Oh weary life! oh weary death!
Oh spirit and heart made desolate!
Oh damned vacillating state!"
Now the philosophy of In Memoriam may be, indeed is, regarded by
robust, first-rate, and far from sensitive minds, as a "damned
vacillating state." The poet is not so imbued with the spirit of
popular science as to be sure that he knows everything: knows that
there is nothing but atoms and ether, with no room for God or a soul.
He is far from that happy cock-certainty, and consequently is exposed
to the contempt of the cock-certain. The poem, says Mr Harrison,
"has made Tennyson the idol of the Anglican clergyman--the world in
which he was born and the world in which his life was ideally passed-
-the idol of all cultured youth and of all aesthetic women. It is an
honourable post to fill"--that of idol. "The argument of In Memoriam
apparently is . . . that we should faintly trust the larger hope."
That, I think, is not the argument, not the conclusion of the poem,
but is a casual expression of one mood among many moods.
The argument and conclusion of In Memoriam are the argument and
conclusion of the life of Tennyson, and of the love of Tennyson, that
immortal passion which was a part of himself, and which, if aught of
us endure, is living yet, and must live eternally. From the record
of his Life by his son we know that his trust in "the larger hope"
was not "faint," but strengthened with the years.
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