Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/843

 philosophy, he was shaken by storms of doubt and difficulty that seemed to have nothing but a tonic effect upon his more robust contemporary. Struggle, uncertainty, hesitation are revealed throughout the whole of his work; he holds his faith with infinite effort; even In Memoriam, as he told Mr. James Knowles, was more sanguine than the man himself; and he got but little beyond a "faint trust" of "the larger hope." Yet there are other sides to Tennyson's writings that reveal the man in a very different light. His keen interest in science; his sympathetic hold upon the vast movements in progress around him; his manly attitude toward the changes that life and thought were everywhere undergoing; his reiterated belief that we are but in the morning of the times—the "rich dawn of an ampler day"; his faith, only now and then shaken, in the years that are still to come—all these characteristics combine to render Tennyson the most intensely modern of all our modern poets.

There is the very index to Tennyson's intellectual position. And a very casual reading of his collected works will suffice to show how large an expression many of our new scientific conceptions find in his utterances. The underlying principle of all our modern thought—the doctrine of the universality of law, and of that orderly progression or development within the domain and under the influence of law which we call evolution—these principles constitute the firm foundation of the entire fabric of his philosophy of life; they characterize his attitude toward the external world; they mold all his social and ethical teaching; out of them grows his faith in the destiny of the race, his hope for the untried future. For him, man is as yet "being made"; the "brute inheritance" clings about him; but, because so much has already been accomplished, much more will be accomplished by and by.

Above all things, it seems to me significant that, with all the reaction against the cry of progress that undoubtedly marks some of his later poems, the evolutionary note comes out with ever-increasing strength to the very end. It should not be forgotten that such poems as The Dawn, The Dreamer, and The Making of Man all belong to his last published volume.