[In the following essay, August discusses Tennyson's depiction of faith in terms of nineteenth-century scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's The Phenomenon of Man, concluding that while some critics condemn In Memoriam for failing to adequately portray faith, Tennyson is actually offering a radically modern depiction of it.]

“In Memoriam can, I think, justly be called a religious poem … because of the quality of its doubt. Its faith is a poor thing, but its doubt is a very intense experience.”¹ Thus, in the early years of this century did T. S. Eliot state the case for reading In Memoriam as a poem of doubt veneered by an inadequate faith. By calling the poem's faith “a poor thing,” Eliot apparently meant two things. First, the faith was not deeply professed by Tennyson himself: “Tennyson's contemporaries … may have been taken in by it,” Eliot says, “but I don't think that Tennyson himself was, quite: his feelings were more honest than his mind” (p. 187). And, second, the faith was poor because serious-thinking men today could see through its contradictions. “The hope of immortality,” Eliot argues, “is confused (typically of the period) with the hope of the gradual and steady improvement of this world” (p. 186). Eliot's two points are related: the poem's faith is a poor thing because Tennyson was half aware that he had compromised his religious beliefs with the Philistine doctrine of material progress.

In one form or another these objections to the poem's faith have been leveled at In Memoriam since its publication. As early as the 1850's Matthew Arnold was reading it as a poem of doubt. In “The Scholar-Gipsy” (ll. 182-186), he drew a gloomy portrait of the author of In Memoriam:

                              … and amongst us one,
          Who most has suffered, takes dejectedly
His seat upon the intellectual throne;
          And all his store of sad experience he
                    Lays bare of wretched days.(2)

For Arnold, the poem's faith was too poor a thing to cure the strange disease of modern life.

In the twentieth century, Harold Nicolson argued that the real In Memoriam was to be found in the original, heart-wrung elegies lamenting Hallam's death, and not in “the theological treatise on the conflict between faith and doubt, religion and dogma, belief and science.”³ Hoping to make Tennyson palatable to a recalcitrant generation, Nicolson directed attention away from the “outdated” faith to the poignant lament for Hallam. He urged the reader to “forget the delicate Laureate of a cautious age; the shallow thought, the vacant compromise. … Let us recall only the low booming of the North Sea upon the dunes; … the cold, the half-light, and the gloom” (p. 306).

Later critics have not been kinder to the poem's faith.⁴ E. D. H. Johnson feels that Tennyson's alienated vision is falsified by In Memoriam's triumphant conclusion. Only half aware of the inadequate compromise he had effected, Tennyson “chooses to believe,” according to Johnson, that he has “brought his poetry into tune with the spirit of the age.”⁵ Robin Mayhead, hostile to Tennyson as an artist, apparently regards it as a historical curiosity that anyone took the poem's faith seriously.⁶ Even a sympathetic critic like Valerie Pitt winces over “Tennyson's half-comprehending and totally unconvincing reconciliation of the religious and the scientific conceptions of the universe.”⁷ Summing up the case against the poem's faith, George O. Marshall in the recent Tennyson Handbook states that In Memoriam no longer serves its purpose “of bolstering faith in the meaning of life.”⁸ Quoting Eliot on the quality of the poem's doubt, Marshall concludes: “And so it seems to the twentieth century, which regards Tennyson as much more pessimistic than his contemporaries thought him to be” (p. 124). In short, the poem's faith is a poor thing.

This alleged inadequacy in the poem should be faced squarely. Tennyson intended the poem to portray a convincing resolution of doubt by faith. He called In Memoriam “the way of a soul,” which was supposed to portray not only “the different moods of sorrow” but also “my conviction that fear, doubts, and suffering will find answer and relief only through Faith in a God of Love.”⁹ If the poem's faith is a poor thing, then In Memoriam is badly flawed because it does not achieve the resolution that it is so obviously trying for. Moreover, its worth is diminished if present-day readers can discover nothing but antiquarian value in its faith. The faiths embodied in The Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost have relevance to modern man (as Dorothy L. Sayers and C. S. Lewis have so ably demonstrated),¹⁰ and clearly their value to us is thereby enhanced. About In Memoriam, therefore, the question should be honestly raised: can twentieth-century men who have lived through two world wars, Auschwitz and Hiroshima, Korea and Vietnam, still take seriously Tennyson's belief in progress and his hope of immortality? The question is not whether all men can share Tennyson's faith (for that is clearly impossible), but whether liberally minded men can accord it respect. Or, must modern readers reject the faith of In Memoriam as a poor thing, a shabby compromise between traditional religion and a belief in material progress?

This article proposes that the faith of In Memoriam is anything but a Victorian curiosity. On the contrary, it foreshadows a recent and dynamic strand of twentieth-century religious thought, perhaps best expounded by the priest-paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Linking Tennyson's name with Teilhard's will no doubt seem ludicrous to many. What can “the stupidest of English poets” have in common with “the Aquinas of the Atomic Age”? And yet, just as surely as Tennyson anticipated the religious doubt that Charles Darwin was to precipitate upon the Victorian era, so also did he anticipate the shape of the faith that Teilhard was to forge in the twentieth century from his synthesis of religion and science. Moreover, the way in which Tennyson prepares the reader to accept the poem's faith is similar to that used by Teilhard in his masterwork The Phenomenon of Man. In both thought and strategy, then, there is a bond between the two men.¹¹

Viewed in the light of Teilhard's work, the faith of In Memoriam can be seen more clearly for what it is—a faith so radically modern that many critics, thinking in more conventional terms, have mistakenly dismissed it as a poor thing.

