SOURCE: Flynn, Philip. “Hallam and Tennyson: the ‘Theodicaea Novissima’ and In Memoriam.” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 19, no. 4 (autumn 1979): 705-20.

[In the following essay, Flynn closely analyzes the influence of Hallam's ontological essay, “Theodicaea Novissima,” on Alfred Tennyson's eulogy to Hallam, In Memoriam.]

When Arthur Hallam and Tennyson matriculated at Cambridge in the late 1820s, the University was in a period of theological transition. Orthodox Anglican theology, timid and insular in spirit, looked backward to the eighteenth century. The epistemological attitude of Paley's Natural Theology (1802) prevailed, and his Evidences of Christianity (1794) and Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (1785) had recently been introduced into the University curriculum.¹ But, within the colleges, and particularly at Trinity, new forces were at work. Julius Hare and Connop Thirlwall, both resident fellows, carried German biblical criticism to the Trinity common room, while, among the undergraduate “Apostles,” F. D. Maurice and John Sterling preached the political and religious thought of Coleridge.

Among those “Apostles,” Hallam's enthusiasm for metaphysics was noticeably keen,² and the chronological study of his writings indicates that the summer and fall term of 1831 were a turning-point in his precocious intellectual development. At that time he turned intentionally from verse to prose, from personal lyric laments on the transiency of human lives and affections to a systematic attempt to erect through prose a coherent ontological philosophy. The most ambitious product of that attempt was an essay read to the “Apostles” in October, 1831, on the proposition, “that there is ground for believing that the existence of moral evil is absolutely necessary to the fulfillment of God's essential love for Christ.” The essay was entitled “Theodicaea Novissima” and, after Hallam's death, was included at Tennyson's request in the first edition of the Remains compiled by Henry Hallam in 1834. The “Theodicaea” is a curious piece, an amalgam of the Coleridgean philosophy of Christian experience encountered at Cambridge with Optimistic rationalism and Hallam's private readings in Plato, Dante, and medieval philosophy.³ It stands as the most coherent and mature ontological statement of the man whom Tennyson remembered in In Memoriam as having “faced the spectres of the mind / And laid them.”

Because of Henry Hallam's editorial interference, the “Theodicaea” was excluded from all but one of the later editions of the Remains, and the essay was virtually unknown until the appearance of Motter's edition of Arthur Hallam's collected writings in 1943.⁴ Subsequently, Eleanor Mattes has treated the essay through brief paraphrase in her study of the making of In Memoriam, suggesting that “Hallam's answers to the questions In Memoriam raises would in many cases have been very different from those to which Tennyson finally came.”⁵ Mrs. Mattes, convinced that Hallam's intellectual influence upon Tennyson was generally encouraging, concentrates upon Hallam's earlier poetry, poetry which anticipates the concerns and tone of In Memoriam, but poetry which Hallam himself had represented to Gladstone in 1830 as “the record of several states of mind, which may all be comprehended in a cycle out of which I fancy I am passing.”⁶ The suggestion which Mrs. Mattes found uncongenial to her own argument is worth exploring, however, because a closer comparison of the two works challenges the opinion that Hallam's thought was an encouraging influence upon the way of Tennyson's soul. In fact, the comparison suggests that Tennyson's personal bewilderment was caused, in part, by his recognition of the philosophical disparity between his own thinking and that of the young man whom he mourned. Hallam's rejection of natural theology—a rejection recorded in the “Theodicaea”—had been but a brief prelude to his intuitive acceptance of Christian revelation. But Tennyson's progress was slower, his skepticism more insistent. At the time of Hallam's death, Tennyson could give assent only to the negative aspect of his dead friend's creed—the distrust of natural theology. A compensating acceptance of Christian revelation was for many years beyond the poet's grasp.

The “Theodicaea” opens with Hallam's statement of personal epistemology, a rejection of the theological argument from design:

Can man by searching find out God? I believe not. I believe that the unassisted efforts of man's reason have not established the existence and attributes of Deity on so sure a basis as the Deist imagines. However sublime may be the notion of a supreme original mind, and however naturally human feelings adhered to it, the reasons by which it was justified were not, in my opinion, sufficient to clear it from considerable doubt and confusion. Between the opposing weight of reasonings, equally inalienable from the structure of our intellect, the scale hung with doubtful inclination, until the Bible turned it. I hesitate not to say that I derive from Revelation a conviction of Theism, which without that assistance would have been but a dark and ambiguous hope.

