Alfred Tennyson

om 1833 onwards. It is to be observed that the "section about evolution" was written some years before 1844, when the ingenious hypotheses of Robert Chambers, in Vestiges o

forms of life, a marine environment, and the minimum of supernormal assistance in the way of stimulating the primal forms in the direction of more highly differentiated developments. "The rudimentary forms, Inapertwa, were in reality stages in the transformation of various plants and animals into human be

and were not patronised by the scientific, world. In November 1844 he wrote to Mr Moxon, "I want you to get me a book which I see advertised in the Examiner: it seems to contain many speculations with which I have been familiar for years, and on which I have written more than one poem." This book was Vestiges of Creation. These poems are the stanzas in In Memoriam about "the greater ape," and about Nature as careless of the type: "all shall go." The poetic and philosophic originality of Tennyson thus faced the popular inferences as to the effect of the doctrine of evolution upon religious beliefs long before the world was moved in all i

s sure as God'

was a great

ed "to lay the spectres of the mind"; ever faced world-old problems in their most recent aspects? I am not acquainted with any

itivism 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

moriam 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 na?vely 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 w

efore 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 ath

I, in my mo

freshness o

forth in que

privilege to

e! I

doubt, but

lasp Idols.

I Idol? Le

over, an

mber'd, a

me. Oh t

efore the

me, and th

arp-headed

s blackness

ife! oh we

nd heart ma

vacillat

m 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 c

sion 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

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 hop

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 alwa

he wiser ma

up from chi

like the

born to ot

as well revert to polyandry and paint, because our Celtic or Pictish ancestors, if we had any, practised the one and wore the other. However, petulances like the verse on the gre

1830. But the doubts had exerted, probably, but little influence on his happiness till the sudden stroke of loss made life for a time seem almost unbearable u

ng in

eek, to find, a

d questions. These require new attempts at answers, and are answered, "the sad mechanic exercise" of verse allaying the pain. This is the g

merged from the darkness of the shadow of death into the light, whither, as it seems to us, we can scarcely hope to come. It is the sympathy and the example, I think, not the speculations, mystical or scientific, which make In Memoriam, in more than name, a book of consolation: even in hours of the sharpest distress, when its technical beauties and wonde

Laureate, has told

re was a young reader to whom All along the Vall

y years were a mis

as if none could endure for two-and-thirty years the comp

g the face

oister'd in th

life-long companion: we walk with Great-hear

's tomb; or academic, like Milton's Lycidas. We are not to suppose that Milton was heart-broken by the death of young Mr King, or that Shelley was greatly desolated by the death of Keats, with whom his personal relations had been slight,

he mother

y brothers

ction, real or dramatic, which informs the sonnets of Shakespeare. So the poem stands alone, cloistered; not fiery with indignation, not breaking into actual prophecy, like Shelley's Ad

e Morte d'Arthur. "It is not reasonable, it is not fair," says Mr Harrison, after comparing In Memoriam with Lycidas, "to compare Tennyson with Milton," and it is not reasonable to compare Tennyson with any poet whatever. Criticism is not the construction of a class list. But we may reasonably say that In Memoriam is a nobl

ch graspest a

time. But here already "the rhythm, phrasing, and articulation are entirely faultless, exquisitely clear, melodious, and rare." [74] It were superfluous labour to point at special beauties, at the exquisite rendering of natur

t feel it to

second, the face of a stranger for the face seen only in d

and placed in a designed sequence, are xcii

ision sho

s, I might

canker of

t spake and

where our l

in the da

t say, I h

murmurin

spake and b

hin the co

months, rev

the phantom

not seem th

tual pres

refractio

ises ere t

phantasm; nor is it easy to see what mode of proving his identity would be left to

d touch, and

strong for

s blindness

feel that t

moriam, expressing almost such thing

once it see

oul was flas

his was wound

eal heights

that which i

lsations of

usic mea

Time-the shoc

Death. At len

, stricken th

but ah, how

oulded form

r intellec

y that whic

" In The Mystic, Tennyson, when almost a boy, had shown familiarity with strange psychological and psychical conditions. Poems of much later life also deal with these, and, more or less consciously, his philosophy was tinged, and his confide

ted by the evolutionary theories which had always existed as floating speculations, till they were made current coin by the genius and patient study of Darwin. That Tennyson's opinions between 1830 and 1840 were influenced by those of F. D. Maurice is reckoned probable by Canon Ainger, author of the notice of the poet in The Dictionary of National Biography. In the Life of Maurice, Tennyson does not appear till 1850, and th

of course, must seem foolishness to most professors of science. Bishop Westcott was at Cambridge when the book appeared: he is one of Mr Harrison's possible sources of Tennyson's ideas. He recognised the poet's "splendid faith (in the face of every difficulty) in the growing purpose of the sum of life, and in the noble destiny of the individual man." Ten years later Professor Henry Sidgwick, a mind sufficiently sceptical, found in some lines of In Memori

ther the logos may lead us, or later generations; and we ought not to be irritated with others because it leads them into what we think the wrong path. It is unfortunate that a work of art, like In Memoriam, should arouse theological or anti-theological passions. The poet only shows us the paths by which his mind travelled: they may not be the right paths, nor is it easy to trace them on a philosophical chart. He escaped from Doubting Cas

eart of the widow of a military man." This is only equalled, if equalled, by a recent critique which treated a fresh e