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TENNYSON’S MAUD: A REEXAMINATION OF ITS

BIOGRAPHICAL GENESIS AND AESTHETIC MERITS

James N. O'Neill

A Dissertation

Submitted to the Graduate School of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

August 1975

Graduate School Representative r /

URÏ ï<\

© 1975

JAMES NORMAN O'NEILL

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED il

ABSTRACT

This dissertation reexamines Maud * s experiential ele­ ments and reconsiders whether Tennyson*s poem is seriously marred hy its personal matrix. It appraises a number of conclusions about the nature of Maud's aesthetic merits arrived at in Ralph Rader’s important biographical account of the composition of Tennyson’s poem. In his work Rader contends that Maud is flawed by a "hidden emotional dimen­ sion" which results from Tennyson’s inability to distance himself sufficiently from the emotional experiences about which he was writing. Rader believes that "the emotion which flows from the frenetic hero is distorted and dis­ proportionate to its objects as they appear in the poem."

This study confirms that Maud is, indeed, a mosaic­ like rendering of Tennyson’s first forty-five years. In Maud Tennyson does seem to have made use of the complex of psychological wounds he had sustained during his rural childhood years and post-Somersby relocating and recasting years. However, this study disputes the claim that Tennyson was unable to distance himself sufficiently from the emo­ tional experiences about which he was writing. The poet’s frame of mind at Chapel House and Farringford between 1851 and 1855 was sufficiently serene for him to embark upon the composition of Maud with a sense of financial indepen­ dence and emotional security.

Finally, this study contends that Maud * s emotional element is neither unconscious nor uncontrolled. The emo­ tional element in the poem’s sections of social invective does seem consciously employed when one considers how Tennyson’s hero is deliberately fashioned after the conven­ tional Spasmodic protagonist. Similarly, the emotional element in Maud* s war passages seems purposeful and regu­ lated when one recognizes how the advocacy of war can be understood as the speaker’s ardent desire for his country to cease its internal selfishness and dlvisiveness by turn­ ing its energies outward to the earning of a true peace. Ill

TABLE OF CONTENTS Page INTRODUCTION ...... 1

Chapter

I. THE EARLY YEARS: FAMILY PROBLEMS, 1809-1834...... 24

II. LOVE, COMMERCE, AND MARRIAGE: THE POET'S MATURATION, 1834-1855 ...... 54

III. THE POET VERSUS THE AUTOBIOGRAPHER IN MAUD...... 106

BIBLIOGRAPHY...... 1.71 I

INTRODUCTION

Ralph Rader in his generally accepted study of the "bio­

graphical genesis" of Tennyson’s Maud: A Monodrama has said

that the poem is a "crucial document"--a "purgative recapit­ ulation of the inner and outer circumstances of his [Tenny­

son* s3 early life, a deeply rooted act of spiritual self-

definition and affirmation. ..." Several Tennyson schol­ ars have shown agreement that Maud is, as Rader calls it,

"the swan song of the bitter and troubled young poet, the inaugral hymn of the Laureate." Sir Harold Nicolson, for example, considered it the "last defiant flash" of the "black 3 unhappy mystic of the Lincolnshire Wolds." Another critic,

Humbert Wolfe, has regarded it as Tennyson’s "supreme effort as a poet of despair," a kind of funeral-pyre on which twenty II years of personal suffering were burned away.

If it is so pivotal in Tennyson’s career, Maud surely deserves more recognition and critical attention than it has received to date. The major Tennyson studies have in­ variably skipped over Maud quicklyj and until recently, a serious paucity of periodical studies of Maud has existed.

Fortunately, several valuable articles dealing with Maud have been published during the past few years. Their appearance clearly indicates an increase of interest in the poem. However, these periodical analyses, for the most part, have been necessarily narrow in their focus; some, unfor­ tunately, have been rather general in their treatment. Clyde 2

de L. Ryals’s comment of a few years ago that "Modem critics

have hardly known what to make of this lyric monologue"holds

nearly as true today as it did when it was made in 1962. In

the almost one hundred twenty years since the poem’s publica­

tion there have been only two full-length studies of Maud

done; both are deficient in several respects. Kenneth Kirk-

wood’s study, while it was published in 1951» was actually

in the main written prior to World War II as he explains in

his Author’s Note. Further, although it makes several val­

uable comments on the structure of the "Monologue," it has a

tendency to be somewhat verbose, repetitive, and diffuse.

Moreover, only 200 copies of Kirkwood’s book were ever issued, o R. J. Mann’s little book, also very useful in some respects, is similarly restricted by its date of printing (1856) and style. Hence, both writers because of their methodology and dates were unable to utilize the excellent body of research which has been done in the last four decades—research which according to the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Lit­ erature includes about two hundred fifty studies of Tenny­ son’s poetry published since 1957 and which has apparently more than doubled in volume since 1935 according to a com­ parison of the three hundred seventy entries in the CBEL and its Supplement (of 1935 and 1955) with the number of seven hundred to eight hundred items in the New CBEL.^ Signifi­ cant perhaps, too, is the fact that these last four decades of Tennyson scholarship are firmly distanced from the peak 3

"Period of Tennysonian Backlash." Ralph Rader’s extensive

examination in 1963 of the sources Tennyson drew upon for

the composition of Maud, itself indebted to this surge of

Tennysonian scholarship, calls for renewed interest in Maud.

A fascinating work, Rader’s Tennyson's "Maud"; The Biograph­

ical Genesis should have opened the way for several new full-

length studies of Tennyson's second major long poem. Unfor­

tunately, such has not yet occurred.

This study is undertaken to reexamine a number of con­

clusions about the nature of Maud's aesthetic merits arrived

at in Rader's important biographical account of Tennyson's

composition of Maud. In his disquisition Rader contends

that Maud is flawed by a "hidden emotional dimension" which

resides in the "Monodrama" as a result of Tennyson's ina­

bility to distance himself sufficiently from the emotional

experiences he was writing about over the two-year period

of 185^-1855. He believes that "the emotion which flows

from the frenetic hero" is "distorted and disproportionate to its objects as they appear in the poem."10 Viewing the

love story as "strained and unreal"H and as "queer" and

"disjointed," Rader cites the "character of the emotion"

in the poem as its chief imperfection. Because Maud is

"filled with exaggerated sentiments," because its frenzied protagonist is overcharged with an "extravagantly self-cen­

tered emotion," says Rader, the reader is prevented "from

identifying with him fully and sympathetically, despite the 4

fact that such identification is almost required by the 12 nature of the poem."

While writing Maud in 1854-1855» asserts Rader, Tenny­ son was unable to recognize the extravagance of the emotion he was having his speaker express in several parts of the poem. Neither did he fully realize the extent to which he was drawing his materials for the poem from his own past pain­ ful experiences. Rather, the composition was characterized by

"an astonishing unconsciousness of the autobiographical bear­ ings of the poem."13 This happened because Tennyson had re­ pressed the accumulated hurt from his adolescent years and from his later years of financial struggle and disillusionment with the ways of love. Because he was by 1854 not yet emotionally free of these troubles, contends Rader, he was unable to ac­ quire "the proper precondition" or "perspective" with which to write Maud. He was incapable of maintaining an adequately

"detached intuition of the original emotional object." Con­ sequently, a "hidden emotional dimension" developed. For

Tennyson, the poem took on a measure of meaning which it does not have for the reader unfamiliar with the biographical back­ ground at its core, believes Rader.

This study will seek to show that the poet’s early life was the quarry he mined rather than the obsessions he was un­ able to deal with poetically and that the emotion which flows from the thoughts of the poem’s speaker is not disproportionate to its objects nor a source of serious imperfection but is 5

rather conscious and controlled. This study will proceed on the premise that there is a need for a reconsideration of the relationship between Tennyson’s life and the poem, par­ ticularly the issue of whether the confluence between the poet’s experiences during the pre-1850 period and the situ­ ations of the speaker in the poem means that Maud is auto­ matically over-personal and emotional. Frequently, as Ruskin noted in discussing the poem, Tennyson effectively employs the pathetic fallacy in the language of a dramatic character in an intensely dramatic situation; and frequently it is a consciously employed device intended to startle the Victorian reading public into an awareness of the evils present in mid-

Victorian society. Also, it will be argued that Maud to the extent that it is a complex and difficult poem does benefit from an understanding of its biographical background. Such knowledge provides the interested reader a deeper appreciation of the poem. But while the biographical elements in Maud are the necessary materials with which Tennyson composed the work, and while they do add force to the poem, they are not the poem.

Rather, Maud resulted from Tennyson’s use of language in cer­ tain ways and from his imposing form on the events which he selected. As for how much of a "hidden emotional element" there might be in Maud, that is, how much of a discrepancy might exist in the poem between the speaker's emotion and the motivations for that emotion, this study proposes the following: there may be a certain excess of emotion, though it is, for the most part, 6

not severely distorted and disproportionate; Tennyson may not

have been totally free of his hurt, but he was, nonetheless,

conscious of his art; and, finally, the emotional element is

not the inexorable imperfection in the poem, nor is it the

reason to charge that the poem’s meaning or significance is

subsequently obscure. It is the structure of Maud which is

confusing—the free flow of thoughts from the speaker’s mind

and gaps Tennyson leaves in his narrative by design. These

at times make Maud perplexing, but no more so than is The

Waste Land, for example, for the reader unfamiliar with Eliot’s

symbols and techniques. Indeed, the reader who is reasonably

familiar with the themes of Tennyson’s earlier poems should not have great difficulty either in understanding Maud’s

meaning or in responding to its emotion. He should, instead, have a geniune and appreciative feeling for much of the poetry

of Maud. For Maud may be regarded in several ways as the cul­ mination of Tennyson’s art, and, as was previously mentioned,

the poem has often been considered to be the turning point in

Tennyson’s career.

By the time in his career when the "Monodrama" reached the presses (1855)» Tennyson had already achieved domestic and financial security from his marriage and the Laureateship.

In Memoriam's success had settled popularity and critical ac­ claim upon him, and his move in 1853 into his Farringford estate had helped him forget the Somersby parsonage and his turbulent early life there. Behind him were the scenes of 7

violence and the episodes of his mad, drunken father beating

his brothers and on one occasion attempting to kill the eldest son, Frederick. Distant now were the hard times when his only peace came from an escape into the cemetery where he more than once contemplated suicide.

It was during this period between 1850 and 1855 that

Tennyson became ’’able to look freely at his old self. He had to a very large extent found his way out of the wood • . . and the writing of Maud completed the dark journey.He could now create a character approaching a composite of his earlier personality and experiences who yet differed suf­ ficiently for Tennyson to disclaim identification by stating:

This poem of ‘Maud or the Madness* is a little Hamlet, the history of a morbid, poetic soul, under the blighting influence of a recklessly speculative age. He is the heir of madness, an egoist with the makings of a cynic, raised to a pure and holy love which elevates his whole nature, passing from the height of triumph to the lowest depth of misery, driven into madness by the loss of her whom he has loved, and, when he has at length passed through the fiery furnace, and has recovered his reason, giving himself up to work for the good of mankind through the unselfishness born of great passion. The pecu­ liarity of this poem is that different phases of passion in one poem take the place of different characters.15

Annoyed by critics who repeatedly linked him to his hero,

Tennyson stressed the dramatic nature of the poem, though, as J. B. Steane has recently said, ”in a deeper way than was probably suspected by those critics or by himself, he was •giving of his own substance* in this poem."l6

This unconscious giving, these connections between his 8

early life and the details of the work, are striking. In the

character’s love of Maud as well as in his derangement we

have a projection of Tennyson himself. The poem’s passion

is drawn from Tennyson’s memories of the three women he had

loved in his youth: Rosa Baring, Sophy Rawnsley, and Emily

Sellwood (whom he courted off and on for twenty years before

their marriage in 1850). The hero’s madness derives from

Alfred's scrutiny of his father's and his own neuroses as well as from his observations of his brothers: especially

Frederick, the eldest, described as "sinister in aspect and

terrific in manner"; Charles, his favorite, who became an

opium addict; Edward, who had to be institutionalized in

1832; and Septimus, who greeted visitors with the words,

"I am Septimus, the most morbid of the Tennysons." All six of the sons (there were also five daughters cramped into the limited confines of the Somersby parsonage) seem to have possessed an inherited gloomy streak. It is this Tennyson

"black blood" which went into the hero of Maud.

By 185^ Tennyson felt safe enough to explore this psy­ chological phenomenon in an extended work. He had already worked it into the protagonist of "Locksley Hall" whose character and situation in love are very similar to those of the speaker of Maud. But this same security which permitted

Tennyson to deal with the materials of Maud had other effects also. For recognition and domestic calm caused discernible changes in his work. The opening and ending of Maud and the 9

turn to the Idylls of the King following the poem's comple­

tion do, without question, reflect some amount of capitula­

tion to a sense of duty connected with his title, public

pressure, and his feeling that the anxious times needed a

spokesman who could supply moral guidance. In Maud, itself,

perhaps Tennyson's most original work and surely his most

carefully calculated, constructed, and controlled long poem,1*7 there is a mixture of the lyrical and the didactic,

of shadow and substance, which is accomplished by associating

the hero's despondency with the corruption in mid-Victorian society.

Throughout the 1850's, as Jerome Buckley has said,

Tennyson "became increasingly alarmed at the exploitation of the populace by the rugged captains of industry and all the entrepreneurs and speculators of a laissez-faire economy."1®

Both the early section of Maud and its closing reflect this concern, while the middle is filled with some of Tennyson's most lyrical poetry. After Maud, the element of social mes­ sage grew stronger and Tennyson's development as a subjective poet ceased; what continued was largely repetition and the perfection of manual dexterity, although he did retain his lyrical impulse and continued to fill his verse with personal issues right through to "Crossing the Bar." But Maud marked that turning point in Tennyson’s career where the decision he had struggled with during the thirties, described by Robert

Preyer in his essay on "Tennyson as an Oracular Poet," 7 was finally reached. Following Maud is the point where truly 10

•'the inner impulse flags, the quest for subjects begins, the urge to compose comes from without."2°

Related to this general situation is the issue of how

the poem was received and how the reviews affected Tennyson’s

thinking. The public and press alike were disappointed with

Maud. They had expected another In Memoriam and did not know

what to make of this new passionate and violent love story

that Tennyson gave them. The hostility with which Maud was

received was due mainly to Tennyson’s use of contemporary

issues, his sympathetic treatment of his hero, and, most of

all, to his philosophy of war. Readers also found the shifts

in tone and the variety of forms perplexing and charged the poem with being obscure.2^

Tennyson’s first major venture as Laureate, his "first attempt to represent the state of society," and "his central political poem,"22 Maud was reviewed with a good deal less than unqualified praise. However, as Edgar Shannon has shown, it was not received "with almost universal reprobation" as Sir Charles Tennyson and other commentators have generally believed. Rather, "a number of the early reviews in the daily and weekly newspapers were both sympathetic and favorable."^3

Shannon’s conclusion which was drawn from an examination of ninety-one reviews and essays was that "the British reception must be described as unfavorable" because "the derogatory slightly outnumber the laudatory’’^2* [italics minej . Yet as

Shannon also notes, "Never before had a volume of Tennyson’s 11

been so widely reviewed, and the contradictory testimony of

the reviewers along with the contemporary aspect of the poem merely stimulated interest."25

The criticism of Maud in the press and from readers

caused Tennyson endless suffering. Time and again in late

1855 and in the years that followed he told friends and ac­

quaintances at dinner parties and in private of his anguish

over the reactions to his favorite poem. He had been and always would continue to be extremely sensitive to any form

of criticism made about any of his works. During his younger days at Cambridge, for instance, despite the principles of free speech to which the Apostles were pledged, "criticism of what he read was not allowed by the poet, disapprobation being permitted to express itself only in silence.This hypersensitivity continued through the fifties as the follow­ ing anecdote points out:

... after dinner at Balliol Tennyson read some of his latest work, not quite up to his best standard. When he ceased, there was a long silence, broken by the chirping treble of Jowett, ’If I were you, Ten­ nyson, I wouldn’t publish those.’ There was yet a more awful hush; and then the booming bass of an out­ raged poet, ’If it comes to that, master, the sherry you.gave us at luncheon today was positively filthy.’2'

And that this sensitive bent continued into later life is evident from an anecdote about a luncheon date at Aldworth during which Tennyson asked Edmund Gosse if he had read an unfavorable review of Demeter by Churton Collins. Gosse re­ plied that he had. "Collins,” thundered Tennyson, "is a louse upon the locks of literature."2® 12

As for specific criticisms of Maud that haunted Tennyson, one was a critic’s comment "that one of the two vowels should be omitted from the title, and that it didn’t matter which was chosen for the purpose."29 Another was a letter from an anony­ mous correspondent which asserted:

Sir, once I worshipped you—now I loathe you! So you’ve taken to imitating Longfellow, you BEAST!30

Tennyson was considerably stung by these barbs because he was convinced Maud was one of his best poems. It was for this reason that he read his "Monodrama" so forcefully and with such feeling. When, for example, he recited his poem at

Browning’s home on September 27, 1855, before a small group,

Dante Gabriel Rossetti noted "the extraordinary passion and range of his reading—’whilst the fiery passages were delivered with a voice and vehemence which he alone of living men can compass, the softer passages and the songs made the tears course down his cheeks.*"31 Elizabeth Barrett Browning was similarly affected; she recalled how Tennyson read Maud with a "voice like an organ" and that he paused during the reading every now and then with "There’s a wonderful touch! That’s very tender! How beautiful that is!"32 While Tennyson was delivering his performance that evening, Rossetti (who af­ fectionately referred to it as the "night of the Gods") was making his famous pen-and-ink sketch of the Laureate. In the sketch, above which is written the poem’s opening line,

Tennyson is pictured as sitting on a sofa sideways in a loose coat and waistcoat. The night must have been memorable; for 13

when Tennyson finished, Browning read his "Fra Lippo Lippi."

The occasion, however, was only one of several vividly re­

called instances of Tennyson’s emotional readings of Maud.

By all accounts, the "Monodrama" was "his favorite poem, the

one which he loved best to read aloud and read with the most overwhelming effect."33

Such enthusiasm, such fondness, for his poem Tennyson

voiced relentlessly in spite of the harsh reception. On one

occasion, for example, he told a friend: "You must always stand up for Maud when you hear my pet bantling abused."34

But the course of events relating to the history of Maud * s

publication and reception had its impact. It marked Tenny­

son’s "last attempt to put across his social theories in a direct manner. Afterwards his methods were more oblique."35

And his extensive efforts in experimentation ended. In

Shannon’s words, "Hurt and annoyed, he withdrew from the

troublesome nineteenth century to his favorite era, the past, and diffidently began the protracted process of casting in mellifluous splendor the Idylls of the King."36

It is fitting that with the proceeds from the sales of

Maud (which netted him 2000 pounds from the Illustrated edition of 1856 alone) Tennyson was able to pay for Farring- ford, a rare monetary accomplishment from a single poem. He lived on this secluded Isle of Wight estate, furthermore, for the next forty years and was in 1884 "created Baron of Farring ford, which meant that he was a Lord of an estate acquired 14

through the success of Maud."37 This is a rather interesting

fact when one realizes the grudging feelings Tennyson harbored

while growing up toward Bayons and Brancepeth manors, the

bourgeois homes of his Uncle Charles and his Aunt Elizabeth,

which are the sources for the neighboring squire’s Hall in Maud.

The story line of Maud signalizes how the plot of the

poem involves the aftermath of a financial ruin conditioned by

the false values of the Victorian industrial system; the story

deals with the deterioration of a twenty-five-year-old unnamed

youth whose mind struggles first with the suicidal death of

his father and then with the failure of his own intimate re­

lationship with the seventeen-year-old daughter of the neigh­

boring squire whose treachery in a business transaction caused

the hero’s father to take his life. The poem is divided into

three parts. The first part begins with the grief-stricken

and hate-filled youth reacting to his father’s death with a

savage denunciation of the commercial spirit of the age—a

spirit he regards as responsible for fostering the "lust of

gain" which contributed to his family's downfall.

So what we find immediately in Maud is self-analysis

combined with social analysis. The youth realizes and tells us that his morbid mood mirrors the general madness of the

times; in his bitter resentment he blames the materialism of the age for his father’s death and the distortion of his mind.

These social forces shape his consequent behavior and pre­ dispose his personality to a gloomy disposition. Initially 15

in a severe state of depression as a result of the suicide

and his reflections on it, he is, however, gradually brought

out of withdrawal by a growing involvement with the squire’s

daughter Maud (the only person in the poem who has a name), who is returning home to their country estate by the sea with her brother after having been for a number of years abroad.

Chancing to view her carriage passing, he sees her and even­ tually meets her. By the final scene of Part I, the Hall-

Garden scene, he has fallen in love with, wooed, and won

Maud only to kill her interfering brother in a duel and to have to escape the country, an exile.

Part II describes the hero exiled in Brittany where he hears that Maud has died and where he suffers successive phases of insanity and remorse and is later confined to a

London madhouse where he is haunted by the phantom of Maud.

In Part III, finally, the hero's recurrent nightmares yield to a dream in which Maud is no longer a threatening ghost but rather an angel coming to him with a message of hope. "Sane but shattered," the hero at the poem's close decides to ex­ piate his crime by fighting for what he believes to be a worthy cause—the British involvement in the Crimean War. We leave him in the last scene departing England on board a ship headed for the Black Sea.

These are the essentials of the plot whose central idea 38 is, as Tennyson himself said, "the holy power of love"-7 and whose basic design traces a movement from search to discovery, 16

withdrawal to involvement. "In terms of the redemptive power

of love," as Clyde de L. Ryals has noted, "Maud may be regarded

as a kind of Victorian Rime of the Ancient Mariner, in which

the burden of isolation is relieved through enlargement of the human’s ability to love."39 just as the mariner in Coleridge’s

poem is cleansed of his crime of killing the albatross by

blessing the water snakes, so in similar fashion does the

hero of Tennyson’s poem in his perception of the sea shell

on the Brittany coast symbolically repent for the impulsive killing of the brother of Maud. Each is an act of self­ understanding, as well as a recognition of beauty outside the self; they prepare the respective men for the further suffering that lies ahead of them.

There are several literary echoes in Maud because the nature of experience one finds therein is archetypal and universal. Tennyson himself called the poem his "little Hamlet"21'0 undoubtedly because of the similarities between his protagonist and Shakespeare’s, especially the similar traits of cynicism and moral outrage in their indecisive makeups. Then, also, the element of feuding families and a duel likens Tennyson’s drama to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, as the element of madness also recalls King Lear. Maud is, indeed, an amalgam of many things. Containing lyrical, narrative, and dramatic elements, it deals with nearly all the fundamental Tennysonian themes and employs nearly all

Tennyson’s typical techniques. In it we confront both the 17

mystic and the "bard, see both Tennyson’s morbid and missionary

sides. A "mixture of aloofness and passion, alienation and 4l commitment, meaning and mystery," the poem is at once a

drama of an individual struggling for self-identity and a

drama of human relations between the old landowning caste and

the new merchant class. There are scenes of darkness and moments of vision together with feelings of loneliness and love, and words of madness and wisdom. And the "Monodrama," as Tennyson subtitled it, moves in its most intense passages

"beyond reason altogether into realms of immediate sensuous 42 apprehension." It recalls the kind of thing Tennyson did so well in his earlier works "Mariana," "The Lady of Shalott,"

"Tithonus," and "The Palace of Art" where he had dealt with morbid, lonely and introspective types in sensuous lyrics in which states of mind were revealed against an exotic and lush or decayed and forlorn setting. As in these poems, Maud, too, is essentially "an art of juxtaposition of images, colors, and scenes held together by elaborate similitudes in sound and 43 tone and just the hint of a story line." J In creating his dark, world-weary hero and delineating him with the touches of detail that he does, Tennyson brings to Maud the three qualities which T. S. Eliot said make him a great poet: 44 abundance, variety, and competence. Though Maud has its de­ ficiencies, the "undoubted originality of the poem, its abrupt changes of feeling and tone, the suppression of links in the narrative, the variety of different kinds of verse— 18

these things are undeniably impressive.

To effectively assay the complex meaning of Maud, one

must not only deal with the work qua work but must also

necessarily explore the "inner soul of the poet” and the 46 "outer envelope of contemporary circumstance" which

contribute so substantially to the poem. As earlier men­

tioned, the first step in such a complete analysis of

Maud's meaning should be a consideration of the creative

process behind the poem’s composition--an appraisal of its

personal matrix. This includes an examination of the re­

markable confluence between a span of notable crises in the

poet’s early career and the sequence of vicissitudes con­

fronted by the speaker in this autobiographical poem. In

the three chapters which follow we will seek to explore

the element of personal matrix in the poem by reviewing the

poet’s early development through 1855 and by reexamining

the issue of whether Tennyson was conscious of the extent

to which he drew upon his past personal troubles for the

substance of Maud.

Chapter I will focus on the early years of the poet’s

life and on the problems which the Tennyson family faced between 1809 and 1834. Chapter II will deal with the ways

in which love, money, and marriage affected the poet’s maturation during the years 1834-1855» Chapter III will

then consider whether Tennyson could have become free of the hurt he had accumulated from the experiences of his 19

early life and whether he could have obtained the necessary

"precondition" by 1854 to compose Maud without inculcating

into its meaning "a hidden emotional element."

Studying the "whole experience" of the Victorian who

wrote Maud will expand one’s appreciation of Tennyson's

poem—this is the principle upon which this study will

proceed. As Park Honan has said, a "holist criticism of

process"—one "not quite ’biographical’ or ’historic,’" but one which has "one foot, as it were, in the real world" — canHavoid the abstract quality which the New Criticism

fosters. ..." In the following chapters an effort will be made to have what is said about Maud "checked as well as nourished by historic and biographic facts and the text itself" and to "move back and forth between the poet’s 47 experience and the text." 1 20

NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

^Ralph Wilson Rader, Tennyson's "Maud": The Biograph­ ical Genesis, Perspectives in Criticism, No. 15 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1963). p. 115» 2Ibid.. p. 115.

^Tennyson: Aspects of His Life, Character, and Poetry (London^ Constable, 1923)» pp. 15-16. h Humbert Wolfe, Tennyson, The Poets on the Poets, No. 3 (London: Faber and Faber, 1930), p. 58.

-’Clyde de L. Ryals, "Tennyson’s Maud," Connotation, 1 (1962), 12. ^Kenneth Parker Kirkwood, "Maud": An Essay on Tennyson's Poem (Ottowa: Le Droit, 1951)• 7 fIbid., p. 215. Kirkwood supplies the following explana­ tion about his book’s problematic history prior to publication:

In 1939, while residing in Holland, I occupied some of my leisure moments writing an essay on Maud. Unfor­ tunately, in consequence of the German invasion, all my papers were lo6t. During a period of the Second World War, I found myself in an Artie outpost in Greenland. By devious postal channels, out of occupied Holland, I unexpectedly received a copy of the typescript of my essay on Maud from the Dutch girl who had, in typing it, privately kept a carbon copy for herself. I was more than grateful to have that study restored to me. During the next nine or ten years, the typescript has lain in my trunk while I have been living in many foreign parts of the world. It was never forgotten, and has in a sense, ripened and matured during this long interment. Recently an opportunity provided itself for me to revise the essay and make some additions. So here is now printed an essay which has been gestating almost ever since my youth, (pp. 215-216) o R. J. Mann, Tennyson's "Maud" Vindicated: An Explana­ tory Essay (London: Jarrold and Sons, 1856)• ^See Donald Gray, rev. of The New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, ed. George Watson, Victorian Studies, 15 (1971)7 88. 21

3-°Rader, see pp. 115-121,

1:LIbid., p. 2, p. 116.

