CARLILE AND TENNYSON: RELATIONS

BETWEEN A PROPHET AND A POET

by

JOHANNES ALLGAIER

B.A., University of British Columbia, 1963

A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF

MASTER OF ARTS

in the Department

of

English

We accept this thesis as conforming to the required standard

THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA

April, 1966 In presenting this thesis in partial fulfilment of. the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of .

British Columbia, I agree that the Library shall make it freely available for reference and study. I further agree that per• mission for extensive copying of this thesis for scholarly - purposes may be granted by the Head of my Department or by his representatives,. It is understood that copying, or publi• cation of this thesis for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission.

JOHANNES ALLGAIER

Department of ENGLISH

The University of British Columbia, Vancouver 8, Canada.

Date April ^0, 1966 CARLYLE AND TENNYSON: RELATIONS

BETWEEN A PROPHET AND A POET

ABSTRACT

Carlyle was much, more popular and influential in the nineteenth century than he is in the twentieth. Many critics "believe that he exerted an influence over Tennyson, but there is very little direct evidence to support such an opinion. However, circumstantial evidence shows that Tennyson must have been interested in what Carlyle had to offer; that Carlyle and Tennyson were personal friends; and that there are many parallels between the works of Carlyle and Tennyson.

Carlyle is essentially a romantic. His attitude toward art is ambivalent, a fact which is indicative of the conflict between Carlyle's longing for beauty, goodness, and truth on the one hand, and, on the other, his realization of the difficulty in reaffirming these absolutes within the spirit of his age. This ambivalence is related to the post-Kantian conflict between "Mere Reason" and "Understanding". Carlyle describes that conflict as the result of a process of ever-increasing self-consciousness of both the individual and society.

Tennyson's early poetry is determined by the ii same "romantic" conflict, "but whereas in Carlyle's writings this conflict is philosophically resolved, Tennyson's early poems lack this resolution. One may say that these poems represent Tennyson's "Everlasting No."

Carlyle and Tennyson met first in 18J8 and soon became personal friends. Although during the forties their friendship was at times very intimate, it seems that Carlyle took Tennyson not very seriously, and that Tennyson was sometimes annoyed over Carlyle's blustering manner. But on the whole, Tennyson regarded Carlyle very highly.

In In Memoriam. many sections of which were written after Tennyson had become acquainted with Carlyle, Tennyson arrives at an "Everlasting Yea," i.e., at a reconciliation of "Mere Reason" and "Understanding" through renunciation (Selbsttotung). In addition, the poem displays many similarities with Sartor Hesartus. But whereas in Carlyle's writings the resolution of the "basic romantic polarity" is mainly rational, it becomes an intense emotional experience in Tennyson's poem. "Locksley Hall" displays many similarities with Sartor Resartus in general, and with Book II in particular. These similarities have led William D. Templeman to maintain that "Locksley Hall" is a dramati• zation of Book II of Sartor. But apart from parallels iii "between the two works, there is no evidence to support this view.

After 1850, when Tennyson received the laureateship and founded a family, he became more self- reliant. His meetings with Carlyle became less frequent and more formal. However, there are many indications that both men held each other in high esteem, despite the fact that Carlyle often criticised Tennyson.

The plot and the characters in Maud resemble Book II of Sartor Resartus. In addition, there are several other parallels between Maud and some of Carlyle*s works. In one instance it appears likely that Tennyson has used an image from Past and Present. Furthermore, the hero in Maud undergoes a progression from an "Everlasting No" to an "Everlasting Yea," but there is little evidence to prove that such parallels reflect influences.

After 1855» the friendship between Carlyle and Tennyson may be described as a "friendly companionship between two equals, neither ignoring the other, but each enjoying full intellectual independence." After a temporary estrangement, probably caused by Carlyle's overbearing manner, Tennyson appears to have taken the initiative in reviving the friendship (1865)• Although Carlyle's criticism of Tennyson continued to be unfair and destructive, Tennyson often indicated that he had an iv affectionate regard for Carlyle. "Locksley Hall Sixty

Years After" suggests that Tennyson agreed closely with

Carlyle's political views.

Because Carlyle and Tennyson were interested in the same intellectual problems; because Carlyle formulated solutions to these problems much earlier than

Tennyson; because Tennyson appears to have accepted these solutions after he had met Carlyle; because the two men were personal friends; and because there are many parallels between their works, it appears likely that

Carlyle has exerted some influence over Tennyson, although the extent of such influence cannot be determined. TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter Page

I. A DEFINITION OF THE PROBLEM AND A JUSTIFICATION OF THE METHOD EMPLOYED IN ITS SOLUTION 1

II. CARLYLE AS A ROMANTIC ...... 12

III. TENNYSON AS- A ROMANTIC: AN EXAMINATION OF HIS EARLY POETRY . 28

IV. CARLYLE'S INTERCOURSE WITH TENNYSON BETWEEN THE TIME OF THEIR FIRST MEETING AND THE PUBLICATION OF IN MEMORIAM . 44

V. PARALLELS BETWEEN SARTOR AND IN MEMORIAM AND SOME POSSIBLE INFLUENCES FROM CARLYLE UPON TENNYSON 61

VI. PARALLELS BETWEEN SARTOR AND "LOCKSLEY HALL", AND SOME POSSIBLE INFLUENCES FROM CARLYLE UPON TENNYSON 84

VII. TENNYSON'S INTERCOURSE WITH CARLYLE FROM 1850 TO 1855 (PUBLICATION OF MAUD) 100

VIII. CARLYLE AND MAUD: PARALLELS AND SOME POSSIBLE INFLUENCES Ill Chapter Page

IX. CARLYLE AND TENNYSON AITER MAUD .... 125

X. SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 136

WORKS CITED 142 CHAPTER I A DEFINITION OP THE PROBLEM, AND A JUSTIFICATION OP THE METHOD EMPLOYED IN ITS SOLUTION

In the second half of the twentieth century- it is extremely difficult to estimate the full influence which Carlyle's thought exerted over the minds of his contemporaries. The sharp decline of Carlyle's reputation in the English-speaking world, particularly after the turn of the century, can only partly be explained as the outcome of a critical examination of his ideas. Today, Thomas Carlyle is not so much disliked as he is simply ignored. His eclipse was caused by the fact that his literary fate is closely related to the history of Europe during the last fifty years. During his lifetime, Carlyle had been the chief interpreter of German literature and thought in England. Some time after his death, during two World Wars, many of his ideas were used consciously and unconsciously as rallying cries by those who were to be the vanquished. Thus it is only natural that the estrangement between England and Germany contributed decisively to the decline of Carlyle's popularity with his countrymen. And having been unpopular with one generation, Carlyle came to be almost ignored by the next.

To accept the near oblivion into which Carlyle's works have passed in the late twentieth century as an indication of his intellectual standing in the nineteenth may therefore be highly deceptive. In his prime the "Sage of Chelsea" was regarded by most literate Englishmen as the prophet of the age. The fact that his compatriots seldom heeded his advice rather confirms than denies his standing as a prophet, if indeed a "prophet is not without honour, save in his own country, and in his own house."

In the words of a scholar who was a Victorian himself, the "man who first gives us a key to the signi• ficance of the age of Tennyson is not Tennyson himself, nor Browning, nor any writer of verse, but one who believed that the day of poetry was past, — Thomas Carlyle."^*

And this man "was during a considerable part of his life p . . . the greatest literary force in England." In the opinion of the same scholar Sartor Resartus "is the first great book which faces the difficulties, and, in a way, embodies the aspirations of the new period."^ The fact that Sartor was nevertheless not very popular at any time may easily be ascribed to Carlyle's devious and difficult style. "Swift, whom Carlyle resembled in not a few ways, wrote a style unsurpassed for clearness and simplicity yet he is not much read. How much less would he be read were Gulliver's Travels written in the style of Sartor Resartus!" John Nichol compares Carlyle to two of his greatest contemporaries as follows: Carlyle "remains the 3 master spirit of his time, its Censor, as Macaulay is its

Panegyrist, and Tennyson its Mirror."''

The assertiveness of such critical estimates makes it worth one's while to consider the influence

Carlyle may have exerted over Tennyson. Many critics hold that Carlyle did indeed exert a strong influence over the poet. For example, the Rev. John Wilson says:

Most of the living writers of our time hear some trace of Carlyle in their work, even those who are in other respects unlike him. Do we not, for instance, find the poet- laureate giving forth this purely Carlylean utterance [i.e., the protest against modern shams], as if the spirit of the Chelsea sage, struggling to find for itself expression in polished verse, had taken temporary possession of Tennyson?"

One of Tennyson's "biographers concurs. Harold Nicolson states that Carlyle was "at the outset of his prophetic career when Tennyson was first admitted to his intimacy, and his outright certitude on all those problems which disturbed and muddled the younger man, acted as an immediate and very bracing stimulus."' Both men tried to solve those problems through their "mistrust of logic" and of "soulless intelligence", through the "belief in truth and virtue dominant and triumphant in face of the evidence of sense, in face of those two disturbing negatives — the infinity of space and the infinity of time;" and through their "ultimate appeal to intuitive 8 theology." 4 These common characteristics, shared as they were by Arnold and Browning, to name just two, sharply distinguished the poet and the prophet from those who held the opinion that reason alone, subjected to quasi- mechanical rules of logic, provided the means by which man could arrive at the truth. The split between the intuitive and the empirical way of knowing constitutes, of course, Western man's fundamental spiritual problem. Nowhere was that split more in evidence than in the relations between Carlyle and John Stuart Mill. In order to understand what drew Carlyle and Tennyson together it may be helpful to examine what kept Carlyle and Mill far apart.

Ironically, when Carlyle, in 1831, read Mill's articles on "The Spirit of the Age" in The Examiner, he Q hailed the disciple of Jeremy Bentham as "a new Mystic." To be sure, these articles were Mill's first public admission that he had recognized the limitations of the purely Benthamite view of human nature. But Mill was far from making any metaphysical concessions. He merely marvelled at his recent discovery, inspired by Wordsworth, that poetry could be "a source of inward joy, of sympathetic and imaginative pleasure," as he put it in his

Autobiography.10 Unlike Bentham, Mill had acknowledged beauty as a commodity of life. 5 Mill's first literary acquaintance with Carlyle is similarly ironic. In the Autobiography he mentions Carlyle's gospel of stoic renunciation as "one of the channels through which [he] received the influences which enlarged [his] early narrow creed." But instead of renouncing "happiness" on metaphysical grounds, he merely rejects it as a direct, principal aim, only in order to enjoy it the more fully, as he says, "en passant."11 Perhaps never has a literary friendship thriven on a deeper misunderstanding than that between Carlyle and Mill.

J. A. Froude, Carlyle's good friend and authorized biographer, suggests that what really drew Carlyle and Mill together initially was their belief "that the existing social arrangements in this country were incurably bad, that . . . there was at present such deep injustice that the system which permitted such things 12 could not be of long endurance." But when it came to prescribing a cure for the sick body politic, the two practitioners could not even agree on the nature of the patient. Believing in the supremacy of logic, Mill could not imagine himself to form an unconscious part in a historical, quasi-biological process. For him society functioned by virtue of a social contract which existed solely for the benefit of the individual. Carlyle, on the other hand, had found in Kant and the post-Kantians a rational justification for his Promethean defiance of the restraint of empirical knowledge. His view of the body politic as an organism is the social-political consequence of the Critique of Pure Reason.1^ Man,

Carlyle felt, cannot "understand" the mechanism of a process in which he himself is involved; he can merely

"see" or "feel" that he forms a natural part of something greater than himself.

Thus it was not long before both men discovered that they were worlds apart. As early as 1836 Carlyle wrote to his wife about a visit to Mill: "It seemed to me the strangest thing what this man could want with me, or

I with such a man so unheimlich to me. . . .1 think I 15 shall see less and less of him." ' About Mill's Autobiography. which had appeared shortly after his death in 1873i Carlyle wrote to his brother: "It is wholly the life of a logic-chopping engine, little more of human in it than if it had been done by a thing of mechanized iron. However, it goes wholly to the credit of Mill's noble character that he always spoke of Carlyle with the highest.respect. In the Autob i o graphy he says: "I did not . . . deem myself a competent judge of Carlyle. I felt that he was a poet, and that I was not; that he was 17 a man of intuition, which I was not."

In contrast to Mill, Tennyson was a "poet" and a "man of intuition". Indeed, Harold Nicolson suggests that Tennyson's and Carlyle's "mutual identity of thought" 7 was so profound that it overcame their rather obvious temperamental differences.

For Carlyle did not treat Tennyson the poet with the same sympathy which he extended to Tennyson the man; nor was the latter generally given to cultivating the acquaintance of people who were outspoken in their criticism of his work. And Carlyle, with his broad Annandale accent, was very outspoken. He advised Tennyson to give up writing verses altogether; ... he laughed at him for his sensitiveness to criticism; . . . their friendship was not based on a community of literary tastes, and we do not find Tennyson indulging Carlyle with recitations from Maud or The Duke of Wellington. Their companionship was of a more robust, and in truth of a more enduring character.18

Froude also confirms what others have stated. "Tennyson became the voice of this feeling [i.e., the reaction against insincerity] in poetry; Carlyle in what was called prose, . . . Carlyle stood beside him as a 19 prophet and teacher." 7 Henry J. Jennings, who published a biography of Tennyson as early as 1884, says, "Carlyle, there can be little doubt, had a considerable influence upon 20 Tennyson." And, finally, a more recent critic of Tennyson, Valerie Pitt, finds that "... the influence of Carlyle on his verse is more than the mere echo of Carlyle's dedicated belligerence. It is deeply absorbed 21 into his thinking." Yet despite their assertivehess, none of the critics and biographers quoted provides any direct, concrete evidence for such "influences." Indeed, such 8 evidence cannot "be drawn from the incomplete biographical record of the friendship and intercourse between Carlyle and Tennyson. The biographical data merely permit one to form a picture of the friendship in general, rather than to point to specific influences in either man's work. 22 Charles Richard Sanders has carefully compiled most of the available data concerning the intercourse between Carlyle and Tennyson into a chronological record.

Without the discovery of new evidence, little could be added to this study, upon which the biographical part of the present work largely rests. Professor Sanders suggests that the . . . full impact of Carlyle's mind on Tennyson's poetry . . . is important and should be investigated fully. It is concerned with such matters as common sense and practicality in Carlyle's Abbot Samson and Cromwell and in Tennyson's first Northern Parmer, the Duke of Wellington, and King Arthur; with a protest against all kinds of shams and a holding up of veracity and sincerity as high ideals; with a fascination with the past, and with the vital interest in the social and political problems of the present;

. . . with a praise of honest doubt but also with faith in the imagination and a conception of reality which emphasizes the part mystery has in the nature of things; with a persistent protest against materialism and a fresh interpretation of the Christian religion; [and with] . . • a style which at times makes much of suggestion, silence, simplicity, and brevity and at other times unfolds itself in forms which are colorful, complex, irregular, richly ornamented, rough-grained, expansive, or baroque.23 Now it need not be pointed out that all of the parallels which Professor Sanders lists are so general that they can be found in a great number of men other than Carlyle and Tennyson. Some of the parallels in their works are indeed striking and have led many critics to claim "influences". However, taken by themselves these parallels do not prove that Carlyle influenced Tennyson. Similarly, as has been pointed out, the biographical evidence alone is equally inconclusive.

This essay will attempt to substantiate some of the biographical and internal evidence by what may be termed, for want of a better word, "psychological" evidence. There was, it will be argued, an essential psychological, philosophical, and spiritual kinship between Carlyle and Tennyson before the two men ever became acquainted; and that, furthermore, by the time their acquaintance began, Tennyson had reached a stage in his intellectual and spiritual development in which the poet's mind was eagerly receptive of the word of the prophet; in which, moreover, it may be assumed that he had been actively searching for the solutions of those problems which Carlyle had already solved. Separate from the biographical and internal evidence, the psychological method of investigation offered here leads to wholly inconclusive results. But a psycho• logical comparison itself may have critical usefulness if 10 it contributes something to the understanding of the authors compared. As Richard D. Altick put in in The Art of Literary Research.

. . . once we realize that both kinds of answer — identification of a unique source and the conclusion that a given feature of a work can be found in many- other places — have potential critical usefulness, we need not worry about the direction in which our evidence leads us. It is what we conclude at our journey's end that counts.

At the end it may appear that all three categories of evidence regarded as a whole will point to the conclusion that, indeed, Carlyle did exert a noticeable influence over Tennyson. FOOTNOTES

1Hug5h Walker, The Age of Tennyson (London, 1897), p. 12.

^Ibid., p. 16.

5Ibid., p. 25.

4Ibid., p. 35.

^Thomas Carlyle (London, 1892), p. 244. Thomas Carlyle, The Iconoclast of Modern Shams (Paisley, 1881), pp. 101-102.

^Tennyson (London, 1923), p. 140.

8Ibid., pp. 140-141.

9john Stuart Mill, Autobiography (London, 1873), p. 17^«

10Ibid., p. 148.

i:LIbid., pp. 142, 174.

12Thomas Carlyle (London, 1884), II, 420-421.

15Q.v. be low;,, p. 19 ff. ^uncanny.

15Proude, I, 74-75.

16Ibid., p. 420.

17Ibid., p. 176.

18Nicolson, op. cit., pp. 141-142.

19Proude, I, 291. Lord Tennyson. A Biographical Sketch (London, 1884), p. 81.

21Tennyson Laureate (London, 1962), p. 177*

22,,Carlyle and Tennyson," PMLA, LXXVI (1961), 82-97-

25Ibid., p. 97.

24(New York, 1963), pp. 82-83. CHAPTER II

CARLYLE AS A ROMANTIC

Long before Carlyle and Tennyson became acquainted with each other, their minds were engaged with similar problems. Indeed, the parallelism in their intellectual interests, at a time when they did not know each other, was so close, that it appears as an inter• esting task to explore the possible effects and the nature of their eventual intercourse.

The assumption that Carlyle came to exert an influence over Tennyson is supported by the characters of the two men. Carlyle, who was fourteen years older than Tennyson, was a self-conscious, almost arrogant prophet with a turn for bitter irony, whereas Tennyson was a somewhat shy and withdrawn, highly sensitive artist who probably suspected irony even where it was not intended. It seems probable — and it may be shown clearly later on — that Tennyson was strongly attracted by Carlyle *s magnetism, and became, from an acquaintance, an intimate and pliant friend.

It seems to be taken for granted that any influence occurred in one direction only, namely from Carlyle to Tennyson; indeed, to one familiar with the characters and works of Carlyle and Tennyson such a 13 one-sidedness seems so obvious that the opposite case tends to be disregarded altogether. In general, however, it should first be considered that Carlyle was fourteen years older than Tennyson and had arrived at a more or less definite philosophy of life at a time when Tennyson was still searching; secondly, it will be seen that Carlyle's reactions to Tennyson's poetry, whether favourable or, more often, unfavourable, were always so general and epigrammatic that it is fair to say that Carlyle took Tennyson's poetry for little more than a time-consuming diversion. Thirdly and lastly, there is the internal evidence, which indicates that all of Tennyson's poems which show distinct parallels with certain of Carlyle's thoughts and images were written later than the corresponding works by Carlyle. Conversely, no evidence that influence may have taken place in the opposite direction has been discovered.1

But before we examine the question of influences in detail, it is our task to assess the extent of the psychological, philosophical, and spiritual kinship between Tennyson and Carlyle. It will be shown that both Carlyle and Tennyson were essentially romantics, and that it was their romanticism which drew them together. The present chapter will therefore concern itself with a characterization of Carlyle as a romantic. Chapter III will then examine some of those poems by Tennyson which were written at a 14 time when the poet in all probability could not have been p acquainted with Carlyle and his ideas. Tennyson's intellectual interests and problems, it will be found, were very similar to Carlyle's, although in Tennyson's early poetry their elaborations and solutions are still lacking.

Many of Tennyson's poems in the 1830 and 1833 volumes have such typically romantic themes as the nature of art; the nature of the artist and his relation to other men; the relation of art to life and reality; and the relation between the true, the good, and the beautiful.

Such themes are foremost in Carlyle's thought.

His attitude toward art and the artist in modern society, in its marked ambivalence, is strikingly similar to that 4 of Oswald kpengler, whom Carlyle, as Eric Bentley has pointed out, resembles in more than one way. Spengler considers his own philosophy to be that of Goethe;"^ but the young men who are to shape the Twentieth Century he urges not to imitate Sophocles and Goethe, nor Nietzsche, whom he ridicules for his romanticism, but — Cecil Rhodes. Similarly, it may be said that Carlyle's head belongs to the drill sergeant, the empire builder, the captain of industry, but his heart owed allegiance to the poet. Such dualism is, of course, a basic condition of the romantic; "Zerrissenheit" the Germans call it, "being torn apart." It is the basic characteristic of Teufelsdrockh. "To the 15 eye of vulgar logic," says he, "what is man? An omnivorous

Biped that wears Breeches. To the eye of Pure Reason what n is he? A Soul, a Spirit, and divine Apparition."''

