The living will: A study of Tennyson and nineteenth-century subjectivism 9783111391564, 9783111029061

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STUDIES IN ENGLISH Volume LII

LITERATURE

THE LIVING WILL A Study of Tennyson and Nineteenth- Century Subjectivism

by

W I L L I A M R. B R A S H E A R

d 1969

MOUTON THE H A G U E • PARIS

© Copyright 1969 in The Netherlands. Mouton & Co. N.V., Publishers, The Hague. No part of this book may be translated or reproduced in any form by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publishers. Certain portions of this book have appeared previously in Victorian Poetry and are included herein with the kind permission of the editors of that journal.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 69-10746

Printed in The Netherlands by Mouton & Co., Printers, The Hague.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

I. The Subjective Poet

7

II. The Vision of Futility, 1809-1832

52

III. Silence and Revision, 1833-1842 IV. In Memoriam: The Way of the Will V. The Self as King

75 .

.

.

.

92 115

VI. Lucretius and Despair

154

VII. Conclusion

169

Appendix A

175

I T H E SUBJECTIVE POET

1. In 1 8 9 4 Hallam Tennyson received from James Anthony Froude the following letter: I owe to your father the first serious reflexions upon life and the nature of it which have followed m e for more than fifty years. T h e same voice speaks to me now as I come near my own end, f r o m beyond the bar. Of the early poems "Love and Death" had the deepest effect upon me. T h e same thought is in the last lines of the last poems which we shall ever have f r o m him. Your father in my estimate stands and will stand far away by the side of Shakespeare above all other English Poets, with this relative superiority even to Shakespeare, that he speaks the thoughts and speaks to the perplexities and misgivings of his own age. He was born at the fit time before the world had grown inflated with the vanity of Progress, and there was still an atmosphere in which such a soul could grow. There will be n o such others for many a long age. Yours gratefully, 1 J. A. Froude This compact tribute suggests most of the elements of the Tennyson "problem" that w e encounter today. Implicit throughout is an attitude of deep reverence by a man of considerable intellectual stature and achievement. A n d however curious this might seem to the modern reader w h o has been conditioned not to take Tennyson seriously, the most cursory examination of the Memoir must reveal that this was n o isolated instance of homage and 1

Hallam, Lord Tennyson, Tennyson: A Memoir (London, 1906), p. 810. This work will be subsequently referred to simply as Memoir.

8

THE SUBJECTIVE POET

that Tennyson counted among his close friends and distant admirers an impressive number of the intellectual leaders of his day. What is perhaps more interesting in Froude's letter (although equally typical) is that the writer acknowledges Tennyson as a first source of his own development and particularly of his "serious reflexions upon life and the nature of it". Moreover, the "same voice" still speaks to him. The early poem Froude refers to, "Love and Death", is not one of Tennyson's notable works, but the two nouns in the title, properly qualified, go a long way toward describing what is most consistently the view of life envisioned in Tennyson's poetry from first to last, the "same thought" that Froude finds even in the poet's last works. The second paragraph of the letter contains two propositions which have many analogues in the writings and commentaries on Tennyson in the nineteenth century; and these two have been the primary objects of the rather violent reaction against Tennyson in the twentieth century. Froude is not the only Victorian who grouped Tennyson with Shakespeare,2 and there are even more comparisons with Dante, Virgil, and Lucretius, perhaps influenced by the peculiar Latin qualities of the poet's work and his own admiration for those poets.3 That Tennyson wrote to his own age, if he did, has generally been viewed in the twentieth century as a limitation rather than a "superiority". Harold Nicolson felt that Tennyson's great mistake was in attempting to grapple with the problems of the day.4 2

For example, see Memoir, p. 822. Thomas Huxley referred to Tennyson as the "modern Lucretius", and F. T. Palgrave described him as a "Virgil-Lucretius", Memoir, p. 848. The influence of classical and especially Latin poetry on Tennyson has been treated by others and the fact emphasized that his most successful poetic utterances are those poems in which he employs classical myth: Douglas Bush, Mythology and the Romantic Tradition in English Poetry (Cambridge, Mass., 1937) and "The Personal Note in Tennyson's Classical Poems", Univ. of Toronto Quarterly IV (1934), pp. 201-218; Wilfred P. Mustard, Classical Echoes in Tennyson (New York, 1904). It was early noted that Tennyson's inspiration for "Ulysses" derived more from Dante than Homer, Memoir, p. 806; for a study of the Italian influence see P. N. Roy, Italian Influences of the Poetry of Tennyson (Benares, 1936). 4 Harold Nicolson, Tennyson (New York, 1923), pp. 222-271. 3

THE SUBJECTIVE POET

9

And whatever Tennyson's own intentions were, it cannot be questioned that among many "thinking" people in nineteenthcentury England he was considered a kind of practical sage, "nourishing and forming the thoughts of two generations".5 Yet it is to the last paragraph of Froude's letter that we wish to call particular attention; for we can extract from it the "why" and the "what" of Tennyson's decline in the twentieth century. The "why" is what Froude calls the "vanity of progress", which might in a narrow sense be taken to embrace scientific advancements and that "modern psychology" by which Fausset,6 most hostile of Tennyson's detractors, repeatedly judges the poet. Yet to criticize Tennyson in the light of our supposed achievements must in itself commit us to this "vanity of progress", holding out the modern age with its advanced knowledge against Alfred Tennyson and his old-fashioned notions - against a Tennyson who was naive about neither progress nor knowledge. A sympathetic and penetrating reading of Tennyson's poetry by one predisposed to take the poet "seriously" may reveal that Tennyson thought about knowledge, progress and in fact, all "objects" or "things" in an uncommon way. And it is, then, his mode of thought or manner of thinking that distinguishes him in kind and degree, if he is to be distinguished as a thinker, rather than the objects of his thoughts: i.e., the meanings, tenets, theories, values, or intellectual schemata. This mode of thought, the subjective mode, is particularly "what" we have so much difficulty in grasping, for it can be adequately understood only in the context of the critical philosophy that characterizes the early nineteenth century, or, more accurately, in the context of the new psychological subjectivism that this philosophy played a large part in engendering. That congenial "atmosphere" in which, as Froude suggested, such a soul as Tennyson's could "grow" or prosper is, perhaps, best described in terms of this subjectivism, or, as later developed, subjective vitalism. Tennyson may be largely 5

Thomas Walker, Mr. Tennyson's "Despair" (London, 1882), p. 3. Hugh I'Anson Fausset, Tennyson, a Modern Portrait (New York, 1923). See especially p. 17 where Fausset concludes that "Tennyson's genius was pictorial, musical and fanciful. It was neither creative nor imaginative". 8

10

THE SUBJECTIVE POET

comprehended only in terms of this broad and vague phase of nineteenth-century thought in which the so-called "heroic vitalism" of Carlyle appears as but one confused variation. Subjective vitalism appears in so many guises, compounds and alloys in the nineteenth century that it is better characterized as a profound psychological undercurrent of thought pervading the age, rather than as one definite system of philosophy or ideology. This undercurrent and its tragic purport disturbed in some manner or degree most of the notable minds of the century. This prompting from the deep, if it may be called so, caused varied and diverse reactions which found expression in the writing or "conscious" thought of the age. Sometimes this reaction appeared as a common-sense John Bull protest similar to Sam Johnson's reaction to Hume; sometimes it took the form of honest anxiety and confusion; too often it appeared as fragmentary, incoherent, rhapsodic and even dishonest insights ennobled under the auspices of a righteous "transcendentalism". But while this undercurrent disturbed most, it more than disturbed some, through whom it erupted forth and manifested itself consciously in their writings as a fuller and more coherent awareness of tragic fact. Prominent among these few are Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Not so prominent, heretofore, is Tennyson. Tennyson has often been characterized, as by Froude, a poet of his age.7 But he has also been characterized as a poet of private sensation 8 and a poet of great personal emotion.9 These last two characterizations are certainly valid, but provide only a part of the picture, a small part of the picture. For Tennyson was, like us all, a character or personality, and not in all aspects a very attractive personality. As a personality he wrote poems centered around private emotion. He, indeed, wrote poems out of 7

See for example Stopford Augustus Brooke, Tennyson: His Art and Relation to Modern Life (New York, 1894); Ethel Bernstein, "Victorian Morality in The Idylls of the King", in Cornell University Abstracts of Theses (1939), pp. 15-17; and John Killhem, Tennyson and the Princess, The Reflections of an Age (London, 1958). 8 H. M. McLuhan, "Tennyson and Picturesque Poetry", EC, I (1951), pp. 262-282. 9 See Nicolson, and Douglas Bush, "The Personal Note".

THE SUBJECTIVE POET

11

pure spite. It would also appear that during his Cambridge years and immediately following he consciously attempted to write in the aesthetic mode of "private sensation" conforming strikingly to the principles laid down by his friend Arthur Hallam 10 and also, to a lesser degree, to those expounded by John Stuart Mill.11 But this type of "picturesque" poetry, as it has been labelled,12 predominates only in the 1830 and 1832 volumes, or, to put it another way, in that poetry written when Tennyson was closest to and most influenced by Hallam and his aesthetic ideas. This particular side of Tennyson's genius appears most successfully in such mood pieces as "Mariana" and "Recollections from the Arabian Nights". But the picturesque vein is not conspicuous to this same extent in Tennyson's juvenile poetry nor in his later work. At any rate, the point to be emphasized is that such characterizations as "poet of private sensation", "poet of personal emotion", and "spokesman for an age", are, at most, descriptive each of only a facet of Tennyson's creative output. These facets, taken together, can be generally described as more or less conscious directions that the poet was impelled toward, and for these aspects of his art we can properly look to external influences and motivations from the external world. In this area it is useful 10

Hallam's theories on poetry are most extensively expounded in his review "On some of the characteristics of Modern Poetry, and on the Lyrical Poems of Alfred Tennyson", originally published in Englishmen's Magazine, 1831, pp. 616-628, and now reprinted in T. H. Vail Motter, ed., The Writings of Arthur Hallam (New York, 1943), pp. 182-198. This essay is discussed in terms of Tennyson's poetry and the development of the "picturesque" mode in poetry in McLuhan, op. cit. 11 For Mill's poetic theories see John Stuart Mill, "Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties" in Dissertations and Discussions, I (Boston, 1864); and for his review of Tennyson's 1832 poems see "Tennyson's Poems", The London Review, I (1834), pp. 402-425. Mill's aesthetic explains only a facet of Tennyson's early art and falls short of comprehending the essential Tennyson primarily because of the psychology behind that aesthetic, the psychology of an "objective" thinker with a restricted definition of "emotion", a mechanistic conception of the "imagination", and a predisposition to divide truth into two realms: the realm of knowledge or science and the realm of feeling and emotion. 12 McLuhan suggests that Tennyson's modernity lies in his foreshadowing in his highly "picturesque" poetry such as "Mariana" and "Recollections of the Arabian Nights", of modern private sensation schools such as the "imagists" and "symbolists".

12

THE SUBJECTIVE POET

to consider the poet's unhappy childhood, his friendship with Hallam, the effect on him of the reviews of his early volumes, his involvement with Rosa Baring, the effects of Hallam's death and the laureateship. Certainly, to take the simplest example, he wrote much of his patriotic verse simply because he was laureate and was expected to. Beyond or beneath these lesser partial characterizations, there is, perhaps, a far more sweeping observation to be made on Tennyson's poetry as a whole, a characterization not so obvious because it is not to be induced from external evidence from the poet's life (although it may be corroborated by such evidence) and because it involves a better understanding of the subjective psychology than is current. Tennyson, in his most serious poetry, from his juvenile poems through the Demeter volume, evidences to an extreme degree this subjective psychology with all of its dominant elements including a complete failure of confidence in the external, a contempt for knowledge and enlightenment, and a reliance on the "living will" to sustain a world of illusion above the chaos of conscious fact. The underlying subject matter of his serious poetry, for the most part, may be taken to be an embodiment of the dynamics of subjective vitalism with the "living will" pitted as both a shaping and resisting force against the dark and chaotic forces of the infinite realm of over-consciousness - the Dionysiac realm. Such a reading of Tennyson is proper only where he writes as the universal self, from a source that lies beneath conscious personality and theoretic man.13 Yet, at the same time, Tennyson remained a very definite personality, and often wrote as a conscious personality with all of those character traits that have been associated with Tennyson the personality, including a certain amount of pomposity and righteousness and a great deal of vanity. As a "theorist" interested in social problems we see him at work on The Princess; as an amateur student of psychology and compulsive self-analyst in Maud; as an artist preoccupied with private sensation in "Mariana". But when Tennyson wrote 13

By "conscious personality" we mean to denote the "idea of h i m s e l f ' as presented to the reflective or intellectual faculty. See p. 25, infra.

THE SUBJECTIVE POET

13

from a deeper source of inspiration, or, better, compulsion, from that wider unpersonalized and unobjectified realm of consciousness, he came closer to realizing Nietzsche's description of the "subjective poet", the true, universal and tragic subjective poet, than perhaps any other modern. 1 4 A t first glance it might appear startling to put forth Tennyson, the spokesman for Victorian manners, as a Dionysiac artist. Y e t the identification has been implied before. In a highly suggestive article appearing in 1955 George Barker drew attention to a seemingly inexplicable air of supreme authority that runs through Tennyson's work: . . . if you dismantle the construction of Tennyson you will discover that the sum of the parts does not equal the whole. T o me it is as though these poems and this reputation were in fact inhabited by the presence of a superior power, a phenomenon of electricity, seemingly unwilling to subject itself to isolation or analysis. I do not mean to refer to the "Poetry" in the poems or to the "Poet" in name: I mean to speak of a kind of authority infusing both, which neither, upon examination could wholly account for. Tennyson's poems, unlike those of say, Ben Jonson, transcend their own achievements and their own intentions in such a way as to render a purely semantic criticism of them quite specious. 15 What Barker sees, then, to alter his terminology a little, is a more universal and authoritative force behind the conscious personality of the poet and a source of inspiration deeper than the apparent intentions of the specific poems. Barker goes o n to describe h o w he finds "the Dionysian beast" underlying Tennyson's poetry. 16 14 See Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Francis Golffing (New York, 1956), pp. 36-39. 15 George Barker, "The Face Behind the Poem: An Essay in Honour of Tennyson", Encounter, VI (1957), p. 69. 16 Ibid., p. 72: "No, the Dionysian beast whose nature is disguised by the camoflages of an intelligence is a hybrid monster uniting the instincts and the imagination of man. And these instincts and this imagination provide the real or sleeping subject of the poem, where to all appearances, this subject is merely a collection of unverifiable assertions . . . And perhaps one of the reasons why Tennyson's poems wear what I have called an expression of ambivalent authority is this: that they utter the ejaculations of wonder which would be wrung from all perfectly normal intelligences if liberated in a world and underworld of such goddesses, such idols, such sensuous conditions, and so little common sense."

14

THE SUBJECTIVE POET

He concludes with the observation that what is of value in Tennyson's poetry is not the "message", which could be in the nature of theories, ideas, tenets, or moral axioms, but rather the "communicator", not a few objectified "ideas", but the whole subjective consciousness. Tennyson gives us very little to feed on if we are after "ideas". But he presents us with the workings of the human mind at a level below the intellectual or Socratic level, below the level of verbalized or objectified "ideas". He communicates on that level where the unillusioned will struggles naked with the overwhelming chaos of consciousness, in a very uninteresting but highly dramatic primal conflict. So Barker aptly contrasts Tennyson to the poet who seems to carry an important "message" without much authority (whom we may choose to call the poet of "ideas"). In Tennyson the "message" is negligible, but "it would be excusable to assume from his behavior that every word carried by Tennyson contained State secrets. And this consciousness of a supremely responsible communicator (which is not the same thing as a supremely important message) imparts to the poems their air of authority." 17 Whether or not we are disposed to take Tennyson seriously as a thinker may then, in the end, depend on whether we are after the "message" or the "communicator" and upon which of these we hold to be the better measure of profound thought. Perhaps the question can be put in a simpler and more dangerous way: are we looking for objective truth or subjective truth? Begging the epistemological question, most of us might venture the obvious answer that, of course, we are after objective truth and by this we mean the true nature of external things and ideas as they exist (if they exist). We often say that our judgment of something is "objective" when it is verifiable by scientific proof, in consonance with some given criteria, or arrived at by some widely sanctioned method of reasoning. If not, we say it is "subjective" or mere impression or opinion, and we frequently equate these terms. In this sense "subjective" truth is not truth at all but opinion and, specifically, opinion about the so-called real external world. In defense of 17 Ibid., p. 71.

THE SUBJECTIVE POET

15

this kind of "subjectivity" in poetry it can be argued, with the authority of John Stuart Mill,18 Arthur Hallam,19 the imagists, symbolists and other aesthetic schools of "private sensation", that it is not the province of the poet to present to us the truth of external nature at all but simply to convey to us the intensity of his "private" emotion and feeling or his private sensations and images. If he has any truth to convey it is not the truth of fact, which is the province of prose according to Wordsworth and science according to Mill,20 but rather the truth of emotion. This dichotomy of the world of fact and the world of emotion may be said to constitute the strongest line of continuity in English criticism from Wordsworth to I. A. Richards.21 Utilizing this dichotomy we can reconcile art and science; we can even reconcile religion and science. But in each instance we are begging the epistemological question. We are assuming existence, the existence of an external world of things (scientific) or ideas (Platonic) about which we can have either objective knowledge, through the methods of science or philosophy, or opinions and feelings, as the case may be. The more fundamental and "critical" distinction 18

See Dissertations, etc., p. 97: Mill takes pains to point out that this dichotomy stems from Wordsworth's distinction between poetry and prose as the mediums respectively for emotion and matter of fact: "The object of poetry is confessedly to act upon the emotions; and therein is poetry sufficiently distinguished from what Wordsworth affirms to be its logical opposite; namely, not prose, but matter of fact, or science. The one addresses itself to the belief; the other to the feelings. The one does its work by convincing or persuading; the other by moving. The one acts by presenting a proposition to the understanding; the other by offering interesting objects of contemplation to the sensibilities." 19 Hallam disagrees with the followers of Wordsworth that the highest form of poetry is the "reflective". He considers the greatest poets to be poets of sensation, the born poets who are "picturesque" rather than descriptive, and who, during the period of creation, do not allow their minds to be occupied by any motive ulterior to the desire for beauty. See Hallam, pp. 184-185. This distinction can be compared to I. A. Richards' two kinds of poetry, that with an ulterior motive and that complete in itself. 20 John Stuart Mill, "Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties" in Dissertations and Discussions, I (Boston, 1864), pp. 90-91. 21 See I. A. Richards, Principals of Literary Criticism (New York, 1959), pp. 261-271, where he distinguishes the language of emotion from the language of science. A somewhat similar distinction was made by Walter Horatio Pater, Appreciations (London, 1918), pp. 7-11.

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between subjective and objective has been by-passed, for that distinction rests squarely on the epistemological question: is there or is there not external existence of things or ideas apart from the consciousness conceiving or positing such an existence? So, in the every-day sense of the word, Shelley can b e described as subjective because he makes value judgments about things and ideas that generally cannot be substantiated by evidence or by our knowledge of the universe. B u t in the more fundamental sense Shelley is an objective poet, and, perhaps, the objective poet par excellence,

in that he never doubts the reality of the external

which he is judging, and, more than this, through the highly intellectual and Socratic processes of his mind he further

objectifies

the things of existence taken by most of us as self-evident into the most subtle and refined divisions and categories of being. For "ideas" in so far as they are thought to "exist" are as much a part of the objective order as are "things". A n d it may be remembered that the radically subjective Nietzsche considered the "idealist" Socrates the epitome of the objective, theoretic and trivial thinker. 22 Indeed, besides the confusion arising from the common pejorative sense of the word "subjective", there is, perhaps, a greater source of misconception in the misleading use of the term "idealist" to describe generally the critical or Kantian school of philosophy in the nineteenth century. T h e use of this term in this connection is especially unfortunate since to the uninitiated it tends to relate the critical philosophy to Platonic idealism, and, in many ways, the two could scarcely be further apart. Even so, the most radical of the subjective philosophers, Fichte, has often been classified as an "idealist" and G e r m a n idealism has served as a rather inaccurate description of the Kantian school of philosophy. B u t Fichte is an idealist in the same sense that Berkeley is an idealist, in that he sees no reason for positing an external world of "things in themselves". T o Fichte the only reality is the subjective consciousness. B u t this is a very different position from that of Platonic "idealism", and the difference must be suggested here. T h e Platonist conceives of the " i d e a " as something that has -

See The Birth of Tragedy, pp. 91-102.

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objective existence; he has in a real sense objectified the subjective thinking process into segments or ideas which thus become "things", just as substance or matter might be considered as a "thing in itself". To Plato there exist an external world of matter and an external or objective world of ideas. Ideas, to Plato, exist. To Fichte there is no existence, whether of ideas or matter. There is only "knowing" or consciousness. To others of the critical school less radically subjective than Fichte, such as Kant himself, ideas or matter might have real objective existence but the mind could have no certain knowledge of them. This distinction becomes important when we attempt to contrast Tennyson, who is considered here as the subjective poet par excellence, with Shelley, taken to be the objective poet par excellence. Shelley is steeped in Platonism,23 and his abstractions indicate the objective turn of his thinking and his commitment to the external reality of ideas. His concern is with the working out or the development of the external society or cosmos, or with the cosmos of ideas taken as existing in the mind conceived as object. His sympathy accordingly is with the enlightened or those possessed of the most advanced and progressive knowledge about "things" and the best "ideas". His villain is ignorance, and his optimistic vision of human perfectability is based on enlightenment and Platonic love, and the heroism of his Titan in bringing about the eternal hour of man's fulfillment. Tennyson has no such respect for reason or the intellect of man. The external world, whether of matter or ideas, is a hazy dream that he can have no real faith in, and, hence, no respect for the supposed knowledge of it. The only possible chaos or discord is that within the consciousness, of the divided or weak will. His world of consciousness is not qualitative but quantitative, encompassing only the simple unit of awareness; for no ideas or qualities exist and man's only empire, himself, cannot be perfected, but can only be enlarged, sustain itself and endure. There is nothing objective to allegorize (and Tennyson is generally 23

See especially Carlos Baker, Shelley's Major Poetry: The Fabric of a Vision (Princeton, 1948), pp. 241-250; James A. Notopoulous, The Platonism of Shelley (Durham, N.C., 1949).

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feeble when attempting allegory). Instead he uses in his maturity the objective correlative to embody the quantitative dynamics of his self-conscious. King Arthur does not represent an "idea" with given qualities, nor is he the instrument for any external end. He is the self struggling to sustain itself against a conscious background of infinite time and infinite space, all the while dying; and the great hour in Tennyson is that tragic hour when the self fades away into darkness, fulfilling all of the poet's despairing pessimism. It is the fundamental and critical distinction between subjective and objective that underlies Nietzsche's description of the subjective poet in The Birth of Tragedy. To Nietzsche the tragic or Dionysiac artist is first of all "subjective" but not in any sense impressionistic, personal or private. He is rather a "vital" and "universal" artist as distinguished from the private and isolated, for he does not write of himself as a personality (which is an objectified "idea"' of himself). Rather, during his creative experience, he identifies himself with the entire Dionysiac realm of consciousness, the Oneness of the Whole, of which he makes a replica in music, suggesting Carlyle's concept of poetry as "musical thought".24 The lyrical p o e t . . . himself becomes his images, his images are objectified versions of himself. Being the active center of the world he may boldly speak in the first person, only his "I" is not that of the actual waking man, but the "I" dwelling, truly and eternally, in the ground of being.25

This "I" then is not the personal "I". It is the universal "I". "The T thus sounds out of the depth of being",26 Nietzsche continues and readily brings to mind Tennyson's own account of the role of "I" in the creation of In Memoriam: "I" is not always the author speaking of himself, but the voice of the human race speaking thro' him.27 24

See Carlyle, V, pp. 83-84. All citations of Carlyle will be from The

Works of Thomas

25 28 27

Carlyle,

30 vols. (London, 1896).

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, p. 39. Ibid., p. 38. Memoir, p. 255.

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19

Nietzsche and Tennyson are hardly compatable as personalities. On the surface their only common denominators would seem to be extreme sensitivity and pervading pessimism. Had they been acquainted, they would not likely have been attracted to one another. Yet, across cultures, they stand in rather parallel positions in the subjective movement in Western thought. What Nietzsche describes as the characteristics of the true subjective poet Tennyson exemplifies in the Idylls of the King. And it is not here relevant that The Birth of Tragedy appeared some twenty-two years after the publication of In Memoriam and, in fact, after most of the Idylls had been completed. Tennyson and Nietzsche do not derive any inspiration from each other, but they both derive from a common movement in thought and constitute, in their respective ways, the final tragic statements of nineteenthcentury subjectivism, this vague and misunderstood movement which had its beginnings in the late eighteenth century in the epistemological problems posed by Hume and Kant. Tennyson can be viewed as the ultimate spokesman for "subjective truth", and yet to entitle him so gives him no ready passport among intellectual circles today, at least not as long as his qualifications remain confused. For to fully appreciate the thought content of In Memoriam, the Idylls, and Tennyson's poetry in general, the same background and insights are required that are necessary to understand the full purport of The Birth of Tragedy. This entails an understanding not only of the formal development of the critical philosophy, but also of the psychic forces that lay beneath the formal issues and which, taken together, can be said to constitute an evolution in self-consciousness. 2.

With David Hume British empiricism fell on its own sword, should have died, and did not die. For Hume's theory of causation "undermined the validity of reason as Berkeley's doctrine had ruined the validity of the senses".28 We could, perhaps, go 28

See Charles Frederick Harrold, Carlyle and German Thought (New Haven, 1934), p. 21.

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THE SUBJECTIVE POET

further than this and say that Hume dealt a death blow to philosophy itself, considered as man"s pursuit of the truth of the nature of external reality. For in a very real sense Kant can be considered not as the saviour of philosophy, but, rather, as the father of psychology or the study of the human mind as consciousness. Since Hume philosophy has tended to break down into three separate divisions: (1) phychology, (2) logic, or the study of a certain reasoning process conducted by the mind given or posited certain premises, and (3) the philosophy of science, based on nineteenth-century "positivism", which consciously and studiously by-passes the epistemological dilemma posed by Hume and Kant. The revolution in philosophy precipitated by Hume and Kant came about through man's awareness that all he had assumed to be known or knowable pertaining to a world external to his own consciousness was not in any way ascertainable; that, to put it more tersely, there was no provable correspondence between thought and things, between what man conjectured in his consciousness about an external reality and the actual nature of that external reality. To some, after Hume, it appeared doubtful that there even existed such an external reality or world of things apart from the mind perceiving such a world. Locke, and Hume's empiricist predecessors in the eighteenth century (with the exception of Berkeley) more or less took for granted that our perceptions truly reflected an external real order of continuity and relationships,29 but Hume's scepticism would not abide so complacently. We customarily assume a correspondence between the perceived and the real, Hume concluded, but we have no certain knowledge of it. "All inferences from experience . . . . are effects of custom, not of reasoning." 30 29

See Henry D. Aiken, The Age of Ideology (New York, 1957), p. 33: "Actually they did not deeply ponder the concept of objectivity itself. They merely used it to express a half-conscious conviction about the adequacy of the rational faculty to grasp its object and the correspondence between the thing itself and the thing-as-known . . . " 30 David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding in The English Philosophers from Bacon to Mill, ed. Edwin A. Burtt (New York, 1939), pp. 598-604. See especially pp. 603-604: "It is allowed on all hands

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21

For those who fully comprehended the consequences of Hume's inquiries, his conclusions appeared staggering. They shook the very foundations of philosophic certainty. Yet Hume and his philosophy seemed perhaps more shocking still to another larger segment, the more confused and less exacting religiously oriented who took Hume's attack to be principally aimed at absolute and spiritual values as such, rather than at philosophic certainty generally. To both of these groups Kant's apparent solution to the dilemma posed by Hume was equally welcome, if for different reasons. To the former, it appeared to furnish a new basis for valid philosophic inquiry; to the latter, Kant and his critical philosophy appeared as saviours of spiritual and absolute values. Kant's resolution of the problem raised by Hume consists in recognizing the necessity of thinking in terms of two worlds,31 the phenomenal world as it appears to the consciousness, and a world of noumena, or things in themselves, of which we can have no certain knowledge whatsoever. Kant further acknowledges the unbridgeable gulf between these two worlds, between a world as perceived by the mind or consciousness of man and any real existing world, between the I AM and the THINGS EXISTING WITHOUT us, between subject and object. There is a world of knowing and a world of being, and it is only of the former that we can boast of any certainty. It is this same acknowledgement that lies behind most of the philosophy and criticism of Coleridge, who, speaking as a Kantian, passes this judgment on all the attempts of modern philosophers in both empiricist and rationalist traditions, from Descartes and Hobbes on, to explain perception and our knowledge of things: "These conjectures, however, concerning the mode in which our perceptions originated, could not alter the natural difference of things and thought." 32 To the Kantian, then, it was possible to have a valid and certhat there is no known connection between the sensible qualities and the secret powers . . . " 31 See Aiken, pp. 32-33. 32 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Shedd (New York, 1853), III, p. 208. All citations and quotations from Coleridge will be from this edition unless otherwise designated.

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tain understanding of the phenomenal world in so far as the very constitution of this world is determined by the forms and categories of the mind or consciousness perceiving it. We in a real sense shape our own worlds. Thus the Kantian revolution has been aptly termed the Copernican revolution in philosophy in that while previously the mind's knowledge of external things or reality had been considered dependent upon the actual nature of things, which knowledge the mind acquired through experience, education and right reasoning; now the whole world or universe of things was to be considered as merely the reflection of thought, held together by and dependent upon for all its qualities the mind which perceived it. So while previously the mind or subject had revolved around a real external, existing world, which we can call the "object", now that objective world revolved around the subject or consciousness that perceived it. All that was certain was the perceiving or knowing mind or consciousness; the nature and even the existence of an external world apart from the perceiving mind was dubious, and all asserted knowledge of such a real objective world would have to be regarded "critically". Hence Kant's new school of philosophy came to be known as the "critical philosophy", thus distinguishing it from the philosophy which "dogmatically" assumed first the existence of a world of things external to the knowing mind, a world of being-, and, secondly, assumed a correspondence or possible correspondence between that world of things and our thoughts about such a world. Dogmatic philosophy thus assumed that we could have certain knowledge of "things", certain objective knowledge. However, neither Kant nor his English spokesman, Coleridge, denies the existence of a world of "things in themselves". To Kant the phenomenal world is simply the only world of which we can have any understanding. Coleridge, in fact, in the Biographia, in his survey of the development and fallacies of the empiricist and associationist philosophers,33 in effect attempts to show how it might be possible to say that there is a meeting place or correspondence between knowing and being, between subject and object, and although his argument is incomplete, his ultimate 33 Ibid., pp. 207-271.

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23

solution centers around the faculty of "primary imagination".34 But Coleridge, expressing himself rather differently than does Kant, acknowledges that all human thought must start from either of two premises: the subjective, I AM, or the objective, that 35 THINGS EXIST WITHOUT us. To Coleridge the former position has this distinct superiority over the latter in that at least it is not properly a "prejudice" but the starting point of any real knowledge we can attain. That things exist without us is never more than a prejudice, as Coleridge puts it, or a "sentiment" or "belief" in Hume's terminology.36 But neither Kant nor Coleridge would say dogmatically that the subjective world is the only world. Fichte does say this. To Fichte reality is what we make it, and there is no purpose in allowing for a world of "things in themselves" that we cannot know. The "things" we conceive as outside of ourselves are only another aspect of our own consciousness: It appears then that all thy knowledge is merely a knowledge of thyself, that thy consciousness never proceeds beyond thyself, and that what thou hast regarded as a consciousness of the real existence of the object is no more than a consciousness of thine own representation or conception of an object, produced according to an inward law of thought, and necessarily co-existing with thy sensation. 37

Indeed, to Fichte this "inward law of thought" by which we would posit an external world and act in accordance to it, is a dynamic principle within the self by which the self grows. The "will" to Fichte shapes reality and the ego or self can grow in contemplation of and reacting to the non-ego, which is that part of the human consciousness which is not I, analogous, though not identical, to what Carlyle specifically calls the NOT-ME.38 To be aware 34

Ibid., Ill, pp. 363-364: Coleridge conceives of the primary imaginations as essentially "vital" and suggests in his definition of the imagination Schopenhauer's description of the subject or the knowing process. ^ Ibid., i n , pp. 335-350. 36 Hume, pp. 603-604. 37 Johann Gottlieb Fichte, The Destination of Man, trans. Mrs. Percy Sinnett (London, 1846), p. 47; see also The Science of Knowledge, trans. A. E. Kroeger (London, 1889), pp. 79-84. 38 Carlyle, I, p. 136: "In a word, he is now, if not ceasing, yet intermitting to eat his own heart; and clutches round him outwardly on the NOT-ME for wholesomer food."

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of this insularity of the self is to Fichte the highest truth of which man is capable: Thou hast penetrated to the true source of thy conception of things out of thyself. This is not perception, for thou perceivest only thine own state. This is not thought, for things do not appear to thee as the product of thought. It is, really and in fact, an absolute and immediate consciousness of an existence out of thyself, just as perception is an immediate consciousness of thine own state. Do not be deceived by sophists and half-philosophers; things do not appear to thee by means of any representatives. Of the thing that exists, and that can exist, thou art conscious immediately; thou, thyself, art that of which thou art conscious. By a fundamental law of thy being thou art thus presented to thyself, and thrown out of thyself.39 Every man is, then, an island complete of itself, and that part of the human consciousness which we do not regard as self, the non-ego element, is the infinite background toward which the self, by an assertion of will, reacts and grows. Thus in Fichte the dynamic principle of growth is entirely contained within the consciousness and centers not in the intellect, because man can know nothing (no thing existing), but in the will or shaping power, the power within the consciousness to create its own world. If we cannot know, we can will, and this other faculty of the mind in Fichte's philosophy assumes its role as the vital force of subjective growth (as the imagination does in the philosophy of Coleridge). This faculty subsequently appears in many different guises in nineteenth-century philosophy and literature, in the transcendental schools of Fichte and Schelling, and in the anything-but-transcendental school of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Subjectivism, then, admits of varying degrees. While to Kant and Coleridge the subjective consciousness assumed a loftier status than ever before, there seemed insufficient cause to summarily dismiss all claims to objective reality. Both Kant and Coleridge begin rather traditionally, as did Descartes, with the observation that i AM and think, but they also realized, as did later Carlyle, that (Alas! Poor cogitator!) 40 this took them but a 39 49

The Destination of Man, p. 53. Carlyle, I, p. 114.

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25

little way. From this awareness, i AM, we can infer nothing. It was Kant who most succinctly pointed out the fallacy in Descartes' conclusion that I think, therefore I am. 41 From the fact of our consciousness we cannot properly infer that we exist as definite entities in an external order. I AM is, more precisely speaking, an awareness only; nor, contrarily, can this awareness or consciousness be inferred or deduced from a given or posited world of objects (matter): In order to explain thinking, as a material phenomenon, it is necessary to refine matter into a mere modification of intelligence with the twofold function of appearing and perceiving,42 The problem Coleridge raises is simply one of how objective being can ever turn into subjective knowing-. How the esse, assumed as originally distinct from the scrire, can ever unite itself with it; how being can transform itself into a knowing, becomes conceivable on one only condition: namely, if it can be shown that the vis representativa, or Sentient, is itself a species of being . . . 4 3 In other word, to explain the possible correspondence of knowing and being in an act of knowledge, we must either conceive of being as a form of knowing or knowing as a form of being, and it is the latter presumption that is generally made. So today we substitute for knowing a "thing" called the "brain" to account for our knowledge of other "things". But what of our knowledge of the "brain?" Fichte states, in a somewhat different manner, the same problem in The Destination of Man: An external existence - a thing, is something out of me, the intelligence being cognizant of it. Concerning it there arises the question since the thing cannot know of itself, how can a knowledge of it arise? And, since all its modifications lie in the circle of its own existence, and by no means in mine, how can a consciousness of it arise in me? How does the thing affect me? What is the tie between me, the subject, and the thing which is the object of my knowledge? Of what I 41

See Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, ed. Paul Carus (Chicago, 1949), pp. 99-104. 42 Coleridge, III, p. 245. 43 Ibid., pp. 241-242.

