In Memoriam General

Question 1

What evidence is there that Tennyson read Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology?

Answer 1

Christopher Ricks notes that Tennyson had read by the end of 1836 in his 1987 introduction to In Memoriam

Question 2

What happens in William Paley’s Natural Theology?

Answer 2

the location of a congruous stone can be dismissively explained, but it is the disconcerting incongruity of the watch that implicates the work of a higher creator

Question 3

How does catastrophism influence In Memoriam?

Answer 3

• his experience of grief takes the form of catastrophism and (as reflected in Paley’s Natural Theology) it is when an event appears incongruous that it is actually the work of God

Question 4

What did Henry Elton’s letter reflect on the matter of AHH’s death?

Answer 4

“it has pleased God to remove him from this, his first scene of existence, to that better world for which he was created”

Question 5

What did Hallam Tennyson quote Alfred saying in 1892?

Answer 5

“If we look at Nature alone, full of perfection and imperfection, she tells us that God is disease, murder and rapine. We get this faith from ourselves, from what is highest within us, which recognises that there is not one fruitless pang, just as there is not one lost good.”

Question 6

What does Coleridge’s 1825 ‘Aids to Reflection’ do?

Answer 6

• general tendency is to take religious apologetic out of the Paley realm of reasoning from natural phenomena, into the domain of inner experience

Question 7

Why is Charles Lyell’s 1830-1833 Principles of Geology disconcerting for Tennyson?

Answer 7

• wants to believe that the human soul has a special destiny

- Lyell argues that man has little significance as part of the universal scheme

Question 8

What was Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection?

Answer 8

• published 1825
• moved religious apologetics from Paley into the realm of inner experience
• revealed the faults of many religious and spiritual tenets of contemporary belief
• especially those related to evidence writing (ie. Paley, unitarianism etc.)
• stresses the importance of Christianity as a ‘personal revelation’

Question 9

How do we know Coleridge was influential?

Answer 9

• F.D. Maurice (founder of the Apostles) was a disciple of Coleridge and Hallam attests to his influence over that Cambridge generation

Question 10

What did Jerome Buckley say on the condition of Tennyson’s religion?

Answer 10

“By intuition alone, the cry of his believing heart, can [Tennyson] answer 
the negations of an apparently ‘Godless’ nature.”

Question 11

How did Tennyson operate differently from the interests of the Victorians more generally?

Answer 11

Tucker: “Where Victorians hungered for greatness of exhibition and monumental permanence, Tennyson indulged a lifelong fascination with evanescence, flux, and the humiliation to which man and his little systems must submit within the wheelings of aeonic time and the flittings of ever-recessive astral or submolecular space.”

Question 12

What significance might it have for In Memoriam that Tennyson used to receite his own name back to himself?

Answer 12

• he receites his name and this empties the name of individual meaning
• dissolves personal identity back into a power beyond himself
• similar idea with the subject of Arthur - the more he repeats the focus on his death, the more he dissolves the individuality of his circumstance and instead it becomes a power that exists beyond himself

Question 13

Tennyson was initially too bereaved to write the memoir of Arthur’s life that his father had requested - what did Tennyson say?

Answer 13

“at that time my heart seemed too crushed and all my energies too paralysed to permit me any compliance with his request”

Question 14

As part of the Apostles, Tennyson and Hallam joined debates on cultural discussions of the day. When asked ‘can first cause be deducible from nature?’, what did they both respond?

Answer 14

No

Question 15

How many copies of In Memoriam were sold in 3-4 years?

Answer 15

60,000

Question 16

How do the laws of thermodynamics (developing across the period) influence In Memoriam?

Answer 16

• initially death is seen as a ‘waste’ but then there is the discovery into a transformation of energy and form, not a loss
• possibly reflected in the form - constant conservation of energy yet the emotion/ mood of one section is dissipated and metamorphosed by succeeding ones

Question 17

How might we say the bodies of heaven and earth had become regulated?

Answer 17

• Copernican revolution (ie. heliocentrism)
• Kepler’s three laws of planetary motion
• Newton’s laws of universal gravitation

Question 18

What inadvertedly positive relationship might In Memoriam have to the various scientific regulations of heavenly and earthly bodies?

Answer 18

• with various different scientific laws came the modification of the watchmaker analogy into one where God had set off the watch and it now ran according to the prescribed plan
• possibly gives weight to the wedding in the epilogue ie. he sees the goodness of the prescribed plan and the continuation of the world

Question 19

If God was the watchmaker, what did Newton also say he had to do?

Answer 19

“God was forced to intervene in the universe and tinker with the mechanism from time to time to ensure that it continued operating in good working order”

Question 20

What does Charles Drawin conclude in his autobiohraphy after dicounting religious faith but also that nothing could exist in chance?

Answer 20

“the mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an Agnostic”

Question 21

What influence might AHH’s ‘Theodicaea Novissima’ had on the poem?

Answer 21

• similiar belief that God is love
• “that there is ground for believing that the existence of moral evil is absolutely necessary to the fulfilment of God’s essential love for Christ” - and therefore the necessity for Tennyson to accept the death of Hallam

Question 22

What did Henry Sidgwick write on the reception of In Memoriam to Cambridge? (as recorded by Hallam Tennyson’s memoir of his father)

Answer 22

• “Feeling must not usurp the
  function of Reason. Feeling is not knowing.”
  (he follows up with… “but the poet knows this”)

Question 23

What did Henry Sidgwick write of his recollection of Tennyson’s religious beliefs? (as recorded by Hallam Tennyson’s memoir of his father)

Answer 23

“This is a terrible age of unfaith,” he would say.
“I hate utter unfaith, I cannot endure that men should
sacrifice everything at the cold altar of what with their
imperfect knowledge they choose to call truth and reason.”

Question 24

Although formally an opening, how does EB Mattes characterise the prologue?

Answer 24

more a “conclusion more truly an opening”

Question 25

What is the prologue a prologue to?

Answer 25

it “precedes as to the new way of life Tennyson was about to enter”

Question 26

What is the veil of Isis?

Answer 26

• metaphor and allegorical artistic motif in which nature is personified as the goddess Isis covered by a veil or mantle, representing the inaccessibility of nature’s secrets

Question 27

What were the ideas of George Cuvier?

Answer 27

• discovered extinction
• challenging to the idea of the perfection of God’s creation because extinction implied there was a fault in what God had created

Question 28

What did Tennyson say on the matter of his life being part of an evolutionary process?

Answer 28

“I should consider that a liberty had been taken with me if I were simply a means of ushering in something higher than myself” (spoken to his friend Tyndall)