beloved memory”. But, as his postscript suggests, Gladstone felt that such remarks could hardly serve as an adequate memorial. Thus, just three weeks after his death, his oldest friend proposed that “some part of what Hallam had written may be brought together and put into a more durable form, collectively, than it has yet assumed”.

Gladstone had some reason to be concerned about Arthur's writings. Three years earlier, Arthur and Alfred Tennyson had planned a joint publication of their poetry. At the last moment, Arthur had withdrawn from the project. In a letter to Mrs. Tennyson at that time, he spoke of the “exceeding crudeness of style and in parts morbidness of feeling” of his work. But his father later admitted that he insisted that the book be withdrawn. Arthur's Poems of 1830 was privately circulated only among close friends.⁵

As the news of Hallam's death spread, many of the Cambridge Apostles and other contemporaries expressed a sense of need for a public and lasting memorial. Some tried to place a tablet in his memory in Trinity Chapel, only to be frustrated by the regulations.⁶ Gladstone's suggestion found the greatest support. On 26 November 1833, R. J. Tennant, an Apostle and one of Hallam's closest friends at Trinity, wrote Tennyson that “It appears to be a universal wish among [his friends] that, whatever writings Arthur has left should be collected and published, that there may be some memorial of him among us”. By 28 January 1834, Tennant reported that Henry Hallam had “nearly determined to print for private circulation some of Arthur's compositions”. Soon afterwards, Arthur's father wrote to Tennyson, requesting a preface for the publication, and setting forth his principles of inclusion:

I shall be very cautious as to printing any thing that may too much reveal the secrets of his mind, either in prose or verse—& this will preclude the possibility of printing some of his first compositions—among others, his Farewell to the South, already in print, but not circulated.⁷

The specific reference helps us understand his father's somewhat vague general restrictions. “A Farewell to the South” is Hallam's most ambitious poem, published in 1830, a romantic, Byronic invocation to Italy and an exalted account of his first love affair. Arthur was in Rome in 1827-8 with a number of friends from Eton, and they were not the only men who fell under the spell of a 26-year-old English girl holding court in the Eternal City. Anna Wintour, “La bella Stagione”, became an object of the most intense and purely idealistic devotion. In Arthur's poem Anna's identity is veiled, but his romantic adulation given full expression. Henry Hallam, embarrassed by its adolescent fervour, had apparently not wanted Arthur to publish the poem at all, and now he had the chance to make sure it would never be published again. Altogether he reprinted about a third of his son's compositions, roughly half the material actually in his possession. Tennyson found himself unable to compose a preface, and so Henry borrowed extensively from testimonials of Arthur's other friends, chiefly James Spedding, in his own account of his son's life. Tennyson's only contribution to the volume, in fact, was his request that Arthur's essay, “Theodicaea Novissima,” might be included, a request made by many other friends, and which Henry Hallam reluctantly honoured.

Gladstone was delighted to learn of Henry Hallam's intention to print his son's literary remains. Yet, like many of Arthur's friends, he felt that the writings alone could not do justice to the man. As Spedding had written, “the displays of [Arthur's] gifts … sprang naturally out of the passing occasion, and being separated from it, would lose their life and meaning … the compositions which he has left (marvellous as they are), are inadequate evidences of his actual power”.⁸ To supply this lack, to provide a fuller and more personal record of the man, Gladstone proposed collecting and publishing Arthur's letters. Here, Gladstone wrote Gaskell, were the real outpourings of his mind, the true evidence of his “distinct and vivid” selfconsciousness, and his ability to make “his own inward phenomena the objects of his intellectual energies”. Gladstone foresaw no difficulties in matters of decorum: the letters were worthy of preservation aside from any personal consideration, but he himself found only one or two which he might like to keep private. They could be collected now, he suggested, and printed some years later, to circulate only among family and close friends. He had already written to Henry Hallam about the project, and asked Doyle to write to Tennyson.⁹

But the response from all quarters was discouraging. Gaskell felt that no selection could do Arthur justice, that Arthur himself would not have approved, and, most important, that many letters were “too confidential a nature for publicity”.¹⁰ It is worth noting that Gaskell had been in Rome with Hallam in 1827-8; he, too, had fallen under Miss Wintour's spell, and most of his letters from Hallam dealt with that affair. Henry Hallam responded coldly that Gladstone's proposal would be up to those to whom the letters had been addressed, with the clear implication that he would have nothing to do with it.¹¹ Even Tennant found his letters from Hallam almost “wholly relating to private and temporary circumstances”, and thus unsuitable for publication.¹² Tennyson, characteristically, never responded. And so the project was forgotten.

About fifty copies of Arthur Henry Hallam's Remains in Verse and Prose were printed and distributed in 1834. All were received with thanks and praise. Gladstone wrote Henry Hallam, with typical and genuine humility, that the volume would be a friend and instructor, “a sacred incitement to the performance of duty, though indeed if I know anything of myself, it is that my being is of a humbler order [than Arthur's]”. Only J. W. Blakesley ventured to mention that he “had hoped to see a selection from [Arthur's] letters included, for there more than on any other occasion was shown that interpenetration of the qualities for which a man is admired and for which he is loved—which I consider as Arthur's peculiar characteristic”. The most curious response came from Edward Stanley, later Prime Minister, whom Henry Hallam had met at Christ Church, but who had not known Arthur. He had just seen the book, and took the liberty to ask for a copy, not merely for himself, “but as applicable in some degree to a son of mine, whose career hitherto has been distinguished beyond my more sanguine expectations. Should his bright period of existence be as suddenly closed, may I bear the blow with a fortitude & resignation similar to yours.”¹³ Thus already Arthur's death was providing a model of inspiration, although here the father's stoic acceptance seems more significant than the son's transfiguration. But Stanley apparently did not receive a copy. Henry Hallam sent the last to Richard Monckton Milnes, telling him that he had deliberately chosen not to have more reprinted: “On every account, I felt that the voice of his inmost heart was not for the careless public.”¹⁴ Soon after, Arthur's name disappears from the correspondence of his contemporaries.

In his collected edition of Arthur Hallam's Writings, T. H. Vail Motter depicts Henry Hallam as a model of nineteenth-century suppression, the censor, who, wielding his “blue pencil” over the Remains, distorted or stifled Arthur's true voice.¹⁵ But Henry Hallam's editorial decisions must be seen in both a personal and historical perspective. When he printed his son's poetry and essays in 1834, he had no reason to expect that the name and character of Arthur Henry Hallam would become a permanent part of English literature. The high praise of Arthur's abilities might have been paid to any bright young man who died before realizing his promise. And, as even Motter admits, this was no Keats, or even Chatterton.¹⁶ Nor could Henry Hallam see any reason to publish his son's letters; those addressed to him are very prosaic: questions about the family at home, accounts of Debates at Eton, descriptions of friends, despair over mathematics at Cambridge, requests for money, a little politics, a few boyish exuberances, most earnest, certainly nothing extraordinary, nor even, as the small number that survive suggest, worth saving, except as mementoes.

We might chide Henry, perhaps, for not recognizing the value of his son's critical work, especially his 1831 review of Tennyson for the Englishman's Magazine (an essay which Harold Bloom has recently called the best criticism of Tennyson's poetry, and the foundation of the aesthetic movement).¹⁷ But in fact this would be asking too much of Henry, and most of his contemporaries. At the time of Arthur's death, Keats and Shelley were only beginning to gain favour among most college undergraduates, and Wordsworth was still a controversial poet. Leigh Hunt was regularly castigated in most journals. The Quarterly Review had apparently killed Tennyson's career in May 1833.¹⁸ In short, though Victoria was to be crowned only four years later, the prevailing critical precepts were still set by men whose tastes were pre-Romantic or Byronic. The conflicting sensibilities are illustrated in Arthur's letter to Tennyson dated 10 December 1832, written as a number of the Apostles checked over the page proofs of Alfred's second volume of poems at Douglas Heath's house:

We had a long battle with Mr. Heath, a famous lawyer, but no man of letters, about [the last] stanza in the proof [of “The Lady of Shalott”]. We flatter ourselves we floored him; to be sure we were three to one, but he fought well. The principal point of attack was “cloud-white”; he said it was absurd to explain a fixed colour by the most variable hue in the world, that of a cloud. We recovered ourselves with all the grace of practised combatants, and talked learnedly about the context of feeling, and the conformity of the lady's dress to her magical character, till at last our opponent left us in possession of the field, declaring still between his teeth that, for his part, he thought poetry ought to be sense.¹⁹

Arthur had to defend himself in similar fashion against his father's accusation that he read too much modern poetry:

I am sorry you should think my fondness for modern poetry so excessive as to militate against correctness of general views, or the formation of other literary tastes. I do not believe this is the case. I am much less poetical by nature than you imagine; but till I discover, that what little good I have in me is less closely connected with my poetical inclinations, such as they are, than I now conceive it to be, I shall hardly be persuaded to think I have done wrong in feeding myself with Wordsworth or Shelley. “Misty metaphysics” is soon said; but that phrase in my opinion will apply with far more distinct, & weighty meaning to the works of Lord Byron, than to those of his great cotemporaries.

Yet this eloquent defense was not likely to impress a father who had responded to his son's account of an earnest debate about the relative virtues of the study of mathematics as opposed to metaphysics with the terse remark: “Your debate between Mat. and Met. is truly ridiculous.”²⁰ As the preface to the Remains points out, “metaphysical analysis” may have been Arthur's greatest pleasure, and strength, but it had prevented him from systematic study and interfered with his poetical talent. And this comment had been made, not by Henry Hallam, but by James Spedding, Arthur's admiring but judicious contemporary.

In this context, Henry Hallam's view and treatment of his dead son seems eminently just and reasonable. He reprinted only those writings which he thought were worth preserving, and he made no great claims for Arthur's stature as writer. It is not surprising to learn that immediately after the funeral Henry went back to his own work, Introduction to the Literature of Europe during the Fifteenth, Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.²¹

James Milnes Gaskell died forty years after his friend, in 1873, leaving behind his letters from Arthur and a journalist son. Charles Milnes Gaskell was a close friend of Henry Adams and an occasional contributor to the Nineteenth Century. Five months after James Gaskell's death, Henry Adams and his wife, stretched out beneath a beech tree, heard Charles read Arthur Henry Hallam's letters. Mrs. Adams recounted the episode to her father:

[Hallam] and Mr. Gaskell were both desperately in love with the same woman, who refused them both and made a new bond of friendship between them. The woman, who was utterly commonplace, married a boozy Yorkshire yeoman. Hallam got over his love and died at twenty-two, but Mr. Gaskell, though he married very happily [in 1832], never lost his feeling and has left her a nice pension. Such queer family histories I've tumbled across lately, I might, if I had the capacity, make such a strange story book.²²

Charles Milnes Gaskell had no apparent reason to withhold this “strange story”. Anna Wintour died soon after her life-long admirer; Henry Hallam had died in 1859, and his youngest daughter, Julia, Lady Lennard, was the only surviving member of the family. Most important, “A. H. H.” had become the most famous initials in English literature. The Records of an Eton Schoolboy, which Charles had privately printed in 1883, contained many of his father's early letters, and provides an illuminating view of Eton under the redoubtable flogging headmaster, Dr. Keate. But Hallam's letters were clearly the main feature of the book.

On 23 October 1883, Gladstone received his copy, and thanked Charles Gaskell the same day: “It is a revived, almost a new image of Arthur Hallam”, he wrote enthusiastically, and took the opportunity to mention that he had carefully saved all his letters from Hallam. Charles was cordially invited to see them.²³ Charles, who had easily obtained permission from Lady Lennard to publish her brother's letters to his father, now revived Gladstone's plan to publish all of Hallam's correspondence. He solicited Francis Doyle to approach Lady Lennard on the idea.

Doyle's letter, dated 1 December 1883, is very diplomatic. He stressed the great interest of Hallam's letters: “he will be seen at his best, and the more that is known of him the better.” And Doyle did not hesitate to reiterate an essential argument for publishing the letters:

I think that nothing he left behind him quite does him justice for the very reason that his mind was more original & powerful than the minds of us his contemporaries. He required a longer time to master and organize his faculties & though his advancement in strength & ripeness of intellect was moving on with rapid strides, he died, alas, so prematurely that the operation was not fully complete—still even as he shows himself I cannot but think it desirable that he should be known as widely as possible. I can see no reason for objecting to the publication of his letters unless you do so.

Five days later Charles himself wrote Lady Lennard, a little more forcefully, stating that he intended at least to publish Hallam's letters to Gladstone, because of the wide interest in her brother. Lady Lennard finally responded that she would prefer certain of Arthur's letters “from Italy”—in other words, those dealing with Anna Wintour—to be deleted in any future edition. She also did not want Gaskell's present volume reviewed, since excerpts would probably be quoted in the magazines. She specifically did not want him to print her brother's letters in the Nineteenth Century. She failed to mention publishing any other letters. In short, she offered no encouragement.²⁴

The power that intervened, the voice that persuaded Lady Lennard to withdraw her permission, will be obvious to those who recall that James Thomas Knowles was the founder and editor of the Nineteenth Century. Yet the unfolding of this part of the history is far more complex than Tennyson's simple command to Gladstone would indicate.

Soon after Records of an Eton Schoolboy was published, Monckton Milnes (then Lord Houghton) described the volume to “Milord Alfred”; Tennyson was pleased and interested.²⁵ But the prospect of publication in a periodical elicited quite a different response. Tennyson wanted to be sure he had complete editorial command over all of Arthur's letters, for, as he wrote Gladstone, “Knowles is a very clever man & a kindly—but he is … Knowles of the 19th century & would set the fame of his Review above the fame of your old friend and mine.” Yet the bard's real displeasure seemed to be reserved for the editor; in a footnote to the letter quoted by Haight, Tennyson huffed that “Milnes Gaskell has not been gracious enough to send me his book”.

Gaskell had reasons to delay. He had been completely faithful in transcribing Hallam's letters, and thus in depicting Arthur's infatuation with Anna Wintour. Moreover, he had candidly stated that Anna “inspired Arthur Hallam's best verses”. Such a remark was heretical. Many poems in the Remains were addressed to his betrothed, Emily Tennyson, but only a few of the many to Anna had been printed, with no indication of her identity. And as section VI of In Memoriam suggests, the relationship between Emily and Arthur had been immortalized in her brother's elegy:

O what to her shall be the end?
          And what to me remains of good?
          To her, perpetual maidenhood,
And unto me no second friend.

Perhaps remembering this stanza, Gladstone advised Gaskell to consult with Tennyson's son and personal secretary, Hallam Tennyson, about the propriety of sending Alfred a copy of his book.²⁶

Propriety is the most courteous word to describe the subsequent events. Gaskell apparently did send a copy of the Records to the Tennysons. On 20 February 1884, however, Hallam Tennyson, ignoring Gaskell, wrote instead to Lady Lennard about the volume:

I have not liked to show my Father the “Records of an Eton Schoolboy,” for, as you say, there are some letters which ought never to have been inserted, and some expressions which ought to have been erased. I think that it is useless my asking my Father his opinion about a Review of the book in the “Edinburgh,” for he has set your brother on such a pinnacle before all the world, that anything now published concerning your brother can only detract from his fame. Excuse my candid opinion, but you have asked me for it, and I know that my Father has such a deep love for him that he would fain keep all critics at a distance from him.

Lady Lennard, repeating her hope that her brother's letters would not appear in the Nineteenth Century, still expressed regret that Alfred himself had not responded. In an even more characteristic example of Victorian reserve, the Laureate's wife sought to reassure her:

We greatly rejoice that you agree with us as to the Reviews. Certainly fresh and pleasant and thoughtful as these youthful letters are, one cannot but feel that Mr. Gaskell has done well in printing them for private circulation only, lest the public ideal of your brother should in any way be disturbed. For the same reason but on infinitely stronger ground, we have withheld the book from my Ally & I hope that in this also you agree with us. One has to be specially careful with so very sensitive a nature, as you know.

The bulwark of wife and son prevailed. Alfred, apparently, never saw the “disturbing volume” sent to him, though he had certainly known about Anna Wintour and her influence upon Arthur. Shortly afterwards Lady Lennard wrote to Gaskell suggesting that, in any future edition of his work, he should substitute Arthur's letters to Gladstone for those he had published.²⁷ Thus once again the project of publishing any comprehensive collection of Hallam's letters was abandoned. Gladstone gruffly complained about “the mysterious property that private persons are held to have over the thoughts of the illustrious dead”.²⁸

Between the publication of Records of an Eton Schoolboy in 1883 and Alfred, Lord Tennyson: A Memoir by his Son in 1897, several of Arthur's letters found their way into print, in biographies of F.D. Maurice, Richard Chenevix Trench, and Richard Monckton Milnes. But the fullest treatment of Arthur's life, and the greatest number of his letters, appear in the Memoir, compiled by Hallam Tennyson.²⁹ Alfred's son had been marked from his birth as the official heir to the Tennyson throne. Indeed, the Laureate had only accepted the Queen's offer of a barony after Gladstone assured him that his son could not be elevated to the title immediately. Long before, his son had assumed the role of personal secretary; almost all correspondence after 1875 passed under his scrutiny. As the Gaskell episode makes clear, Hallam Tennyson was jealous of his father's privacy and position, and this jealousy, shared by the Laureate, grew to an obsession when, upon his father's death, the burden of biography fell to the son. In fact, Tennyson wished no “long, formal biography”; “Merlin and the Gleam”, he felt, was sufficient. He had seen too many Carlyles discredited by too many Froudes. Yet as the pre-eminent Victorian, the spokesman who sought to create living legends for his age, he certainly had known that his life could not escape the murmurings of innumerable biographers. Perhaps enough of the legend could survive if left in the domain of his son. What better biographer?

This problem has taxed Tennyson scholars for decades. The Memoir is the epitome of Victorian evasion. It is the necessary beginning of all Tennyson research, and the end of much. Invaluable, yet unreliable, it stands as the major impediment to the further pursuit of the history of Hallam. For A.H.H. was very much in the domain of legend, and his namesake took extraordinary pains, and much license with fact, to make sure he remained the heroic figure of In Memoriam.

Ironically, we would not know how inaccurate and distorted the Memoir was, except that two earlier and more complete forms of Hallam Tennyson's work survive. The privately printed four-volume Materials for the Life of A. T., and a set of notebooks containing pasted sheets of Hallam Tennyson's draft manuscript, letters, clippings, etc. are in the Tennyson Research Centre. Hallam Tennyson's wife, Aubrey, transcribed many letters for her husband's use, including a separate notebook of those from Arthur Hallam. Afterwards, Hallam Tennyson destroyed all of Arthur's letters to Alfred, with one minor exception, and a number to other members of the Tennyson family.

