[In the following essay, Bruns examines the organization of In Memoriam, asserting that the poem's reversals of hope and faith need to be critically explored and understood rather than resolved, as some critics contend.]

For me, the most credible readings of In Memoriam are those that have been concerned less with the unity or totality of the poem than with its variable or heterogeneous nature.¹ In this paper I want to engage this variability once more, not in order to resolve it into an ideal form, but simply to understand its meaning. Although my title predicts a thesis, or a conclusion, my intention is not a tendentious one; rather, it is to think through the peculiar reversals that Tennyson's lyrics force us to undergo at the end of his poem, when our expectations of some kind of generic repose, whether elegiac or comic or whatever, seem less than adequately or conventionally fulfilled. At the same time, however, I want to resist the notion that these reversals are simply instances of the “vacillating state” that was Tennyson's enduring mental or psychological condition. This perception of Tennyson's awkward mental life may be accurate and even interesting, but it can also be a critical nuisance, especially when it combines with our habit of regarding In Memoriam in terms of an imperious ideal of unity. Such an ideal tends to persuade us that the poet's inability (or reluctance) to locate a certain or discernible center in the midst of disorder is a form of aesthetic failure; or, conversely (and worse), it may compel us to break up our experience of reading the poem into explanations of the poem's “hidden” or “unnoticed” or “complex” wholeness.

I begin instead with the assumption that there is nothing wrong with Tennyson's poem or with Tennyson's mind. In Memoriam is admittedly a poem of divergent parts, but I regard this as a phenomenon to be understood, not a problem to be solved or regretted. Tennyson perhaps did not disguise his waywardness as well as other writers might have, but it may also be that the Victorians generally were less anxious about composing heterogeneous works than we are about reading them. In Memoriam has, after all, something of the fugitive character of Ruskin's Modern Painters, or of those loose and baggy monsters of Victorian fiction, or of famous discrete essays gathered into a deceptively single volume. A corollary of this assumption is that we should not conceive of In Memoriam according to the model of a problem-solving mechanism whose operation will either yield or fail to yield a solution, or resolution, or summary intellectual relief. Literary critics seem quietly addicted to this model, which is a short and easy method for describing how the human mind shows its power of reason, and thus they are inclined to think of In Memoriam as a work of emotional or psychological grandeur, rich enough in ideas, but haphazardly so: not a particularly intelligent poem. Yet each lyric is an act of thinking that generates a series or array of meanings, and if it is difficult to find for these meanings a uniform interpretive arrangement, this does not mean that the poem is intellectually flaccid or inadequate to its themes. One could say that the poem proceeds according to a principle of adjacency rather than consistency, but perhaps even the notion of “process” should be left out of account, if only to forestall the expectation that the poem conforms to some complicated principle of development.

I

No doubt In Memoriam was meant (at some point during the composition of its parts) to conform to such a principle. One of Tennyson's “official” responses to his poem was to say it “begins with a funeral and ends with a marriage—begins in death and ends in promise of a new life—a sort of Divine Comedy, cheerful at the close.”² Tennyson was perhaps no better a commentator than any of us, but one may still appreciate his thesis: in rough approximation to a sublime or sacred comedy, In Memoriam begins in chaos and ends with the evocation of a new cosmos, a newly felt order of creation predicated upon the active unity of God and Nature. In the death of Hallam the poet had suffered the shattering of a world once ennobled by the presence of human excellence and harmonized by personal affection, by a sense of belonging or of being at home, but he speaks in the end of a world restored through the inauguration of a love that is no less real or personal for having been diffused throughout a cosmic and impersonal space:

My love involves the love before;
          My love is vaster passion now;
          Though mixed with God and Nature thou,
I seem to love thee more and more.
Far off thou art, but ever nigh;
          I have thee still, and I rejoice;
          I prosper, circled with thy voice;
I shall not lose thee though I die.(3)

(CXXX, 9-16)

The categories of absence and presence, infinite distance and proximity of feeling, are traversed by the energies of love, and on this basis the poet is moved to affirm not only Hallam's immortality and man's but, as “comrade” to this higher faith, God's presence in the world—his presence, less as a personal incarnation within human time than as an immanent and creative power that drives history forward toward a point of coherence and repose: as the famous lines tell us, “all, as in some piece of art, / Is toil cöoperant to an end” (CXXVIII, 23-24). To be sure, this end—the spiritualization of man within the temporal order, his eventual entry into an earthly City of God—is figured mainly as a synecdoche of desire, but this is so because Tennyson's thinking is sanctioned by love. Its content is the theme of hope (a theme we shall be in a position to characterize more precisely later on), in the sense that the poet “sees the course of human things” (CXXVIII, 4), but not from the theoretical standpoint of a philosophy of history, nor from the transcendental standpoint of a Romantic or Yeatsian revelation—totalist visions, as we shall see, that are rich and terrifying in their complications. Instead, he sees “in part” (CXXVIII, 22), as one enlightened by mystery.⁴ For him, the emptiness of profane time is filled with the presence of a sacred meaning, and for the time being—the time of one's life or in real human time—merely to sense this presence is ground enough for hope.

