ALFRED TENNYSON AND THE QUESTIONINGS

OF OUR AGE.

BY JAMES T. BIXBY, PH. D.

HE who would discern the present situation and future trend of religious thought will find his readiest and most accurate method in the study of the faith of its representative thinkers. As the lens of a spy-glass, though but an inch or two in diameter, images in little, the gigantic bulk of a mountain peak, or the still vaster ranges and craters of the moon and all its curious phenomena, so do the superior minds of an age reproduce in epitome, all the hopes and fears, doubts and convictions of whole peoples. And of all the varied forms that modern genius assumes, it is in the poet, I think, that we find the nature that is more sensitive than any other to the forces of the day. The same delicate impressionability that gives the poet his exquisite sense of melody and discord in the great symphonies of nature, makes his ear quick to hear the chords to which the human hearts around him are daily vibrating.

Religion and poetry have always had strong poles of attraction and interaction. They both live by the light that never was on sea or land. The inspiration of both is in the visions of the true, the noble, and the beautiful which only the inner eye discerns.

That the poet sees these visions with any more clearness than the religious man I would not claim. But in voicing them, he certainly has an advantage. The poet rarely, from the very nature of his work, echoes the strains of any mere conventional piety, or speculative dogmatism. Such notes do not sing well. They have little melody in them to attract him. He must find strains that come from the heart, and chord with the eternal needs to which the heart is keyed. The poet, therefore, usually gives us a more candid and penetrative view of the honest faith of mankind at large,

than do those sets of abstract propositions and traditional formulas, which creeds and professed theologians give us.

Those who wish to characterize epochs by some single trait or phrase may not unaptly call the times of Luther and Cromwell, the age of reawakened faith, and passion for the recovery of spiritual truth. They may distinguish the next hundred years after Cromwell's death as a period of conventionality and reverence for the past. They may characterize the age of Napoleon as the age of revolution and the glorification of reason. But our age can be included in no one of these categories. Its manifestations can be reduced to no single force or trait. All these diverse energies of preceding ages combine in it, and multitude more, born with itself. This many-sidedness and comprehensiveness is, in truth, its most characteristic feature, its truest expression.

But if we would desire anything less general which we may particularize as a predominating note, I think it is the questioning spirit of our age. Our generation is ever ready to put all things to the test; to search into the heights and depths. It is eager to get at the real facts, the ultimate foundations, and rest on nothing else. This it is that makes it so ready for all experiments, tolerant of all vital forces, responsive to all the varied impulses of humanity.

Now in Alfred Tennyson, we find these traits of the age amply reproduced. His nature, as disclosed to us in his great masterpieces, is a nature well rounded,― delicately vibrating to all the undulations of modern thought.

He has always had an eager interest in all the discoveries of modern science, and the inquiries of contemporary philosophy, and has kept well abreast of their results. He has a robust fearlessness in looking those results straight in the face, and in following wherever it is plain a servant of Truth should follow.

Carlyle's personal acquaintance with Tennyson led him to describe the poet as "a most restful, brotherly, solidhearted man," a "true human soul," and a careful study of his character as revealed in the self-communings and ideal figures of his poems, confirms this judgment.

In Tennyson's Sea-Dreams we have a description of a vision that came to a thoughtful woman one night at the sea-shore, in which the cliffs were changed to huge cathedral fronts of every age, swelling and lessening with the

varying music, and whose statues, king or saint or founder, fell, as often as the sinking music broke.

And then comes a striking description of how the men and women clustered about, strove and wrangled; these crying for the restitution of the statues; those to leave them where they had fallen; while the great wave swept away the men of flesh and blood and the men of stone, to the waste deeps together; till the Virgin Mother herself, that had stood highest of all on the minster-front, began to totter and the Christ-child in her arms sent up a cry of fear.

It is a picture of the manner in which all the objects of popular reverence, even the divine forms themselves, have been jarred and tumbled from their pedestals in these latter days.

Tennyson not only recognizes this as a fact, that "the old order changeth, yielding place to new," but that thereby God is fulfilling himself in some fresh way. He does not sulk over these changes, as a child who has lost his accustomed playthings, but faces them, man-fashion. He probes boldly the whole system of his faith, to learn what of it is dead, and what still possesses vital force. Without wincing, he grapples with the most sweeping doubts, the knottiest enigmas. In his very earliest poems we find already this craving to find someone who will unriddle him "the how and the what, the what and the why."