"Over such a universal medley of high and low, of hot, Q cold, moist and dry, is he here struggling," says Carlyle of his creature, and, "... in Teufelsdrockh, there is always the strangest Dualism."^

Similarly, Carlyle could both condemn and praise art and poetry in the most outspoken terms. Lately, attention has been drawn to the fact, hitherto unsuspected by most of his readers, that Carlyle himself wrote some poetry, mainly before 1840.10 But by the time he wrote "Characteristics" in 1831 he was already highly suspicious of literary art, which he divides into "Babylon the Mother of Abominations" and "such literature as can be said to have some attempt towards truth in it."11 He finds that "all literature has become one boundless self-devouring 12 Review"; Byron "mistakes earthborn passionate Desire for heaven-inspired Freewill," and Shelley is "filling the 15 earth with inarticulate wail." y When Carlyle was in the early stages of his friendship with Tennyson, in 1842, he apparently comforted himself by calling the poet "a life-guardsman spoilt by 14 making poetry." And Edward Fitzgerald marvels at the new friendship since Carlyle was 16 . . . naturally prejudiced against one whom everyone was praising, and praising for a sort of poetry which he despised. But directly he saw and heard the man, he knew there was a man to deal with and took pains to cultivate him; assiduous in exhorting him to leave Verse and Rhyme, and to apply his genius to Prose and Work.15

Wilson quotes a similar story from Margaret Fuller;

At a dinner-party in October, 1846, Carlyle

. . . was talking about poetry. Tennyson wrote verse because the schoolmaster had taught him that it was great to do so, and had thus, unfortunately, been turned from the true path for a man. Burns had, in like manner, been turned from his vocation. Shakespeare had not the good sense to see that it would have been better to write straight on in prose.16

The appearance of Tennyson's Princess furnished Carlyle with "new melancholy proof of the futility of what they 17 call 'Art'," he noted in his journal. ' At his angriest, the old Carlyle accuses the men of genius of forsaking their divinely ordained duty in favour of an escape "into 'Literature*, into what they call Art, Poetry and the like; [where they] will mainly waste themselves in that inane region, — fallen so inane in our mad era. Also, though born Sons of Wisdom, they are not exempt from all our "I Q 'Swarmeries1', but only from the grosser kind of them. This of 'Art', 'Poetry' and so forth., is a refined Swarmery. Carlyle*s mind, which derived its moral earnestness from Scottish puritanism, was only too painfully aware of the difficulty of reconciling the 17 good and the beautiful. But his heart belonged neverthe• less to the artist. Carlyle's cruel vehemence, his dyspepsia, and ultimately his creative drive may be regarded as symptoms of the struggle within himself between the puritan bourgeois and the passionate artist. Whenever the artist succeeded in silencing the protests of the bourgeois, Carlyle could praise the arts and literature in the loftiest terms. In such moments of exaltation art became for him once again a revelation of the divine, as it had been in the beginning of history. Like Matthew Arnold he discovered the true, the good, and the beautiful in religion apart from that which men could no longer believe in. "Our religion has materialized itself in the fact, in the supposed fact; it has attached its emotion to the fact, and now the fact is failing it. . . . The strongest part of our religion today is its unconscious poetry," says Matthew Arnold in the opening paragraph of 20 his essay "The Study of Poetry." Carlyle pronounces 21 literature the religion of the future, when the poet will once again reveal the Eternal behind the veil of time and space, — Goethe's open secret. "Vates means both Prophet and Poet: and indeed at all times, Prophet and 22 Poet, well understood, have much kindred of meaning." The poet is first and foremost a great man, a hero, whom mere accident of fortune and environment has pressed into 23 the service of his particular calling. 18

Carlyle1s appreciation of the music in poetry often borders on the rhapsodic.

A musical thought is one spoken by a mind that has penetrated into the inmost heart of the thing; detected the inmost mystery of it, namely the melody that lies hidden in it; the inward harmony of coherence which is its soul, whereby it exists, and has a right to be, here in this world. . . . Who is there that, in logical words, can express the effect music has on us? A kind of inarticulate unfathomable speech, which leads us to the edge of the Infinite, and lets us for moments gaze into that:24

And "... wherever you find a sentence musically worded, of true rhythm and melody in the words, there is somethin 25 deep and good in the meaning too." ' Fitzgerald told Hallam Tennyson that Carlyle once said that Tennyson "must have music dormant in him, revealing itself in verse," and that his voice was "like the sound of a pine- 26 wood." In some of his letters Carlyle pays homage to the music of Tennyson's poetry and even of his ordinary speech. He calls him "a great melodious Poet-soul" who 27 has a "deep, clear metallic voice," ' and whose speech 28 borders on singing. Nevertheless, the first requirement for a poet, and the foremost, is not any special skill or knowledge, but a determination and ability to see things as they, really are. If he cannot or will not see reality, Carlyl advises him, ". . . it is of no use to keep stringing rhymes together, jingling sensibilities against each other and name yourself a Poet." 7 The poet is the 19 mystical voice of the social organism, "Nature's own sacred voice heard once more athwart, the dreary "boundless element of hearsaying and canting, of twaddle and poltroonery, in which the bewildered earth, nigh perishing, has lost its way."^° "The Poet is a heroic figure belonging to all ages; whom all ages possess, when once he is produced, whom the newest age as the oldest man produce; — and

will produce, always when Nature pleases."^1

The latter limitation is important, for it contains the clue for an understanding of Carlyle's strangely paradoxical relation to art and poetry. The limitation implies that the rise of a poet in a particular age is determined by factors which are not under human control. Nature sets the stage for the appearance of the true poet and, in the ups and downs of human culture, Nature is called History. Like Ruskin and Arnold, Carlyle looked at culture as a function of irreversible time. The quality of a work of art was not to be judged solely

on its inherent, universal, "timeless" value, but also, and mainly, on its veracity as a reflexion of the human condition at a particular time. Similarly, for Carlyle the challenge of the armoured champion of England at the coronation ceremony^ was as much an anachronism in 19th century England as for Ruskin the erection of the Yorkshire Exchange in Gothic. '

Carlyle's keen perception of the Zeitgeist 20 found an early expression in "Characteristics," written in 1831 while Carlyle was in London seeking a publisher for Sartor Resartus. If one were to select one of Carlyle's shorter essays as representative of his life's work one would have to choose "Characteristics" since it contains the essentials of all of his.important ideas. Fundamentally, the essay arose out of the creative tension between the two extremes of what one may call the "basic romantic polarity" between "Pure Reason", and "Understanding" (Kant);^ between logic and intuition; between reality perceived as causality and Ultimate Reality conceived as Truth. In ethics, this polarity manifests itself in man's Zerrissenheit between duty and law on the one hand and between will and desire on the other. The voice of "Thou shalt," however conceived, forms a painful cacophony with that of "I will." Fichte saw the conflict between the Nicht-Ich and the Ich, and he considered all art and philosophy as an attempt to close the gaping wound that Tieck and Novalis -saw as the life of man. Be that as it may, romantic art and thought are pervaded with a strong yearning to be "whole" again, to be "innocent" in Blake's sense, and ultimately, to be unconscious of one's existence as a little rival to Absolute Existence.

There was once a time in the life of mankind and of every individual man when, as Carlyle says, we had 21

. . . seasons of a light, aerial translucency and elasticity and perfect freedom; the body had not yet become the prison-house of the soul, but was its vehicle and implement, like a creature of the thought, and altogether pliant to its bidding. We knew not that we had limbs, we only lifted, hurled and leapt; through eye and ear, and all avenues of sense, came clear unimpeded tidings from without, and from within issued clear victorious force; we stood as in the centre of Nature, giving and receiving, in harmony with it all.35

But man forfeited Paradise by eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, which "springs from a root of evil."56 Man wanted "to be like God,"57 that is, know the difference between good and evil; and as a result 38 logic took the place of insight;-^ rhetoric that of

39J 40 oratory;^ moral philosophy replaced virtue, and 41 sentimentality, true affection. Finally, when Carlyle was writing "Characteristics," science was establishing 42 itself as the religion of the Modern Age, complete with human sacrifice. Literature has fared no better; it "has 4-5 become one boundless self-devouring Review"; ^ its subject matter displays not "the love of greatness, but the love 44 of the love of greatness."

It must be emphasized here that in his exami• nation of the ills accompanying knowledge and consciousness

Carlyle makes no distinction between man and society. It can easily be seen that his criteria apply to both. In

"the Body Politic, as in the animal body, the sign of 45 right performance is Unconsciousness." ' Indeed, for

Carlyle "to figure Society as endowed with life is scarcely 22 a metaphor; but rather the statement of a fact by such imperfect method as language affords. . . . Society has its periods of sickness and vigour, of youth, manhood, he. decrepitude, dissolution and new birth." Carlyle's view of society as a living organism is so important in his thinking that it pervades through all his writings. May it suffice here to refer to a chapter in Sartor Resartus almost exclusively devoted to a demonstration of "organic filaments" ' between men. Carlyle uses here the familiar image of the Phoenix with whose destruction and regeneration the fates of men are inextricably bound. Even hatred and envy among men confirm their brotherhood, which only cold indifference would deny. Such "organic filaments" even reach beyond other men into the whole universe. "It is a mathematical fact that the casting of this pebble from my hand alters the centre of gravity of the Universe," says Tenfelsdrockh. But "if Nature is one, and a living indivisible whole, much more is mankind," he continues. Tradition 'weaves' together generations of men, so that "the Present seems little other than an inconsiderable Pilm dividing the Past and the Future." Small wonder that such a "mystic Union" is not to be governed "by Mechanism, but 48 by Religion; not by Self-interest, but by Loyalty." The question whether society is an organism or the mere result of a social contract is, of course, the fundamental problem of historical science. Within the frame of the present 23 study no attempt can be made to solve a problem which some still consider unsolved in Arnold Toynbee's many-volumed Study of History. Be it emphasized here once again that for Carlyle, and also for Arnold and Ruskin, the concept of society as a quasi-biological organism is more than a mere analogy.

To sum up what has been said so far: Carlyle*s general attitude toward cultural phenomena and art is ambivalent. Such ambivalence is only one manifestation of the dualism which determines the typical romantic. It is indicative of the conflict between Carlyle's longing for beauty, goodness, and truth on the one hand, and, on the other, his realization of the difficulty in reaffirming those absolutes within the spirit of his age. "Characteristics" may be called an attempt to relate his ambivalence to the post-Kantian conflict between "Pure Reason" and "Under• standing," which, in the present work, will be referred to as "basic romantic polarity". Carlyle describes that polarity as the result of a process of ever-increasing self-consciousness of both the individual and society as a whole, a process which slowly and painfully paralyses the creative or intuitive, that is subconscious, faculties of man and results in an isolation of the ego which we may give, ithe modern term "alienation." As it applies to society, Carlyle regards this process not merely as 24 analogous "but as truly homologous with the mental growth of an individual. 25 FOOTNOTES

^Carlyle did quote Tennyson once. See below, p. 49. p For a biographical account of Tennyson's first acquaintance with Carlyle and their first meeting see Chapter IV. ^It is difficult to avoid oversimplification in a definition of romanticism. In brief, then, "romanticism" is understood here as a mode of thought and expression which stresses the above themes. Moreover, the attitude of the romantic toward such themes is one of marked ambivalence, which is the result of the ultimate irreconcilibility of empirical and intuitive knowledge. (See below, p. 20). A more thorough definition of romanticism is implicit in the discussion which follows. It is true, of course, that romanticism, as defined here, is not confined to Carlyle and Tennyson, nor to the nineteenth century, but in Carlyle and Tennyson such "romantic" themes determine their whole creativity more decisively and profoundly than in most other men. It is therefore critically useful, and in the present study relevant, to compare the "romanticism" of both men.

^The Cult of the Superman (London, 1947), passim. ^Der Untergang des Abendlandes (Munchen, 1923), I, 65, 1. 6Ibid., II, 591 ff. "^Sartor Resartus. "The Ashburton Edition" (London, Chapman and Hall, 1885), p. 4-5. (The "Ashburton Edition" will be used hereafter for all page references to Carlyle's works.)

8Ibid., p. 54.

9Ibid., p. 127. 10G. B. Tennyson, "Carlyle's Poetry to 1840: A Checklist and Discussion, A New Attribution, and Six Unpublished Poems," Victorian Poetry. I (1963), 161-81.

^"Characteristics" (hereafter Char.), p. 211.

12Ibid., p. 212.

15Ibid., pp. 217-218. 26 14 Hallam Tennyson, Alfred Lord Tennyson. A Memoir (London, Macmillan, 1897). (hereafter Memoir). I. 188. ^Reported to Hallam Tennyson, Memoir. I, 188.

16D. A. Wilson, Carlyle (London, 1923-1931), III, 34-8.

17Froude, I, 422.

"I Q From the German Sehwarmerei. which means "enthusiasm" (in the contemptuous sense of the Restoration), "fanaticism", "ecstasy", "wild imaginings", or "devotion to unsound ideals".

19Shooting Niagara: And After? (hereafter Niag.), p. 607. 20 Essays in Criticism. Second Series.

21Char., p. 211, Sartor, p. 171.

22"The Hero as Poet," pp. 66-67.

25Ibid., pp. 65-66.

24Ibid., p. 69.

25Ibid., p. 75.

26Memoir, I, 77. 27"Carlyle's Unpublished Letters to Miss Wilson," Nineteenth Century. LXXXIX (May, 1921), 811. 28C. E. Norton, ed., The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston, 1883), II, 49. For Carlyle and music see C. R. Sanders, "Carlyle, Poetry, and the Music of Humanity," Western Hum. Rev.. XVI (1962), 53-66.

29"The Hero as Poet," p. 87.

5°Past and Present, p. 73, (hereafter Past).

51,,The Hero as Poet," p. 65 (my italics).

52Past, p. 119.

55The Crown of Wild Olive: "Traffic." -'Note that Carlyle, in a typically Nietsschean "transvaluation of all values" uses these terms in their opposite meanings. By "Pure Reason" Kant means "Mere Reason", as distinct from intuition, imagination, etc.

55Char., P. 194.

36Ibid., P. 194. ^Genesis, Ill, 5.

38Char., P. 197.

5W., P. 198.

40Ibid., P. 200.

41Ibid., P. 205 ff. 42Ibid., P. 212.

43Ibid., P. 212. ^Ibid., P« 211. 45Ibid., P. 203. 46Ibid., P. 202. 47Sartor , P . 165 ff ^Char., P. 226. CHAPTER III •

TENNYSON AS A ROMANTIC: AN EXAMINATION OF HIS EARLY POETRY

It becomes now an interesting and illuminating task to subject Tennyson's early poems of the 1830 and 1833 editions to a similar analysis. These poems were written at a time when Tennyson could not have known Carlyle, who moved to London in 1834, shortly after his first major work, Sartor Resartus. had begun to appear in Fraser's Magazine. It will be shown that the basic spiritual and intellectual problems expressed in Tennyson's early poetry are very similar to Carlyle's. But whereas Carlyle never failed to provide philosophical solutions for his problems, the young Tennyson, like Browning and Arnold, made his very uncertainty the theme of poetic expression.

The following examination of some of Tennyson's early poems will reveal a spiritual development that led the poet into a state of mind in which he would accept rational formulations of ideas which he had already intuitively conceived. Like Carlyle's "Characteristics," Tennyson's "Supposed Confessions" deals with melancholic reminiscences

of childlike innocence and faith. The poem examines the psychological causes of doubt and closes with a yearning to find new faith. 29

The poet remembers a period in his life when his Ich was almost totally fused with his Nicht-Ich. when he was blissfully unconscious of his own individual existence:

Thrice happy state again to be The trustful infant on the knee, Who lets his rosy fingers play About his mother's neck, and knows Nothing beyond his mother's eyesl They comfort him by night and day; They light his little life alway; He hath no thought of coming woes; He hath no case of life or death; Scarce outward signs of joy arise, Because the Spirit of happiness And perfect rest so inward isi

Similarly, Carlyle says of the young Teufelsdrockh that he was "encircled by the Mystery of Existence; under the deep heavenly Firmament; waited on by the four golden

Seasons."1

But soon the growing ego asserts its individual existence under the guise of critical inquiry. The interests and desires of the Ich are no longer those of the Nicht-I.ch. The poet asks,

Why pray To one who heeds not, who can save But will not?-

And it is with growing consciousness that he realizes

That pride, the sin of devils, stood Betwixt', me and the light of God; 30 At this stage Tennyson draws little comfort from the awareness that the growing assertion of the self is the destiny of man in this world.

Shall we not look into the laws Of life and death, and things that seem, And things that "be, and analyze Our double nature . . . ?

Tennyson knows that such indeed is the fate of man, but he rejects his painful "double nature" with a curse, p "0 damned vacillating state!" A recent critic notes that Tennyson's Poems. Chiefly Lyrical (1830) represents the poet's "Everlasting No," and it will be suggested in subsequent chapters here that Carlyle had a guiding influence in Tennyson's eventual arrival at an "Everlasting Tea." One of Tennyson's most obscure poems, "The Kraken," may be interpreted in the light of what has been said so far. What is the Kraken but a symbol of that which man feels but does not know, of what he loves and fears at the same time but does not understand? After a brief moment of fulfillment in which man triumphantly approaches an understanding of love and beauty he finds that he has lost forever the experience of that'.; which alone could make him happy. So the Kraken . . . once by man and angels to be seen, In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die. 31 Carlyle said of the same phenomenon, "could you ever establish a Theory of the Universe that were entire, unimprovable, and which needed only to be got by heart; man then were spiritually defunct, the species we now name •z Man had ceased to exist." . Like Carlyle, Tennyson, in these early poems, is almost obsessed with the typically romantic concept that inductive knowledge alienates the individual and fossilizes society. Both see in a growing self-consciousness the very process by which man and the body politic grow old and die eventually. But inductive knowledge is only one of the "two ways of knowing." At the other extreme of the "basic romantic polarity" lies intuitive experience, which is nourished by that which man does not understand, namely wonder. In "The Hesperides," Tennyson further develops the theme of mystery destroyed by knowledge. Possession of the golden apple,

... the treasure Of the wisdom of the Vest, brings about eternal pleasure, which is described as almost total tranquility out of which mystery is constantly born anew (1. 31). "Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together; that at length they may emergy, full-formed and majestic, into the daylight 32 of Life,"4 says Carlyle.

But after an allusion to the organic theory of social change,

Kingdoms lapse, and climates change, and races die;

Tennyson expresses fear that "the golden apple- he stol'n away", the "ancient heart" of its weary guardian "drunk with overwatchings night and day." For

If the golden apple be taken, The world will be overwise.

Tennyson seems to imply here that the very mechanism of social change consists of an increase in knowledge which suffocates man's intuitive faculty. As the poem continues, the poet reveals more of the nature of the golden apple. It is a "wound" which must not be "healed," a "glory" which must not be "unsealed," a "secret" not "revealed," the secret, perhaps, that pleasure is mysteriously interwoven with pain, that man attains his greatest in tragedy.

Out of watchings, out of wiles, Comes the bliss of secret smiles. All things are not told to all.

But once the magic veil of mystery is torn from the face of reality man can only see himself alone in the universe. "The man who cannot wonder," says Carlyle, 33 "who does not habitually wonder ... is but a Pair of

Spectacles behind which there is no Eye."^

In "The Poet's Mind" Tennyson contrasts the poet's ability to wonder with the platitudinous "Attorney-

Logic" of the "Dark-brow'd sophist," the critic, the philologist, who cannot hear the poet's inner voice, the

"fountain" of creativity which rises from the subconscious mind and

. . . sings a song of undying love; And yet, tho' its voice be so clear and full, the analyst can no longer hear it because he understands it. Teufelsdrockh mocks him, "Thou wilt have no Mystery and Mysticism; wilt walk through the world by the sunshine of what thou callest Truth, . . . and 'explain' all, 7 'account' for all, or believe nothing of it?"' Nevertheless, neither Carlyle nor Tennyson could simply surrender their rational faculties to the intuitive. Carlyle had formed a synthesis of both in his idealistic creed. But under the scrutiny of his rational mind the young Tennyson underwent periods in which he doubted the reality of the realm of imagination. In "The Lady of Shalott," Tennyson relates the romantic dichotomy between reason and intuition to that between life and art. Which side is man's proper realm? Since the conflict within the poet was by no means resolved, one must expect that his answer to the question 34 is ambivalent, and it should be recalled here that

Carlyle displayed a similar ambivalence in his attitude toward art.

