George P. Landow, Professor of English and Art History, Brown University
or much of this century the term Victorian, which literally describes things and events in the reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901), conveyed connotations of "prudish," "repressed," and "old fashioned." Although such associations have some basis in fact, they do not adequately indicate the nature of this complex, paradoxical age that was a second English Renaissance. Like Elizabethan England, Victorian England saw great expansion of wealth, power, and culture. (What Victorian literary form do you think parallels Elizabethan drama in terms of both popularity and literary achievement?)
In science and technology, the Victorians invented the modern idea of invention -- the notion that one can create solutions to problems, that man can create new means of bettering himself and his environment.
In religion, the Victorians experienced a great age of doubt, the first that called into question institutional Christianity on such a large scale. In literature and the other arts, the Victorians attempted to combine Romantic emphases upon self, emotion, and imagination with Neoclassical ones upon the public role of art and a corollary responsibility of the artist.
In ideology, politics, and society, the Victorians created astonishing innovation and change: democracy, feminism, unionization of workers, socialism, Marxism, and other modern movements took form. In fact, this age of Darwin, Marx, and Freud appears to be not only the first that experienced modern problems but also the first that attempted modern solutions. Victorian, in other words, can be taken to mean parent of the modern -- and like most powerful parents, it provoked a powerful reaction against itself.
The Victorian age was not one, not single, simple, or unified, only in part because Victoria's reign lasted so long that it comprised several periods. Above all, it was an age of paradox and power. The Catholicism of the Oxford Movement, the Evangelical movement, the spread of the Broad Church, and the rise of Utilitarianism, socialism, Darwinism, and scientific Agnosticism, were all in their own ways characteristically Victorian; as were the prophetic writings of Carlyle and Ruskin, the criticism of Arnold, and the empirical prose of Darwin and Huxley; as were the fantasy of George MacDonald and the realism of George Eliot and George Bernard Shaw.
More than anything else what makes Victorians Victorian is their sense of social responsibility, a basic attitude that obviously differentiates them from their immediate predecessors, the Romantics. Tennyson might go to Spain to help the insurgents, as Byron had gone to Greece and Wordsworth to France; but Tennyson also urged the necessity of educating "the poor man before making him our master." Matthew Arnold might say at mid-century that
the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain.
but he refused to reprint his poem "Empedocles on Etna," in which the Greek philosopher throws himself into the volcano, because it set a bad example; and he criticized an Anglican bishop who pointed out mathematical inconsistencies in the Bible not on the grounds that he was wrong, but that for a bishop to point these things out to the general public was irresponsible.
The Reality of Victorianism
Popular ideas about the Victorians and attitudes toward their age change as it recedes into the past. Modern writers who were trying to free themselves from the massive embrace of their predecessors often saw the Victorians chiefly as repressed, over-confident, and thoroughly philistine.
The confidence certainly was there! As Robert Furneaux Jordan points out, "The architecture of the Victorian Age tells us more about the men who made it than does any other architecture in history. It made such very definite statements about life; it was all so self-assured and vulgar, that it never leaves us in doubt. It never diluted itself -- as has our architecture -- with inhibitions about style or taste. The Victorian architect knew what he wanted to do and, good or bad, he did it. (Victorian Architecture, 19)
Jordan also points out that popular notions of Victorian life as cosy and picturesque hardly fit the hurly burly of Victorian reality: That earnest world of Tractarian parsons and Oxford common-rooms, that world of Hardy's peasants buried deep in English shires, did really exist. Of course it did. But it was not very important. By and large Victorian England was a tremendously virile and very terrible affair. If we strip away the gadgets and fashions, Victorian England was not unlike the United States today. There was the same unblinking worship of independence and of hard cash; there was the same belief in institutions -- patriotism, democracy, individualism, organized religion, philanthropy, sexual morality, the family, capitalism and progress; the same overwhelming self-confidence, with its concomitant -- a novel and adventurous architecture. And, at the core, was the same tiny abscess -- the nagging guilt as to the inherent contradiction between the morality and the system.
Jordan, an obviously polemical author, to some degree slants his argument, but assuming that he is largely correct, what does that tell us about the Victorian authors you have read? Does Dickens chiefly support Jordan's view of the age? Which others do not, or at least seem to write works in opposition to the kind of age that Jordan describes?
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Movements and Currents in Nineteenth-Century British Thought
Since the 1830s the Victorians and those who have followed them have identified several opposed trends, tendencies, movements, or loosely organized schools of Victorian thought. Here are some of them:
1. Progressive vs. Conservative
At the very beginning of Victoria's reign, John Stuart Mill argued that contemporary British thought divided into progressive and conservative schools derived from Jeremy Bentham and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Following Mill's lead, modern critics have identified followers of each strain or party.
• Progressives, Liberals, or Rationalists: James Mill (Mill's father), Mill himself John Bright
• Conservatives, Tories, or Reactionaries: Carlyle, Disraeli, Pugin, Newman, Arnold, Ruskin, Morris
2. Radical Progressive vs. Tory Radical vs. Conservative
Another take on political schools recognizes that the terms , liberal, radical, and conservative mean different things in the twentieth century than they did in the last.
• Progressives, Liberals, or Rationalists: James Mill (Mill's father), J. S. Mill, Thomson, Bradlaugh, John Bright. Characteristic beliefs: middle-class fear of government intervention, emphasis upon freedom of action. In today's political context, this once extreme left-wing movement from the early nineteenth century would be considered reactionary or a party of extreme right.
• Tory Radicals, Christian Socialists, Marxists: Carlyle, Arnold, Ruskin, Morris. Characteristic beliefs: need for strong central government, welfare or interventionist state; anti-aristocractic; ambivalent attitude toward middle class.
• Conservatives, Tories, or Reactionaries: Carlyle, Disraeli, Pugin, Newman, Keble, Pusey, Hopkins Characteristic beliefs: pro aristocracy, medieval revival, social hierarchy, established (or official) state religion.
3. Hebrew vs. Hellene (or Moral vs. Aesthetic)
Using Matthew Arnold's opposition of an emotional, fundamentalist (or Puritanical) Evangelical Protestantism to an elite Hellenic school, a series of scholar-critics, of whom Graham Hough and David DeLaura are the most important, have proposed the following kind of opposition:
• Hebrews: Ruskin, Carlyle, Dickens, Eliot, Mrs. Gaskell, the Brownings. Characteristic forms: prophetic modes, social protest, autobiographies emphasizing conversion, dense, often grotesque image and analogy, contemporary, often middle-class subjects.
• Hellenes: Newman, Arnold, D. G. Rossetti, Swinburne, Pater, Wilde. Characteristic forms: would-be elitist subjects, emphasis on clarity, greater use of classical myth, secular version of Tractarian notions of reserve.
4. Believers vs. Nonbelievers
• Orthodox Believers: Newman, Keble, Ruskin (early), C. Rossetti, E. B. Browning, MacDonald, Hopkins
• Idiosyncratic, unorthodox believers -- usually liberal Christians: Dickens, MacDonald, Ruskin (after 1870), Tennyson, R. Browning (?)
• Nonbelievers: Bentham, Mill, Carlyle, Darwin, Huxley, Clough, Arnold, Ruskin (late 1850s through 1860s), D. G. Rossetti, Morris, Swinburne, Hardy, Eliot, Thomson
Suggested Readings
Buckley, J. H. The Victorian Temper: A Study in Literary Culture. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1964.
DeLaura, David J. Hebrew and Hellene in Victorian England: Newman, Arnold, and Pater. Austin: U of Texas P, 1969.
Houghton, Walter E. The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830-1870. New Haven: Yale UP, [c. 1956].
Johnson, E. D. H. The Alien Vision of Victorian Poetry. Princeon: Princeton UP, 1952.
Mill, John Stuart. "Bentham" and "Coleridge," Autobiography and Other Writings. Ed. Jack Stillinger. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969. Originally appeared in 1838-1840 The London and Westminster Review.
Introduction
E. D. H. Johnson, Holmes Professor of Belles Lettres, Princeton University
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Introduction to the author's The Alien Vision of Victorian Poetry: Sources of the Poetic Imagination in Tennyson, Browning, and Arnold which Princeton University Press published in 1952. It has been included in the Victorian web with the kind permisison of the late author's family.
1. Numbers in brackets indicate page breaks in the print edition and thus allow users of VW to cite or locate the original page numbers.
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3. This web version of The Alien Vision is a project supported by the University Scholars Programme of the National University of Sinagpore. It was carried out by the following Student Research Assistants under the direction of George P. Landow: Gerald Ajam of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences created the electronic text using OmniPage Pro OCR software; Adrian Kang of School of Computing, Tiaw Kay Siang of Faculty of Engineering, and Sabrina Lim of Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences created the HTML version, including converting footnotes to in-text citations; all links to materials in VW were added by Landow..
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THE important writing of the Victorian period is to a large extent the product of a double awareness. This was a literature addressed with great immediacy to the needs of the age, to the particular temper of mind which had grown up within a society seeking adjustment to the conditions of modern life. And to the degree that the problems which beset the world of a century ago retain their urgency and still await solution, the ideas of the Victorian writers remain relevant and interesting to the twentieth century. Any enduring literature, however, must transcend topicality; and the critical disesteem into which so much Victorian writing has fallen may be traced to the persistent notion that the literary men of that time oversubscribed to values with which our own time is no longer in sympathy. Yet this view ignores the fact that nearly all the eminent Victorian writers were as often as not at odds with their age and that in their best work they habitually appealed not to, but against the prevailing mores of that age. The reader who comes to the Victorians without bias must be struck again and again by the underlying tone of unrest which pervades so much that is generally taken as typical of the period. Sooner or later he begins to wonder whether there is any such thing as a representative Victorian writer, or at any rate, whether what makes him representative is not that very quality of intransigeance as a result of which he repudiated his society and sought refuge from the spirit of the times in the better ordered realm of interior consciousness. Since, however, any tendency to exalt individual awareness at the expense of conventionally established attitudes ran counter to the concept of the role of the artist which the Victorian age tried to impose on its writers, there resulted a conflict which has been too often ignored, but which must be taken into account in reaching any satisfactory evaluation of Victorian literature. This was a conflict, demonstrable within the work of the writers themselves, between the public conscience of the man of letters who comes forward as the accredited literary spokesman of [ix/x] his world, and the private conscience of the artist who conceives that his highest allegiance must be to his own aesthetic sensibilities.
Most Victorian writers still thought of themselves as men of letters in the full meaning of the term. Victorian literature was predominantly a literature of ideas, and of ideas, furthermore, brought into direct relation with the daily concerns of the reading public. To a degree now inconceivable the influential literary types of the nineteenth century were expository in character-the essay, tract, and treatise. The student who wishes to understand the Victorian world begins with such works as Past and Present, The Stones of Venice, On Liberty, Culture and Anarchy. The assumption that a writer's first responsibility is to get into close correspondence with his audience induced a great many of the original thinkers in the period to turn aside from their fields of special knowledge, to the end of making their theories more generally accessible. So Mill, Carlyle, Ruskin, Arnold, Morris, Huxley, after achieving distinction along specialized lines, gave up exclusive concentration on these in order to apply the disciplines they had mastered to subjects of the broadest human import. Or, to consider the novel, Dickens, George Eliot, Disraeli, Kingsley, Mrs. Gaskell, and Charles Reade all quite evidently chose themes with an eye to their social significance.
Yet, paradoxically, it becomes increasingly difficult to think of the great Victorians as other than solitary and unassimilated figgres within their century. Deeply as they allowed themselves to be involved in the life of the times, familiarity seemed only to breed contempt. Their writings, inspired by a whole-hearted hostility to the progress of industrial culture, locate the centers of authority not in the existing social order but within the resources of individual being. Nor was this procedure merely a reaction to the isolation which is traditionally visited on prophets without honor, although for many the years brought disillusionment and bitterness over the debacle of cherished programs of reform. The prestige of a Carlyle or Ruskin or Newman may almost be said to have risen in inverse proportion to the failure of their preachments. [x/xi] At the core of the malaise which pervades so much that is best in Victorian literature lies a sense, often inarticulate, that modern society has originated tendencies inimical to the life of the creative imagination. By mid-century the circumstances of successful literary production had begun to make demands on writers which strained to the breaking point their often very considerable capacities for compromise. Among novelists the careers of Dickens and Thackeray epitomize the all but intolerable difficulties of reconciling popular appeal with artistic integrity. A new generation, led by Rossetti and Swinburne, was to resolve the dilemma by an outspoken assertion of the artist's apartness; but for the writers who came of age in the 1830's and 1840's no such categorical disavowal of social commitment was admissible. As a result, there is recognizable in their work a kind of tension originating in the serious writer's traditional desire to communicate, but to do so without betraying the purity of his creative motive even in the face of a public little disposed to undergo the rigors of aesthetic experience. Even when, as was too often the case, their love of fame overcame their artistic restraint, traces of the initiating conflict remain imbedded in what they wrote; and it is these constantly recurring evidences of a twofold awareness which, perhaps more than any other trait, give its distinctive quality to the writing of the Victorian age.
In criticizing Victorian poetry it is necessary to keep this ambivalence in mind; and this is especially true for Tennyson, Browning, and Arnold, the poets who touched their period at the greatest number of points. The history of nineteenth century English poetry records a gradual, but radical shift in the relationship of the artist to his public with the three poets just mentioned occupying a position at dead center of the forces which were in opposition. A divorce between the artist and society first became conspicuous as an element of the Romantic movement; but even though they had to endure abuse or neglect, the Romantics did not in any sense think of themselves as abdicating the poet's traditional right to speak for his age. Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, [xi/xii] Keats were all, it is true, keenly sensitive to their generation's reluctance to pay attention to what they were saying, but they accepted isolation as a necessary consequence of their revolutionary program. That they should confess defeat, with the alternatives either of self-withdrawal or compromise, never seriously occurred to them. On the contrary, they declared open warfare on the prejudices which would dispossess them and continued to assert that the poet's vision is transcendently of intellectual and spiritual truth. Before the end of the century, however, the conflict thus resolutely engaged had been lost, and the artist had come to accept as a foregone conclusion his inefficacy as of his contemporaries. In compensation, he now espoused the aesthetic creed which goes by the name of art for art's sake, and with Pater and then Wilde as his apologists and Rossetti and Swinburne as his models, embraced his alienation from all but a coterie of initiates persuaded like himself to value the forms of art above its message.
Between the Romantics and the Pre-Raphaelites lie Tennyson, Browning, and Arnold, leading the poetic chorus of the great Victorian noonday. And by virtue of this midway position between the two extremes represented by the schools of poetry which came before and after, their work brings into sharp focus the choice which has been forced on the modern artist. In the common view, these mid-Victorian poets, either unable or unwilling to maintain the spirit of bellicose selfsufficiency which sustained their Romantic forbears, achieved rapprochement with their audience by compromising with the middle-class morality of the time, and in so doing deliberately sacrificed artistic validity. So flagrant a betrayal of the creative impulse, the argument then continues, provoked a reaction in the following generation, whereby the pendulum swung back towards the belief that art is and must be its own justification irrespective of ulterior motive. But this version of the poetic situation in the nineteenth century gravely misrepresents the real meaning of an endeavor on which Tennyson, Browning, and Arnold were alike engaged. For each [xii/xiii] of them was ultimately seeking to define the sphere within which the modern poet may exercise his faculty, while holding in legitimate balance the rival claims of his private, aristocratic insights and of the tendencies existing in a society progressively vulgarized by the materialism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Thus it came about that the double awareness, which so generally characterized the Victorian literary mind, grew almost into a perpetual state of consciousness in these poets through their efforts to work out a new aesthetic position for the artist.
