Tennyson’s Catholic Years: A Point of Contact

De Vere—his talk of Catholicism, eloquently vague, sliding into Newmanism and Jesuitry. The T.’s mildly dissentient, I getting angry. T., De V., and I went out under the stars; I flared up at last and asked De V., “Do you yourself entirely believe the account given by the Roman Catholic Church of God and man?”

De V.—“I believe it all as surely as that I tread this ground and see those stars.”

W. A.—“And I don’t believe one atom of it.”

Tennyson.—“You have no point of contact then.”¹

One argument of this paper is that Tennyson found in Catholicism, and in the Catholicism of his friends, a powerful support for his desire to believe in the authenticity of his early mystical experiences. Tennyson’s interest in Catholicism was remarkable in that it went against the grain of the English Protestant establishment of which he was a prominent member. He was poet laureate after all, favorite of the Queen, writer of patriotic poems, some of which lambasted the Whore of Babylon, the “church-harpies,” “that half-pagan harlot kept by France.”² Arthur “swept the dust of ruined Rome / From off the threshold of the realm, and crushed / The Idolaters, and made the people free” (Gareth and Lynette [1872], ll. 133–135), with pagan and papal Rome conflated. Tennyson’s Queen Mary, Hallam Tennyson claimed, showed “the final downfall of Roman Catholicism in England, and the dawning of a new age: for after the era of priestly domination comes the era of the freedom of the individual.”³ In the whole of the critical bibliography on Tennyson, stretching over 150 years, there is only one item that links Tennyson and Catholicism, a tiny note by Bernard Aspinwall in Notes and Queries, entitled “Did Tennyson Consider Joining the Catholic Church in 1849?”⁴ So anomalous is this title, that its interest is ignored. In fact, it is the tip of an iceberg.

The frequency of Tennyson’s mystical allusions is well known, though more discussed is the famous Tennysonian doubt that comes hard upon the mystical visions. The authenticity of those visions, their connection with something real, their objectivity as reflections of some supernatural reality, were topics with which Tennyson wrestled throughout life, in one poetic form after another. He is deservedly famous for rendering the conflict of faith and doubt, for his humanizing of eternal themes. Indeed, so empathetic was he to the unresolved complexities of the human condition that he is sometimes accused of mediocrity or worse as a thinker. His plasticity was in fact his strength and his weakness alike; and it laid him open, for good or ill, to the influence of Catholicism. His susceptibility to the evolutionists and skeptics is well known, as exemplified in Aubrey de Vere’s remark: “His nature is a religious one, and he is remarkably free from vanity and sciolism. . . . He has been surrounded, however, from his youth up, by young men, many of them with high aspirations, who believe no more in Christianity than in the Feudal System.”⁵ De Vere had his own Catholic agenda, of course, and it is not my argument that Tennyson was a closet Catholic; but rather that Catholicism was a major term in his lifelong wrestling with the issues of faith and doubt.

One of the many things that this theme reveals is the host of Catholic friends who interacted with Tennyson in important ways. Some were overt Catholics, or soon to be Catholic converts: de Vere, Sir John Simeon, Baron de Schroeter, William Ward, Wilfrid Ward, William Palgrave (brother of Francis), Robert Monteith, John Dalgairns (Newman’s first companion at Littlemore), Peter Haythornethwaite (William Ward’s chaplain); and on the fringes of these, Patmore, Manning, Stephen Hawker, Bishop Vaughan, Lacordaire, Döllinger, Lord Acton. Some of these were “Liberal Catholic Christian” (a phrase Tennyson used to describe Simeon) (Memoir, 2:60), some conservative (like William Ward), some simple in their faith (like Soeur Louise Marie, “an old friend of the Tennysons”; Memoir, 2:68). Other friends were fellowtravelers, not papists but defending a...