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THE SUBJECTIVE POET

am, I know no more than that I am, but here no tie is necessary between subject and the object known of; and this reflection or return of the knowledge on itself is what I designate by the term I, if I have any determinate meaning.44 Both Coleridge's account and Fichte's account of the epistemological problem suggest Tennyson's comment on the same point: No evolutionist is able to explain the mind of Man or how any possible physiological change of tissue can produce conscious thought.45 Our thoughts or thinking about objective things simply cannot be accounted for in terms of those "things". It is impossible to conceive of how an objective thing in being can be transformed into consciousness or knowing. In attempting to explain the act of knowledge, Coleridge accordingly observes that we can start from either one of two positions. We can either take the I AM as the first, and then we have to account for the intervention of the objective; or we can take the proposition THINGS EXIST WITHOUT US as the starting point, in which case we have to explain how the thing can become thought. 48 That THINGS EXIST WITHOUT US is a presumption or "prejudice"; 4 7 and Coleridge observes that taking I AM as the first has this advantage: that it is at least not a prejudice. I AM, cannot so properly be intitled a prejudice. It is groundless indeed; but then in the very idea it precludes all ground, and separated from the immediate consciousness loses its whole sense and import. 44

Op. cit., p. 50. Memoir, p. 271. 46 Coleridge, III, pp. 336-342: "The notion of the subjective is not contained in the notion of the objective. On the contrary they mutually exclude each other . . . ", p. 336. 47 Ibid., Ill, p. 339: "Now these essential prejudices are all reducible to 45

the o n e f u n d a m e n t a l p r e s u m p t i o n , THAT THERE EXIST THINGS WITHOUT

us . . . the philosopher therefore compels himself to treat this faith as nothing more than a prejudice, innate indeed and connatural, but still a prejudice." This is essentially Schelling's account, which can be compared to Fichte's questionings as to why we should be disposed to consider things existing without us, finally concluding that it is only because the ego demands it so: "I perceive that I really know no more than what thou sayest, and that transposition of what is in me to something out of myself is very strange, though nevertheless I cannot refrain from it" (The Destination of Man, p. 32).

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27

It is groundless; but only because it is itself the ground of all other certainty. 48 This "immediate consciousness" is the subject, which is primarily distinguished from the object or thing known in that it is not a being but a consciousness or knowing. In this sense it supports the object or thing known, and the object is dependent upon it. Schopenhauer makes a clearer expression of this point: That which knows all things and is known by none is the subject. Thus it is the supporter of the world, that condition of all phenomena, of all objects, which is always presupposed throughout experience; for all that exists, exists only for the subject. Every one finds himself to be subject, yet only in so far as he knows, not in so far as he is an object of knowledge. But his body is object, and therefore from this point of view we call it idea. For the body is an object among objects, and is conditioned by the laws of objects although it is an immediate object. Like all objects of perception, it lies within the universal forms of knowledge, time and space, which are the conditions of multiplicity. T h e subject, on the contrary, which is always the knower, never the known, does not come under these forms, but is presupposed by them; it has therefore neither multiplicity nor its opposite unity. We never know it, but it is always the knower wherever there is knowledge. 49 T h e subject, then, as knower, supports and sustains the world of objects or things known, that which exists or is thought to exist. Coleridge further emphasizes the primacy of the subject or consciousness: It is asserted only, that the act of self-consciousness is for us the source and principle of all our possible knowledge . . . For us, self-consciousness is not a kind of being, but a kind of knowing, and that too the highest and farthest that exists to us. It may however be shown, and has in part already been shown in page 334, that even when the Objective is assumed as the first, we yet can never pass beyond the principle of self-consciousness. Should we attempt it, we must be driven back ground to ground, each of which would cease to be a Ground the moment we pressed on it. We must be whirled down the gulf of an infinite series. But this would make our reason baffle the end and the purpose of all reason, namely, unity and system. 30 48

Coleridge, III, p. 340. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, trans. R. B. Haldane and J. Kemp (London, 1907), I, p. 5. 50 Coleridge, III, pp. 348-349. 49

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Coleridge recognizes, then, the truth which, as we have seen, Schopenhauer expressed more lucidly, that if we take objective reality as given and then try to analyze its constitution we are driven along an "infinite series" simply because any posited object or thing of necessity wears the aspects of infinite time and infinite space, or, in other words, of the forms prescribed by the knowing or conscious subject - what Schopenhauer called the conditions of multiplicity. There can be no external unity or smallest unit when our spatial imagination renders all conceived and conceivable objects infinitely divisible and infinitely variable. The prominence of spatial imagination and the preoccupation with time and space and their infinite nature can be described as a characteristic of the subjectivist which we will come back to shortly. At this point we can venture this conclusion: the basic distinction between the subjective and objective thinker lies in which of Coleridge's two premises he does take as the first, psychologically, and to what extent. The distinction thus rests on the psychological fact of whether the subject or object is more real to the thinker, and this distinction, of course, suggests varying degrees of subjectivity. To Fichte the object does not exist except in a very special sense; to others less extremely subjective the objective or external world is dim, hazy, unreal or beyond certain knowledge. What should be particularly emphasized here is that this is primarily a psychological distinction and not a philosophic one. Coleridge has, perhaps, a deeper subjective bias than his philosophy would indicate. 51 And whether a man is primarily subjective or objective in this fundamental sense is quite beyond his control. He cannot reason himself into either bias, nor out of it; although, it would seem that the objective prejudice sometimes "evolves" into a subjective awareness of the illusory nature of external things. So Coleridge with all of his argumentative attempts in the 51

The "dejection" Coleridge describes in his "Dejection: An Ode" arises from the "conscious fact" that he can no longer feel any joy, even in the experience of the beauties of external Nature that had before so moved him; and this communion of the self with external Nature had been the basis of the Wordsworthian religion with which he had been so much involved.

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THE SUBJECTIVE POET 52

Biographia

to m a k e the self c o r r e s p o n d t o or be i n h a r m o n y

with external nature, c a n n o t m a k e that external N a t u r e (and its beauty) a n y m o r e real and c o n s o l i n g t o the p o e t of "Dejection: a n Ode". 5 3 I may not hope f r o m outward forms t o win T h e passion a n d the life, whose f o u n t a i n s a r e within. It m a y b e anticipated here that T e n n y s o n likewise finds little c o n s o l a t i o n in any external "nature", which n e v e r appears very real o r tangible to h i m . O n the other hand, it is as little c o n c e i v a b l e that to B e n t h a m m i n d c o u l d ever h a v e b e e n m o r e than a rational m a c h i n e a n d repository f o r impressions of things, or t o Stuart Mill m o r e

t h a n a rational faculty p l u s

an

John

emotional

faculty. 5 4 In B e n t h a m a n d Mill the matter-of-fact bias f o r the external world of tangible things is firmly rooted, t h o u g h the c o n s e q u e n t discrepancies arising b e t w e e n t h e external w o r l d thus posited and his o w n p e r s o n a l feelings c a u s e d the m o r e intuitional Mill s o m e m o m e n t s of h o n e s t embarrassment. 52

T h e s e are d e -

In the philosophical survey in the Biographia that concludes rather abortively with his definition of the Imagination, Coleridge is attempting to explain the "act of knowledge" and how, during this act, it might be possible to say there is a correspondence of subject and object, albeit that they are toto genera different, one a knowing and the other a being. 53 The state of mind described in Coleridge's "Dejection" has, indeed, been interpreted as his awareness, conscious or unconscious, of the gulf between the external world and the self-conscious, Kant's "two worlds". Arthur O. Lovejoy, "Coleridge and Kant's Two Worlds", ELH, Vol. 7 (1940), pp. 341-362. And we might add that this was especially disheartening for Coleridge, a poet whose inspiration had avowedly been derived from Nature. But now to Coleridge Nature seemed unreal and his mind could not be attuned to it. H e had read much metaphysics before this time, but after this he was to devote his life, his "death in life", increasingly to metaphysics, and to talk for hours on end in his sonorous mumble, as Carlyle described it, of his "sumjects"' and "omjects". Carlyle, XI, p. 56. 54 After his "crisis", described in the Autobiography, Mill revises his atomistic conception of human nature to include a capacity for emotion or feeling. And in acknowledging this "feeling" he states, "I was no longer hopeless: I was not a stock or a stone", which may be construed as an unconscious and unadmitted awareness on his part that he was not merely a "thing" in existence. John Stuart Mill, Autobiography (New York, 1873), p. 138.

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scribed in his Autobiography as a "crisis".55 In resolving this personal crisis, revealed to him by an "irresistible self-consciousness", Mill did not become a "subjectivist" by any means, but he did unequivocally acknowledge the needs, if not the preeminence, of his self-conscious. His dilemma may then be described as an unrecognized awareness of the lack of correspondence between subject and object and of the unbridgeable gulf between thought and things. This awareness caused in the case of the unoriented Mill a great shock. To him and his rather awkward attempts to extricate himself from what may have appeared an obvious problem Carlyle may well have applied his general proposition: "To the blind all things are sudden." 56 Yet Mill was hardly so uncharitable as Carlyle, and in his honest questionings he freely acknowledged that Carlyle was a different "kind" of thinker than he was, an "intuitive" thinker: I did not, however, deem myself a competent judge of Carlyle. I felt that he was a poet, and that I w a s not; that h e w a s a m a n of intuition, w h i c h I was not; and that as such, he not only saw m a n y things l o n g before m e , w h i c h I could only w h e n they were pointed o u t t o m e , hobble after and prove, b u t that it was highly probable he could see m a n y things w h i c h were n o t visible to m e e v e n after they were pointed out."

Mill, then, attempted to explain Carlyle's nature in terms of "intuition", and this carries up a step further in our discussion of subjectivism. Apart from the basic distinction between the subjective bias and the objective bias, we can in a general way describe certain characteristics that predominate in the subjective thinker as distinguished from the objective thinker. One of these characteristics is the emphasis on intuition as opposed to intellect or discursive reasoning. Another can be described as a recognition of the thought forms of infinite space and infinite time as being essential to all thought or consciousness as we know it, and consequently an emphasis on spatial imagination. A third 55

Ibid., p. 133. Carlyle referred to Mill's work as "the autobiography of a steamengine" in a letter to his brother John: Emery N e f f , Carlyle and Mill (New York, 1924), p. 44. 57 Autobiography, p. 68. 56

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31

is the prominence of the faculty generally described as the "will" which, in the absence of any possible certain knowledge of things, gives some direction, if not meaning, to conscious life. Incidental to these characteristics that predominate in the subjective thinker is a corresponding disparagement or contempt for all knowledge of "things" or science. In fact, these characteristics are all interrelated and are evidenced to an extreme degree in Tennyson's poetry. 3. A distinction between two aspects of thought was recognized in the nineteenth century long before Bergson applied to the resulting dichotomy the terms "intellect" and "intuition". In attempting to explain the makeup of the human intelligence, Coleridge, in the Biographia, describes two distinct and opposing forces at work: Bearing then this in mind, that intelligence is a self-development, not a quality supervening to a substance, we may abstract from all degree, and for the purpose of philosophic construction reduce it to kind, under the idea of an indestructible power with two opposite and counteracting forces, which by a metaphor borrowed from astronomy, we may call the centrifugal and centripetal forces. The intelligence in the one tends to objectize itself, and in the other to know itself in the object.58 It is important to emphasize here that to describe the first force Coleridge uses the word "objectize" and not "objectify", for actually the second force could be described by this second term. The first force is the expansive apprehending process of conscious awareness; the second is an objectification of this subjective knowing process into concepts, ideas, and things, which includes even a concept of "I" as a thing existing in this objectified world of things. Coleridge makes this distinction clearer: Grant me a nature having two contrary forces, the one of which tends to expand infinitely, while the other strives to apprehend or find itself in this infinity, and I will cause the world of intelligence with the whole system of their representations to rise up before you. 59 58

Coleridge, III, p. 350. Ibid., p. 357; also p. 360: "When we have formed a scheme or outline of these two different kinds of force, and of their different results by the

59

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The first force may even be equated with consciousness itself which moves ever forward and outward in the context of its own forms of space and time. The second force or faculty is reflective and through this faculty we abstract from and objectify the conscious-continuum into existing things and objects, one of which is, indeed, the concept of "I" taken as object, and these concepts and objects we present back to the self as separate and distinct existences. We may recall Fichte's account of how "this reflection or return of the knowledge on itself is what I designate by the term I, if I have any determinate meaning".00 Coleridge does not use the terms "intellect" and "intuition" in treating these two phases of the thought process, but his dichotomy bears a distinct relationship to these faculties as they have been more recently distinguished by the vitalistic Bergson.61 In the Cartesian observation, "I think", Bergson appreciated, as did Kant and Coleridge before him, that there are actually two kinds of thought involved:62 the first is the act of being conscious, or, as we might call it, thinking thought or life; the other is a thinking about thought or life, or reflecting back, even if coinstantaneously, upon the thinking process. It is the intellect, to Bergson, which performs this second process; it attempts to stop, process of discursive reasoning, it will then remain for us to elevate the Thesis from notional to actual, by contemplating intuitively this one power with its two inherent indestructible yet, counteracting forces, and the results or generations to which their inter-penetration gives existence, in the living principle and in the process of our own self-consciousness." Here we see Coleridge beginning to make the connection between his epistemology and his concept of the creative imagination; also implied here are suggestions of the primacy of the intuition and an essentially "vitalistic" view of life. 60 The Destination of Man, p. 50. 61 Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York, 1944), pp. 149-203; "But it is to the very inwardness of life that intuition leads us - by intuition I mean instinct that has become disinterested, selfconscious, capable of reflecting upon its object and of enlarging it indefinitely", p. 194; "Thus intuition may bring the intellect to recognize that life does not quite go into the category of the many nor yet into that of the one: that neither mechanical causality nor finality can give a sufficient interpretation of the vital process", p. 195. 62 See Kant, Prolegomena, p. 103: "The Ego in the proposition, 'I am', means not only the object of internal intuition (in time), but the subject cf consciousness . . . "

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33

abstract from, segmentize, or "objectify" the continuous or vital flow of conscious life, in order to categorize it into "things", "ideas", "systems", values, and so forth. The intuition, on the other hand, is the ever moving apprehension of conscious life. The intellect is then mechanical, the intuition, organic. Both Platonic and Aristotelian philosophies, according to Bergson, are similar to mechanical science in that they are largely the work of the intellect and they attempt to explain life in a static context, stopping its duration and extension in order to examine and objectify it, and, hence, neither can ever catch up with life or comprehend it. Contrarily, we can say that in the subjective vitalist intuition predominates over the intellect. To Kant space and time are "forms of intuition" or the very constitution or dimensions of the subjective consciousness through which all phenomena must necessarily be experienced. We cannot imagine or visualize that which is without time and space, however much the intellect might conjecture upon such verbal concepts as spacelessness and timelessness, nor can we even conceive of an "object" outside of time and space. When I speak of objects in time and space, it is not of things in themselves, of which I know nothing, but of things in appearance, that is of experience, as the particular way of knowing objects which is afforded to man.63 Coleridge goes further than this in identifying self-consciousness with time: The act of consciousness is indeed identical with time considered in its essence. (I mean time per se, as contra-distinguished from our notion of time; for this is always blended with the idea of space, which, as the contrary of time, is therefore its measure.) 64 This appreciation of the indispensability of time and space is also explicit in Schopenhauer and Fichte.65 What is important to emphasize here is that conscious thought or conscious life as we 63

Ibid., p. 28. Coleridge, III, p. 238. 65 See Schopenhauer in footnote 49 of this chapter; Fichte, The Destination of Man, pp. 40-54; in Carlyle Space and Time are reduced to "mere" forms of man's mind, XXVIII, p. 34. 64

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know it is impossible beyond space and time. The Platonic "idea" of eternity, timelessness or all-time, is the result of an objectification or idealization of time as a "thing", followed by an argument from this idea to its absence or perfection. And it is this happy idea of perfection that lies behind the exhilarating optimism of Plato and Shelley, while the "infinite" dimensions of the subjective state or human self-conscious, limitless in time and limitless in space, lies behind the despairing pessimism of Lucretius 64 and Tennyson. Bergson went so far as to contrast the intuitive thinker ("he who installs himself in becoming") to the Platonic or Aristotelian philosopher of "ideas": Hence, through the whole philosophy of Ideas there is a certain conception of duration, as also of the relation of time to eternity. He who installs himself in becoming sees in duration the very life of things, the fundamental reality. The forms, which the mind isolates and stores up in concepts, are then only snapshots of the changing reality. They are moments gathered along the course of time; and just because we have cut the thread that binds them to time, they no longer endure. They tend to withdraw into their own definition, that it to say, into the artificial reconstruction and symbolical expression which is their intellectual equivalent. They enter into eternity, if you will; but what is eternal in them is just what is unreal.87 We approach here the development from subjectivism to vitalism. What we think about things is not the same as simply "thinking" or consciously living, installing ourselves in becoming; and all our abstractions, whether in the field of religion, philosophy or science, fall far short of a comprehension of life. We can describe, then, another characteristic of the subjective and intuitive thinker as a recognition of the indispensability of time and space. Consciousness or thought is impossible apart from time and space. Thought is time and space. Moreover, this space, which defines the consciousness and by which time is measured, is essentially three-dimensional Euclidean, M

See Wade Baskin, trans. Henri Bergson, Philosophy York, 1959). 67 See Bergson, Creative Evolution, pp. 344-345.

of Poetry

(New

THE SUBJECTIVE POET

35

that is, infinite extension in all directions from a point. Objectively, after positing a world of scientific fact, it is possible to arrive at a theory of space as curved or non-Euclidean, but it is impossible to subjectively imagine such a space. And no matter what scientists may calculate or prove to be the nature of objective space, or an "idea" of space, subjective space must remain forever three-dimensional. This, perhaps, better than any other example demonstrates the gulf between subject and object. Thus, the time and space we envision is limitless or infinite to the extent that neither in time or space is it possible for us to conceive of a largest or a smallest. There is always something beyond or within, and no final boundaries. Hence we can say that all that we can contemplate has the aspects of infinity. Even when we presume external matter, it is not "finite" or definite. As Coleridge observes: Matter has no Inward. We remove one surface, but to meet with another. We can but divide a particle into particles; and each atom comprehends in itself the properties of the material universe.68 And as Tennyson himself described it: Only That which made us meant us to be mightier by and by, Set the sphere of all the boundless heavens within the human eye, Sent the shadow of Himself, the boundless, thro' the human soul; 68 Coleridge, III, pp. 242-243. See also Fichte, The Destination of Man, p. 38: "Of the object, therefore, we have nothing remaining but what is perceptible - what possesses the property of producing sensation. And this perceptibility thou hast extended through a cohesive mass divisible to infinity, so that the true supporter of attributes, the object which thou hast sought, must after all, be nothing more than the space which it occupies?" Also p. 36: "Spirit . . . Canst thou divide the mass in which thou has imagined the body to consist? I. I can. Of course I do not mean with instruments, but in thought divide it to infinity. N o part can be so small as not to be further divisible, etc." For the remainder of this argument see Appendix A. A comparison of Fichte's treatment with Joseph Addison's contemplation of infinity in Spectator, N o . 565, affords an excellent contrast between the subjective and objective modes of thought. In Addison it is an external universe that is infinite, rather than the self.

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Boundless inward in the atom, boundless outward in the Whole. ("Locksley Hall Sixty Years Later")«» This is an argument which Arthur Hallam implied in his "Essay o n Sympathy": Wide, therefore, as that universe might be, which comprehended for the imagination all varieties of untried consciousness, it was no wider than thai self which imagined it. Material objects were indeed perceived as external. But how? As unknown limits of the soul's activity, they were not a part of subjective consciousness, they defined, restrained, and regulated it. [Italics supplied] 70 If our consciousness can conceive of no ends it is itself boundless. This same thought is found over and over again in Tennyson, notably in "The Ancient Sage", where the poet again uses this aspect of the subjective consciousness to suggest a kind of God, described simply as "endlessness" and to suggest also the unbounded capacity of the human consciousness to expand itself. The Sage tells the young sceptic that he does not understand "bound nor boundlessness", and that he himself sees a sign of the Nameless (and boundless) "in the million-millionth of a grain? Which cleft and cleft again for evermore / And ever vanishing, never vanishes." 71 4.

U p to this point there is nothing in "subjectivism" that would positively deter the religious or optimistic spirit. Indeed, as was perhaps true in the case of Carlyle, there was much on the face of the Kantian revolution and the critical philosophy that might afford new pegs for the spiritual to hang their moral hats. The 69

All quotations from Tennyson's poetry will be, unless otherwise specified, from the Eversley Edition: Works, ed. Hallam Lord Tennyson, 9 vols. (London, 1907-9). 70 Hallam, p. 137. Hallam seems to acknowledge here a distinction between the phenomenal world of appearance and a possible substratum real world of things beyond our perception when he expresses "a difficulty in conceiving any existence, except in the way of matter, external to the conceiving mind". 71 "The Ancient Sage", 11. 41-43. This awareness is evidenced, as we shall see, throughout Tennyson's poetry.

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critical philosophy, and more particularly certain notions derived or distorted from it, became the basis for a wide-spread reassertion of spiritual and absolute values over material and utilitarian values. This was true in the cases of Fichte and Schelling and some of their successors in Germany. It was most outlandishly true in the case of Emerson and the American "transcendentalists". Moreover the enthusiasm for transcendentalism, especially in America, was shored up and buttressed by a great deal of rationalization and righteousness. Accordingly, it remained for the pessimists, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, to fathom the fuller tragic implications of the new thought. Nietzsche and Schopenhauer were radical subjectivists but in no sense "transcendentalists". In Coleridge, and in the writings of the so-called "transcendental" school, there is a confusing mixture of Platonism with critical subjectivism.72 To Nietzsche, Plato and Socrates were the arch-enemies of truth, the liars, who covered over the subjective world of tragic, terrifying consciousness with an external world of posited "things" and objectified "ideas", lending "meaning" to life and shielding man from his "self'. But Heraclitus will remain eternally right with his assertion that being is an empty fiction. The "apparent" world is the only one: the "true" world is merely added by a lie. 73

To both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche the faculty of "will" appeared pre-eminent, as it did to Fichte, and as a shaping power, a power for shaping the world of appearance or phenomena. Yet it must go without saying that a concept necessarily so "nebulous" as "will" could not represent precisely the same things for any two philosophers, although it can be said generally that in Scho72

It is to be observed that Coleridge retained the greatest admiration for Plato, III, pp. 322-323, and that his primary distinction between kinds of thinkers is between Platonists and Aristotelians, VI, p. 336: "Every man is born an Aristotelian or a Platonist." To Nietzsche Aristotle and Plato represented the same mode of thought, the Socratic, theoretic, or objective; and, as we have seen, Bergson made a similar distinction. Plato and Aristotle, it can be said, are alike "unvital". 73 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols, trans. Walter Kaufman in The Portable Nietzsche (New York, 1954), p. 481.

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penhauer and Nietzsche the "will" appears in a more morally emancipated guise, or further beyond good and evil in the conventional sense, than in the philosophy of Fichte.74 And while Fichte, in despair of finding no "thing" existing externally in itself, turns to the promptings of what he calls his "living will" to give shape and direction to his conscious life, Schopenhauer goes a possible step further with the statement that the will or life force is itself the only "thing in itself". Phenomenal existence is idea and nothing more. AH idea, of whatever kind it may be, all object, is phenomenal existence, but the will alone is a thing in itself. As such, it is throughout not idea, but toto genere different from it; it is that of which all idea, all object, is the phenomenal appearance, the visibilty, the objectification.75 Schopenhauer is saying in effect that the only thing in itself is no existing thing at all, since the will is rather a subjective psychic force toto genere different from all objects. It is true that the terms "will" and "life force" in the late nineteenth century became appropriated rather confusingly by G. B. Shaw and the biological vitalists to describe a kind of physical external force, but certainly the Nietzsche of The Birth of Tragedy uses "will" in the sense of a psychic force as did Fichte and Schopenhauer before him. Indeed after Fichte we can say that generally the concept of the "will", variously described, comes more and more to stand for either that dynamic and vital power by which that subjective consciousness gives shape and purpose to its world or a force, as in Schopenhauer, that lies behind all conscious life. It is this general concept of the will as a subjective psychic force that underlies, shapes and imparts the air of authority to In Memoriam and Idylls of the King. In consonance with these concepts of the primacy of the subjective and shaping power of the will is a contempt for science as a certain knowledge of things as they are. This contempt is manifest in Fichte, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, as well as in Tennyson and Carlyle. For Fichte, however, the disparagement 74

Neither Schopenhauer nor Nietzsche talk of the "Will" in terms of divinity or Providential Nature. In Nietzsche's philosophy the "will to power" is most emphatically "beyond good and evil". 75 Schopenhauer, pp. 142-143.

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of knowledge preceded and caused his espousal of "will" rather than the other way around. Since there was no ascertainable correspondence between mind and object, Fichte realized that we can only "know" what we have premised or posited: Thou wouldst know thine own knowledge. Is it wonderful that in this attempt thou hast discovered nothing more? What is discovered by and through knowledge, is nothing more than knowledge. All knowledge consists of representations, images, and thou hast asked for some correlative to these images. This demand cannot be satisfied by knowledge; a system of mere knowledge, is a system of mere pictures, without reality, significance or object. 76 In its search for reality, Fichte's "self" realized then that "I have reality in myself". 77 Hence thought "is founded o n intuition", 78 and the only significance of knowledge lies in the "will to admit this knowledge". 7 9 Fichte found an "inward voice'" within himself compelling him to act in certain ways which from the outset he designated "conscience", 8 0 and which should be compared to Tennyson's "conscience" in his early poem "Sense and Conscience" discussed later. Yet to Fichte this inward voice became more than conscience. It became the faculty which can succeed, where the reason has failed, in giving law and order to the universe. It is "will". T h e will alone, lying hid f r o m mortal eyes in the obscurest depths of the soul, is the first link in a chain of consequences that stretches through the invisible realms of spirit, as, in this terrestrial world, the action itself, a certain movement communicated to matter, is the first link in a material chain that encircles the whole system. T h e will is the effective cause, the living principle of the world of spirit, as motion is of the world of sense. 81 76

Fichte, The Destination of Man, p. 68; see also p. 74: "Such knowledge never finds anything in the conclusion that it has not previously placed in the premises by faith, and even then its conclusions are not always correct." 77 Ibid., p. 72. 79 Ibid., p. 75. 79 Ibid., p. 74. 80 Ibid., pp. 77-79. 81 Ibid., p. 98. This passage in a sense answers the question raised by Fichte on p. 70: "And what is then this something lying beyond all conception, toward which I look with such ardent longing? What is the power

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Here we begin to see Fichte's "transcendentalism" and morality intruding. There is an Infinite Will that all the lesser wills subserve and which gives purpose and direction to man's action. "The Infinite Will unites me with himself, and with all finite beings such as myself." 82 So to Fichte Nature takes on again a providential character: "Thy will, O Infinite Being, thy Providence alone, is this higher nature." 83 "Great living will! whom no words can name, and no conception embrace, well may I lift my thoughts to thee, for I can think only of thee." 84 This invocation of the "living will" suggests the final poem in In Memoriam: 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, etc. But the disparagement of science and knowledge of things is also prominent in the equally subjective but by no means "transcendental" Nietzsche: Today it is drawing on perhaps five or six minds that physics, too, is only an interpretation of the universe, an arrangement of it (to suit us, if I may be so bold!), rather than a clarification.85 What science concludes about an objectified world of things has no bearing on the self. Einstein cannot make space anything else than three-dimensional for the selfconscious. If we view science with the subjective-objective distinction in mind, Tennyson's final disposition of scientific conclusions as to the nature of man in In Memoriam no longer seems so evasive. Men are Not only cunning casts in clay: Let Science prove we are, and then What matters Science unto man, At least to me? which draws me toward it? What is the central point in my soul with which it is united?" 82 Ibid., p. 112. 83 Ibid., p. 118. 84 Ibid., p. 115. 85 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Marianne Cowan (Chicago, 1955), p. 115.

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Carlyle, in his "vitalistic" philosophy, s e e m s to reflect m u c h of Fichte, and like Fichte is ultimately concerned with a higher providence and morality. Y e t Carlyle is n o t so clearly a "subjectivist". W h a t h e did not c o m p r e h e n d in G e r m a n thought was the subject-object distinction. H i s vitalism then, while clothed in transcendental purpose, actually f o r e s h a d o w s the biological vitalism, or Life F o r c e , popularized b y G. B . Shaw. 8 6 So in his early essay "Characteristics" ( 1 8 3 1 ) h e analogizes all living organisms to the h u m a n B o d y , for which "the first condition of complete health is, that each organ perform its f u n c t i o n unconsciously, unheeded". 8 7 T h e healthy k n o w not of their health, b u t only the sick: that is the Physician's Aphorism; and applicable in a f a r wider sense t h a n he gives it. W e m a y say, it holds n o less in moral, intellectual, political, poetical, t h a n in merely corporeal therapeutics; that wherever, or in what shape soever, powers of the sort which c a n b e n a m e d vital are at work, herein lies the test of their working right or working wrong. 8 8 Carlyle's plea in this essay is for "spontaneity", for the "sign of health is Unconsciousness". 8 9 Nature is a kind mother w h o , if w e f o l l o w the vital impulse within us, will lead u s "right". T o Carlyle the b o d y is not as to Schopenhauer "objectified will", but rather the w h o l e m a n should

be like "an incorporated Will". 9 0

Boundless as is the domain of man, it is b u t a small fractional proportion of it that he rules with Consciousness and by Forethought: what he can contrive, nay, w h a t he can altogether k n o w and comprehend, is essentially the mechanical, small; the great is ever, in o n e sense or other, t h e vital; it is essentially the mysterious, and only the surface of it can be understood. But N a t u r e , it might seem, strives, like a kind mother, to hide f r o m us even this, that she is a mystery: she will have 86

See especially Man and Superman, but also Shaw's rather confused distinction between will and reason in The Quintessence of Ibsenism (New York, Hill and Wang, n.d.), pp. 23-45, and especially p. 33: "Ability to reason accurately is as desirable as ever; for by accurate reasoning only can we calculate our actions so as to do what we intend to do: that is, to fulfill our will; but faith in reason as a prime motor is no longer the criterion of the sound mind, any more than faith in the Bible is the criterion of righteous intention." 87 Carlyle, XXVIII, p. 1. 88 Ibid. 88 Ibid., p. 4. 60 Ibid., p. 2.

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us rest on her beautiful and awful bosom as if it were our secure home; on the bottomless boundless Deep, whereon all human things fearfully and wonderfully swim, she will have us walk and build, as if the film which supported us there (which any scratch of a bare bodkin will rend assunder, and sputter of a pistol-shot instantaneously burn up) were no film, but a solid rock-foundation. Forever in the neighborhood of an inevitable Death, man can forget that he is born to die.91 Man has only to follow the life force (which in Shaw he cannot help following) and to "work", and the end will be "good" and "right". Everything is "Change" but this is not "terrible",92 for truth, quoting Schiller, is in "becoming" and not in existence: immer wird nie ist.93 Truth is the life process. And Carlyle, like Nietzsche and Fichte, shows an unequivocal contempt for the reasoner or theoretical man: This is he whom business-people call Systematic and Theoriser and Word-monger; his vital intellectual force lies dormant or extinct, his whole force is mechanical, conscious: of such a one it is foreseen that, when once confronted with the infinite complexities of the real world, his little compact theorem of the world will be found wanting.94 Schopenhauer and Nietzsche differed from their Kantian predecessors in emphasizing the great irrational forces in the consciousness of man, which is essentially an infinite indifferent chaos of irrepressible and uncontrollable forces.95 Man's will is only one of these forces. What man sees in his own nature is not Providential or governed by a "kind Mother". In Nietzsche, this aspect of subjective human nature is described as the "Dionysiac realm", the great dark sea of consciousness on which the ego floats as in a small boat, struggling to stay above, struggling for its own existence and identity. Nietzsche perceived two opposing forces at work in the human consciousness. The first is what we might call death-longing or the urge to self-annihilation, to merge with indifferent nature, to return, as Tennyson would put it, to the "great deep", and this tendency Nietzsche designates as the 01 92 93 94 85

Ibid., pp. 3-4. Ibid., p. 21 and p. 39. Ibid., p. 38. Ibid., p. 6. See Aiken, p. 104.

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96

Dionysiac. Against this disintegrating tendency is set that urge to sustain the ego as individual, to maintain self-identity, to stay afloat above the sea at all costs as long as possible, and this tendency Nietzsche calls the Apollonian. To maintain his identity man creates heroic or Apollonian illusions and identifies himself with them. Nietzsche likens this tendency to Schopenhauer's concepts of the principium individuations: In an eccentric way we might say of Apollo what Schopenhauer says in the first part of The World as Will and Idea, of man caught in the veil of Maya: "Even as on an immense, raging sea, assailed by huge wave crests, a man sits in a little rowboat trusting his frail craft, so, amidst the furious torments of this world, the individual sits tranquilly, supported by the principium individuationis and relying on it." One might say that the unshakable confidence in that principle has received its most magnificent expression in Apollo, and that Apollo himself may be regarded as the marvelous divine image of the principium individuationis, whose looks and gestures radiate the full delight, wisdom, and beauty of "illusion".97 Apollo embodies the transcendent genius of the principium individuationis', through him alone is it possible to achieve redemption in illusion.08 Wisdom to Nietzsche is an awareness of the scope and terror of the Dionysiac realm or substratum of consciousness that underlies our individual lives. Thus, the only conclusion to be drawn from this awareness is the wisdom of Silenus: "Ephemeral wretch, begotten by accident and toil, why do you force me to tell you what it would by your greatest boon not to hear? What would be best for you is quite beyond your reach: not to have been born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second best is to die soon." 99 There is, then, a natural opposition of the Dionysiac element, man's awareness of the chaos which he is, to the Apollonian illusion by which he strives to maintain his individuality or identity against these great forces of darkness, the spark in the night. The struggle inherent in this opposition describes the true nature of tragedy. »» The Birth of Tragedy, pp. 19-28. 97 Ibid., p. 22. 98 Ibid., p. 97. 99 Ibid., p. 29.

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Here we have, in a great symbol of art, both the fair world of Apollo and its substratum, the terrible wisdom of Silenus, and we can comprehend intuitively how they mutually require one another. But Apollo appears to us once again as the apotheosis of the principium individuationis, in whom the eternal goal of the original Oneness, namely its redemption through illusion, accomplishes itself. With august gesture the god shows us how there is need for a whole world of torment in order for the individual to produce the redemptive vision and to sit quietly in his rocking rowboat in mid-sea, absorbed in contemplation.100 T o Nietzsche, then, the human consciousness, and the Nature it comprehends, is no happy or ordered state as the Stoics or rationalists would have it: It should have become apparent by now that the harmony with nature which we late-comers regard with such nostalgia, and for which Schiller has coined the cant term naive, is by no means a simple and inevitable condition to be found at the gate way to every culture, a kind of paradise. Such a belief could have been endorsed only by a period for which Rousseau's Emile was an artist and Homer just such an artist nurtured in the bosom of nature. 101 This same view appears in Beyond Good and Evil: "In moderation, according to nature" you wish to live? Oh noble Stoics! How your words deceive! Think of being like Nature, immoderately wasteful, immoderately indifferent, devoid of intentions and compassion and a sense of justice, fruitful and desolate and uncertain at the same time; think of Indifference on the throne - how could you live in moderation according to this indifference? Living - isn't it precisely a wishing-to-be-different from this Nature? 102 Nature, then, is to Nietzsche as it was to Tennyson, the dark realm of infinite consciousness above which the ego floats. But this fundamental struggle between will and awareness was to be replaced by Socrates and Euripides with a new antithesis. Socrates replaced Apollo as the opponent of Dionysus - the inquiring spirit of "theoretical" and "objective" man replaced the living will as the resisting force to annihilation, and man threw up a bulwark of objectified "ideas" and value systems against the >o Ibid., pp. 33-34. Ibid., p. 31. 102 P. 8. 101

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chaotic indifference of the conscious fact. "Might it be", writes Nietzsche, "that the 'inquiring mind' was simply the human mind terrified by pessimism and trying to escape from it, a clever bulwark erected against the truth?" 103 He later elaborates on this inference: For who among us can close his eyes to the optimistic element in the nature of dialectics, which sees a triumph in every syllogism and can breathe only in an atmosphere of cool, conscious clarity? Once that optimistic element had entered tragedy, it overgrew its Dionysiac regions and brought about their annihilation and, finally, the leap into genteel domestic drama. Consider the consequences of the Socratic maxims: "virtue is knowledge; all sins arise from ignorance; only the virtuous are happy" - these three basic formulations of optimism spell the death of tragedy.104 Of Socrates Nietzsche writes: He is the great exemplar of that theoretical man whose significance and aims we must now attempt to understand.105 Theoretical man is motivated by the presumption that "thought, guided by the thread of causation, might plumb the farthest abyss of being and even correct it".106 This theoretical man reminds us of the detached philosopher described by Coleridge: To such a man philosophy is a mere play of words and notions, like a theory of music to the deaf, or like the geometry of light to the blind. The connection of the parts and their logical dependencies may be seen and remembered; but the whole is groundless and hollow, unsustained by living contact, unaccompanied with any realizing intuition which exists by and in the act that affirms its existence, which is known, because it is, and is, because it is known.107 In Tennyson, theoretical man appears often under the disparaging guise of the "well-fed" or "foolish" wit.108 To Nietzsche, the objective and theoretic Socrates is also the precursor of the modern scientists. He is the "archtype of the 103 Birth of Tragedy, pp. 4-5. ,M Ibid., p. 88. 105 Ibid., p. 92. Ibid., p. 93. 107 Coleridge, III, p. 334. 108 See especially "The Hesperides" and "The Lady of Shalott", 1832 version.