II

Putting In Memoriam side by side with The Phenomenon of Man reveals their agreement on three crucial points: the importance of seeing the human phenomenon in the light of recent scientific knowledge, the nature of doubt that afflicts modern man, and the shape that belief must take if man is to survive. Often, what Tennyson as poet portrays in particular and personal terms is what Teilhard as scientist discusses in general ones. Finally, both works attempt in a similar way to awaken the reader's assent to their new vision of man.

In Memoriam is one of the few poems in which an attempt is made to see man as a biological phenomenon with a past, present, and future. Teilhard, at the start of The Phenomenon of Man, stresses the need for men to base their thought on the realities of the human phenomenon; either man will see, Teilhard says, or he will perish.¹² Tennyson, studying works like the Principles of Geology, the Vestiges of Creation, and the Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy, was making this effort to see the phenomenon of man as contemporary science revealed it. In In Memoriam he is acutely aware that man's biological past stretches backward into the dim origins of life, that this planet is but a tiny globe spinning through an immeasurable universe, and that time and space are not comfortably tailored to man's measure:

                    They say,
The solid earth whereon we tread
In tracts of fluent heat began,
                    And grew to seeming-random forms,
                    The seeming prey of cyclic storms,
Till at the last arose the man.(13)

Tennyson, of course, does not have Teilhard's more advanced, firsthand scientific knowledge. Like most Victorians, he “thinks of science as entirely inductive and empirical; he has no inkling of the extent to which later science will be deductive and conceptual.”¹⁴ He is uncertain, moreover, how the different species originated (Darwin's famous study was not published until nine years after the poem was), and he holds a somewhat confused concept of embryonic development.¹⁵ These vagaries, however, never eclipse the essential accuracy of his scientific view. Tennyson, as A. C. Bradley noted in 1929, is the only poet “to whose habitual way of seeing, imagining, or thinking, it makes any real difference that Laplace, or for that matter Copernicus, ever lived.”¹⁶ When Tennyson asks us in In Memoriam to “contemplate all this work of Time” (cxvii.1), he is urging only what he himself has done throughout the poem.

The immediate result of this effort to see is a paralyzing doubt about the meaning of human existence. This doubt, recorded so vividly in In Memoriam, is the same malady described in The Phenomenon of Man. Teilhard points out that anxiety is the price modern man pays for seeing the world anew: “For our mind to adjust itself to lines and horizons enlarged beyond measure, it must renounce the comfort of familiar narrowness” (p. 225). To his credit, Tennyson had renounced the familiar narrowness of conventional concepts of the universe. But the result of this daring is evident in In Memoriam's terrifying fear that man is an insignificant event in a purposeless universe. Teilhard calls this fear “the malady of space-time.” “The whole psychology of modern disquiet,” he says, “is linked with the sudden confrontation with space-time. … In the first and most widespread degree, the ‘malady of space-time’ manifests itself as a rule by a feeling of futility, of being crushed by the enormities of the cosmos” (pp. 225-226). There could be no better description of the doubt pervading In Memoriam, especially Sections lv and lvi where Tennyson desperately wonders: “Are God and Nature then at strife, / That Nature lends such evil dreams?” (lv.5-6).¹⁷ So careless of the individual life, Nature implies that a man's individual existence is negligible. Worse, Nature has wiped out “a thousand types,” implying that the whole human species is a foredoomed joke. In this absurd world, man—who can perceive the awful absurdity—is an evolutionary monstrosity:

                    Dragons of the prime,
That tare each other in their slime,
Were mellow music match'd with him.

(lvi.22-24)

Faced with such a horror, Tennyson can only exclaim: “O life as futile, then, as frail!” (lvi.25).

It is a mistake to argue that “despite numerous references to scientific ideas, despite [Tennyson's] anxiety to keep up to date with scientific progress, science has little or nothing to do with his best and most characteristic poetry.”¹⁸ On the contrary, the much-admired quality of doubt in In Memoriam has everything to do with science. Tennyson's doubt springs directly from “living” a boundless universe. “Which of us,” Teilhard asks, “has ever in his life really had the courage to look squarely at and try to ‘live’ a universe formed of galaxies whose distance apart runs into hundreds of thousands of light years? Which of us, having tried, has not emerged from the ordeal shaken in one or other of his beliefs?” (p. 226). Tennyson tried to live the kind of universe Teilhard describes. Once, responding to his brother's fears about attending a dinner party, Tennyson remarked, “Fred, think of Herschel's great star-patches, and you will soon get over all that” (Memoriam, i, 20). In “The Two Voices,” Tennyson's small, still voice of Despair constantly alludes to man's insignificance in a boundless universe.¹⁹ Early in In Memoriam, Sorrow voices the worst fear of the space-time malady when she whispers that the stars “blindly run” (iii.5). Clearly “one or other” of Tennyson's beliefs had been badly shaken. The gloom of the lonely Lincolnshire poet, so rightly admired by Nicolson and others, stems partly from Tennyson's attempt to look squarely at and live Herschel's great star-patches.

The doubt of In Memoriam, of course, had particular as well as cosmic origins, and here again there is a parallel with Teilhard's experience. Arthur Hallam's apparently senseless death precipitated Tennyson's spiritual crisis by painfully straining the poet's belief in spiritual evolution. How could Nature be aiming at the evolution of finer men like Hallam when it wantonly destroyed the living Hallam in his youth? In Memoriam is largely the way of a soul trying to cope with the meaning of this death. This kind of experience was well known to Teilhard, and his work is at least partly a response to death's challenge to faith. When his friend Davidson Black died suddenly in 1934, Teilhard wrote:

Today I am deeply aware of the call to rescue the world from the blackness of its materialism. You already know that Dr Black has died. The apparent absurdity of that untimely end, the noble but blind acceptance of this tragedy by his friends here, the complete absence of “light” on the poor body lying in that cold room at the Peiping Union Medical College—all these lent a leaden quality to my sadness, and revolted my spirit.

