His faith is, of course, no argument for others,--at least it ought not to be. We are all the creatures of our bias, our environment, our experience, our emotions. The experience of Tennyson was unlike the experience of most men. It yielded him subjective grounds for belief. He "opened a path unto many," like Yama, the Vedic being who discovered the way to death. But Tennyson's path led not to death, but to life spiritual, and to hope, and he did "give a new impulse to the thought of his age," as other great poets have done. Of course it may be an impulse to wrong thought. As the philosophical Australian black said, "We shall know when we are dead."Mr Harrison argues as if, unlike Tennyson, Byron, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Burns produced "original ideas fresh from their own spirit, and not derived from contemporary thinkers." I do not know what original ideas these great poets discovered and promulgated;their ideas seem to have been "in the air." These poets "made them current coin." Shelley thought that he owed many of his ideas to Godwin, a contemporary thinker. Wordsworth has a debt to Plato, a thinker not contemporary. Burns's democratic independence was "in the air," and had been, in Scotland, since Elder remarked on it in a letter to Ingles in 1515. It is not the ideas, it is the expression of the ideas, that marks the poet. Tennyson's ideas are relatively novel, though as old as Plotinus, for they are applied to a novel, or at least an unfamiliar, mental situation. Doubt was abroad, as it always is; but, for perhaps the first time since Porphyry wrote his letter to Abammon, the doubters desired to believe, and said, "Lord, help Thou my unbelief." To robust, not sensitive minds, very much in unity with themselves, the attitude seems contemptible, or at best decently futile. Yet I cannot think it below the dignity of mankind, conscious that it is not omniscient. The poet does fail in logic (In Memoriam, cxx.) when he says -"Let him, the wiser man who springs Hereafter, up from childhood shape His action like the greater ape, But I was BORN to other things."I am not well acquainted with the habits of the greater ape, but it would probably be unwise, and perhaps indecent, to imitate him, even if "we also are his offspring." We might as well revert to polyandry and paint, because our Celtic or Pictish ancestors, if we had any, practised the one and wore the other. However, petulances like the verse on the greater ape are rare in In Memoriam. To declare that "Iwould not stay" in life if science proves us to be "cunning casts in clay," is beneath the courage of the Stoical philosophy.
Theologically, the poem represents the struggle with doubts and hopes and fears, which had been with Tennyson from his boyhood, as is proved by the volume of 1830. But the doubts had exerted, probably, but little influence on his happiness till the sudden stroke of loss made life for a time seem almost unbearable unless the doubts were solved. They WERE solved, or stoically set aside, in the Ulysses, written in the freshness of grief, with the conclusion that we must be "Strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."But the gnawing of grief till it becomes a physical pain, the fever fits of sorrow, the aching desiderium, bring back in many guises the old questions. These require new attempts at answers, and are answered, "the sad mechanic exercise" of verse allaying the pain.
This is the genesis of In Memoriam, not originally written for publication but produced at last as a monument to friendship, and as a book of consolation.
No books of consolation can console except by sympathy; and in In Memoriam sympathy and relief have been found, and will be found, by many. Another, we feel, has trodden our dark and stony path, has been shadowed by the shapes of dread which haunt our valley of tribulation: a mind almost infinitely greater than ours has been our fellow-sufferer. He has emerged from the darkness of the shadow of death into the light, whither, as it seems to us, we can scarcely hope to come. It is the sympathy and the example, I think, not the speculations, mystical or scientific, which make In Memoriam, in more than name, a book of consolation: even in hours of the sharpest distress, when its technical beauties and wonderful pictures seem shadowy and unreal, like the yellow sunshine and the woods of that autumn day when a man learned that his friend was dead. No, it was not the speculations and arguments that consoled or encouraged us.
We did not listen to Tennyson as to Mr Frederic Harrison's glorified Anglican clergyman. We could not murmur, like the Queen of the May -"That good man, the Laureate, has told tis words of peace."What we valued was the poet's companionship. There was a young reader to whom All along the Valley came as a new poem in a time of recent sorrow.
"The two-and-thirty years were a mist that rolls away,"said the singer of In Memoriam, and in that hour it seemed as if none could endure for two-and-thirty years the companionship of loss. But the years have gone by, and have left "Ever young the face that dwells With reason cloister'd in the brain."
In this way to many In Memoriam is almost a life-long companion: we walk with Great-heart for our guide through the valley Perilous.