46 theoretical optimist"

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with a positive attitude toward existence.11»

But science, spurred on by its energetic notions, approaches irresistibly those outer limits where the optimism implicit in logic must collapse. For the periphery of science has an infinite number of points. Every noble and gifted man has, before reaching the mid-point of his career, come up against some point of the periphery that defied his understanding, quite apart from the fact that we have no way of knowing how the area of the circle is ever fully charted. When the inquirer, having pushed to the circumference, realizes how logic in that place curls about itself and bites its own tail, he is struck with a new kind of perception: a tragic perception, which requires to make is tolerable, the remedy of art.111 Perhaps the Kantian revolution in philosophy may be viewed as an all-out frontal attack on this periphery, and Hume, the logic of empiricism biting its own tail. And in this sense we may view the tendency toward subjectivism in the early and mid-nineteenth century as a new awareness of the more fundamental forces within the human consciousness, a reopening of the Dionysiac realm. For our purposes the actual philosophic development and its fine points are not nearly so significant as the psychological change that seems to follow upon the heels of these innovations in philosophy. Tennyson, after all, was no systematic philosopher, and, perhaps more so than in the case of any other major poet, it is impossible to say that he is influenced by so-and-so or is committed to such-and-such a system.112 This is not to say that Tennyson was not aware of these problems. Tennyson was well-read, and Hugh Walker even ventured so far as to assert that his "real history is in his learning".113 But it is far more important for our 109 Birth of Tragedy, p. 94: "As against this practical pessimism, Socrates represents the archetype of the theoretical optimist, who, strong, in the belief that nature can be fathomed, considers knowledge to be the true panacea and error to be radical evil." 110 Ibid., p. 95. 111 Ibid., p. 95, but see generally pp. 76-96 for Nietzsche's full discussion. 112 But see A. B. Dhruva, Kant and Tennyson and Kant and Browning (Bombay, 1917). 113 See Hugh Walker, The Literature of the Victorian Era (Cambridge, 1910), pp. 374-410; see also John Mitchell Kemble's comment in Brook-

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purposes to consider Tennyson as the extreme exemplar of the "subjective" psychology with all of its characteristics and elements. 5.

In 1882, Thomas Walker, in his little pamphlet, Mr. Tennnyson's "Despair", describes the apparent conclusion of that poem as follows: Thus we complete the circle, coming back to the secret which Silenos imparted to Midas in the rose-garden, that "It is best of all for men not to be born; and next, for those who are born to die as soon as possible." 114 And it is Walker, representing the conventional religious voice of the nineteenth century, who raises that cry of consternation: "What does he mean." 115 He observes that the poem sounds like the pessimism of "Schopenhauer and Nietzsche", but he trusts that Tennyson was trying to convey a deeper message. "The age is sad", continues Walker, "because the comforting face of God has been obscured by clouds".116 It is this same fact that "Mr. Tennyson" has laid his hand on in "Despair". Walker then proceeds to unravel a long theological argument and never returns to either Tennyson or the poem. But we can see from this work that even in his own time it was not impossible to relate Tennyson to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, at least for those acquainted with the Germans. There is some reason to believe that Walker knew something more than their names since the quotation from Silenos appears prominently, as we have seen, in The Birth of Tragedy.1" Yet along with this association with continental pessimism is the field, p. 163: "In Alfred's mind the materials of the very greatest works are heaped in an abundance which is almost confusion." Tennyson's early reading is surveyed in Charles Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson (London, 1949), to be referred to hereinafter as Charles Tennyson, pp. 31-45; Tennyson was certainly made acquainted with the German philosophers through the "Apostles", if not before, and studied diligently during the period of his life known as the "ten-year silence" in all fields; Charles Tennyson, pp. 149-197: passim. 114 Op. cit., p. 10. 118 117

Ibid. Ibid., p. 11. P. 29.

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steadfast refusal to believe that Tennyson could have intended a pessimistic conclusion. In commenting on the song from "The Coming of Arthur", "Rain, rain, and sun!", Henry van Dyke writes in 1889: We recognize here the accents of the modern philosopher who holds that all knowledge is relative and deals only with phenomena, the reality being unknowable. Or listen to Tristram as he argues with Isolt: The vows! O, ay - the wholesome madness of an hour They served their use, their time; for every knight Believed himself a greater than himself, And every follower eyed him as a God; Till he, being lifted up beyond himself, Did mightier deeds than elsewise he had done, And so the realm was made. But then their vows First mainly thro' that sullying of our Queen Began to gall the knighthood, asking whence Had Arthur right to bind them to himself? Dropt down from heaven? washed up from out the deep? They fail'd to trace him thro' the flesh and blood Of our old kings. Whence then? a doubtful lord To bind them by inviolable vows, Which flesh and blood perforce would violate; For feel this arm of mine - the tide within Red with free chase and heater-scented air, Pulsing full man. Can Arthur make me pure As any maiden child? lock up my tongue From uttering freely what I freely hear? Bind me to one? The wide world laughs at it. And wordling of the world am I, and know The ptarmigan that whitens ere his hour Woos his own end; we are not angels here Nor shall be. Vows - I am woodman of the woods, And hear the garnet-headed yaffingale Mock them - my soul, we love but while we may; And therefore is my love so large for thee, Seeing it is not bounded save by love.118 Tristram is essentially the voice of Nature or Dionysos. Van Dyke then attempts to show that Tennyson felt that Tristram was 118

158.

Henry Van Dyke, The Poetry of Tennyson (London, 1890), pp. 157-

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"wrong", and that this view of life was "wrong". But this conclusion is not so apparent as Van Dyke assumes. What does not occur to Van Dyke is that the Dionysiac view is Tennyson's view of life, and that the real morality of the Idylls does not lie in any pretty or orderly picture of life, but rather in the strength and force by which the tragic truth it actually describes is met and resisted. Tennyson makes no attempt to cover over the horrors of the chaotic Dionysiac realm with intellectual or Socratic dreams, replete with value, purpose and meaning. Rather he demonstrates in Arthur the ability of the self to resist succumbing to the paralyzing implications of the tragic fact through the force of the "will" and the Apollonian illusion shaped by the will to harbor and sustain the self (as in a tiny rowboat). The Idylls of the King certainly does not reveal the world of consciousness (or the external world) to be meaningful, purposeful, or hope inspiring. The only mark of value is the strength of will with which the individual can face this inevitability. Tennyson himself once remarked to Frederick Locker-Lampson: "I am not blase, I see the nothingness of life, I know its emptiness, but I believe in Love, and Virtue, and Duty." 119 In other words, he believes in these values in spite of what he sees. This seemingly paradoxical position is closely paralleled in Joseph Conrad who desperately holds fast to the simple virtues such as "fidelity" in face of the nihilism he envisions.120 This is a kind of faith by "willful" resistance rather than by rational assent. Moreover, Tennyson's "view" of life remains constant from his earliest juvenile poems to those in the Demeter and Persephone volume, and we can describe this view of life as the "vision of futility". What grows and develops in Tennyson is his resistance to this view, from a faint and feeble "conscience" or "feeling" in his early poems to a strong, positive, and active force, the "living will that shalt endure / When all that seems shall suffer shock".121 The polar dissimilarity between Tennyson and Shelley as well 118

Memoir, p. 475. 12« See especially Robert Penn Warren, intr. to Nostromo 1951), p. xxiii. 121 In Memoriam, CXXXI.

(New York,

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as his affinities to Lucretius were suggested in Tennyson's own time. Aubrey de Vere wrote: We sometimes sketched an imaginary likeness of the unknown poet. We determined that he must be singularly unlike Shelley; that his step must be not rapid but vague, that there would be on his face less of light, but more of dream; that his eye would be that of one who saw little where the many see much, and saw much where the many see little.122 Tennyson himself confessed that he found "a great wind of words in a good deal of Shelley".123 George Barker, as we have remarked before, finds "the Dionysian beast" underlying Tennyson's poetry.124 Thomas Huxley, the eminent Victorian popularizer of science, once called Tennyson "the modern Lucretius".125 While it should become more apparent that Tennyson was much further "beyond good and evil" than many of his most ardent contemporary admirers could have allowed themselves to admit, it would be a mistake to obscure the truly moral nature of Tennyson's poetry, which morality does not lie exclusively in the "living will", but also in the universal love that permeates his writing. Charles Tennyson concluded very rightly that he was the "most human" of English poets,128 and indeed his own version of Christianity seems to be an unorthodox religion of love, similar in some respects to that found in Arthur Hallam's Theodicia Novissima or F. D. Maurice's The Religions of the World. This "religion" will be discussed further in conjunction with In Memoriam. Nowhere in Tennyson's work do we find an elaborate apocalyptic vision or system of a better state than the natural. Tennyson will never be theoretical and will never conjecture on what is not within his consciousness. There is, therefore, no great "triumph of life" as in Shelley - only a "hint to salace woe". Basically there is in Tennyson a view of the total human consciousness or human nature as wild, chaotic, dark and indifferent; 122 123 124 125

Memoir, p. 868. Ibid., p. 475. See footnote 16, supra. But see Nicolson, p. 11. Charles Tennyson, p. 541.

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and against this awarenes the force of the will to shape an illusion, even the beautiful dream-kingdom of Camelot, in which the momentary self can endure before it "reels back into the beast and is no more", 127 or is overwhelmed by the ever "climbing wave", so prominent in Tennyson, that is always poised to fall. In a sense we can describe this vision as "hell", the "immortal hell" that the poet describes in "Lucretius", and man's' power to resist as a kind of Purgatorial activity. There is no Paradise in Tennyson. Yet, there is no denial of Paradise. Aubrey de Vere recalled the following conversation with Tennyson: I reminded him of what he had let fall on that subject, and added that such a scheme of poetic thought if carried out to the full, would create in a lyrical form, a work not without much analogy to Dante's Divina Commedia, the first part of which is all woe, though the latter cantos of the second part, the "Purgatorio", abound in consolation and peace; while the third part, the "Paradiso", is the song of triumph and joy. I remarked that many of the later pieces in the second part of "In Memoriam" were also songs of consolation and peace, and suggested that perhaps he might at some later time give to the whole work its third part, or Paradiso. The poet's answer was this: "I have written what I have felt and known; and I will never write anything else." 128

127 188

This is a continuing motif in Idylls of the Memoir, p. 245.

King.

n THE VISION OF FUTILITY, 1809-1832

The account of the life at the Somersby rectory presented by Charles Tennyson in his biography of the laureate indicates that the poet's childhood was far from being so happy and carefree as previously supposed. His father, the rector and a man of limited means, gave way increasingly to a constitutional disintegration, leaving the responsibility for his large family of eleven children largely to his wife and Alfred, who was the most responsible in spite of his extreme sensitivity and brooding nature. Five of Tennyson's brothers experienced sometime in their lives nervous of mental breakdowns, and Alfred himself approached such a state during the period we know as the "ten-year silence".1 Alfred's own brooding nature and morbidity may be, and indeed have been, attributed to environmental causes and especially to the strain on a sensitive nature of increasing domestic strife. Likewise, his extreme nervous state following his father's death (which resulted in his withdrawal from Cambridge) can in part be explained by the anxieties of insecurity and responsibility, enhanced by the adverse critical reception of his early volumes of poetry and Arthur Hallam's death. But to accept only these explanations is to view his disposition simply as a "malady" rather than as the source or symptom of his peculiar genius, and to explain Tennyson away as an eccentric personality conditioned by adversity. Environment may be over-emphasized in such a case. Those who have wished to depreciate Tennyson have used both the old and the corrected views of his early life to support their 1

Charles Tennyson, pp. 46-192.

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positions. Fausset sought to show that what he took to be Tennyson's love of only the "elegant, chaste and precious" stemmed from an indolent and cloistered youth. 2 Less severely, Douglas Bush felt that the morality in Tennyson's poetry does not move us because it was too easily come by and not "proved on his pulses". 3 On the other hand, subsequent to Charles Tennyson's biography, D. G. James concluded that Wordsworth's genius is stronger and more lasting than Tennyson's, but added that "we could hardly expect such a home, or such a countryside to nourish a hardy and severe genius such as that of Wordsworth". 4 By "such a home" James means that gloomy and painful environment depicted by Charles Tennyson. Conversely, those who have found unqualified praise for Tennyson have likewise proceeded from both views.5 It is a mistake to attach too much importance to the circumstances of Tennyson's childhood, as it is likewise a mistake to emphasize too strongly the influence of Cambridge on the young poet, or the Apostles, or even Arthur Hallam. In fact, we would prefer to view Hallam's death as the catalytic agent for, rather than the source of, In Memoriam, which seems to have its real beginnings in Tennyson's earliest juvenile writings. But in dealing even with these early, "formative" years, it is important not to ignore the poetry, for there is definite evidence of the peculiar nature and scope of Tennyson's mind in his earliest works, whether we consider them good or bad as poetry. There is something which not only distinguishes this poetry from other juvenilia but also carries over throughout Tennyson's poetry to the very last. This "something" can best be described as the characteristics of an extreme subjectivism and its "vision of futility". Undoubtedly the most notable of Tennyson's extant adolescent poems is "Armageddon". This poem, written at the age of fifteen, 2

Fausset, p. 46. "The Personal Note", op. cit., p. 206. D. G. James, p. 122. » See especially Alfred Noyes, "The Real Tennyson", QR, CCLXXXVII (1949), pp. 495-507 at p. 497: "The poet emerges from this dark background of tragedy with a magnificent balance of mind hardly to be found elsewhere in literature." 3

4

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or thereabouts, was later reshaped into the poet's Cambridge prize poem, "Timbuctoo". Fausset describes "Timbuctoo" as "a piece, in short, of richly modulated nonsense, and it carried off the prize".6 On the other hand, Arthur Hallam saw in this poem a promise of Tennyson's becoming "the greatest poet of our generation".7 Charles Tennyson describes a good deal of the poem as "undigested Milton",8 and certainly its blank verse is heavier and more pronounced than the highly refined and easy flowing blank verse of Tennyson's maturity. Perhaps somewhat suggestive of Milton is the preponderance of vague and gaping spatial imagery: I stood upon the mountain which o'erlooks The valley of Megiddo. - Broad before me Lay a huge plain whereon the wandering eye Weary with gazing, found no resting place. Unbroken by the ridge of mound or hill Or far-off cone of some aerial mount Varying the horizon's sameness. 9

Absent is that minute descriptiveness that was to characterize such poems of his early 1830 on 1832 volumes as "Mariana" and "The Lady of Shalott", intensely private poems. In "Armageddon" Tennyson seems to be attempting to describe a state of consciousness or vision without a suitable objective correlative. In fact, the imagery in "Armageddon" suggests rather those broad spatial images that Tennyson was to use sparingly and effectively in his classical poems and the Idylls of the King: or if she slept she dream'd An awful dream, for then she seem'd to stand On some vast plain before a setting sun, And from the sun there swiftly made at her A ghastly something, and its shadow flew Before it till it touch'd her, and she turn'd When lo! her own, that broadening from her feet, And blackening, swallow'd all the land, and in it Far cities burnt . . . 6

Fausset, p. 28. Memoir, p. 39. 8 Charles Tennyson, p. 3 8. 9 Quotations from "Armageddon" are from Unpublished op. cit. 7

Early

Poems,

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Or the following passages from "Armageddon", Full opposite within the lurid West, In clear relief against the long rich vein Of melancholy red that fring'd the sky, A suite of dark pavilions met mine eyes, That covered half the western tide of Heaven, Far stretching, in the midst of which tower'd one Pre-eminent, which bore aloft in air A standard, round whose staff a mighty snake Twin'd his black folds, the while his ardent crest And glossy neck were swaying to and fro. and All the crimson streaks And blood dapplings faded from the disk Of the immaculate morn. may call to our minds

or

God made himself an awful rose of dawn ("The Vision of Sin", 1. 224) While Ilion like a mist rose into towers. ("Tithonus", 1. 63)

"Armageddon" has many of the aspects of a "dream-vision" of the genre of Petrarch's "Trionfi", Chaucer's "House of Fame", or Shelley's "Triumph of Life", or even Dante's Commedia,10 The speaker (the poet) finds himself initially in a wild and desolate land perplexed, and then is confronted by a "seraph", analogous to the person, animal, bird, or spirit that meets Chaucer, Petrarch, Dante, and Shelley. In the typical "dream vision" allegory, however, the person who meets the poet acts as a guide either to take him on a journey or to point out to him certain marvelous phenomena from which "sententia" or deeper meanings may be worked out. But, although the seraph tells the poet in "Armageddon" to "open thine eyes and see (1.108)", he does not point out anything to the poet, nor does the poet in the passage immediately following describe his beholding of any "things" that signify. Rather he describes a psychic phenomenon which can only be termed an expansion of self: 10 For summaries of many of the medieval dream-vision allegories see W. O. Sypherd, Studies in Chaucer's House of Fame (London, 1907).

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I felt my soul grow godlike, and my spirit With supernatural excitation bound Within me, and my mental eye grew large With such a vast circumference of thought, That in my vanity, I seem'd to stand Upon the outward verge and bound alone Of God's omniscience. His consciousness expands till it almost comprises the universe of consciousness. Not only does it expand, but it penetrates infinitely inwardly or apprehends infinite divisibility: I saw The smallest grain that dappled the dark Earth, The indistinctest atom in deep air.11 The poet's concern is not with a secret of the external universe or with any "meaning" that can be conjectured upon. Rather it is with the wonder of the infinite expansive power of his own consciousness. The wonder is not in an external world or order, but in himself: I wondered with deep wonder at myself: My mind seem'd wing'd with knowledge and the strength Of holy musings and Immense Ideas, Even to Infinitude. AH sence of Time And Being and Place was swallowed up and lost Within a victory of boundless thought. 11

See also from The Devil and the Lady. 0 suns and spheres and stars and belts and systems, Are ye or are ye not? Are ye realities or semblances Of that which men call real? Are ye true substance? are ye anything Except delusive shows and physical points Endow'd with some repulsive potency? Could the Omnipotent fill all space, if ye Or the least atom in ye or the least Division of that atom (if least can dwell In infinite divisibility) should be impenetrable? 1 have some doubts if ye exist when none Are by to view ye; if your Being alone Be in the mind and the intelligence Of the created? should some decree Annihilate the sentient principle Would ye or would ye not be non-existent?

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Not only is this experience self-conscious, but the whole universe seems to take on itself the aspect of a vital consciousness, which the poet comprehends or is in tune with: The clear stars Shone out with keen but fix'd intensity, All-silence, looking steadfast consciousness Upon the dark and windy waste of Earth. There was a beating in the atmosphere, An indefinable pulsation Inaudible to outward sense, but felt Thro' the deep heart of every living thing, As if the great soul of the Universe Heav'd with tumultuous throbbings on the vast Suspence of some grand issue . . . This last quoted passage describes strikingly what has been termed "cosmic consciousness", 12 or a consciousness extended beyond self. It is possible, in Jungian terms, to consider this as a kind of collective unconscious, 13 or some other over-consciousness. In Nietzschean terms, again more appropriate, we could call this the infinite realm of Dionysiac consciousness, boundless by its own nature. Secondarily important in "Armageddon" is the wild and chaotic view that the poet takes of nature. It is in a real sense Lucretian and there are definite foreshadowings here of Tennyson's late poem, "Lucretius": There was a mingling too of such strange sounds (Which came at times upon my startled hearing) Half-wailing and half-laughter; such a dissonance Of jarring confus'd voices, part of which Seem'd hellish and part heavenly, whisperings, Low chantings, strangled screams, and other notes Which I may liken unto nothing which 12 Interesting, but not to be taken seriously, is Richard Maurice Bucke, Cosmic Consciousness (New York, 1901), in which the author ranks consciousness in the degrees of simple, self and cosmic. He then attempts to describe the characteristics of cosmic consciousness as manifested in certain actual persons and to conjecture upon its presence in others, including Tennyson: pp. 292-294; see also R. B. Span, "Tennyson as a Mystic", Westminster Review, CLXXX (1913), pp. 43-49, and C. F. E. Spurgeon, "Mysticism in English Poetry", QR, CCVn (1907), pp. 453-455. 15 See footnote 13, Chapter VII, infra.

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I ever heard on Earth, but seem'd most like A Mixture of the voice of man and beast. ("Armageddon", 11. 55-63) There is the suggestion here that Tennyson has pierced what Nietzsche called the Apollonian veil of illusion and sees that "his Apollonian consciousness was but a thin veil hiding from him the whole Dionysiac realm".14 He has, then, descended into or expanded into a broader consciousness, and his " 'I' thus sounds out of the depth of being." 15 "So stirred", writes Nietzsche, "the individual forgets himself completely",16 and this is just what the poet seems to be saying: I was part of the Unchangeable. It must be allowed that Tennyson's early accounts of such an experience are probably confused and, perhaps, falsified. Granted that he may have possessed unusual powers at this early age, it is less conceivable that he could fully cope with them. Moreover, as a voracious reader, it would be surprising if even Tennyson's most self-revealing early pieces were not alloyed with the notions and ideas of others. Indeed, it is very difficult to view "Armageddon" as a coherent work, and we are not attempting an explication of it, or of any of these early poems. We are content here to point out the passages that unmistakably reflect the unique scope and power of Tennyson's mind. We can observe, then, in "Armageddon", Tennyson's early awareness of the primacy of the self-conscious and its power to expand itself and take in a kind of over-conscious realm. Moreover, this expansion of self is without terminus, since the self can conceive of no limits. And the "natural phenomena" described in the poem are terrible and chaotic, suggesting an irrational Dionysiac realm. There is no suggestion of any possible "worship" of Nature, then, for this mind such as we find in Wordsworth. Rather there is worship of self: Yea! in that hour I could have fallen down Before my own strong soul and worshipped it. 14

Birth of Tragedy, See supra, p. 18. ™ Birth of Tragedy,

p. 28.

15

p. 22.

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Yet "self" is essentially "meaningless", since what we speak of generally as "meaning" is concerned with the relationship of "things" or "ideas" existing in an external world. "Allegory" is a means for communicating "meaning" or sententia, but allegory is impossible without "things" or "qualities". "Armageddon" is not, in any sense, an "allegory" but, rather, the expression of a self-conscious state without a suitable correlative. It is, perhaps, significant that "Armageddon" breaks off at the "suspense of some grand issue", for what issue can there be? Is not this being one with the universe the very definition of "solipsism?" This same expansion of self is explicit in others of Tennyson's early poems.17 In the poem "The Mystic", which appeared in the 1830 volume, Poems Chiefly Lyrical, but was probably written earlier, Tennyson seems to acknowledge the "mystical" quality of this power: He often lying broad awake, and yet Remaining from the body, and apart In intellect and power and will, hath heard Time flowing in the middle of the night, And all things creeping to a day of doom. How could ye know him? Ye were yet within The narrower circle; he had well nigh reached The last, which with a region of white flame, Pure without heat, into a larger air Upburning, and an ether of black blue Investeth and ingirds all other lives.18

Emphasized in this poem is a quantitative hierarchy of the mind. The outer circles described in the poem are not allegorical, representing higher ideas or qualities. They are remoter boundaries to the human consciousness. And both "Armageddon" and "The Mystic" are bad poems in that they attempt to reveal a state of subjective consciousness without an objective correlative. Tenny17

See especially The Devil and the Lady. Dost think that Heaven is local and not rather The Omnipresence of the glorified And liberated spirit - the expansion Of man's depressed and fettered faculties Into Omniscience? 18 "The Mystic" appears in Suppressed Poems of Alfred Tennyson (18301862), ed. J. C. Thompson (New York, 1902).

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son relies here, instead, on vague spatial landscape. He is attempting to suggest scope of mind rather than a peculiar emotion or intense feeling as in the picturesque "Mariana", where he can use pathetic fallacy and a concentration on particular detail to emphasize the "private", particular experience. To John Stuart Mill "Mariana" was everything a poem should be: intense, concentrated, unified by a particular emotion, and conveying principally this dominant feeling. But it is in these unsuccessful early poems, "Armageddon" and "The Mystic", that we see the beginnings of Nietzsche's subjective poet, where the "I" is not a particular "I" with unusually intense feeling, but the universal "I" sounding out of the depth of being. The phrase from "The Mystic", "all things creeping to a day of doom" is especially significant, and sets the tone for most of Tennyson's major poetry, which can be described generally as "doom-ridden". This aspect of Tennyson's thought was already suggested in "Armageddon" with the "suspense of some grand issue". The culmination of this vision of doom is Idylls of the King. Moreover, this acute, immediate awareness of the doom implicit in human nature is to take on the aspects of an enervating deathconsciousness, which has been mistaken so often in Tennyson for a melancholy disposition. Equally suggestive in "The Mystic" is the poet's description of how he hears "time flowing in the middle of the night", which evidences the vitalistic orientation of even his earliest thought. Life is a flowing, vital continuance, which we can know only through a direct apprehension of it, rather than by a reflection back upon it: i.e., through the intuition rather than the intellect. As in "Armageddon", the poet perceives himself to be at the center of a "living" universe or overconsciousness. In a poem written sometime later and published in the 1830 volume Tennyson writes what purports to be a description of the "flowing" philosophy: 1. All thoughts, all creeds, all dreams are true, All visions wild and strange; Man is the measure of all truth

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Unto himself. All truth is change: All men do walk in sleep, and all Have faith in that they dream: For all things are as they seem to all, And all things flow like a stream. 2. There is no rest, no calm, no pause, Nor good nor ill, nor light nor shade, Nor essence nor eternal laws: For nothing is but all is made. But if dream that all these are, They are to me for that I dream; For all things are as they seem to all, And all things flow like a stream.19

We might at first glance conclude, as others have, that this poem derives essentially from Tennyson's reading, especially when taking into account the note he affixed to it: Argal - this very opinion is only true relatively to the flowing philosophers.

But why should Tennyson be at such pains to qualify this poem? Perhaps he wished to dissociate himself from the view expressed in the eyes of his Apostle friends, because he felt that there was in his deepest nature that which was not in full accord with their positive and hopeful spirit of inquiry. It is also possible that the note is meant to assuage those close to him who suspected his religious unorthodoxy.20 But it must be observed here that the young Tennyson wrote no poems on the opinions "relative" to any other species of philosophers, the Platonic for instance. Moreover, the consistency and inclusiveness of the view of life described in this poem suggests in itself how well it corresponds to the poet's own psychology. This becomes clearer when considered in the light of such other early poems as "Armageddon" and "The Mystic", where also "Man is the measure of all truth / Unto himself." 18

Also in Suppressed Poems. See Eleanor Bustin Mattes, In Memoriam: The Way of a Soul (New York, 1951), pp. 90-98; also the chapter on Tennyson's religion in Charles Tennyson, Six Tennyson Essays (London, 1954), pp. 70-124. M

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The "flowing philosophers" are, of course, the Pre-Socratic predecessors of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and especially Bergson, to whom life is an ever becoming flux. For them "all truth is change". We will recall how Nietzsche praised Heraclitus for his apprehension of the fact that the apparent world was the only real world.21 So to Schopenhauer the will or life force in man is the only real thing in itself.22 In the second stanza we find an explicit renunciation of the objectifying, idealizing, or theorizing process, the Socratic or intellectual mode of thought, in the observation that there is no "essence nor eternal laws." The shaping power within the consciousness as well as the unreality of any external world in itself is evidenced in the following lines: For nothing is, but all is made. But if I dream that all these are, They are to me for that I dream . . . We recall Nietzsche's description of the primitive Greek thinker who takes deep delight in creating an Apollonian dream or illusion above the terrible vision of his Dionysiac consciousness: " 'That is a dream, and I want to go on dreaming', and we can infer . . . that he takes deep delight in the contemplation of his dream." 23 From this view of life there follows inevitably the denial of good and evil as objective qualities: There is no rest, no calm, no pause, Nor good nor ill . . . Yet absent the objectified external world, there can be no meaning or purpose in life beyond the simple expansion or growth of personal awareness, which is essentially solipsistic: I am, I can be larger, and still I die. The self within the great sea of consciousness is only a lamp that flickers its hours; and then comes the doom when, as Tennyson wrote so much later in "Lucretius", "momentary man will seem no more a something to himself." That is, selfconsciousness will be inevitably submerged and the self lost in the infinite Dionysiac realm. 21 22 23

Supra, p. 37. Supra, p. 38. Birth of Tragedy, p. 32.

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Nowhere in Tennyson's early poetry is the "vision of futility" more emphatically drawn than in another very early poem of about the same date as "Armageddon": I never liv'd a day, but daily die, I have no real breath; My being is a vacant worthlessness, A carcass in the coffin of this flesh, Pierc'd thro' with loathly worms of utter Death. ("Perdidi Diem", 11. 4-8) 24 This passage suggests the conclusion of Tennyson's very late poem (1889) "Vastness": What is it all, if we all of us end but in being our own corpse-coffins at last? Swallow'd in Vastness, lost in Silence, drown'd in the deeps of a meaningless Past? We can begin to appreciate, then, in just these few comparisons between some of Tennyson's earliest extant poetry and late poems such as "Lucretius" and "Vastness", that the same view of life persists throughout, and its early development is remarkable. The adolescent Tennyson continues in "Perdidi Diem": My soul is but th' eternal mystic lamp, Lighting that charnel damp, Wounding with dreadful days that solid gloom, And shadowing forth th' unutterable tomb, Making a 'darkness visible' Of that which without thee we had not felt As darkness, dark ourselves and loving night, Night-bats into the filtering crevices Hook'd, clinging, darkness-fed, at ease: Night-owls whose organs were not made for light. I must needs pore upon the mysteries Of my own infinite Nature and torment My Spirit with a fruitless discontent. Present here is the Dionysiac death-longing or peace-longing tendency, to give up the ship of selfhood or individuality and 21

In Unpublished

Early

Poems.

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merge in the great deep, what becomes later in "The Lotus Eaters" the wish to be like a "falling fruit". Indeed, it is in the 1832 version of "The Lotus Eaters" and the similarly incantatory "The Hesperides", which first appeared with "The Lotus Eaters", that Tennyson gives his most effective poetic expression of this peace-longing or death-longing tendency. The symbolism of "The Hesperides" has been treated in some detail in a provocative article by G. Robert Stange, in which he views the poem as "a symbolic statement of the situation of the artist", and suggests that "the inner pattern of complexely associated motifs and images may all be seen to lead toward and enforce this core of meaning".25 Stange observes that the antithesis of East and West has an important position in the poem, as in much of Tennyson's poetry,26 and with this, the antithesis of Phospor and Hesper, the morning and evening stars. "Tennyson connects the West", Stange observes, "with images of the sea, of growth, and paradoxically, of death".27 We would add that when viewed against the background of a Dionysiac over-consciousness, this seems no longer so paradoxical. The West, as Stange points out, is also the land of the Lotus Eaters and of the "Sea Fairies".28 Stange further observes that the mystic number five can stand for the five senses and that Tennyson explicitly stated, in "The Palace of Art", that the artist should be lord of the five senses,29 which, we might add, can be extended to signify the facets of consciousness. The golden fruit of wisdom, then, grows in the West, the land of darkness. Going beyond Stange, we might ask here if this golden apple can be taken as the Apollonian illusion that the self creates to sustain itself above the Dionysiac realm. Stange indeed notes that "the senses too belong symbolically to the shadowy world of the unconscious".30 The enemy in the poem is the light of the East, Phosphor, which can be taken roughly to mean the intellect or Socratic mode of thought. The poet is ap25 26 27 28 29 30

Stange, "Tennyson's Garden of Art", pp. 732-733. Ibid., p. 735. Ibid., p. 736. Ibid. Ibid., p. 739. Ibid., p. 740.

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prehensive not of the invasion of the dark realm as such, because the intellect is quite powerless against the fact of consciousness; but, rather, of the theft of the golden apple, perhaps, then, the destruction of the illusion by the forces of enlightenment, and incidentally the values which the illusion may represent, such as virtue, faith, love, and so forth. This, of course, is merely a suggested reading of a poem which is unique in the Tennyson canon for being in a very modern sense "symbolistic". And Stange is probably right in his conclusion that this is mainly an aesthetic poem and that the poet's concern here is with the poetic imagination as such. But it is also apparent that to Tennyson poetic imagination is at the core of our wisdom of life. This is a difficult poem. Tennyson himself was apparently not satisfied with it since he omitted it from further editions, although later expressing some regret for so doing.31 But it is interesting in connection with "The Hesperides" that, while allegory was wholly unfeasible for an expression of the scope and dynamics of the human consciousness, symbolism was at least a possibility, which, however, Tennyson never again pursued to this extent.32 To Tennyson, then, the poet is a man of deeper wisdom with insights to a vaster realm of thought who necessarily dwells on the verge of Night.33 It is understandable, then, that Tennyson should evidence so often a not very subtle resentment at attempts by those of an intellectual bent to enter into any sort of examination or analysis of the poet's mind. The clearest statement of this resentment, again noted by Stange, is to be found in "The Poet's Mind": 31 Memoir, p. 52. Douglas Bush has called "The Hesperides" "the purest piece of romantic magic in Tennyson". "A Personal Note", p. 205. 32 This is not to say that much of Tennyson's subsequent poetry is not more or less "symbolic", but in such an excellent poem as "Tithonus" it is the action and landscape of the myth employed that incorporates the subjective dynamics to be conveyed, rather than a set of "meaningful" symbols; and this is emphatically true of the Idylls of the King. For an account of Tennyson's influence on the French symbolists, and especially on Paul Verlaine, see Marjorie Bowden, Tennyson in France (Manchester, 1930), pp. 100-128. Verlaine was particularly attracted to In Memoriam. ' 3 See Stange, "Tennyson's Garden of Art", p. 735. Stange here observes that for Tennyson "wisdom" has a special meaning.

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Vex not thou the poet's mind With thy shallow wit: Vex not thou the poet's mind; For thou canst not fathom it. And, indeed, "shallow wit" recurs in Tennyson as an uncomplimentary synonym for the intellectual or Socratic mind. We should also emphasize here Tennyson's early preoccupation with time, and with memory as the temporal dimension of the self-consciousness corresponding to space. James Spedding once commented, at Cambridge, that Tennyson was a man who "worshipped" the past,34 and Tennyson, indeed, wrote several early poems dealing specifically with memory.35 If Tennyson's view of life was well evolved in these early years, this terrifying and dark vision, the resisting force had not yet been firmly developed or crystallized in his mind. The "living will" is still only "an infant crying in the night", and, sometimes, less than this. For in some of the early poetry, such as the early version of "The Lotus Eaters", Tennyson seems to give way completely to absorption. Yet there are suggestions of the life force in his early poetry. In an early sonnet he observes: 36 We live but by resistance and the best Of life is but the struggle of the will: Thine unresisting boat shall pause - not still But beaten on both sides by swaying unrest. More significant is the early unpublished fragment, "Sense and Conscience".37 Tennyson here attempts to describe allegorically, with characteristic lack of success, a conflict between Sense, allied with and serving Time, an alliance suggesting absorption of the self, and Conscience, or a force tending to resist this absorption. Arthur J. Carr has taken this conflict between sense and conscience to be central in Tennyson's writing,38 but he views this 34

Charles Tennyson, p. 155. See the boyhood poem "Memory" in Unpublished Early Poems, as well as the "Ode to Memory" in all collected works. 38 Unpublished Early Poems, p. 66. 37 In Unpublished Early Poems. 84 Carr, p. 368. 35

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conflict as being essentially a psychological "subconscious" dilemma. However, as should be evident from "Armageddon", "The Mystic", and "The Hesperides", Tennyson was very much aware of this struggle, and, moreover, the struggle was one that went deeper than Freudian psychology. It was one of will striving to maintain the self above the dark, boundless sea of the overconscious, and the allegory of sense and conscience is a most imperfect and limited approximation of the whole tragic conflict. Viewing the conflict in this limited sense only, Carr concludes very wrongly that Tennyson's "theme is frustration".39 It is rather "despair", the despair of boundless power and limitless possibility going nowhere; and, indeed, as we shall see, Tennyson's most agonizing moments are those in which he most clearly realizes the scope of his and man's power. Frustration is impossible to Tennyson. Man wants nothing, for there is no "thing" to want. And there is no real doubt or "anxiety" in Tennyson's mind that "momentary man" will eventually, inevitably "reel back into the beast and be no more", and that that ever climbing wave, poised always to fall, will indeed fall, submerging self, ego, and will. To the mentally farsighted Tennyson this doom is always immanent, and he has no sublimating faculty. Neither an orthodox religious schema, nor a make-believe world of scientific facts and progress, nor immediate issues of the day, could shield him from his ultimate vision. He lives in the West, in the realm of Hesper, on the verge of night. In "The Poet", published in 1830, we not only see in Tennyson's conception of the poet a confirmation of these views, but also the first definite statement about the role of the "will". The poet is born in a "golden clime", which suggests the golden fruit in "The Hesperides", and the wisdom of the will. More important is Tennyson's account of the poet's vision: He saw thro' life and death, thro' good and ill, He saw thro' his own soul The marvel of the everlasting will, An open scroll Before him lay. »» Ibid., p. 381.

