[In the following essay, Moore discusses Tennyson's In Memoriam, focusing on the author's struggle with questions of faith and his search for mystical reunion with the deceased Arthur Henry Hallam.]

We are still wont to think that Tennyson must abide our question because he confused personal confession and public prophecy. In Memoriam especially, with its wavering progression from a deeply-felt religious doubt to the proclamation of a universal faith, has been dismissed as a typical instance of Victorian rationalization which no longer speaks to us. Yet with all the commentaries, analyses, and keys which have appeared since 1850 the poem still eludes consensus. In its own time readers generally accepted it as a poem of faith and rejoiced with Kingsley to find “in the science and history of the nineteenth century new and living fulfillments of the words which we learnt at our mothers' knee.”¹ But the praise was not unanimous. Some critics thought the doubt which they saw there made the faith less than “honest,” and objected to Tennyson's admitting it even into the concluding sections.² Nevertheless, for half a century In Memoriam brought solace to worried and struggling believers, many of whom did not perceive and were therefore not troubled by its ambiguities, while those readers who did perceive them were comforted by the commentaries which, like A. C. Bradley's, charted the triumphal journey from doubt to faith.³

The critical reaction came when religion began to lose its hold on the individual conscience. Carlyle's loss of the traditional faith in which he had been reared produced what William James called “the sick shudder of the frustrated religious demand.”⁴ Leslie Stephen, writing about his own similar loss a generation later, confessed, “I did not feel that the solid ground was giving way beneath my feet, but rather that I was being relieved of a cumbrous burden. I was not discovering that my creed was false, but that I had never really believed it.”⁵ As the need for spiritual support diminished, or was satisfied by other supports, religion as an institution began to lose its social value. Separated from ethics it did not have to be regarded as the indispensable basis of all moral conduct. One could be both happy and good, apparently, without benefit of faith. In Memoriam, therefore, with its intense spiritual struggles seemed to an agnostic to be a somewhat foolish and misguided poem, the faith attained therein meaningless or insincere. It is not without irony that Tennyson was rescued from the neglect in which most Victorians languished during the early decades of this century when it was discovered that those struggles had produced some of his best poetry. It mattered little that in the hands of Sir Harold Nicolson the rescue involved splitting Tennyson in two and throwing away the worser half: the “prosperous Isle-of-Wight Victorian” wrote pontifical verse lacking both inspiration and sincerity, but elsewhere, in the lines of the “lonely, frightened spirit crouched broodingly over thoughts of death … the mystical genius of Tennyson comes upon one in a flash, and there can be no question of the reality of his emotion and his impulse.”⁶ Later T. S. Eliot's critical authority made it more than ever impossible to read In Memoriam as a poem of faith, though he did defend it against the charge of insincerity.⁷ All that remained to be said in behalf of Tennyson's long struggle for faith was that he had fought a good fight and remained a good doubter.

The critical wheel had thus turned full circle. From being hailed as a noble poem of faith despite its admixture of doubt, In Memoriam came to be defended as a moving poem of doubt despite its unconvincing faith. In both cases large portions of the whole were ignored or ruled out of consideration. Each judgment reflected special views of its age: post-Darwinian and post-Freudian. But it may be asked whether such partial readings of the poem can be said to do it justice. Having discovered the genuineness of the doubt, perhaps we should re-examine the faith, should ask whether in the light of that “mystical genius” of Tennyson's which Nicolson recognized both are not admissible and, indeed, wholly reconcilable, when the poem is seen in relation to the phenomenon of religious conversion.

In its external, formal aspect In Memoriam is a public utterance, a conspicuous attempt to reconcile opposing tendencies which seemed to Tennyson and his contemporaries to be threatening the foundations of English society. Viewed thus it is fundamentally an effort to save religion from science by adducing a Coleridgean philosophy of religious experience against the demonstration of God from nature, or by reconciling the nineteenth-century belief in the progress of the species with the Christian concept of salvation.⁸ Beneath this great argument lies Tennyson's intimate response to Hallam's death cast into language which expresses his shifting thoughts and moods over a period of seventeen years. Though he employed many of the familiar terms and concepts of his time he also, in a remarkable way, conveyed the mystical quality of his own vision and experience. T. S. Eliot remarks that Tennyson's “surface” (by which he means technical skill) “is intimate with his depths.” But for Eliot, Tennyson's depths are depths of sorrow; Tennyson is “the saddest of all English poets” (p. 203). It is strange that the poet of “the moment in the rose-garden” should have taken no notice of Tennyson's similar moment in the garden at Somersby. The trance-like experience of Section XCV marks the climax of the poet's efforts to commune with the spirit of Hallam; it provides a nexus between the disparate elements of doubt and faith; and it tends to draw the poem away from the tradition of the pastoral elegy, in which the turning point, “He is not dead, he lives!,” is so often merely a rhetorical device, and associates the poem with another kind of tradition altogether, that of religious conversion. Jerome H. Buckley pointed out in 1951 that “Though loosely organised as an aesthetic whole, In Memoriam closely followed the general pattern of nineteenth-century conversion” in the way it “traced the soul's growth from unshadowed hope through the denial of life itself towards the final conquest of doubt and despair.”⁹ But he did not explore the work from this point of view except to demonstrate that in it and similar works the pattern of conversion often found expression in certain recurring images of fire and water, of which Teufelsdroeckh's “Baphometic Fire-Baptism” in Sartor Resartus is probably the clearest example.