(201)

During the year in which Hallam composed and delivered the “Theodicaea,” the second volume of Lyell's Principles of Geology (1830-33) appeared and Darwin's association with the Beagle began. The argument from design, essential to the Deist position and still influential among conservative Anglican theologians, was soon to fall upon hard times. Several poems which Hallam wrote in the late 1820s, the records of those “several states of mind … out of which I fancy I am passing,” suggest that he was at least partially aware of the implications of contemporary geology, and he apparently recognized the vulnerability of the Deist's position in the face of changing attitudes in the physical sciences.⁷ At that same intellectual moment, however, questions on the validity of scriptual authority, questions raised by both the physical sciences and contemporary German biblical criticism, made a reassessment of the argument from revelation equally necessary. For Hallam, the authority of revelation was not attested by historical or miraculous evidence, but by psychological evidence—by its capacity to speak to the spiritual drives of man:

I see that the Bible fits into every fold of the human heart. I am a man, and I believe it to be God's book because it is man's book. It is true that the Bible affords me no additional means of demonstrating the falsity of Atheism; if mind had nothing to do with the formation of the Universe, doubtless whatever had was competent also to make the Bible; but I have gained this advantage, that my feelings and thoughts can no longer refuse their assent to what is evidently framed to engage that assent; and what is it to me that I cannot disprove the bare logical possibility of my whole nature being fallacious?

(201)

In this illative position, Hallam was indebted, as were other young men of his generation at Trinity, to the influence of Coleridge. It was the Coleridge of the Aids to Reflection (1825), synthesizing Platonic and Kantian elements with the theology of St. John, whom the “Apostles” and their mentors had come to regard as, in Hare's words, “the true sovereign of modern English thought.”⁸ In the Aids to Reflection Coleridge had stated, “Wherever the forms of Reasoning appropriate only to the natural world are applied to spiritual realities, it may be truly said, that the more strictly logical the Reasoning is in all its parts, the more irrational it is as a whole.”⁹ Thus he attacked “the prevailing taste for Books of Natural Theology”: “Physico-theology, Demonstrations of God from Nature, Evidence of Christianity, & c. & c. Evidences of Christianity! I am weary of the Word. Make a man feel the want of it; rouse him, if you can, to the self-knowledge of his need of it; and you may safely trust it to its own Evidence.”¹⁰ Christian conviction comes, Coleridge argued, through “a broad act of the soul,” and the authority of the scriptural message is attested by its fitness to human nature and needs: “In short, whatever finds me, bears witness for itself that it has proceeded from a Holy Spirit.”¹¹ It was upon this basis, because the Bible was clearly framed to engage the assent of his total personality, that Hallam could state, “I am determined therefore to receive the Bible as divinely authorized, and the scheme of human and divine things which it contains, as essentially true. I consider it as an axioma, or law, to which I have ascended by legitimate induction of particulars, and from which I am entitled to descend with increased knowledge on the heap of remaining phenomena” (201). Such a foundation is necessary for his argument, because it is from biblical quotation that he derives authority for his concept of God as love.

“Now what is the scheme of Christian philosophy?” Hallam begins. “What account does it give of the reasons for which God created us? I find in the Bible that ‘man is created in the image of God.’ I find also these words, ‘God is Love.’ ‘In Christ alone God loved the world.’ ‘By Christ and for Christ all things consist.’ ‘Through Christ God constituted the ages.’ ‘He is the well beloved Son in whom the Father is well pleased.’ ‘He is the express image of His person.’ ‘He was made perfect through sufferings.’ ‘He came into the world to destroy the works of the devil’” (202). Hallam chooses his quotations to give authority to four themes which he will develop in the course of his theodicy: (1) man is created in the image of God, and, thus, reasoning through analogy is possible and valid; (2) the essence of God is love; (3) an understanding of the relationship of the Father to the Son is essential to an understanding of Creation; (4) Christ's perfection is a developing one, developing through the struggle with moral evil. Each of these themes contributes in the course of the essay to Hallam's thesis that the existence of moral evil is necessary for the fulfillment of God's essential love for Christ.