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Not only is the poet's wisdom explicitly equated in this poem with the "marvel of the everlasting will", but his vision is conceived of as a "seeing through" of things, even of good and ill. Ideas or qualities of good and evil, recalling again Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, are only illusions; the will is the only reality. But Tennyson does not, in this poem, try to incorporate the actual dynamics of the will. The "will" appears here as an explicit concept rather than as an embodied vital force. It is in "The Two Voices", written in 1883 but not published till 1842,40 that we first come across the actual reality of the "will" as a resisting force, very faintly present it is true, in that "little whisper silver clear" which we can take to be the "living will" in embryo. Perhaps the most interesting feature about "The Two Voices" is that there are more than two voices involved: there are three. The first is that "still small voice" that initially addresses the poet and tells him it were "better not to be". This is the voice of conscious fact, of Dionysos with his wisdom of Silenus, if you will. The second voice is that of the poet attempting to refute by argument the suicidal purport of the Dionysiac vision. It is the Socratic or intellectual voice, and its optimistic arguments are all objective, utilizing a full assortment of rationales ranging from scientific faith in progress to Platonic ideas of immortality. But from whatever external source the argument is drawn, it is feeble and impotent against the subjective fact. The third voice (actually described as the second in the poem) enters at the conclusion, and this voice simply bolsters the poet against the overpowering vision of futility. Yet it is significant that this hopeful, rather than optimistic, voice "may not speak" of what it knows. It is no more than "a little hint to solace woe". It is a "secret hope" and succeeds in rescuing the self from suicide or surrender to the Dionysiac wisdom of Silenus. To the Dionysiac voice the poet's first reply is simple: Let me not cast in endless shade What is so wonderfully made. 40

See Alfred Tennyson, Works, note on "The Two Voices", I, p. 353.

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The voice, without arguing or concluding, merely describes in return the phenomenon of the wonderful dragon-fly, who flies like a "living flash of light". There is no need of the conclusion that it flies, shines, and then flies and shines no more. The intellect tries to refute the implication on evolutionary grounds, with the "objective knowledge" that Nature ran through five cycles before it created its crown and glory, man. The Dionysiac voice again does not deign to argue. The subjective fact is enough. This voice does not call upon the poet to reason, only to see: Thereto the silent voice replied: "Self-blinded are you by your pride: Look up thro' night; the world is wide. 'This truth within thy mind rehearse, That in a boundless universe Is boundless better, boundless worse.' The human consciousness is boundless, and, being boundless, progress is an impossible concept; and even growth is futile. The consciousness is "boundless better" because its expansive possibility is infinite; boundless worse because it never gets anywhere. Thus the despairing voice does return the argument of the intellect by cleverly, effortlessly turning the scientific theory back on itself. 'Think you this mould of hopes and fears Could find no statelier than his peers In yonder hundred million spheres?' But the real import of these statements lies not in the argument but in the observation on the doomed self being eventually "cancelled in the world of sense". The intellect then suggests the progress of humanity and how the day of "human power" grows. The retort is again an appeal to the discouraging vision of infinity. 'Forerun thy peers, thy time, and let Thy feet, millenniums hence, be set In midst of knowledge, dream'd not yet. 'Thou hast not gain'd a real height, Nor art thou nearer to the light, Because the scale is infinite.'

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One and ten thousand bear exactly the same relation to infinity. This fact not only renders the concept of external progress invalid, but also that of subjective growth. Suppose the self can and does grow or expand? It is still only itself and still dying. The poet discards this line of "reasoning" and cries in despair: 'Hard task to pluck resolve', I cried, 'From emptiness and the waste wide Of that abyss . . . ' The intellect then recalls youthful enthusiasm and attempts to bring it to his defense, with its glorious valor, and high spirit of inquiry, the dream of youth. The dark voice replies that youthful enthusiasm is only part of the natural process as evidenced in the flower as well as man: the flower falls and the implication is again clear. Then comes the check, the change, the fall, Pain rises up, old pleasures pall. There is one remedy for all. The voice thus prompts the self toward suicide, and we can detect that same seductive force at work which is later so successful in Tennyson's "Lucretius". There is no dignity or Roman valor in crying in the night. 'Cease to wail and brawl! Why inch by inch to darkness crawl? There is one remedy for all.' The intellect then argues that even if he has no higher vision of eternal things or immortality, yet others have - the saints - with their "supernatural" visions or revelations. To this the Dionysiac voice gives a scornful and Lucretian twist: in the saint the "elements were kindlier mix'd". The intellect then turns to the Platonic arguments, attempting to evade the purport of the tragic conscious fact through logic and theory. Like Plato, in the Phaedo, the intellect attempts to argue death down by demonstrating that we cannot prove that the dead are dead! Apart from the fact that the burden of proof would appear to be with the proponent of immortality, logic has

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nothing to do with truth, and certainly death and nature are unmoved by argument. Yet, switching over to the positive side of Platonism, the intellect observes that man does have an "idea" of Eternity (or at least a word for Eternity): "He names the name Eternity". The very phrasing here suggests that Tennyson, like Nietzsche, viewed Socratic systems as verbal, and "ideas" as simply "names".41 'That type of Perfect in his mind In Nature can he nowhere find. He sows himself on every wind.' The Platonic argument is, of course, that if we have an "idea" of Eternity then there must be the reality of Eternity. It follows that if the soul is immortal it must have had no beginning, and the Dionysiac voice asks the intellect if it can remember life before birth. Again reflecting Plato, the intellect suggests that we may have glimpses or intimations of such an immortality although our memories are poor and cannot recall definitely or clearly. The possibility of reincarnation is also suggested. But the Dionysiac voice is as little impressed with Plato as with man's glorious evolution: The still voice laugh'd 'I talk', said he, 'Not with thy dreams. Suffice it thee Thy pain is a reality.' Then the poet drops the Socratic mask and prepares the way for the appearance of the "little whisper". He evidences an awareness of a life force: 'Tis life, whereof our nerves are scant, Oh life, not death, for which we pant; More life, and fuller, that I want.' 41

See The Portable Nietzsche, p. 483: "Indeed, nothing has possessed a more naive power of persuasion than the error concerning being, as it has been formulated by the Eleatics, for example. After all, every word we say and every sentence speak in its favor. Even the opponents of the Eleatics still succumbed to the seduction of their concept of being: Democritus, among others, when he invented his atom. 'Reason' in language - oh, what an old deceptive female she is! I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar."

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The vision of boundless darkness is now opposed by the will to live, and with this will comes the voice of hope. The self has been defeated decisively in argument, and the intellect has proved a poor support for it. But a power or force of resistance has made its appearance. Life is now "endurable". It is not, however, "meaningful". Aubrey de Vere wrote of "The Palace of Art": In its extreme subjectivity it reminds us of German genius; but though its scope is a philosophical and spiritual one, its handling is as strikingly objective; and it consists almost wholly of images which though subordinated to moral, not material ends, yet possess a vividness and a concentrated power rarely found elsewhere, and reminds us of Matthew Arnold's assertion that German Literature, however, profound it may be in thought, is cumbrous and clumsy in style compared with English. Its theme is the danger resulting from that "Art Heresy" of modern times, which substitutes the worship of Art for its own sake in place of that reverence which man should feel for it, only when it knows its place, and is content to minister at the altars of Powers greater than itself, viz. Nature and Religion.42 This commentary is interesting in that it is one of the few actual comparisons of Tennyson with anything German made in his own day. However, it is more important to observe that de Vere took the "art Heresy" to be the central theme of the "Palace", and this has been the general view since the poem was first connected with Richard Trench's warning to Tennyson: "Alfred, we cannot live by Art." 43 In his biography, Charles Tennyson describes the poem as follows: Its aim was to present allegorically the condition of a mind which, in the love of beauty and consciousness of intellectual power, had lost sight of its relation to man and God.44 These and other similar statements about the poem are largely true, but also misleading. For from the proposition "we cannot live by Art" it is all too easy to assume that opposition between 42

Memoir, p. 869. Charles Tennyson, p. 131. Ibid. See also James Spedding, .Reviews and Discussions 1879), p. 189.

43

44

(London,

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art for art's sake and the poet's responsibility to society. Yet while it is true, as we shall see, that many of Tennyson's friends among the Apostles were committed to a "moral aesthetic" 45 that would make the artist responsible to society, the idea of such a responsibility or the shirking of it is not a part of the poem. The poem, although making reference to an outside world, goes no further than the awareness that the poet's soul or self cannot live stagnant and contained. It is for its own sake, not the world's, that it decides to leave the "Palace". There can be no doubt that the subject of the poem is very literally a "Palace of Art", rather than a more inclusive and suggestive Isle of the Hesperides. It is a poem ostensibly dealing with an aesthetic problem. Yet viewed in the context of what has been observed about subjectivism in general and Tennyson's own nature, the poem takes on a new dimension. For to Tennyson to talk about the role of the poet was to talk about man and life. Apart from the art imagery the poem is not far removed from the self-worship of "Armageddon". No nightingale delighteth to prolong Her low preamble all alone, More than my soul to hear her echo'd song Throb thro' the ribbed stone; Singing and murmuring in her feastful mirth, Joying to feel herself alive, Lord over Nature, Lord of the visible earth, Lord of the senses five . . . But for the self even to sustain itself in the vaster sea of consciousness it must struggle to stay afloat by pushing against the non-ego element of the consciousness. So Fichte, the most subjective of philosophers, posited the realm of the non-ego in order to satisfy the needs of the ego,w providing it with something to struggle against and grow into. Otherwise self-knowledge is only stagnation of self, and the light that makes a "darkness visible" 46

The "moral aesthetics" of the Apostles will be discussed somewhat further in Chapter i n , infra. See Jerome Hamilton Buckley, "Tennyson - The Two Voices", in The Victorian Temper (Cambridge, Mass., 1951). 46 See supra, especially footnote 39 of Chapter I.

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must soon be suffocated. To this the Palace of Art is ultimately reduced: A spot of dull stagnation, without light Or Power of movement, seem'd my soul Mid onward-sloping motions infinite Making for one sure goal. The one sure goal is death. What is wanting is motion, or, in short, life itself. The whisper of protest opposing the Dionysiac voice in "The Two Voices" was a voice of resistance of the will to live. In "The Palace of Art" we have suggestions of the active and dynamic aspect of the will, and how it must be not only a will to live, but a "living will". And so the larger conflict reflected in this poem is that of private sensation versus vitalism, the author of "Mariana" versus the future author of Idylls of the King. The self, however beautifully it may clothe itself, cannot drift and survive. It must strive. Finding its own power is not enough; and, indeed, this awareness of power is the most agonizing moment described by Tennyson in the conclusion of the poem. There is a full realization of the soul's own undreamt of, seemingly godlike powers, but these are not self-sustaining and can be enjoyed only in an unbearable loneliness, with death still lord of all: As in strange lands a traveller walking slow, In doubt and great perplexity of mind, A little before moon-rise hears the low Moan of an unknown sea; And knows not if it be thunder, or a sound Of rocks thrown down, or one deep cry Of great wild beasts; then thinketh, 'I have found 47 A new land, but I die.'

47

"The Palace of Art" was considerably revised for the 1842 volume and could be treated in the following chapter on revision. But although much descriptive material was trimmed in the revised work and the poem as a whole made more decorous, the meaning or intention was not essentially changed. It is, in fact, the 1842 text that we are using here.

Ill SILENCE AND REVISION, 1833-1842

1. The period in Tennyson's life between 1833 and 1842 is often described as the "ten-year silence". In 1830 Tennyson published his first volume of poetry, Poems Chiefly Lyrical. In the next year his father died, after long years of mental and physical suffering, and Alfred left Cambridge.1 In 1832 a second volume of poems appeared, dated 1833.2 In 1833 Arthur Hallam died. Throughout this three-year period there appeared several reviews of Tennyson's two volumes, some unjust, most of them discouraging. Tennyson was not to publish again until 1842 when two volumes appeared containing many of the earlier published poems much revised, and many notable new works including the highly acclaimed "Ulysses". The 1842 volumes brought Tennyson a somewhat more favorable reception which was to grow steadily from this time on. Besides surer craftsmanship, the 1842 volumes apparently exhibited some quality that the earlier volumes had lacked - perhaps, a moral fiber. Carlyle remarked later that it was "Ulysses" that first convinced him that Tennyson was a "true poet". 3 In 1833, immediately after Hallam's death, Tennyson wrote "The Two Voices", which, as we have observed, is a preview of what is to come. In Memoriam was almost entirely composed during this ten-year period and can be viewed as a more thorough and further reaching development of the struggle with the "vision 1 8 8

See especially Charles Tennyson, pp. 46-100. This second volume was actually published in December of 1832. Memoir, p. 869.

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of futility", differing from "The Two Voices" most significantly in the strength of the resistance and the affirmation involved. It, too, is a poem of high morality, but not morality in a conventional good-and-evil sense. The same development or self-strengthening process is evidenced in the revisions appearing in 1842 of poems previously published in 1830 and 1832. The moral tone is more pronounced, but, again, the term "moral" can be misleading here. Tennyson has not solved any "problems" or found any given "purpose in life". The revisions have been explained in many ways, and the "silence" variously interpreted.4 The change in his poetry, which many have taken to be simply away from the sensuous and emotional and toward the moral and didactic, has been attributed to the influence of adverse criticism,5 a catering to popular tastes, or a new leaning toward "moral aesthetics" on Tennyson's part, perhaps influenced by certain of the Cambridge Apostles or Carlyle. Yet however we choose to view this period, it is undeniably one of the most significant internal developments and we would choose to consider it a period of retrenching and strengthening out of which comes a clearer and stronger affirmation of the power of the "will" as a sustaining force. This is Tennyson's "center of indifference".6 The influence of Cambridge and the Cambridge Apostles on Tennyson has been greatiy over-emphasized. Fausset has rightly observed that Tennyson was not one of the guiding lights of this extraordinary group;7 but it does not follow that he was a servile follower. The dominant spirit of the Apostles, the spirit of inquiry, was not Tennyson's and could not be. His deep subjective bias precluded it; his doom-ridden vision of futility actually opposed it. Many of Tennyson's closest friends were Apostles, and, for the most part, they stayed close to him throughout their lives. Without exception they held him in the highest esteem as poet, 4

See, for example, T. R. Lounsbury, op. cit.; Edgar Finley Shannon, Jr., op. cit., pp. 33-96; Joyce Green, op. cit.; William D . Paden, "Tennyson and the Reviewers", op. cit. 5 See especially Shannon, pp. 60-96; also Fausset, pp. 96-127. « See Carlyle, I, pp. 135-145. 7 Fausset, pp. 17-38.

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thinker, and man. But even from a cursory examination of the correspondence of the Apostles and other friends, it is easily detected that Tennyson was always considered as something apart.8 He is frequently mentioned in these letters and commentaries, and considered even by this remarkable group as a person set off from the rest of the world, and, in Blakesley's words: "Truly one of the mighty of the earth." Their friendship was of great importance to Tennyson, haunted by his deep insights and terrifying vision, and he relished the light, optimism and purposefulness that emanated from them. But he appears not to have been a very active participant in their debates, and, indeed, was asked to resign when he refused to read in turn his assigned essay.9 This difference was apparently sensed, though not explicitly acknowledged by the closest of his friends among the Apostles, Arthur Hallam; and nowhere is it more strikingly suggested than in a letter from Hallam to Brookfield in which the writer speaks of his love for Emily Tennyson, the poet's sister: Every shadow of - not doubt, but uneasiness, or what else may be a truer name for the feeling that Alfred's language sometimes casts over my hopes - is destroyed in the full blaze of conscious delight with which I perceive that she loves me.10 Hallam is not referring to any specific words of Tennyson but certainly to what the poet saw in himself and could not wholly hide, that "doom that ever poised itself to fall". It should also be emphasized that Tennyson was not a companionable thinker. This is not to say that he was not an avid conversationalist; but his deeper thoughts did not proceed from the interplay and commerce of "ideas". He was a brooder, and he shaped in silence whatever order he could make out of the chaos of consciousness. F. D. Maurice, who attended Cambridge a few years prior to Tennyson and was perhaps the most eminent and influential of the Apostles, owned a similarly retiring nature 11 and seems to have regarded the debates and intellectual exercises 8

See especially Brookfield. • Ibid., p. 314. '» Ibid., p. 150. 11 Ibid., pp. 216-220.

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of the Society as a disintegrating influence: "On one occasion he said he thought some of them ought to thank God for having passed through a debating Society with any part of their souls undestroyed." 12 For Tennyson there was no danger of this, for the integrity of self was too pronouncedly a part of his nature. What he heard and assimilated from the eminent minds with whom he was early associated,13 was, like his considerable reading, only peripheral to the struggle within his own consciousness. Carlyle's observation on him, certainly with reference to a time within the ten-year period of silence, is the most acute. He depicts the poet "as being a man solitary and sad, as certain men are, dwelling in an element of gloom, carrying a bit of Chaos about him, in short, which he is manufacturing into Cosmos". 14 Moreover, it is important to appreciate the fact that neither the Apostles nor the larger group of Tennyson's notable friends were a homogenous lot. Even their views on poetry and the role of the poet in society, in some instances carefully elaborated theories and in others only vague notions, differed strikingly. It follows that their opinions of Tennyson as a poet should differ also, that they liked and encouraged different facets of his genius and proposed different courses for him to follow. Trench's observation that "we cannot live by Art" 15 is a fairly common sentiment among them, but the "moral aesthetic" that it implies varies from individual to individual. Shelley's "unacknowledged legislators of the world", Carlyle's poet as hero, and Wordsworth's instructional bard are at least three distinct species of moral poets. The first implies an avant-garde enlightenment; the second, a conscious shaping of man's destiny; the third, the revealing of eternal verities and virtues in man and nature. The first is radical and intellectual; the second, conservative and vitalistic; the third, liberal and humanistic. There appears little of the moral element in any form in the 12

Ibid., p. 221. For an account of Tennyson's associations in London and Cheltenham see Charles Tennyson, pp. 166-210. 14 Memoir, p. 156. 15 See supra, p. 72. 13

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16

aesthetics of Monckton Milnes, and the Apostles were by no means unanimous in their advocacy of "moral aesthetics" of any kind. Apart from the Apostles, the influences of Mill and Carlyle cannot be ignored. In Mill's review of Tennyson's early volumes which appeared in 1835, we find, as we would expect, definite praise for Tennyson's genius at scene-painting in words.17 Like Hallam, Mill approved most of poems in the extreme picturesque mode such as "Mariana". Yet it is important to observe that in conclusion Mill advised the young poet to study "philosophy", which would seem to indicate that Mill believed that Tennyson was by constitution more a poet of culture than a poet of nature. 18 He must see that his theory of life and the world be no chimera of the brain, but the well-grounded result of solid and mature thinking; - he must cultivate, and with no half devotion, philosophy as well as poetry. 19

Tennyson did not know Mill personally, and there is no reason to believe that he was especially influenced by Mill's review, except, perhaps, insofar as Mill's views were consistent with those of Hallam. Tennyson did meet Carlyle during this ten-year period, and the two were to remain friends for the remainder of Carlyle's life. The possible influence of Carlyle's philosophy on Tennyson has been frequently suggested,20 and indeed the heroic vitalism of Sartor Resartus and On Heroes and Hero Worship is akin to the "living will" in Tennyson's psychology. Carlyle's concepts of the poet as hero and of poetry as musical thought 21 would seem 19

Brookfield, p. 234. John Stuart Mill, "Tennyson's Poems", The London Review, I (1835), pp. 402-424. 18 See Mill's distinction, footnote 18, Chapter I, supra. 19 "Tennyson's Poems", p. 423. 20 See Mattes, pp. 64-70; D. T. Starnes, "The Influence of Carlyle upon Tennyson", The Texas Review, VI (1921), pp. 316-336. 21 See Carlyle, "The Hero as Poet", V, pp. 83-84: "Poetry, therefore, we will call musical thought. The Poet is he who thinks in that manner. At bottom, it turns still on power of intellect; it is a man's sincerity and depth of vision that makes him a Poet. See deep enough, and you see musically; the heart of Nature being everywhere music, if you can only reach it." See also Frederick William Roe, Thomas Carlyle as a Critic 17

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to apply to Tennyson more than to any other contemporary poet. Yet it would be the greatest of errors to attach great importance to such an influence. Tennyson did not meet Carlyle, in all probability, until 1839 22 after almost the whole of In Memoriam was completed and probably a great part of the revisions. There is no evidence that "Ulysses", the poem first published in 1842 which Carlyle was so understandably fond of, was influenced by him. Tennyson stated explicitly in later life that "about poetry or art Carlyle knew nothing. I would never have taken his word about either." 23 And, indeed, with reference to Carlyle's own concept of the hierarchy of human minds, there is no indication throughout their long acquaintance that Carlyle ever presumed to look down on Tennyson, or that Tennyson looked up to or considered Carlyle in any sense a guiding light. A comprehensive study of Tennyson's diversified reading,24 his close association with so many of the most eminent men of completely divergent philosophies, and his unusually accurate and complete scientific knowledge,25 should indicate at least that he was not influenced greatly by any particular source or faction, and, at most, that his mind was actually more comprehensive than most of its sources. He assimilated rapidly and completely what was useful to him; but, as we have tried to emphasize, his concern was not with "ideas" or "systems", but with a direct confrontation with the fact of self-consciousness. Such development as there is then during this "ten-year silence" is one of internal strengthening and resolve which can be traced in the work completed in this period. This work includes revisions and new poems published in 1842 and In Memoriam. We will discuss In Memoriam in Chapter Four. The remainder of this chapter is devoted to consideration of the 1842 volumes. of Literature (New York, 1910) and Alba H. Warren, English Theory, 1825-1865 (Princeton, 1950), pp. 79-92. 22 See Charles Tennyson, p. 176. 23 Memoir, p. 698. 24 Best treated by Charles Tennyson. 25 Which so impressed Thomas Huxley.

Poetic

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Several of the poems appearing in the 1830 and 1832 volumes were very considerably revised for the 1842 edition. A great part of the recent concern with these revisions has been directed at an attempt to ascertain to what extent Tennyson was influenced by the early reviews of his work.26 It is not suggested here that this is a wrong track investigation, but merely a short track - one that cannot take us so very far toward an understanding of Tennyson's development. There are, as we have suggested, other rather obvious external influences which cannot be so easily measured as the more or less specific strictures of the reviewers: for example, the influence of the "moral aesthetics" of the Apostles and other friends,27 the influence of Hallam particularly and his aesthetics of the "picturesque",28 and the death of Hallam and its effect on Tennyson's psychology. But to concentrate on any one of these influences would constitute a still greater distortion. For any comprehensive and intensive reading of Tennyson's poems, and especially the poems of his boyhood and adolescence, must suggest that Tennyson's real development or change during this period of silence and revision was largely internally motivated, for which motivation there is no possible external evidence except what may be induced from his 1842 poems and from the changes he did make in the earlier poems. 2.

Since so little is known of Tennyson's activities during this period, in reaching conclusions regarding his internal or spiritual development we must apply a method analogous to the jurist's res ipsa loquitor and let the results speak as well for themselves as they can. About the revisions it may be possible to make some cautious generalizations. The poems revised and reprinted in the 1842 volumes appear on the whole to be rather less "picturesque" than their originals in that there seems to be a shifting in emphasis from the "descriptive" to the "dramatic" element. This shifting of perspective is well illustrated in "The Lady of Shallott", perhaps 26

"

28

See footnote 4 of this chapter. See Buckely. See McLuhan.

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the most extensively altered of all the earlier works. The nature of these changes, granted that many are merely matters of style and decorum and evidence a greater maturity in these matters, considered together with Tennyson's refusal to accede to many of the specific strictures of the reviewers, suggests that he had more in mind than simply making this a better poem. The conclusion of the earlier version reads as follows: 29 They crossed themselves, their stars they blest Knight, minstel, abbot, squire and guest, There lay a parchment on her breast, That puzzled more than all the rest The well-fed wits at Camelot. "The chain is broken utterly, Draw near and fear not - this is I, The Lady of Shalott". In 1842 this was changed to: Who is this? and what is here? And in the lighted palace near Died the sound of royal cheer; And they crossed themselves for fear, All the knights at Camelot: But Launcelot mused a little space; He said, "She has a lovely face; God in his mercy lend her grace, The Lady of Shalott". Some scholars have taken this new conclusion as evidence of Tennyson's acceptance of specific criticism directed at the early conclusion and particularly John Stuart Mill's statement in the London Review in which he called the conclusion "lame and impotent". But such a concession on Tennyson's part is not so obvious as might appear at first glance. Mill actually says that this is "a poor lame conclusion, where no conclusion was required".30 Yet the new ending is just as much a conclusion as the former. It is simply a different conclusion, even as the revised poem is a different poem. 29

The texts of the 1832 version (designated 1833) used here are from The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson, ed. John Churton Collins (London, 1900). 30 Mill, "Tennyson's Poems", p. 413.

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31

We can judge from Mill's aesthetic writings what was behind his criticism, apart from the fact that the early conclusion was simply bad. Implicit in Mill's statement is his view that a poem ought not to have a reflective conclusion at all, that it is the expression of immediate feeling or sensation, and here Mill's views are in consonance with those of Hallam.32 Yet Tennyson's revised conclusion is every bit as reflective as the former, probably more so, but different, and it gives the poem a completely different direction and perspective. And it is not only the conclusion that suggests this turn; those other significant changes corroborate it. The early version of the poem is Shalott-centric, roads go to it (that is, from Camelot). The role of the reaper or observer is played up by placing the reaper stanza as the last in Part One. In the early version the reaper is more properly part of the landscape of Shalott; in the later version he is much more the observer from an external world, an agent of the external. Moreover, in the conclusion of the 1832 poem the lady attests to her own isolation and uniqueness; her experience is prominent. In the later version it is the comment of the world (Launcelot) that is emphasized. The poem has thus been cast in a wider perspective and the internal world juxtaposed to something outside of it. It is generally more dramatic and has more movement.83 The conclusion is mildly ironic and a preview to the extensive use Tennyson was to make of irony i n Idylls

of the

King. 3.

"The Lotos Eaters" is not the same kind of poem as "The Lady of Shalott", not so picturesque for one thing; it is, nonetheless, a description of a subjective psychic tendency, though of a different and more fundamental sort than the dream-weaving of "The Lady of Shalott". It was James Spedding who suggested that the poem dealt with the "deterioration of moral and intellectual nature", and he highly commended the revisions which seemed to point up 31

See See 33 See (1838), lifeless, 32

footnote 18, Chapter I. footnote 19, Chapter I. the review by J. S. Dwight in the Christian Examiner, XXIII pp. 305-327, in which he finds Tennyson's poetry beautiful but p. 325.

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34

the moral issue. The poem is undoubtedly moral, although not in a didactic sense; but it does not deal with the "intellect" at all. As we have seen, Tennyson is seldom concerned with the mind as a calculator or speculator, the badge of the "well-fed" or "foolish" wit, but rather simply as a consciousness, differentiated by size or scope, to which purpose is not given.35 Why should we mount the ever mounting wave? No reason. But the human selfconsciousness, in Nietzschean terms, has fundamentally two opposing tendencies, one to merge or be lost in the chaotic forces of nature or a larger consciousness, to disintegrate into the whole totality of being, what can be called death-longing; the other, to resist disintegration or annihilation, to maintain somehow the identity, individuality, or essential life of the ego; not to yield; what, as we have seen, many nineteenth-century thinkers conceived of as the "will" as opposed to the intellect; and which to many is a more important "mental" faculty than the intellect.36 In "Ulysses", first published in 1842, Tennyson wrote the credo of the unyielding will, as much earlier in the first version of "The Lotos Eaters" he had described the death-longing or peacelonging tendency: i.e., to become one with nature, to be like a ripening and falling fruit. There is no more "reason" for Ulysses's determination than there is "reason" against the allurement of the Lotos. Yet, from an egoistic standpoint, "The Lotos Eaters" (first version) is a poem of weakness, and it is entirely appropriate that in the revised work, which appeared with "Ulysses" in 1842, Tennyson should subtly convert the poem into another appeal to the "will", this time by indirection, perhaps, even, a strange sort of irony. Essentially the important revisions are like those in "The Lady of Shalott". They change the direction and purpose of the poem by opposing the subjective experience involved, Lotoseating or peace-longing, to another force; and this is accomplished primarily by building up the other force, the striving life, even though painting it in rationally unavoidable terms of futility. The 34

James Spedding, Reviews and Discussions, p. 284. See the above discussion of the subjectivist's attitude toward the intellect, pp. 37-41. 38 See supra, pp. 38-45. 35

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inclusion of the sixth stanza in the Choric Song is the most overt instance of this opposition. It deals more fully with the life left behind, as the previous stanzas had not: yet, as an objective reality, the foresaken life must appear to the reason as a futile illusion filled with merely posited and ultimately meaningless purpose. So the appeal of the forsaken world must be rationally rejected by the Lotos Eaters: There is confusion worse than death, Trouble on trouble, pain on pain, Long labor unto aged breath, Sore task to hearts worn out by many wars And eyes grown dim with gazing on the pilot-stars. (1842, 11. 83-87) These pilot-stars are the Apollonian illusions with which the "will" persists in identifying the ego. These illusions cannot stand on rational or Socratic thought.37 The Lotos Eaters cannot answer their questions of futility when faced with the overwhelming seductive force of the dark and chaotic Dionysiac realm, because to the simple consciousness there is no answer, only what the shallow wits can speculate on. We cannot see purpose, and the only resistance to disintegration by the deep thinking man is by the strength of the will. And what Tennyson has done in this sixth stanza, and in the last stanza, is to make a subtle appeal to the will of the reader. This is, if you will, moralizing, but non-didactic moralizing; for it is conducted on a level of thought below the rational or didactic. Such expressions as "careless of mankind" (in the last stanza) or "let what is broken so remain" (in the sixth stanza), which have no counterparts in the earlier version, are provoking. The suggestion of being "careless of mankind", or even "careless" in the abstract, is an affront to the will; for it is a blow to the illusion of human value it strives to maintain. Tennyson thus prods the will of the reader even while the will of the Lotos Eater is being seduced or annihilated by the overwhelming non-rational argument of the rerum natura. 37

Supra, p. 43.

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For they lie beside their nectar, and the bolts are hurl'd Far below them in the valleys, and the clouds are lightly curl'd Round their golden houses, girdled with the gleaming world; Where they smile in secret, looking over wasted lands, Blight and famine, plague and earthquake, roaring deeps and fiery sands, Clanging fights, and flaming towns, and sinking ships, and praying hands. But they smile, they find a music centred in a doleful song Steaming up, a lamentation and an ancient tale of wrong, Like a tale of little meaning tho' the words are strong . . . (1842, 11. 111-119)

Meaning itself is not given-, meaning is speculative or Socratic, superimposed by the intellect on the simple fact of consciousness. Tennyson is preeminently a poet of fact, and his best moralizing, rather than being in the nature of an ethical "meaningful" system in the manner of Shelley, is merely the fortifying of the faculty of will against the overwhelming darkness, or "vastness". Thus by indirection, Tennyson achieves in the final "Lotos Eaters" an effect completely different from that of the earlier version. There the Lotos Eater yields and will not wander more, and so does the reader experientially. In the later poem the Lotos Eater reaches the same conclusion, but the reader cannot quite. 4.

What then can we conclude from these revisions about Tennyson's development? First, it can be inferred from the revisions of "The Lady of Shalott", by which that poem is rendered less a purely descriptive impression and more a dramatic and ironic study, that Tennyson was moving away from that "picturesque" or highly descriptive mode advocated and praised by Hallam and implied in Mill. A similar toning down of the descriptive element is evidenced in the revisions of other republished poems including "Mariana in the South" and "Oenone". 38 Indeed, the inspiration 38 For the early versions see The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson.

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for this kind of poem may have actually been Hallam, since Tennyson's most notable achievements in this vein, "Mariana", "Oenone", and "Recollections of the Arabian Nights" (all praised by Hallam) were written and published during that period when Tennyson was closest to Hallam. Tennyson's juvenilia do not particularly reflect this descriptive, even decorative tendency. The original "Lady of Shalott" was written probably right after Hallam's review of the 1830 poems appeared (1831) and is clearly a poem in consonance with Hallam's theory of poetry. Indeed, it is said to be based on an Italian novella,39 and we know that Hallam was preoccupied with medieval and renaissance Italian literature and derived his aesthetic views in part from Dante.40 Apart from this inference, that Tennyson is moving away from the "picturesque" mode, little can be deduced from the revisions of "The Lady of Shalott" beyond the fact that the broader perspective and ironic treatment in the later version indicates Tennyson's denial of the intrinsic value of the non-universal subjective experience, "the private experience" basic to Mill's conception of the purpose of poetry. If anything, the later version is more dramatic and narrative, perhaps more "vital", as is the later "Oenone", and Mill felt that the "narrative" was a non-poetic primitive element that might actually detract from the poetic experience.41 If Tennyson seems to be turning from the picturesque (private sensation) mode of poetry, is he turning toward "moral aesthetics" and the social responsibility of the poet? Here we must look to "The Lotos Eaters", a poem that does not reflect Hallam's influence but is rather conceived in the manner of "The Hesperides". We have already suggested that the 1842 "Lotos Eaters" is a "moral" poem in a unique and non-didactic sense. But this kind of "moralizing" is of a quite different sort from that advocated by the moral aestheticians of the age, by several of the Apostles and others of Tennyson's friends; for it does not involve responsibility to society for the sake of society. The purposes of all social 38 40 41

See note to "The Lady of Shalott", Works, I, p. 352. See Hallam, pp. 113-130, 213-278, 285-291. Dissertations, etc., pp. 91-92.

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and intellectual organizations are ultimately futile to Tennyson. But for the ego to submit to futility and chaos is to be lost or annihilated; the i AM must struggle to maintain itself, and its only hope is, as in "Ulysses", strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. The passages in "The Lotos Eaters" that refer back to the active world do not impute any reality or given purpose to that world, but only a futile striving toward illusory ends. And in "Ulysses" the speaker is in a sense actually forsaking responsibility to "society" though affirming striving qua striving. Even in "Locksley Hall", another new poem in the 1842 volumes, where the speaker apparently becomes involved in his intellectual "speculations" of what the world will be, it is obviously not the argument he builds up that determines him to forge onward. For Tennyson never manifests any real faith in an external world. This is strikingly underscored in the most characteristically Tennysonian phrase in that poem: Howsoever, these things be [Italics supplied] So in "Ulysses" the speaker's resolution is not buoyed up by faith in any external goal: It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, And see the great Achilles, whom we knew. [Italics supplied] In both "Locksley Hall" and "Ulysses" the "will" moves on not because but in spite of. In "Love and Duty", also appearing in 1842 and a poem perhaps more autobiographical than the rest,42 out of the despair of hopeless love Tennyson resolves: Live - yet live Shall sharpest pathos blight us, knowing all Life needs for life is possible to will — Even Tennyson's fullest manifestation of the living will, King Arthur, was to him a mind "clouded with doubts", who knew not whether he be King.43 42

See Charles Tennyson, pp. 176-183. See "The Passing of Arthur", 11. 145-146 and 1. 426. This aspect of the Idylls will be treated at some length in Chapter V, infra.

