“Men proved, as sure as God’s in Gloucester,
That Moses was a great impostor.”
distrust of Moses increased with the increase of hypotheses of evolution. But what English poet, before Tennyson, ever attempted “to lay the spectres of the mind”; ever faced world-old problems in their most recent aspects? I am not acquainted with any poet who attempted this task, and, whatever we may think of Tennyson’s success, I do not see how we can deny his originality.
Mr Frederic Harrison, however, thinks that neither “the theology nor the philosophy of In Memoriam are new, original, with an independent force and depth of their own.” “They are exquisitely graceful re-statements of the theology of the Broad Churchman of the school of F. D. Maurice and Jowett—a combination of Maurice’s somewhat illogical piety with Jowett’s philosophy of mystification.” The piety of Maurice may be as illogical as that of Positivism is logical, and the philosophy of the Master of Balliol may be whatever Mr Harrison pleases to call it. But as Jowett’s earliest work (except an essay on Etruscan religion) is of 1855, one does not see how it could influence Tennyson before 1844. And what had the Duke of Argyll written on these themes some years before 1844? The late Duke, to whom Mr Harrison refers in this connection, was born in 1823. His philosophic ideas, if they were to influence Tennyson’s In Memoriam, must have been set forth by him at the tender age of seventeen, or thereabouts. Mr Harrison’s sentence is, “But does In Memoriam teach anything, or transfigure any idea which was not about that time” (the time of writing was mainly 1833–1840) “common form with F. D. Maurice, with Jowett, C. Kingsley, F. Robertson, Stopford Brooke, Mr Ruskin, and the Duke of Argyll, Bishops Westcott and Boyd Carpenter?”
The dates answer Mr Harrison. Jowett did not publish anything till at least fifteen years after Tennyson wrote his poems on evolution and belief. Dr Boyd Carpenter’s works previous to 1840 are unknown to bibliography. F. W. Robertson was a young parson at Cheltenham. Ruskin had not published the first volume of Modern Painters. His Oxford prize poem is of 1839. Mr Stopford Brooke was at school. The Duke of Argyll was being privately educated: and so with the rest, except the contemporary Maurice. How can Mr Harrison say that, in the time of In Memoriam, Tennyson was “in touch with the ideas of Herschel, Owen, Huxley, Darwin, and Tyndall”? [65] When Tennyson wrote the parts of In Memoriam which deal with science, nobody beyond their families and friends had heard of Huxley, Darwin, and Tyndall. They had not developed, much less had they published, their “general ideas.” Even in his journal of the Cruise of the Beagle Darwin’s ideas were religious, and he naïvely admired the works of God. It is strange that Mr Harrison has based his criticism, and his theory of Tennyson’s want of originality, on what seems to be a historical error. He cites parts of In Memoriam, and remarks, “No one can deny that all this is exquisitely beautiful; that these eternal problems have never been clad in such inimitable grace . . . But the train of thought is essentially that with which ordinary English readers have been made familiar by F. D. Maurice, Professor Jowett, Ecce Homo, Hypatia, and now by Arthur Balfour, Mr Drummond, and many valiant companies of Septem [why Septem?] contra Diabolum.” One must keep repeating the historical verity that the ideas of In Memoriam could not have been “made familiar by” authors who had not yet published anything, or by books yet undreamed of and unborn, such as Ecce Homo and Jowett’s work on some of St Paul’s Epistles. If these books contain the ideas of In Memoriam, it is by dint of repetition and borrowing from In Memoriam, or by coincidence. The originality was Tennyson’s, for we cannot dispute the evidence of dates.
