And yet "this round of green, this orb of flame," this "fantastic beauty," is not absolutely godless. There is indeed a god behind the external world but he is not directly responsible for its blind forces and ruthless destructiveness. He can be seen only by glimpses and far away splendors, for he plays about the surfaces only of external nature. As behind a far away summer cloud the lightning plays softly in a quiet summer evening, so on the farthest edges of this vast external universe mystic gleams, "green-rushing from the rosy thrones of dawn," vie with each other in splendid and brilliant display and Vast images in glimmering dawn,

Half shown, are broken and withdrawn."

Though these glimmerings hover only about the outer surface of the great contour of the universe and tend to fade away into misty indistinctness, they are of much importance to the mind of the poet. For the poet joins them in his experience to the heat of inward evidence that has its roots in the power of an exalted and transcendental memory and makes them bear testimony to the fact of immortality.

It is barely possible to explain this memory as the memory of a pre-existent state. At the point in the "Two Voices" where the poet waxes strong against the skeptical voice, he says,

As here we find in trances, men

Forget the dream that happens then,
Until they fall in trance again;

So might we, if our state were such

As one before, remember much,

For those two likes might meet and touch.

11"The Two Voices."

This explanation, however, is only tentative. Tennyson feels that these memories may be memories of pre-existent life, or they may not. We cannot be sure. But there is one thing upon which the poet has positive conviction, namely, that he is deeply conscious of strange presences, such as no language may declare, which are bound up with an inner sense of memory and will. It is this experience in the "Two Voices" that keeps his horizon from becoming dark, that makes him apprehend a labor working to an end, that causes him to hear a Heavenly Friend. It is this experience, joined with a picture of human love in the poem, that gives him final victory and makes him rejoice.

This mystic memory, then, serves as a mediator between the fact of scientific materialism and the fact of immortality. It refutes the view that there is no life beyond the life of the senses, and serves as a seal to our faith in immortality. Immortality is at best a shadowy thing for us here below. But when the idea of it once finds lodgment in our minds its claim upon us is well nigh boundless. Grant its reality and it becomes sovereign in the mind. And it matters not on how minute, or trivial, or vague a fact or circumstance it rests for its verification to our consciousness. It can be confidently said that had Tennyson not had this inner experience of the memory of more than mortal things he would have remained in the "slough of despond" and would have given us the poetry that brings the eternal note of sadness in and that tends to settle in despair. He would hardly have attained to that joy and positive faith that a man must possess when he aspires to become the representative poet of a nation and a race.

CHAPTER VII

TENNYSON: FREEDOM AND LAW.

I

The central basis upon which Tennyson built a positive faith was the power of will and the principle of freedom grounded thereon. Even though he could not find God in world or sun, in eagle's wing or insect's eye, it does not follow that he did not find Him at all. On the contrary, the ardency of his seeking was rather intensified as a result of its being narrowed in direction; and while the scientific views he held regarding external nature narrowed the natural and mystic tendencies of his experience, they tended to direct him to seek for the truth that cannot die more directly within the soul. And he found that truth in the "marvel of the everlasting will" and in the miracle of the power of free-will in man.

But the theory of evolution and the facts of science in general and scientific materialism in particular placed strict conditions and limitations on Tennyson's notion of the power of freedom as well as on his conceptions of external nature. It is easy to see how a planet in its mechananical and unvarying course through the heavens is governed by a fixed and unchangeable law. It is even easy enough to see how a plant, or an animal, is governed by the same principles of unvarying law in its growth and

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mechanical round of activities. It is easy moreover, says Scientific Materialism, to see how man, who is simply more complex in his make-up and shows more outward deviations and variations but is ultimately of the same material which composes animal plant and star,-how man is subject precisely to the same inexorable law, and that his free-will is an utter delusion. When one passes from the outer world of mechanical law that obviously guides a planet in its course to the inner world of man's soul, as he thinks of it, he is more and more impressed that this law should obtain throughout. At what particular point does it cease to obtain? is the question that is decidedly the most difficult to answer.

Now, Tennyson is duly impressed with the fact of the orderliness and the mechanical fixedness of the universe in which we live. He surrenders to it as much as any poet dare surrender. He surrenders the stars and all the hosts of heaven to absolutely blind but unchangeable forces:

A star that with the choral starry dance
Join'd not, but stood, and standing saw
The hollow orb of moving Circumstance
Roll'd round by one fix'd law.1

And societies and nations are to adjust themselves to something that is very much like this admirable "Circumstance roll'd round by one fix'd law." An ideal land is

A land of settled government,
A land of just and old renown.2

And the people who dwell in such a land are those who have learned

"The Palace of Art."

2"You Ask Me."

To live by law,

Acting the law they live by without fear.'

Although this ideal of law by which societies and governments are to exist enters very largely into Tennyson's poetry, it is quite evident that if the principle of inexorable law be carried through the whole of man's experience man becomes as mechanical and soulless as the stars that run blindly through the heavens; a web will be woven across his soul as surely as it is "woven across the sky," a ghastlier cry will come out of the waste places of his soul than from the "waste places" of external nature and the "godless deep." Tennyson realizes that he is caught in the mesh of his own weaving, or rather in that which was woven for him by his social and scientific environment. He saw, more clearly than most men see, how deep the contradiction really is between the postulate that man's soul is immortal and free and the assumption that "nothing is that errs from law." Though he saw the contradiction between freedom and absolute fixedness, he sometimes fell into Charybdis in order to avoid Scylla. One of the mightiest efforts, however, in his work as a poet was to make the passage successfully—to mediate between the ideas of freedom and fixed law, between personal power and impersonal force. He surrenders much, indeed, to fixedness but he cannot, and never does, surrender all. Even the will of man itself is invoked to mediate :

Thy will, a power to make

This ever-changing world of circumstance,

In changing, chime with never-changing Law.*

But the fact that man has the power of freedom in a

"Enone."

"To the Duke of Argyll."