BOOKS.

SIR ALFRED LYALL ON TENNYSON.*

WHILE it is quite easy to understand why Mr. Morley should have wished to include in his series a volume from the cul- tivated literary intelligence and eloquent pen of Sir Alfred Lyall, it is not so easy to see why Sir Alfred Lyall chose or accepted the particular subject allotted to him ; because, to judge from the study he has given us, there seems to be a fundamental want of sympathy between the poet and his critic as to the religious and philosophic ideas which under- lie the most important part of Tennyson's work. And even on purely artistic matters Sir Alfred Lyall seems to worship • Tennyson. By Sir Alfred Lyon, K.C.U. London: Macmillan and Co. "English Men of Letters." DM net.] only in the temple's outer shrine. After quoting FitzGerali, judgment that Tennyson reached the grand climacteri of his poetry in the volumes of 1842, he adds : "flann7 question whether the settled judgment of a later genera-4 will find much fault with it." That is to say, in Sir arei Lyall's opinion, Tennyson will not live as the poet of GI "In Memoriam" and " Maud," which in the opinion of 1j admirersare his two greatest works, but as the poet lower than is right, Sir Alfred Lyall seems to have brou task a determination to praise where he could. Mariana in the South," "The Lady of Shalott," and ,,,pht Palace of Art." However, despite this want ofThs

which pervades the whole book and makes the general tone of it

sympathy which

glitto

of the King" do not please him because "the unreality of the whole environment inevitably diminishes the dramatic effect". yet he acknowledges that they "interweave some magnificen't embroidery upon the unvarnished canvas -of the old ro In praise of the love lyrics in " Maud " a sentence is quoted from Jowett : "I do not know any verse out of Shakespeare in which the ecstasy of love soars to such a height," though it is added that the general verdict on this encomium wouldbethat it is excessive. "Enoch Arden" almost inspires the critic with enthusiasm ; "it is indeed an excellent piece of work which for sincerity of feeling, distinctness of outline, and restraint in language may be matched with the poem of 'Dora." The Ode on the Duke of Wellington is said to be "probably the best poem on a national event that has ever been struck off by a Laureate under the sudden impatient spur of the moment," which may be meant for very high praise, though we do not recall any poem with which comparison can be intended; for Dryden and Wordsworth are the only Laureates of a poetical rank to be compared with Tennyson, and neither of them celebrated any national event in the manner described. The shorter lyrics come in for the highest commendation. the songs in "The Princess," with the exception of "Home she brought her warrior dead," are pronounced "exquisite, and the picturesque writing in the volumes of 1830 and 184i is well analysed and warmly praised. But, on the whole, the impression that the reader takes away from the book is that Tennyson has been weighed in the balance and found just a little wanting. Possibly Sir Alfred Lyall has felt too keenly the responsibility of sitting in Rhadamanthus's seat, and has seen the necessity for avoiding at all costs what Matthew/ Arnold called the "historical and personal" estimates of poetry, so that his judgment may be colder than he meant it to be.

As the Spectator through half a century welcomed the poetry of Tennyson, not only for its artistic perfection, but also for the religious and philosophical ideas on which it is based, we propose in this review, not to examine any of Sir Alfred Lyall's resthetic judgments, but to point out how be seems to us to have missed the real significance of the religious side of Tennyson's work. All readers of Tennyson know how deeply the poet's imagination was impressed by the new discoveries of science, whether in astronomy, geology, or anthropology. But he did not give to the world this imagce tive picture of the new heaven and earth that science revealed without giving at the same time his sense of how far, and in what way, it was significant. To have enlarged the 'magma- tion of his countrymen so that they might grasp the new facts, without at the same time suggesting the point of new from which human nature ought to regard them, would bare been to content himself with only half his task, and that the far less difficult and far less serviceable half. Sir Alfred Lyall of course recognises from time to time that the poet had an optimistic philosophy, a sort of anodyne, of which. hr. took himself, and recommended to his patients, an occarithe dose; but he again and again repeats the statement that poet's mind was in fact dismayed by the new discovery of_the vastness in both space and time of the material universe.. Tbe following paragraph, which puts this view forward with

gres!

eloquence, will also serve as an example of the dignified a'tY* in which the book is written :—

" The feeling that man is but dust and shadow, anins. te!fr a brief moment, that he is born to sorrow, and that hi:geoorif. perish, is primeval in poetry and religion; thheestarbviThi7, suggested it to the ancient sages and preachers no Zs than all the discoveries of astronomy and geology. fronted the eternal silences mournfully, yet with tralultL, trepidity ; they drew lessons of composure and ethical f!oliv•a; from the spectacle; they used. lb tie rebuke cowardly Mr tition. .....If the modern poet's imagination appears supers

wered by alarm, by a kind of terror lest the main-

ew

-*- e overpo

,.;,,, of our moral and spiritual activities should give way, we hve to consider that the tremendous expansion of the scientific record ' these latter days seems to have affected Tennyson like a een ln tence of inflexible predestination, overshadowing his delight in the _,...1A' glories by a foreknowledge of its inevitable doom. The vision which unrolled itself before his imagination of the blind mechanical evolution of a world 'dark with griefs and graves,' of human energy squandered on a planet that is passing from fire to frost, evidently fascinated his mind more and more, and possessed it with dismay. That mankind and their works must perish, slowly or suddenly, leaving not a wrack behind, has been the warning of all religions, the foundation of all beliefs in a future life, and the poem of vastness gives the same warning in the terms of science, but without the same clear note of intrepidity, or of confidence in revealed promises."

