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Modern Thought in Meredith's Poems
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
“Victorian” is now commonly used as a depreciatory-epithet, and yet we shall search the history of the last thousand years in vain for a period of more important social, political, and industrial changes than those carried on in the Victorian Era. The changes in the spiritual sphere were no less significant. Professor Henry Sidgwick, a singularly acute and subtle observer, writing to Tennyson's son for the Biography published in 1897, said of the sixties:—
During these years we were absorbed in struggling for freedom of thought in the trammels of a historical religion : and perhaps what we sympathize with most in “In Memoriam'' at this time, apart from the personal feeling, was the defence of “honest doubt,” the reconciliation of knowledge and faith in the introductory poem, and the hopeful trumpet-ring of the lines on the New Year—
- Ring out the thousand wars of old,
- Ring in the thousand years of peace,
and generally the forward movement of the thought.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1912
References
page 2 note 1 Alfred Lord Tennyson, A Memoir by his Son, v. 1, pp. 301-2.
page 3 note 1 Life and Letters of Huxley, by his son, v. 2, p. 359.
page 4 note 1 Quoted by Wise, Letters from Robert Browning to Various Correspondents, v. 1, pp. 82–84, and by Griffin and Minchin, The Life of Robert Browning, p. 295.
page 6 note 1 Modern Painters, v. 1, pt. 2, sec. 6, ch. 3, par. 21.
page 15 note 1 See Huxley's letter on the death of his son, addressed to Kingsley,—Life u. s., v. 1, pp. 233-239. Huxley's opinions, especially as expressed in the paragraphs on pp. 235–6 are in remarkable agreement with Meredith's. The letter, though written in 1860, was not published till 1901, but the view it sets forth was “in the air,” especially in scientific circles. Huxley says in the course of his letter: “Understand that all the younger men of science I know intimately are essentially of my way of thinking.”
page 18 note 1 V. 2, p. 338.
page 18 note 2 V. 2, p. 303.
page 18 note 3 V. 2, p. 307 and 303.