Part 5 (2/2)
”None of the songs had the old cha either by Thackeray or by my father met FitzGerald's approbation unless he had first seen it in manuscript”
This prejudice was very hu in this work, born too early, that ”the sooner woins, that 'woman is not undeveloped ress of the world”
But probably the ”educational movement” will not make much difference to womankind on the whole The old Platonic res as ood, at least in the arts, and in letters, except in rare cases of genius
A new Jeanne d'Arc, the enius in history, will not coes have waited vainly for a new Sappho or a new Jane Austen Literature, poetry, painting, have always been fields open to wohest rank in letters--Sappho and Jane Austen And ”when did woovernh to yield to Cecil at the eleventh hour, and escape the fate of ”her sister and her foe,” the beautiful unhappy queen who told her ladies that she dared to look on whatever th so served her” {6} ”The foundress of the Babylonian walls” is a myth; ”the Rhodope that built the Pyramid” is not a creditable iht Aurelian,” and the revered nalish queens, Victoria Thus history does not encourage the hope that a man-like education will raise hest of their sex in the past, or even that the enore of the opportunity of a ned for the reading of women depresses optimism, and the Princess's prophecy of
”Two plummets dropped for one to sound the abyss Of science, and the secrets of the mind,”
is not near fulfilment Fortunately the sex does not ”love the Metaphysics,” and perhaps has not yet produced even a ic It must suffice man and woman to
”Walk this world Yoked in all exercise of noble end,”
of a more practical character, while woman is at liberty
”To live and learn and be All that not harms distinctive womanhood”
This was the conclusion of the poet who had the most chivalrous reverence for womanhood This is the eirenicon of that old strife between the women and the men--that war in which both armies are captured It may not be acceptable to excited lady combatants, who think man their foe, when the real enes
A new poem like The Princess would soon reach the public of our day, so greatly increased are the uses of advertisement But The Princess moved slowly fro neitherwith his fa his new acquaintances were Sydney Dobell, the poet of a few exquisite pieces, and F W
Robertson, later so popular as a preacher at Brighton Meeting hi Robertson's ”wish to pluck the heart from my mystery, from pure nervousness I would only talk of beer”
This kind of shyness beset Tennyson A lady tells irl) she and her sister, and a third, nec diversa, h discourse But his speech was all of that wingless insect which ”gets there, all the sa to an American lyrist; the insect which fills Mrs Carlyle's letters with bulletins of her success or failure in do London, where he saw Thackeray and the despair of Carlyle, and at Bath House he was too reat Duke whose requielas Jerrold enthusiastically assured Tennyson, at a dinner of a Society of Authors, that ”you are the one ill live” To that end, hu, he placed himself under the celebrated Dr Gully and his ”water-cure,” a foible of that period In 1848 heArthur's Cornish bounds, and another to Scotland, where the Pass of Brander disappointed him: perhaps he saw it on a fine day, and, like Glencoe, it needs tempest and mist lit up by the white fires of many waterfalls By bonny Doon he ”fell into a passion of tears,” for he had all of Keats's sentiment for Burns: ”There never was ilish poets, the warmest in the praise of Burns have been the two s that Tennyson preferred; Wordsworth liked the Cottar's Saturday Night
CHAPTER V--IN MEMORIAM
In May 1850 a few, copies of In Memoriam were printed for friends, and presently the poem was published without author's name The pieces had been composed at intervals, from 1833 onwards It is to be observed that the ”section about evolution” ritten soenious hypotheses of Robert Chaiven to the world, and caused a good deal of talk Ten years, again, after In Mein of Species These dates are worth observing The theory of evolution, of course in a rude mythical shape, is at least as old as the theory of creation, and is found aes The Arunta of Central Australia, a race remote from the polite, have a hypothesis of evolution which postulates only a few rudimentary forms of life, a marine environment, and thethe prihly differentiated developes in the transforsThey had no distinct li, or smell” They existed in a kind of lumps, and were set free froa,' or 'self- existing' Men descend from lower animals thus evolved” {7}
This example of the doctrine of evolution in an early shape is only mentioned to prove that the idea has been fae of culture Not less familiar has been the theory of creation by a kind of supre The notion of creation, however, up to 1860, held the foremost place in modern European belief But Lamarck, the elder Darwin, Monboddo, and others had subinality of Tennyson, as a philosophic poet, that he had brooded froe when they were practically unknown to the literary, and were not patronised by the scientific, world In Noveet me a book which I see advertised in the Examiner: it seems to contain many speculations hich I have been familiar for years, and on which I have written es of Creation These poereater ape,” and about Nature as careless of the type: ”all shall go” The poetic and philosophic originality of Tennyson thus faced the popular inferences as to the effect of the doctrine of evolution upon religious beliefs long before the world was in of Species Thus the geological record is inconsistent, we learned, with the record of the first chapters of Genesis If man is a differentiated monkey, and if a ranted), where are man's title-deeds to these possessions? With other difficulties of an obvious kind, these presented themselves to the poet with renewed force when his only chance of happiness depended on being able to believe in a future life, and reunion with the beloved dead Unbelief had always existed We hear of atheists in the Rig Veda In the early eighteenth century, in the age of Swift -
”Men proved, as sure as God's in Gloucester, That Moses was a great impostor”
distrust of Moses increased with the increase of hypotheses of evolution But what English poet, before Tennyson, ever attempted ”to lay the spectres of the mind”; ever faced world-old problems in their most recent aspects? I am not acquainted with any poet who attempted this task, and, whatever we may think of Tennyson's success, I do not see hoe can deny his originality
Mr Frederic Harrison, however, thinks that neither ”the theology nor the philosophy of In Meinal, with an independent force and depth of their own” ”They are exquisitely graceful re- statey of the Broad Churchman of the school of F
D Maurice and Jowett--a coical piety with Jowett's philosophy of ical as that of Positivisical, and the philosophy of the Master of Balliol may be whatever Mr Harrison pleases to call it But as Jowett's earliest work (except an essay on Etruscan religion) is of 1855, one does not see how it could influence Tennyson before 1844 And what had the Duke of Argyll written on these themes some years before 1844? The late Duke, to whom Mr Harrison refers in this connection, was born in 1823 His philosophic ideas, if they were to influence Tennyson's In Mee of seventeen, or thereabouts Mr Harrison's sentence is, ”But does In Meure any idea which was not about that ti was mainly 1833-1840) ”common form with F D