Abstract: Tennyson's central beliefs are well known, and his grandson summarizes them admirably at the end of his essay on 'Tennyson's Religion': 'the guidance of the Universe by a God who is Love,' 'the revelation of God's love and the divine law through Jesus Christ,' 'the immortality of the human spirit,' and 'the freedom of the human will.' Equally well known is the unsystematic way in which Tennyson held these beliefs: 'he was certainly no regular church-goer,' Robert Martin says of the about-to-bemarried poet, and Hallam Tennyson notes his father's consistent refusal to formulate his creed: "he thought, with Arthur Hallam, that 'the essential feelings of religion subsist in the utmost diversity of forms.'" This liberalism was neither hazy nor lazy; it was based on Tennyson's acute perception of actual human experience, particularly his own, with all its depths and heights, starts and hesitations, calms and alarms. Such experience was a fruitful source for the poetry, and accounts for the complex and sometimes contradictory ways in which In Memoriam, for instance, is organized. Alan Sinfield, James Kincaid, Dwight Culler, and others have explored these complexities skilfully, and their analyses give fresh force to the assertion that Tennyson bases his faith on actual experience. Revelation, the Bible, miracles, and the authority of the church were (and are) conventional foundations for faith, and Tennyson does not exclude these from consideration, but his central concern is life as it is actually lived. We know a great deal about Tennyson's life as he actually lived it, thanks to Robert Martin's superb biography, but we know less about the intellectual background of Tennyson's position. Not, I hasten to add, about his faith in the context of the science of his age, for Douglas Bush, Lionel Stevenson, Georg Roppen, and others have examined such matters as Tennyson's treatment of astronomy and evolution in relation to belief. But the view that human life itself is the basis of faith—that has a context that needs exploring.
Publication Year: 1986
Publication Date: 1986-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 15
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