Perhaps no other age in the thought-history of the world witnessed so acute an anguish in the minds of earnest men, to whom faith in an eternal spirit summing up all values was an inner necessity, as did the Victorian age. It is this anguish of his age which finds an expression in Tennyson's poetry. Whence and wherefore was that anguish? Of what nature was it? To envisage it one should realise that science from different points of the compass, and progressively as a series of catastrophes, bad palled down the universe. Astronomy revealed the terrific vastitudes and wildernesses of space dotted with millions of uninhabited worlds of mere dead matter. Geology unfolded aeons of time in which the story of life was only a scene, and the story of man but a passage in that scene. Biology came in to blow up faith in the creation of man by a benevolent Providence. The structure of forms the disappearance of species and all the wanton wastage in nature, gave no support to belief in a benign purpose or omniscient design. If one wants to understand the nature of the appalling void that gaped in men's minds one has only to read cantos 34, 35, 36. 54, 55 and 56 of In Memoriam, The Two Voices, The Ancient Sage, and Vastness. In this last poem Tennyson asks the very question that troubled the minds of hundreds in his day:
Tennyson asked, too, the questions that thoughtful souls have, in all ages, flung to the immensities of space to the
For illustration the reader has but to turn to canto LXVI of In Memoriam.
"The issue of the central problem round which the minds of thoughtful men were coming to revolve, can be very simply stated," says G. M. Young. "What was the standing of personality, the finite human personality, in a world which every year was revealing itself more clearly as a process of perpetual flux?
We may perhaps forget, among our own more pressing concerns, how formidable an attack on human dignity and personal values, the ground of all Western philosophy and religion, was implicit in the new conceptions of geological and biological time. When once you have mastered the thesis that after inconceivable ages to come the whole conscious episode may have been nothing more than a brief iridescence on a cooling cinder, what solid ground of conduct is left to you? And Tennyson had mastered the thesis: from his under- graduate days, when Darwin was on the high seas in the Beagle, he had meditated on the mystery of development and the succession of types."
The answer that Tennyson gave to these problems may or may not satisfy us today, but it did win for thousands "in the season of their distress the guidance and assurance for which they asked". Tennyson declared again and again that evolution, instead of taking away purpose and meaning from the world, opened out endless gradation of higher and higher forms of intelligence and goodness to the highest of which man can climb if only he would will aright. Man, "the seeming prey of cycling storms," can turn the myriad shocks of evolution to his spiritual gain if he will but
By an Evolutionist states the poet's answer with resonant conviction. "If the human soul will but hold the sceptre and rule the province of the brute, man can stand on the heights of his life with a glimpse of a height that is higher.” This gospel of the hierarchy of types, each realizing possibilities only latent at a lower level, and indicating fresh possibilities to be realized at a higher," afforded to the racked minds of his generation a heaven from the stormy seas of doubt and despair.
Apart from this he made it clear that the realms of science and spiritual experience were distinct and incommensurable. The reader will recall the well-known passage in The Ancient Sage in which he enlarges on the truth that spiritual realities are beyond scientific demonstration:
Thus Tennyson made it possible for his spiritually minded contemporaries to retain their faith in soul and immortality, without losing their scientific integrity. And to those intellectual conscience compelled them to be sceptics he had the fortifying message that "there live more faith in honest doubt than in half the creeds."
His exhortation to "cling to Faith beyond the forms of faith" appealed to philosophical minds who recoiled from many of the dogmas of religion. The conflict between Faith and Doubt in Tennyson's mind was the reflection of the same conflict in the fore- most minds of the time. He did not depart from his own convictions to offer to his contemporaries a working solution of their theological difficulties. Profound or shallow, tossed between head and heart, he remained true to his inner promptings. His moments of faith soothed others, while his moments of inner anguish reflected the anguish of Victorian thought.