Towards the end of Tennyson's life there were two intellectual elites vying for an
influence on the
direction to be taken by Victorian society. There was doubt that culture was moulded by Nature.
But was Nature to be viewed as an inexhaustable mine of resources for endless machine-driven
national economic growth, or was technology to be tamed according to a view of Nature as the
matrix of spirituality to support the human commonwealth as a whole? These cultural alternatives
are now exemplified by ecology as a neutral system of limited resources, which can either be
exploited for the short-term eonomic gain of today's population, or be conserved long-term to
ensure benefits for generations of children yet unborn. In the 1880s there was no mid position. Two
utopias were exemplified. Thomas Henry Huxley on the one hand, urged that civilisation should
confidently follow where the light of science was leading, and William Morris on the other, rejected
science and technology out of hand, and advocated a return to preindustrial economics.
In the sixth essay in 'The Lights of the Church and the Light of Science', Huxley's
convictions
about the validity of 'scientific criticism', as he called it, comes out as follows:-
"Time was--and
that not very long ago--when all the relations of Biblical authors concerning
the whole world were received with a ready belief; and an unreasoning and uncritical faith
accepted with equal satisfaction the narrative of the Captivity and the doings of Moses at
the court of Pharaoh, the account of the Apostolic meeting in the Epistle to the Galatians,
and that of the fabrication of Eve. We can most of us remember when, in this country, the
whole story of the Exodus, and even the legend of Jonah, were seriously placed before boys
as history; and discoursed of in as dogmatic a tone as the tale of Agincourt or the history of
the Norman Conquest.
But all this is
now changed. The last century has seen the growth of scientific criticism to
its full strength. The whole world of history has been revolutionised and the mythology which
embarrassed earnest Christians has vanished as an evil mist, the lifting of which has only
more fully revealed the lineaments of infallible Truth".
By extinguishing the light
of the Church, science had removed the moral brakes on the engine of
industrial development.
Morris was representative of the The Arts and Crafts Movement, which
developed in the second half
of the 19th century and lasted well into the 20th. It drew its support from progressive artists,
architects and designers, philanthropists, amateurs and middle-class women seeking work in the
home. They set up small workshops apart from the world of industry, revived old techniques and
revered the humble household objects of pre- industrial times. The movement was strongest in the
industrializing countries of northern Europe and in the USA, and it can best be understood as an
unfocused reaction against industrialization. It was not unique in its anti-industrialism; indeed it
was only one among several late 19th-century reform movements, such as the Garden City
movement, vegetarianism and folksong revivals. They all promoted Romantic values of nature and
folk culture against the artificiality of modern life sustained by mass production.
Into this cultural dichotomy stepped Tennyson in the last decade of his life to write
about a third
way. This excerpt from Locksley Hall
show that he believed in the general good of progress.
"Not in vain
the distance beacons; forward, forward let us range,
Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change.
For, I doubt not, through the ages one increasing purpose runs,
And the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns;
Through the shadows of the globe we sweep into the younger day,—
Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay."
But to reap the benefits from the ringing grooves of change all humankind would have
to be
embraced by a culture centred on rational technology and thoroughgoing humanised science,
which would be concerned solely with the happiness of the human race on a global scale.
Tennyson evisaged that culture and ecology would be bonded by a synthesis of scientific and
poetic imagination.
Golffing, F. (1966) .Tennyson's last phase: The Poet as Seer, The Southern Review,
2.