The Lady of Shalott weaves a "magic web with colors gay," that is, she is creating a work of art. The figures in her tapestry represent reality as it reflects itself in the "mirror" of the artist's mind or imagination.

But that reflection consists only of "shadows of the world" as it really is. Upon the Lady lies a curse which forbids her to look at life and reality as they really are,

"To look down to Camelot."

She knows not what the curse may be, And so she weaveth steadily.

She "hath no loyal knight and true,"

But in her web she still delights To weave the mirror's magic sights.

However, when the image of "two young lovers lately wed" appears in her mirror, she exclaims,

I am half sick of shadows, and when she sees the image of the "red-cross knight,"

Sir Lancelot,

She left the web, she left the loom,

She saw the helmet and the plume, She look'd down to Camelot. 35 As soon as she actually sees the reality behind the mere appearance of things

The mirror crack1d from side to side; 'The curse is come upon me," cried The Lady of Shalott.

She has lost the ability to wonder. Her Ich and Nicht-Ich. widely cleft asunder, can only be reunited in death.

But Tennyson's allegory is ambivalent, for the Lady does not only raise the veil of mystery, she also opens the door to life, of which her art had only been a "shadow." The poet himself gave the following inter• pretation to Canon Ainger: "The new-born love for some• thing, for some one in the wide world from which she has been so long secluded, takes her out of the region of shadows o into that of realities. For the first time in her life the Lady of Shalott actually experiences, rather than describes love; she does that which formerly she had only contemplated, she feels that which before she had understood. But Tennyson implies that Sir Lancelot does not return her love. Having once experienced life the Lady of Shalott cannot return to the world of shadows. One is reminded of Sappho's legendary leap from the Leucadian rock once her love to Phaon had been thwarted. In his examination of what we have termed the "basic romantic polarity" Tennyson here goes deeper than 36 Carlyle. Art and life themselves, rather than knowledge and intuition, are seen as opposite poles of the human microcosm, art becomes the script of the dialogue of the tortured, self-conscious mind with itself. Perhaps such an insight lies also at the root of the intuitive and typically Puritan suspicion with which Carlyle regarded art and the artist.

Genone may be said to undergo the Lady of

Shalott's metamorphosis in the opposite direction.

Deprived of life, Oenone becomes an artist, she sings of love, the experience of which is denied her by Paris.

. . . for it may be That, while I speak of it, a little while My heart may wander from its deeper woe.

One should also note that Paris' lust for beauty, the object of all true art, becomes the cause for the cataclysmic downfall of Troy. Paris rejects the power "wisdom-bred" of Hera and the "self-reverence, self- knowledge, self-control" of Athena in favour of the beauty of Aphrodite which defies all ethical nomenclature. Tennyson, the artist, is questioning the ethics of art. In the end Oenone has lost her power of love altogether, when she draws fierce comfort from the catastrophe which is to befall the city of her former lover. In a little poem entitled "To -," which appeared in the 1833 edition, as a foreword to "The Palace of Art" 37 Tennyson's doubts of the benign nature of his own vocation find their strongest expression. With little disguise he calls himself

A sinful soul possess'd of many gifts, A spacious garden full of flowering weeds, A glorious devil, large in heart and brain, That did love beauty only . . . And knowledge for its beauty; or if good, Good only for its beauty, seeing not That Beauty, Good, and Knowledge, are three sisters That dote upon each other, friends to man, Living together under the same roof, And never can be sunder'd without tears.

In this early stage of his spiritual progress, Tennyson does not understand that the tearful sundering of "Beauty, Good, and Knowledge" is not only the cross but, also the glory of man wherein he alone of all creatures realizes his potential "to be like God", to "know good and evil." In his lamentation over his "sinful soul" the poet still looks back to where the tree tops of Eden disappear under the horizon, so that he cannot see the towers of the Celestial City rising before him. Little does it dawn on him that before his guilt can become the felix culpa^ of the "Everlasting Yea" he must first proclaim his freedom in an "Everlasting No."

In his state of ambivalence toward art and the artist Tennyson, like Teufelsdrockh, has visions of

"green Paradise-groves in the waste of Ocean-waters,"10 in which it appears to him that the lure of the Sea-Fairies 38 and Lotos-Eaters provides the only relief for his painful Zerrissenheit. If existence depends upon the tension "between the Ich and Nicht-Ich. then non-existence is salvation.

All things have rest: why should we toil alone, We only toil, who are the first of things . . . ? (I'The Lotos-Easters, " 11. 60-61)

To be "in the middle of the wood" again, to revert to a lower order of life, to fuse with nature appears as the only way out.

Again, the poet does not only derive his cosmic fear of change from his own growing self-consciousness, but also from that of society. Like Carlyle, Tennyson sees no good in the growth of the body politic, which he regards as decay.1 In stanza vi of "The Lotos-Eaters" he may be expressing his revulsion at the seemingly mad and senseless pursuit of social progress in the England of the Industrial Revolution.

Is there confusion in the little isle? Let what is broken so remain. The Gods are hard to reconcile; 'Tis hard to settle order once again. There is confusion worse than death.

And indeed it was not until he wrote Shooting Niagara: And After? that the angry Carlyle resigned himself to the prospect that the old order had to burn itself out totally 39 before a new could rise. Whether Tennyson actually ever came to share Carlyle's optimistic faith in the resur• rection of the Phoenix remains to be examined.

Among the early poems "The Palace of Art" is

Tennyson's most articulate and mature statement on art and the artist in society. Through the voice of his soul, the female speaker of the poem, Tennyson tells us his spiritual history up to the publication of the 1833 volume.

It is a story of hybris. tragic isolation, and renunciation.

The drama, which is the drama of human life, began when his

. . . soul would live alone unto herself In her high palace there.

Prom her cloistered (1. 26) Parnassian height, amidst "a cloud of incense" (1. 39) she would luxuriate in the dreamland of an amoral aestheticism, regarding Heaven, in the existence of which her egoistic expectations would not allow her to doubt, as an extension of the Eldorado of her mind, complete with

A group of Houris bow'd to see The dying Islamite, with hands and eyes That said, We wait for thee.

With God and the angels awaiting her pleasure she would disregard the suffering of her fellow creatures,

But over these she trod (l. 157); 40 . . . let the world have peace or wars, •Tis one to me" (11. 182-183).

She felt

Lord over Nature, lord of the visible earth, Lord of the senses five (11. 179-180) and pleased herself "To mimic heaven." But Plato, whose wisdom she acknowledges (1. 163) knew that no man can he lord over his senses; that once the higher reason has argued the good out of existence it cannot he rediscovered in the beautiful. "Consider this, fair youth, and know that in the friendship of the lover there is no real kindness; he has an appetite and wants to feed upon you:

'As wolves love lambs so lovers love their loves!"11

Similarly, once religion becomes a theoretical construct of "mere reason," separated from the wealth of human experience reflected in the mythological "garment" of a specific creed, faith has already been lost.

Then of the moral instinct would she prate And of the rising from the dead, As hers by right of full-accomplish's Fate; And at the last she said: 'I care not what the sects may brawl. I sit as God holding no form of creed, But contemplating all.'

But punishment is here an inherent and necessary consequence of the crime. Once the "Attorney-Logic" of "mere reason" has been permitted to strip the Almighty of his garment 41 by which men may see Him, man can only see himself in a great nothingness which he will only recognize as an All once he has purged himself of all desires. Thus,

Lest she should fail and perish utterly, God, before whom ever lie bare The abysmal deeps of personality, Plagued her with sore despair.

The parallels of this stage in the young poet's spiritual journey with that of Teufelsdrockh in the "Everlasting No" are indeed distinct. Por Carlyle's creature, too, "Doubt had darkened into Unbelief," and "the loss of his religious Belief was the loss of every• thing." And yet, says Carlyle, in his "strange isolation" Teufelsdrockh was never "more decisively the Servant of Goodness, the Servant of God, than even now when doubting God's existence." Thus, too, after the poet's soul had found forgiveness through "Selbsttotung," through renunciation or self-abandonment, she still regards her hybris. and her consequent loneliness^.in the wilderness, for both of which the Palace of Art gives evidence, as necessary steps toward salvation. After much suffering

She threw her royal robes away. "Make me a cottage in the vale," she said, "Where I may mourn and pray.

Yet pull not down my palace towers, that are So lightly, beautifully built; Perchance I may return with others there When I have purged my guilt." (my italics) 42 For nearly ten years Tennyson was silent. When he "returned" in 1842 with two new volumes of poems, and

in 1850 with In Memoriam. after he had met Carlyle, the 12 subject-matter and style of his poetry had changed.

He had found the "New Mythus" of Carlyle's "Everlasting

Yea";15 he had embodied "the divine Spirit" of Christianity

"in a new vehicle and vesture, that our Souls, otherwise 14 too like perishing, may live." In the meantime the death

of Hallam toward the end of 1833 had shown Tennyson the

whole abysmal nothingness of a universe stript of "wonder".

It is the task of the remaining pages of the present work

to show how the poet's acquaintance and friendship with

Carlyle, which began in 1839» may have helped him to shape

that great Nothingness into an All through an "Everlasting

Yea". 43 FOOTNOTES

Sartor, p. 67. Of course, such, experiences and reminiscences are by no means the sole property of Carlyle and Tennyson. Indeed, it may be argued that the central theme of literary art is the search for innocence. But, as major literary figures of the nineteenth century both Carlyle and Tennyson gave that theme greater prominence, more profound consideration, and more eloquent expression than most of their predecessors, contemporaries, and successors. For this reason it may be assumed that Tennyson was interested in what Carlyle had to offer after he had become acquainted with him. p Clyde de L. Ryals, Theme and Symbol in Tennyson's Poems to 1850 (Philadelphia, 1964), pp. 39-40. 3Char., p. 223. ^Sartor, p. 148.

5Ibid., p. 47.

6Ibid., p. 48.

7Ibid., p. 48.

8Memoir, I, 117. ^Laudes, Roman Easter Liturgy.

10Sartor, p. 103. •^"Phaedrus?*," in B. Jowett, trans., The Dialogues of Plato. 4th ed. (Oxford, 1953), III, 14-7.

12D. T. Starnes, "The Influence of Carlyle upon Tennyson," Texas Rev.. VI (1921), 336. 13Clyde de L. Ryals, "The 'Heavenly Friend': The •New Mythus' of In Hemoriam." The Personalist. XLIII (1962), 402. 14 -^Sartor, p. 132. CHAPTER 17

CARLYLE'S INTERCOURSE WITH TENNYSON BETWEEN THE TIME OF THEIR FIRST MEETING AND THE PUBLICATION OF IN MEMORIAM

Tennyson probably first beard of Carlyle after the publication of The French Revolution in 1837 when Carlyle established himself as an important literary figure. Previously, from 1833 to 1834, Sartor Resartus had appeared in Fraser's Magazine, but the work was at first so unpopular that it hardly attained any notice at all. However, after Sartor had appeared with great success in America in 1836, under Emerson's supervision, Carlyle had it published in book form in London two years later, when it may be assumed that Tennyson read it.

The two men met for the first time in 1838 in the newly founded "Sterling Club," a literary club named after John Sterling, the brilliant son of Edward Sterling, The Times' "Thunderer". Previously, in 1835, J. S. Mill had introduced Carlyle to Sterling;1 and Sterling had been an old friend of Tennyson's from the days of the "ApostlesV:'; club at Cambridge ten years earlier. In his Life of John p Sterling Carlyle quotes a membership list of the Sterling

Club, signed by "James Spedding, Secretary", in which the most important names, among many others, are those of

Carlyle, Mill, Sterling, and Tennyson.

On September 5, 1840, Carlyle wrote to his brother: 4-5 Some weeks ago, one night, the Poet Tennison [sic] and Matthew Allen were discovered here, sitting smoking in the garden. Tennison had been here before, but was still new to Jane, — who was alone for the first hour or two of it. A fine large-featured, dim-eyed, bronze- colored, shaggy-headed man is Alfred; dusty, smoky, free-and-easy: who swims, outwardly and inwardly, with great composure in an inarticulate element as of tranquil chaos and tobacco smoke; great now and then when he does,emerge: a most restful, brotherly, solid- hearted man.^

This letter indicates that by the time it was written the relations between Carlyle and Tennyson had

already been more intimate than those one should expect

in a mere acquaintance. One critical biographer suggests

that Tennyson's impression upon Carlyle was such that it 4- broke Carlyle's antipathy toward poetry, and that he was perhaps more drawn to Tennyson the man than the poet.^

Indeed, '"He seemed to take a fancy to me*, Tennyson . . . told a visitor at Farringford in speaking of Carlyle*s

favorable treatment of him in the early forties."

Perhaps Carlyle's ardent tribute to the poet in his

lecture, "The Hero as Poet," presented on May 12, 1840, had something to do with his new friendship.

Hallam Tennyson writes: During the 'forties' he was in the habit of walking with Carlyle at night, . . . They were not in the least afraid of one another although many were afraid of them, and they had long and free discussions on every conceivable subject, and once only almost quarrelled, when Carlyle asserted that my father talked of poetry as 'high art', which he flatly contradicted, 'I never in my whole life spoke of a high art'.7 46 This little episode gives further indication how firmly both men refused to commit themselves to an absolute

aestheticism at the expense of life and reality. About this time, Sterling, according to Andrew Lang, wrote to Tennyson that Carlyle "said more in your praise than in any one's except Cromwell, and an American backwoodsman who has killed thirty or forty people with a bowie-knife." According to Hallam Tennyson, his father became q intimate with Carlyle in 184-2,' probably after the publication of the new Poems. What was perhaps Carlyle's most lavish tribute to Tennyson is contained in a letter written in response to a reading of the 1842 poems. Cheyne Road, Chelsea, 7th Dec. 1842 Dear Tennyson, Wherever this find you, may it find you well, may it come as a friendly greeting to you. I have just been reading your Poems; I have read certain of them over again, and mean to read them over and over till they become my poems: this fact, with the inferences that lie in it, is of such emphasis in me, I cannot keep it to myself, but must needs acquaint you too with it. If you knew what my relation has been to the thing call'd English 'Poetry' for many years back, you would think such fact almost surprising! Truly it is long since in any English Book, Poetry or Prose, I have felt the pulse of a real man's heart as I do in this same. A right valiant, true fighting, victorious heart; strong as a lion's, yet gentle, loving and full of music: what I call a genuine singer's heart! There are tones as of the nightingale; low murmurs as of wood-doves at summer noon; everywhere a noble sound as of the free winds and leafy woods. The sunniest glow of Life dwells in that soul, chequered duly with dark streaks from night and Hades: everywhere one 47 feels as if all were fill'd with yellow glowing sunlight, some glorious golden Vapor; from which form after form bodies itself; naturally, golden forms. In one word, there seems to be a note of "The Eternal Melodies' in this man; for which let all other men be thankful and joyful! Your 'Dora' reminds me of the Book of Ruth: in the 'Two Voices,' which I am told some Reviewer calls 'trivial morality,' I think of passages in Job. For truth is quite true in Job's time and Ruth's as now. I know you cannot read German: the more interesting is it to trace in your 'Summer Oak' a beautiful kindred to something that is best in Goethe; I mean his 'Mullerinn' (Miller's daughter) chiefly, with whom the very Mill-dam gets in love; tho' she proves a flirt after all and the thing ends in satirical lines! very strangely too in the 'Vision of Sin' I am reminded of my friend Jean Paul. This is not babble, it is speech; true deposition of a volunteer witness. And so I say let us all rejoice somewhat. And so let us all smite rhythmically, all in concert, 'the sounding furrows'; and sail forward with new cheer, 'beyond the sunset,' whither we are bound —

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down, It may be we shall touch the happy Isles And see the great Achilles whom we knew! These lines do not make me weep, but there is in me what would fill whole Lachrymatories as I read. But do you, when you return to London, come down to me and let us smoke a pipe together. With few words, with many, or with none, it need not be an ineloquent Pipe!

Farewell, dear Tennyson; may the gods be good to you. With very great sincerity (and in great haste) I subscribe myself

Yours,

T. Carlyle10

Tennyson valued this letter so highly that he had it copied by his sister Emily to be sent to his mother. But how sincere was Carlyle in his praise? His comment on "Dora" and the "Two Voices", the latter perhaps the dreariest poem in the edition, consists of commonplaces. 48 And the fact that the "Vision of Sin" reminded Carlyle

of his "friend Jean Paul" was probably not very interesting to Tennyson.

It is doubtful whether Carlyle noticed the ambiguity in the mood and in the ending of "Ulysses". Despite the general popularity of this poem, critics have often been at a loss to determine its precise meaning. The predominant modern critical opinion about "Ulysses" is well summed up by W. W. Robson: "Tennyson, the responsible social being, the admirably serious and 'committed' Victorian intellectual, is uttering strenuous sentiments in the accent.t of Tennyson the most un-strenuous, lonely, and poignant of poets."11

Tennyson himself said, "Ulysses was written soon after Arthur Hallam's death, and gave my feeling about the need of going forward, and braving the struggle of life 12 perhaps more simply than anything in In Memoriam." He also told James Knowles: "Ulysses* ... was written under the sense of loss and that all had gone by, but that still life must be fought out to the end. It was more written with the feeling of [Hallam's] loss upon me than many poems in 'In Memoriam'."15 But Ulysses is not "going forward" to lead men, to "produce" — he bequeaths:, these tasks to his son whom he leaves behind — he seeks the "Happy Isles," which are not so unlike those of the Lotos- Eaters. 49

However, in Past and Present, written a year after the first publication of "Ulysses," Carlyle quotes the "Happy Isles" in the sense of an abode of active heroes and hero-worshippers. Typically, Carlyle's quotation of a line from "Ulysses" is distorted.

Carlyle says about his proposed future age of hero-worship:

There lies the Heroic Promised Land; under that Heaven's- light, my brethren, bloom the Happy Isles, — there, 0 there 1 Thither will we;

'There dwells the great Achilles whom we knew'.14

But Tennyson's line reads in all editions,

And see the great Achilles, whom we knew (1. 64).

The liberal carelessness with which Carlyle uses

Tennyson's poetry to suit his own ends may be indicative of his somewhat arrogant refusal to occupy his mind seriously with Tennyson. Similarly, a poem entitled "Summer Oak", which Carlyle mentions in his letter to Tennyson, does not exist. Carlyle must mean "The Talking Oak," the "kindred" of which to Goethe's "Miillerin" may well be disputed. Besides, as Tennyson said to his sister Emily, "Carlyle is mistaken about the satirical lines, concluding the 15 'Mullerinn' [sic]. They are in another poem." y

Carlyle's somewhat haughty assumption that

Tennyson did not know German also illustrates the jovial 50 superficiality of the letter. Emily explains,

I asked Alfred what Carlyle meant by saying he could not read German, and he said, when the poems he (i.e. Carlyle) alluded to were written he knew little or nothing of German.16He must have told Carlyle this who has made a jumble.

It should also be noticed that Carlyle did not at all mention "Locksley Hall," which became one of the most popular of the poems in the 1842 edition, and which shows some evidence of having been written under Carlyle's 17 influence. ' One would not do Carlyle an injustice if one assumed that he had not bothered to read it.