43

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We can say then that in Tennyson's mind the full concept of the living will was developed during this "ten-years silence". This can be taken as a victory of the Apollonian or egoistic urge over the Dionysiac and can be corroborated not only by an examination of many of the new poems in the 1842 volumes, such as "Ulysses" and "Locksley Hall", but also through a closer study of the nature of the spiritual victory in In Memoriam, which was largely composed during this same period. For Tennyson in In Memoriam achieves two victories of faith: on the didactic level in an external God and immortality of the soul, glimpsed sometimes in dreams, always tenuous, weak, flimsy, and to most readers ineffectual against the great forces of doubt, darkness, and despair encountered in the poem. But, secondly, Tennyson achieves in the poem the affirmation of the power of the living will to sustain the human ego at least throughout the mortal duration; and this victory is sure and complete. The concluding poem of In Memoriam, O living will that shalt endure When all that seems shall suffer shock,

suggests the fulfillment and confirmation of the role of the poet laid down by Tennyson in his earlier poem "The Poet", which appeared in 1830: He saw thro' life and death, thro' good and ill, He saw thro' his own soul, The marvel of the everlasting will, An open scroll Before him lay.44

We have attempted to show that the beginnings of the "living will" predate Cambridge, the Apostles, Hallam, and the reviewers, but that the poet's full apprehension of this force was accomplished in "silence". It may be further suggested that in one way or another most of Tennyson's major personal poems after 1842 reflect this same fundamental mode of thought, with the overwhelming forces of darkness pitted against the unyielding vitality of the living will, the struggle which Nietzsche took to be the essencc 44

See supra, p. 67.

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of genuine tragedy.45 The ultimate treatment is in the Idylls of the King where the strong will, Arthur, sustains in himself the whole Apollonian illusion of Camelot, and with it the entire fellowship of the Round Table 4 6 ; but when the self is gone, to death or elsewhere, the world is left in night again, and darkness is the ultimate victor. This view of Tennyson's very fundamental thought process explains many other facets of his life and art: his deep understanding of and affinity to Lucretius, the importance of musical power that amounts almost to incantation in some of his work (see Nietzsche's description of primitive Greek tragedy), the implicit disparagement of Socratic or Platonic concepts, and the absence of intellectual systems or theories in his poetry. He is, again, concerned not with a rational solution or resolution, but with the facing of the fact of consciousness, and his victory is a victory of strength and endurance. But, as we have suggested, he tended to discard the portrayal of non-universal subjective states; and as he came to understand more clearly the faculty of the will, he became a universal subjective poet, one who treats not private sensations and unique states, but the potentialities and limitations, the dynamics, of the human self-conscious. We have already compared Nietzsche's description of the true subjective poet, "The 'I' thus sounds out of the depth of being", with Tennyson's own note on In Memoriam: "I" is not always the author speaking of himself, but the voice of the human race speaking thro' him.47 And it might be suggested that Tennyson stands alone in this universal-subjective position, the Pre-Raphaelites and subsequently many schools of modern poetry having continued in and developed the "picturesque" or private-sensation tradition, following the aesthetics of Mill and, especially, Hallam. But Tennyson, thinking naturally, though not incessantly, at a more profound level of thought, a level which is not simply "emotion", followed 45

Supra, pp. 43-44. See Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, p. 126: "Like a mighty titan, the tragic hero shoulders the whole Dionysiac world and removes the burden from us." This view will be elaborated on in Chapter V, infra. 47 See supra, p. 18. 48

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on the whole his own convictions. And as this is increasingly understood and worked out through the entire volume of his poetry, it must be realized that this was not "the stupidest of English poets", though perhaps "the saddest". 48

48

For W. H. Auden's characterization see A Selection of the Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson (New York, 1944), p. x; Eliot concludes his short essay on In Memoriam with the suggestion that Tennyson is the "saddest of all English poets": op. cit., p. 295.

IV IN MEM0R1AM:

T H E WAY OF THE WILL

Since its publication in 1850 In Memoriam has received more scholarly and critical attention, not to mention religious commentary, than any other of Tennyson's works.1 Almost immediately it was taken to be an expression of the dilemma faced by the nineteenth century in reconciling the new science, and especially natural and evolutionary theories of the origin of man, with established religion.2 In this sense, perhaps, the religious struggle involved in the poem may be thought to have had much more significance to the mid-nineteenth century than to our own age. Yet it is again necessary to look beneath the surface and especially beneath the nineteenth-century view of the poem, since, as we have implied throughout, the average nineteenth-century reader may have understood Tennyson no better than we do. 1

Most notable of the commentaries is A. C. Bradley, A Commentary on Tennyson's "In Memoriam" (London, 1901); but see also G. F. Bradby, "Tennyson's 'In Memoriam' " in The Brontes and Other Essays (Oxford, 1932); Rachel Elizabeth Chapman, A Companion to In Memoriam (London, 1888); John F. Genung, Tennyson's In Memoriam (London, 1904); Joseph Jacobs, Tennyson and "In Memoriam" (London, 1892); L. S. Peake, "Tennyson and the Search for Immortality", I, II, III, SR, CLIII (1931), pp. 192, 216, and 266; Frederick W. Robertson, Analysis of Mr. Tennyson's "In Memoriam" (London, 1862); Henry E. Shepherd, A Commentary Upon Tennyson's In Memoriam (New York, 1908); and Eleanor Bustin Mattes, In Memoriam: The Way of the Soul (New York, 1951). 2 See Memoir, pp. 249-251. See also John S. Lidgett, The Victorian Transformation of Theology (London, 1934); George R. Potter, "Tennyson and the Biological Theory of Mutability in Species", PQ, XVI (1936), pp. 321-343; Lionel Stevenson, Darwin among the Poets (Chicago, 1932); William R. Rutland, "Tennyson and the Theory of Evolution", in Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association, XXVI, ed. Arundell Esdale (Oxford, 1941).

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In the first place, the influence of scientific thought on Tennyson can be over-emphasized. As a "subjectivist" the terror and chaos of infinity or the infinite self (what Kierkegaard called the "despair of infinitude" or the "despair of possibility")3 appeared to Tennyson in his early visions. What science "established" about the external universe could neither intensify nor assuage this tragic fact. There was even "hope" in science, while there was no hope in self. What we have described as the vision of futility in Tennyson is most understandable in the psychic milieu of the early nineteenth century after the faith in the external or objective as such had been philosophically attacked, and the prejudice that "things exist without us" appreciated by some for what it was: a prejudice. Yet the subjectivist's vision of futility as a psychic phenomenon cannot be so absolutely confined to any period or place. Kant, after all, did not change man's psychic constitution. This same awareness of the infinite intuition of self and the cosmic isolation of self was possible to every man in even the most primitive ages, and perhaps potentially more so before the Socratic bulwark of ideas and values (that tended to make the worlds of heaven and earth definite and knowable) shielded man from the Dionysiac realm or irrational over-consciousness. This awareness would seem to be evidenced in portions of Lucretius, for instance, and Tennyson could have been as easily influenced by Lucretius,4 whom he much admired, as by the scientists of his day. In fact, Darwin's Origin of Species was not to appear until 1859, and certainly the imaginative man has always seen more terrifying possibilities within himself than those suggested by Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology5 or Chambers' Vestiges of Creation.8 The subjective consciousness has always been "infinite".

3

See Soren Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death, trans. Walter Lowrie (New York, 1955), pp. 162-170, and especially the account of the process of infinitizing: "Generally speaking, imagination is the medium of the process of infinitizing . . . ", pp. 163-164. 4 See discussion of Tennyson's "Lucretius" in Chapter VI, infra. 5 Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology (London, 1830-1833). • Robert Chambers, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (New York, 1845).

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And indeed, as we have already seen, Tennyson was acutely conscious of the tragic dilemma of self even in his earliest poems: in "Armageddon", written at the age of fifteen,7 before Lyell, before Chambers, and probably before the poet had read much at all into natural science. Often Tennyson uses the terminology and arguments of science to objectify or describe in more concrete terms the nature which is self; or, at other times, he treats science as a foil, an object of intellectual interest, not to be taken too seriously and eventually to be dismissed. It is true enough that the "problem" posed by science disturbed the religious faith of countless thinking people in the nineteenth century, but it would be amiss to transfer this "shock" to an imagination so prodigious and introspective as Tennyson's. That we have so readily done so only indicates again that we may have tried to read too much of the nineteenth century into Tennyson. The second mistake is to over-emphasize the death of Arthur Hallam in explaining the genesis of In Memoriam. Death-consciousness appears early in Tennyson (see "Perdidi Diem", supra, p. 63), and is a characteristic of his subjective psychology, which, together with the infinite backgrond, or perspective, impresses an aspect of futility even on self-expansion. The self can grow, but it grows without terminus and still dies as it grows. That Tennyson was long preoccupied with these themes is stated explicitly in In

Memoriam:

Likewise the imaginative woe, That loved to handle spiritual strife, Diffused the shock thro' all my life, But in the present broke the blow. What is distinctly new in In Memoriam is the heightening of the impact of death by the presence of "love". For In Memoriam is more than anything else a poem of love and describes a struggle to make love enduring and meaningful. Tennyson's affection for Hallam cannot be doubted, but also to be considered is his involvement at this time with "love" as a cosmic force. It was perhaps Hallam's commitment to a religion of love that made him 7

See supra, p. 59.

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so appealing to Tennyson, who was grasping for something enduring to fall back on or for some fuller description of that "feeling" or "little whisper" that he found pitted against the suicidal voice and the vision of futility. It is easy to see why Hallam's religious views, as well as those of F. D. Maurice, a religion of humanitarianism and love, should have had such a special attraction to him. In his Cambridge years "Tennyson did not look upon himself as a religious man".8 It is safe to go further in suggesting that he never did consider himself a Christian in the orthodox sense. He often said that he hated an utter lack of faith,9 but would venture very little as to the particulars of his own faith: But he would not be pinned down to any more dogmatic statement, and he would not go further in describing Christ's God-head than to agree that He might be in some sort - perhaps not exclusively - an incarnation of the Divine. In the middle 1870's he horrified John Bright by saying that he "thought the Turkish religion a very good one", and in the remarkable vision which he inserted, rather incongruously, in "Sea Dreams" (published in 1 8 6 4 , . . . ) , he showed clearly that he regarded the great historic creeds as having purely relative validity and as doomed to vanish and be superseded by others in accordance with the inexorable but wholesome law of spritiual evolution, which may in the end sweep away the basic dogma of the Christian religion itself . . . 1 0

And Hallam Tennyson remembered of his father: His creed, he always said, he would not formulate, for people would not understand him if he did; but he considered that his poems expressed the principles at the foundation of his faith. 11

This, at least, is what he told his son, but it must be remembered in dealing with Hallam Tennyson's comments about his father's religion that the religious tone in the Tennyson household was set by the orthodox and devout Mrs. Tennyson. Her letters to her son Hallam at Cambridge are testimony enough to this piety.12 8 Brookfield, p. 328. See also Charles Tennyson, Six Tennyson Essays, pp. 70-124. » Memoir, p. 259. 10 Six Tennyson Essays, p. 82. 11 Memoir, p. 259. 12 Charles Tennyson, pp. 416-423.

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The poet would not have contradicted the tenets, dogma, and "principles" behind this piety. It has already been noted that one of the reasons for the long delay in Tennyson's marriage was his fiance's suspicion as to his orthodoxy, even as to his Christianity,13 which caused her to wonder how compatible they were. But Tennyson, perhaps better than most poets of his stature, recognized the vast gulf between his profoundest thoughts and the presumptions necessary for practical life. This is in consonance with the "subjective" nature of his thought and his recognition of the impossibility of reconciling thoughts and things. Nietzsche, who tried to live his life at the "ends of thought" went insane, for this deeper mode of thought, unlike the Socratic, with "a triumph in every syllogism", is not happy. Mrs. Mattes has suggested that the positive religious tone of the Introduction to In Memoriam was a concession on Tennyson's part to his future wife.14 The dissonance between the Introduction and the poem as a whole was noted in Tennyson's own time and pointed up by Henry Sidgwick in the letter he wrote to Hallam Tennyson describing his first reaction to the poem. "And yet", Sidgwick wrote "I have always felt that in a certain sense the effect of the Introduction does not quite represent the effect of the poem. Faith in the Introduction, is too completely triumphant." 15 And this comment was made before scholarship had definitely established that the composition of the Introduction postdated the poem proper by several years at least.18 The truth would seem to be that Tennyson "would not formulate" his creed, because he had no creed that could be conceptualized or reduced to principles. His religion, like his morality, was non-rational in a very real sense, but not, therefore, simply an emotional bias. It was grounded in a realm of thought deeper than the rational or Socratic realm of objectified and verbalized ideas. It is generally expressed in terms of "love", God being even

13 14 15 16

See Mattes, pp. 91-92. Ibid., p. 96. Memoir, p. 255. See especially A. C. Bradley, A Commentary, etc., pp. 11-19.

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equated with love. In fact, as late as the year of his death, we hear Tennyson proclaiming, almost ritualistically, this same identity: "Yet God is love . . . " 17 "Love", in a sense, is Tennyson's most philosophic concept in that it is an interpretation of the "feeling" in "The Two Voices" that restrains the speaker from suicide. It may be justifiably conjectured that the evolution from feeling into love was greatly influenced by Arthur Hallam's views on religion and morality, those of F. D. Maurice, and even Bishop Butler's Analogy of Religion, which Hallam and Tennyson read together. 18 But since Tennyson incorporated these views on love into the deeper struggle within his mind between will and darkness, they have a more "vital" and desperate significance to him than to Hallam, and certainly more than to the comparatively detached and philosophic Maurice. Love was man's last best hope, the only possible power to pit against death in the struggle of the will for the maintainance of self. Appearing in the 1830 volume was the short allegory "Love and Death", which so impressed J. A. Froude: What time the mighty moon was gathering light Love paced the thymy plots of Paradise, And all about him roll'd his lustrous eyes; When turning round a cassia, full in view, Death, walking all alone beneath a yew, And talking to himself, first met his sight. 'You must begone', said Death, 'these walks are mine'. Love wept and spread his sheeny vans for flight; Yet ere he parted said, 'This hour is thine; Thou art the shadow of life, and as the tree Stands in the sun and shadows all beneath, So in the light of great eternity Life eminent creates the shade of death. The shadow passeth when the tree shall fall, But I shall reign for ever over all.' The image of the yew tree is connected with death, as it is in In Memoriam. But it is death in a "vital" sense. It is nature and 17

18

Memoir,

p. 263.

Mattes, p. 47.

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death, or dying nature, into which the poet of In Memoriam sometimes yearns to grow incorporate: And gazing on thee, sullen tree, Sick for thy stubborn hardihood, I seem to fail from out my blood And grow incorporate into thee. "Love" then justifies the will's resistance. It is as strong as death, or at least Tennyson wishes it to be as strong as death. Therefore, when Arthur Hallam does die, there is more than a personal loss involved; Tennyson's new foundations of hope are now ready for testing. Can love endure death? In In Memoriam, then, Hallam stands for the principle of love, the only "principle" Tennyson espoused. Arthur Hallam's theology is outlined in "Theodicaea Novissima", the essay which he read to the Apostles in 1831.19 It is interesting that Hallam begins his essay by expressing his belief that the "unassisted efforts of man's reason have not established the existence and attributes of Deity on so sure a basis as the Deist imagines".20 For Hallam, like Tennyson, seems strikingly aware of the limitations of human reason regarding knowledge of "things", and, therefore, he does not really consider God as a thing external, although his essay is a little ambiguous. From the "scheme of Christian philosophy" he induces the fact that "GOD IS LOVE",21 and hence he places the foundations of religion in human psychology and not in an external universe. E. B. Mattes has observed that Hallam's favorite writers were those who were also committed to this identity and that in the "Theodicaea" he expresses his "conviction that emotion rather than intellect is the chief dynamic power of human life".22 In this sense Tennyson and Hallam were "kindred spirits".23 Moreover it is clear why they valued so highly the theological writings of Bishop Butler24 and 19 20 21 22 28 24

Hallam, pp. 198-213. Ibid., p. 201. Ibid., p. 222. Mattes, p. 20. See Mattes, p. 26. Joseph Butler, The Analogy of Religion (London, 1906).

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F. D. Maurice,25 since both express a belief in the "eternal verities" common in all men and all religions, of which "love" is the most prominent. Yet it should be remarked here that neither Butler nor Maurice is "subjective" in the sense that Tennyson is, and even Hallam to a lesser degree. Maurice conceived of eternal verities as "ideas" rather than instincts, "truths" rather than psychic "facts". Even the egocentric ethic of Lord Shaftesbury is "idealized" in a Platonic sense. Hallam's ethic is more truly intuitional, and this is emphasized most strikingly in his essay "On the Philosophical Writings of Cicero", in which he compares the Stoic and Epicurean moralities. He concludes in favor of the Epicureans, in one sense the anti-Platonic descendants of Heraclitus and the "flowing philosophers": We are now better enabled to consider the question, which of these two sects, Stoic or Epicurean, did most f o r the advance of psychological knowledge, and, if the foregoing observations be founded on truth, we cannot, I think, hesitate to pronounce, that it was not that sect which did most for the general increase of moral and religious cultivation. 26

For In spite of these grievous errors, whose consequences ran riot through many generations, there was this merit in the Epicurean theory, that it laid the basis of morality in the right quarter. Sentiment, not thought, was declared the motive power: the agent acted from feeling, and was by feeling: thoughts were but the ligatures that held together the delicate materials of emotion. 2 7

In this essay Hallam seems to foreshadow Nietzsche and Bergson in his attack on the "intellect" and Socratic thought and in his commitment to a vital or intuitive philosophy or psychology. It is important to note in the last passage quoted that "feeling" is the motive power and the source of morality. The morality of In Memoriam, as of "The Two Voices" and 25 See F. D. Maurice, Theological Essays, and The Religions of the World. For an account of Tennyson's belief in "eternal verities" see Memoir, p. 261: "He continually emphasized his own belief in what he called the Eternal Truths . . . " 28 Hallam, p. 169. " Ibid., p. 167.

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other earlier poems, is founded on "feeling" and the will to live and love in spite of death. A. C. Bradley observed that "in his distress the poet cries to what he 'feels is Lord of all'," 28 and disregards what "reason" may conjecture about Nature: A warmth within the breast would melt The freezing reason's colder part, And like a man in wrath the heart Stood up and answer'd 'I have felt'.

However, it must be emphasized here, as Bradley did not, that this Nature to Tennyson is primarily "subjective" Nature, the vaster chaotic realm of an overconsciousness of which the physical concepts of science are only, in Nietzschean terms, an interpretation.29 Bradley also called attention to the prominence of "feeling" in the earlier "The Two Voices" and in the very late poem "Vastness", to which we have already referred.30 Peace, let it be! I loved him, and love him for ever: the dead are not dead but alive.

Again and again in In Memoriam there is echoed the deepest of Tennyson's convictions, that an external Nature can prove nothing, being but a posited prejudice, that we know nothing certain of "things", and that, if we did, this knowledge would tell us nothing of self. Tennyson's comment on the wonders of physical nature in the Memoir gains added significance in this light: Strange that these wonders should draw some men to God and repel others. N o more reason in one than in the other. 31

For "external" nature is not a reality, or if it is, we can know nothing about it. The self is still an infinite consciousness, dying, with a will to live. Who loves not Knowledge? Who shall rail Against her beauty? May she mix With men and prosper! Who shall fix Her pillars? Let her work prevail. 28 29 30 31

Bradley, pp. 59-60. See supra, p. 40. See supra, p. 63. Memoir, p. 271. See Bradley, p. 56.

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But on her forehead sits a fire! She sets her forward countenance And leaps into the future chance, Submitting all things to desire. Wisdom is thus placed far above knowledge again, but again also Tennyson's Wisdom is a special concept. And it is significant that following this poem on Knowledge and Wisdom (CXIV), Tennyson in CXXI again uses the imagery of "The Hesperides", Phosphor and Hesper. Tennyson clearly recognizes that "knowledge is of things we see". [Italics supplied]. In Memoriam is not then a religious poem in a doctrinal sense. As Charles Tennyson has observed, there is "a marked absence of dogma" 32 in the poem. Even the Introduction refers to the "Strong Son of God" as "Immortal Love". There is no grappling with or arguments on good and evil, no ideas in the Platonic sense, and no attempt to justify the ways of a definite external God to man. In Memoriam is rather a poem on the religious, moral, and striving nature of man or the self, his will to resist absorption in nature or an over-soul and to make love endure. From this struggle the self learns nothing, but grows and strengthens itself. And this is the secret of Tennyson's Wisdom, the Golden Apple, that is achieved only in accepting "Sorrow" and struggling with death in the dark kingdom of Hesper - a Wisdom that the "foolish" wits, the Socratics, cannot attain. T. S. Eliot's conclusion that In Memoriam is a poem of religious despair 33 is correct in that it describes the struggle of the will against a despairing vision of man's infinite nature rather than an apocalyptic revelation of some divine external order. This dynamic nature of the poem has been suggested, although not fully explored, by others. A. C. Bradley, for instance, noted that there are three ways in which a man may face the fact of death and personal bereavement.34 He can be overcome by grief and submit to the omnipotence of death; he can put death out of his mind and involve himself in external life again; or he can face 58 38 34

Six Tennyson Essays, p. 81. Eliot, Essays, Ancient and Modern, p. 295. Bradley, pp. 39-42.

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the fact of death and struggle with it. In the first instance the self loses itself to death and nature; in the second, it runs from itself into the external bulwark of things and ideas; in the third, it pits its will to live against the Dionysiac force, endures the tragic struggle, maintains its own identity, and grows. In Memoriam is the record of just such a confrontation and struggle. The cyclical structure of the poem in itself suggests this "vital" and dynamic import. It is creative evolution in Bergson's sense,85 the self rising or growing from out of its dead self or past. The Worship of Sorrow perhaps suggests Carlyle,36 but also recalls the lines from Tennyson's early sonnet: 37 "We live but by resistance." In Memoriam is in no fundamental sense a poem of ideas and only incidentally reflects the notions of the age.38 The scientific and Platonic arguments introduced to support or refute immortality are dismissed as easily as in "The Two Voices". Indeed, with reference to some of his carefree discussions with Hallam, Tennyson suggests what weight he attributed to the Socratic arguments: Whereat we glanced from theme to theme, Discuss'd the books to love or hate, Or touch'd the changes of the state, Or threaded some Socratic dream. It is not that the unphilosophic nature of In Memoriam has not been appreciated almost from the time of its publication, but what has been obscured is the subjective bias behind the poem. Both Maurice and F. W. Robertson,39 unorthodox theologians, found in the poem a genuine religious experience moving toward the affirmation of eternal truths. Robertson concluded: By slow degrees, all the doubts, and worse, are answered; not as a philosopher would answer them, nor as a theologian, or a metaphy35

See supra, pp. 31-34. See especially Sartor Resartus, Carlyle, I, pp. 121, 128 and 151-154. But the worship of sorrow can also be accounted for in Jungean terms: i.e., as the regression of the libido necessary for the integration of self. 37 See supra, p. 66. 38 For an account of evolutionary theories in the poem, however, see Rutland, op. cit. 39 See Memoir, p. 250. 36

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sician, but as it is the duty of a poet to reply, by intuitive faculty, in the strains in which Imagination predominates over Thought and Memory.40 And later Arthur Sidgwick, in his centenary address at Cambridge in 1909, observed that "The poem seems gradually to rise from the depths of sorrow and doubt to a new hope and faith - in short, to new life. The marks of what it has passed through are seen in the deeper thought, the larger nature and insights and scope. The soul has grown and strengthened, we may almost say." 41 This was as much as Tennyson had hoped for the poem to "convey", but it does not quite fathom the depth of the religious experience involved, for it ignores the peculiarly "subjective" nature of the poem. We have already repeated Tennyson's own statement about his position as author: " T is not always the author speaking of himself, but the voice of the human race speaking through him"; and suggested how this fits Nietzsche's definition of the true subjective poet.42 Nietzsche is of further assistance here. In explaining the function of the Chorus in Greek tragedy as embodying the Dionysiac spirit, he observed that "being compassionate as well as wise, it proclaims a truth that issues from the heart of the world".43 This is equally true of the Dionysiac foundations underlying In Memoriam, the Wisdom of which is essentially the dark Wisdom of Silenius. Wisdom and Compassion are then at the core of the poem. In describing the contribution of Kant and Schopenhauer to modern thought, Nietzsche wrote: Its most important characteristic is that wisdom is put in the place of science as the highest goal. This wisdom, unmoved by the pleasant distractions of science, fixes its gaze on the total constellation of the universe and tries to comprehend sympathetically the suffering of the universe as its own.44 40 41 42 43 44

F. W. Robertson, Analysis of Mr. Tennyson's "In Memoriam", p. iii. Arthur Sidgwick, p. 30. See supra, p. 18. The Birth of Tragedy, p. 57. Ibid., p. 111.

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This passage should immediately bring to mind the cosmic consciousness of "Armageddon" and the dark Wisdom of "The Hesperides". Perhaps the most sensitive appreciation of In Memoriam by any of Tennyson's contemporaries is that revealed by the scientifically minded Henry Sidgwick in his letter to the poet's son: What In Memoriam did for us, for me at least, in this struggle was to impress on us the ineffaceable and ineradicable conviction that humanity will not and cannot acquiesce in a godless world: the "man in men" will not do this, whatever individual men may do, whatever they may temporarily feel themselves driven to do, by following methods which they cannot abandon to the conclusions to which these methods at present seem to lead. 45

Sidgwick probably means the methods of science, although this statement could be extended to include theoretic thought as such. In referring to certain favorite lines, Sidgwick continues: I feel in them the indestructible and inalienable minimum of faith which humanity cannot give up because it is necessary for life; and which I know that I, at least so far as the man in me is deeper than the methodical thinker, cannot give up. 48

Is not Sidgwick recognizing in these words that Dionysiac man is deeper than theoretical man, and that there is a realm of thought that undercuts "methodical thinking?" In Memoriam is then at once a struggle of the will for the sustaining of self and also a struggle to make love endure death. The poem does achieve a victory of faith, in fact two victories.47 On the theological and rational level there is apparently an affirmation of God as a God of Love and of immortality of the soul. However, God in the poem generally seems to stand for either the epitome of love or the oversoul or general soul, the infinite consciousness itself, with which the self must finally merge. While there is achieved, then, in In Memoriam, a kind of faith in God and immortality, it is a tenuous faith, confirmed only 45 46 47

Memoir, p. 253. Ibid., p. 254. See supra, p. 89.

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in brief visions or dreams, and to most readers it is ineffectual against the greater forces of doubt and despair presented in the poem. Yet there is a more important victory, the triumph of the "living will" to sustain the self, at least for the mortal duration, above the despairing vision of death and infinity, and this victory is in In Memoriam finally complete and unwavering. The victory of faith is important to the extent that the Christian or generally religious values reaffirmed are part of the civilized illusion that the will strives to sustain above the Dionysiac chaos. But it is the fundamental struggle of the will itself to which we shall turn for the remainder of this chapter. The vitalistic orientation of the suffering and achievement of In Memoriam is indicated in the opening sections, in the image of men rising on "stepping-stones of their dead selves" and the despairing contemplation of Nature and the old yew. And while the status of Nature in In Memoriam is somewhat ambivalent it is far less significant as an external something than as a subjective backdrop. Indeed, "objective" Nature is but a "phantom", dependent, as it were, on the perceiving consciousness, echoing the vital impulses of self: 'And all the phantom, Nature, stands With all the music in her tone, A hollow echo of my own, A hollow form with empty hands.'

Nature has nothing to give back that is not put in it by the self and it can afford the poet no semblance of consolation here. The emptiness and meaninglessness of Nature and self are persuasive toward despair and death-longing. The "will" is almost annihilated from the start: To Sleep I give my powers away; My will is bondsman to the dark; I sit within a helmless bark . . . There is thus evidenced in the opening sections of In Memoriam no tendency to evade grief, the course of the well-compensated

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"objective man", but there is the strong impulse to submit completely to grief and absorption in the dark nature of the Dionysiac realm. The "will" sleeps, but never for long: With morning wakes the will, and cries, 'Thou shalt not be the fool of loss.'

In VI the poet dismisses the "objective" consolatory arguments that "loss is common" and that "other friends remain". The fact of death must not be hidden from. On the other hand, he is deeply attentive to his own psychic reactions, as in XVI where he remarks on how "calm despair and wild unrest" can be tenants of the same breast. This apparent contradiction is accounted for in the struggle between the Dionysiac fact, that leads only to despair and peace-longing, and the will to live and resist absorption - the irreducible vital principle. The deepest sorrow that the poet "feels" is thus not susceptible to verbal formulation, and this limitation is expressed in XIX where he compares his sorrow with the ebbing tides of the Severn. What he speaks is only a kind of verbal residue of his deeper thoughts: The tide flows down, the wave again Is vocal in its wooded walls: My deeper anguish also falls, And I can speak a little then.

This is the first statement of a notion that reoccurs in the poem, first as a recognition that the deeper thoughts and emotions remain unexpressed, and later as a more general conclusion that language itself is an inadequate vehicle for communicating such thoughts. Nietzsche, speaking of a similar limitation, found the very origins of language to be "Socratic" and hence unsuitable for the expression of non-verbal thought.48 It is also interesting here to compare Tennyson's observations with Hamlet's: But I have that within which passeth show, These but the trappings and the suits of woe;

and recall how Nietzsche considered Hamlet akin to Dionysiac man: 48

See supra, Chapter II, footnote 41.

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In this sense Dionysiac man might be said to resemble Hamlet: both have looked deeply into the true nature of things, they have understood and are now loath to act. They realize that no action of theirs can work any change in the eternal condition of things, and they regard the imputation as ludicrous or debasing that they should set right the time which is out of joint. Understanding kills action, for in order to act we require the veil of illusion; such is Hamlet's doctrine, not to be confounded with the cheap wisdom of John-a-Dreams, who through too much reflection, as it were a surplus of possibilities, never arrives at action. What, both in the case of Hamlet and of Dionysiac man, overbalances any motive leading to action, is not reflection but understanding, the apprehension of truth and its terror.49 By understanding Nietzsche is, of course, referring to the dark "Wisdom of Silenius", and although Tennyson does not in In Memoriam conceive of Wisdom in anything like this hopeless sense, yet he is at pains to distinguish it from a cheaper commodity - knowledge. For Wisdom to Tennyson emanates from a higher source than the intellect, that of intuition and will, and it is inseparably joined to Sorrow, being achieved through Sorrow or suffering. Wisdom then is an achievement rather than an acquisition, the development of a constitution. Prominently involved in this Wisdom is a recognition of the necessity of holding to certain positions and values without the sanctions of intellectual affirmance, rational belief, or even religious faith. In In Memoriam "love" is viewed as a necessary demand of human nature, whatever its actual permanence and value in the natural order: I hold it true, whate'er befall; I feel it, when I sorrow most; 'Tis better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all. The perpetuation of love is, at the outset, a matter of will: 'Yet even here, But for one hour, O Love, I strive To keep so sweet a thing alive.' And the case is likewise with death and immortality. It is necessary to suppose that the self lives forever and to struggle to sustain such 49

The Birth of Tragedy, p. 51.

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assertion even if it be an illusion. For without this personal immortality all else, even the existence of God, is valueless. So in Tennyson's subjective view the existence of God does not give value to man's life, but rather man's immortality makes meaningful the concept of God, especially so since God in Tennyson's work is invariably defined in terms of the human consciousness, quantitatively as infinite consciousness, qualitatively as consummate love. If the self must die, What then were God to such as 1? 'Twere hardly worth my while to choose Of things all mortal, or to use A little patience ere I die: 'Twere best at once to sink to peace, Like birds the charming serpent draws, To drop head-foremost in the jaws Of vacant darkness and to cease. This is the conclusion drawn by Tennyson's Lucretius (see Chapter VI), and the "little patience" referred to here is no more fortifying in itself than Plato's advice that good soldiers may not quit their posts was to Lucretius. Neither Tennyson nor Tennyson's Lucretius evidence any moral aversion to suicide. Life will be sustained when the will to live overbalances the inclination to peace and death. This will may in turn bolster itself through the necessary illusions of love and immortality. On the other hand, the thought of the negating power of an all-consuming death weakens resolve and renders the mortal duration less bearable: 'The sound of that forgetful shore Will change my sweetness more and more, Half-dead to know that I shall die.' Thus in In Memoriam life, death, immortality and God himself are viewed subjectively in terms of the human consciousness. So in X L V Tennyson describes not so much the birth of a child as an objective being, but, rather, the advent of an individual selfconsciousness. But as he grows he gathers much, And learns the use of T and 'me',

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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 thro' the frame that binds him in His isolation grows defined. The use of "isolation" is particularly informing here. Every man, in the deeper epistemological sense, is an island complete unto itself. However in X L V I I Tennyson entertains the possibility of the self remerging into a larger consciousness, a notion which, though he sometimes attempted to refute it argumentatively, always remained for him a plausible end to envision: That each, who seems a separate whole, Should move his rounds, and fusing all The skirts of self again, should fall Remerging in the general Soul, Is faith as vague as all unsweet . . . However plausible there is no consolation in this prospect, for if the self loses its identity at death it is none the less dead. In L I V - L V I Tennyson considers the futility of life in biological and geological terms, thinking temporarily within a framework of knowledge. Yet knowledge as such has no real basis: Behold, we know not anything; I can but trust that good shall fall At last - far off - at last, to all, And every winter change to spring. So runs my dream: but what am I? An infant crying in the night: An infant crying for the light: And with no language but a cry. If we are inclined to put our trust in an external God, an external Nature cries out against it: Tho' Nature, red in tooth and claw With ravine, shrieked against his creed The conclusion to be drawn from these speculations is clear enough, in fact, not much altered from the despairing view of Tennyson's earliest poems:

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O life as futile then, as frail! Although it cannot be said that the poem changes direction radically at this point it does constitute the lowest level of the poet's despair. The foundation for such positive faith in God and immortality as is achieved in the poem consists of those glimpses, trances and psychic suggestions that sometimes came to the poet - "a little flash, a mystic hint" - experiences not really explicable in terms of the human self or consciousness as we know it. They are experiences beyond self (if this is possible) or delusions, and the poet himself cannot fully credit them. The "will" has no part in bringing about such moments, which are, indeed, always more suggestive than revealing. In LXX, in attempting to reconstruct Hallam's features, the poet has just such an unaccountable experience. When he strives willfully to recall the face he cannot do it: Till all at once beyond the will, I hear a wizard music roll, And thro' a lattice on the soul Looks thy fair face and makes it still. Supernaturally then the solipsism of the soul or self-consciousness is breached from without and the self sees beyond itself. This is a revelation of something external to the self, a glimpse beyond "subject", but this experience is short-lived and doubtful. It is a hint at revelation, but Tennyson is not disposed to make more of it, nor persuade himself that it definitely imparts a divine message. On the other hand, the force of life, the will to live, with minimal aid from these glimpses or revelations, gradually grows stronger until the poet can again contemplate with some pleasure the ordinary posited values and hopes of men, and willingly take for reality the necessary illusion of an external world filled with possibilities and goals. This movement is accelerated by the coming of spring again following the poem's second Christmas. My pulses therefore beat again For other friends that once I met; Nor can it suit me to forget The mighty hopes that make us men.

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But this strengthening has been achieved not through argument or conviction but through a process of psychic-dynamics, the indulgence of Sorrow, the development of constitutional fibers, the expansion of self through struggle and exertion, or, to use Tennyson's phrase from XLII, a growth of "mind and will". In XCV the dead man appears to the poet in a trance, from the past, and the poet's own soul seems to catch the "deep pulsation of the world". The resulting experience is not a revelation or a "mystic hint" but a becoming of something more, an expansion of self, reminiscent of Tennyson's earliest experiences of the living universe, the infinite consciousness, described as vividly in "Armageddon". This is not a transcendental or supernatural experience: Aeonian music measuring out The steps of Time - the shocks of Chance The blows of Death. Then the experience is cancelled out and the poet cannot recall what he "became", not, significantly, what he saw or discovered. Vague words! but ah, how hard to frame In matter-moulded forms of speech, Or ev'n for intellect to reach Thro' memory that which I became. Again the deficiencies of language are emphasized, the "mattermoulded forms of speech". How suggestive this is of Nietzsche's criticism that our language springs from false notions of "being", and can accordingly reflect only the artificial, fixed, objectified. The problem here is to describe a process of subjective becoming, a quantitative development, and here language fails. In XCVI the notion that doubt is "devil-born" does not trouble the poet, for the dogmatic creed, and, more than that, the qualities of good and evil that the concept of a devil imply, have little significance to him. The principal struggle in In Memoriam is one of love and life against darkness and death, vital not conceptual. Above all it is a struggle by the self and within the self: He fought his doubts and gathered strength, He would not make his judgment blind,

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"in memoriam": t h e w a y of t h e w i l l He faced the spectres of the mind And laid them: thus he came at length To find a stronger faith his own.