Hallam's interpretation of the riddle of Creation is that “the motive which drew God from eternity into time was the love of Christ” (203). In this interpretation he is faced immediately with the necessity of proving that a conscious motive impelled Creation, and that that motive was love. He meets both difficulties by argument from analogy, based upon the biblical statement that man is created in the image of God: “Since man is in the image of God, and since nothing can be more essential to man, as an intelligent being, than to act upon a motive, some motive must have actuated the Supreme Being in his original fiat of creation” (202). But, granting the existence of a conscious motive behind Creation, what reason is there to assume that God's motive was love? Hallam cites the opinion of classical and medieval philosophers that love is the noblest of human attributes and the strongest of human motives: “It should follow then from their opinion, that while we consider human thought, design, volition, & c., as images of qualities somehow resembling these, though at infinite distance, in the Divine Mind, a passion so manifestly the noblest attribute of our nature should also be considered as representing some principle equally eminent in the Supreme Character” (203). Stating, then, that the motive behind Creation was one of love, and employing the analogical argument that the noblest attribute of human nature reflects an equal eminence of that attribute in the Divine, Hallam goes on to argue that the love which actuated Creation was God's love for Christ.

It was through his readings in classical and medieval thought that Hallam was drawn to those portions of the Bible which emphasize the moral primacy of love, “a passion from which religion had condescended to borrow her most solemn phrases, her sublimest hopes, and her most mysterious modes of operation” (274). In Plato he found an early attempt to establish love as the basis of ethical conduct; in Dante and medieval thought he encountered a philosophy based upon the concept of God as love and of human love as an analogical participation in that divine self expression.¹² It was upon this central principle, reinforced by revelation, that Hallam built the Trinitarian speculation which forms the body of the “Theodicaea Novissima.”

“Philosophers, who have fallen in love, and lovers who have acquired philosophy by reflecting on their peculiar states of consciousness, tell us that the passion is grounded on a conviction, true or false, of similarity, and consequent irresistible desire of union or rather identification, as though we had suddenly found a bit of ourselves that had been dropt by mischance as we descended upon earth” (203). If love is based upon a conviction of similarity, and the essence of God is love, it follows from analogy that God's own love must proceed from the same conviction and desire. Hallam anticipates the objection that God is without desire, that His felicity is supreme and independent: “I ask, whether or not God has created the Universe? If he has, he must have had some motive, some desire of some object to be attained by action. … It is mere abuse of terms to talk of God as wrapt in independent felicity; we should not be here to say it, if he were” (203-204). The mere existence of a created universe is testimony that God's happiness is in some way contingent upon his creations. “Having thus disposed of this objection, I revert to my former conclusion, that love, by which I mean direct, immediate, absorbing affection for one object, on the ground of similarity perceived, and with a view to more complete union, as it is the noblest quality of the human soul, must represent the noblest affection of the Divine Nature” (204).

Citing the words of Christ in 1 John 17:24, “thou lovedst me before the foundation of the world,” Hallam argues that the primary and eternal object of God's love is Christ. Hallam's language is ambiguous unless he be understood to mean by “Christ,” not only the historical Jesus, but also the pre-incarnate Son, the Second Person of the Trinity. It is as an expression of the Father's essential love that Hallam interprets the Godhead of Christ: “Surely these views throw light on the assertion that Christ is God. He is God, not in that highest sense in which the Absolute, the ‘O’ΩN [the eternal first person singular, “Being”] is God: but as the object of that Infinite Being's love, the necessary completion of his being, the reproduction of Him, without which His nature could not have been fulfilled, because He is love” (204). Moreover, the Godhead of the Son is not fixed and invariable. It has increased through time and the Incarnation, and perfect union and identity with the Father will come when the Son has triumphed over moral evil.

To clarify his concept of the Son's evolving Godhead, Hallam returns to the scriptural comment, “He is made perfect through sufferings,” and to his analogical examination of the nature of divine love:

Similarity, it has been said, is an essential condition of love, and it is equally true that reciprocity is implied in its idea. … Is it not reasonable therefore to conclude that the love of the Eternal Being will require similarly in the object that excites it, and a proportionable return of it, when once excited? But here arises a difficulty. Whatever personality is generated by God out of His substance must be essentially subordinate to God. I say not how subordinate, or to what extent; I contend for the plain truth that he must be so in one sense, and that an important one. Elevate and magnify the Son, as you will: he is the Son still, and not in all points or in all senses equal to the Father. … How then will the requisite similarity be possible, since the nature of God is Infinite, Absolute, Perfect? And how will the Reciprocity be possible, since the attributes of God are all infinite, and that great attribute so infinite to Him, that the Apostle [St. John] asserts it to be His essence, must be altogether illimitable?

