra" and "Pippa Passes." But I confess that he often reminds me of Horace's description of Lucilius. That fluent veteran, it appears, would frequently perform the feat of dictating two hundred verses "stans pede in uno," a phrase the precise meaning of which has exercised the critics a great deal, but which we may render with sufficient

1 This lecture, delivered from a few notes at the London Institution on Monday, Dec. 7, 1896, is now printed from the shorthand writer's report, with such corrections as seemed necessary.

Horace adds, as the turbid stream flowed along, there was much which one could wish away-"quum flueret lutulentus erat quod tollere velles." I confess I hope I shall not shock any one here very much-that a great deal of Browning's verse appears to me little better than random doggrel, while the so-called philosophy which it is supposed to set forth, is largely mere bombastic rhodomontade on subjects which the poet had never taken the trouble to think out. If ever there was a writer who darkened counsel by words without knowledge, it was Browning.

Far otherwise is it with Tennyson. He appears to have laid to heart that most true dictum that poetry is the loftiest expression of the art of writing. "The art of writing," note: which recalls the lines of Pope:

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,

As those move easiest who have learnt to dance.

There is not a poem of Tennyson'sor there is hardly one-which is not the outcome of prolonged meditation and prolonged labor; the result of the supreme art which veils itself in the achievement. His work is classical in the best sense of the word: classical in its "happy coalescence of matter and style." If you take up Pope's "Essay on Criticism"-and I know of no more valuable aid to judgment on the subject with which it deals-and test Tennyson's work by the rules and precepts so admirably given there, you will find that they bear the test singularly well. To give one instance merely: I suppose there is no poet-I at least know of none - who has SO felicitously carried out the rule, "the sound must seem an echo to the sense." Consider, for example, those lines in the "Princess:"

Sweeter thy voice; but every sound is sweet:

Myriads of rivulets hurrying through the lawn,

The moan of doves in immemorial elms,
And murmuring of innumerable bees.

So much must suffice to indicate, in the briefest outline, and as if by few strokes of the pencil, some of the reasons which lead me to think that Tennyson will survive as the English poet of our century. But my concern, this afternoon, is with what he has said rather than with his way of saying it; with his message rather than with his I wish to put before you what, as it seems to me, was his chief lesson to his generation and to the generations that should come after.

manner.

For poetry, which is really such, is something more than a pleasing play of fancy, an instrument of high intellectual enjoyment. There appears to be, at the present day, a superstition in certain quarters, that poetry has nothing to do with moulding the manners and the morals of human society; that it has no influence over the religion, the philosophy, the passions of men. That seems to me a great error. I think Joubert uttered a profound truth when he observed that poetry should be the great study of the philosopher who would really know man. Consider the poetry of ancient Greece for example. It contains the thought of a whole people. The soul-yes, and the details of the life of the Hellenic race are there. Hence it was, I suppose, that Aristotle was led to speak of poetry as "more philosophic and more seriously true than history." It is better fitted for the exposition of the higher verities. There can be no doubt that poetry is not only the most beautiful, but also the most legitimate and the easiest instrument of education, in the highest sense of the word. It is the most amiable means of building up character. And this the great poets have ever felt. “I wish to be considered a teacher or nothing," Wordsworth wrote. And assuredly such was the feeling of Tennyson. That verse of his, "Poets whose thoughts enrich the blood of the world," sums the matter up.

But we may go further than that, as, indeed, the title which I have given to this lecture indicates. "The Mission of Tennyson." Yes; I hold that every great poet has a mission, in the proper

sense of the word. He is marked off from his fellows of the race of men by what Cicero calls, "magna et divina bona," great and divine endowments, which are distinct from temperament, from environment, from evolution, from heredity; which you cannot sum up in a formula or explain by analysis; and as the highest and truest of which we must reckon what Krause calls Schauen: vision, intuition. He is a seer; the man whose eyes are opened; he speaks that which he knows; he testifies that which he has seen soaring in the high reason of his fancies. He speaks not of himself. Wordsworth has admirably expressed this in some lines of the "Prelude:"Poets, even as Prophets, each with each Connected in a mighty scheme of truth, Have each his own peculiar faculty: Heaven's gift.