This is faith in self rather than faith in anything external and points to the second and more convincing victory in In Memoriam, the affirmation of the "will". Section CIII has generally been considered especially significant to an interpretation of In Memoriam. It is a small dreamvision in itself and more clearly allegorical than "Armageddon". The poet sees himself dwelling within a hall with maidens, and there is a river running close to the wall. In the center of the hall is a veiled statue to which the maidens sing, at once the shape of the deceased veiled by death and a monument of love. In the midst of harping and caroling a dove flies in and summons the speaker to the sea. Accompanied by the maidens, the poet then journeys in his boat down the stream; the landscape and water gradually become more immense, and likewise the maidens also seem to grow in stature: And still as vaster grew the shore And roll'd the floods in grander space, The maidens gather'd strength and grace And presence, lordlier than before. In a poem such as this it is perhaps not appropriate to inquire what these maidens "signify". Perhaps they generally represent aspects of humanity that accompany this evolution of self into a vaster sea of consciousness. Hallam awaits the poet on a larger vessel, perhaps a larger self, and the maidens are permitted to board also. We must remember that this is only a dream, but to Tennyson it indicates a possibility of how the human self can retain its own characteristics and love for others after merging in the great deep, or a greater deep. Yet where does the larger ship go? "Toward a crimson cloud", and this is the end of the dream. During the course of the poem, which is meant to cover an imaginary period of about three years,50 the poet's love has not died, and the will has managed to strengthen and fortify the self 50

See Bradley, pp. 30-35.

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to the extent that the despairing and seductive Dionysiac voice seems no longer so close at hand. These victories are, it may be said, celebrated in the last twenty-eight sections or so, most exultingly in "Ring out, wild bells" (CVI) and "Love is and was my Lord and King" ( C X X V I ) . In the course of this subdued celebration the poet reaffirms the resolution of "The Palace of Art", that of vitalism over private sensation: I will not shut me from my kind, And lest I stiffen into stone, I will not eat my heart alone, Nor feed with sighs a passing wind: What profit lies in barren faith, And vacant yearning, tho' with might To scale the heaven's highest height, Or dive below the wells of Death? What find I in the highest place, But mine own phantom chanting hymns? And on the depths of death there swims The reflex of a human face. We may recall that in "The Palace of A r t " private sensation led only to stagnation of the self, void of the illusion of human companionship and love. In In Memoriam the illusion of love has been successfully sustained against the Dionysiac fact and is hence exalted much more forcefully than in any of Tennyson's earlier poems. It is, we repeat, a poem of love, but it is the "will" that has gained this victory and sustained the illusion. The real nature of this victory is described more overtly in C X X I I I in a passage that is central not only to In Memoriam but to all of Tennyson's poetry: The hills are shadows, and they flow From form to form, and nothing stands; They melt like mist, the solid lands, Like clouds they shape themselves and go. But in my spirit will I dwell, An dream my dream, and hold it true . . . The poet has not "answered" Dionysus; he has resisted him. All "things" melt because they never were solid. We recall Nietzsche

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again: 'This is a dream, and I want to go on dreaming." But Tennyson's Apollonian illusion is to become the dream-kingdom of Camelot sustained by Arthur, the will incarnate. In describing his own genius in In Memoriam, the poet writes: Nor mine the sweetness or the skill, But mine the love that will not tire, And, born of love, the vague desire That spurs an imitative will. In C X X I V Tennyson repeats in summary his awareness that nothing can be derived or proven from "things" or intellectual configurations: I found Him not in world or sun, Or eagle's wing, or insect's eye, Nor thro' the questions men may try, The petty cobwebs we have spun. These are "verbal" cobwebs. And the poet reaffirms that the source of any hope he has attained was in his "feeling". To the voice that admonishes, "Believe no more", he has answered "in wrath", "I have felt". The final section, C X X X I , begins with an invocation not to an external God, nor even to love. It is addressed to the "living will": o

will that shalt endure When all that seems shall suffer shock

LIVING

V T H E SELF AS KING

1.

AS A WHOLE

From a note which Tennyson gave to Knowles in 1869 and from certain extant prose fragments we know that the poet was contemplating some form of an entire plan for the Idylls of the King as early as 1833. 1 It has also been suggested that such early poems as "The Lady of Shalott" furnish evidence of his preoccupation with this subject. 2 However, "The Lady of Shalott" derives from different external and inspirational sources than the Idylls and the two should not be confused. "The Lady of Shalott", and especially the 1832 version, is a "picturesque" poem based directly, as Tennyson himself revealed, on an Italian novella, "Donna di Scalotta", and was written during that period when Tennyson was most influenced by Hallam's aesthetics and Italian art. 3 The 1842 version, as we have suggested, is enhanced in irony, less picturesque, and thus hints at the movement toward the vital conception of poetry as musical thought and the universal subjectivism of Nietzsche. But the real beginning of the Idylls is surely the "Morte d'Arthur" which appeared in the 1842 volumes and was later incorporated into "The Passing of Arthur" in the 1

For the note to Knowles and prose fragment see Memoir, pp. 519-521. This note is in the form of a cipher for an allegory. Modred, for instance, is conceived as the "Sceptical Understanding" and the Round Table as "liberal institutions". See also the outline for a drama (1833-1840) appearing in Memoir, pp. 521-522. For a fuller discussion of earlier versions and fragments see Charles Tennyson, Six Tennyson Essays, pp. 153-187; and Richard Jones, The Growth of the Idylls of the King (Philadelphia, 1895). 8 See Memoir, p. 519. 3 See supra, p. 87.

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"Morte d'Arthur" is not a "picturesque" poem but more properly "vital" and is to be compared with "Ulysses" of the 1842 volumes and its companion piece "Tithonus".4 In such very early poems as "Armageddon" and "The Mystic" Tennyson was attempting to describe subjective dynamics without a correlative. In "Mariana" and the early "Lady of Shalott" he turned to private experience, ideally suited to the picturesque mode. In In Memoriam he returns to the fundamental struggle within the human self-conscious through a series of short poems loosely connected on the surface by a rather lax utilization of the elegiac tradition, but solidly unified below the surface of conventions and commonplace ideas by an intuitive comprehension of the struggle between the will and darkness and the subjective dynamics of resistance and growth. It is first in the classical poems "Ulysses" and "Tithonus" that we find Tennyson utilizing what Nietzsche defined as the "objective correlative".5 The superior artistry as well as the subjective nature of the classical poems has been emphasized by others. Douglas Bush concluded that "classical themes generally banished from his mind what was trivial, parochial, sentimental, inadequately philosophical, and evoked his special gifts, his most authentic emotions, his rich style".6 Bush did not attempt to come to terms with Tennyson's mind and generally conceives his thought content in a purely didactic sense. We have already questioned Tennyson's "love of nature". Stange would seem to penetrate deeper into Tennyson's real achievement in these poems when he observes that it "does not spring from objective treatment or acute analysis" but rather in the poet's suffusing them with his "noble melancholy".7 But Idylls.

4

"Tithonus", though composed perhaps prior to "Ulysses", was not published until 1860. See note in Works, II, p. 340. 5 Nietzsche's term is actually Objectivation. In Greek tragedy Nietzsche found the objectivation to be inadequate. "The structure of the scenes and the concrete images convey a deeper wisdom than the poet was able to put in words and concepts." p. 103. This is, perhaps, a somewhat broader concept than that embraced by T. S. Eliot's "objective correlative". See Eliot, Selected Essays, p. 145. • See Bush, "The Personal Note, etc.", p. 205. 7 G. Robert Stange, "Tennyson's Mythology, etc.", p. 70.

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Stange also suggests that each "Greek or Roman theme he used became a vehicle for the theme of separation". 8 It is somewhat misleading to talk of these poems as being "thematic". And while Tennyson indeed suffuses "Tithonus" and "Tiresias" and "Demeter" with a dark and wistful mood, they are more than mood pieces. In a very real sense they embody subjective dynamics in their very landscapes and actions. Nietzsche's concept of the objective correlative certainly applies, for to him the true subjective poet, to use Coleridge's psychological terms, does not objectify himself, or place himself in the object, but rather objectizes himself.9 In a sense then "Tithonus" is related to such Old English elegies as "Seafarer" and "Wanderer" in that it gives a sense of absolute isolation of the speaker. And there is also a parallel in the use of pathetic fallacy. Yet, in such a poem as "Tithonus" this is really not pathetic fallacy at all, for the pathetic fallacy implies a reading into or a humanizing of external nature. In Tennyson's poetry the cart is pulling the horse, and the subject sustains and shapes the object. External nature is nothing more than a manifestation of self. So "Tithonus", the most nearly perfect of Tennyson's poems, begins: T h e w o o d s decay, the w o o d s decay and fall, T h e vapors w e e p their burthen t o the ground . . .

The entire myth, then, comes alive in terms of a vivid but essentially created natural order, that serves only the purpose of the myth, enforcing some aspect of the subjective psychology that lies beneath it. In "Tithonus" as in "Tiresias" it is essentially the dilemma of cosmic isolation; in "Demeter" it is the power of the self to delve into an overconscious realm. These poems, accordingly, do not submit easily to explication or verbal analysis, and such an explication will not be ventured here. 10 But an appreciation of the artistic development evidenced in these poems is important in approaching Idylls of the King. s

Ibid. See discussion, supra, pp. 31-33. 10 However, for a suggestive interpretation of "Demeter" see Stange, "Tennyson's Mythology"; also see E. D. H. Johnson, The Alien Vision of Victorian Poetry, p. 66, and, for "Tiresias", pp. 66-68.

9

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These classical "dramatic lyrics", as they have been called, are not character studies. Arthur Hallam, in describing Tennyson's early art, with probable reference to "The Lady of Shalott" and "Mariana" besides such lesser known poems as "Lilian" and "Madeline", remarked that Tennyson's method was to collect the "most striking phenomena of individual minds until he arrives at some leading fact, which allows him to lay down an axiom or law" and then to proceed to a "brief and coherent" expression of the particular character.11 If this account pertains to Tennyson at all, it describes a different and more objective Tennyson than we have been discussing. This is, perhaps, a better description of Browning's objective and empirical art. For, while Tennyson wrote many ostensible "character sketches", especially for his early volumes - and even such a poem as "The Lady of Shalott" can be considered as a character sketch in that its subject is peculiar and unique - in such poems as "Tithonus" and "Demeter" Tennyson found a vehicle for the subjective dynamics he struggled to convey in "Armageddon" and "The Mystic". In these poems he was not concerned with character at all. Tithonus, Tiresias, Demeter, and Ulysses have no characters. They are all Tennyson in a sense, but only insofar as Tennyson spoke as the universal " I " sounding out the depths and potentialities of the human self-conscious. Without presuming to guess how Browning arrives at his insights into character or to pass judgment on their validity, it can be readily appreciated that he portrays or describes his several and peculiar characters in terms of their attitudes toward and relations with the external world, external things, external values, external ideas and philosophies, and most emphatically, the person being addressed in the monologue. The speaker in Browning's characteristic dramatic monologue, then, is properly a "character" or "personality" insofar as the very nature of personality consists of an individual's relationships to an external world, his values, desires, opinions, beliefs, and prejudices. The more we know of his attitudes toward the "external", the more we know of him as a distinct personality; and this is precisely Browning's method 11

Hallam, p. 197.

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of penetrating into distinctive and distinguishing traits of his separate characters. They may be more or less typical or more or less unique as characters. Browning can thus often reach the general or typical in human characters. He never penetrates to the level of characterless "universal self" because he always treats self as an object in a world of objects, objectifying rather than objectizing it. He does not consider the self-conscious as subject, as the supporter of all notions of the external and the infinite universe. This is equally true whether the character portrayed is contemporary, Renaissance, or Biblical. Thus Browning tends toward particularization and what Matthew Arnold deplored as the "multitudinousness" of Browning, Arnold himself being otherwise obsessed with the symmetry, harmony, and oneness of the external order. 12 It can be said that we take a keen intellectual interest in Andrea del Sarto, Creon, and Karshish, which is not to imply that Browning's approach is not also to a great extent emotional. But we cannot take such an "interest" in Tithonus or Ulysses or Demeter; they do not excite our curiosity. They are not characters of which we can have knowledge, but rather they are all Tennyson, not the "waking man" 13 Tennyson who lived, wrote, and kept his garden at Farringford, the character Tennyson, but Tennyson as the universal self, without distinguishing features, without attitudes toward things, involved always in some fundamental psychic struggle. "Tithonus", "Tiresias", "Ulysses", and "Demeter", are a 12 Robert Browning, "Introductory Essay", in Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley (London, 1852). For an account of this essay and Browning's aesthetic views see Alba H. Warren, Jr., English Poetic Theory, pp. 111-125. It is interesting that Browning's only essay on aesthetics revolves around a distinction between the subjective and objective poet which he inherited from Schiller, deVere, and others. But Browning does not conceive of this distinction in the philosophical sense that we have outlined. To Browning the subjective poet strives toward "Ideas" and he sets up Shelley as the subjective poet par excellence. Browning's aesthetic is transcendental and, as has been pointed out, is very close to Carlyle's, although, perhaps, somewhat less "vitalistic". Like Carlyle, Browning does not seem to grasp the basic Coleridgean and critical distinction between subject and object, nor to appreciate the unbridgeable gulf between them. 13 See Nietzsche's description of the subjective poet, supra, p. 18.

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proper part of this study of Tennyson's subjectivism and vitalism. Not so Maud. For in Maud the "I" is not the universal "I". Although there are surely autobiographical elements in the poem pertaining to the character Tennyson, the notable achievement here is that Tennyson is portraying a distinct character, with peculiarities and distinguishing features. It may well be for this reason that Tennyson remained always so fond of Maud. He designated the poem a "monodrama", which suggests Browning's "dramatic monologue". The persona is conditioned and acted upon by the external world rather than, as in "Tithonus", the myth and its landscape being employed as a correlative to some deeper universal psychic tendency, some aspect of subjective dynamics. Maud presents a psychological case or study, and in a sense foreshadows developments in the novel. Unlike Browning's characteristic study, it is composed of a series of lyrics of new and extraordinary meters and forms. It may be said that the whole work is largely experimental and like a great deal of Tennyson's work, is not concerned with the primal struggle of will and darkness. It is for this reason, that we are slighting Maud here, as, for a somewhat similar reason, we declined to discuss earlier The Princess, which we take to be an experiment of a different kind. Apart from the excellent lyrics contained within it, The Princess is primarily a thematic poem and a poem of ideas rather than tragic fact. There is, perhaps, a good deal of contemporary social philosophy and some feminist notions in the poem,14 and these "ideas" are central to it. But The Princess is not the work of the universal "I". It has no dimension deeper than its conscious design. Neither The Princess nor Maud is doom-ridden. It should be observed at this point that the "Morte D'Arthur" of 1842 differs from all the above-mentioned poems of classical subjects in that it is not written in the first person, and this indicates that the Idylls cannot be accounted for in exactly the same way as these classical poems. We have noted in regard to the revisions of "The Lady of Shalott" a new tendency in Tennyson toward dramatic structure and especially dramatic irony. Tenny14

See Killhem.

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son subsequently employed in such poems of intended popular appeal as Enoch Arden and Ay Inter's Field a more obtuse or cruder kind of irony. Enoch Arden was published in 1864. The first four Idylls to be completed after "Morte D'Arthur" - "Enid", "Vivian", "Elaine", and "Guinevere", - were published in 1859 under the collective title The True and the False,15 and essentially these four poems, as the title would suggest, are studies in irony. Since the project for the Idylls occupied Tennyson for such a long period, it is understandable that his conception of the work fluctuated from time to time. We know that at one time he considered the work as a possible drama in five acts in which the role of the villain Modred was to be much more prominent than in the final work.16 So also we can conjecture that in the years previous to 1859 Tennyson was thinking in terms of ironic studies of four women prominent in Arthurian legend. It is significant that the 1859 titles for these poems were "Enid", "Vivien", "Elaine", and "Guinevere", as contrasted to three of the later titles, "Geraint and Enid", "Merlin and Vivien", and "Lancelot and Elaine". Irony essentially involves a discrepancy either between truth and falsity, appearance and fact, or one person's view and another's; and each of these four Idylls revolves around one or several such ironies. Geraint supposes Enid to be unfaithful; Guinevere suspects Lancelot of having given his love to Elaine; Lancelot's very character is an irony in that he is repeatedly forced to be faithful to his and Guinevere's betrayal of Arthur; Vivien manages to seduce Merlin only after she has apparently given up the conscious attempt to do so; Guinevere realizes in the end that Arthur himself possesses also those human qualities she sought in Lancelot: I yearn'd for warmth and color which I found In Lancelot - how I see thee what thou art, Thou art the highest and most human too . . . But it should also be observed that while irony is so prominent in these four Idylls they are rather less doom-ridden than the 15 See Charles Tennyson, p. 316. Actually only a few trial copies were set up under this title. 18 See Memoir, pp. 421-522.

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finished whole. They are perhaps more interesting as studies but by themselves much less fundamental or tragic. Arthur is not yet so clearly the central figure, and the struggle of self against darkness is secondary to the subject of love between man and woman, and truth and falsity in this love, which seem to be generally prime interests of Tennyson about this time. In the final version, "Merlin and Vivien" is considerably revised through the introduction of the King Mark element and his bestial realm. We are mainly concerned here with Idylls of the King as a final coherent work, which embodies not only interesting studies in irony, and perhaps some more superficial moral and social notions of the day, but also the deeper and central struggle in Tennyson, the struggle of self against the dark womb of Nature. In the four Idylls published in 1869, "The Coming of Arthur", "The Holy Grail", "Pelleas and Ettarre", and "The Passing of Arthur", the king becomes more clearly the center and a new emphasis is placed on the "wave poised to fall" and the inevitability or doom of civilized man reeling back into the beast and being no more. These motifs are also prominent in the remaining Idylls, "Gareth and Lynette" (1872), "The Last Tournament" (1872) and "Balin and Balan" (1885), and in these there is also stressed the illusion of the "dream-kingdom" created by Arthur and the "vows" that bind his knights to its preservation. Thus, in its final form, Tennyson has combined in the Idylls something of the technique of the classical poems and his developing interest in dramatic irony. He cannot, in a work of such length and movement, employ as he did in the classical poems the landscape and action of myth to embody the drama of self, but these shorter poems are only aspects of the self's struggle while the Idylls purports to be the entire history or cycle of self. "It is not the history of one man or of one generation", Tennyson told his son, "but of a whole cycle of generations". 17 Within the whole cyclical and dramatic structure we hear the voice of self again and again in the longer reflective speeches not only of Arthur, but also of Lancelot, Percivale, and even Tristram. For while these knights are for the dramatic purposes of the story "characters", 17

Memoir, p. 524.

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when they reflect they are as universal and characterless as Tithonus, Ulysses, or Demeter, differentiated not by their features or mannerisms, but by their degree of strength or weakness, power of resistance or tendency to submit to the voice of Nature. They describe together an essentially quantitative hierarchy of the human self, rated by their scopes of vision and wills to resist, from Arthur down to Lancelot to Tristram to Mark. Although Idylls of the King has often been treated as an allegory, both religious and social, it is allegory only on its most superficial and least successful level. As we have observed, Tennyson is generally feeble at allegory because of the subjective and non-qualitative nature of his thought process. The poet himself cautioned: "Let not my readers press too hardly on details whether for history or for allegory." 18 Two of Tennyson's friends, Dean Alford and J. T. Knowles, came out with moral allegorical interpretations of the Idylls in 1870, 19 and Tennyson did not apparently object to these at the time. But he often remarked later that "they have taken my hobby, and ridden it too hard, and have explained some things too allegorically, although there is an allegorical or perhaps rather a parabolic drift in the poem". 20 And the poet continued: Of course Camelot for instance, a city of shadowing palaces, is everywhere symbolic of the gradual growth of human beliefs and institutions, and of the spiritual development of man. Yet there is no single fact or incident in the 'Idylls', however seemingly mystical, which cannot be explained as without any mystery or allegory whatever.21 This statement of Tennyson is suggestive of a passage from F. D. Maurice's lecture on Spenser's Fairie Queene delivered in 1864. In dealing with a particular episode in the first book of that poem, he says: Do you ask what this means? You will get many answers. One will tell you how it describes a man deluded by Falsehood and Superstition; another that it describes the slavery of the Christian Church to some enemies. I believe that it could not mean one of these things 18 19 20 21

Works, V, p. 452. See Memoir, p. 523. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 523-524.

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without meaning both. And therefore there is no occasion to decide between opposing commentators. And this is what I would say to you about the complaint which I told you many people make of Spenser, that it requires great ingenuity to get at his meaning, and that when you think you have got it, you cannot be sure that he did not intend something quite different. I would beseech all his readers not to waste any ingenuity in deciphering his hieroglyphics. The simplest man who is engaged in the battle of life will know most of what he means. None who are not engaged in it will know anything of what he means, let them be as clever as they may.22 We can detect behind Maurice's language his preoccupation with the eternal verity or truth that lies within the reach of all men. It is highly probable that Tennyson knew of this lecture or at least of Maurice's views on Spenser. When he asks the reader of the Idylls not to ponder too much the allegory, he may mean just what Maurice means, but only in regard to the simple moral level of the poem, the Enoch Arden level. Essentially Tennyson's art is the opposite of Spenser's. Really to fathom Spenser we must fathom his allegory. The core of the Idylls, on the other hand, is not allegory. The knights do not "represent" objective "ideas" or "qualities"; they embody various degrees of subjective awareness and growth. Tennyson's further comments become significant here. When asked if those commentators were right who interpreted the three Queens who accompany Arthur on his last voyage as Faith, Hope, and Charity, he answered: They are right, and they are not right. They mean that and they do not. They are three of the noblest of women. They are also three Graces, but they are much more. I hate to be tied down to say, 'This means that', because the thought within the image is much more than any one interpretation.23 This is perhaps the most revealing comment Tennyson ever let fall on his poetry in general. It suggests again that to Tennyson the thought was in the image rather than in the idea or the word. "Interpretations" are verbal. He continues: 22 For the text of this lecture see F. D. Maurice, The Friendship of Books and Other Lectures (London, 1893), pp. 165-186; the above reference is to p. 179. 23 Memoir, p. 524.

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Poetry is like shot-silk with many glancing colours. Every reader must find his own interpretation to his ability, and according to his sympathy with the poet.24

These lines suggest that Tennyson did not expect many to fathom his work completely, and, also, that he consciously wrote on many levels. Hallam Tennyson's conclusion that we must take the poem as a whole is well-founded, and we would agree with him that "the completed poem, regarded as a whole, gives his innermost being more fully, though not more truly, than 'In Memoriam' ".25 It is the complete history of self and, like In Memoriam, is based on an annual cycle. As Tennyson wrote: "Birth is a mystery and death is a mystery, and in the midst lies the tableland of life, and its struggles and performances." 26 And he was himself careful to point out the cyclical nature of the poem: The Coming of Arthur is on the night of the New Year; when he is wedded 'the world is white with May;' on a summer night the vision of the Holy Grail appears; and the 'Last Tournament' is in the 'yellowing autumntide'. Guinevere flees thro' the mists of autumn, and Arthur's death takes place at midnight in mid-winter. The form of the 'Coming of Arthur' and of the 'Passing' is purposely more archaic than that of the other 'Idyls'.27

This is, then, the cycle of the self, from the great deep to the great deep, the light that "makes a darkness visible". We have only to recall the very early poem "Perdidi Diem", in which Tennyson wrote, I never liv'd day, but daily die,

and in In Memoriam, Half-dead to know that I shall die,

to appreciate why the Idylls seem doom-ridden almost from the beginning, almost with the advent of self-consciousness, which is also "death-consciousness". Hallam Tennyson further suggests the epic scope of the Idylls: ** Ibid. 25 Ibid., p. 525. 2« Ibid., p. 524. 27 Ibid., p. 528-529.

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If epic unity is looked for in the Idylls, we find it not in the wrath of an Achilles, nor in the wanderings of an Ulysses, but in the unending war of humanity in all ages - the world-wide war of Sense and Soul, typified in individuals, with the subtle interaction of character upon character, the central dominant figure being the pure, generous, tender, brave, human-hearted Arthur - so that the links (with here and there symbolic accessories) which bind the Idylls into an artistic whole, are perhaps somewhat intricate.28 It should, however, be suggested again that the struggle is wider than that of "Sense and Soul" taken with their religious connotations or unless we consider "Sense" to describe the chaotic subjective Dionysiac realm. Tennyson once remarked, "The vision of an ideal Arthur as I have drawn him had come upon me when, little more than a boy, I first lighted upon Malory." 29 In the Epilogue to the Idylls, addressed to the Queen, he inserted, as an after-thought, the description of Arthur as "Ideal manhood closed in real man." But statements like these are most apt to lead to misconceptions about Tennyson and misreadings of his poems. By "ideal" Tennyson does not mean "perfect", and we should avoid the Platonic connotation. There exist no "ideas". The "ideal" is an illusion, but a necessary illusion in Tennyson. Neither Tennyson, nor Arthur, believes in the ideal, that is, in its truth or existence, and that Tristram supposes that Arthur does constitutes what we shall later describe as the "master irony" of the Idylls by which Tennyson fuses his talents for subjective portrayal and dramatic irony. " I tried in my Idylls", Tennyson said, "to teach men the need of the ideal". 30 He did not undertake to teach them the truth of it. There is, accordingly, more doubt and despair in Arthur and Lancelot than in any of the lesser knights because they are capable of greater doubt and despair. Arthur, then, is the self embodied, and not simply a symbol of it. It may also be said that he is the "will" which sustains the Apollonian illusion of "Camelot" or civilization above the Dionysiac chaos, and prevents, as long as possible, the individual from merg28 2»

30

Ibid., p. 526. Ibid., p. 525.

Charles Tennyson, Six Tennyson Essays, p. 94.

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ing back into the beast and being no more. Or his sword, Excalibur, may be thought of as the "will" in a narrower sense. The poem is essentially vitalistic and the forces embodied in the other persons are vital rather than allegorical. Tennyson deals primarily with subjective dynamics in the Idylls, principally objectized in the dream-kingdom of Camelot, the Quest of the Holy Grail, and the fellowship of the Round Table, which we will treat in that order. 2.

THE D R E A M - K I N G D O M

In discussing In Memoriam, we suggested that the key passage in resolution is the following: 31 The hills are shadows, and they f l o w F r o m f o r m to f o r m , and nothing stands; T h e y melt like mist, the solid lands, Like clouds they shape themselves and go. But in m y spirit will I dwell, A n d dream m y dream, and hold it true . . .

We compared this with Nietzsche's statement: "This is a dream, and I want to go on dreaming", which is the will's answer to the Wisdom of Silenus. Nietzsche goes on to describe the tragic hero: Like a mighty Titan, the tragic hero shoulders the w h o l e D i o n y s i a c world a n d removes the burden f r o m us. S 2

This hero, like I. A. Richards' tragedian,33 confronts what human beings generally cannot confront except in the experience of tragedy, and his death is uplifting rather than depressing because he has affirmed to the end the strength of the will: The hero, the highest manifestation of the will, is destroyed, and we assent, since he too is merely a phenomenon, and the eternal life of the will remains unaffected.84 31

Supra, p. 113. The Birth of Tragedy, p. 126. 33 See I. A. Richards, Principals of Literary Criticism, p. 246: "Suppressions and sublimations alike are the devices by which we endeavor to avoid issues which might bewilder us. The essence of Tragedy is that it forces us to live for a moment without them." 34 The Birth of Tragedy, p. 102. 32

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The Dionysiac foundation, the terrifying voice in the background, is established in the first lines of "The Coming of Arthur". After briefly introducing the figure of Guinevere, around whom the narrative structure of the first Idyll revolves, Tennyson turns immediately to the description of the land before Arthur's coming: And so there grew great tracts of wilderness, Wherein the beast was ever more and more, But man was less and less, till Arthur came. Arthur, who like the mysterious faculty of the "will" itself comes with no ascertainable origin from the great deep, cannot destroy the beast. Rather, he pushes him to remote corners of the realm, where he remains an ever-present danger to the civilization of posited values that Arthur maintains centered around the dreamkingdom of Camelot. The self emerges out of the chaotic realm of consciousness and sustains itself, or its identity, through an illusion. But Arthur cannot escape the fact of his own isolation and loneliness and considers Guinevere essential to his ability to will his will, which reflects again the importance of the support of human love so prominent to the struggle in In Memoriam: What happiness to reign a lonely king, Vext - O ye stars that shudder over me, 0 earth that soundest hollow under me, Vext with waste dreams? for saving I be joined To her that is the fairest under heaven, 1 seem as nothing in the mighty world, And cannot will my will, nor work my work Wholly, nor make myself in mine own realm Victor and Lord. But were I join'd with her, Then might we live together as one life, And reigning with one will in everything Have power on this dark land to lighten it, And power on this dead world to make it live. Arthur's vision of life is Tennyson's vision of futility, "the hollow earth". Arthur's goal is to lighten the land ("making a darkness visible") and to make it live (the vital force of the "living will"). He feels it is necessary to wed himself to the earth in order for will to function "vitally". The self cannot endure in self-contemplation, which is a new fashioning of the conclusions reached

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in "The Palace of Art" and In Memoriam. Merlin has been taken as the power of "reason" or "intellect" that can either create or destroy and can serve many masters. But he may more accommodatingly be taken to represent the poetic imagination (Cf., "Merlin and the Gleam"), although he is much more than either representation. When questioned as to Arthur's origin he apparently evades the question with this song: Rain, rain, and sun! a rainbow in the sky! A young man will be wiser by and by! An old man's wit may wander ere he die. Rain, rain, and sun! a rainbow on the lea! And truth is this to me, and that to thee; And truth or clothed or naked let it be. Rain, sun, and rain! and the free blossom blows: Sun, rain, and sun! and where is he who knows? From the great deep to the great deep he goes. But this is not merely an evasion. Merlin expresses in the song the relativity of all objective truth, or knowledge about "things", concluding only about the self that it comes from and goes to the great deep. And Tennyson, unlike Malory or Geoffrey, deliberately declines to make the King"s origin more definite. The city that Merlin built for Arthur is awesome and strange, particularly to the young Gareth, seeing it for the first time in the distance. The reality of the city is doubted, even as Arthur's origins were doubted. Gareth's attendants comment significantly on it. One remarks on how a wise man in the North said that the King was not king at all but a "changeling out of Fairyland". Another avows: "Lord, there is no such city anywhere, / But all a vision." On approaching, Gareth meets an Old Seer whom he questions about the city and who confirms that the city was built by fairies and built "to music". And, as thou sayest, it is enchanted, son, For there is nothing in it as it seems Saving the King; tho' some there be that hold The King a shadow, and the city real. Yet take thou heed of him, for, so thou pass Beneath this archway, then wilt thou become A thrall to his enchantments, for this King

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Will bind thee by such vows as is a shame A man should not be bound by, yet the which No man can keep; but, so thou dread to swear, Pass not beneath this gateway, but abide Without, among the cattle of the field. For an ye heard a music, like enow They are building still, seeing the city is built To music, therefore never built at all, And therefore built for ever. The facts that the city was planned by Merlin and was built to music suggest Carlyle's vitalistic concept of poetry as "musical thought".35 The contrasting of those within the city and the cattle of the fields points to the fact that the dream-kingdom is an Apollonian or civilized illusion, with nothing "real" in it "saving the King", or the "living will", which Schopenhauer found to be the only "thing in itself", the vital principle. Those who would dwell within the illusion must strive to preserve it and take the "vows" for this purpose. The city is not built at all because it has no "objective" reality and, being subject, cannot be object. It is built forever insofar as the vital principle of the human will endures forever, even "when all that seems shall suffer shock" (Cf. In Memoriam,

supra, p . 114).

The figure of King Mark was introduced in the Idylls written after those appearing in 1859, and contrasts strongly to Arthur. "Mark hath tarnished the great name of king" (G and L, 1. 418). His kingdom is not ruled by "will" and laws and values sustained by will, but by "Mark's Way", which corresponds to the chaotic indifference of the Dionysiac realm. Tristram, who denounces the Apollonian illusion and the vows and would live according to Nature, dies by "Mark's way". In "Balin and Balan'", the last written of the Idylls, the regenerate Balin asks to wear the Queen's crown on his shield to recall to him his vows. The King tells him that he must put the "crown to use" and adds: The crown is but the shadow of the king, And thus a shadow's shadow, let him have it, So this will help him of his violences! 35

("Balin and Balan", 11. 199-201) See Carlyle, V, pp. 83-84.

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The King in a sense acknowledges here that he himself, insofar as he is king, is shadow, and emphasizes the "use" that the concept of crown must be put to. This passage should be compared to Merlin's statements in "Merlin and Vivien" about the relative positions of fame and "use", the name versus the vital fact: I once was looking for a magic weed, And found a fair young squire who sat alone, Had carved himself a knightly shield of wood, And then was painting on it fancied arms, Azure, an eagle rising or, the sun In dexter chief; the scroll, "I follow fame." And speaking not, but leaning over him, I took his brush and blotted out the bird, And made a gardener putting in a graff, With this for motto, "Rather use than fame." ("Merlin and Vivien", 11. 469-478)

There may be a suggestion here of Carlyle's doctrine of work,36 but this doctrine is in itself a vitalistic concept. Going beyond the practical and moral levels, "use" implies the process of growth or becoming as opposed to an external ideal or idea: fame. Vivien makes her initial appearance (with respect to the final sequence of the Idylls) in "Balin and Balan", riding out of Mark's court with a young squire in attendance. She sings a song about "the fire of heaven", which is her own idealization of the forces of Nature that she follows: This fire of heaven, This old sun-worship, boy, will rise again, And beat the Cross to earth, and break the King And all his Table. (B and B, 11. 450-453)

She purposely breaks Balin's "dream" of Guinevere's purity (1. 493) with the knowledge that Guinevere also worships the "fire of heaven". For Vivien, like Tristram after her, sees clearly enough that all the King stands for is an illusion or "dream", but she, even more than Tristram, is blind to the necessity for the dream, and, consequently, cannot herself be raised by it. And so her delight is in the destruction of the dream, and she thoroughly en38

See Carlyle, I, pp. 154 and 181.

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joys Lancelot's suffering, and reveals her own awareness of the impending doom that must be precipitated by Lancelot's sin: Ah little rat that borest in the dyke Thy hole by night to let the boundless deep Down upon far-off cities while they dance Or dream - of thee they dream'd not - nor of me These - ay, but each of either; ride, and dream The mortal dream that never yet was mine Ride, ride and dream until ye awake - to me! (M and V, 11. 110-116) Vivien then conceives of her own mission as one of letting the boundless deep, the chaotic forces, in upon the dream world. She leaves the court quietly but with secret confidence: Then, narrow court and lubber King, farewell! For Lancelot will be gracious to the rat, And our wise Queen, if knowing that I know Will hate, loathe, fear - but honor me the more. (M and V, 11. 117-120) Merlin, on the other hand, hardly noticing that Vivien follows him, leaves Camelot in despair, for he too foresees its destruction: Then fell on Merlin a great melancholy; He walk'd with dreams and darkness, and he found A doom that ever poised itself to fall, An ever-moaning battle in the mist, World-war of dying flesh against the life, Death in all life . . . 37 (M and V, 11. 187-192) He, in effect, leaves Arthur to sustain his realm alone? On the aesthetic level, Merlin may again be considered as the creative imagination, being seduced by the forces of Chaos and Nature. It is possible that Tennyson was thinking of certain actual poets of his own age, but only incidentally. Merlin sees the forces of destruction in Vivien herself: You seem'd that wave about to break upon me And sweep me from my hold upon the world, My use and name and fame. 37 This passage first appeared in 1873. See Richard Jones, The of the Idylls of the King, p. 93.