There was, to be sure, a period when he seemed to have turned aside from this path to become a mere minne-singer, chanting of love and fair women in melodious refrains. But it was not long before he returned to these more serious themes, to deal with them with a stronger touch than ever.

With what force of antagonistic argument, and what intensity of contending feeling has he depicted in his "Two Voices," that inward duel of doubt with faith, of which every true child of the nineteenth century knows more or less. And again in "In Memoriam," that spiritual autobiography of our generation, how pathetic are those frank delineations of the alternate waves that now bury his heart in the depths of despair, now lift him on the crests of hope to glimpses of the light. It is the Pilgrim's Progress of the soul in this nineteenth century, contending with giants more dangerous, groping through caverns more gloomy, and climbing "hills of difficulty incomparably craggier, than any with which the Christian of Bunyan's day had to contend.

Tennyson has little respect for the conventional forms of popular religion. In his sonnet to his friend J. M. K. he hails him as one who "will stir the dusted velvets" and "scare the church harpies from the Master's feast."

Hypocrisy is to Tennyson the sin "that neither God nor man can well forgive."

What a picture has he given in Simeon Stylites, of the sanctimonious, self-depreciating, yet self-worshipping ascetic. And in Sea-Dreams, with what scathing sarcasm he brands the false friend:

"With all his conscience and one eye askew,
So false he partly took himself for true;

Whose pious talk, when most his heart was dry,
Made wet the crafty crowsfoot round his eye."

Equally abhorrent to him are the slanders upon the fair name of God, which those indulge in who go about preaching, not the coming of the kingdom of heaven, but the terrors of hell. Such perversions of Christianity are to him the nurses of infidelity, and the spawning ground of the blackest glooms. With what tragic power has he depicted in his poem of "Despair," the baleful influences of the fatalistic creed of Calvinism, and how those who are nursed in that "dark night-fold" and made to believe that "Christ spake of a hell without help, without end," are so maddened by it, as "to break away from the Christ, their human brother and friend."

To Tennyson, "One shriek of hate would jar all the hymns of heaven."

The doctrine that God made everlasting hell, that "He made us, foreknew us, foredoomed us, and does what He wills with His own," is a doctrine he feels, that transforms the Infinite Love into Infinite Wickedness. It is with truth to the experiences of life, as well as with profound artistic power that Tennyson derives the disbelief and hopelessness of the poor suicide in "Despair," from the travesties of religion supplied by one who "bawled the dark side of his faith and a god of eternal rage."

In many of the brightest minds of our age, such as Huxley, Clifford, and Robert Ingersoll, and even in philosophic minds like that of Herbert Spencer, it is evident how influential the popular misrepresentations of Christanity have been in repell

ing them from its eternal truths. Atheism often is but the camp-follower who skulks in the rear of ecclesiastical dogmatism and superstition, stripping and giving the coup-degrace to the maimed souls whom its five terrible bayonet points have already left on the battlefield, as the helpless prey of the first marauder.

But to Tennyson, the answer of the sceptics is equally as repugnant as that of the bigot and the dogmatist. There are seasons when the drifting icebergs from the north send their chill over all the sea and land to the south of them. So there are many modern poets in whom a cold wave of scepticism, radiating from the polar regions of science, seems to have filled their whole spiritual atmosphere with gloom.

Tennyson has evidently more than once been near enough this wave to understand its power. But it has never frozen the springs, of faith within his heart. The philosophy of a Lucretius, he sees, not unnaturally results in suicide. If the night of Calvinistic decrees is cheerless, the glare of that unbelief which fancies that it has found out that every heavenly light is a lie, is far drearier. If there be

"No soul in the heaven above,

No soul on the earth below."

Then it is not strange that that earth seems but

"A fiery scroll written over with lamentation and woe."

It is incredible to Tennyson to think that

"We are wholly brain, magnetic mockeries,
Let science prove we are, and then,
What matters science unto men?

At least to me? I would not stay."

Such is the healthy reaction of Tennyson's sturdy, moral nature against the fashionable scepticism of the time, to which, as he pithily says:

"Doubt is the lord of this dunghill, and crows to the sun and the

moon,

Till the sun and the moon of our science are both of them turned into blood."

Tennyson would steer clear alike of the Scylla of this