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• Title: Spurring an Imitative will: The Canonization of Arthur Hallam.
• Author : Christianity and Literature
• Release Date : January 01, 2006
• Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 222 KB

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T. S. Eliot observes of Tennyson's In Memoriam that "its faith is a poor thing, but its doubt is a very intense experience" (200-201). Earlier in the same essay, he compares the poem to "the concentrated diary of a man confessing himself" (196). Together, these statements create the image of a poet struggling to give meaning to life by articulating the enormous pain of doubt and grief. Considered in this way, the very personal qualities of In Memoriam transform the reader into a sort of literary eavesdropper, and the sheer pathos of Tennyson's grief feels slightly embarrassing--as if it were something we should not be seeing. (1) Tennyson's poem, however, cannot be read only as a record of private grief, as recent critics have reminded us. (2) Indeed, even Eliot's comparison of the poem to a diary reminds us that the very act of articulation places memory into the public sphere, for a diary, despite the intensely personal feelings it may contain, always exists to be read by others. (3) Modern sociologists have even questioned whether any act of articulating memory can be considered "personal" at all. Eviatar Zerubavel, for instance, builds on the idea of collective memory proposed by Maurice Halbwachs to suggest that "It was language that freed human memory from having to be stored exclusively in individuals' brains" (5). If the pathos of In Memoriam begins with "no language but a cry" (54, 20) trapped within Tennyson's own mind, the act of committing Hallam's memory to writing ultimately transfers that memory into a public arena where it becomes something altogether different from the inarticulate cry of personal grief. (4) Pierre Nora has identified the first half of the nineteenth century as a time characterized by the loss of collective memory, which he defines as "memory without a past that ceaselessly reinvents tradition, linking the history of its ancestors to the undifferentiated time of heroes, origins, and myth" (8). Although Nora writes specifically of French history, his comments speak as well to a process that occurred in Victorian England. Chartism, electoral reform, and various Church reforms together signaled a break in any smooth narrative of English history. In response to these ruptures, Victorians countered with efforts to reestablish a collective memory as Nora defines it. Thomas Carlyle tried to reconnect England with its heroes and its origins by arguing in On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) and in Past and Present (1843) that the only way to proceed into the future was by correctly understanding the past; as he puts it in Past and Present, the greatest threat to Victorian England was that the past was "sacrilegiously mishandled; effaced, and what is worse, defaced!" (239). In its own way, the Oxford Movement attempted a similar re-creation of English memory, hoping to locate in the ancient Catholic Church an origin that would preserve the continuity of the English Church despite the recent repeals of the Test and Corporation Acts and the admission of Roman Catholics to the government. Tennyson holds a secure place as one of the chief poetic voices in this effort to repair the breaches in history by giving voice to the past. Unlike Carlyle and Newman, Tennyson seeks not so much to establish a historical chain connecting the past to the present as to recreate the past in the present and by so doing to shape the future. James W. Hood has argued that In Memoriam's "most shocking attribute" is its claim to creative power: it "does not merely remember a dead friend; the poem enshrines him permanently as a much grander figure than he could have been had he lived" (118). I wish to take seriously this idea that the poem "enshrines" Hallam, recognizing, as Hood reminds us to, that Tennyson crafted the poem in a specific historical moment in which the language of religion permeated Victorian culture. With In Memoriam, Tennyson draws from the religious debates of the day to effect a secular c

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