He sees “as one enlightened by mystery”: yet what sort of seeing is this? The idea of mystery is rarely a useful critical concept, because it presupposes an unspeakable distance between experience and interpretation. This distance, however, is precisely what is characteristic of In Memoriam, the more so because Tennyson assumes the sagelike responsibility of constructing a version of what he cannot know: the nature of time and the course of human history. In Memoriam expresses a discontinuity between the poet's response to time and his interpretation of it; or, better, it expresses a difference between lived experience and reasoned sight or transcendent vision. Time is filled with the presence of a sacred meaning, but a presence only, not a product or content of understanding. Its distinctive feature is its irreducibility before the power of explanation. But if time incorporates a dimension that cannot be comprehended in its totality, the poet nevertheless claims to know the pressure of its reality (even as he grows conscious of Hallam's presence), and accordingly he is moved to bear witness, as one filled with hope, to its formal difference from the dimension of ordinary experience. In Tennyson's poem the experience of time is regularly figured as an experience of circularity:⁵ time is the ancient adversary who carries man through the cycle of birth, growth, decay or violence, and death: he is, in Tennyson's striking metaphor, “a maniac scattering dust” (L, 7). It is in part to counter this adversary that Tennyson takes recourse to the model of comedy, which (soberly, as with elegiac restraint) superimposes upon the circularity of temporal experience the saving and mythic patterns of recurrence and renewal, as in the last Christmas sequence:

Be neither song, nor game, nor feast;
          Nor harp be touched, nor flute be blown;
          No dance, no motion, save alone
What lightens in the lucid east
Of rising worlds by yonder wood.
          Long sleeps the summer in the seed;
          Run out your measured arcs, and lead
The closing cycle rich in good.

(CV, 21-28)

But despite this virtue of renewal—despite the repose that the model of comedy might have conferred upon the poet and his poem's ending—Tennyson's desire is to break through the cycle. For him, the hidden form of time is its linearity: in its deepest recesses (in its sacred meaning) time is not repetition but emergence and development, not merely the ceaseless making and undoing of random forms (CXXIII) but formation according to providential design (CXXIV). Interestingly, the one is not cancelled by the other: circularity is not so much opposed to providential design as different from it—adjacent, as though of a different order, but not contradictory. Or, again, Tennyson seeks to interpret time from the standpoint of its end, not in terms of a repetition or a version of the past. Time in this sense is history—the gradual emergence of a meaning that is present in time but impossible to fully grasp, even as the meaning of a narrative informs and secretly compels a course of events, but becomes accessible to understanding only by virtue of the narrative's completion.⁶ Thus one may know the presence of meaning in history without knowing how that meaning is to be spoken. The best that one can do is to construct for history an intelligible form: insofar as history is providential, the linearity of time may be figured vertically rather than horizontally. It is an ascension in and through time as through successive orders of nature:

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

(CXVIII, 25-28)

II

It is necessary, however, to balance this schematic or formalized account of the poet's “lesser faith” (CXXVIII, 3)—his movement, so to speak, from nature to history, or from the circularity of temporal experience to a developmental construction of time—by a critical and more searching account of how this faith is actually engaged by the poet's imagination. Love opens the poet to the mystery of things and so makes possible the act of hope that implicates both the poet (CXVII) and mankind (CXVIII) in a benevolent future, but the hard fact is that this act of hope does not possess comedy's magic power of transformation—the power, for example, of conjuring a golden world where.

          all the breeze of Fancy blows,
And every dew-drop paints a bow,
          The wizard lightnings deeply glow,
And every thought breaks out a rose.

(CXXII, 17-20)

It is important to accept this work of Fancy as a real event in the poet's experience, but it remains an event only, part of the enthusiasm with which in this lyric he invokes the spirit of Hallam, not a state or privileged domain. It cannot be used to signal “the course of human things,” especially because it is itself an episode in what becomes a perplexing (because discontinuous) turn of events. For not long after, at precisely that moment when the poet is illuminated by the tidings of love's “sentinel” (CXXVI, 9) and is in turn moved to affirm time's sacred meaning, he imagines most powerfully the terrible ordeal of time's destructiveness:

And all is well, though faith and form
          Be sundered in a night of fear;
          Well roars the storm to those that hear
A deeper voice across the storm,
Proclaiming social truth shall spread,
          And justice, even though thrice again
          The red fool-fury of the Seine
Should pile her barricades with dead.
But ill for him that wears a crown,
          And him, the lazar, in his rags:
          They tremble, the sustaining crags;
The spires of ice are toppled down,
And molten up, and roar in flood;
          The fortress crashes from on high,
          The brute earth lightens to the sky,
And the great æon sinks in blood,
And compassed by the fires of Hell;
          While thou, dear spirit, happy star,
          O'erlook'st the tumult from afar,
And smilest, knowing all is well.