Growth

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He quickly grows weary of her, seeing her as the destroyer of man's created dreams: Yea, they would pare the mountain to the plain, To leave an equal baseness; and in this Are harlots like the crows that if they find Some stain or blemish in a name of note, Not grieving that their greatest are so small, Inflate themselves with some insane delight, And judge all nature from her feet of clay, Without the will, to lift their eyes, and see Her godlike head crowned with spiritual fire, And touching other worlds, I am weary of her. He condemns Vivien, then, not because she sees through the illusion or the ideal of the Round Table, but because she delights in man's nothingness rather than grieving over it. Vivien is deficient in vision in not seeing the actual chaos and terror of Nature, and utterly deficient in will. All that she can see is that the ideals of the Round Table are not "real". The fact that Arthur sustains Camelot and the Round Table is emphasized again and again. In the opening section of "The Holy Grail" the monk Ambrosius describes the fellowship of the Round Table: For good you are and bad, and like to coins, Some true, some light, but every one of you Stamped with the image of the King . . . It follows that if the King should not be real, then nothing remains of this grand illusion. So the naive and well-meaning Pelleas, coming on the scene after the Round Table has been wasted by the Quest and the effects of Guinevere's sin, finds one ideal after another prove itself empty and finally learns that the Queen herself is not what she seems to be but false. In frantic disillusionment he asks Percivale: "Is the King true?" The thought that the King could not be true cannot be tolerated: 'The king', said Percivale, 'Why, then let men couple at once with wolves. What! art thou mad?' ("Pelleas and Ettarre")

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In "The Last Tournament" Arthur is called away from Camelot to accept the challenge of the Red Knight who has set up a kingdom in the North, meaning to uphold all things contrary to what Arthur upholds. Tell thou the King and all his liars that I Have founded my Round Table in the North, And whatsoever his own knights have sworn My knights have sworn the counter to it - and say My tower is full of harlots, like his court, But mine are worthier, seeing they profess To be none other than themselves - and say My knights are all adulterers like his own, But mine are truer, seeing they profess To be none other; and say his hour is come, The heathen are upon him, his long lance Broken, and his Excalibur a straw. Doom is now imminent, and Arthur accepts the challenge to prove, at least, that his Excalibur is not a straw. He leaves Lancelot, ironically, to preside over the tournament of the "dead innocence", for the rubies worn by the foundling who died in Guinevere's care. Tristram, embodying the forces of Nature, comes out of the woods and easily wins the prize, while Lancelot, as judge, can only watch and contemplate in agony his own betrayal. Arthur does not leave upon this venture with any hope of ultimate success. He apprehends in the challenge of the Red Knight that that ever-climbing wave, Hur'ld back again so often in empty form, Hath lain for years at rest . . . And he expresses his fear to Lancelot before he leaves: Or whence the fear lest this my realm, uprear'd, By noble deeds at one with noble vows, From flat confusion and brute violences, Reel back into the beast, and be no more? Arthur's only true follower remaining in Camelot is the fool, who will not skip or dance to Tristram's music: I had liefer twenty years Skip to the broken music of my brains Than any broken music thou canst make.

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When Tristram asks what music he himself has broken, Dagonet, the fool, replies: "Arthur, the King's." Tristram's song is the song of free love and Nature, the song he made in "the woods". The Fool proves himself no fool in that he recognizes the value of illusion: I have had my day and my philosophies And thank the Lord I am King Arthur's fool. Swine, say ye? swine, goats, asses, rams, and geese, Troop'd round a Paynim harper once, who thrumm'd On such a wire as musically as thou Some such fine song - but never a king's fool. Dagonet describes the vows and the civilized values of Camelot in terms of Arthur's "star" that he can see even in day-time, and which Tristram cannot see. Dagonet says that only he and Arthur see it and hear the silent music (11. 348-350), whereupon Tristram asks if Arthur also is a fool. Dagonet answers: Ay, ay, my brother fool, the king of fools! Conceits himself as God that he can make Figs out of thistles, silk from bristles, milk From burning spurge, honey from hornet-combs, And men from beasts - Long live the king of fools! Tristram has irrefutable argument on his side, the argument of Dionysos that so over-powered the intellect in "The Two Voices". Considered against this background, Arthur's values are meaningless, his purposes futile, and he is indeed a king of fools except that he is not fooled. Tristram returns to Cornwall to Isolt and finds her fearful of Mark and Mark's Way, "to steal behind one in the dark" (1. 613). Both Tristram and Isolt, trying to live according to Nature, are tortured by their growing apprehension of its chaos, indifference, and senselessness. In Tristram's views of free love Isolt sees only her own eventual loss, and she secretly fears Tristram because he has broken his "vows" to King Arthur and mocks them: The vows! O, ay - the wholesome madness of an hour They served their use, their time; for every knight Believed himself a greater than himself,

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And every follower eyed him as a God; Till he, being lifted up beyond himself, Did mightier deeds than elsewise he had done, And so the realm was made. But then their vows — First mainly thro' the sullying of our Queen Began to gall the knighthood, asking whence Had Arthur right to bind them to himself? Dropt down from heaven? Wash'd up from out the deep? They fail'd to trace him thro' the flesh and blood Of our old kings. Whence then? a doubtful lord To bind them by inviolable vows, Which flesh and blood perforce would violate; For feel this arm of mine - the tide within Red with free chase and heather-scented air, Pulsing full man. Can Arthur make me pure As any maiden child? Lock up my tongue From uttering freely what I freely hear? Bind me to one? The wide world laughs at it. Tristram's denunciation of Arthur and the vows is based essentially on his perception that they are "unnatural" and have no definite sanctions in a real world of things. Arthur's very origin has not been "ascertained". He employs his "reason" and concludes that neither the King nor his vows are "real", not questioning the basis of external reality as such. He finds the Arthurian realm illusory, but does not apprehend the necessity for illusion, because he does not really apprehend the terrifying fact of Nature, his own nature. He does not, then, conceive life as tragedy. To live according to nature, to be absorbed in nature, is to be no longer "self". When Arthur returns he sees that the illusion, staggered by Guinevere's betrayal, Vivien's nibbling at the dyke by night, and the decimation of the ranks of the Round Table through the illprojected Quest of the Holy Grail, has now utterly collapsed by virtue of Tristram's victory. So all the ways were safe from shore to shore, But in the heart of Arthur pain was lord. All that remains is that last battle in the West for the "will" to play out its dream to the end. There is no more delight in illusion.

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"I am thy fool", says Dagonet, "and I shall never make thee smile again". "The Passing of Arthur" begins with sections added to the 1842 "Morte D'Arthur" describing Arthur's own self-doubt. Behind all of his actions had always been at least a religious "hope" that his will was a projection of a greater Will. This, perhaps, partly explains the role of the Lady of the Lake in the Idylls, the sword Excalibur also coming out of the great deep. Now complete futility and hollowness confront the King: For I, being simple, thought to work His will, And have but stricken with the sword in vain, And all whereon I lean'd in wife and friend Is traitor to my peace, and all my realm Reels back into the beast, and is no more.

It is of some significance that the battle is fought in the West, the land of the Hesperides, the realm of twilight. The battle is like none other ever fought before and describes the self struggling blindly in the clutches of chaos: Nor ever yet had Arthur fought a fight Like this last, dim, weird battle of the west. A death-white mist slept over sand and sea. Whereof the chill, to him who breathed it, drew Down with his blood, till all his heart was cold With formless fear; and even on Arthur fell Confusion, since he saw not whom he fought. For friend and foe were shadows in the mist, And friend slew friend not knowing whom he slew . . .

The power of Death is felt acutely by Arthur after the battle: O Bedivere, for on my heart hath fallen Confusion, till I know not what I am, Nor whence I am, nor whether I be king; Behold, I seem but king among the dead.

But the will sustains its illusion to the very end. Arthur will accept no other account of Excalibur from Bedivere except that the Lady of the Lake reached out and pulled the sword down into the great deep. There is no faith in the external evidenced, but no denial of faith either. Arthur does not know where he is going:

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I am going a long way With these thou seest - if indeed I go For all my mind is clouded with a doubt To the island-valley of Avilion . . . This passage describes the final inevitable domination of the death-longing or peace-longing tendency, so strong in Tennyson's earliest poetry. Bedivere repeats to himself after the passing of the King the weird rhyme, "From the great deep to the great deep he goes" which can be taken to describe the emergence and absorption of the self, the cycle of man. Arthur's consolatory speech to Bedivere is essentially a contemplation of mutability, and he tells Bedivere that he must "comfort himself". "What comfort is in me?" When the King has vanished the "new sun rose bringing the new year".

3.

THE R O U N D TABLE

In "Merlin and Vivien" the great magician recalls the founding of the Round Table: It was the time when first the question rose About the founding of a Table Round, That was to be, for love of God and men And noble deeds, the flower of all the world; And each incited each to noble deeds. The nature of these "noble deeds" is never precisely described, nor are the "vows" which bind the fellowship to the King. For the nature or qualities of the deeds and vows are relatively unimportant. The knights of the Round Table are bound to the "will" of the King, and the only elaboration that can be made is that in a vague way the goal is "love" of God and men. For in Tennyson's work Arthur attains a stature and a central position far beyond that in any of its medieval sources.38 Arthur is not only the strongest knight, but he sustains the realm in his 38

Tennyson's avowed sources are Malory's Morte D'Arthur, Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae, and the Mabinogion; see Memoir, p. 518. For the Arthurian tradition see generally James Douglas Bruce, The Evolution of Arthurian Romance from the Beginnings down to the Year 1300 (Baltimore, 1923); for the pseudo-historical tradition see

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own wisdom. In the pseudo-historical tradition of Gildas, Nennius, and Geoffrey of Monmouth, Arthur is the supreme hero king; but this Arthur has no relationship to a fellowship of the Round Table or to the early legendary knights whose deeds achieved fame in the various traditions of medieval romance.89 In both the Welsh Mabinogion series and Chrétien de Troyes' French romances of the twelfth century, Arthur is king and nothing more. He is neither very formidable nor unique, and it is the exploits of several of his knights, Gawaine, Yvaine, Eric (Geraint), and Percivale that are central.40 Gradually these separate romances are more and more centralized about Arthur and elaborated in the extensive French prose cycles of the thirteenth century.41 Finally the Tristram cycle is incorporated into Arthurian tradition,42 and the notorious recreant made knight of the Round Table. Malory, whose Morte D'Arthur is Tennyson's primary source, based his work largely on the French prose cycle with its large Tristram section; and surely it is the Tristram section (disregarding Book Five which is based on a source deriving from Geoffrey's pseudo-historical tradition) that seems most dissonant or out of place in Malory.43 But in Malory's work, Lancelot, John Strong Perry Tatlock, The Legendary History of Britain; Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae and Its Early Vernacular Versions (Berkeley, 1950); see also The Mabinogion, trans. Lady Charlotte Guest (London, 1906); Geoffrey of Monmouth, Histories of the Kings of Britain, trans. Sebastion Evans (London, 1911); Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte D'Arthur, ed. with intr. John Rhys (London, 1955); Roger Sherman Loomis, Wales and the Arthurian Legend (Cardiff, 1956); Eugene Vinaver, "Malory's Morte D'Arthur in the Light of a Recent Discovery", in Bulletin of John Rylands Library Manchester, XIX (1935), pp. 438-457; and M. W. Maccallum, Tennyson's Idylls of the King and Arthurian Story from the XVlth Century (Glasgow, 1894). 38

See Bruce, pp. 19-36, and Vinaver, pp. 452-454. Tatlock and Loomis disagree as to whether there was a legendary tradition of Arthur and his knights existing before and independent of the pseudo-historical tradition of Geoffrey. 40 Chrétien de Troyes, Arthurian Romances, trans. W. W. Comfort (London, 1955). 41 See Bruce, pp. 369-495. 42 Ibid., p. 488. 43 In Malory the Tristram episodes (Books VIII-XII according to Caxton) are disproportionately long and incoherent and the Lot-Pellinore feud less prominent.

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whose character in the twelfth century Le Chevalier de la Charrette was highly ambiguous,44 is the supreme figure, though Arthur himself attains grand stature, especially in the "Morte D'Arthur" sections at the conclusion, based on the equally moving French prose work. Yet, in Malory, several knights are stronger than the King. King Pellinore overthrows him in battle in Book One; Lancelot's superiority is unquestioned; implicit is that of Tristram and Lamorak de Galis; and it will be recalled that in the last Book Lancelot's cousin, Bors de Ganis, overthrows the King but is restrained by Lancelot from killing him.45 Likewise, while it is probably not true that Malory's work lacks structural unity, its unifying principle is far different from that of the Idylls. Tennyson's theme, if we can call it a theme, is doom, the King's doom, and from the outset an atmosphere of foreboding engulfs the Idylls. While the King's final days are described with at least equal dramatic effect by Malory, his work, regarded as a whole, is not centered either on the King's life or his death. The destruction of the Round Table is a final chapter, even as Lancelot's sin with Guinevere is merely an episode. Excluding the Fifth Book, which would seem to have no place in the whole and actually appears to spring from an entirely different source with different characters and places,46 Malory's work is unified throughout primarily by the carrying-through of the feud between the houses of King Pellinore and King Lot. Malory inherits this theme from his French predecessors, but, perhaps influenced by the contemporary Wars of the Roses, seems to heighten it. From the very outset we learn how Lot fought against Arthur and how Pellinore becomes Arthur's friend. However, Lot's wife, Bellicent, is Arthur's sister, and, therefore, the King owes a certain favoritism to her son, his nephew, Gawaine, his brothers Gaheris and 44

Chrétien de Troyes, pp. 270-360. See Malory, II, p. 360. In Book Five of Malory, Arthur is a warrior and nationalistic king w h o fights in some more or less real places on the continent. Gawaine and Kay are the strong and honorable knights of the Geoffrey of Monmouth pseudo-historical tradition. There is no suggestion of the feud between the houses of Lot and Pellinore, nor of Gawaine's envy or treachery. With the exception of Gawaine, the knights prominent in the French romances and Prose Cycle do not appear at all. 45

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Gareth, and half-brothers, Mordred and Agravaine. Within Arthur's court the hostility of these brothers (except Gareth) to Pellinore and his sons festers and grows right from the appearance of Pellinore's oldest son, Tor, at court. Gawaine also envies Lancelot and his kinsmen, and it is Lancelot's accidental slaying of Gaheris and Gareth, intensified by Gawaine's hatred, that finally causes the great break between the King and Lancelot, rather than Lancelot's love for the Queen, which is ancillary and might have been excused. We know that Tennyson made a life-long study of Arthurian materials, 47 but it is not known just what sources he read besides Malory and Mrs. Geste's translation of the Welsh Mabinogion, which are the avowed sources of the Idylls,48 Yet it will readily be appreciated that Tennyson significantly altered both narrative and characters as they appear in Malory, and some of his alterations suggest earlier sources than Malory: e.g., the recreant Tristram of earlier French sources, 49 and the ambivalent character of the Lancelot of Chretien's romances. 50 But the use Tennyson makes of these several characters is more complicated still. In connection with Tennyson's role as subjective poet, they can be considered in two significant ways: first, as aspects of internal struggle, self-doubt, and self-betrayal; and second, as varying degrees of vision and will, describing a kind of quantitative hierarchy of self-evolution from Mark up to Arthur. In regard to the first of these, and especially the notion of self-betrayal, it is interesting to note how Tennyson has transformed the most despicable of medieval crimes, treason, or a breach of fealty, represented so frequently in medieval literature by the figures of Judas and Ganlon, from an objective to a subjective context. To the extent that the "vows" in the Idylls can be 47

Memoir, p. 518. Ibid., p. 522; Charles Tennyson, pp. 296-301. 49 In Chretien's Cliges, for example (pp. 131-132), Fenice is fearful lest they be thought of and talked of as another Tristram and Iseult. 50 Chretien de Troyes, op. cit. Although Lancelot in Chretien's romance, is involved in the rescue of the Queen, while on this mission he ignominiously condescends to ride in a "cart", which action apparently merits the scorn and abuse of all who meet with him thereafter. 48

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taken to bind all of man's faculties to the will, betrayals such as Lancelot's and Tristram's, can be taken as forms of self-betrayal. The taking of the "vows" is most fully described in "The Coming of Arthur": His warriors cried, "Be thou the king, and we will work thy will Who love thee." Then the King in low deep tones, And simple words of great authority, Bound them by so strait vows to his own self That when they rose, knighted from kneeling, some Were pale as at the passing of a ghost, Some flush'd and others dazed, as one who wakes Half-blinded at the coming of a light. But when he spake, and cheer'd his Table Round With large, divine, and comfortable words, Beyond my tongue to tell thee - I beheld From eye to eye thro' all their Order flash A momentary likeness of the King . . .

It is important to remember that the warriors placed Arthur in command to save them from the "beast" or the chaos of indifferent Nature. It has been said that "Gareth and Lynette" is the only one of the Idylls that is not "doom-ridden" in tone.61 Gareth is young vision, and this Idyll is the cycle in miniature as seen through the high-spirited faith and hope of youth. Gareth, playing at being knight under the supervision of his mother, longs to be a "knight of Arthur, working his will" (1. 24). In the course of the Idyll, he faces a cycle of life described not by the entire year, as in the poem as a whole, but by a single day, and his antagonists in this brief struggle, which may be taken as a cursory and hopeful view of life and death, are Morning-Star, Noonday Sun, Evening-Star, and finally, Night or Death. Struggling bravely with the first three, Gareth achieves in his final battle with Death an effortless miracle, for the sinister and dreadful black knight, decorated by a skeleton, when his helmet is cleft, turns out to be, like Gareth, only a youth. 50 Gareth, in his youthful imagination, overcomes death. This triumph should be compared with Arthur's last painful 51

See E. D. H. Johnson, The Alien Vision of Victorian Poetry, pp.

43-44.

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straggle with Modred in "The Passing of Arthur", where with his last strength he manages to kill Modred, sustaining in return his fatal wound. Modred, unlike Vivien, Tristram, Mark or the Red Knight, is not actually defined as a living character and speaks only two short lines in the entire Idylls (P and E, 1. 597, and G., 1. 105). He is a silent force. He is death, who continually watches, and is on crucial occasions terrifyingly glimpsed by others of the characters. Gareth, or youth, shows little concern for Modred: Tho' Modred biting his thin lips was mute, For he is always sullen - what care I. It is Modred, moreover, who continually spies on Lancelot and Guinevere, and who so frightens Guinevere, which may suggest the medieval theme of concupiscent love and death being inseparably joined. The original Tristram and Iseult drank the potion of "love and death". 52 Modred waits patiently. His shield is described as "blank as death". Significantly, at the Last Tournament, Lancelot, overseeing the jousts and filled with intense anguish at his own guilt and the success of Tristram, and seeing the laws that rule the tournament repeatedly broken, heard someone curse "the dead babe and the follies of the King"; And once the laces of a helmet crack'd And show'd him, like a vermin in its hole, Modred, a narrow face. The savage Balin is a character of Tennyson's own devising, since the Balin and Balan episode in Malory is slight 53 and hardly suggests the use Tennyson makes of it. Balin, like Tristram, is a knight of the woods, but unlike Tristram is in no sense an intellectual and cannot comprehend the intricacies of the civilized society at Camelot. He feels that it is impossible that he could ever live up to the vows he has taken or the ideals they represent: Too high this mount of Camelot for me; These high-set courtesies are not for me. Shall I not rather prove the worse for these? 52

See, for example, in Gottfried von Strassburg's Tristan and Isolt in Medieval Romances, ed. Roger Sherman Loomis and Laura Ribbard Loomis (New York, 1957), pp. 158-162. 53 See Malory, pp. 51-70; for an early prose account by Tennyson of the "Dolorous Stroke" see Memoir, pp. 529-534.

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Fierier and stormier from restraining, break Into some madness even before the Queen? Failing of comprehension, but with the best intentions, Balin needs a constant example before him, and, unfortunately he chooses a symbol of the Queen as his guiding light. He observes her meeting privately with Lancelot but is too simple to suspect and is only further confused. Vivien's disclosure to him of the Queen's guilt drives him wild again and he kills the man he most loves, his brother Balan. Lancelot is not far below Arthur, and Tennyson treats him with the greatest sympathy. He is "human, all to human", and it is in his imperfection that Guinevere finds him warmer and more attractive than Arthur. His is the sharpest sense of guilt and responsibility because he most nearly comprehends what he betrays and Arthur's true greatness. Nor does the King ever blame Lancelot. In fact the King, even after it is quite clear that he suspects the Queen's unfaithfulness, seems particularly close to Lancelot, for it is Lancelot rather than Guinevere who relieves his loneliness. Lancelot is most like himself. Yet Tennyson, unlike Malory, makes this distinction as to their comparative powers in battle: For Lancelot was the first in tournament, But Arthur mightiest on the battle-field (G and L, 11. 485-486) The implication is that Lancelot functions superlatively within the illusion that Arthur maintains, Arthur in those struggles against the beast to sustain the illusion. Having mastered everything within the illusion it is for Lancelot alone to recognize that some other force sustains it. It is with self-reproach and reverence that Lancelot points out the King to Lavaine: Me you call great; mine is the firmer seat, The truer lance; but there is many a youth Now crescent, who will come to all I am And overcome it; and in me there dwells No greatness, save it be some far-off touch Of greatness to know well I am not great. There is the man. ("Lancelot and Elaine", 11. 444^50)

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Yet Lancelot makes the same mistake about Arthur as does Guinevere. They both tend to read their own human weaknesses out of Arthur and treat him as something apart. This only heightens his own sense of loneliness, since it is Guinevere and Lancelot upon whom he most relies. At the conclusion of "Lancelot and Elaine", although Lancelot cannot give up the Queen, his love for her turns to self-loathing, deepened by the king's continued confidence and trust in him. His will is no longer his own and he longs for peace and death: Alas for Arthur's greatest knight, a man Not after Arthur's heart! I needs must break These bonds that so defame me. Not without She wills it - would I, if she will'd it? nay, Who knows? but if I would not, then may God. I pray him, send a sudden angel down To seize me by the hair and bear me far, And fling me deep in that forgotten mere, Among the tumbled fragments of the hills? After the ranks of the Round Table have been decimated by the Quest of the Holy Grail, a new generation of knights comes to replace the former. The most promising of these is Pelleas. "Pelleas and Ettarre" is in many ways parallel to "Gareth and Lynette" with the young, untried knight distinguishing himself although scorned by the lady he loves. But Pelleas comes to Camelot after Guinevere's sin has corrupted and destroyed the illusion and the Quest broken the old order of the Round Table. This is no atmosphere in which the spirit of youth can prosper, and it is significant that while Gareth had Lancelot ready behind him to assist and guide him, Pelleas has Gawaine, a knight characterized by his superficial courtesy and nobility and his utilitarian and hedonistic views. Gawaine, in fact, betrays Pelleas and takes Ettarre for himself. And Pelleas, whose faith in the Queen and the Round Table has been destroyed, in his immature rage suspects even the King. He sees the Arthurian realm as bestial and false-seeming: "Black nest of rats", he groaned, "ye build too high". Pelleas leaves Arthur's court with malice and vengeance in his

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heart. Pelleas is the Red Knight who builds his Kingdom in the North opposed to Arthur's, and who challenges the King in such bitter terms: Lo, art thou not that eunuch-hearted king Who fain had dipt free manhood from the world The woman-worshipper? He ended. Arthur knew the voice; the face Wellnigh was helmet-hidden, and the name Went wandering somewhere darkling in his mind. ("The Last Tournament") 4. THE QUEST OF NOTHING

Arthur sees in the Quest of the Holy Grail the end of the Round Table, for the knights, following Percivale's example, take a vow to something other than himself. This much is from Malory except that in Malory it is Gawaine who first makes a vow to seek the Sangreal and Arthur remarks that he has betrayed him.54 But Tennyson gives the Quest of the Holy Grail and the foresaking of Arthur and Camelot a wholly different significance than does Malory. Most strikingly, Tennyson does not emphasize the holiness of the Quest, but rather the abandonment of Arthur. Tennyson often expressed a view that redemption or life after death would be meaningless to him if he were not himself,55 that is, self-consciousness as we know it. Yet what he saw within selfconsciousness was dying and hopeless, and even growth or expansion seemed futile viewed against the infinite scale. In early poems such as "The Mystic" and in In Memoriam he seemed sometimes to glimpse or experience some sort of intuition of that beyond self, but the characteristic experience of this sort, as in "Armageddon", is actually a "becoming" of something more than self. So also, as we have observed, Tennyson generally conceived of God as but an extension of self-consciousness. "Take away", he once said, "the self-conscious personality of God and you take away the backbone of the world".56 54

Malory, II, p. 172. Memoir, p. 544. s « Ibid., p. 261. 55

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Essentially, then, the Holy Grail to Tennyson is not an external "thing" to be discovered, even a divine "idea", but rather a state of being to be achieved. Galahad is not man in the ordinary sense; he is more than man, and consequently we are never allowed to enter his consciousness. Tennyson could not. For Galahad had "lost himself to gain himself", as had Percivale's sister. The Quest was manifestly for them. Arthur will not allow that the Quest is for his other knights because it definitely means the weakening of self and the illusion sustained by the self, and the deposing of the sovereign "will", which is the only "sure", if temporary, defense against the Dionysiac forces, the beast, and the climbing wave that remain perpetually in the background ready to overwhelm the self at its first sign of weakness. Holy selflessness obviously weakens the self as much as submission to the ways of Nature. It is perhaps significant that in "Balin and Balan" King Pellam, the murderous Garlon's father, a former enemy of King Arthur, has taken to the holy and retired life, and indeed epitomizes this kind of life, and yet is described as being a close friend of King Mark. Tennyson thus faces in "The Holy Grail" the problem of trying to reconcile the tragic view of life with the religious view, the former subjective and the latter objective. For the most part, to Arthur, as well as to Tennyson, the intuitions of an external God are too faint or tenuous to risk surrendering the will, which surrender would involve the destruction of the illusory Apollonian realm. Arthur is more a tragic than a religious hero. Galahad comes to Camelot a ready-made saint, already something other than the ordinary man. There is accordingly nothing dramatic or human in the Galahad aspect of the Quest, and Tennyson focuses this Idyll upon Percivale. Percivale stands close to Arthur and Lancelot as Tennyson's manifestation of the evolved self. Like Arthur and Lancelot he is harassed by self-doubt, concluding often in near despair: "This quest is not for me." But he continues to struggle. As long as he attempts to "discover" or find the Grail, as his own self, his quest is futile, for all objects disintegrate on penetration by the self s own forms of intuition into nothingness. Every "thing" at his touch turns into dust and there is no "innermost" and no "things" at all:

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And on I rode, and when I thought my thirst Would slay me, saw deep lawns, and then a brook, With one sharp rapid, where the crisping white Play'd ever back upon the sloping wave And took both ear and eye; and o'er the brook Were apple-trees, and apples by the brook Fallen, and on the lawns. "I will rest here", I said, "I am not worthy of the quest"; But even while I drank the brook, and ate The goodly apples, all these things at once Fell into dust, and I was left alone And thirsting in a land of sand and thorns. We recall from our discussion of Coleridge how objective ground melts as soon as we step on it, as soon as its composition or components are thought about.57 Everything else that Percivale "finds", the woman, the dead babe, the plowman, the gold knight, the walled city, and the old man, turn into dust, for the subjective consciousness cannot actually conceive of external reality as "being". This apprehension leads Percivale to his cry of despair: Lo, if I find the Holy Grail itself And touch it, it will crumble into dust: The Holy Grail, conceived as an external thing, or a religious system, or the concept of an external God, even if arrived at, can always be rendered into dust on more penetrating scrutiny. Its "objective" nature destroys it, because it is always subject to the endless series and divisions with which the self must contemplate it. To the human mind as we know it all certain knowledge of things external is impossible. But in his despair, Percivale, counseled by the hermit, begins his evolution beyond self: "Thou hast not lost thyself to save thyself / As Galahad". Percivale has still retained the tragic pride in self. After his faint distant glimpse of the Grail, he retires into a hermitage to practice the destruction of self. It is significant that Tennyson gives each of the four knights described by Malory as viewing the Holy Grail a glimpse "according to their sight" (1. 871). "

Supra, pp. 27 and 35.

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"Deafer", said the blameless King, "Gawaine, and blinder unto holy things, Hope not to make thyself by idle vows, Being too blind to have desire to see. But if indeed there came a sign from heaven, Blessed are Bors, Lancelot, and Pertivale, For these have seen according to their sight." Notice, again, the King's doubt: "If indeed there came a sign from heaven." The King remarks that his prophecy about the breaking-up of the Round Table has come true and then testifies as to his own glimpses of something beyond, but again expressed in terms of the "self-expansion" of "Armageddon": "And some among you held that if the King Had seen the sight he would have sworn the vow. Not easily, seeing that the King must guard That which he rules, and is but as the hind To whom a space of land is given to plow, Who may not wander from the allotted field Before his work be done, but, being done, Let visions of the night or of the day Come as they will; and many a time they come, Until this earth he walks on seems not earth, This light that strikes his eyeball is not light, This air that smites his forehead is not air But vision - yea, his very hand and foot In moments when he feels he cannot die, And knows himself no vision to himself Nor the high God a vision, nor the One Who rose again. Ye have seen what ye have seen." So spake the King; I knew not all he meant.

5. THE MASTER IRONY We have suggested, without going into that aspect of the Idylls, the prominence of irony and compounded irony in the structure of the separate Idylls and also the poem as a whole. The four Idylls published in 1859 all deal centrally with the love of man and woman and involve the irony of "the true and the false" in

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this sense. Tennyson's only authorial interpolation in the Idylls, appearing at the beginning of "Geraint and Enid", would seem to apply more particularly to these four Idylls considered as a group, or to the themes of these four Idylls extended through the work as a whole: O PURBLIND race of miserable men, How many among us at this very hour Do forge a lifelong trouble for ourselves, By taking true for false, or false for true; Here, thro' the feeble twilight of this world Groping, how many, until we pass and reach That other where we see as we are seen! Yet if irony involves essentially a false-seeming or a discrepancy between appearance and fact, we can further suggest that along with the predominant theme of doom that permeates the Idylls, centered around the King as self, there is also a master irony toward which all the lesser ironies point, and this is also centered around the King. This irony involves the discrepancy between what the King appears to others or what he apparently stands for, on the one hand, and, on the other, the King as he is, human and despairing. Lancelot seems closer to a sympathy with Arthur's real nature than Guinevere, who complains to Lancelot: Arthur, my lord, Arthur, the faultless King, That passionate perfection, my good lord But who can gaze upon the sun in heaven? He never spake word of reproach to me, He never had a glimpse of mine untruth, He cares not for me. Only here today There gleamed a vague suspicion in his eyes; Some meddling rogue has tamper'd with him - else Rapt in this fancy of his Table Round, And swearing men to vows impossible, To make them like himself; but, friend, to me He is all fault who hath no fault at all. For who loves me must have a touch of earth; The low sun makes the color. (L and E, 11. 121-134) Guinevere does not think that Arthur has suspected until, perhaps, the present moment, and considers him "rapt in this fancy of his

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Table-Round". When Arthur confronts her in the cloister his Round Table is no more, and nothing is, and only then does she begin to fathom the King: I yearn'd for warmth and color which I found In Lancelot - now I see what thou art, Thou art the highest and most human too, Not Lancelot, nor another. ("Guinevere", 11. 642-645)

Vivien and Tristram believe that Arthur knows all along of Guinevere's infidelity but winks and is thus reproachable: Man! is he man at all, who knows and winks? Sees what his fair bride is and does, and winks? (M and V, 11. 779-780)

And the Red Knight in the North in challenging Arthur calls him "that eunuch-hearted king" (LT, 1. 444). Tristram implies that he regards Arthur literally as the King of Fools and calls Dagonet the jester "his one true knight" (LT, 1. 302). Yet Tristram takes Arthur for a fool because he supposes that the King believes in the "reality" of the values of his illusion and the vows rather than the "necessity" of the illusion. Tristram is, in a sense, the naive nature-follower, mocked by Nietzsche,58 who believes that it is possible and desirable to live according to nature and that Arthur's way, as described in the content of the "vows", is contrary to Nature. But just what are the "values" contained in the vows and the Arthurian civilization? Nowhere are they described beyond the vague and youthful prospects of Gareth to "do the good and right the wrong". What is important is not the content or qualities of these values, but rather the fact that they are part of an illusion raised above the Dionysiac realm to preserve the self. Again and again the impossibility of keeping the vows is emphasized, and not only by Arthur's detractors (see "Gareth and Lynette", 11. 266267). The vows represent the selfs resistance to absorption. In a conventional good-and-evil sense the Idylls of the King is not 48

Supra, p. 44.

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the moral tract that some have made it out to be, and it is difficult to discern just where the so-called "Victorian morality" appears. Immediately Guinevere's "sin" is called to mind, and the fact that it is always referred to as a "sin". Within the medieval context of the poem it is a "sin". Tennyson in a sense passes judgment on Guinevere but not so much because she did "wrong" as because she betrayed and caused the destruction of the Apollonian illusion, man's last hope. So Arthur, apparently when he first suspects Lancelot in "Lancelot and Elaine", instead of reproaching him or breaking with him, tries to bolster and strengthen him by repeating his name to him: Lancelot, my Lancelot, thou in whom I have Most joy and most affiance, etc. Nietzsche's description of the triumph of the Dionysiac tendency perhaps provides the best explanation for the use of sexual promiscuity in the Idylls: The central concern of such celebrations was, almost universally, a completely sexual promiscuity overriding every form of established tribal law; all the savage urges of the mind were unleashed on those occasions until they reached that paroxysm of lust and cruelty which has always struck me as the "witches', cauldron" par excellence.59 Nietzsche views promiscuity as the manifestation of the destruction of the illusion and the submission to the voice of Dionysos. Arthur's dream-kingdom can be compared to the Apollonian illusion that Nietzsche found completely triumphant in the heroic ideals of Homer. "Nature often uses illusions of this sort in order to accomplish its real purposes. The true goal is covered over with a phantom." 60 A n d this illusion is necessary. Nietzsche is perhaps a more accurate psychologist than historian in his conclusion: The Greeks were keenly aware of the terrors and horrors of existence; in order to be able to live at all they had to place before them the shining fantasy of the Olympians. Their tremendous distrust of the 59

The Birth of Tragedy, «» Ibid., p. 31.

p. 25.

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titanic forces of nature; Moira, mercilessly enthroned beyond the knowable world . . . the Greek conquered.61 This describes the nature of the dream-kingdom of Camelot, surrounded by the beast that must inevitably absorb it and the wave of doom poised at every moment to fall. While Idylls of the King has many different facets and levels of significance, at its core it is the most comprehensive vision of a "subjective poet", more tragic than religious, and beyond good and evil in any conventional sense.

«

Ibid., p. 29.

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A connection between Tennyson and Lucretius was recognized in the nineteenth century. Palgrave called Tennyson a "VirgilLucretius" and Thomas Huxley a "modern Lucretius".1 Yet it would appear that what the Victorians had in mind in this comparison was the idea of a "scientific poet", or one who took an empirical rather than a reverential view of nature. Huxley, indeed, greatly admired Tennyson for this reason.2 On the other hand, it was not generally suggested that Tennyson could have anything in common with the Epicurean morality of Lucretius, and his monologue "Lucretius" was taken as a demonstration of the dire consequences of the Roman's errors. Yet Tennyson's resemblance to Lucretius goes much deeper than this. Lucretius was the avowed follower of Democritus and Epicurus or the anti-Platonic school of philosophy. Lucretius could be linked to the Pre-Socratic philosophers of flux, except that in the atomic system of Democritus, as pointed out by Nietzsche,3 atoms are considered as "things" in being, and the Democritean-Lucretian philosophy is essentially a philosophy of "being" rather than of "becoming". In this sense it foreshadows the philosophy of modern science, dealing with external "things" in a changing universe rather than Bergson's philosophy of "becoming". Lucretius is not a subjectivist, and his quarrel with Plato is as to existence of "ideas" in addition to matter. However, while ostensibly Lucretius's subject is "the Nature 1 2 3

Memoir, p. 848. See Charles Tennyson, p. 518. See supra, Chapter n, footnote 41.