The literary careers of Tennyson, Browning, and Arnold present a number of striking parallels which, since their poetic endowments were so divergent, can only be explained in terms of influences impingeing on them from the outside. In the early manner of each there is an introspective, even a cloistral element which was later subdued in an obvious attempt to connect with contemporary currents of thought. Of the three, Tennyson succeeded most quickly in conforming to the Victorian ideal of the poet as popular bard; his reward was the laureateship as Wordsworth's successor. Browning's progress in public favor was more gradual, but the formation of the Browning Society in 1881 signalized his eventual arrival within the select company of Victorian idols of the hearth. Less versatile in poetic range, Arnold became a full-fledged man of letters and won the prestige of the Oxford Professorship of Poetry only after turning to prose; and it is perhaps worth pondering whether his inability to bring his poetry into closer accord with the demands of the age does not account for the fact that he has attracted a greater amount of serious critical attention in recent years than either Tennyson or Browning.
The Victorian writer, of course, had to acclimate himself to a reading public vastly bigger in size and more diverse and unpredictable in its literary requirements than any that had existed hitherto. There is something astonishing, even slightly appalling, in the unselective voracity with which the Victorians wolfed down In Memoriam and Bailey's Festus, The Origin of Species, and Samuel Smiles' Self-help, the novels [xiii/xiv] of Dickens and the tales of Harriet Martineau. The ill success of their first volumes early awakened Tennyson, Browning, and Arnold to a realization that under existing conditions originality was no passport to artistic acclaim. The critics were for the most part hostile; but it was the disapprobation of intimate friends which carried the greatest weight. For while the poets might turn a deaf ear to the voice of the age as it spoke through the weekly and monthly journals which had feebly replaced the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews as arbiters in literary matters, the well-intended strictures of a Hallam or Elizabeth Barrett or Clough were another matter. And friends and foes were at one in their insistence that the poets take a broader view of their responsibilities as men of letters. In general, their work drew reproof on three counts, one major and two incidental thereto. It was unduly introspective and self-obsessed and as a result it was too often obscure content and precious in manner. All three faults are chargeable to immaturity; but as attributed indiscriminately to Tennyson, Browning, and Arnold, thev carry additional implications suggestive of the tyranny which the age was to exercise over its artists. For the invariable in- ference in the attacks on these poets is that their faults could easily be remedied by more attention to normal human thoughts and activities, and correspondingly by less infatuation with their own private states of being.
The experiments in the narrative and dramatic modes to which Tennyson, Browning, and Arnold turned so early in their careers were certainly undertaken out of a desire to counteract objections of this kind. Yet it is apparent from the vagaries of their critical reputations that they were never sure enough of their audience to be able to estimate its response with any degree of reliability. The appearance of a Maud or Sordello or Empedocles on Etna, interspersed among more admired efforts, is continuing evidence that the best will in the world could not compensate for temperamental variances with prevailing tastes which went much deeper than the authors themselves always recognized. That they should have professed impatience with the often obtuse and [xiv/xv] ill-considered estimates of their poetry is not in itself surprising; but it is to be noted that as time went on they tended increasingly to transfer this resentment to the reading public at large. In their later days Tennyson and Arnold would have agreed with Browning's statement in Red Cotton Night-Cap Country about "artistry being battle with the age/ It lives in!" There is, of course, an element of the disingenuous in such professions of disdain for popular favor; and their assumed indifference cannot disguise the fact that all three poets were keenly sensitive to the fluctuations of their literary stock. In this respect they were no more than exhibiting an awareness natural to men of letters possessed of an inherent belief in the instrumentality of literature as a social force.
Yet again, the conventional explanation does not cover the facts; and we are brought back to the dichotomy which emerges from any close analysis of the relations between the artist and society in the Victorian period. The hallmark of the literary personalities of Tennyson, Browning, and Arnold alike is a certain aristocratic aloofness, a stubborn intractability which is likely to manifest itself at just those points where the contemporary social order assumed automatic conformity with its dictates. Thus, their refusal to be restricted by current suppositions is less often a subterfuge to cover a fear of failure than a forthright avowal of the artist's independence from societal pressures whenever these threaten to inhibit the free play of his imaginative powers. Tennyson, Browning, and Arnold never went to the lengths of the poets who came after in disassociating themselves from their audience. On the other hand, there is a fundamental error in the prevalent notion that they uncritically shared most of the foibles that, rightly or wrongly, are attributed to the Victorians. Such an opinion overlooks that quality of double awareness which we are now to investigate as the crux of the Victorian literary consciousness.
With these remarks as a starting point, it is proposed in the ensuing chapters to survey the artistic careers of the three poets, testing for each in turn the truth of the following statements. (1) In their youthful poems Tennyson, Brown- [xv/xvi] ing, and Arnold revealed the habits of mind, the emotional and intellectual leanings, the kinds of imaginative visionin other words, the native resources at the disposal of each. (2) Subsequently, from a desire to gain a wide audience for their work and hence to play an influential part in the life of the times, all three poets showed a willingness to make concessions to literary fashions with which they were temperamentally out of sympathy. (3) Resolved, nevertheless, that conformity should involve as little artistic loss as possible, Tennyson, Browning, and Arnold perfected remarkable techniques for sublimating their private insights without materially falsifying the original perceptions at the heart of their creative impulse. (4) The identification of these insights, along with the recognition of their concealed but vivifying action within poems ostensibly concerned with subjects of different and sometimes contradictory import, draws attention to the true centers of poetic intent in Tennyson, Browning, and Arnold, and thus provides a basis for reassessing their total achievement.
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Introduction
David J. DeLaura, Professor of English Emeritus, University of Pennsylvania
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Introduction of the author's Hebrew and Hellene in Victorian England: Newman, Arnold, and Pater, which University of Texas Press published in1969. It appears in the Victorian web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright.
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6. Seah Joo Yee and Sabrina Lim of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Tiaw Kay Siang of Faculty of Engineering, Adrian Kang of School of Computing and Derrick Wong of School of Design and Environment created the electronic text using OmniPage Pro OCR software, created the HTML version, converting footnotes, and adding links.
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his book comprises three studies investigating in detail the intellectual and personal relations existing among three dominating figures in nineteenth-century English thought and culture. These studies are fundamentally concerned with the humanistic vision of Matthew Arnold and Walter Pater and emphasize their adaptation of the traditional religious culture to the needs of the later nineteenth century. John Henry Newman enters as a figure of central importance, a far greater importance than he has hitherto been accorded, because of his commanding position in the thought of both younger men and because the contrasts and continuities in Arnold and Pater often become clearest in relation to him. I am concerned with nothing less than the total "vision" of Arnold and Pater though I have not by any means entered into every aspect of their thought. I have attempted to give a sense of motive and progression to both careers by concentrating on the ways in which the religious problems of the Victorian period centrally affected their evolving humanistic syntheses.
In The Last Romantics Graham Hough has traced the heritage of English aestheticism and "Decadence" through its best-known figures -- Ruskin, Rossetti, Pater, Morris, the Rhymers, and Yeats. He stresses the increasing dominance of the "aesthetic" norm in English art, religion, and life and underlines some of the ways in which English religious attitudes were transformed in the process. But Pater seems distinctly out of place in this scheme; Hough does not establish the long-supposed link between Ruskin and Pater, and he does not adequately account for the place of religious concerns in Pater's distinctive synthesis. I have attempted to work out the "other" line leading from traditional norms to the nineties. This line has not gone entirely unnoticed, especially by the late [ix/x] T. S. Eliot, but its full implications are by no means clear. Eliot's conception of continuity and diminution among the three -- that Arnold's "degradation" of religion was "competently" continued by Pater -- has been constantly before me in these studies although his viewpoint is not precisely my own and his interests not my exclusive concerns. By establishing Arnold's and Pater's extensive indebtedness to Newman and by analyzing the nature of their "use" of his ideas, it is easier to account for the peculiar and complex role of traditional religion (especially as mediated through Newman) in their successors, notably Oscar Wilde and Lionel Johnson, though this is an extension of the topic I have not taken up here.2
These studies have been conducted in great, though I hope not stupefying, detail: a benefit of the method may be an understanding of the density and elaborate interconnectedness of the intellectual currents of High and Late Victorian culture. Only by examining the immense interweaving of interests, arguments, and goals, in a much more unified culture than our own, can we detect the full flavor of these men's work as well as measure the full weight of the polemics and preoccupations [x/xi] themselves. The uniquely satisfying quality of Victorian prose arises in part from the sense of rich and diverse talent in a small, geographical close-knit, and "centripetal" intellectual community. The public statements of Victorian critics and essayists (and sometimes of poets and novelists) are often best regarded as refutation, qualification, or approval of some other writer's views. In particular, I have sought to define the mechanics of the process by which the substance of dogmatic Christianity was transformed, within one or two generations, into the fabric of aestheticism. I have endeavored to describe the pressures generating a response, the precise elements of transvaluation, and the shared and unshared factors in a shifting cultural equation, by which the conservative humanism of Newman, at once religious and literary, could be exploited, with a strong sense of meaningful continuity, in the fluid, relativistic, and "aesthetic" humanism of Pater. That the development of aestheticism, especially in Arnold and Pater, is fundamentally bound to changes in religious doctrine and expression has long been acknowledged; but the dearth of detailed studies has obscured this major line of inheritance in Victorian culture. Although deliberately emphasizing the transformation of values and categories in Newman, Arnold, and Pater -- one of the most closely interwoven successions in intellectual history -- I have tried everywhere, in righting a false balance, to escape the danger of making myself liable to the charge of the fallacy of the unique source.
The most revealing transformation can be seen in the history of certain phrases and ideas. For example, the "inwardness" that Newman insists on as man's essential spiritual quality is secularized as part of Arnold's criticism and culture and emerges finally as Pater's "impassioned contemplation" -- that detached observation of "the individual in his isolation," the "solitary prisoner" whose dream of a world consists of certain traditional states of mind apart, ultimately, from real objects. Equally important is the emphasis all three place on an elite culture; that is, their shared sense that the highest organization of the human powers was "aristocratic," a privileged mode of perception endangered in a rapidly democratizing society. In all three, too, culture is defined almost as much in religious as in secular terms: if there is a shift, it is, paradoxically, toward the progressive religionizing of the [xi/xii] idea of culture and its attendant intellectual qualities. As one moves from Newman to Arnold to Pater, the ideal of culture acquires more and more "religious" graces derived from the traditional culture. Arnold and Pater both were free of Newman's suspicion of the corrective and self-transcending power of secular culture, viewed in broad historical perspective, and were consequently free, again paradoxically, to identify it increasingly with the function of historic religion. Moreover, all three men were continuously involved with the problematic role of religion and of religious experience in the modern world, a concern that, as much as any other theme, reveals the true proportions and progression of their three disparate careers.
Newman's role was that of the supremely adequate nineteenth-century apologist of orthodoxy in terms comprehensible to his contemporaries. The chief effort of the final two decades of Arnold's life, in both the religious writings and the later literary criticism, was precisely to defend the validity of Christian ethics and Christian feeling, even while acknowledging the disappearance of God announced by contemporary agnosticism and science. Moreover, he continually violated his own self-imposed intellectual limitations by suggesting a transcendent source or power or tendency whose name was the "Eternal." In Pater's most Christian phase, religion remained only the supreme "hope" or "possibility" but still a "necessity." Even in his early, most antipathetic mood, when traditional religion was presented largely as the forerunner of certain ideal modes of apprehension, the "religious graces" remained as the crown of life, the reward of the highest human striving.
Newman's important role in the history of nineteenth-century aestheticism seems virtually to have escaped detection. At the base of the large number of suggestive phrases and ideas from Newman which resonate through Arnold's and Pater's work is the extraordinary openness of Newman's Christian humanism to the diversity and unpredictability of human experience, even of secular experience. This openness is best conveyed in the Idea of a University, above all in the too little known essays of the second half, and in the Grammar of Assent. Perhaps the "miracle" both Arnold and Pater found in Newman is the astonishing fact that this, the most powerful defender of the claims [xii/xiii] of religion upon the modern mind, was also the most adequate definer, in prose of incomparable lucidity and suavity, of an ideal of totality, comprehensiveness, inclusiveness, at a time when the image of the distinctively human was being either fragmented or radically reduced. Arnold's religionizing of culture in the sixties had ample precedent in Newman's transference, almost verbatim, of the description of the supernatural virtues in the Oxford sermons to his description of secular education in Discourse V of the Idea of a University. Moreover, Newman's early view that "Poetry ... is our mysticism" anticipates Arnold's view in the literary essays of his final decade. No doubt Pater found it easy to turn to his own uses Newman's discussion of the "beauty of our moral being" and "the beauty of grace" (Idea, p. 108). Perhaps most important, Arnold, Pater, and their successors live out the full consequences of Newman's prediction, expressed in an 1841 review of Henry Hart Milman, that, on the liberal Anglican premises, Christian revelation will "have done no more than introduce a quality into our moral life, not anything that can be contemplated by itself, obeyed and perpetuated" (ECH, 11, 242).
Newman could be important to these two men in part because orthodox Christianity, although imperiled, remained a decisive cultural force in England, dose to the mainstream of national life and of consequence to intellectuals, long after its importance had receded on the Continent. The picturesque medievalism of the Romantic and Victorian poets unquestionably lay behind, and gave impetus to, both the Oxford Movement and aestheticism.4 The lines traced here present, I think, [xiii/xiv] a more serious side of the nineteenth century's encounter with its "medieval" past. To combine Hough's approach with my own is suddenly to throw the Late Victorian cultural situation into a new perspective: it can be meaningfully seen as Protestant England's partial rediscovery and recapturing of its disavowed European, and thus "Catholic," past. Hence, part of the fascination Catholicism exercised over both Arnold and Pater: hence, also, the impression that this Catholic emphasis, which marks in one respect the end of Protestant England, comes too late in the day to be of the most vital use in a rapidly deteriorating religious and cultural situation.5 It is probably Newman who, above all, accounts for Arnold's and Pater's calling for a "Catholic" religious humanism, even though no longer on the basis of belief in Newman's sense of the term. To that extent, the Tractarians, and especially Newman after the publication of the Apologia in 1864, were important agents in putting an end to "Protestant" England, though its successor was not an England any of the principals in this book would have approved--for reasons similar to those later voiced by T. S. Eliot in his sociological essays. It is tempting to say that if there had not been the "miracle" of Newman -- the subtle defender of religious orthodoxy who was also the adequate definer of a humanist consciousness -- Late Victorian literary life might well have been less "religious" than it was, and that without him it is impossible otherwise to account for the precise religious tone suffusing much of the work of the period.
