At length my trance
Was cancell'd, stricken thro' with doubt.
Vague words! but ah, how hard to frame
In matter-moulded forms of speech,
Or ev'n for intellect to reach
Thro' memory that which I became."
Experiences like this, subjective, and not matter for argument, were
familiar to Tennyson. Jowett said, "He was one of those who, though
not an upholder of miracles, thought that the wonders of Heaven and
Earth were never far absent from us." In The Mystic, Tennyson, when
almost a boy, had shown familiarity with strange psychological and
psychical conditions. Poems of much later life also deal with these,
and, more or less consciously, his philosophy was tinged, and his
confidence that we are more than "cunning casts in clay" was
increased, by phenomena of experience, which can only be evidence for
the mystic himself, if even for him. But this dim aspect of his
philosophy, of course, is "to the Greeks foolishness."
His was a philosophy of his own; not a philosophy for disciples, and
"those that eddy round and round." It was the sum of his reflection
on the mass of his impressions. I have shown, by the aid of dates,
that it was not borrowed from Huxley, Mr Stopford Brooke, or the late
Duke of Argyll. But, no doubt, many of the ideas were "in the air,"
and must have presented themselves to minds at once of religious
tendency, and attracted by the evolutionary theories which had always
existed as floating speculations, till they were made current coin by
the genius and patient study of Darwin.
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