SOURCE: Gransden, K. W. “The Poem.” In Tennyson: In Memoriam, pp. 42-60. London: Edward Arnold (Publishers) LTD., 1964.

[In the following excerpt, Gransden examines In Memoriam as an elegy, noting that Tennyson's approach is tentative and exploratory, resulting in a poem that documents his trial and error as he attempted to translate his vision into words.]

Tennyson at one time thought of calling In Memoriam ‘Fragments of an Elegy’, a title which overstresses the intermittent nature of the poem at the expense of its underlying unity and development. A better pointer is his subtitle ‘The Way of the Soul’, and his remark, quoted in the Memoir, that the poem is a kind of divine comedy beginning with a death and ending with a marriage. The poem moves from the darkness of loss towards the light of hope and future gain: we shall see that both meanings of ‘loss’, as the opposite of finding and the opposite of gain, are important. Another parallel suggested by the subtitle is with Donne's second anniversary (The Progresse of the Soule) which also carries the required domestic note: that is, in Donne's case, a poem primarily intended for the attention and solace of a particular household, and in Tennyson's, a poem primarily intended as an act of autobiography and autotherapy and secondarily as an account of experience which the poet hoped might be of wider service.

The poem, like ‘Locksley Hall’ and Maud, aroused, inevitably, speculation as to the nature and extent of its autobiographical element. One problem was that of chronology. How far does the poem's time-sequence correspond to that of actual events? (One of the chief features of any transmutation of life into art is that the needs of art generally dictate a new tempo.) We know that the poems were not written in the order in which Tennyson, after seventeen years' work, finally arranged them for publication. Three Christmases elapse in the poem but these cannot actually be the first three Christmases after Hallam's death (1833, 1834 and 1835) since the third Christmas is also apparently Tennyson's first after leaving Somersby in 1837.

Another problem (to which Bradley devotes several pages) was Tennyson's supposed borrowings from earlier poets, particularly Herbert (who is echoed several times in the introductory stanzas). A modern reader, familiar with The Waste Land, will not find this surprising and will not feel any need to reconcile any such borrowings with the originality of the new poem. More interesting, perhaps, is the way in which Tennyson's reading of Herbert may have taught him something of the technique of dramatising one's difficulties in verse, of conducting spiritual argument. The crude dialogue form of ‘The Two Voices’ becomes in In Memoriam something much more subtle and flexible.

‘So careful of the type?’ but no.
          From scarped cliff and quarried stone
          She cries, ‘A thousand types are gone:
I care for nothing, all shall go.’

Nor does it detract from the originality of the poem to suggest that it may to some extent be read as a poet's commonplace book, a journal in time in which the entries are separated by time and silence; the working up into a unified whole of material some of which is quite new to English poetry but some of which is so familiar that even in Tennyson's hands its expression hardly rises above the level of the embroidered text:

Behold, we know not anything;
          I can but trust that good shall fall
          At last—far off—at last, to all,
And every winter change to spring.

In its new context, such a stanza may be enriched by everything else the poet has to say about the future: it is perhaps not too far-fetched to say that the word ‘but’ in the second line is the most significant word in the stanza, the ‘placing’ qualificatory key-word by which a common-place may open into a whole philosophy of experience.

At the other extreme are those sections of the poem in which Tennyson is trying out difficult scientific or metaphysical hypotheses: and here, his anxiety to be accurate and fair, and at the same time to give his own feelings their full weight, produces obscurities of a kind not normally associated with Victorian verse. The once-notorious obscurities of Browning are of a different kind, for Browning will usually be found to be wrapping up quite simple ideas in layers of verbal cotton wool, multiplying examples or analogies and repeating the same idea in different ways, thereby spoiling even his more lyrical poems. In ‘Two in the Campagna’, this annoying procedure lies open to the reader and even forms the subject of the poem. The thread of a perfectly familiar proposition is compared to a spider's web and the idea is only ‘tantalising’ because Browning deliberately makes it so; by playing with an idea he reduces its claim on our serious attention.