The special reasons for Arnold's and Pater's attraction to Newman must begin and end with the force of the Oxford tradition itself, a distinctive tradition of personal and intellectual formation that I have called "theological humanism." Unquestionably, the writings of the [xiv/xv] three men reflect the progressive detachment of the older Oxford from the realities of contemporary society; it is increasingly a theme for picturesque, nostalgic treatment, like one of Morris' or Rossetti's medieval subjects.6 But it is equally true that the Oxford consciousness and "sentiment," which Arnold found embodied in Newman and passed on to Pater, was very close to the center of the practical work of his critical career. Newman was attractive to Arnold because he provided the fullest definition and exemplification of the highest, most complex use of the human faculties, a complex of values both men saw as increasingly under attack from an insurgent scientific naturalism and a newly refurbished rationalism. Newman was thus the supreme practitioner of that refined intellectual and spiritual perception that is the link between Arnold's intellectual and religious writings. Moreover, Newman had best described and accounted for changes in religious dogma as the result of changes in general culture: his doctrine of development, itself an acknowledgment of the new nineteenth-century demand for an "historical" view of things, was admirably adapted to the needs of an Arnold increasingly attuned to the whispers of the Zeitgeist. Pater found in Newman the fullest formulation of the psychological grounds of faith and the act of belief -- - one-half of his final, awkwardly maintained dualism. He was responding, again, to [xv/xvi] Newman's prophetic sense of the special character of any apologetic adequate to the needs of the nineteenth century, a sense first clearly enunciated in the Introduction to the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845). Further, Newman had worked out a "personalist" theory of literature which best embodied Pater's idea of the special function of literature in modern times. And finally, to both Arnold and Pater, Newman had presented the image of European -- and Christian -- civilization as an enduring source of value satisfying the permanent ethical and aesthetic needs of man: in effect, the basis of a culture superior to the anarchic individualism of the nineteenth century.7
This book converges, in ways I had not originally anticipated, on Pater. For example, by an instructive paradox not previously worked out, Pater's final religious position is seen to be as much indebted to Newman's orthodoxy as it is to Arnold's "natural" Christianity. It is important to insist that in emphasizing the complex uses to which Pater puts his Arnoldian borrowings, I am not claiming too much or the wrong things for Arnold as a source; indeed, none of these studies is conceived as a "source" study in the narrow sense. I have deliberately neglected many of the known sources of Pater's interest in art for art's sake and other doctrines (for example, Goethe, Swinburne, Hegel, Heine), but there is no other author whose phrases, ideas, arguments, and attitudes so completely saturate Pater's writings at all stages as do Arnold's, and the apparent echoes illuminate as much by contrast as by likeness. A dose examination of the full significance of the Arnoldian matrix clarifies and readjusts our apprehension of the unifying motives and directions of Pater's career. Moreover, the chronological reading of Pater's works from the points of view I have adopted (his response to Arnold, his dialectical struggle with the Christian-pagan dichotomy, his reliance on Newman in working out his later religious position) reveals with, I hope, new clarity and precision the central motifs, the [xvi/xvii] polemical intentions, and the shifts in thought which seem still to be ignored in most readings of Pater.
The central topic of the Present book is a Victorian embodiment of one of the great recurrent and unifying "myths" of European history: the conflict of Apollo and Christ, Rome and Jerusalem, intelligence and belief, the secular and the sacred impulses in society. This culture conflict as it is worked out in Arnold and Pater is not a thrice-told tale. Indeed, its full implications can only be grasped in a very long look ahead to our present situation, a look we seem even today scarcely prepared to take. For the full dimensions of secularity in the modern world, especially as it has exhibited itself in phenomena of the mid-twentieth century like religious and atheistic existentialism and "secular" Christianity, are the long-delayed fruits of "Modernist" speculation in the late nineteenth century. The importance of the Christian-pagan theme in Arnold and Pater is its inconclusiveness. Despite his avowed agnosticism, his pose of empiricism, and his resistance to the transcendental and metaphysical, Arnold persistently appeals to a covert supernaturalism in the religious writings and in the literary writings of the final decade, whether in his periphrases for God or in his generally unrecognized openness to the "mystery" of existence and to a universal morality of history. In the final reckoning he confessed his inability to fuse reason and faith, ideas and morality, in a higher, post-Christian synthesis. For Pater there is a similar exhaustion of thought after the careful irresolution of Marius, and his subsequent failure to define the "mixed" culture he aspired to, or what the "third condition" of man, transcending historic dualisms, might be.
The "failure" of Arnold and Pater is significant because they insist, in effect, that a "religious" reading of human nature involving a complex vision of man's permanent moral and aesthetic needs is requisite in any adequate modern humanism. They remain figures of living importance even today because, with unparalleled force and fullness in their own generation, they insisted on a humanistic vision alive on the one hand to the implications of nineteenth-century evolutionary science and on the other to a comprehensive retention of those qualities of mind, emotion, and imagination which have defined what it has meant [xvii/xviii] to be fully "human" in the European past.8 More specifically, the issue is that of the place of religion in an increasingly embattled literary humanism. The older tradition of "literae humaniores," in which letters (including history) shared room, perhaps the smaller room, with philosophy and theology, was the shifting synthesis within which European civilization, "theological humanism," defined itself. Only in the rapid breakdown of that tradition in the nineteenth century did letters move to the center of the humanist scheme, filling the void created by the discrediting or even disappearance of the more ratiocinative components of the traditional educational program; "reason" itself was increasingly confined to the methods of science and technology and denied a significant role in metaphysical or theological speculation. In any event, modern apologists for letters, whether theologically orthodox or not, tend to adopt a religious tone and to assign to poetry a central function in the preservation of humane values -- a function previously shared with the more normative disciplines.9 [xviii/xix]
Arnold and Pater provide necessary points of departure for any survey of the evolution of this modem rationale of letters or the "humanities" in a hostile environment because they are the first conservative literary thinkers to defend letters while fully acknowledging the challenge of radical, reductive modern though . I think it no exaggeration to say that the contemporary defense of letters (illogical, unstable, and necessary) cannot be understood without a strong sense of the complex of values, deriving from the experience of Oxford itself, which the three principals of this book centrally defended throughout their entire careers. And so if the Oxford humanists, Newman, Arnold, and Pater, are foster parents, however problematical, of aestheticism, the issues they raise reach well beyond the abortive productions of a special moment in late nineteenth-century culture. The fate of their shared concern for the maintenance of certain inherited modes of human consciousness was involved in the collapse of the older Oxford tradition itself and thus with the collapse of the unity and dynamism of European education as a whole. To perpetuate the values that Arnold and Pater subsumed under the term "culture" -- despite the absence of older sustaining religious and social beliefs and an increasing divorce from the actualities of modern society -- remains, I believe, the tragically unfulfilled aspiration of twentieth-century literary humanists. The sustaining and growing conviction, then, out of which this book has grown is that the definition of the humanist consciousness linking Newman, Arnold, and Pater, an effort made, significantly, with a strong and increasingly defensive sense of an entire scale of values in grave, perhaps terminal, crisis, is even today the indispensable basis of our discussion [xix/xx] of literature and the role of literature in the humanizing process. Indeed, the confusions and failure of historical perspective of the Leavis-Snow debate and our mandatory and perennial anguish over the "crisis in the humanities" repeat without much advancing that earlier line of thought. The issues in the on-going debate -- literary, religious, and broadly cultural -- have by no means been worked out to their ultimate conclusion or even to some sort of stability. Far from comprising an "episode" of a past culture, the issues first raised with some clarity and penetration by Newman, Arnold, and Pater are the issues defining the quality of our future.
References
Hough, Graham. The Last Romantics. 2nd ed. London: Methuen; New York, Barnes and Noble, 1961
Tennyson and Victorianism
Glenn Everett, Associate Professor of English, University of Tennessee at Martin
lfred, Lord Tennyson, like Charles Dickens, Matthew Arnold, Charles Kingsley, T.H. Huxley, and Victoria herself, is one of the people meant when we speak of " the Victorians."
What made Tennyson so Victorian was his ready acceptance of the mores of his day, his willingness to conform to popular taste, to write a poetry that was easily understood and enjoyed (something that Robert Browning never could, or would, do, although he often said he wanted to). If we expect poets to be rebellious, like Shelley, Byron, Swinburne, or Dylan Thomas, Tennyson must disappoint us in this regard; but it is important to remember that his behavior involves no hypocrisy. This was a position which he readily accepted: no Poet Laureate before him had so regularly written so much occasional verse. He wrote poems on the death of Lord Nelson, on the birth of Princess Alexandra, and dedicated the complete Idylls of the King to Albert, the Prince Consort (Victoria's beloved husband) -- which lead to Swinburne's description of the Idylls as the "Morte d'Albert." But again, we should remember that Tennyson knew and liked the royal family. Prince Albert had come to visit him on the Isle of Wight just shortly after he and his family had moved in, and the Queen summoned him to court several times. It was at her insistence that he accepted his title, having declined it once when Disraeli offered it and again when Gladstone did.
Partly as a result of his position as a public and nationalist figure, Tennyson was by far the most popular poet of the Victorian era. No poet was ever so completely a national poet: Henry James said in 1875 that his verse had become "part of the civilization of his day." This probably explains why literary opinion turned so sharply against him in the earlier part of the twentieth century, as we reacted against all things Victorian.
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Newman on the Gentleman
George P. Landow, Professor of English and Art History, Brown University
John Henry Cardinal Newman, the most famous English convert to Roman Catholicism of the nineteenth century, included the following description of the gentleman in his treatise on university education for Roman Catholics, who had only recently received civil rights. As you read Newman's portrait of the gentleman, compare it to those found in discussions of the concept of gentleman in Elizabeth Gaskell and other authors as well as specific characters in Robert Browning, Charles Dickens, and Anthony Trollope.
It is almost a definition of a gentleman to say he is one who never inflicts pain. This description is both refined and, as far as it goes, accurate. He is mainly occupied in merely removing the obstacles which hinder the free and unembarrassed action of those about him; and he concurs with their movements rather than takes the initiative himself. His benefits may be considered as parallel to what are called comforts or conveniences in arrangements of a personal nature: like an easy chair or a good fire, which do their part in dispelling cold and fatigue, though nature provides both means of rest and animal heat without them. The true gentleman in like manner carefully avoids whatever may cause a jar or a jolt in the minds of those with whom he is cast; -- all clashing of opinion, or collision of feeling, all restraint, or suspicion, or gloom, or resentment; his great concern being to make every one at their ease and at home. He has his eyes on all his company; he is tender towards the bashful, gentle towards the distant, and merciful towards the absurd; he can recollect to whom he is speaking; he guards against unseasonable allusions, or topics which may irritate; he is seldom prominent in conversation, and never wearisome. He makes light of favours while he does them, and seems to be receiving when he is conferring. He never speaks of himself except when compelled, never defends himself by a mere retort, he has no ears for slander or gossip, is scrupulous in imputing motives to those who interfere with him, and interprets every thing for the best. He is never mean or little in his disputes, never takes unfair advantage, never mistakes personalities or sharp sayings for arguments, or insinuates evil which he dare not say out. From a long-sighted prudence, he observes the maxim of the ancient sage, that we should ever conduct ourselves towards our enemy as if he were one day to be our friend. He has too much good sense to be affronted at insults, he is too well employed to remember injuries, and too indolent to bear malice. He is patient, forbearing, and resigned, on philosophical principles; he submits to pain, because it is inevitable, to bereavement, because it is irreparable, and to death, because it is his destiny. If he engages in controversy of any kind, his disciplined intellect preserves him from the blunder. [From The Idea of a University, 1852]
Taken in isolation, Newman's descriptive definition, which appears an exemplary idealization of the British gentleman, appears a standard, unsurprising presentation of a sociopolitical ideal clearly related to specific class interest. In context, however, his statement immediately appears more complex, since he does not address those with political or even economic power. In fact, his intended audience of Irish Catholics were doubly disenfranchised as members of a colonized people and a despised, only recently permitted religion. In addition, as David J. DeLaura points out, for Newman, "the insuperable defect of humanistic culture," appears in the limitations of the gentleman, who has 'no means for transcending the limits of the natural man (p. 238).'"
Related Materials
• The Gentleman
• The Political Function of the Gentleman
• From London Coffee Houses to London Clubs
The Crisis of Organized Religion
John Caperton (English 32, 5 /11 /89)
oth Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Gerard Manley Hopkins address thegrowing impotency of organized religion that was present in the Victorian era. Scientific discovery, especially evolution, had found explanations of the dynamics of the universe which debunked what the church offered. This crisis is perhaps summed up best by the great controversy when Bishop Colenso published in 1862 The Pentateuch and the Book of Joshua Critically Examined. This book questioned the justice of the church, which was forcing ministers to except the scripture literally. As Voltaire once said, "If God did not exist, it would have been necessary to invent him." Human beings hunger for an understanding of why things are as they are. Organized religion had simply been bested in performing that function by the natural sciences. Consequently, its popularity dropped considerably. Such an understanding had prompted Comte's philosophy of Positivism, which asserted that mankind was progressing from a point when it would rely on science for understanding instead of "superstition".
There was clearly a crisis going on. Hopkins, a Catholic priest who was asked to write by the authorities of the church, addresses it directly in "God's Grandeur". He asserts that stress or pressure creates a higher beauty in all things, especially the church. Therefore, one should worship.
It gather's to greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men now not reck his rod?
In Memoriam presents the long struggle of a man trying to make sense of a world and a God that has taken his friend. In the process the concept of typology incorporates evolutionary thought into the Christian mythos. In that way, Tennyson presents for the reader a way to hold on to traditional systems of faith without rejecting the notions that science offers.
Victorian Earnestness
Philip V. Allingham, Contributing Editor, Faculty of Education, Lakehead University (Canada)
espite the great humour of Dickens and Thackeray, the whimsy of the Victorian burlesque and pantomime, and sometimes Pythonesque humour of the magazine Punch, we think of the Victorians as earnest. The age that gave us Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland also gave us Tennyson's In Memoriam. The Victorian poets were essentially third-generation Romantics, Tennyson being a disciple of Keats and Browning of Shelley. Like their mentors, they grappled with religious and social issues, for they regarded the artist as society's conscience. The code of respectability and puritanism advocated by dissenters from the Church of England -- the Nonconformists and Evangelicals -- is summed up in the Sunday Observance Bill of 1837. Although thanks to such liberals as Dickens it was narrowly defeated, the Sober Sunday became an established custom in England.
In contrast, as The French Lieutenant's Woman points out, some 8,000 prostitutes plied their trade in London at mid-century. At that time in the medium-sized industrial town of Leeds, a northern town in West Yorkshire, had two churches, 39 chapels, 451 taverns, and 98 brothels. But the newly-rich, insecure middle class insisted upon an outward respectability and conformity -- hence, the desire of Wilde's Jack Worthing's to keep up appearances for the sake of his ward, 'little' Cecily, whom he has kept secreted in his country-house as though she were some princess in a fairy-tale, and he some controlling enchanter or ogre.