There is a total of fourteen complete or partial letters from Arthur printed in the Memoir. Early in his account, Hallam Tennyson notes that “most of [Arthur's] philosophical and religious letters to my father have been lost”.³⁰ Yet the editor chose not to print most of Arthur Hallam's letters in his wife's notebook, crossing through, cutting out and rearranging the transcripts, with no indication in the printed text. Less than a third, for example, of Arthur's letter to Mrs. Tennyson appears in the Memoir, and the significant phrase about “morbidness of feeling”, which Arthur repeated nearly two years later to a Cambridge friend, is carefully deleted from the sentence.³¹

It is, of course, important to remember that Hallam Tennyson's Memoir of his father is not a scholarly work, nor even a biography in the modern sense. It is a charmingly written account that, as Christopher Ricks points out, “at its best [breathes] a sense of what it was like in the immediate vicinity of Tennyson”.³² Moreover, some of the editorial suppressions show an understandable sense of decorum. Early in May 1832, Arthur, who, we are led to believe, never spoke ill of any man, wrote Alfred about two wealthy Scottish acquaintances currently visiting Somersby. Arthur was concerned that the Scotsmen, Garden and Monteith, would fail to appreciate, and even condemn the simple, often eccentric life of the Tennyson household. He warned Tennyson that “G & M are not perhaps worthy of Somersby, tho' they probably think themselves so. … When I say ‘not worthy’, you understand what I mean; I speak only of those views and feelings we have been accustomed to hold most dear.” To W. H. Brookfield, perhaps Arthur's closest friend at Trinity, Hallam was blunter. Even if the Scotsmen did like Somersby, he would, in his own words, “have them gagged. You will shake your head, maybe, & ask whose fault it was that they went, & who ought to abide consequences. Still something may be done perhaps in the way of restraint, should either Scotchman prove too garrulous; and I think you might occasionally keep them in check. Nevertheless I hardly know what I mean when I write this; perhaps it had better be considered unwritten; of course it must remain unshown.”³³ Other letters show that the high-minded Hallam did not really approve of these worldly, ostentatious but good-natured gentlemen. Yet he was very careful to conceal his feelings, and had little difficulty adapting to their witty repartee and style of life. We can hardly blame Tennyson's son for respecting Arthur's desire to keep his feelings private.

Other deletions show the extraordinary care Hallam Tennyson took to preserve the legend of A. H. H. He prints a letter from Blakesley to Alfred Tennyson which remarks on Hallam's activities in London: “He was not well while he was in London; moreover, he was submitting himself to the influences of the outer world more than (I think) a man of his genius ought to.” But these were not Blakesley's words; the manuscript version of this letter shows that Hallam Tennyson heavily inked over the last part of the sentence (after “more than”) and supplied instead his own phrase. He apparently felt that Blakesley's original was somehow damning to Arthur's character. It is impossible to recover the original.³⁴ Later, Hallam Tennyson described a letter from his uncle Frederick written in 1834: “He wrote a few lines urging my father to publish in the spring. But he would not and could not; his health since Hallam's death had been ‘variable, and his spirits indifferent’.” In fact Frederick's letter (written not to Alfred but to their friend John Frere) states that “Alfred will probably publish again in the Spring”. Moreover, a heavily deleted section in the manuscript of the letter obviously refers to Charles Tennyson's increasing addiction to opium, a situation which contributed to his brother's variable and indifferent spirits. But Hallam Tennyson would not and could not mention this family problem. Thus, though Frederick's letter did not even suggest the connection, Arthur's death provided a far more acceptable explanation for Alfred's state of mind.³⁵

Other alterations in the Memoir are totally incomprehensible. In his letter of 6 February 1833, Hallam wrote Alfred that he had stopped by the shop of Effingham Wilson, who published Tennyson's 1830 volume, to settle an account. He wrote: “I am confident the £11 will be found a mistake.” In the Memoir version, Hallam Tennyson provides a footnote to this sentence: “the sum my father received for the 1830 volume”, and Arthur's letter continues with other matters. Yet even in the privately printed Materials for the Life of A. T., the sentence continues: “perhaps a bravado of that saucy cub, his son. Come what may you need not pay it. Take no step yourself. Leave it to Moxon, Tennant, Heath and myself.” One can perhaps understand why the joking reference to Wilson's son would be deleted. But for what possible reason could Hallam Tennyson have deliberately distorted Hallam's meaning, turning his father's debt into a royalty?³⁶ The question is baffling, even to a student of Victorian sensibility. I begin to understand the frustration of a former professor who had compared a nineteenth-century expurgated edition of Typee with Melville's original. He told me that he simply could not find any reason for the expurgations, and sadly concluded that the nineteenth-century editor had a dirtier mind than his own.

It would be very convenient, and would certainly make this essay more illuminating, if we could ascribe similar motivations to Hallam's nineteenth-century editors. And, of course, this has been done. The evasiveness, the deletion and suppression of material has, ironically, had exactly the opposite effect from the one these cautious Victorians intended. To post-Freudian critics, the relationship between Arthur and Alfred has seemed too close, the grief of In Memoriam too intimate, the figure of A. H. H. too idolized. For men who had been through Eton and Cambridge in their decadence, a homosexual misconstruction was enticing. Harold Nicolson's sly references to the hand upon the shoulder, the afternoons on the Somersby lawn, and “Oh! the way he would take one's arm on summer evenings, under the limes”, are all derived, in much the same language, from In Memoriam and Hallam Tennyson's account.³⁷ Yet the inspection of manuscripts, the decipherings of passages deleted, the reconstructions of originals offer no grounds for such suspicion—if indeed such things are suspect. Quite the opposite.

To understand this treatment of the man, the zealous protection of the vital surviving evidence of his character and personality, we must recall its role in the development of the legend. The most significant episode in the afterlife of Arthur Hallam (or at least of his earthly “remains”) unfolds on a quiet summer evening as the poet and his guests sit singing on the lawn. One by one they depart, the lights in the house go out, and the poet feels the full sense of loneliness, a feeling long known to him.

A hunger seized my heart; I read
          Of that glad year which once had been,
          In those fallen leaves which kept their green,
The noble letters of the dead:

And strangely on the silence broke
          The silent-speaking words, and strange
          Was love's dumb cry defying change
To test his worth; and strangely spoke

The faith, the vigour, bold to dwell
          On doubts that drive the coward back,
          And keen through wordy snares to track
Suggestion to her inmost cell.

So word by word, and line by line,
          The dead man touched me from the past,
          And all at once it seemed at last
The living soul was flashed on mine,

And mine in this was wound, and whirled
          About empyreal heights of thought,
          And came on that which is, and caught
The deep pulsations of the world,

æonian music measuring out
          The steps of Time—the shocks of Chance—
          The blows of Death.

The trance is stricken through with doubt, but only momentarily. Nature confirms the experience, the dead man has spoken, has touched the poet's soul, and Tennyson's faith is restored. He is able to grasp the hand he has sought since the beginning of the poem, and thus comprehend the unity of past, present and future, a unity which overcomes Time, Chance and Death.

That this mystical union takes place in section XCV of In Memoriam shows how hard-won and tortuous is the way of the soul. Tennyson himself said that parts of the poem were far more optimistic than his own faith.³⁸ The one positive, unchanging force, that guides and sustains the poet throughout the poem, is the spirit of Arthur. Hallam's letters play a crucial role in the climactic section of In Memoriam; they confirm the reality of that spirit, a spirit which becomes the model of belief for the age. Thus both Tennyson and his age were concerned that this spirit remain inviolate, that the real character of Arthur Henry Hallam remain true to the legendary figure, the spirit of the crowning race, the man who fought and overcame his doubts, the master bowman of debate and oration.

The creator of this mythical figure had little difficulty distinguishing the man from the legend. Though Alfred called A. H. H. as near to perfection as mortal man might come (as Hallam Tennyson eagerly reported in the Memoir), he did not hesitate to say that Arthur would not have been a great poet.³⁹ Still more illuminating is his written note in the copy of a commentary on In Memoriam by his friend, the Reverend William Gatty. About one of the numerous passages which compare Arthur to a departed husband and the poet to his loyal wife, Gatty had written that the poet drew a “comparison which typifies his own humble relation to his exalted”. Tennyson underlined “humble” and retorted that this was “the relation of one on earth to one in the other & higher world. Not my relation to him here. He certainly looked up to me fully as much as I to him.”⁴⁰

And a careful reading of In Memoriam shows that this equal relationships is maintained through the process of recovering faith and moral purpose. A. H. H. may be the guiding light, but it is the poet himself (as in most elegies) who undergoes the experience, and thus emerges as the protagonist. In life and afterlife, as Tennyson argues, each man has his own individual path to fulfilment, and each path has equal merit: “He works his work, I mine.”

By the end of the century, however, even the tentative faith embodied in In Memoriam was called into doubt. Not only God, but Godlike men, the heroes whom the Victorians often worshipped in place of the deity, and in many instances had created, were being, in Swinburne's words, “dethroned, cast out in a day”. Hallam Tennyson had not only his father's reputation to protect, but also that of the figure on whom the Laureate had built his trust, A. H. H. Any departure from the saintly ideal of In Memoriam had to be suppressed. Hallam Tennyson felt obliged to preserve the period of Alfred and Arthur's friendship as an idyll worthy of the Laureate; if Arthur had indeed fought his doubts, his struggle should be easy, his burden light.

In fact, Arthur's struggle was intense, and the torment considerable. From the beginning of his time at Trinity, he had been depressed with college life, having left behind politics at Eton, his close Etonian friends at Christ Church, and Anna Wintour in Italy. His struggle for university honours to please his father was, as he put it, rotting his soul, and mathematics in particular he found impossible to comprehend. Poetry and metaphysical speculation became his only source of solace. Yet during a trip to Scotland in the summer of 1829, even these supports seem to fail. On 21 July, he wrote his then close friend at Trinity, Milnes, that “In my fits of gloom I so often look death, & insanity in the face, that the impulse to leave some trace of my existence on this bulk of atoms gathers strength with the warning that I must be brief”. Two weeks later he again wrote Milnes:

I really am afraid of insanity: for God's sake, send me letters, many letters, amusing letters … any thing to distract me; any thing to give me hope, sympathy, and comfort! … I am not master of my own mind; my own thoughts are more than a match for me; my brain has been fevering with speculations most fathomless, abysmal.⁴¹

That Milnes was in Italy, where Arthur spent the only blissful period in his life, distressed him more. There is no sense of defeat, or even resignation, however, merely a constant struggle. As he reported later, he had fought back the monster of Atheism with the principle of God's bountiful love, though necessarily rejecting all formal religion and all purely rational approaches to belief. Yet the struggle, as he told Milnes later, was not over yet: “My dark hours are less frequent, but they come. For God's sake do not flatter me by talking of ‘victory in the wilderness’ & ‘selfraised music of the mind’: I am very weak, & fleshy.” To Gladstone he expressed similar sentiments—he hoped to make his name honoured in future generations, but only by “inward power, which is its own reward”. If not, then he at least had lived, loved, and been beloved—and the suffering of this world (which he readily accepted) was but momentary. And after describing periods of “the most abject despondency mixed with vague dread and strong remorse” to his friend Robert Robertson, he later resigned himself to the unknown purposes of the creator: “Perhaps it is God's will that I should never change it; my natural mood has been always melancholy.”⁴²

Even Arthur's engagement to Emily Tennyson was hardly the cheerful serene period depicted in the Memoir. The bright dawn of their relationship, which, Arthur wrote Charles Tennyson, recalled “the sunny season of my Italian youth”, soon passed into shadows cast by the couple's financial circumstances and an estrangement between their individual temperaments. Arthur's letters to Emily reflect a progressive, though not unrelieved sense of frustration and despair. In 1831, he could write of his firm conviction that their hope would be answered by God. By late 1832, he wrote of them “tottering down the hill together” and soon afterward he admitted that misery was “always” at his heart: “to love & be beloved by you is to be either most happy or most wretched.” Finally, in April 1833, after all negotiations over the marriage between the two families had come to naught, Arthur cried out in complete despair: “it is a weary, weary time—three years now since I have felt that you were my only hope in life—more than two since we plighted to each other the word of promise. It is indeed a weary time.”⁴³

Yet it would be misleading to imply that Arthur's letters have a predominantly melancholy tone. In August 1831, for example, he wrote to Charles Merivale, who had just returned from the continent and a battle between the Dutch and the Belgians. Arthur imagined the excuses of the defeated Frenchmen:

The article in the Independent, the Belge and such papers are worth framing and glazing, that one may always know how to make the best of a bad business. “No, the army of the Meuse is not defeated!” (a lie of imperial dimensions to start with). “A few cowards must there always be in the bravest of armies!” (how philosophical!). “With the best soldiers it has sometimes happened that, seeing cowards run, an unaccountable panic seizes them, and—and—they run too” (what insight into human nature, and what noble candour!). “Therefore the army of the Meuse has not been defeated!” (Irresistible logic, of a piece with the valor it defends!). Oh, heroes of September, so wise and brave, what a pity you have got a licking from the Dutchman, but if to such profound measures I might be allowed to suggest an argument, when in future any ignorant man takes upon him to twit you about the army of the Meuse, make your principles a shield for your practice, & say boldly, “We leave it, sir, to fools of the Juste Milieu to stand their ground in battle; we are of the Mouvement, & we run: ‘la revolution marche partout’ except into the contaminating presence of illprincipled men with muskets in their hands.”⁴⁴

Twentieth-century accounts of Hallam have hardly helped to illuminate Arthur's “natural mood” or indeed any other aspects of his character. Mrs. Frances Brookfield's Cambridge Apostles, the most accessible collection of Hallam's letters and related materials, must, as Motter warns, be read with the greatest caution. It is a travesty of scholarship; even the occasional accurate fact is virtually discredited by the preponderance of errors.⁴⁵ Other more reliable presentations, such as Morley's Life of Gladstone, Lounsbury's Life and Times of Tennyson, Schonfield's edition of Letters to Frederick Tennyson, and Zamick's publication of Hallam's letters to W. W. Farr (originals in the John Rylands University Library of Manchester), offer at best a limited and one-sided view of this elusive figure. Even Motter's edition of Hallam's Writings provides only a very general outline of the author's character. And like all trailblazing efforts, it has necessarily yielded to the undergrowth of new scholarship and appearance of new materials.⁴⁶

Thus an edition of Hallam's letters seems particularly appropriate at this time. One hundred and forty years have seen the loss or destruction of much that would illuminate the life and character of A. H. H., yet those years have also allowed vital collections of documents to come to light. Moreover, we have come, through a process of action and reaction, to see the Victorians in proper perspective, with an understanding of their frame of mind, to borrow Walter Houghton's phrase, undistorted by either their or our own preconceptions. Most important, full portraits of Arthur Henry Hallam's illustrious contemporaries are now available in M. R. D. Foot's edition of Gladstone's Diaries, Christopher Ricks's Poems and his fully annotated biography of Tennyson, and Cecil Lang's forthcoming edition of Tennyson's Letters, all superb examples of the present state of Victorian scholarship.⁴⁷ Hallam's letters should occupy a relatively minor, yet valuable place in this body.

My purpose, both in this essay and in my edition of Hallam's letters, is to stimulate, rather than conclude discussion and debate about Hallam's place in English literary history. For even in the circumspect view which his letters offer, the character and impact of A. H. H. remain curiously hard to gauge. He seems to have inspired a type of reverential awe among his comrades, and invited closer and more intimate friendships than he himself desired. His metaphysical musings—for him a bulwark against disbelief and insanity—often made him appear deeply philosophical, even otherworldly to his comrades. Indeed, he was accused of vanity by a few contemporaries who saw only this side of his character.⁴⁸ This elusive attractiveness not only made Hallam seem superior to the world, free from its torments, but also encouraged others to cast him, even while he lived, in their own images. To Gladstone he seemed the master politician; to Gaskell, the forlorn lover; to the Apostles, the great metaphysician and religious thinker. And Arthur's seemingly quick empathy appeared to confirm these reflections. Yet as his letters to the Tennyson family show, Arthur's personality was still largely unformed, his purposes undetermined, even at the time of his death.

This incomplete, unformed quality is, I think, curiously appropriate to his permanent embodiment in In Memoriam. Arthur Henry Hallam, in Tennyson's words, becomes the link between man and the crowning race. But as his letters indicate, he, like all parts of creation, had his own sphere, in which, in life as in death, he moved towards that “one far-off divine event”. Like Ruskin's treatment of the Gothic, or Browning's “Saul”, or Tennyson's “Ulysses”, he becomes, in epistle and verse, a symbol of the incomplete in man that aspires to divine perfection.

Notes

1. See TLS [Times Literary Supplement], 26 January 1973, pp. 87-89. Tennyson's letter, dated 2 December 1883, is in the British Museum (Add. MS. 44484, fol. 168); the section which Haight quotes is printed in Hallam Tennyson's Alfred, Lord Tennyson: A Memoir (London, 1897), ii. 301 (see below).

2. Gladstone's reference to In Memoriam appears in a letter to Henry Hallam dated 23 June 1850. He had just read part of Tennyson's poem, which he found “an unexampled case among tributes of affection” and surprisingly fresh, “as if it recorded the events of yesterday”. The letter is in Christ Church Library (Hallam Papers, Vol. 15, fols. 260-61).

3. In 1861, Tennyson's close friend Edward Fitzgerald had written to W. H. Thompson: “Mrs. Browning's Death is rather a relief to me, I must say: no more Aurora Leighs, thank God! A woman of real Genius, I know: but what is the upshot of it all? She and her Sex had better mind the Kitchen and their Children; and perhaps the Poor: except in such things as little Novels, they only devote themselves to what Men do much better, leaving that which Men do worse or not at all” (Letters and Literary Remains, ed. W. Aldis Wright [London: Macmillan, 1889], i. 280-1). Unfortunately—for the Victorians—Browning saw this remark shortly before his own death, dashed off his famous vitriolic sonnet, “To Edward Fitzgerald”, and defended it in a letter to the Tennysons (published by Christopher Ricks in TLS, 3 June 1965, p. 464).