As the stock-in-trade of Methodism, conversion became immensely popular in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Against a background of philosophic skepticism on the one hand and of the hard Calvinist creed of damnation on the other, there developed a widespread feeling that a saving faith was attainable by everyone, whatever his status, through a sudden electrifying emotional and spiritual crisis, and thousands were “reborn” in a quick and easy way that sensitive minds distrusted. Herr Teufelsdroeckh observed sardonically that such conversions represented “a new-attained progress in the Moral Development of man; hereby has the Highest come home to the bosoms of the most Limited; what to Plato was but a hallucination, and to Socrates a Chimera, is now clear and certain to your Zinzendorfs, your Wesleys, and the poorest of their Pietists and Methodists.”¹⁰ Teufelsdroeckh's own conversion belongs to a different order, for it was not primarily an acceptance of Christ nor was it induced by a heavy burden of sin, but rather by a fear that God did not love the world. With some romantic dramatization, Teufelsdroeckh repeats in its main outlines Carlyle's own spiritual crisis experienced on Leith Walk in 1821.¹¹ Not a doctrinal conversion, like Newman's adoption of a creed and submission to authority, this was rather, like Mill's reading of Marmontel, a spontaneous awakening, an intellectual and emotional discovery of new truths which though not self-induced answered a personal need and, in Carlyle's case, was strongly mystical. Moreover, it was attended by the two conditions which seem to characterize the intellectual species of conversion. The first of these conditions is a state of mind which for reasons known or unknown has become unbearable and is rationally irremediable. The occasion may be a fear for one's own security, or virtue, or a broader concern for the spiritual welfare of society or the cosmos. The second is the occurrence of a climactic experience during which a power greater than oneself is felt to be taking control and directing one towards a solution.¹² Often this does not complete the conversion but only begins it. Sometimes it is followed by a prolonged period of doubt which delays and modifies the faith ultimately attained. Sometimes there are repetitions of the original experience. Even John Wesley's conversion, which he dated precisely at a quarter of nine, 24 May 1738, was followed by fears and agonizing doubts.

Both of these conditions are to be found in In Memoriam. The grief and “wild despair” which are now so much admired cannot be endured indefinitely. Hallam's death, the “soul-shaking event” in his otherwise undramatic life, had exacerbated Tennyson's already brooding and hypersensitive temperament to a state of depression which no mere passage of time can remedy. Domestic and personal troubles before 1833 had prepared the way: the death of his father in 1831, the mental breakdown of his younger brother Edward and the opium-addiction of Charles in 1832, and Croker's harsh treatment of his 1832 Poems in the Quarterly Review. After 1833 the burden of family business fell on his shoulders when Frederick left on a pleasure trip to Italy. He was concerned for his mother, for his sister Emily who had been engaged to Hallam, and for Septimus who was also, for a time, threatened with a mental breakdown. The unfriendly reception of his poems continued to worry him, and kept him from venturing to publish another volume. There was little money to support the large family, and when his grandfather died in 1835 the Somersby Tennysons were, as always, slighted.¹³ Upon these depressing circumstances the loss of Hallam came like the jolt which turns already sub-freezing water to ice: “Break, thou deep vase of chilling tears, / That grief hath shaken into frost!”¹⁴ Preoccupied already with the bearing of science on religion, he could not fail to find in this personal loss a demonstration of the finality of death and the remoteness of God.

