The Life Style of Alfred Tennyson

THE LIFE STYLE OF ALFRED TENNYSON By JAMES CARL LUNDQUIST A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE COUNCIL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA EN PARTLVL FULFLLLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF 1LORIDA l August, l )67 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to express my thanks to Professors Alton C. Morris, Ants Oras, and Richard Anderson for serving on my committee. To Professor Edwin C. Kirkland, who served as an encouraging yet patient chairman, I am deeply grateful. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ii PROLOGUE: TENNYSON'S GREAT ESCAPE 1 PART ONE: ALFRED TENNYSON, SECRET AGENT 6 PART TWO: THE GHOST OF ARTHUR HALLAM 61 PART THREE: PRINCE ALBERT'S KISS 109 PART FOUR: "MR. TENNYSON'S ABOMINABLE CARICATURE" 160 PART FIVE : LORD TENNYSON ON THE CROSS BENCHES 194 EPILOGUE: THE TABLELAND OF LIFE 244 BIBLIOGRAPHY 253 VITA 257 ill PROLOGUE: TENNYSON'S GREAT ESCAPE Tennyson hated literary biographers and desperately tried to avoid their clutches. "What business has the public to want to know all about Byron's wildnesses?" he once ranted. "He has given them fine work, and they ought to be satisfied." But Byron's poetry, as much as it reveals about the man, has never satisfied the curiosity of his readers; and neither has Tennyson's. Since Tennyson's death, no less than fourteen full or partial biographies of the poet have been published. Two of these, Hallam Tennyson's Memoir (1897) and Sir Charles Tennyson's Alfred Tennyson (1949), are factually indispensable to the Tennyson scholar. A third, Sir Harold Nicolson's Tennyson (1922), is useful for its attempt to defend Tennyson's relevance in this century. But most of the others are the collections of gossip that Tennyson detested and that he took steps to avert. As death was approaching, he instructed his son, Hallam, to burn a substantial portion of his letters and other biographical mate- rial, and said that, if necessary, the incidents of his life should be given as briefly as possible but with sufficient notes to preclude the 2 chance of further biographies. Hallam realized the impossibility of such a demand, and according to a possibly apocryphal story, snatched many of the Tennyson papers from the fire at the last moment. And so, instead of putting future biographers out of business, Hallam provided Hallam Tennyson, Alfred, Lord Tennyson: A Memoir by His Son (New York, 1897), II, 165. Hereafter cited as Memoir . Memoir , I, xii, xvi. them with a massive body of uninterpreted facts and anecdotes— about the interpretation of which, Hallam' s successors have not felt his humility. But as the steady appearance of Tennyson biographies would indicate, there has been a pervasive dissatisfaction with the results of the interpretation; despite all of the lives we have of the poet, it seems as if he has indeed succeeded in escaping the postmortem characterization he so hated. Because of Tennyson's great escape, the following general state- ment made by Jerome H. Buckley about a current deficiency in Victorian scholarship has much validity when applied to Tennyson studies: "the essential character of all but a few of the great poets eludes us; we know scarcely any of them as we know the great Romantics. We need there- fore fresh biographies, assimilating the many details at our disposal, lives which will show us the poets at work as poets rather than merely supply amusement through chronicles of eccentricities different from our 3 own. The Life Style of Alfred Tennyson is an attempt to answer Buck- ley's challenge through the application of Alfred Adler's individual psy- chology to biography and literary study. This approach seems especially relevant to the peculiar deficiency in Victorian period biography, for Adlerian theory emphasizes the very aspect which is most lacking in the majority of studies we now have— the essential character of the subject. Tennyson's earlier biographers have touched on his essential character, but in a fragmentary and inconsistent way. Two impressions of the 3Jerome H. Buckley, "General Materials," The Victorian Poets: A Guide to Research , ed. Frederic E. Faverty (Cambridge, Mass., 1956), p. 28. poet are thus gained in reading the various lives. The major image is that of a Victorian saint, a man who upheld the ideals of a period in which ideals, like the Crystal Palace, glittered on the outside and sparkled on the inside, but proved to be drafty, gross, and devoid of any lasting worth. This is the impression given by most of the turn-of- the-century biographies written by Benson, Weld, Lounsbury, and others. And it is also given by such a recent work as Joanna Richardson's The Pre-Eminent Victorian (1962). The second impression, and the one that has most appealed to twentieth century readers of Tennyson, is that of a brooding, schizophrenic, English