(CXXVII)

“And all is well”: this, Tennyson would later say, “‘is the keynote of the whole.’”⁷ But the hope that time's hidden movement is guided by a God of Love does not preserve the poet from a terrifying vision of the world's annihilation; it does not free him from the imagination of disaster. It is possible, of course, to explain away such a vision, whose terror can be made a matter of one's point of view.⁸ Tennyson, after all, is the great poet of adjusted perspectives, as when in 1892 he drove out one of his recurrent episodes of melancholy by asserting defiantly, “God is love, transcendent, all-pervading! We do not get this faith from Nature or the world. If we look at Nature alone, she tells us that God is disease, murder and rapine. We get this faith from ourselves, from what is highest in us.’”⁹ By this same token, if we interpret history too strictly from the standpoint of our experience in time, we see only what Mircea Eliade has called “the terror of history”: catastrophes that are nothing less than demonic when suffered in the immediacy of the present, and that traditionally have compelled man to nullify such experience by withdrawing to a point outside of time, as to the imagination of such cosmic distance as Hallam achieves, or to such interior distance as the world of the spirit appears to provide the poet (CXXIII).¹⁰

We should note in passing, however, that such distancing is a two-edged sword, for its effect is to devalue historical reality, as when Yeats, in “The Gyres,” responds to bloody cataclysm by laughing in “tragic joy,” thus asserting over and against the destruction of all temporal things the judgment of transcendence: “What matter?”¹¹ For in the cosmic view of things events in and of themselves do not matter; what matter are the patterns that they execute—the forms of eternal recurrence or, if we are thinking of Tennyson's poem, of linearity and development. The difficulty is that when such saving judgment is achieved (“What matter?” “all is well”) the immediacy of individual life is not therefore deprived of its reality, but continues to assert its claim upon human feeling. This is why Hallam's smile is likely to strike us as being overdistanced—rather like the smile of those Lucretian gods who, in “The Lotos-Eaters,” take such cruel delight in the misery of human events. More to the point, Hallam seems profoundly careless of “the single life” that forms the most vital portion of historical reality, and thus he appears to countermand the poet himself, who has made the value of “the single life” one of his poem's most compelling affirmations (LIV).

Can one value history and still remain a part of it, or can it be valued only from a safe distance? One needs to pose this question fairly. I do not mean to undervalue the power of explanation that we may bring to bear upon “And all is well.” The spirit of Hallam, after all, does not dwell in any Lucretian or Yeatsian universe but has come to exist as part of the dynamics or economy of human destiny. He is “mixed with God and Nature,” and it is, in effect, under his aegis that even now the catastrophes of time are being redeemed by the deeper movement of the “historical process.” Moreover, the catastrophe upon which Hallam smiles is rhetorically as well as cosmically distanced, in the sense that “And all is well” is bounded (one could say: “buttressed”) on both sides by firm enunciations of love as a power that confers upon the single life in time the strength to endure history's eruptions. Hallam knows that “the course of human things” must be referred for its meaning and value to this higher principle of love. Man's temporal experience may not be illusory; indeed, the cycles and their cataclysmic endings are real—part of

The deep pulsations of the world,
æonian music measuring out
          The steps of Time—the shocks of Chance—
          The blows of Death.

(XCV, 40-43)

But taken by itself such experience is incomplete and will remain only an experience of terror if it is not informed at the same time by the saving experience of love—saving, or mitigating, because it is only through love that one acquires the sense of an ending, that is, the intimation that history's changes are determined by a sacred final cause: that “one far-off divine event, / To which the whole creation moves” (Epilogue, l. 144)

Nevertheless, having fairly considered this explanation (which surely brings us close to Tennyson's meaning), we must in equal fairness consider how it bears upon (and is complicated by) our experience of reading Tennyson's poem. The peculiarity of “And all is well” is that it confounds this explanation, and (like mystery) sets interpretation at defiance. For “And all is well” turns upon a rupture that isolates the keynote from the imagination that carries the poem forward, as though the poem were motivated as much by a principle of terror as by the principle of love. To be sure, the lyric begins safely enough as a distanced affirmation of the benevolence of time despite isolated moments of terror:

          Well roars the storm to those that hear
A deeper voice across the storm.

(CXXVII, 3-4)

We have already learned that man is only the “seeming prey of cyclic storms” (CXVIII, 11), and that through faith, or through the emulation of types (like Hallam) that herald a “higher race” (CXVIII, 14), he can, at least in spirit, transcend catastrophe, even as the poet can transcend the flow of material things by reposing among things of a different, less vulnerable order (CXXIII). But “And all is well” develops as though in forgetfulness of this meaning. Suddenly, the whole temper of the poem, which is to say its fundamental point of view and the emotion that such a viewpoint generates, undergoes a sharp reversal:

But ill for him that wears a crown,
          And him, the lazar, in his rags:
          They tremble, the sustaining crags;
The spires of ice are toppled down,
And molten up, and roar in flood;
          The fortress crashes from on high.

