Shelburne Essays: Tennyson (Part 1)

(Pictured: Alfred Lord Tennyson.) Having concluded our revised re-presentation of An Apology for Poetry, which inaugurated Tradition Restored in the summer of 2016, we are now returning to the essays of Paul Elmer More. I am happy to present the first post of More’s essay “Tennyson,” one of the chapters in his Shelburne Essays, Seventh Series. P. E. More (1864-1937) was an American journalist, critic, essayist, and Christian apologist. Russell Kirk wrote, “as a critic of ideas, perhaps there has not been his peer in England or America since Coleridge.” Kirk speaks of More’s insight into the “enormous error” of secular humanists. More believed that when religion is replaced by the “mere ‘brotherhood of man,’ fratricide is not far distant.” He wrote that the one effective way of “bringing into play some measure of true justice as distinct from the ruthless law of competition . . . is through the restoration in the individual human soul of a sense of responsibility extending beyond the grave.” The alternative is a society “surrendered to the theory of ceaseless flux, with no principle of judgement except the shifting pleasure of the individual.” One may say that at present we are wading through the high tide of that flux. He and his friend Irving Babbitt became the founders of the conservative literary movement known as the New Humanism.

Tennyson (Part 1)

Whatever changes may occur in the fame of Tennyson—and undoubtedly at the present hour it is passing into a kind of obscuration—he can never be deprived of the honour of representing, more almost than any other single poet of England, unless it be Dryden, a whole period of national life. Tennyson is the Victorian age. His Poems, Chiefly Lyrical had been published only seven years when the Queen came to the throne in 1837; he succeeded Wordsworth as poet-laureate in 1850; and from that time to his death in 1892 he was the official voice of the Court and the acknowledged spokesman of those who were leading the people through that long period of transition. There was something typical of the heart of England in his birth and childhood. For what better nursery can be imagined for such a poet than one of those village rectories where the ancient traditions of the land are preserved with religious reverence and the pride of station is unaccompanied by the vanity of wealth? And what scenery could be more appropriate than the country of Lincolnshire, rolling up from the salt marshes of the sea and from the low dunes, “where the long breakers fall with a heavy clap and spread in a curdling blanket of seething foam over the level sands”? Tennyson never forgot those sights and sounds of his childhood; their shadows and echoes are in all his later verse. 

And the surroundings of his early manhood were equally characteristic. In 1828 he went to Cambridge and was matriculated at Trinity College, leaving in 1831 without a degree. Those were years when the spirit stirred in many lands. In France the romantic movement, with Victor Hugo as prophet and Sainte-Beuve as interpreter, was beginning its career of high-handed victory. In England it was a time of reform, felt at the two universities as powerfully as in Parliament. At Oxford, Newman and Keble and Hurrell Froude were preparing the great reintegration of religion and the imagination which runs through the century parallel and hostile to the main current of ideas. In Tennyson’s university a group of young men were brooding over strange and lofty liberties, and were dreaming vaguely of a new guide born of the union of idealism and science. A few of these more ardent minds had banded together as the Apostles, a secret debating society which afterwards became famous from the achievement of its members. Among the strongest of the brotherhood was Arthur Henry Hallam, whose sudden death at Vienna caused grief to many friends, and to Tennyson the long sorrow which, with the vexatious problems of human mortality, winds in and out through the cantos of In Memoriam. The meaning of this loss cannot be measured by the scanty remains of Hallam’s own writings. He stands with John Sterling and Hurrell Froude among the inheritors of unfulfilled renown—young men, whose confidence in life was, in those aspiring days, accounted as achievement, and whose early death, before the inevitable sordor of worldly concession touched their faces, crowned them with imperishable glory. So the memory of his friend became to Tennyson in a few years a symbol of hopes for him and for the world frustrate. He revisits college and goes to see the rooms where Hallam dwelt; but, hearing only the clapping of hands and the crashing of glass, thinks of the days when he and his circle held debate, and would listen to Hallam’s master words: 

. . . Who, but hung to hear 
The rapt oration flowing free

From point to point, with power and grace 
And music in the bounds of law, 
To those conclusions when we saw 
The God within him light his face, 

And seem to lift the form and glow 
In azure orbits heavenly wise; 
And over those ethereal eyes 
The bar of Michael Angelo. 

Those who at college have felt the power of such a guiding friendship will tell you it is the fairest and most enduring part of education. I myself know. 

