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Tennyson's Religious Opinions
By Carlos Baker

ALTHOUGH he was the author of In Memoriam which, after The Prelude of William Wordsworth, is probably the greatest of the long religious poems of nineteenth-century England, Tennyson's choice was emphatically for a career in literature rather than religion. As an octogenarian, he summarized his position through the assumed voice of Merlin, magician to the court of King Arthur. Merlin says that as a youth he was taken in hand by a mighty wizard who advised him to "Follow the Gleam." For Tennyson, as for his mythical ancestor, this meant the intermittent light of imaginative inspiration rather than strict adherence to the tenets of the Christian faith.

At twenty-two, still an undergraduate at Trinity College, Cambridge, Tennyson considered entering the ministry. In some respects, this might have been a natural enough decision, since he had been born and raised at Somersby Rectory in rural Lincolnshire, where his father was rector until his death in 1831. But the young man soon rejected his tentative plans for a life in the church, moving rapidly onwards into the only calling he was ever to follow, the composition of poetry. The choice could not have been wiser. Despite his commanding stature, his serious nature, and the deep organ-tones of his voice, he would not have succeeded as a preacher, and he was temperamentally too shy and diffident to have become a useful pastor. Instead, by age forty-one, in 1850, the year in which The Prelude and In Memoriam both finally appeared, he followed Wordsworth as Poet Laureate of England.

The best modern record of his life and work can be found in Robert Bernard Martin's frank, brilliant, and exhaustive biography, Tennyson: The Unquiet Heart (Oxford University Press, 1980, 432 pp., $25.00), which is also the most trustworthy guide to Tennyson's religious opinions. From this book there emerges an objective but sympathetic portrait of that tall, handsome, swarthy, myopic, and port-drinking poet, whose clothes were invariably dirty, who pipe-smoked his way through seventy years enveloped in a thick haze of shag tobacco, and whose mind was repeatedly assailed by "the anguish of [religious] disbelief."

His undergraduate prize poem, "Timbuctoo," as Professor Martin

Carlos Baker is Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature, Emeritus, Princeton University. A long-time member of the Editorial Council of THEOLOGY TODAY, Dr. Baker is the author of novels, poems, and literary criticism. He is perhaps best known as the biographer of Hemingway and has recently edited the widely acclaimed Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters (1981). The older generation among our readers will remember with nostalgia how Tennyson (and Browning) were invoked in sermon after sermon as poetic apologists for Christian faith. Today, as Carlos Baker intimates, a new and deeper appreciation is available to us in seeing the person behind the poetry.

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tells us, engaged as its theme "the relativity of truth in myth and religion, which may both spring from man's mind and then in turn become the object of his devotion." This suspicion continued to haunt him all his life. His interest in religious ideas and ideals was strongly tempered by the fact that his father was "an embittered, crazed, rural parson, addicted to drugs and alcohol, subject to epileptic fits," and given to displays of anger that severely frightened his wife and their eleven surviving children. At least four of the seven Tennyson brothers are known to have spent time in mental institutions, and Tennyson himself long feared that the taint of "black blood" in his ancestry, including the curse of petit mal, might be flowing in his own veins, a possibility that made him defer his marriage to Emily Sellwood until the banner year of 1850.

Mrs. Tennyson was devoted and hardworking but also deeply conventional and conservative. According to a friend, it was her "great and constant desire ... to make her husband more religious." The battle had been lost long before the wedding. At Cambridge, Tennyson had often skipped compulsory chapel and readily denied that "an intelligent first cause is deducible from the phenomena of the universe." As a parson's son, writes Martin, "he was already inoculated against religious enthusiasm," and he seems never to have embraced the "strict Evangelical beliefs" of his pious and long-suffering mother.

