FAITH IN HONEST DOUBT

- EXAMINING FAITH AND DOUBT IN ALFRED TENNYSON’S IN MEMORIAM -

Ever since its publication in 1850, Alfred Tennyson’s In Memoriam has been regarded, quite paradoxically, as the proverbial work of both Victorian faith and doubt. Tennyson’s requiem over the loss of his friend, Arthur Henry Hallam, is a story of the overwhelming loss of a kindred spirit, and a man’s subsequent journey through darkness in search of everlasting life. A battle is raged within Tennyson between losing faith in a loving God and carrying on in the wake of death through a renewed sense of trust. The author’s intention has been the subject of critical debate for over a century, with countless arguments made in favor of either claim. However, it is the intent of this essay to examine such criticism and postulate that Tennyson’s journey takes him through shadow into a firm belief in immortality and an absolute trust in the ultimate purpose of God.

The culmination of seventeen years of soul searching, the prologue of In Memoriam was the last section of the poem to be written, and yet is the first section presented to the reader. It exposes the author’s final meditations on faith and doubt, which he clearly intended to impart to his reader before the poem proper. He asks that his Lord “Forgive what seemed my sin in me / … Forgive my grief for one removed / …Forgive these wild and wandering cries / Confusions of a wasted Youth; / Forgive them where they fail in truth, / And in thy wisdom make me wise” (Tennyson, Prologue: 33-44). It is clear that Tennyson is a man of faith and trust, asking God to forgive his former confusions – the doubts that compose the first half of the poem – and therefore the prologue is meant to instruct the reader to view In Memoriam as a man’s triumphant journey from doubt to faith.

While Tennyson’s journey may end in a conquest over despair, it begins with a realization of the fragility of life. He stands before Hallam’s former home, for the first time truly aware of his friend’s mortality, a “consciousness painfully intensified by the contrast between the dead friend and the risen God” (Rosenberg). He hears the sounds of the city, the noise of life, and yet feels completely isolated. The dawn, once the symbol of rebirth, is for him only a lesser darkness. Ironically, Tennyson desires not just his friend’s continued company, but also the consolation and support that he knew only Hallam could have given him (Pollard): “And I should tell him all my pain / And how my life had drooped of late / And he should sorrow o’er my state / And marvel what possessed my brain (14: 13-16). Tennyson erodes into depression, never feeling more alone than his first Christmas experience without the one person he would share it with.

As those around him celebrate the birth of Christ, Tennyson mourns not only the death of Hallam, but also his faith. His belief in immortality has diminished, and he prays that “The light that shone when Hope was born” (30: 52), the hope of immortality, be lit once again. Without hope he believes the “Earth is darkness at the core” (34: 3) and in the wake of human life we find only dust and ashes. Life after death is the crux of religious dogma, in that the purpose of life on Earth is to live a life worthy of ascension into Heaven. It is the central belief of his faith, and having not felt Hallam’s presence since his death, Tennyson is not assured of its truth.

This shocking realization frightens him in such a way that he feels like a child “crying in the night / An infant crying for the light / And with no language but a cry” (56: 18-20), like a child in search of its mother, knowing that only she can quell his fears and reveal to him that all will be okay. He is now no more than an animal afraid of extinction, at the mercy of Nature, “red in tooth and claw” (56: 6). Tennyson’s despair over the loss of his friend is now exponentially greater, in that his funeral song is now sung for all of mankind, doomed to this Earth for eternity.

Nature itself becomes his enemy, a hostile goddess who brings to life only to bring to death, usurping his loving God (Rosenberg). Her terrible power and utter lack of sympathy are never more on display than they are on the first anniversary of Hallam’s death, upon which Tennyson awakes to find himself amidst a torrential storm. A streaming pane blurs the splendor of the sun, much like his tears of a year earlier. The day seemed “marked as with some hideous crime” (72: 18) – Hallam’s death – when a hand struck down and “cancelled nature’s best.”

Fortunately for Tennyson, he seems to be experiencing not the calm before the storm, but the storm before the calm. While last year’s Christmas brought with it a great deal of sadness, the second Christmas without Hallam brings an unexpected sense of tranquility, and a “quiet sense of something lost” (78: 8). With no tears or pain, Tennyson begins to ask himself if it is possible that his sorrow is waning. “Oh last regret, regret can die!” (78: 17) he says, sensing a release from his fixation with loss. Up to this point, Tennyson has been wracked with grief over his disconnection from his departed friend. His incessant search for evidence of the afterlife has yielded no results, but with his waning sorrow comes the detachment with the past that was always missing. His loss was too fresh and his grief too strong to allow him the peace of mind needed for such a religious experience.