Queen Victoria
David Cody, Associate Professor of English, Hartwick College
ictoria, the daughter of the duke of Kent and Princess Victoria of Saxe-Coburg, was born in 1819. She inherited the throne of Great Britain at the age of eighteen, upon the death of her uncle William IV in 1837, and reigned until 1901, bestowing her name upon her age. She married her mother's nephew, Albert (1819-1861), prince of Saxe-Coburg Gotha, in 1840, and until his death he remained the focal point of her life (she bore him nine children). Albert replaced Lord Melbourne, the Whig Prime Minister who had served her as her first personal and political tutor and instructor, as Victoria's chief advisor. Albert was moralistic, conscientious and progressive, if rather priggish, sanctimonious, and intellectually shallow, and with Victoria initiated various reforms and innovations -- he organized the Great Exhibition of 1851, for example -- which were responsible for a great deal of the popularity later enjoyed by the British monarchy. (In contrast to the Great Exhibition, housed in the Crystal Palace and viewed by proud Victorians as a monument to their own cultural and technological achievements, however, we may recall that the government over which Victoria and Albert presided had, in the midst of the potato famine of 1845, continued to permit the export of grain and cattle from Ireland to England while over a million Irish peasants starved to death).
Sir Francis Grant's Portrait of Queen Victoria. You might wish to compare this image to others in the Victorian Web's Gallery of Portraits of Queen Victoria and the Royal Family. What do they suggest about the Queen's role in Victorian society? Her changing function as what the twentieth century terms a "role model"?
After Albert's death in 1861 a desolate Victoria remained in self-imposed seclusion for ten years. Her genuine but obsessive mourning, which would occupy her for the rest of her life, played an important role in the evolution of what would become the Victorian mentality. Thereafter she lived at Windsor or Balmoral, travelling abroad once a year, but making few public appearances in Britain itself. Although she maintained a careful policy of official political neutrality, she did not get on at all well with Gladstone. Eventually, however, she succumbed to the flattery of Disraeli, and permitted him (in an act which was both symbolic and theatrical) to have her crowned Empress of India in 1876. (As Punch noted at the time, "one good turn deserves another," and Victoria reciprocated by making Disraeli Earl of Beaconsfield.) She tended as a rule to take an active dislike of British politicians who criticized the conduct of the conservative regimes of Europe, many of which were, after all, run by her relatives. By 1870 her popularity was at its lowest ebb (at the time the monarchy cost the nation £400,000 per annum, and many wondered whether the largely symbolic institution was worth the expense), but it increased steadily thereafter until her death. Her golden jubilee in 1887 was a grand national celebration, as was her diamond jubilee in 1897 (by then, employing the imperial "we," she had long been Kipling's "Widow of Windsor," mother of the Empire). She died, a venerable old lady, at Osborne on January 22, 1901, having reigned for sixty-four years.
Related web resources
• Queen Victoria's Education
• Portraits of Queen Victoria: A Gallery of Paintings
• Portraits in Stone and Bronze of Queen Victoria: A Gallery
• Roger Cullingham kindly notified us about his Royal Windsor site, which he's creating for Thamesweb.
Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Brief Biography
Glenn Everett, Associate Professor of English, University of Tennessee at Martin
Alfred Tennyson was born August 6th, 1809, at Somersby, Lincolnshire, fourth of twelve children of George and Elizabeth (Fytche) Tennyson. The poet's grandfather had violated tradition by making his younger son, Charles, his heir, and arranging for the poet's father to enter the ministry. (See the Tennyson Family Tree.) The contrast of his own family's relatively straitened circumstances to the great wealth of his aunt Elizabeth Russell and uncle Charles Tennyson (who lived in castles!) made Tennyson feel particularly impoverished and led him to worry about money all his life.
He also had a lifelong fear of mental illness, for several men in his family had a mild form of epilepsy, which was then thought a shameful disease. His father and brother Arthur made their cases worse by excessive drinking. His brother Edward had to be confined in a mental institution after 1833, and he himself spent a few weeks under doctors' care in 1843. In the late twenties his father's physical and mental condition worsened, and he became paranoid, abusive, and violent.
In 1827 Tennyson escaped the troubled atmosphere of his home when he followed his two older brothers to Trinity College, Cambridge, where his tutor was William Whewell -- see nineteenth-century philosophy. Because they had published Poems by Two Brothers in 1827 and each won university prizes for poetry (Alfred winning the Chancellor's Gold Medal in 1828 for زTimbuctooس) the Tennyson brothers became well known at Cambridge. In 1829 The Apostles, an undergraduate club, whose members remained Tennyson's friends all his life, invited him to join. The group, which met to discuss major philosophical and other issues, included Arthur Henry Hallam, James Spedding, Edward Lushington (who later married Cecilia Tennyson), and Richard Monckton Milnes -- all eventually famous men who merited entries in the Dictionary of National Biography.
Arthur Hallam's was the most important of these friendships. Hallam, another precociously brilliant Victorian young man like Robert Browning, John Stuart Mill, and Matthew Arnold, was uniformly recognized by his contemporaries (including William Gladstone, his best friend at Eton) as having unusual promise. He and Tennyson knew each other only four years, but their intense friendship had major influence on the poet. On a visit to Somersby, Hallam met and later became engaged to Emily Tennyson, and the two friends looked forward to a life-long companionship. Hallam's death from illness in 1833 (he was only 22) shocked Tennyson profoundly, and his grief lead to most of his best poetry, including In Memoriam , "The Passing of Arthur", "Ulysses," and "Tithonus."
Since Tennyson was always sensitive to criticism, the mixed reception of his 1832 Poems hurt him greatly. Critics in those days delighted in the harshness of their reviews: the Quarterly Review was known as the "Hang, draw, and quarterly." John Wilson Croker's harsh criticisms of some of the poems in our anthology kept Tennyson from publishing again for another nine years.
Late in the 1830s Tennyson grew concerned about his mental health and visited a sanitarium run by Dr. Matthew Allen, with whom he later invested his inheritance (his grandfather had died in 1835) and some of his family's money. When Dr. Allen's scheme for mass-producing wood carvings using steam power went bankrupt, Tennyson, who did not have enough money to marry, ended his engagement to Emily Sellwood, whom he had met at his brother Charles's wedding to her sister Louisa.
The success of his 1842 Poems made Tennyson a popular poet, and in 1845 he received a Civil List (government) pension of £200 a year, which helped relieve his financial difficulties; the success of "The Princess" and In Memoriam and his appointment in 1850 as Poet Laureate finally established him as the most popular poet of the Victorian era.
By now Tennyson, only 41, had written some of his greatest poetry, but he continued to write and to gain in popularity. In 1853, as the Tennysons were moving into their new house on the Isle of Wight, Prince Albert dropped in unannounced. His admiration for Tennyson's poetry helped solidify his position as the national poet, and Tennyson returned the favor by dedicating The Idylls of the King to his memory. Queen Victoria later summoned him to court several times, and at her insistence he accepted his title, having declined it when offered by both Disraeli and Gladstone.
Tennyson suffered from extreme short-sightedness -- without a monocle he could not even see to eat -- which gave him considerable difficulty writing and reading, and this disability in part accounts for his manner of creating poetry: Tennyson composed much of his poetry in his head, occasionally working on individual poems for many years. During his undergraduate days at Cambridge he often did not bother to write down his compositions, although the Apostles continually prodded him to do so. (We owe the first version of "The Lotos-Eaters" to Arthur Hallam, who transcribed it while Tennyson declaimed it at a meeting of the Apostles.)
Long-lived like most of his family (no matter how unhealthy they seemed to be) Alfred, Lord Tennyson died on October 6, 1892, at the age of 83.
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Where is Tennyson in In Memoriam?
George P. Landow, Professor of English and Art History, Brown University
The proto-hypertextuality of In Memoriam thus atomizes and disperses Tennyson the man. He is to be found nowhere, except possibly in the "Epilogue," which appears after and outside the poem itself. Tennyson, the real, once-existing man with his actual beliefs and fears, cannot be extrapolated from within the poem's individual sections, for each presents Tennyson only at a particular moment. Traversing these individual sections, the reader experiences a somewhat idealized version of Tennyson's moments of grief and recovery. In Memoriam thus fulfills Paul Valéry's definition of poetry as a machine that reproduces an emotion. It also fulfills another of Benjamin's observations in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" -- one he makes in the course of contrasting "painter and cameraman. The painter maintains in his work a natural distance from reality, the cameraman penetrates deeply into its web. There is a tremendous difference between the pictures they obtain. That of the painter is a total one, that of the cameraman consists of multiple fragments which are assembled under a new law" (233-34). Although speaking of a different information medium, Benjamin here captures some sense of the way hypertext, when compared to print, appears atomized, and in doing so, he also conveys one of the chief qualities of Tennyson's antilinear, multi-sequential poem.
From George P. Landow, Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Theory and Technology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1992; Hypertext 2.0, revised, expanded edition, 1997.
Appendix: The Political and Public Poems
James R. Kincaid, Aerol Arnold Professor of English, University of Southern California
Appendix, part 1, of the author's Tennyson's Major Poems, which Yale University Press published in 1975. It has been included in the Victorian Web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright.
1. Numbers in brackets indicate page breaks in the print edition and thus allow users of VW to cite or locate the original page numbers.
2. Where possible, bibliographical information appears in the form of in-text citations, which refer to the bibliography at the end of each document.
3. Superscript numbers link only to documents containing substantial bibliographical information; the numbers do not form a complete sequence.
4. Non-bibliographic notes appears as text links.
5. This web version is a project supported by the University Scholars Programme of the National University of Singapore. Scanning, basic HTML conversion, and proofreading were carried out by Gerhard Rolletschek, a Postgraduate Visiting Scholar from the University of Munich, working under the direction of George P. Landow, who added links to materials in VW.
6. indicates a link to material not in the original print version. [GPL].
n this category fall those poems which are self-consciously public in nature: the Horatian verse epistles, the official Laureate poems, and various other poems on political and nationalistic themes. One could make a case for the real distinction of many individual poems in the first two categories, but not, I think, for the highly charged political poems that issued from Tennyson's wrath arid indignation regularly throughout his career. These are not the Laureate Poems. When Tennyson became Laureate he was forced to find for the official poems a different, more comprehensive and inclusive point of view, arid a more detached stance, all of which made for much more interesting and powerful poetry. He did continue during this period to publish his "real feelings" without the softening of much art or distance, but he did so anonymously. It is this unquestionably inferior category which is, unfortunately, most revealing for my purposes. The fine poems in the first two categories can be given only a nod in passing.
First, the Laureate poems. Despite the excellence of Valerie Pitt's analysis of them, it is not easy to accept her very high estimate of their quality. It is true that in the great Wellington Ode one can see how skillfully Tennyson creates an elegiac community, a unity of sorrow in "hamlet and hall" (l. 7) and of all those in the "long long procession" (l. 15)- Surprisingly, he strives first to increase the community's sorrow and sense of loss: "The last great Englishman is low" (1. 18), but, having uttered this, he immediately turns from it - the next line says "he seems the last" [my italics] - and begins to build a new unity. The cohesiveness is provided by the power of the society to give honor and thus give life:
And through the centuries let a people's voice
In full acclaim, [216/217]
A people's voice,
The proof and echo of all human fame,
A people's voice, when they rejoice
At civic revel and pomp and game,
Attest their great commander's claim
With honour, honour, honour, honour to him,
Eternal honour to his name. [ll. 142-501]
It is not a new idea to suggest immortality through fame, of course, but Tennyson gives it quite a special emphasis by focusing not so much on the continuance of the dead man's name as on the power of the people to grant that continuance. It is the "people's voice," as the recurrent phrase insists, that endures through the ages. The poem subtly promotes not the immortality of Wellington so much as the immortality of a unified and disciplined people. The duke finally becomes explicitly a "great example" (l. 220), showing that "the path of duty was [and will be] the way to glory" (l. 202) and teaching discipline, union, and peace. One sees, in other words, that the poem is rhetorically subtle and highly controlled. But one can also see how this and the other Laureate poems work deliberately to restrict their area of concern and to establish it both impersonally and abstractly. The impulse to cleanse, rejuvenate, and solidify is there, as it is in the major comedies, but it seems contained and modest in comparison to the boldly ambitious The Princess, In Memoriam, and Maud.
Much the same point may be made in relation to Tennyson's undoubted mastery of epistolary verse, where again the emphasis is on controlled grace and perfect felicity of phrasing. The most famous example is the sophisticated and charming ending of "To E. FitzGerald":
And so I send a birthday line
Of greeting . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . which you will take
My Fitz, and welcome, as I know
Less for its own than for the sake
Of one recalling gracious times,
When, in our younger London days,
You found some merit in my rhymes, [216/217]
And I more pleasure in your praise. [ll. 45-46, 50-56]
The warm "My Fitz" is balanced by the self-depreciating "rhymes," the deliberate understatement of "some merit," and the quiet word pleasure. The emotion is expressed by being unexpressed, so that the commonest words, like gracious, become remarkably expansive when used to cover a whole range of emotional experience; gracious times. There is a warm sense of mutual understanding, of scarcely needing to state what is so well understood, that gives new life to simple language and includes the reader in its familiarity and sophistication. The last lines of "To the Rev. F. D. Maurice" achieve the same restrained warmth through the use of a slight, happy ambiguity: "Nor pay but one [visit], but come for many,/ Many and many a happy year" (ll. 47-48).
Again, while these epistolary poems are obviously expressions of a comic impulse, they are, like the Laureate poems, expressions of a very restrained, ordered comedy, The multiplicity and abandon associated with comedy are played down in order to emphasize the great control. Even the "Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington" works by deliberately simplifying our response in order to specify our emotional attitude and create a restricted unity. Many diverse emotions are raised in the poem (it opens, we recall, by focusing our grief), but they are finally brought into a closed form, cast out, or superseded by the overriding force of oneness. This can he seen as a part of a great comic tradition, and no one can say that the tradition is in any sense deficient.
But it does seem that by the nineteenth century more chaotic, multitudinous strategies were beginning to prevail. The old, coherent certainties are gone, and even Dickens, who we can sense would have had a wonderful time manipulating vices and virtues, does not stay with the simplifying strategy for long. The Pickwick Papers begins that way, but before long Sam and Tony Welter appear, spraying subversive comments everywhere and disallowing -- in fact attacking -- the crystalline rhetoric and clear unity the novel had seemed to be advocating. Though there are no Wellers in Tennyson, his solutions in the long comic poems tend toward the same deliberate denial of simplicity and unity that we find in The Pickwick Papers. Only in these minor poems does he reach a level of assured public statement by a highly skillful process of selection and focusing. [217/218]
Beneath this level of confident and sophisticated art in Tennyson runs a kind of subterranean stream that feeds the direct political poems in the third category. These poems are made up of dark fears that are to the comic impulse approximately what a jungle howl is to a symphony. Critics often express astonishment that the same mind could produce both "St Simeon Stylites" and "The May Queen"; there is, surely, an equal distance between "Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington" and "Riflemen Form!". I am aware that no one would deny this; the only reason for discussing these poems is that they represent an interesting perversion and reduction of many of Tennyson's major themes and -generic preoccupations. Though trivial, they are revealing.
