Shelburne Essays: Tennyson (Part 3)

(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 third 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 3)

There is not a little of this effeminate grace in the long elegy In Memoriam, which above any other single poem, I think, seemed to the men of the Victorian age to express the melancholy and the beauty of life. I find a trace of it even in the more exquisite sections, in the nineteenth for instance: 

The Danube to the Severn gave 
The darken’d heart that beat no more; 
They laid him by the pleasant shore, 
And in the hearing of the wave. 

There twice a day the Severn fills; 
The salt sea-water passes by
And hushes half the babbling Wye, 
And makes a silence in the hills. 

The imagery of grief’s home could not be more melodiously uttered, and it is close to the facts. “From the Graveyard,“ writes the editor of the Eversley edition, “you can hear the music of the tide as it washes against the low cliffs not a hundred yards away“; and the poet himself adds in the note: “Taken from my own observation—the rapids of the Wye are stilled by the incoming sea.“ The application is like the image: 

The Wye is hush’d nor moved along, 
And hush’d my deepest grief of all. 
When fill’d with tears that cannot fall, 
I brim with sorrow drowning song. 

The tide flows down, the wave again 
Is vocal in its wooded walls; 
My deeper anguish also falls, 
And I can speak a little then. 

Such was the music that Tennyson learned from the Wye at Tintern Abbey, where, as the editor tells us, the verses were actually composed. Exquisitely refined and curious, no doubt; but the editor’s note sets us involuntarily to thinking of other Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, where Wordsworth heard “These waters, rolling from their inland springs, with a sweet inland murmur,“ and from that sound conjectured “the still, sad music of humanity.“ It is not a question here of philosophy but of art, and no one can fail to note the thinness of Tennyson’s style compared with the larger harmonies of Wordsworth. 

But however much the prettiness of In Memoriam caught the ears of the sentimental, it was another quality which won the applause of the greater Victorians. There is an interesting letter given among the editor’s notes, showing how the men who were leading English thought in those days felt toward the new poem, and in particular toward one of its religious sections: 

If e’er when faith had fall’n asleep, 
I heard a voice “believe no more” 
And heard an ever-breaking shore 
That tumbled in the Godless deep; 

A warmth within the breast would melt 
The freezing reason’s colder part, 
And like a man in wrath the heart 
Stood up and answer’d “I have felt.”

No, like a child in doubt and fear: 
But that blind clamour made me wise; 
Then was I as a child that cries,
But, crying, knows his father near. 

“These lines,” writes Prof. Henry Sidgwick in the letter referred to—“these lines I can never read without tears. I feel in them the indestructible and inalienable minimum of faith which humanity cannot give up because it is necessary for life; and which I know that I, at least so far as the man in me is deeper than the methodical thinker, cannot give up,“ Now Sidgwick was no ordinary man. He was in fact one of the keenest and hardest-headed thinkers of those days, one of the leaders in the philosophical and economical revolution then taking place; and these tears of his were no cheap contribution of sentiment, but rose from the deepest wells of trouble. Many men still living can remember the dismay and the sense of homelessness that fell upon the trusting mind of England when it became aware of a growing hostility between the new school of science and the established creed. When Arthur Hallam died in 1833, Darwin was making his memorable voyage of investigation on the Beagle, and while Tennyson was elaborating his grief in long-linked sweetness, Darwin was writing that “first note-book of Transmutation of Species” which was developed into the Origin of Species of 1859. The alarm of the Church over this assimilation of man and monkey, the bitter fight between Huxley and Wilberforce and between Huxley and Gladstone—all this is well known, though the tumult of the fray begins to sound in younger ears as distant as the battles about Troy. [The controversy rage till now, and the Creationists at present advance with an impressive array of arguments that reveal the portentous nonsense that is Darwinism and Neo-Darwinism. —Ed.] Meanwhile within the Church itself the scientific criticism of sources [the province of Liberalism in the Protestant communities and the headwaters of Modernism in the Catholic Church] was working a havoc no less dreaded than the attacks from without. This breach within the walls, though long a-making, first became generally visible by the publication of the famous Essays and Reviews in 1860, which, harmless as the book now seems, kept two of its principal contributors, Jowett and Mark Pattison, for years from university promotion. 