4. Part of Doyle's letter to Gaskell is in the John Hay Library, Brown University (Koofman Collection); the letter to Gladstone is in the British Museum (Add. MS. 44450, fols. 54-55). A transcript of Gladstone's letter to Gaskell is the property of James Milnes Gaskell.

5. Hallam's letter to Mrs. Elizabeth Tennyson, written during the last week of June 1830, is one of the few autograph letters to the Tennyson family which have survived; it is in the Tennyson Research Centre. Henry Hallam confessed his prohibition in his preface to Arthur's Remains in Verse and Prose (privately printed, 1834), p. xlv (see below).

6. The plaque was forbidden because Arthur had not been a scholar (see Frederick Tennyson's letter to George Tennyson d'Eyncourt, 18 December 1833, in the Lincolnshire Archives Office, H/113/67).

7. Tennant's first letter is quoted in the Memoir, i. 498-9; his second, to Frederick Tennyson, is at Harvard (Eng. MS. 933[5]). Henry Hallam's letter, dated 7 February 1834, is in the Tennyson Research Centre.

8. Remains, pp. xxvi; xxix. Spedding's letter, dated 11 March 1834, is at Christ Church (Hallam Papers, Vol. 15, fols. 205-206).

9. A transcript of Gladstone's letter to Gaskell, dated 7 February 1834, is the property of James Milnes Gaskell.

10. Gaskell's letter, dated 9 February 1834, is in the British Museum (Add. MS. 44161, fols. 112-14).

11. So Gladstone reluctantly reported to Gaskell in his 7 February letter.

12. Undated letter to Henry Hallam, the property of Miss Elizabeth Lennard.

13. Gladstone's letter is dated 23 June 1834; Blakesley's 19 July 1834; Stanley's 2 April 1835. All are at Christ Church (Hallam Papers, Vol. 15, fols. 219, 237-38).

14. Henry Hallam's letter, dated 2 September 1835, is in Trinity College Library (Houghton Papers, 10³³⁵).

15. (New York and London: MLA and Oxford U.P., 1943), pp. v-vii.

16. See p. vi: “No one can pretend that the restored body of his poetry now gives Hallam rank as poet.”

17. The review appeared in the August issue. See Bloom's comments in “Tennyson, Hallam, and Romantic Tradition” in The Ringers in the Tower (Chicago: Chicago U.P., 1971), pp. 145-54, and his preface to Pater's Marius the Epicurean (New York: Signet Books, 1970), pp. ix-xi. Henry Hallam, apparently with some reluctance, did print a large section of the review in the Remains.

18. J. W. Croker's caustic review in the April 1833 number is an interesting example of his pre-Romantic sensibility.

19. Transcript in the Tennyson Research Centre.

20. Arthur's letter to his father, dated 18 November 1829, is at Christ Church (Hallam Papers, Vol. 9, fols. 142-43). Henry Hallam's comment on “Mat. and Met.” is relayed, among other places, in Gladstone's short memoir of his friend, in the British Museum (Add. MS. 44790, fols. 84-88). The debate took place at the Eton Society on 27 May 1826.

21. Henry Hallam's activities are related in Hallam family diaries, the property of Miss Elizabeth Lennard. Henry Hallam's last major work was published 1837-9.

22. The Letters of Mrs. Henry Adams, 1865-1883, ed. Ward Thoron (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1936), p. 126. The letter is dated 29 June 1873.

23. A transcript of Gladstone's letter is the property of James Milnes Gaskell.

24. Letters from Doyle and Charles Gaskell, together with a draft of Lady Lennard's reply, are at Christ Church (Hallam Papers, Vol. 13, fols. 184-88).

25. From an account contained in a letter from Catherine [?] Cator to Lady Lennard, dated 14 November 1883, at Christ Church (Hallam Papers, Vol. 13, fols. 171-72).

26. Transcript, dated 10 November 1883, the property of James Milnes Gaskell. In a letter to Gladstone, dated 6 December 1883 (in British Museum Add. MS. 44484, fols. 181-82), Charles Gaskell mentions another passage potentially offensive to the Tennyson family: Arthur had called Alfred's grandfather a “wretch” who made “most shabby offers” during the negotiations over Emily Tennyson's dowry. But as even the Memoir suggests, Alfred might well have expressed similar sentiments, and this quotation seems to have been a less significant problem.

27. Hallam Tennyson's letter, dated 20 February, his mother's letter and drafts of Lady Lennard's replies are all at Christ Church (Hallam Papers, Vol. 13, fols. 191-95). The excerpts are printed by Christopher Ricks in “Hallam's ‘Youthful Letters’ and Tennyson”, ELN [English Language Notes], iii (December 1965), 120-2.

28. Quoted by A. C. Benson in Fasti Etonenses. A Biographical History of Eton (Eton: Drake, 1899), p. 503. Gladstone incorrectly identifies Lady Lennard as Hallam's grandniece.

29. The Life of Frederick Denison Maurice, ed. J. F. Maurice (London, 1884), contains an excerpt from one letter; Richard Chenevix Trench, Archbishop. Letters and Memorials [ed. M. Trench] (London, 1888), contains nine letters or excerpts; The Life, Letters and Friendships of Richard Monckton Milnes … ed. T. Wemyss Reid (London, 1890), contains one letter. Part of an additional letter from Hallam to W. B. Donne appears in the Memoir, i. 500-1; the original is the property of Miss M. Barham Johnson.

30. Memoir, i. 44, note 2.

31. See ibid. i. 51. Hallam's letter to John Pearson, dated 29 February 1832, thanks Pearson for his praise of the volume of poems, but expresses regret that it should have ever been published: “It is full of enormous faults of conception & expression, and, what is worse, of morbid feeling” (letter in the Miriam Lutcher Stark Library, University of Texas).

32. Tennyson (London: Macmillan, 1972), p. viii.

33. A transcript of the letter to Tennyson, in Aubrey Tennyson's hand, is in the Tennyson Research Centre. It is crossed through by Hallam Tennyson. The letter to Brookfield, dated 3 May 1832, is in the Henry E. Huntington Library (HM 19464).

34. See Memoir, i. 68-69.

35. See ibid. i. 138. Frederick Tennyson's letter, dated 10 February 1834, is in Duke University Library. Ralph Rader, in Tennyson's Maud: The Biographical Genesis (Berkeley: California U.P., 1963), discusses this example in detail (pp. 17-18 and 127, note 57).

36. See Memoir, i. 92-93.

37. Tennyson; Aspects of his Life, Character, and Poetry (London: Constable, 1923), p. 88.

38. See Ricks, Poems of Tennyson (London: Longmans, 1969), p. 859.

39. See Memoir, i. 38.

40. The annotated copy of Gatty's book is in the Tennyson Research Centre. The remark is reprinted, with some variations, in the Eversley edition of Tennyson's Works (six-volume ed., New York: Macmillan, 1908), ii. 574.

41. Arthur's letters are at Trinity (Houghton Papers 10^1-8).

42. Arthur's letter to Milnes, dated 11 October 1829, is at Trinity (Houghton Papers 10^13-14); to Gladstone, dated 14 September 1829, in the British Museum (Add. MS. 44352, fols. 131-32). A transcript of Arthur's letter to Robertson [Glasgow], dated 2 October 1829, is in the hands of the editor.

43. Arthur's letter to Charles Tennyson, dated 12 September 1830, is at Yale; his letters to Emily, dated 5 March 1831, 26 September 1832, 5 December 1832, and 11 April 1833, are in the Wellesley College Library.

44. Transcript in the Tennyson Research Centre.

45. Mrs. Brookfield, who had access to many collections of the correspondence of many Apostles, published her ingenuous volume in 1906. See Motter's warning on p. 326 of the Writings.

46. John Morley's Life (London: Macmillan) was published in 1903; Thomas R. Lounsbury's Life (New Haven: Yale U.P.) in 1915; Hugh J. Schonfield's Letters (London: Hogarth Press) in 1930; and M. Zamick's “Unpublished Letters of Arthur Henry Hallam from Eton” in the Bulletin, vol. xviii (1934). I am preparing a new edition of Hallam's Writings which will greatly expand Motter's collection.

47. The first volumes of the Diaries were published in 1968; Lang's edition of Letters should appear sometime in 1974.

48. Gladstone's older brother, John, accused Hallam of vanity in several letters, and John Rashdall, a Cambridge associate and neighbour of the Tennysons, responded to news of Hallam's death: “the vain philosophic Hallam is dead!” (diary in the Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. misc. e 351).

Arthur Henry Hallam 1811-1833

(Also wrote under the names Arthur Hallam and A. H. H.) English essayist and poet.

Arthur Henry Hallam is known primarily as a friend of Alfred Tennyson and the subject of Tennyson's elegy In Memoriam. Yet among his contemporaries, Hallam was admired for his intelligence and critical acuity. At the time of his death at twenty-two years of age, Hallam was generally regarded as a young writer with promise, especially as an essayist. “On Some of the Characteristics of Modern Poetry, and on the Lyrical Poems of Alfred Tennyson,” Hallam's review of Tennyson's Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, remains his best-known work. The essay has been labeled a poetic manifesto, and poets such as William Butler Yeats have acknowledged its influence on their writing. Although much of the scholarship on Hallam still focuses on his relationship with Tennyson—as his friend, as his editor and critic, and as his inspiration—Hallam's critical essays are viewed increasingly as significant documents in their own right.

Biographical Information

Arthur Henry Hallam was born in 1811, the eldest child of Henry Hallam and Julia Maria Elton Hallam. His father was a prominent historian, philosopher, and the author of Constitutional History of England from the Accession of Henry VII to the Death of George II. Like his father, Arthur demonstrated an interest in politics and was a successful member of the Eton Debating Society from 1822 until his graduation in 1827. Through these debates, both in political and literary arenas, Hallam formed friendships with such notable figures as Francis Hastings Doyle, James Milnes Gaskell, and William Gladstone. Traveling in Italy during the winter of 1827-1828, Arthur became enamoured with Anna Wintour, an Englishwoman eight years his senior. His infatuation led him to compose poems in praise of both Wintour and Italy.

Returning to English in 1828, Hallam attended Trinity College, Cambridge at his father's request. In doing so, Hallam was separated from his friends who went on to attend Christ Church, Oxford. It was a situation that distressed the sensitive Hallam. However, he eventually adjusted and became a respected member of the Cambridge Apostle Society. While at Trinity, Hallam's interests in metaphysics and poetry continued to develop, and he met Tennyson during a competition for the Cambridge Chancellor's English Verse prize in 1829. Each admired the other, and they formed a lifelong friendship that would affect both of them deeply. During Christmas break of 1829, Hallam brought Tennyson and his brother Charles to London to meet his Eton friends. In 1830, Tennyson reciprocated. It was at this time that Hallam met and fell in love with Tennyson's younger sister Emily. Hallam's intimacy with the Tennyson family was tempered by his father's refusal to have Hallam publish his poems with Tennyson, perhaps to counter what Henry viewed as Hallam's excessive interest in metaphysical poetry. Hallam's Poems by A.H. Hallam Esq. (1830) was privately published and circulated in a separate volume. By the end of 1830, Hallam had proposed secretly to Emily; they had spent a total of approximately one month in each other's presence.

From this point until his death in 1833, Hallam's life increasingly centered on the Tennyson family. Hallam assumed the role of Tennyson's publisher and reviewer. His essay on Tennyson's 1830 poems established Hallam as a thoughtful critic. During this time Hallam had promised his father he would not see Emily until after his twenty-first birthday. Hallam secretly broke this promise at least once. After Hallam's birthday, Henry accepted the engagement and entered financial negotiations with Emily's family. Hallam began a career in law in fulfillment of Henry's career plans for his son. The nuptial negotiations proved difficult, with neither Henry nor Emily's family able to reach a mutual settlement. Hallam intervened with the Tennyson family at several points without success. Throughout this period, Hallam continued to work as Tennyson's editor, soliciting interest in Tennyson's work, preparing manuscripts for publication, and prodding Tennyson to write. A meeting between Hallam's parents and Tennyson and his sister Mary in the spring of 1833 gave hope that Hallam's engagement to Emily would progress, but Hallam's happiness was tempered by a bout of illness. At Henry's suggestion, father and son took a recuperative trip. While in Vienna, Hallam apparently suffered a relapse. He died on September 15, 1833, and an autopsy indicated an aneurism. Hallam's body was sent to England for burial at Clevedon Church by the Severn River. Hallam's father later published an edited collection of Hallam's writings, Remains, in Verse and Prose, of Arthur Henry Hallam (1834). Tennyson, despondent over Hallam's death, was unable to write its preface. Tennyson's famous elegy to Hallam, In Memoriam, was published in 1850.

Major Works

Hallam left a small body of work, though he was generally considered to have demonstrated a great deal of potential. His review of Tennyson's poems is his most famous work. In this essay entitled “On Some of the Characteristics of Modern Poetry, and on the Lyrical Poems of Alfred Tennyson,” Hallam distinguishes between the poetry of reflection and the poetry of sensation. Making this distinction permitted Hallam to position Tennyson as a new type of poet. The essay, though little known outside Hallam's circle at the time of its publication, articulated an influential moment in aesthetic tradition. Critics still argue about the implications of this essay for Hallam's contemporaries and subsequent writers. Hallam wrote other essays, as well as poetry, that demonstrated his continued interest in philosophy and art. Essay on the Philosophical Writings of Cicero (1832) critically examined Cicero's work and its influence upon the English. “Theodicaea Novissima,” delivered shortly before Hallam received his B.A. in 1832, presented a theological argument on the necessary existence of moral evil. His interest in these types of questions are evident in most of his writings, which are collected posthumously as Remains, in Verse and Prose, of Arthur Henry Hallam,The Writings of Arthur Henry Hallam (1943), and The Letters of Arthur Henry Hallam (1981). Although Hallam's other writings have not achieved the notoriety of his essay on Tennyson, Hallam's works reflect the continued development of his interests presented in that essay.

Critical Reception

Most scholarship that discusses Arthur Henry Hallam does so in relationship to Alfred Tennyson and his In Memoriam. Even work which is overtly concerned with Hallam tends to be concerned with Tennyson. The bulk of work on Hallam focuses on his review essay of Tennyson's poetry. It is a work which has generated a fair amount of interest. While critics generally agree on the importance of Hallam's essay “On Some of the Characteristics of Modern Poetry, and on the Lyrical Poems of Alfred Tennyson,” the exact nature of its importance is debated. Norman Friedman suggests the essay demonstrates Hallam's development of a precursor to modernism. Eileen Tess Johnston (see further reading) argues that Hallam presents the possibility that poetry is a moral aesthetic. Steven Dillon criticizes Hallam for oversimplifying the nuances of poetic conventions in order to reinforce the worth of Tennyson's poetry. If each of these scholars adopt a different position, they agree on the influence of Hallam's critical writing on Hallam's other works and on the work of others, particularly Tennyson. Other representative scholars include Philip Flynn, who examines the tension between the ideas Hallam expressed in “Theodicaea Novissima” and Tennyson's In Memoriam. Aidan Day considers the version of Timbuctoo (1829) created by Hallam side-by-side with Tennyson's version to trace Hallam's artistic and theoretical influences. Finally, Jack Kolb, whose body of criticism on Hallam is considerable, argues for the examination of Hallam's letters to consider Hallam's standing among his contemporaries. Regardless of his own standing as a poet, critics concur that Hallam and his critical writings are worthy of analysis.

SOURCE: Friedman, Norman. “Hallam on Tennyson: An Early Aesthetic Doctrine and Modernism.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 8, no. 2 (fall 1975): 37-62.

[In the following essay, Friedman examines “On Some of the Characteristics of Modern Poetry, and on the Lyrical Poems of Alfred Tennyson.” He claims the essay demonstrates Hallam as an original and almost prescient critic, noting connections between Hallam's essay and modernism.]

Tennyson praised Hallam, whose death set In Memoriam in motion, as a man of unusual intellectual promise cut off in his prime. If Hallam's essay, “On Some of the Characteristics of Modern Poetry” (1831),¹ published two years before his untimely death, is any indication, then Tennyson was right, for it seems to me a brilliant piece of work. Following Newman's “Poetry with Reference to Aristotle's Poetics” (1829) by two years, and preceding Mill's “Thoughts on Poetry and its Varieties” (1833, rev. 1859) by the same number of years, Hallam's essay has a more clear-cut notion of the uniqueness of poetry as an art and of what that uniqueness entails in actual poems than either of these. With a slight change of style and in the references to poets, it could be imagined to have been written only yesterday under the same title, so modern are its basic ideas. Its importance was not really recognized during the Victorian period, however, nor was its significance felt in the anthologies of Victorian literature until recently. But it is Yeats who gives us the clue here, as he does in so many other things regarding the transition from Victorian to modern: “When I began to write I avowed for my principles those of Arthur Hallam in his essay upon Tennyson,”² and speaking of the 1890's Yeats says: “The revolt against the literary element in painting was accompanied by a similar revolt in poetry. The doctrine of what the younger Hallam called the Aesthetic School was expounded in his essay on Tennyson. …”³ Let us see what those “principles” and that “doctrine” were, and try to determine why they seemed so crucial to Yeats. For, since Yeats is one of the great originators of modernism, Hallam's ideas have great implications as forerunners of that movement.

Hallam's essay falls into two over-all divisions: the first is a discussion of the nature of the poetry “of Sensation,” and the second is a review of Tennyson's first book, Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830), as coming under the heading of that category.⁴ We shall analyze this division, and its several sub-sections, in that order.

I

Hallam begins by praising what he takes to be Wordsworth's notion that popularity is not a test of poetry, but then he disagrees with Wordsworth's too exclusive admirers who claim “that the highest species of poetry is the reflective.” These two points—the relation of intellect to poetry and the relation of poetry to its audience—will be his basic themes in this division of the essay as he tries to define the true nature of poetry.

Hallam's conception is that the poet's mind works in a different way from most men's minds, and that therefore what he writes is to be read and appreciated in a different way from other forms of discourse. Newman saw, however confusedly, that the poet works by feeling rather than reason, and Mill distinguished the varying ways in which the mind of the ordinary man, the mind of the man of business or of science, and the mind of the true poet worked. And Mill also showed how emotion is the dominant force in the true poet's mind, subordinating and absorbing ideas into its own tendency. The point is the modern one—derived in turn from the eighteenth-century psychologists and the romantics—that there are other kinds of structure than the logical kind, and that poetry has a structure of its own. The structure of poetry is associational rather than rational, and it proceeds according to the “logic” of feeling and imagery rather than reason. Once the full implications of this concept are grasped, poetry can be defended for being as “true” and significant as prose, while at the same time being seen as autonomous, as having an order and worth of its own. Poetry, that is, has to be taken out of competition with science, business, philosophy, morality, and religion, and yet it has simultaneously to be assigned to an alternative category that will be just as valuable.