12Ibid., p. 115, p. 116.

13lbid., p. 91.

•^J. B. Steane, Tennyson, Arco Literary Critiques (New Yorks Arco Publishing Company, Inc., 1969), p. 101. ^■%allam Lord Tennyson, Alfred Lord Tennyson! A Memoir by His Son (London! Macmillan, 1&97), I, 468. Hereafter referred to as the Memoir. The nature of this "giving of his own substance," that is, of the drawing upon the wisdom learned from his previous years of suffering recalls the remarkable letter of Keats to John Hamilton Reynolds of May 3, 1818, writ­ ten during the poet’s own period of perplexity! . . . axioms in philosophy are not axioms until,they are proved upon our pulses . . . Until we are sick, we understand not;—in fine, as Byron says, ’Knowledge is Sorrow; and I go on to say that Sorrow is Wisdom’ . . Quoted in Walter Jackson Bate, John Keats, (1963), rpt. New York! Oxford University Press, 1970), p? 329« 1 z Steane, p. 98.

Jerome Hamilton Buckley, Tennyson! The Growth of a Poet, Riverside Studies in Literature (1965; Bostons Houghton Mifflin Company, i960), p. 144. 18Ibid., p. 136.

19"Tennyson as an Oracular Poet," Modem Philology, 55 (1958), 250-251. on Pauli Franklin Baum, Tennyson Sixty Years After (Chapel Hill! University of North Carolina Press, 1948), p. 236. 2^Edgar F. Shannon, Jr., "The Critical Reception of Tennyson’s Maud," PMIA, 68 (1953), 400-404. 22Valerie Pitt, Tennyson Laureate (Toronto! University of Toronto Press, 1962), p. 179- 23"Critical Reception of Maud," 399«

2^Ibid., p. 405. 22

25ibjd., p. 406.

2®Sir Charles Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson (Londons Mac­ millan, 1949), p. 85. 2^Tennyson: Aspects of His Life, Character, and Poetry (London: Constable, 1923), p. 202. 2®Sir Harold Nicolson, "Tennyson: Fifty Years After," The Poetry Review, 33 (19^2), 33^«

29Ibid., p. 286.

3Qlbid., p. 289.

33-lbid.

32Ibid., p. 290.

33ibid., p. 285.

^Ssemoir, I, 468.

35pitt, p. 181.

36«critical Reception of Maud," PLMA, 68 (1953), 414.

3?Kirkwood, "Maud:" An Essay on Tennyson’s Poem, p. 2.

3®See Tennyson’s MS headings and notes to the poem in Memoir, I, 402 ff. 39"Tennyson*s Maud," Connotation, 1 (1962), 20.

^Memoir, I, 396.

^Robert Preyer, "Alfred Tennyson: The Poetry and Poli­ tics of Conservative Vision," Victorian Studies, 9 (1966), 3^8. ^2Buckley, Tennyson: The Growth of a Poet, p. 145«

^3preyer, 348.

^’’In Memoriam’’ in Essays Ancient and Modern (London: Faber and Faber, 1936), rpt. in Critical Essays on the Poetry of Tennyson, ed. John KiIlham (I960; rpt, New York: Barnes and Noble, 1967), P» 207. 23

^Robin Mayhead, "The Poetry of Tennyson," in The Pelican Guide to English Literature: From Dickens to Hardy, ed. Boris Ford (1958; rpt. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1968), VI, p. 237. h z These phrases are from Richard D, Altick, The Scholar Adventurers (1950; rpt. New York: The Free Press, 1966)7 p. 2. ^Park Honan, "In the Meantime," Victorian Poetry, 10 (1972), 144. CHAPTER I

THE EARLY YEARS: FAMILY PROBLEMS, 1809-1834

To consider Tennyson's poem from the perspective of its

deeply rooted personal matrix, to study its biographical back­

ground and experiential elements (which, as Jerome Buckley has

noted, are "not only considerable but ultimately decisive",

is to recognize how Tennyson in Maud charts the inner land­

scape he saw himself emerging from in the 1850’s. After 1850,

as is generally known, Tennyson’s life and career would final­

ly begin to stabilize. Although there were to be further

crises such as the stillbirth of his first son Lionel in 1853

and although he would continue on occasion to retreat into

somber states of silence, the course of his life after 1850

tended to follow a pattern of relative calm. By 1850 the period of unrelenting disappointment would be concluded—

stilled by the poet’s two greatly successful ventures of that year: his propitious marriage to Emily Sellwood and his par- 2 venu publication of In Memoriam.

It is, however, the pre-1850 period of chronic chagrin upon which hinges an understanding of the autobiographical bearings of Maud. While this biographical background is not necessary to the understanding of the poem as such, the close relationship between the lives of Tennyson and Maud's speaker offers a unique opportunity to examine how Tennyson’s poetic consciousness shapes, alters, combines, and finally trans­ 25

mutes the raw materials of personal experience into a separate

and independent work of art. To study the biographical data

of the pre-1850 period is to perceive how Tennyson in Maud made use of the complex of psychological wounds from his rural

childhood years. To explore the circumstances of this period

of the poet’s life is to see how Tennyson used his past troub­

les in a manner not dissimilar to that of numerous Victorians who turned their unhappy childhoods and early years to liter­ ary use. One thinks, for instance, of Dickens who in his suc­ cessful and mature years (when loved, famous, and rich) dis­ tanced and reformulated the traumatic experience of the black­ ing warehouse into the literature of David Co-pperfield. Over the psychological wounds of his rural childhood years (and later wounds from his post-Somersby relocating and recasting years), Tennyson between 1850 and 1855 similarly sought to triumph. From such experiences during these years as the vio­ lent and turbulent episodes in the crowded Somersby parsonage, the humiliating developments involving his family’s dealings with their Bayons and Brancepeth relatives, and the distress­ ing circumstances pertaining to his father's disinheritance, illness, and death, Tennyson fashioned the thematic materials for Maud. This chapter will examine Tennyson's psychological development at Somersby between I809 and 1834, that is, dur­ ing the first three stormy decades of the pre-1850 period. 26

The similarities between the speaker in Maud and

the pre-1850 Tennyson are striking. The morbid despon­

dency, the immeasurable sadness, the sense of loss, the

spectre of insanity, the psychic conflicts, and the death

wish which Tennyson’s character in Maud suffers had all

afflicted Tennyson himself. Like his saturnine and tem­

peramental narrator, Tennyson during the pre-1850 period

had been a man at war with himself and the world, a moody

soul who had struggled to conquer doubt and despair and who

had scorned the reckless and blighting spirit of his ruth­

lessly speculative age. His contemporaries often alluded to

these quirks when recording their impressions of the poet.

For instance, in 1840 Edward FitzGerald described Tennyson

as "really ill in a nervous way, what with an hereditary ten­ derness of nerve. . . ."^ in 1844 Carlyle characterized

the poet as "a man solitary and sad," dwelling "in an ele­

ment of gloom," and working his way "through Chaos and the

Bottomless and Pathless.In 1851 William AHingham re­

corded this description of Tennyson in his diary: "Hollow

cheeks and the dark pallor of his skin gave him an unhealty

appearance. He was a strange and almost spectral figure." He "looked much older fthan forty-onej , from his bulk, his

short sight, stooping shoulders, and loose careless dress.

FitzGerald, Carlyle, and Allingham were close personal friends

of Tennyson. Yet even onlookers occasionally detected in the 27

poet’s demeanor his peculiarly morbid temperament. Nathaniel

Hawthorne, himself a moody and withdrawn man (at least in his

early life), recorded this bystander’s account from an ob­

servation of the poet’s appearance at the Manchester Exhibi­

tion in 1857«

Tennyson is the most picturesque figure without affectation, that I ever saw; of middle-size, rather slouching, dressed entirely in black, and with nothing white about him except the collar of his shirt, which methought might have been clean the day before. He had on a black wide-awake hat, with round crown and wide, irregular brim, beneath which came down his long black hair, looking terribly tangled; he had a long, pointed beard, too, a little browner than the hair, and not so abundant as to incumber any of the expression of his face. His frock coat was buttoned across the breast, though the afternoon was warm. His face was very dark, and not exactly a smooth face, but worn, and expressing great sensitiveness, though not, at that moment, the pain and sorrow which is seen in his bust Cdone by Thomas Woolner and on display at the Exhibition3 .... His manner, while conversing with . . . £some ac- quaintances^ was not in the least that of an awkward man, unaccustomed to society; but he shook hands and parted with them, evidently as soon as he courteously could, and shuffled away quicker than before. He be­ trayed his shy and secluded habits more in this, than in anything else that I observed; though, indeed, in his whole presence, I was indescribably sensible of a morbid painfulness in him, a something not to be meddled with.6

When one looks at the speaker of Maud, one discerns these same characteristics. For Maud is a mosaic-like rendering of the first forty-five years of Tennyson’s life. To read

Maud with a foreknowledge of the Tennyson biography is to see a pronounced correspondence between the events of the first half of the poet’s course of life and the situations of his speaker in the poem. To approach Maud as "an autobiographical 28

expression” is to see the surfacing of a good deal of the

long sublimated "morbid painfulness" from Tennyson’s

psyche—the lingering residue of which Hawthorne had de­

tected at the Manchester Exhibition in 1857» To approach

the poem this way is to see how Tennyson In Maud released

emotions which had been brewing in him since his turbulent

boyhood years at Somersby.

The influence of Somersby on the early growth of the

poet’s mind may be briefly compared to the influence

Haworth had on the development of Emily Bronte. In Tenny­

son’s youth Somersby was, like the West Riding village,

an unhurried and unchanging remote little hamlet well re­

moved from the large industrial Northern centers (of

Lincoln, Bradford and Leeds, respectively) to the west.

On the edge of the Lincolnshire wolds, a ridge of hills

reaching in places five hundred to a thousand feet in

height, which in their grim way resemble the Yorkshire moors, Somersby like its counterpart led to secluded ex­

panses of elevations and depressions across which rushed

howling winds and dismal rains. What the Yorkshire moors were to the writings of the Brontes, the Lincolnshire wolds were to much of Tennyson’s poetry. Each was the "imaginary homeland"? behind a myriad of unforgettable representations.

Moreover, to focus on the manner in which each family adapted to the rough region where they lived is to discern further similarities. The Somersby countryside harbored 29

the local rectory occupied by the Reverend George Tennyson

and his offspring of seven sons and four daughters in a way not so dissimilar to the situation of Haworth’s harboring

the Reverend Patrick Bronte and his brood of six children.

The two fathers were both austere heads of quarrelsome, problem-laden families. Each was a part-time poet and graduate of Cambridge, George Tennyson in 1801, Patrick

Bronte in 1806. Each fired the imaginations of his children with the literary and cultural glories of the past and pro­ hibited them from playing with the neighboring scions (many of whom were illiterate) which resulted in the inclination toward solitude and the playing of games involving private fantasy worlds created by the children. The Tennyson sib­ lings engaged in sword fights and tournaments they fash­ ioned from the Arthurian legends; the Bronte foundlings created the Kingdoms of Gondal and Angria and acted out a series of goings on there with the toy soldiers their father had given them. Such habits of solitude, a principal formative influence on the young Tennyson, constituted a daily drama not too different from the activities of Emily

Bronte. For each there were frequent gazings from an attic window down upon rows of intimidating tombstones in' the ad- O jacent churchyard; each spent many hours in reclusive withdrawal to the nearby bogs and fens where castles and manorial halls could be roamed; and for each on several occasions the pastoral scene soothed a Gothic spirit fleeing 30

from the drunken behavior of a loved one.9

Hallam Tennyson tells us in the Memoir that his father

held "the highest admiration" for the Bronte sisters, and he

quotes a letter from Gurrer Bell (Charlotte) of June 16, 1847,

in which she offers to Tennyson a copy of their poems with

the acknowledgment of "the pleasure and profit we have often and long derived from your works."1° The similarities one

notices between Wuthering Heights (and to a lesser extent

Jane Eyre with its characterization of Rochester) and Maud

are mainly, of course, a matter of general influence by the

Romantic spirit of the age whose Gothic motifs and themes

became, as Massao Miyoshi in The Divided Self has said, "the underground impulses of the Victorian mind."^^ Still, one

is struck by how much Maud, like Wuthering Heights, is a

study of human nature in all its elemental fierceness! each

embodies a psychological, social, and romantic drama; each

is staged against the stormy, passionate, and vengeance-

filled setting of conflicting emotions, divided households, and arranged and prevented marriages; and in each it is the torment of loss which rages from beginning to end. Maud is, when scrutinized under these terms, an examination of "the powers and terrors of the isolated ego";I2 it is "the cul­ mination to nearly all of Tennyson’s early poetry which had so often been set in a garden, park, grove, or other wooded enclosure."^3 its hero, who has emerged out of the numerous isolated maidens of Tennyson’s early poems, is nineteenth- 31

century man in revolt who seeks reconciliation or else he

will be destroyed. Like Heathcliff, Tennyson's tormented

hero must work his way out of the abyss to discover a reason

for living and to achieve a reunion with his kind. He has

to forsake the dreary moated grange of self into which so

many of the poet's early characters, such as Mariana, had

shut themselves.

The morbid despondency, world weariness, mental im­

balance, and suicidal impulse which afflict Maud *s protagonist

were also, as earlier noted, a part of Tennyson’s early de­

velopment. To study their profound influence on the forma­

tion of the poet’s personality and to see how parallel are

the circumstances which in the poet’s young years gave vent

to these emotions is to gain added appreciation for and

added understanding of the hero’s situation in the poem. Of

chief interest is the connection of these emotions with the

relationship of the poet and his father and of the poet with

the feminine acquaintances he made during these early years.

In Maud Tennyson puts to use a series of indelible experi­

ences which include those of loneliness and lost opportunity, those of violence and anguish, and those of his family's sense of social inferiority in their associations with their father’s wealthier relations. When, for example, the speaker in Maud bitterly complains of how in these "days of advance" the "poor are hovelled and hustled together each sex like swine,"1^ Tennyson was probably drawing upon his mordant 32

memories of his family’s very tight living quarters at the

Somersby parsonage—a cramped existence little eased in the

poet’s mind by the affluent Tennyson relations at Bayons

and Brancepeth who confined themselves to their baronial

splendor inside the walls of their lavish and gaudy manorial

halls.

It was these emotions, including, especially, his pain­

fully sharp recollection of the inglorious circumstances

leading up to and following his father’s death which Tenny­

son in the fifties molded into the fabric of Maud. He

finally by this time felt himself capable of the task. He was by then a secure and successful forty-six-year-old

husband who had gained fame and fortune, who had found a safe anchorage far removed from the threatening storms of his earlier years. By then he sensed that he could trans­ mute the details of his father’s death, for example, into the story of the narrator’s plight in Maud. From his re­ membrance of how his father had been disinherited and of how his family had struggled financially, he formulated the situation of the poem’s young speaker happening to witness the suicide of his father and having to perceive that the death had been precipitated by financial ruin. From his recollections of his own distressed personality, too, during those early years of tribulation, Tennyson created the disturbed and disoriented persona^ of the speaker in

Maud. With the conviction that the poem’s framework guaranteed him a measure of dramatic concealment, he meshed 33

these and other autobiographical ingredients together. He did so, that is, feeling satisfied that the attitudes and emotions he was expressing in Maud would be understood and accepted by his readers not as the thoughts of the poem’s author but rather as the utterances of the poem’s dramatic character. Though they were not to be, for a variety of reasons, regarded as so, Tennyson during the composition of

Maud firmly believed he would have no trouble discounting conjecture about the affinities between the words, actions, and situations in the "Monodrama" and those manifestly his own. The poem, he stressed, was a drama. Hence, any opin­ ions expressed therein were solely those of the poem’s nar­ rator. With what he thus considered to be a critical warrantee, he submerged in Maud these sentiments: his bitterness, as mentioned, over the causes of his family’s fiscal downfall; and his brooding resentment toward commerce, social connections, and financially arranged marriages.

Tennyson has his speaker express his attitude towards com­ merce and the corruption of the times, for example, near the beginning of Maud. Here the hero denounces "the lust of gain" which runs rampant; he regards it as leading the merchant to sell "chalk and alum and plaster" to "the poor for bread" (I, 39), as leading the druggist to cheat "the sick of a few last gasps" by pestling a "poisoned poison"

(I, 43-44), and as leading "a Mammonite mother" to kill "her babe for a burial fee" (I, 45). And at the very start of the 34

poem when the speaker in a rage wonders why his father might

have committed suicide, he associates the father's death

with the mid-Victorian "lust of gain" (I, 23) which for him

so characterizes the ages specifically, he senses the wood­

lands to be permeated with "flying gold" (I, 12); and he

figures that his father has been left "flaccid and drained"

(I, 20) from a fraudulent financial "scheme" perpetrated upon

him by their neighbor, "that old man, now lord of the broad

estate and the Hall" (I, 19)» As for his attitude toward

financially arranged marriages, Tennyson drew this from the

difficulties he had encountered during the three chief ro­ mantic attachments of his life, his relationships with Sophy

Rawnsley, Rosa Baring, and Emily Sellwood. All were finan­

cially and socially troubled relationships; and all were severely upset by the dark and muddled state of affairs at

the Tennyson household.

The events which transpired at the Tennyson household between 1824 and 1834, the period during which his family reconciled themselves to the difficulties pertaining to their father’s long illness and death, Tennyson worked into the representation of the family background of his speaker in the poem. He used his financially troubled father as the source for the hero’s father in the poem. And he drew on his family’s fiscal troubles during this time for the des­ cription of the factors which led the speaker’s father in

Maud to take his life. In the opening lines of the poem 35 the speaker says:

I hate the dreadful hollow behind the little wood: Its lips in the field above are dabbed with blood-red heath The red-ribbed ledges drip with a silent horror of blood And Echo there, whatever is asked her, answers ’Death.* (1,1—4)

We then learn that the hero’s father probably flung himself down an embankment. He had just prior to his death, says the speaker, "muttered and maddened, and even wanned with despair," over the "vast speculation [whichj had failed"

(I, 10, 9). He found his father, he tells us, "Mangled, and flattened, and crushed, and dinted into the ground;/

There lies the rock that fell with him when he fell" (I, 7-8).

Tennyson’s father did not commit suicide; nor did he lose a fortune from a failure in an investment (though, significantly, Alfred did, as will be seen shortly, during the forties in a wood-carving scheme promoted by a Dr. Mat­ thew Allen). What is significant, however, about Dr.

Tennyson’s death is that the Rector did die rather young, in 1831 at the age of fifty-three; and his death was, similarly, brought on by anxieties over a money matter, his disinheritance by "old George," Alfred’s grandfather.

As a result, Dr. Tennyson developed a classic case of the

Esau complex, began to drink, became morose, fell into fits of violent temper, and gradually drank himself to death.

As Rader has pointed out, the death of the speaker’s father in the poem 36

is only a melodramatic exaggeration of the essential truth about the real ones Tennyson’s father did by his alcoholism in a very real sense destroy himself; he, too, had made ’false haste to the grave.’ In both poem and life, it is the memory of the father’s er­ ratic life, ending in a death tinged by scandal, which is in large measure responsible for the son’s aliena­ tion.15

During the last years of Dr. Tennyson’s life, tension

and turmoil of several sorts prevailed at the Somersby par­

sonage. Besides sickness contracted by the eleven children,

quarreling in the cramped quarters, Frederick’s rustication

from Cambridge, Charles’s falling in love with one of his

sisters* governesses, and the family cook being accidentally

burned to death, Dr. Tennyson suffered from recurring seiz­

ures, became unable to perform his parish duties, and had

to take trips to the continent in order to restore his health.

When he returned from the final one, he was for a short time

better, but he died a few months later of what was officially

diagnosed as low typhus. Sir Charles tells us that Eliza­

beth Tennyson ’’made a faint effort to have her husband buried at Tealby, as would have befitted the heir apparent of the house of Tennyson, but old George Tennyson expressed himself very strongly against this suggestion and she gave way. • • •"17 So the funeral was held at Somersby. And

"That night Alfred slept in his father’s bed praying •j Q earnestly to see his ghost."x

It is from these incidents that Tennyson culled the ideas for the problems faced by the youth in the poem and for the motive behind the father’s committing suicide. As 37

the young speaker in Maud endures the knowledge of the

factors that led to his father's death, so similarly had

the young Tennyson struggled to keep his bearings following

the rector's expiration. This correspondence between the

role of financial worries in the downfall of the real life

and fictive fathers is being given the accentuation that it

is because it is just such a financial issue which lies

thematically at the heart of the story-line of Maud.

Financial worries also contributed to developments at

the Tennyson home during the 1820's and 1830's, the period

leading up to and immediately following the Rector’s death.

From 1824 on, Dr. Tennyson’s health continued to fail as he

grew increasingly anxious about how he could handle the

fiscal needs of his family which was becoming larger all

the time while space at the Somersby rectory was getting

ever scarcer. Then, too, he was becoming increasingly dis­

turbed over how he could provide an education for each of

his children. While he dealt for awhile successfully with

these daily problems there always loomed, however, the greater problem that weighed on his mind of the grievance

of having been cheated out of his birthright (as eldest son) because his father felt his brother Charles (six years younger) the more deserving (more practical and capable) of inheriting Bayons, the family estate, and of carrying on the

Tennyson name. As a result of this injustice, George, with his degrees of Bachelor of Arts and Doctor of Civil Law from 38

Cambridge University, presided over a household which in

1824 he described to his brother as, "three and twenty in family and sleep[ingj five or six in a room."1^ And to this discomfiture was added the relative ignominy of the profes­ sional responsibility for the two parishes of Somersby and

Bag Enderby, remotely tucked into a corner of Lincolnshire wold and marsh with a combined population of under one hundred people (most of whom "rough to the point of barbar­ ism") and situated seven miles from the closest shopping center of Spilsby to the southeast.20

It was in 1824 that the Doctor started to suffer "recur­ ring seizures" and went into periods of extreme lethargy, lying in bed for forty-eight hours at a time.21 Worse still, he grew increasingly eccentric and absentmindedj and he de­ veloped over the next few years the habit of heavy drinking which induced "paroxysms of violence" and episodes during which he and the eldest son Frederick would engage in fierce arguments, on one occasion erupting into a knife and gun incident with the Rector threatening to kill several family members, and on another occasion requiring the local con­ stable to be called. Frederick’s aggressive nature coupled with the father’s unhappiness and constant drinking were, it seems, the causes of considerable and almost unremitting trouble. In 1828 the family learned that Frederick had been

"rusticated," or suspended for three terms from Cambridge for missing chapel, for not doing impositions, and for 39

arguing that young Wordsworth, the son of the Master, had

received a much smaller punishment than himself from the

Dean for the same offense. The difficulty was later cleared

up; the Rector went to Cambridge in defense of his son’s ac­ tions, and Frederick was readmitted the following year.22

It was, however, during this period of turmoil (1824-1831)

that Alfred suffered the fears and anxieties which often

led him, as Sir Charles says, to "run and throw himself down among the graves in the churchyard, longing for death."23

One recalls that it had been in 1824, the year of Byron’s

death, that "the fourteen-year-old Tennyson, who felt almost

as though the world had come to an end, ran to his beloved

Holywell wood, threw himself on the ground and carved upon the sandstone the words, ’BYRON IS DEAD.’?24

As the Doctor’s periods of erratic conduct continued

over these seven long years till his death in 1831, Alfred’s sense of affection for his father was progressively eroded and ultimately riven. He had been his father’s favorite, and they had been very close—he had received extensive tutoring from the learned Dr. Tennyson—but the drinking and violence and, in the last stages, the complete listlessness of his father shook Alfred’s, love and loyalty. Before the end came he witnessed successive bouts of cursing, outrage, and thunderously savage behavior. The parsonage became the subject of local scandal. As early as 1828 it was the topic of conversation throughout the neighborhood when gossip 4o

spread about the accidental burning to death of the Tennyson cook and the responsibility of the Rector in the matter.25

And a year later, as Christopher Ricks has recently shown,

circumstances in the household grew so bad that Mrs. Tenny­

son resolved to separate from the Rector as "the only step

that can effectually secure myself and my family from the consequences of his ungovernable violence. . . In a

letter written to her father-in-law in February, 1829, she graphically describes how life at the parsonage had reached the point where

I do not feel it safe either for myself or my children to remain any longer in the house with him.

George did everything to irritate Frederick a few days ago and though Frederick said nothing disrespectful (as I can produce respectable witnesses to prove) he sent for the Constable (Mr. Baumber) and turned him out of doors. He remained with Mr. Baumber three days, he is now with my sister at Louth and is again taken into his father’s favour who has allowed him a hundred pounds a year for the present. . • . George asserts that he had your authority for turning him out of doors. There is another and perhaps a stronger reason than any I have given for our separation, the impression which his con­ duct may produce upon the minds of his family, not to mention the perpetual use of such degrading epithets to myself and my children as a husband and a Father and above all a person of his sacred profession ought particularly to avoid. A short time since he had a large knife and loaded gun in his room. The latter he took into the kitchen to try before he went to bed and was going to fire it off through the kitchen windows but was dissuaded. With the knife he said he would kill Frederick by stabbing him in the jugular vein and in the heart. ... I do not say this to impair my poor husband in your opinion but only to convince you that in the state of mind in which he is at times it is not safe for his family to live with him. . . • when insult is aggravated by injury the burthen of such accumulated ills is grievous and insufferable. I shall take lodgings at Louth as soon as possible. . . .2' 41

Conditions such as these evoked in the young Tennyson a sense

of shame toward his home and stimulated the morbid bent in

his personality. When the speaker in Maud is haunted by the memory of his crushed father lying dead in the hollow he says:

What! am I raging alone as my father raged in his mood? Must I too creep to the hollow and dash myself down and die Rather than hold by the law that I made, nevermore to brood On a horror of shattered limbs and a wretched swindler’s lie? (I, 53-56)

Tennyson was vexed by this same fear during his adolescence; and in the form of various nervous disorders the fear may be said to have persisted throughout much of the poet’s adult life.

Later in the poem the hero says, "I am sick of the Hall and the hill,/ I am sick of the moor and the main" (I, 6l).