The climactic experience in question, and the one about to occur to Tennyson, is one of religious conversion. Thus far, Tennyson had not the prerequisite mindset, which occurs through two necessary conditions. The first of these is a state of mind which has become unbearable and is nearly beyond repair. This may come about through a fear of one’s own security or a broader concern for humanity in general. The second condition is the occurrence of a climactic experience in which a power greater than oneself takes control and directs toward a resolution (Moore).

That Tennyson fell into his state of despair is no surprise considering the years preceding Hallam’s untimely passing. His father had passed away two years earlier, his brother Edward had endured a mental breakdown, and his brother Charles suffered from an opium addiction (Moore). Coupled with unfavorable critical reception for Tennyson’s recent poetry, Hallam’s death was simply the nudge that sent him off his pious cliff. Yet through all of this, Tennyson never seems to lose faith entirely, just faith in a loving God. He fears divine neglect, not divine punishment. Having lost his trust in God, he turns to Hallam to be his savior, to reach out and touch him in such a way that would revive his belief in man’s immortal spirit. Tennyson experiences several mystical experiences throughout the poem, where he feels like he has left his “mortal ark behind” and feels “a weight of nerves without a mind” (12: 6-7). He says that he comes back to his body a full hour after he left. However, as a result of his doubt, he fears that he is losing his mind, that his grief has “made [him] that delirious man / Whose fancy fuses old and new / And flashes into false and true” (16: 17-19). Again, his mind is not in its proper state, and thus he is unable to have a true experience.

Tennyson attaches great importance to the event of his communion with Hallam as the resolution of his doubts: “O for thy voice to soothe and bless! / What hope of answer, or redress?” (56:26-27). By not feeling Hallam’s presence, he doubts the immortality of man, and thus doubts God.

But as discussed earlier, with the passing of time comes the passing of grief, which allows the poet to reach “a state of emotional equilibrium” through which he was “grateful at least for the memory and friendship of Hallam” (Moore). This is a major turning point in the poem, for Tennyson realizes that within his despair lies a renewed sense of strength. Although he has not felt Hallam’s presence, he has accepted that through “dear words of human speech / We two communicate no more” (85: 83-84) and that they will have “a meeting somewhere, love with love” (85: 99). Harkening back to the prologue, we are reminded of how Tennyson begged forgiveness for his “sin,” for his “grief,” and his “wild and wandering cries.” We see now that these are sins indeed, and while he nurtured them, God’s presence remained unrevealed to him. Now that serenity has been achieved, he has opened his mind enough to allow Hallam’s spirit to enter.

Here we come to the climax of the poem, and consequently, Tennyson’s religious awakening. The conversion sequence begins in section ninety where he once again longs for Hallam, not in the begging, crying way as before, but as a way of assuring Hallam’s spirit that he still thinks of him: “come thou back to me” he says, “I find not yet one lonely thought / That cries against my wish for thee” (90: 21-24). Where in some cases spouses or relatives would not be welcome were they to return from the other side, because their loved ones have moved on to other things, Tennyson promises that his love remains, as it always will. As if feeling a change within himself – a new belief that he is now worthy of the experience – Tennyson asks Hallam to return to his earthly body to be with him once more. Feeling that the time is right, and that it is quickly fading, Tennyson demands to see Hallam soon, for doubt has begun to creep back into his life, and he fears he will soon distrust a vision as a “canker of the brain” (92: 3). If doubt were to gain a hold of him again, Tennyson fears that it would be a battle he no longer has the strength to win, and so if Hallam does not appear to him soon, the chance may be lost forever. Thus, he begs Hallam to “descend, and touch, and enter” (93: 13).

It is clear that Tennyson structured In Memoriam to prepare the reader for the moment of his spiritual reawakening in section ninety-five, when Tennyson reads a letter written to him by Hallam years earlier during their time at Somersby. He rereads Hallam’s letters, and is overwhelmed with a presence he has not felt in some time: “word by word, and line by line, / The dead man touched me from the past, / And all at once it seemed at last / The living soul was flashed on mine” (95: 33-36). He is said to have felt the “deep pulsations of the world,” which is important because it is the turning point in Tennyson’s outlook on nature. Where he before felt fear and disdain for an uncaring world, the pulsations he now feels indicate his belief in life as one giant organism, where everything is connected and everything is meaningful. Tennyson is ambiguous here in regards to whom or what “the living soul” is, but he is content in not knowing because the source means nothing to the value of the experience. It was a genuine one in which he was touched by some divine spirit, and whether that spirit was Hallam or God itself is of little consequence, for what remains is the fact that the dispelling of Tennyson’s religious doubt has begun.

This moment of clarity is clearly the result of religious conversion. Having conquered doubt he is reminded of a similar experience of Hallam’s in which he too suffered through religious uncertainty, only to prevail and realize that “There lives more faith in honest doubt, / …than in half the creeds” (96: 11-12). To possess honest faith one must have, at some point, possessed honest doubt, for if this faith is not able to stand against it, then no faith ever really existed. Even the strongest faith “dwells not in the light alone / But in the darkness and the cloud” (96: 20-21). He understands that his journey was all part of some divine plan, the only course possible to lead him to this point where he has found true faith for the first time. Passage ninety-six is particularly significant, where he absolves himself of his past negativity, “ringing out” his grief, strife, sin, and faithlessness (106: 9-18).

What separates Tennyson now from before Hallam’s death is that he understands that to have faith is to place one’s trust in something one will never fully understand. At first he hopes a second connection will occur, but resolves to feel content with possibly the one moment of truth he may ever be subjected to. The one moment he received has “enabled him to accept the ordinary state of human ignorance” (Moore). His one flash of joy will empower him to endure any further doubt: “all is well, tho’ faith and form / Be sunder’d in the night of fear; / Well roars the storm to those that hear / A deeper voice across the storm” (127: 1-4). He has faith that all will be well, in spite of the inevitable evils that will occur, for he has been touched by a presence from the other side and understands that everything is part of a design that he will never be privy to.

Yet, these evils weigh upon Tennyson’s mind, or more specifically, the nature of these evils. Why do they occur? Why does God not interfere with the realm of man to protect him from nature’s ills? How can he be certain “that God and Nature are not at strife?” (Rosenberg). These are questions that he knows will not be answered for him, and so upon careful introspection, he discovers his own answer: a synthesis of God and Nature, a union of evolutionary progress and the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth. Man “throve and branched from clime to clime, / The herald of a higher race, / And of himself in higher place, / If so he type this work of time” (118: 13-16). With renewed confidence Tennyson resolves that doubt will never shake him from his faith, for he has felt the presence of God. He looks back to his earlier cries for help, to when he reached out his childish hands, only to have them turned away (sections 55-56). He then reflects upon when the living soul flashed upon him, and sees that “out of darkness came the hands / That reach thro’ nature, moulding men” (124: 23-24).

These hands, which Tennyson has been in search of for the entire poem, are not of his friend Hallam, but of the divine presence we are told of in the prologue, the one who “madest man” and “madest life” (Rosenberg). He is blurring the distinction between humanity and divinity, and by doing so he achieves the synthesis alluded to earlier. The evolutionary argument (“the herald of a higher race”) answers Tennyson’s earlier fears about racial extinction at Nature’s hand, “red in tooth and claw,” yet it did not guarantee Hallam’s immortality. And while God reached out his hands to Tennyson, they were ultimately not the hands he had wished for (Hallam’s). Evolution did not allow for a meeting with Hallam, but Christianity did. And thus as the poem nears its end Tennyson joins the myth of progress with that of immortality. The fully evolved state of man becomes one and the same with Christianity’s promise of a Kingdom of Heaven on Earth.

Tennyson’s resolution that all will be well on Earth as well as in Heaven brings him to his final stage of faith. He has trust in Hallam’s security in the afterlife, and also his own on earth, knowing that each is serving the purpose he was designated by God. This faith affords him the strength to look into the future and be unafraid, even if “the fortress crashes from on high, / The brute earth lightens to the sky, / and the great Aeon sinks in blood” (127: 14-16). Tennyson rejoices even in the Apocalypse, for he knows that Hallam is smiling from on high, “knowing all is well” (127: 20), that the destruction of the earth is simply a prelude to a higher race, that “all, as in some piece of art, / Is toil and cooperant to an end” (128: 23-24). Years after the publication of In Memoriam, Tennyson would later remark that “all is well” is the “keynote of the whole” (Bruns). It is the quintessential message delivered by the poem, and the greatest affirmation of faith it can possibly impart.

While Critics have spent the last hundred and fifty years dissecting In Memoriam for concrete examples that will cement the poem as either the proverbial work of Victorian faith or the proverbial work of Victorian doubt, what many have failed to realize is that it is both. Much of In Memoriam is about doubt, just as much as it is about faith. However, it is ultimately a story about overcoming doubt and having a stronger faith for having gone through it. Tennyson’s original title for the poem, The Way of the Soul, sheds light on the poem’s purpose: to show the reader that one does come to honest faith without honest doubt and that one should not shy away from the questions that truly matter, for their answers will bring a contentment that has long been sought. Questions are intrinsic to faith, but the truly faithful understand that some questions may not bring an answer, which is acceptable, because they trust that in the end, all will be revealed.