Chapter 5

--IN MEMORIAM.

In May 1850 a few, copies of In Memoriam were printed for friends,
and presently the poem was published without author's name. The
pieces had been composed at intervals, from 1833 onwards. It is to
be observed that the "section about evolution" was written some years
before 1844, when the ingenious hypotheses of Robert Chambers, in
Vestiges of Creation, were given to the world, and caused a good deal
of talk. Ten years, again, after In Memoriam, came Darwin's Origin
of Species. These dates are worth observing. The theory of
evolution, of course in a rude mythical shape, is at least as old as
the theory of creation, and is found among the speculations of the
most backward savages. The Arunta of Central Australia, a race
remote from the polite, have a hypothesis of evolution which
postulates only a few rudimentary forms of life, a marine
environment, and the minimum of supernormal assistance in the way of
stimulating the primal forms in the direction of more highly
differentiated developments. "The rudimentary forms, Inapertwa, were
in reality stages in the transformation of various plants and animals
into human beings. . . . They had no distinct limbs or organs of
sight, hearing, or smell." They existed in a kind of lumps, and were
set free from the cauls which enveloped them by two beings called
Ungambikula, "a word which means 'out of nothing,' or 'self-
existing.' Men descend from lower animals thus evolved." {7}

This example of the doctrine of evolution in an early shape is only
mentioned to prove that the idea has been familiar to the human mind
from the lowest known stage of culture. Not less familiar has been
the theory of creation by a kind of supreme being. The notion of
creation, however, up to 1860, held the foremost place in modern
European belief. But Lamarck, the elder Darwin, Monboddo, and others
had submitted hypotheses of evolution. Now it was part of the
originality of Tennyson, as a philosophic poet, that he had brooded
from boyhood on these early theories of evolution, in an age when
they were practically unknown to the literary, and were not
patronised by the scientific, world. In November 1844 he wrote to Mr
Moxon, "I want you to get me a book which I see advertised in the
Examiner: it seems to contain many speculations with which I have
been familiar for years, and on which I have written more than one
poem." This book was Vestiges of Creation. These poems are the
stanzas in In Memoriam about "the greater ape," and about Nature as
careless of the type: "all shall go." The poetic and philosophic
originality of Tennyson thus faced the popular inferences as to the
effect of the doctrine of evolution upon religious beliefs long
before the world was moved