repeating the historical verity that the ideas of In Memoriam could
not have been "made familiar by" authors who had not yet published
anything, or by books yet undreamed of and unborn, such as Ecce Homo
and Jowett's work on some of St Paul's Epistles. If these books
contain the ideas of In Memoriam, it is by dint of repetition and
borrowing from In Memoriam, or by coincidence. The originality was
Tennyson's, for we cannot dispute the evidence of dates.

When one speaks of "originality" one does not mean that Tennyson
discovered the existence of the ultimate problems. But at Cambridge
(1828-1830) he had voted "No" in answer to the question discussed by
"the Apostles," "Is an intelligible [intelligent?] First Cause
deducible from the phenomena of the universe?" {9} He had also
propounded the theory that "the development of the human body might
possibly be traced from the radiated vermicular molluscous and
vertebrate organisms," thirty years before Darwin published The
Origin of Species. To be concerned so early with such hypotheses,
and to face, in poetry, the religious or irreligious inferences which
may be drawn from them, decidedly constitutes part of the poetic
originality of Tennyson. His attitude, as a poet, towards religious
doubt is only so far not original, as it is part of the general
reaction from the freethinking of the eighteenth century. Men had
then been freethinkers avec delices. It was a joyous thing to be an
atheist, or something very like one; at all events, it was glorious
to be "emancipated." Many still find it glorious, as we read in the
tone of Mr Huxley, when he triumphs and tramples over pious dukes and
bishops. Shelley said that a certain schoolgirl "would make a dear
little atheist." But by 1828-1830 men were less joyous in their
escape from all that had hitherto consoled and fortified humanity.
Long before he dreamed of In Memoriam, in the Poems chiefly Lyrical