This autonomy is the essential point of the aesthetic doctrine—not that poetry is all form without content, but rather that its form is its own. And the corollary of this is that the form subordinates the content, absorbs it, transmutes it, re-shapes it, and makes it something different from what it was before. And it is in the shaping powers of the imagination that the romantic-Victorian-modernist tradition finds the true differentia of the poet. Art is not an imitation of life but a re-creation of how the poet experiences life, a subjection of reality to the creative processes of the mind. Hence follows the nineteenth- and twentieth-century interest in the mind's looking at itself. Poetry is an interpretation of life, a kind of interpretation that is produced by no other form of discourse, and it works by means of structures that are duplicated nowhere else. The primacy of form implies, then, that poetry is to be analyzed in terms of its own structures and evaluated according to its own criteria. If art has its own forms—and this is basically what Coleridge meant by his principle of organic form—it has its own laws, and it creates it own world with its own rules.

It is autonomous, however, not in the sense that it is divorced from life but rather in the sense that the poet, as artist, is concerned more with perfecting his poem than with instructing his audience. The proper adjustment of parts to the whole, of means to the end, of details to the design, of materials to the intention, is what occupies his primary efforts. And even though his insight into and grasp of life may be—indeed, should be—true, his function as an artist is not discharged until he has embodied them successfully in a beautiful poem. For a poem must transform its materials in order to evoke the illusion of life. Things look different in different contexts, and an exact copy of reality does not seem real. Andy Warhol was simply reversing the normal artistic process when he reproduced soup can labels: whereas the usual operation is to alter, shape, select, and organize so as to get the proper effect of the thing represented, he produced an effect of strangeness by merely copying what he saw. In this sense, the formalist is the realist and the copier is the fantasist. That is why our family photographs betray us so, since we merely point the camera and shoot, whereas a real photographer, who can do us more justice, must be an artist to catch us as we really are. Thus the poet who wishes to create a profound impression of life must have more than profound ideas—he needs, in addition, a mastery of his medium. That is why Buchanan and Morley, in attacking the aestheticism of Rossetti and Swinburne in the name of content over form, were mistaken: the better the form of the poem, the truer the insight; the more didactic it tries to be, the worse its form will be and the falser its insight.

The distinction between Beauty and Truth, then, is not a way of isolating poetry from life but rather of isolating its quality as an art from its other qualities. Truth may be a necessary condition of great art, but it is not a sufficient cause. And it follows from these distinctions that a poem cannot be great merely by virtue of treating great ideas or great subjects, and conversely that great poems may be written that treat of apparently trivial things. As all our textbooks from Brooks and Warren on have told us, the poetry is not the content but in the form, not in the subject but what is done with the subject, not in what is said but in how it is said.

Thus Hallam says, “it is a gross fallacy, that because certain opinions are acute or profound, the expression of them by the imagination must be eminently beautiful.” The poet's job is not to write melodious philosophy but rather to create unified poems: “Whenever the mind of the artist suffers itself to be occupied, during its periods of creation, by any other predominant motive than the desire of beauty, the result is false in art.” For the poet's mind works according to its own principles and for the sake of its own ends: “for a man whose reveries take a reasoning turn, and who is accustomed to measure his ideas by their logical relations rather than the congruity of the sentiments to which they refer, will be apt to mistake the pleasure he has in knowing a thing to be true, for the pleasure he would have in knowing it to be beautiful. …” And this difference in mental processes will produce different kinds of writing. The reflective man “will pile his thoughts in a rhetorical battery, that they may convince, instead of letting them flow in a natural course of contemplation, that they may enrapture.” There is much in Wordsworth, for example, “which is good as philosophy, powerful as rhetoric, but false as poetry.” For poetry is different from either philosophy or rhetoric, and it works by congruity of sentiment rather than logical relation.

It remains now for Hallam to exemplify and explain this doctrine and so, anticipating Mill, he adduces Shelley and Keats as natural poets in contrast to Wordsworth.⁵ He concedes that there are differences between Shelley and Keats, but claims that there is “a groundwork of similarity sufficient for the purposes of classification, and”—here Hallam evinces his keen sense of history, a sense that will show itself more fully in a moment—“constituting a remarkable point in the progress of literature.” The similarity is that they “are both poets of sensation rather than reflection.” That this does not constitute a dichotomy between Beauty and Truth becomes clear as he explains what it means: “Susceptible of the slightest impulse from external nature, their fine organs trembled into emotion at colors, and sounds, and movements, unperceived or unregarded by duller temperaments. Rich and clear were their perceptions of visible forms; full and deep their feelings of music.” The difference between the poetry of reflection and that of sensation is a difference, not in content, but in form: “So vivid was the delight attending the simple exertions of eye and ear, that it became mingled more and more with their trains of active thought, and tended to absorb their whole being into the energy of sense.” It is not that aesthetic poetry has no ideas in it, representing a simple choice between manner as opposed to matter, but rather that it “mingles” ideas with sensations and feelings, and “absorbs” them into the process of imagery-making. For aesthetic poetry is organized according to the logic of images: “Other poets seek for images to illustrate their conceptions; these men had no need to seek; they lived in a world of images; for the most important and extensive portion of their life consisted in those emotions which are immediately conversant with the sensation.” Organic metaphor, as the modernist would say, in opposition to rhetorical or scientific metaphor.

The problem of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful resolves, not into an either/or option, but rather into a matter of hierarchical relation. Aesthetic poetry does not choose Beauty rather than the True or the Good; it subordinates them to the Beautiful. Aesthetic poetry may be full of ideas, but they are organized into poetry rather than philosophy. The difference is a difference in methods of organization. “This powerful tendency of imagination to a life of immediate sympathy with the external universe, is not nearly so liable to false views of art as the opposite disposition of purely intellectual contemplation.” For when the mind is working aesthetically, the Beautiful becomes a principle of organization rather than an abstract idea, and so is less liable to be misunderstood as a mere alternative to the True and the Good: “For where beauty is constantly passing before ‘that inward eye, which is the bliss of solitude’; where the soul seeks it as a perpetual and necessary refreshment to the sources of activity and intuition; where all the other sacred ideas of our nature, the idea of good, the idea of perfection, the idea of truth, are habitually contemplated through the medium of this predominant mood, so that they assume its color, and are subject to its peculiar laws, there is little danger that the ruling passion of the whole mind will cease to direct its creative operations, or the energetic principle of love for the beautiful sink, even for a brief period, to the level of a mere notion in the understanding.”

Hallam admits that minds of this sort “are especially liable to moral temptations,” and that, in the larger scheme of things, the man as citizen “is of infinitely higher interest than” the man as artist. But this is no necessary contradiction of his aesthetic doctrine. The man as artist does and should have more freedom than the man as citizen, and the former should keep trying to enlarge the scope of the latter. But it is also appropriate that the latter will always lag behind, for experiments in life have direct consequences whereas those in art have only indirect effects. The freedom of art is paradoxical: it depends on art's separation from life, on its being relieved of the pressures of practical consequences, on its viewing life disinterestedly and apart from the necessities of ego-involvement; and yet at the same time, if this is merely a permitted freedom, a court-jester's license, and having ultimately no practical effect on life, it will in fact be “mere” aestheticism, sterile and trivial indeed. In order for the poet to fulfill his own function in his own way, he must be allowed this freedom, even though his poems can—and should—influence life for the better in the long run. In the meantime, in his daily life as a citizen he must be—and inevitably is—responsible for the consequences of his actions, as are all men.

This is not to say that he leads a double life, demonic within and conformist without, nor that he should be “consistent,” either in the sense of “living” aesthetically or in the sense of writing philistine verse. It is rather that, although both art and ethics should be based on the same passion for growth, openness, honesty, and freedom, they nevertheless belong to different categories and operate in different ways. The artist as citizen may violate the conventions and even break the laws of his own day, especially if they are narrow conventions and unjust laws, but he cannot expect to be exempted from calculating the costs of and paying the price for his nonconformity, any more than any other man. Although poets may possess “their mission as artists,” as Hallam says, “by rare and exclusive privilege,” they have, in “their mission as men,” no special privileges. If they do not want practical concerns to distort aesthetic concerns, they must also concede that aesthetic ones should not be allowed to distort practical ones.

The real danger, as Hallam says, is not that aestheticism will make men brutish (as Wilde fantasied in Dorian Gray over half a century later), but rather that moralism will make them too spiritual (and Wilde himself acknowledged the polarization by saying that his novel had too much of a moral). This is what is harmful to art, and we would do well to recall that the position here is being so earnestly advocated not by a Blake or a Byron or a Shelley but rather by a pure and devout early Victorian; “Not the gross and evident passions of our nature, but the elevated and less separable desires”—I think he means those amorphous spiritual desires that, unlike the merely physical passions, we cannot easily identify and condemn as being merely physical—“are the dangerous enemies which misguide the poetic spirit in its attempts at self-cultivation.” Too much moral passion can distort the poetic process more than too much sensual passion. “That delicate sense of fitness which grows with the growth of artistic feelings and strengthens with their strength, until it acquires a celerity and weight of decision hardly inferior to the correspondent judgments of conscience, is weakened by every indulgence of heterogeneous aspirations”—this must mean nonpoetic aims—“however pure they may be, however lofty, however suitable to human nature.”

It is no wonder, then, Hallam concludes this portion of the argument, since the true poet's mind works differently from that of other men, that true poets are not popular in their own day.

II

But this position raises another problem: does it mean that poets are shut off from other men, that men will never be able to understand poets, and that therefore art can have no effect on life after all? “We answer,” says Hallam, “this is not the import of our argument.” The poet may go beyond most men, but he begins where most men are and ultimately returns there. “Undoubtedly the true poet addresses himself, in all his conceptions, to the common nature of us all. Art is a lofty tree, and may shoot up far beyond our grasp, but its roots are in daily life and experience. Every bosom contains the elements of those complex emotions which the artist feels, and every head can, to a certain extent, go over in itself the process of their combination, so as to understand his expressions and sympathize with his state.”⁶ This, of course, is akin to Wordsworth's assertion that the poet is a man speaking to men. The artist does not deal with different materials from those with which we are all familiar; his contribution is rather “the process of their combination.” The poetry is not in the materials but rather in what is done with them—or, as Wordsworth puts it, the poet is endowed with a more lively sensibility than ordinary men.

This process requires, therefore, a certain ability on the part of the reader to grasp, understand, and appreciate the nature of poetic form; it “requires,” as Hallam puts it, “exertion.” Since the poet organizes his poem around a certain formal principle, it is necessary for the reader to be able to locate that same principle and read the poem in its terms. “For since the emotions of the poet, during composition, follow a regular law of association, it follows that to accompany their progress up to the harmonious prospect of the whole, and to perceive the proper dependence of every step on that which preceded, it is absolutely necessary to start from the same point, i.e. clearly to apprehend that leading sentiment of the poet's mind, by their conformity to which the host of suggestions are arranged.” This, it seems to me, is an even clearer picture of the nature of form and of the problems of formal analysis than we find in most modern critics; it is an almost Aristotelian conception, for it credits the poet with having a design in mind and it asks the critic to recover from the poem the principle of that design before analyzing how the parts relate to the whole. Hallam's conception of form, in other words, not only calls for part-whole analysis, but it also contains a principle of hierarchical order by means of which to do so. Although its sources in Hartley are clear, this hierarchical principle is also a part of Hallam's specifically romantic heritage, deriving in large part from August Wilhelm von Schlegel through Coleridge, and it is the very principle which, as R. S. Crane points out, the New Critical adherents of Coleridge omitted from their considerations.⁷

Such exertion, however, although it is possible for most readers, is not likely to be forthcoming, for most readers are lazy and prefer, therefore, to have their poetry either deal with the easy and familiar passions—“Love, friendship, ambition, religion, & c.,” as Hallam says—or be diluted with nonpoetic matters. “Hence, whatever is mixed up with art, and appears under its semblance, is always more favorably regarded than art free and unalloyed. Hence, half the fashionable poems in the world are mere rhetoric”—this over fifty years before Verlaine said that we must take eloquence and wring its neck—“and half the remainder are, perhaps, not liked by the generality for their substantial merits.” Thus, popularity is likely to be a sign of inferior poetry, and lack of it a sign of true poetry. Obscurity, the modernist might say, is almost a necessary condition of good art. Art springs from the personal vision, and it is bound to appear eccentric in a depersonalized age. Indeed, if it does not, it has probably sold out. This is not a poetic ideal, however, but is rather a historical problem, and it is to this problem that Hallam now turns.

It may be objected, he admits, that great poets used to be popular. Look at Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton, for example. “If these are really masters of their art, must not the energy required of the ordinary intelligences that come into contact with their mighty genius, be the greatest possible? How comes it then, that they are popular?” The answer is that they lived during periods which were favorable to communication between author and audience. “In the youthful periods of any literature there is an expansive and communicative tendency in mind which produces unreservedness of communion, and reciprocity of vigor between different orders of intelligence.” And Hallam goes on to explain this historical shift in terms which ultimately derive from Schiller and which greatly resemble T. S. Eliot's “dissociation of sensibility” theory.⁸ “But the age in which we live comes late in our national progress.” Neo-classical poetry over-intellectualized the art, and the romantics tried to bring emotion back in.⁹ “With the close of the last century came an era of reaction, an era of painful struggle to bring our overcivilized condition of thought into union with the fresh productive spirit that brightened the morning of our literature.” Notice that he says “union” and not “competition,” for ideally, thought and feeling should work together.

This attempt at union, however, merely intensified the already developing fragmentation of what was once a “reciprocity of vigor between different orders of intelligence.” As Hallam says, “repentance is unlike innocence; the laborious endeavor to restore has more complicated methods of action than the freedom of untainted nature.” Organic development, we might say today, is irreversible. There is a sort of historical dialectic at work here, and as society becomes more objective, men feel a corresponding deprivation in their subjective lives. The efforts of the true poets, therefore, become increasingly more desperate on behalf of subjectivity, and they become more private as their audience gets more public. And this is bound to result in a dissociation of sensibility: “Those different powers of poetic disposition, the energies of Sensitive [or “sensuous,” as Hallam suggests in a footnote], of Reflective, of Passionate Emotion, which in former times were intermingled, and derived from mutual support for an extensive empire over the feelings of men, were now restrained within separate spheres of agency. The whole system no longer worked harmoniously, and by intrinsic harmony [no longer] acquired external freedom; but [instead] there arose a violent and unusual action in the several component functions, each for itself, all striving to reproduce the regular power which the whole once enjoyed.”

This fragmentation explains the morbidness, the subjectivity, the eccentricity, and the hostility toward technology which are so characteristic of modern poetry. “Hence the melancholy which so evidently characterises the spirit of modern poetry; hence that return of the mind upon itself and the habit of seeking relief in idiosyncrasies rather than community of interest. In the old times the poetic impulse went along with the general impulse of the nation; in these it is a reaction against it, a check acting for conservation against a propulsion toward change.” It may be pointed out, here and below, that the early Tennyson, despite his love and veneration for Hallam, did not entirely share his dear friend's views, and that in this connection he did make various attempts to align himself with progress—and not always with salutary results.¹⁰

Perhaps it is true, as some of Eliot's critics have said, that one cannot easily find a point in time separating the unified sensibility from the dissociated one, that the Middle Ages were just as wracked by torment and doubt as the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and that the common man always had his cheap and popular art. Perhaps it is also true that technology has in some respects elevated the popular taste rather than degraded it, and may some day work a general improvement in culture. But it is also true, as has been eminently clear from Blake and Wordsworth on, that a Puritanical, industrial, and democratic society has so far created special problems for the serious artist. “We have indeed seen it urged in some of our fashionable publications, that the diffusion of poetry must be in the direct ratio of the diffusion of machinery, because, a highly civilized people must have new objects of interest, and thus a new field will be open to description. But this notable argument forgets that against this objective amelioration may be set the decrease of subjective power, arising from a prevalence of social activity, and a continual absorption of the higher feelings into the palpable interests of ordinary life.” Without being able to prophesy what Baudelaire and Eliot were to find poetically viable in the underside of urban life, and without even being able to guess at the actual strains which the effort to reconcile what public life was to become with the private vision would put on Hart Crane, Pound, and Williams, Hallam has nevertheless put his finger squarely on the causes of modern artistic alienation.

And it is precisely this alienation that Arnold was to lament in his letters of the 1850's as the unpoetical quality of the age, and this is why he was to define modernism in his 1853 Preface as “the dialogue of the mind with itself.” At the time of the Preface, however, although he agreed with Hallam that contemporary subjects do not necessarily constitute viable material for poetry, he was still more concerned with reforming poetry than with reforming society, and more concerned with both of these than with dwelling on the self, and so he took this subjectivity of the poet as a bad sign and urged him to take pains to inspirit and rejoice the reader rather than inflicting the morbid on him. Not so for Hallam, for good poetry, in his eyes, is going to be unpopular, and it is the fault of society rather than the artist. “Our inference, therefore, from this change in the relative position of artists to the rest of the community is, that modern poetry in proportion to its depth and truth is likely to have little immediate authority over public opinion.”

III

Hallam turns now to the second half of his essay in which he reviews Tennyson's first book. If the first half of his essay was concerned with definition, in which he isolated the nature of the poet's mind and the consequent nature of poetic composition, the second half is a classifying argument, in which he endeavors to show that “Tennyson belongs decidedly to the class we have already described as Poets of Sensation.” This “is sufficient,” as he remarks wryly, “to secure him a share in their unpopularity.”

Hallam begins by listing the “five distinctive excellencies of [Tennyson's] own manner,” and they all relate, of course, to his definition of the poet's mind as one which absorbs thought and feeling into the dominant train of sensation, and of artistic form as that which subordinates the parts to the whole according to this “regular law of association.” The first is Tennyson's “luxuriance of imagination, and at the same time his control over it.” The second is his ability to create moods of character so “that the circumstances of the narration seem to have a natural correspondence with the predominant feeling.” The third is the way he describes objects “and the peculiar skill with which he holds all of them”—and here Hallam anticipates Eliot's famous catalyst-analogy—“fused, to borrow a metaphor from science,¹¹ in a medium of strong emotion.” The fourth is the way Tennyson's meters and style modulate “to the swell and fall of the feelings expressed.” And the fifth is the way Tennyson implies rather than states his ideas, thereby subordinating Truth to Beauty.