When one speaks of “originality” one does not mean that Tennyson discovered the existence of the ultimate problems. But at Cambridge (1828–1830) he had voted “No” in answer to the question discussed by “the Apostles,” “Is an intelligible [intelligent?] First Cause deducible from the phenomena of the universe?” [66] He had also propounded the theory that “the development of the human body might possibly be traced from the radiated vermicular molluscous and vertebrate organisms,” thirty years before Darwin published The Origin of Species. To be concerned so early with such hypotheses, and to face, in poetry, the religious or irreligious inferences which may be drawn from them, decidedly constitutes part of the poetic originality of Tennyson. His attitude, as a poet, towards religious doubt is only so far not original, as it is part of the general reaction from the freethinking of the eighteenth century. Men had then been freethinkers avec délices. It was a joyous thing to be an atheist, or something very like one; at all events, it was glorious to be “emancipated.” Many still find it glorious, as we read in the tone of Mr Huxley, when he triumphs and tramples over pious dukes and bishops. Shelley said that a certain schoolgirl “would make a dear little atheist.” But by 1828–1830 men were less joyous in their escape from all that had hitherto consoled and fortified humanity. Long before he dreamed of In Memoriam, in the Poems chiefly Lyrical of 1830 Tennyson had written—
“‘Yet,’ said I, in my morn of youth,
The unsunn’d freshness of my strength,
When I went forth in quest of truth,
‘It is man’s privilege to doubt.’ . . .
Ay me! I fear
All may not doubt, but everywhere
Some must clasp Idols. Yet, my God,
Whom call I Idol? Let Thy dove
Shadow me over, and my sins
Be unremember’d, and Thy love
Enlighten me. Oh teach me yet
Somewhat before the heavy clod
Weighs on me, and the busy fret
Of that sharp-headed worm begins
In the gross blackness underneath.Oh weary life! oh weary death!
Oh spirit and heart made desolate!
Oh damnèd vacillating state!”
Now the philosophy of In Memoriam may be, indeed is, regarded by robust, first-rate, and far from sensitive minds, as a “damnèd vacillating state.” The poet is not so imbued with the spirit of popular science as to be sure that he knows everything: knows that there is nothing but atoms and ether, with no room for God or a soul. He is far from that happy cock-certainty, and consequently is exposed to the contempt of the cock-certain. The poem, says Mr Harrison, “has made Tennyson the idol of the Anglican clergyman—the world in which he was born and the world in which his life was ideally passed—the idol of all cultured youth and of all æsthetic women. It is an honourable post to fill”—that of idol. “The argument of In Memoriam apparently is . . . that we should faintly trust the larger hope.” That, I think, is not the argument, not the conclusion of the poem, but is a casual expression of one mood among many moods.
The argument and conclusion of In Memoriam are the argument and conclusion of the life of Tennyson, and of the love of Tennyson, that immortal passion which was a part of himself, and which, if aught of us endure, is living yet, and must live eternally. From the record of his Life by his son we know that his trust in “the larger hope” was not “faint,” but strengthened with the years. There are said to have been less hopeful intervals.
His faith is, of course, no argument for others,—at least it ought not to be. We are all the creatures of our bias, our environment, our experience, our emotions. The experience of Tennyson was unlike the experience of most men. It yielded him subjective grounds for belief. He “opened a path unto many,” like Yama, the Vedic being who discovered the way to death. But Tennyson’s path led not to death, but to life spiritual, and to hope, and he did “give a new impulse to the thought of his age,” as other great poets have done. Of course it may be an impulse to wrong thought. As the philosophical Australian black said, “We shall know when we are dead.”
Mr Harrison argues as if, unlike Tennyson, Byron, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Burns produced “original ideas fresh from their own spirit, and not derived from contemporary thinkers.” I do not know what original ideas these great poets discovered and promulgated; their ideas seem to have been “in the air.” These poets “made them current coin.” Shelley thought that he owed many of his ideas to Godwin, a contemporary thinker. Wordsworth has a debt to Plato, a thinker not contemporary. Burns’s democratic independence was “in the air,” and had been, in Scotland, since Elder remarked on it in a letter to Ingles in 1515. It is not the ideas, it is the expression of the ideas, that marks the poet. Tennyson’s ideas are relatively novel, though as old as Plotinus, for they are applied to a novel, or at least an unfamiliar, mental situation. Doubt was abroad, as it always is; but, for perhaps the first time since Porphyry wrote his letter to Abammon, the doubters desired to believe, and said, “Lord, help Thou my unbelief.” To robust, not sensitive minds, very much in unity with themselves, the attitude seems contemptible, or at best decently futile. Yet I cannot think it below the dignity of mankind, conscious that it is not omniscient. The poet does fail in logic (In Memoriam, cxx.) when he says—