Carlyle's letter and subsequent sayings well illustrate the peculiar relationship between the two men. Tennyson, the poet, listened to Carlyle and took him seriously, perhaps too seriously. Carlyle, the critic who perhaps believed in silence because he wanted to do all the talking himself took no one seriously, with the 1 ft possible exception of himself. Tennyson's sincerity sometimes bordered on the naive. When Amos B. Alcott, the American apostle of vegetarianism, visited London in 1842, he could soon pride himself on "his success in converting Tennyson — for a time. Tennyson abstained from mutton chops for three whole months before he relapsed into flesh-eating. Carlyle was less open to such 'light', confessing to Spedding, 19 •I defended myself with quizzing,' . . ." 7 51 Despite their different temperaments, it may

he assumed that relations between Carlyle and Tennyson

during the early forties were quite amicable. The

following biographical details may help one to form a

picture of the friendship. On December 27, 1842, a

meeting took place at Carlyle's home between Tennyson,

Carlyle, Dr. John Carlyle and Erasmus Darwin, brother of

Charles, at which Tennyson probably read some of his 20 poetry. The following day Carlyle praised Tennyson in enthusiastic terms in a letter to his brother 21 Alexander. A letter dated March 1843, written by Jane for her cousin Helen Welsh, and calling Tennyson "handsome", "noble-hearted" and a "genius," indicates a degree of affection and familiarity which leads one to assume that 22 the meetings continued. In a letter to Emerson, already mentioned, Carlyle praised the musical quality of Tennyson's speech (Nov. 17, 1843). Anne Thackeray Ritchie reports that in the summer of 1844 Tennyson, Carlyle and Fitzgerald sometimes dined together at "The

Cock" in the Strand,25 and Fitzgerald says that Carlyle "opened the gates of his Valhalla" to Tennyson "and now kept a pipe for him in a special niche in the garden wall at Cheyne Row."^ More of Carlyle's pleasantries abound in a letter to Emerson of August 5, 1844. Alfred is "a true human soul", ". . . a man solitary and sad,* . . . carrying a hit of Chaos about him . . . , which he is manufacturing into Cosmos1."2^ Another letter to

Fitzgerald, dated October 26, 1844, describes an

"unforgettable day" with Tennyson. Some time in 1845

Carlyle was at his patronizing best when he persuaded

Richard Monckton Milnes, M.P., to get a pension for the 27 poet. ' But it seems that by the end of 1844 Tennyson, for a while at least, had enough of the blustering Carlyle. The poet must have given the philosopher some of his due, for Carlyle complained in a letter of October 12, 1844, to his brother James that he "got an po ugly headache from the jog, ..." The meetings seem to have become less frequent, for Carlyle wrote to Fitzgerald February 6, 1845, that he met Alfred only 29 "twice," 7 probably since he last told Fitzgerald about him the previous autumn (see above). Jane, too, in a letter to her husband who was then in Scotland, implies that a certain estrangement had taken place. When she met Tennyson at a play he did not recall her name, although he recognized her. To his brother John, on May 5, 1846, Carlyle complained about Tennyson that "no man has a right to be so lazy in this world; — and none n3> 1 that is so lazy will ever make much way in it, I think! 53 Nevertheless, Sir Charles Tennyson assures us that "Patmore's sympathy and comeradeship, and Alfred's affection for Carlyle, were the chief influences which kept him so much in London during the first half of this •52 year [184-6]."^ It seems that the deep differences in temperament between the men were not sufficient to cut the deeper bonds which united their kindred spirits. In the conclusion of "The Golden Year," which appeared first in the fourth edition of Poems in 184-6 and has been retained in subsequent editions, Tennyson pays obvious tribute to Carlyle.55 The poem is in the form of a dialogue. After the final speaker has expressed a somewhat bleary- eyed, idealistic faith in a "golden" future of peace and abundance, he is countered by an old choleric character, here called James, as follows: •What stuff is this! Old writers push'd the happy season back, — The more fools they, — we forward: dreamers both: You most, that in an age, when every hour Must sweat her sixty minutes to the death, Live on, God love us, as if the seedsman, rapt Upon the teeming harvest, should not plunge His hand into the bag: but well I know That unto him who works, and feels he works, This same grand year is ever at the doorsi

Tennyson's probable indebtedness to Carlyle in this passage becomes the clearer the more fully one realizes how strongly Carlyle's advocacy of the vita activa- conflicts with the contemplative temperament of the poet of "The Lotos-Eaters." 54- But soon Tennyson seems to have withdrawn somewhat. In a letter to Fitzgerald, dated September 22,

1846, Carlyle complained that Tennyson, who had just returned from a trip to Switzerland, had not visited him, 34 although he had been in London upon his return. A few days later, at a dinner party, Carlyle made the remark, referred to earlier, that Shakespeare, Burns, and Tennyson would all have done better in prose. And after his visit to England in 1847 Emerson said, "He [Carlyle] is quite contemptuous about Kunst (art) . . . ," and, "Carlyle thinks him [Tennyson] the best man in England to smoke a pipe with, and used to see him much; had a place in his little garden, on the wall, where 35 Tennyson's pipe was laid up.">-' It is significant that the latter part of Emerson's description is in the past tense. In September, 1847, Tennyson published The Princess, which Carlyle regarded as something of an affront. One critic3^ suggests that Carlyle's Simonianism — he had translated Saint-Simon's Le Nouveau Christianisme, but never published it — possibly influenced Tennyson, but "Carlyle . . . thought very ill of the 'femme libre' 37 interests of the Saint-Simonians.ny' He wrote to Lady Harriet Baring, later Lady Ashburton, that the Princess 38 was "almost imbecile."^ Another time he said that it

"had everything but common-sense."3^ To Emerson he wrote 55 at the end of 1847 that Tennyson had "almost lost his way among the will-o-wisps," that he "may flounder even deeper, over neck and nose at last, among the quagmires that aboundl" and that Alfred "wants a task".40

But Carlyle was very fond of "Tears, idle Tears."

Hallam Tennyson quotes his father as saying, "Old Carlyle, who is never moved by poetry, once quoted these lines of mine, while we were out walking," and, Hallam says, "He 41 valued Carlyle's opinion." How much he did so is also illustrated in the following dinner talk, given in the presence of Carlyle: "'I don't think that since Shakespeare there has been such a master of the English language as I,' said he, and when the others were looking astonished, he 42 calmly added — 'To be sure, I've got nothing to say'." How difficult it actually was for Tennyson to get along with the friend whom he obviously admired so much is indicated by what he told Elizabeth Bundle in 1848. "You would like him for one day," he said, "but then get 43 tired of him; so vehement and destructive." ' Tennyson did not seek the company of Carlyle as often as he could have. In a letter to Aubrey de Vere of January 17, 1849, Carlyle described him as follows: "Tennyson it seems, has returned to Town: a glimpse of him was got, the other day, 'walking with large strides into Regent Street,' — in a northerly direction; and then then he went over the horizon again, and has not reemerged 56 44 since." , But there must have been a meeting early in

1849, for Carlyle wrote to John Forster on March 21,

1849, that Tennyson had left his umbrella at Cheyne Row.'

whenever they met Carlyle would play the

"vehement Jeremiah" in a manner that probably left the poet speechless. Espinasse reports one such encounter:

I found him [Carlyle] one forenoon deep in the Acta Sanctorum, and full of the story of the dealings of an early Christian missionary with some Scandinavian and heathen potentate. 'Alfred', he declared, ' would be much better employed in making such an episode interesting and beautiful than in cobbling his odes,' the occupation in which, when visiting him some time before, Carlyle had found him engaged, and with the futility of which he had then and there reproached him. I asked Carlyle if the late Laureate did not 'stand up' for his literary procedure. 'Noi he lay down for it,' Carlyle replied, doubtless with a reference to 'Alfred's' careless, indolent ways.46

On' June 1, 1850, Tennyson published In Memoriam. Two weeks later he married, and in November he became Poet Laureate. Thus it appears that during its first decade the friendship between Carlyle and Tennyson was sufficiently intimate, and of such a peculiar, rather one-sided quality, that it is probable that Carlyle impressed Tennyson with his ideas. An examination of Tennyson's greatest poem, begun shortly before the publication of Sartor Resartus, and published at the end of the first decade of the poet's friendship with Carlyle, will suggest that Tennyson's mind did indeed not remain unchanged under the onslaught of Carlyle's JeremiacLs, receptive as it was during a period in which the poet must have been searching for the very ideas Carlyle had already formulated. 58 FOOTNOTES

•'•Wilson, II, p. 372.

2P. 133. ^Sanders, "Carlyle and Tennyson," 82 (from the original letter in the National Library of Scotland).

H. I* A. Fausset, Tennyson. A Modern Portrait (London, 1923), p. 93.

5Ibid., p. 141.

Hallam, Lord Tennyson, Tennyson and His Friends (London, 1911), pp. 131-132. ^Memoir. I, 267.

8Alfred Tennyson (London,: 1901), p. 36.

9Memoir, I, 188.

10Ibid., I, 213-214.

llf,The Dilemma of Tennyson," in Critical Essays On the Poetry of Tennyson, ed. John Killham (London, I960), p. 159. 12Memoir, I, 196.

13James Knowles, "Aspects of Tennyson," Nineteenth Century. XXXIII(l893), 182.

14Past, p. 31.

1^Memoir. I, 214. 16 Ibid., I, 214. If not earlier, Tennyson became acquainted with modern German thought through the "Apostles" at Cambridge, among whom the Germans were highly in vogue. (See Lore Metzger, "The Eternal Process: Some Parallels Between Goethe's Faust and Tennyson's In Memoriam." Vict. Poetry. I, 189-96). In July 1832 Tennyson toured the Rhineland with Arthur Hallam, and a year or so later a typical week's work looked like this: Monday History, German Tuesday Chemistry, German 59 Wednesday Botany, German Thursday Electricity, German Friday Animal Physiology, German Saturday Mechanics Sunday Theology

(Memoir, I, 124.)

In 1839 Tennyson is known to have read German poetry (See Bartle Teeling, ed., "A Visit to the Tennysons in 1839," Blackwood's Magazine. CLV [1894], 605-21). But in 1890 Tennyson admits to he no "judge of German verse" (Memoir. II, 378).

17See Chapter VI. l ft See also below, p. 130. 19Wilsonh , III, 169. 20, 'Ibid., p. 196. 21 Alexander Carlyle, ed., New Letters of Thomas Carlyle (London, 1904), I, 279-280. 22Memoir, I, 188.

25Records of Tennyson, Ruskin, Browning (New York, 1893), PP. 59-60. ?4 Sir Charles Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson (New York, 194-9), p. 202. ^Correspondence of Carlyle and Emerson, II, 66-67•

toF. R. Barton, ed., Some New Letters of Edward Fitzgerald (London, 1923), I, 321-322.

27Memoir, I, 225.

28Sanders, "Carlyle and Tennyson," p. 87 (from the original letter in the National Library of Scotland).

2^Ibid., p. 85 (from the original letter in the National Library of Scotland).

5°J. A. Froude, ed., Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle (London, 1883), I, 339-344.

51Sanders, "Carlyle and Tennyson," p. 85 (from the original letter in the National Library of Scotland). 32 ^ Charles Tennyson, op. cit., p. 214.

55Pitt, op. cit., p. 129. ^Some New Letters of Edward Fitzgerald, pp. 131-133. 35 y

57Ibid., p. 39 (note); see Cofer, D. B. Saint- Simonianism in the Radicalism of Thomas Carlyle, London, 193D. 38 ' Lawrence and Elizabeth Hanson, Necessary Evil: The Life of Jane Welsh Carlyle (London, 1952), p. 361. 5^F. Espinasse, "The Carlyles and a Segment of Their Circle," in Literary Recollections and Sketches (London, 1893), pp. 213-214. 40 Correspondence of Carlyle and Emerson. II, 159*

41Memoir, II, 73.

42Wilson, IV, 11.

45Charles Tennyson, op. cit., p. 231. Sanders, "Carlyle and Tennyson," p. 88. (From the original letter in the National Library of Scotland.) ^Charles Richard Sanders, "Carlyle's Letters," Bull. John Rylands Libr.. XXXVIII (1955), 220.

46Espinasse, op. cit., p. 214. CHAPTER V

PARALLELS BETWEEN SARTOR AND IN MEMORIAM, AND SOME POSSIBLE INFLUENCES FROM CARLYLE UPON TENNYSON

Little is known about the dates at which the various sections of In Memoriam were written. Tennyson himself said,

It must be remembered that this is a poem, not an actual biography. . . . The sections were written at many different places, and as the phrases of our intercourse came to my memory and suggested them. I did not write them with any view of weaving them into a whole, or for publication, until I found that I had written so many.l

Because it is not possible to establish dates for the composition of most sections of In Memoriam. it is very difficult to trace specific influences from Carlyle upon Tennyson. To be sure, there are many similarities and parallels between Sartor and In Memoriam. but most of these passages, as they appear in the poem, may, for all we know, have been written before Tennyson knew Carlyle. Moreover, even when it has been established that Tennyson composed a certain section after he had met Carlyle, its mere similarity with Carlyle's thought does not, of course, prove any influence. It will be seen that those critics who do substantiate their assertions that Carlyle influ• enced Tennyson with specific examples invariably base their claims on mere parallels. In its examination of a 62 critical opinion held by several scholars, the present study can go no further than to point out such parallels, and to show that it is psychologically probable and biographically possible that Carlyle influenced Tennyson. Certain clues indicate that the composition of

In Memoriam occupied Tennyson intermittently throughout the seventeen years between Hallam's death and the 2 publication of the poem. There are some specific clues as to dates, Section LXXXVI was written at Barmouth,^ which Tennyson visited in 1839. ^he nostalgic tone of Section LXXXVII suggests that a long time has passed between the writing of the poem and the poet's departure from Cambridge in 1831. Similarly, in Section XC the poet speaks as if a long span of years had elapsed since Hallam's death. Sections C - CIII refer to the removal of the Tennysons from Somersby to High Beech in Epping Forest in 1837, and the following two Sections (CIV - V) allude to the new home. The "black fronts long-withdrawn" in Section CXIX also suggest that the section was written comparatively late. Edward Lushington, for whose marriage with the poet's sister Cecilia in 1842 Tennyson wrote the epithalamium which concludes In Memoriam. had some opportunity to observe the progress of the poem. He wrote, 63 At Christmas 1841 . . . the number of the memorial poems had rapidly increased since I had seen the poet [in the summer of 1840], his book containing many that were new to me. Some I heard him repeat before I had seen them in writing, others I learnt to know first from the book itself which he* kindly allowed me to look through without stint. I remember one particular night when ... he began to recite the poem that stands sixth in "In Memoriam," ... On one other occasion he came and showed me a poem he had just composed, saying he liked it better than most he had done lately, this was No. LI, . . .5

Lushington visited Tennyson again in the summer of 1845. About this visit he wrote:

He [the poet] had then completed many of the cantos in "In Memoriam" and was engaged on "The Princess," of which I had heard nothing before. ... He said to me, 'I have brought in your marriage at the end of "In Memoriam" and then showed me those poems of "In Memoriam" which were finished and which were a perfectly novel surprise to me. 6

Unfortunately, with the exception of No. LI, Lushington does not mention specific sections. He merely seems to imply that "many" of the sections were written between 1840 and 1845, that is, during the first five years of the friendship between Carlyle and Tennyson, when, as the biographical evidence indicates, both men had a greater interest in each other than during the following five years. Furthermore, it is likely that those sections which may be said to breathe an "Everlasting Yea" in the face of Death were written later than those in which the poet's grief and doubt appear unresolved, if In Memoriam 64 reflects a spiritual pilgrimage at all. We "can hardly help thinking it improbable that many of the last thirty or forty sections were composed within a few years of

Hallam's death", says A.: C. Bradley with great caution in his Commentary to In Memoriam.' To show how Tennyson arrived at an "Everlasting Yea", and, if possible, to suggest where Carlyle could have exerted a guiding influence, will be the purpose of the remaining pages of this chapter. Of course, this is not to imply that Tennyson's "Everlasting Yea" is simply the outcome of Carlyle's influence. It has been shown in Chapter III that Tennyson's intellectual problems, and a few tentative steps toward solving them, were very similar to Carlyle's at a time when he could not have known Carlyle. Moreover, an "Everlasting Yea", in its wider meaning, is an almost universal human experience. The only conjectures to be drawn from the existing parallels between Sartor and In Memoriam. with due consideration of the psychological and biographical evidence, are therefore that Carlyle may have exerted a "guiding influence" over Tennyson with respect to the final form of the poet's "Everlasting Yea", and to the time at which it occurred.

The "Prologue", written in 1849, when almost all of the poems had been written and arranged as they stand now, introduces the basic problem of In Memoriam. the split between the "two ways of knowing," which forms 65 the basis of what has been described in Chapter II as

the "basic romantic polarity". To heal that split,

reason is to be transfused by emotion and emotion purified by reason, so that Ultimate Reality, the real nature of

things, once again manifests itself in such a way that

reason cannot protest and emotion may be persuaded to

follow along. The manner in which Ultimate Reality

manifests itself to the new man is through the "human

form divine", in the present case, through the transfigured Q Hallam, so

That mind and soul, according well, May make one music as before.

Such an "Everlasting Yea" implies, as it always does, an "Everlasting No". Man may only truly love that which arouses his pity. Jealous and revengeful Jehoya, throning in the Heavens, arouses a brave man's contempt, to the same extent to which the suffering Christ arouses his love and devotion. "Religion contains infinite sadness. If we are to love God, he must be in Q distress," Carlyle quotes Novalis, and says that, on the intellectual side of our nature, "To become acquainted with a truth, we must first have disbelieved it, and

10 disputed against it — #» In Memoriam is Tennyson's great dispute with God. That the poet's spiritual struggle may be related 66 to Carlyle's is suggested even in some of the "early"11 sections. In Section IV Tennyson compares his languishing grief to a supercooled liquid which freezes as soon as it is shaken. His languor stems from something

. . . which thou hast lost, Some pleasure from thine early years. Break, thou deep vase of chilling tears, That grief hath shaken into frost!

In The French Revolution Carlyle uses the same image in a different context:

. . . in few days, some say in not many hours, all France to the utmost borders bristles with bayonets. . . . But thus may any chemical liquid, though cooled to the freezing-point, or far lower, still continue liquid; and then on the slightest stroke or shake, it at once rushes wholly into ice. Thus has France, for long months and even years, been chemically dealt with: brought below zero; and now, shaken by the Fall of a Bastille, it instantaneously congeals.12

One critic believes that in Section V Carlyle's imagery may be in the back of Tennyson's mind. In the last stanza the poet describes his poetry in relation to his grief as "clothes" in relation to that which they

"enfold".

3h words, like weeds, I'll wrap me o'er, Like coarsest clothes against the cold; But that large grief which these enfold Is given in outline and no more.

Carlyle says in Sartor. "Language is called the Garment of Thought: however, it should rather be, 67 Language is the Flesh-Garment, the Body, of Thought."15

In addition, the whole imagery in Sartor Resartus revolves, of course, about "clothes". Alice Maddeford

Darch accepts the mere fact that Tennyson employs such a widely used metaphor as proof that Section V is one of those "sections of In Memoriam that show the direct 14 influence of Sartor Resartus". Obviously, her reasoning is wholly inconclusive, and unfortunately, it is indicative of the quality of evidence which one encounters all too frequently in a critical examination of a firmly held scholarly opinion, such as the one under investigation. It is to be remembered once again that all evidence based on parallels between words, ideas, and images in the writings of Carlyle and Tennyson must remain inconclusive if considered apart from the psychological and biographical evidence. Only if one regards all three categories of evidence as a whole may one conclude that it is probable that Carlyle influenced Tennyson. Even so, one must not imagine that Tennyson accepted Carlyle*s ideas without reserve. It is known that he listened to him, but as poet he was forever suspicious of any philosophical system which laid claim to universal validity. Whereas Carlyle, the philosopher, would jubilantly proclaim the philosophical solution of his religious doubts as valid and obligatory for all men, Tennyson, the poet, would always feel that the wiser is also the sadder man. 68

Thus in Section XXXIII he seems to he 15 addressing a man much like Carlyle, y perhaps in response to a typical argument during one of those nightly walks in the 'forties'.16 0 thou that after toil and storm Mayst seem to have reach'd a purer air, Whose faith has centre everywhere, Nor cares to fix itself to form,

Leave thou thy sister when she prays Her early heaven, her happy views; Nor thou with shadow'd hint confuse A life that leads melodious days. Her faith thro' form is pure as thine, Her hands are quicker unto good. . . .

Indeed, Tennyson's warning seems to be directed against Carlyle's typical irreverence, for which Tennyson once 17 mildly reproached Carlyle during a conversation. In the following section (XXXIV) Tennyson touches upon the basic question of Sartor Resartus and In Memoriam. in fact, the basic question of man: to be or not to be. In the light of an "Everlasting Yea" God is revealed through His garment, which is the universe; in the darkness of the "Everlasting No" that garment appears as a shroud spread over the dead body of mankind. In the absence of faith, 'Twere best at once to sink to peace, Like birds the charming serpent draws, To drop head-foremost in the jaws Of vacant darkness and to cease. Teufelsdrockh undergoes a strikingly similar experience.

At one place he describes his doubts thus:

It seemed as if all things in the Heavens above and the earth beneath would hurt me; as if the Heavens and the Earth were but boundless jaws of a devouring monster, wherein I, palpitating, waited to be devoured.-1"

In Section XXXVI Tennyson deals with the

Platonic idea that words, and therefore poetry, or "tales can only approach Ultimate Reality, but never attain it.

Yet paradoxically, words are the only means by which man can approach the Truth.

For wisdom dealt with mortal powers, Where truth in closest words shall fail, When truth embodied in a tale Shall enter in at lowly doors.