It remains for Hallam to analyze some poems in the light of these claims, and, since his argument rests upon a concept of part-whole relations, he must do so in terms of entire poems rather than excerpts—“for no poet,” as he says, “can be fairly judged of by fragments, least of all, a poet like Mr. Tennyson, whose mind conceives nothing isolated, nothing abrupt, but every part with reference to some other part, and in subservience to the idea of the whole.” Accordingly, he discusses “Recollections of the Arabian Nights” in the light of its “unity,” “The Ballad of Oriana” in terms of “the author's intention” and “the design of the whole” and “the leading sentiment,” and so on. His analysis of “The Ballad of Oriana,” “Confessions of a Second-rate, Sensitive Mind,”¹² and the dramatic monologues about women calls for further comment in terms of Hallam's modernity on three counts.

The first point is the extension of his concept of organic form to include the organicity of language. The writer does not use the devices of poetic style to make things difficult for the reader, nor to elevate his language, nor to make the sound echo the sense, but rather to capture a meaning that could not be expressed otherwise. Poetry deals with special meanings, a different kind of truth than that of prose, as the New Criticism claims, and hence it needs a different kind of language. These meanings are inexpressible by means of ordinary discourse, and poetry must approach them obliquely and suggestively. In the light of these conceptions, the New Critic can claim that the language of poetry is more exact than that contained in the dictionaries.¹³

The point Hallam is making about “Oriana” is that, although it evinces a “happy seizure of the antique spirit,” it is nevertheless a modern literary ballad, what Hallam terms “lyrical” as opposed to the “epic” form. The difference is that the former is the result of conscious artistry, as is the work, he says, of Dante and Petrarch. “These mighty masters produce two-thirds of their effect by sound. Not that they sacrifice sense to sound, but that sound conveys their meaning where words would not.” Poetry deals with an area of experience which is beyond the power of the ordinary use of language. “There are innumerable shades of fine emotion in the human heart, especially when the senses are keen and vigilant, which are too subtle and too rapid to admit of corresponding phrases. The understanding takes no definite note of them; how then can they leave signatures in language?” Nor is it that they are merely imaginary simply because they are so elusive; they are just as real as more palpable objects. “Yet they exist; in plenitude of being and beauty they exist; and in music they find a medium through which they pass from heart to heart. The tone becomes the sign of the feeling; and they reciprocally suggest each other.”

IV

Hallam was discussing “this suggestive power” almost before Mallarmé and the French Symbolists did, and certainly long before their influence began to be felt in England and America (although certainly Poe and the romantics were already thinking along similar lines). He also appreciated the poetic uses of ambivalence long before Laforgue, Yeats, Hulme, Pound, and Eliot developed the idea of impersonality, and his discussion of “Confessions” brings out this second point. He likes the poem, for it is “full of deep insight into human nature, and into those particular trials which are sure to beset men who think and feel for themselves in this epoch of social development,” but he takes exception to the title. It is not only a bit too quaint, he says, but it is also incorrect. Such unresolved ambivalence is more “the clouded season of a strong mind than the habitual condition of one feeble and ‘second-rate’.” Keats, we recall, was struggling toward a concept of “negative capability,” the ability to remain in uncertainties and doubts without an irritable reaching after fact and reason.¹⁴ His ideal of the poet was that of the chameleon-poet rather than of the egotistical-sublime poet—Shakespeare rather than Milton or Wordsworth—the poet who could so project himself out of himself that he became his characters instead of creating characters who were merely mirrors of himself. This is an “aesthetic” idea, one which puts Beauty above Truth in the sense that it is the poet's function to give an impression of life rather than to utter philosophical and moral pronouncements. Thus Keats noticed that as much imaginative energy, if not more, went into the creation of Iago as of Imogene, just as Blake noticed, some years before, that Satan was the true hero of Paradise Lost. And this is an idea which has had great effect on the New Criticism, as is evidenced by Eliot's acknowledgement of the genius and truth of Keats's statements about poetry, in The Use of Poetry.¹⁵

Thus we find Hallam saying: “Ordinary tempers build up fortresses of opinion on one side or another; they will see only what they choose to see.” And if by chance they happen to see the torment of a divided mind, they will be frightened into a further rigidification of their inner selves. “The distant glimpse of such an agony as is here brought out to view is sufficient to keep them for ever in illusions, voluntarily raised at first, but soon trusted in with full reliance as inseparable parts of self.” Hallam knows full well that Tennyson thinks it is better to have made up one's mind, “but we should not despair of convincing Mr. Tennyson that such a position of intellect would not be the most elevated, nor even the most conducive to perfection of art.” The fact is, however, that Tennyson wrote very few subsequent poems which ended so indecisively. There is ambivalence aplenty in “Locksley Hall,” In Memoriam, and Maud, for example, but they each try to end, contrary to Hallam's advice, by hook or by crook, in some definite and affirmative way.

But “Confessions” is probably Tennyson's most modern poem, in conception at least, if not in execution. It portrays a man asking for faith from a god in whom he knows he should believe but cannot. A modernist trick if there ever was one—to want a faith one cannot credit, and to be in despair over its lack. And the poem ends in just that way:

O weary life! O weary death!
O spirit and heart made desolate!
O damned vacillating state!

This is a poem, unlike Empedocles, which perfectly fits the category Arnold was to reject some twenty years later because it portrayed a state of unrelieved distress where the suffering finds no vent in action. Empedocles does, after all, find a way out of his despair by committing suicide, an act which has some positive aspects in that he does it in order not to lose the final clearing of his vision just before he leaps into the crater. And the suffering finds an even more positive vent in action in many of Tennyson's other poems, but not in this one. He came, like many Victorians, to see the choice between introspection and action as an either/or option, and he, like Arnold, who was also a naturally rather morbid poet, panicked, and stampeded in the direction of action. Needless to say, Browning, and then Rossetti, Swinburne, and Hopkins—not to mention Meredith—were not similarly persuaded, and continued, each in his own way, to explore ways of coming to psychological and artistic grips with painful material.

Returning to Hallam's essay, we may look ahead two years to Tennyson's 1832 volume, where we find the further development of this conflict in “The Palace of Art.” Tennyson indeed had to consider an ambivalent mind as being second-rate, because it represented a threat to his sanity. Having taken to heart his friend Richard Trench's remark that “we cannot live in art,” and having been terrified by what he saw when his mind returned upon itself, he banished “The abysmal deeps of personality” (l. 223) as being too selfish a concern for art to dwell upon. This poem, which Robert Hillyer, one of our own anti-aesthetes, said was “acutely applicable in our own day as a refutation of the aestheticism of the school of Pound and Eliot,”¹⁶ is not that simple, however. Although the penultimate stanza punishes the soul of the artist for having dwelt too exclusively in the isolated palace of art, the final stanza leaves the palace gates open:

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.

Tennyson, we may notice, rejects not art but rather an art which is centered on the self—which seems to many in the Victorian period an art divorced from life.

He does, however, have a hard time reconciling them, for he is both gifted and cursed with a morbidly compelling subjectivity and an overwhelmingly exotic sense of language and imagery against which to contend. Additionally, he has an excessively puritanical notion of what “life” should be. Although one should, I suppose, condemn his Lotos-Eaters for giving up the struggle, one can almost feel Tennyson's whole nature yearning in sympathy with their lassitude: “We have had enough of action” (l. 150). “Life” meant for Tennyson a vague kind of involvement with mankind, and a vague kind of struggle and effort. And it meant, in violent reaction against his own poet's nature, a rejection of idleness, relaxation, and self-exploration.¹⁷ Finally, he had, like many others, but unlike his dear friend Hallam, an overly-narrow view of the relation between Beauty and Truth in art, and he suffered from the common confusion between the poet as artist and the poet as citizen. For, as Hallam saw, not only is there no necessary contradiction between writing an artistically perfect poem and having insight into life, but also there is none between being a good artist and being a good man.

That the poet's allegiance is to how life looks and feels, as Hallam says, and to the proper ordering of his poem around this principle, and not to philosophical doctrine, moral improvement, and social progress, does not mean that he rejects Truth and Goodness in favor of Beauty, or that he divorces art from life. Beauty should not be identified with mere languor, nor should Truth and Goodness be equated with mere action. Idleness is not good simply because it can be “creative,” but more because introspection is as much a part of “life” as action—and so is morbidity. What is in the mind is at least as important as any railroad. And the way the poet's mind works is to incorporate ideas and ideals into the total context of what it means to be alive. The aesthetic idea of form does not set Beauty against Truth and Goodness, as we have seen, but rather incorporates them into a poetic order. The idea of the Beautiful is an idea of relationships rather than of exclusions, of a fusion of abstract and concrete rather than a rejection of one in favor of the other.

And, just as the poet's mind blends ideas, feelings, and sensations to capture a sense of the whole of life, so does his poem order its parts in relation to the whole. Although Hallam does not explicitly relate the idea of the dramatic monologue to that of negative capability, nor either to his earlier claim that Beauty should be the dominant principle of art, I think his ensuing discussion of Tennyson's dramatic monologues about women makes it abundantly clear that they are related. For the attempt to render a poem from the point of view of some imagined character is at once a principle of organization, a way of imaginatively rendering experience, and a method for remaining in uncertainties and doubts. In this kind of poem, the poet can be much more fruitfully true to “life” than if he tried to build up a fortress of opinion on one side or another. The dramatic monologue, in short, offers a specific structure for embodying an aspect of experience in an undogmatic and impersonal way.

V

So Hallam makes his third point by beginning the final section of his analysis thus: “A considerable portion of this book is taken up with a very singular and very beautiful class of poems on which the author has evidently bestowed much thought and elaboration.” He refers to those concerning Lilian, Isabel, Madeline, Mariana, and Adeline. He then analyzes the principle according to which these poems are organized. “Mr. Tennyson's way of proceeding seems to be this. He collects the most striking phenomena of individual minds until he arrives at some leading fact, which allows him to lay down an axiom of law. …” I think this means that the poet abstracts inductively from individuals certain recurring traits, which he then formulates into a definition of a type of human character; that the poet notices, in other words, that there are certain key resemblances among individuals which allow him to place them in certain groups. And “then, working on the law thus attained, he clearly discerns the tendency of what new particulars his invention suggests, and is enabled to impress an individual freshness and unity on ideal combinations.” This appears to mean that the poet gives dramatic vividness to his rendering of this type by re-imagining it as an individual and working with the new details thereby suggested, selecting those which are consonant with his leading idea and omitting those which are not. And indeed, this is how Hallam puts it: “These expressions of character are brief and coherent; nothing extraneous to the dominant fact is admitted, nothing illustrative of it, and, as it were, growing out of it, is rejected.” In this way the poet combines individuality with typicality, and multiplicity of detail with unity of design—or, as a New Critic might put it, texture with structure.

Remembering what Mill was to say about the lyric as a dramatic soliloquy, looking forward to Browning's development of the dramatic monologue, and anticipating what modern criticism was to make of the lyric as a dramatic mask—and, of course, we have Yeats's word for it that he was influenced by Hallam, and Pound's and Ransom's word that they were influenced by Browning—we may gain a fuller appreciation of what Hallam is saying here. “They are like summaries of mighty dramas.” Perhaps it would be better to say they represent a moment along the curve of a larger, but implied, action. “We do not say this method admits of such large luxuriance of power as that of our real dramatists; but we contend that it is a new species of poetry, a graft of the lyric on the dramatic, and Mr. Tennyson deserves the laurel of an inventor, an enlarger of our modes of knowledge and power.”

The whole point, then, of Hallam's essay is that a poem is an objective structure with its own principles of organization, and not just a versified expression of the poet's opinions. What better way to achieve this structure than to imagine it as representing a moment of human drama—or, as Aristotle might say—an imitation of an action? If a lyric poem can be seen as having a “plot” like a play, and if the speaker can be regarded as a character in a play, then the poem can be detached from the poet's private personality and handled as an aesthetic object having a life of its own. The poet's allegiance, then, is to the integrity of this object and not to philosophy, morality, or politics. And if the speaker is not “good” according to accepted moral standards, for example, the poet has no obligation to condemn him—only to present him in the fullest, truest, and most vivid way possible within the limits of the poem.¹⁸

Thus the “truth” of poetry, the modernist would say, is another and higher kind of truth than that of science, for it is more concrete, complex, and inclusive than factual truth. It is, as Hallam has been saying all along, a rendition of experience rather than a copying of it or an overt judgment on it. I think Aristotle meant something like this when he said that poetry is more philosophical than history, in that the poet, being chiefly characterized by his ability to make plots, is constrained not to a recital of things as they actually may have happened but rather to the need to fashion a unified sequence of incidents having a beginning, a middle, and an end, and being bound by what is humanly probable or necessary. And it is clear that this is what Keats meant by negative capability, in that the poet, being content to rest in doubts and uncertainties, should be able to portray an Iago as vividly as an Imogen. It is also clear that this is what Hallam meant earlier by saying that the poet should not build up a fortress of opinion on one side or another. It seems that Browning was aiming at something of the sort in poems such as “My Last Duchess,” and that Arnold was trying to express a similar conception when he said that the poet should get out of his own mind and present great and noble actions.

But Arnold, like Tennyson, as we have seen, tended to see the mind precisely as a depthless well of ambivalence rather than as a builder of fortresses, and so his feeling was that subjectivity and objectivity were opposed. This is not, however, the tendency of Hallam's argument, nor is it the conception of the modernists. Apparently, if one sees the mind as too uncertain, one will tend to look for escape in action; whereas if one sees it as too dogmatic, one will look for balance in dramatization. Although Eliot seems to overstate the case in favor of impersonality in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” I do not think he meant that objectivity excluded subjectivity but rather that it subordinated and transformed it. This interpretation is further substantiated by his essay on the later Yeats,¹⁹ and Yeats himself, of course—although he curiously seems to have had a mind more uncertain than dogmatic—was looking for a way, not of avoiding subjectivity, but rather of objectifying it. Now this can be done in a number of ways, some of which were known and used by the Victorians, some of which were not developed until the moderns, and some of which are still not commonly defined.

The first and clearest is the method being discussed here by Hallam, the one according to which the poet selects or imagines a specific character who is clearly not the poet—a character, it may be, from history, legend, or literature, and so one who has an entirely separate and distinct identity and biography. Tennyson's women-poems, his “Lotos-Eaters,” and his “Ulysses” are examples, as are Browning's famous monologues and Yeats's Crazy Jane poems. The relation between subjective and objective may work in two ways, depending upon which one is the starting point. The poet may begin either with a character and then try to get inside him or her, or with an inner state and then look for a character in which to embody it. Either way, however, subjective and objective will modify one another: in the first case, the poet will naturally tend to select characters whose traits find an echo in his own breast, although he will be able to distance and criticize these traits—as in Browning's “Fra Lippo Lippi,” for example, who is not simply a mouthpiece for the poet's philosophy of art but also a somewhat weak and foolish man; and in the second case, the poet will naturally tend to select characters who already offer some correspondence between their traits and the ones he wants to express—as in Tennyson's “Ulysses,” for example, whose pre-existing traits as an adventurer the poet must reconcile with his own need to fight off his depression over Hallam's death.²⁰

The second method is related to the first in its use of characters from history, legend, and literature, but it differs in that it uses them symbolically rather than literally. It represents not so much a graft of the lyric on the dramatic as a graft of the lyric on the epic. This is the sort of poem exemplified by Eliot's The Waste Land, Hart Crane's The Bridge, Pound's Cantos, and Williams' Paterson, in which the speaker—or the speaker's sensibility—moves about a metamorphosing epic landscape in the shape, variously, of Ulysses, Aeneas, Roland, Tiresias, and so on. Thus, whereas either version of the first method presents us with what is to be taken as an actual character, and leaves its relations with the subjective to inference, this second method more or less explicitly assumes that its central sensibility is the literal and unifying element of the poem, and presents the objective narrative elements as analogues of the conditions of that central sensibility. Characteristically, ancient is combined with modern, and symbolic parallels are seen between the journey of the hero toward the fulfillment of his destiny and the voyage of the soul toward wholeness. The public is seen as an aspect of the personal, and the personal is seen in terms of the public. Accordingly, the techniques devised are partly subjective and lyric, partly objective and narrative. The method is that of the juxtaposition of fragments—excerpts from documents lying side by side with inner meditations, descriptions of objects and places lying next to emotional outbursts—and the order of the whole is supposed to arise somehow from a gathering pattern of recurrences and contrasts. Needless to say, this method is more modern than Victorian, although I suspect that In Memoriam and Hardy's The Dynasts would bear looking into in these terms.

The third method is more rooted in tradition, and is represented by Yeats's “Dialogue of Self and Soul.” Here the poet projects two conflicting aspects of himself, and dramatizes their debate by giving each of them a separate and distinct voice. The medieval convention of debates between Owl and Nightingale doubtless lies behind this form, but I do not think it represents much of a factor in Victorian poetry and poetics.

