Shelburne Essays: Tennyson (Part 5)

(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 (after a long hiatus), I am happy to present the fifth 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 5)

Only Sir Galahad, in whom is no taint of sin or selfishness, and who was bold to find himself by losing himself, had beheld clearly the vision of the cup as it smote across the hall. I do not know how it may be with others, but to me the answer of Galahad to the King has a mystical throb and exultation almost beyond any other words of English: 

But I, Sir Arthur, saw the Holy Grail, 
I saw the Holy Grail and heard a cry— 
“O Galahad,” and “O Galahad, follow me.” 

That is the cry and the voice, now poetry and philosophy, which Tennyson had in mind when he wrote of hearing “the word that is the symbol of myself.” He who has once heard it and heard the responding echo within his own breast, can never again close his ears to its sound. To Galahad it meant the vanishing of the world altogether, and there is nothing more magnificent in Tennyson, scarcely in English verse, I think, than Sir Percivale’s sight of Galahad fleeing over the bridges out into the far horizon, and disappearing into the splendours of the sky, while— 

. . . thrice above him all the heavens 
Open’d and blazed with thunder such as seem’d 
Shoutings of all the sons of God: and first 
At once I saw him far on the great Sea, 
In silver-shining armour starry-clear; 
And o’er his head the Holy Vessel hung 
Clothed in white samite or a luminous cloud. 

There, in the inspiration from Tennyson’s own visionary faith and from no secular compromise, we find the lift and the joy and the assurance that Milton knew and sang in Lycidas and that was so sadly missed in the “great Intelligences fair” of In Memoriam. 

But to Sir Percivale himself the vision brought no such divine transfiguration. He is the one who sees, indeed, and understands, yet cannot lose himself. Because the Holy Grail signifies a dualism which sets the eternal world not at the end of the temporal, but utterly apart from it, he who knows the higher while lacking the courage to renounce the lower, wanders comfortless with neither the ecstatic joy of the one nor the homely satisfactions of the other. So the world and all that it contains turn into dust at his touch, leaving him alone and wearying, in a land of sand and thorns. Another, Sir Bors, the simple, trustful gentleman, who goes out on the Word of others, following duty only and trusting in the honour of the act as it comes to him, sees in adversity the Holy Cup shining through a rift in his prison, and abides content that the will of God should reserve these high things as a reward for whomsoever it chooses. Still another. Sir Gawain, finding the vision is not for him, and having turned his eyes from the simple rule of duty, sinks into sensual pleasures, and declares his twelvemonth and a day a merry jaunt. Most fatal of all is the experience of Launcelot, he, the greatest of all, who brought the sin into the court, who cannot; disentangle the warring impulses of good and evil within himself. He, too, rides out of Camelot on the Quest, and then: 

My madness came upon me as of old, 
And whipt me into waste fields far away. 
* * * * *
But such a blast, my King, began to blow. 
So loud a blast along the shore and sea, 
Ye could not hear the waters for the blast, 
Tho’ heapt in mounds and ridges all the sea 
Drove like a cataract, and all the sand 
Swept like a river, and the clouded heavens 
Were shaken with the motion and the sound. 

This is an application to the smaller field of wind and earth and water of that dizzy tempestuous motion which in Tennyson’s earlier poem of Lucretius surged through the Epicurean’s atomic universe. To the eye of the spirit, Tennyson would seem to say, the material world is a flux and endless, purposeless mutation—leaving the self-possessed soul to its own inviolable peace, or, upon one that perceives yet is still enmeshed in evil desires, thronging in visions and terrors of madness. One need not be a confessed mystic to feel the power of these passages, any more than one need be a Puritan (standing, that is, at the opposite pole of religion from the mystic) to appreciate Milton. To the genuine conviction of these poets our human nature responds as it can never respond to the insincerity of the world’s “minimum of faith.” With Tennyson, unfortunately, the task is always to separate the poet of insight from the poet of compromise.

[Concluded.]