Either there is an escape from death—somewhere—for an individual's thought, for his self-consciousness, or else the world is a hideous mistake. And if it is, then there is no use in our going on. But, since the uselessness of going on is an idea intolerable to everyone, the alternative must be to believe. To awaken this belief shall be, now more than ever, my task. I swear it. I have sworn it on the mortal remains of Davy, that more than brother of mine.²⁰

In another letter, the priest wrote: “I miss Black very much. Missing him is like a shadow, or an emptiness that I carry wherever I go.”²¹ The similarity to the sorrow of In Memoriam should be obvious, for Tennyson also was aware that if there was not some escape from death, then the world is a hideous mistake.

Both Tennyson and Teilhard agree that if men cannot believe in survival after death, then human life, activity, and the entire evolutionary process will grind to a halt. If there is no chance that “life shall live for evermore,” Tennyson says, then “earth is darkness at the core, / And dust and ashes all that is” (xxxiv.3-4). Teilhard argues that “the radical defect in all forms of belief in progress, as they are expressed in positivist credos, is that they do not definitely eliminate death” (pp. 269-270). Attacking those “positivist and critical” thinkers who say “that the new generation, less ingenuous than their elders, no longer believes in a future and in a perfecting of the world,” Teilhard asks: “Has it even occurred to those who write and repeat these things that, if they were right, all spiritual movement on earth would be virtually brought to a stop? … Even on stacks of material energy, even under the spur of immediate fear or desire, without the taste for life, mankind would soon stop inventing and constructing for a work it knew to be doomed in advance” (pp. 230-231). As a basic wage for human effort, man needs to know, first, that there can be a “suitable outcome” to evolution and, second, that “there is for us, in the future, under some form or another, at least collective, not only continuation but also survival” (pp. 232-233). Without such a belief in progress and survival, man is doomed. “If progress is a myth,” Teilhard writes, “that is to say, if faced by the work involved we can say: ‘What's the good of it all?’ our efforts will flag. With that the whole of evolution will come to a halt—because we are evolution” (p. 231).

This paralysis of human effort is exactly what afflicts Tennyson in In Memoriam. As usual, the poet depicts in personal terms what the scientist has discussed in general ones. The very first poem of In Memoriam presents this paralysis:

I held it truth, with him who sings
          To one clear harp in divers tones,
          That men may rise on stepping-stones
Of their dead selves to higher things.
But who shall so forecast the years
          And find in loss a gain to match?
          Or reach a hand thro' time to catch
The far-off interest of tears?

The preterite “held” indicates that Tennyson can no longer share Goethe's belief in spiritual progress and survival.²² Who can forecast the years and see whether evolution will have a suitable outcome? Who can honestly affirm that a man can evolve spiritually in this life and the next, catching the far-off interest of his tears and rising thereby to higher things? Or, even if there is material progress, if there is no survival, what comfort is it to the man living now to know that the yet-unborn will find a gain in his loss? Under such conditions, Tennyson can only give himself over to the calm despair and wild unrest that live in woe (xi, xv, xvi). His whole life becomes virtually paralyzed, with only “the sad mechanic exercise” of verse-making to numb his pain (v).

The belief that there is no human survival is portrayed by both Tennyson and Teilhard as a disabling fear that death may be stronger than love. Again, Tennyson expresses this fear at the very outset of In Memoriam: in the latter half of the first poem, he says:

Let Love clasp Grief lest both be drown'd,
          Let darkness keep her raven gloss.
          Ah, sweeter to be drunk with loss,
To dance with Death, to beat the ground,
Than that the victor Hours should scorn
          The long result of love, and boast,
          ‘Behold the man that loved and lost,
But all he was is overworn.’

With the passage of time, Tennyson guesses that his love for Hallam will ebb away and that the dead man will not survive even in the poet's affections. Love, Teilhard says, “becomes impoverished with remoteness in space—and still more, much more, with difference in time. For love to be possible there must be co-existence” (p. 269). But precisely because Tennyson cannot at first conceive that the dead Hallam is coexistent, he is appalled at the prospect of love's impoverishment as time draws the two men farther apart. Teilhard speaks of love as spiritual energy, but if this energy is perpetually diminished by time, man will suffer what Teilhard calls the “sickness of the dead end—the anguish of feeling shut in” (p. 228). Once more, man will sense that the “earth is darkness at the core, / And dust and ashes all that is.”

The cure for this sickness lies in faith. But faith in what? Certainly not popular Christianity, with its literal reading of Genesis, its antiquated theologies, and its fierce sectarianism. That kind of Christianity cannot cure the space-time malady because (among other reasons) it refuses to see the phenomenon of man squarely. But neither Tennyson nor Teilhard rejects Christianity because some forms of it are too narrow. Instead, both men grope toward a renewed understanding of Christianity: they search for what Newman calls legitimate developments of Christian doctrine. In both Tennyson and Teilhard the shape of these developments is strikingly similar.

For one thing, both men believe in progress. So too do many other people. The important thing, however, is that Tennyson and Teilhard mean much the same thing by progress, namely spiritual growth or what Teilhard calls “hominisation”—which he defines as “the progressive phyletic spiritualisation in human civilisation of all the forces contained in the animal world” (p. 180). Too often Tennyson is regarded as the Lord Macaulay of Victorian verse, hymning the imminent brave new world of technological prosperity. But for Tennyson progress means primarily something else:

Let knowledge grow from more to more,
          But more of reverence in us dwell;
          That mind and soul, according well,
May make one music as before,
But vaster.