(204-205)

Hallam finds the solution to this difficulty in the existence of moral evil. Only through a struggle against and eventual conquest over moral evil could Christ attain conformity with the nature of the Father and reciprocate the Father's love. If this be true, it can be argued that the existence of moral evil is necessary in order that God's essential love for Christ might be fulfilled: “evil may have been called into existence and power, because it was the necessary and only condition of Christ's being enabled to exert the highest acts of love, that any generated Being could perform, and thereby attaining that high degree of conformity comprised in the Divine Idea of his existence, and that high degree of reciprocate affection required by the eternal love of his Father” (205-206).

Hallam recognizes that within his breezy Arianism the existence of moral evil is a by-product of divine love: “Undoubtedly it would be blasphemous to assert that sin exists in virtue of the particular approbation, and according to the desire of God: … But the plain answer to all objections, drawn from logical definitions of God is—Look at the facts: here is a world overrun with sin and suffering: how did they get here except by Divine permission? Every system of theism must make God the author of sin in this sense” (206-207). Committed to a scheme of Creation in which the foundation and motivating principle is divine love, rather than divine justice, Hallam was unable to appeal to the doctrine of Original Sin in its traditional function as an explanation of moral evil. Accepting evil as a necessary part of his theological system, he attempted to show that temporal evil is conducive to eternal good—that is, the fulfillment of God's first impulse and self-affirmation, His love of Christ.

The main argument of the “Theodicaea” closes with Hallam's explanation of why Christ's necessary struggle with moral evil must involve the presence of sin in other created spirits. Hallam offers three reasons, each based upon the conformity and/or reciprocity demanded of Christ by divine love. In the first place, “if the object was to exalt that Evil Principle to a very high degree of dominion, in order that more exalted love might be called forth for his overthrow, it is obvious that this particular species of power, namely, over the hearts, the grounds of character, in a plurality of sentient beings, would be the very kind we should expect would be entrusted to that Evil Principle” (207). Secondly, as man is created in the image of God, God's love must extend to all men on the grounds of similarity perceived. By the Incarnation and Redemption Christ was able to imitate God's love for man: “By chusing this mode therefore of warfare with evil, Christ effected another part of the necessary conformity, since he displayed a perfect love for the lost souls of men, and, by living for them, procured salvation for as many as the Father gave him” (208). Finally, the love of man for Christ resembles, at least in direction, the love of Christ for God. The love for Christ of subordinate beings resembling the love of the subordinate Son for the Father, another stage in the desired conformity is realized.

In the “Theodicaea,” as in his essays on Cicero and on Gabriel Rossetti's study of Dante, Hallam considered the ethical implications of the Incarnation and Redemption in terms of the failure of pre-Christian ethical systems. Through Christ's sacrifice, human love found a worthy object and an efficient incentive to virtue. But Hallam's dominant attitude was theocentric. The Incarnation and Redemption were to be understood primarily in terms of Trinitarian love:

I answer that the infinite superiority of God to man is the very truth, which renders it far more probable to my judgment that God should act from a regard to a Being nearest to His Supreme Nature, and immeasurably exalted above our frail condition, than that the astonishing facts of a creation involving evil, an incarnation, and a redemption, should have ultimate reference to such atoms in the immense scheme as ourselves. Christ indeed is one, and inferior spirits, of whom we perhaps are the lowest, may be innumerable; yet in excellence and plenitude of existence, in nearness to God and adequacy to the absorption of His glorious love, what are the myriads of created beings, when weighed against that Only begotten Son, the express image of the Father's person?

(211)

Rather than citing the existence of moral evil as an indictment against a benevolent God, Hallam concludes, let us be content in those circumstances which have made a true human love possible and without which the fulfillment of God's essential nature—His love and its expression through love of Christ—would have been impossible.

Any judgment on the philosophical value of the “Theodicaea” is inevitably a personal judgment, depending first upon the modern reader's ability to entertain sympathetically Hallam's basic assumption of the validity of the “scheme of human and divine things” in the New Testament and, secondly, upon that reader's willingness to accept an epistemological combination of intuitionism and Optimistic rationalism. But, granting his assumption, and despite the rich variety of the philosophical traditions which shaped his thought, Hallam's essay will probably elicit from modern readers at best a notional assent. Although he initially employs a Coleridgean epistemology, his thesis fails Coleridge's mature test of philosophic truth—it does not find us, does not speak to common human feelings and needs. His epistemology appears, to this reader, not a synthesis, but a medley of epistemological traditions.

