There are said to
have been less hopeful intervals.
His faith is, of course, no argument for others,--at least it ought
not to be. We are all the creatures of our bias, our environment,
our experience, our emotions. The experience of Tennyson was unlike
the experience of most men. It yielded him subjective grounds for
belief. He "opened a path unto many," like Yama, the Vedic being who
discovered the way to death. But Tennyson's path led not to death,
but to life spiritual, and to hope, and he did "give a new impulse to
the thought of his age," as other great poets have done. Of course
it may be an impulse to wrong thought. As the philosophical
Australian black said, "We shall know when we are dead."
Mr Harrison argues as if, unlike Tennyson, Byron, Wordsworth,
Shelley, and Burns produced "original ideas fresh from their own
spirit, and not derived from contemporary thinkers." I do not know
what original ideas these great poets discovered and promulgated;
their ideas seem to have been "in the air." These poets "made them
current coin." Shelley thought that he owed many of his ideas to
Godwin, a contemporary thinker. Wordsworth has a debt to Plato, a
thinker not contemporary. Burns's democratic independence was "in
the air," and had been, in Scotland, since Elder remarked on it in a
letter to Ingles in 1515. It is not the ideas, it is the expression
of the ideas, that marks the poet.
Pages:
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85