It is significant that there is no sense of sin, or sinfulness, in Tennyson's unhappiness. He fears divine neglect, not divine punishment (LII), and grieves because he has been left desolate, “widowed,” and alone, with no sure prospect of reunion with the one in whom he had found not only affection but support in a world growing increasingly harsh and alien. With Hallam gone even Christ seemed distant. During that first Christmas of 1833 he thought of Christ only in connection with the miracle of Lazarus which occurred long ago (XXXI), and the second Christmas did not banish his sense of loss.¹⁵ There is some tendency to identify Hallam and Christ in spirit, to think longingly of Christ as a human savior (XXXII, XXXVI) who, as he saved Lazarus and inspired Mary's perfect faith, may with “mortal sympathy” and love save Hallam in the other world; but this develops slowly. Meanwhile, God is remoter still. Although His existence seems sure, His goodness and love cannot be seen in His creation of nature “red in tooth and claw” (XXXIV, LV, LVI). However self-centered his despair, Tennyson's concern for the immortality of all souls is real: “Else earth is darkness at the core, / And dust and ashes all that is” (XXXIV). The threat of current evolutionary ideas to the doctrine of immortality was equally real, and the more disturbing because it did not help, as Lionel Stevenson remarks, to read into these ideas a spiritual principle of successively higher incarnations of the soul. For he had still to persuade himself (and others) in a more than purely rational and logical way that man's “inward sense of immortality is stronger and truer than the inconsistent physical forms of the universe.”¹⁶ Even after the intellect was satisfied the heart still felt the loneliness and grief of personal loss: “We cannot hear each other speak” (LXXXII). It remained for an intuitive conviction of immortality to be achieved through an actual, possibly a mystical, contact with the spirit of the lost one.

This brings us to the second necessary condition of conversion. “Tennyson was at heart a mystic,” wrote Sir Charles Tennyson, “with a capacity for true mystical experience.”¹⁷ Many evidences of this may be found in his poems, from among the earliest (“Armageddon,” 1823-24) to the latest (“The Ring,” 1889). In Memoriam contains many signs of it, and in an important group of sections, from XC through XCIV, there is a plea for a vision of Hallam which is answered with the trance-like experience which ultimately gives him the assurance he has sought.

Everything had led up to this episode. The opening sections, with their mood of enforced calm expressing the poet's loss and initial shock, the subsequent despair and confusion, nevertheless constitute a developing (if not orderly) series of lucid pictures of the past (the yew tree, the house on Wimpole Street) and the imagined present (the ship returning, anticipations of its arrival, the burial) which are threaded with his increasing anguish. As efforts to control it, or divert it, or reason it away, fail, the larger significance of Hallam's death becomes clearer, creating fresh fears, and Tennyson comes to feel the need of some sort of contact with Hallam's spirit to revive his belief in man's immortal spirit and in love as the universal law (XLII).

In response to this need, but also as a direct expression of Tennyson's sensibility, there are mystical intimations throughout the poem, from the earliest sections, in which he hopes that he may “reach a hand thro' time to catch / The far-off interest of tears”; and in the presence of the old yew tree he feels himself disembodied: “I seem to fail from out my blood / And grow incorporate into thee.” In Section XII he again describes himself as leaving his own body, “I leave this mortal ark behind, / A weight of nerves without a mind,” and hasting over seas to the ship which brings the dead Hallam home he can only “circle moaning in the air” and return “to where the body sits, and learn / That I have been an hour away.” This half-dream, half-trance leads to the fear, in Section XVI, that his grief has unbalanced his mind, “made me that delirious man / Whose fancy fuses old and new, / And flashes into false and true.” When with the oscillating movement of the poem calm returns, and the first Christmas brings a degree of resignation (“'Tis better to have loved and lost …”), he begins to search for convincing evidence of immortality in man's life (“My own dim life should teach me this, / That life shall live for evermore” [XXXIV]), or in the “tale” of the life and resurrection of Christ (XXXVI), or, hopefully, within his own consciousness. Truths lie “Deep-seated in our mystic frame,” but “darkly-joined.” Perhaps in the same way that there existed the Wordsworthian possibility of receiving intimations of our life before our birth, in “A little flash, a mystic hint,” so there is the possibility of communication between souls in the afterlife and here.

If such a dreamy touch should fall,
          O turn thee round, resolve the doubt;
          My guardian angel will speak out,
In that high place and tell thee all.

(XLIV)

This seems to anticipate, though as yet without much hope, a communion with the spirit of Hallam in some sort of trance or vision, and it is clear that Tennyson attaches immense importance to such experiential evidence in the resolution of his doubts. Soon he gives more direct expression to his desire to be made aware of Hallam's accrual presence: “Be near me when my light is low … Be near me when the sensuous frame / Is rack'd with pangs that conquer trust … when my faith is dry … when I fade away” (L); then more generally:

Be near us when we climb or fall:
          Ye watch, like God, the rolling hours
          With larger other eyes than ours,
To make allowance for us all.