These words seem to me true to the letter, and worthy of being deeply pondered. They might well supply a theme for my whole lecture. In passing I may point out that Wordsworth himself affords a striking illustration of them. His divine gift, his peculiar faculty it was to draw out, as no poet had drawn out before, as no poet has drawn out since, the mystic sympathy between external nature and the soul of man; and to point to that path into the transcendental which we may find, by means of this, in the phenomena of the visible universe. There is, indeed, as the old Greeks used to say, something inspired in all of us. Even ordinary virtue, which has the praise of men, is of divine inspiration, Plato teaches in the "Meno." In all our best thoughts, our best works, surely we must be conscious, if we reflect, of a nonself which works with us and upon us. But it is the privilege and the peril of those gifted souls who alone can be called, in the highest sense, artists, to experience this influence in far ampler measure than the other sons of men. Hence the ancients regarded a kind of possession as their distinctive note. "Divine madness" Plato calls it, and Cicero, "poetic fury." And one of the deepest thinkers of these later times

writes: "The artist, however full of design he is, yet, in respect of that which is the properly objective in his production, seems to stand under the influence of a power which separates him from all other men, and compels him to declare or represent things which he himself has not completely seen through, and whose import is infinite." Do you tell me that these words of Schelling are mysticism? I know they are. But I know, also, that they are true. And they are especially true of the poet. "Poets even as prophets." Yes; poets are prophets, in the proper sense of the word. "Messengers from the Infinite Unknown with tidings to us, direct from the Inner Fact of things." "We see not our prophets any more," lamented the Hebrew patriot at a dark period of the history of his people. A dark period indeed: the darkest, surely, when the prophetic vision is quenched; when the prophetic word is mute; when not one is there that understandeth any more. Yes; the poets of a nation are its true prophets; and indeed St. Paul, as you will remember, recognizes this when he speaks of one of the bards of Hellas as a prophet of their own. So a saintly man of these later days, the venerable Keble, in dedicating to Wordsworth those charming volumes of Prælections, speaks of him as truly a sacred seer: "viro vere vati sacro." And with reason. Assuredly, Wordsworth is, in some respects, the highest of modern prophets.

So much may suffice to vindicate the title of this lecture and to indicate the scope of it. I wish to speak this afternoon of the mission of Tennyson to his age. Now the first gift required in any one who would teach his age is that he should understand it. Perhaps the great reason why the pulpit exercises so little influence, comparatively, among us, is that the vast majority of preach ers are out of touch with the age. They occupy themselves Sunday after Sunday-to use a phrase of Kingsley's-in combating extinct Satans. Far otherwise was it with Tennyson. One of his most remarkable gifts was his acute sensibility to the intellectual and

spiritual, the social and political developments of the times in which he lived. Wordsworth speaks of "the many movements" of the poet's mind. Few minds, perhaps, have moved so quickly, so far, and in so many directions, as Tennyson's. Nothing human was alien from him. It has been remarked by one of his critics, "He is at once metaphysician and physicist, sceptic and theologian, democrat and aristocrat, radical and royalist, fierce patriot and far-seeing cosmopolitan; and he has revealed to the age the strange interaction of these varied characters, and how the beliefs and passions of each modify, and are modified by, those of all the others."

One of the most striking characteristics of the age has been the stupendous progress achieved by the physical sciences. I need not dwell upon what is so familiar. And, indeed, only an encyclopædia could deal even with the outlines of so vast a subject. But the spirit in which the physicist works has greatly contributed to our progress in provinces of the human intellect lying outside his domain. It has impressed upon the minds of men this great truth, that everywhere the way to knowledge is to go by the facts, testing, verifying, analyzing, comparing, inducting. And in proportion as this lesson has been laid to heart, by investigators of all kinds, have their researches been rich in real results. Now with this scientifie movement, so eminently characteristic of our times, Tennyson was deeply in sympathy. I do not know that he was profoundly versed, as an expert, in any branch of physical science. But he followed from the first, with the closest attention, the achievements of the masters in all its fields. And his verse teems with evidence of the completeness with which he had assimilated their teaching and made it his own. Thus, to give one example merely, you remember those noble lines in "In Memoriam," which so admirably sum up the conclusion of an important chapter in geology:

There rolls the deep where grew the tree: O Earth, what changes thou hast seen!

been

The stillness of the central sea.

The hills like shadows melt, they flow From form to form, and nothing stands; They fade like mists, the solid lands; Like clouds they shape themselves, and go.

But the vast progress of the physical sciences of which I have been speaking, and which appealed to Tennyson so powerfully, has not been unmixed gain -as he well knew. One result of it has been the establishment of a sort of dogmatism of physicists, not less oppressive than the old dogmatism of theologians. There has been a tendency, and more than a tendency, to assert that outside the boundaries of physical science we can know nothing; that its methods are the only methods of arriving at truth; a tendency to restrict our ideas to generalizations of phenomena, to erect experimental observation into the one criterion of certitude, to treat mental and moral problems as mere questions of physiology; in a word, to regard the laws of matter as the sole laws. And this has issued in the effacement, to a very great extent, of the true idea of law from the popular mind.