In "Resolution and Independence," Wordsworth had sorrowfully observed that "we poets in our youth begin in gladness" only to succumb in the end to "despondency and madness." Arthur Hallam, Tennyson's closest friend at Cambridge, quoted the second phrase in a letter of condolence when Tennyson's father died, hoping that his classmate had known neither affliction. Tennyson luckily escaped his father's madness, but could not always shed the despondency occasioned by his religious skepticism. His memorial poem on Hallam, over which he labored for seventeen years, opens with a brave invocation to "Strong Son of God, immortal Love," whom we "by faith, and faith alone, embrace." Unhappily, "we cannot know," since "knowledge is of things we see." Therefore we can only "trust" the faith that seems to come like "a beam in darkness"-when it comes at all. Despite the rolling majesty of these stanzas, which Martin calls "more transparently Christian" than any other part of the poem, and despite the iteration of seemly words like "faith" and "trust," doubt is faintly visible between the lines. It is as if the "beam" of kindly light were far less powerful in Tennyson's mind than old Merlin's imaginative "gleam," in which he could wholeheartedly believe, having often experienced it.

By Section 96, the poet is saying: "There lives more faith in honest doubt,/Believe me, than in half the creeds." Such statements caused T.S. Eliot, the most eloquent of modern Christian poets, to remark that In Memoriam was "not religious because of the quality of its faith, but because of the quality of its doubt." The doubt was evidently "a very intense experience" for Tennyson, whereas the faith was "a poor thing."

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Poor or not, the poet strove valiantly for an understanding that never eventuated:

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.

The one larger hope to which he returned with obsessive interest was the possibility of personal immortality. Had he heard of it, he would have scorned a contemporaneous wag's remark that "eternal life is an indefinitely continued existence in Greenwich time under improved conditions." Like Elizabeth Barrett Browning, he turned briefly to spiritualism in the hope that the borderline between this world and the next might be crossed through the intercession of a medium. It was not.

Sometimes he spoke as if he were a Victorian Thomas Dubitimus: "What I want is an assurance of immortality." On other occasions he told young disciples about his intuitions or intimations of an after-life. In old age he once said that he felt "constantly aware of an unseen world of spirit" like "a great ocean pressing round us on every side, and only leaking in by a few chinks." The roofing or plumbing metaphor was inept enough, certainly, but the rest could easily have been a distant recollection of Wordsworth's lines in the Great Ode about "that immortal sea/Which brought us hither" and whose mighty waters roll round us evermore.

Tennyson's eightieth birthday brought hundreds of congratulatory letters and telegrams from "nearly every poet in the kingdom," as well as from Queen Victoria and many of her lesser-known subjects. The Laureate was pleased and puzzled. "I don't know what I have done to make people feel like that towards me," he said, "except that I have always kept my faith in immortality." Even though this remark reads like a non- sequitur, Tennyson may have meant that his belief in immortality was the one aspect of his religious outlook that had survived the battering of eighty years and could therefore serve as an object lesson to the public. A more likely explanation for his wide popularity is that he had been able to frame in memorable and quotable verse many of the moral and metaphysical dilemmas with which his contemporaries were wrestling.

His extreme myopia once made him declare that he was "the second most short- sighted man in England." More rugged Christians than he might construe the remark in a spiritual as well as an ophthalmological sense. Despite his imaginative and verbal gifts, he was not well equipped to deal with profound theological, philosophical, or scientific questions. So, for example, he plucked a daisy, peered at it closely, wondered aloud whether its delicate beauty betokened a "thinking Artificer," and versified the idea in his small lyric about the flower in the crannied wall. He vainly speculated on the teleological implications of "a natural world where death is the norm." Once in St. Paul's Cathedral he said defiantly, "This is a symbol that man is immortal." On a visit to

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Westminster Abbey with his son Hallam, he said, "It is beautiful, but what empty and awful mockery if there were no God." He closed In Memoriam with a ringing allusion to the "one far-off divine event/To which the whole creation moves," but without specifying what it would be. Tennyson cannot fairly be accused of having evaded the central ethical issues of his troubled age. But he never managed to crack the carapace of religious certainty. Professor Martin's word for Tennyson's religion is "fragile." The facts appear to justify the adjective.