Dostoevsky, given to long periods of despondency accentuated by the conflict between the private and public aspects of his personality. This is the image put forth by Nicolson, Baum, Buckley, and even, in most instances, Sir Charles Tennyson. Both impressions are essentially valid, but neither alone presents the com- plete Tennyson, for his personality constituted an intricate interweav- ing of his idealism and his black-bloodedness Tennyson's life was dominated by one central theme, the ideal society, a theme that was recurrently thwarted by a counter theme, what 4 in "The Palace of Art" he called "the riddle of the painful earth." Out of Tennyson's concern for the ideal society, the world vision it led to, and the depression brought about by the frustration of his apocalyptic dream, came a distinctive response pattern which can be seen as his life 4 Tennyson's treatment of the riddle is studied in detail by Will- son Emery Wood in an unpublished dissertation, "Alfred Tennyson and His Riddle of the Universe" (George Peabody, 1954). style. As early as the age of five or six, he developed a way of living which, more than anything else, determined the nature of his poetry, his thought, and his role as the most representative figure of his age. He was at once an idealist and something of a neurotic pessimist, a child of his century and yet a forerunner of subsequent generations of poets. He fervently hoped for a better world, yet at the same time realized that the world is a painful place, that human attainments are limited, and that the postulation of any sort of ideal seems preposterously absurd. What has been missed in the analysis of Tennyson's life is the delicate balance he struck between his idealism and his awareness of all the questions implied by the riddle. Recent commentators, it seems, have made much of Tennyson's depression and doubt; but not enough has been made of the core of idealism which was just as central to his life. Nicolson wrote, for example, that "We find him throughout his life en- deavouring in anguish to rid himself of this obsession of Space and Time, of this crushing immensity, of this dread of eventual annihilation." Throughout Tennyson's poetry and his life are, to be sure, numerous instances when anguish and despair have the upper hand. Yet Tennyson was adamant in his conviction that the instinct of the soul attests to a need for the far-off goal of a better England, a better world, and an improved humanity. In his persistent belief in his ideal, and in his equally persistent doubt of the significance of human hopes and dreams in the immensity of the universe, he neither achieved the lasting mystic ecstasy of 5 Sir Harold Nicolson, Tennyson: Aspects of His Life, Character, and Poetry (London, 1922), p. 270. Christina Rossetti, nor did he submit to the sad agnosticism which at- tracted Clough. Like his own King Arthur, he struck a compromise between the two; and in this compromise lies his essential character. PART ONE: ALFRED TENNYSON, SECRET AGENT I Early in July, 1830, Tennyson set out with Arthur Hallam on the only real adventure of his life, an adventure which symbolizes his way of living both in his earlier and later years. Tennyson had decided to take part in a proposed Spanish revolution as a secret agent, hoping through his services to help bring about a more democratic government in Spain. Hallam and Tennyson had had enough of Cambridge life, and wanted to test the political idealism which they had so strongly af- firmed during debates in a club called "The Apostles," a group of in- tellectuals to which they belonged. While Tennyson was at Cambridge, the University environs were fre- quented, as were London and Oxford, by a shabby, discontented group of Spanish exiles, some of whom earned a meager living by teaching their native language. The Spaniards were refugees from the tyranny of Fer- dinand VII, who had torn up the Spanish Constitution in 1823 and rein- stated the Inquisition. Throughout the 1820' s, these exiles wandered up and down the English streets, mumbling discontentedly and plotting a return to their homeland. "Daily in the cold spring air, under skies so unlike their own," wrote Carlyle, "you could see a group of fifty or a hundred stately tragic figures, in proud threadbare cloaks; perambulating, mostly with closed lips, the broad pavements of Euston Square and the regions about St. Pancras new Church." The leader of this group was ''"Thomas Carlyle, Life of John Sterling , Scribner's Edition (New York, 1900), p. 64. General Torrijos, a diplomatic, courtly man who was regarded at the time 2 as "a kind of living romance." Torrijos and his ragged followers were largely without realistic hope or direction until they gained the sym- pathy of John Sterling, then editor and owner, along with Frederick Maurice, of The Atheneum .

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