The fourth method is the most elusive but the most promising. It rests upon the concept that, even when the poet is writing directly and autobiographically, if he writes a successful poem it will be an objective construct. The assumption is, and I think it accords with Hallam's argument, that any successful verbal discourse is the product of a selecting and shaping process, of an adjustment of parts to the whole, of means organized to achieve an end. Even when the poet writes about himself, therefore, and speaks in his own voice, he is, by virtue of the requirements of artistic form, creating an image of himself, a persona, a dramatic projection, and is not spilling himself as he really is all over the page.²¹ The sage and sensitive New England farmer who speaks many of Frost's poems is certainly very much like Frost himself, but he is a reflection only of certain elements in Frost which he found viable for poetry—no matter how much he himself may have imitated his own creation when appearing before the public in person, or may seem to be the same in the eyes of admiring biographers.²² Indeed, the speaker or speakers of any corpus of lyric poetry by a given author will tend, as the poet develops, to assume the lineaments of a character or characters acting out a continuing drama against the backdrop of a certain created world. Just as simply disguising personal materials may be no guarantee of objectivity—as in Tennyson's “Locksley Hall,” for example²³—so too may the most “naked” of poems be a successful dramatic projection—as in Robert Lowell's Life Studies, for example. The issue is best expressed, then, not in terms of objective versus subjective, but rather in terms of form—of whether the poet has embodied his materials, no matter how openly personal they may be, in a vivid and unified poem, and by means of an underlying insight into their significance for others as well as the poet. The problem, that is to say, is not to suppress one's personality in favor of impersonality; it is, instead, to embody and universalize that personality. If a personal poem fails, it does so not because it is personal, but rather because it lacks structure and insight—which, of course, is also true for the failure of any poem, regardless of how impersonal it may be. One may refer to structure and insight in terms of “objectifying” if one wishes, so long as such reference is not confused with “depersonalizing.”²⁴

Yeats added a useful twist to this method by building his personal and overlapping involvements in his thwarted courtship of Maud Gonne and in Ireland's struggle for independence into the shape of a poetic “myth,” and by exploiting his own ambivalences as a dramatic device for self-projection, self-exploration, and self-criticism. To develop a self-conscious, self-mocking, and self-questioning speaker is thus an additional way of becoming negatively capable, of not building up fortresses of opinion on one side or another, or distancing the poem from the poet, and of insuring its own integrity as an objective structure. In this way, not only can various—even opposing—voices be dramatized from poem to poem, as in “Sailing to Byzantium” and “The Spur,” and not only can two separate voices be dramatized in the same poem, as in “Dialogue,” but also a single voice can be made to encompass and reconcile various moods, as in “Among Schoolchildren.” This last is at once completely personal and completely objective. It is this objectification of the subjective which Wordsworth, as both Keats and Yeats noted, lacked, and which Tennyson could not quite manage to control in “Ulysses” and “Locksley Hall.”

However this may be, it is possible to see many lyrics in Aristotelian terms as embodying a moment of human experience,²⁵ whether the speaker is someone very much like the poet or very different. If the speaker is responding to some specific situation in which he is placed, whether stated or implied, and if his utterance represents some specific sensory, emotional, and/or mental activity if he is alone, as in Marvell's “The Garden,” or a verbal action if he is talking to someone who is there in the situation with him, as in “To His Coy Mistress,” then it is not only possible but also desirable to regard it as an objective construct built on dramatic principles, no matter how similar to the poet the speaker seems to be. The New Critics often talk about persona, scene, situation, drama, tone, atmosphere, and so on, but they have not made these observations a functional part of their theory of poetic form, preferring to discuss the “drama” of meanings as they interact rather than the drama of human actions. Kenneth Burke is one of the few modern critics, outside of the Chicago School, who has evolved a theory of poetic “action,” but it is a theory of symbolic rather than of literal action. Thus Hallam can be seen not only as an anticipator of modernism but also as a corrector of it as well.

Hallam concludes his essay with a brief discussion of Tennyson's style, and, ending where he began, with a witty condition concerning popularity. In presenting Tennyson as a poet who is not likely to be popular, he says, he does not want to be taken as recommending him by reverse psychology, pretending to wish the opposite of what he says he believes. “We have spoken in good faith, commending this volume to feeling hearts and imaginative tempers”—those, that is, which are capable of the exertion required to read poems in terms of their own form—“not to the stupid readers, or the voracious readers, or the malignant readers, or the readers after dinner!” As E. E. Cummings said, “The poems to come are for you and for me and are not for most people. … You and I are human beings; most people are snobs.”²⁶ Hallam confesses, however, that those who scorn popularity when they do not have it, do not often reject when it comes. “So much virtue is not, perhaps, in human nature; and if the world should take a fancy to buy up these poems, in order to be revenged on [me], who knows whether even we might not disappoint its malice by a cheerful adaptation of our theory to ‘existing circumstances’?” Tennyson was to become popular, to be sure, and he was to do so by virtue of a poem lamenting Hallam's death, but I do not think he did so by remaining entirely faithful to the principles Hallam praises him for exemplifying here. It remained to others, and most notably Yeats, to appreciate and develop Hallam's brilliant insights for what they were—living seeds of the future planted in too-long dormant soil.

Notes

1. The Writings of Arthur Hallam, ed. T. H. Vail Motter (New York: MLA [Modern Language Association], 1943), pp. 182-98. All of the emphases in the quotations from this essay are Hallam's. For my essay on Newman, who is mentioned just below, see “Newman, Aristotle, and the New Criticism: On the Modern Element in Newman's Poetics,” PMLA [Publications of the Modern Language Association], 81 (1966), 261-71.

2. “Art and Ideas” (1913), Essays and Introductions (New York: Collier Books, 1968 [1961]), pp. 346-55.

3. “Estrangement” (1909), sec. 47, from The Autobiography of William Butler Yeats.

4. Helen Pearce, in “Homage to Arthur Henry Hallam,” The Image of the Work: Essays in Criticism, by B. H. Lehman et al, Univ. of Cal. Pubs., Eng. Sts., No. II (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of Cal. Press, 1955), pp. 113-33, 258-60, also analyzes the essay, but she does so mainly in terms of Hallam's knowledge and use of eighteenth-century associationism and of romantic criticism. Indeed, she sees him not as an innovator but rather as an intelligent critic of his time. I find, however, that when regarded from the perspective of modernism, Hallam appears much more original. Of course, as I myself point out, modernism owes much to these same earlier traditions, but it also differs in certain emphases and developments, and it is in these that Hallam seems, from the wisdom of hindsight, prophetic. Henry J. Smith's “Arthur Henry Hallam,” SAQ [South Atlantic Quarterly], 47 (1948), 204-15, dismisses the worth of Hallam's writings altogether, and finds the source of his effect on Tennyson and other contemporaries to stem from his personality. Harry Allen Hargrave, in “The Life and Writings of Arthur Henry Hallam,” (Diss. Vanderbilt, 1966), pp. 193-203, shows how Hallam went beyond Hartley and associationism (esp. pp. 196-7, 200).

5. Andy P. Antippas, in “Tennyson, Hallam, and The Palace of Art,” VP [Victorian Poetry], 5 (1967), 294-6, sees Hallam as disapproving of Keats and Shelley, and on the basis of a reading of Hallam's sonnet, “Long hast thou wandered on the happy mountain,” concludes that he wanted the poet to be a participant in the problems of mankind rather than a detached observer. Houghton and Stange, taking a more balanced view, see Hallam as sometimes liking didactic and reflective poetry: “The fact is that in the early thirties Hallam and Tennyson were both uncertain of their critical principles and tended to oscillate between ‘Romantic’ and ‘Classical’ poetics” (Walter E. Houghton and G. Robert Stange, eds., Victorian Poetry and Poetics [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2nd ed. 1968 (1959)], p. 848, n. 1). It seems to me, however, that Hallam, unlike Tennyson, was remarkably consistent in his critical attitudes—he lived, after all, only for two years more—as is seen in his other essays. “On Gabriele Rossetti's Dante Theories” (1832), for example, also to be found in Motter's ed. (pp. 237-79), is based on the underlying premise that poetry is to be read as poetry, not as something else. The sonnet (Motter, p. 112) cited by Antippas is more a personal farewell to poetry in favor of religion than a statement of the poet's function.

6. Here Antippas finds the most support for his argument that Hallam wanted the poet to be involved with other men, but this claim, it seems to me, fails to read Hallam's remarks in their actual context.

7. “The Critical Monism of Cleanth Brooks,” Critics and Criticism, ed. R. S. Crane (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1952), pp. 83-107, esp. p. 90.

8. Johann Friedrich Schiller, “On Simple and Sentimental Poetry” (1795), anon. Eng. trans., Essays Aesthetical and Philosophical (Bohn Library, 1875): “The senses and reason, the receptive faculty and the spontaneously active faculty, have not been as yet separated in their respective functions: a fortiori they are not yet in contradiction with each other. … But when man enters the state of civilization, and art has fashioned him, this sensuous harmony which was in him disappears, and henceforth he can only manifest himself as a moral unity, that is, as aspiring to unity.” Cf. also Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (1793-5). F. N. Lees, in “The Dissociation of Sensibility: Arthur Hallam and T. S. Eliot,” N&Q [Notes and Queries], 14 (1967), 308-9, says: “Hallam's historical analysis is not identical with that of Eliot but their diagnoses are essentially the same. Eliot's view, then, is certainly not a view peculiar to a disciple of Remy de Gourmont and an admirer of the French Symbolists, even if (as René Taupin showed in 1929) his celebrated phrase and his attempted remedy are to be so explained.”

9. Houghton and Stange correctly point out that Hallam is taking an ultra-romantic view of neo-classicism here (Victorian Poetry and Poetics, p. 852, n. 17).

10. Cf. Pearce, “Homage,” p. 122.

11. Pearce points out that Coleridge employed this “fusion” idea in Biographia Literaria (1817), Ch. XIV (“Homage,” p. 259, nn. 27-8). A similar notion is also found in Keats (see n. 15, below).

12. Tennyson's titles are given here as Hallam puts them (I have changed his italics to quotes, however), although they are not always exactly as Tennyson has them.

13. The modernist doctrine is sound enough, it seems to me, as far as poetry is concerned, but when it denies prose any stylistic organicity it claims too much. Poetry does not use a different language from prose—nor do the dictionaries “contain” language—but rather uses the same language, having the same potentialities, in different ways, depending upon the nature of the end in view. Language in general, as we know, has two aspects—the significant and the sensory, roughly corresponding to referential and emotive, denotative and connotative—and in any successful form of verbal discourse they are combined effectively with one another. And if certain things are best expressed, relatively speaking, by emphasizing the sensory aspect of style in a certain way, that applies to prose as well as to poetry. Nor is it true that the language of science is devoid of connotative power: even at its most clinical it conveys not only exact denotations but also the “atmosphere” of the laboratory, the “aura” of impersonality, the “glow” of objectivity, the “air” of a detached passion for rational truth. That is why writers in the social sciences so often try to use the language of the physical sciences, with however unfortunate results, in an attempt to capture the flavor of impartiality. The scientist chooses his style, that is, whether he is aware of it or not, for its suggestive powers as well as for its dictionary meanings (and, of course, a good dictionary will also deal with connotations). Furthermore, these meanings themselves are just as contextual or reflexive as those of the poet: the meanings in any verbal discourse are modified and in part created by the pressure of the context. Poetry may be differentiated from prose as having different forms answering to different ends, but it cannot be differentiated by virtue of its organicity. The distinction Hallam makes here is not between poetry and prose but rather between the art ballad, which is the result of conscious artistry and hence achieves much of its effect via suggestion, and the traditional or popular ballad, which cannot pause, as Hallam implies, to develop rich verbal effects. Thus, although I find Hallam quite modernist here, I feel he avoids the cul de sac that certain New Critical tendencies have led to.

14. Pearce notes this connection, in “Homage,” p. 113, and says that Hallam would have been delighted to see Keats's letter (to George and Thomas Keats, 21 Dec. 1817). Keats's letters were not published, of course, until 17 years after Hallam's essay (cf. Hargrave, “Life and Writings,” pp. 197-8). But the idea of the poet not imposing his own views upon his characters and of being able to project empathically into the minds of others could also have been found in Coleridge, Hazlitt, and Shelley. It is remarkable that the romantics, who were saddled so long with Wordsworth's “spontaneous overflow of power feelings” idea quoted out of context, were so concerned with the idea of impersonality.

15. Although Eliot did not refer to Keats when he first propounded his theory of impersonality in poetry in 1917, he did quote approvingly from the letter to Benjamin Bailey of 22 Nov. 1817, in his essay on Shelley and Keats of 1933. Keats wrote: “Men of Genius are great as certain ethereal chemicals operating on the Mass of neutral intellect—but they have not any individuality, any determined character. …” Eliot comments: “This is the sort of remark, which, when made by a man so young as was Keats, can only be called the result of genius. There is hardly one statement of Keats about poetry, which, when considered carefully and with due allowance for the difficulties of communication, will not be found to be true. …” See The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (London: Faber and Faber, 1933), p. 101.

16. In Pursuit of Poetry (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1960), p. 158.

17. Thus John Speirs suggests, in Poetry Towards Novel (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1971), that the vein of psychological exploration developed by the romantic poets, being by-passed by the Victorian poets, was taken up by the Victorian novelists instead. There is a point, of course, at which introspection becomes non-productive, or—in Arnold's terms—“morbid,” and where it is healthy to turn outward, but Tennyson and Arnold in particular were extremely apprehensive about reaching that point too quickly, and this curiously set a dominant note in Victorian poetry. If one lacks sufficient ego strength to counterbalance the threat of going below one's defenses, or if the material is simply too painful, or if one gets stuck in morbid obsessing, or if one becomes so self-absorbed as not to be able to function, it would seem more fruitful to be getting up and doing something. On the other hand, it may also be observed that one almost never resolves an inner problem by seeking outlets; one simply holds it at bay, and in consequence pays the price in the energy which that effort consumes. To a degree, Browning found an artistic solution to the dilemma of Tennyson and Arnold by portraying others going into or revealing themselves, but how far this technique represents a successful objectification of Browning's own self-exploration, and how far it represents an evasion or displacement of them, is a moot point (see my discussion below). Similarly, in fiction a novelist has a ready-made structure for psychological exploration, in being compelled to create characters who are usually not literally himself. Perhaps the idea of the lyric “I” outside of the dramatic monologue not necessarily being the author's literal self, which comes out in some of Swinburne's essays and is a mark of later poetic theory, was not clearly enough established in the minds of Tennyson and Arnold. We may remark that this lack did not hinder Wordsworth in The Prelude, nor does it hinder our modern confessional poets. On the other hand, perhaps what Yeats saw as the reason for the failure of the Tragic Generation is related to the danger of going into the self without adequate ego-support to serve as guide, and the suicides of Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, and Anne Sexton may serve as sobering reminders of the risk involved in “tearing oneself to pieces,” as Arnold put it. In this connection, we may note that T. S. Eliot, whose early poetry represents psychological exploration to a painful degree, was almost obsessively insistent in his early criticism upon the impersonality of poetry, and was very concerned with presenting an impervious personal front to the world as a man. Yet even he became more mellow in his maturer years, both as a critic and as a person, and conceded that studying the later Yeats, as I show below, convinced him that a poet could get his actual self successfully into poetry.

18. Wayne Booth, of course, has mounted an extended attack, in The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: Chicago Univ. Press, 1961), on this position as it became incorporated into modernist fiction and fiction theory, and this attack has been one of the most controversial points in his book. I do not think, however, that his moral position—which holds that a writer should leave us neither in doubts or uncertainties nor with the sympathetic contemplation of evil—is any essential consequence of his aesthetic position—which holds that a writer's means of persuading us to accept his world cannot be reduced to a formula and that the intrusive narrator can be just as organic a part of the objective presentation as the retiring narrator. Robert Langbaum's The Poetry of Experience (New York: Random House, 1957), is the classic statement so far of the uses and structures of moral ambiguity (or “relativism,” as he terms it) in the dramatic monologue, but this is not the place to attempt to trace out the sinuosities of his argument nor of the controversies it in turn has engendered. C. K. Stead's The New Poetic: Yeats to Eliot (1964, rpt. New York: Harper and Row, 1966), esp. pp. 33-34, presents a very good account of the history and meaning of the modernist conception of the mask, and shows how objectification can be combined successfully with “opinion.” My own position, which goes somewhat counter both to Booth and to Langbaum, is that we always know when an overwhelmingly evil character is evil, even though the author remains “neutral” or even empathetic, for the same reason that we know it when the author makes it clear what he thinks of such a character—from our own experience of the probable and necessary in actual life. Empathy—sensing how someone else sees the world—is not to be confused with sympathy—feeling favorable toward what someone else feels—and an evil character in Browning, or even in Robbé-Grillet, does not mislead us for a minute. Certainly in Browning, at least, despite his enormous emphasis on dramatization, we usually know just where we stand. Nor is the presentation of outsiders—even perverts and criminals—necessarily the same as the presentation of overwhelmingly evil characters, for literature has always striven, and especially in the last two hundred years, to transcend conventional categories in order to encourage us to broaden and deepen our views of reality.

19. “The Poetry of W. B. Yeats,” The First Annual Yeats Lecture, delivered to the Friends of the Irish Academy at the Abbey Theatre, June, 1940; subsequently published in The Southern Review, 7 (1942), 442-54. Eliot later included it in his collection of essays, On Poetry and Poets (1957, rpt. New York: Noonday Press, 1961), pp. 295-308.

20. Needless to say, such reciprocal modification may or may not result in a coherent poem. The interaction between a life-centered theory of art and the tenuous character of the man who proposes it, in “Fra Lippo Lippi,” seems to produce a satisfyingly rich and ambiguous portrait, in that Browning is more concerned with difficulties the artist as a human being has in withstanding audience pressure than with simply advancing an aesthetic position. Tennyson's need to buck himself up, however, put his Ulysses in the unsatisfyingly ambiguous position of having to condescend, to say the least, toward his wife, son, subjects, as he proclaims his reasons for beginning once again on a new series of adventures. The structure of the legend, that is to say, does not offer an entirely suitable embodiment of what Tennyson began by needing to say: seeking courage in facing one's grief over the death of a beloved friend does not find a very appropriate equivalent in the need to face one's middle-age crisis by leaving home and responsibility.

21. This is a modernist idea that is similar to Booth's notion of the Implied Author in fiction.

22. Indeed, as Lawrance Thompson's biography of Frost shows, there were many less attractive features of himself that Frost was unwilling or unable to come to terms with, either poetically or personally.

23. Another example is Thomas Wolfe's discovery that changing the names of people and places does not necessarily result in the objectification of the obsessive life-story forming practically the sole substance of his major fiction. His problem was not that he was too autobiographical; it was, rather, that he had difficulty in grasping the significance of his experiences as they related to his intense but vague and chaotic passions, hungers, longing, and compulsions.