(CXXVII, 9-14)

Why this amplification of disaster? For it is clear that the attitude toward catastrophe in these lines is no longer controlled by the transcending power of love; instead, the tone becomes consonant with terror. The decorum of the keynote is broken by a sharp appeal to fear and trembling, quite as though the God of Love who otherwise dominates the concluding sections of In Memoriam had suddenly been displaced by the fierce Jahweh of the Old Testament, who regularly visited catastrophes upon his faithless people in order to recall them to the Covenant. The poet thus falls perceptibly out of character, becoming a prophet not of new life but of divine wrath—divine wrath, moreover, that appears to know no bounds. Our expectations are, perhaps, that “all is well,” but not for all: not for those who presumably fail to hear “the deeper voice across the storm.” But in defiance of these expectations the opposition of king and beggar forms a social rather than moral category: it incorporates the whole of mankind—and, just so, in retrospect we can see that the movement of “And all is well” obliterates the saving distinction between the faithful and the damned, because it is a movement from the particular to the general, from local, momentary events—a “night of fear,” recurrent (and therefore temporary) reigns of political terror—to the consummation of all earthly and temporal life:

          The brute earth lightens to the sky,
And the great æon sinks in blood,
And compassed by the fires of Hell. …

(CXXVII, 15-17)

Doubtless (we can only hope) this bloodly conflagration is merely one of the “vast eddies in the flood / Of onward Time” (CXXVIII, 5-6), a lapse of history into cyclic endings, but the poet's language resists the thinking that would make it so, because the language derives its energy from what amounts to a new category of time: the supernatural dimension of Apocalypse. Notice that the limits that these lines place upon destruction are limits that define both totality and finality, as in an eschatological vision. It is as though Hallam were smiling upon the annihilation of all that is not transcendent, as though the “great æon” were human history itself. Hallam's smile is thus made all the more inscrutable, as in an augury of a fearful Second Coming, a vision of a divine holocaust that destroys not only temporal things but time itself—a prophecy, in other words, not of new and everlasting life fashioned out of love, nor even life born of something like a Carlylean “Fire-Baptism,” but simply of that dread Day of Wrath when both king and beggar will be called equally to account.¹²

This dire Apocalypse—this foreshadowing, not of Paradise, but of Inferno—is a metaphor that turns back our expectations of time and history: it disrupts the sense of an ending that, at least since Section CXVIII, Tennyson appears to have been fashioning for his poem. The ideas with which he has fleshed out his sense of mankind's future have been roughly those of an early nineteenth-century historicist (a Liberal Anglican, perhaps), for whom the categories of linearity and development serve as a way of implicating the intelligibility and, ultimately, the sacredness of human events.¹³ We have been asked to “Contemplate all this work of Time” (CXVIII, 1) according to an explanatory model of evolution, thus to place our trust in a historical vision that distributes mankind along a progressive continuum. Even in “And all is well” we have been asked to look forward to a time within time when “social truth” and “justice” shall prevail as in a new golden age—but suddenly the fulfillment of this historical design is figured negatively as a consummation of man's world by “the fires of Hell.” Hallam continues intrepidly to smile, knowing (somehow) that “all is well,” but on the poet's part the categories of historicism that would have been consonant with such a smile are abandoned for those of Apocalypse—and a darkly foreshortened Apocalypse at that. “Love is and was my Lord and King” (CXXVI, 1), the poet has assured us, but the anticipated Kingdom of God is displaced by a Vision of Judgment purely and simply. In the end, time is imagined to repose, not in the plentitude of comedy, but in the desolation of eternal damnation.

III

What is the reason for this rupture of imagination and idea? Part of the answer, certainly, may be derived from the formal nature of In Memoriam itself. Those critics are in the main correct who find that the parts of the poem have not been organized into a system of interdependent and mutually determining lyrics: conventional exegesis, whereby one lyric is used to interpret another, carries us only a very little way: one poem will light up another, as the saying goes, but only to darken others. Each lyric represents, not a relation within a systematic discourse, but an instance of mental activity whose progress is marked by contingency.¹⁴ Or, alternatively, we may say that the poem is well known to be reflexive or inward-looking, a monument of subjectivity. Its expressions of doubt attend less to doubtful propositions of belief than to doubt's travail, even as its expressions of belief are generated less by a coherent body of faith than by the dynamics of faithfulness, as though the poet were concerned to improvise a sort of phenomenology of the spirit that brackets the content of belief in order to disclose the manifold and conflicting conditions of experience in which faith is forced to make its appearance. As a recent commentator has suggested, “What Tennyson believes is not particularly important. Much more important is the way his mind and his poem work.”¹⁵

