Shelburne Essays: Tennyson (Part 4)

(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 fourth 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 4)

It may seem that I have dwelt over-much on this weaker side of an admired writer who has so much noble work to his credit, but it was these compromises that gave him his historic position, and, also, it is only by bringing out clearly this aspect of his work that we are enabled to discern the full force of another and contrasted phase, which was not of the age but was the unfettered voice of the poet himself. As we hear of the impression made by the man Tennyson upon his contemporaries, and then consider the sleeker qualities of his verse, we find it difficult to associate the two together; there was no prettiness or convention in his character, but a certain elusive wildness of beauty and a noble, almost defiant, independence. To distinguish between the two poets in the one writer is the only way rightly to understand and wisely to enjoy him. Now if we examine the spirit of compromise, which made the official poet in Tennyson, we shall see that it rests finally on a denial of religious dualism, on a denial, that is, of the consciousness, which no reasoning of philosophy and noise of the world can ever quite obliterate, of the two opposite principles within us, one bespeaking unity and peace and infinite life, the other calling us to endless change and division and discord. Just this cleft within our nature the Victorians attempted to gloss over. Because they could not discover the rational bond between the world of time and evolution and the idea of eternity and changelessness, they would deny that these two can exist side by side as totally distinct spheres, and by raising the former and lowering the latter would seek the truth in some middle ground of compromise. Thus instead of saying, as Michael Angelo said, “Happy the soul where time no longer courses,” they placed the faith of religion in some far-off event of time, as if eternity were a kind of enchantment lent by distance. [cf., Teilhard de Chardin.]

Such was the official message of Tennyson. But by the side of this there comes up here and there through his works an utterly different vein of mysticism, which is scarcely English and certainly not Victorian. It was a sense of estrangement from time and personality which took possession of him at intervals from youth to age. In a well-known passage he tries to analyse this state: 

“A kind of waking trance I have frequently had, quite up from boyhood, when I have been all alone. This has generally come upon me thro’ repeating my own name two or three times to myself silently, till all at once, as it were out of the intensity of the consciousness of individuality, the individuality itself seemed to dissolve away into boundless being, and this not a confused state, but the clearest of the clearest, the surest of the surest, the weirdest of the weirdest, utterly beyond words, where death was almost a laughable impossibility, the loss of personality (if so it were) seeming no extinction but the only true life.” 

This was not a reading into youth of a later knowledge gained from Oriental sources. In the notes to the Eversley volumes, the editor gives an unpublished juvenile poem, The Mystic, in which the same feeling is expressed, if not so clearly, at least with a self-knowledge every way remarkable for a boy: 

Ye could not read the marvel in his eye, 
The still serene abstraction; he hath felt 
The vanities of after and before. 

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

He often lying broad awake, and yet 
Remaining from the body, and apart 
In intellect and power and will, hath heard 
Time flowing in the middle of the night, 
And all things creeping to a day of doom. 

The point to note is how Tennyson in such passages feels himself an entity set apart from the flowing of time, whereas in the official compromise of In Memoriam he—not only he, but God Himself—is one with the sum of things in their vague temporal progress. In that difference, if rightly understood, lies, I think, the distinction between faith and naturalism. 

This sense of himself as a being set apart from change strengthened, if anything, as he grew old. Its most philosophic expression is in The Ancient Sage, which was first published in 1885 and was regarded by him as one of his best later poems; it is rebellious in Vastness, lyrical in Break, Break, Break, purely melodic in Far—Far—Away, dramatic in Ulysses, auto-biographical in The Gleam. Always it is the man himself speaking his own innermost religious experience, and no mere “minimum of faith” needed for the preservation of society. 

For the fullest and most artistic utterance of this faith we must go to the Idylls of the King. I will confess to being no unreserved lover of that mangled epic as a whole; it seems to me that in most of its parts the Victorian prettiness is made doubly, and at times offensively, conspicuous by the contrast between Tennyson’s limpid sentimentality and the sturdier fibre of Mallory’s Morte Darthur, from which he drew his themes. But it is true that here and there, in a line or a musically haunting passage, he has in the Idylls spoken from the depth of his heart, as he has spoken nowhere else, and that one of them, The Holy Grail, has an insight into things spiritual and a precision it would be hard to match in any other English poem. The mystic cup, which had been brought to England by Joseph of Arimathea and had vanished away for the sinfulness of the people, was first seen in vision by a holy sister of Sir Percivale, and by her Galahad was incited to go on the sacred quest. Meanwhile, one day, when the knights were gathered at the Round Table in the absence of the King, Galahad sits in Merlin’s magic seat, which, as Tennyson explains, is a symbol of the spiritual imagination, the siege perilous, wherein “no man could sit but he should lose himself”: 

And all at once, as there we sat, we heard 
A cracking and a riving of the roofs. 
And rending, and a blast, and overhead 
Thunder, and in the thunder was a cry. 
And in the blast there smote along the hall 
A beam of light seven times more clear than day: 
And down the long beam stole the Holy Grail 
All over cover’d with a luminous cloud, 
And none might see who bare it, and it past. 
But every knight beheld his fellow’s face 
As in a glory, and all the knights arose, 
And staring each at other like dumb men 
Stood, till I found a voice and sware a vow. 

The vision, in other words, is nothing else but a sudden and blinding sense of that dualism of the world and of the human soul beneath which the solid-seeming earth reels and dissolves away, overwhelming with terror and uncomprehended impulses all but those purely spiritual to whom the earth is already an unreal thing. Then enters the King and perceives the perturbation among his knights. It is characteristic of England and of the age, although it has, too, its universal significance, that Tennyson’s Arthur should deplore the search for the Grail as a wild aberration, which is to bring impossible hopes and desolate disappointments to those whose business was to do battle among very material forces. “Go,” he says— 

Go, since your vows are sacred, being made: 
Yet—for ye know the cries of all my realm 
Pass thro’ this hall—how often, O my knights, 
Your places being vacant at my side, 
This chance of noble deeds will come and go 
Unchallenged, while ye follow wandering fires 
Lost in the quagmire! 

[To be continued.]