In "The Everlasting Yea" Teufelsdrockh, too, begins to see the Reality of things behind their measurable mani• festations. He expresses his new faith thus:

One Bible I know, of whose Plenary Inspiration doubt is not so much as possible; nay with my own eyes I saw the God's-Hand writing it, thereof all other Bibles are but Leaves, -- say, in Picture-Writing to assist the weaker faculty.x9

But despite such glimpses, Tennyson, in his spiritual journey, has not yet reached the height from which he can see the pinnacles of the Celestial City before him. Nevertheless, in Section XLV, for instance, he begins to look forward and to understand the purpose 70 of the pilgrimage. His struggle, life itself, is here conceived as the progressive differentiation between the

Ich and the Nicht-Ich. Only when that differentiation is complete, when the Ich stands, so to speak, wholly on its own feet, only then can the poet dissolve his ego into an

"Everlasting Yea."

This use may lie in blood and breath, Which else were fruitless of their due, Had man to learn himself anew Beyond the second birth of death.

However, at this stage, Tennyson's ego still clings anxiously to its earthly shape, from which by nature it is destined to separate. In Section XLVII he reveals what he expects to find "Beyond the second birth of death": not the unio mystica with the Nicht-Ich. but an eternal Ich apparently strong enough to withstand its loneliness. "Eemerging in the general Soul"

Is faith as vague as all unsweet. Eternal form shall still divide The eternal soul from all beside; And I shall know him when we meet;

As yet the poet cannot renounce that which it is most painful to renounce, his own existence. Ultimately, it will be his longing to be reunited with the friend that will reconcile him to the nature of such a reunion which his reason tells him to be the only real one: the reunion of dust with dust. 71 Thus, when he nevertheless "faintly" trusts

"the larger hope" (LV), the split between the two ways of knowing, between Kant's "Mere Reason" and Carlyle's

"Pure Reason" is as wide open as ever. It reveals some• thing very interesting of Tennyson's mind to observe that when he considers the alternative to his "larger hope" in unsparing horror, his mind, only subconsciously perhaps, turns to Carlyle. Was he looking for a solution without fully realizing it?

What is probably the most famous image in

In Memoriam. "Nature, red in tooth and claw" (LVI), bears such resemblance to an image Carlyle used repeatedly, that one is tempted to regard it as something more than a mere 20 coincidence. In Past and Present. Carlyle says about nature: Nature, like the Sphinx, is of womanly celestial loveliness and tenderness: the face and bosom of a goddess, but ending in claws and the body of a lioness. There is on her a celestial beauty, . . . but there is also a darkness, a ferocity, fatality, which are infernal. . . . Answer her riddle, it is well with thee. Answer it not, pass on regarding it not, it will answer itself; the solution for thee is a thing of teeth and claws; Nature is a dumb lioness, deaf to thy pleadings, fiercely devouring. . . . thou art her mangled victim. . . .21 (my italics)

And in Sartor. Carlyle also uses the Sphinx image.

Teufelsdrockh says,

The Universe was a mighty Sphinx-riddle, which I knew so little of, yet must rede, or be devoured. In red streaks of unspeakable grandeur, yet also in the blackness 72

of darkness, was Life, to my too-unfurnished Thought, unfolding itself.22

Section LVI closes with the poet's desperate demand to see the true nature of things, to find the solution of the riddle,

Behind the veil, behind the veil.

Were he ever granted the look behind the veil, he would see himself. Indeed, later, when the poet's Ich has become reunited with the Nicht-Ich through renunciation, he says in lyric XCVII:

My love has talk'd with rocks and trees; He finds on misty mountain-ground His own vast shadow glory-crown'd; He sees himself in all he sees, (my italics)

The way in which the poet's self-realization and ultimate reconciliation are brought about in In Memoriam may be closely compared to the struggle of Teufelsdrockh. Through Hallam as mediator, the poet asks whether the ens a se owes him happiness (LX). But he finds the answer himself,

. . . "How vain am I! How should he love a thing so low?" (LX)

"What Act of Legislature was there that thou shouldst be

Happy?"23 Teufelsdrockh asks himself the same question. 73 And in Past and Present Carlyle devotes a whole chapter to the superstition that man has a right to he "happy".

Gradually, the poet has accomplished the 24 "first preliminary moral Act, Annihilation of Self"; with Teufelsdrockh, he bids the phantoms of his will-to- survive farewell. "Fly, then, false shadows of Hope; 25 I will chase you no more, I will believe you no more." ' Once man has renounced his petty claims on time and space they lose their spell over him and flee like spectres. "And seest thou therein any glimpse of IMMORTALITY? —" exults Teufelsdrockh. Is the white Tomb of our Loved One, who died from our arms, and had to be left behind us there, which rises in the distance, like a pale, mournfully receding Milestone, to tell how many toilsome uncheered miles we have journeyed on alone, — but a pale spectral Illusion I Is the lost Friend still mysteriously here, even as we are Here mysteriously, with Godl — Know of a truth that only the Time-shadows have perished, or are perishable; that the real Being of whatever was, and whatever is, and whatever will be, is even now and forever.

For the modern poet as for the ancient sculptor, Thanatos becomes one with Eros. In lyric LXVIII, death, for the first time, is no longer looked upon with grief but almost with a sigh of relief. "Sleep, Death's twin- brother" grants for a while what Lethe gives forever. It may be said that Tennyson passes through a "Centre of Indifference" when he becomes resigned to the ...inevitable.

I curse not Nature, no, nor Death; For nothing is that errs from law. (LXIII) 74- From here one does not have to go far until one regards

that which is as that which ought to he; until one says

"lea."

Thus the whole inconceivable nothingness by which the poet has formerly been horror-struck becomes

transfused with the very being of the beloved friend.

. . . Death has made His darkness beautiful with thee. (LXXIV)

One can only understand the full meaning of such an emotional process if one understands the whole depth of the friendship between the poet and Hallam. And that depth cannot be measured by standards which happen to be regarded as "normal" at the present time. For the Elizabethans, as for the Romantics, and paradoxi• cally, for the modern psychoanalyst, there was and is only one love which is inseparable and ultimately indistinguishable from its physical manifestations. To observe how a wholly superstitious belief in love apart from the body, i.e., apart from reality, serves as the basis for moral and legal judgements alone suffices to discredit the myth that ours is a rational age. Many of the expressions of Tennyson's love for Hallam strike the unbiased modern ear as unusual, and the prudish as offensive. The poet once compares himself to 75 A happy lover who has come To look on her that loves him well. (VIII)

Arthur Hallam is to the poet

Dear as the mother to the son. More than my brothers are to me. (iX)

And he sheds

Tears of the widower, when he sees A late-lost form that sleep reveals, And moves his doubtful arms, and feels Her place is empty, . . • (XIII;

If he could see Hallam's dead body, he,

. . . falling on his faithful heart, Would breathing thro' his lips impart The life that almost dies .... (XVIII)

The repeated use of the word "Love" in the context.; of Sections XXV - XXVII sounds equally strange to modern ears. In lyric XL the poet compares his friend's death to the departure of a bride from home. In another place, Tennyson says that in the friend he found and admired "manhood fused with female grace" (CIX).

A recent study27 of Tennyson traces his ambi• valence toward women, which expresses itself in the fact that the poet's female characters tend to be either devils or angels, to a strong homosexual trait in Tennyson's character which became manifest in his love 76 for Hallam. It is interesting that a reading of Milton's

Samson Agonistes had a profound effect on the twelve year old Tennyson and caused his lifelong fear of blindness.

Psychoanalysis has suggested that an irrational fear of blindness is a symbolic expression of a person's fear of losing his manhood. Such a fear may easily be related to homosexual behaviour.

With these considerations in mind, one can understand the mystical experience described in lyric

LXXXV. Through his death Hallam has become part of the

Nicht-Ich. of the universe; and the poet looks at his own death as a consummation of his love, by which he will be 29 united with the friend. J

And every pulse of wind and wave Recalls, in change of light or gloom, My old affection of the tomb, And my prime passion in the grave.

Such a reconciliation of man with nature is possible only after the poet has asked himself, like Teufelsdrockh in the "Everlasting No", "What art thou afraid of?" . . . what is the sum-total of the worst that lies before thee? Death? Well, Death;"50 Now the poet's friendship

. . . Masters Time indeed, and is Eternal, separate from fears, (my italics) 77 It is possible that, in his contemplation of death, Tennyson thought of an idea he may have read in

Sartor. Teufelsdrockh, at one place, tries to visualize the eternal law of change in the following consideration:

Nay it is very mournful, yet not useless, to see and know, how the Greatest and Dearest, in a short while, would find his place quite filled-up here, and no room for him; the very Napoleon, the very Byron, in some seven years, has become obsolete, and were now a foreigner to his Europe.31

Section XC of In Memoriam expresses a similar idea:

But if they came who past away, Behold their brides in other hands; The hard heir strides about their lands, And will not yield them for a day.

And in Section LI Tennyson asks,

Do we indeed desire the dead Should still be near us at our side? Is there no baseness we would hide? No inner vileness that we dread?

According to Lushington, this section was composed around Christmas 1841 (see above, p. 63), at a time when

Tennyson had already been quite intimate with Carlyle for more than a year.

But Tennyson's personal love for Hallam is stronger than Carlyle's rationalization. The loving poet scolds the rational philosopher, 78 He tasted love with, half his mind, Nor ever drank the inviolate spring Where highest heaven, who first could fling This bitter seed among mankind. (XC)

In fact, in Section CXIV Tennyson seems to tell

Carlyle that "Knowledge", or ratio alone, even Carlyle's critical, Kantian, use of it, "cannot fight the fear of death" (1. 10).

. . . Let her [ratio] know her place; She is the second, not the first.

Paradoxically, a critic defines the theme of lyric CXIV as the "Kantian-Coleridgean-Carlylean distinction" ''between the two ways of knowing, between knowledge and experience.32

This distinction is pursued in Section CXXIV. Tennyson here rejects all 'rational' approaches toward a reconciliation of the Ich with the Nicht-Ich. of man with nature, or God.

I found Him not in world or sun, Or eagle's wing, or insect's eye, Nor thro' the questions men may try, The pretty cobwebs we have spun.

Instead, the poet has found God in the cold fear of His •53 vast nothingness, in Carlyle's "Everlasting No"r> and in the love of that nothingness which Hallam's death had transfigured into an All, in Carlyle's "Everlasting Yea". 79 A warmth within the breast would melt The freezing reason's colder part, And like a man in wrath the heart Stood up and answered, "I have felt."

For the poet, as for Teufelsdrockh, fear was a necessary- first step in his growth because it made him conceive the whole vastness of that which he came to love.

No, like a child in doubt and fear: But that blind clamor made me wise; Then was I as a child that cries, But, crying, knows his father near.

But Tennyson did not transcend his Weltangst merely as a result of Teufelsdrockt's quasi-mathematical "lessening" of the "Denominator" of his "Fraction of

Life."5'' Ultimately, man cannot achieve fulfillment by renouncing all desires, because to live means to have a will-to-power, a desire to love. The poet, rather, reached fulfillment because with the power of his imagination he welded his desires to his fate.

The dust of the beloved friend had transformed a hostile universe into the loving womb of nature.

Thy voice is on the rolling air; I hear thee where the waters run;. Thou standest in the rising sun, And in the setting thou art fair. . . . Tho' mix'd with God and Nature thou I seem to love thee more and more. (CXXX

Thus Tennyson, the poet, had achieved what 80 Carlyle, the thinker, could only call for. He had embodied "the divine spirit" of Christianity "in a new 36 Mythus, in a new vehicle and vesture"^ by "substituting a symbolic and transformed Hallam for the figure of

Christ."57 81 FOOTNOTES

Memoir. I, 304. p For the following chronological analysis I am largely indebted to Alice Maddeford Darch, "A Comparison of Tennyson's In Memoriam with Carlyle's Sartor Resartus." (Master's essay, Univ. of Western Ontario, 1927), p. 19. ^Memoir, I, 313.

4Ibid., p. 173.

^Memoir, I, 202-203.

6Ibid., p. 203.

7(London, 1915), p. 18.

8See below, p. 74. i •

q"Novalis," p. 456.

10Ibid., p. 454.

llf,early", that is, in the present arrangement of the poem. French Revolution. I, 175. Of. Thomas Baynes, "Carlyle and Lord Tennyson," Notes and Queries. 7th ser., XI (1891), 204.

15Sartor, p. 50. Cf. Darch, op. cit., p. 56. 14 Darch, op. cit., p. 55. 15Cf. Darch, op. cit., p. 55* 16 See above, p. 45. 17See below, p. 129 f. l ft Sartor, pp. 115. Of. Darch, op. cit., p. 56. iqSartor, p. 132. Cf. Thomas Davidson, Prolegomena to "In Memoriam" (Boston, 1909), p. 39-40. Of) Of course, this does not mean that Tennyson owes the idea expressed in his familiar image to Carlyle. The concept of organic evolution, and the problems it presented, were among the main intellectual issues of the 82 nineteenth century. Tennyson was disturbed by these problems many years before the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859. As early as 1837 Tennyson was "deeply immersed" in Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology (Memoir. I, 162), and in November 1844 Tennyson asked his publisher Moxon for. a copy of Robert Chambers' Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. But Hallam Tennyson assures us that "the sections of In Memoriam about Evolution" had been written before the publication of Chambers' book in 1844 (Memoir. I, 223). Basil Willey, in More Nineteenth Century Studies (London, 1956), provides no conclusive evidence for his assertion that "this book contains so many passages which seem to be paraphrased in In Memoriam that we cannot doubt its consonance with Tennyson's own thought, and in some particulars its direct influence" (p. 87). In the present case we are mainly concerned with Tennyson's image, rather than with his ideas.

21Past, p. 6. Cf. Robert A. Greenberg, "A Possible Source of Tennyson's 'Tooth and Claw'." Modern Language Notes. LXXI (1956), 491-92.

22Sartor, p. 88.

25Ibid., p. 131.

24Ibid., p. 127.

25Ibid., p. 127

26Ibid., .p. 177. 27Betty Miller, "Tennyson and the Sinful Queen," Twentieth Century, CLVIII (1955), 355-63. 28Cf. "Enid and NimuS, "Morte D'Arthur," "The Dead Prophet," a.o.

2^See also the description of the poet's own death and reunion with Hallam in lyric CIII. 30 3°Sartor, p. 115- 51Ibid., p. 32.

32Ryals, Theme and Symbol in Tennyson's Poems to 1850. p. 250.

55Ryals, "The 'Heavenly Friend': The 'New Mythus' of In Memoriam." 395. 83 34 ^ Darch, op. cit., p. 56.

55Sartor, p. 130. 56Ibid., p. 132. Quoted by Ryals, "Tne 'Heavenly Friend': The 'New Mythus' of In Memoriam." p. 402.

57Ibid., p. 384. CHAPTER VI

PARALLELS BETWEEN SARTOR AND "LOCKSLEY HALL", AND SOME POSSIBLE INFLUENCES FROM CARLYLE UPON TENNYSON

An examination of "Locksley Hall" reveals many similarities with Carlyle*s ideas in general and with those expressed in Sartor Resartus in particular.

According to Ryals,

'Locksley Hall' is a poem of tension between the Everlasting No and the Everlasting Yea. . . . [The] speaker undergoes the same pattern of development as that which led Teufelsdrockh to argue the Everlasting No into the Everlasting Yea. For .the speaker, and presumably for Tennyson, positive romanticism has supplanted negative romanticism.

William D. Templeman is convinced "that Tennyson has extracted the symbolical heart of Sartor Resartus, compressed its action, and turned it into poetry predominantly lyrical yet retaining the original dramatic tension between the Everlasting No and the Everlasting

Yea."2

The dating of "Locksley Hall" presents some difficulties. At least one line,

Let the great world spin forever down the ringing grooves of change, was written as early as 1830. Tennyson told his son:

"When I went by the first train from Liverpool to Manchester

(1830), I thought that the wheels ran in a groove. It was 85 a black night and there was such a vast crowd round the train at the station that we could not see the wheels.

Then I made this line."5

Sir Charles Tennyson believes that "the bulk of the poem was composed after the death of old George

Tennyson in 1835"» out he has no evidence to support his view; in fact, he admits that there "is no evidence as to the date of composition". Besides, Sir Charles does not say how soon after 1835 "Locksley Hall" was written.

Hallam Tennyson provides a further clue. He reports that "during some months of 1837" his father read

Thomas Pringle's A Narrative of a Residence in South Africa. from which the poet "got the image of the hungry lion used in his simile in 'Locksley Hall' (1. 135). "6 7 However, Templeman's conjecture' that the poem as a whole was completed in 1841 appears to be most plausible. John C. Walters tells us that an old hall at North Somercotes, at the Lincolnshire coast, served partly as model for Locksley Hall; that "on the authority of the late Rev. Dr. Wood, Tennyson is said to have actually written part of the poem in its ivied casement;" and that g the poem "was the result of six weeks' continuous labour".

And Hallam Tennyson quotes a letter from his father to

Fitzgerald which indicates that the poet spent some time 9 in 1841 at Mablethorpe on the Lincolnshire coast. Tennyson said that "Sir William James' prose 86 translation of the Mojallakat, the seven Arabic poems hanging up in the temple of Mecca, gave him the idea of the poem."10 One of the seven poems, entitled "Amriolkais," tells of a young man who stops by the deserted camp site of his beloved to lament her departure. The resemblance between the poems goes no further.

On the other hand, the similarities between the stories of Sartor Resartus. Book II, and "Locksley Hall" are indeed remarkable. In both works, the romantic hero falls in love with a high-born maiden who eventually, under pressure from her wealthy family, breaks the relationship in favour of a socially more acceptable match. The hero undergoes an emotional revolt against his misfortune but at last becomes reconciled with reality through stoic renunciation.

Both heroes display distinct Byronic or "Wertherian" traits. Both are orphans whose origins are somewhat out of the ordinary; Teufelsdrockh, "God-born", was handed over to his foster-parents by a mysterious, unearthly stranger; Tennyson's hero was born "in yonder shining Orient (1. 154)." Poor and without family connections, they are free to subject society to merciless scrutiny. Being rather preoccupied with the failure of society to fulfill their expectations of "happiness", they fail completely to sense their own responsibility toward the social order, until after agonizing cartharses. 87 Thus both heroes apparently do no productive work. Teufelsdrockh gives up his position as "auscultator" to seek "Food and Warmth" somewhere else in the "whole wide

Universe".11 The hero of "Locksley Hall" similarly seems to roam the countryside without aim or purpose. But both are emotionally sensitive, highly intelligent, and well educated so that they are constantly driven to review their position within the universal context of Absolute Existence. Like Hamlet, they tend to express such soul- searching in poetic terms.

The similarities between Blumine and Cousin Amy are, perhaps, even more distinct. To be sure, Templeman is stretching his case to the breaking point when he claims a parallel between the two female characters on the ground that Amy's name is derived from the French aimee, and that Carlyle sometimes refers to Blumine as "the IP Loved". On the other hand, there are certain similarities which may be more than coincidences. Thus Tennyson's heroine is made "Cousin Amy", and Carlyle says about Teufelsdrockh's beloved: "We seem to gather that she was 13 young, hazel-eyed, beautiful, and some one's Cousin." Amy, too, has "hazel eyes" (1. 28), and Templeman points out "that nowhere else does Tennyson provide one of his 14 characters with hazel eyes". Both authors strongly identify their heroines with the noble mansions in which they live. Amy's residence provides the very title for 88

Tennyson's poem; and for Teufelsdrockh, Blumine's abode seems to possess some of her magic charm. Teufelsdrockh rhapsodizes: "Noble MansionI There stoodest thou, in deep Mountain Amphitheatre, on umbrageous lawns, in thy serene solitude; stately, massive, all of granite; glittering in the western sunbeams, like a palace of El Dorado, over• laid with precious metal.""^

Although Towgood is a more positive character than Amy's husband, the two men have several traits in common. Both are typical young country gentlemen who fit well into Matthew Arnold's category of "Barbarians". Amy's husband is a coarse boor, a "clown" (1. 4-7), and a drunkard. "Like a dog, he hunts in dreams" (1. 79) • Towgood seems to have preserved some of the nobility of the barbarian, but he is "unspeakably ill-cultivated"; he betrays "total ignorance, for he knew nothing except 16 Boxing and a little Grammar."

In addition to these parallels between the plots and between the characters, Sartor and "Locksley Hall" display many similarities of ideas and images. One may describe the fundamental theme of those of Carlyle's and Tennyson's works which have been discussed in preceding chapters as the conflict between Kant's "Pure Reason" and "Understanding", or, to put it simply, between reason and imagination. This conflict, as far as it is recognized as man's typical condition, as the price man has to pay 89 for his rational mind, has also been described above in terms of a "basic romantic polarity". In one of the opening lines of "Locksley Hall" Tennyson introduces this theme again in a manner reminiscent of Carlyle's thought and imagery. In 1. 12 the hero of "Locksley Hall" expresses his disillusionment with "the fairy tales of science" which have failed to bring about true progress.

