Tennyson’s Faith

Of all the classic English poets, none is so unavailable to modern readers as Alfred, Lord Tennyson. I mean that both literally and figuratively. It is much rarer to walk into an American bookstore and find a copy of Tennyson’s poems than it is to find, say, comparable works by Shakespeare, Milton, or Keats. When I was preparing to teach a class on Tennyson last autumn, I was surprised to find that there are almost no secondary works on him still in print and affordable for students. Christopher Ricks’s Tennyson, first published in 1972, is still the leading critical study of the poet, and we have only three major biographies of the man, the first written by his grandson, and the most recent, John Batchelor’s Tennyson: To Strive, to Seek, to Find, a solid entry from 2012, is already difficult to track down. It is perhaps telling that Tennyson’s two most famous quotations are often misattributed to others: “’Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all” (to Shakespeare) and “Nature, red in tooth and claw” (to Darwin). Why this oblivion for a poet once deemed a master? Tennyson’s eye for the evocative image (the “mouse / behind the mouldering wainscot shriek’d” in “Mariana”), his command of tone, and, above all, his perfect modulation of sound and rhythm were once considered unparalleled. His reputational decline owes partly to the literary modernists who, looking for kings to kill, held up Tennyson as a fusty, mannered, Establishment figure that the new school would have to overcome. Hence James Joyce’s epithet “Alfred, Lawn Tennyson” and W.H. Auden’s uncharacteristically vituperative assertion that Tennyson “had the finest ear, perhaps, of any English poet; he was also undoubtedly the stupidest.” But there are other, more immediate reasons for Tennyson’s inability to speak to many modern readers. His poetry is rigorously formal, often jauntily rhymed, and addresses issues that were intensely alive for Victorian readers—women’s education, the religious implications of evolution—but have become commonplace for us. Then, too, his later poems, written as poet laureate of the United Kingdom (including his most famous, “The Charge of the Light Brigade”) are all too easily read as bellicose and jingoistic. Amid the neglect that followed the twentieth century’s outright hostility, Richard Holmes’s new book, The Boundless Deep: Young Tennyson, Science, and the Crisis of Belief, is a welcome recovery. Holmes is one of the more accomplished living literary biographers, having previously written acclaimed volumes on Percy Shelley and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, among others. In 2008, he published his landmark The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science, in which he ventured beyond purely literary concerns to explore questions in the history of science, demonstrating how scientific discoveries fired the imaginations of creative writers just as Romantic ideals shaped the work of scientists. The Boundless Deep seeks to re-evaluate Tennyson in terms of such reciprocal influence, depicting him as an exemplary figure at the intersection of late Romantic poetry and the apotheosis of Victorian science. The title of the biography comes from one of Tennyson’s earliest poems, “The Kraken,” which Holmes describes as “a mysterious combination of ancient folklore and modern marine science, summoning a powerful, menacing and even repulsive image, and bringing a new tone and edge to nineteenth-century poetry”: Below the thunders of the upper deep; Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea, His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee About his shadowy sides: above him swell Huge sponges of millennial growth and height; And far away into the sickly light, From many a wondrous grot and secret cell Unnumbered and enormous polypi Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green. There hath he lain for ages and will lie Battening upon huge seaworms in his sleep, Until the latter fire shall heat the deep; Then once by man and angels to be seen, In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die. For Holmes, the Kraken is doubly symbolic: It represents both the potentially terrifying natural forces being discovered by nineteenth-century science as well as the internal darkness, the monsters of the mind, that propelled Tennyson’s penumbral early poetry. Alfred Tennyson was born in 1809, at Somersby Rectory in Lincolnshire, the son of a clever and troubled clergyman. His father, George, was the oldest son in his family, but his own stern father had passed on his wealth to George’s younger brother Charles. This humiliation tormented George, and he took it out on his wife and children. The young Alfred, interested in poetry from his earliest years, fantasized about escape, often depicting