And yet, whatever be our judgment of it, the “Theodicaea” stands as both Hallam's most ambitious ontological attempt and our most reliable index of the temper of his mind and direction of his thought in the two years immediately preceding his death, the years of his closest intimacy with the Tennyson family. The essay indicates that, by 1831, Hallam had assumed two significant philosophical postures: he had “faced the spectres of the mind / And laid them” through an intuitional acceptance of “the scheme of human and divine things” in the New Testament, and he was inclined to solve the problems of moral evil and physical suffering by a logical subordination of human affairs to a greater moral drama. The despair which Tennyson felt upon Hallam's death would have been mitigated could he have confidently shared these attitudes. But Tennyson's memorial poem indicates that he could not—that his confusion in the decade that follows was, rather, a function of his desperate attempt to approximate some tentative measure of the faith in which Hallam, at his death, had been so secure.

To understand the extent of that confusion it is necessary to examine In Memoriam from an unfamiliar perspective. Tennyson's struggle with the specters raised by early Victorian science is an often-and well-told tale. Still unappreciated is the significance of the bequest which Hallam left to Tennyson through the “Theodicaea”: an epistemology and ontology which, had Tennyson been able to accept them, would have sustained him through the years of immediate personal grief and subsequent scientific study. That Tennyson had need of such assistance, even before Hallam's death, is suggested by “Supposed Confessions of a Second-Rate Sensitive Mind” and other early poems. His father's death in 1831 deepened his confusion and his friends' concern. “I hope you will do all you can to assist me in endeavouring to restore Alfred to better hopes & more steady purposes,” Hallam wrote to Emily Tennyson in January, 1832, a month after he had written to request the return of his notebook that contained the “Theodicaea.” “It will be sweet to labour together for so holy an end. I would sacrifice all my own peace to see you & him at peace with yourselves & with God.”¹³ Hallam had sent the “Theodicaea” to Tennyson as part of an unsuccessful campaign to convert his friend to “better hopes & more steady purposes,” and Tennyson's qualified recommendation of the essay to Henry Hallam should be considered in that context: “I know not whether among the prose pieces you would include [in the Remains] the one which he was accustomed to call his Theodicean Essay. I am inclined to think it does great honour to his originality of thought.”¹⁴ That Tennyson was impressed by the “originality” of the essay supports Hallam Tennyson's admission that his father did not read widely in philosophy at Cambridge or immediately after. More significant, the disparity between the fundamental attitudes of the essay and those of the early sections of In Memoriam suggests that the ambiguous praise of “originality” was the highest praise that Tennyson could bring himself to give.

“I hesitate not to say,” wrote Hallam in the “Theodicaea,” “that I derive from Revelation a conviction of Theism, which without that assistance would have been but a dark and ambiguous hope.” While at Cambridge Tennyson, like Hallam, had found the argument from design unconvincing. When the “Apostles” debated the question, “Is an intelligible First Cause deducible from the phenomena of the Universe?”, Tennyson had voted “No.”¹⁵ But, unlike Hallam, Tennyson did not share the “Apostles'” enthusiasm for the compensating epistemology of the Aids to Reflection. Hallam Tennyson remembered that his father “never much cared” for Coleridge's prose; nor is there evidence of Coleridge's influence in those sections of In Memoriam that can be assigned to the period of 1833-37, the period between Hallam's death and Tennyson's reading of Lyell's Principles of Geology.¹⁶ There is, in fact, no confident appeal to the assurances of Christian revelation, on intuitive or other grounds, throughout the stanzas of this period. The tentative Christian hope of the first Christmas section (XXX) is undercut by the Christmas section written in the following year, which admits that the psychological relief of the Christmas season, as represented by his response to village church-bells, comes through its association with his less troubled youth, rather than with present faith (XXVIII, 13-18).¹⁷ What hints at Christian eschatology there are appear especially tentative when contrasted with the unqualified Naturalism of sections II and XVIII. Tennyson's inability to stand secure in the basic epistemological posture of the “Theodicaea” is most evident, however, in the very sections which invoke, muse-like, Hallam's memory and aid. In section LXXXV Tennyson asserts that Hallam's “All-comprehensive tenderness, / All-subtilising intellect” are “An image comforting the mind, / And in my grief a strength reserved” (47-48, 51-52). But that section poses the question, “whether trust in things above / Be dimm'd of sorrow, or sustained; / And whether love for him have drain'd / My capabilities of love” (9-12). Tennyson can answer with assurance only the latter half of that question. He is still able to return love for love, but, although he recognizes that with Hallam's memory before him “Nor can it suit me to forget / The mighty hopes that make us men” (59-60), he is compelled to admit that his speculations on immortality are proof only of how grief will “with symbols play / And pining life be fancy-fed” (95-96).