Sartor Resartus, too, opens with a satiric dispraise of science: "Considering our present advanced state of culture, and how the Torch of Science has now been brandished and borne about, with more or less effect, for five thousand years and upwards;" Carlyle expresses his surprise that "nothing of a fundamental character . . . has been written on the subject of Clothes" (p. 3)» And in the chapter entitled "Pure Reason" Carlyle explains that "progress of Science, which is to destroy Wonder, and in its stead substitute Mensuration and Numeration, finds small favour with Teufelsdrockh, much as he otherwise venerates these two latter processes" (p. 47). But while they are still young, life seems to be a fairy tale for the two heroes. The purpose of the Nicht-Ich seems to be the procurement of happiness for the Ich. Both the young Teufelsdrockh and the young hero of "Locksley Hall", under the spell of their desires, hear a harmony where there is discord. Both describe their experience of love in similar terms. Tennyson says, 90

Love took up the harp of Life, and smote on all the chords with Might; Smote the chord of Self, that, trembling, pass'd in Music out of sight. (11. 33-34;

And Carlyle describes the song of the sirens in prose which approaches poetry:

Thus did soft melodies flow through his heart; tones of an infinite gratitude; sweetest intimations that he also was a man, that for him also unutterable joys had been provided.

. . . As from Aeolian Harps in the breath of dawn, as from the Memnon's Statue struck by the rosy finger of Aurora, unearthly music was around him, and lapped him into untried balmy Rest.1?

Templeman points to the similarity in the descriptions of a kiss in Sartor and "Locksley Hall". Tennyson's line,

And our spirits rush'd together at the touching of the lips, is perhaps one of his most beautiful. When Teufelsdrockh and Blumine bid each other farewell, Carlyle says: their lips were joined, their two souls, like two dew-drops, rushed into one, — for the first time, and for the last (p. 101).

One cannot deny the similarity between the two images. But one must also admit that the thoughts of the young lovers are, perhaps, not fundamentally different from those of any young man in similar circumstances. Templeman supports his opinion that Tennyson derived his line from Carlyle with the assertion that no one "has ever 91 found another passage that begins to approach the above sentence in Sartor as a probable basis for Tennyson's 18 line." Surely, the poet may have used Carlyle's image, but to base such an opinion on the assumption that

Tennyson must- have had a source appears as a gross under• estimation of his creative power.

When Teufelsdrockh and the hero of "Locksley

Hall" discover that life is not a fairy tale they react rather violently. Amy's jilted lover curses the world that has rejected him. Cursed be the social wants that sin against the strength of youthI Cursed be the social lies that warp us from the living truthI

Cursed be the sickly forms that err from honest Nature's rule I Cursed be the gold that gilds the straiten'd forehead of the fooll

Although the speaker clothes his protest in the guise of moral indignation, it is clear that his anger is not just directed against certain faults of society but against society itself, which by its very existence must impose a restraint on the individual.

Similarly, Teufelsdrockh's disillusionment and disappointment lead to his Promethean defiance in the

"Everlasting No". After he had discarded hope he asks himself the essential question "What art thou afraid of?"

And realizing that the Nicht-Ich does not owe him 92 happiness, and that for this reason he is at least a free man, he challenges Fate. "Let it come, then; I will meet 19 it and defy iti" 7 To the post-Nietzschean reader it. appears as something of an anti-climax, when, a few sentences below, Teufelsdrockh rather meekly reveals the object of his titanic hatred — the devil. Perhaps, like

Milton, he blames Satan for the sins of Jehovah.

However, after his "Fire-baptism", Teufelsdrockh

"signifies that his Unrest was but increased; as, indeed,

'Indignation and Defiance', especially against things in 20 general, are not the most peaceable inmates." Whether Teufelsdrockh knows it or not, hatred is but the result of fear, and man can only overcome his fear of Fate by embracing it lovingly. Teufelsdrockh describes the next step in his spiritual journey as follows: "I seemed to surrender, to renounce utterly, and say: Fly, then, false shadows of hope; I will chase you no more, I will believe you no 21 more." And the hero of "Locksley Hall" frees himself from the demon of false hope in these words: "I will pluck it from my bosom, tho' my heart be at the root" (1. 66). Thus both characters accomplish the "first 22 preliminary moral Act, Annihilation of Self."

Like Teufelsdrockh, the speaker in "Locksley

Hall" becomes contemptuous of man's quest for "happiness".'

Scornfully he hurls his old desires, which had enslaved 93 him, at Amy:

Overlive it — lower yet — be happyi Wherefore should I care? I myself must mix with action, lest I wither by despair (11. 97-98). In his "Everlasting Yea", Carlyle similarly calls for action. He quotes Goethe's Wilhelm Meister: "Doubt of any sort cannot be removed except by Action" (p. 133), and many years later, in 1866, he concludes his inaugural address as Rector of the University of Edinburgh with the words "Work, and despair not." But the hero of "Locksley Hall" faces a modern problem; he does not know what he should do. He ponders the possibility of action on the battlefield,

But the jingling of the guinea helps the hurt that honor feels, And the nations do but murmur, snarling at each other's heels.

Carlyle, in Past and Present, is equally contemptuous of the uneasy peace of Europe, and it is possible that he gave vent to his anger in one of his early conversations with Tennyson, although there is nothing at all to suggest that Tennyson,had to wait for Carlyle's words. "'Violence', 'war', 'disorder'," says Carlyle, "well, what is war, and death itself, to such a perpetual life-in-death, and 24 'peace, peace, where there is no peace'!" As the hero of "Locksley Hall" considers the world he becomes more and more disillusioned with those 94 endeavours upon which men ordinarily base their hopes.

What is the prosperity of a flourishing commerce (11. 121-

124), the peace of "universal law" (1. 130),

... to him that reaps not harvest of his youthful joys, Tho' the deep heart of existence beat forever like a boy* s?

It is through sorrow that Teufelsdrockh and the speaker in "Locksley Hall" realize that man "has a soul quite

other than his stomach,"25 that the "deep heart of existence" longs for something quite beyond peace and prosperity. The great increase in scientific knowledge during the nineteenth century encouraged man to look forward to a future in which the satisfying of his material needs would only partly require his full strength. But as scientific knowledge liberated man from material want, it enslaved his mind to empirical reality, a process which had been given philosophical sanction by Francis Bacon, and which reached its ultimate consequence in nineteenth century political economy. The ability to see beyond scientific reality, which Carlyle regards as mere phenomena of man's sensory perception, into the realm of things as they really are is what Tennyson calls "wisdom" in the following stanza of "Locksley Hall":

Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers, and I linger on the shore, And the individual withers, and the world is more and more. 95

The concern expressed in these lines was shared by all literate Victorians. Even John Stuart Mill came to recognize the vision into the real nature of things behind their empirical manifestations as an important hedonistic utility, but Ultimate Reality was never more than a pleasant yet vain fancy for him. It is perhaps correct to say that in none of their contemporaries' work did that "basic romantic polarity" determine every utterance more decisively than in the works of Carlyle and Tennyson, although it was equally decisive in the writings of Dickens, Arnold, and Browning.

In the stanza immediately following the one quoted above, Tennyson expresses the main idea of Carlyle's "Characteristics", the idea namely, that the more conscious man becomes of himself through knowledge, the more lonely will he be in an empty universe in which his will to act will be paralyzed by indecision whether "to be or not to be."

Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers, and he bears a laden breast, Full of sad experience, moving toward the stillness of his rest.

In their desolation, Teufelsdrockh and the hero of "Locksley Hall" yield to the lure of the Lotos-Eaters.

Teufelsdrockh has visions .of "green Paradise-groves in pc the waste Ocean-waters,." and Tennyson's hero dreams 96 of a land where

Droops the heavy-"blossom'd bower, hangs the heavy-fruited tree — Summer isles of Eden lying in dark-purple spheres of sea.

But both recognize their phantasies as mere escapes. Both are driven by an irresistible urge to go forward. They accept time and change as the law of the world. Teufelsdrockh says:

. . . how could your Wanderer escape from his own shadow? Nevertheless still Forward! I felt as if in great haste; to do I saw not what. From the depth of my own heart, it called to me, Forwards! The winds and the streams, and all Nature sounded to me, Forwards! Ach Gott. I was even, once for all, a Son of Time.27

Tennyson's hero expresses his resolution very similarly:

Not in vain the distance becons. Forward, forward let us range, Let the great world spin forever down the ringing grooves of change.

In the exuberance of their "Everlasting Yea" both heroes implicitly resolve to make their intuitive perception of what lies hidden beyond time and space visible to their contemporaries through literary works of art.

Ancient founts of inspiration well thro' all my fancy yet, exclaims the hero of "Locksley Hall", and Teufelsdrockh 97 resolves to bring order into a chaotic world.

The parallels between the two works examined here are distinct and remarkable. To conclude from such a similarity alone that "Locksley Hall" was written under the influence of Sartor Resartus constitutes a case of post hoc logic. However, if one is willing to take into consideration the probability that Tennyson had something to gain from Carlyle's transcendentalist philosophy and the fact that a personal friendship existed between the poet and the philosopher, one may, perhaps, conclude with Templeman that "Thanks to Tennyson's genius, 'Locksley Hall' is a poem that gives an effective illustration of Carlyle's romantic philosophizing in Sartor, and gives it in such an enriched way as to defy a charge of plagiarism." To be sure, Templeman is grossly overstating his case when he defends Tennyson against the charge of "plagiarism" at the conclusion of a study which actually does no more than point out a number of similarities between "Locksley Hall" and Sartor. 98

FOOTNOTES

•'•Ryals, Theme and Symbol in Tennyson's Poems to 1850. p. 125. 2"Tennyson*s 'Locksley Hall' and Carlyle," in Booker Memorial Studies, ed. H. Shine (Chapel Hill, 19507, pp. 34-59. . ^Memoir, I, 195. ^Alfred Tennyson, p. 194.

5Ibid., p. 193.

6Memoir, I, 162.

70p. cit., p. 57* 8John Cuming Walters, In Tennyson Land (London, 1890), pp. 21, 23.

^Memoir, I, 178. 10Ibid., P. 195. i:LSartor, P'. 92. 12 51. Qp.i.ci.t,, P« 15Sartor, • P . 95. 14Ibid., P. 51. 15Ibid., P. 96. 16Ibid., P. 80.. 17Ibid., P. 100. Cf. Templeman, op. cit., pp. 52-53.

180p. cit., P. 54-

•^Sartor,» P . 115. 20Ibid., P. 116.

21Ibid., P. 127.

22Ibid., P. 127. 99

25Sartor. p. 130.

24Past, p. 207.

25Sartor, p. 130. 26 Ibid., p. 103. Cf. Templeman, op. cit., p. 46.

27Sartor, p. 108.

Templeman, op. cit., p. 58. CHAPTER VII

TENNYSON'S INTERCOURSE WITH CARLYLE FROM 1850 TO 1855 (PUBLICATION OP MAUD)

With his marriage in June of 1850 a new phase began in the life of Tennyson. One may assume that his new status gave him a sense of independence and self- reliance which he had formerly lacked, especially in his encounters with Carlyle. He had now published In Memoriam. which turned out to be the greatest of his works, and in November he was appointed Poet Laureate, becoming almost overnight one of the most famous men in England. Hence• forth he could meet Carlyle on an equal footing. Both Tennyson and Carlyle were now usually accompanied by their wives when they met each other — not at Carlyle's home, as so often previously, but usually at the home of various mutual friends. One must assume that the atmosphere at these meetings was much more formal than during the early forties, and that consequently Carlyle was much more inhibited in his eccentricities and exaggerations than during the earlier, more intimate meetings.

Carlyle met Mrs. Tennyson for the first time in October, while he was a guest of Mr. and Mrs. James Marshall at Coniston. The Marshalls had also provided one of their houses nearby for the Tennysons! honeymoon. In a letter to Jane, dated October 3, Carlyle writes: 101 . . . Alfred looks really improved, I should say; cheerful in what he talks, and looking forward to a future less 'detached' than the past has been. Poor fellow, a good soul, find him where or how situated you may! Mrs. T. also pleased me; the first glance of her is the least favorable. A freckly round-faced woman, rather tallish and without shape, a slight lisp too: something very kleinstadlisch ["small-townish"] and unpromising at the first glance; but she lights up bright glittering blue eyes when you speak to her; has wit, has sense, and, were it not that she seems to be very delicate in health, "sick without disorder", I should augur really well of Tennyson's adventure.1

Hallam Tennyson reports how Emily helped to keep Carlyle somewhat in check during meetings such as the one at Coniston: ". . .in answer to one of his wild p grumbles, she said, 'That is not sane, Mr. Carlyle'." To prove his sanity, or to show genuine appreciation of someone who dared to oppose him, Carlyle wrote a letter to Tennyson shortly after his return to Chelsea early in October, again paying his respects to Mrs. Tennyson. He also told Tennyson of the ill fortune of a mutual admirer, a friend of Dr. John A. Carlyle. But it seems that during the fifties and the early sixties neither Carlyle nor Tennyson actively sought each other's company. On December 21, 1850, Carlyle wrote to his brother John: "I have never actually seen him [Tennyson] since the evening at Coniston, — nor 4- in fact in my present mood and his do I much wish it."

Perhaps Carlyle felt that he had helped, lay the philosophical foundation for Tennyson's "Everlasting 102

Yea," and that he had nothing more to offer to the poet.5

If Jane's feelings are indicative of his own, he did not really dislike Tennyson; for in a letter to the sculptor

Thomas Woolner, Coventry Patmore mentions Jane's keen desire to have a medallion of Tennyson.6

when Mrs. Tennyson had a miscarriage in April 7 1851, the Carlyles visited her right after the mishap. According to J. Nichol, the Carlyles and the Tennysons met at Malvern in the summer of 1851, while 8 Carlyle was undergoing Dr. Gully's water cure. However according to Hallam Tennyson, his parents had left for q Italy on July 15th. In a letter to Emerson, written at Malvern on August 25th, 1851, Carlyle confirms his presence hut mentions that Tennyson "is gone to Italy with his wife." In the same letter Carlyle expresses some disillusionment with Tennyson: "Alfred has been taken up on the top of the wave, and a good deal jumbled about since you were here."10 However, the Tennysons and the Carlyles did meet earlier in the summer. Hallam Tennyson tells how Carlyle described the poet to Sir J. Simeon as "sitting on a dung-heap among innumerable dead dogs." Hallam explains that "Carlyle meant that he [Tennyson] was apt to brood over old-world subjects for his poems." Many years later, when Tennyson teased Carlyle about this utterance, Carlyle replied: "Ehi that was not a very 103 luminous description of you."11

A letter from Jane to Mrs. Tennyson proves that another meeting took place early in 1852. Jane refers to an evening at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Alan Ker at which the Carlyles and the Tennysons were present. The letter bears no date, but one may gather an approximate date from the fact that the Kers left for Jamaica early in 1852, and 12 that Jane refers to their recent departure. Early in 1852 Tennyson wrote "Hands All Round".

The poem was inspired by Louis Napoleon's rise to power15 in December, 1851, and was published February 7, 1852 in the Examiner. The first stanza contains a metaphor which Carlyle had previously used in Past and Present, published in the spring of 184-3. Tennyson wrote: May Freedom's oak for ever live With stronger life from day to day; That man's the true Conservative Who lops the moulder'd branch away.

Speaking of "Conservatives", Carlyle had said in the chapter entitled "The English":

The bough that is dead shall be cut away, for the sake of the tree itself. . . . let the Conservatives that would preserve cut it away.-^

Of course, the metaphor of the "moulder'd branch" is almost commonplace, but the fact that Tennyson uses it in conjunction with the idea of a 'true conservatism' does 104 lead one to suspect an influence from Fast and Present.1^

Some time during the spring of 1852 the

Tennysons were staying with the Rev. John Rashdall at

Malvern, and it seems that the Carlyles visited them there.

However, in their biographies of Carlyle, neither Froude nor Wilson records this visit, and Hallam Tennyson merely mentions it without any particulars.

Carlyle's reaction to Tennyson's "Ode on the

Death of the Duke of Wellington" may be indicative of his relation to the poet at that time. On November 19, 1852, he wrote in his journal: "Tennyson's verses are naught. 17 Silence alone is respectable on such an occasion." ' Not even Mrs. Tennyson was safe from Carlyle's dyspeptic grumblings. When in January, 1853 a friend suggested to him that "Marriage was dipping into a pitcher of snakes for the chance of an eel, and that Alfred Tennyson had found an eel," Carlyle retorted that "eels had a faculty by very natural transformation for becoming -1 Q snakes." For the next two and a half years no meeting or intercourse of any kind between Carlyle and Tennyson has been recorded. Carlyle was busy writing his

Frederick, and, as suggested previously, he may have felt that he had nothing more to offer Tennyson after the poet had accepted Carlyle's transcendentalist philosophy. Carlyle tended to dominate over people, but after 105 Tennyson had married and had achieved fame and relative wealth he was not to he dominated so easily. It may have taken Carlyle some time to reconcile himself to his friend's new status.

Apparently, that reconciliation came shortly before the summer of 1855. On June 1st of that year Carlyle wrote in a letter to John Forster: "If Alfred do come to you, remind him that there is an old inhabitant living here, whom he ought not to have been so long without seeing."iq

Wilson's biography of Carlyle contains a report of a visit Tennyson made to Carlyle sometime in 1855» perhaps in response to the above invitation. This time Tennyson came alone, and the friends held a smoking parliament as in former days. One topic of the conversation was the Crimean War, but unfortunately no significant 20 details of the conversation have been recorded. It seems that by this time the friendship had once again attained some of its former intimacy. An anonymous witness reports the following in Chamber's Journal: At that time, seeing that I was devoted to Tennyson, [Mrs. Carlyle] sent me his likeness, giving me some curious literary information, and remarking, concerning Maud — which had, I think, just come out at that time — that before it was printed, Tennyson used to come and read it aloud to her, and ask her what she thought of it. Her reply the first time was: "I think it is perfect stuff1" Slightly discouraged by this remark, the 106 Laureate read it once more; upon which Mrs. Carlyle remarked: "It sounds better this time;" and on being read to her the third time, she was obliged to confess that she liked it very much. This little incident shows how Tennyson must have valued her clear judgment and excellent taste.21

One may assume, of course, that Tennyson's friendship with Carlyle was not less cordial that that with his wife. But with Maud Tennyson made it clear to Carlyle that he was more than ever determined to go his own way. He had long come to accept Carlyle's transcendentalist philosophy; an examination of Maud will show how fully Tennyson had absorbed the basic tenets of that philosophy. But he reserved the right to interpret reality for himself, and to have his own vision of the Truth.

Thus it was probably Tennyson's enthusiasm for the Crimean War and Carlyle's condemnation of it which caused the latter to judge Tennyson's Maud very harshly. In the spring of 1854- Carlyle had written in his notebook regarding the war: "[It] seems to me privately I have 22 hardly seen a madder business." On September 26, 1855 he mentioned in a letter to his brother John that he had never yet read Maud because he "wanted heart to persist."2^ Two months later Carlyle told Edward 24 Fitzgerald that Maud was a "cobweb".

It seems that even Jane1s conversion to Maud was only temporary, for she wrote to her uncle's widow, 107 Mrs. George Welsh, that Tennyson talked so much about

Maud when he and the Carlyles were guests at Lady

Ashburton's Grange at Christmas, 1855, that she wished herself "far away among people who only read and wrote 25 prose or who neither read nor wrote at all". y And when Tennyson read Maud to the assembled guests, Carlyle went 26 for a walk. Tennyson composed most of Maud during the last 27 six months of 1854; ' he copied it out for the press at the end of April 1855 and published it in July. It appears, then, that he did not have any personal inter• course with Carlyle during the composition of Maud. It has been seen that in its treatment of the Crimean War the poem was opposed to Carlyle*s opinion. But in spite of these facts it must be considered that Carlyle was now approaching the climax of his literary fame and influence and that he was unlikely to be ignored by any literary personage. The foregoing account of the personal relations between Carlyle and Tennyson has shown that the poet was the least likely to ignore Carlyle, with whose transcen- dentalist philosophy he wholeheartedly agreed, because, despite various disturbances, he was united with Carlyle in a bond of true friendship. An examination of Maud will reveal a number of similarities with ideas and 108 images found in Carlyle's writings. In the light of

Tennyson's friendship with Carlyle, one may, perhaps, trace some of these similarities to Carlyle's influence. 110

17Froude, II, 126.

18Wilson, IV, 463.

iqSanders, "Carlyle's Letters," p. 220, (from the original letter in the Victoria and Albert Museum, South Kensington).

20Wilson, V, 152.