These words echo Tennyson’s longing to escape the discontent at Somersby occasioned by the disinheritance. In fact, it might be said that just as the hero in Maud lived under the shadow of a magnificent manor (and the status and wealth for which it stood), so similarly did the Tennysons in a very real sense live under the spectre of Bayons Manor, their grandfather’s home. Actually, Bayons and Brancepeth manors together were in Tennyson’s mind the sources for the Hall he describes in Maud. In the poem the hero says to Maud, "Your father has wealth well-gotten, and I am nameless and poor"

(I, 119)» This must have been the way Alfred felt while growing up. Bayons was not next door to the rectory, as

Maud’s estate is to the hero’s in the poem. (It was, rather, 42

twenty miles away.) But in light of the father’s constant

and vehement proclamations on the injustice his father had

done him which was thoroughly instilled into the children,

Bayons and the wealthy relatives must have been continuously

on the minds of all the Tennysons and must have seemed

psychologically, if not physically, contiguous. Indeed,

correspondence flowed often and freely between the family

branches, though, just as in the poem the "old man never

comes to his place," so similarly, did "old George" Tenny­

son seldom come to see his grandchildren. Rader notes:

Since Alfred and the family certainly felt the in­ justice of the disinheritance as strongly as the father himself, the grandfather and uncle must al­ ways have seemed to them the real cause of Dr. Tennyson’s and thus of their own multiplying troubles. In Maud it is not a grandfather but another 'old man, now lord of the broad estate and the Hall,' who is the source of the family’s distresses.28

These wealthy relatives of whom the Somersby Tennysons were clearly jealous and envious included, in addition to the grandfather and Uncle Charles, the rector’s sister, the

Aunt Elizabeth Russell, who had married well and lived regally once the father of her husband Matthew died and left them his fortune. (She was closer to Charles, it seems, than to George, another blow to the latter’s fierce ego.) In 181? when Matthew’s father died, the Russells moved into Brancepeth Manor in Durham on which they spent, say reliable accounts, the handsome sum of 80,000 pounds annually (for several years) to restore the castle and estate to true Gothic form—with great hall, ancient armor collection, stained glass windows, and other adornments. As an indica­

tion of Dr. Tennyson’s response, in 1819 ("to house his

growing family) he remodelled the parsonage to add a dining

room by designing "a strange but rather charming Gothic 29 appendate." y Sixteen years later when the poet’s grand­

father (in 1835) died, Bayons was similarly turned into a

Gothic castle by the Uncle Charles at an even greater ex­

pense when he inherited the home and nearly the entire

fortune. Alfred's uncle similarly redecorated with the

additions of a moat, drawbridge, towers, great hall, con­ cealed staircase, and secret rooms.3° Hence, the image of an extravagant and spurious manorial hall was firmly estab­

lished in Tennyson’s impressionable mind. And significantly affixed to that image of his relatives’ grandiose estates were the following two interrelated notions: on the one hand, the idea of how landed gentry can come through in­ heritance into a self-indulgent and intemperate life style; and, on the other, the conviction of how his rela­ tives had been accountable for his family's financial down­ fall.

In Maud the narrator's family experiences such a down­ fall which, while not identical to the circumstances of the

Rector's death, nevertheless possesses several correspon­ dences: it, too, is connected with a father's premature death and is associated with a conviction of foul play.

Tennyson seemingly drew the situation of the speaker's 44

father’s suicide in part from what he viewed as the quasi-

suicidal circumstances of his own father’s death and in

part from what he viewed as the reasons for the Rector’s

death—the disinheritance by the grandfather and the in­

clination of the wealthy Tennysons at Brancepeth and Bayons

to dissociate themselves from their struggling Somersby

kin. As Rader has observed, the way in which the narrator’s

father is swindled in the poem through some sort of vaguely

depicted commercial scheme by the father of Maud

compares with the biographical fact that Tennyson’s hopes of an early marriage with Emily were defeated by Dr. Allen’s virtual swindle of him in the wood­ carving venture, as well as, less directly, by the grandfather's will. (The multiple connection is strengthened by the fact that the invested funds were a legacy from the grandfather and that both his uncle Charles and Emily’s father were directly associated in Tennyson’s mind with Allen’s scheme.) Similarly, one can easily believe that part of the angry emotion directed at Maud’s family is an effect of Tennyson’s resentment not only of the Edens' op­ position to his courtship of Rosa, but also (as Sir Charles thinks) of the opposition of the Sellwood group to his marriage with Emily.31

Also in Maud the narrator expresses these sentiments

toward the friend of Maud's brother who comes calling on

Maud and whom the speaker is shocked to see riding at her side:

Sick, am I sick of a jealous dread? Was not one of the two at her side This new-made lord, whose splendor plucks The slavish hat from the villager’s head? Whose old grandfather has lately died,

And left his coal all turned into gold To a grandson, first of his noble line, Rich in the grace all women desire, ^5

Seeing his gewgaw castle shine, New as his title, built last year, There amid perky larches and pine, And over the sullen-purple moor— (Look at it)—pricking a cockney ear. (I, 330-334, 340-342, 347-351)

As Rader has shown, the financial windfall of this "new-made

lord" who has been left in his grandfather's will a fortune

in coal and who has used this inheritance to build a "gewgaw

castle" and to buy a political commission has a close paral­

lel in

the family of Tennyson's paternal aunt, Elizabeth Tennyson Russell, who were in close social and political alliance with Charles Tennyson d’Eyncourt. Elizabeth's husband, Major Matthew Russell, in­ herited from his eighty-year-old father a vast fortune in Durham coal, which he lived to enjoy only five years before leaving it in turn to his own son William and his daughter Emma. Insofar as his family and position are concerned, the grandson- lord in Maud is a functional compound of William Russell and Emma's husband, Gustavus-Frederick Hamilton, later Viscount Boyne, who succeeded to the Russell family's property on William's death in 1850, assuming the name of and arms of Russell. Tennyson's lack of respect for both men makes the identification the more likely.32

This financial frustration of the Tennysons and the brooding resentment which accompanied it grew steadily worse. During the years following his father's death

(in 1831), Alfred (and his family) suffered through a series of closely related financial, fraternal, and ro­ mantic agonies. First, there were the liabilities amassed during the Rector's illness (which included debts run up by the three eldest sons at Cambridge). The settlement of the father's affairs dragged on for more than six months and caused Alfred, who assumed the role and responsibilities of head of the family, acute anxiety. These months of

judicial strife, of perplexing litigation and probate, may well be the genesis of the hero’s memory in Maud of his mother’s problems following his father’s death. There the narrator recalls how his mother’s faded cheek "grew so thin" after her husband's fatality

That I felt she was slowly dying Vext with lawyers and harassed with debt; For how often I caught her with her eyes all wet, Shaking her head at her son and sighing A world of trouble within. (I, 704-708)

In Maud the hero’s mother dies sometime shortly afterwards leaving the narrator alone in the family home except for the "man and maid" he keeps who, he says, are "ever ready to slander and steal" (I, 120) from him. Elizabeth Tenny­ son, on the other hand, lived on for thirty-four long years after her husband’s demise. Nevertheless, Alfred in re­ calling the conditions surrounding his family’s settlement of his father’s affairs undoubtedly had such a similar concern for his mother as is shown by the speaker in Maud.

In 1832 (the year in which The Two Voices, originally entitled Thoughts of a Suicide, was composed) there followed concern over the despondent state of Edward, a younger brother who had to be sent away to York for private medical care and who became incurably insane. Shortly afterwards, another brother, Charles, came down with a nervous disorder and in taking medicine for his listless condition became an opium ^7

addict.33 The following year, I833, in which was published

"Oh that ’twere possible," the germinal lyric for Maud,

brought still more misery. Alfred’s second volume of Poems (1832) "met with a very chilly reception,”3^ was

pronounced inferior to the Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (I83O),

which had on the whole been favorably regarded, and in

April was damagingly attacked by John Croker in the

Quarterly Review, a journal whose influence on the tastes

of reading public and reviewers alike at this time was so

significant that "for almost a decade the tone of public

reference to Tennyson was one of either disparagement or ridicule."35 October brought another devastating emotional

blow with the news of the death of his close friend, Arthur

Hallam. And then in the late fall of the year^ Alfred was

wounded once again when he heard how his uncle Charles had

been called home to Tealby from London by the grandfather

who, worried that his son’s political and social future was

flagging, decided to move out of Bayons into a smaller house

he owned nearby and to give Charles possession of the family

estate, formally acknowledging him as his successor. Alfred took this news very bitterly.3®

Plagued with such a sequence of sufferings, Tennyson at

this point might well have begun to believe that there was a

curse on his household. In 1834 there was still further

trouble, this time concerning his brother Septimus’s deranged state of mind which Alfred in a January letter described as 48

"subject to fits of the most gloomy despondency accompanied with tears—or rather he spends whole days in this manner,

complaining that he is neglected by all his relations and 37 blindly resigning himself to every morbid influence."-"

To this problem were added, moreover, the even more serious and more personal anxieties about his sister Emily and about himself who for months mourned the loss of Hallam, her fiance and his friend. For the delineation of the narrator’s paranoia in the madhouse soliloquy (II, V) of Maud, Tenny­ son reclaimed the data his mind had stored from memories of these and subsequent encounters (of himself and his brothers) with mental stress and distress. After imagining in this scene that he is in a shallow grave beneath a busy street, the disturbed speaker of Maud describes the conditions of his fellow inmates this way:

See, there is one of us sobbing, No limit to his distress; And another, a lord of all things, praying To his own great self, as I guess; And another, a statesman there, betraying His party-secret, fool, to the press; And yonder a vile physician, blabbing The case of his patient—all for what? To tickle the maggot bom in an empty head, And wheedle a world that loves him not, For it is but a world of the dead. (II, 268-278)

Vexed by the bane of disinheritance, perpetual sickness, epi­ sodes of savage behavior, the rector’s protracted disablement and death, and its aftermath, the Tennysons during these first three decades of the pre-1850 period probably felt as though there were "No limit" to the distresses afflicting their parsonage. As we shall see in Chapter II, it would he some time before the Tennyson family’s troubles would finally be abated. 50

NOTES TO CHAPTER I

^Tennyson: The Growth of a Poet, p. 147

2As Christopher Ricks has aptly put it, Tennyson was by 1855 "in important respects all he was ever to be as a man: his greatest achievements were behind him though fine ones to come too; he was successful, famous, secure, and the Poet Laureate; he was a husband and a father." Tennyson, Masters of World Literature Series, ed. Louis Kronenberger (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1972), p• 236.

^Quoted in Sir Charles Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson, p. 184. ^Quoted in Charles Richard Sanders, "Carlyle and Tennyson," PMLA, ?6 (1961), 84. ^Quoted in Randall Stewart, ed., The English Note­ books by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1941; rpt, New York: Russell & Russell, Inc., 1962), pp. 553-554. At the Exhibition of English paintings in Manchester, Hawthorne did not intro­ duce himself or speak to Tennyson. It had been his first sight of the Laureate. The two men never were to meet one another or to become acquaintances. Curiously, however, there are a number of general similarities between these two literary giants of the nineteenth century. Both pub­ lished their masterpieces in 1850 following protracted periods of social seclusion during which they had labored to revise earlier works not well received. Hawthorne’s "Twelve Year Silence," which lasted from his college gradua­ tion in 1825 through his successful publication in 1837 of "Twice-Told Tales," roughly parallels the reclusive "Ten Years Silence" of Tennyson. The results of Hawthorne’s investment in Brook Farm could, also, be regarded as roughly analagous to Tennyson’s disheartening investment in the Patent Woodcarving venture with Dr. Allen. And even more pertinent is the correspondence which can be noted between the influence of the Puritan past and of Hawthorne's an­ cestors in the creative process of Hawthorne's writing and the influence of the Bayons and Brancepeth Tennyson kin on the creative impulse behind Tennyson’s work. This is to say that in both bodies of writing there can be discerned a strong sense of the past (albeit in the one case Puritan and in the other the ancient and feudal) at the root of each writer’s greatness. And, too, both craftsmen were deeply concerned with the destiny of man in a changing world. 51

z H. Allingham and D. Radford, eds., William Allingham’s Diary (1907; rpt. Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 1967), pp. 6O-0I.

?See Basil Willey, More Nineteenth Century Studies (1956; rpt. New York: Harper & Row, 1966), pp. 58-60. Q My recollection is that Somersby Churchyard lies diagonally across from the rectory at a distance of perhaps thirty yards. Ezra Tipple in his chapter on Somersby in his Some Famous Country Parishes (1911; rpt. New York: The Abingdon Press, 1914), p. I87 notes that the church scene at the end of The Two Voices is probably drawn from Tenny­ son’s frequent observations from his attic window as a child of the Somersby church across the road where on Sun­ day mornings he would watch his father’s parishoners gathering for services. 9Four lesser points of similarity may be noted as emerging from the profiles of the two households also. Each a manifestation of the times, these are the parallel troubles of illness, early schooling, early joint pub­ lication, and incessant apprehension about the drug ad­ diction of prodigal sons. Corresponding to the well-known consumptive conditions of the Bronte siblings would be the nearly as devastating neurotic afflictions of the young,, Tennysons. Corresponding to the hatred Charlotte Bronte had for the Misses Wolners* private school at Roe Head would be Alfred Tennyson's loathing for the Louth Grammar School with its headmaster, the Reverend Dr. Waite, des­ cribed by the poet as "a pompous flogging master of the old type." For each pupil the experience was an indellible one. Charlotte’s vivid memories of Wolners’ were drawn upon in more than one of her novels. Who can forget the mean Mr. Brocklehurst, inspector at the disease-stricken Lowood who ridiculed Jane and was responsible for Helen Burns’s death in Jane Eyre (1847)? Tennyson recalled the school at Louth so graphically, says Sir Charles, that "in after life he would never go down the street in which it was situated. He used to recall that he could often not hold his knife and fork for days after one of the head­ master’s cannings, and that one poor little boy was so brutally flogged for not knowing his lessons, that he had to stay in bed for six weeks (p. 26). Corresponding, thirdly, to Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell (1846) is the Tennyson joint publication of Poems by Two Brothers (1827). And, fourthly, corresponding to the opium-addicted Branwell, problem brother of Emily and Charlotte, was Charles Tennyson who for several years (before overcoming his addition) was a similar source of public disgrace for the Tennysons. 52

l°Memoir, I, 262.

•^The Divided Self: A Perspective on the Literature of the Victorians (New York: New York University Press, 19^9)» p. 108.

12James Walton, "Tennyson’s Patrimony: From ’The Out­ cast’ to Maud," frexas Studies in Literature and Language, 11 (1969), 732.

13lbid.

^Alfred Lord Tennyson, The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks, Longman’s Annotated English Poets, gen. ed. F.W. Bateson (London: Longman, Green and Co., Ltd., 1969), #316, p. 1042, I, 25, 34. Subsequent quotations from Maud and the other poems of Tennyson will be cited from this edition. The first reference to each poem quoted will be documented herein according to the number Ricks assigns it and to the page in Ricks where it can be found. Additional line references to the poem will then be cited parenthetically. l^sir Charles Tennyson in the November, 1971, issue (p. 127) of the Tennyson Research Bulletin has noted in an article entitled "Tennyson: Mind and Method” that the use of a persona or mask by the poet in such works as "Ulysses," "Tithonus," the Idylls, "Locksley Hall," Maud, and other important works is indicative of how much he liked to speak "in character" and is "a factor the nature and importance of which has I think only begun to be realized lately. . . .” Sir Charles takes the position that Tennyson created his characters not "to expressopinions which he did not venture to express on his own" but rather "generally as the ex­ pression of mood." l8The Biographical Genesis, pp. 89-90.

-^Sir Charles Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson, p. 107»

18Ibid.

T9ibjd., p. 30.

20See Ibid., pp. 35-36.

2Tibid., p. 46.

22Ibid., pp. 59-60.

23ibid., p. 48.

24Ibid., p. 33. 53

2^Ibid., pp. 58-59»

2^Ricks, Tennyson, p. 22.

2?Ibid., pp. 22-23»

2®Rader, p. 90.

29sir Charles Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson, p. 16.

30lbid., pp. 158-160.

3lRader, pp. 103-104.

32Rader, p. 91»

33sir Charles Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson, pp. 127-128.

34ibid., p. 130.

35ibid., pp. 136-137.

36lbid., p. 141.

37ibid., p. 150. 54

CHAPTER II

LOVE, COMMERCE, AND MARRIAGE:

THE POET’S MATURATION, 1834-1855

Tennyson in 1834 was twenty-five years old; he was

single, still living at home, and head of his household.

There were nine members of the Tennyson family residing

at the Somersby parsonage now—the poet, his mother, and

seven of the poet’s sisters and brothers. (Frederick was

living in Italy; Charles, who had been ordained in 1833»

was living in Tealby; and Edward, as earlier mentioned,

was in York at a private mental institution.) Because of

his apprehension about the financial difficulties and ner­

vous disorders afflicting his family, because of his distress

over the poor reception of his recently published poems, and

because of his involvement with Sophy Rawnsley and Rosa

Baring during this year, Tennyson’s maturation in 1834 and

in the years immediately thereafter continued to run an

exceedingly emotional course. The purpose of this chapter will be to trace the poet’s continuing psychological de­ velopment between 1834 and 1855 by focusing on the following:

(1) the three amorous relationships Tennyson embarked upon

during this period; (2) the failure of a wood-carving venture

in which Tennyson invested his patrimony at this time; and

(3) the poet’s marriage to Emily Sellwood and his recipience 55

of the laureateship.

It was from his relationships with Sophy, Rosa, and

Emily that Tennyson drew the composite character of Maud

in the poem. The importance of his alliances with each of

these women has been pointed out by Rader:

The deep personal commitment which . . . Tennyson had to the thesis of his poem must be understood in terms of the interpenetration of his conception of love, as it emerged from the psycho-biographical background • • • £involvingj the intimate personal relationships of his own life. For Maud—the object of love in the poem— is, I believe, an image in which were blended Tennyson’s memories of all three of the women whom he had succes­ sively loved—Rosa Baring, Sophy Rawnsley, and Emily Sellwood—-an image through which he retrospectively defined and interpreted the long search for an ideal­ izing love which he had carried on from the time of, Hallam’s death to his marriage with Emily Sellwood.

The attraction to Sophy and Rosa covered roughly the

identical two-year period from 1834 through 1836, though he

had probably known both from childhood. Sophy was the

daughter of the Reverend Thomas Rawnsley, Rector of Halton

Holgate, not far from Somersby; he had been a close friend

of Alfred’s father, and he became after 1831 the guardian

of the Tennyson children. In Sophy, Tennyson seems to have

perceived a pleasant disposition, an ample supply of good

sense, a simple, honest, and forthright person, and someone who could understand him. He discovered that he could be at ease with her, and he seems to have enjoyed singing and

dancing with Sophy at the local gatherings in Spilsby and

Horncastle which he began to frequent at this time with the death of Hallam finally fading from his mind.2 Tennyson’s feeling for her was apparently limited to mild affection, although village tradition says he proposed to Sophy. If true, the proposal must have occurred before 1836 (when

Sophy would have been seventeen), since during this time

Tennyson’s chief infatuation was for Rosa, which only started to subside after I836 as he began to get deeply involved with Emily. In the description of Maud in the poem we find several traits bearing a resemblance to those which the poet had found appealing in Sophy. Maud is described by the narrator as having a sweet smile, a "face of tenderness" (I, 24l), and a sweet "wild voice" (I, 174) with "tender tone" (I, 252). Struck by her stately and sedate demeanor, the speaker acclaims Maud’s wondrous powers of understanding—particularly her "pitying womanhood"

(I, 253)» Yet the descriptive detail which links Maud to the poet’s memories of Sophy most notable is the speaker’s recollection of how "I played with the girl when a child"

(I, 68), Maud having been the daughter of one of his father’s old friends. Similarly, Sophy had been a childhood playmate of the poet; her father was one of Dr. Tennyson’s long and close friends.

The second of the poet’s romantic attachments was with Charlotte-Rose Baring, a close friend of Sophy. Rosa, as those who knew her well called her, was the granddaughter of Sir Francis Baring, Chairman of the East India Company and founder of the great financial house of Baring. Rosa’s 57

family moved into the Somersby area around 1825 when her

mother and stepfather, Arthur Eden, who held a prosperous

government position as Assistant Comptroller of the Ex­

chequer, leased Harrington Hall, an opulent estate two

miles from the Tennyson parsonage. The Edens were actively

involved in local social festivities and their children grew

up in close contact with those of the Tennysons and the

Rawnsleys. Alfred probably first met Rosa in 1827 before

he left for Cambridge. They likely saw one another spor­

adically during his college vacations and then more fre­ quently following his return to Somersby just prior to his

father’s death.

Rader has convincingly established that "Tennyson’s

love for Rosa was one of the most important episodes of his

life. ..." As Rader emphasizes, it lies behind the central situation in the "Monodrama," that of "the idealistic brood­ ing youth’s love for a woman of wealth and position, and the frustration of that love through the snobbish opposition of the girl’s family."5 It was "the associational core of

Tennyson’s conflation of his grandfather and uncle with

Arthur Eden, of the Russells with the Shaftos, and of Harrington Hall with Bayons Manor."5 To Rosa, Tennyson was drawn passionately. She possessed physical beauty, social status, and affluence and was by accounts perhaps "the 7 prettiest and most elegant girl in the neighborhood."'

In late 1834 Rosa was about twenty, or five years younger 58

than Alfred. She was intellectually only a rather "ordinary

gentlewoman—complacent, slightly vain, and not at all in­

clined to introspection or reflection—who took life pretty

much as it came . . . very gay, very fond of clothes and

company, and a bit inclined to extravagance.Yet these

deficiencies did not deter Tennyson from feeling very strongly

toward her; this fervor he later said sprang primarily from

sexual attraction. In the "Monodrama" Maud is described by

Tennyson as "perfectly beautiful" (I, 80), as "tall and stately" (I, 427), and as possessing "mystic" (I, 480) and

"maiden" (I, 669 and 808) grace. As for her particular features, Tennyson portrays her as having a "starry head"

(I, 620) and "sunny hair" (I, 212), sweet and inspiring smile (I, 226-228), and "exquisite face" (I, 173)« These seem to be the physical features Tennyson esteemed in Rosa in the poems he wrote about her wherein he similarly ac­ claims her "shining tresses," sweet face, and "perfect world of winning graces." Further, in writing about Rosa and Maud, he stresses in each case the notion of enthrallment and ex­ presses it in similar terms. In Maud the speaker when first captivated by Maud’s beauty asserts that her "sweetness hardly leaves me a choice/But to move to the meadow and fall before her" (I, 185-186). In writing about his feeling for Rosa, as will be seen, Tennyson refers to himself as a

"vassal at her feet." The results of Tennyson’s relationship with Rosa were further disappointment and anxiety for the 59

poet. For a short while Rosa, says Rader, must have "to some

extent returned his feeling" and there must have been "at least a momentary éclaircissement," £sicj or "partial under­ standing between them" with some amount of involvement from

Rosa. But this was succeeded some time later by a "lovers* quarrel" and growing indifference on Rosa’s part, a con­ tributing cause for which was undoubtedly the divergence in the two families’ financial standings.9

A group of poems Tennyson wrote both at the time and many years later (when stirred by memories of Rosa) expresses his strong ardor and substantiates the case for Rosa’s being the model for Maud. In "To Rosa," unpublished during Tenny­ son’s life and written in I836, Tennyson sketched a lovers’ quarrel at a balls

Sole rose of beauty, loveliness complete, If these few words were bitter or unjust, Yet is thy gentle nature so discreet That they will pass thee like an idle gust. Henceforward, fancy shall not force distrust,

Blow, summer rose, nor fall; and, oh, be sure That if I had not loved, I had not blamed; For my whole heart is vassal at thy feet.

By all my grief for that which I did say, By all the life of love that never dies,

By that madonna grace of parted hair And dewy sister eyelids drooping chaste, By each dear foot, so light on field, or floor, By that full form and slender moulded waist, And that all perfect smile of thine, I swear, That these rash lips shall blame thee, Rose, no more.TO

The final stanza of "To Rosa" is notable for its juxtaposition 6o

of conventional Victorian notions of proper young womanhood

with some expressions containing sexually slanted implica­

tions. In the speaker’s references to his "Sole rose of

beauty" who is both "gentle" and "discreet" and who pos­

sesses "madonna grace," Tennyson draws for us the portrait

of a chaste and demure Victorian young lady. But in the

speaker’s descriptions of his rose’s "parted hair," "dewy

sister eyelids," and "full form and slender moulded waist,"

Tennyson imbues a strain of carnal intimation. To the speaker

here, his "summer rose" is both a madonna and carnal woman;

his thoughts while commending her for her goodness turn to a sexual yearning regarding the reclaiming of her love. It

is this same type of sensual suggestion, rare in Tennyson’s work after 1833, which suffuses many of the lyrical passages of Maud such as these:

There is none like her, none,

£she hasJ made my life a perfumed altar-flame;

Here will I lie, while these long branches .of the "Dark cedar"] sway, And your fair stars that crown a happy day Go in and out as if at merry play. (I, 611, 622, 627-629) and

Is that enchanted moan only the swell Of the long waves that roll in yonder bay?

Dear heart, I feel with thee the drowsy spell. My bride to be, my evermore delight, My own heart’s heart, my ownest own, farewell;

Beat, happy stars, timing with things below, Beat with my heart more blest than heart can tell. (I, 660-661, 670-672, 679-680) 61

In "The Gardener’s Daughter" written in 1833-1834,

Tennyson again delineates a speaker’s passionate longing for

a sweetheart associated with roses. Often noted as one of

Tennyson's most erotic poems, "The Gardener's Daughter" was

composed at the onset of his enthrallment with Rosa Baring.

In it Tennyson conveys "an oblique compliment to Rosa,"

notes Rader, "even though the details of the love story can

hardly express more than Tennyson's hopeful extrapolation of his incipient passion."I1 While the imagery which is

used to describe love in the poem is very conventional, the

profile of Rose contains several traits which are similar

to the features Rosa possessed. Tennyson describes Rose as

having a full bosom and violet eyes and an association with

the flower for which she is named, features he also used to

delineate Rosa in the poems he was writing to and about her at the time. Not long after "The Gardener’s Daughter" begins, this comment is made by the speaker about love and beauty and about how he came to feel for Rose:

Such a lord is Love, And Beauty such a mistress of the world. And if I said that Fancy, led by love, Would play'with flying forms and images, Yet this is also true, that, long before I looked upon her, when I heard her name My heart was like a prophet to my heart, And told me I should love.12

Especially revealing are the references to the gardener’s daughter Rose as a "Juliet," who "so light of foot, so light of spirit" (13-14) became for the speaker "The summer pilot 62

of an empty heart" (16). When he first sees her in the

family garden attending to a rose hush which had been dis­

turbed by the previous night's gale, the speaker character­

izes Rose as follows:

The full day dwelt on her brows, and sunned Her violet eyes, and all her Hebe bloom, And doubled his own warmth against her lips, And on the bounteous wave of such a breast As never pencil drew. Half light, half shade, She stood, a sight to make an old man young. So rapt, we neared the house: but she, a Rose In roses, mingled with her fragrant toil. (136-143)

So dazed is the speaker by the loveliness of Rose that he can

not that night "sleep for joy,/ Reading her perfect features

in the gloom,/ Kissing the rose she gave me ov'r and ov'r"

(170-172). As he says, "Love trebled life within me, and

with each/ The year increased" (194-195). For

in the compass of three little words, More musical than ever came in one, The silver fragments of a broken voice, Made me most happy, faltering, 'I am thine.' (226-230)

Two similar poems utilizing the rose association and

a.lso depicting a youthful romantic infatuation, whose dates

of composition, however, have not been able to be determined

but which in style and sentiment seem close to the Rosa

poems, are also of interest in this regard. The first,

entitled by Ricks "Early Verses of Compliment to Miss Rosa

Baring," expresses a speaker's seasonal turnings of feeling

for his "Rose of roses, bliss of blisses": 63

June on many a flower reposes, Many a blossom May discloses, But in Autumn unto me Blooms a rose, the rose of roses.

Rose of roses, bliss of blisses, Rosebud-lips for honey-kisses; East and West and North and South Bear not such a rose as this is.

