Alfred Tennyson was indeed a striking young man, over six feet tall and powerfully built. The mass of his somewhat unkempt black hair was set upon a noble head. His face carried an intense expression of melacholy.
The son of a gloomy Lincolnshire clergyman, he arrived at Cambridge in 1827 already an accomplished and precocious poet. The Somersby rectory had been a dysfunctional household to say the least, with the eleven children largely left to amuse themselves by wandering around the local marshes and fens. If Tennyson was shy at first, his prodigious ability and intensity of personality soon attracted others; and he found some companionship in an intellectual society known as ‘The Apostles’.
In Tennyson’s second year at Cambridge, another young man arrived at the University who would become the kind of intimate friend that his childhood had lacked. His name was Arthur Hallam, the son of a leading historian and scholar, and in his own way remarkably gifted. In the cynicism of the times in which we live, we have lost the ability to talk about the power and the depth of friendship without hinting at some sexual overtone.
There was no hint of anything erotic in the relationship between the two men. That would be to miss just how profound the intimacy of their friendship became as a friendship. Indeed, Hallam became engaged to Tennyson’s sister Emily. They shared not in an amorous passion, but in the delights of intellectual discovery and in the vigorous discussion of any topic they could think of. They shared with one another their difficulty they found at maintaining religious belief and yet the sense of loss they felt in not believing. Criticism of the text of the Bible and scientific discoveries about the age of the earth had appeared to challenge the faith of many of the best minds at Cambridge; and Tennyson and Hallam were no different. Certainly nothing in Tennyson’s upbringing at the rectory would have commended Christian faith to him as anything but a burden to be borne.
The summer of 1833 began with Hallam spending time at the Tennyson home in rural Lincolnshire, in the English midlands. These were memorable weeks – a sweet time that Tennyson would always remember with some sense of pain because they were never to be repeated. In August, Hallam’s father took him on a journey to the European continent. On Sept 15th, Henry Hallam returned to his hotel in Vienna only to discover his son in an armchair, dead of a cerebral haemorrhage.
The blow this struck to Tennyson was overwhelming. His grandson, Sir Charles Tennyson, would later write:
The sudden extinction of his friend, with all his infinite capacity for affection and his brilliant promise, struck at the very roots of his will to live. Could it really be that all this great spiritual treasure was annihilated: that all human love and all man’s spiritual effort are but a momentary ripple on the ocean of eternity? Was the world wholly without purpose and man an irresponsible toy for the gigantic forces of Nature? If so, what value could there be in life?
If you have ever had a chance to walk about a Victorian graveyard you will be struck by the openness and even sentimentality with which they regarded death. We are not unlike them, in that terrible griefs affect us too. But we have less experience of them, and fewer words with which to express our loss. We are not given to the public elaboration of our feelings – we do not feel that anyone would be interested in our thoughts about the brevity of life and the nearness of our mortality.
But Tennyson was to make an art form of grieving. He was too sorrowed to attend the funeral, and did not visit Hallam’s tomb until after he was married. But he could not stop his pen:
Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart and gather to the eyes,
In looking on the happy Autumn-fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more.
Dear as remembered kisses after death,
And sweet as those by hapless fancy feigned
On lips that are for others; deep as love,
Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;
Death in Life, the days that are no more.
The poem which made Tennyson’s career as a poet, In Memoriam A.H.H., is a lengthy reflection on the death of his friend which did not appear for seventeen further years. It is a poem of grief at the loss of a dear friend. But it also a poem about the pain of losing faith. Tennyson was one of the great doubters of his age. His was still very much a Christianised society, and in general traditionally orthodox Christian views held sway. However, developments in astronomy and geology had seemed to contradict Biblical cosmology as it had been traditionally understood. The world was not new, but rather very, very ancient. The universe was far more vast than had been previously imagined. It seemed less and less that humankind occupied anything like a significant place in that universe. If humankind felt small, and lonely, there was at the same time an optimism about human technological progress. This was the age of the industrial revolution, of the steam engine and the factory. People still wanted to believe, but wanted to do so in all sincerity given what they now knew about the world. Was there a way forward for them?
Added to this for Tennyson was the personal existential crisis occasioned by the loss of his friend. It seemed to be exactly the kind of random occurrence that would characterise a heartless universe. And yet, he was not ready to give up on faith entirely. Here’s a passage from In Memoriam:
I falter where I firmly trod,
And falling with my weight of cares
Upon the great world's altar-stairs
That slope thro' darkness up to God,
I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope,
And gather dust and chaff, and call
To what I feel is Lord of all,
And faintly trust the larger hope.
All that is happening and all that has happened to him has led to uncertainty. His feet now ‘falter’, where once before he had been confident of his footfall upon the ground of faith. His ‘weight of cares’ – primarily his deep sense of loss for his friend – causes him to fall upon the ‘world’s altar-stairs’. The picture reminds me of the burden Christian carries in John Bunyan’s great Christian classic Pilgrim’s Progress. Only this burden is not the poet’s sin, but rather his ‘weight of cares’. The path to God (a stairway to heaven?) is shrouded in darkness. He is not yet ready to declare that this is a road to nowhere, to cite the Talking Heads. But all he can do is reach out his ‘lame hands of faith, and grope’. He can have no certainty about what he is reaching for, but only in the end a faint trust. The ‘dust and chaff’ that gathers suggests the dust to which Adam is told he will return in Genesis 3 on account of the curse. It is a mark of mortality and an intimation of death. The poet calls, not to a personal God who reveals himself in the traditional and Biblical sense, but rather to ‘what I feel is Lord of all’. Who or what is this dark divinity, shrouded in mystery and unknowability? He hopes for a hand to reach out to meet his groping arm, but with no confidence, however much he wishes it. What is the ‘larger hope’? He doesn’t quite know, other than to say that hope is, perhaps inexplicably, part of his experience too.
Tennyson became famous through this poem because its themes of grief, loss and doubt resonated deeply with his Victorian contemporaries. The twentieth century poet T.S. Eliot wrote of In Memoriam: 'It is not religious because of the quality of its faith, but because of the quality of its doubt.’ It was profound in the honesty with which it faced the most difficult and personal questions of all – to do with love and death.
Tennyson was unshaken in his conviction that his friend had lived on in some form; and he never
rejected belief in the existence of God. One of his last poems was the famous ‘Crossing the Bar’, an expression of hope at life’s end:
Twilight and evening bell,
And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
When I embark;
For tho' from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crossed the bar.
But despite believing in the immortality of the soul and in his ‘Pilot’, it could never be said that he was an orthodox Christian believer in any sense. That conviction had long been shaken loose from him in his sorrows.
They have real mountains here - and you can almost see them in my poor photograph:
