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.
Ruskin had not published the first volume of Modern Painters. His
Oxford prize poem is of 1839. Mr Stopford Brooke was at school. The
Duke of Argyll was being privately educated: and so with the rest,
except the contemporary Maurice. How can Mr Harrison say that, in
the time of In Memoriam, Tennyson was "in touch with the ideas of
Herschel, Owen, Huxley, Darwin, and Tyndall"? {8} When Tennyson
wrote the parts of In Memoriam which deal with science, nobody beyond
their families and friends had heard of Huxley, Darwin, and Tyndall.
They had not developed, much less had they published, their "general
ideas." Even in his journal of the Cruise of the Beagle Darwin's
ideas were religious, and he naively admired the works of God.
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