Perfect world of winning graces, Music-made for Love’s embraces, Many a face I see, but thine Sweeter than all human faces.

Rose of roses, bliss of blisses, What care I for others* kisses? When a thousand years are dead Comes there no such rose as this is.

Love and fancy shape caresses, Twenty million tendernesses; All my life and heart and soul Tangle in her shining tresses.

Rose of roses, bliss of blisses, Were not thine the kiss of kisses? Ah! for such a kiss as that!- Ah! for such a rose as this is.

The second poem, a shorter piece entitled "The Rosebud,"

was, says Rader, probably written in 183^ and is "a remarkable

evocation in strikingly concrete and vivid terms of the in- 14 tensity which Tennyson’s infatuation achieved." In the

following lines of "The Rosebud" one discerns the Tenny­

sonian feeling of wishful yearning:

The night with sudden odour reeled, The southern stars a music pealed, Warm beams across the meadow stole; For love flew over grove and field, Said, ’Open Rosebud, open, yield Thy fragrant soul.’15

These images in "The Rosebud" call to mind several sections 64

of Maud where scenes are depicted in terms of "the meadow,"

"southern stars," "music," and "Viarm beams." One thinks, for example, of the scene in I, XII where the speaker is enraptured over having kissed Maud's "slender hand" in the meadow at twilight while she gathers woodland lilies and all about her the birds sing her name.

Another related poem is "Rose on the Terrace," which though published in 1889 may have been written, believes •

Rader, as a response to the Laureate's hearing the news of the death of Robert Shafto, the man who married Rosa.

Shafto's obituary appeared in the Times on March 25, I889.

The poem describes a blush which "fifty years ago" came across the face of a lover after a "declaration" was made:

Rose, on this terrace fifty years ago, When I was in my June, you in your May, Two words, 'My Rose,' set all your face aglow, And now that I am white, and you are gray, That blush of fifty years ago, my dear, Blooms in the Past, but close to me today As this red rose, which on our terrace,jaere Glows in the blue of fifty miles away.

And as additional evidence Rader also cites two sonnets from the Unpublished Early Poems which, written according to the verification of manuscript watermarks during the period of

1835-1836, "tell the story of a love moving by stages into disillusionment." ' The first1- describes a woodland lamenta­ tion which "grows in the shades" as "The sweet Rose fades" and "leaves the land to winter." The second of the two with its phrase "Far too costly to be mine" is significant for 65

its suggestion of a "barrier of wealth" which, notes Rader, would have "doomed the affair [between Tennyson and RosaJ

to failure, even had Rosa been less indifferent than these 19 verses seem to say she was." 7 In what follows, the speaker

is asking himself why he lingered for as long as he did:

I lingered yet awhile to bend my way To that far South, for which my spirits ache, For under rainy hills a jewel lay And this dark land was precious for its sake, A rosy-coloured jewel, fit to make An emperor’s signet-ring, to save or slay Whole peoples, such as some great King might take To clasp his mantle on a festal day: And yet a jewel only made to shine, And icy cold although ’tis rosy clear-- Why did I linger? I myself condemn, For ah! ’tis far too costly to be mine, And nature never dropt a human tear go In those chill dews whereof she froze the gem.

The sonnet is interesting, too, for its allusions to linger­ ing, to the loss of a precious jewel, to a signet-ring, and to a condemnation. The imagery of each of these sonnets, moreover, is far less conventional than that of "The Gar­ dener's Daughter"—perhaps because love here is beset with difficulty, thus engendering poetic tension. In Maud one finds these elements together in a similarly close associa­ tional context in the Hall-Garden scene. There, too, a lin­ gering occurs. The hero lingers outside Maud’s Hall through the night and into the morning in wait for his "jewel" who Is to meet him secretly by prearrangement when the Ball inside ends. When Maud finally comes to her lover, however, she is followed by her brother whose accusations against the two 66

lead to the duel, the killing, the hero’s loss of Maud, and

his condemnation to a life of exile abroad where in the sub­

sequent scene he recalls how the brother as "he lay dying

there" in the "red-ribbed hollow" had on "one of his many rings—" (II, 115-116).

As for the overall significance of the foregoing group of poems taken in concert, one notes that they contain many of the elements Tennyson blended together, with some modifi­ cations, in Maud8 particularly, the description of a love which is first intensely experienced and which is later un­ luckily lost; the employment of the rose image to delineate the features of the exceedingly desirable beloved; the quarrel of lovers at a ball; and the feeling of ill will towards a

"barrier of wealth" which is suggested to be a key factor in the loss. In Maud, of course, the quarrel which occurs is between the hero and Maud’s brother (about his right to in­ terfere and to heap "terms of disgrace" upon his sister), rather than between the lovers themselves; and in Maud while the hero is always aware of the social differences between himself and Maud and while it is an important ele­ ment in the poem, it is not a "barrier of wealth" which is the immediate cause of the lovers’ separation but rather the duel and the exile.

And as for the biographical bearings of the group of poems, it can be said that from them one is able to discern a "dim shape" of the relationship between Rosa and Tennyson 67

as it grows from a more or less conventional romantic involvement to serious passion and finally to dis­ illusionment j and we can see that, at the end of the affair at least, Rosa’s feeling was not strong enough to oppose whatever discouragement her parents may have offered to Tennyson’s suit.21

That Tennyson would have been very apprehensive during

his relationship with Rosa between 1835 and 1837 about such a "barrier of wealth" is clear from the corresponding events of this period. Sir Charles tells us that he was having serious financial troubles—with his only source of income

"the occasional generosity of Elizabeth Russell," his aunt at Brancepeth, and he "could not bring himself to adopt any other way £than poetryJ of earning a living."22 In July of

1835 the grandfather died and the publication of the old man’s will ended all hopes of Alfred for a "comfortable in­ dependence and a settled establishment in his life and in his career as a poet."23 He was, however, left a small piece of property at Grasby worth about three thousand pounds which he sold for the benefit of the seven younger Tennysons. His mother, Frederick, and Charles were similarly remembered; but "the contents of old Mr. Tennyson’s will, when they be­ came known, served only to increase the resentment of the Somersby family."2^

Then in 1837 Tennyson heard rumors that Rosa was to be engaged to Robert Duncombe Shafto, "scion of a wealthy old

Durham family and a first cousin of Arthur Eden, with whose family the Shaftos had been closely connected for three 68

generations. The marriage, an excellent and obvious match . . . took place on October 22, 1838."25 Rader has postulated per­

suasively that Tennyson was embittered by the part that

Rosa’s parents played in the connections and that he re­

garded the marriage as an arrangement made to satisfy the

financial backgrounds of the two families involved; that it

probably was is made evident from an entry in the diary of

Rosa’s step-aunt, Lady Brougham, which indicates that "the

marriage was the result, not primarily of Shafto’s romantic

attraction to Rosa, nor presumably of hers to him," but was

a contrivance similar to the match made by Amy’s parents in

"Locksley Hall" (whose probable date of composition and

that which is accepted by Ricks is the spring of 1838 when

Tennyson returned to Lincolnshire and got the definite news of the engagement and pending marriage2^). The "jealous

dread" of the hero in Maud towards the suitor Maud’s brother

has brought to the Hall (in order to secure a profitable and

politically advantageous marriage of arrangement for his sister) seems to have been drawn from the emotion Tennyson

harbored towards the Edens and Shaftos for their part in the marrying off of Rosa and towards Robert Shafto for being a party to the disposition.

In "Locksley Hall" where the speaker similarly expresses a feeling of abhorrence for arranged marriages, Tennyson had been drawing upon this same emotional impetus. There the narrator denounces "shallow-hearted" Amy for permitting her 69

parents to marry her off to a man of wealthy means. In fact, the "brute"2? to whom she has, as a "Puppet to a

father’s threat, and [as] servile to a shrewish tongue"

(42), allowed herself to be allied bears some resemblance

to Robert Shafto. Amy’s affluent husband is described in

"Locksley Hall" as "coarse" and "gross," and as a "clown"

whose eyes are always heavy with the glaze of wine (See

46-51). Shafto, similarly, was wealthy and worldly, a man

fond of hunting, drink, and cards. Of course, the corres­

pondences between "Locksley Hall," one of Tennyson’s most

famous poems, and Maud extend much further. For example,

in some respects the morbid heroes of the two poems may almost be regarded as poetic twins. Or if not twins they are, at least, in their similar losses in love, in their similar social situations, and in their similar efforts to rise out of despair through correlative commitments to military causes, very close blood brothers. Beyond these correspondences, moreover, one discerns how the ninety-seven couplets of "Locksley Hall" contain, as does Maud, wildly impassioned verse alternating with sections of mild reflec­ tive poetry; these are uttered by a kind of modern Byronic hero who describes the development of a romantic love which leads him through several stages and diverse moods (though in the one the tale is told in the past tense and concerns the speaker’s recollection of what has already happened to him, while in the other the tale is told in the present tense 70 as he is describing his situation as it is happening to him).

Further, each poem is a poem of great bitterness and despair; each dramatically delineates the inner conflict of a narrator who in his morbid and declamatory way tells why he feels oppressed by the ruthless spirit of the times.

Also, each poem deals with the theme of love and loss and presents that theme through the painful and intimate con­ fession of its speaker; each has a powerful emotional impact, has ranges of rapid metrical movement, and has both the elements of suggestive narrative and of direct social pro­ test. That these correlative elements are so present in the two poems seems, thus, to indicate that "Locksley Hall" and

Maud each echo Tennyson’s disheartening involvement with

Rosa Baring and the concurrent emotional difficulties with which he was coping during the thirties. Christopher Ricks has summarized effectively the extent of Rosa’s impact on the poet and the significance of these elements in these and several other poems:

Family pride, social snobbery, money pressures: Tennyson already knew what these were from the feud within the Tennyson family and from the thwarting of Arthur Hallam and Emily Tennyson. But he knew them all the better, all the worse, after Rosa Baring, and in his poems he showed what he knew: in such poor poems as ’The Flight,’ ’The Wreck,’ and ’Charity,’ and in such diversely good poems as ’Locksley Hall,’ ’Northern Farmer, New Style,* and above all Maud.28

In I838 began the third and final key romance of the poet’s life, his engagement to Emily Sellwood. By this time the Tennysons were living at High Beech, Epping, near London. 71

They had been more or less evicted from the Somersby parsonage as a consequence of the new rector’s wish to take over the premises. The Tennyson family had reluctantly and tardily acceded to the new rector’s wish. It was Alfred who ac­ cumulating a further quota of exacerbation undertook the entire relocation. (He would go through this annoyance four more times during the next twelve years, with the family’s successive moves to Tunbridge Wells in 1840, Boxley in 1841,

Cheltenham in 1843, and finally Farringford in 1853«)

Tennyson had first met Emily, according to tradition, in the spring of 1830 while walking with Hallam in the Holy- well glen. It is said that he greeted her with the words: "Are you a Dryad or an Oread wandering here?"29 The Tenny­ sons and Sellwoods had known each other even before this, as Emily’s uncle and aunt had lived at Harrington Hall pre­ ceding Rosa’s family. And the Sellwoods were friends of the

Rawnsleys. The evidence concerning Alfred’s relationship with Emily is scanty; most of their 1838-1840 correspondence was burned at the poet’s direction by his son Hallam. The two were engaged in 1838, but it is not known how close they were or how often they saw one another between 1830 and I838.

Still, it seems that "In the mid-thirties Tennyson would have been seeing all three girls socially; and £thatJ in the space of one year (1836) he seems to have been to some extent drawn to all three."3°

What survives of the 1838-1840 correspondence indicates 72

that Alfred was attracted to Emily not primarily because of a captivating physical beauty (although she had charm and grace) , but rather by her ’’tender face’’ and her "qualities of mind and heart." Casting her in the image of an angelic form that reminds one of the sequestered Lady of Shalott, he referred to Emily as a "white dove, brooding in thy lonely chamber."In the "Monodrama" when the speaker sees Maud at Sunday services in the village church, he describes her as "an angel" (I, 303) who "blushed" when her eyes "were met by my own" (I, 3O5-3°6). And later when he sees Maud coming from the Hall just after her brother has left for town he describes the sight this way (Some time has passed since his last having been with her because the brother has imposed a ban on his sister’s seeing him.): And I see my Oread coming down, [italics mine J

0 beautiful creature, what am I That I dare to look her way? (I, 5^-5^7)

And when the speaker early in Part II thinks back upon the happy times he had had with Maud walking in the meadow, he remembers her as "My own dove with the tender eve" (II, 186). [italics mine J.

Tennyson’s relationship with Emily developed steadily and smoothly until the winter or spring of 1840 when the couple decided to break off their engagement and to stop seeing one another. The real reason for the discontinuance, as Rader indicates with letters from Hallam Tennyson's 73

Materials for a Life of Alfred Tennyson, was not (as had been

assumed) primarily Mr. Sellwood's opposition to Alfred, but rather the poet's sense of duty towards Emily--arising from the realization of his lack of funds (his "eternal want of pence," as he alluded to it at the time), the torment her family's attitude was causing Emily, and the thought that he was not (yet at least) worthy of her.82 The Sellwood’s felt as they did because the marriage of their daughter Louisa to

Alfred’s brother Charles had turned out a wreck. Married four years earlier in I836, Charles had succumbed once more, after brief improvement, to the opium habit; and Louisa, as a result of this strain, had to go away about this time for mental treatment. Also, the Sellwoods were aware of Alfred's unwillingness to work at any vocation other than poetry and of his unorthodox religious views.

The breach of relations with Emily was, notes Sir

Charles, "the beginning of a long period of [furtherJ unhap-

33 piness and misfortune for Alfred." As Christopher Ricks has emphatically asserted, "the years from 1840 to 1845 con- stitute the most wretched phase of his life."^3 4 In February of 1840 FitzGerald reported Tennyson to be "really ill in a nervous way. . . ."35 This was probably due not only to his not seeing Emily but also to the problems he was having with

American publishers who were pressuring him to publish his poems in America. Also, he was very dissatisfied with

Tunbridge Wells to which the family had relocated during the 7^

winter of 1840. In a letter he wrote to the Reverend J. J.

Tennant at this time, Tennyson expressed his malcontent with

the area:

My people are located at a place which is my abomina­ tion, viz. Tunbridge Wells in this country; they moved thither from Essex by the advice of a London physician, who said it was the only place in England for the Tenny­ son constitution: the sequel is that they are half killed by the tenuity of the atmosphere and the pres~x ence of steel more or less in earth, air, and water.

In addition to such complaints about the climate, the Tenny­

sons apparently found their new residence in Kent to be too

small for them. In the Memoir Hallam Tennyson quotes his

father as having referred to the house at Tunbridge as "a

mere mouse-trap."-" The family stayed at Tunbridge Wells

less than a year; in early 1841 they moved to Boxley.

The most ominous event of 1840 for Tennyson was his in­

volvement in July of that year in a financial alliance with

the physician and speculator Dr. Matthew Allen. The ac­

quaintance with Allen would be climaxed by disastrous pecuni­ ary results for the poet. It was initially spurred by Allen’s affiliation with a progressive mental institution at Fair­ mead, near High Beech. The proprietor, Allen, took Alfred to visit his patients (one of whom, the poet John Clare,

Tennyson may have met and observed, since he was under Dr. Allen’s care through July of 18418®). The visits to Fair­ mead must have furnished very useful impressions for the vivid madhouse scenes Tennyson later incorporated into Part II,

Section V of Maud. In the following passage, for example, the 75

hero describes what he thinks are his condition and his

surroundings :

Dead, long dead, Long dead! And my heart is a handful of dust, And the wheels go over my head, And my bones are shaken with pain, For into a shallow grave they are thrust, Only a yard beneath the street, And the hoofs of the horses beat, beat, The hoofs of the horses beat, Beat into my scalp and my brain, With never an end to the stream of passing feet, Driving, hurrying, marrying, burying, Clamor and rumble, and ringing and clatter; (II, 239-251)

The passage conveys the speaker’s psychoneurosis; he believes himself to be dead and buried in a shallow grave beneath a busy road along which are traveling above multitudes of "dead men." In what he believes to be the confines of the burial plot, he thinks he hears the resounding noises of hoofbeats clattering overhead. (Actually, he is in an insane asylum.)

As they beat into his scalp and brain, they cause him acute distress and prevent him from having even a little peace and rest. Driven into this dark delusion by the loss of Maud, the narrator here has reached the nadir of despondency in the poem. "What he feels as burial," as John Reed has noted, "is his actual retreat into himself."Searching for solace in escape, he has found no peace; withdrawal into self has, in­ stead, brought about the deterioration of his mind. For the madhouse scenes in Maud and for the financial-psychological connection which is crucial to the motivation behind the narrator's troubles in Maud, Tennyson was ironically though 76

assuredly indebted to Allen, the medical man and financial

schemer.

Tennyson’s troubles with Allen came about when the

doctor persuaded the poet to invest in a scheme for process­

ing carved oak furniture and other wood objects by machine.

The Patent Decorative Carving and Sculpture Company was set

up by Allen to sell mass-produced articles to the public at

cheap prices. Promoting his venture under the classical

trade name ’’Pyroglyphs” which he selected for its cultural

appeal, Allen convinced Tennyson that his ’’Woodworks’’ (as

the enterprise was familiarly called) would be a sure success

and could be the solution to Alfred’s financial troubles and

the means for the poet’s reestablishing himself with Emily.

In November of 1840 under Allen’s persistent prodding,

Tennyson turned over for investment in the company his

legacy of more than 3000 pounds partly from the sale of his

small estate at Grasby which had been left to him by his

grandfather and partly from a sum which had been bequeathed

him by Hallam’s aunt; to these he also added some money

from his brothers and sisters. Thus did Tennyson completely commit himself to Allen’s enterprise and to the single business venture of his life. ’’By October, 1841, it was reported,” says Sir Charles, "that the agent who was to have bought the patent for the promoters, had turned out to be a rogue [had skipped townj, and it seems that Allen himself had to find the money. . . .”40 77

We have seen how in the opening section of Maud the

narrator’s father had been duped by the lord of the neighbor­

ing estate and had been left "flaccid and drained" from "a

vast speculation £whichj had failed" (I, 20, 9)» Further,

it can be said that throughout much of Part I the speaker

remonstrates against a throng of financial schemers which

runs the gamut from pickpockets, uncaring landlords, and

burglars to chemists who without concern pestle a poisonous

additive into drugs they prepare for their sick customers and to treacherous parents who kill their children for a burial fee. In these days of Mammon worship, says Tenny­ son’s speaker in the poem, one is a fool to "have faith in a tradesman’s ware or his word"(I, 26). For the cities are bubbling over "with gossip, scandal, and spite;/ And Jack on his ale-house bench has as many lies as a Czar" (I, 109-

110). I wish to live, says the narrator, a "philosopher’s life in the quiet woodland ways," one "Far-off from the clamor of liars belied in the hubbub of lies" (I, 150, 152).

He is aware, he tells us, of how easily one can be used by others for their gain and of how "often a man’s own angry pride/ Is cap and bells for a fool" (I, 250-251)« In a comment recorded in the Memoir about his social sentiments in Maud, Tennyson attributed the financial machinations and commercial mania of the times to "the blighting influence of a recklessly speculative age."24,1 Throughout Maud Tenny­ son curses the ruthlessly competitive economic system which 78

he believed to be responsible for the increasing corruption

and brutality in English life. The social invective in

Maud typifies the temper of much mid-Victorian literature;

it also may be regarded as having been drawn from Tenny­

son’s own personal financial troubles. To the extent that

he disavows a Macaulay-like complacent pride in statistical

progress and instead relishes a Carlylean and Dickensian

disdain for the industrial system, Tennyson in Maud is a

representative Victorian. To the extent that he not only

excoriates commercialism in the poem but also alludes to

the narrator’s father as having been ruined by "a vast

speculation,” refers to the friend of Maud’s brother as

being a fraudulently manufactured ’’new-made lord,’’ and

makes numerous other allusions to the age’s avarice, hypocrisy,

and venality, Tennyson in Maud may be regarded as expressing

his strong personal attitudes toward materialism, greed, and

sham. For these convictions he probably drew upon the series

of financial troubles which had caused him great personal

anguish* these included his memory of how his father had

been disinherited, his recollection of the role of finances

in his relationship with Rosa Baring, his remembrance of how

his engagement to Emily Sellwood had been broken off chiefly because of his financial insecurity, and his memory of how he had lost his patrimony in the wood-carving scheme.

Combined with the shock of his losses from the wood­ carving venture with Dr. Allen at this time was the added 79

suffering of Tennyson over the reception of his 1842

volumes which he had reluctantly (after "Ten Years Silence")

decided to publish for the same reason he had taken the

2lo chance with Allen—to "earn a livelihood on which to marry.

The two volumes, one with extensive revisions of previously

published poems and the other containing mostly new works,

including "Locksley Hall," went mainly unnoticed by the

critics and sold just as poorly. Though in time the 1842

poems established Tennyson’s literary reputation, they

presently brought on a "severe hypochondria." In a state­

ment which might well have later furnished the opening line

of Maud ("I hate the dreadful hollow behind the little wood";), Tennyson described his desperation by saying he

felt as if he had "drunk one of these most bitter draughts

out of the cup of life, which go near to make men hate the world they move in"^3 [italics mineJ.

1842 was also for Alfred another year of fearful distress about his brothers. Arthur was the first to cause concern by running up debts the family had to repay and then requiring psychiatric care. Horatio, next, came home destitute from Tasmania and in want of a "useful occupation."

And concurrently Charles, whose opium habit had once again worsened, also needed help. Following these troubles the

Tennysons moved to Cheltenham; and Alfred, in need of rest and seclusion, entered a hydropathic hospital close by where he stayed, taking treatments of wet sheets and alternating 80

hot and cold baths, until the spring of 1844. Assessing

his condition at the time, he declared in a letter he wrote

from the hospital that he felt as though he had been "through

Hell" s

The perpetual panic and horror of the last two years had steeped my nerves in poison: now I am left a beggar, but I am or shall be shortly somewhat better off in nerves . . . They were so bad six weeks ago that I could not have written this. ... I went through Hell. Thank you for inquiring after me. I am such a poor devil now I am afraid I shall rarely see you. No more trips to London and living in London, hard penury and battle will be my lot.

He went for hospitalized water treatments twice again during

the next seven years (in 1847 at Umberslade Hall, near

Birmingham and in 1848 at Malvern). In the "Monodrama"

after having discovered in Maud the countercharm to his

earlier despair, the hero contemplates his changed condition

this way: I have climbed nearer out of lonely hell [italics mine J . Beat, happy stars, timing with things below, Beat with my heart more blest than heart can tell, Blest, but for some dark undercurrent woe That seems to draw—but it shall not be so; Let all be well, be well. (I, 678-683)

Tennyson’s financial situation finally began to stabilize

in 1845 with the sudden death of Dr. Allen from which Alfred

regained most of his patrimony, because Edmund Lushington

(the poet’s friend) had taken out an insurance policy on the physician’s life with Tennyson as beneficiary. The poet’s spirits, however, were only slowly to be healed; he continued to rant (according to a conversation recorded by Aubrey de 81

Vere) "against the whole system of society, and said he was miserable."^ Nevertheless, the tide was turning for Tenny­ son. He also that year received a pension from the Civil

List granted by Sir Robert Peel on the recommendations of

Henry Hallam and William Gladstone.

Though the times were now growing brighter for Tennyson, these years were darkening ones for England. The "hungry forties," as they were called, were a decade of economic depression, high unemployment, menacing epidemics, and chronic starvation; they were a period during which, as one social historian has put it, "the English masses approached a state of downright bestiality."^ In 1845, for example, incessant rains ruined the wheat harvest in England and the potato crop in Ireland. Much of the undernourished and badly fatigued populace was starving in damp, over­ crowded, dimly lit, and poorly drained houses. As textile workers, they tended to be regarded as mere commodities on a treadmill-like market of supply and demand, typically working (if fortunate enough to be hanging on to their jobs) from 6t00 in the morning to 6:00 at night.*4"? When a worker lost his employment, he got little help from the Victorian

Poor Law which, fashioned after the Malthusian thesis, tended to regard man as destined to struggle for his existence, tended to consider his poverty a crime, and out of fear of encouraging his laziness replaced an earlier 82

paternalistic attitude toward the destitute with a stringent 48 doctrine of self-reliance. Those in better situations

were also not doing that well. Railway speculation was

raging across England and causing a shortage of capital;

this contributed to a collapse of credit two years later.

In Maud (specifically in Part I, 25-48 and 120-155 and

in Part II, 295-302 and in Part III, 17-54) Tennyson conveys his concern over these deplorable social and economic con­ ditions of the pre-Crimean decade. His narrator indicts the era as a morass of "plunder and prey," as a quagmire of unremitting "civil war" between the fanatical and maniacal forces of the rich and the poor. As had the similarly embittered speaker of "Locksley Hall," the censorious narrator of Maud also views nearly "all things" in mid-

Victorian society as outrageously "out of joint." He considers what he sarcastically calls "this golden age" to be an era of self-seeking monetary gain, to be an in­ terregnum of vile exploitation and fiendish malevolence.

In the MS notes to Maud, for instance, appeared these sharp sentiments which though they were later muted clearly reveal

Tennyson’s opinion of the times:

What use for a single mouth to rage . At the rotten creak of the State-machine, 9

When middle class Englishmen, suggests the narrator in the published poem, are pursuing the wanton worship of the money 83

god, Mammon, then meanness, cruelty, and contemptuous neglect

become the evident outward signs of the darkness of the times—

replacing the bonds of kindness, loyalty, friendship, and so­

cial commitment. From the outset of Maud the narrator makes

clear that it has been the commercial fever of the age which

has destroyed the neighborly friendship between his family

and the family next door. And as a contemporary critic of

the poet’s noted more than a century ago, Tennyson’s tech­

nique throughout Maud is to portray his protagonist’s pre­

dicament as "related dynamically to the society of the time which serves as a background of the picture. . . ,"5<^ Thus

does the narrator maintain the strong and intensely personal

conviction about the era’s "lust of gain" and "spirit of

Cain"; and thus does he strongly feel on the basis of his own

experiences that it is foolish for one to expect one's fellow

citizens to exhibit any true commitment to the principles of

social justice. For, contends the narrator, when money be­

comes a god and a tyrant, moral tenets are inevitably dis­

carded. And, consequently, in such a climate the few who strive to lead an honest and simple life will frequently, like, his own family, end up the victims of ruthless men’s schemes. In Part I of Maud we are told that the moral at­ mosphere of the age has been so polluted by the grossly am­ bitious and self-interested that "the spirit of murder is working in the very means of life" (I, 40). It is an age of cheat and be cheated, an age when "the filthy by-lane 84

rings to the yell of the trampled wife” (I, 38). It is an

age "When only the ledger lives, and when only not all men

lie" (I, 35).

In "Locksley Hall" the speaker had similarly been con­

vinced that in "days like these" each and "Every door is

barred with gold, and opens but to golden keys" (100). The

social ills he curses, in fact, are the same as those de­

nounced by the narrator of Maud:

Cursed be the social wants that sin against the strength of youth! Cursed be the social lies that warp us from the living truthi

Cursed be the sickly forms that err from honest Nature’s rule * Cursed be the gold that gilds the straitened forehead of the fool! (59-62)

In Part III of Maud such a condemnation of wealth and privilege is, correspondingly, made. Here the narrator hopes (as also does the speaker at the close of "Locksley Hall") that no longer will "Britain’s one sole God be the millionaire/ No more shall commerce be all in all. • ." (Ill, 22-23).