(LI)

If Hallam remains distant it is not, Tennyson believes, because of his own human shortcomings, the despair, the sensuous nature, the spiritual dryness, of which he is humbly aware, for he is confident his love for Hallam will redeem him (LII).

Meanwhile rational consolation (“Oh yet we trust that somehow good / Will be the final goal of ill” [LIV]) yields inevitably to rational depression: “O for thy voice to soothe and bless! / What hope of answer, or redress? / Behind the veil, behind the veil” (LVI). The next large group of sections (LVII-LXXXIX) dwells on wavering moods of resignation and despair, while the anniversary of Hallam's death (LXXII), the second Christmas (LXXVIII), and the New Year (LXXXIII), pass him by without much helping or hurting. He did dream of a “mystic glory” shining on Hallam's grave (LXVII), but in this dream (“kinsman thou to death and trance”) his efforts to see Hallam's features are frustrated and confused,

Till all at once beyond the will
          I hear a wizard music roll,
          And thro' a lattice on the soul
Looks thy fair face and makes it still.

(LXX)

Still, there is no communion or sign of recognition in such dreams or fancies, and the poet reaches a state of emotional equilibrium (LXXXII, LXXXIII) in which, blaming no person or thing (“I wage not any feud with Death”), he seem resigned to his “low beginnings of content” (LXXXIV), and grateful at least for the memory and friendship of Hallam. It is in such a state of resignation that, according to James,¹⁸ religious conversions are likely to occur. It is the turning point both of the poem and of the poet's hopes. At the very bottom of his fortunes he realizes that there is “in my grief a strength reserved.” There are “mighty hopes that make us men.” And though “in dear words of human speech / We two communicate no more,” he has a premonition that “I shall prove / A meeting somewhere, love with love” (LXXXV). Still sad, he now thinks less about himself, more about Hallam's days at Cambridge (LXXXVII) and at Somersby (LXXXIX), and this leads directly into a group of sections (XC-CVI) in which Tennyson invokes the spirit of Hallam: “Come, beauteous in thine after form, / And like a finer light in light” (XCI), culminating in the unmistakable awareness of his spirit in Section XCV.

The trance occurs in a large group of sections in which Tennyson describes the circumstances leading up to his mystical experience and records its immediate consequences. In Section XC he begins to think about what he desires so much, namely the return of Hallam. But the subject is, at this stage, general and hypothetical. If men could return from death they might not be welcomed back either by their wives, now “in other hands,” or by their sons, jealous of their inheritance; but these wives and sons have not felt love. Tennyson, who has, can only cry to Hallam, “Come thou back to me!,” and in the next section (XCI) he asks Hallam to appear either in body or in visible spirit. Ever prone to doubt, Tennyson now fears that he might distrust such a vision (XCII) as a “canker of the brain,” and might discredit the phantom's spoken prophecies as mere presentiments. “I shall not see thee,” he writes in the next section (XCIII). Therefore, he begs Hallam to “Descend, and touch, and enter” so that he may feel his presence. Yet, this may be impossible, since (XCIV) one needs a peaceful and serene spirit to hold communion with the dead.

It is clear that up to this point Tennyson has been preparing both himself and us for the climactic experience which is told in Section XCV. Providing an effective change of pace and tone, this section is the richly descriptive narrative of one summer evening at Somersby (1835), spent singing old songs with the members of his family and watching the approach of night, when, after the others had gone to bed and he was alone, he reread Hallam's letters, and suddenly felt a presence.

So word by word, and line by line,
          The dead man touched me from the past,
          And all at once it seem'd at last
The living soul was flashed on mine.
And mine in this was wound, and whirl'd
          About empyreal heights of thought,
          And came on that which is, and caught
The deep pulsations of the world.

(XCV)

It is well known that until 1878 the phrases “The living soul” and “mine in this” read “His living soul” and “mine in his.” For twenty-eight years this section of the poem described a personal contact with Hallam's spirit, a contact which by itself could indeed resolve all doubts and restore one's faith in immortality. It was a record of genuine mystical experience, a clear sign from a beloved spirit in the next world which, because it effected, or seemed to effect, the dispelling of all religious doubts, had all the earmarks of a conversion comparable in its way with St. Paul's.