21"Jane Welsh Carlyle," Chamber's Journal, LVIII (1881), 135. 22Wilson, V, 93.

25Sanders, "Carlyle and Tennyson," p. 91, (from the original letter in the National Library of Scotland).

24William A. Wright, ed., The Letters of Edward Fitzgerald (London, 1894), I, 305.

25Leonard Huxley, ed., "Letters from Jane Welsh Carlyle," Cornhill Magazine. LXI (November, 1926), 633-635. 26Wilson, V, 201.

27Charles Tennyson, op. cit., p. 282.

28Memoir, I, 384. 109 FOOTNOTES

^Trudy Bliss, Thomas Carlyle: Letters to His Wife (Cambridge, Mass., 1953), pp. 271-272. 2 Tennyson and His Friends, p. 133* ^Sanders, "Carlyle and Tennyson," p. 89. 4 Ibid., p. 89, (from the original letter in the National Library of Scotland). 5 •^Admittedly, there is no further evidence to support such a hypothesis, other than the strong probability, as has been seen in Chapter V, that Tennyson's acceptance of an "Everlasting Yea" coincided with the early and most intimate period of his friendship with Carlyle. Amy Woolner, Thomas Woolner. Sculptor and Poet (London, 1917), p. 12. 'Charles Tennyson, op. cit., p. 262.

80p. cit., p. 107. ^Memoir. I, 34-0. However, Carlyle met Tennyson the following year at Malvern while the Tennysons were guests of the Rev. John Rashdall. Nichol probably confuses the two visits. See below, p. 104.

1QThe Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson. II, 205-207- ,

11Memoir, 1, 34-0 • -i p Sanders, "Carlyle and Tennyson," p. 90, (from the original letter at Yale University). •^Memoir, I, 343.

14Past, p. 139. ^I am grateful to Professor E. Morrison of the University of British Columbia for having drawn my attention to these parallel passages. See also below, p. 114 for a further possible influence from Past and Present.

16Memoir, I, 355. Cf. Fausset, op. cit., p. 175. CHAPTER VIII

CARLYLE AND MAUD: PARALLELS AND SOME POSSIBLE INFLUENCES

In many respects, Maud resembles "Locksley Hall" and the love story in Sartor Resartus. Again, the hero is a romantic young lover, poor, and rather preoccupied with his own inner self in the fashion of Werther or Hamlet. Like Teufelsdrockh or the speaker in "Locksley Hall", the hero in Maud is infatuated with a young woman of superior social rank. Perhaps such a rather humiliating, self-effacing passion indicates the endeavour of the romantic ego to rid itself of its own painful existence. To be or not to be are alternatives which, ultimately, allow no compromise. The stronger, the more self- conscious the Ich, the more painful and irresistible will be its longing to dissolve itself again in the Nicht-Ich.

As in "Locksley Hall" or in Sartor, the "mansion" in Maud is a symbol of the magic and charm of its noble inhabitant, a kind of El Dorado in which Maud is the Fountain of Youth. In all three stories, the hero's antagonist is a rather brutish aristocrat, a soulless sportsman and a Mammon worshipper, a barbarian at best and a greedy exploiter and deceptive demagogue at worst.

Valerie Pitt, in her recent reappraisal of 112

Tennyson, writes: "To Carlyle's idea of the individual's responsibility in society Maud owes an obvious debt."1

Again, one finds that the assertiveness of such a critical opinion leaves nothing to be desired. All too often, however, as has been seen, statements such as this are based on diffuse generalities rather than on specific evidence. Valerie Pitt fails to define "Carlyle's idea of the individual's responsibility in society." And the most ardent admirer of Carlyle will have to concede that the idea of social responsibility is not Carlyle's discovery, nor that of any single man.

Yet in the light of the fact that Carlyle and

Tennyson were, after all, major spokesmen of one parti• cular Weltanschauung, which one may sum up as a titanic refusal to bow to the soulless tyranny of empirical reality; and in the light of the further fact that, despite temperamental differences, these two men had an affectionate, personal interest in each other, it becomes an interesting and illuminating task to compare Tennyson's

Maud to some of Carlyle's ideas and images.

To be sure, Tennyson's glorification of war in Maud seems to come from the very soul of Carlyle.

This is not to say that Carlyle was mad enough to love war for its own sake, but he did accept it quite joyfully as the only realistic means to end chaos and anarchy; and Carlyle, rightly or wrongly, saw chaos and anarchy 113 almost everywhere. Besides, war was for Carlyle one of the paths which lead the hero to his glorious destiny.

Thus he once angered Tennyson with his admiration for p William the Conqueror, and during the Franco-Prussian war he shocked some Englishmen with his defence of Bismarck. Past and Present had been published in 184-3, that is, more than ten years before the composition and publication of Maud. Hence it may be assumed that Tennyson had read Past and Present. In Book IV, Chapter I, Carlyle says: "'Violence', 'war*, 'disorder';;: well, what is war, and death itself, to such a perpetual life-in-death, and 'peace, peace, where there is no peace'!" Valerie Pitt cites the rejection of peace at all cost in Past and Present and Maud in support of her view that Tennyson's enthusiasm for the Crimean War had •5 been influenced by Carlyle. Yet obviously, such enthusiasm must have inspired many more than Carlyle and Tennyson, for otherwise it is unthinkable that Britain could have engaged in the war with any hope for success. However, in one instance at least there is a strong indication that Tennyson did indeed think of Carlyle while composing Maud. George 0. Marshall Jr. points out that Tennyson's line, When a Mammonite mother kills her babe for a burial fee, 114 4 appears to have its source in Past and Present. Carlyle reports the following incident:

At Stockport Assizes ... a Mother and a Father are arraigned and found guilty of poisoning three of their children, to defraud a 'burial-society' of some 3£ 8s. due on the death of each child: they are arraigned, found guilty; and the official authorities, it is whispered, hint that perhaps the case is not solitary, that perhaps you had better not probe farther into that department of things. This is in the autumn of 1841; the crime itself is of the previous year or season.

It is true that Tennyson could have learned of the incident from some other source, a newspaper, for example; but the fact that he did not make poetic use of it until thirteen years after it had happened seems to show that he received the information from a later source such as Past and Present, although he may have been writing of another similar incident. However, Tennyson's use of the word "Mammonite" further supports Marshall's opinion. "Mammonism", although by no means restricted to Carlyle, is a word constantly used in almost all his major writings. One chapter in Past and Present bears the title "Gospel of Mammonism". Thus it is quite probable that Tennyson associated the word with Carlyle in general, and, in the above instance, with Past and Present in particular. It seems that the radical tone of the political passages in Maud, especially in the first section, approaches Carlyle's radicalism much more closely than 115 anything else Tennyson has written, with the exception of the two "Locksley Hall" poems. In Maud Tennyson has come a long way from the cautious conservatism expressed in "You Ask Me, Why, Tho' 111 at East," written in 1853.

In this poem he had wished that England was

A land of settled government, A land of just and old renown, Where Freedom slowly broadens down From precedent to precedent;

Although Tennyson does not actually encourage revolution in Maud, he expresses extreme impatience with the kind of slkow, orderly social change advocated in the 1833 poem. One can well imagine how contemptuous Carlyle would have been of progress "from precedent to precedent," who, in The French Revolution had described a mob as "a genuine outburst of Nature; issuing from, or communicating with, the deepest deep of Nature, ... a Sincerity and

Reality" (Vol. I, Bk. VII, Chap, iv).7 It is true that these words refer specifically to France and the French Revolution; but as Carlyle grew older he became increasingly impatient with conditions in England. Fast and Present is an eloquent attack against what Carlyle considered to be modern "shams". His condemnation of nineteenth century England is so sweeping that nothing short of a revolution could bring about a social system envisioned by Carlyle. And in Shooting Niagara he is 116 actually looking forward to a general "Niagara plunge" to put an end to what he called England's "ballot- boxing, Nigger-emancipating, empty, dirt-eclipsed days."'

Thus, feeling as he evidently did during the composition of Maud. Tennyson's thoughts may have quite naturally turned to Carlyle, whom friend and foe alike regarded as a radical. As early as Sartor Resartus

Carlyle had made a contemptuous remark about the Peace

Society, which had been founded by the Quakers in 1816 in London. Carlyle asks with some sarcasm,

. . . what will any member of the Peace Society make of such an assertion as this: 'The lower people everywhere desire War. Not so unwisely; there is then a demand for lower people — to be shot!9

Similarly, in Maud. Tennyson devotes a whole stanza (11. 366-381) to a devastating condemnation of a member of the Peace Society.

This huckster put down war! can he tell Whether war be a cause or a consequence?

Of course, this is not to imply that Tennyson was provoked into writing the stanza by Carlyle. The similarity between the passages does show, however, that

Tennyson's thinking was closely akin to Carlyle's during the composition of Maud. Like Carlyle's, Tennyson's regard for his fellow human beings was never of the sentimental kind. In 1866, during the Eyre controversy, 117 "both men, as members of the Defence Committee, took decisive issue on the side of the governor, who was under attack by the liberals of those days, John Stuart Mill among them, for having caused excessive bloodshed in putting down a revolt in Jamaica.

The internal development of the hero in Maud is, again, very similar to Teufelsdrockh's in Sartor Resartus. The hero's unfulfilled love for Maud, the misfortune of his family, his poverty and deprivation, the terrible social condition of England during the Industrial Revolution, and finally his loss of faith in a benign order of things have led him into disillusionment and despair. Like Teufelsdrockh, he can only rescue his Ich in a hostile Universe through a Promethean defiance of the Nicht-Ich. Carlyle's "Everlasting No."

He does realize that his own hopes and desires are ultimately the cause of his misery, for without hopes there can be no disappointment; without desire, no frustration.

For not to desire or admire, if a man could learn it, were more Than to walk all day like the sultan of old in a garden of spice (11. 142-143).

But before the hero can carry out the "first preliminary moral Act, Annihilation of Self,"10 he must first assert his self in its full potential. In Section 118 IV, Part I, the hero hurls his defiant No at everything that had formerly inspired his love and admiration. He condemns nature as

... a world of plunder and prey (1. 125).

Man is a mere puppet, being unmercifully and cruelly manipulated by an amoral Fate (11. 126-131). Although the supreme achievement of organic evolution, man has never been able to conceal his animal ancestry.

He now is first, but is he the last? is he not too base? (1. 137)

If man subdues his emotion in favour of reason, he becomes a mere calculating machine.

The man of science himself is fonder of glory, and vain, An eye well-practised in nature, a spirit bounded and poor (11. 138-139)•

If man follows his emotion instead, he can never distinguish between artistic inspiration and animalistic passion.

The passionate heart of the poet is whirl'd into folly and vice (1. 140).

Eventually, the speaker comes to resign to the inevitable, but he accepts it only under protest. When he concludes •British Columbia I * REQUEST * Transaction Number ' 4654580 iPatro ADMINISTRATIVn Name E REQUEST ! I Patron Number

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. . .. the drift of the Maker is dark (1. 144), he does not merely note that the order of things surpasses his reason, hut that it surpasses his sense of justice, truth, and beauty as well. He lays the blame where it belongs, when he says:

I have not made the world, and He that made it will guide (1. 149).

What Carlyle says about Teufelsdrbckh is also applicable to the hero in Maud: "... perhaps at no era of his life was he more decisively the Servant of Goodness, the Servant of God, than even now when doubting God's existence.1,11 Only through rebellion, that felix culpa, can the Ich overcome its fear of being devoured by the Nicht-Ich. Only when free from fear can the hero find the stoic peace and serenity of the "Centre of Indifference", and resolve:

Be mine a philosopher's life in the quiet woodland ways, Where if I cannot be gay let a passionless peace be my lot (11. 150-151).

But whereas Teufelsdrbckh, on his pilgrimage from the

"Centre of Indifference" to the "Everlasting Yea", has to find his own way, the hero in Maud is guided by his beloved. In his love, he has found 120 The countercharm of space and hollow sky (1. 641).

Love has enabled him to heal the split between the Ich and the Nicht-Ich by renouncing the Ich altogether.

Through love the hero can renounce that to which man clings most tenaciously, life itself. For the beloved he

Would die, for sullen-seeming Death may give More life to Love than is or ever was In our low world, where yet 'tis sweet to live. (11. 644-647)

Like Teufelsdrbckh, the hero awakens "to a new Heaven and a new Earth. The first preliminary moral Act, 12 Annihilation of Self, had been happily accomplished." In the face of death, life becomes worth living again, the dead morality of the Law gives way to a new morality of Love: Not die, but live a life of truest breath, And teach true life to fight with mortal wrongs. (11. 651-652)

Tennyson said about these lines: "This is the central 13 idea, the holy power of Love." ^ But since the hero's regeneration depends so strongly on his passion for Maud, Tennyson still regards it as incomplete. He has the hero kill Maud's brother in a duel and consequently accept exile" in Brittany.

It is here, far away from the beloved, whom he will never 121 see again, that he completes his "Annihilation of Self".

Bereft of Maud's beauty, he begins to see beauty in the small and modest aspects of nature. A small shell on the beach appears to him as a "work divine", which teaches him to "wonder", to regard nature as a symbol of Ultimate

Reality. "Wonder", says Carlyle, "is the basis of

Worship."14 Purged of all desires, the hero's Ich forms a unio mystica with the Nicht-Ich.

Strange, that the mind, when fraught With a passion so intense One would think that it well Might drown all life in the eye, — That it should, by being so overwrought, Suddenly strike on a sharper sense Por a shell, or a flower, little things Which else would have been past byi

(Part II, 11. 106-113)

The hero's love for Maud had merely been the first rung of the Platonic ladder of love which reaches into Heaven. His love has become completely selfless:

Comfort her, comfort her, all things good, While. I am over the seal Let me and my passionate love go by, But speak to her all things holy and high, Whatever happen to me I Me and my harmful love go by; But come to her waking, find her asleep, Powers of the height, Powers of the deep, And comfort her tho' I die! (11. 119-131)

But before the hero can be resurrected to the full glory of the "Everlasting Yea;;-," he has to descend 122 into the hell of an imaginary death (11. 239-34-2).

When he rises again, he is at one with Ultimate Reality, with the world, with his people. He no longer tries to stem the river of time, hut he joyfully rides its waves toward the ocean in which all things join into one.

I embrace the purpose of God, and the doom assign'd.

Although the close kinship of this poem with

Carlyle's philosophy and its similarity in some places with Carlyle's images cannot he denied, there is little evidence to prove that these similarities are the result of Carlyle's direct influence. In dealing with literary sources and influences one must he on guard against the error of belittling the creative power of an author. Poetry is primarily the reflexion of experience, rather 15 than of "influences". Ralph Wilson Rader ' has demonstrated that the plot, the characters, and even some of the images in Maud may be traced to events and experiences in Tennyson's life. This is hardly surprising if one regards art as a mirror of reality. However, the poet is free to communicate his real experiences through fictional stories and images. In reference to Maud Tennyson described the creative process as follows: In a certain way, no doubt, poets and novelists, however dramatic they are, give themselves in their works. The mistake that people make is that they think the poet's 123 poems are a kind of 'catalogue raisonne' of his very own self, and of all the facts of his life, not seeing that they often only express a poetic instinct or judgment on character real or imagined, and on the facts of lives real or imagined.16

Surely, such a process as explained here is open to various modifying influences which may become part of the original experience itself. If one therefore considers that Carlyle's thought corresponded so closely to Tennyson's imagination, that Carlyle was the most influential and best known spokesman of a philosophy which closely resembles the underlying transcendentalism of the poem, and that the philosopher and the poet were personal friends, it appears very unlikely that the many similarities between Maud and some of Carlyle's writings do not reflect some influence from Carlyle. However, the available evidence does not enable one to determine the extent of such an influence. 124 FOOTNOTES

1Memoir, I, 174-5. p Tennyson once retorted to Carlyle's repeated exclamation, "Oh, for a day of Duke William again!" with the following words: "I suppose you would like your Duke William back, to cut off some twelve hundred Cambridgeshire gentlemen's legs, and leave their owners squat upon the ground, that they mightn't be able any longer to bear arms against him!" Carlyle replied, "Ah! That was no doubt a very sad thing for the Duke to do; but somehow he conceived he had a right to do it — and upon the whole he had!" "Let me tell your returning hero one thing then," cried Tennyson, "and that is that he had better steer clear of my precincts, or he will feel my knife in his guts very soon." (Wilson, IV, 7-8.)

50p. cit., p. 175.

4"An Incident from Carlyle in Tennyson's Maud," Notes and Queries.•new ser., VI (1959), 77-78. ^Past, p. 3. . The Oxford English Dictionary lists Carlyle as the earlier of two authors who used the word "Mammonism".

?Cf. Pitt, op. cit., p. 175. Q Niagara, p. 612. ^Sartor, p. 169.

10Ibid., p. 127.

i:LIbid., p. 112. 12Ibid., p. 127. 13 Memoir. I, 404. 14Sartor, p. 46. •^Tennyson's "Maud": The Biographical Genesis (Berkeley and Los Angeles), 1963.

16Memoir, I, 402. CHAPTER IX

CARLYLE AND TENNYSON AFTER MAUD

The relations between Carlyle and Tennyson after the publication of Maud remained much the same as they had been since 1850, when Tennyson had reached his maturity as a poet;1 never again were they as intimate as during the early forties, although on many occasions the two men indicated that they had never lost interest in p each other. In 1855 Carlyle was sixty years old and Tennyson was forty-six; both had reached that age at which men do not usually change what Newman called "philosophical habits". One may perhaps describe the years after 1855 as a period of friendly companionship between two equals, neither ignoring the other, but each enjoying full intellectual independence. Probably late in 1855> just before the Carlyles went to the Ashburton's Grange,5 they were visited by Tennyson at Chelsea. The two friends smoked a pipe as they had in earlier years and talked about such things as the advisability of accepting titles if they were offered, an honour which Tennyson was then disposed to decline. During the conversation Tennyson suggested that at the time of the Crimean War Peter the Great of Russia would have been a better subject for Carlyle than h. Frederick; Carlyle agreed. 126 The next meeting, at Christmas, at the

Ashburton's country residence has already been referred to. Apparently Carlyle dominated the conversations with special fervour, for Wilson says that "Carlyle was more in evidence on this visit than usual.ny

For the next ten years no meeting between Carlyle and Tennyson has been recorded. Mrs. Tennyson sent a number of invitations to Mrs. Carlyle during this period, but Jane declined them all because of her own ill health and her husband's unwillingness to leave his work.

It is true that Mrs. Carlyle's health was very delicate, especially during the last ten years before her death in

1866, and that Carlyle laboured heavily at his Frederick; but it is also true that both Carlyles, alone and together, did travel quite frequently during this period.

Justin McCarthy says that in "the early sixties

Thomas Carlyle wast,commonly accepted as the despotic n sovereign of thought."' There is definitely a strain of intellectual despotism in Carlyle's character which may permit one to conjecture that in those years in which he avoided Tennyson he preferred the respectful company of inferiors to the demanding fellowship of the few who were his equals.

On October 14, 1864, "Carlyle "spoke with great affection of [Tennyson], but . . . thought him inferior to

Burns: he had known 'Alfred' for years: said he used to 127 come in hob-nailed shoes and rough coat to blow a cloud Q with him." Perhaps these words show studied condescension, studied, because it may seem that Carlyle deemed it necessary to emphasize his former intimacy with the

Laureate while belittling him.