Throughout the forties and fifties Tennyson espoused in his poetry his dissatisfaction with the state of society.

Much of what he wrote contained a strong sense of social mission. Deeply concerned about what came to be called the

"Condition of England" question, he followed closely the in­ tellectual thought of the times—social and economic as well as scientific. When the Chartists and Socialists agitations erupted in the forties, for example, he resolutely kept abreast 85

of what was happening. As with a number of such similar

social developments, he was distressed about the accounts

which he read in the daily press. As a reactionary, he

deplored the passing of what he viewed as a once solid social

order and felt as though he were abandoned in the new.

Somewhat like Arnold he sensed himself to be caught between

two worlds, and he was far from sure that the quality of

life in the new was as good as it had been in the old.

As Valerie Pitt has pointed out, "the need to correct

was strong in him, and [after Maud ] not only the Idylls but

the rest of his long life’s work was directed to the making

of mirrors in which the Victorian public could see itself and be ashamed."^1 According to Alfred Noyes, "No pessimist

of our time has noted more incisively the things that are wrong with the world."-’2 In Maud and in his other poetry

of the period, Tennyson castigated repeatedly the concepts

of self-help and cash-nexus as propagated by the Manchester'

industrialists and their apologists. While such invective

was representative of the spirit of much contemporary writing,

the poet’s personal financial troubles were its direct bio­

graphical source. As Jerome Buckley has said, the "conflict" which is expressed in Tennyson’s poetry is both "broadly

typical of the conflict which all major Victorian artists had to face" and "highly individual."^ Buckley credits Tennyson with being more sensitive to the temper of the times than any other Victorian. 86

Perhaps in part to show his appreciation to Sir Robert

Peel, Tennyson in 1845 published his poem "The Golden Year"

in which he prematurely and rather naively expressed a hope

for a happier time ahead and subscribed to the doctrines of

a more equitable distribution of wealth, a lessening of

privilege, and the gospel of work. The Golden Year, wrote

Tennyson, would be a time

•When wealth no more shall rest in mounded heaps, But smit with freer light shall slowly melt In many streams to fatten lower lands,55

and:

When shall all men’s good Be each man’s rule, and universal Peace Lie like a shaft of light across the land, (47-49)

and:

Well I know That unto him who works, and feels he works, This same grand year is ever at the doors.’ (71-73)

In 1846 with the Repeal of the Com Laws economic

tensions in England were somewhat eased. The legislation

provided free trade for the industrialists and lower food

prices for the masses. And in 1848 with the passage of a

Public Health Act sanitary conditions were improved, though

its passage did not come soon enough to prevent a disastrous

cholera epidemic that year. In Maud, as previously suggested,

a much more pessimistic outlook predominates. There the

allusions to such social and economic atrocities as the

selling of "chalk and alum and plaster" to the "poor for bread" (I, 39)» the hustling of the poor "together, each sex, 8?

like swine’’ (I, 34), and the killing of babes "for a burial

fee" (I, 44), for instance, indicate Tennyson’s cognizance

of the urgent need to correct the dastardly situations of a serious food scarcity, of paltry working wages, and of in­ adequate sanitation which were plaguing the impoverished lower classes of Britain during the "hungry forties."

Tennyson in 1846 spent considerable time in London dis­ cussing these critical problems with Carlyle, Thackeray,

Patmore, and Dickens. The latter was at work at this time on Dombey and Son and was to publish Bleak House in 1853 and

Hard Times in 1854. In 1847 Tennyson published The Princess.

With its extensive study of dramatic character in conflict, this new narrative poem pointed in the direction of Maud and promoted further the upturn in the poet’s financial situation, selling very well from the beginning. A friendship with

Sydney Dobell, author of the Spasmodic tragedy Balder (1853)» was begun in 1848 as well as a correspondence with Mrs.

Gaskell, author of the industrial novels Mary Barton (1848) and North and South (1855)»5^ Each of these acquaintanceships had a bearing on the element of social message in Maud.

By 1850, undoubtedly the most memorable year in the poet’s life, Tennyson was at last in a position to renew his relationship with Emily with a proposal of marriage.

It was twenty years from the moment they had met in Holywell glen; he had seen her only once since their parting in 1839 and that by accident. But now with annual earnings from his 88

poetry and pension exceeding five hundred pounds, he felt he

could support a wife. Charles and Louisa had been reunited in late 1849; his Elegies had been accepted for publication by Moxon with an advance of three hundred pounds; and he probably hoped the religious nature of his new poems would ease the orthodox Sellwood minds. Through a friend Emily obtained a copy, the reading of which assuaged both her own and her father’s doubts "as to Alfred’s religion and

[it, furthermore,J cleared the way for the marriage."On the first of June In Memoriam was published under the title chosen by Emily, and on the thirteenth the couple were married. Then on November 19 the Queen named Tennyson, Poet

Laureate, succeeding Wordsworth who had died in late April.

As for the effect on the poet of the union with Emily, we have his pronouncement of some years later that "the peace of God came into my life when I married her.And, indeed, in his marriage Tennyson finally found "a comfort such as he 59 had never known."The "continuous battle between mood Z and will" which had been such a dominant element during the eighteen-year period of his development, from 1832—the year of his father’s death—until now, would seem to have been, for the most part, finally concluded.

It may be said that in Part I of the "Monodrama" Maud leads the hero out of his dark despair in a way not dissimilar to this role Emily in 1850 played as the poet’s guiding light. 89

In each case, at least, the antecedent period was one marked,

as the hero says in Maud, by "a morbid hate and horror" of

"a world in which I have hardly mixed" (I, 264-265). And

one is inclined to believe that the slim ray of hope with

which the poet looked gloomily forward to the winning of

Emily's love and esteem was not unlike the quavering antici­

pation expressed by the hero in Maud after meeting his inter­

cessor in the village street:

And thus a delicate spark Of glowing and growing light Through the livelong hours of the dark Kept itself warm in the heart of my dreams, Ready to burst in a colored flame; (I, 204-208)

Also one may be struck by the similarity in the manner of in­

fluence which Maud has on the hero in the poem and which Emily

seems to have had on the poet throughout their married life.

In the "Monodrama" Tennyson emphasizes that the power of at­

traction which draws his hero to Maud is a spiritual power,

the powerful influence of her beautiful voice as he listens to her singing the martial song "by the cedar tree/ In the meadow under the Hall" (I, 162-163). As the speaker says,

Still*. I will hear you no more, For your sweetness hardly leaves me a choice But to move to the meadow and fall before Her feet on the meadow grass, and adore, Not her, Not her, not her, but a voice. (I, 184-189)

Hence, it seems here that Maud should be regarded as a soul or anima, as a pure voice, a disembodied lyric principle who reminds one "of other Romantic feminine representations of 90

the soul—particularly of Wordsworth's solitary reaper who

also sings of 'battles long ago.'" x Similarly, it is in­

teresting to note the estimate of Emily's influence upon

the recently married poet as discerned by Tennyson’s close

friend Aubrey de Vere during a ten-day visit to the couple’s

home in the late summer of 18 5A (just after Tennyson had be­

gun working on Maud). Of Tennyson’s emotional state at this

time de Vere concluded that the poet was "much happier and

proportionately less morbid than he used to be, and in all 62 ways improved." And as for Emily, he found her to be "a woman full of soul as well as mind, and in all her affec­

tions, it would seem to me that it is in the soul, and for the soul, that she loves those dear to her"^5 [italics minej.

Later in Maud Tennyson again expresses such a spiritual feel­ ing in the lines he was writing at this time about the hero's exultation over having won the love and understanding of Maud:

My bride to be, my evermore delight, My own heart’s heart, my ownest own, (I, 671-672)

Emily gave the poet this kind of understanding; she also gave him the attention which he needed. Her love cured his loneliness and restored his confidence substantially; it filled the emotional vacuum and salved the psychological wounds that had been inflicted by the losses of his father,

Hallam, and Rosa and by the financial difficulties which were associated with these and the other emotional setbacks here­ tofore discussed. 91

Tennyson’s memories of his courtship of Emily, the third

in the sequence of romantic relationships, together with his

recollections of Sophy and Rosa, were the biographical ingre­

dients which were gradually fused between 1833 and 1855 into

the characterization of Maud and into the poem’s lily and

rose imagery which conveys the speaker’s changing attitudes

toward Maud's character. With some modifications, Tennyson

fashioned the description of the relationship between the

narrator and Maud from his emotional experiences with Sophy,

Rosa, and Emily. In doing so, he associated the imagery of

the rose with Rosa, that of the lily with Sophy, and that of

the "Queen Lily and Rose in one" with Emily. In drawing upon

these associations, he depicted the process in the poem where­ by the narrator through his love of Maud is gradually "raised 64 to a pure and holy love."

Tennyson’s separation from Sophy and Rosa became the correlative for the poem's climactic dance-duel scene in the garden in which the heroine who has all along been as­ sociated with the rose is then referred to as "Queen lily and rose in one" (I, 905) and in which the hero loses Maud as a consequence of slaying her brother. These were the sources behind the emotions of disappointment and loss which the hero feels and expresses in Part II of Maud where he sayss

It is gone; and the heavens fall in a gentle rain, When they should burst and drown with deluging storms The feeble vassals of wine and anger and lust, The little hearts that know not how to forgive; Arise, my God, and strike, for we hold Thee just, 92

Strike dead the whole weak race of venomous worms, That sting each other here in the dust; We are not worthy to live. (II, 41-48)

Rader believes, quite correctly it would seem, that the

double strand of sentiment (the bitterness over the losses

of Sophy and Rosa, the contentment from reunion with Emily)

contained in these three relationships formed a kind of

oscillation on Tennyson’s part between the poles of passionate and ethical attachment which came to rest in Emily at the ethical pole and then became the "essential pattern" the poet employed "with much concentration and telescoping in

Maud."Significantly, the hero’s love of Maud in the poem is shown to be at first a source of sensual entrapment; but finally, the love becomes what seems to be a guide to his spiritual redemption, as is intimated by his decision to dedicate himself to the Crimean cause. So understood,

Tennyson is, it would seem, in the garden scene of Maud (as well as in the parallel episodes of "Edwin Morris" and

"Locksley Hall") acting out, as Rader says:

the aggressions which he had felt toward those who had helped to thwart his love of Rosa and Emily--toward, primarily, his uncle and grandfather and, secondarily, toward the Edens and the Sellwoods. But the scene then also involves his retrospective imaginative judgment on the ambiguous spiritual development which, in the dark and confused years after the death of his father and Hallam, had led to his entanglement with Rosa and became merged, in the defeat of his love for her, with the in­ capacitating and atrophying hatreds which after the loss of her, and of Sophy and Emily, left him progressively more alienated from a society dominated, as it must have seemed to him, by selfish materialism and devoted to scandal and spite. 93

The marriage and publication of In Memoriam thus brought

to Tennyson a combined spiritual and financial redemption.

The elegies were an "overwhelming success." Within a few

months after their publication "no less than 60,000 copies Z o had passed into circulation." ' The fame that resulted from

the Laureateship led Tennyson in 1850 into further social

engagements. He talked extensively, for instance, with

Kingsley, who had six months earlier published Alton Locke,

Tailor and Poet, a fictional tract on the exploitation of

the textile worker which included documented details of

mid-Victorian food prices. Tennyson read Kingsley’s novel

with feeling and related the anguish in it to his own mental

struggle. Undoubtedly, the subjects he discussed with

Kingsley at this time included the issue of housing condi­

tions, as Kingsley was then at work on articles attacking

sweated labor and bad sanitation in the industrial cities—

issues which, as we have seen, also appear in the social

sections of Maud. In April of I850 the fourth edition of

The Princess was published into which Tennyson incorporated

the weird cataleptic seizures of the Prince who, when so

entranced, "seemed to move among a world of ghosts," feeling 68 himself to be "the shadow of a dream." It is as if

Tennyson in writing these descriptions were preparing him­ self for the composition of the madhouse scenes in Maud.

In early 1852 Tennyson published anonymously the national 94

songs "Britons, Guard Your Own," "Hands All Round," and

"The Third of February, 1852" in John Forster’s The Examiner.

The poems anticipate the attitudes Tennyson’s hero in Part

III of Maud exhibits toward war where he ways, for instance,

that "No more" shall "Peace/ Pipe on her pastoral hillock a

languid note," no more shall "the cannon bullet rust on a

slothful shore" (III, 24, 26). All three of these national

songs were responses to Louis Napoleon’s coup d’etat of

December, 1851 and to what the poet regarded as apathy on

Parliament’s part to the actions of France and the possi­

bility of England’s being invaded. The first poem echoed the fear that "The world’s last tempest darkens overhead"69 and

the sentiment that while all Englishmen desire "sweet Peace"

(13) they should be weary of Louis, for "who can trust a liar?" (14). In Maud, as he patriotically asserts that we all "have hearts in a cause" (III, 55) to put down the

Crimean violence "Far into the North" (III, 36), the narrator similarly says that "the peace, that I deemed no peace, is over and done" (III, 50); now "God’s just wrath shall be wreaked on a giant liar" (III, 45), the Russian Czar. In

"Hands All Round," considered by the poet Landor to be "in­ comparably the best convivial lyric in the language,"

Tennyson expressed the view that "That man’s the true con­ servative/ Who lops the mouldered branch away"?1 and extended a toast to slow-perceiving Parliament that "both our Houses, 95

may they see/ Beyond the borough and the shire1!? (27-28).

Similarly, in Maud Tennyson seems to be attacking the

Liberal-Radical ideas of the Manchester economists in the

social sections of the poem and to be "repudiating the whole recent course of [Britishj national policy"; at least, that was what he was charged with by contemporary critics such as W. C. Bennett and others.?2 And in Part III of the "Mono- drama" the speaker feels that his country’s loss of sloth­ ful peace has been "full of wrongs and shames." He wants to "hail once more to the banner of battle unrolled" so that the people will be awakened to "the better mind" (III,

40, 42, and 56). "The Third of February" espoused further 73 warnings that the "storm of Europe" y was about to erupt into "Wild War" (8) in spite of which, however, said Tenny­ son, silence could not be sanctioned. The conduct of

France, the poet felt, should be publicly denounced though it involved a risk; for "As long as we remain, we must speak free" (13). And "Though niggard throats of Manchester may bawl" (43), some still "love England and her honor yet"

(46). As the narrator of Maud seems nearly to exult corres­ pondingly, "we are noble still" (III, 55) and "With a loyal people shouting a battle-cry" (III, 35) we can "embrace the purpose of God, and the doom assigned, (III, 59).

Late in 1852 Tennyson's best known and accomplished occasional poem, the "Ode on the Death of the Duke of 96

Wellington" was published. Extolling the country's glories,

it was the poet's "first acknowledged work as Laureate";' because the poem expressed some unpopular political views,

the critics attacked the masterpiece of craftsmanship savagely. In the "Ode" Tennyson voices many of the same patriotic sentiments he had expressed in the national songs and would again espouse in Maud. After recounting the ac- 7 5 complishments of Wellington as a "statesman-warrior," 7 as a "Mighty Seaman" (83), and as a "Foremost captain of his time" (31)» Tennyson sets forth the fervent hope that

England in the future will continue to be kept "from brute control" (159)• Then the poet cautions British statesmen to "guard the eye, the soul/ Of Europe" and to strive to

"keep our noble nation whole" (161-162). As his narrator would similarly warn in Maud, the poet here admonishes present-day leaders to "wink no more in slothful overtrust" while "Your cannons moulder on the seaward wall" (170, 173)»

As Tennyson notes, the Duke had "never sold the truth to serve the hour" (179)» His life was honest work and his

"path of duty was the way to glory" (202). His "eighty win­ ters freeze with one rebuke/ All great self-seekers trampling on the night" (186-187).

In the fall of 1853» finally, began "the happiest period of Tennyson's life" with the leasing of Farringford on the remote western edge of the Isle of Wight where "for the first time since his marriage" the poet felt "more or less immune 97

from intrusion." ° A large, late Georgian, Gothic-looking

mansion containing fifteen rooms, a walled garden, and a

secluded elmgrove in back, Farringford stood on a hill over­

looking the sea. To the north there was a view of the

Solent Channel and the English coast beyond; and to the east

the land sloped down to Freshwater Bay. It was in the old

den at the top of the house, which Tennyson called "his

little fumitory," where "his best thoughts came to him 77 while sitting in a hard high-backed wooden chair."r{

Life at Farringford for Tennyson was "essentially an out-of-door life."’'’8 He sat much in the garden or on the lawn" and went each day "for solitary tramps along the lanes, or over the downs, or by the seashore—no matter what the weather might be."^ Between 1853 and 1855 several notable friends came to visit the poet at Farring­ ford. For instance, there were Edward FitzGerald, James

Spedding, Arthur Hugh Clough, Coventry Patmore, John Millais,

Benjamin Jowett, and Sir John Simeon, among others. With

Simeon, Tennyson grew at this time very friendly. A Roman

Catholic squire at Swainston Hall, near Newport, eight miles to the east, Simeon "became one of the few ,men," according to Sir Charles Tennyson, "to whom the poet freely opened his heart. Hardly a week passed in which one of them did 80 not walk or drive over to visit the other." It was Simeon

(who a few years earlier had represented the Isle of Wight in Parliament) who now urged Tennyson on with the weaving 98

of a story around the germinal lyric, "Oh that ’twere

possible." And it was this lyric of the thirties which

Tennyson formulated into the publication of Maud. Both

Farringford and Swainston found their ways into the descrip­

tions in the poem; as Sir Charles has said, it was "Farring­

ford, the dark solitary house ’half hid in the gleaming

wood,• from which the roar of the sea and scream of the

down-dragged shingle could be heard on stormy nights, and Swainston with its magnificent cedar trees, [whichj supplied

the scene" x for several descriptions in Maud—scenes such

as the hero’s listening "to the tide in its broad-flung

shipwrecking roar" and to "the scream of a maddened beach

draggéd down by the wave" (I, 98-100), or such as the

hero’s hearing outside the Hall a rivulet "Running down to my own dark wood/Or the voice of the long sea-wave as it

swelled/ Now and then in the dim-gray dawn" (I, 518-520),

or such as the narrator’s hearing Maud’s voice "by the

cedar tree/ In the meadow under the Hall" (164-165) or his

later lying in Maud’s garden and listening to the "long

branches" of the "Dark cedar" sway (See I, 616-627).

It was shortly after Tennyson moved to Farringford in

late November of 1853 that the Crimean War erupted. He

followed with great concern the progress of his country’s military efforts against the Russians at Alma, Balaklava, and Inkerman. In particular, he was moved by the news of what happened at Balaklava, outside the city of Sebastopol. 99

Reading in early December of 1854 about how five-hundred

British cavalry soldiers had been slaughtered while

executing a “blundered [misinterpreted] order,“ Tennyson

paid tribute to the troops with "The Charge of the Light

Brigade.” The eulogy noted that it was*

Theirs not to make reply Theirs not to reason why,R- Theirs but to do and die.

Fortunately for England, this early disaster was succeeded by several victories. As he followed the developments of the war with “anxious interest,"®5 Tennyson was now im­ mersing himself in the study of metaphysics and starting some work on a poem about the enchantment of Merlin (later titled “Merlin and Nimue" when completed in March of 1856).

Subsequently, he proceeded to put his full energies into the finishing of Maud.

During the last six months of 1854 and the first six of 1855» Tennyson added some one thousand lines to the two lyrics of the early thirties, the 110-line "Oh that ’twere possible" and the 82-line "shell lyric." The additions in­ cluded, among other things, the mad scene (now Part II,

Section V) and the closing scene (Part III) which describes the hero’s final determination to enlist for service in the

Crimean campaign. When in 1855 Maud went to the presses, it may be said that the publication culminated "the long- purposed accomplishment of an inchoate, frustrated, but persistent intention" (and was not, as has been assumed until 100

Rader’s scholarship, the passive and accidental rediscover­ ing of an old poem and the extending of it simply because Oh of John Simeon’s cajoling). Notably, after three months from its publication in July of 1855, Maud had sold over eight thousand copies, not as good as In Memoriam had done, but still a phenomenal accomplishment for a volume of poems during these times.83 101

NOTES TO CHAPTER II

^Rader, The Biographical Genesis, pp. 98-99»

2Ibid., pp. 60- 6l.

^Ibid., p. 64.

^Ibid., p. 60.

5Ibid., p. 39»

6Ibid., p. 103.

^Ibid., pp. 17-20.

8Ibid., pp. 25-26.

9Ibid.. p. 32+-

10See Ricks, ed., The Poems of Tennyson, #251, p. 649, I, 1-5, 12-14; II, 1-2, 9-1^»

^^■Rader, p. 31.

12See Ricks, ed., The Poems of Tennyson, #208, p. 511, 56-63. 13see Ibid., #243, PP» 634-635.

■^'Rader, p. 33 •

-L^See Ricks, ed., The Poems of Tennyson, #244, p. 635.

l6See Ibid.. #434, p. 1423.

^Rader, pp. 3^-35«

18See Ricks, ed., The Poems of Tennyson, #250, pp. 647-648.

^9Rader, p. 35«

20See Ricks, ed., The Poems of Tennyson, #249, pp. 646-647.

2^Rader, p. 37«

22Sir Charles Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson, p. 15^« 102

23see Ibid., pp. 157-158 and Rader, p. 21.

24 Sir Charles Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson, p. 157« 23Rader, p. 25»

26Ibid., pp. 42-43 and 40-41.

2?See Ricks, ed., The Poems of Tennyson, #271, p. 692. Pp Ricks, Tennyson, p. 148. 2^Sir Charles Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson, p. 103.

3°Rader, p. 146, n. 36.

31lbid., p. 69.

32see Ibid.. pp. 69-73 and Sir Charles Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson, pp. 179-183« 33sir Charles Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson, p. 184.

3i|'Ricks, Tennyson, p. 135«

3^1 bid.

3^Memoir, I, 177-178.

3?lbid., I, 171.

3®Sir Charles Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson, p. 186.

39perce-p~tion and Design in Tennyson’s "Idylls of the King” (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 19&9)» P« 43. ^°Ibid., p. 187.

^Memoir, I, 468.

^2Ibid., I, 166.

^3ibid. , I, 221.

44 Quoted in Sir Charles Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson, p. 201. ^Quoted in Rader, pp. 76-77• 103

Richard D. Altick, "The Social Background [to the Growth of a Mass Reading Public] in The English Common Reader (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), rpt. in Backgrounds to Victorian Literature, ed. Richard A. Levine (äan Franciscos Chandler Publishing Company, 1967), p. 217. ^See Ibid., pp. 209-219. kfi °See D. C. Somerville, English Thought in the Nine­ teenth Century (1929; rpt. New York; Tartan Books-David McKay Company, Inc., 1965), p. 81 and see Robert L. Heil- broner, The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times, and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers (1953? rpt. New Yorks Clarion Books-Simon and Schuster, 1967), pp. 68-95. ^Memoir, I, 403. The lines appeared in the original draft of Part I, Section XI and were, said Tennyson, in "originally verse III but I omitted it." See also Ricks, ed., The Poems of Tennyson, p. 1059» •5°George Brimley, "Alfred Tennyson’s Poems," in Cam­ bridge Essays (1855), rpt. in The Critical Heritage, ed. John D. Jump (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1967), p. 196. ^Tennyson Laureate, p. 181.

■52"The Real Tennyson," Quarterly Review, 287 (1949), 507.

53^The Victorian Temper, p. 68. 5^1 bid., p. 84.

Ricks, ed., The Poems of Tennyson, #216, p. 715, 32-34. -^See Sir Charles Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson, pp. 218- 224 and pp. 234-238. 5?See Rader, pp. 82-84 and Sir Charles Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson, pp. 241-243« 5®Sir Charles Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson, p. 245.

-^Rader, p. 85.

uPitt, Tennyson Laureate, p. 85. 104

^Several critics have made such observations about the spiritual quality of Maud's song including Kirkwood and Mann and more recently Alice Chandler who in "Tennyson's Maud and the Song of Songs," Victorian Poetry, 7 (1969), 95, uses the idea to show how the poem charts the progress of a soul in language strikingly similar to that of the Biblical Song of Songs.

Quoted in Sir Charles Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson, p. 282. ^Quoted in Rader, pp. 86-87.

^Memoir, 1, 468.

65Rader, pp. 108-109.

66Ibid., p. 108.

6?Sir Charles Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson, p. 248. Zo °See Ricks, ed., The Poems of Tennyson, #307, p. 1002, 7-8. Sir Charles refers to the seizures in Alfred Tennyson, p. 26l. ^9See Ricks, ed., The Poems of Tennyson, #304, p. 998, 2.

?°Sir Charles Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson, p. 266.

^^See Ricks, ed., The Poems of Tennyson, #307, p. 1002, 7-8. 72W. L. Bum, The Age of Equipoise:. A Study of the Mid-Victorian Generation (1964; rpt. NewYork: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1965),p• 56. ?5See Ricks, ed., The Poems of Tennyson, #306, pp. 1000- 1001, 14. 7 4*. 'Sir Charles Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson, p. 271. 7%ee Ricks, ed., The Poems of Tennyson, #309, p. 1008, 25« In drawing the British people together during this national loss and in using the Duke's death for the purpose of inspiring a feeling of patriotism in all Englishmen, Tennyson, as J. B. Steane has noted, conveniently overlooked the fact that Wellington "had placed his formidable self in opposition to practically every desirable change since 1815." Rather, the poet now viewed the Duke "as a great man who represented England as she had been in days of former great­ ness." Tennyson, Arco Literary Critiques, p. 10?. 105

7^Sir Charles Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson, pp. 277-278.

77 'Oliver Huckel, Through England with Tennyson: A Pilgrimage to Places Associated with the Great Laureate (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, Publishers, 1913), pp. 123-124. 78Ibid., p. 132.

79Ibid. p Sir Charles Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson, p. 281. 8kbid.

82See Ricks, ed., The Poems of Tennyson, #315, p. 1035, 13-15. 83sir Charles Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson, p. 283.

84 See Rader, pp. 2-10. ^Shannon, "Critical Reception of Maud," PMLA, 68 (1953), 406 and n. 45, 4o6. |OM>

CHAPTER III

THE POET VERSUS THE AUTOBIOGRAPHER IN MAUD

Having traced the personal development of Tennyson’s mind and art from adolescense through the publication of

Maud in 1855, we are now in a better position to reassess

the biographical genesis and aesthetic merits of Maud. To­ wards such a resolve, this chapter will take up the issues set forth at the outset of the present study as constituting

Rader’s chief objections to the "Monodrama." As previously noted, these are: (1) that Maud is flawed by "a hidden emotional element," (2) that the emotion in Maud is

"distorted and disproportionate to its objects," (3) that

Maud♦s protagonist is "overcharged with an extraordinarily self-centered emotion," and (4) that Maud’s love story is

"strained" and "unreal." As a rejoinder to these objections, this study proposes the following: first, that Maud is not marred by a "hidden" or unintended emotional element; and secondly, that Tennyson by 1854 had attained sufficient emotional maturity to deal freely in Maud with the financial and domestic troubles of his earlier years. To confirm the reliability of these propositions, let us examine once again the circumstances which bear upon the question of

Tennyson’s emotional status during the period 1851-1855*

According to Rader, it was not until after 1855 that 107

is, until after the completion of the "Monodrama," that

Tennyson found "complete peace" and a "secure sense of

establishment in the world.It is Rader's contention

that Tennyson did not have the needed perspective during

the poem's composition from which to view calmly and ob­

jectively his earlier problems. This, however, seems very

debatable. Admittedly, there were, as Rader has noted,

some further troubles for the poet between 1850 and 1855«

It is true that Tennyson's first child was stillborn in

1851 and that Emily was briefly ill, but these were short­

term, quickly passing distresses. As Sir Charles has said,

the couple do not seem to have brooded for long over their misfortune; the loss was considerably eased by a long trip

to Italy and by the news that they would soon be having another child. Their travels across the Italian country­

side seem to have been immensely enjoyable; and Tennyson seems to have returned from them "refreshed in body and 3 mind."> It was within weeks of their return to England that they learned that Emily was expecting again. Hallam, their first son, was born in 1852, healthy and well.