it figuratively as a welcoming death. A happier escape came in 1828, when Alfred went up to Cambridge and met the cherubic Arthur Henry Hallam, a more privileged young man, a graduate of Eton, and a charming and loyal friend. Hallam’s premature death, during a visit to Vienna with his father in 1833, shattered two Tennysons—Alfred, for whom Arthur would become a muse comparable to Laura or Beatrice, and his sister Emily, who had been engaged to marry the brilliant family friend. Tennyson once wrote that “I have no life to give—for mine has been one of feelings not of actions,” and this was largely true. After Arthur’s death, Tennyson led a wandering, restless existence, living off the generosity of Cambridge friends, smoking unholy quantities of tobacco, partaking in a nearly ruinous investment scheme, and hobnobbing with the Victorian intelligentsia, including Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens, Edward Lear, and his “dear Fitz,” Edward FitzGerald, translator of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyáam. But for all these seventeen years, he was brooding over a series of elegies to Arthur that would finally emerge in 1850 as In Memoriam. Even before that, there was much brilliant poetry. The earliest published poems were dream-like and fantastical, already displaying the preternatural mastery of sound and rhythm that made Tennyson preeminent among his peers. After Hallam’s death, the plaintive melodies of these songs became fixed to a deeper sorrow. Despite his reputation for artificial, needlessly baroque language, Tennyson was in fact a master of simplicity and poetic understatement. In his crushing “Break, Break, Break,” the narrator stands looking over a cliff at the sea crashing thunderously against the rocks. He sees a “fisherman’s boy” and a “sailor lad,” happily at play and work, unaware of the abyss existence has revealed to him. He concludes: “Break, break, break, / At the foot of thy crags, O sea! / But the tender grace of a day that is dead / Will never come back to me.” At the same time he was honing his poetic voice, Tennyson was becoming increasingly enmeshed in the world of science. Holmes has a seemingly encyclopedic knowledge of the popular scientific works of the era, and one of the delights of The Boundless Deep is learning about Jane Marcet, Mary Somerville, and other science writers—many of them female—who cultivated a sense of wonder and excitement in young readers like Alfred, who played with microscopes and telescopes as a boy at Somersby. At Cambridge, Tennyson studied under William Whewell, who coined the term “scientist,” and pored over Charles Lyell’s revolutionary work on geology. Indeed, this “stupidest” poet was astonishingly well informed. The new geology confronted Tennyson’s generation with three unsettling ideas, Holmes argues: “biological evolution, a godless universe, and planetary extinction.” These ideas were further developed by another of Tennyson’s influences, Robert Chambers, whose Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844) predated Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by fifteen years, arguing for a natural order in which the “individual is left…to take his chance amidst the mêlée of the various laws affecting him.” At the same time, astronomical discoveries by John Herschel charted a vast new cosmos that extended indefinitely both in space and time. This mysterious, enlarged universe, both magnificent and seemingly beyond human conceiving, captivated Tennyson. As Holmes writes, the prospect of extinction provoked a “deep and existential terror” in the poet, even as he clung to the belief that “science was still a delight and a visionary promise.” These contradictory feelings about scientific discovery form a large part of the interest of Tennyson’s great long poemIn Memoriam. Originally conceived of as a series of distinct elegies for Arthur, the fragments ultimately took on a unified form, encompassing not only Tennyson’s grief but also his broader culture’s anxieties about evolution, atheism, and immortality (or the lack thereof). Tennyson’s great innovation in English poetry was to overthrow the Romantic view of nature and of the poetic imagination’s congruence with the natural world. Nature was no longer a balm, a peaceful respite for the overwrought nerves. Rather, in light of Victorian science, it could shout “A thousand types are gone: / I care for nothing, all shall go.” For Tennyson, science revealed a world in which everything humans hold dear—poetry, truth, courage, love—is phantasmal. Time is “a maniac scattering dust, / And Life, a Fury slinging flame.” In such a world, humanity is not noble and divine, but “A monster then, a dream, / A discord. Dragons of the prime, / that tare each other in their slime, / Were mellow music match’d with him.”