(Prologue, ll. 25-29)

Tennyson does not disparage material progress, and he does want knowledge to grow from more to more. But he introduces another, more important concept of progress: the growth of reverence for some ideal manhood—in this case, the “Strong Son of God” of the Prologue. In short, Tennyson looks toward the spiritual perfection of man's humanity: “the valiant man and free, / The larger heart, the kindlier hand” (cvi.29-30).²³ Teilhard's concept of progress is similar. He too wants knowledge to grow from more to more; in fact, the increase of knowledge is one of the prerequisites of human progress (pp. 248-250). But he also believes that knowledge must contribute to increased hominisation. To Teilhard, progress also means increased reverence for the highest, holiest manhood. As man learns to direct his own evolution, Teilhard says, he must choose to grow into what he worships (pp. 283-285). For Teilhard, as for Tennyson, this ideal manhood is found in Christ.

Thus, both Tennyson and Teilhard believe that evolution has shifted from a biological natural selection to a spiritual growth which is partly man-controlled. In man, evolution has become conscious of itself, Teilhard says, and “for an elementary part we hold it in our hands, responsible for its past to its future” (p. 225). It is up to men to perfect the process of hominisation. This belief is precisely what Tennyson has in mind in passages like this:

          Arise and fly
          The reeling Faun, the sensual feast;
          Move upward, working out the beast,
And let the ape and tiger die.(24)

(cxviii.25-28)

To both Tennyson and Teilhard, then, progress means hominisation, that is, men rising on stepping stones of their dead selves to higher things.

Both agree that man's spiritual growth cannot take place in isolation. As In Memoriam progresses, Tennyson comes to realize that sorrowing in solitude cuts him off from the life of the world: he learns he must escape the Palace of Sorrow just as surely as the artist's soul must escape the Palace of Art. When, after much struggle, he finally declares in Poem cviii.1-3,

I will not shut me from my kind,
          And, lest I stiffen into stone,
          I will not eat my heart alone,

he has made an important decision to return to life with others here on earth. For Teilhard, isolation is a blind alley to be avoided: “No evolutionary future awaits man except in association with all other men” (p. 246).²⁵ He condemns ideas of egocentric, racial, or national survival and exalts the concept of mega-synthesis, “the ‘super-arrangement’ to which all the thinking elements of the earth find themselves … subject” (p. 244; italics mine).

Both men recognize that spiritual progress will suffer setbacks and will take a long, long time. Both men feel that discouragement at the slow rate of improvement is, in Teilhard's words, “a feeling to be overcome” (p. 254). Contrary to what some critics have written, Tennyson does not believe that Utopia is just around the corner:

No doubt vast eddies in the flood
          Of onward time shall yet be made.

(cxxviii.5-6)

The consummation of the earth is a far-off, divine event.²⁶ Teilhard also recognizes that man has a long way to go, and he warns against feeling discouraged because of this: “After all half a million years, perhaps even a million, were required for life to pass from the pre-hominids to modern man. Should we now start wringing our hands because, less than two centuries after glimpsing a higher state, modern man is still at loggerheads with himself?” (p. 255). For Tennyson also, discouragement is a feeling to be overcome. By refusing to shut himself from his kind, he takes a step to free himself from the anxiety that comes of realizing that “mankind is as yet on one of the lowest rungs of the ladder” (Memoir, i, 324). In Poem cxxvii.1-4, he has achieved the overview that banishes discouragement:

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.

Both men are concerned with the problem of finding a faith for the here-and-now. Despite their attention to the goal of evolution, neither forgets that faith is valid only if it works in the present to nourish living men in their endeavors for the future. Once men believe that evolution can have a suitable outcome, then they can begin to work toward that outcome. With his new-found faith, Tennyson finds that he can turn from writing elegies in solitude and can move on (like the “rude swain” of Milton's Lycidas) to “fresh Woods and Pastures new.”²⁷ In Poem cvi.19-20, Tennyson calls upon the New Year bells to “Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes, / But ring the fuller minstrel in.” Similarly, Teilhard realizes that without a particular kind of faith mankind will “go on strike,” refusing the effort needed to move evolution forward (p. 305). His concern is that men should see the necessity for striving in the present, and his work is dedicated to curing the paralysis of will caused by the space-time malady. Tennyson makes the same point in Poem cxxviii: if the changes wrought by time are merely deceptions posing as progress, then man could only scorn the whole evolutionary process. But because Tennyson can see that all is “toil cöoperant to an end” (l. 24), he can return confidently to fruitful activity.

There are, then, profound similarities between the faiths of Tennyson and Teilhard. They both believe that progress must now be spiritual, that man is at least partly responsible for the direction evolution will take, that man must grow in conjunction with all other men, that the process of hominisation has only begun, and that discouragement at this thought must be overcome for man to work fruitfully in the present.

We are now in a position to recognize one of the fundamental misunderstandings that led T. S. Eliot to judge the faith of In Memoriam as a poor thing. Tennyson, Eliot believes, tried to effect a compromise between “the religious attitude” and the Philistine belief that a materialistic Utopia was near at hand.²⁸ But, Eliot continues, Tennyson sensed that God and Mammon could not both be served and was not quite taken in by the very compromise he tried to effect. Eliot writes: “There is evidence elsewhere—even in an early poem, Locksley Hall, for example—that Tennyson by no means regarded with complacency all the changes that were going on about him in the progress of industrialism and the rise of the mercantile and manufacturing and banking classes. … Temperamentally, he was opposed to the doctrine that he was moved to accept and to praise.”²⁹

Clearly, Eliot has misjudged Tennyson's concept of progress. Tennyson never connected human perfectibility with “the progress of industrialism and the rise of the mercantile and manufacturing and banking classes.” Nor did he ever believe that an imminent Utopia was taking shape in “all the changes that were going on about him.” Poem cvi (“Ring out, wild bells”) is almost a summary of Tennyson's idea of progress, and it is hardly a celebration of industrialism and the rise of the Philistines. Eliot has failed to distinguish between the Philistine “doctrine” of materialistic progress which Tennyson opposed and the “doctrine” of spiritual progress that he accepted and praised. This failure to distinguish between the two concepts of progress undermines Eliot's conclusion about the quality of faith in In Memoriam.