Yet certainly it is an odd and complacent thing to say that what Tennyson believes isn't important. Why isn't it? As true as these decidedly formalist views of the poem may be, they remain incomplete, and they make In Memoriam seem less urgent (and surely less thoughtful) than it appears to be in the experience of reading it. Better to argue, I believe, that the peculiar breach of imagination and idea that troubles “And all is well” is not an accident of composition but a necessary component of Tennyson's “lesser faith”—that is, of his relation to time and history.¹⁶ For the radical shift of feeling from a rhetoric of hope that announces “all is well” to the rhetoric of fear that appropriates the metaphor of Apocalypse is rather a kind of dialectical reversal—not a reversion to an earlier state of doubt when time in its natural destructiveness seemed entirely the mortal enemy of man, but a return of Tennyson upon his own thinking, or upon his own impulse toward explanation and wish-fulfillment—an impulse that would reduce time to a pure idea of history, and so substitute for the reality of man's temporal life a merely conceptual alternative or reward. Time is irreducible, and its terror helps to make it so, because terror is a reality that cannot be humanly contained within the restraints of explanation. Apocalyptic terror heightens this point, and becomes thereby a decisive metaphor, because least among all forms of terror does Apocalypse belong to the realm of explanation—to natural or philosophical history; rather, it belongs to the realm of sacred literature, in which human history passes human understanding, and in which terror is not a problem, but a mystery.¹⁷

Admittedly, to argue thus is simply to adduce one explanation the more; it is not to resolve the elemental conflict that appears to abide within Tennyson's “lesser faith”—the conflict between universal design and individual value, or between history as it is conceived and history as it is lived. This conflict is of special interest, not simply because it is another instance of Victorian distrust of transcendental paper-visions, but because it constitutes the form in which Tennyson confronts the characteristic dilemma of historicism: namely, as Eliade puts the question, “How can the ‘terror of history’ be tolerated from the view point of historicism?”¹⁸ How can we affirm the reality of history against the cyclicism that generates myths of destruction and renewal—how can we affirm this reality, and invest it with human (not to mention sacred) value, when history leaves man so vulnerable to catastrophe? Tennyson's position seems to be that the mere historicist cannot tolerate this dilemma; he cannot accept the mystery of terror, which forever maintains its presence in the world in defiance of all valuations of history, and which forces the man of faith into a posture of defiance all his own: “And all is well, though faith and form / Be sundered in the night of fear”—as though terror had the power to deprive belief of its positive explanations, but not of its meaning. It is the drama of this impasse between meaning and explanation that makes “And all is well” (or, for that matter, In Memoriam itself) such a persistently compelling poem, and which leads us to acknowledge once more that time for Tennyson is not homogeneous but is breached by opposition: there is the time of history that is sacred because it is shaped by God toward some perfect end, but over and against this millennial tract of time there is the time of experience—a cyclical time insofar as its daily theme is the destruction of all temporal things, their inescapable and reeling return to the aboriginal chaos whence they came. It is worth noting that in Section CXVIII Tennyson momentarily adumbrates the model of the Catastrophism, with its idea of development through violent transformation, as a way of suggesting how these two orders of time might be related:

                                                  … life is not as idle ore,
But iron dug from central gloom,
          And heated hot with burning fears,
          And dipt in baths of hissing tears,
And battered with the shocks of doom
To shape and use.

(ll. 20-25)

The metaphor of life as iron helps to obscure the human issue, but not to abolish it: even more than most explanations (how can one predicate life of iron?), this one leaves entirely unguarded the single life of man as a creature of the present whose subjection to “the shocks of doom” weighs heavily upon the valuation of history.

This weight, however, is nothing less than the traditional oppression of mystery, wherein meaning abides without explanation. For the point is that terror is present in Tennyson's poem—is present, moreover, at the end, when theme and feeling ought to be converging toward repose—as something more than a problem to be solved by explanation. Terror cannot be distanced or forgotten or imagined away, because it is part of the mystery of time, part of the hiddenness of time's sacred meaning, and therefore part of the exigency of hope. This is what Reinhold Niebuhr has in mind when he says that the “basic message of Christianity is a message of hope in tragedy,” by which he means a hope that is born, almost absurdly, of despair (the sense of being utterly forsaken and forsakable).¹⁹ It is what Paul Ricoeur means when he writes, in “Christianity and the Meaning of History,” that “it is essential that hope always remain in direct contact with the dramatic, disquieting aspect of history. It is precisely when hope is no longer the hidden meaning of an apparent nonsense, when it has freed itself from all ambiguity, that it comes back to rational and reassuring progress and heads toward stagnant abstractions.”²⁰ Tennyson seems to have understood this point very well, that ambiguity or irreducible doubleness is the environment of hope, that hope freed from its contraries—from the imagination of disaster and the “terror of history”—is deprived of its occasion, and therefore of its reason and its life. For hope is the cry of its occasion: uprooted from man's lived experience, it becomes mere fantasy, or (worse) an abstract and mildly credible possibility among other possibilities equally remote, equally arbitrary: a conventional optimism, a vague Utopianism. The metaphor of Apocalypse, whose foreshadowing of Inferno betrays optimism by confounding the reasons that optimism needs, is in this sense a necessary correlative to the keynote of “all is well”: it suggests that the genesis of Tennyson's hope is not part of an abstraction or escape from time, a leap into transcendence, but part of a movement through the reality of history, even as the movement of “And all is well” is not a movement away from terror but an unrestrained imagination of it.

