Shelburne Essays: Tennyson (Part 2)

Tennyson (Part 2)

(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 have returned to the essays of Paul Elmer More. Accordingly, I am happy to present the second 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 2)

But it was as reciter of his own poems that he maintained in our modern prosaic society the conscious office of bard. He read on all occasions and to all sorts of people, frankly and seriously, rolling out his verses with the rhythm and magnificent emphasis that poets love to bestow on their own works. Nor can I recall a single instance in which the listener was troubled by our tedious sense of humour—not even when, on the celebrated voyage to Copenhagen with Gladstone and a party of royalties, Tennyson patted time to one of his poems on the shoulder of an unknown lady, whom he afterwards discovered to be the Empress of all the Russias. Best of all these accounts is that of Mrs. J. H. Shorthouse, who, with her husband, the novelist, visited the poet at Farringford: 

“Then the moon rose, and through the great cedar on the lawn we saw its light approach and fill the room, and when the gentlemen came in, and Lady Tennyson returned to her sofa, we had the great pleasure of hearing Lord Tennyson read three of his favourite poems—the Ode to the Duke of Wellington, Blow, Bugle, Blow, and Maud. Only the candles by his side lit up the book of poems from which he read; the rest of the room was flooded by moonlight. . . . Many of Lord Tennyson’s visitors have described his reading of poetry, varying, of course, with their own tastes and sympathies. To me, as we sat in the moonlight listening to the words we loved, I seemed to realise the scenes of very olden days when the bards improvised their own lays in great baronial halls to enraptured listeners.” 

Nothing could better characterise the position of Tennyson as the official voice of the land, turning its hard affairs and shrewd debates into the glamour of music before flattered eyes and ears. He was beloved of the Queen and the Prince Consort. Men of science like Huxley were “impressed with the Doric beauty” of his dialect poems; or, like Herschel, Owen, and Tyndall, admired him “for the eagerness with which he welcomed all the latest scientific discoveries, and for his trust in truth.” Serious judges cited him on the bench, as did Lord Bowen when, being compelled to preside over an admiralty case, he ended an apology to counsel for his inexperience with the punning quotation: 

“And may there be no moaning at the Bar, 
When I put out to sea.”

In all this chorus of acceptance there is a single strangely significant discord. Edward FitzGerald [English poet and writer; 1809–1883], as we have seen, was one of Tennyson’s warmest friends; of all the great men of his acquaintance, and he knew the greatest, Tennyson alone overawed him. “I must, however, say further,” he once writes, after visiting with Tennyson, “that I felt what Charles Lamb describes, a sense of depression at times from the overshadowing of a so much more lofty intellect than my own: this (though it may seem vain to say so) I never experienced before, though I have often been with much greater intellects: but I could not be mistaken in the universality of his mind.” FitzGerald was one of those who first recognised Tennyson’s poetic genius; but after a while there comes a change in the tone of his comment. In Memoriam, which he read in manuscript before it was published, he cannot away with; it has to him the “air of being evolved by a Poetical Machine of the highest order”; and from that time his letters contain frequent hints of dissatisfaction. It was not that Tennyson’s later works were inferior to his earlier, but that somehow he seems to have felt, as we to-day are likely to feel, a disparity between the imposing genius of the man himself and these rather nerveless elegies and rather vapid tales like The Princess. He cries out once upon “the cursed inactivity” of the nineteenth century for spoiling his poet, coming close to, but not quite touching, the real reason of his discontent. That determined recluse of Little Grange, who, in the silent night hours, loved to walk about the flat Suffolk lanes, among the shadows of the windmills that reminded him of his beloved Don Quixote; who, as the years passed, could scarcely be got to visit his friends at all, but wrote to them letters of quaint and wistful tenderness—he alone among the busy, anxious Victorians, so far as I know them, stood entirely aloof from the currents of the hour, judging men and things from the larger circles of time; he alone was completely emancipated from the illusions of the present, and this is the secret of the grave, pathetic wisdom that so fascinates us in his correspondence. And so the very fact that Tennyson was the mouthpiece of his generation, with the limitations that such a character implies, cooled the praise of our disillusioned philosopher, just as it warmed the enthusiasm of more engaged minds. 

One is impressed by this quality of Tennyson’s talent as one goes through his works anew in the Eversley edition [1] that has just been published, with notes by the poet and by the poet’s son. It is useless to deny that to a later taste much of this writing seems an insubstantial fabric; that it has many of the qualities that stamp the distinctly Victorian creations as provincial and ephemeral. There is upon it, first of all, the mark of prettiness, that prettiness which has been, and still is, the bane of British art. Look through collections of the work of Landseer and Birket Foster and Sir John Everett Millais, and others of that group, and observe its quality of “guileless beauty,” as Holman Hunt calls it, or innocuous sentimentality as it seems to us. These scenes of meek lovemaking, of tender home-partings and reconciliations, of children floating down a stream in their cradle with perhaps a kitten peering into the water—it is not their morality that offends us, far from that, but their deliberate blinking of what makes life real and, in the higher sense of the word, beautiful. You will find this same prettiness in many of Tennyson’s early productions, such as The May Queen and Dora and The Miller’s Daughter. Or take a more pretentious poem, such as Enoch Arden, and compare it with a similar tale from Crabbe [English poet, surgeon, and clergyman, best known for his early use of the realistic narrative form and his descriptions of middle and working-class life and people; 1754-1832 (from Wikipedia)]; set Tennyson’s picture of the three children, “Annie Lee, the prettiest little damsel in the port,” etc., beside one of the coast scenes of the earlier poet’s Aldworth, and you will be struck by the difference between the beribboned daintiness of the one and the naked strength, as of a Dutch genre painting, of the other. Or go still higher, and consider some of the scenes of the Idylls. In its own kind Launcelot and Elaine is certainly a noble work, yet somehow to all its charm there still clings that taint of prettiness, which is a different thing altogether. I read the words of Gawain to the Lily Maid of Astolat: 

“Nay, by mine head,” said he, 
“I lose it, as we lose the lark in heaven, 
O, damsel, in the light of your blue eyes.” 

‘T is a sweet compliment, but I remember the same metaphor in an old play: 

Once a young lark 
Sat on thy hand, and gazing on thine eyes 
Mounted and sung, thinking them moving skies,—

and by comparison I seem again to note in Tennyson’s lines the something false we designate as Victorian. There is in the same poem another scene, one of the most picturesque in all the Idylls, where Launcelot and Elaine’s brother ride away from the ancient castle and the lily maid to join the tournament: 

She stay’d a minute, 
Then made a sudden step to the gate, and there—
Her bright hair blown about the serious face 
Yet rosy-kindled with her brother’s kiss—
Paused by the gateway, standing near the shield 
In silence, while she watch’d their arms far-off 
Sparkle, until they dipt below the downs. 

One sees it all—the sentimental maiden at the arch, gazing with shaded eyes after the two departing knights, while some flowering vine of an English summer droops from the stones about her slender form; one sees it, but again it is a painting on the walls of the Burlington House rather than the reality of a more virile art. 

[To be continued.]

[1] Works of Alfred Lord Tennyson. In six volumes. The Eversley Edition. Annotated by Alfred Lord Tennyson, edited by Hallam Lord Tennyson. New York: The MacmillanCo., 1908.