The difficulties of In Memoriam arise, not from elaboration but from compression; not from word-play but from Tennyson's own genuine struggle with difficult ideas and strong emotions. In getting these ideas and emotions under the control of a strict lyric stanza, Tennyson produces a kind of opaqueness—that is, we think we see to the bottom, but find the logic occluded by the very gnomic quality of the utterance. I do not want to imply that Tennyson is cheating—the very reverse is the case. His approach is, au fond, tentative and exploratory, but the highly finished form of the stanzas, their technical assurance, seems to imply a corresponding intellectual assurance which Tennyson is far from claiming. He is always in complete control of his imagery, but underneath ideas are being offered and withdrawn, hypotheses are tested and rejected. Tennyson's achievement is that he has left all the evidence of this hard work in the poem without detracting from the poem's authority.

One example of the process I am thinking of is to be seen in Tennyson's use of the word ‘and’ at the beginning of lines or sentences. I have counted over three hundred instances of this use, in which ‘and’ carries the emotional force of one of the stronger Greek enclitics, rather than the sequential force of the conjunction; it often introduces a proposition which does not follow logically from its predecessor but which, inevitably, we want to read as if it did. Thus an emotional formula appears disguised as an intellectual argument: it has to do this because no satisfactory argument has been found, because—indeed—the attempt to find such an argument is the subject of the poem. There are some good examples in the introductory stanzas:

(1)          He thinks he was not made to die;
And thou hast made him; thou art just.
(2)          They are but broken lights of thee;
And thou, O Lord, art more than they,
(3)          For knowledge is of things we see;
And yet we trust it comes from thee.

In (1) it does not follow that man is immortal because (like the rest of creation) he is of divine origin and God is just: but emotionally it is central to the poem that this argument should work. Much, therefore, must be understood in that ‘and’: something like ‘for after all, it is thou who hast made man and it would not be fair if thou hadst given him the power to believe himself immortal if in fact he is not’. In (2) the choice of ‘and’ as the linking word (rather than ‘for’ or ‘since’) helps to disguise the vagueness of the emotive line ‘they are but broken lights of thee’: the lines mean that man is fragmentary, God is wholeness, and a whole must be more than a part. A hypothesis is framed as a gnomic utterance. In (3) ‘and yet’ conceals some such argument as ‘knowledge is of things we see, and our trouble is with the unseen; but God is unseen, and is the source of all knowledge, so why should he not send more knowledge and, ultimately, knowledge of the unseen too?’ Tennyson is here offering a favourite speculation: that there is no reason why the causes of man's present despair should not one day be removed.

Such uses of ‘and’ can be seen as intensified emotive repetitions of a position reached in a previous proposition, carrying with them the force of a new step forward. Moreover, in many lines beginning with ‘and’ there is a suppressed verb which has to be understood from a previous line: the omission of these verbs contributes to the gnomic and opaque quality of many of the stanzas. Examples are ‘and vacant chaff well meant for grain’ (VI, 4), ‘and those wild eyes that watch the wave’ (XXXVI, 15), ‘and such refraction of events as often rises ere they rise’ (XCII, 16).

Thus the compressed, gnomic quality of so much of In Memoriam is often the result of syntactical ellipsis, or apposition, telescoping argument, as in the lines at the end of CVIII:

          'Tis held that sorrow makes us wise,
Whatever wisdom sleeps in thee.

‘Whatever’ suggests that Tennyson does not know what kind of wisdom sleeps in Hallam, though elsewhere in the poem (e.g. in CXIII) there are attempts to define it. The vague generalised adjective combines with the negative verb ‘sleeps’ to produce a turning away from precision, a gesture towards the hopelessness of defining this important unknown. The two lines must of course be taken with what precedes them, where Tennyson says that all his attempts to scrutinise the mystery of things are ‘barren faith’ and ‘vacant yearnings’ and that he'll

rather take what fruit may be
Of sorrow under human skies:

but this does not help as much as it seems to. For if the poet would rather learn from his own grief than from Hallam's death (‘the second state sublime’), why then should such store be set by Hallam's death? Several thoughts seem to be present at once: (1) a straight eighteenth-century type of antithesis, viz. ‘we can only be made wise by sorrow, but Hallam's wisdom (whatever its nature, and whether or not it be active), is achieved without sorrow’; (2) ‘I don't know what kind of wisdom Hallam has, but in any case it is dormant, no use to me’; (3) (connecting up with the return of the same idea in CIX and CXIII) ‘if I did not profit by Hallam's wisdom while he lived I cannot expect to do so now he is dead’; and (4) ‘if Hallam had lived his wisdom would have helped not only me but the whole age; but now that wisdom is dormant so I can only hope it is true (as they say) that sorrow makes us wise, since this seems to be the only source of wisdom left to me’.

