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Tennyson and Aestheticism >4 Art for Art C\, containscan escapethe scandalouspreciosiry of beingeven containable. Yet, though the bowl may be cracked,the pot broken, the urn smashed, to break through all the conditions of comely form, the shapewhich remains,even if just'shards',will continue to express recovering,touch by touch, a loveliness... the senseof music, or beauty,set againstthe hard truth. Celan'sPoetry lVaher Pater may increasingly,after 'Todesfuge]have consisted of 'musicalfragments', broken bits of a vision which it can hardly bearto recall,but the music The only aristocraryis neverto touch ... does not thereforestop. The cello comes in behind pain, just as, in that early, bitterly beautiful, guilry poem, 'Todesfugelthe death fugue FernandoPessoa goeson and on, the playersunable to do anythingelse except 'sing now and play'. 3 Touchitg Forms: Tennyson and Aestheticism 'Art for Art's sake! Hail, truest Lord of Hell!' (III. 12. l)t Ten- nyson's uninspired squib is a rare outburst on a subject which engrossedmany of his contemporaries.Berween Victorian aestheti- cism and Victoria's Laureate there is a marked stand-off, a silence broken only here and there by skirmisheson both sides.Tennyson never refersto Pater in his letters,owned none of his books, though he certainly read and marked some of his essaysin journals.2Pa- ter, for his part, is oddly circumspectabout Tennyson. In the essay on 'Sryle' he praisesthe poet's eclectic mix of 'savoursome'Latin and 'Racy Saxon monosyllables' which are, significantly, 'close ro us as touch and sight'.3 Otherwise, quotations from Tennyson are dropped anonymously. 'The blot upon the brain lThat will show it- self without', from 'Maud', turns up unacknowledgedin the essay I All quotations from Tennyson's poetry are taken from The Poemsof Tennyson,ed. ChristopherRicks, 2nd edn, 3 vols.(London:Longmans, 1987), and arecited in the text. 2 See Tennyson in Lincoln: A Catalogue of the Collections in the ResearchCentre, compiled by Nancie Campbell,2 vols. (Lincoln: Tennyson Sociery, 1971-3), ii.38, n. 4558. Gerhard Josephdiscusses similarities betweenTennyson and Pater in Tennyson and the Text: The W'eauer\Shuttle (Cambridge: Cambridge Universiry Press,1992). 3 'i/alter Pater,'Sqyle', in Appreciations(London: Macmillan, 1910), 5-38, 16. Tennysonand Aestheticism 56 Tennysonand Aestheticism 57 'Coleridge'+ as an example of modern sceptical thinking, while on sensuousloveliness were separated from all thegeneral purposes of life'.1I 'handfuls of white dust' from 'The Lotos-Eaters'are recalled the two Tennyson'ssense of shorelines,of islandsbeyond or after life, might the Epicurean.5Some inhibition made Pater reticent about in Marius well havebeen in Years'smind alongsidethose of Spenserand Keats.'I Tennyson. am hauntedby numberlessislands, and many a Danaanshore',12 Yeats The same was not true of Swinburne, who pesteredthe Laureate writes in 'The \7hite Birds', echoing,perhaps not coincidentally,the of his own as well as adulation and defamation. In with copies Poems, metre of Tennyson's own rrish imrama, 'The voyage of Maeldune': in his reply to Buchanan's'Fleshly School' article,he takes o.re pla-e, 'And we came to the Silent Isle that we neverhad touched at before' cheekysideswipe at Tennyson,claiming that in 'Merlin and Vivien' a (III. 63. 11).To 'touch at' someisland, with that little extraeffort and the Laureate far surpassed'the author of Mademoisellede Maupin or 'touch reachof having ro at' land, is a rypicallyTennysonian landing. It author of the Fleursdu Mal' in 'sensualimmoraliry'.6 Interestingly, the suggeststhe difficulry and delay of getting there, as if it neededa small yearsbefore, Leigh Hunt had criticized the 1842volume for somethirry final push: 'at'. If 'certain forms of sensuousloveliness' are similarly on feelings'toosensual'.7 If Swinburnerelished the disreputable relying islanded in early Yeats, this is becauseTennyson, as well as orhers, with Gautier and Baudelaire,Tennyson's own reported association was there before. The paradox of Tennyson is that he managed to on the sexualpassages of his poem 'Lucretius',''What a mess comment be both victoria's Laureate,official and moral, and perhapsthe most would have made of this',8hints at a certainenvious little Swinburne powerful, undeclaredvoice of English aestheticismar the sametime. with that self-proclaimed'Lord of Hell'. rivalry Listed along with Swinburne,Rossetti, Morris, and \7ilde in one of Tennyson's place in Victorian poetry has often been too monu- the first books on the subject, The AestheticMouement in England by for its own good. An easy target for the enfants terriblesof 'w'alter mental Hamilton,r3 ir is Tennyson who is also remembered,as late time, Swinburne and \(ilde, he was, for modernist rebels,also a his as 1950 by Richard