IV

This matter of the doubleness of hope seems to receive a second rendering in the lyric that immediately follows “And all is well”:

The love that rose on stronger wings,
          Unpalsied when he met with Death,
          Is comrade to the lesser faith
That sees the course of human things.
No doubt vast eddies in the flood
          Of onward time shall yet be made,
          And thronèd races may degrade;
Yet O ye mysteries of good,
Wild Hours that fly with Hope and Fear,
          If all your office had to do
          With old results that look like new;
If this were all your mission here,
To draw, to sheathe a useless sword,
          To fool the crowd with glorious lies,
          To cleave a creed in sects and cries,
To change the bearing of a word,
To shift an arbitrary power,
          To cramp the student at his desk,
          To make old bareness picturesque
And tuft with grass a feudal tower;
Why then my scorn might well descend
          On you and yours. I see in part
          That all, as in some piece of art,
Is toil cöoperant to an end.

(CXXVIII)

The critical task here, as in the case of “And all is well,” is to read the poem's opening and closing affirmations without forgetting the utterances that connect them. Tennyson here testifies to his faith in providential history by apostrophizing those “mysteries of good” that drive time forward to its sacred end, but characteristically he does so with the mysteries of evil (including evil's banalities) in the foreground of his imagination. For the apostrophe is part of a dramatic reversal (“Yet O ye mysteries”): the poet proceeds by heaping up a catalogue of events that belong not to a world made Utopian by love but to a world of melancholy and all-too-human experience. The movement of the lyric, in other words, resembles a dialectic, the turning of Tennyson upon his own thinking, thus affirming the sacred meaning of history without abstracting that meaning from history itself. The “mysteries of good” are addressed not in the purity of their transcendence, but as mysteries: they are conjured by opposition, in a movement through an inventory that names the backwardness of time—discloses, in Ricoeur's word, the “ambiguity” of hope. Nor is this ambiguity merely an ironic turn of thought, for what is dramatized in this lyric is the poet's felt relation to his theme, which is to say his own historicity, even his own doubleness as a being whose time is breached, who casts his eyes toward an invisible and even unspeakable end, all the while imagining those baleful circumstances that would otherwise (were he a merely positive thinker) finally compel his scorn of history and history's God.

This helps to explain the curiously negative formulation of Tennyson's “lesser faith,” for what is finally affirmed in “The Love that rose on stronger wings” is the belief that history's disquieting aspects are not a sum total, but parts and consequences of the temporality and therefore of the incompleteness of God's design. One cannot help thinking here of Arthur's lament in the midst of his own catastrophe in the Idylls of the King:

O me! for why is all around us here
As if some lesser god had made the world,
But had not force to shape it as he would … ?(21)

History cannot be experienced from within as a plenum or a system but only in its changes as a world that has not yet been brought fully into being—a half-created work. It is as though the poet of In Memoriam, like Arthur, recognized himself as a creature of the present caught up in the shaping of recalcitrant material—in a process of “toil” or becoming whose diverse antagonisms disclose a basic opposition between the brute stuff of creation and the ideality of its formal cause. Here indeed is what history looks like from the standpoint of the single life; yet the single life is not closed. To move from matter to form, as from part to whole or from experience to idea, requires nothing less than a dialectical reversal: the movement of a mind that can contemplate, by turns or adjacently, the negativity of history as a time of suffering and death and history's sacred meaning as a continuation in time of God's creative act.

Contradictions, of course, may be unthinkingly held, but I use the term “dialectic” to emphasize that Tennyson is not an unthinking agent in his poem. To be sure, the term will be misleading if it merely implies a grammar of self-regulating procedures by which the mind obtains from variable and contradictory meanings a set of systematic results. Were this the whole of the case, I would seem to be doing no more than reverting to the old illusion that beneath the irregular surface of In Memoriam there is at work some law of internal necessity that, once discovered and described, will enable us to make sense of the poem in all of its heterogeneous details. But I find the term “dialectic” useful because it does not refer simply to a method of resolving logical difficulties but, on the contrary, describes a form of meditation whose distinctive feature is its concreteness or historicity. “Dialectic,” Merleau-Ponty writes, “is not the idea of reciprocal action, nor that of the solidarity of opposites and their sublation [into some higher synthesis].” It is not an abstract, self-correcting operation of thought but an activity carried on within the doubleness of being and thinking. Dialectic in this sense is not predictable in its results. It does not deal with already ordered relationships, like the binary oppositions of structuralism, or Marxist super- and infrastructures; rather, as Merleau-Ponty says, “these relationships are marvels, curiosities, paradoxes”—moments of terror, for example, that erupt within the tidings of love. “They enlighten only when one grasps them in … experience,” for only in experience is there “room, without contradiction and without magic, for relationships with double meanings, for opposite and inseparable truths, for sublations, for perpetual genesis, for a plurality of levels or orders.”²² One could look for other words to describe Tennyson's thinking in this poem, but for my part I cannot find a better way to characterize the habit of mind that gives life to In Memoriam than to borrow Merleau-Ponty's words on dialectic.