Among critics Section XCV has occasioned both perplexity and indignation. Why, if he wanted to record a conversion, did Tennyson make emendations which removed the personal element, and throw the whole thing into doubt? And why did he wait so long to make them? John D. Rosenberg writes, “If ‘The living soul’ is not Hallam's, the lines are without meaning”; for Paull F. Baum they cause the whole section and with it the whole poem to fail as a clear and honest work of art.¹⁹ It is certainly true that the earlier version is the clearer. We may well ask why it did not satisfy Tennyson. Certainly the bereaved poet desired an intimate, even a physical contact. But we have seen that he has already rejected this possibility (XCII, XCIII) in favor of a vaguer if no less real spiritual one. We have no way of knowing whether the contact described in the earlier version is what he thought he had felt, or what he wanted to think he had felt. In time he was convinced that it suggested a more personal contact than the trance justified. There is, indeed, ample meaning in the amended version if it is understood that Hallam's spirit is not in a state of isolation but exists as an all but indistinguishable part of the universal spirit of the Deity. The poet, reading Hallam's letters, feels in his trance the touch of this spirit, which conveys a comforting sense of the closeness of his friend and convinces him for the moment that they have touched. It is this necessary ambiguity that the final version seems meant to convey: the contact suggested both Hallam and the Deity. The poem cannot be called dishonest unless its maker is here compromising his belief or distorting his actual experience. Tennyson seems to have tried, rather, to correct the record. To James Knowles he said later that what he felt was “perchance the Deity … my conscience was troubled by ‘his’. I've often had a strange feeling of being bound and wrapped in the Great Soul” (Knowles, p. 186). Nor does it seem just to commit the poem to clarity, if it deals with an experience that by its very nature is beyond clarity, and if its parts are consistent with the whole. The idea of Hallam merged in the Deity is no afterthought but finds grateful expression in many of the later sections (e.g., XCVII, CXXII, CXXIV, CXXX):

          To feel thee some diffusive power,
I do not therefore love thee less …
          Tho' mix'd with God and Nature thou,
I seem to love thee more and more.

(CXXX)

Though at the expense of clarity, the emendations enlarge and universalize the whole experience of the trance. They also introduce an admixture of doubt into the very middle of the newly-awakened faith which, religiously and psychologically, is not unprecedented. The faith of the saints was made arduous by doubt. Quite apart from the emendations, however, Tennyson's trance was followed immediately by doubt: “At length my trance / Was cancell'd, stricken through with doubt.”²⁰ It is not surprising that its end should have been sudden, the return to reality a shock. “Sometimes,” he told Knowles, “I get carried away out of sense and body, and rapt into mere existence, till the accidental touch or movement of one of my own fingers is like a great shock and blow and brings the body back with a terrible start” (Knowles, p. 169). It is the nature, not the actual occurrence of the experience that the poet doubts. Tennyson is not, in fact, so worried as his critics are by the uncertainty of his trance-contact, but seems content not to know whether it was Hallam or “some higher name” he has touched, or both. The last four stanzas of this section, which Bradley calls “one of the most wonderful descriptive passages in all poetry” (p. 192), express a mood of exalted calm.

That the experience belonged to the phenomenon of conversion is clear from what follows. Through it his doubts have been scotched, his faith has become stronger. He thinks now of another, perhaps Hallam, who fought against doubt to a stronger faith (XCVI); he reflects that honest faith in these times does not exclude doubt, that even the strongest faith “Dwells not in the light alone / But in the darkness and the cloud, / As over Sinai's peaks.” His own faith was intuitive, based not only on “the unreality of the material and the reality of the spiritual world but on the mystic's power of spiritual communion and the capacity of the human mind to transcend the material and in some sense apprehend infinity” (Six Tennyson Essays, pp. 110-111). Rational argument had failed as the basis for religious evidence, but there was the appeal to experience, the same appeal which is found in Coleridge, Carlyle, and Maurice, and earlier in Kant and Schleiermacher: “the heart / Stood up and answer'd ‘I have felt’” (CXXIV). The “Ring out wild bells” passage (CVI) celebrates his victory, and he resolves to cease his introspective grief and, after Goethe and Carlyle, accept sorrow as a strengthener of the soul. In Section CXX he compares his struggles with St. Paul's; he recalls the climactic trance of Section XCV, repeating his uncertainty about its precise nature (“Oh, wast thou with me, dearest, then, / Whilst I rose up against my doom”), and asks Hallam to return (“be with me now, / And enter in at breast and brow”) in another mystical experience

          As in the former flash of joy,
I slip the thoughts of life and death;
And all the breeze of fancy blows,
          And every dewdrop paints a bow,
          The wizard lightnings deeply glow,
And every thought breaks out a rose.