But to return to Tennyson and Teilhard. As persons, both men share significant characteristics. Both have a strong dash of the mystic, both have a lifelong interest in science, and both see the world from this double perspective. Both men renounce “systems” of thought. Tennyson's famous statement in the Prologue (ll. 17-18), “Our little systems have their day; / They have their day and cease to be,” is paralleled by Teilhard's disclaimer in the Foreword to The Phenomenon of Man: “So please do not expect a final explanation of things here, nor a metaphysical system” (p. 35). Later he says, “Besides, I know the danger of trying to construct a lasting edifice with hypotheses which are only expected to last for a day, even in the minds of those who originate them” (p. 39).³⁰ Both men are acutely aware that knowledge grows from more to more. In both men, however, this relativity is balanced by faith in an Absolute. Both look to the future and see man evolving toward a “crowning race … No longer half-akin to brute” (Epilogue, ll. 128-133), or—to use Teilhard's words—toward the “hyper-personal” at Point Omega.

Both In Memoriam and The Phenomenon of Man are concerned with a faith beyond the forms of faith. Neither work seems overtly permeated by Christianity, but both are (in the authors' opinions) valid developments of it. Both men believe in a cosmic Christianity and a Christ beyond the merely sectarian Christs. Throughout The Phenomenon of Man Teilhard speaks primarily as a religiously neutral sage, naming the evolutionary goal as the “hyper-personal” or “Omega.” Only in the Epilogue does he equate Omega with a Christ who is both the historical Jesus and the cosmic Person toward whom the whole creation moves. Tennyson sometimes speaks of the evolutionary goal in Christian terms, such as, “the Christ that is to be” (cvi.32), but more often he too uses religiously neutral terms, such as, “the Power in darkness whom we guess” (cxxiv.4). The Prologue to In Memoriam, written last, is the most openly Christian part of the poem, yet it too shies away from sectarian Christianity and points instead to a Christ who is both personal and cosmic. Tennyson's Prologue, however, is no more an inconsistency or an afterthought than Teilhard's Epilogue.

The Prologue to In Memoriam has especially puzzled many readers, but an understanding of Tennyson's cosmic Christianity helps to clarify some of its difficulties. Critics have objected to the Prologue for frequently contradictory reasons. For some, like Henry Sidgwick, “Faith, in the introduction, is too completely triumphant” (Memoir, i, 304). For others, it is not nearly triumphant enough, particularly in lines like: “Thou madest man, he knows not why, / He thinks he was not made to die” (ll. 10-11; italics mine). To some critics, the Prologue is too Christian: “There is nothing especially Christian in [the Epilogue's] creed of a dimly defined Deity and the progress of the universe toward some remote goal He purposes,” writes Eleanor Mattes, “whereas the Prologue is in the form of a prayer to Christ, ‘Strong Son of God, immortal Love,’ the Word who was God's agent in the Creation.”³¹ To others, the Prologue is not Christian enough, especially when Tennyson apparently hesitates to affirm Christ's dual nature: “Thou seemest human and divine” (l. 13; italics mine). Dissatisfaction with the Prologue has caused some critics to dismiss it as an afterthought or as a muddled attempt to quiet Emily Sellwood's fears about Tennyson's religious beliefs.

But is there such confusion in the Prologue? And is there really such a discrepancy between its Christianity and the faith expressed in the rest of the poem? Not if we recognize that Tennyson is praying to a cosmic Christ—and not to the sectarian Christs preached by the churches of his day. Tennyson's Christ-that-is-to-be is a Christ to be found “when Christianity without bigotry will triumph, when the controversies of creeds shall have vanished” (Memoir, i, 326). Tennyson's Christ is larger than the “little systems” of nineteenth-century sectarianism can picture.

The paradox remains, however: even while affirming Christ's dual nature in the Prologue (Christ is both the “Strong Son of God” and “the highest, holiest manhood”), Tennyson avoids a clear-cut assertion of the doctrine by saying that Christ seems human and divine. The contradiction is partly resolved when we see that Tennyson's hesitancy reflects his abhorrence of theological squabbling, especially about the Incarnation. “He disliked discussion on the Nature of Christ,” Tennyson's son reports, “‘seeing that such discussion was mostly unprofitable, for none knoweth the Son but the Father’” (Memoir, i, 326). Furthermore, Tennyson was aware, as Newman was, that Christian doctrine would develop through the centuries. He knew that men might come to understand the Incarnation differently than most nineteenth-century Christians did. For Tennyson, “the forms of Christian religion would alter; but … the spirit of Christ would still grow from more to more ‘in the roll of the ages’” (Memoir, i, 326).³² The Prologue is the prayer of a man who poises belief with an awareness that his form of belief is not the last word on the subject.³³

To say this, however, is not to say that Tennyson is hopelessly muddled in his belief. T. S. Eliot, who holds this view, writes that Tennyson “was desperately anxious to hold the faith of the believer, without being very clear about what he wanted to believe: he was capable of illumination which he was incapable of understanding. The ‘Strong Son of God, immortal Love’, with an invocation of whom the poem opens, has only a hazy connexion with the Logos, or the Incarnate God.”³⁴ Examined closely, Eliot's complaint is basically that Tennyson's belief is not defined in familiar, first-century terms and is therefore vague. But Tennyson was aware that first-century definitions of faith were sometimes derived from outmoded concepts of the world and needed to be re-expressed in modern terms for modern man. Teilhard explains the situation in this way:

During the first century of the Church, Christianity made its decisive entry into human thought, boldly assimilating the Jesus of the Gospels to the Logos of Alexandria. We cannot fail to see the logical sequel to this gesture and the prelude to a similar success in the instinct which is today impelling the faithful, two thousand years later, to adopt the same tactics—not, this time, with the ordering principle of the static Greek kosmos, but with the neo-Logos of modern philosophy—the evolutionary principle of a universe in movement.³⁵

Tennyson in In Memoriam is following that instinct to assimilate the historical Jesus with the neo-Logos of an evolving universe. The “hazy connexion” between the Christ of Tennyson's Prologue and the first-century Logos is Eliot's misunderstanding of the direction in which Tennyson's belief is tending: like Teilhard, Tennyson is trying to transpose belief out of “a field of thought that most modern people have left behind them.”³⁶

The Prologue, and indeed the whole of In Memoriam, indicates that Tennyson could have assented more readily to Teilhard's cosmic Christ than to the Christs preached by nineteenth-century clergymen unaware of or hostile to the world-view opened up by science. In Tennyson's day, little attention was devoted to the cosmic aspects of Pauline and Johannine teaching, and few—if any—theologians attempted to synthesize this cosmic Christianity with the recent scientific discoveries.³⁷ The result was, of course, that the nineteenth century produced no Aquinas to whom Tennyson could play Dante. In Memoriam was intended to be “a kind of Divina Commedia” (Memoir, i, 304), but Tennyson was well aware that no Angelic Doctor had appeared to reconcile “faith and form … sunder'd in the night of fear” (cxxvii.1-2).

Ultimately, Tennyson and Teilhard see the universe in a process of Christogenesis, that is, an attempt to give birth to Christ again by evolving AfterChrists—to borrow Hopkins' word. There is little doubt that the three Christmases which serve as crucial landmarks in In Memoriam form a leitmotif emphasizing the new birth of Christ with which the universe is in labor. Like St. Paul in Romans viii.18-27, Tennyson and Teilhard see Nature suffering birth pangs, trying to give birth to a Christ-that-is-to-be, a “Jesus, the centre towards whom all moves.”³⁸

Both Tennyson and Teilhard see love as the spiritual energy that moves creation toward its new birth. Teilhard argues that love has a long evolutionary history: “If there were no internal propensity to unite, even at a prodigiously rudimentary level—indeed in the molecule itself—it would be physically impossible for love to appear higher up, with us, in ‘hominised’ form” (p. 264). Teilhard sees love as the sign of successful “involution” in the universe: love is “the more or less direct trace marked on the heart of the element by the psychical convergence of the universe upon itself” (p. 265). Thus, human love—in all its varied forms—is the highest evolutionary manifestation of the energy that drives creation toward universal convergence and is itself the sign of that movement.

Again, what the scientist speaks of in general terms, the poet portrays in personal ones. When Tennyson speaks of love, he usually means his own love for Hallam: this is the love that he fears in Poem i will be drowned unless it clings to grief. But as Tennyson becomes increasingly aware in In Memoriam that the dead Hallam is (to use Teilhard's term) “co-existent” with himself, he discovers that love is stronger than death. His love has not been impoverished by remoteness in space or difference in time, as the experience of Poem xcv demonstrates. With this awareness, Tennyson can again believe in a cosmic love that can bring about a suitable outcome to evolution:

The love that rose on stronger wings,
                    Unpalsied when he met with Death,
                    Is comrade of the lesser faith
That sees the course of human things.

(cxviii.1-4)

Tennyson has come to recognize that his own love for Hallam is a particular, direct trace of the universal psychical convergence. If his love for Hallam can survive death and can grow into “vaster passion,” then there is hope that the larger, cosmic pattern of convergence can be fulfilled: “Behold, I dream a dream of good, / And mingle all the world with thee” (cxxix.11-12).

It is no “semantic sleight-of-hand” when Tennyson, in the Prologue, identifies “immortal Love” with Christ.³⁹ Just as Dante sees in his love for Beatrice a reflection of and a participation in the Love that moves the sun and other stars, so also Tennyson comes to see in his love for Hallam a reflection of and a participation in the immortal Love toward whom the whole creation moves. For Tennyson, love is ultimately a Person—Christ in the Prologue, God in the Epilogue. And here again he agrees with Teilhard. For Teilhard, Omega is in the final analysis a “supremely attractive” Person, whom he names God-Omega (p. 287) and Christ (p. 297).

The identification of Love with Christ in the Prologue of In Memoriam should awaken us to hints that appear in the body of the poem: if we read carefully, we can see Tennyson working toward this identification within the poem. (The process resembles that in Newman's Apologia: at the outset, we know that Newman is going to identify truth with Roman Catholic doctrine, and as we read, we watch him working toward that identification.) Throughout In Memoriam itself, Tennyson focuses on Hallam, but the figure of Christ is always present in the background.⁴⁰ Hallam, Tennyson comes to recognize, is “a noble type” of the ideal man, an AfterChrist or BeforeOmega, who awakens Tennyson to “the highest, holiest manhood” found in Christ. It is fitting, therefore, that Hallam's birthday be celebrated as another Christmas, as it indeed is in Poem cvii. As AfterChrist, Hallam shares the human-divine nature (cxxix.5); as BeforeOmega, he reconciles God and Nature, thereby indicating in his own self that evolution can have both a suitable outcome and a focus (cxxx). The dead Hallam thus shows forth the divine love to Tennyson just as the dead Beatrice did to Dante. Like the just man in Hopkins' sonnet, Hallam “acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is— / Christ.”⁴¹ Teilhard explains the process this way: in order for man to love Omega, this supremely attractive Prime Mover Ahead must somehow be present to man now. Space and time impoverish love, Teilhard says; therefore, “to be supremely attractive, Omega must be supremely present” (p. 269). In In Memoriam Tennyson discovers that Christ-Omega is supremely present in Hallam. Thus, to both Tennyson and Teilhard, the focus of evolution is at times in sight even now, and this vision of the end, present even now, enables men to continue striving toward the one far-off divine event at Point Omega.

