Tennyson as a Modern Poet

TENNYSON AS A MODERN POET ARTHUR J. CARR M ODERN fame is nothing," said Tennyson to William Allingham. "I'd rather have an acre of land. I shall go down, down! I'm up now. Action and reaction." "Action and reaction" only partly account for Tennyson's fall. We cannot help feeling in the bard of Farringford and Aldworth, in the author of "The J\l!ay Queen," "Enoch Arden," and ''The Promise of May," that depressing sense of an imagination "more saved than spent," which made Henry James breathe, "Oh, dear, oh, dear;" upon discovering that Tennyson himself "was not T ennysonian.'' Not until after the great dividing years of 1914~18 was it possible to view the dead laureate with some composure and to wish to retrieve at least the part of his work that was not official and "Victorian." For an age that demanded of poetry "reality of emotional impulse," Harold Nicolson boiled the essential Tennyson down to "a morbid and unhappy mystic," "afraid of death, and sex, and God." A little later, T. S. Eliot boldly called him "a great poet," because of his "abundance, variety, and complete competence." When W. H. Auden made up a selection of Tennyson 's poetry very much as Nicolson had specified, he conceded . that Tennyson ''had the finest ear, perhaps, of any English :Poet"; then he added, "he was undoubtedly the stupidest; there was little about melancholia that he didn't know; there was little else that he did." In the presence of such a figure it is no wonder that critics who~are also- poets grow nervous and exasperated. They see in Tennyson not an open but a covert capitulation, perhaps involuntary though not·altogether unconscious. Yet he is our true precursor . He shows and hides, .as if in embryo, a master theme of Joyce's Ulysses-the accentuated and moody self~consciousness and the sense of loss that mark Stephen Dedalus. He forecasts Yeats's interest in the private myth. He apprehended in advance of Aldous Huxley the uses of mysticism to castigate materialistic culture. And in MaudJ at least, he prepared the way for the verse of Eliot's "Preludes" and "Prufrock." At some crucial points Tennyson is a modern poet, and there are compelling reasons why we should try to comprehend him. Our uneasiness, our reluctance to acknowledge the relationship is understandable, and . 361 362 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY it explains how little we advance toward seeing what Tennyson's poetry is like. Seeing what it is like, discerning the essentials without "essentializing ," as Kenneth Burke would ask, demands that criticism breathe a mixed atmosphere, neither wholly aesthetic nor wholly biographical. It is not a question of choosing to consult biography in order to chart the poem or of preferring to ignore the private reference. In Tennyson's poetry the private and public worlds are fused. In the presence of such poetry, criticism must act upon life as well as upon art. Tennyson's double nature does not divide itself between the poet and the man; his poetry has a double nature and reveals not only itself but the poet. This is the truth that Hallam Tennyson confessed in his preface to the Memoi-r of his father's life: ". . . but besides the letters of my father and of his friends there are his poems, and in them we must look for the innermost sanctuary of his being. For my own part, I feel strongly that no biographer could so truly give him as he gives himself in his own works." Although we must look to the man to find the poet, we shall find the man in his poems. The artistic and cultural crisis which underlies the swervings and sudden drops in his long career was clearly sketched for Tennyson while he was at Cambridge, from 1828 to 1831. It was the protean question that the members of the Apostles Club debated, and that some of them attempted to resolve in action. The ill-fated Torrijos expedition, vigorously recounted by Carlyle in his Life of john Sterling, was a point of focus. With a handful of exiled Spaniards around General Torrijos, a few of...