(CXXII)

No second trance occurs, but Tennyson is not despondent on this occasion either, for his memory of the first has enabled him to accept the ordinary state of human ignorance. Having transcended this state once, in a “flash of joy,” he is strong enough to withstand all rational doubts and natural terrors:

And all is well, tho' faith and form
          Be sunder'd in the night of fear;
          Well roars the storm to those that hear
A deeper voice across the storm.

(CXXVII)

Natural terrors will remain, though deprived of their old effect because of the “deeper voice” which came to him from a divine source “across” (not in, or through) the storm.

Yet the repeated “all is well” of Sections CXXVI and CXXVII, mentioned along with war, social injustices, and dying aeons, conveys a profound sense of sadness that so much evil should be prerequisite to eventual good. The triumph is muted. Such faith as he has won leaves great questions unanswered: Why so much evil? Why is our vision so limited? Like religious skeptics of all ages, he “would see a sign.” He had felt one, and he was grateful for the evidence which despite “The freezing reason's colder part” enabled him to believe that “all is well.” The attitude is not very different from T. S. Eliot's in “Little Gidding”: “Sin is Behovely, but / All shall be well, and / All manner of thing shall be well.” Beginning with doubt and fear, Tennyson ends with doubt and hope. It should not be giving him too much the benefit of his doubts to say that this attitude is not dated, but will have relevance for as long as man separates faith and reason.²¹

It is at this point that we can see why In Memoriam is neither a poem wholly of faith nor one wholly of doubt. Its faith admits an ignorance of the whole truth and leaves room for doubt; its doubt, having made room for itself after Hallam's death, had to make room for faith after the trance of Section XCV. Love and hope are the bonds. For if religious faith is necessarily incomplete, so is science. A faith which is at once intuitive and intellectual will not be attainable until faith and knowledge meet. Tennyson hoped that with evolutionary progress man would ultimately find that religion and science reveal one and the same truth.²² Meanwhile, one of the strengths of the Christian religion, as Sir Thomas Browne had observed, is its absence of logical proof. If miraculous visions occurred daily we should depreciate or ignore them, like the Israelites who “made their gods of gold, / Altho' the trumpet blew so loud” (XCVI). Not that doubt is to be nurtured; it is to be endured, like a hairshirt, as a chastener of one's faith. Far from falling back on the standard affirmations of his day,²³ Tennyson chose a limited faith which required courage to sustain. The position taken in the concluding sections and the Prologue was his final position. That he never went beyond it has been lamented and deplored, but considering its dependence on the progress of the species, it is a position which hardly admits of much advancement in a lifetime.

When all is said, In Memoriam remains one of the most egoistic of elegies. The selfless sorrow felt for Hallam's premature death is soon obscured by Tennyson's tragic bereavement, by his anguished desire for sensible contact with Hallam, and by his prolonged efforts to establish the idea of a loving deity. The poem would be more autobiography than elegy if Tennyson had not contrived so well to work his experience into the traditional elegiac form. It was, I think, the trance that enabled him to use the elegiac turning-point, “He is not dead, he lives!,” with conviction, to combine the pattern of elegy with the pattern of conversion. Yet he departs more from that of elegy. As Bradley observed, the turning point is not so clearly marked as in Lycidas and Adonais. Indeed it is hard to locate at all (p. 30). But this is because Tennyson is following his own experience rather than poetic tradition. The announcement that “he lives!,” accordingly, had to be delayed until after the period of uncertainty and doubt that succeeded the trance, and as with Carlyle, whose “Everlasting Yea” had to follow the long “Centre of Indifference,” his faith evolved slowly.

But if In Memoriam is not pure elegy, neither is it a straight record of experience. Tennyson arranged the elegies to lead from the moment of mystical contact through a slow recovery to a faith that stopped short of completion, at least in the Wesleyan sense. Brought up in the evangelical tradition, he came naturally by his knowledge of conversion and its various stages. For his final construction of the whole it was his own much less dramatic conversion that supplied the pattern, but even this was modified to admit discourses and arguments that had little to do with that experience. The result is a form which, like the envelope-quatrain, he made uniquely his own. His success, considering the difficulties he encountered, is almost without precedent. Few long poems achieve such a synthesis of disparate parts. During the long period of its composition Tennyson gained not only artistic development²⁴ but religious and emotional maturity. We have seen that along with the many strands of thought and feeling that run through it—reflections on science, on nature, on society, on the relationships between this life and the next, on the Christmases and the anniversaries, and on his concern for his relatives and friends—there is the clear strand of mystical experience leading up to and beyond the gentle but significant trance in the garden at Somersby which enabled him to recover his faith, determined the peculiar leaven of doubt in that faith, and, finally, enriched the inner character of the poem itself.