To these currents of thought Tennyson was quickly responsive. Without hesitation he accepted the new point of view for his In Memoriam, and those who were leading the revolution felt this and welcomed enthusiastically a recruit from the writers of the imagination who were commonly against them. “Wordsworth’s Attitude towards Nature,” says Professor Sidgwick, in the same letter to Tennyson’s son, “was one that, so to say, left Science unregarded: the Nature for which Wordsworth stirred our feelings was Nature as known by simple observation and interpreted by religious and sympathetic intuition. But for your father the physical world is always the world as known to us through physical science; the scientific view of it dominates his thoughts about it.” And Professor Sidgwick is perfectly right. It is unnecessary to point out the many passages of In Memoriam in which the law of evolution, the survival of the fittest, and man’s kinship to the ape, were clearly hinted before Darwin had definitely formulated them in his epoch-making book. What more impressed men like Sidgwick was the fact that Tennyson felt with them the terrifying doubts awakened by this conception of man as part of a vast, unfeeling, blind mechanism, but still clung to “the indestructible and inalienable minimum of faith which humanity cannot give up because it is necessary for life.” And Tennyson, and this is the view to be emphasised, found this minimum of faith, not outside of the new science but at its very heart. He does, indeed, cry out at times against the harsher hypothesis, declaring what we are not “magnetic mockeries”—

Not only cunning casts in clay: 
Let Science prove we are, and then 
What matters Science unto men, 
At least to me? I would not stay. 

Let him, the wiser man who springs 
Hereafter, up from childhood shape 
His action like the greater ape, 
But I was born to other things. 

That note is heard in In Memoriam, but the gist of Tennyson’s faith, and what made him the spokesman of the age, was in a bold completion of evolution by the theory of indefinite progress and by a vision of some magnificent consummation wherein the sacrifices and the waste and the pain of the present were to be compensated somehow, somewhere, somewhen —who shall say? 

Oh yet we trust that somehow good 
Will be the final goal of ill, 
To pangs of nature, sins of will, 
Defects of doubt, and taints of blood; 

That nothing walks with aimless feet; 
That not one life shall be destroy’d, 
Or cast as rubbish to the void. 
When God hath made the pile complete; 

That not a worm is cloven in vain; 
That not a moth with vain desire 
Is shrivell’d in a fruitless fire, 
Or but subserves another’s gain. 

And the end of the poem is the climax of this comfortable belief: 

That God, which ever lives and loves, 
One God, one law, one element, 
And one far-off divine event, 
To which the whole creation moves. [Cf., Teilhard de Chardin.]

That reconciliation of faith and science, this discovery of a father near at hand within the inexorable law of evolution, this vision of an eternal state to be reached in the progress of time—all this is what we call the Victorian compromise. The prettiness which we found so characteristic of Victorian painting and of Tennyson’s non-religious verse was indeed only another phase of the same compromise. The imperious sense of beauty, which has led the great visionaries out of the world and which Tennyson portrayed tremblingly in his Palace of Art, was felt by the Victorians to be dangerous to the British sentiment of the home, and motherhood, and girlish innocence, and so they rested in the middle ground of prettiness where beauty and innocent sentiment might meet. Here also they held to that “indestructible and inalienable minimum of faith which humanity”—British humanity at least in those years—could not give up. And men like Professor Sidgwick were stirred to the heart by this compromise, and wept. 

Undoubtedly the fame of Tennyson in his own day was due largely to his expression of what may be called the official philosophy, but it is a question whether this very trait has not weakened his hold upon a later generation; whether, for instance, the stoic resolve and self-determination of Matthew Arnold, whom Professor Sidgwick in one of the most scathing essays of the century denounced as a trifling “prophet of culture” have not really expressed the higher meaning of that age—though not the highest meaning of all—better than any official and comfortable compromise; whether the profounder significance of that time of doubt was not rather in Matthew Arnold’s brave disease: 

And we are here as on a darkling plain 
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, 
Where ignorant armies clash by night. 

I am confirmed in this view by one of the present editor’s observations. I read the stanza of In Memoriam which describes the reception of the poet’s dead friend into the heavenly host: 

The great Intelligences fair 
That range above our mortal state, 
In circle round the blessed gate, 
Received and gave him welcome there;— 

and then in the editor’s note I read the lines of Milton’s Lycidas which Tennyson imitated: 

There entertain him all the Saints above 
In solemn troops, and sweet societies. 
That sing, and singing, in their glory move, 
And wipe the tears for ever from his eyes. 

Why is it that Tennyson here leaves us so cold, whereas at the sound of Milton’s words the heart still leaps as at a bugle call? Why are these fair Intelligences so meaningless and so frigid? Is not the cause just the spirit of compromise between religion and science that has entered into Tennyson’s image, leaving it neither the simple objective faith of Milton nor the honest questioning of Matthew Arnold? 

[To be continued.]