Chapter 5 - Page 2

in all its deeps by Darwin's Origin of
Species. Thus the geological record is inconsistent, we learned,
with the record of the first chapters of Genesis. If man is a
differentiated monkey, and if a monkey has no soul, or future life
(which is taken for granted), where are man's title-deeds to these
possessions? With other difficulties of an obvious kind, these
presented themselves to the poet with renewed force when his only
chance of happiness depended on being able to believe in a future
life, and reunion with the beloved dead. Unbelief had always
existed. We hear of atheists in the Rig Veda. In the early
eighteenth century, in the age of Swift -

"Men proved, as sure as God's in Gloucester,
That Moses was a great impostor."

distrust of Moses increased with the increase of hypotheses of
evolution. But what English poet, before Tennyson, ever attempted
"to lay the spectres of the mind"; ever faced world-old problems in
their most recent aspects? I am not acquainted with any poet who
attempted this task, and, whatever we may think of Tennyson's
success, I do not see how we can deny his originality.

Mr Frederic Harrison, however, thinks that neither "the theology nor
the philosophy of In Memoriam are new, original, with an independent
force and depth of their own." "They are exquisitely graceful re-
statements of the theology of the Broad Churchman of the school of F.
D. Maurice and Jowett--a combination of Maurice's somewhat illogical
piety with Jowett's philosophy of mystification." The piety of
Maurice may be as illogical as that of Positivism is logical, and the
philosophy of the Master of Balliol may be whatever Mr Harrison
pleases to call it. But as Jowett's earliest work (except an essay
on Etruscan religion) is of 1855, one does not see how it could
influence Tennyson before 1844. And what had the Duke of Argyll
written on these themes some years before 1844? The late Duke, to
whom Mr Harrison refers in this connection, was born in 1823. His
philosophic ideas, if they were to influence Tennyson's In Memoriam,
must have been set forth by him at the tender age of seventeen, or
thereabouts. Mr Harrison's sentence is, "But does In Memoriam teach
anything, or transfigure any idea which was not about that time" (the
time of writing was mainly 1833-1840) "common form with F. D.
Maurice, with Jowett, C. Kingsley, F. Robertson, Stopford Brooke, Mr
Ruskin, and the Duke of Argyll, Bishops Westcott and Boyd Carpenter?"

The dates answer Mr Harrison. Jowett did not publish anything till
at least fifteen years after Tennyson wrote his poems on evolution
and belief. Dr Boyd Carpenter's works previous to 1840 are unknown
to bibliography. F. W. Robertson was a young parson at Cheltenham.