“Thy mild deep eyes upraised, that knew
The beauty and repose of faith,
And the clear spirit shining thro’.”
That faith is already shaken, and the long struggle for belief has
already begun.
Tennyson, according to Matthew Arnold, was not _un esprit puissant_.
Other and younger critics, who have attained to a cock-certain mood of
negation, are apt to blame him because, in fact, he did not finally agree
with their opinions. If a man is necessarily a weakling or a hypocrite
because, after trying all things, he is not an atheist or a materialist,
then the reproach of insincerity or of feebleness of mind must rest upon
Tennyson. But it is manifest that, almost in boyhood, he had already
faced the ideas which, to one of his character, almost meant despair: he
had not kept his eyes closed. To his extremely self-satisfied accusers
we might answer, in lines from this earliest volume (_The Mystic_):—
“Ye scorn him with an undiscerning scorn;
Ye cannot read the marvel in his eye,
The still serene abstraction.”