the overwhelming revelation of astronomy, is so vigorously impressed on my memory that as I recall it here I seem to smell the very perfume of the sunwarmed heather trod out by our feet; I seem to see the luxuriant, basking ferns, and that favorite hound of his leaping through them, making little dusty whirlwinds as he moved; I seem to hear the birds in the bushes too. over-estimating this or that social that the only thing which threatened structure of man's in a universe where to paralyze his artistic function was there is so much of the wonderful. I had been saying that, save at moments when the impulse of his dramatic imagination was upon him, he never fell into the mistake into which poets like Shelley and Hugo and other highminded dreamers are apt to fall-the mistake of supposing that the universe is so entirely enclosed in man that the little economies of one nation or parish are of greatly more importance than It was then that I saw clearly what I the little economies of another nation had long guessed, that he belonged to or parish, whether the nation or parish that class of poets who by temperabe composed of Englishmen, of Irish-ment are progressive, as truly progresmen, of Caucones, or of Zamzumminsive, perhaps, as those fervid ones who the mistake of supposing that nature followed the French Revolution, bewho teaches the ant "there's no laboring in winter"-nature who takes as deep an interest in the work of longed to that class of poets who, having in some cases the knowledge, in other cases the instinct, to see how slow as well as how long has been The singing masons building roofs of gold man's upward movement towards his as ever she took in the work of human present position, and how slow and masons, even of those mighty workers how long probably will be his upward who built Westminster Abbey-is so movement in the future, do not condeeply concerned with the doings of sider change and progress to be conman that the stars have to be neglected. vertible terms, and do not consider the The moment the wings of his imagina-ideals of any particular civilization tion were folded for rest his philosoph- Assyrian, Babylonian, Hellenic, Chiical intellect resumed its sway, and nese, English, French, or German-to although there was no scientific doc- be absolute and final, but only relative trine of evolution to enlighten him, he to the particular civilization itself. by many a gird at the "fool of nature seems to have known that man, notwithstanding all the nobility of his spiritual side, is on the other side "the paragon of animals" highly developed by circumstances over which he had only partial control; seems to have known that although in many things the social economies in which man moves are superior to those of the bees, they are not so in all ways; and that it is when we study the royalties and aristocracies of other gregarious animals which are entirely functional, rational, and philosophic, it is when we study the economies of a beehive, that the humor of man's civilization softens its pathos and its tragedy. The way in which Tennyson then began to speak of the littleness of all human ambition confronted by the workings of infinite nature, the way in which he told me I saw, in short, that he was one of those philosophical poets who, studying the present by the light of the past, and finding that all civilization is provisional, do not look upon every change in the social structure as being necessarily mischievous, yet who see that every new scheme of society which the doctrinaire formulates fails to strike at human nature down to the roots; see that round every human fibre are woven the old sophisms which originally aided in man's development have been keeping him back for ages - the sophisms which are the basis not only of every civilization, but of almost every Utopian dream, from Plato to Sir Thomas More and Campanella. At a time so revolutionary as this, when it seems to be impossible to find the proper place of any thinker without first inquiring as to the standpoint from - I that rather held it better men should perish one by one Than Not that earth should stand at gaze like Joshua's moon in Ajalon! in vain the distance beacons. Forward, forward let us range, 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. 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 originated 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. Man and animals whom he has infected with his society, or depraved by his dominion, are alone diseased. The wild hog, the mouflon, the bison, and the wolf are perfectly exempt from malady, and invariably 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. 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 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 affirmed that such ideas of evolution as 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 English poet, or, indeed, any worker in pure literature, saw its importance as indicating a new standpoint for human thought, or, indeed, gave it any consideration at all. In a footnote to "The 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, And as with optic glasses her keen eyes Pierced thro' the mystic dome, Regions of lucid matter taking forms, Zoo 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 the deep and skilled attention he was giving to this science. This is never obtruded, but it appears in such lines 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. logique " which Lyell lived to repent, says that the great Frenchman has "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 graye face." 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. So it was in England at that time in regard to the nebulous realms of the great truth of our century floating in the air an intellectual tree here and a tree there would seem to catch and concentrate the scattered rays of the coming day, and make a kind of morning of its own. Of these light-gathering trees in pure Years went on, and Lamarck's specu- literature there were one or two, but in lations in biology began, by the aid of poetry there was, among poets who had the two Saint-Hilaires and the author made their mark, Tennyson alone. It of the "Vestiges," to spread in this was not till 1859 that the sun finally country, but against angry opposition. broke through the mist, the sun proLyell's "Principles of Geology," un-claimed by Darwin and by Wallace. consciously to its author, or rather, Meantime, however, "In Memoriam " judging from certain passages in the had appeared in 1850: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. There rolls the deep where grew the tree. The hills are shadows, and they flow That a poet should have read a meanFrom form to form, and nothing stands; ing into a great geologist's treatise the They melt like mist, the solid lands, true meaning which the geologist who Like clouds they shape themselves and go. wrote the book failed to read, is quite as marvellous as the case of Goethe, Many angry things have been said where the poet gave the biologists les-about Carlyle, and not unjustly, on sons in their own science. The Quar-account of these words of his upon terly Review for March, 1832, in a Darwin's "Origin of Species: " 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. 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- 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 greatness of Tennyson is seen the heart-thought of the universe is not merely in the readiness with which war, she was not driven thereby to he confronted the teaching of science, noisy revolt against those sanctities of but also in the temper with which he the soul which are truer than all scireceived it. For at first it is hard in-ence; she devoted herself to that deed for a poet to accept any theory" relief of man's estate" which, acthat seems (as the doctrine of evolu- cording to Bacon, is the goal of all tion at first seemed) to be materialistic. man's best endeavor, she simply felt 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, From scarped cliff and quarried stone She cries, "A thousand types are gone : I care for nothing, all shall go. "Thou makest thine appeal to me : 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, |