Without the assurance of revelation, Tennyson's yearnings to believe in a God of love, a benevolent order, and his and Hallam's immortality remained a “dark and ambiguous hope.” He was seeking intimations of immortality in a variety of places, including Wordsworth's poetry and Isaac Taylor's Physical Theory of Another Life (1836), and the sections that record the ebb and flow of his hope (XXXIV, XXXV, XL, XLIII, XLVI) are a-Christian in expression. His will to believe was strong. His sympathy with the Christian message was probably deep. But he could not bring himself to make Hallam's intuitive leap of faith from his own needs to an acceptance of Christian consolation.¹⁸ Therefore, when readings in Lyell and contemporary scientific literature indicated that his personal loss was part of a greater human tragedy, he was unable to find immediate rebuttal, as Hallam could have done, in the assurances of scripture.

Yet, could Tennyson have followed Hallam here, it remains unlikely that Hallam's dismissal of moral evil and human suffering as necessary to the consummation of Trinitarian love would have consoled a man who demonstrated, as Jowett recognized, “a pertinacity on the part of man in demanding of God his rights.”¹⁹ Hallam was able to sacrifice the concerns of “such atoms in the immense scheme as ourselves” to the logic of his own Optimistic and Trinitarian ontology:

I may further observe, that however much we should rejoice to discover that the eternal scheme of God, the necessary completion, let us remember, of His Almighty Nature, did not require the absolute perdition of any spirit called by Him into existence, we are certainly not entitled to consider the perpetual misery of many individuals as incompatible with sovereign love. If Christ could attain the requisite degree of exaltation without the concession of so much power to evil, there is no doubt everlasting torment would not be, because God is love, and can have no delight in inflicting pain for its own sake; but if the loss of certain souls was necessary to Christ's triumph over the evil that opposed him, most certainly on the principles I have laid down, God must have included it in His plan, and a contrary mode of proceeding would have been contradictory to that infinite love which constitutes his moral nature.

(207-208)

“Why has God created souls knowing they would sin and suffer?” Tennyson wrote to Emily Sellwood in 1839. “There is no answer to these questions except in a great hope of universal good.”²⁰ But Tennyson's “larger hope” demanded that no created spirit “but subserves another's gain” (LIV, 12), and he rejected a “barren faith … tho' with might / To scale the heaven's highest height” for the “wisdom” to be learned through “sorrow under human skies” (CVIII, 5-7, 14). His proper study was of man, and, despite the theocentric argument of the “Theodicaea,” he stubbornly resisted the Optimistic subordination of personal suffering and aspiration to divine necessity. Hope in the immortality of a “general Soul” was “faith as vague as all unsweet” (XLVII, 4, 5); his and Hallam's immortality, in some mode, must be personal. He was firm in that attitude throughout his life: “Yes, it is true that there are moments when the flesh is nothing to me, when I feel and know the flesh to be the vision, God and the Spiritual the only real and true. Depend upon it, the Spiritual is the real: … but you never, never can convince me that the I is not an eternal Reality, and that the Spiritual is not the true and real part of me.”²¹ When, in later life, he was able to deal more confidently with the promise of Christian revelation, his concepts of the Incarnation and Redemption were consistently homocentric: “The life after death … is the cardinal point of Christianity.”²²

After 1837, the year of encounter with the Principles of Geology, Tennyson's personal elegy began its own evolution toward a Victorian Essay on Man, and section CXIV records his acceptance of a crucial epistemological distinction between Wisdom and Knowledge, a position reached apparently by 1839 through the influence of Carlyle, Julius Hare, and the Kantian-Coleridgean orientation of the ex-“Apostles” with whom he maintained contact. If that distinction was a potential defense against the implications of empirical science, it also brought him closer to a basic attitude of Hallam's faith, and the psychological relief of that belated approximation is evident in the closing stanzas of section CXIV. But approximation was not coincidence. The Wisdom-Knowledge distinction might or might not serve him in dealing with the implications of empirical science. The stanzas of the early 1840s express not only the philosophical battle of Tennyson's generation, but Tennyson's continued personal struggle to be true to Hallam's memory—the desire to believe as Hallam believed, the sense of personal moral failure if he could not:

Nor mine the sweetness or the skill,
                    But mine the love that will not tire,
                    And, born of love, the vague desire
That spurs an imitative will.

