Crisis of Faith and Knowledge in Tennyson

3.58 w. DAVID SHAW Crisis of Faith and Knowledge in Tennyson W. DAVID SHAW Kenneth M. McKay. Many Glancing Colours: An Essay in Reading Tennyson 1809-1850 University of Toronto Press. xiv, 287. $40.00 Douglas Bush once observed that Tennyson's 'poems are diverse objects made, as it were, by a whole corps of different craftsmen.' Though Kenneth McKay's study supports Bush's conclusion, it goes on to show how Tennyson's sense ofpoetry as shot silk allows him to unify all this diversity. There are many perspectives, all equally good perhaps, from which Tennyson's diversity in unity can be studied. But critics who have seen most in Tennyson have usually adopted a single standpoint. McKay wisely aligns himself with their practice by limiting each chapter to an examination of specific problems and techniques. He studies, for example, the increasing control Tennyson shows in his early derivative and experimental verse, the ideas of progress and the unconscious that shape the poems of 1830 and 1832, the influence upon 'The Palace of Art' of the habits of mind encouragedby the Apostolic DebatingSociety, and the theoryofknowledge informing In Memoriam. No critic has made such sustained and resourceful use of Arthur Hallam's 'Theodicaea Novissima' or made such effective use of F.D. Maurice's novel Eustace Conway in explaining Tennyson. McKay shows how Hallam's treatise consolidates Tennyson's belief in the educative power ot suffering. In a fascinating discussion of In Memoriam, McKay argues that Tennyson rejects the Platonic theory of knowledge which locates truth in the mind's conformity to some idea. He later argues, against Timothy Pelatson, that Tennyson's faith in God cannot depend finally 'on a prior feeling in himself, in the authority ... of his own imagination.' Tennyson believes in knowledge by divination, but how does that relate to Platonic and Viconian models? McKay's outright repudiation ofboth the Platonic and subjective models seems to me to betray the complexity of Tennyson's own point of view and achievement in In Memoriam. It also works against the thesis of diversity in unity and threatens to attenuate those great crises of faith and knowledge that In Memoriam dramatizes so powerfully. The more translucent the mourner's dreams become in In Memoriam, irradiated by his own creative spirit, the more opaque must seem the mind of God, that 'wild poet' who has designed a hostile nature and who seems to work 'Without a conscience or an aim.' If man is truly a Viconian self-maker, as Tennyson affirms in his late poem, 'The Making of Man,' then he cannot be fashioned in the image of a mad creator: and ifGod is truly what Augustine says he is, then such a deity has set fixed limits to the man-made world in which each creative self is a true citizen: an artist, an architect, a fashioner of new and better worlds. Crises arise when Tennyson's belief in the power of the suffering soul to grow and evolve comes into conflict with official Victorian teachings that God alone is a creator. GREAT WHINERS 359 McKay's book tenaciously wrestles with contradictions inherent in seemingly authoritative pronouncements by some of Tennyson's most influential critics, including T.5. Eliot. His study also provides valuable correctives to two popular misconceptions about Tennyson. He dispels the myth that the influence of Tennyson's father upon his gifted son was merely debilitating, and he lays to rest the notion that Tennyson was incapable of assimilating Hallam's loss by 'organizing and getting on with his life' after Hallam's death. McKay's study is a signal achievement: instead of trying to see all the glancing colours at once, McKay accepts as a condition of seeing anything at all in Tennyson's shot silk poetry the need to delineate with clarity and precision a few of the leading ideas and methods that contribute to the iridescence of the whole. Great Whiners JEFFREY MEYERS The Collected Letters ofJoseph Conrad: Volume 3, 1903-1907. Edited by Frederick Karl and Laurence Davies Cambridge University Press 1988. 532. us $49.50 The Letters of T.S. Eliot: Volume 1, 1898-1922. Edited by Valerie Eliot...