It is
strange that Mr Harrison has based his criticism, and his theory of
Tennyson's want of originality, on what seems to be a historical
error. He cites parts of In Memoriam, and remarks, "No one can deny
that all this is exquisitely beautiful; that these eternal problems
have never been clad in such inimitable grace . . . But the train of
thought is essentially that with which ordinary English readers have
been made familiar by F. D. Maurice, Professor Jowett, Ecce Homo,
Hypatia, and now by Arthur Balfour, Mr Drummond, and many valiant
companies of Septem [why Septem?] contra Diabolum." One must keep
repeating the historical verity that the ideas of In Memoriam could
not have been "made familiar by" authors who had not yet published
anything, or by books yet undreamed of and unborn, such as Ecce Homo
and Jowett's work on some of St Paul's Epistles. If these books
contain the ideas of In Memoriam, it is by dint of repetition and
borrowing from In Memoriam, or by coincidence. The originality was
Tennyson's, for we cannot dispute the evidence of dates.
When one speaks of "originality" one does not mean that Tennyson
discovered the existence of the ultimate problems. But at Cambridge
(1828-1830) he had voted "No" in answer to the question discussed by
"the Apostles," "Is an intelligible [intelligent?] First Cause
deducible from the phenomena of the universe?" {9} He had also
propounded the theory that "the development of the human body might
possibly be traced from the radiated vermicular molluscous and
vertebrate organisms," thirty years before Darwin published The
Origin of Species.
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