Elsewhere (in LXI) Tennyson does try to pursue Hallam's newly acquired wisdom, but the attempt falters:

Tho' following with an upward mind
          The wonders that have come to thee,
          Thro' all the secular to-be,
But evermore a life behind.

This suggests that Hallam's wisdom, far from being dormant, still sets the pace for the living. (The word ‘secular’ is used, as in LXXVI, in its nineteenth-century sense, of the long processes of change, and not in the older sense of ‘age-long’ given by Bradley—Tennyson would have come across the usage in Lyell's Principles of Geology from which an example is quoted in the N.E.D.). And the lines in LXXXII

Eternal process moving on,
          From state to state the spirit walks

again suggest the dead as active in wisdom and progress. We are told that they achieve insight into the processes of creation not yet fully revealed in time but one day to be revealed; meanwhile the dead can say

          I triumph in conclusive bliss
And that serene result of all.

But in the first part of In Memoriam the partial insight of the living is more real to Tennyson than any speculation about the total insight of the dead. The pessimism of grief can be seen in that curious, baffled ‘evermore’ in ‘evermore a life behind’. Tennyson feels Hallam is always going to have the advantage of his early death, he will always be the one who got there first; he has skipped the years of uncertainty to which Tennyson is condemned. One may dismiss this as simply another example of the humanist fallacy, an inability and a refusal to separate in the mind the two processes of time and eternity; but the confusion is a source of the very real emotional speculations in the first half of the poem, the sense of having been abandoned.

‘Whatever’ (in the lines just discussed) is one of the large number of negative qualifying words to be found in the early part of In Memoriam, where the vocabulary should be compared with that of ‘The Two Voices’. They demonstrate the workings of a mind rather than its conclusions:

I sometimes hold it half a sin
          To put in words the grief I feel;
          For words, like Nature, half reveal
And half conceal the Soul within.

Where a modern poet might admit to a technical difficulty in expressing ‘just what I mean’—

                                                                      Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break under the burden

—Tennyson finds a moral and psychological difficulty. He is not even sure that so personal a grief ought to be expressed at all.

We must also distinguish between a genuine doubt as to the propriety of articulation where a profound personal feeling is concerned, and the conventional inarticulateness of the elegist working on commission. Donne for instance:

Language thou art too narrow, and too weake
To ease us now: great sorrow cannot speake.

And Tennyson himself, in some lines written to James Spedding on the death of his brother, had said

Words weaker than your grief would make
Grief more.

Although In Memoriam finishes by being a public poem Tennyson makes it clear that it started as a private one; he says it was begun, not to ‘part and prove’, not to close ‘grave doubts and answers here proposed’, but to express, so far as was possible, his own feelings and to find, in the mechanics of versified articulation (which by the mere fact of its being versified, necessarily carries with it a suggestion of feelings being arranged, like flowers in a vase) some relief from sorrow. Thus characteristically he anticipates, and deals with as part of the poem itself, any objections that may be raised as to its consistency or its finality. Rather, the poem is a door opening on to a sequence of vistas. It is the poem's therapeutic quality which is first emphasised: it is the end product of compulsive activity:

But for the unquiet heart and brain
          A use in measured language lies;
          The sad mechanic exercise,
Like dull narcotics, numbing pain.

(Thus ‘I pipe but as the linnet sings’ does not mean that the poem is naïve and artless but that he could not help writing it.)

Tennyson further stresses that beneath all our intellectual show we are essentially inarticulate, unable to find words (other than formulas of doubtful value) to express our deepest feelings. And when he speaks in the first part of the poem of trusting ‘what I feel is Lord of all’ it is the word ‘feel’ which asks to be stressed; and when he says ‘I can but trust that good shall fall’, in a stanza already discussed, he at once comments:

So runs my dream: but what am I?
          An infant crying in the night:
          An infant crying for the light:
And with no language but a cry.