At the very least these words do not misrepresent the open and expansive nature of Tennyson's mind: he seems to have felt that any act of thinking would be incomplete, not simply if it were left unfinished or indecisive, but if it left anything out of account. There is no resolution or repose at In Memoriam's end, because what makes possible the poet's affirmation of those “truths that never can be proved” (CXXXI, 10) is also that which makes affirmation a difficult and perhaps impossible thing to fix in a formulation: freedom from any sort of closure. More than anything else, it is this freedom that proves so exasperating to our efforts of hard interpretation, the more so as we continue to make the coherence of many meanings into one a privileged feature of mental activity. Accordingly, the temptation will always remain to think of Tennyson's faith (and particularly his “lesser faith‘”) as insubstantial: so many watery or unmastered aspirations toward the Unknown—a groundless array of religious feelings intensified by love but finally less credible than the turmoil of the poet's doubt. But this sense of the poem's impoverishment disappears when we understand that the poet's faith is inseparable not only from love but from hope. The poet dreams “a dream of good” (CXIX, 11)—admittedly a private and subjective phenomenon—but this dreaming cannot be explained as the musing of an abstract or closeted soul. It is not reducible to an imaginary wish-fulfillment that abolishes the terrifying features of human life. On the contrary, what is striking about the poet's subjectivity is its openness to the world and to visions of terror that only the world can occasion. This openness contrasts sharply with what I take to be the closure of doubt, which is to say the skepticism toward “double meanings” and “opposite and inseparable truths” that earlier had closed up the poet's spirit in an amplification of grief.

Notes

1. Numerous studies have tried to describe the unity of In Memoriam according to a diversity of forms or models (structural, organic, symbolic, developmental, musical, etc.). Some of these are quite compelling—see, e. g., Robert Langbaum's “The Dynamic Unity of In Memoriam,” in The Modern Spirit: Essays on the Continuity of Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Literature (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 51-75. I have no doubt that we will continue to find new and impressive ways of discussing the poem's organization, and of discovering patterns and coherences that render the poem accessible to interpretation. Yet it remains true that the starting point of any such enterprise is the experience of the poem's discontinuities, which are not to be explained away. A good example of how this experience informs and strengthens a critical study of the poem is James R. Kincaid's discussion in Tennyson's Major Poems: The Comic and Ironic Patterns (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1975), pp. 80-109.

2. From Tennyson's conversation with James Knowles, in Nineteenth-Century, 33 (1893), 182.

3. The edition that I have used is The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1969).

4. I have used the term “mystery” with Reinhold Niebuhr's statement in mind: “Mystery does not annul meaning but enriches it. It prevents the realm of meaning from being reduced too simply to rational intelligibility” (Faith and History: A Comparison of Christian and Modern Views of History [New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1949], p. 103). Tennyson would have felt a great kinship with Niebuhr, whose conviction it was that “Perplexities, too simply solved, produce despair” (Faith and History, p. 233).

5. See James G. Taaffe, “Circle Imagery in Tennyson's In Memoriam,” in Victorian Poetry, 1 (1963), 123-31.

6. As in Wilhelm Dilthey's conception that the “category of meaning” that we bring to bear upon history “designates the relation, rooted in life itself, of parts to whole.” But this “is a relation which is never complete. One would have to wait for the end of a life and, in the hour of death, survey the whole to ascertain the relation between the whole and its parts. One would have to wait for the end of history to have all the material necessary to determine its meaning” (Gesammelte Schriften [Stuttgart: B. G. Teubner, 1938], vii, p. 233). The translation is H. P. Rickman's, from Meaning in History: Wilhelm Dilthey's Thoughts on History and Society (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1961), p. 106. See also J. Hills Miller, “Narrative and History,” in ELH, 41 (1974), 460-61.

7. Quoted by Hallam Tennyson in Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir (London: Macmillan, 1897), I, 298.

