VICE-PRESIDENT OF THE NATIONAL ANTI-VIVISECTION SOCIETY
[Picture: Tennyson. From an unpublished photograph in the possession of
Charles Bruce Locker Tennyson, C. M. G.]
Tennyson, as was inevitable with a man of such nobility of mind and life,
regarded the torture of animals for the sake of knowledge with "the hate
of hate, the scorn of scorn."
If authority be cited in great moral questions here is one that must
compel reverence from all but the poor trifler with his "hollow smile and
frozen sneer."
He looked modern Science in the eye, perceived whither its aggrandisement
of knowledge to a place supreme in human estimate, above conduct, must
inevitably lead mankind, and proclaimed, in accents which can never die,
that it is impossible for man to acquiesce in a godless world.
He taught us that men's hearts can never be satisfied with a world
explained and comprised by the cold "changeless law" of foreordained
evolution and inevitable destiny. "Knowledge comes," said he, "but
wisdom lingers."
From the first, then, Tennyson lent the weight of his splendid name to
the cause of mercy, and I find his signature to the original great
petition for the restriction of vivisection between those of Leslie
Stephen and Robert Browning on the same sheet of paper--a sheet of paper
now one of the treasured possessions of the National Anti-Vivisection
Society.
All the world knows the allusions in his works to those who "carve the
living hound," and to curare, which he called "the hellish oorali." And
thus this greatest poet of the Victorian age gave the weight of his
commanding authority for all time to a fierce condemnation of vivisection
as the most awful and monstrous of the offsprings of modern Science.
Tennyson was religious in the widest and most inspiring sense.
"Almost the finest summing up of religion," he wrote, "is 'to do justice,
to love mercy, and to walk humbly with God.'"
"To love mercy!" That is the true sign of magnanimity in man. All holy
men, all brave men, all great and knightly men have loved mercy. "It is
an attribute to God Himself."
Time passes, and succeeding races of mankind, like the leaves of autumn,
are blown away and perish, but countless men of heroic mould, reaching
back into the dim mists of legend and down through innumerable years
while the great world spins "for ever down the ringing grooves of
change," have one and all been gloriously crowned with the same shining
diadem of mercy.