(CX, 17-20)

Seraphic intellect and force
                    To seize and throw the doubts of man;
                    Impassion'd logic, which outran
The hearer in its fiery course;
.....All these have been, and thee mine eyes
                    Have look'd on: if they look'd in vain,
                    My shame is greater who remain,
Nor let thy wisdom make me wise.

(CIX, 5-8, 21-24)²³

But the wisdom of the poem's conclusion is not Hallam's wisdom. Tennyson was more consistent in his application of intuitive epistemology. His melioristic interpretation of pre-Darwinian theory on the biological evolution of the species does not logically necessitate belief in personal immortality, much less belief in the continued moral evolution of personality after death. The concept of “one far-off divine event / To which the whole creation moves” (Epi., 143-44) might logically contradict, rather than support, belief in the survival of personality. Yet these beliefs are valid as intuitions and, as such, are more consistent with an intuitive epistemology than the “fiery logic” of the “Theodicaea.” Both men accepted love as an ultimate ontological principle, phrasing their acceptance in the vocabulary of St. John. But the focus of Hallam's ontology was a Trinitarian love in which the “myriads of created beings” play a supporting role. Tennyson's concern was with those very myriads in their struggle toward “the Christ that is to be” (CVI, 32).

Was Tennyson engaged in a half-realized debate with the memory of Hallam's late metaphysical position? The comparison of the two works suggests, at least, that the relationship between the two men was more complex and ambiguous than has been recognized. The hold which the memory of Hallam's thought and personality exercised upon Tennyson remained strong: the Epilogue cited him as “a noble type” of man's moral evolution, “Appearing ere the times were ripe” (Epi., 138-39), and Tennyson's attempt in the Prologue to give his intuitions a Christian expression satisfied his persistent “imitative will” to more closely approximate the Christian faith that was Hallam's when “At last he beat his music out” (XCVI, 10). The music which Tennyson eventually beat out was his own, nonetheless, more consistent in epistemology and more comprehensive of human aspiration than that of the precocious metaphysician he mourned. Hallam's bequest was both inspiration and confusion, and the “Theodicaea Novissima” has an ambivalent but intriguing place in the troubled intellectual history of In Memoriam.

Notes

1. See Denys Arthur Winstanley, Early Victorian Cambridge (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1940), p. 68.

2. Among the testimonials to Arthur Hallam's genius which Henry Hallam included in the Remains is one from Francis Doyle, Arthur Hallam's friend at Eton and Trinity: “In fact, his energy and quickness of apprehension did not stand in need of outward aids. He could read or discuss metaphysics as he lay on the sofa after dinner, surrounded by a noisy party, with as much care and acuteness as if he had been alone; … His chief pleasure and strength lay certainly in metaphysical analysis. He would read any metaphysical book, under any circumstances, with avidity; and I never knew him decline a metaphysical discussion. He would always pursue the argument eagerly to the end, and follow his antagonist into the most difficult places.” Quoted in Remains in Verse and Prose of Arthur Henry Hallam, ed. Henry Hallam (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1863), pp. 29-31. This testimonial is anonymous in the Remains; W. E. Gladstone identified it as Doyle's in the former's Arthur Henry Hallam, Companion Classics (Boston: Perry Mason and Co., no date; rpt. from “The Youth's Companion,” 6 January 1898), p. 15. In her memoir of the “Apostles,” Frances Brookfield described Hallam as roaming the rooms of his friends: “He never, it seems, avoided a metaphysical discussion, his subtlety in this branch of philosophy being considered greater than that of any of his contemporaries.” Frances Mary Brookfield, The Cambridge “Apostles” (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1906), p. 127. However, Doyle recognized that Hallam was “not … a very patient thinker” and that “his natural skill in the dazzling fence of rhetoric, was in danger of misleading and bewildering him in his higher vocation of philosopher” (Remains, p. 32). Henry Hallam allowed that “more practice in the strict logic of geometry, a little more familiarity with the physical laws of the universe, and the phenomena to which they relate, would possibly have repressed the tendency to vague and mystical speculation which he was too fond of indulging” (Remains, p. 22).

3. In his remarks on the “Theodicaea” Motter writes, “Hallam acknowledges his interest in Jonathan Edwards; and it is apparent that he has sometimes chosen to follow another American, William Ellery Channing, especially the ‘Discourse at the Ordination of Rev. F. A. Farley … 1828’.” T. H. Vail Motter, ed., The Writings of Arthur Hallam, The Modern Language Association of America General Series, No. XV (New York: MLA [Modern Language Association of America], 1943), pp. 199-200—cited hereafter as Writings. Hallam does acknowledge an interest in Edwards in one of his own notes to his essay, but states that “the genius of Calvinism, ‘torva tuens,’ frightens him” away from an ontology of divine love (Writings, pp. 206-207, n. 4). The specific influence of Channing is not apparent from a comparison of the “Theodicaea” and the “Discourse,” and Motter does not offer external evidence to that point.

