A KEY TO LORD TENNYSON’S “IN MEMORIAM.”
I.
It may be stated, on the highest authority, that the special passage alluded to in the opening stanza, cannot be identified, but it is Goethe’s creed.
St. Augustine wrote, that we can rise higher on the ladder of life, by trampling down our vices. His words, in a Sermon on the Ascension, are, De vitiis nostris scalam nobis facimus, si vitia ipsa calcamus.
Longfellow published a Poem, not earlier than 1842, which he called “The Ladder of St. Augustine;” and more recently, Lowell, another American Poet, and Minister Plenipotentiary in London, adopted a similar idea when he said,
“’Tis sorrow builds the shining ladder up,
Whose golden rounds are our calamities,
Whereon our feet firm planting, nearer God
The spirit climbs, and hath its eyes unseal’d.”
The “dead selves” of Tennyson are neither our vices nor our calamities; but, rather, our general experiences, which all perish as they happen; and of these, in his own case, the special loss he had sustained in the death of Hallam (his “more than brother”—his dimidium sui, “bosom-friend and half of life”) ought to rouse him to soar into “higher things;” rather than leave him to be pointed at, as “the man that loved and lost” (see Poems xxvii., 4, and lxxxv., 1); and all that he had before been, as now “over-worn,” and prostrated by this one bereavement.
But it was difficult to anticipate in the future a gain to match the loss he had sustained; and to appropriate interest, i.e., reap the fruit of tears that he was now shedding. Love, however, shall uphold his grief with sustaining power; for it is better to be grief-mad, and “dance with death”—(singing and dancing being a custom at ancient funerals)—than become a spectacle of scorn for “the victor Hours” to deride, after they have effaced his love-born sorrow.
II.
But the struggle back to past contentment and happiness is difficult; and the “Old Yew” of the churchyard seems to typify his present state of feeling.