Notes

1. Edgar F. Shannon, Tennyson and the Reviewers (Cambridge, Mass., 1952), p. 149.

2. Strongest objections to Tennyson's theological doubts came from the High Church English Review which scolded him for having no faith at all, and from the Thunderer's Times which denounced “the enormous exaggeration of the grief,” and the tone of “amatory tenderness”; further recognition of the serious doubt in the poem can be seen where it is recommended as spiritual therapy for the bereaved, e.g., by Lewes writing in the Leader: “All who have sorrowed will listen with delight to the chastened strains here poured forth in In Memoriam” (Shannon, pp. 142, 149-157).

3. A Commentary on Tennyson's In Memoriam, 3rd ed. (London, 1936), pp. 36-43. Among the many which preceded Bradley's (originally published in 1901) were F. W. Robertson, Analysis of Mr. Tennyson's “In Memoriam” (London, 1862); Alfred Gatty, A Key to Tennyson's “In Memoriam” (London, 1881); John F. Genung, Tennyson's “In Memoriam”: Its Purpose and Structure (London, 1881); and Elizabeth R. Chapman, A Companion to “In Memoriam” (London, 1888). For a recent analytical and structural study of the poem see Eleanor B. Mattes, In Memoriam: the Way of a Soul (New York, 1951).

4. Will to Believe and Other Essays (New York, 1927), p. 42.

5. Some Early Impressions (London, 1924), p. 70.

6. Tennyson (London, 1923), pp. 14, 27.

7. Eliot, in Essays Ancient and Modern (London, 1936), favored discarding the faith which “is a poor thing” and keeping the doubt which “is a very intense experience”; but he insisted that to be adequately understood the poem must be read entire (pp. 182-188). Following Eliot, Samuel C. Burchell, in “Tennyson's Dark Night,” South Atlantic Quarterly, LIV (1955), thinks the twentieth century first to appreciate In Memoriam as an expression of anguish and doubt: “There is a concreteness in the pessimism and despair of Tennyson and In Memoriam, and it is something for which we can have great sympathy … after a period of being a schoolboy's medicine and a clergyman's platitude, In Memoriam now finally merits the serious attention of modern critics” (p. 81).

8. See Graham Hough, “The Natural Theology of In Memoriam,” Review of English Studies, XXIII (1948), 244-256; and John D. Rosenberg, “The Two Kingdoms of In Memoriam,” Journal of English and German Philology, LVIII (1959), 228-240.

9. The Victorian Temper (Cambridge, Mass., 1951), p. 87.

10. Sartor Resartus, ed. C. F. Harrold (New York, 1937), p. 198.

11. See my “Sartor Resartus and the Problem of Carlyle's Conversion,” PMLA [Publications of the Modern Language Association], LXX (1955), 662-681.

12. For more detailed analysis of conversion see William James, Varieties of Religious Experience (London, 1902), pp. 189-258; A. D. Nock, Conversion (Oxford, 1933), pp. 1-16, 254-271; and Robert H. Thouless, The Psychology of Religion (Cambridge, 1923), pp. 187-224. Among the class of spontaneous, or involuntary, conversions, James distinguishes the moral conversion, involving little or no intellectual readjustment, from the fuller, spiritual one which involves far-reaching intellectual and emotional changes. These vary in three main respects: the state of consciousness out of which they arise, the nature of the crisis itself, and the effects of the crisis. The inductors may be a feeling of personal sinfulness, weariness of self (accidie), or the fear of a godless world. (For Carlyle, Mill, and Tennyson, the crux was not a burden of sin, or even the loss of belief in God, but the lack of moral, rational meaning in the universe and human life.) Though sometimes gradual the crisis is more often instantaneous, attended by trance or vision: and the effects are a feeling of peace and harmony, a perception of truths not known before, and an enhanced view of the objective world (pp. 248 ff.). There is an interesting discussion of “The Metaphysics of Conversion” by R. H. Hutton in his Contemporary Thought and Thinking (London, 1894), I, 369-376.

13. Charles Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson (New York, 1949), pp. 105-154. See also R. W. Rader's “Tennyson in the Year of Hallam's Death,” PMLA, LXXVII (1962), 419-424, for a study, using fresh materials, of Tennyson's inner grief and outer behavior in 1834.