The ‘dream’, the ultimate vision of reality, cannot be precisely articulated: the frightened child, like the ‘man in wrath’ who (in CXXIV) opposes his feelings to materialist theories, is inarticulate because he cannot help it. (And compare ‘they called me fool, they called me child’, in the crown of thorns poem.) Yet the child's cry and the angry man's claim that his feelings are not to be explained away by science, are both valid responses to experience.

In XIX Tennyson expands the earlier statement (in V) that words may afford some covering (both protective and definitive) to the nakedness of grief; here grief is compared to the tidal movements which affect the River Wye. As the deeper waters of the Severn flood into the Wye, the smaller river becomes silent, absorbed in the larger; at the ebb, the noises of the Wye itself are heard again. This double movement of waters is finely used to express the imperfect articulation of ‘the deepest grief of all’. The tears that cannot fall are the real tears. As the poem proceeds, submerged feelings rise towards the surface, they ‘rise in the heart’ (see ‘Tears, idle tears’, in The Princess). The whole emphasis of the early part of the sequence is on the secretness of inner feeling, while later, this feeling gradually merges (and emerges) into a new view of experience.

This intense grief with which the poem begins seemed real to Tennyson but he clearly felt others might not find it justifiable. So the prayer in XIII

Come, Time, and teach me, many years,
          I do not suffer in a dream

is precise, and is precisely answered. What times teaches in the poem is not just that ‘loss is common to the race’ (a lesson which Tennyson rejects early in the sequence as irrelevant) but that it is a part of experience which, though it seemed to exist as a dream in a brain disordered by grief, is in fact something each man must master, assimilate and accept as part of the total pattern of human experience. Thus the poem is addressed both to the reader who comes to doubt but stays to understand, and to the poet himself, and one can see passages in which the one or the other audience is uppermost in the poet's mind. The poem's popularity shows that the Victorians felt Tennyson had not only done something for himself, turned loss into gain, which would have appealed to their practical sense, but had also done something for humanity at large. Individual experiences of loss are not weakened by repetition but intensified. The clamour of the indifferent, the false attempts to use scientific theory to discredit human hopes, only emphasise the importance of Tennyson's undertaking. And the final dismissal of theory by personal feeling in

          And like a man in wrath the heart
Stood up and answer'd ‘I have felt’,

is significant because it is not my heart but the heart of man; so, too, in the closing poems of the cycle Tennyson changes from ‘I’ (I shall not lose thee tho' I die) to ‘we’: the pooling of experience increases the stature of man.

The poem has three time values. There is the present—grief and suffering—to which we must add that the poem's present is itself offered to the reader as a grief past and overcome. This is emphasised by the introductory stanzas, written in 1849, the year before the poem was published and sixteen years after it was begun: so that the words

Forgive my grief for one remov'd …
Forgive these wild and wandering cries

are among the first we read. Though addressed to ‘the strong Son of God, immortal Love’ they seem equally to be addressed to the reader, a characteristic attempt to forestall criticism.

The second time value is the past: memories of Hallam, arousing the nostalgia with which the poem is commonly associated (‘thinking of the days that are no more’). There is finally the future: speculation as to Hallam's new state, the relation between the living and the dead, and a possible connection between man's gradual evolution on earth as a race and his instant evolution in heaven as an individual (see CXVIII discussed in Chapter 1).

The present is the felt and recorded desire to surrender to despair and the moral struggle not to (see for instance IV in which darkness and sleep, a ‘type’ of death, temporarily conquer the will). The past is places where Tennyson and Hallam were together, e.g. the Cambridge poem LXXXVII. The future is opaque, the battleground of faith and doubt, the realm of speculation which at first seems useless because irresoluble and is only gradually worked out into an acceptable pattern. It is here that Tennyson has to work hardest to reconcile personal feelings with, intellectual hypothesis. He feels it to be the poet's duty to do this, to set his personal feelings into the context of the whole of human experience, however distasteful (at first) or difficult the process seems. Thus, in XXXIV, he says that if there were no immortality the poet could set aside moral considerations and concentrate on aesthetic ones. The need to believe in a moral purpose in man's creation requires a corresponding sense of moral purpose in the poet. Death, and the grief it brings to the living, is at first noted as an intolerable evil, a black mark against the universe. In LV death is seen as part of the natural process and the wish to believe man an exception, an ‘evil dream’. The poem's triumph is that it converts this evil dream into a dream of good, and finally into the total reality of man's experience.

