Victorian Faith
Pressing Forward: Alfred, Lord Tennyson and the Victorian Age
by Louis A. Markos
Sapientia Press, 2007
(301 pages, $25.95, paperback)
reviewed by Anne Barbeau Gardiner
In his masterpiece In Memoriam, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, arguably the greatest poet of his time, travels from agnosticism to faith in immortality and in a Creator who molded man through nature. In Pressing Forward, Louis Markos traces Tennyson’s conversion against the background of six “sages”—Huxley, Newman, Mill, Carlyle, Ruskin, and Arnold—and their responses to the crisis of faith produced by a new science and the struggle against materialism.
Revealingly, even the unbelievers among the sages retained something of a Christian ethos. With neither the faith of Newman, nor what Markos calls the “half-agnostic/half-Christian compromise of Tennyson,” their declarations about the soul and our duty to posterity reflect the Gospels, while their desire to press forward to a glorious consummation echoes the hope for a New Jerusalem.
Three Sages
Markos, a professor of English at Houston Baptist University, begins by introducing the three “sages” who provide the map of Victorian belief upon which Tennyson’s spiritual journey can be traced.
At one end is T. H. Huxley, who popularized Evolution as a worldview. He used biblical imagery to disguise his materialism, but in the end wanted such metaphors dropped, calling it our duty to adopt materialistic language. He saw man as produced by “material forces,” but still believed him free to shape the world.
At the other end is John Henry Newman, who proposed the Church as the bulwark against the “all-dissolving skepticism of the intellect.” Without “first principles” from Revelation, he warned, the world would lack necessary signposts and boundaries.
And between them (though closer to Huxley) is John Stuart Mill, brought up along rigidly utilitarian lines, who suffered a nervous breakdown at age 21 and was healed by discovering the imagination by way of Wordsworth. He went on to “humanize” the creed of utilitarianism and fight against injustices.
Markos then launches into a moving analysis of Tennyson’s epic-long In Memoriam (1850), a meditation on grief occasioned by the death of his friend Arthur Henry Hallam. At the start, the poet wants to “stop feeling, to turn himself to stone,” but over the course of 131 poems wrestles his way out of despair and “into the Victorian age.”
At the midpoint, he contemplates the crisis of faith caused by the new science. He meditates on “the horror of a blind, impersonal universe,” a “Nature red in tooth and claw” indifferent to mankind:
Anne Barbeau Gardiner is Professor Emerita of English at John Jay College of the City University of New York. She has published on Dryden, Milton, and Swift, as well as on Catholics of the 17th century.
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