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of things", he often unconsciously describes this nature in terms of the self-conscious. It will be remembered that Arthur Hallam found the Epicureans truer psychologists than the Stoics in that they placed the source of morality within self and thus made it ego-centric.4 So Lucretius, in a passage that suggests Tennyson, while attempting to demonstrate the endlessness and oneness of the external universe, actually describes the impossibility of the human mind ever contemplating a limit or bound: Learn, therefore, that the universe is not bounded in any direction. If it were, it would necessarily have a limit somewhere. But clearly a thing cannot have a limit unless there is something outside to limit it, so that the eye can follow it up to a certain point but not beyond. Since you must admit that there is nothing outside the universe, it can have no limit and is accordingly without end or measure. It makes no odds in which part of it you take your stand: whatever spot anyone may occupy, the universe stretches away from him just the same in all directions without limit. Suppose for a moment that the whole of space were bounded and that someone made his way to its uttermost boundary and threw a flying dart. Do you choose to suppose that the missile, hurled with might and main, would speed along the course on which it was aimed? Or do you think something would block the way and stop it? You must assume one alternative or the other. But neither of them leaves you a loophole. Both force you to admit that the universe continues without end. Whether there is scone obstacle lying on the boundary line that prevents the dart from going farther on its course or whether it flies on beyond it, it cannot in fact have started from the boundary. With this argument I will pursue you. Wherever you may place the ultimate limit of things, I will ask you: "Well then, what does happen to the dart?" The upshot is that the boundary cannot stand firm anywhere, and final escape from the conclusion is precluded by the limitless possibility of running away from it.5 Actually in this passage Lucretius has described the self-consciousness and subjective space. He has not observed the infinite nature of an external universe. Rather, with his mind's eye he has apprehended the impossibility of ever conceiving of a bound or limit. Since this universe is endless, it is "all"; there can be no 4

See supra, p. 99. Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe, trans. Ronald Latham (London, 1951), pp. 55-56. 5

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other universe but this natural universe that the human consciousness, with its infinite forms of intuition, comprehends. Yet Lucretius, a pre-Kantian, presumes an external universe and transfers these aspects to it. Tennyson has no such prejudice. Lucretius may also be considered as a kind of pre-vitalist in that he found a vital spirit 6 permeating living matter, but this is objective or biological vitalism and suggests Shaw rather than Nietzsche. But to both Lucretius and Tennyson, all that man can see is "natural", "endless", and changing. It is not surprising, then, that Tennyson was attracted to Lucretius, or that he should take over the consciousness of that Roman poet in one of his most penetrating works, "Lucretius", which first appeared in 1868. "Lucretius" describes the impossibility of living tranquilly in contemplation of Nature. Tennyson's Lucretius has deliberately overdeveloped his "thinking function" 7 and has accordingly attempted to define philosophically man's highest state as one of detachment from the sensual world, through which detachment and temperance he can live in harmony or peace with the chaotic forces of Nature. He does not "resist" the Dionysiac forces but attempts to avoid them. For this attempted evasion and for this building-too-high or over-development of his rational system, Fate has a retribution which takes the form of violent psychosis. This is Fate in Jung's psychological sense,8 which is, perhaps, the best explanation of man's inevitably "tragic" nature. For Jung "neurosis" (and "psychosis") is an "inner cleavage": Neurosis is an inner cleavage - the state of being at war with oneself. Everything that accentuates this cleavage makes the patient worse and everything that mitigates it tends to heal the patient. What drives people to war with themselves is the intution of the knowledge that they consist of two persons in opposition to one another. The conflict may be between the sensual and the spiritual man, or between the ego and the shadow. It is what Faust means when he says, "Two 6

Ibid., pp. 106-107. See C. G. Jung, Psychological Types, trans. H. G. Baynes (New York, 1923), pp. 530-547. 8 See Ira Progoff, Jung's Psychology and Its Social Meaning (New York, 1955), pp. 116-119. 7

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souls dwell in my breast apart." A neurosis is a dissociation of personality.9 This neurosis is actually necessary for the integration of self on a deeper level and just such a process of integration is roughly described in In Memoriam, where the Worship of Sorrow and refusal to evade the dilemma eventually reestablishes an equilibrium, a tragic balance. In In Memoriam the self was able to confront and defy its "shadow" and so come to accept that "shadow" or "anima" 10 as part of its own nature. The intellectually overbalanced Lucretius has gone too far in the other direction and has too violently suppressed the chaotic and sensual in his nature; and these forces have gathered such strength in his unconscious as to force their way, initially through dreams, into the conscious realm and so completely disrupt the purpose and peace of his conscious activities. The prominence of sexuality in the insane Lucretius's monologue, and the cosmic chaos that it implies (as in all of Tennyson's works), is of great significance. So also is the fact that Lucretius's acute mental state is induced by a "love potion" administered by his wife, which can be taken to represent a "possession" by the suppressed demon or shadow that (through neglect) has grown in the unconscious into a strong autonomous nucleus.11 Lucretius is in Jungian terms "possessed". The most difficult problem in the poem is how to interpret the three dreams related at the beginning. The first is a vision of the consequences of the Lucretian system or view of the universe, "terrible", but endurable insofar as the poet has conditioned himself to withstand the fact of mutability: Terrible: for it seem'd A void was made in Nature; all her bonds Crack'd; and I saw the flaring atom-streams • C. G. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, trans. W. S. Dell and C. F. Baynes (New York, 1933), p. 273. 1D For Jung's discussion of the "shadow" element in the consciousness see ibid., pp. 46-47 and 151-162; for the "anima" C. G. Jung, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, trans. H. G. and C. F. Baynes (New York, 1928), passim. 11 Modern Man in Search of a Soul, p. 36.

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And torrents of her myriad universe, Ruining along the illimitable inane, Fly on to clash together again, and make Another and another frame of things For ever. That was mine, my dream, I knew it This much Lucretius had accounted for: cosmic chaos and indifference. What he thought man could avoid, temporarily, and what he had striven to suppress in his own nature, was the bestial and indifferent nature of the immediate existing order. He had attempted to avoid this through temperance and abstinence rather than through resistance and illusion. But the immediate environment is Tennyson's "Nature red in tooth and claw", as revealed in the second dream. And no heroic ideals or illusions are born of this nature and even its "beauty" is menacing: Then, then, from utter gloom stood out the breasts, The breasts of Helen, and hoveringly a sword Now over and now under, now direct, Pointed itself to pierce, but sank down shamed At all that beauty; and as I stared, a fire, The fire that left a roofless Ilion, Shot out of them, and scorch'd me that I woke. This third dream is the most difficult. The sword may be taken to be the reason or intellect 12 ready to strike but shrinking from destroying the natural beauty. But because this beauty is natural it involves all of the chaotic and destructive force of Nature. The sword declines to strike and Ilion is consequently destroyed. For those acquainted with De Rerum Natura there was perhaps some irony intended in the fact that Lucretius should see these visions in a dream. For Lucretius explained the substance of dreams as follows: Whatever employment has the strongest hold on our interest or has last filled our waking hours, so as to engage the mind's attention, that is what seems most often to keep us occupied in sleep. Lawyers argue cases and frame contracts. Generals lead their troops into action. Sailors continue their pitched battle with the winds. And as for me, I go on with my task, for ever exploring the nature of the universe . . . 1 S 18 15

See E. D. H. Johnson, The Alien Vision of Victorian Poetry, p. 31. On the Nature of the Universe, p. 160.

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So in his dreams Tennyson's Lucretius goes on in describing the Nature of Things, and what he sees is no longer endurable to him. For the practical morality of Epicurus, which Lucretius tries to make his own, consists in accepting the universe as it is and avoiding as much as possible involvement in the destructive forces of Nature, especially the animal passions. The highest pleasure life affords, supposedly, is to seek and contemplate in detachment knowledge of the nature of things.14 But Nature wars within Tennyson's Lucretius. There is no possible detachment, for Nature is One and comprehends everything in its chaotic and indifferent processes. So Lucretius is depicted as becoming painfully aware of the contradictions involved in the Epicurean system. He asks Venus if this is her vengeance on him, reminding her that he addressed the proemion of his work to her, but also recalling to himself that he had relegated the gods to a mutable position only slightly higher than that of man. But, even if he had displeased Venus, he sees how useless it is to appeal to gods whom he had proved have neither power over nor care for men. He had, indeed, attempted to prove that gods existed and were deathless, but if all are atoms endlessly changing how could gods endure? Meant? I Meant? I have forgotten what I meant; my mind Stumbles, and all my faculties are lamed. The mind of Lucretius begins more and more to reflect the chaos which it contemplates. His actual commitment is not to the existence of overseeing gods, and recovering his composure he speaks with a grand detachment of Apollo, the sun, that knows not what he sees, neither the eye of the new-born child nor the dying man: And me, altho' his fire is on my face Blinding, he sees not, nor at all can tell Whether I mean this day to end myself, Or lend an ear to Plato where he says, That men like soldiers may not quit the post Allotted by the Gods. "

Ibid., p. 129.

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Contempt for the Platonic may be read into this passage. And what is duty in an indifferent Godless universe? But he that holds The Gods are careless, wherefore need he care Greatly for them, nor rather plunge at once, Being troubled, wholly out of sight . . . "Being troubled", and one who sees the chaos of Nature, the terror of the Dionysiac realm, cannot help being troubled, terrified. To Lucretius the most unbearable manifestation of this chaos and indifference is, as in Idylls of the King, the immediate bestiality of life epitomized in the orgy: and worst disease of all, These prodigies of myriad nakedness, And twisted shapes of lust, unspeakable, Abominable, strangers at my hearth Not welcome, harpies miring every dish, The phantom husks of something foully done, And fleeting thro' the boundless universe, And blasting the long quiet of my breast With animal heat and dire insanity? This passage brings to mind a self-analytic comment by one of Jung's patients: I recognize that a psychic factor is active in me that can free itself from my conscious will in the most incredible way. It can put extraordinary ideas in my head, and can provoke unwished for unwelcome moods and effects, can lead me into astonishing behavior for which I can take no responsibility, and can disturb my relations with other people in an irritating way. I feel myself to be helpless in the face of this fact, and what is worse, I am in love with this thing so that I can only wonder at it.15 Tennyson's Lucretius sees that the human mind cannot accept these "idols" unless it loves them (11. 164-165). He does not. He asks if there is any escape from this terrifying presence within himself (1. 173) and hopelessly enough turns to the actual and immediate Nature, the garden of Picus and Faunus, and remembers a tale "to laugh at" but "more to laugh at in my15

Two Essays, p. 185.

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self" (11. 182-183). He then sees the naturally beautiful Oread chased by the satyr he had tried to prove impossible, half-man, half-beast: I hate, abhor, spit, sicken at him; and she Loathes him as well . . . But "she" tries in her escape to fling herself "shameless" on Lucretius, and he now prays that the satyr catch her. Nature is too much for him. He asks the gods to destroy them all, and realizes then the impossibility of the Epicurean life: I thought I lived securely as yourselves No lewdness, narrowing envy, monkey-spite, No madness of ambition, avarice, none; No larger feast than under plane or pine With neighbors laid along the grass, to take Only such cups as left us friendly-warm, Affirming each his own philosophy Nothing to mar the sober majesties Of settled, sweet, Epicurean life. But now it seems some unseen monster lays His vast and filthy hands upon my will, Wrenching it backward into his, and spoils My bliss in being . . . It will be observed that it is his "will" that is affected and wrenched back into the "beast", and by an "unseen monster", surely "Moira mercilessly enthroned beyond the knowable world." Lucretius has tried to live by a rational system, but now, in the closing sections, he seems more and more to see only the negative value in a work such as his, the purpose of which he finally describes as "to make a truth less harsh". He has lost his conscious will, or in Jungean terms, the libidinal energy has flowed out of his conscious activities and regressed into the deeper regions of the unconscious - too deep for extrication. Yet at the end the pride of self rises in him and he defies not only the Epicurean life but, again, Plato's restraint on suicide: And since the nobler pleasure seems to fade, Why should I, beastlife as I find myself, Not manlike end myself? - our privilege -

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What beast has heart to do it? And what man, What Roman would be dragg'd in triumph thus? Not I. This is an assertion of self. Yet the last invocation to Nature is the great victory of the peace-longing tendency - to be absorbed or annihilated: And therefore now Let her, that is the womb and tomb of all, Great Nature, take, and forcing far apart Those blind beginnings that have made me man, Dash them anew together at her will Thro' all her cycles - into man once more, Or beast or bird or fish, or opulent flower. Soon the present mold of things will be gone, "vanishing, atom and void, atom and void, / Into the unseen for ever." Until that time, Lucretius proclaims that his work shall live, whose purpose, he reveals, was but to stay the "rolling of the Ixionian wheel" for a moment (speaking in terms of infinity), and to pluck "the mortal soul from out immortal hell". Parenthetically, the actual Lucretius believed that the life of "misguided mortals becomes a Hell on earth". 16 Life, Dionysiac life according to Nature, is Hell, and Lucretius longs for peace, the divine tranquility that Epicurus could not afford him: For O Thou Passionless bride, divine Tranquillity Yearn'd after by the wisest of the wise, Who fail to find thee, being as thou art Without one pleasure and without one pain, Howbeit I know thou surely must be mine Or soon or late, yet out of season, thus I woo thee roughly, for thou carest not How roughly men may woo thee so they win Thus - thus - the soul flies out and dies in the air. "Lucretius" thus complements Idylls of the King. In the Idylls, and especially in the figure of Arthur, Tennyson had described the complete and balanced, though tragic, integration of self. In "Lucretius" he describes the inability to integrate. "Lucretius" reveals the impotency of the intellect and the impossibility of ™ On the Nature of the Universe, p. 127.

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living deliberately and tranquilly in contemplation of Nature. Lucretius tried to derive a philosophy of life from the external universe and never achieved the self-knowledge of the "will". On the collapse of his philosophy the will is easily surrendered to death and peace. We are not, however, asked to look down on Lucretius, whom Tennyson portrays, even in madness, as a gloriously imaginative mind too far-seeing and comprehensive for the system it tries to live by. "Lucretius" and the last Idylls were written during approximately the same period (1865-1874). Tennyson's subsequent poetry continues to reflect the subjective struggle between the will and the vision of futility, often in as bare and didactic a manner as in some of his earliest poems, but sometimes expressed in a strong unprecedented rhetoric. If anything, the view of life becomes darker and more hopeless and the resisting voice becomes simpler and appears sometimes as the bluntest defiance. Tennyson often in his late years expressed his feeling that the world was darkening.17 He seemed less and less inclined to indulge in any philosophic apologies. Characteristic is a conversation he had with Carlyle which he related to his son: While touching on the life after death he spoke of Carlyle, and his dimming faith in the closing years of his life. He said that when he was stopping at a coffee-house in London, Carlyle had come to smoke a pipe with him in the evening and the talk turned upon the immortality of the soul; upon which Carlyle said: "Eh! old Jewish rags: you must clear your mind of all that. Why should we expect a hereafter? Your traveller comes to an inn, and he takes his bed, and it's only for one night, he leaves next day, and another man takes his place and sleeps in the bed that he has vacated." My father continued: "I answered, 'Your traveller comes to his inn, and lies down in his bed, and leaves the inn in the morning, and goes on his way rejoicing, with the sure and certain hope and belief that he is going somewhere, where he will sleep the next night', and then Edward FitzGerald, who was present said, 'Your have him there'", "which proves", said my father, "how dangerous an illustration is".18 This was all that the incident proved to Tennyson, or all that 17 18

See Memoir, pp. 688-779. Ibid., pp. 761-762.

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anything could possibly "prove" to him. Carlyle was expressing the bitter after-effects of his prior enthusiasm and positive involvements. Not so Tennyson. If it can be said that Tennyson's faith remained unshaken, it is only because of the peculiar nature of that faith, the faith in self: But in my spirit will I dwell, And dream my dream, and hold it true . . . Nowhere in Tennyson's work is the vision of futility described with a more devastating application to the immediate apparent world than in such late poems as "Vastness", "Locksley Hall Sixty Years After", and "Despair". "Vastness" is, in its way, a masterpiece of rhythm and rhetoric in which for thirty-five lines the poet describes the meaninglessness and chaotic intermixture of all the elements of life - "things", ideas, values and sentiments, concluding: What is it all, if we all of us end but in being our own corpse-coffins at last? Swallow'd in Vastness, lost in Silence, drown'd in the deeps of a meaningless Past? Yet the thirty-sixth line is an unanticipated and baffling affirmation: Peace, let it be! for I loved him, and love him for ever: the dead are not dead but alive. This is flagrantly non-rational. This last single line does not outweigh the rest of the poem and Tennyson knew it. The poem describes the scope of the negation to be resisted, the smallness of the resisting force, and still its persistence. "Despair" was the most controversial of Tennyson's late poems, and, as we have observed, many of the poet's most loyal admirers were confused by its apparently complete negation: O, we poor orphans of nothing - alone on that lonely shore Born of the brainless Nature who knew not that which she bore! Trusting no longer that earthly flower would be heavenly fruit -

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Come from the brute, poor souls - no souls - and to die with the brute Yet this poem simply describes, in no uncertain terms, religious despair - a despair that Tennyson faced throughout his life. Perhaps the most interesting of the late poems is "The Ancient Sage", published in the Tiresias volume of 1885. This poem is in the form of a dialogue between the Sage and a young nihilistic poet and reminds us of "The Two Voices", with which it should be compared. The total of the young poet's lines, if collected together, make up a despairing lyric song of mutability: But vain the tears for darken'd years As laughter over wine, And vain the laughter as the tears, O brother, mine or thine, For all that laugh, and all that weep And all that breathe are one Slight ripple on the boundless deep That moves, and all is gone. The Sage answers always in blank verse, and the resulting mixture produces a not very successful poem. The argument is of great interest, however; for the Sage, unlike the Socratic voice in "The Two Voices", does not actually entertain any rational positive "arguments" at all. His is the voice of "life" and, as such, is also a voice of protest against the spirit of negation and the futile import of the young poet's song. The Sage thus expresses not only a will to live and a will to believe, but also a hatred for death: "I hate the black negation of the bier". We find in his lines implicit and explicit almost all of the characteristics of the subjective psychology we have observed throughout Tennyson's poems. Initially the Sage concedes that all that man can conclude about "things" is mutability and purposelessness. The "Nameless" cannot be found in an unreal and changing objective world. He asks the young poet to look to the "self", implying in his phrasing, not simply self-analysis, but self-reverence: If thou wouldst hear the Nameless, and wilt dive Into the temple-cave of thine own self, There, brooding by the central altar, thou

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Mayst haply learn the Nameless hath a voice, By which thou wilt abide, if thou be wise . . .

This "voice" is the hopeful voice of "The Two Voices" which developed into the "living will", and thus the Nameless, like the God in In Memoriam, is to be defined in terms of self. The young poet will abide by this "voice" if he is "wise", says the Sage - not simply if he is knowing. Again, there is nothing to know. And nothing can be proved: Thou canst not prove the Nameless, O my son, N o r canst thou prove the world thou movest in, T h o u canst not prove that thou art body alone, N o r canst thou prove that thou art spirit alone, N o r canst thou prove that thou art both in one. Thou canst not prove that I, who speak with thee, A m not thyself in converse with thyself, For nothing worthy proving can be proven, N o r yet disproven.

These lines are suggestive of Fichte: Such knowledge never finds anything in the conclusion that it has not previously placed in the premises by faith, and even then its conclusions are not always correct. 19

Moreover, "thyself in converse with thyself" would seem in accord with Fichte's ego and non-ego elements within the self. Also suggestive of Fichte, but as we have observed, prominent throughout Tennyson, is the inference of man's infinite nature from the fact that he cannot conceive of any limit: A n d when thou sendest thy free soul thro' heaven, N o r understandest bound nor boundlessness, Thou seest the Nameless of the hundred names,

Man's strength then consists of the infinitely expansive power of his consciousness. As an argument for man's divine nature this is weak, but it is a central truth about the "self". Very similar is the account given in "Locksley Hall Sixty Years After": Only that which made us meant us to be mightier by and by, Set the sphere of all the boundless heavens within the human eye, 18

See supra, Chapter I, footnote 76.

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Sent the shadow of Himself, the boundless, thro' the human soul; Boundless inward in the atom, boundless outward in the Whole.

This is actually the same argument that Arthur Hallam suggested in his essay On Sympathy,20 that the human consciousness is infinite in that it cannot conceive of any bound or limit. The Ancient Sage likewise finds infinite divisibility the greatest of wonders, the million-millionth of a grain Which cleft and cleft again for ever-more, And ever vanishing, never vanishes, To me, my son, more mystic than myself, Or even than the Nameless is to me.

He infers from the boundless nature of what he contemplates his own boundless nature: But that one ripple on the boundless deep Feels that the deep is boundless, and itself For ever changing form, but evermore One with the boundless motion of the deep.

It is important to note again the prominence of the word "feels", and the notion of the self emerging from and being part of the "great deep". The individual consciousness is a ripple on the boundless sea of consciousness and can recognize this fact only through intuition. Man's direction or purpose, then, is, again, not to find any objective truth, but rather self-expansion, and characteristically the Sage's intuitions of the Nameless are described in terms of the self-expansion of "Armageddon": . . . for more than once when I Sat all alone, revolving in myself, The word that is the symbol of myself, The mortal limit of the self was loosed, And past into the Nameless, as a cloud Melts into heaven.

The Nameless is reduced from an external being or power to simply the total consciousness which the self can expand into. The si

See supra, p. 36.

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secret of immortality, if there is an immortality, lies with the Nameless, in the hand of what is more than man, Or in man's hand when man is more than man . . . Man as he is cannot conceive of immortality or God. What he is is hopeless and futile. T h e only possibility is that he can become more than this, but that this is only the barest possibility and a weak hope is duly emphasized in the compound qualifications of the conclusion: Look higher, then - perchance - thou mayest - beyond A hundred ever-rising mountain lines, And past the range of Night and Shadow — see The high-heaven dawn of more than mortal day Strike on the Mount of Vision! This is an inner landscape of human self-consciousness or "mortal day", and the "hundred ever-rising mountain lines" represent the infinite series involved in all human thinking. The Sage never implies that the young poet's view of life as we know it is "wrong", any more than Tennyson implies that Tristram's view of life is "wrong". The young poet, like Tristram, lacks the will to resist, to live against this view.

VII CONCLUSION

To an extreme degree Tennyson, in most of his serious poetry, reflects a subjective psychology with its egocentric and intuitive preoccupation with "becoming", its immanent awareness of the lack of correspondence between thought and "thing", its contempt for science and knowledge of "things" and Platonic "ideas", and its commitment to the primacy of the "will". This is certainly not the only way of looking at Tennyson, or of reading those poems that we have considered; but understanding the subjective nature of his genius goes a long way toward explaining the "Tennyson problem" or why he has been both so revered and so maligned. It has not been suggested that Tennyson was definitely influenced by any of the philosophers or thinkers of the nineteenth century, English or German, and indeed, the possibility of such an influence has been played down. It is not really important here except as a possible corroboration. For we have not proceeded from a "history of ideas" approach or attempted to trace certain "systems" or "ideas" into Tennyson's poetry. Rather we have attempted to describe the peculiar nature of Tennyson's psychology, the subjective psychology, and to suggest its possible evolution through the philosophical revolution of Kant and the subjective philosophies of Fichte, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Carlyle. 1 It is possible that Tennyson read Schopenhauer early, since The World as Will and Idea originally appeared in German in 1819, 1 We have excluded Hegel from our discussions since, pre-occupied as he was with historical consciousness and "applied philosophy", he adds very little to the questions of epistemology we have touched on or to our anatomy of the subjective psychology.

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although Schopenhauer was not widely translated into English until the 1880's and 90's.2 The poet was definitely made acquainted with German thought through the Cambridge Apostles. He was on friendly terms with Carlyle after 1839. Whether he read Fichte early or not is uncertain, but Fichte was not to be found in his library until the 1850's.8 Mrs. Sinnett's London translation of Fichte's popular and readable work The Destination of Man appeared in 1847, but while the discussion in it of the thought forms of infinite time and infinite space seems suggestive of Tennyson's preoccupation with the "boundless", there are evidences of this concept in Tennyson as early as "Armageddon" or 1824. Nietzsche's earliest published work, The Birth of Tragedy, did not appear in German until 1872, too late to be regarded as an influence, though containing the most penetrating analysis of the subjective psychology so applicable to Tennyson and a description of the true and universal subjective poet. Tennyson's true province was the human consciousness or self viewed as subject. We will recall that Schopenhauer, in distinguishing between subject and object, described the object as always conditioned by the laws of objects or forms of intuition. "The subject, on the contrary, which is always the knower, never the known, does not come under these forms, but is presupposed by them; it has therefore neither multiplicity nor its opposite, unity." 4 In this fundamental sense, both Arnold and Browning can be taken to be objective poets, the former preoccupied with the "unity" or harmony of the object, the latter with its "multiplicity", and diversity. So Arnold disliked Browning's poetry because he found in it "a confused multitudinousness".5 To Browning, Arnold's goal of harmony or symmetry in art and society, and style, would have come within the scope of his principal dis2

See Ralph Hinsdale Goodale, "Schopenhauer and Pessimism in Nineteenth Century English Literature", PMLA, XLVII (1932), p. 240. 3 Memoir, p. 258. 4 See supra, Chapter I, footnote 49. 5 Matthew Arnold, The Letters of Matthew Arnold to Arthur Hugh Clough, ed. Howard Foster Lowry (New York, 1932), p. 97: "As Browning is a man with a moderate gift passionately desiring movement and fullness, and obtaining but a confused multitudinousness."

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6

value, "the eternal petrifaction". Browning valued the Renaissance man above the ancients because he was gloriously imperfect, holding that the "great Campanile is yet to finish",7 and that "what's come to perfection perishes".8 It is too strong a generalization to draw such an antithesis between Arnold and Browning except for the purpose of suggesting that in regard to this subjectobject distinction Tennyson undercuts them both. Whether the stress is on "multiplicity" or "unity" their concern is primarily with the object, the known; Tennyson's is with the fact of consciousness or the subject "which is always the knower, never the known". So George Barker's observation that what is most important in appreciating Tennyson is the "face behind the poem" takes on a deeper significance.9 It is not the poem that is of the first importance, nor the poet considered as a particular man or character who was born in 1809 at Somersby, went to Cambridge, had a close friend, Arthur Hallam, and so on. Rather it is the "Universal I" or subject dwelling eternally, as Nietzsche put it, in the "ground of being", supporting and sustaining, as knower, all that is known. In 1950 D. G. James passed this judgment on Tennyson in a comparison with Wordsworth: Wordsworth is greater than Tennyson because in his poetry the criticism of life is profounder and a richer enablement of life. He remains, a hundred years after his death, one of the masters, and a poet of strength and healing. It is hardly possible to stand today where Tennyson stood; and we see that this is so.10 This is so, but only in the peculiar sense that Tennyson as subject stood on no ground. Of healing power he, perhaps, has none, but we can more seriously consider his comparative profundity and strengthening power. For Tennyson was throughout his work 8 See Robert Browning, "Old Pictures in Florence" in The Poems Plays (New York, 1934). 7 8

9

and

Ibid. Ibid.

See supra, pp. 13-14. D . G. James, "Wordsworth and Tennyson", Warton Lecture on English Poetry, The Proceedings of the British Academy, X X X V I (London, 1950), p. 129. 10

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preoccupied with the tragic fact of consciousness and the primal struggle of the self to sustain itself above the chaotic and indifferent realm of over-consciousness. The Nature that Wordsworth takes strength from, as far as it is object was to Tennyson "unreal", and, as far as it is subject, was terrifying. Tennyson thus saw life far differently from Wordsworth. Very early he broke through the semantic bulwark of existing "things" and "ideas" to find an infinite realm of consciousness, in constant flux and "becoming", a vital, living universe. There was no ground on which to stand, and, in keeping with Carlyle's description of him, he carried about this Chaos striving constantly to "manufacture" a Cosmos out of it. Tennyson was a subjectivist and a vitalist. He was not a Heroic Vitalist as we sometimes use the term today. Only "Ulysses" points in this direction. For Tennyson was not a Hero Worshipper in the sense that Carlyle and Nietzsche were. Tennyson was never carried away by his mental breakthrough to any positive enthusiasm. He saw and felt the infinitely expansive power of the self, but saw also how the infinite background and death made a mockery not only of progress but growth. And his mental farsightedness compelled his mind to focus always in the distance and always on death. "I have found a new land, but I die." So he "invariably believed that humility is the only true attitude of the human soul". 11 T o his way of thinking it would have been prideful and foolish to proclaim, with Nietzsche, that "God is dead". 12 He kept the door of possibility open and hoped for a revelation in terms completely incomprehensible to the human consciousness as we know it: . . . perchance - thou mayest - beyond A hundred ever-rising mountain lines, And past the range of Night and Shadow - see The high-heaven dawn of more than mortal day Strike on the Mount of Vision!

H e gives us nothing comparable to a Wordsworthian religion, it 11

12

Memoir,

p. 265.

See The Portable Nietzsche, p. 124: "This old saint in the forest has not yet heard anything of this, that God is deadV

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is true, nor the consolation of such a religion, but his poetry is "religious" in the sense that it describes so vitally the subjective "need" for religion. The complaint that Tennyson wrote to his own age and reflected the ideas and morals of Victorian culture should also be reconsidered. Beneath any conventional and topical surface that may be found lies the genius of a subjective poet concerned with the cosmic isolation of self and a primal and tragic struggle. At this level Tennyson's poetry is as non-social and universal as "The Wanderer", "The Seafarer", "The Ancient Mariner", and The Shadow Line. The important "truths" he conveys are not truths of "objective" "relationships" nor of "private" individual experience, but rather the truths of universal "subjective" nature, primordial human nature. 13 Returning to Froude's letter of tribute, with which we opened Chapter One, we can perhaps now read more into and between the lines. Tennyson, like Arthur, perpetuated an illusion, and Froude, like so many of the Victorians, took the "vows". It is probably safe to say that not many of them recognized the "face behind the poem". The twentieth century revolted against the vows, revolted rationally and intellectually against the "ideas" and "opinions" that they thought Tennyson stood for or believed in. German philosophy was on its way out. Subjectivism had never 13 A s we have previously suggested, it is possible to apply Jungean terminology to Tennyson's "subjectivism", since Jung in a real sense follows in the tradition not only of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, but of Kant. See Ira Progoff, Psychology and Its Social Meaning (New York, 1955), p. 73: "It is a fact that there is a point in Jung's thought where he has a close affinity to Kant, particularly on the question of what the psychological investigator is in a position to assume about the nature of psychic reality. On the question of reality in general, Jung agrees with Kant that we are not able finally to know the thing in itself. Within the experience of the individual, however, things may be 'psychologically real', in the sense that they involve great intensities of psychic energy." And Jung's "collective unconscious" may be taken to correspond roughly to the "overconsciousness" we have discussed in connection with Tennyson. Tennyson's role as universal subjective poet and the general theory of "inter-subjective" truth can be explained in a Jungean context as an expression from the collective unconscious: "When, therefore, the individual expresses something from the collective unconscious, it is primordial because it comes out of the inherent nature of man." Progoff, pp. 72-73.

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been widely understood. And much of the profoundest of nineteenth-century thought was being diluted and misrepresented by such popular writers as G. B. Shaw. The Laureate became Alfred Lawn Tennyson, the spokesman for Victorian manners. It seems a very remote possibility now that, as Froude predicted, Tennyson will stand preeminent after Shakespeare among English poets. However, certain signs in our times, such as the more judicious reading of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, and the tendency to compensate for Freud's deficiencies with the vaguer and more comprehensive psychology of Jung, suggest that we may be arriving at more appropriate standards with which to judge such a poet. "Howsoever these things be", the last line of Froude's letter, written at the verge of the nineteenth century by a straggler, by a Bedivere, rings unmistakably prophetic: There will be no such others for many a long age.

APPENDIX A

Johann Gottlieb Fichte, The Destination of Man, trans. Mrs. Percy Sinnett, London, 1847, pp. 35-39. Spirit. Let us take the case merely in which the hand is regarded as an implement, for that will decide at the same time the second. In the immediate perception of it can lie nothing further than what belongs to touch and to sensation in general; to that which leads thee in consciousness to regard thyself as the conscious being. Either thy sensation is of the same kind, in which case I cannot see why thou shouldst extend it over a surface, and not rather conceive of it as a point; or if thy sensations are various, why thou dost not conceive of them as succeeding one another at the same point. That thy hand should appear to thee as a surface, is just as inexplicable as the idea of a surface in general. Do not employ what is itself unexplained to explain further. The second case in which thy hand or any other member is itself the object of sensation, is easily understood from the first. Thou perceivest it by means of another part, which then becomes the sentient one. I ask the same question concerning it, and thou wilt just as little be able to answer. So will it be with every other surface. It may be that the consciousness of extension out of thyself, proceeds from the consciousness of thine own extension as a material body, and depends upon it; but it is then necessary to explain this extension of thy material body. I. It is enough. I perceive clearly that I neither see nor feel the superficial extension of the properties of bodies; I see that it is my constant practice to conceive as extended over a surface what nevertheless in sensation is merely a point, and to represent as

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contemporaneously existing, what I know only as successive. I discover that I proceed in fact exactly as the geometer does in the construction of his figures, extending points to lines and lines to surfaces. It seems strange that I should do so. Spirit. T h o u dost what is yet more strange. This outer surface, this extension, thou canst not indeed truly see or feel, or perceive by any sense, but at least thou canst see red upon it and feel smoothness. But why dost thou extend this surface to a solid mathematical figure, and assume the existence of an inward body beneath the surface? Canst thou see it, feel it, or by any sense recognize its existence? /. By no means. The space within the surface is impenetrable to my senses. Spirit. A n d yet thou hast assumed the existence of a n interior which thou hast not perceived by any sense? / . I confess it, and my surprise increases. Spirit. W h a t is then this something beneath the surface? /. I conceive of it as of something similar to the surface, something tangible. Spirit. We must examine this more closely. Canst thou divide the mass in which thou hast imagined the body to consist? I. I can. Of course I do not mean with instruments, but in thought divide it to infinity. N o part can be so small as not to be further divisible. Spirit. A n d in this division dost thou ever reach a point at which these particles become no longer perceptible in themselves? I say in themselves, that is, not merely with reference to thy senses. 1 . 1 do not. Spirit. Sensible, perceptible absolutely? O r with certain properties of color, roughness, smoothness and the like? / . Undoubtedly with certain properties. Nothing can be sensible or perceptible absolutely, without reference to any property that can be perceived. Spirit. This is but to extend to the mass the susceptibilities that belong to thyself, which lead thee to regard what is visible as coloured, what is tangible as rough, smooth, and the like. Yet these things are only certain affections of thine own organs of sense. Or dost thou think otherwise?

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/. By no means. This is merely a necessary inference from what I have already admitted. Spirit. And yet thou hast in reality no perception but of a surface? /. By breaking it, I could perceive an interior. Spirit. So much thou knowest therefore in advance. And this infinite divisibility - in which as thou has maintained thou canst not reach a point at which the atoms become absolutely imperceptible, hast thou ascertained it by experiment, or canst thou do so? /. Certainly I cannot. Spirit. To sensations therefore which thou hast had, thou hast added in thy conception others which thou hast not had, and canst not have? 1.1 am sensible only of a surface. I am not sensible of what lies beneath it, yet I assume that it exists. This I must admit. Spirit. And when brought to the test of experiment, the real sensation is found to correspond with thy preconception? I. Certainly. When I break through the surface of a body, I find beneath, something perceptible, as I have before said. Spirit. But thou hast also spoken of something beyond the senses, and not perceptible to them. I. I have asserted that in the division of a corporeal mass to infinity, I can never come to what is in itself imperceptible, although I can never make this division. Spirit. Of the object, therefore, we have nothing remaining but what is perceptible - what possesses the property of producing sensation. And this perceptibility thou hast extended through a cohesive mass divisible to infinity, so that the true supporter of attributes, the object which thou has sought, must, after all, be nothing more than the space which it occupies? I. Although I cannot be satisfied with this, but must still conceive in the object something more than this property of perceptibility, and the space which it occupies, yet I must confess that I cannot explain what that is. Spirit. Confess whatever really appears to thee at the moment to be true. What is now dark will presently become brighter, and

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the unknown be made known. The space itself is not perceived, and thou canst not understand why this perceptibility should be extended in conception through space. Just as little canst thou understand how the idea of something perceptible out of thyself has been attained, since thou art really conscious of a sensation in thyself, not as the property of a thing, but as the peculiar affection or state of thine own being. /. I see clearly that I perceive in reality nothing more than my own state of being, and not the object in itself. I neither see it, feel it, nor hear it; but on the contrary, precisely there, where the object should be, all seeing, feeling, and so forth comes to an end. Sensations, as affections of myself, are simple and have no extension; they are not contiguous to one another in space, but successive to one another in time. I do, however, conceive them as contiguous in space, and it appears to me that it may be exactly at this point, this extension, and this changing of what is only a perception in myself, to something perceptible without me, that a consciousness of the object arises within me. Spirit. This conjecture may be verified; but could we raise it immediately to a conviction, we should yet attain to no clear insight, for the higher question would remain to be answered - Why dost thou extend thy sensation through a space? Let us immediately state this question. I have my reasons for this, in the following more general manner. How does it happen that from thy consciousness, which is nothing more than consciousness of thine own state, thou proceedest beyond thyself, in order to add to the perception of which thou art conscious, a something, perceptible, of which thou are not conscious?