Arthur Hallam

Have you ever read a poem by Alfred Tennyson called In Memoriam? It's one of my favorite poems.

He speaks about the loss of a friend called Arthur Henry Hallam, at 22 years of old, at the peak and prime of his life.

He died of what was called consumption at the time, tuberculosis.

And it sent Tennyson into an absolute tailspin to have his friend.

The Wordsworth Society was founded with the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Dean of St. Paul's, the lord chief justice of england the then american minister mr lowell and a number of distinguished literary men among its members the transactions of that society give evidence that among the thoughtful men and women of the last decade wordsworth was by far the strongest influence that he was not merely a literary tradition but that he was a vital force in the minds and hearts of nearly all the most interesting people of the period students of to-day however will be well content to read wordsworth only in matthew arnold's selection here they will find him as a sonneteer proclaiming liberty with scarcely less zeal and power than milton they will find him as the sympathetic friend of the poor and of the oppressed to be dead to the charm of matthew arnold's selections from wordsworth is to care nothing for poetry to appreciate with any measure of enthusiasm the twelve volumes of wordsworth's collected writings is equally to have one's sense of true poetry deadened and destroyed we have no time now for the excursion and the prelude we have less for wordsworth's ecclesiastical sonnets and the borderers for his copious prose moralizings one has no toleration whatever it is not easy to judge whether alfred tennyson will ever cease to retain the very wide hold upon the public which was his for at least thirty years prior to his death and which is his to-day the poems of tennyson might be read by succeeding generations of englishmen if only for their exquisite purity of style music he has also in abundance in harold queen mary and his other plays there is no great gift of characterization and these assuredly will go the way of southey's more ambitious poems but in maude tennyson caught the social aspiration of his time with singular insight the world he pleaded and england in particular was given over to money-getting the capitalist was more tyrannical than the old expiring slave-owner even peace was a mere word there was a worse tyranny than that which left men for dead on the battlefield there was the tyranny which ground them to dust for a bare pittance in mill and factory tennyson never wrote with greater force or with more perfect dramatic and lyric art and his poem is as striking and effective to-day as at the time of its publication in eighteen fifty five lord tennyson for the poet laureate accepted a peerage in won the hearts of a wider audience by in memoriam, and of a still larger one by the idols of the king.

In memoriam, a lengthy elegy of his college friend, Arthur Hallam, touched the great religious public of England.

The poem reflected a certain transcendentalism of view, which was fast becoming fashionable.

There lives more faith in honest doubt, believe me, than in half the creeds.

Before them there were chroniclers of contemporary events and pamphleteers under the guise of historians, but little more.

Goldsmith's histories are the laughing-stock of those to whom the modern methods of research are familiar, and even Hume had little of the spirit of the genuine student.

Hallam and Lingard were the pioneers of this branch of literature, although both of them had done their work before Queen Victoria came to the throne.

seventeen seventy seven to eighteen fifty nine henry hallam was born at windsor where his father held a canonry his first great work entitled view of the state of europe during the middle ages was published in eighteen eighteen and his constitutional history of england from the accession of henry the seventh to the death of george the second in In 1838 he produced his Introduction to the Literature of Europe in the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries.

And you get the two of them together and it, it takes you to the heights.

I mean, again, you think in the, in, uh, in the history of the West, you know, "Lycidas" by John Milton, uh, dealing with the death of Edward King in 1637, is viewed as the greatest lamentation in the English language alongside Tennyson's "In Memoriam" for Arthur H. Hallam of 1850.

Coltrane goes beyond those, brother.

Hmm.

And in fact, the biographer Richard Holmes has just done a wonderful book in the last year about Tennyson's early years called, um, uh, The, T- The Boundless Deep.

But Tennyson, in his early 20s, he, uh, he had a very, very close friendship with a man called Arthur Hallam.

They'd, they planned to, uh, publish books of poetry together.

They were obsessed by Wordsworth and Coleridge, and so they wanted to publish their own version of lyrical ballads.

But what happens is Arthur Hallam, in 1833, dies very quickly and, and suddenly while in Vienna with his father, and this completely polarizes Tennyson.

And people have sort of written a great deal trying to kind of get to the bottom of the profound psychological impact it has on Tennyson because it goes beyond any...

It, it goes beyond even the unimaginable depths of profound grief.

I'm, I mean, he is obsessed by what has happened and cannot get over it.