14. Sec. IV; see Thomas Bayne, “Carlyle and Tennyson,” N & Q [Notes and Queries], 7th ser., XI (1891), 204.

15. Sec. LXXVIII. Though few readers doubt the depth of his grief, some have wondered whether it was quite healthy for a man to grieve so long for another man, as if there were a decent maximum as well as a decent minimum for mourning. Paull F. Baum's view, in Tennyson Sixty Years After (Chapel Hill, 1948), is that “the composition of these elegies [became] a kind of habit and the death of Hallam a kind of convenience to the muse” (p. 116), but this deliberately ignores the early and lasting association in Tennyson's mind of Hallam's death with the distressing problem of man's ultimate destiny.

16. Lionel Stevenson, Darwin Among the Poets (Chicago, 1932), p. 89.

17. Six Tennyson Essays (London, 1954), p. 96. See also James Knowles, “Aspects of Tennyson,” Nineteenth Century, XXXIII (1893), 169, 186. According to Sir Charles, Tennyson was not a complete mystic but “possessed in some degree the power mystics have claimed through the centuries, to establish immediate communication … between the spirit of man, entangled among material things, and … God” (p. 71). Tennyson believed that he possessed this power and told both Tyndall and Knowles how he could induce trance-states by concentrating on his own name (Alfred Lord Tennyson, A Memoir, by His Son [London, 1897], II, 473-474). He described it also in “The Ancient Sage.” This has led some critics, e.g., Robert Preyer, “Tennyson as an Oracular Poet,” Modern Philology, LV (1958), 250, to dismiss his mystical experience as self-hypnosis. That it is larger than this, and unforced, seems evident from its presence throughout his poetry. The experience described in In Memoriam, as we shall see, is spontaneous. He distrusted the current cult of spiritualism, and was self-conscious about his own modest capacity, protesting to Tyndall: “By God Almighty, there is no delusion in the matter! It is no nebulous ecstasy, but a state of transcendent wonder, associated with absolute clearness of mind” (A Memoir, II, 473-474).

18. James cites the apathy and exhaustion of Teufelsdroeckh on the Rue de l'Enfer. Tennyson's mood of resignation and acceptance, bringing a certain relief, invites the mystical contact: “So long as the egoistic worry of the sick soul guards the door, the expansive confidence of the soul of faith gains no presence. But let the former faint away, even but for a moment, and the latter can profit by the opportunity” (p. 212).

19. Rosenberg, p. 234n; Baum, pp. 307-308. While granting beauty in many of the lyrics Baum accuses Tennyson of “perverting” his poem; he should not have attempted to “arrange” them at all. Further, his glossing of “The living soul” as “The Deity, maybe” betrays a “weakness inherent in Tennyson's character … we have a right to expect some sort of clear statement: either it was the Deity—for the purposes of the poem, of course—or it was not” (p. 307).

20. Sec. XCV. I take it that “cancell'd” does not mean repudiated but, rather, brought so suddenly to an end that Tennyson could not be sure of either the nature or the identity of the spirit whose presence he had felt. Bradley concludes: “Probably at the moment of the experience he did think his friend's soul was present, but thereafter never felt any certainty on the subject” (p. 191n). But this uncertainty did not “cancel” the growing certainty, stemming from this experience, that his plea for contact with Hallam had somehow been granted.

21. In his Tennyson, the Growth of a Poet (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), Jerome H. Buckley also sees the trance as effecting Tennyson's recovery of faith: “his experience has given him the certitude that ‘science’ could not establish and therefore could not destroy. Though unable to sustain his vision, the ‘I’ of the poem finds his mystical insight the surest warrant for spiritual recovery.” After comparing Tennyson's faith with Pascal's (“who likewise trusted the reasons of the heart which reason could not know”) and with Kierkegaard's existentialism (“which similarly balances the demands of the inner life against the claims of nineteenth-century ‘knowledge’”), he concludes that it had genuine relevance and importance in a Victorian England which was finding all dogmatic positions increasingly vulnerable. Jonathan Bishop, in “The Unity of ‘In Memoriam’” (Victorian Newsletter, No. 21 [Spring 1962], p. 13, n. 7) agrees.

22. Sec. CXXVIII, and the Prologue; also A Memoir, I, 323.

23. This indictment still persists. See Jacob Korg, “The Pattern of Fatality in Tennyson's Poetry,” VNL, [Victorian Newsletter] No. 14, (Fall 1958), pp. 8-11.

24. For an excellent study of the maturing of Tennyson's conception and mastery of his poetic art during these years, see E. D. H. Johnson, “In Memoriam: The Way of the Poet,” VS [Victorian Studies], II (1958), 139-148.