As for Tennyson's living situation between 1851 and

1853, the period of his not completely happy residence in

Twickenham, it is true that he was less than fully satisfied with the location of his home there. But life at Chapel

House, the fine Early Georgian home they had leased, was probably far happier than anything Tennyson had previously 108

known. The house itself was beautiful and spacious, an

excellent residence for the newly married and recently

appointed poet laureate. It overlooked Marble Hill, had

exquisite paneled rooms and a carved oak staircase and 4 a delightful garden in back. Though Tennyson was restless

about the proximity of the property to London and about

the excessive flow of visitors with which they had to

contend, he was in no sense troubled by the kinds of

financial or domestic problems which had previously plagued

him. Emily understood him thoroughly, waited on him

willingly and lovingly, and attended to all his needs. He

clearly was a happier, more peaceful, and more secure man

at Chapel House than he had ever been before. It was only

the restlessness about the fast pace of life and the over­

flow of curious visitors at his Twickenham home which led

Tennyson to seek the more secluded residence of Farring­

ford on the Isle of Wight. Thus, it cannot be said that

this restlessness was in any way comparable to the psychic crises Tennyson had suffered through during the thirties and forties. These present years (1851-1853) were only an interval of mild restlessness, not a continuation of the earlier decades of dark disturbance. This restlessness did not propel the poet into more morbid despondency; nor, to be sure, did it have any connection with Tennyson's recollection of his father's disinheritance, of his own personal relationships with Rosa or Sophy, of his personal 109

repugnance for marriage marketing or social privilege, or of his gnawing disappointment over the financial failure of the wood-carving venture.

Then in 1853 this mild disquietude gave way to a sense of near total quiescence when the Tennysons moved into their

Farringford estate where, as previously noted, they were

"more or less immune from intrusion." Here they were able to make the acquaintance of a few near neighbors and to be visited by their close friends from London and elsewhere who came down to see them frequently. Despite the letter quoted by Rader from Tennyson to Patmore which suggests that the poet was not yet content and secure,-’ there is ample evidence to show that Tennyson was very happy at

Farringford. The Patmore letter was probably written in a moment of passing loneliness. There is no reason to believe that it typifies Tennyson's feelings of this time. Numerous visitors came to Farringford between 1853 and 1855; further, as we have already seen, Tennyson developed a very close friendship with Sir John Simeon at this time—one which had them visiting one another almost weekly. And in 1854 the Tennysons' second son, Lionel, was bom. Even Rader admits that the poet's life in the summer of 1854 "took on a decided aspect of solid comfort and peace. . . .

Jerome Buckley has summarized the probable emotional con­ dition of the poet during these years this way:

Though his public verses of the fifties were often 110

rebellious, his own temper was increasingly serene. Farringford, which became his home in 1853, was to afford him both the seclusion he required as artist and the peace he sought as a family man eager to give his two small sons, Hallam and Lionel, the benefit of open skies and quiet understanding. There the frequent guests who made the tedious journey from London or Oxford found him not merely the genial„host but also the mature and sympathetic human being.'

Thus to believe that Tennyson between 1851 and 1855 was

unable to find "complete peace" and a "secure sense of

establishment" seems misleading and a bit off the mark.

True, Tennyson did not find complete peace at this time; however, he probably never found it later in life either.

As for a secure sense of establishment, he seems to have

found this at both Chapel House and Farringford; there is no abundance of evidence to indicate otherwise. He had the love of Emily, a family, and financial security from the laureateship; he was distant now from Somersby and the problems he had had there while supervising the turbulent affairs of his kin. Hence, by 1851 the poet seems to have found a fairly full measure of independence, security, and emotional maturity. As W. D. Paden has said, his happy marriage would seem to bear witness to such an achievement-- one which permitted his youthful troubles to lose their im­ mediacy and one which allowed him to "see them in some per- p spective." Similarly, Buckley has affirmed that "the cele­ bration of a passion far more intense than the sentiment of his earlier love lyrics must be ascribed in large part to his present sense of complete emotional fulfillment in Ill

marriage."9 Indeed, Tennyson was by this time "able to

look freely at his old self." He was, as we will see,

able to stand aside and create a real character, like

himself in part, yet not himself." And he was able to

link his hero’s emotional outbursts to the theme of mad­

ness in the poem and to make the madness "a social theme as well as a matter of individual psychology."10

Next there is the question of whether the emotion in

Maud is "distorted and disproportionate to its objects as

they appear in the poem"—whether Tennyson unconsciously

set up a "hidden emotional dimension." For Rader, Maud is

"filled with exaggerated sentiments" spoken by a protagonist who is overcharged with an "extravagantly self-centered emotion." But is Maud♦s emotional element really so un­ controlled and so disproportionate to the motivation for it in the;poem? This study contends that the emotion in Maud is, in the main, both controlled and consciously employed,

While Tennyson may have been unconscious about how much of his experiences he was putting to use in Maud, he was not mistaken about the existence or degree of the emotional factor in the poem. He intended the frenzied emotional condition of his hero; he fully realized that many of the hero’s words were frenzied ravings. That was why he read his poem with such emotion. And that was why he called his poem "a little Hamlet"—"the history of a morbid, poetic soul"; that, too, was why he declared that he sought to 112

dramatize in Maud the development of a series of different

phases of passion in a single character.

The ever-shifting sequence of moods in Maud illustrates

this. At the start of the poem the narrator’s embittered

temper is due to his knowledge of the circumstances which

caused his father to commit suicide. The speaker has just

heard the horrible death sounds of his father echoing from

the "red-ribbed hollow" behind their home and has just

learned that his father jumped to his death because he had

been swindled by the neighboring squire. After relating how

this deceptive "scheme" has left his family financially

drained, the narrator denounces the villainy he perceives

all around him this way:

Why do they prate of the blessings of Peace? we have made them a curse, Pickpockets, each hand lusting for all that is not its own; And lust of gain, in the spirit of Cain, is it better or worse Than the heart of the citizen hissing in war on his own hearthstone?

But these are the days of advance, the works of the men of mind, When who but a fool would have faith in a tradesman’s ware or his word? Is it peace or war? Civil war, as I think, and that of a kind The viler, as underhand, not openly bearing the sword.

Sooner or later I too may passively take the print Of the golden age—why not? I have neither hope nor trust; May make my heart as a millstone, set my face as a flint, Cheat and be cheated, and die: who knows? we are ashes and dust. (I, 21-32) 113

Several stanzas of social statement follow. In these the nar­

rator assails a plethora of Victorian vices which include ne­

glect of the poor, crime in the streets, deceptive business

practices, and swindling of the consumer. Maddened that such

criminality flourishes, the narrator conjectures:

Must X "too creep to the hollow and dash myself down and die Rather than hold by the law that I made, nevermore to brood On a horror of shattered limbs and a wretched swindler’s lie? (I, 54-56)

Then he hears the sounds of "Workmen up at the Hall" (I, 65)

who are renovating the home of the neighboring squire. When

he learns that the squire’s family will soon be returning

from abroad, he thinks about "the singular beauty" (I, 67)

of the millionaire squire's daughter Maud. Subsequently, he

sees the repatriate family’s carriage passing:

Long have I sighed for a calm: God grant I may find it at last! It will never be broken by Maud, she has neither savour nor salt, But a cold and clear-cut face, as I found when her carriage past, Perfectly beautiful: let it be granted her. (I, 76-79)

At this point the declamatory spirit which has predominated

through the first four sections of Part I gradually gives way

to a mood of rhapsodic delight. In the following lyric the narrator describes the sense of exhilaration he feels as he sits in his family's garden in early spring:

A million emeralds break from the ruby-budded lime 114

In the little grove where I sit--ah, wherefore cannot I be Like things of the season gay, like the bountiful season bland, When the far-off sail is blown by the breeze of a softer clime, Half-lost in the liquid azure bloom of a crescent of sea, The silent sapphire-spangled marriage ring of the land? (I, 102-107)

This lighthearted yearning is abruptly halted, however, when the speaker's thoughts turn to speculations about what is happening in the village below which he has been viewing from "the little grove" and to ruminations about how he is "nameless and poor":

Below me, there, is the village, and looks how quiet and small! And yet bubbles o'er like a city, with gossip, scandal, and spite; And Jack on his ale-house bench has as many lies as a Czar; (I, 108-110) and:

I keep but a man and a maid, ever ready to slander and steal; I know it, and smile a hard-set smile, like a stoic, or like A wiser epicurean, and let the world have its way. (I, 120-122)

From this bitter declamation back to euphonious delight—such is the shift which occurs as we reach Section V. Here it is the "beautiful voice" of Maud which soothes the speaker's cantankerous tempers

A voice by the cedar tree In the meadow under the Hall! She is singing an air that is known to me, A passionate ballad gallant and gay, A martial song like a trumpet's call! 115

Maud with her exquisite face, And wild voice pealing up to the sunny sky, And feet like sunny gems on an English green, Maud in the light of her youth and her grace, Singing of death and of Honour that cannot die, Till I well could weep for a time so sordid and mean, And myself so languid and base.

Silence, beautiful voice! Be still, for you only trouble the mind With a joy in which I cannot rejoice, A glory I shall not find. Still! I will hear you no more, For your sweetness hardly leaves me a choice But to move to the meadow and fall before Her feet on the meadow grass, and adore, Not her, who is neither courtly nor kind, Not her, not her, but a voice. (I, 162-166, 173-189)

Throughout the remaining sections of Part I, similar shifts take place again and again with the difference that from Section V onward it is the poem's lyrical stretches which are periodically interrupted by stanzas of social statement.

Sections VI-IX describe the narrator's infatuation with Maud.

In these four lyrics the speaker's mind pulsates with thoughts of how she "touched my hand with a smile so sweet" when he saw her at sunset at "the head of the village street" (I, 196-203), of how if she "were all that she seemed,/And her smile were all that I dreamed,/Then the world were not so bitter/But a smile could make it sweet" (I, 225-228), of how she "lifted her eyes" in the village church and "suddenly, sweetly, strangely blushed/

To find they were met by my own" (I, 301-307), and of how she

"waved to me with her hand" while riding on the moor (I, 314-

321). Then in Section X the declamatory spirit suddenly bursts forth again when the speaker proclaims his hatred for a "new- 116

made lord” whom he sees riding at his inamorata's side and

for a "broad-brimmed hawker of holy things" whom he encoun­

ters preaching the gospel of peace. For the friend of Maud’s

brother, the speaker feels a "jealous dread":

Sick, am I sick of a jealous dread? Was not one of the two at her side This new-made lord, whose splendor plucks The slavish hat from the villager’s head? (I, 330-333)

For the itinerant preacher, he feels a fulsome nauseousness

too:

Last week came one to the country town, To preach our poor little army down, And play the game of the despot kings, Though the state has done it and thrice as well: This broad-brimmed hawker of holy things,

This huckster put down war! can he tell Whether war be a cause or a consequence? Put down the passions that make earth Hell! Down with ambition, avarice, pride, Jealousy, down! cut off from the mind The bitter springs of anger and fear; Down too, down at your own fireside, With the evil tongue and the evil ear, For each is at war with mankind. (I, 366-370, 373-381)

The latter half of Part I (Sections XI-XXII) consists

principally of lyrics. In Sections XI, XIV, XVII, XVIII, and

XXII, one finds the best of Maud's lyrics. From the dark

dread and outrage of Section X, Section XI, for example,

shifts sharply to a feeling of tentative but buoyant new

found optimism:

0 let the solid ground Not fall beneath my feet Before my life has found 117

What some have found so sweet; Then let come what come may, What matter if I go mad, I shall have had my day.

Let the sweet heavens endure, Not close and darken above me Before I am quite quite sure That there is one to love me; Then let come what come may To a life that has been so sad, I shall have had my day. (I, 398-411)

In Section XIII ("Scorned, to be scorned by one that I

scorn,/ Is that a matter to make me fret?") the tone shifts

back briefly to one of bitterness, but the speaker's mood

by Section XIV has been once again transformed to one of

bliss. The scorn of Section XIII is directed at Maud's

brother and father. The one is reviled as turning the "live air sick" with his "barbarous opulence jewel-thick" (I, 454-

455); the other is vilified as a "gray old wolf and a cheat"

(I, 471-472). The bliss of Section XIV is actuated by Maud's garden and by the speaker's proximity to Maud's "little oak- room" set in the heart of the Hall's "carven gloom'1!

Maud has a garden of roses And lilies fair on a lawn, There she walks in her state And tends upon bed and bower, And thither I climbed at dawn And stood by her garden-gate; A lion ramps at the top, He is claspt by a passion-flower. Maud's own little oak-room [looksj

Upon Maud's own garden-gate: And I thought as I stood, if a hand, as white As ocean-foam in the moon, were laid 118

On the hasp of the window, and my Delight Had a sudden desire, like a glorious ghost, to glide, Like a beam of the seventh Heaven, down to my side, There were but a step to be made.

I heard no sound where I stood But the rivulet on from the lawn Running down to my own dark wood Or the voice of the long sea-wave as it swelled Now and then in the dim-gray dawn; But I looked, and round, all round the house I beheld The death-white curtain drawn; Felt a horror over me creep, Prickle my skin and catch my breath, Knew that the death-white curtain meant but sleep, Yet I shuddered and thought like a fool of the sleep of death. (I, 489-497, 504-510, 516-526)

Section XVII is an expression of the speaker’s intense yearn­ ing to see his adorable Oread. About to meet, he is thinking of the moment when she will yield to him—when a "happy yes" will falter "from her lips." The lyric is addressed to the happy day, beseeching that darkness be kept away until Maud is his:

Go not, happy day, From the shining fields, Go not, happy day, Till the maiden yields. Rosy is the West, Rosy is the South, Roses are her cheeks, And a rose her mouth When the happy Yes Falters from her lips, Pass and blush the news Over glowing ships; (I, 571-582)

In Section XVIII we have the climactic sequel in which, as the narrator tells us, Maud has given herself to him and he has taken her home:

I have led her home, my love, my only friend. 119

There is none like her, none. And never yet so warmly ran my blood And sweetly, on and on Calming itself to the long-wished-for end, Full to the banks, close on the promised good.

There is none like her, none. Nor will be when our summers have deceased. 0, art thou sighing for Lebanon In the long breeze that streams to thy delicious East, Sighing for Lebanon, Dark cedar, though thy limbs have here increased, Upon a pastoral slope as fair, And looking to the South, and fed With honeyed rain and delicate air, And haunted by the starry head Of her whose gentle will has changed my fate, And made my life a perfumed altar-flame; And over whom thy darkness must have spread With such delight as theirs of old, thy great Forefathers of the thornless garden, there Shadowing the snow-limbed Eve from whom she came. (I, 599-604, 611-626)

Finally, in Section XXII ("Come into the garden, Maud") we reach the culmination of Part I. The lyric describes the speaker’s emotions as he waits for Maud by her garden gate.

She has promised to meet him as soon as she can leave the dancing in the Hall which her brother has arranged as part of a "grand political dinner" for the province's Tories:

Come into the garden, Maud, For the black bat, night, has flown, Come into the garden, Maud, I am here at the gate alone; And the woodbine spices are wafted abroad, And the musk of the rose is blown.

For a breeze of morning moves, And the planet of Love is on high, Beginning to faint in the light that she loves On a bed of daffodil sky, To faint in the light of the sun she loves, 120

To faint in his light, and to die.

All night have the roses heard The flute, violin, bassoon; All night has the casement jessamine stirred To the dancers dancing in tune; Till a silence fell with the waking bird, And a hush with the setting moon.

I said to the lily, 'There is but one With whom she has heart to be gay. When will the dancers leave her alone? She is weary of dance and play.' Now half to the setting moon are gone, And half to the rising day; Low on the sand and loud on the stone The last wheel echoes away.

I said to the rose, 'The,brief night goes In babble and revel and wine. 0 young lord-lover, what sighs are those, For one that will never be thine? But mine, but mine,' so I sware to the rose, 'For ever and ever, mine.*

And the soul of the rose went into my blood, As the music clashed in the hall; And long by the garden lake I stood, For I heard your rivulet fall From the lake to the meadow and on to the wood, Our wood, that is dearer than all; (I, 850-887)

In Part II this pattern of perpetually shifting moods continues. In the "shell lyric" which forms Section II, for instance, the speaker expresses these sentiments:

See what a lovely shell, Small and pure as a pearl, Lying close to my feet, Frail, but a work divine, Made so fairly well With delicate spire and whorl, How exquisitely minute, A miracle of design!

What is it? a learned man 121

Could give it a clumsy name. Let him name it who can, The beauty would be the same.

The tiny cell is forlorn, Void of the little living will That made it stir on the shore. Did he stand at the diamond door Of his house In a rainbow frill? Did he push, when he was uncurled, A golden foot or a fairy horn Through his dim water-world?

Slight, to be crushed with a tap Of my finger-nail on the sand, Small, but a work divine, Frail, but of force to withstand, Year upon year, the shock Of cataract seas that snap The three decker’s oaken spine Athwart the ledges of rock, Here on the Breton strand! (II, 49-77)

The speaker’s mood here is motivated by the shock he has suf­

fered from having been disunited from Maud. His discovery of

the seashell on the "Breton strand" to which he has deported

himself for the killing of Maud’s brother is an analogue for

his troubled condition. It symbolizes how as a "Breton, not

Briton," as a "shipwrecked man," he must withstand the "cata­

ract seas" of life which continue to flow on despite what has

happened to him. Some lines later the reason for his troubled mood is related when the narrator recalls noticing a mourning

ring with a lock of his mother’s hair on the hand of a man

(Maud’s brother) as "he lay dying there." He wonders, "Am

I guilty of blood?" (II, 115, 121) and he ponders*.

Who knows if he be dead? Whether I need have fled? 122

However this may he, Comfort her, comfort her, all things good, While I am over the sea! Let me and my passionate love go by, But speak to her all things holy and high, Whatever happen to me! (II, 119-120, 122-127)

Because of this memory the narrator’s mind is "fraught/ With

a passion so intense" that his sight has suddenly struck on

"a sharper sense/ For a shell, or a flower, little things/

Which else would have been past by!" (II, 106-107, 111-113)«

What is worse, he is

Plagued with a flitting to and fro, A disease, a hard mechanic ghost That never came from on high Nor ever arose from below, But only moves with the moving eye, Flying along the land and the main— Why should it look like Maud? Am I to be overawed By what I cannot but know Is a juggle bom of the brain? (II, 81-90)

In Section III the speaker then tries to console himself

this ways

Courage, poor heart of stone! I will not ask thee why Thou canst not understand That thou art left for ever alone: Courage, poor stupid heart of stone.-- Or if I ask thee why, Care not thou to reply: She is but dead, and the time is at hand When thou shalt more than die. (II, 132-140)

However, he continues to be disturbed by the loss of Maud and by the "phantom" of the mind which he describes in Section IV, the "0 that ’twere possible lyric," as flitting before him, in 123

ducing in him a "nameless fear," and being a "blot upon the

brain." The "shadow" vexes him so that he cannot dispel it

from his sight. Generated by his dysfunctioning faculties,

the chimera is a projection of his feelings of reprehensi-

bility and remorse. It is the speaker’s memories of the

death scene which provoke these misgivings. When these

memories trigger the realization that he will never "find

the arms of my true love/ Round me once again," he is

stirred by spasms of self-pity and regrets

Do I hear her sing as of old, My bird with the shining head, My own dove with the tender eye? But there rings on a sudden a passionate cry, There is some one dying or dead, And a sullen thunder is rolled; For a tumult shakes the city, And I wake, my dream is fled; In the shuddering dawn, behold, Without knowledge, without pity, By the curtains of my bed That abiding phantom cold.

Get thee hence, nor come again, Mix not memory with doubt, Pass, thou deathlike type of pain, Pass and cease to move about! ’Tis the blot upon the brain That will show itself without.

Through the hubbub of the market I steal, a wasted frame, It crosses here, it crosses there, Through all that crowd confused and loud, The shadow still the same; And on my heavy eyelids My anguish hangs like shame. (II, 184-201, 208-214)

Similar hallucinations perplex the speaker in Section

V, the poem’s mad scene. However, now the narrator is in 124

a madhouse where he believes that he is buried in a shallow

grave and that horses are hurrying by overhead. Although

his talk here is that of a raving madman, much of what he

says also derives from his bitter memories of how he had

lost Maud’s love:

Nothing but idiot gabble! For the prophecy given of old And then not understood, Has come to pass as foretold; Not let any man think for the public good, But babble, merely for babble. For I never whispered a private affair Within the hearing of cat or mouse, No, not to myself in the closet alone, But I heard it shouted at once from the top of the house; Everything came to be known. Who told him we were there?

she is standing here at my head; Not beautiful now, not even kind; He may take her now; for she never speaks her mind, But is ever the one thing silent here. She is not of us, as I divine; She comes from another stiller world of the dead, Stiller, not fairer than mine.

But I know where a garden grows, Fairer than aught in the world beside, All made up of the lily and rose That blow by night, when the season is good, To the sounds of dancing music and flutes: It is only flowers, they had no fruits, And I almost fear they are not roses, but blood.

0 me, why have they not buried me deep emough? Is it kind to have made me a grave so rough, Me, that was never a quiet sleeper? (II, 279-290, 303-316, 334-336)

And in Part III, too, the railing exhibits a similarly close

link with the complex of pre-deportation experiences. Out

of the madhouse and once again sound of mind, the speaker 125

indicates that he is ready to do something positive to prevent commerce from continuing to be "all in all" (III,

23). Wanting to participate in the effort to combat the age’s social crimes, he briefly expresses the wish here to abrogate the villainy which in Part I he denounced in ex­

tensive detail:

My life has crept so long on a broken wing Through cells of madness, haunts of horror and fear, That I come to be grateful at last for a little thing: My mood is changed.

I wake to the higher aims Of a land that has lost for a little her lust of gold, And love of a peace that was full of wrongs and shames, Horrible, hateful, monstrous, not to be told. (Ill, 1-4, 38-41) and:

Let it flame or fade, and the war roll down like a wind, We have proved we have hearts in a cause, we are noble still, And myself have awaked, as it seems, to the better mind; It is better to fight for the good than to rail at the ill. (Ill, 54-57)

What led Tennyson purposely to create such an emotional protagonist? Probably he was striving to emulate the con­ ventions of the day, especially the popular and successful convention of the high-strung Spasmodic protagonist who was characterized by the use of a language of farflung exaggera­ tions.11 Also, Tennyson may have chosen to create such an emotional narrator in Maud because of his success with the excitable hero of "Locksley Hall" (which after the initially cool reception of the 1842 poems had gained considerable pop- 126

ularity). As for why Maud was received less than favorably

upon publication, this does not seem to have been due prin­

cipally to the Victorian public's disenchantment with or

misunderstanding of the emotional element in the poem.

Tennyson's hero was recognized as a conventional figure in

the tradition of the suffering and confessional Byronic-

Spasmodic protagonist. The Victorian reading public un­

derstood the type because of the popularity during the

forties and the first half of the fifties of characters

such as Festus, Gerald, Walter, and Balder in the Spasmodic poems of Philip Bailey, John Marston, Alexander Smith, and

Sydney Dobell. What Tennyson's contemporary audience dis­

liked in Maud was mainly the hero's attitudes toward war and commerce. Tennyson himself, on the other hand, blamed

the "Monodrama's" poor reception on the inability of people to read the poem properly; and in later editions he made changes in the text to make the story more comprehen­ sible. However, he never altered his opinion about Maud's being one of his best and favorite poems.

The trouble Tennyson's audience had in understanding the poem resulted from the omissions, gaps, and sharp tran­ sitions in the story—not from the emotional element. As

Steane has said, Tennyson makes the reader of Maud work.

"We are not always told in so many words what has happened or where we ares the fact of Maud's death, for example, is 12 not made explicit, but has to be conjectured." 127

Although Tennyson's hero, as we have seen, does at times

rant, these times are localized: in I, 21-52 and I, 120-149

he does so because he has just learned of his father’s having

been swindled and is excoriating the "Civil war" conditions

which he considers to be raging in these days of "plunder

and prey"; and in III, 15-18 he does so because he is con­

sidering enlisting in the Crimean War and is reiterating his

scorn for the false peace of the times; as for his madhouse

ravings in Part II (240-342), these do not seem especially to

have upset Tennyson’s contemporary readers—at least not near­

ly as much as did the opinions on war and economics, which

were unquestionably the two chief sources of contemporary

outrage with the poem. Further, to locate the sections in

which the emotional outbursts occur is to realize that Maud

is not filled start to finish with either frenzied social in­

vective or feverish emotional turbulence. The passages of

social invective make up a small percentage of the poem's

total content; and the passages of excited emotional ebul-

lience--those sections where the hero expresses an intense yearning, anxiety, or exultation over Maud as the object of his desires—are not frenzied or distraught. The madhouse passages are, but this, as we have seen, is because they are clearly meant to be the insane ravings of a mentally disturbed man. Moreover, one notes that throughout the poem the narrator’s retaliatory statements tend to come and pass, as we might expect, in moments of defeat and setback, mo- 128

merits such as when the alien suitor comes on the scene in I,

X, when in exile the narrator thinks hack to what could have

been in II, I-IV, and when in the madhouse he thinks about

the mixed-up world outside in II, V. Hence, the emotions

of Maud are purposely diversified by Tennyson both according

to kind and degree. At times they run smoothly and at times

they are intended to be grating. Their fluctuations are tied

to Tennyson's shifts of purpose and technique. So under­

stood, Maud's emotion can be regarded as consciously employed

and carefully constrained. As Jerome Buckley has asserted,

"the verse throughout, for all its onrush of sentiment, is

calculated and controlled with great discretion."

The question of disproportionate emotion is one of

whether Tennyson has provided sufficient dramatic basis for

the reader to sympathize with the poem's emotional hero.

Those who say that this cannot be done tend to point to the

opening section of Part I and to decry the protagonist's dis­

enchanting cynicism and egotistical outlook. But if one re­

cognizes that there is considerable motivation behind this early sullenness, then one can probably have a true concern for the hero and his predicament. Tennyson arouses such an interest and curiosity in the reader at the poem's outset by having the hero issue the jarring proclamation, "I hate the dreadful hollow behind the little wood/ Its lips in the field above are dabbed with blood-red heath" (I, 1-2). This strange and dramatic opening line is then followed by a 129

bloody description of how the hero's father had gone to his

sudden and violent deaths

For there in the ghastly pit long since a body was found, His who had given me life—0 father! 0 God! was it well? — Mangled, and flattened, and crushed, and dinted into the grounds There yet lies the rock that fell with him when he fell.