Like most modern comic poets, Tennyson almost always envisioned the ideal social unit as the family, not the nation. But there was a part of him that had national opinions, very deeply held opinions on political issues accompanied by a deeply felt compulsion to express them. It is often said that Tennyson was not very intelligent in these matters, that "he really did hold a great many of the same views as Queen Victoria, though he was gifted with a more fortunate literary style," (Chesterton, p. 162) or that he was, in a general way, "undoubtedly the stupidest" of English poets (Auden, p. x). To read his "views" in the Memoir or in his wife's and son's various recordings of his "Sayings" is a tedious and depressing business. But the quality of his intelligence is really not the problem; rather, it is the depth of uncontrolled, primitive feeling welling over in the poems that makes an unsympathetic reader think, not so much of defective intelligence as defective emotions, not a dull schoolteacher but a drunk in a bar declaiming on the moral decline. The poems are not unintelligent; they operate beneath the level of intelligence altogether. It was this plain primitivism, no doubt, that caused [218/219] John Stuart Mill to wonder if "they are meant for bitter ridicule of vulgar nationality," "if they are to be taken seriously." (Review, 42).
The vulgarity and bitterness Mill perceived in the early volumes continue to dominate these poems until Tennyson's death, There is absolutely no development, a fact which certainly suggests that they had no connection with Tennyson's notions of his duties as Laureate; similarly, the violence of the language suggests that neither were they connected with high-minded views of social duty, apostolic or otherwise. One can hardly imagine the Apostles countenancing such things as the hysterical reference to the French in the original version of "Riflemen Form!":
Ready, be ready! the times are wild!
Bearded monkeys of lust and blood
Coming to violate woman and child! (see p. 1779 in the Ricks edition).
This is extreme even for Tennyson, but it suggests the level of simplicity, even brutality, on which much of his political poetry operates.
This poetry is dedicated to "law and order" in the peculiarly modern sense that slogan has acquired: it is reactionary, cautious, and terribly afraid. It meets the cataclysmic change of the nineteenth century with a childish, mocking jeer. The price Tennyson paid for his great poetry was this barbarous counter-strain, where he could, apparently, blow off steam and gather his resources for his important efforts. He relaxed from irony and comedy into poetry that was made as simple as possible so that the tension could be released. The political poetry is, perhaps, an artistic and emotional drainage system.
It is significant that when, as in "The Charge of the Light Brigade," Tennyson was stirred by public events to write. ironically, he tried in revisions to dispose of the irony. In the 1855 version Tennyson changed the poised and tonally ambiguous ending to one that is bland and unidirectional. He also dropped the famous line, [219/220] "Some one had blundered." John Ruskin wrote to him about this subversive line, urging him to restore it: "It was precisely the most tragical line in the poem," (Memoir, I:411) he said. It is, in our sense, precisely the most ironic line, Though Tennyson later did restore it, the 1855 revision is interesting, in that it suggests riot so much timidity as Tennyson's Deed for emotional simplification in this genre. This statement is just the sort that would have infuriated Tennyson, but the truth is he cared very little for political life or even for the conception of "England" as a political unit. He could, after all, use them in this necessary but quite offhand way, releasing his tensions onto them so he could turn his mind to genuine work. The poems are sincere, of course; they have the sincerity of emotional doodles.
There is, as I have said, no discernible development throughout them. "English Warsong" in the 1830 volume might have been published at any time. Its shrill purpose is to convince any waverers that fear of death is shameful, deserving "withering scorn" (l. 5), and that, in any case, the enemy who will force us to confront death will hardly be able to manage it: "He is weak! we are strong; he a slave, we are free" (l. 30). One would suppose that the thought of death need hardly arise if "The child in our cradles is bolder than he" (l. 27), but one is not encouraged to suppose anything. The poem is full of such gaps, constantly returning to slogans and the obsessive "we are free." This word free is the key term in all of Tennyson's national songs, popping up in chorus after emotional chorus' The comic principle of freedom is continually stated but never realized, since the motive of the poem is so obviously a fear that the vaunted freedom is or soon will be gone.
The poems strive for comedy without any optimism, and they spend an enormous amount of energy playing what might be called "Find the jailer." The perception of bondage is reduced to a search for a cause, and since there is no real cause, the political poems can only use symbolic villains that are quite inadequate. Most often the scapegoat asked to bear the weight of responsibility for the frustration is France - "For the French the pope may shrive [220/221] 'em, / For the devil a whit we heed 'em" ("National Song") - or, even better, Napoleon Buonaparte: "He thought to quell the stubborn hearts of oak, / Madman! - to chain with chains, and bind with bands / That island queen who sways the floods and lands / From Ind to Ind" ("Buonaparte," ll. 1 - 4).
When actual war threatened in 1852, Tennyson rose to the challenge with vigorous attacks on all complexities. The one thing, he urged, was to "Arm, arm, arm!": "Is this a time to cry for peace, / When we should shriek for rifles?" ("The Penny-Wise," ll. 34-35). "Shriek" indeed. All those who stood in the way of the arming and the rifle clubs, war plans, and, one supposes, an invasion of the Continent, were quickly dismissed: the "O babbling Peace Societies" ("The Penny-Wise.," l. 32); the tradesmen and "niggard throats of Manchester" ("The Third of February, 1852," ll. 43 - 45), whom Tennyson more than suspected of promoting peace in order to build profits; the House of Lords for their niggling economies; and all those who foolishly urged religious, moral, or practical scruples against war.
Everything must be concentrated on the search for and the elimination of the villain:
Let your reforms for a moment go!
Look to your butts, and take good aims!
Better a rotten borough or so
Than a rotten fleet and a city in flames!
("Riflemen Form!", ll. 15-18). In the end, the major enemies are logic, reason, and especially prudence: "For her there lie in wait millions of foes, / And yet the 'Not too much' is all the rule she knows" ("Suggested by Reading an Article in a Newspaper," ll. 59-60), Tennyson's snarling attack on British "respectability" and his inflamed defense of extremism make us aware that we are up against a kind of temporary hysterical paranoia, therapeutic to the writer, no doubt, but not conducive to great art. Poems like these are at the opposite pole from the poised reasonableness of the Laureate poems.
There is no evidence that Tennyson, for all his morbidity, was paranoid, but these poems do project a sense of betrayal on all sides. The political poems are only the crudest expression of the feeling of loss, an attempt to find a central enemy so that the ironic tension may be dissolved. Tennyson keeps returning in the later poems, not only in Maud, to the term "liar"- "peace-lovers we - but who can trust a liar?" ("Britons, Guard Your Own," l. 14) - and Arthur's kingdom stands and falls on its central belief in absolute honesty. [221/222]
Again, this political expression seems to be a reduction of what in the Idylls is a sense of great cosmic trickery. The ironic apprehensions, then, are present in the political poems, which are not so much superficial politics as mistaken attempts to solve the ironic dilemma by reducing it to manageable, discreet terms.
What is remarkable, then, is not that Tennyson was attracted to simple escapes from his vision but that he was attracted to them so little. One might say that these poems are inferior only because Tennyson's ironic perception was so strong yet delicate that he could not put labels on the villains at all convincingly. In any case, a few poems on British hearts of oak are a small price to pay for Idylls of the King.
References
Knight, G. Wilson. "Excalibur: An Essay on Tennyson," in Neglected Powers, pp. 419-29.
Solimine, Joseph. "The Burkean Idea of the State in Tennyson's Poetry," HLQ 30 (1967): 147-65.
Preyer, Robert. "Alfred Tennyson," VS 9 (1966): 325-52.
Nicholson, Harold. Tennyson: Aspects of His Life, Character, and Poetry. London: Constable, 1923.
Chesterton, G. K. The Victorian Age in Literature. London: Williams and Norgate, n.d. [1913].
A Selection from the Poems of Alfred, Lord Tennyson ed. W.H. Auden. Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1944.
Tennyson, Hallam, Lord. Alfred, Lord Tennyson. A Memoir. 2 vols. New York: MacmillAn Introduction to In Memoriam
George P. Landow, Professor of English and Art History, Brown University
hen Tennyson came to write In Memoriam, one of the most experimental and yet most influential poems of the century, he already had refined his characteristic basic poetic structure and needed a theme that would permit him to apply his gifts to a major form. Arthur Henry Hallam's death in 1833 provided Tennyson with one by forcing him to question his faith in nature, God, and poetry. In Memoriam reveals that Tennyson, who found that brief lyrics best embodied the transitory emotions that buffeted him after his loss, rejected conventional elegy and narrative because both falsify the experience of grief and recovery by mechanically driving the reader through too unified -- and hence too simplified -- a version of these experiences. Creating a poetry of fragments, Tennyson leads the reader of In Memoriam from grief and despair through doubt to hope and faith, but at each step stubborn, contrary emotions intrude, and one encounters doubt in the midst of faith, pain in the midst of resolution. Instead of the elegaic plot of Lycidas, Adonais, and Thyrsis, In Memoriam offers 133 fragments interlaced by dozens of images and motifs and informed by an equal number of minor and major resolutions, the most famous of which is section 95's representation of Tennyson's climactic, if wonderfully ambiguous, mystical experience of contact with Hallam's spirit. In addition, individual sections, like 7 and 119 or 28, 78, and 104 variously resonate with one another.
One of the central resolutions of In Memoriam involves the poet's plays upon the word type, which in the poem means either "biological species" or "divinely intended prefiguration of Christ." Typology (or typological symbolism) is a Christian form of biblical interpretation that proceeds on the assumption that God placed anticipations of Christ in the laws, events, and people of the Old Testament. Typology, which had enormous influence on medieval Europe, seventeenth- century England, and Victorian Britain, provided literature and art with an imaginatively rich iconography and particular conceptions of reality and time.
According to this way of understanding the Bible, Samson, who sacrificed his life for God's people, partially anticipates Christ, who repeats the action, endowing it with a deeper, more complete, more spiritual significance. Similarly, the scapegoat and the animals sacrificed in the Temple at Jerusalem, both of which atoned for man's sins, and Aaron, God's priest, are types.
Tennyson closes his elegy with the now calm assurance that Hallam "was a noble type / Appearing ere the times were ripe." In Memoriam resolves the crisis of faith precipitated by Hallam's death by presenting him doubly as a type, because he foreshadowed both the second appearance of Christ and the coming higher race of human beings. In making this characteristically Victorian -- that is, characteristically idiosyncratic -- use of biblical typology, Tennyson ³solves" the problem raised earlier in the poem where type means ³biological species." The central sections 54 through 56, which dramatize his groping for consolation, show how the poet's doubts raised increasingly appalling specters. He thus begins section 54 with trust that when God's plan is understood, all will see that not one life is ³cast as rubbish to the void," but even as he tries to assert this hopeful view, his doubts wear away his confidence. Retreating, he tries in the next section to find consolation in the fact that although nature may be careless of the individual life, she is nonetheless "careful of the type." In response to this last desperate hope that nature preserves the species if not the individual, section 56 immediately replies: "So careful of the type?" but no. / From scarpèd cliff and quarried stone / She cries, "A thousand types are gone: / I care for nothing, all shall go." Thus, his friend's death, which first made the poet realize the emotional reality of loss, soon forced him to realize the possibility that not only he himself but also the entire human species could die out. But, as the final sections of the poem make clear, Tennyson can accept the possibilty that man will become extinct because he has come to believe that such extinction would occur only when God was ready to replace man with a higher, more spiritual descendant. At the close of the poem, then, theological type replaces biological type, or rather encompasses it, because faith reveals that God's eternal plan includes purposeful biological development.
Tennyson, the real, once-existing man with his actual beliefs and fears, cannot be extrapolated from within the poem's individual sections, for each presents Tennyson only at a particular moment. In Memoriam thus fulfills Paul Valéry's definition of poetry as a machine that reproduces an emotion. Tennyson makes us re-experience an idealized version of his own separate experiences -- and thereby become ready to accept the entirely subjective truths of religious belief.
an, 1898. Reconciling the Spiritual and the Material in In Memoriam
Alexa Van Brunt '04, English 156 (Victorians and Moderns), Brown University, Spring 2004
The structure of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's epic elegy, In Memoriam, exposes the reader to the evolution of the poet's feelings and attitudes over chronological time, which flows in tandem with the unfolding of the verse. Because the poem supposedly portrays the speaker's feelings at the moment he is writing the stanzas, there are many contradictions in thought and belief throughout the work -- revealing the shifting, ever-changing nature of human nature. The most significant example of this change is the author's attitude toward eternal life. That is, the author's preliminary disbelief in immortality and spirituality is transformed as the protagonist's grief lessens over time and he rediscovers the importance of combining both the spiritual and the material worlds.
The reader is led to believe that the speaker's lack of faith is not only a consequence of Hallam's death, but also symptomatic of the times, evidence of an increasingly skeptical Victorian society in the era immediately pre-dating Darwin. The author's poem uses explicit references to the mechanistic and materialist scientific paradigms of the 1830s, and in the beginning of the poem, it seems as if the speaker has wholly abandoned his faith in favor of the cold and calculated science of electric impulses and natural selection. However, as the work progresses, the reader senses a veritable lifting of the poet's soul, for as the years pass following his friend's death, he is once again able to recapture his connection to and respect for the spiritual world, able to extend his poetic aims beyond the limits of his personal grief to higher planes of aesthetic creation.
In the following section of the poem, Tennyson stresses the necessity of infusing society with simple faith, with belief that exceeds the popular intellectual egoism that abounded in the scientific world and among the higher, educated classes in this time period
Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
The faithless coldness of the times;
Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes,
But ring the fuller minstrel in . . .
Ring in the valiant man and free,
The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be. [Section 106, p. 71]
In this frame of mind, the poet scorns those figures of the intellectual world who espouse cynicism in the face of religious belief and spiritualism, the scientists who reduce human beings to a set of "cunning casts in clay" operating by a system of mechanized magnetic reactions.
I trust I have not wasted breath:
I think we are not wholly brain,
Magnetic mockeries; not in vain,
Like Paul with beasts, I fought with Death;
Not only cunning casts in clay;
Let Science prove we are, and then
What matter Science unto men,
At least to me? I would not stay.
Let him, the wiser man who spring
Hereafter, up from childhood shape
His action like the greater ape,
But I was born to other things [Section 120, p. 80]
However, Tennyson's assertion of the supremacy of the spiritual world over the material sphere is by no means unqualified. Immediately prior to what many critics dub the final section of the poem, when the poet begins to reconcile his doubt concerning faith and immortality with more scientific notions of evolution and materialism, the speaker's emphasizes his own skepticism with pure religious faith. Using Hallam's questioning nature as a prototype for his own, the poet accentuates the necessity of maintaining doubt, for doubts strengthen individuals by forcing them to reason and fight against their uncertainties.
Perplext in faith, but pure in deeds,
At last he beat his music out.
There lives more faith in honest
doubt, Believe me, than in half the creeds.
He fought his doubts and gather'd strength,
He would not make his judgment blind,
He faced the specters of the mind
And laid them: thus he came at length
To find a stronger faith his own;
And Power was with him in the night,
Which makes the darkness and the light,
And dwells not in the light alone,
But in the darkness and the cloud,
As over Sinai's peaks of old,
While Israel made their gods of gold,
Altho' the trumpet blew so loud. [Section 96, p. 62]
In the end, where do you feel the speaker's stands in the realms of doubt and religious faith? How does the author reconcile the spiritual and the material worlds? Does one supersede the other, or are they of equal value, merely existing in separate planes? How does the author's understanding of faith and disbelief alter throughout the course of the poem? How is your own reading of the poem affected by Tennyson's shifting and occasionally ambiguous perspectives on the spiritual and the material?
