Where he hesitates, his is the sincere pause of process and
uncertainty. It has been said that Tennyson, midway between the student
of material science and the mystic, wrote and thought according to an age
that wavered, with him, between the two minds, and that men have now
taken one way or the other. Is this indeed true, and are men so divided
and so sure? Or have they not rather already turned, in numbers, back to
the parting, or meeting, of eternal roads? The religious question that
arises upon experience of death has never been asked with more sincerity
and attention than by him. If "In Memoriam" represents the mind of
yesterday it represents no less the mind of to-morrow. It is true that
pessimism and insurrection in their ignobler forms--nay, in the ignoblest
form of a fashion--have, or had but yesterday, the control of the popular
pen. Trivial pessimism or trivial optimism, it matters little which
prevails. For those who follow the one habit to-day would have followed
the other in a past generation. Fleeting as they are, it cannot be
within their competence to neglect or reject the philosophy of "In
Memoriam." To the dainty stanzas of that poem, it is true, no great
struggle of reasoning was to be committed, nor would any such dispute be
judiciously entrusted to the rhymes of a song of sorrow. Tennyson here
proposes, rather than closes with, the ultimate question of our destiny.
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