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Article Excerpt
De Vere--his talk of Catholicism, eloquently vague, sliding into Newmanism and Jesuitry. The T.'s mildly dissentient, I getting angry. T., De V., and I went out under the stars; I flared up at last and asked De V., "Do you yourself entirely believe the account given by the Roman Catholic Church of God and man?"
De V.--"I believe it all as surely as that I tread this ground and see those stars."
W. A.--"And I don't believe one atom of it."
Tennyson.--"You have no point of contact then." (1)
One argument of this paper is that Tennyson found in Catholicism, and in the Catholicism of his friends, a powerful support for his desire to believe in the authenticity of his early mystical experiences. Tennyson's interest in Catholicism was remarkable in that it went against the grain of the English Protestant establishment of which he was a prominent member. He was poet laureate after all, favorite of the Queen, writer of patriotic poems, some of which lambasted the Whore of Babylon, the "church-harpies," "that half-pagan harlot kept by France." (2) Arthur "swept the dust of ruined Rome / From off the threshold of the realm, and crushed / The Idolaters, and made the people free" (Gareth and Lynette [1872], ll. 133-135), with pagan and papal Rome conflated. Tennyson's Queen Mary, Hallam Tennyson claimed, showed "the final downfall of Roman Catholicism in England, and the dawning of a new age: for after the era of priestly domination comes the era of the freedom of the individual." (3) In the whole of the critical bibliography on Tennyson, stretching over 150 years, there is only one item that links Tennyson and Catholicism, a tiny note by Bernard Aspinwall in Notes and Queries, entitled "Did Tennyson Consider Joining the Catholic Church in 1849?" (4) So anomalous is this title, that its interest is ignored. In fact, it is the tip of an iceberg.
The frequency of Tennyson's mystical allusions is well known, though more discussed is the famous Tennysonian doubt that comes hard upon the mystical visions. The authenticity of those visions, their connection with something real, their objectivity as reflections of some supernatural reality, were topics with which Tennyson wrestled throughout life, in one poetic form after another. He is deservedly famous for rendering the conflict of faith and doubt, for his humanizing of eternal themes. Indeed, so empathetic was he to the unresolved complexities of the human condition that he is sometimes accused of mediocrity or worse as a thinker. His plasticity was in fact his strength and his weakness alike; and it laid him open, for good or iii, to the influence of Catholicism. His susceptibility to the evolutionists and skeptics is well known, as exemplified in Aubrey de Vere's remark: "His nature is a religious one, and he is remarkably free from vanity and sciolism.... He has been surrounded, however, from his youth up, by young men, many of them with high aspirations, who believe no more in Christianity than in the Feudal System." (5) De Vere had his own Catholic agenda, of course, and it is not my argument that Tennyson was a closet Catholic; but rather that Catholicism was a major term in his lifelong wrestling with the issues of faith and doubt.
One of the many things that this theme reveals is the host of Catholic friends who interacted with Tennyson in important ways. Some were overt Catholics, or soon to be Catholic converts: de Vere, Sir John Simeon, Baron de Schroeter, William Ward, Wilfrid Ward, William Palgrave (brother of Francis), Robert Monteith, John Dalgairns (Newman's first companion at Littlemore), Peter Haythornethwaite (William Ward's chaplain); and on the fringes of these, Patmore, Manning, Stephen Hawker, Bishop Vaughan, Lacordaire, Dollinger, Lord Acton. Some of these were "Liberal Catholic Christian" (a phrase Tennyson used to describe Simeon) (Memoir, 2:60), some conservative (like William Ward), some simple in their faith (like Soeur Louise Marie, "an old friend of the Tennysons"; Memoir, 2:68). Other friends were fellow-travelers, not papists but defending a kind of ideal Catholicity, or mediation of the secular and the Catholic, which was an important point of discussion in the Victorian period: Arthur Hallam, Richard Milnes (Lord Houghton), John Knowles; and on the fringes of these, Gladstone and Frederick Maurice with his disciples, Frederick Farrar and Richard Trench. I do not know that Tennyson ever met Newman, but they tiptoed toward each other in the later years, with illuminating hesitation. When Simeon's wife attempted in 1877 to arrange a meeting, Newman expressed delight and added: "Great differences of opinion and personal history lie between us, but it would be strange if I alone of Englishmen did not feel the force of those endowments of mind which have made your name so popular" (Newman's italics). (6) Later (in 1882) Tennyson expressed the same eagerness to meet and added, in his echoing way: "I feel that some day or other I ought to go to you, for though, I dare say, there are a hundred things on which we might differ, there is no man on this side of the grave, more worthy of honour and affection than yourself" (Letters, 3:230).
After Tennyson died, de Vere wrote a set of "Memorial Poems" for Simeon, Newman, Manning, and Tennyson. Tennyson, the only "non-Catholic," got the longest poem, in four parts, one of which, "Westminster Abbey," compares Tennyson's dying to that of an Italian painter:
Thus, when in Rome the Prince of Painters died, His Art's last marvel o'er his bier was hung, At once in heavenly hope and honest pride: Thus England honoured him [Tennysonl she loved that day; Thus many prayed-as England's Saints will pray. (7)
Whether de Vere is referring to Newman's "Second Spring" (8) (when a recatholicized England's new saints will pray), whether he is referring to a new kind of saint, a humanized kind represented in Tennyson, or whether he simply sees Tennyson as in need of prayer, this otherwise unexceptionable compliment points to the importance that Tennyson had for his Catholic company. He was for them the bridge figure between the Victorian Frame of Mind and the older faith.