Would you consider this poem a religious literary work? How does its religious and moral tone compare with other Victorian works, most especially Aurora Leigh? Specifically, where do Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Tennyson converge in their views on spirituality? Where do they diverge? How do these authors understand the role of the poet in the greater society?
Now compare Tennyson's views on his contemporary Victorian society with those espoused by Carlyle. In what aspect of Tennyson's poem does he seem to mimic Carlyle's perspective on the evolution of this society?
________________________________________
Identity Formation in In Memoriam 45
Claire Dunnington '05, English 156 (Victorians and Moderns), Brown University, Spring 2004
In section 45 of his poem In Memoriam, Tennyson ultimately describes death as a "second birth" (line 16). He opens the section by discussing an infant's new association with the world and the recognition of the self that begins the formation of a person's identity. As the poem progresses, Tennyson links this recognition with isolation, suggesting that in some ways, developing one's own mind separates one from the rest of the world. He concludes by comparing death to birth -- although he does not use the term rebirth, opting instead for a term with strong Christian religious connotations: "second birth" (16).
The baby new to earth and sky,
What time his tender palm is pressed
Against the circle of the breast,
Has never thought that "this is I":
But as he grows he gathers much,
And learns the use of "I" and "me,"
And finds "I am not what I see,
And other than the things I touch":
So rounds he to a separate mind
From whence clear memory may begin,
As through the frame that binds him in
His isolation grows defined.
This use may lie in blood and breath,
Which else were fruitless of their due,
Had man to learn himself anew
Beyond the second birth of Death.
Questions
1. Tennyson ends the third stanza with "His isolation grows defined" (line 12). Is he describing the emergence of isolation, or was the isolation always present but simply undefined before that moment? In the second stanza, Tennyson describes the formation of identity matter-of-factly -- does he pass judgement on self-recognition and resulting isolation, or regard them as neutral aspects of life?
2. In the second stanza, Tennyson posits that the quote "I am not what I see/And other than the things I touch" expresses the feelings a baby or young child has upon learning of his own identity as separate from the world. However, the language he uses to express the idea is not that of even a slightly older child. How does this disparity function in the poem? Is it significant that most people do not remember the moment when they recognized their self?
3. "Mind" (line 9), "binds" (11), and "defined" (12) echo one another in sound, drawing attention to themselves. How are the three connected in creating and portraying isolation?
4. How would a character like Dick Crick from Graham Swift's Waterland fit Tennyson's rubric for self-recognition?
5. Tennyson spends most of the section describing the effects of self-recognition after birth. He then compares death to a "second birth" (line 16). How does he think self-recognition and identity would function after death?
Unanswered Questions (In Memoriam 51)
Briel Steinberg '06, English 156 (Victorians and Moderns), Brown University, Spring 2004
Within its 131 sections, Alfred, Lord Tennyson's elegy In Memoriam A.H.H. awakens many painful questions regarding death and mortality. Tennyson makes no attempt in any of the verses to hide his pain and devastation over the loss of his close friend Arthur Henry Hallam to a fever in 1833. Throughout In Memoriam Tennyson continues his contemplations upon the transient nature of life and the tragedy of his friend's death. In doing so, the poet touches upon many of the cornerstones of the human fascination with death and offers up many questions that he himself leaves more or less unanswered. He seems unable and unwilling to see beyond the uncertainty and indiscernible nature of death itself, regardless of how he struggles to do so:
Do we indeed desire the dead
Should still be bear us at our side?
Is there no baseness we would hide
No inner vileness that we dread?
Shall he for whose applause I strove
I had such reverence for his blame,
See with clear eye some hidden shame
And be lessen'd in his love?
I wrong the grave with fears untrue:
Shall love be blamed for want of faith?
There must be wisdom with great Death:
The dead shall look me thro' and thro'
Be near us when we climb or fall:
Ye watch, like God, the rolling hours
With larger other eyes than ours,
To make allowance for us all. [section 51, page 32]
Questions
1. How does Tennyson use questions within the various sections of In Memoriam A.H.H. as well as in this one? Are these rhetorical devices merely the poet ruminating aloud to himself, or do they serve a more complex function within the work?
2. In this section, Tennyson seems almost uncomfortable with the idea of an omnipotent afterlife. What conclusion does he ultimately come to within the rest of the work regarding Hallam's gaze from heaven upon him down on the earthly plane?
3. Tennyson switches points of view in this section in terms of speaking as a "we" and then as himself alone. What is the effect of doing so within this section as well as within the rest of the elegy?
4. Here Tennyson seems to waver from his original desire for his friend to "be near me" at all times. What, if anything, creates this change? How does the previous section contrast with section 51 in terms of tone and literary devices?
On Borrowed Time: Cycles of Narrative, Nature, and Memory in the work of Tennyson and Eliot
Sarah Eron '05, English 156 (Victorians and Moderns), Brown University, Spring 2004
Naked I came from my mother's womb, and naked shall I return there; The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord. -- Job 1:20
For misery does not come from the earth,
nor does trouble sprout from the ground:
but human beings are born to trouble
just as sparks fly upward. -- Job 5:6 - 5:7
The structure of the nonlinear narrative, so favored in the Modernist era, has proven to be part and parcel to a kind of fiction and poetry writing often exclusively associated with this age. Nevertheless, it is clear that the origins of nonlinear narratives reach back as far as the rise of the novel in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and even farther into the stories of the first ancient epics (see Frye, Lukacs, Ortega y Gasset, and Watt). What does seem to change within various works of literature are the agents, or functions, of this textual non-linearity, and the Modernist era does indeed absorb these different kinds of motivations for episodic, cyclical, or annexing narratives. At times, a narrative might turn around shifts in voice (i.e. Eliot's narrative poem The Wasteland or Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea), or at times a narrative's non-linearity may stem from a kind of layering of genres, texts, and sub-stories (i.e. Jack Maggs).
The most common -- or popular -- function of non-linearity in the Modernist text, however, is to represent time (i.e. Graham Swift's Waterland). Evidently, a kind of nonlinear theory of literature or narrative in Modernism seems to be always intertwined with a nonlinear sense of time. We see such nonlinear uses of time, of course, even in the novels of the Victorian era. For example, in the Dickensian novel, coincidence is something which enhances both the episodic nature of the text along with its overall sense of nonlinear time. As Peter Brooks writes Reading for the Plot, the past constantly resurfaces into the present in novels such as Great Expectations, when characters like Magwich begin to haunt Pip, and thus the seemingly linear novel takes on both a nonlinear plotline and a nonlinear construal of time. The nonlinear notions of time and their relationship to narrative in both Modernist fiction and poetry can, however, be linked more closely to what was happening in Victorian verse rather than what was happening in the Victorian novel. With the poetry of writers such as Robert and E.B. Browning, A.C. Swinburne, and Lord Alfred Tennsyon, the development of the narrative poem was conjoined with a growing conceptual interest in time. This literary venue in which cyclical theories of time maintained a close proximity with the long, and often non- or multi- linear narrative poem, thus became the basis for different structural techniques and thematic emphases in Modernism.
Once absorbed into Modernist literature, such Victorian nonlinear theories of time from (which led to even more exaggerated examples of nonlinear narrative in the Modernist era) did not undergo too many structural changes. Rather, these concepts of time simply began to take on new implications and meanings in the context of Modernism. For example, if we compare Tennyson's In Memoriam to Eliot's re-adaptation of it, The Wasteland, we note that Eliot uses the exact same structures, forms, and images of nonlinear time found in In Memoriam in his own Modernist narrative poem. What does change when Eliot takes on Tennyson's thematic and narrative obsession with the cycle is that the spiritual and natural implications behind this temporal form begin to shift. Whereas Tennyson uses the cycle to illustrate certain fundamental laws behind human time and natural time and to draw certain religious and social conclusions in In Memoriam, Eliot borrows the same images and narrative structures from In Memoriam concerned with the cycle, only to invert the religious and social significances behind this form.
In In Memoriam, Tennyson explores time as something which oscillates along a past-present-past-present continuum. That is to say, even in the here and now, Tennyson shows that we can experience the immanence of the past, that the past resurfaces in the present, patterning both large-scale, or natural, and small-scale, or human, cyclical phenomena. Part of what creates the nonlinear shape of Tennyson's verse is thus a theoretical sense of nonlinear time. Just as poetic turns center around shifts in emotion and spiritual beliefs, they also play a structural part of a world in which the past inextricably links to the present, in which dreams and illusions intertwine with reality, and in which nature, often conflated with God, forms a pattern of losses and gains. All of these binaries thus become part of the cycles within the poem.
Despite the general non-linearity of In Memoriam, however, the poem does undergo a definite progression. Much of the progression derives from the poet's (or speaker's) ultimate personal reconciliation with Hallam's death. Tennyson experiences a more general kind of spiritual renewal that accounts for his attempt to reshape the elegiac mode of the poem into a Carlylean ideal for a more social, conciliatory, and less self-absorbed, type of poetry. Thus the poem takes on a structure similar to the story of Job in which man, after undergoing the tests and trials of God, emerges out of human suffering with some kind of spiritual, and or, material gain, returning to a belief in a mysterious, and often unjust, divinity. It is no surprise then that the first section places the poem in the framework of a Joban question: "But who shall so forecast the years / And find in loss a gain to match? / Or reach a hand thro' time to catch / The far-off interest of tears?" (section 1, lines 5-8). The answer to this question, of course, becomes the speaker himself, who in a visionary moment ultimately can restore his faith in a spiritual, or natural, pattern of losses and gains at the climax of the poem, thus foreshadowing the regenerative implications of the marriage scene that takes place in the epilogue. However, another interesting progression occurs in Tennyson's In Memoriam in which all of the cycles mentioned above--of time, sleep, nature, and humankind--are conjoined in this same climatic and visionary moment. Hence, we realize that Tennyson's notions of time are initially dependent upon the strict division between human time, or clock time, and time as it exists in nature. Indeed, the speaker stresses this distinction throughout the first half of the poem, particularly in the scene of Hallam's death in section 22:
The path by which we twain did go,
Which led by tracts that pleased us well,
Thro' four sweet years arose and fell,
From flower to flower, from snow, to snow;
And we with singing cheer'd the way,
And, crown'd with all the seasons lent,
From April on to April went,
And glad at heart from May to May.
But where the path we walked began
To slant the fifth autumnal slope,
As we descended following Hope,
There sat the Shadow fear'd of man;
Who broke our fair companionship,
And spread his mantle dark and cold,
And wrapt the formless in the fold.
And dull'd the murmur on thy lip,
And bore thee where I could not see
Nor follow, tho' I walk in haste,
And think that somewhere in the waste
The Shadow sits and waits for me. [section 22, 1-20]
Tennyson here describes a kind of spiritual fall, in which the fall from innocence becomes the descent from immortality into death. Moreover, both the speaker and Hallam experience a second kind of fall out of natural, or seasonal, time, for whereas the two begin in a blissful coexistence with the natural passing of the seasons, they ultimately are wrenched from what appears to be a cyclical and eternal time into a more linear time endowed with the immanence of death. Once Hallam blindly descends into death, the speaker's attitude changes and, likewise, so do his surroundings. The fruitful return of the spring and the easy cycling of the seasons seem to dissipate once the speaker describes death, or the Shadow, as something which awaits him in the waste. We can, of course, assume that natural time does not stop although human, or clock time, does. However, Tennyson wishes to make a disjunction here between the two, allowing the speaker to remove himself from what once appeared to be the paradise of the natural world. This kind of world design in which human time maintains a distinct course from natural time is, however, impossible in the ultimate Tennysonian vision played out through the course of In Memoriam. Nevertheless, part of the poem's length derives from the speaker's need to reconcile human time with natural time, and even early in the poem when the speaker insists upon dividing the two, Tennyson hints at the futility behind such a phenomenological assumption. For example, in section 2, the speaker contradicts himself by asserting the difference between human time and clock time and then illustrating a world in which man is absorbed into nature:
Old yew, which graspest at the stones
That name the underlying dead,
Thy fibres net the dreamless head,
Thy roots are wrapt about the bones.
The seasons bring the flower again,
And bring the firstling to the flock,
And in the dusk of thee the clock
Beats out the little lives of men.
O, not for thee the glow, the bloom,
Who changest not in any gale,
Nor branding summer suns avail
To touch thy thousand years of gloom;
And gazing on thee, sullen tree,
Sick for thy stubborn hardihood,
I seem to fail from out my blood
And grow incorporate into thee. [section 2, lines 1-16].
Whereas the second stanza outlines the distinction between the endless cycling and renewal of seasonal time and the transience of human life, the poet is still incorporated into nature in the last stanza. This resolution of course parodies the poet's own elegy, which is an art form that mimics the nature of the yews that grow out of and cling to the dead. However, the speaker also compares himself not only to the yews but to the dead, for it is possible that when the speaker states, I "grow incorporate into thee," that he becomes like the bodies entangled in the yews' roots. Either reading, nevertheless, allows us to see nature as forever intertwined with humankind, dead or living, and such an absorption into nature only complicates any distinctions between human and natural time.
As the poet begins to have visions in his dreams, Hallam resurfaces in the present, or is reawakened in the speaker's memory just as natural images are reborn with the cycles of nature. Thus Hallam's reappearances and the cycling of the living and the dead follow the natural patterns of day and night and the human patterns of sleep and wake. In section 69 when the speaker dreams of himself as a tortured Christ-figure, or child of Christ, Hallam (who ultimately becomes the true Christ-figure at the end of the poem) appears to him and lifts him out of his suffering. It is this kind of dream cycle which creates reverberations between the past and present, and as the speaker states in section 71, sleep being a microcosm of death, creates a kind of non-linearity even for human time: "Sleep, kinsman to death and trance / and madness, thou hast forged at last / A night-long present of the past . . ." (section 71, lines1-4). Tennyson's verse thus structurally patterns these temporal fluctuations when he writes the dream sequences in the past tense and the waking states in the present. We only realize that the speaker has awakened with the switch from the final stanza of section 69 to the opening stanza of section 70:
He reach'd the glory of a hand,
That seem'd to touch it [the speaker's crown of thorns] into leaf;
The voice was not the voice of grief,
The words were hard to understand.
I cannot see the features right,
When on the gloom I strive to paint
The face I know; the hues are faint
And mix with hollow masks of night. [sections 69 and 70, lines 17-20 and lines 1-4]
As the speaker wakes from sleep, the verse switches from past to present, and Hallam's inscrutable words become like his ambiguous features when the poet tries to reconstruct his face in the dark. Once the transient dream fades, however, the poet, or speaker, receives a clear vision of Hallam, and it is this visionary moment which foreshadows the climactic vision of the poem: "Till all at once beyond the will / I hear a wizard music roll, / And thro' a lattice on the soul / Looks thy face and makes it still." The speaker's vision of Hallam's face we note comes from a turning within, and thus Tennyson begins to construct a spatial world in which things are organized concentrically. Here, we note that the speaker finds Hallam in his soul, and thus the two friends exist, regardless of the cycle of life and death, "soul in soul."