III

In addition to the similarity of vision shared by Tennyson and Teilhard, there is also a similarity of technique. Neither man attempts merely to argue the reader into assent. Both are aware, with Newman, that “the whole man” is involved in Real Assent. Rational or logical arguments can win National Assent, that is, agreement to intellectual propositions. To win Real Assent, the whole man must be engaged and must share the same vision as the writer. This is what both Tennyson and Teilhard attempt to do. In Memoriam has its “structure” of sorts, The Phenomenon of Man has its “rational” framework, but both works recreate experiences which the reader shares. By living through the same experiences as the writer, the reader is slowly led to accept the same conclusions that the writer was forced to accept. There is nothing deceptive about this persuasive technique: the writer uses art to revivify the experience which led him to his faith; the reader, by reading the work, is put through a similar experience and is led to assent (if he can) to the writer's beliefs.

Teilhard is not just a philosopher whose thought can be epitomized. Rather, he is a sage with a vision to communicate. In the Foreword to The Phenomenon of Man he says that his work “may be summed up as an attempt to see and to show what happens to man, and what conclusions are forced upon us, when he is placed fairly and squarely within the framework of phenomenon and appearance” (p. 31). Like the Victorian sages discussed by John Holloway, Teilhard's “main task is to quicken his reader's perceptiveness; and he does this by making a far wider appeal than the exclusively rational appeal. … He gives expression to his outlook imaginatively.”⁴² In Teilhard's book, the reader is given an overview of the phenomenon of man, from its primitive origins in the “stuff of the universe,” to its present spiritual crisis, to its future evolution. This survey, however, is more than just a scientific treatise; it is an artistically constructed narrative told by a skillfully created persona. When, for example, Teilhard concludes a section of his book with the solemn words, “Thought is born” (p. 160), this brief dramatic sentence is a carefully prepared-for climax, designed to awaken in the reader a sense of the awesomeness of what has happened. Images are used to clarify and actualize abstract concepts; some images, like “the great spiral of life,” form leitmotifs. Words are used connotatively as well as denotatively. For example, discussing the “noosphere,” the envelope of thought and culture that man lives in, Teilhard concludes:

With that [awareness of the noosphere] it bursts upon us how utterly warped is every classification of the living world … in which man only figures logically as a genus or a new family. This is an error of perspective which deforms and uncrowns the whole phenomenon of the universe. To give man his true place in nature it is not enough to find one more pigeon-hole in the edifice of our systemisation or even an additional order or branch. With hominisation, in spite of the insignificance of the anatomical leap, we have the beginning of a new age. The earth ‘gets a new skin.’ Better still, it finds its soul.

(p. 182)

Even in translation, the passage bristles with emotion evoked to a great extent by skillful word choices. This is hardly the place for an extended study of the art of The Phenomenon of Man, but any account of the book must recognize that art is a fundamental part of its effort to win the reader's assent.

Similarly, Tennyson uses art to reconstruct his own experiences after Hallam's death. With Tennyson—or, more accurately, with the speaker in the poem—the reader relives the shock of loss, the collapse of faith, the struggle to achieve emotional balance, the slowly dawning awareness of hope and faith, the mystical intuitions, and the final release of returning joy. Tennyson also uses art to show man placed squarely within the framework of phenomenon and appearance. Like Teilhard, he attempts to make us see the work of time. When the poem has been experienced, the reader can understand at least how the speaker has achieved his final faith. But perhaps the reader will also recognize the inherent rightness of that faith. If the poet's vision is valid, if his art is skillful, and if the reader's mind and heart are right, then there is a good chance that poet and reader will be in accord when the poem reaches its conclusion.

In any event, it is time to re-evaluate the quality of faith in In Memoriam. If Teilhard's “work gives our generation the comprehensive view it sorely needs,” as Arnold J. Toynbee says, then the faith of In Memoriam—with its many resemblances to Teilhard's vision—cannot be dismissed as a poor thing.

Notes

1. T. S. Eliot, “In Memoriam,” Essays Ancient and Modern (London, 1936), p. 187.

2. The Poems of Matthew Arnold, ed. Kenneth Allott (New York, 1965), p. 341. See Allott's note to ll. 182-190 identifying Tennyson as the poet referred to in these lines.

3. Tennyson: Aspects of His Life, Character, and Poetry, rev. ed. (Garden City, N. Y., 1962), p. 299. This book was originally published in 1923.

4. Some notable exceptions: Basil Willey, “Tennyson,” More Nineteenth Century Studies: A Group of Honest Doubters (New York, 1966); Jerome Hamilton Buckley, Tennyson: The Growth of a Poet (Boston, 1965); and Carlisle Moore, “Faith, Doubt, and Mystical Experience in In Memoriam,” VS [Victorian Studies], vii (1963), 155-169.

5. The Alien Vision of Victorian Poetry (Hamden, Conn., 1963), p. 21.

6. “The Poetry of Tennyson,” From Dickens to Hardy, ed. Boris Ford (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1958), pp. 243-244, n. 13.

7. Tennyson Laureate (Toronto, 1963), p. 101.

8. New York, 1963, p. 122.

9. Quoted in Hallam Lord Tennyson, Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir, i (New York, 1897), 304-305—hereafter cited as Memoir.