8. Thus most commentators attend only to the opening and closing stanzas of “And all is well.” John D. Rosenberg, “The Two Kingdoms of In Memoriam,” in Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 58 (1959), is virtually alone in considering the poem in its troubling totality: “Hallam, witness to this incandescent holocaust, ‘smil[eth], knowing all is well.’ The line is very nearly incredible. The smile is diabolic or divine, expressing either pyromaniacal joy or sublime content in the knowledge that the flaming of the earth is prelude to a finer order and a higher race” (p. 237).

9. Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir, I, 314.

10. Eliade's famous distinction between cosmos and history in relation to historical catastrophe is particularly pertinent to In Memoriam. See Mircea Eliade, The Myth of Eternal Return, trans. Willard Trask (New York: Bollingen, 1954), pp. 146-52.

11. Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (New York: Macmillan, 1956), p. 291.

12. See John D. Rosenberg's discussion of cyclic and apocalyptic time in The Fall of Camelot: A Study of Tennyson's “Idylls of the King” ([Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1973], esp. pp. 34-37). Rosenberg remarks that “In In Memoriam Hallam is the ‘herald of a higher race,’ a ‘noble type’ of perfected man … ; in the Idylls, through a cataclysmic reversal of evolution, men ‘reel back into the beast.’ Evolution has been tinged with Apocalypse.” Evolution is clearly “tinged with Apocalypse” in In Memoriam as well—as Rosenberg suggested earlier in “The Two Kingdoms of In Memoriam” (p. 237).

13. See Duncan Forbes, The Liberal Anglican Idea of History (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1952), pp. 63-86. Tennyson had no “philosophy” of history, but it is possible to reconstruct his reflections into a fairly coherent exposition. See Henry Kozicki, “Philosophy of History in Tennyson's Poetry to the 1842 Volume,” ELH, 42 (1975), 88-106. This matter has also been discussed by Ward Hellstrom, On the Poems of Tennyson (Gainsville: Univ. of Florida Press, 1972), pp. 26-36; and John Killman, Tennyson and ‘The Princess’: Reflections of an Age (London: Athlone Press, 1958), pp. 243-66. Also useful in this context is Susan Gliserman, “Early Victorian Science Writers and Tennyson's In Memoriam,” Victorian Studies, 18 (1974), 277-308; 437-459. For my part I regard Tennyson as a historicist in Maurice Mandelbaum's sense of the term in History, Man, and Reason: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Thought (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1971), p. 42: “Historicism is the belief that an adequate understanding of the nature of any phenomenon and an adequate assessment of its value are to be gained through considering it in terms of the place which it occupied and the role which it played within a process of development.”

14. See Henry Puckett, “The Subjunctive Imagination in In Memoriam,” Victorian Poetry, 12 (1974), 97-124.

15. Puckett, p. 107.

16. It is worth noting in this connection that Tennyson substituted “And all is well” for a much less ambiguous lyric. The original Section cxxvii is published in Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir, I, 307:

    Are those the far-famed Victor Hours
              That ride to death the griefs of men?
              I fear not; if I fear'd them, then
    Is this blind flight the winged Powers.

    Behold, ye cannot bring but good,
              And see, ye dare not touch the truth,
              Nor Sorrow beauteous in her youth,
    Nor Love that holds a constant mood.

    Yet must be wiser than your looks,
              Or wise yourselves, or wisdom-led,
              Else this wild whisper round my head
    Were idler than a flight of rooks.

    Go forward! crumble down a throne,
              Dissolve a world, condense a star,
              Unsocket all the joints of war,
    And fuse the peoples into one.

17. As in Gabriel Marcel's distinction between problem and mystery in Being and Having (trans. Katherine Farrer [New York: Harper & Row, 1965], pp. 117-18): “A problem is something which I meet, which I find complete before me, but which I can therefore lay siege to and reduce. But a mystery is something in which I am myself involved, and it can therefore only be thought of as a sphere where the distinction between what is in me and what is before me loses its meaning and initial validity. A genuine problem is subject to appropriate technique by the exercise of which it is defined: whereas, a mystery, by definition, transcends every conceivable technique. It is, no doubt, always possible (logically and psychologically) to degrade a mystery so as to turn it into a problem. But this is a fundamentally vicious proceeding, whose springs might perhaps be discovered in a kind of corruption of intelligence” (p. 117).

18. Eliade, p. 150.

19. Reinhold Niebuhr, Beyond Tragedy: Essays on the Christian Interpretation of History (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1937), p. 19.

20. Paul Ricoeur, History and Truth, trans. Charles A. Kelbley (Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1965), pp. 96-97. See also p. 95: “Hope tells me that there is a meaning [in history] and that I should seek it. But it also tells me that this meaning is hidden; after having encountered the absurd, it now faces system. Christianity has an instinctive distrust of systematic philosophies of history which would like to provide us with the key to intelligibility. One has to choose system or mystery.”

21. Poems of Tennyson, pp. 1742-43.

22. [Maurice] Merleau-Ponty, Adventures of the Dialectic, trans. Joseph Bien (Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1973), pp. 203-204.