On an even more macrocosmic level, however, both Hallam's essence and his material body are absorbed into nature. In section 82, Tennyson points to the absorption of the corpse into nature along with the transcendence of life into afterlife: "Nor blame I Death, because he bare / The use of virtue out of earth / I know transplanted human worth / Will bloom to profit, otherware." This stanza creates a double entendre in the phrase "transplanted human worth" which suggests Hallam's passage into the afterlife, foreshadows his role as a beneficial Christ-figure, and simultaneously points to the "planting" of Hallam's body in the ground which ultimately "blooms" by fertilizing the earth. Furthermore, the speaker encounters Hallam, or Hallam's essence, in other natural images even before the speaker comes to a climactic vision, or revelation, in section 95. In the speaker's imagined, or perhaps real, communion with the dead in section 85, he notes Hallam's presence in various natural forms: "And every pulse of wind and wave / Recalls, in change of light or gloom, / My old affection of the tomb, / And my prime passion in the grave" (section 85, lines 73-76). In this implementation of a kind of Ruskinian pathetic fallacy, in which the poet projects his emotions onto inanimate, or natural objects (a technique which we also saw in section 2), the speaker's emotions and thoughts bleed into his natural surroundings as the poet becomes united with nature. In another sense, however, Hallam's essence literally exists in nature after the poet's recognition of the material body as that which is absorbed into the cycles of the earth at the time of death. It is no coincidence, therefore, that in the above stanza the speaker notes Hallam's presence not simply in a static, or object-filled, kind of nature but rather in a series of natural cycles such as the pulsations, or fluctuations, of the wind and the waves and the cycle between light and dark. Once Tennyson develops a kind of spatial, or physical, concentricity in his poem, we then note that these unified forms become part of a unified cycle of natural time.
Not surprisely then the climactic visionary moment in the poem illustrates the union of Hallam and the speaker in tandem with the union of both past and present, night and day. In fact, the speaker's realization in section 95 seems to stem out of this above cited series of revelations which occur in the first half of the poem. Nevertheless, what distinguishes this moment from the rest of the speaker's visions is that here the speaker reaches a renewal of faith that is unwavering. No longer does the speaker turn to doubt by attributing his visions to fancy, illusion, or dream, but rather here the speaker literally interprets nature, allowing himself to fully experience the physical resurfacing of the past into the present and the dead into the living. Not only does the speaker, or poet, exhibit in this scene a very acute ability to interpret nature, but also nature, or God, or a conflation of the two, speaks back to the poet. In creating a kind of spiritual reawakening and climax to his poem, Tennyson is thus turning to both the Joban paradigm and a Carlylean conception of poetic and prophetic vision:
But when those others, one by one,
Withdrew themselves from me and night,
And in the house light after light
Went out, and I was all alone,
A hunger seized my heart; I read
Of that glad year which once had been,
In those fallen leaves which kept their green,
The noble letters of the dead.
And strangely on the silence broke
The silent-speaking words, and strange
Was love's dumb cry defying change
To test his worth; and strangely spoke
The faith, the vigor, bold to dwell
On doubts that drive the coward back,
And keen thro' wordy snares to track
Suggestion to her inmost cell.
So word by word, and line by line,
The dead man touch'd me from the past,
And all at once it seem'd at last
The living soul was flashed on mine . . . [section 95, lines 17-36]
The first part of this excerpt, in which the speaker reads the dead in the living leaves of the tree and sees that which is eternal in that which is transient, clearly reflects Thomas Carlyle's notions of divinity and prophesy. In his lecture on "The Hero as Divinity" from On Heroes and Hero Worship, Carlyle points to a kind of ideal poetic nature in which the divine can be seen in elements from the natural world:
To us also, through every star, through every blade of grass, is not God made visible, if we will open our minds and eyes? We do not worship that way now: but it is reckoned still a merit, proof of what we call a "poetic nature," that we recognize how every object has a divine beauty in it; how every object is 'a window through which we may look into Infinitude itself? [p. 10].
Thus Tennyson signals his readers that his speaker is entering a kind of prophetic communion with the divine and a kind of visionary moment in nature by setting the speaker's experience within a Carlylean moment, or framework. As the poet reads, or interprets, nature, the reader realizes that nature begins to speak back to the poet (see the next stanza). Ultimately, however, the voice which seems to be external is actually a silent voice within, representative of the poetic conscience. The Joban exchange between "love's dumb cry defying change to test his worth" and the response of the faith emerging from doubt thus occurs internally in the silent mind and the body, or "cell," of the speaker. This Joban paradigm then becomes externalized in the next seven stanzas with the image of the whirlwind:
And mine in this
About empyreal heights of thought,
And came on that which is, and caught
The deep pulsations of the world,
Aeonian music measuring out
The steps of Time -- the shocks of Chance --
The blows of Death. At length my trance
Was cancell'd, stricken thro' with doubt . . .
And suck'd from out the distant gloom
A breeze began to tremble o'er
The large leaves of the sycamore,
And fluctuate all the still perfume,
And gathering freshlier overhead,
Rock'd the full-foliaged elms, and swung
The heavy-folded rose, and flung
The lilies to and fro, and said,
"The dawn, the dawn," and died away;
And East and West, without a breath,
Mixt their dim lights, like life and death,
To broaden into boundless day. [section 95, lines 37-64]
Thus the speaker reaches an epiphanic moment of union in which he and Hallam are united "like life and death" with the colliding image of the dawn. Once again in these stanzas, Tennyson signals his reader that the poet is entering a Carlylean moment of vision in his allusion to the Aeoninan music which unifies the natural fluctuations and cycles of time. "See deep enough, and you see musically; the heart of Nature being everywhere music, if you can only reach it," [p. 84] states Carlyle in his lecture on the romantic vision entitled "The Hero as Poet." This same acuity and depth of vision allows the speaker, or poet, to see into the divinity of nature and finally arrive at a renewed spiritual faith. Tennyson points to this transformation by offering up two images of spiritual rebirth: the stock image of the sycamore tree (as a kind of tree of life) and the force of the whirlwind, representative of a Joban God, which moves through the foliage of the trees and the blooming flowers. Before the Joban wind dies away, of course, it speaks out, offering up an answer to the Joban question which appears earlier in section 95 and also which begins the poem. Here, the image of the dawn becomes another unifying force in which the binaries of the light and dark collide. Moreover, it is this union of day and night, compared to the union of life and death, which leads to rebirth, or the coming again of the "boundless day." The fact that the day is described as "boundless," of course, suggests an eternal renewal of life and faith. Thus the poem's parallel to a series of Joban gains and losses becomes a spiritual one, for the speaker's faith is soon said to be stronger than before he suffered the loss of Hallam. It is no surprise then that the last section prior to the epilogue of the poem calls for a spiritual striving and human endurance invoked here in another biblical type, that of the rock which points to Mosaic law:
O living will that shalt endure
When all that seems shall suffer shock,
Rise in the spiritual rock,
Flow thro' our deeds and make them pure,
That we may lift from out of dust,
A voice as unto him that hears,
A cry above the conquer'd years
To one that with us works, and trust,
With faith that comes of self-control,
The truths that never can be proved
Until we close with all we loved,
And all we flow from, soul in soul. [section 131, lines 1-12]
Thus the last section invokes the story of Moses who struck the rock to give water to his people when God had obeyed him only to pass his staff over it. Moses, therefore, forbidden to enter the Promise Land, still led his people to land of the Canaanites. Therefore, he here becomes an image, similar to that of Job, of spiritual endurance and tried faith. In the last stanza, the poet then concludes that we must endure human suffering and losses with a practiced and controlled faith, knowing that all will be revealed at the moment of death. The allusion to "soul in soul" in the final line thus allows us to see this "closure" as something which alludes to both the end of life and the end of the poem, for this kind of concentricity in which Hallam and the poet survive within one another becomes like the cycles of the poem, a fundamental and natural law which is undisturbed by the passage from life into death.
T. S. Eliot's The Wasteland
Eliot's The Wasteland, a retelling of In Memoriam,adopts and reconfigures the Tennysonian notion of nonlinear time as it stems from natural and human cycles. Eliot borrows the same structural pattern from Tennyson of a past-present-past-present continuum to shape his verse, allowing the poem to shift and turn with a fluctuation between past and present narrative modes. This kind of nonlinear timeframe which envelops Eliot's verse is somewhat similar to Tennyson's narration of the speaker's dream sequences in In Memoriam. Nevertheless, there is another agent of non-linearity in Eliot's The Wasteland that rises out of the poem's multi-vocalism. As the verse shifts from one narrator to another, the poem begins to take on a cyclical kind of structure. Here, images and allusions resurface throughout the poem transcending the divisions between narrators and narratives of the past and present. This kind of recycled imagery makes sense in light of Eliot's vision of cyclical time, for although Eliot uses the cycle as the central structural and thematic shape of The Wasteland, there is a sense in which this narrative and conceptual form symbolizes a kind of stasis for Eliot -- hence, the distinction between Eliot's and Tennyson's theories of time. Eliot adopts the same images from Tennyson's In Memoriam that invoke the natural cycles of the seasons between death and life, destruction and regeneration. Eliot, unlike Tennyson, never reconciles these cycles with some kind of spiritual gain. Rather, the natural cycles become part of the suffering and misery of the human condition in which nothing ever changes. Haunted by memory, as is Tennyson's speaker in In Memoriam, the characters of The Wasteland strive to forget; the past is there, resurfacing, but it is never learned from; the dead do not merely enter the land of the living but rather the living become like the dead. Thus if we were to place Eliot's poem in the midst of Tennyson's Joban paradigm, it would occur somewhere in the middle of the storyline, before God's answer to the Joban question, for in Eliot's land of the living dead, the living are waiting in a kind of amnesial stasis, for God, or death, or relief, or change.
Eliot opens part I of The Wasteland with the return of the spring that defies the traditional positive implications of a regenerative April rain. Here, the notion of life growing out of death becomes for Eliot both a kind of negative regeneration and an assault on the human desire to forget. Eliot's April completely inverts Chaucer's
Whan April with his showres soote
The droughte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veine in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flowr." [The Canterbury Tales, The General Prologue, lines 1-4]
Eliot's April does, however, approximate Tennyson's notion of April as the season of regret: "Is it, then, regret for buried time / That keenlier in sweet April wakes, / And meets the year and gives and takes / The colors of the crescent prime?" (section 116, lines 1-4). However, even Tennyson, who sees the coming of the spring as a phenomenon tied to resurgent memories, finds something positive in the season. It is not all, or only, regret which April brings, his speaker concludes in answer to his own question, but rather: "the songs, the stirring air, / The life re-orient out of dust, / Cry thro' the sense to hearten trust / In that which made the world so fair" (section 116, lines 5-8). Therefore, although Tennyson, like Eliot, sees spring as something that grows out of death, or as something emblematic of the "re-oreint out of dust," Tennyson unlike Eliot ties the biblical dust-to-dust cycle to a reawakening belief in God, the agent of natural change. Eliot, on the other hand, opens his poem with the announcement of spring as that which disturbs the only form of human relief. The act of forgetting, asserts Eliot, provides the only escape from cyclical time which humanity can find, and thus this image of April, a metaphor which recalls the Tennysonian union of natural and human time becomes for Eliot the perfect opening for the thematic basis of his poem:
April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers. [lines 1-7]
Winter, the season of forgetfulness, thus becomes the season of burial -- of buried memory that is -- and the speaker implies that death feeds the "little life" left in the living. Here, Eliot adopts Tennyson's metaphor, "my regret becomes an April violet," and makes it part of the symbolism behind the natural cycle of the season that Eliot aligns with the human cycle of past and present, memory and forgetting. This entrance into the verse of The Wasteland thus seems to be told in a present, third-person narrative closest to what becomes the authorial voice in the poem. That is to say, that the poem begins in a mode of impartial narration, with a kind of voice that resurfaces throughout The Wasteland and becomes representative of an observant bystander who interprets the various stories told by the other narrators. (Although this narrator attributes meaning to the many stories in the poem, uniting them into a kind of similar whole, he is not always a third-person narrator, but rather sometimes enters the poem in the first-person narrative mode. Either way, however, he maintains an authorial distance from the other monologues and voices in the poem).
After the poem opens with this image of spring, however, the voice quickly shifts to a form of past narration told by an aristocratic lady who is remembering the summers and winters of her childhood. Thus the narrative of the symbolic month of April, which at first seemed to belong to the third person narrator, shifts us into the memory of a character who reveals, once again in the present tense, that she is trying to escape the natural cycles of time: "I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter," she states. It is difficult to tell whether or not the first part of the narration, juxtaposing winter with spring, then belongs to the character's monologue or to a third person, or more impartial, narrator because the character herself claims to escape the winter rather than embrace it. Nevertheless, the character reveals a desire common to all of the voices within the poem to escape the seasonal and natural cycles, for here she claims to avoid both the natural transitions of time and season (i.e. the shift from night into day and the shift from fall to winter). After this character's asserted attempt to avoid natural time, however, the verse clearly shifts back into a straight, third-person narrative set in the present tense. Here, the speaker's question and response verse echoes the Tennysonian model of poetry, and Eliot invokes both Tennyson's image of the yews and his use of biblical typology in the image of the Mosaic rock:
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock . . . (lines 19-25).
Once Eliot's narrator invokes the image of the tree roots which cling to the tree branches and grow out of the waste, an image reminiscent of Tennyson's yews, he insists that humankind cannot know what regenerative good stems out of human waste and destruction. Unlike the second part of Tennyson's In Memoriam, Eliot separates human time from natural time. Although the cycles of death and regeneration exist in natural time, Eliot asserts that they are unknown to humankind, for human time, at least in this passage, has become static for Eliot. Using types from Ecclesiastes and Deuteronomy, Eliot points to the reality of The Wasteland in which humanity sees no regeneration or relief. Thus the Mosaic rock, representative of spiritual relief and striving in Tennyson's In Memoriam, becomes here a rock which offers no hope, no fertility, no water. "Only there is shadow under this red rock," writes Eliot, borrowing the Tennysonian symbol of the shadow as death to reconstrue the biblical type of the rock (an image which resurfaces in part V of The Wasteland) as something which provides no regeneration or water, but only sterility and death. The authorial narrator thus begins to construct a world in which the human cycle is becoming static and human memory is dissipating. Once the narrative shifts again to another female character voice, we transition back into the past tense and into another example of dying memory and the conflation of life and death:
'You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
'They called me the hyacinth girl.'
Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence. [lines 35-41]
This passage thus illustrates the sudden fading of the day, the flowers, and a general human innocence. As the scene turns to evening, the character's memory begins to turn into a strange moment in which she reaches a forgetful stasis and claims that she "knows nothing," that she exists somewhere between the living and the dead. Here, when the speaker turns to the silence and the light, Eliot creates another symbolic image in which humanity is turning towards death, is waiting to die, and is emptied out of memory. In this case, the loss of knowledge is conjoined with the loss of innocence, inverting the biblical paradigm of the fall which conjoins the end of innocence with the rise of human knowledge. Thus Eliot in his invocation of natural, biblical, narrative, and human cycles clearly tries to avoid any traditional fluctuation between loss and gain. Hence, the narrative takes on a kind of cyclical stasis in which the characters of The Wasteland cycle but never progress forward and in which the natural cycles of death and regeneration never bring any real relief to human time. The next narrative written from the perspective of a fortuneteller, Madame Sosostris, appears therefore highly ironic, for in a world where time is cyclical but has become static, it is easy and useless to predict the future. Thus we see the futility of the future tense in Eliot's The Wasteland which takes into account only the timeframe of a present trying to forget the past. In the somewhat one-sided conversation between the two characters which concludes part I, "The Burial of the Dead," of Eliot's poem, we once again return to Eliot's thematic emphasis on the cruel nature of the natural cycles and the human attempt to escape the past:
. . .I saw one I knew and stopped him: 'Stetson!