O yet we trust that somehow good
          Shall be the final goal of ill

‘O yet’, that is, despite evidence to the contrary; ‘somehow’, that is, in ways of which science is still ignorant. Yet the imperative ‘shall’ observes that any other conclusion is intolerable, and points away from the tentative half-hearted faith of the opening poems (expressed in words like ‘failing’, ‘faltering’, ‘grope’, etc.) towards the triply repeated formula of acceptance, ‘all is well’, with which the poem ends and which recalls the words of Dame Julian of Norwich quoted at the end of T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets: ‘and all shall be well’.

Thus In Memoriam is a journey from doubt and despair to acceptance, a journey through time and experience, in which past, present and future co-exist, and in which different modes of experience (memory, speculation, vision) all find a place. As T. S. Eliot says in Burnt Norton ‘only through time time is conquered’; and again in The Dry Salvages:

Here the impossible union
Or spheres of existence is actual
Here the past and future
Are conquered and reconciled

At the start of the poem Tennyson wants to remain fixed in grief, in the total absorption of loss; he resists the processes of time by which grief may (and as time itself will show, must) be conquered. But he is not immediately prepared to

                    reach a hand thro' time to catch
The far-off interest of tears.

The idea of loss is central to the poem: financial imagery occurs in several places, e.g. gain, credit, influence-rich all occur in LXXX. Here, present loss may be eventual profit but Tennyson does not yet want to be comforted by borrowing on the doubtful security of this future dividend. Grief is his only immediate asset and he is not yet ready to risk it on a theory he has not yet tested. He repulses the ‘victor hours’ (the effects of time) and in the yew tree poem (II) seems ready to identify himself with the tree, as a symbol of unchanging gloom. One notices the word ‘fail’ at this point: the sense is that of the poet's life-processes running down in sympathy with Hallam's: there is a strong desire to ‘cease’. So too in L, the prayer of the sinking soul, in which Tennyson anticipates his own death. In this poem, again, there is the feeling (helped by the monosyllables) of time being halted, natural processes being slowed down almost to a stop:

Be near me when my light is low,
          When the blood creeps and the nerves prick
          And tingle; and the heart is sick,
And all the wheels of Being slow …

This mood persists even after the return of Hallam's body to England and the burial. In XXVI, however, time begins to show its strength and the poet must struggle to keep his grief perpetually present. Can love survive time and separation? The desire (and the need) to prove that it can begins: the victor hours are already showing their hand:

Still onward winds the dreary way;
          I with it; for I long to prove
          No lapse of moons can canker Love,
Whatever fickle tongues may say.

In the early part of the sequence love is still identified with grief, grief seen as the only true evidence of enduring love: ‘let love clasp grief lest both be drowned’ in the victor hours poem precisely formulates the poet's early need: he ‘still would grieve on’. But already in that characteristic ‘I long to prove’ the first doubt as to time's power to change one's feelings is, half apprehensively, admitted. Later in the same poem (XXVI) he says that if love does turn to indifference and there is no immortality, then he would despise his grief and wish for death. This idea is taken up again in XXXV, a subtler version of ‘The Two Voices’. The argument here is (1) even if all things die, it is still worth loving for love's own sake:

Might I not say? ‘Yet even here,
          But for one hour, O Love, I strive
          To keep so sweet a thing alive:’

But (2) the objection to this comes from love itself; the very nature of love would be altered if there were no immortality: love would be ‘half dead to know that it would die’. And (3) the nineteenth-century evolutionists put in their warning:

But I should turn mine ears and hear
The moanings of the homeless sea,
          The sound of streams that swift or slow
          Draw down Aeonian hills and sow
The dust of continents to be;