4. For an account of the publishing history of the “Theodicaea” and its critical neglect, see Motter, Writings, pp. 317-21. Quotations from the “Theodicaea Novissima” and from Hallam's “On Gabriele Rossetti's Dante Theories” are taken from this edition.

5. Eleanor Bustin Mattes, In Memoriam: The Way of a Soul (New York: Exposition Press, 1951), p. 21.

6. Hallam to W. E. Gladstone, 17 June 1830; quoted in Writings, no page number.

7. See, especially, “Sonnet Written in the Pass of Glencoe” and “Written in View of Ben Lomond,” Writings, pp. 51-52.

8. Quoted from Hare's introductory essay in John Sterling's Essays and Tales by Bernard Reardon, From Coleridge to Gore: A Century of Religious Thought in Britain (London: Longman, 1971), p. 61, n. 2. See also Frederick Denison Maurice, The Life of Frederick Denison Maurice, ed. Frederick Maurice, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1884), 1:45-60, and E. S. Shaffer, “Kubla Kahn” and The Fall of Jerusalem (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1975), pp. 17-61.

9. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, in the Formation of a Manly Character, 1rst American ed. from the 1rst London ed. (Burlington, Vermont: Chauncy Goodrich, 1829), p. 156.

10. Aids to Reflection, p. 245.

11. Ibid.

12. See Hallam's “Essay on the Philosophical Writings of Cicero,” Writings, pp. 157-61; “On Gabriele Rossetti's Dante Theories,” Writings, p. 261.

13. Hallam to Emily Tennyson, 22 January 1832; quoted in Writings, p. 199.

14. Tennyson to Henry Hallam, 14 February 1834; quoted in Enoch Arden and In Memoriam, ed. Hallam Lord Tennyson, Eversley Edition (London: Macmillan, 1908), p. 258. Quotations from In Memoriam are taken from this edition.

15. See Hallam Lord Tennyson, Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1897), 1:44, n. 1—cited hereafter as Memoir.

16. Memoir, 1:50. The dating of many individual sections of the poem can be nothing more than tentative, because Tennyson stubbornly discouraged chronological analysis of the poem during his lifetime. I have depended upon statements in the Memoir, the Eversley edition of Enoch Arden and In Memoriam, Mrs. Mattes' “Chronology” in In Memoriam: The Way of a Soul, pp. 111-25, and evidence offered by Christopher Ricks, ed., The Poems of Tennyson (London: Longmans, 1969).

17. Tennyson warned that “the ‘I’ is not always the author speaking of himself, but the voice of the human race speaking thro' him” (Enoch Arden and In Memoriam, p. 204). But, in the sections discussed here and especially in those referring to Hallam's mind and character, that distinction does not appear to be important.

18. Section XXXVI, however, reads very much like such a leap, and Mrs. Mattes has assigned the composition of this section to 1835, admitting that “for this dating there is only the internal, tentative evidence that these sections [XXXIV-VI] reflect Wordsworth's views on immortality and on the relation ‘natural religion’ and the Christian revelation, and that Tennyson was reading ‘a great deal of Wordsworth’ in 1835 (Memoir, 1:151)” (In Memoriam: The Way of a Soul, p. 117). Attempting to refute “internal, tentative evidence” through other internal, tentative evidence is a dangerous game, but the explicitly Christian confidence of XXXVI does appear to be a significant advance beyond the speculations of XXXIV-V, and there is nothing comparable to it in the other sections which can be assigned with any assurance to this period. On the internal evidence of that confident expression, XXXVI seems to belong to a later stage in the poem's composition.

19. Quoted in Memoir, 2:464.

20. Tennyson to Emily Sellwood, 1839; quoted in Memoir, 1:170.

21. Quoted in Enoch Arden and In Memoriam, p. 265. Tennyson recognized that his preoccupation with the survival of personality was in conflict with the “kind of waking trance” described in section XCV (see Enoch Arden and In Memoriam, pp. 217-18). He did not resolve the conflict.

22. Quoted in Enoch Arden and In Memoriam, p. 209, n. 1.

23. See also sections LXXX and XXXVII.