Aldington, as 'for a time the chief masrerof the Lawn Tennyson,someone who'd mockablegrandee: the stupidestpoet, aesthetes'.l4 Ne,r.rtheless,the sound of Tennyson rings on in their ears blundered. The key to this unofficial repurarion is, as critics like Mcluhan and their writings. StephenDaedalus' wet-dream verse' 'Are you not and Bloomr5 have pointed out, Arthur Hallam. Hallam was rhere ar tDearyof ardent ways',smixes Tennysonian wearins55-'I\4y life is full the beginning, announcing Tennyson's place in l83l as a 'Poet of of *."ry days'(I. 383. l)-with Nineties' lust. StevieSmith is haunted sensation'-2 p661 motivated by nothing more than 'the desire of by his 'sea-sad,loamishly-sad'r0 sounds, which give all her work an beaury' or by 'the energetic principle of love for the beautiful'. For of Victorian melancholy.Yeats, in 'The Tragic Generation', undertow Hallam, 'Poems, chiefly Lyrical'is an example of 'the spirit of modern attacksTennyson for'moral valuesthat were not aesthetic',but in the proetry',which is marked by'melancholy'and a'rerurn of the mind upon paragraphrecalls 'those islands'where 'beaury,certain forms of same itself'.16The phrase 'art for art's sake',with its return of the idea on itself, I 's7'. ' B. Yeats,Autobiographiu, ed. Villiam H. O'Donnell and DouglasN. a \Talter Pater, 'Coleridge', in Appreciations,65 - 104, 98. Archibald(New York: Scribner, 1999),242. (London: 1910)' ii. 100. 12 5 '0ZalterParer, Marius theEpiciiean,2vols. Macmillan, \(/. B. Yeats,'The\x/hite Birds', in The variorumEdition of thepoems of \v. B. jnder 6 A. C. Swinburne, from the Microscope(1872), quoted in Tennyson:The )'rats,ed. Peter Allt andRussell K. Alspach(New York: Macmillan, 1957), lz2.' 1967), r'Walter Critical Heritage, ed. John D. Jump (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, Hamilton, TheAesthetic Moaement in England(London, lg82), 41. ta 3r8-2r,32r. _TheReligion of Be1u4tSelections from theAesthetis, intro. RichardAldington (Lon- z Leigh Hunt, review (1842), in Jump, ed., 126-36,128- ,lrrrr:Heinem ann, l95O), 34. (London: Head, s qu"oted in Oscar Browning, Memories of Sixty Years Bodley '5 H. M. Mcluhan,.'Tennysonand PicturesquePoetry', in CriticalEssays on tbe t9to),1r7. I'tletqof Tennyson,ed. John Killham (London: Roudedge & Keganpaul, 1960i G7_85; (Harmondsworth: e JamesJoyce, A Portraitof tbeArtist as a YoungMan Penguin, I terold Bloom, 'Tennyson,Hallam, and RomanticTraditiof , in TheRingers in the 1960),223. Iou,er:Studiu in RomanticTradition (Chicago: Universiqy of Chicagopreis, l97l), ro SrevieSmith, Nouel on YellowPaper (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1951)' 19. I i5-54. 1.6 Henry Hallam,Remains in verseand Prose (London: Murray, 1863), ,,)4;297;302._{r1hur John 5n Tennysonand Aestheticism Tennyson and Aestheticism 59 was not yet current in England, at least not in that precise formulation. roundabourwaydisparaging the early poemsand praising In Memoriam Its first recorded use is in 7854, with the translation of Victor Cousin's Forits human and moral interest:'Poetry and passion ,roblerand wiser "r. Lectures on the True, the Beautiful and the Good, in which 'art for art's than stoicismor Epicureanism',he concludes.Brimleyoffers an exposure sake'r7 is separated from religion and moraliry. Hallam's advocacy of and an apology at the sametime. He exposesTennlrson,s aesrh;ticism beauty for beaury's sake, and his definition of moderniry as 'melancholy' and Epicureanismas youthful mannerisms,soon ro be abandoned,, and introspective, pitch the argument in exactly the key it will take later but meanwhilelavishes attention on thosepoems which affectthem. In 'inexhaustible in the century. Pater's own account of modern poetry's particular,he indulgesthe sonorous effects of 'The Lotos-Eaters',wriring, discontent, languor, and home-sickness,that endlessregret,'18 might be in oneplace, that its'rhythmicallanguage ... takesthe formativeimpulJe echoing Hallam's self-returning'melancholy'. Certainly, the continuing of the.feeling,as fallingwater doesof the forcesthat draw it into fl"rhi.rg " visibiliryof Hallam's reviewin the rwo main publications of the Remains, curve'.21In that onesentence he evokesTennyson's formative emotiona] in 1834 and 1863, but also in that rare edition edited by Le Gallienne landscape:the valley of Caut eretz,with its cararactsand streams,and forJohn Lane in 1893, kept Tennyson's aestheticist reputation alive. It makesit serveas the landscapeof creativiry,of that'rhythmical language' may have been this last edition that Yeats was remembering when he which t_akesshape, or form, directly from feeling. Forming, dtti"'g, 'what referred to the younger Hallam called the Aesthetic School'.re In and flashing are words that Tennyson reworks thioughout [i, nr. i, fact Hallam does not use the term 'Aesthetic',
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