The known, reachable, comfortable limits of human life are contrasted with the formless and homeless sea, outside the control of homo domesticus. (One thinks of ‘the unplumb'd salt estranging sea’ in Arnold's ‘Marguerite’ and the desolation of his ‘Dover Beach’.) The processes of creation seem to be on the wrong side. But (4) the poet rejects the fruitless hypothesis:

                                        If Death were seen
          At first as Death, Love had not been,
Or been in narrowest working shut …

Tennyson here adduces his own experience of love as evidence for immortality. While paying lip-service to scientific formulas, he insists that man may be an exception to whatever rules these seem to prove. Otherwise, human love could never have been experienced. Here we must bear in mind Tennyson's deep sense of waste: so much love concentrated into so few years must somehow be made to go on being valuable; in the same way, the whole splendour of human achievement through history becomes pointless if man is a doomed race (see LVI). Throughout the poem Tennyson links the immortality of the individual with that of the race. Like the seventeenth-century elegists, he has to come to terms with a divine law which can cut good men off in their prime: will the same law, one day, cut off the whole race? The seventeenth century could draw a theological moral from premature death and even, with a little ingenuity, find in it a positive gain; but Tennyson, far more involved in Hallam than was Jonson in Salomon Pavy or Donne in Lord Harrington, finds it harder to take refuge in neat and pious formulas. Of course In Memoriam is not really about Hallam at all, but about Tennyson after Hallam's death. Thus it is his own intense feelings that at first prevent him from seeing Hallam's death (as Donne saw Harrington's) as some kind of triumphant achievement on Hallam's part. The triumph, when it comes, is Tennyson's rather than Hallam's. Donne used the elegy, as the patron would have required him to do, to praise the dead man; Tennyson specifically refuses to use In Memoriam to praise Hallam (see LXXV), partly because his achievement was less than his potential (a seventeenth-century elegist would have been expected to use all his literary skill to get round this, but Tennyson knew that the Victorian world

                              which credits what is done
Is cold to all that might have been);

and partly because he is unable to convey Hallam's qualities to those who did not know him (see XII). People must deduce those qualities from the strength of the poet's grief and love. It is not until near the end of the sequence, in the rather uninteresting poems CIX-CXI, that any attempt is made to describe Hallam. We then learn that he was a good critic, logical, moral, not ascetic, freedom-loving, beautiful, a good influence on others, and a gentleman. But the picture that emerges is too idealised, and comes too late in the poem, to be significant.

Tennyson makes it clear that while Hallam lived no thought of time's destroying their friendship entered his mind. In LXXXIV he supposes that, if Hallam had lived to old age and they had both died at roughly the same time, there would have been no problem: Christ would have taken them ‘as a single soul’. But now the link is broken:

But thou art turn'd to something strange,
          And I have lost the links that bound
          Thy changes;

The words used here (in XLI) imply, as they must be intended to, the interruption of a happy and well-tried domestic routine which can never be resumed. In the longest poem in the sequence (LXXXV), in which Tennyson, with characteristic honesty and conscientiousness, excuses himself for again thinking of other, earthly friendships, the point is stressed that, however Hallam's new state is to be conjectured, nevertheless

                    in dear words of human speech
We two communicate no more.

From the grief of the living left behind Tennyson turns, in XLIV and some later poems, to the conjectured state of the dead. Perhaps after all the link may not be quite broken: the dead may retain images of their former life as well as their new knowledge. Tennyson suggests that these intimations of mortality may be comparable to the intimations received by the living either of a previous existence (but this primitive idea of reincarnation, though found in ‘The Two Voices’, is dropped in In Memoriam) or of the earliest, forgotten days of life. During our first year after birth we have no conscious processes; then we begin to be self-conscious. Individualisation is a mental process. This is most interestingly stated in XLV:

The baby new to earth and sky,
          What time his tender palm is prest
          Against the circle of the breast,
Has never thought that ‘this is I’.
But as he grows he gathers much,
          And learns the use of ‘I’ and ‘me’,
          And finds ‘I am not what I see,
And other than the things I touch’.
So rounds he to a separate mind
          From whence clear memory may begin,
          As thro' the frame that binds him in
His isolation grows defined.