To Tennyson that high comradeship of youth and those generous ideals lasted as one of the forces that made him the typical poet of the age. You may read through the memoirs of the period, and almost always you will meet him somewhere moving among other men with the mark of the Muses upon him, as a bard in the old days stood amid lords and warriors with the visible insignia of his calling in his hands and on his brow—sacra ferens. Whether in his free-footed and wandering earlier years, or as the prosperous householder in his beautiful homes at Farringford on the Isle of Wight and at Aldworth on Blackdown, Surrey, “overlooking the vast expanses of light and shadow, golden cornfields, blue distances”—wherever you see him, he is the same bearer of conscious inspiration. Now we have a glimpse of him with FitzGerald, visiting James Spedding in his home in the Lake country—Spedding who devoted a lifetime to the whitewashing of Chancellor Bacon, he of the “venerable forehead”; “No wonder,” said his waggish friend, “that no hair can grow at such an altitude; no wonder his view of Bacon’s virtue is so rarefied that the common consciences of men cannot endure it.” The three young men, we know, discoursed endlessly and enthusiastically about the canons of poetry, while the elder Spedding, a staunch squire of the land who “had seen enough of the trade of poets not to like them”—Shelley and Coleridge and Southey and Wordsworth—listened with ill-concealed impatience. It was at this time, probably, that Tennyson and FitzGerald held a contest as to which could produce the worst Wordsworthian line, with the terrible example claimed by both of them: “A Mr. Wilkinson, a clergyman.” Again Tennyson is seen with the same friends in London, “very droll, and very wayward; and much sitting up of nights till two or three in the morning with pipes in our mouths: at which good hour we would get Alfred to give us some of his magic music, which he does between growling and smoking; and so to bed.” Or he is at Carlyle’s house at Chelsea, with “Jack and a friend named Darwin, both admirers of Alfred’s,” still talking and interminably smoking—“one of the powerfullest smokers I have ever worked along with in that department,” writes the experienced host. Or in the Isle of Wight, he is wandering one stormy night with Moncure Daniel Conway, while “his deep bass voice came through the congenial darkness like mirthful thunder.”

With another guest, perhaps, we go up-stairs to the poet’s den on the top-story at Farringford, where in safe seclusion he can pour out his stores of deep questioning and Rabelaisian anecdote; or climb still higher, up a ladder to the leads, where he was wont to go to contemplate the heavens, and whence one night, like Plato’s luckless philosopher, he fell down the hatch; whereat a brother bard quoted to him: “A certain star shot madly from his sphere.” Such stories could be multiplied endlessly. The best of all pictures of him is that written down in the diary of the Rev. R. S. Hawker, the strange vicar of Morwenstow, near Tintagel, the birthplace of the legendary Arthur, whither Tennyson had come in 1848 to make himself familiar with the country of the Idylls. 

It is observable in all these accounts that the great personality of Tennyson, with his contempt for little conventions, impressed those who lived with him as if he possessed some extraordinary daemonic power not granted to lesser men. And his conversation was like his figure. It is agreeable, when we consider certain finical over-nice qualities of his verse, to know that his talk was racy with strong, downright Saxon words; that, like our Lincoln, he could give and take deep draughts of Pantagruelian mirth. I confess that it does not displease me to touch this vein of earthy coarseness in the man. But I like also to hear that his mind rose more habitually from the soil to the finer regions of poetry and religion. In a hundred recorded conversations you will find him at close grips with the great giants of doubt and materialism, which then, as in the caverns and fastnesses of old fable, were breeding in every scientific workshop and stalking thence over the land. How often you will find him, when these questions are discussed, facing them calmly, and then ending all with an expression of unalterable faith in the spirit-forces that blow like one of his mystic winds about the solid earth; speaking words which sound commonplace enough in print but which, with his manner and voice, seem to have affected his hearers as if they had been surprised by a tongue of revelation. 

Still oftener his talk was of the poets and their work. Sometimes it was long discourse and rich comparison. Other times it was a flashing comment on the proper emphasis or cadence of a line, as on that day when he visited Lyme Regis with William Allingham, and, sitting on the wall of the Cobb, listened to the passage out of Persuasion where Louisa Mulgrave hurts her ankle. And then, continues Allingham, we 

‘. . . take a field-path that brings us to Devonshire Hedge and past that boundary into Devon. Lovely fields, an undercliff with tumbled heaps of verdure, honeysuckle, hawthorns, and higher trees. Rocks peeping through the sward, in which I peculiarly delight, reminding me of the West of Ireland. I quote— 

“Bowery hollows crowned with summer sea.” 

‘T. (as usual), “You don’t say it properly”—and repeats it in his own sonorous manner, lingering with solemn sweetness on every vowel sound,—a peculiar incomplete cadence at the end.’

It is but one example among a thousand of Tennyson’s supreme care for the sound of a word and for the true melody of a verse. “When Tennyson finds anything in poetry that touches him,” says Coventry Patmore, “not pathos, but a happy line or epithet—the tears come into his eyes.” 

[To be continued.]