24. These are issues similar to those raised in Mark Schorer's well-known “Technique as Discovery” essay of 1947. While I agree with the main thrust of his argument—that the meaning of a work cannot emerge properly unless the writer finds a way of distancing and structuring his materials—I think he confuses the work-reader relationship with the work-writer relationship. He claims, in effect, that a writer can only know what he means by first finding the appropriate distancing technique. But this is the way the work seems to the reader—with structure embodying insight—rather than to the writer, who must have a sense of the meaning of his materials before he tries to find means of embodiment. No amount of technical distancing between Lawrence and Paul, to use Schorer's most conspicuous example, Sons and Lovers, would have enabled Lawrence to “discover” and control his ambivalence about Paul vis à vis Miriam and Paul's mother, without Lawrence having been ready psychologically and emotionally beforehand to perceive and accept it. Had he told the story from Miriam's point of view, for example, surely a distancing technique, he could just as easily have revealed her as wanting to suck the soul out of Paul—as he actually did in the novel we have—as he could have shown her not to deserve this imputation. Of course, if he had used this technique, he might have discovered something about Paul's (and his own) confusion, but only if he had been able successfully to get empathically inside Miriam's consciousness to begin with. And if he had that, he could have used his present omniscient technique without his present ambivalence. So we are back where we started. Schorer, it seems to me, falls victim to the shortcomings of the extreme organicist position, which claims that if expression and its embodiment are inseparable, then the writer cannot know what he wants to say until after he has said it. This is to confuse process with product. While it is true that writers commonly make discoveries as they write, it is equally true that whatever they may discover en route becomes willy nilly a part of what they want to say, and that it is still this latter which serves to organize the remainder of the creative process. The finished poem, i.e., however it became finished, is still governed by whatever end in view the poet is finally aiming at. Thus, while the end in view itself may shift and vary throughout the writing process, its role as organizing principle does not, and it is this that ultimately determines meaning, not technique, which is more properly seen in terms of means to the end.

25. Many poems, such as Ralegh's “What Is Our Life?” and Emily Dickinson's “Tell All the Truth,” are expository or argumentative statements, and although they—like any form of verbal discourse—involve the proper adjustment of parts to the whole, it would be a mistake to see them as forming the same kind of wholes as are found in poems like Frost's “Stopping by Woods.” Any form offers to the poet the resistances of its own integrity, but this does not mean that all forms are alike. There is no suggestion in Hallam, as I have shown, that organicity is limited to poetry. His notion of poetry is based, unlike that of the New Criticism, on the concept of an intentional process, and hence on a hierarchical ordering of parts, and hence on a plurality of forms. Although he does say that poetry is not philosophy or rhetoric, I do not think he would see successful poems of statement as coming under these heads. Indeed, as a glance at Ralegh's and Emily Dickinson's poems will show, the speaker of such poems is also conceived as a persona in a situation—although now the situation is vis à vis the reader, and thus its structure differs from that of a speaker responding in an imagined world—and hence can, and should, be regarded just as dramatically, in its own way, as the speaker in “Stopping by Woods.” Of course, the same may be said of a successful prose essay, and that is exactly the point: it is not a matter of “objective” and “reflexive” form versus subjectivity and prose, but rather of form in general, or different kinds of forms, and of distinctions between success and failure in creating forms.

26. Introduction to Collected Poems (1938).

Timbuctoo (poetry) 1829

Poems by A. H. Hallam Esq. (poetry) 1830

“On Some of the Characteristics of Modern Poetry, and on the Lyric Poems of Alfred Tennyson” (essay) 1831

Essay on the Philosophical Writings of Cicero (essay) 1832

Remains, in Verse and Prose, of Arthur Henry Hallam (poetry and essays) 1834

The Writings of Arthur Henry Hallam (poetry and essays) 1943

The Letters of Arthur Henry Hallam (letters) 1981

SOURCE: Flynn, Philip. “Hallam and Tennyson: the ‘Theodicaea Novissima’ and In Memoriam.” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 19, no. 4 (autumn 1979): 705-20.

[In the following essay, Flynn closely analyzes the influence of Hallam's ontological essay, “Theodicaea Novissima,” on Alfred Tennyson's eulogy to Hallam, In Memoriam.]

When Arthur Hallam and Tennyson matriculated at Cambridge in the late 1820s, the University was in a period of theological transition. Orthodox Anglican theology, timid and insular in spirit, looked backward to the eighteenth century. The epistemological attitude of Paley's Natural Theology (1802) prevailed, and his Evidences of Christianity (1794) and Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (1785) had recently been introduced into the University curriculum.¹ But, within the colleges, and particularly at Trinity, new forces were at work. Julius Hare and Connop Thirlwall, both resident fellows, carried German biblical criticism to the Trinity common room, while, among the undergraduate “Apostles,” F. D. Maurice and John Sterling preached the political and religious thought of Coleridge.

Among those “Apostles,” Hallam's enthusiasm for metaphysics was noticeably keen,² and the chronological study of his writings indicates that the summer and fall term of 1831 were a turning-point in his precocious intellectual development. At that time he turned intentionally from verse to prose, from personal lyric laments on the transiency of human lives and affections to a systematic attempt to erect through prose a coherent ontological philosophy. The most ambitious product of that attempt was an essay read to the “Apostles” in October, 1831, on the proposition, “that there is ground for believing that the existence of moral evil is absolutely necessary to the fulfillment of God's essential love for Christ.” The essay was entitled “Theodicaea Novissima” and, after Hallam's death, was included at Tennyson's request in the first edition of the Remains compiled by Henry Hallam in 1834. The “Theodicaea” is a curious piece, an amalgam of the Coleridgean philosophy of Christian experience encountered at Cambridge with Optimistic rationalism and Hallam's private readings in Plato, Dante, and medieval philosophy.³ It stands as the most coherent and mature ontological statement of the man whom Tennyson remembered in In Memoriam as having “faced the spectres of the mind / And laid them.”

Because of Henry Hallam's editorial interference, the “Theodicaea” was excluded from all but one of the later editions of the Remains, and the essay was virtually unknown until the appearance of Motter's edition of Arthur Hallam's collected writings in 1943.⁴ Subsequently, Eleanor Mattes has treated the essay through brief paraphrase in her study of the making of In Memoriam, suggesting that “Hallam's answers to the questions In Memoriam raises would in many cases have been very different from those to which Tennyson finally came.”⁵ Mrs. Mattes, convinced that Hallam's intellectual influence upon Tennyson was generally encouraging, concentrates upon Hallam's earlier poetry, poetry which anticipates the concerns and tone of In Memoriam, but poetry which Hallam himself had represented to Gladstone in 1830 as “the record of several states of mind, which may all be comprehended in a cycle out of which I fancy I am passing.”⁶ The suggestion which Mrs. Mattes found uncongenial to her own argument is worth exploring, however, because a closer comparison of the two works challenges the opinion that Hallam's thought was an encouraging influence upon the way of Tennyson's soul. In fact, the comparison suggests that Tennyson's personal bewilderment was caused, in part, by his recognition of the philosophical disparity between his own thinking and that of the young man whom he mourned. Hallam's rejection of natural theology—a rejection recorded in the “Theodicaea”—had been but a brief prelude to his intuitive acceptance of Christian revelation. But Tennyson's progress was slower, his skepticism more insistent. At the time of Hallam's death, Tennyson could give assent only to the negative aspect of his dead friend's creed—the distrust of natural theology. A compensating acceptance of Christian revelation was for many years beyond the poet's grasp.

The “Theodicaea” opens with Hallam's statement of personal epistemology, a rejection of the theological argument from design:

Can man by searching find out God? I believe not. I believe that the unassisted efforts of man's reason have not established the existence and attributes of Deity on so sure a basis as the Deist imagines. However sublime may be the notion of a supreme original mind, and however naturally human feelings adhered to it, the reasons by which it was justified were not, in my opinion, sufficient to clear it from considerable doubt and confusion. Between the opposing weight of reasonings, equally inalienable from the structure of our intellect, the scale hung with doubtful inclination, until the Bible turned it. I hesitate not to say that I derive from Revelation a conviction of Theism, which without that assistance would have been but a dark and ambiguous hope.

(201)

During the year in which Hallam composed and delivered the “Theodicaea,” the second volume of Lyell's Principles of Geology (1830-33) appeared and Darwin's association with the Beagle began. The argument from design, essential to the Deist position and still influential among conservative Anglican theologians, was soon to fall upon hard times. Several poems which Hallam wrote in the late 1820s, the records of those “several states of mind … out of which I fancy I am passing,” suggest that he was at least partially aware of the implications of contemporary geology, and he apparently recognized the vulnerability of the Deist's position in the face of changing attitudes in the physical sciences.⁷ At that same intellectual moment, however, questions on the validity of scriptual authority, questions raised by both the physical sciences and contemporary German biblical criticism, made a reassessment of the argument from revelation equally necessary. For Hallam, the authority of revelation was not attested by historical or miraculous evidence, but by psychological evidence—by its capacity to speak to the spiritual drives of man:

I see that the Bible fits into every fold of the human heart. I am a man, and I believe it to be God's book because it is man's book. It is true that the Bible affords me no additional means of demonstrating the falsity of Atheism; if mind had nothing to do with the formation of the Universe, doubtless whatever had was competent also to make the Bible; but I have gained this advantage, that my feelings and thoughts can no longer refuse their assent to what is evidently framed to engage that assent; and what is it to me that I cannot disprove the bare logical possibility of my whole nature being fallacious?

(201)

In this illative position, Hallam was indebted, as were other young men of his generation at Trinity, to the influence of Coleridge. It was the Coleridge of the Aids to Reflection (1825), synthesizing Platonic and Kantian elements with the theology of St. John, whom the “Apostles” and their mentors had come to regard as, in Hare's words, “the true sovereign of modern English thought.”⁸ In the Aids to Reflection Coleridge had stated, “Wherever the forms of Reasoning appropriate only to the natural world are applied to spiritual realities, it may be truly said, that the more strictly logical the Reasoning is in all its parts, the more irrational it is as a whole.”⁹ Thus he attacked “the prevailing taste for Books of Natural Theology”: “Physico-theology, Demonstrations of God from Nature, Evidence of Christianity, & c. & c. Evidences of Christianity! I am weary of the Word. Make a man feel the want of it; rouse him, if you can, to the self-knowledge of his need of it; and you may safely trust it to its own Evidence.”¹⁰ Christian conviction comes, Coleridge argued, through “a broad act of the soul,” and the authority of the scriptural message is attested by its fitness to human nature and needs: “In short, whatever finds me, bears witness for itself that it has proceeded from a Holy Spirit.”¹¹ It was upon this basis, because the Bible was clearly framed to engage the assent of his total personality, that Hallam could state, “I am determined therefore to receive the Bible as divinely authorized, and the scheme of human and divine things which it contains, as essentially true. I consider it as an axioma, or law, to which I have ascended by legitimate induction of particulars, and from which I am entitled to descend with increased knowledge on the heap of remaining phenomena” (201). Such a foundation is necessary for his argument, because it is from biblical quotation that he derives authority for his concept of God as love.

“Now what is the scheme of Christian philosophy?” Hallam begins. “What account does it give of the reasons for which God created us? I find in the Bible that ‘man is created in the image of God.’ I find also these words, ‘God is Love.’ ‘In Christ alone God loved the world.’ ‘By Christ and for Christ all things consist.’ ‘Through Christ God constituted the ages.’ ‘He is the well beloved Son in whom the Father is well pleased.’ ‘He is the express image of His person.’ ‘He was made perfect through sufferings.’ ‘He came into the world to destroy the works of the devil’” (202). Hallam chooses his quotations to give authority to four themes which he will develop in the course of his theodicy: (1) man is created in the image of God, and, thus, reasoning through analogy is possible and valid; (2) the essence of God is love; (3) an understanding of the relationship of the Father to the Son is essential to an understanding of Creation; (4) Christ's perfection is a developing one, developing through the struggle with moral evil. Each of these themes contributes in the course of the essay to Hallam's thesis that the existence of moral evil is necessary for the fulfillment of God's essential love for Christ.

Hallam's interpretation of the riddle of Creation is that “the motive which drew God from eternity into time was the love of Christ” (203). In this interpretation he is faced immediately with the necessity of proving that a conscious motive impelled Creation, and that that motive was love. He meets both difficulties by argument from analogy, based upon the biblical statement that man is created in the image of God: “Since man is in the image of God, and since nothing can be more essential to man, as an intelligent being, than to act upon a motive, some motive must have actuated the Supreme Being in his original fiat of creation” (202). But, granting the existence of a conscious motive behind Creation, what reason is there to assume that God's motive was love? Hallam cites the opinion of classical and medieval philosophers that love is the noblest of human attributes and the strongest of human motives: “It should follow then from their opinion, that while we consider human thought, design, volition, & c., as images of qualities somehow resembling these, though at infinite distance, in the Divine Mind, a passion so manifestly the noblest attribute of our nature should also be considered as representing some principle equally eminent in the Supreme Character” (203). Stating, then, that the motive behind Creation was one of love, and employing the analogical argument that the noblest attribute of human nature reflects an equal eminence of that attribute in the Divine, Hallam goes on to argue that the love which actuated Creation was God's love for Christ.

It was through his readings in classical and medieval thought that Hallam was drawn to those portions of the Bible which emphasize the moral primacy of love, “a passion from which religion had condescended to borrow her most solemn phrases, her sublimest hopes, and her most mysterious modes of operation” (274). In Plato he found an early attempt to establish love as the basis of ethical conduct; in Dante and medieval thought he encountered a philosophy based upon the concept of God as love and of human love as an analogical participation in that divine self expression.¹² It was upon this central principle, reinforced by revelation, that Hallam built the Trinitarian speculation which forms the body of the “Theodicaea Novissima.”

“Philosophers, who have fallen in love, and lovers who have acquired philosophy by reflecting on their peculiar states of consciousness, tell us that the passion is grounded on a conviction, true or false, of similarity, and consequent irresistible desire of union or rather identification, as though we had suddenly found a bit of ourselves that had been dropt by mischance as we descended upon earth” (203). If love is based upon a conviction of similarity, and the essence of God is love, it follows from analogy that God's own love must proceed from the same conviction and desire. Hallam anticipates the objection that God is without desire, that His felicity is supreme and independent: “I ask, whether or not God has created the Universe? If he has, he must have had some motive, some desire of some object to be attained by action. … It is mere abuse of terms to talk of God as wrapt in independent felicity; we should not be here to say it, if he were” (203-204). The mere existence of a created universe is testimony that God's happiness is in some way contingent upon his creations. “Having thus disposed of this objection, I revert to my former conclusion, that love, by which I mean direct, immediate, absorbing affection for one object, on the ground of similarity perceived, and with a view to more complete union, as it is the noblest quality of the human soul, must represent the noblest affection of the Divine Nature” (204).

Citing the words of Christ in 1 John 17:24, “thou lovedst me before the foundation of the world,” Hallam argues that the primary and eternal object of God's love is Christ. Hallam's language is ambiguous unless he be understood to mean by “Christ,” not only the historical Jesus, but also the pre-incarnate Son, the Second Person of the Trinity. It is as an expression of the Father's essential love that Hallam interprets the Godhead of Christ: “Surely these views throw light on the assertion that Christ is God. He is God, not in that highest sense in which the Absolute, the ‘O’ΩN [the eternal first person singular, “Being”] is God: but as the object of that Infinite Being's love, the necessary completion of his being, the reproduction of Him, without which His nature could not have been fulfilled, because He is love” (204). Moreover, the Godhead of the Son is not fixed and invariable. It has increased through time and the Incarnation, and perfect union and identity with the Father will come when the Son has triumphed over moral evil.

To clarify his concept of the Son's evolving Godhead, Hallam returns to the scriptural comment, “He is made perfect through sufferings,” and to his analogical examination of the nature of divine love:

Similarity, it has been said, is an essential condition of love, and it is equally true that reciprocity is implied in its idea. … Is it not reasonable therefore to conclude that the love of the Eternal Being will require similarly in the object that excites it, and a proportionable return of it, when once excited? But here arises a difficulty. Whatever personality is generated by God out of His substance must be essentially subordinate to God. I say not how subordinate, or to what extent; I contend for the plain truth that he must be so in one sense, and that an important one. Elevate and magnify the Son, as you will: he is the Son still, and not in all points or in all senses equal to the Father. … How then will the requisite similarity be possible, since the nature of God is Infinite, Absolute, Perfect? And how will the Reciprocity be possible, since the attributes of God are all infinite, and that great attribute so infinite to Him, that the Apostle [St. John] asserts it to be His essence, must be altogether illimitable?

(204-205)

Hallam finds the solution to this difficulty in the existence of moral evil. Only through a struggle against and eventual conquest over moral evil could Christ attain conformity with the nature of the Father and reciprocate the Father's love. If this be true, it can be argued that the existence of moral evil is necessary in order that God's essential love for Christ might be fulfilled: “evil may have been called into existence and power, because it was the necessary and only condition of Christ's being enabled to exert the highest acts of love, that any generated Being could perform, and thereby attaining that high degree of conformity comprised in the Divine Idea of his existence, and that high degree of reciprocate affection required by the eternal love of his Father” (205-206).

Hallam recognizes that within his breezy Arianism the existence of moral evil is a by-product of divine love: “Undoubtedly it would be blasphemous to assert that sin exists in virtue of the particular approbation, and according to the desire of God: … But the plain answer to all objections, drawn from logical definitions of God is—Look at the facts: here is a world overrun with sin and suffering: how did they get here except by Divine permission? Every system of theism must make God the author of sin in this sense” (206-207). Committed to a scheme of Creation in which the foundation and motivating principle is divine love, rather than divine justice, Hallam was unable to appeal to the doctrine of Original Sin in its traditional function as an explanation of moral evil. Accepting evil as a necessary part of his theological system, he attempted to show that temporal evil is conducive to eternal good—that is, the fulfillment of God's first impulse and self-affirmation, His love of Christ.

The main argument of the “Theodicaea” closes with Hallam's explanation of why Christ's necessary struggle with moral evil must involve the presence of sin in other created spirits. Hallam offers three reasons, each based upon the conformity and/or reciprocity demanded of Christ by divine love. In the first place, “if the object was to exalt that Evil Principle to a very high degree of dominion, in order that more exalted love might be called forth for his overthrow, it is obvious that this particular species of power, namely, over the hearts, the grounds of character, in a plurality of sentient beings, would be the very kind we should expect would be entrusted to that Evil Principle” (207). Secondly, as man is created in the image of God, God's love must extend to all men on the grounds of similarity perceived. By the Incarnation and Redemption Christ was able to imitate God's love for man: “By chusing this mode therefore of warfare with evil, Christ effected another part of the necessary conformity, since he displayed a perfect love for the lost souls of men, and, by living for them, procured salvation for as many as the Father gave him” (208). Finally, the love of man for Christ resembles, at least in direction, the love of Christ for God. The love for Christ of subordinate beings resembling the love of the subordinate Son for the Father, another stage in the desired conformity is realized.