'You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!
'That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
'Has it begun to sprout? / Will it bloom this year?
Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
Oh keep the dog far hence, that's friend to men,
Or with his nails he'll dig it up again!' [lines 69-76]
This conversation clearly plays with the kind of "planted" corpse imagery seen in Tennyson's In Memoriam and renders it grotesque, implicating the harsh nature of the seasons which cause the dead to return, metamorphose, and reenter the world of the living. Alluding to the dog who might literally dig up the corpse, the speaker also refers to the human desire to keep past memories and the memory of the dead buried, that is to erase any evidence of the past. Once the narrative moves into part II, "A Game of Chess," the poem retains the nonlinear fluctuations between past and present narration, and, furthermore, images and themes from "The Burial of the Dead" begin to resurface. There is, therefore, a sense in which Eliot's narrative structure defies the poem's thematic stress on the human desire to prevent the past from resurfacing into the present. Eliot illustrates this haunting inability to suppress memory and the implications of the past in the opening scene of "A Game of Chess." Here, by alluding to the metamorphosis of Philomela seen in Ovidian mythology and in Sidney's rewriting of Ovid's myth in his poem "The nightingale," Eliot uses the symbol of Philomela as another crude -- and deathlike -- announcement of the spring and of seasonal regeneration:
Above the antique mantel was displayed
As though a window gave upon the sylvan scene
The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king
So rudely forced; yet there the nightingale
Filled all the desert with inviolable voice
And still she cried, and still the world pursues,
'Jug Jug' to dirty ears.
And other withered stumps of time
Were told upon the walls, staring forms
Leaned out, leaning, hushing the room enclosed. [lines 97-106]
In the story of Philomela, she is raped by her brother-in-law, King Thereus, who cuts out her tongue so that she will not speak of the rape. In Ovid's Metamorphoses, she is then turned into a nightingale who announces the spring with her song as a thorn pierces into her breast. Thus here Philomela not only recalls the violent emergence of the spring that begins The Wasteland but also she becomes part of a collage of images displayed on the wall which seem to haunt the enclosed room where another character dialogue takes place. The fact that Eliot describes the images invading the room in both the past tense, "[they]leaned out," and the continuing present tense, creates an effect in the scene where the past seems to enter into the present stealthily, and the once static pictures begin to become part of the live scene in the room. However, the dialogue once again reveals a human denial of memory and the past. Here, the characters know nothing and remember nothing but images of death scattered throughout the poem:
'My nerves are bad tonight . . .
Speak to me . . .
What are your thinking of? What thinking? What? I
never know what you are thinking. Think.'
I think we are in rats' alley
Where the dead men lost their bones.
. . . 'Do you know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember
Nothing?
I remember
Those pearls that were his eyes
'Are you alive or not? Is there nothing in your head?'
. . . What shall we do tomorrow?
What shall we ever do?'
The hot water at ten
And if it rains, a closed car at four.
And we shall play a game of chess,
Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door. [lines 111-138]
This dialogue thus takes on a question and answer form in which the character responding reveals the nature of the human condition in which we think, remember, and wait only for death. The image of rat's alley resurfaces again in "The Fire Sermon" (part III), and the eyes of pearl recall the sailor's eyes in Madame Sosotris' prediction of a death by water in "The Burial of the Dead." This latter image then becomes the basis for part IV of The Wasteland which narrates the death of Phlebas, the Phoenician sailor. Once we view this dialogue as a confluence of images organized together from various parts of the poem, we then can see the speaker's answers to these questions concerning his thoughts, memories, and actions, as representative of the human condition applicable to all of the characters in the poem. In the speaker's response to the question, "What shall we ever do?" Eliot thus reveals the nature of the human life as something which unfolds like a static cycle. When the character describes the habitual day, by sectioning it off into menial activities marked by meaningless hours, he concludes that they will play a game of chess while waiting for death, the symbolic "knock upon the door." Hence, Eliot re-emphasizes that death is the only relief from the cycling of memory and human time in The Wasteland. With this realization, the call from the bar scene, "HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME," which concludes part II of The Wasteland , is infused with the immanence of death and becomes not merely a closing call, but a call for the end of life.
Throughout the following section, entitled "The Fire Sermon," Eliot reinforces these thematic images of death, sterility, and degeneration. At times, the essence behind certain stock images gets reincorporated into other classical and biblical allusions or becomes part of the assorted narrative voices and individual stories throughout the poem. For example, the violent and sterile sexual symbol of Philomela reappears in an indifferent sexual scenario which is narrated by Tiresias, who having experienced both the body of a woman and a man, was asked by Hera and Zeus for which sex was intercourse better. Eliot, of course, ironizes this myth by having Tiresias, the prophet, prophesize and narrate a sexual scene entirely devoid of pleasure. As these images and voices thus cycle throughout the poem, Eliot finally reaches a kind of climax, or anti-climax rather, which inverts the resolution of Tennyson's In Memoriam.
Here, in the final part to The Wasteland, Eliot plays with Tennyson's two endings to In Memoriam: the first ending that concludes with the biblical type of the rock and Mosaic law, and the second ending which is centered around the marriage scene and arrives at a regenerative apocalyptic vision. In Eliot's adoption of Tennyson's use of the biblical type of the rock, Eliot has no water flow from Tennyson's spiritual symbol: "Here is no water but only rock / Rock and no water and the sandy road / the road winding above among the mountains of rock / Which are mountains of rock without water . . ." (lines 331-334). Thus Eliot highlights the frustration behind Moses' story: Moses is never allowed to enter the Promise Land but only dies looking at it from atop Mount Nebo. This kind of inversion of the Tennysonian use of this biblical type not only outlines the sterility of The Wasteland but it highlights a world in which everyone is waiting, hoping for a relief, a paradise that does not come. Tennyson's call for the patient endurance of human suffering, which forces us to have faith in a truth, or salvation, revealed only in death, thus becomes a large part of Eliot's model for The Wasteland. However, here Eliot reads this kind of spiritual striving and patience in a perverse light when he writes: "We who were living are now dying / With a little patience" (lines 329-330). If Tennyson is right in saying that all will be revealed in death, then Eliot concludes that death is thus the only salvation from suffering; hence, death is what we live for. Eliot, of course, does not abandon entirely a sense of God's presence, he simply illustrates a world in which humanity is waiting for a God who does not answer. Thus Eliot creates a narrative which abandons the regenerative ending to the Joban story. The voices, or at least the more authorial voice, in The Wasteland cry out for salvation, but they are simply left without relief:
If there were water
And no rock
If there were rock
And also water
And water
A spring
A pool among the rock
If there were the sound of water only
Not the cicada
And the dry grass singing
But sound of water over a rock . . .
Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop
But there is no water. [lines 346-359]
The call for water that does not come thus becomes like the call at the end of the Fire Sermon which alludes to St. Augustine's Confessions: "To Carthage then I came / Burning burning burning burning / O Lord Thou pluckest me out / O Lord Thou pluckest / burning" (lines 307-311). Ironically, these images of purification, i.e. the water and the fire, which are typical tropes in Victorian novels such as Brontë's Jane Eyre and Dickens' Great Expectations, become forms of torture in which no one is saved and nothing is blissfully renewed. St. Augustine's call for the Lord's salvation, of course, is entirely dependent upon an unseen God who finally appears, or speaks, but perhaps comes too late in Eliot's The Wasteland, for the characters of the poem never attain salvation but are merely left amidst the degeneration, or as Eliot says here, they are left "to burn." Eliot's poem, like Tennyson's, thus also comes to a climactic realization, and in this climax, Eliot conflates two scenes from Tennyson's In Memoriam from section 95 and the poem's epilogue:
And bats with baby faces in the violet
And crawled head downward down a blackened wall
And upside down in air were towers
Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours
And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells.
In this decayed hole among the mountains
In fainted moonlight, the grass is singing
Over the tumbled graves, about the chapel
There is the empty chapel only the wind's home . . .
Dry bones can harm no one. [lines 380-391]
The image of the bats thus stems from the scene proceeding Tennyson's speaker's vision in section 95 of In Memoriam where the bats circle and hover above the grass whereas the image of the tolling bells comes from the chapel scene at the end of In Memoriam and also from earlier in The Wasteland when the bells toll the "dead hour of nine." Eliot allows a number of images which originate in earlier parts of the poem to recycle into this climactic moment. For example, the "violet hour" of evening which Tiresias prophesies returns to describe the same evening in which Tennyson's speaker has a kind of spiritual reawakening in In Memoriam . The towers then are taken from the previous stanza which refers to the falling cities of Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria, Vienna, and finally the very city of The Wasteland, London. Furthermore, Eliot's assertion that "dry bones can harm no one" brings us back to the April rain which stirs old memories and the sprouting corpse from part 1, "The Burial of the Dead." In section V, we also see the importance of such sounds in The Wasteland as the repeated "jug jug" and "swallow swallow" of the nightingale and the illusionary "drip drop" of the nonexistent water, for when Eliot refers to the voices singing in the grass and the empty wells, he is recreating a kind of Tennysonian and Carlylean moment of epiphany in which the musicality of nature lies at the heart of prophesy and poetic vision.
Nevertheless, here the regenerative implications of the marriage scene are inverted once Eliot describes the chapel as being emptied out, like an open grave through which the wind passes. Thus Eliot, weaving a web of borrowed images, allows all of these symbolic sounds and pictures to unite in what becomes an emptying out, an atmospheric death, a giant anti-climax of sorts. Keeping to the tradition of the natural cycles, Eliot of course, finally allows the rain to come in the final section of The Wasteland. Nevertheless, Eliot implies that the rain, like the drought, is only another cruel cycle of nature bringing extreme repercussions and damages, for here the river, the Ganges, is "sunken," implying the hollowness of the riverbed before the rain and the swelling of the waters in a flood. With the coming of the rain, Eliot thus has the opportunity to create a genuine moment of regeneration but instead exposes the natural cycles of death and rebirth as being devoid of spiritual worth or meaning. As the natural cycles implied throughout the poem come to a climax in the scenario of the storm, (another biblical trope often used in Victorian literature which is sometimes connected with the flood scene in Genesis but always creates a spiritual or narrative shift as it does, for example, in novels such as Bronte's Jane Eyre with Jane's journey from Thornfield to Marsh End), the storm brings the long-awaited response of God, but this prophetic moment brings no solace, no gain, and the poem simply ends with a falling London. The voice of the thunder, which can be construed as a kind Joban answer from God as it appears in In Memoriam, is very much in line with the Tennysonian revelation and conclusion of spiritual striving: "Give, Sympathize, Control," (Datta, Dayadhvam, Damyata) says Eliot's thunder (lines 401-419). Nevertheless, it is clear that although Eliot is very much in accordance with the Tennysonian model of time and narrative, the poet mocks the Tennysonian resolution to In Memoriam. Here, Eliot has humankind respond to the thunder with three distinct denials of these spiritual principles. To the command, "sympathize," the narrator responds by illustrating a world in which men are all enslaved in their own personal prisons, or all isolated in their own preoccupations, and to the command "control" the narrative response is one of a sailor at the wheel, which of course echoes the death of the sailor who drowns in part IV of the poem. In answer to the thunder's instruction, "give," the narrator responds: " . . what have we given? / . . .The awful daring of a moment's surrender / Which an age of prudence can never retract" (lines 402-405). This response thus becomes one which mocks the measured patience and "prudence" of a Victorian spiritual striving, which Eliot sees as being disingenuous both in his own era and in Tennyson's. Despite the praise, which Eliot lavishes upon Tennyson's technical abilities, in his essay "In Memoriam" Eliot still concludes that Tennyson was "the surface flatterer of his own time" and was thus "rewarded with the despite of an age [Eliot's time] which succeeds his own in shallowness"[p. 627]. Thus Eliot finds something forced in the spiritual renewal of Tennyson's In Memoriam which finds solace in the natural cycles of time and conflates them with human time and suffering. The Carlylean turn in Tennyson's poem, thus becomes for Eliot a technique which defies the reality behind our own human egoism, isolationism, and melancholy self-absorption.
If Tennyson's poem is, therefore, a poem which deals with cycles, cycles of time, narrative, memory, and nature, that become united, or reconciled, in the overall progression of the verse, then Eliot's poem is one which inverts this progression. Whereas Tennyson intertwines human time and natural time in the course of In Memoriam , Eliot through the telling of The Wasteland draws these two temporal phenomena apart, suggesting that humankind remains at odds with both nature and God at the end of his poem. Both poems are grounded in the same microcosmic structure of the cycle, a structure which both becomes part of these poets' theories of time and narrative. Nevertheless, as Tennyson's cycles move towards a climactic regeneration, a hopeful and renewing kind of apocalyptic vision ("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," In Memoriam, epilogue, lines 141-144), Eliot's cycles degenerate, pointing to a destructive apocalyptic vision which works against an already wasting humankind. Although Eliot admired Tennyson's technical abilities, during the time in which Eliot was writing The Wasteland, he appears to have been at odds with Tennyson's resolution, with his Carlylean poetic turn. Therefore, whereas Tennyson's images and cycles combine to create a moment of spiritual gain, or rebirth, Eliot's repeated sounds, cyclical structures, and symbolic allusions collide only to disintegrate again into the empty, hollow, and sterile background of The Wasteland. Eliot thus employs the Tennysonian technique only to invert his predecessor's climactic meaning, his thematic end. In writing an anticlimactic poetry of borrowed images and structures, Eliot thus echoes the very sentiment of his verse; in a world where the past insistently haunts us, always resurfacing into the present, we are compelled to erase it, defying thought and memory until we enter the very emptiness of our own age.
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Tennyson, Science and Religion
Glenn Everett, Associate Professor of English, University of Tennessee at Martin and George P. Landow, Professor of English and Art History, Brown University
n a characteristically Victorian manner, Tennyson combines a deep interest in contemporary science with an unorthodox, even idiosyncratic, Christian belief. In Memoriam, which he wrote between 1833 and 1850, contains his most important confrontations with contemporary science, particularly with geology and biology. Drawing upon Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology (1830-33), Tennyson anticipated Darwinian conceptions of evolution and their implications, such the extinction of entire species, including man. Darwin did not publish until 1859, almost a decade after In Memoriam; Robert Chambers' Vestiges of Creation had come out in 1844 after most of Tennyson's poem was already written.
In Darwin among the Poets, Lionel Stevenson suggests that the crucial lines from Idylls of the King,
The old order changeth, yielding place to new,
And God fulfills Himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world,
suggest Tennysonian ideas of evolution. These ideas of human progress probably have much in common with those of Hegel and Comte, both of whom see man progressing from an early state of mere superstition, through Christianity, to an understanding of his place in the universe based more nearly on reason and science.
Source: http://faculty.ksu.edu.sa/Nugali/English%20431/Victorian%20and%20Victorianism.doc
Web site to visit: http://faculty.ksu.edu.sa and http://www.victorianweb.org
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