Chapter 4 - Darwin, Tennyson and the Writing of ‘The Holy Grail’

Summary

In 1888 Algernon Charles Swinburne published in the Nineteenth Century a short spoof in the style of the ‘Did Bacon Write Shakespeare?’ articles popular at the time, in which he claimed energetically that the real author of Tennyson's poems was actually Charles Darwin. He cites as proof ‘the well-known passage from Maud beginning with what we may call the pre-Darwinian line — “A monstrous eft was of old the lord and master of the earth” as well as “the celebrated lines which describe Nature as “so careful of the type, so careless of the single life” (129).’ Earlier chapters of the present volume, in their explorations of Tennyson's response to pre-Darwinian evolutionary debates, especially in his reading of Charles Lyell and of Robert Chambers, have revealed that there was a genuine perceptiveness behind Swinburne's comedy. The present chapter focuses on a direct encounter between Tennyson and Darwin and will argue (giving unexpected, if extremely limited, support to Swinburne!) that there may be a link between the only documented meeting of these two iconic figures, on 17 August 1868, and Tennyson's subsequent completion of ‘The Holy Grail’ idyll in what Emily Tennyson described as ‘a breath of inspiration’ during the following three weeks.

The Holy Grail episode had been on Tennyson's mind for over a decade: to him it was the key to the whole cycle of Idylls of the King, but he demurred year after year, doubting, he said, ‘whether such a subject could be handled in these days, without incurring a charge of irreverence’.