My intention in this essay is to outline briefly (the material is booklength), Tennyson's Catholic years, that is, his relationship to Catholicism over the years. That relationship is a continual dialogue where he sometimes approaches and sometimes withdraws from close identification with the Catholic faith. Of course, the Oxford Movement and the rise of Anglo-Catholicism complicate the picture; but my argument is that Tennyson saw in the old Catholicism, represented in its Roman form, what he considered the real thing, as far as experience of the sacred was concerned. (9) He was fully aware of the papist corruption and superstition that in his Protestant mood he attacked; and he was always attuned to the other voice that declared the Catholic sacred to be nonsense. The Church of England was a more benign entity for Tennyson; it was the national church, the church symbolized in King Arthur. (He had no use for the Calvinism of his childhood.) The simultaneously darker and brighter alternative was symbolized in Galahad and the Holy Grail, the lure of which threatened the viability of Arthur's court. It is no coincidence that this conflict replicates the fundamental post-Reformation fissure in English national culture. The Holy Grail is like a Catholic challenge to the Erastian Church of England. As recent historiography has shown, Catholicism may slumber in that culture but has a way of awaking in all its intensity, to make mad the guilty and appall the free, and also occasionally to convert.
II
Already in his early mystical poetry Tennyson had alluded to Catholic traditions. Nurturing these allusions was Dante, to whom Tennyson referred throughout his life, with an enthusiasm he shared with Arthur Hallam, his Catholic friends, and many others. (10) Tennyson's key mystical experience has been often noted. "My most passionate desire is to have a clearer and fuller vision of God," Tennyson said; and to this Hallam Tennyson juxtaposed another statement:
A kind of waking trance I have frequently had, quite up from boy hood, when I have been all alone. This has generally come upon me thro' repeating my own name two or three times to myself silently, till all at once, as it were out of the intensity of the consciousness of individuality, the individuality itself seemed to dissolve and fade away into boundless being, and this not a confused state, but the clearest of the clearest, the surest of the surest, the weirdest of the weirdest, utterly beyond words, where death was an almost laughable impossibility, the loss of personality (if so it were) seeming no extinction but the only true life.... This might, he said, be the state which St Paul describes, 'Whether in the body I cannot tell, or whether out of the body I cannot tell'. (11)
We might compare this to something that on the surface looks very similar, Newman's description of his mystical sense in childhood, "confirming me in my mistrust of the reality of material phenomena, and making me rest in the thought of two and two only absolute and luminously self-evident beings, myself and my Creator." (12) "If I looked into a mirror, and did not see my face, I should have the sort of feeling which actually comes upon me, when I look into this living busy world, and see no reflexion of its Creator" (Apologia, p. 230).
The difference is that Tennyson's experience of the sacred tended to move inward toward the self, subjectivity, the Me; whereas Newman's experience tended to move outward, toward God and Church. (13) Thus it made sense that Newman would become the most important Catholic of Victorian England, and that Tennyson would become, in some arguments (see William Buckler on Tennyson's Europeanness), the most important poet. (14) But they shared the same playing field, where the self and the sacred are in an ongoing agon.
Repeatedly through his life, Tennyson met figures who confirmed his attraction to Catholicity. The first and most formative was Arthur Hallam. Arthur, the son of the Whig historian Henry, was a true blue Protestant, like Tennyson. But again there was that strange attraction for things Roman. Hallam managed to create in his mind an image of an ideal Catholicism, made up of Dante, cathedrals, the Madonna, chastity, Michelangelo, eros and agape, even an idealized Pope (to be distinguished from the dreadful real thing). Hallam's early Italian Catholicism represented an ideal civilization, in a way forecasting T. S. Eliot and his "dissociation of sensibility." Dante's Christianity illustrated, for Hallam, an integration of spirit and sense, of theology and science, of devotion and learning, that Hallam proposed (and Tennyson listened), as a model for poetry: Dante's age was one when "the energies of Sensitive, of Reflective, of Passionate Emotion ... were intermingled, and derived from mutual support an extensive empire over the feelings of men," not split into separate spheres of agency. (15) Hallam famously celebrated Tennyson as a poet of "Sensation," for his imaginative concreteness ("vivid, picturesque delineation of objects, and the peculiar skill with which he holds all of them fused, to borrow a metaphor from science, in a medium of strong emotion") (Hallam, Writings, p. 192). "Sensation" (contrasted with "Reflection") was an inadequate term to formulate what Hallam wanted, namely an integration of poetic image and poetic meaning. This reflected Coleridge, who inspired the Cambridge Apostles and "that gallant band of Platonico-Wordsworthian-Coleridgeananti-Utilitarians," (16) and it pointed forward to Symonsian Symbolism on the one hand and on the other to a Catholic incarnationalist approach to art, in de Vere.Hopkins-Chesterton-Maritain-Lynch-Wimsatt, both of which schools climax in the New Critical idea of paradox and the Verbal Icon. (17)
Hallam's Catholicity stood to the side of the Oxford Movement, and the late emergence of Anglo-Catholicism as a Church of England movement. It also stood to the side of the Catholic conversions of the nineteenth century: it was almost postmodern in its sense of entertaining Catholicism as an imaginative vision and spiritual possibility, an optional Catholicism pruned of force. It was also different from that streak of medievalism without Catholicism, the early-Ruskin tradition, alluded to by Kevin...
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