ine Ungm or in iviemonam y
passages in it are of immediate interest to readers
of Tennyson. Some phrases recall similar phrases
in his poems, though we cannot say whether the
similarity is due to coincidence, or to unconscious
reminiscence on the part of the poet, or even to
the use by Hallam of expressions caught from the
talk of his friend. Thus the lines (p. 56),
My own dear sister, thy career
Is all before thee, thorn and flower \
and the lines (p. 84),
am I free to
Still close my happy eyes,
And paint upon the gloom thy mimic form,
recallIn Memoriam, XLVI. 2, and LXX. 2. When
we find Chaucer described as our beautiful morn- *
ing-star' we remember the opening stanza of the
Dream of Fair Women}- The words, '
that indeed
is in the power of God's election, with whom
'
alone rest the abysmal secrets of personality (p.
3;>9)> remind us of the words in The Palace of
Art,
God, before whom ever lie bare
The abysmal deeps of Personality.
Tennyson's references to the early history of
1
1 do no f nean to imply that no one had used the phrase before.
It occurs, for instance, in Denham.
8 In Memoriam
the earth are paralleled by the following lines to
Ben Lomond (p. 1 2) :
Oh, if thy dread original were not sunk
I' th' mystery of universal birth,
What joy to know thy tale of mammoths huge,
And formings rare of the material prime,
And terrible craters, cold a cycle since 1 !
Like the poet, too, Hallam seems to have had a
strong feeling of the utter insignificance of the
earth in the 'immense scheme' (p. 360).
As we know from the Memoir, Tennyson did
not by any means fully share his friend's appre-
hensions about the political future, but some words
of Hallam's (Remains, p. 1 44) might be taken as a
commentary on In Memoriam, CXXVII.
'
:
Looking
then to the lurid presages of the times that are
coming believing that amidst the awful commo-
;
tions of society, which few of us do not expect
the disruption, it may be, of those common bonds
which hold together our social existence, neces-
sarily followed by an occurrence on a larger scale
of the same things that were witnessed in France
<
forty years ago. . . .'
The two friends must often have talked together
of that belief in love as the central meaning of
things which with Hallam was evidently partly
1 '
Cycle
'
is common in Tennyson :
'
material prime
'
occurs i
TTie Two Voices.
The Origin of In Memoriam 9
due to his study of Plato, Dante, and Petrarch,
and which took a curious shape in his Theodic&a
Ncvissima and such sentences as the following
;
(arid there are not a few of the kind) have much
of the spirit of parts of In Memoriam :
'
But it
1
was not in scattered sonnets that the whole mag-
nificence of that idea could be manifested, which
represents love as at once the base and the pyra-
midal point of the entire universe, and teaches us
to regard the earthly union of souls, not as a
thing accidental, transitory, and dependent on the
condition of human society, but with far higher
import, as the best and the appointed symbol of
our relations with God, and through them of his
own ineffable essence' (p. 130). This 'idea' is, in
essentials, the same as
'
that solemn idea which
alone solves the enigma of our feelings, and while
it supplies a meaning to conscience, explains the
destination of man' (p. 170. The student of In
Memoriam will find it worth while to read the
whole passage down to p. 177).
I do not intend to imply by these remarks that,
of the two friends, Hallam had the more original
and influential mind. We have little evidence,
and it is quite possible that many of the ideas in
the Remains were not merely common to the two,
1
He is referring to Dante.
io In Memoriam
but passed from Tennyson to Hallam. What
seems nearly certain is that Hallam was more
inclined to philosophical and theological specula-
tion than his friend then was, and much more
inclined to formulate the results of such specula-
tion than Tennyson ever became.
II.
THE COMPOSITION OF IN MEMORIAM.
WHEN was In Memoriam written? We know *
that its occasion was the death of Arthur Hallam
1
in 1833, and that it was published first in iSso.
Do we know anything of the date of its composi-
tion beyond the fact that it came into being
during those seventeen years?
In considering this question we must be on our
guard against inferences drawn from what may be
called the internal chronology of the poem. It
will be shown presently that the author almost
certainly intended to produce the impression that
the 131 sections cover a period of about three
years. But In Memoriam is
'
a poem, not an
actual biography.' The poet who speaks in its
\*g
1
Without sections xxxix. and Lix. of the present text. See
notes on these.