Did he fling himself down? who knows? for a vast speculation had failed, And ever he muttered and maddened, and ever wanned with despair, And out he walked when the wind like a broken worldling wailed, And the flying gold of the ruined woodlands drove through the air.

I remember the time, for the roots of my hair were stirred By a shuffled step, by a dead weight trailed, by a whispered fright, And my pulses closed their gates with a shock on my heart as I heard The shrill-edged shriek of a mother divide the shuddering night. Villainy somewhere! whose? One says, we are villains all. Not he: his honest fame should at least by me be maintained: But that old man, now lord of the broad estate and the Hall, Dropt off gorged from a scheme that had left us flaccid and drained. (I, 5-20)

Such an opening serves to shock and startle the reader— exactly as Tennyson intended it to do. It conveys the hero's sense of shock to a shocked reader, and it intimates how the hero is seeking to cope with the unsettling news of his father's suicide. Like "the harsh clang of a gong," it makes the reader aware that someone is addressing him in a 130

14 direct, assertive, and petulant voice. The lines draw

the reader immediately into the core experience of the poem and contain the kernel of the situation which is

later developed in the rest of the "Monodrama." The poem’s first line works to accomplish this in a way sim­ ilar to the openings one finds in the love poetry of John

Donne. One recalls, for instance, the dramatic opening of

"The Canonization" where Donne's speaker addresses his friend with the words, "For God's sake hold your tongue, and let me love." Donne’s reader is similarly startled and provided with the kernel of the experience which "The

Canonization" develops.

As for whether the hero’s selfishness and sullenness are sufficiently motivated at the poem’s start by the news of his father’s suicide, it can be shown that they pro­ bably are by considering the symbolic overtones which Tenny­ son imparts to the delineation of the death. In the opening description of the father’s plunge into the dreadful hollow,

Tennyson suggests, as James Walton has observed, an aura of the "primal scene" and prepares the reader for the emotions related to the facts of the hero’s "bereavement and of his attraction for the daughter of his father’s enemy.The circumstances of the father's death have, as Walton notes,

"a complex effect" on the hero’s feelings:

The son’s immediate response to the suicide is composed of feelings other than pure grief and rage against his father’s enemies. He recalls 131

with loathing his father’s violent behavior be­ fore the event, becomes terrified that he will follow the same pattern, and continues to think of the dead man as his successful rival for his mother's love.1“

In the poem these lines make this clears

What! am I raging alone as my father raged in his mood? Must I too creep to the hollow and dash myself down and die Rather than hold by the law that I made, nevermore to brood On a horror of shattered limbs and a wretched swindler's lie?

Would there be sorrow for me? there was love in the passionate shriek, Love for the silent thing that had made false haste to the grave— (I, 53-58)

Further, as G. Robert Stange has recognized, there is

in stanza four "a subterranean suggestion that the present 17 self of the hero came to birth with the death of his father."

The description contains "standard birth images. The roots of

the young man’s hair were stirred, and he heard ’the shrill-

edged shriek of a mother divide the shuddering night.’"

The stanza’s last image may be associated "with the cry of

labor" and conduces "to the most important pattern of the poems the description of a stage of life marked by suffering

and madness followed by a very implicitly suggested symbolic 18 death and the emergence into a new life of social meaning."

Moreover, in stanza five there is a hint that the hero’s

father "was villainously murdered by the profiteering father

of Maud, but this idea is never actually stated in the poem."

Though we later learn that the father took his own life, the 132

leaving of the circumstances so enigmatic at this point

is especially effective in suggesting that "in the tor­

tured mind of the young man" the death "tends to be a

result of the malignancy of his society and of nature itself."19

Once drawn into the poem by its startling opening

and once made curious about these strange motivations,

the careful reader becomes caught up in the excitement

of the speaker as he contemplates vzinning and attempts

to win Maud's love in lyrics such as the following:

Birds in the high Hall-garden When twilight was falling, Maud, Maud, Maud, Maud, They were crying and calling.

Where was Maud? in our wood; And I, who else, was with her, Gathering woodland lilies, Myriads blow together.

Birds in our wood sang Ringing through the valleys, Maud is here, here, here In among the lilies.

I kissed her slender hand, She took the kiss sedately; Maud is not seventeen, But she is tall and stately. (I, 412-417) and:

Maud has a garden of roses And lilies fair on a lawn; There she walks in her state And tends upon bed and bower, And thither I climbed at dawn And stood by her garden-gate; A lion ramps at the top, He is claspt by a passion-flower. 133

The fancy flattered my mind, And again seemed overbold; Now I thought that she cared for me, Now I thought she was kind Only because she was cold. (I, 489-496, 511-515)

These feelings are credible and understandable. For as he

falls in love with Maud, the narrator gradually outgrows his

cynicism and becomes an interesting and engaging character; and as the reader shares in the experiences which spur these shifting moods, he follows with enthusiasm the trials through which the narrator passes. These include, of course, his several meetings with Maud and the anxiety and frustration; which he feels as he waits for his lover to join him in the garden near the end of Part Is

Queen rose of the rosebud garden of girls, Come hither, the dances are done, In gloss of satin and glimmer of pearls, Queen lily and rose in one; Shine out, little head, sunning over with curls, To the flowers, and be their sun.

She is coming, my own, my sweet; Were it ever so airy a tread, My heart would hear her and beat, Were it earth in an earthy bed; My dust would hear her and beat, Had I lain for a century dead; Would start and tremble under her feet, And blossom in purple and red. (I, 902-907, 916-923)

The reader shares emotionally in each of these experi­ ences. Then through Part II we pursue with further interest and concern the predicament of the hero as he recalls in exile 134

how he had killed Maud’s brother in the duel and as he

reports his feelings from the madhouse during his struggle

with insanity. Then when the hero emerges from his mad­

house sojourn, the probable response of the reader is a sigh

of relief for the hero’s having secured a healthier frame

of mind—even if this empathy is then cut short for some

by the speaker's decision to fight in the Crimean War.

Hence, it would seem that for the most part the careful

reader of Maud probably can sympathize and identify with

the protagonist of the poem. And it would seem true that

the hero's strong feelings at the poem's start are suf­

ficiently motivated and are not disproportionate to the

incentives for those sentiments.

What now can be said of the objections some critics have raised against Maud's sections of social invective?

Presumably it is in these portions of the poem where the frenzy grows most intense; supposedly it is here where the speaker's voice takes on almost a declamatory shrill­ ness which seems to weaken what otherwise is effective social indictment. That this happens to some extent would seem to have to be conceded. And that the hero's

"diatribes against a corrupt society" are, as Rader says,

"a heightened version of thejpoet'sj bitter railings at the world so often reported in the forties by Tennyson's 20 friends" seems, as previously noted, also probable. Yet the hero's emotional attacks on the spirit of gain running 135

rampant in the mid-Victorian age cannot he simply and wholly

categorized as excessive and unrestrained. For many of the poem’s passages of vivid social criticism are regulated and

controlled in accordance with the functional purposes for which Tennyson utilizes them. As Philip Drew has emphasized

in a recent article about Maud, "the passages of rancorous

overstatement need not be taken as evidence of lack of con­

trol on Tennyson’s part but may fairly be ascribed to a deliberate attempt" to depict a distraught state of mind.

"The unbalanced tone of the first four sections can be reasonably accounted for on grounds of dramatic verisimiltude, that is to say, the lack of balance is the hero’s lack of 21 balance. . . ." The expression in these sections is

"distorted for purposes of characterization, and yet is sufficiently documentary—in the manner of the social novel- 22 ists of the time—to achieve an objective statement."

Furthermore, the tone of the entire poem, no matter what the subject, reflects the state of the protagonist’s emotions, both as a personality and at the time he is going through a particular experience. Like Hamlet, the narrator of Maud is "a ’man of wild and whirling words’ who moves with be­ wildering rapidity from dark melancholy to an unnatural hilarity, from freaks of violence to freaks of madness, who plays role after role. . . ."25 His excoriation of the mercantile ethic is a symptom of his madness, and the so­ ciety against which he rails is an integral part of the 136

24 poem’s dramatic situation.

Most of the social passages of Maud, indeed, are excep­

tionally intense; but few can be legitimately labeled as

either digressive or hysterical. Rantings and ravings which come from a character who rants and raves are in accord with the classical principle of decorum—the adjust­ ment of the tone to the speaker. In Maud the "railing quality of the reflections, the violence and the shift of attention," develop the sensibility of the hero and "affirm his instability."2-’ Also, it can be said that the strange imagery Tennyson uses to delineate the hero’s distorted per­ sonality "gives a very impressive sense of paranoid reaction.

The whole universe seems to be antagonistic to the hero; if nature is seen in the image of vicious humanity, men are conceived as animals: Maud’s father, for example, is com­ pared to a leech who ’Dropt off gorged from a scheme that left us flaccid and drained.*"

So the social invective would seem to be artistically done. In fact, as Peter Bayne noted several decades ago, sections IX-XII of Part I, which begin with the speaker’s declaration that peace is "sitting under her olive and slurring the days gone by" while "the poor are hovelled and hustled together" and while "only the ledger lives," may

"take rank with the most picturesque invectives uttered by

Hood in verse or Carlyle in prose, against our poor nine- 27 teenth century." 1 Bayne also seems correct in saying that 137

sections XIV, XV, and XVI of Part I are "noble" and "per- OQ fectly attuned to the context." They serve the practical function of telling the reader that the speaker’s father did not die accidentally nor was he murdered, but rather he com­ mitted suicide by dashing himself down amongst the rocks of the hollow.

Also, it can be pointed out that many of the verses of

Part I which have been characterized as shrill and excessive do not seem nearly so much so when one realizes how effec­ tively Tennyson utilizes the pathetic fallacy therein.

Throughout Part I of Maud one finds Tennyson imparting "prodigality to the crocus, cruelty to sea-foam, £andj speech

29 to lilies and roses." 7 It is Tennyson’s technique in Maud to invest nature with "a sentient physical body" and to make 30 "natural objects reflect the morbid feelings of the hero."7

Ruskin praised Tennyson’s line about the "sere leaves of autumn" for this reason, noting that it is "an exquisite in­ stance of the pathetic fallacy" spoken as it is by one "rush­ ing about the woods in frantic despair" and by one to whom

"the leaves take on the semblance of flying gold." For Ruskin, the hero’s excitement seemed "great enough to render the trans- 31 formation ’just and true.’"7 The image in the opening stanza of the "dreadful hollow" with its "red-ribbed ledges" dripping "a silent horror of blood" does the same. In fact, it is this startling image which establishes Tennyson’s use of the pathetic fallacy throughout Maud. As Bayne has itemized 138

them, many of the numerous instances of Tennyson’s use of the

pathetic fallacy may be summarized as follows:

In the first verse things so tenderly sweet as blooming heather, and so delicately beautiful as lichened rock, are bathed in blood; in the third, the falling leaves become gold, swept from the bankrupt branches by the blast of ruin; further on, we hear the scream of a mad­ dened beach dragged down by the wave; the gale as a ruffian, catching and cuffing ‘the budded peaks of the wood’: and then, as circumstances change the birds cry, and call ‘Maud, Maud, Maud, Maud’; the stars look down in new brightness of sympathetic splendor; the larches and pines are ’perky’ about a rival’s castle; and roses, lilies, larkspurs, passion-flowers, weeping, listening, crying, all become vivaciously alive-in the presence or expectation of the lady.

Each of these examples of pathetic;fallacy while a

modification of actual fact indicates the action of the hero’s

mind. In each case Tennyson shows external reality to be

"an extension of the young man’s mind, and all nature is suffused with his distorted fancies."33 Two further

examples may also be noted. One of these occurs in Part I

when the speaker describes how while "walking in a wintry

wind" he found the "shining daffodil dead, and Orion low in

his grave" (I, 100-101). In fact, however, the condition of

the constellation’s setting indicates the season to be

spring, the time of new life—not death. Yet because the

hero at this point in the poem is still in his morbid des­ pondency, because he "exists at this time in a state of death

in life," all nature "represents death to his mind."^

Significantly, the Orion image appears again at the close

of the poem. There "the Charioteer/ And starry Gemini hang 139

like glorious crowns/ Over Orion’s grave low down in the west"

(III, 6-8). That the?hero in the concluding scene contem­ plates Orion as being "crowned" by the constellations above it seems to symbolize the life of glory and self- sacrifice to which he ultimately pledges himself in Part III.

The second example occurs not long after the initial Orion image in Part I when the speaker contemplates "the whole little wood where he sits" as "a world of plunder and prey" and describes in these terms what he is convinced is the cruel malignancy of nature:

For nature is one with rapine, a harm no preacher can heal; The Mayfly is tom by the swallow, the sparrow speared by the shrike. (I, 123-124)

What is significant, of course, about Tennyson’s use of the pathetic fallacy in Part I in the sections of social in­ vective and elsewhere is that it is directly related to the hero’s neurosis. As Philip Drew has commented, "it is clear that the alliteration and the pathetic fallacy and the over- energetic vocabulary of the poem’s opening sections are not heedlessly employed, but fairly characterize a state of bit­ 's z temess bordering on insanity."As for the social sec­ tions themselves, there should be no question but that they are, as previously mentioned, closely connected with the poem’s essential purpose, which is the delineation of the mind of the hero—a mind made sick by the experiencing of a father’s bloody death and a mind made acutely apprehensive about the social sickness of the times. The invective is, 140

thus, not a series of digressive fits or "magnified isolated

emotions" in the Spasmodic vein; it is not a series of "em­

broidered random sentiments often quite irrelevant to the given mood"^6 of the kind one finds in the poetry of the

Spasmodic School. Rather, the invective is intricately asso­

ciated with the presentation of the speaker’s psychological

condition; it is an aspect of the morbid phase of passion

through which he is passing at this stage of the poem. It is

directly related to the representation in the early scenes of

Maud of the hero’s feeling that he is, as Valerie Pitt has

said, "wrecked or nearly wrecked by the unnatural state of

community given over to the catch-phrase ’Damn you Jack, I’m 37 alright.”' It is directly connected with the showing of

the hero to be sick with an egocentricity; this attitude of

self-concern is in turn shown to be the widespread disease

of the age—a disease Tennyson seems to suggest to be the di­

rect result of the kind of social situation one finds analyzed

in Carlyle’s Past and Present. This social self-seeking is

characterized, that is, as thrusting the nation into a peri­

lous state of exigency where the bonds which had once linked men together in a spirit of paternalism have now been severed by a ruthless desire for cash. For these reasons the emotion of Maud’s social sections while more high-pitched than else­ where (with the exception of the equally frenzied sentiments of the madhouse sections of Part II) should not be regarded as the poet’s hysterical, wild, and uncontrolled ranting. 141

Tennyson’s purposes clearly reveal it to be highly con­

trolled.

Throughout Maud the thought and feeling are appropriate

to the context. Tennyson’s ideas participate fully, in­

tensely, and immediately in the poetry of the "Monodrama."

He combines his ideas with his images meaningfully and main­ tains unity of form and substance. The poetry of Maud is

sharp and real. Tennyson's shifts of tone, dramatic frame, abrupt transitions, and gaps in thought all contribute to the richness of his effects. With a texture that has been ap­ praised as "finely conceived" and "subtly enunciated,"3® the "Monodrama" has precision of poetic image and complexity of poetic organization. Its "differently colored poetic pas­ tels," or "juxtaposition of factual and fantastic poetic sec­ tions," are joined "in lightning flash fashion"39 by a sequence of actively interwoven image patterns which spontaneously carry the poem's meaning. On the whole, the narrative element is thin. There is, for instance, considerably less narrative in Maud than in The Princess. In Maud the sense is spread through the separate poems by having each explore a moment in the psychic life of the speaker or central consciousness.

Maud seldom capsizes capriciously into billows of exposition or swells of lucid loveliness. Rather, Tennyson's expression in Maud is firmly managed. He makes his reader into, as

Coleridge said, "an active creative being"—that is, he in­ volves him and causes him to participate in the experience of 142

4o the poem. His imagery is clear, concentrated, disciplined,

and complicated. The more one tracks down its implications,

the richer becomes the meaning of the poem. This is to say

that we can respond to the "value of feeling" in Maud. For

it has what the modernist would call emotional intensity. It

has, as Allen Tate defines this formalist concept, "repeti­

tion of sound and sense, the contrast or comparison of part

with other parts or with the whole, and the interfusion of 4l sense and feeling into each part simultaneously." It also

has what T. E. Hulme indicates in this theoretical disputa­

tion to be the essentials of intensity:

A powerful and imaginative mind seizes and combines at the same instant all the important ideas of its poem or picture, and while it works with one of them, it is at the same instant working and modifying all in their relation to it—as the motion of the snake’s belly goes through all parts at once and its volition actsr? at the same instant in coils which go contrary ways.

Maud contains just such an ongoing process. In Maud there is

"a combination of positive and negative emotions: an intensely strong attraction toward beauty and an equally intense fas­ cination by the ugliness which is contrasted with it and 43 which destroys it." J In Maud Tennyson reconciles the con­ tinuously oscillating attitudes of love and hate and the con­ stantly fluctuating tones of concord and cacophony. Further, one struggles in Maud to comprehend the following elements which I.. A. Richards regards as constituting intensity:

"meanings lurking in obscurities of various sorts, . . . pro­ saic or even antipoetic terms, startling contrasts of various 143

sorts and variations in tone, and a compromise with the rhy- 44 thms of prose." It would seem that Tennyson wrote Maud with

just such a "free rein." The "Monodrama" is "an expression of

personality, raging in a fierce exclamatory kind of verse,

swooning ecstatically in long lines, or tripping along daintily in short ones as the mood takes it."^5 Also, the

hero in Maud is constantly changing as he passes through each

"mood, gust of feeling, and psychological posture. The verse

form of each poem fits its needs and faithfully reflects this 46 inner nature." And Maud * s rhythms are entirely flexible,

serving the needs of each moment of feeling by taking on its

character, from the lyrical babble of ’Go not, happy day' to 47 the beat of madness." '

Moreover, Maud may be said to radiate emotional intensi­

ty in two additional ways. It possesses that tension which

Gerhard Joseph refers to as the occidental duality between the

expression of romantic sensuous love and the expression of the 48 contrary spiritual love of evangelical Christianity. This

is manifested in Maud in the poem’s lily and rose imagery

and in the hero’s changing attitudes toward Maud as a sensu­

ous and seductive figure at some junctures and as an ethereal

and maternal form at others. It also possesses that aspect

of emotional tension which has frequently led critics to see

Maud as the turning point in Tennyson's career and as the

culmination of his art. This is the duality between the poem's

expression of subjective lyricism and its expression of ob­ 144

jective social commentary. Such a mixture, which would

never again appear in Tennyson's work, was the duality of

the Spasmodic impulse (the commitment to the charting of the

inner consciousness) and of the sociological aesthetic (the

commitment to the role of social critic). This was the "ten­

sion between the insight of the solitary and the sense of 49 the common and social." 7

In Rader's course of contending that Maud * s "hidden

emotional dimension" is the poem's chief imperfection, there

is no consideration given to either Tennyson's use of the

pathetic fallacy or to his probable indebtedness to the Spas­

modic poets. That such a latter influence existed not only

helps to explain why Tennyson saw fit to employ consciously

such an emotional protagonist but also to understand why he

wrote Maud in the form which he did. There is no question

that Maud is Spasmodic in the peculiarity of its emotion, in

its bitter declamations, in its rebellious accent, in the

strangeness of its imagery, and in the remarkable fluctua­

tions of its metrics. Further, like Bailey's Festus, Mar­

ston's Gerald, Smith's Walter, Dobell's Balder, and Byron's

Ghilde Harold before them, Tennyson's confessional hero con­

tains much of what typically went into the conventional Ro­ mantic rebel. His self-pitying, Wertherian sensibility is

characteristic of the Byronic-Spasmodic consciousness in its

struggle with the decision not to participate in the work of

society but rather to reject the claims of the world. 145

W. E. Aytoun had coined the term "spasmodic" in an ef­

fort to attack the extravagance he saw in the works of Smith and Dobell. In 1854 Aytoun wrote a popular burlesque poem called FirmiIlian in which he parodied the emotional elements of contemporary poets. According to Hugh Walker, "What Aytoun condemned in them was the confession and inequality and extra­ vagance of their work, the passion piled on passion, its thought disjointed from thought, the rant and fustian of the style, the lavishly sprinkled and over-wrought metaphors."

From the publication of Bailey’s Festus in 1839» the

Spasmodics enjoyed more than a decade of extreme popularity in England. It has been said that "they rose to fame almost 61 as rapidly as Byron";-7 strangely, they declined from public favor just as suddenly. As Buckley has noted in his chapter on the Spasmodic poets in The Victorian Temper, Festus "car­ ried the reputation of a Victorian Goethe through edition 52 after edition."-^ Though uneven, irregular in form, and filled with a mixture of "purple patches" and "deserts of 53 vast verbosity," Bailey’s forty-thousand-line poem-7-7 received considerable acclaim for its "torrential cascades of emotion,"

"highly wrought rhetoric," and "flashes of metaphoric light­ ning. Three years later Marston published Gerald (1842) whose avowed purpose was to "consciously explore moments of high passion" and "to illuminate certain points in Gerald’s mental history." Though its plot slights the "logic of structure with nonchalant indifference," Gerald remains his­ 146

torically important," notes Buckley, because it is "an early example of the Spasmodic approach to social problems."55

Further, it has additional significance because of a foot­

note Marston appended to the poem’s second act explaining

his intention to experiment with "a new technique, later to be imitated by Dobell and Smith and even by Tennyson."58 The

note contains Marston’s distinction "between the soliloquy

and the reverie, the latter of which

he reserved for ’thoughts which one would scarcely ex­ press in language to oneself—far less to another-- involuntary thoughts by which the mind is borne along without any conscious efforts of its own.’ Developed in such terms, the reverie . . . anticipated the method by which the lyric drama or monodrama would become a vehicle for the projection of psychological values, for the poeticizing of subjective experience or private intuitions. '

In 1852 followed Alexander Smith’s 139-Page A Life-

Drama which also received a tremendously popular reception.

According to Buckley, "No poem since Childe Harold had won its author such acclaim."58 Walter, the protagonist of

Smith’s poem, is a typically gloomy and Byronic character; he "strains after fanciful images and lurid descriptions,"

saluting "’the passion-panting sea,’" and "watching ’the

unveiled beauty of the stars, like a hungry soul.* His im­ pulsive courting of the lovely Violet is marred by a fierce

sensualism that repels the lady and shocks his own finer sensibilities."59 The movement of the Life-Drama, as Mark

Weinstein comments in his recent study of the Spasmodic

Controversy, "is away from Spasmodic individuality and toward 147

social responsibility: Walter violates Violet, wanders a-

lone, writes a great poem, rejoins Violet, and accepts the world."60 Then in the poem’s last two pages he decides to

go forth to perform "Great duties," proclaiming "Gome*./ Let us go in together."61

Sydney Dobell’s Balder, finally, was published during

the last week of 1853; Balder is considered to be "the most

inchoate of all Spasmodic tragedies." It, too, depicts a

character trapped in "the wells of self-analysis," one who has "experienced most deeply the romantic mal du siecle."^2

It is, as Edmund Gosse has said, "a shapeless drama in

forty-one scenes of blank verse" with "practically only two

persons in it"—the hero and his wife. "There is no action

whatever, but the personages indulge in vast monologues of

self-analysis,"Still, notes Gosse,

while it has every fault, it has one redeeming fea­ ture—it is instinct with beauty. In the first place, Dobell was a master of prosody; no bad verse can be pointed out in Balder. In the second place, although the plot is so thin and foolish, the lan­ guage often timid and wearisome, the embroidery of images and symbols exaggerated to the last degree, it yet possesses what Mr. Oliver Elton admirably defines as 'the unseizable rainbow guality' which distinguishes good poetry from bad.

Hence, while Dobell "thought and wrote by spasms," there Z r "is a magnificent energy in these spasms." As Buckley tells us, Balder lives in "an 'old tower gloomy and ruinous,"' and is "tom by the half-awakened social consciousness that in­ vaded the metaphysical dreams of all Spasmodics." Further, 148

Balder’s "one gesture of assertion," the mercy killing of his

insane wife Amy, seems to he actually only a "vain protest 66 against the common paralysis of inaction." With the pub­

lication of Dobell's Balder, the critical tide turned swiftly

against the Spasmodic School. When Balder appeared, notes 67 Weinstein, the poem "so shocked Victorian readers" ' that

Dobell added a preface to the second edition defending him­

self. In this preface he explained his intention "to por­ tray in three parts [two of which were yet to be published]

the progress ’of a doubtful mind to a faithful mind.’" Fur­

ther, he asserted, the published first part "presents merely Zp •the egotistic hero of isolation and doubt.’" ' The latter

two parts of Dobell’s poem were never completed principally

because of the abrupt change of taste on the part of Victori­

an readers. Though it seems probable that Tennyson could not

have expected it as he worked on Maud between 1854 and 1855» 69 Balder marked "the culmination of Spasmodic art." 7 With

Balder the popularity of Spasmodic poetry met Its demise;

that it did partially explains the reception that Maud re­

ceived when published in July of 1855« Actually, both situa­

tions seem to have been significantly related to a general

change in Victorian literary tastes. As W. L. Burn says in

The Age of Equipoise, "By the beginning of the fifties Eng­

land was becoming a little tired of being 'improved' and an­ noyed with the improvers. It was willing to take things, or

some things, rather more easily. Chadwick's official career 149

70 came to an end in 1854."' If one reviews the course of mid-

Victorian fiction over these years, for instance, one finds that the novels of the fifties and sixties were "more con­

cerned with the effects of particular beliefs and practices on individual minds, . . . and they were paying much more at­ tention to the love affairs of their characters." On the other hand, the novels of the thirties and forties had been much more "controversial ‘in their belligerent tone, in their subordination of story to sermon, [and inj their method of constructing characters to argue and situations to illus- 71 trate.’"' Hence, as Bum aptly explains,

so far as changes of opinion can be traced through changing tastes in fiction (and the reading of fiction had become one of the major national occupations) there was something of a shrinking in the fifties and the six­ ties from the extremes of ‘high’ and ’low’ life, a ten­ dency to forget the past in the present, a preference for being amused, interested and excited rather than for having the conscience stirred or the mind deepened bv the contemplation of social and political problems.?2

Thus, the situation of changing literary tastes around

1855 is a significant one, and the reaction against Spasmodic poetry is startling. The latter is all the more remarkable when one realizes that the Spasmodics continued to be regarded with considerable respect as late as 1853. One can surmise that Tennyson as he worked away on Maud in 1854 viewed the re­ action to Balder as simply the public’s hostile response to a poor poem done in the still prevailing taste—a situation he believed he could probably reverse with his more moderate, more carefully done, and more cautiously controlled "Monodrama." 150

That Tennyson knew and respected the Spasmodic poets is

clear. To paraphrase Gosse, he worshipped with the Spas­

modics in 1854 at their shrine to Apollo.Thus, it seems

likely that in Maud he sought to continue what at the time

still seemed to he a popular tradition. Tennyson probably

felt, furthermore, that his Spasmodic "Monodrama" would sur­

pass the works of Bailey, Marston, Smith, and Dobell in most

if not in all respects. For evidence of Tennyson's admira­

tion of the Spasmodics, one can cite the poet's recorded

opinions on Bailey and Dobell and certify that he had read

the works of Marston and Smith. This enthusiastic opinion

of Tennyson on Festus, for example, was quoted in the pub­

lisher's notices: "I can scarcely trust myself to say how 7 & much I admire it, for fear of falling into extravagance."'