Let me explain what I mean. And here I would beg of you to favor me with your closest attention. For what I am immediately about to say-though I shall employ the simplest and least technical language that the subject allows-will not be so easy to follow as a leading article in a newspaper, or a page in a novel. If, then, we keep strictly within the domain of physics, we have no right to speak of law at all. The mere physicist cannot get beyond ascertained sequences and co-ordinations of phenomena. A distinctive characteristic of law is necessity. And necessity-the notion we express by the word “must”-has no place in pure physics. Its place is taken by the word "is." In strictness, what the physicist calls natural laws, are merely hypotheses which have gradually won their way into general credit, by explaining all the facts known to us, by satisfying every test applied to them.

certainty. Only those laws are absolutely or metaphysically certain which are stamped upon all being, and therefore upon the human intellect; which are the very conditions of thought, because they are the conditions under which all things and all beings, even the Being of Beings, the Absolute and Eternal Himself, exist. I am far from denying-indeed, I strenuously affirm that there is a sense in which necessity may be predicated of physical laws. But for that sense-nay, for the very notion of necessity-we must quit the proper bounds of physical science; we must go to an order of verities transcending the physical; to what Aristotle called

τὰ μετὰ τὰ φυσικά, to metaphysics; that is to say, to supersensuous realities, to the world lying beyond the visible and tangible universe. I need not go further into that now. I have said enough for my present purpose, which is that every physical truth is necessarily connected with-or rather takes for granted-some metaphysical principle. Law is of the will and of the intellect. And will and intellect are not the objects of the physical sciences. "That which assigns unto everything the kind, that which doth moderate the force and power, that which doth appoint the form and measure of working-the same we term a Law," says Hooker, summing up, in his judicious way, the Aristotelian and scholastic teaching on the matter.

But the dreary dogmatism of a certain school of physicists has brought this august conception into discredit. I say "dreary dogmatism," for even the most highly gifted of the school which I have in view are open to this charge. To speak of one of the most gifted of them, for instance; the late Professor Huxley, so admirably clear and cogent and convincing when dealing with subjects within his own domain, becomes amazingly confused and incoherent and depressing in discussing purely philosophical questions. The general result of this dogmatism has been to diffuse widely a belief that there is nothing in the universe but matter and force, or,

at all events, nothing that we can know; and that ascertained sequences and coordinations of phenomena are the only laws we can attain to. Hence it has come to pass that laws which are really such, have, in the eyes of a vast multitude, lost their true character. Thus

we are told by a writer much in credit, that the laws of ethics are merely generalizations from experiences of utility: a doctrine the effect of which is to unlaw them-if I may borrow a word from Carlyle for experiences of utility cannot possibly do more than counsel; they can lay no necessity upon us to do what they indicate as desirable. But the essence of a moral law is necessity; is what Kant calls its categorical imperative, indicated by the word "ought." On the other hand, things are dignified as laws which are not laws at all in the proper sense of the word. For example, what are called laws of political economy are mere statements of probabilities of action by free agents, and imply no necessity.

I beg of you not for one moment to imagine that in insisting upon this matter I am indulging in mere logomachy, in unprofitable disputation about words. The question is concerning the idea of law: an idea of the utmost practical importance. The doctrine that "the universe is governed, in all things great and small, by law, and that law not the edict of mere will, but identical with reason, or its result," is no mere abstract speculation, that men may hold or reject, and be none the better or the worse for holding or rejecting it. It is a doctrine fraught with the most momentous consequences in all relations of human life. And that because of a reason set forth by Euripides more than two thousand years ago: I borrow Bishop Westcott's version of his words:

For 'tis by law we have our faith in Gods, And live with certain rules of right and

wrong.

Law is, as Aquinas calls it, "a function of reason." Lose the true idea of law, and you derationalize the universe and reduce it to mere senseless mechanism. You lay the axe to the root of

Now it seems to me to have been Tennyson's mission to meet this tendency of the age of which I have been speaking, by witnessing to, by insisting on, the true conception of law. That was the great work given him to do, in his day and generation, and to do in his own manner; not as a philosopher, not as a critic, not as a preacher, but as a poet. It is the lot of poets “to learn in suffering what they teach in song." Tennyson, as I have said, was emphatically of his age. And the physiological speculations wherewith physicists invaded the province of philosophy, and broke the dogmatic slumber of ancient orthodoxies, at one time troubled and perplexed him. But it may be truly said of him as he said of his dead friend:

He fought his doubts, and gathered strength,

He would not make his reason blind, He faced the spectres of the mind, And laid them; thus, he came at length

To find a firmer faith his own:

And Power was with him in the night, and dwells not in the light alone. Which makes the darkness and the light,

Let me tell you briefly how he found that firmer faith.

Tennyson possessed not only a most keen and sensitive mind, tremulously susceptible to the intellectual move