In these fine lines the word ‘isolation’ carries undertones of a sadness not strictly required, since its primary meaning here is purely technical (bio-physical). But Tennyson is also thinking of another kind of isolation. Love is the coming together of two isolates: thought-processes can only operate through language. In the last verse of this poem Tennyson draws a speculative conclusion:

This use may lie in blood and breath,
          Which else were fruitless of their due,
          Had man to learn himself anew
Beyond the second birth of Death.

This ties up with the feeling of waste which prompted the argument for immortality deduced from the preciousness of love; but the lines have a further implication: that if we never grew up on earth we should have to go through the process in heaven. Death must be an advance on life, not a mere repetition of it. Self-knowledge must be carried over and incorporated into the new knowledge, the ‘conclusive bliss’ and insight into ‘that serene result of all’ offered by death. But the use of ‘may’ suggests that Tennyson is not entirely happy about his hypothesis, though Shaw would not have found it absurd. Life involves considerable effort, and Tennyson does not want to feel that this effort is wasted: but it would not be wasted if (1) there were a ‘second birth of death’; and (2) man carried over into this the habits formed in life. Man would be in a better position to concentrate on the new knowledge made available after death if he did not at the same time have to try to reestablish his own identity. In the preface to his evolutionary play Back to Methuselah, in which he seeks to replace Darwinism with the earlier theories of Lamarck (who believed that the life force, the will, not the blind force of natural selection, was the cause of evolution) Shaw writes ‘the moment we form a habit we want to get rid of the consciousness of it so as to economise our consciousness for fresh conquests of life’. Like Shaw, Tennyson is constantly trying to put back into evolutionary theory the spiritual element which Darwinism, it seemed, was about to discard; like Shaw, too, he felt that the greatest stumbling-block to man's moral progress was the shortness of his life and the inevitability of his death. Only by getting over this obstacle could he see a way out of the mechanistic heresy; and he got over it by positing death as a development in the individual paralleling the development of the race on earth, rather as the embryo's nine months in the womb takes it through ages of natural selection from primitive cell to highly developed organism, yet still leaves it only at the beginning. So in ‘The Ancient Sage’ he speculates:

Who knows? or whether this earth-narrow life
Be yet but yolk, and forming in the shell?

Like Shaw, Tennyson felt that human life must somehow be prolonged if it is not to be cruel and pointless, and this would have seemed particularly important when a man died young as Hallam did; he needed to feel that its unused potential (‘the force that would have forged a name’) was retained for some new activity:

                    I know transplanted human worth
Will bloom to profit otherwhere;

and again, in LXXV, he is thinking of the waste which, without an evolutionary immortality, Hallam's death must have been:

          But somewhere, out of human view,
          What'er thy hands are set to do
Is wrought with tumult of acclaim.

Tennyson cannot relinquish the idea of Gray's ‘applause of list'ning senates to command’, the

Hands, that the rod of empire might have sway'd
          Or wak'd to ecstasy the living lyre.

Although Gray's dead missed high achievement by leading a quiet life not a short one, Hallam does become a village Hampden, a Cromwell guiltless of his country's blood; this is clear from LXIV, from which I quoted at the beginning of Chapter 1. In that poem Hallam, looking back from eternity upon his life on earth, is compared to a man of humble origins who has risen to high place while Tennyson, left behind on earth, becomes the boyhood friend who

                    in the furrow musing stands:
‘Does my old friend remember me?’

And in LX and XCVII Tennyson again casts himself in an inferior role and looks up to Hallam. All these poems emphasise the way in which Tennyson tries to think of Hallam's death as a success story, a kind of promotion. By advancing in heaven and not on earth Hallam finds achievement without its concomitant disappointments and misunderstandings. Like Adonais

From the contagion of the world's slow stain
He is secure.

But besides positing for Hallam the triumphs he missed on earth, Tennyson wants him also to remember the happy life they shared on earth, memories of which he himself still retains. Again, this is part of the feeling that nothing must be lost, that there must be continuity; what seems to have been lost must be seen as gain. Time lost is time wasted and the poem is a protest against that proposition. The link which seemed in the first time of grief to have been broken is replaced by ‘some strong bond which is to be’.