Sir Charles echoes this estimate, noting how in 1846 Tennyson

was "expressing great admiration" for Bailey's poem which

the laureate "declared contained many grand things—grander

than anything he himself had written." Also Sir Charles notes how

At one dinner-party [in 1846J the company, who doubted his sincerity, not knowing his singular magnanimity about the works of his contemporaries, challenged him to repeat a line of Bailey's poem, whereupon he si­ lenced criticism by quoting: There came a hand between the sun and us And its five fingers made five nights in air.'7

Additionally, there is this statement in Tennyson’s letter to

FitzGerald in 1846 which as quoted in the Memoir reads: "I have got Festus; order it and read. You will most likely 151

find it a great bore, but there are really very grand things in Festus.”?6

Regarding Tennyson’s opinion of the work of Alexander

Smith, the Memoir records that he considered Smith to be a

poet with "plenty of promise," though he criticized his too

extensive use of the pathetic fallacy.'' Also relating to

Tennyson’s estimate of Smith, there is a recently discovered

piece of reminiscence just published in the Tennyson Research

Bulletin. The reminiscence describes an accidental meeting

between W. W. Mitchell and Tennyson in October of 1857 aboard

a tourist boat in Scotland. Mr. Mitchell refers to a conver­

sation he had with the poet on the boat with these two sen­

tences: "Our chief topic of conversation turned upon the

spasmodic school of poetry, which at that time had been cre­

ating something of a sensation, and was generally censured by

those wielding the critical pen. The chief of the spasmodic

school was Alexander Smith, of whom the Laureate spoke in no laudatory terms."' As for Marston and Dobell, Tennyson was

familiar with the works of these men also. At Cheltenham in

1848, according to Sir Charles, Tennyson had met and become a

congenial friend of Dobell.'7 And according to Edmund Gosse,

"Tennyson not merely had a very genuine admiration for Do- Q bell’s poems, but was . . . positively influenced by them."

All of this indicates that Tennyson in Maud owes a siza­ ble debt to the Spasmodics and that Maud is extensively influ­

enced by the conventions of the Spasmodic School. Weinstein 152

believes that Tennyson’s admiration of the Spasmodics may

have determined the form of Maud. As he says,

Why should the laureate, at the height of his fame af­ ter the publication of In Memoriam and already at work ’on a poem about the enchantment of Merlin,’ suddenly start off in a new and strange direction? A Life- Drama was published in late 1852; Balder, in the last week of 1853; Tennyson dropped Merlin and began Maud in the summer of 1854. It seems reasonable to con­ clude that, on the one hand, Tennyson determined to surpass these anti-Tennysonians [SpasmodicsJ on their own terms, and, on the other hand, he hoped to take advantage of the contemporary popularity of their writings. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, he saw in their lyrical monodramas the form which would enable him to blend most perfectly his dramatic and lyrical gifts.81

While Maud owes much to the Spasmodic School of poetry,

it is, nevertheless, steps above the art of the Spasmodics.

Tennyson's poem has a precision of statement and clarity of

form that Spasmodic poetry lacks. Tennyson's "stringing together of lyrics on a narrative thread" in the "Monodrama" is a far "superior handling of the common material," and it gives Maud a much more closely knit structure than has any of the Spasmodic poems. Furthermore, Tennyson's lyrics in Maud

"express the fluctuating moods of the hero, vzhile those of the Spasmodic protagonists are often digressive. Similarly,

Tennyson's descriptions of nature in Maud reflect the speak­ er's state of mind, while the Spasmodics seem to delight in extravagant descriptions for their own sake. Thus Ruskin can choose two ’exquisite' instances of the pathetic fallacy from Maud, while Kingsley attacks Smith for his 'mere con- Op ceits.’" What this indicates is that the Spasmodic impulse 153

in Maud is carefully controlled. As John Reed and Philip

Drew, among others, have avowed, "the design of Maud is firm,"8^ -that is, the poem is "firmly enough organized to

contain its explosive mixture of powerful emotions and passion- 84 ate political rhetoric." For Tennyson establishes a "care­

ful linking of events"—the changes that occur are con­ vincingly accounted for in dramatic terms.8^

Also, it should be emphasized that Tennyson succeeds in

Maud in creating more than a mere sensibility. His hero at

least approaches the status of a dramatic character—one whose actions occur in a real world and whose motivations are consistent and credible. Tennyson, indeed, makes the hero as dramatic as he should for the kind of poem which Maud is. His hero is interesting and vividly delineated as he moves through the settings of wood, hollow, garden, Hall, seashore, and madhouse and as he boards ship for the Crimea at the end of 8 6 Part III. All of the poem’s settings are, as Steane has emphasized, "vividly parts of a conscientious artistic crea­ tion."87

If this much of Maud can be seen as the result of a con­ scious and controlled effort, what can be said, finally, about

Part III with its problematic war element? For Rader, there is "aesthetic imperfection" in Part III as a result of its being "an imaginative projection" of Tennyson’s "own still un­ resolved inner conflicts";88 for other critics, too, Part III has sometimes been regarded as the immoral ranting of a 154

89 warmonger. 7 There are 59 lines in Part III, the poem’s con­

cluding scene, which makes it especially slender in comparison

with the much longer first and second parts of Maud. Although

attenuated in this respect, Part III has never lacked at­

tention. When Tennyson’s poem was first published, it was

Part III with its philosophy of war which triggered the lar­

gest public stir. Victorian readers reacted with outrage to

the hero’s advocacy of war. They derided Tennyson's idea of

war as a tonic for domestic ills and made Part III the; focus

of the most violent criticism Maud received. Today the debate

still goes on. To tally the amount of rhetoric which has

been written in damnation or in defense of the war element is

to conclude that the critical dispute over the poem’s bother­

some ending has hardly abated. A recent sample of the disdain

which the war element has persistently provoked is the re­

sponse of Gerhard Joseph who notes that "Not only our own

recognition of the horrors of modern war but even the con­

temporary knowledge that the Crimean War was an international

•blunder' undercuts the historical and moral effectiveness of Tennyson's conclusion."9°

The action of Part III involves three things: the hero's

emerging from the madhouse, his vision of Maud, and his en­

listing for service in the Crimean War. The attitudes to­ ward war in Part III are twofold: first, it is the speaker’s

firm conviction that the era of peace just past has been a period "full of wrongs and shames" (III, 40)—a period during 155

which the "iron tyranny" of commerce has been "all in all"

(III, 20, 23); and secondly, it is the speaker’s firm con­

viction that "the banner of battle" (III, 51) now being un­

furled will awaken the nation "to the higher aims" (III, 38)

and will purge the people of their "lust of gold" (III, 39)-

Shortly after Part III begins, the hero declares, "My

mood is changed" (III, 4); a few lines later he describes

the vision he has had, saying how in it Maud "seemed to di­

vide in a dream from a band of the blest" and to speak to

him "of a hope for the world in the coming wars" (III, 10-11).

This, asserts the hero, has "lightened my despair" by leading

me to believe that "a war would arise in defense of the right"

(III, 18-19) and would no longer permit Peace to

Pipe on her pastoral hillock a languid note, And watch her harvest ripen, her herd increase, Nor the cannon-bullet rust on a slothful shore. (Ill, 24-26)

Cleaving "to a cause that I felt to be pure and true" (III,

31), the speaker declares a few lines further on, "It is time, it is time, 0 passionate heart" (III, 29), thereby com­ mitting himself to the cause of fighting for his country in the Crimean War. Next, we see him on board a battleship about to embark for the Crimea. From the ship’s "giant deck" he tells us that he has "mixt my breath/ With a loyal people shouting a battle cry" (III, 34-35)- Then several lines lat­ er as the ship pulls out from the dock for the "Black and Bal­ tic deep" (III, 51)» the hero announces that the "blood-red 156

blossom of war with a heart of fire" flames from the "death-

ful-grinning mouths" of the troops shipping out aboard this

ocean-going "fortress" (III, 52-53)»

In regard to the connection between these actions of

the hero and his attitudes toward war, it can be noted that

Tennyson depicts the protagonist of the poem as committed to

a cause of resistance; his actions are aimed at stemming

what he believes to be the Russian aggression in the Crimea,

Tennyson sketches his hero as taking pride in the cooperative

effort of his countrymen to cope with the Crimean menace. He

shows the hero as taking hope in the possibility of being

able to secure for himself some enduring peace of mind. The

sacrifice that the speaker is making is clearly motivated by his fervent expectation of solving permanently his fits of

solitary despair. Tennyson presents him as seeking his sal­ vation in this dedication to a noble cause. The speaker tells us that he has decided to cease railing "at the ill" and will commence fighting "for the good" (III, 57)« Thus, it can be said that Tennyson’s theme in Part III is the theme of "Moral

Regeneration through self-abnegation in a selfless and worthy cause of national service."7 Tennyson delineates the regen­ eration of the hero as a process involving the narrator’s realization that he must take action if such mental and social paralysis as have plagued him and his country in the past is to be overcome. In the activity of war, believes the narrator, one can find "a purpose to life which peace did not provide, 157

and though he is aware that many innocent folk will be

’crushed in the clash of jarring claims,’ he nevertheless

finds this preferable to 'a peace that was full of wrongs and shames.’"92 Hence, the speaker is characterized by Tennyson

as discovering a sense of brotherhood in war such as he had not previously known. This is clear from the poem’s final lines which represent the narrator as sharing a spirit of

fellowship with his countrymen and as committed to a common

cause. And it is such a spirit of national togetherness, suggests Tennyson, which the speaker wishes to see ultimately replace the ruthless self-interest and cash-nexus which have corrupted the country in the recent past. In Maud's last two lines, the hero proclaims, "I have felt with my native land, I am one with my kind/ I embrace the purpose of God, and the doom assigned" (III, 58-59)•

Do such actions and attitudes constitute, as Rader has contended, an "aesthetic imperfection" or are they, as others have concluded, the immoral ranting of a warmonger? The is­ sues are thorny, and they require careful thinking. In con­ sidering Rader’s contention, it can be said that it hinges on the question of whether Part III is "at bottom the poet’s own sublimation" and of whether Tennyson wrote it while in <53 "an extraordinary emotional situation,"7-7 as Rader claims.

To Rader, the deficiency of Part III is essentially the same one he sees existing throughout Maud; it is the condition of

Tennyson's having unconsciously imparted to the work a "hidden 158

emotional dimension." In Part III, says Rader, when Tenny­

son’s hero attacks "the tyrannical Czar," he is releasing "hy transference his own deeply repressed aggression."^

The present study has already shown that Tennyson hy 1853 was in the main free of the emotion from his earlier setbacks and

of the frustrations which had been connected with them. It has been already argued that while at Chapel House and Far­ ringford between 1853 and 1855» Tennyson was a far happier and more secure man than he had ever been before—one who had found in marriage and the Laureateship a fairly full measure of independence, security, and emotional maturity. Hence, the rejection of this allegation from Rader about the emo­ tional imperfection in Part III may be rested on what has been heretofore said.

As for the charge of warmongering, this also may be set aside firmly, though not by maintaining, as several critics have sought to do, that the hero’s regenerative hope should 9 5 be regarded ironically.7-7 To the contrary, the speaker’s attitude towards war should be viewed as that of Tennyson’s too. Indeed, Tennyson does seem to have "shared deeply his hero’s enthusiasm for the war" and does seem to have "believed 96 fervently in the moral efficacy of the public madness. . . . "7

Just as the views on commercialism in Parts I and II are

Tennyson’s, so, too, is the advocacy of war in Part III the poet’s. Just as Tennyson consciously employs the emotional element in the sections of social criticism, so too does he 159

stand behind the war element at the poem's close. But this

does not make Tennyson a warmonger. For Tennyson's philoso­

phy of war is moral. As Valerie Pitt has pointed out, Tenny­

son is "not glorifying war qua war, but war as a remedy for . 97 what he thought a worse disease." In war, Tennyson’s hero

sees "a sense of relationship: a sense that sacrifice and 98 loyalty are more important than the making of money."7

If a criticism is to be made of Part III, it should be

that Tennyson in the delineation of this final phase of

passion does not really "resolve his hero's dementia with

the same imaginative force with which he portrayed the stages

leading to it."77 Nor does he give himself sufficient space

in the brief fifty-nine lines of Part III with which to do

so. This, of course, is a proclivity common to many of

Tennyson's poems. One thinks, for instance, of the ending

to The Two Voices where the voice of gloom is suddenly over­

come by the speaker’s seeing a family on their way to Sunday

church services at the close of that earlier poem.

Still, there is a "symbolic rightness" to the "Monodra­ ma's" conclusion. Tennyson's use of the rebirth motif "is necessary for the exaltation of love hinted at in the Prologue and in psychological terms for the completion of the process which the poem symbolizes."100 Also, war not only is "the point of departure and the source of resolution,"101 It is throughout Maud "the expression of unreason in the self or the society, a restless passion which may be turned to good or 160

102 evil purpose." It Is part of the poem’s total design; and it is "thoroughly consistent" with the psychological pattern of the hero's character development. The hero’s

admiration of war and violence has been emphasized from the very beginning of the poem when he practically blames the family financial disgrace on peace. His participation in the war, moreover, satisfies his sense of guilt, for the Czar, whom he calls a 'great liar' (III, 45), is merely a projection of that wretched swindler, Maud's father; by fighting against the Czar-- he unconsciously seeks to avenge his father's death.

The hero has "associated violence and warfare" with Maud 104 throughout the poem. The themes of love and war were symbolically merged in I, V in Maud's martial ballad. It had been the ballad which first attracted the hero to Maud, and it is his vision of Maud in Part III which seems to result in his enlistment to serve in the Crimean War. Hence, the element of war can be regarded as interwoven into the total structure of Maud, and Tennyson may be credited with main­ taining a "tight control" over his materials right through to the poem's very closing.What the hero seeks in Part

III by dedicating himself to the Crimean cause is to purge himself completely of his spells of morbid despondency. What the hero learns in Part III is that "freedom involves commit­ ment, and concern, and an acceptance of violence to destroy the cash-based class-conscious regime which is hostile to love and the good of humanity." That Tennyson conveys such a "view of human activity" in Maud's final scene "cannot simply be dismissed on the grounds that the sentiments them- i nA selves are patently wrongheaded." l6l

By way of summary, let us now turn our efforts to a

review of what has been said in these chapters. At the

outset, it may be recalled, this study proposed to re­

examine Maud’s experiential elements and to reconsider whether the "Monodrama" is seriously marred by its personal matrix. In Chapters I and II we traced the extent of Maud * s biographical genesis and confirmed that the poem does, in­ deed, seem to be a mosaic-like rendering of Tennyson’s first forty-five years. We saw that in Maud Tennyson does seem to have made use of the complex of psychological wounds he sustained during his rural childhood years and post-

Somersby relocating and recasting years. We saw how the speaker of Maud is plagued by a morbid despondency, sense of loss, spectre of insanity, and death wish which are very similar to what tormented the pre-1850 Tennyson. We saw how in the "Monodrama" the speaker’s bitterness over the reasons for his family’s fiscal downfall and his brooding resent­ ment toward commerce, social connections, and arranged mar­ riages does seem to be drawn from Tennyson's embittered mem­ ories of his father's disinheritance and death and from his bellicose recollections of his family’s sense of social in­ feriority in their associations with their wealthier Bayons and Brancepeth relatives. Further, we saw how the composite character of Maud in the poem does seem to be based to a large degree upon Tennyson's relationships with Sophy

Rawnsley, Rosa Baring, and Emily Sellwood; and we saw how 162

the poem’s financial-psychological connection does seem to

be partly indebted to Tennyson’s involvement with Dr. Matthew

Allen, the proprietor of the mental institution at Fairmead

and the "Woodworks" speculator. The fact of such connections with Tennyson’s life, however, does not make their signifi­

cance private or hidden. Tennyson’s own experience of near

financial ruin provided him with a personal experience of a very common occurrence which was typical, as we have seen, of the commercial rapaciousness of the age. Similarly the love

situation, though based on personal experience, is used by

Tennyson as a typical example of the equally common commer­ cialization of marriage. Indeed, the very fact that Maud is a fusion of Tennyson’s three loves—along with, we might add, such literary prototypes as Juliet and Ophelia—is an indica­ tion that Tennyson could reshape his personal and literary experiences for the aesthetic and thematic purposes of an independent work of art.

In Chapter III, finally, which commenced with an account of the poet’s emotional condition at Chapel House and Far­ ringford, we contended that Tennyson’s frame of mind during this period had become sufficiently serene for him to embark upon the composition of Maud with a sense of financial inde­ pendence and emotional security. Consequently, we maintained,

Tennyson probably had the capability to look freely and ob­ jectively at his old self during the writing of Maud in 1854-

1855« From there, we went on to consider whether the social 163

invective in Parts I and II and the war passages in Part III

of the poem need he construed as the unconscious and uncon­

trolled utterance of Tennyson’s unresolved inner conflicts.

We saw that the emotional element in Maud* s social sections

does seem to be conscious and controlled when one considers

how Tennyson’s frenzied hero is deliberately fashioned after

and superior to the conventional high-strung Spasmodic pro­

tagonist. Similarly, we saw that the emotional element in

the war passages seems to be conscious and controlled when

one recognizes how the advocacy of war in Part III may be un­

derstood as the poet’s ardent desire for his country to cease its internal selfishness and factionalism by turning its en­

ergies outward to the establishment of a true peace. Hence, this study concludes that the emotion which flows from

Tennyson’s frenetic hero is not "distorted and dispropor­ tionate to its objects as they appear in the poem" and that

Maud is not flawed by a "hidden emotional dimension" residing in the poem as a result of Tennyson’s inability to distance himself from the emotional experiences about which he was writing. 164

NOTES TO CHAPTER III

■^See Rader, p. 85, pp. 116-117, and p. 119.

^Sir Charles Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson, p. 262.

3lbid., p. 265.

^Ibid., p. 26l.

-’Rader, pp. 85-86. Rader quotes Tennyson as telling Pat­ more in the spring of 1854 that "We have hardly seen a human face since we came here except the members of our household, Happy I certainly have not been." Such feelings seem not only atypical, but also there are no data to explain their specific motivation and no further expressions of similar feelings du­ ring the period which would put them in their proper perspec­ tive . 6Ibid. , p. 86.

^Buckley, Tennyson: The Growth of a Poet, p. 148.

8 Paden, Tennyson in Egypt: A Study of the Imagery in His Early Work, University of Kansas Humanistic Studies, No. 27 {Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1942), p. 92. ^Tennyson: The Growth of a Poet, p, 14?. Gerhard Joseph in Tennysonian Love: The Strange Diagonal (Minneapolis: Uni­ versity of Minnesota Press, 1969), p. 104 also seems to agree in part that Tennyson during the composition of Maud was emo­ tionally free of his earlier experiences. In commenting on the development of Tennyson's handling of characterization and poetic form from his earlier poetry through Maud, Joseph de­ clares that the poet’s "projection of himself into a male rather than female lover indicates the maturity of one who has partial­ ly mastered his sorrows." l°Steane, Tennyson, Arco Literary Critiques, p. 102.

^Tennyson also may have been influenced to some extent by Thomas Carlyle’s characterization of Diogenes Teufelsdróckh in Sartor Resartus; Teufelsdróckh also is a very emotional hero who suffers from the aftereffects of love and who feels a strong sense of alienation from the social conditions of the times. His emotional and spiritual situation and his movement from "Everlasting No" through the "Center of Indifference" and to an "Everlasting Yea" resembles that of Tennyson’s hero in 165

several respects. 12 Tennyson, Arco Literary Critiques, p. 90. 18Tennyson: The Growth of a Poet, p. 144.

^Kirkwood, "Maud"; An Essay on Tennyson's Poem, p. 27.

15"Tennyson*s Patrimony: From 'The Outcast' to Maud," TSLL, 11 (1969), 752-753. l8Ibid., 753.

^"Tennyson and the Voice of Men: A Study of the Theme of Isolation in His Poetry," Diss. Harvard 1951» p. 204. 18Ibid.

19Ibid., p. 203.

20Rader, p. 112.

21"Tennyson and the Dramatic Monologue: A Study of Maud" in Tennyson, ed. D. J. Palmer, Writers and Their Background (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1973)» p. 123. 22Stange, "Tennyson and the Voice of Men," p. 204.

28A. Dwight Culler, "Monodrama and the Dramatic Mono­ logue," PMLA, 90 (1975), 379. 24 Drew, "Tennyson and the Dramatic Monologue," p. 120. 2%tange, "Tennyson and the Voice of Men," p. 204.

26Ibid., pp. 204-205.

27"The Two Versions of Maud," in Lessons from My Masters, Carlyle, Tennyson and Ruskin (London: James Clark and Co., 1879)» p. 246. 28Ibid., p. 247.

29Ibid., p. 244.

8°Stange, "Tennyson and the Voice of Men," p. 203.

81Quoted in Bayne, p. 244.

32Ibid., p. 245. 166

33stange, "Tennyson and the Voice of Men," pp. 207-208.

3\bid., p. 208.

35 -'-'"Tennyson and the Dramatic Monologue," p. 120. 3^Jerome Hamilton Buckley, The Victorian Temper: A Study in literary Culture (New York: Vintage Books-Random House, Inc., 1951), p. 43. 37 7'Pitt, Tennyson Laureate, p. 179« 38r. j, Mann, Tennyson’s "Maud" Vindicated: An Explan­ atory Essay, p. 9 • 39Humbert Wolfe, Tennyson, The Poet on the Poets, p. 32.

40 Quoted in Robert Penn Warren, "Pure and Impure Poetry" in Perspectives on Poetry, ed. James L. Galderwood and Harold E. Toliver (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 87. ^Quoted in William Van O’Connor, Sense and Sensibility in Modem Poetry (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1948), p. 143.

4?¿Quoted in Ibid. ^This is T. S. Eliot’s notion of what should constitute a "balance of contrasted emotion." "Tradition and the Individ­ ual Talent" in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (1920; rpt. New York: Barnes & Noble, 19^6), p. 57» ^Quoted in O'Connor, p. 145.

^%teane, p. 89.

^^Patricia Ball, "Tennyson and the Romantics," Victorian Poetry, 1 (1963), 15« ^Ibid. 48 See Joseph, pp. 10-24 and pp. 188-191. ^Pitt, p. 18.

3°Hugh Walker, The Literature of the Victorian Era (1910; rpt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940), p. 513• 51Ibid., p. 514.

32Buckley, The Victorian Temper, p. 44. 167

58The original version had 8000 lines; as Bailey pub­ lished successive editions, he expanded the poem nearly each time. See Mark A. Weinstein, William Edmonstoune Aytoun and the Spasmodic Controversy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), p. 74. •^Buckley, The Victorian Temper, p. 44.

55Ibid., pp. 47-48.

58Ibid., p. 48.

57Ibid.

58Ibid., p. 52.

59Ibid., p. 53.

8°Weinstein, p. 90.

8lQuoted in Ibid.

82Buckley, The Victorian Temper, p. 53» 56.

^Silhouettes (London: William Heinemann, Ltd., 1925)» pp. 332-333- 6Vbid., pp. 333-334.

8-^falker, p. 523«

zz The Victorian Temper, p. 56. 8^Weinstein, p. 94.

68Ibid.

89Buckley, The Victorian Temper, p. 56. Ironically, Balder is far superior to Dobell’s earlier and vastly more popular poem The Roman (1850) which, according to Gosse, had been "a blazing success" (p. 331). ?°Bum, The Age of Equipoise, p. 73«

^Ibid., p. 78. Bum bases his statements upon Joseph E. Baker’s account in The Novel and the Oxford Movement (Prince­ ton: Princeton University Press, 1932). 72Ibid., p. 81.

ilhouettes, p. 335• 168

7 ¿Weinstein, p. 173«

7-Sir Charles Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson, pp. 215-216.

7 ^Memoir, I, 234.

77Ibid., II, 73.

7( 8June Steffenson Hagen, "Tennyson Praises the Spas­ modics: A Second Conversation with the Scottish Mr. Mitch­ ell," Tennyson Research Bulletin, 2 (1973)» 74. 7%ir Charles Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson, p. 234.

^Silhouettes, p. 331.

S^Weinstein, p. 174.

82Ibid.

83john Reed, Perception and Design in Tennyson's "Idylls of the King," p. 31. 84 Philip Drew, "Tennyson and the Dramatic Monologue: A Study of Maud," p. 115- 85Ibid., p. 136.

86See Steane, pp. 97-98.

87Ibid., p. 98.

88Rader, p. 118.

8^W. C. Bennett, Goldwin Smith, William Caldwell Roscoe, and W. E. Gladstone, among others, have regarded Part III of Maud as immoral ranting, false and exaggerated propaganda, or warmongering. In Anti-Maud: By a Poet of the People (London, 1855), Bennett parodied Tennyson’s purported views of peace and war and called the "Monodrama" a "vulgar war-hoop." Smith, in the November 1855 issue of the Saturday Review, used the term "bathos" to describe the poem’s ending and expressed the judgement that it was "not a just and necessary war, but war in itself" which was the "first object of the poem's speaker." In an 1855 issue of the National Review Roscoe accused Tenny­ son of "forgetting his own maxim to eschew 'the falsehood of extremes'. . . ." Gladstone in the October 1859 issue of the Quarterly Review called Maud's climax "the most doubtful part of the poem" and labelled the closing passages as "far over­ pass [ing] the bounds of moderation and good sense. ..." 169

See Jump, ed., Tennyson. The Critical Heritage Series, p. 187, 186 and Shannon, PMIA, 68 (1953), 402, and Jump, p. 246, 248. ^Joseph, p. 114

91Kirkwood, "Maud": An Essay on Tennyson’s Poem, p. 191.

92Steane, p. 91»

93Rader, p. 118.

9^lhid.

9^3ee, for instance, Roy P. Easier, "Tennyson the Psy­ chologist," The South Atlantic^Quarterly, 43 (1944), rpt. in Sex, -Symbolism and Psychology in LiteraTure (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1948) and S. Ronald Weiner, "The Chord of Self: Tennyson's Maud," Literature and Psychology, 16 (1966). Both of these critics contend that the hero’s views of war should not necessarily be identified as Tennyson’s because, as they see it, the hero’s mind is still impaired at the close of the poem. Says Basler, "One cannot suppose that Tennyson was unaware of the irony of his poem’s conclusion in effecting the hero’s reintegration of personality by means of sublimation and a complete swing from an extreme public madness" (p. 157)• Weiner Says similarly, "Tennyson provides no optimistic solution, and his hero really does not know his words are wild" (p. 182). 96Rader, p. 117.

97Pitt, p. 180.

98lbid., p. 181.

^9"Tennyson*s Maud," Connotation, 1 (1962), 3°«

100Ibid., 31.

^O^Buckley, Tennyson: The Growth of a Poet, p. 141.

102Ibid., p. 142.

103Weiner, 180.

1QZpIbid., 181.

103philip Drew, "Tennyson and the Dramatic Monologue: A Study of Maud," p. 138. l?o lo6Ibid.. p. 135. 171

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