10. See especially Dorothy L. Sayers' introductions and notes to The Comedy of Dante Alighieri the Florentine, trans. Dorothy L. Sayers and Barbara Reynolds, 3 vols. (Baltimore, 1949-62); and C. S. Lewis, Preface to Paradise Lost (New York, 1961).

11. There is no question of “influence” here: Tennyson did not influence Teilhard any more than he influenced Darwin. On Tennyson's anticipating Darwin, see Willey, “Tennyson,” More Studies, p. 87, and Buckley, Tennyson, p. 121.

12. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, tr. Bernard Wall (New York, 1961), p. 31. Unless otherwise noted, all references to Teilhard's writing are to this text.

13. In Memoriam cxviii.7-12. All quotations from Tennyson's poetry are taken from Works, ed. Hallam Lord Tennyson, 6 vols. (New York, 1908).

14. Buckley, Tennyson, p. 276, n. 16.

15. Willey, “Tennyson,” More Studies, pp. 83-84.

16. A Miscellany (London, 1929), p. 31.

17. Throughout the paper Tennyson is referred to as the speaker in the poem. An absolute identification of author and speaker is questionable, however, because the poem is not strictly autobiographical. See Memoir, i, 304.

18. Mayhead, “Tennyson,” From Dickens to Hardy, p. 239.

19. See, e.g., ll. 22-30.

20. Quoted in Claude Cuénot, Teilhard de Chardin, tr. Vincent Colimore (Baltimore, 1965), p. 158.

21. Quoted in Cuénot, p. 158.

22. For the identification of “him who sings,” see Memoir, ii, 391 and n. With the reading of Poem i given here, cf. Lore Metzger, “The Eternal Process: Some Parallels Between Goethe's Faust and Tennyson's In Memoriam,” Victorian Poetry, i (1963), 189-196.

23. Cf. Locksley Hall Sixty Years After, l. 276: “Forward, till you see the highest Human Nature is divine.”

24. Valerie Pitt objects to this passage: “The modern mind can scarce endure this; moral endeavor is not its ideal, and it recognises that the energies of the ape and tiger are not without their place in the higher life of man” (Tennyson Laureate, pp. 113-114). It is difficult to quarrel with generalizations about “the modern mind,” but Basil Willey apparently disagrees with Miss Pitt about it: “We have rightly learned from the nineteenth century that man must make himself, and be the changer as well as the product of his own environment. But we must also learn that if man makes himself wholly in his own image, he may find that like Frankenstein he has created his own destroyer” (“Origins and Development of the Idea of Progress,” Ideas and Beliefs of the Victorians, New York, 1966, p. 39).

    Also, has Miss Pitt confused Tennyson's tiger with Blake's? To Tennyson, the ape and tiger in In Memoriam represent only unreflecting animalism. Is it accurate to see in them energies that have their place in the higher life of man? Do they not function much as Dante's leopard, lion, and she-wolf do in Canto i of Hell, that is, as symbols of what obstructs man in his efforts to climb higher?

    With Tennyson's idea, cf. Teilhard's statement: “See how the animals behave (monkeys, for example, or even certain insects): we see them doing things that are materially culpable, and only need the emergence of a fuller consciousness to become fully reprehensible.” Quoted in Henri de Lubac, Teilhard de Chardin: The Man and His Meaning, tr. René Hague (New York, 1967), p. 101, n. 16.

25. Cf. a canceled section of In Memoriam (originally cxxvii) in which Tennyson calls upon the “Victor Hours” to “fuse the peoples into one” (Memoir, i, 307).

26. The Idylls of the King, describing the deterioration of King Arthur's civilization, is devoted primarily to depicting one such eddy in the flood. In Locksley Hall Sixty Years After, the old man says (ll. 235-236):

    Forward then, but still remember how the course of Time
              will swerve,
    Crook and turn upon itself in many a backward streaming
              curve.

27. Cf. Joseph Sendry, “In Memoriam and Lycidas,” PMLA, lxxxii (Oct. 1967), 437-443.

28. “In Memoriam,” Essays, p. 187.

29. “In Memoriam,” Essays, p. 187.

30. Cf. de Lubac, Teilhard, p. 97: “Moreover, [Teilhard] never achieved a definitive formulation of his thought, nor did he ever claim to provide a complete theological or dogmatic exposition.”

31. In Memoriam: The Way of a Soul (New York, 1951), p. 91. It is interesting to note that while Mrs. Mattes immediately identifies the “Strong Son of God” with the Word of God, or the Logos, T. S. Eliot finds only a “hazy connexion” between the two. See below in text.

32. Cf. Teilhard's “O Christ, ever greater!” See de Lubac, Teilhard, pp. 45-54.

33. Cf. Memoir, i, 309-312, where Tennyson's “reverent impatience of formal dogma” is discussed. Note that Tennyson's attitude is different from poising belief with unbelief, as exemplified in the famous prayer: “O God, if there is a God, save my soul, if I have a soul.”

34. Eliot, “In Memoriam,” Essays, pp. 184-185.

35. Quoted in de Lubac, Teilhard, p. 38.

36. Teilhard de Chardin, quoted in de Lubac, Teilhard, p. 116.

37. See de Lubac, Teilhard, p. 44.

38. Quoted in de Lubac, Teilhard, p. 44.

39. See Pitt, Tennyson Laureate, p. 115.

40. See, e.g., the three Christmases in xxviii, xxix, xxx, lxxviii, civ, and cv; as well as xxxi, xxxii, xxxvi, lxix, and cvi.

41. Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. W. H. Gardner and N. H. MacKenzie, 4th ed. (London, 1967), p. 90.

42. The Victorian Sage (New York, 1965), p. 10.