And again :— " It is the prospect of this elanet, a minute and negligible part of the universe, rolling round in its diurnal course after man and his works have vanished, of inanimate matter surviving with mtire unconcern all vital energies, that seems to have oppressed the poet with dejection at the thought of mortal man's utter insignificance."

in thus speaking of Tennyson's "dejection," of the " alarm " that" overpowered" his " imagination," Sir Alfred Lyall appears to be misled by the necessarily disproportionate space that the mere description of the new facts occupies in the poems.

Tennyson had a fondness for detail, a fondness which in many poems his critic finds fault with ; but in the religious poems he also misunderstands it. It has been well said that optimism must be reached, not by the exclusion, but by the exhaustion

of pessimism ; and therefore not to have stated the case for science in its full force would have been for the poet to throw iway his labour. And besides that, Tennyson's strength as a poet lay more in imaginative description than in the statement of philosophical ideas. But in every case the imaginative description leads up to, and is undertaken for the sake of, the statement of a spiritual principle. What, then, is Tennyson's

reply to the scientific doctrine of man's insignificance in time

and space ? It is practically the same as Pascal's : "Man is a reed, but a reed which thinL 3"; nay, it is practically the same as that of the Hebrew Psalmist, 'who, as we may remind Sir Alfred Lyall, drew another lesson from Le spectacle of the heavens than that of "composure and ethical fortitude." The writer of the Eighth Psalm, although he is tempted by the greatness of the material universe to despise mankind, yet sees that in man's power of mind and will he is far superior to sun or star, and "little less than God." Tennyson's reply

is found in his poems in two forms. In its first form, it

appears as the passionate assertiOn of a man's own personality, not so much in thinking and willing as in loving. The hero in "Maud," looking up at those infinite spaces the eternal silence of which has been found so terrifying by imaginative minds, looking up to the stars with their—

"Innumerable, pitiless, passionless eyes, Cold fires, yet with power to burn and brand His nothingness into man" ;

could yet in the powerful realisation of the self which his -- -.- found love brought him say :—

"But now shine on, and What care I,

Who in this stormy gulf have found a pearl, The counterckares of space and hollow sky ?" And that was Tennyson's own experience, as he gives it us in " In Memoriam "

" If e'er when faith had fall'n asleep, I heard a voice believe no more' And heard an ever-breaking shore That tumbled in the Godless deep ; A warmth within the breast would melt The freezing reason's colder part, And like a man in wrath the heart Stood up and answered I have felt."

But behind this assertion of the self as a being capable of thought and will and love lay the ideal philosophy which Tennyson learned from Kant and later thinkers who have analysed experience and shown the necessary part played in it by the thinking subject. If a thinking subject can be shown to be necessary to the very existence of space and time, we may hesitate to regard it as merely at their mercy' • and therefore the assertion of a spiritual principle as a necessary conititnent of the universe, both as a whole and he OUt Partial knowledge of it—in other words the existence of

God and the so

el—became for Tennyson the words, verity at - the basis of his faith. It comes out clearly in the poems

published in the early "fifties," in "The Higher Pantheism." in "The Voice and the Peak," and even in the Ode on the Duke of Wellington :—

" For tho' the Giant Ages heave the hill

And break the shore, and evermore Make and break, and work their will : Tho' world on world in myriad myriads roll Round us, each with different powers, And other forms of life than ours, What know we greater than the soul ? "

There is no note of dejection here ; nor, again, is there any note of dejection in the assertion to which " Lockaley Hall— Sixty Years After," leads up :—

"Many an Aeon moulded earth before her highest, man, was born, Many an Aeon too may pass when earth is manless and forlorn,

Earth so huge, and yet so bounded—pools of salt and plots of land—

Shallow skin bf green and azure—chains of mountain, grains of sand !

Only that which Made us, meant us to be mightier by and by, Set the sphere of all the boundless Heavens within the human eye, .. .

Sent the shadow of Himself, the boundless, thro' the human soul ; Boundless inward, in the atom, boundless outward, in the whole." . .

On the twofold bed-rock of this belief in God and the soul

rested Tennyson's faith in immortality. Sir Alfred Lyall treats this faith as though it were a tender plant that the poet coaxed into vitality, and hence he finds quite unin- telligible Tennyson's judgment, often made to his friends, and deliberately recorded in the "In Memoriam," that if immortality could be disproved, suicide would be justifiable. Against such an " irrational " and.," degrading " doctrine Sir Alfred Lyall protests, and refers to the wiser behaviour of the ancient Greeks, who were content to "concentrate their efforts and.

aspirations on the ideals which ennoble the present life, as courage, temperance, and justice, and on making the best of it

by harmonising the inevitable conditions of existence." Tennyson ought to have been above taking "opiates." "In the four voluraek of Jovrett's Plato, which he received from

the translator in 1871, he must have found—not only in the dialogues, but also in Jowett's characteristic commentaries— that loftier conception of service in the cause of truth and humanity, which can inspire men to go forward undauntedly, whatever may be their destiny beyond the grave." These are excellent sentiments ; but they are really beside the mark.

The point is,—Would suicide be justifiable if immortality were not merely doubtful, but could be disproved P-

" Not only cunning casts in clay : Let Science prove we are, and then What matters Science unto men, At least to me ? I would not stay."

Plato believed in immortality; Jowett did not disbelieve in it; the Stoics, who for the most part surrendered the belief, advo.

cated, and largely practised, suicide. It is very difficult for men immersed in affairs, and not gifted with large imagina- tion, to realise, a Tennyson realised, the meaning of such a phrase as "without God in the world" ; and because he did so, and conveyed to his generation some sense of what such a desolation would bet it is not becoming to lecture John on the advantages of "self-respect, and the stoical temper."