It appears that Tennyson took the initiative in reviving the friendship. On December 5, 1865,

Carlyle wrote to his brother John that Tennyson had visited him two days before at Chelsea: "[Tennyson] had a dilapidated kind of look, but in talk was cheerful 9 of tone," Carlyle wrote. Carlyle took a leading part in the formation of the Governor Eyre Defence Committee in August 1866, and Tennyson entered his name in support of the Governor in October, 1866. The Committee could eventually boast of the membership of such men as Carlyle, Ruskin, Tennyson, Dickens, and Kingsley. The Eyre controversy found the two old friends on the same side.10 According to Charles Tennyson, the prophet and the poet met frequently early in 1866, until the time of Mrs. Carlyle's death on April 21, 1866. Tennyson had seen Jane for the last time when he visited the Carlyles at Chelsea on March 22, 1866.11 Despite the apparent restoration of close relations between the friends Carlyle's subsequent utterances about Tennyson were mostly disparaging. He 128 wrote to Emerson on January 27, 1867, that Tennyson's Idylls of the King had an "inward perfection of vacancy" 12 despite their "finely elaborated execution". On

April 2, 1870, Carlyle wrote to his brother John that he had found Tennyson, who had visited him recently,

"good-natured, almost kind; but rather dull . . . !"15

And on June 28, 1871, he said to William Allingham that

"Browning has far more ideas than Tennyson, but is not 14 so truthful. Tennyson means what he says, poor fellow!" Charles Eliot Norton noted in his journal on January 13,

1873, that Carlyle had spoken of "Tennyson's decline".15 In the autumn of that year Carlyle almost surpassed himself in a letter to John Carlyle with the following report of a recent meeting with Tennyson: Tennyson was distinctly rather wearisome; nothing coming from him that did not smack of utter indolence, what one might almost call torpid sleepiness and stupor; all still enlivened, however, by the tone of boglike naivete and total want of malice except against his Quarterly and other unfavorable Reviewers.16

Near the end of December, 1873, Tennyson visited Carlyle with his two sons. Mrs. Tennyson wrote in her journal that during this visit Carlyle had described Disraeli as "a gentleman Jew who sits at the top of chaos."17 Apparently, Tennyson did not quite agree with him, for a few days later Carlyle wrote to his brother John that the Tennysons were "poor souls 129 after all."18

A few months later, in March 1874, Carlyle expressed the opinion to Leslie Stephen that "Tennyson has declined into a comparatively sentimental and 19 effeminate line of writing, mere aestheticism." Carlyle greeted Tennyson's tragedy Queen Mary 20 with shocked disbelief. "Did you ever?" he exclaimed after he had read it. And to his brother he described it 21 as "stone-dead" and "ineffectual". However, he told Allingham in 1876 that he preferred Tennyson to Browning, 22 although Browning was "a man of great abilities." Yet it seems that Tennyson was either unaware of Carlyle's unfriendly criticism or took no notice of it. The poet was among the well-wishers on Carlyle's eightieth birthday, on December 4, 1875. Hallam Tennyson writes that in the years 1875-1879, "whenever a chance offered itself, we called on the Carlyles."23 It is not clear why Hallam says "the Carlyles", for Mrs. Carlyle had died in 1866. But since Hallam refers to his note• book within the same context, and since he was only fourteen when Mrs. Carlyle died, it is unlikely that he confuses the above period with an earlier one. During these visits, the conversation ranged over a wide variety of topics, some of which Hallam 24 Tennyson mentions in his Memoir. Once, when Carlyle paid him a return visit Tennyson called Carlyle "the 130 most reverent and most irreverent man" he knew. Another time Tennyson read poems to Carlyle, among which "Harold",

"The Revenge", "The May Queen", and "The First Quarrel" were warmly received. Other topics were Goldsmith,

Goethe, the condition of England, Gladstone, and Milton.

During what Hallam described as their last meeting, the two friends talked about death. Both were tired after long, successful lives. Carlyle said, "I am just twinkling away, and I wish I had had my Dimiitis long ago." Then he gave Tennyson his tobacco box "as a 25 pledge of eternal brotherhood." ^ Carlyle died on February 5, 1881, at the age of eighty-five. We do not know how Tennyson received the news; but Professor Sanders has shown that the poet was seriously distressed over Froude's description of Carlyle's married life in the official biography, which 26 was published in 1884. According to Wilfrid Ward, Tennyson spoke of Mrs. Carlyle a few years after Carlyle's death as "a most charming, witty converser, but often sarcastic." But Ward added that Carlyle himself always dominated the conversation. Ward asked Tennyson, "Did he not listen to you when you talked?" Tennyson replied, "In a way, 27 but he hardly took in what one said."

This last quotation best sums up the relation between Carlyle and Tennyson. Carlyle's extreme 131 self-centeredness made it nearly impossible for him to become more intimate with anyone than he had been with

Tennyson. His self-imposed loneliness made Carlyle appear as a despot of thought to his contemporaries.

It is always safest to stay out of a despot's way, but one cannot ignore him. Tennyson was careful not to let

Carlyle destroy him as a creative artist; but if he succeeded, perhaps better than any other, in reconciling his countrymen to reality as it presented itself to his age, it may have been because Carlyle helped him to distinguish reality from sham, to perceive the great nothingness behind man's high-sounding political, religious, and moral phrases; and because Carlyle showed him how to create an All out of that nothingness through an "Everlasting Yea". In 1886, when Tennyson was seventy-seven, he published "Locksley Hall Sixty Years After." This sequel to the earlier "Locksley Hall" contains a bitter indictment of modern democracy, which provoked Gladstone to defend the policies of his government in The Nineteenth Century. January, 1887,. against what he considered

Tennyson's attack. Indeed, Tennyson's condemnation of universal suffrage sounds as angry in some passages of the poem as Carlyle's in his Latter-Day Pamphlets and 29 ''Shooting Niagara." Valerie Pitt quotes the following lines from 132

Tennyson's poem as illustration for her opinion that

"echoes of [Carlyle's superman] are very evident in 30 Tennyson's admirations and his contempts:-^

Plowmen, Shepherds, have I found, and more than once, and still could find, Sons of God, and kings of men in utter nobleness of mind,

Truthful, trustful, looking upward to the practised hustings-liar; So the Higher wields the Lower, while the Lower is the Higher. Here and there a cotter's babe is royal-born by right divine; Here and there my lord is lower than his oxen or his swine (11. 121-126).

31 In addition Hugh T'Anson Fausset^ suggests that Tennyson may have thought of Carlyle * s "persistent refusal to see how progressive the Victorian world was," when he wrote these lines: Is it well that while we range with Science, glorying in the Time, City children soak and blacken soul and sense in city slime? (11. 217-218)

It seems that, five years after Carlyle's death, Tennyson once again remembered his friend, in the sequel to a poem which he may have associated with Carlyle for 32 its resemblance to Sartor Resartus^ and for its place in the 1842 edition of poems, which evoked Carlyle's 33 particularly warm response. ^ 133 FOOTNOTES

^See above, p. 100. p See esp. above, p. 105.

5See above, p. 107. 4David Davidson, Memories of a Long Life (Edinburgh, 1890), pp. 299-309. Sanders, "Carlyle and Tennyson," p. 92. 5V, 203.

6Sanders, "Carlyle and Tennyson," p. 92. ^"Thomas Carlyle — Alfred Tennyson," in Portraits of the Sixties (New York, 1903), p. 34-.

8Vilson, V, 557. ^Sanders, "Carlyle and Tennyson," p. 93, (from the original letter in the National Library of Scotland).

10For a detailed account of Carlyle's and Tennyson's contributions to the defence of Governor Eyre, see Bernard Semmel, The Governor Eyre Controversy (London, 1962).

"^Sir Charles Tennyson, op. cit., p. 363. 1? Correspondence of Carlyle and Emerson, II, 303-304,

15New Letters of Thomas Carlyle, II, 265-266.

14William Allingham, A Diary (London, 1907), p. 205. 15Letters, ed. Sara Norton and M. A. DeWolfe Howe (New York, 1913), I, 457• 16New Letters of Thomas Carlyle, II, 300-301.

17Memoir, II, 152. 18Sanders, "Carlyle and Tennyson," p. 94, (from the original letter in the National Library of Scotland).

19Vilson, VI, 323-324. 134

20 Sanders, "Carlyle and Tennyson," p. 95, (from Carlyle's original letter to John Forster, now in the Victoria and Albert Museum). 21 Ibid., (from Carlyle's original letter to his brother John, October 26, 1875, now in the National Library of Scotland). 22 Allingham, op. cit., p. 244.

25Memoir, II, 233.

24Ibid., pp. 234-237.

25Ibid., p. 237.

26"Carlyle and Tennyson," p. 96. 27"Talks with Tennyson," New Review. XV (July, 1896), 80-81. Sanders, "Carlyle and Tennyson," p. 97. 28See Chapter VI., 29 'For example: "The Noble in the high place, the Ignoble in the low; that is, in all times and in all countries, the Almighty Maker's Law. To raise the Sham-Noblest ... is ... a practical blasphemy, and Nature will-in no wise forget it. . . . It is the Noblest, not the Sham-Noblest, . . . that must in some approximate degree be raised to the supreme place. . . . Will the ballot-box raise the Noblest to the chief place; does any sane man deliberately believe such a thing?

I say, it is the everlasting privilege of the foolish to be governed by the wise." (Latter-Day Pamphlets, "The Present Time," p. 20)

"Aristocracy by title, by fortune and position, who can doubt but there are still precious possibilities among the chosen of that class? And if that fail us, there is still, we hope, the unclassed Aristocracy by nature, not inconsiderable in numbers, and supreme in faculty, in wisdom, human talent, nobleness and courage, 'who derive their patent of nobility direct from Almighty God.'" (''Shooting Niagara, • p. 605)

5°0p. cit., p. 176.

510p. cit., pp. 271-272. 135

52See Chapter VI.

35See above, p. 46 ff. CHAPTER X

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION

The present study has been inspired by a curiosity to know whether the most outspoken and perhaps most influential prophet of the Victorian age has exerted any noticeable effect upon the Poet Laureate. There are indeed a number of critics who maintain that Carlyle has influenced Tennyson, but the evidence on which these views are based has been seen to be insufficient and inconclusive. Furthermore, no direct, that is, biographical evidence has been found which would enable one to reason conclusively that a specific poem by Tennyson has been written under Carlyle's influence (Chapter I).

Therefore our investigation had to rely entirely on circumstantial evidence, which has been divided into three categories. The first concerned itself with the available biographical evidence, which, although scarce and inconclusive, indicates that there was sufficient intercourse between Carlyle and Tennyson to make it possible for the former to influence the latter. The second category is an assessment of the psychological probability that Carlyle exerted an influence over Tennyson. And the third, the internal evidence, can go 137 no further than to show that there are many parallels between Carlyle's and Tennyson's work. None of the three categories of evidence is conclusive in itself, but all three considered as a whole may help one to gain a new insight into the workings of Tennyson's creative mind.

Chapter II is an attempt to draw a character sketch of Carlyle as a romantic thinker. His ambivalence and dualism, typically romantic traits, have been related to the post-Kantian conflict between "Pure Reason" and "Understanding", which, in the present work, has been referred to as "basic romantic polarity."

It has been shown that the same romantic traits are determining factors in Tennyson's early poetry, written at a time when he could not have known Carlyle (Chapter III). But although Tennyson felt much the same way as Carlyle, his early poetry lacks the comfort and resolution which one finds in Carlyle's transcendental!st philosophy. In general, one may say that those early poems did not go beyond Carlyle's "Everlasting No." Although Carlyle and Tennyson possessed widely different temperaments, they became intimate friends during the decade between 184-0 and 1850 (Chapter IV). Carlyle, in his bustling manner, tended to dominate Tennyson, who was at that time rather shy and withdrawn. But this peculiar one-sidedness in their relationship 138 makes it appear all the more probable that Carlyle impressed Tennyson with his ideas, particularly since Tennyson must have been interested in Carlyle's answers to problems which he had himself raised in the early poems.

In Memoriam (Chapter V) does indeed provide these answers in agreement with transcendentalist philosophy. To speak in Carlyle's terms, Tennyson now goes beyond the "Everlasting No" of his early poems to achieve an "Everlasting Yea" in much the same fashion as Teufelsdrockh in Sartor Resartus. A number of additional similarities between Sartor Resartus and In Memoriam have also been pointed out.

Since it appears that much of In Memoriam was written when Carlyle and Tennyson were already friends, or when Tennyson, at any rate, must have known Sartor Resartus, it cannot be ruled out that Carlyle exerted a "guiding influence" over Tennyson during the composition of In Memoriam. But Tennyson went further than Carlyle by shaping the intellectual concepts of transcendentalism into an intense emotional experience. In addition to many striking parallels with Sartor Resartus. "Locksley Hall" displays a similar progression from an "Everlasting No" to an "Everlasting Yea" (Chapter VI). But there is simply nothing to prove that these parallels are the result of Carlyle's influence. One may consider the probability that 139 Tennyson had something to gain from Carlyle, and the fact that a personal friendship existed between the poet and the philosopher, but here the case must rest.

It seems that in 1850, when Tennyson married and achieved fame, his friendship with Carlyle lost some of its intimacy (Chapter VII). Meetings became less frequent, but there are indications that Tennyson by no means lost interest in Carlyle, who was approaching the climax of his literary fame at the time when Tennyson published Maud (1955).

An examination of Maud (Chapter VIII) reveals many parallels between the poem and some of Carlyle's works. In one instance it appears very likely that Tennyson utilized something he had read in Fast and Present. The radical tone of the poem, and the underlying trans- cendentalist philosophy are very similar to Carlyle's, but such similarities in themselves do not prove that Carlyle influenced Tennyson. The relationship between Carlyle and Tennyson after 1855 has been described as "a period of friendly companionship between two equals, neither ignoring the other, but each enjoying full intellectual independence." Despite Carlyle's frequently unfair and destructive criticism, Tennyson always retained an affectionate regard for Carlyle, without ever falling victim to his intellectual despotism. Five years after Carlyle's death 140

Tennyson published "Locksley Hall Sixty Years After," which, in its angry condemnation of universal suffrage and its attack on Victorian complacency, is very similar in tone and content to Carlyle's Latter-Day Pamphlets and "'Shooting Niagara/'

The present study has not answered the question how Tennyson would have developed differently if he had never known Carlyle. One may argue that such a question is logically invalid because no man can say what Tennyson would have done, other than what he actually did. Ultimately, the question may be reduced to one which has long puzzled philosophers but which no one has answered conclusively, namely, whether man has a free will or whether he is a mere link in the chain of causality. Thus even the most abundant evidence in favour of literary "influences" is always subject to a logical objection.

Circumstantial evidence has shown that Tennyson had something to gain from Carlyle's transcendentalist philosophy; that there was sufficient intercourse between the two men to make it possible that Carlyle influenced Tennyson; that indeed Tennyson appears to have accepted Carlyle's philosophical idealism in In Memoriam. many sections of which were written after Tennyson had met Carlyle; and, lastly, that "Locksley Hall" and Maud display many similarities with some of Carlyle's thoughts and images. 14-1

To interpret all of these similarities as influences from Carlyle would he as unjust to Tennyson's creative genius as it would be logically fallacious.

But if the present study of the relations between a prophet and a poet has contributed a tentative insight into the mysteries of Tennyson's creative mind, its purpose has been achieved. LIST OP WORKS CITED

Primary Sources

Bliss, Trudy, ed. Thomas Carlyle: Letters to His Wife. Cambridge, Mass.:: Harvard Univ. Press, 1953*

Carlyle, Alexander, ed. New Letters of Thomas Carlyle. 2 vols. London: John Lane, 1904.

Carlyle, Thomas. Thomas Carlyle's Works. "The Ashburton Edition." 1? vols. London: Chapman and Hall, 1885-1888.

Norton, C. E., ed. The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson. 2 vols. Boston: J. R. Osgood, 1885.

Tennyson, Alfred, Lord. The Works of Tennyson, ed. Hallam, Lord Tennyson. 9 vols. London: Macmillan, 1908. (The Eversley Edition).

Secondary Sources

Books Allingham, William. A Diary., eds. H. Allingham and D. Radford. London: Macmillan, 1907. Altick, Richard D. The Art of Literary Research. [1st ed.] New York: Norton, 1965. Bentley, Eric. The Cult of. the Superman. London: R. Hale, 1947- Bradley, A. C. Commentary to "In Memoriam." 3d ed. rev. London: Macmillan, 1915• Chubb, Edwin Watts. Stories of Authors. British and .: American. Rev. ed. New York: Macmillan, 1926.

Cofer, D. B. Saint-Sjmonianism in the Radicalism of Thomas Carlyle. College Station: English Publishing Co., 1931. Darch, Alice Maddeford. "A Comparison of Tennyson's In Memoriam with Carlyle's Sartor Resartus." Master's essay, University of Western Ontario, 1927. 143 Davidson, David. Memories of a Long Life. Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1890.

Davidson, Thomas. Prolegomena to "In Memoriam." Boston: D. C. Heath, 1909.

Espinasse, Francis. Literary Recollections and Sketches. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1893.

Fausset, Hugh T1Anson. Tennyson. A Modern Portrait. London: Selwyrt and Blount, 1923. Fitzgerald, Edward. The Letters of Edward Fitzgerald, ed. William A. Wright. 2 vols. London: Macmillan, 1894.

. Some New Letters of Edward Fitzgerald, ed. F. R. Barton. 2 vols. London: Williams and Norgate, 1923* Froude, James Anthony, ed. Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle. 2 vols. New York: C. Scribner's Sons, 1883. . Thomas Carlyle. 2 vols. London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1884. Hanson, Lawrence and Elizabeth. Necessary Evil; The Life of Jane Welsh Carlyle. London: Constable, 1952. Jennings, Henry J. Lord Tennyson. A Biographical Sketch. London: Chatoo and Windus, 1884. Killham, John. Tennyson and "The Princess." [London]: Univ. of London, Athlone Press, 1958. Lang, Andrew. Alfred Tennyson. London: W. Blackwood, 1901.

McCarthy, Justin. Portraits of the Sixties. New York: Harper, 1903. Mill, John Stuart. Autobiography. London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1873. Nichol, John. Thomas Carlyle. English Men of Letters Series. London: Macmillan, 1892. Nicolson, Harold. Tennyson. Aspects of His Life. Character, and Poetry. London: Constable, 1923. 144

Norton, Charles Eliot. Letters, ed. Sara Norton and M. A. DeWolfe Howe. 2 vols. New York: Constable, 1913. Pitt, Valerie. Tennyson Laureate. London: Barrie and Rpckcliff, 1962.

Rader, Ralph Wilson. Tennyson's "Maud": The Biographical Genesis. Univ. of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1963.

Ritchie, Anne Thackeray. Records of Tennyson. Ruskin. Browning. New York: Harper, 1892.

Robson, W. W. "The Dilemma of Tennyson," in Critical Essays on the Poetry of Tennyson, ed. John Killham. London: Routledge and K. Paul, I960.

Ryals, Clyde de L. Theme and Symbol in Tennyson's Poems to 1850. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1964.

Semmel, Bernhard. The Governor Eyre Controversy. London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1962. Spengler, Oswald. Der Untergang des AXbendlandes. Munchen: Beck, 1923. Templeman, William Darby. "Tennyson's 'Locksley Hall' and Carlyle," in Booker Memorial Studies, ed. H. Shine, Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1950.

Tennyson, Sir Charles. Alfred Tennyson. New York: Macmillan, 1949. Tennyson, Hallam, Lord. Alfred Lord Tennyson, A Memoir. 2 vols. London: Macmillan, 1897. . Tennyson and His Priends. London: Macmillan, 1911. Walker, Hugh. The Age of Tennyson. Handbooks of English Literature. London: Bell, 1897* Walters, John Cuming. In Tennyson Land: Influences of Lincolnshire. London: Redway, 1890.

Willey, Basil. More Nineteenth Century Studies. London: Chatto and Windus, 1956. 14-5 Wilson, David Alec. fLife of Carlyle1. 7 vols. [each volume has own title.] London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co., 1923-1931. Wilson, Rev. John. Thomas Carlyle. The Iconoclast of Modern Shams. Paisley: A. Gardner, 1881.

Woolner, Amy. Thomas Woolner. Sculptor and Poet. London: Chapman and Hall, 1917*

Articles in Periodicals and Journals 1

Baynes, Thomas. "Carlyle and Lord Tennyson." Notes and Queries. 7th Series, XI (March, 1891), 204. Greenberg, Robert A. "A Possible Source of Tennyson's •Tooth and Claw'." Modern Language Notes. LXXI (1956), 491-92.

Huxley, Leonard, ed. "Letters from Jane Welsh Carlyle." Cornhill Magazine. LXI (November, 1926), 633-635. Knowles, James. "Aspects of Tennyson." Nineteenth Century, XXXIII (1893), 182. Marshall, George, 0. "An Incident from Carlyle in Tennyson's Maud." Notes and Queries. New Series, VI (February, 1959), 77-78. Miller, Betty. "Tennyson and the Sinful Queen." Twentieth Century. CLVIII (1955), 355-63. Ryals, Clyde De L. "The 'Heavenly Friend': The 'New Mythus' of In Memoriam." The Personalist, XLIII (1962), 383-402. Sanders, Charles Richard. "Carlyle, Poetry, and the Music of Humanity." Western Humanities Review. XVI (1962), 53-66. . "Carlyle's Letters." Bulletin of the John Rylands Library. XXXVIII (1955), 199-224. "Carlyle and Tennyson." PMLA, LXXVI (March, 1961), 82-97- Starnes, D. T. "The Influence of Carlyle upon Tennyson." Texas Review. VI (1921), 316-336. 146

Tennyson, G. B. "Carlyle's Poetry to 1840: A Checklist and Discussion, a New Attribution, and Six Unpublished Poems." Victorian Poetry, I (August, 1963), 161-81.

Ward, Wilfrid. "Talks with Tennyson." New Review. XV (July, 1896), 80-81.