I have said that it is wrong to think of Tennyson as a crude meliorist. He accepts the evidence of the evolutionists, but transferred to human history this requires (as scientists themselves saw) modification. The roar of traffic is not necessarily an improvement on the stillness of the central sea, but man must evolve to ever nobler ends since any other kind of change would be a counsel of despair. This cannot be proved, though man's previous record may be an argument in its favour, and attempts to prove it are gradually abandoned in favour of gestures towards the ‘larger hope’ and other vague and distant ends ‘to which the whole creation moves’. Knowledge being concerned only with the phenomenal cannot help here, but wisdom can; and by this, as we have seen, Tennyson meant insight into moral law gained through experience, or, as he said in ‘Oenone’, ‘self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control’ (the last term recurs in the last stanza of In Memoriam). Thus we learn a kind of stretching out of human dignity beyond the present limits of science and what T. S. Eliot called ‘the lifetime of one man only’.

The importance of love, which has directed the whole poem, is that it can make such leaps into the dark seem both intelligible and valuable. So the introductory stanzas are addressed to the ‘Strong Son of God, immortal Love’. When Tennyson personifies God it is usually as Christ and usually periphrastically, as ‘He that died in Holy Land’ (compare Lycidas, ‘Him who walked the waves’).

Moreover, love is not a vague emotion but a powerful specific. In CXXVIII, Tennyson says that his love for Hallam is related to, but is greater than, faith in man's moral evolution—the second pillar upon which the poem's structure is built. He argues that if time is a mere process of change and decay it would offer man no hope: the so-called evolutionary process, instead of being a progress to ever nobler ends, would merely be the blind mutations of chance. Love, having been tested by experience, is stronger than faith in the related, but unverifiable, concept of spiritual evolution. Tennyson's love for Hallam has defied time and death: it is

The love that rose on stronger wings,
          Unpalsied when he met with Death

And the line, stated twice in CXXVI, ‘Love is and was my Lord and King’, underlines the central significance of love, both as personal experience tested through time, and as a principle operating in the universe through Christ. What is to be admired in the poem is the way it reconciles a traditional renaissance individualism with the contemporary emphasis on the species: the close view and the long view.

Thus In Memoriam is itself an example of the process of moral evolution which it describes. Its value as a record of experience on the two levels of personal suffering and intellectual speculation, lies in the fact that it demonstrates how man can progress from despair both about the ‘type’ and about the ‘single life’ to a position in which both may be secured against destruction. In CXVII, another poem addressed to conquered time—the ‘days and hours’ which had at the beginning of the cycle seemed enemies of love—Tennyson again stresses his acceptance of his role in time. His ultimate meeting with Hallam, of which he is by now sure, will be ‘fuller gain’ (after the repeated use of the word ‘loss’ at the beginning of the cycle the use of ‘gain’ is significant)

For every grain of sand that runs,
          And every span of shade that steals,
          And every kiss of toothed wheels
And all the courses of the suns.

The stanza emphasises the poet's time-consciousness. He knows now that life has to be lived through moment by moment and that, until his life's end, he will be subject to the processes of time. But his ‘proper place’ is with Hallam: he reverts to the feeling of a broken link which must be renewed if his love is to have any meaning. He is prepared to be isolated from Hallam through time, but only because he believes that his love will be resumed beyond time.

Thus Tennyson reconciles two attitudes to the dead Hallam: his feeling, while he himself is still alive, that Hallam's presence can be felt by him as part of the universe; and his belief that, after his own death, ‘I shall know him when we meet’. Hallam's metamorphosis, then, is itself subordinate to Tennyson's timebound state; it exists only in his mind as a means of turning grief into acceptance. When Tennyson himself quits time, he will no longer need to imagine Hallam as ‘standing in the rising sun’. Thus (as is stated in CXXIX) Hallam is at once far off and near; part of a ‘dream of good’ and an immortal recognisable being waiting for Tennyson to follow him out of time. This I take to be the significance of the words

Strange friend, past, present and to be;
          Loved deeplier, darklier understood.

Hallam is ‘strange’ because he now has a double existence: as part of Tennyson's timebound philosophy and as an eternal being existing outside time. Again, T. S. Eliot in the Four Quartets comes nearest of any later poet to expressing the complex idea resolved in In Memoriam, when he says

                    See, now they vanish,
The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them,
To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.