In the “Theodicaea,” as in his essays on Cicero and on Gabriel Rossetti's study of Dante, Hallam considered the ethical implications of the Incarnation and Redemption in terms of the failure of pre-Christian ethical systems. Through Christ's sacrifice, human love found a worthy object and an efficient incentive to virtue. But Hallam's dominant attitude was theocentric. The Incarnation and Redemption were to be understood primarily in terms of Trinitarian love:

I answer that the infinite superiority of God to man is the very truth, which renders it far more probable to my judgment that God should act from a regard to a Being nearest to His Supreme Nature, and immeasurably exalted above our frail condition, than that the astonishing facts of a creation involving evil, an incarnation, and a redemption, should have ultimate reference to such atoms in the immense scheme as ourselves. Christ indeed is one, and inferior spirits, of whom we perhaps are the lowest, may be innumerable; yet in excellence and plenitude of existence, in nearness to God and adequacy to the absorption of His glorious love, what are the myriads of created beings, when weighed against that Only begotten Son, the express image of the Father's person?

(211)

Rather than citing the existence of moral evil as an indictment against a benevolent God, Hallam concludes, let us be content in those circumstances which have made a true human love possible and without which the fulfillment of God's essential nature—His love and its expression through love of Christ—would have been impossible.

Any judgment on the philosophical value of the “Theodicaea” is inevitably a personal judgment, depending first upon the modern reader's ability to entertain sympathetically Hallam's basic assumption of the validity of the “scheme of human and divine things” in the New Testament and, secondly, upon that reader's willingness to accept an epistemological combination of intuitionism and Optimistic rationalism. But, granting his assumption, and despite the rich variety of the philosophical traditions which shaped his thought, Hallam's essay will probably elicit from modern readers at best a notional assent. Although he initially employs a Coleridgean epistemology, his thesis fails Coleridge's mature test of philosophic truth—it does not find us, does not speak to common human feelings and needs. His epistemology appears, to this reader, not a synthesis, but a medley of epistemological traditions.

And yet, whatever be our judgment of it, the “Theodicaea” stands as both Hallam's most ambitious ontological attempt and our most reliable index of the temper of his mind and direction of his thought in the two years immediately preceding his death, the years of his closest intimacy with the Tennyson family. The essay indicates that, by 1831, Hallam had assumed two significant philosophical postures: he had “faced the spectres of the mind / And laid them” through an intuitional acceptance of “the scheme of human and divine things” in the New Testament, and he was inclined to solve the problems of moral evil and physical suffering by a logical subordination of human affairs to a greater moral drama. The despair which Tennyson felt upon Hallam's death would have been mitigated could he have confidently shared these attitudes. But Tennyson's memorial poem indicates that he could not—that his confusion in the decade that follows was, rather, a function of his desperate attempt to approximate some tentative measure of the faith in which Hallam, at his death, had been so secure.

To understand the extent of that confusion it is necessary to examine In Memoriam from an unfamiliar perspective. Tennyson's struggle with the specters raised by early Victorian science is an often-and well-told tale. Still unappreciated is the significance of the bequest which Hallam left to Tennyson through the “Theodicaea”: an epistemology and ontology which, had Tennyson been able to accept them, would have sustained him through the years of immediate personal grief and subsequent scientific study. That Tennyson had need of such assistance, even before Hallam's death, is suggested by “Supposed Confessions of a Second-Rate Sensitive Mind” and other early poems. His father's death in 1831 deepened his confusion and his friends' concern. “I hope you will do all you can to assist me in endeavouring to restore Alfred to better hopes & more steady purposes,” Hallam wrote to Emily Tennyson in January, 1832, a month after he had written to request the return of his notebook that contained the “Theodicaea.” “It will be sweet to labour together for so holy an end. I would sacrifice all my own peace to see you & him at peace with yourselves & with God.”¹³ Hallam had sent the “Theodicaea” to Tennyson as part of an unsuccessful campaign to convert his friend to “better hopes & more steady purposes,” and Tennyson's qualified recommendation of the essay to Henry Hallam should be considered in that context: “I know not whether among the prose pieces you would include [in the Remains] the one which he was accustomed to call his Theodicean Essay. I am inclined to think it does great honour to his originality of thought.”¹⁴ That Tennyson was impressed by the “originality” of the essay supports Hallam Tennyson's admission that his father did not read widely in philosophy at Cambridge or immediately after. More significant, the disparity between the fundamental attitudes of the essay and those of the early sections of In Memoriam suggests that the ambiguous praise of “originality” was the highest praise that Tennyson could bring himself to give.

“I hesitate not to say,” wrote Hallam in the “Theodicaea,” “that I derive from Revelation a conviction of Theism, which without that assistance would have been but a dark and ambiguous hope.” While at Cambridge Tennyson, like Hallam, had found the argument from design unconvincing. When the “Apostles” debated the question, “Is an intelligible First Cause deducible from the phenomena of the Universe?”, Tennyson had voted “No.”¹⁵ But, unlike Hallam, Tennyson did not share the “Apostles'” enthusiasm for the compensating epistemology of the Aids to Reflection. Hallam Tennyson remembered that his father “never much cared” for Coleridge's prose; nor is there evidence of Coleridge's influence in those sections of In Memoriam that can be assigned to the period of 1833-37, the period between Hallam's death and Tennyson's reading of Lyell's Principles of Geology.¹⁶ There is, in fact, no confident appeal to the assurances of Christian revelation, on intuitive or other grounds, throughout the stanzas of this period. The tentative Christian hope of the first Christmas section (XXX) is undercut by the Christmas section written in the following year, which admits that the psychological relief of the Christmas season, as represented by his response to village church-bells, comes through its association with his less troubled youth, rather than with present faith (XXVIII, 13-18).¹⁷ What hints at Christian eschatology there are appear especially tentative when contrasted with the unqualified Naturalism of sections II and XVIII. Tennyson's inability to stand secure in the basic epistemological posture of the “Theodicaea” is most evident, however, in the very sections which invoke, muse-like, Hallam's memory and aid. In section LXXXV Tennyson asserts that Hallam's “All-comprehensive tenderness, / All-subtilising intellect” are “An image comforting the mind, / And in my grief a strength reserved” (47-48, 51-52). But that section poses the question, “whether trust in things above / Be dimm'd of sorrow, or sustained; / And whether love for him have drain'd / My capabilities of love” (9-12). Tennyson can answer with assurance only the latter half of that question. He is still able to return love for love, but, although he recognizes that with Hallam's memory before him “Nor can it suit me to forget / The mighty hopes that make us men” (59-60), he is compelled to admit that his speculations on immortality are proof only of how grief will “with symbols play / And pining life be fancy-fed” (95-96).

Without the assurance of revelation, Tennyson's yearnings to believe in a God of love, a benevolent order, and his and Hallam's immortality remained a “dark and ambiguous hope.” He was seeking intimations of immortality in a variety of places, including Wordsworth's poetry and Isaac Taylor's Physical Theory of Another Life (1836), and the sections that record the ebb and flow of his hope (XXXIV, XXXV, XL, XLIII, XLVI) are a-Christian in expression. His will to believe was strong. His sympathy with the Christian message was probably deep. But he could not bring himself to make Hallam's intuitive leap of faith from his own needs to an acceptance of Christian consolation.¹⁸ Therefore, when readings in Lyell and contemporary scientific literature indicated that his personal loss was part of a greater human tragedy, he was unable to find immediate rebuttal, as Hallam could have done, in the assurances of scripture.

Yet, could Tennyson have followed Hallam here, it remains unlikely that Hallam's dismissal of moral evil and human suffering as necessary to the consummation of Trinitarian love would have consoled a man who demonstrated, as Jowett recognized, “a pertinacity on the part of man in demanding of God his rights.”¹⁹ Hallam was able to sacrifice the concerns of “such atoms in the immense scheme as ourselves” to the logic of his own Optimistic and Trinitarian ontology:

I may further observe, that however much we should rejoice to discover that the eternal scheme of God, the necessary completion, let us remember, of His Almighty Nature, did not require the absolute perdition of any spirit called by Him into existence, we are certainly not entitled to consider the perpetual misery of many individuals as incompatible with sovereign love. If Christ could attain the requisite degree of exaltation without the concession of so much power to evil, there is no doubt everlasting torment would not be, because God is love, and can have no delight in inflicting pain for its own sake; but if the loss of certain souls was necessary to Christ's triumph over the evil that opposed him, most certainly on the principles I have laid down, God must have included it in His plan, and a contrary mode of proceeding would have been contradictory to that infinite love which constitutes his moral nature.

(207-208)

“Why has God created souls knowing they would sin and suffer?” Tennyson wrote to Emily Sellwood in 1839. “There is no answer to these questions except in a great hope of universal good.”²⁰ But Tennyson's “larger hope” demanded that no created spirit “but subserves another's gain” (LIV, 12), and he rejected a “barren faith … tho' with might / To scale the heaven's highest height” for the “wisdom” to be learned through “sorrow under human skies” (CVIII, 5-7, 14). His proper study was of man, and, despite the theocentric argument of the “Theodicaea,” he stubbornly resisted the Optimistic subordination of personal suffering and aspiration to divine necessity. Hope in the immortality of a “general Soul” was “faith as vague as all unsweet” (XLVII, 4, 5); his and Hallam's immortality, in some mode, must be personal. He was firm in that attitude throughout his life: “Yes, it is true that there are moments when the flesh is nothing to me, when I feel and know the flesh to be the vision, God and the Spiritual the only real and true. Depend upon it, the Spiritual is the real: … but you never, never can convince me that the I is not an eternal Reality, and that the Spiritual is not the true and real part of me.”²¹ When, in later life, he was able to deal more confidently with the promise of Christian revelation, his concepts of the Incarnation and Redemption were consistently homocentric: “The life after death … is the cardinal point of Christianity.”²²

After 1837, the year of encounter with the Principles of Geology, Tennyson's personal elegy began its own evolution toward a Victorian Essay on Man, and section CXIV records his acceptance of a crucial epistemological distinction between Wisdom and Knowledge, a position reached apparently by 1839 through the influence of Carlyle, Julius Hare, and the Kantian-Coleridgean orientation of the ex-“Apostles” with whom he maintained contact. If that distinction was a potential defense against the implications of empirical science, it also brought him closer to a basic attitude of Hallam's faith, and the psychological relief of that belated approximation is evident in the closing stanzas of section CXIV. But approximation was not coincidence. The Wisdom-Knowledge distinction might or might not serve him in dealing with the implications of empirical science. The stanzas of the early 1840s express not only the philosophical battle of Tennyson's generation, but Tennyson's continued personal struggle to be true to Hallam's memory—the desire to believe as Hallam believed, the sense of personal moral failure if he could not:

Nor mine the sweetness or the skill,
                    But mine the love that will not tire,
                    And, born of love, the vague desire
That spurs an imitative will.

(CX, 17-20)

Seraphic intellect and force
                    To seize and throw the doubts of man;
                    Impassion'd logic, which outran
The hearer in its fiery course;
.....All these have been, and thee mine eyes
                    Have look'd on: if they look'd in vain,
                    My shame is greater who remain,
Nor let thy wisdom make me wise.

(CIX, 5-8, 21-24)²³

But the wisdom of the poem's conclusion is not Hallam's wisdom. Tennyson was more consistent in his application of intuitive epistemology. His melioristic interpretation of pre-Darwinian theory on the biological evolution of the species does not logically necessitate belief in personal immortality, much less belief in the continued moral evolution of personality after death. The concept of “one far-off divine event / To which the whole creation moves” (Epi., 143-44) might logically contradict, rather than support, belief in the survival of personality. Yet these beliefs are valid as intuitions and, as such, are more consistent with an intuitive epistemology than the “fiery logic” of the “Theodicaea.” Both men accepted love as an ultimate ontological principle, phrasing their acceptance in the vocabulary of St. John. But the focus of Hallam's ontology was a Trinitarian love in which the “myriads of created beings” play a supporting role. Tennyson's concern was with those very myriads in their struggle toward “the Christ that is to be” (CVI, 32).

Was Tennyson engaged in a half-realized debate with the memory of Hallam's late metaphysical position? The comparison of the two works suggests, at least, that the relationship between the two men was more complex and ambiguous than has been recognized. The hold which the memory of Hallam's thought and personality exercised upon Tennyson remained strong: the Epilogue cited him as “a noble type” of man's moral evolution, “Appearing ere the times were ripe” (Epi., 138-39), and Tennyson's attempt in the Prologue to give his intuitions a Christian expression satisfied his persistent “imitative will” to more closely approximate the Christian faith that was Hallam's when “At last he beat his music out” (XCVI, 10). The music which Tennyson eventually beat out was his own, nonetheless, more consistent in epistemology and more comprehensive of human aspiration than that of the precocious metaphysician he mourned. Hallam's bequest was both inspiration and confusion, and the “Theodicaea Novissima” has an ambivalent but intriguing place in the troubled intellectual history of In Memoriam.

Notes

1. See Denys Arthur Winstanley, Early Victorian Cambridge (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1940), p. 68.

2. Among the testimonials to Arthur Hallam's genius which Henry Hallam included in the Remains is one from Francis Doyle, Arthur Hallam's friend at Eton and Trinity: “In fact, his energy and quickness of apprehension did not stand in need of outward aids. He could read or discuss metaphysics as he lay on the sofa after dinner, surrounded by a noisy party, with as much care and acuteness as if he had been alone; … His chief pleasure and strength lay certainly in metaphysical analysis. He would read any metaphysical book, under any circumstances, with avidity; and I never knew him decline a metaphysical discussion. He would always pursue the argument eagerly to the end, and follow his antagonist into the most difficult places.” Quoted in Remains in Verse and Prose of Arthur Henry Hallam, ed. Henry Hallam (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1863), pp. 29-31. This testimonial is anonymous in the Remains; W. E. Gladstone identified it as Doyle's in the former's Arthur Henry Hallam, Companion Classics (Boston: Perry Mason and Co., no date; rpt. from “The Youth's Companion,” 6 January 1898), p. 15. In her memoir of the “Apostles,” Frances Brookfield described Hallam as roaming the rooms of his friends: “He never, it seems, avoided a metaphysical discussion, his subtlety in this branch of philosophy being considered greater than that of any of his contemporaries.” Frances Mary Brookfield, The Cambridge “Apostles” (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1906), p. 127. However, Doyle recognized that Hallam was “not … a very patient thinker” and that “his natural skill in the dazzling fence of rhetoric, was in danger of misleading and bewildering him in his higher vocation of philosopher” (Remains, p. 32). Henry Hallam allowed that “more practice in the strict logic of geometry, a little more familiarity with the physical laws of the universe, and the phenomena to which they relate, would possibly have repressed the tendency to vague and mystical speculation which he was too fond of indulging” (Remains, p. 22).

3. In his remarks on the “Theodicaea” Motter writes, “Hallam acknowledges his interest in Jonathan Edwards; and it is apparent that he has sometimes chosen to follow another American, William Ellery Channing, especially the ‘Discourse at the Ordination of Rev. F. A. Farley … 1828’.” T. H. Vail Motter, ed., The Writings of Arthur Hallam, The Modern Language Association of America General Series, No. XV (New York: MLA [Modern Language Association of America], 1943), pp. 199-200—cited hereafter as Writings. Hallam does acknowledge an interest in Edwards in one of his own notes to his essay, but states that “the genius of Calvinism, ‘torva tuens,’ frightens him” away from an ontology of divine love (Writings, pp. 206-207, n. 4). The specific influence of Channing is not apparent from a comparison of the “Theodicaea” and the “Discourse,” and Motter does not offer external evidence to that point.

4. For an account of the publishing history of the “Theodicaea” and its critical neglect, see Motter, Writings, pp. 317-21. Quotations from the “Theodicaea Novissima” and from Hallam's “On Gabriele Rossetti's Dante Theories” are taken from this edition.

5. Eleanor Bustin Mattes, In Memoriam: The Way of a Soul (New York: Exposition Press, 1951), p. 21.

6. Hallam to W. E. Gladstone, 17 June 1830; quoted in Writings, no page number.

7. See, especially, “Sonnet Written in the Pass of Glencoe” and “Written in View of Ben Lomond,” Writings, pp. 51-52.

8. Quoted from Hare's introductory essay in John Sterling's Essays and Tales by Bernard Reardon, From Coleridge to Gore: A Century of Religious Thought in Britain (London: Longman, 1971), p. 61, n. 2. See also Frederick Denison Maurice, The Life of Frederick Denison Maurice, ed. Frederick Maurice, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1884), 1:45-60, and E. S. Shaffer, “Kubla Kahn” and The Fall of Jerusalem (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1975), pp. 17-61.

9. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, in the Formation of a Manly Character, 1rst American ed. from the 1rst London ed. (Burlington, Vermont: Chauncy Goodrich, 1829), p. 156.

10. Aids to Reflection, p. 245.

11. Ibid.

12. See Hallam's “Essay on the Philosophical Writings of Cicero,” Writings, pp. 157-61; “On Gabriele Rossetti's Dante Theories,” Writings, p. 261.

13. Hallam to Emily Tennyson, 22 January 1832; quoted in Writings, p. 199.

14. Tennyson to Henry Hallam, 14 February 1834; quoted in Enoch Arden and In Memoriam, ed. Hallam Lord Tennyson, Eversley Edition (London: Macmillan, 1908), p. 258. Quotations from In Memoriam are taken from this edition.

15. See Hallam Lord Tennyson, Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1897), 1:44, n. 1—cited hereafter as Memoir.

16. Memoir, 1:50. The dating of many individual sections of the poem can be nothing more than tentative, because Tennyson stubbornly discouraged chronological analysis of the poem during his lifetime. I have depended upon statements in the Memoir, the Eversley edition of Enoch Arden and In Memoriam, Mrs. Mattes' “Chronology” in In Memoriam: The Way of a Soul, pp. 111-25, and evidence offered by Christopher Ricks, ed., The Poems of Tennyson (London: Longmans, 1969).

17. Tennyson warned that “the ‘I’ is not always the author speaking of himself, but the voice of the human race speaking thro' him” (Enoch Arden and In Memoriam, p. 204). But, in the sections discussed here and especially in those referring to Hallam's mind and character, that distinction does not appear to be important.

18. Section XXXVI, however, reads very much like such a leap, and Mrs. Mattes has assigned the composition of this section to 1835, admitting that “for this dating there is only the internal, tentative evidence that these sections [XXXIV-VI] reflect Wordsworth's views on immortality and on the relation ‘natural religion’ and the Christian revelation, and that Tennyson was reading ‘a great deal of Wordsworth’ in 1835 (Memoir, 1:151)” (In Memoriam: The Way of a Soul, p. 117). Attempting to refute “internal, tentative evidence” through other internal, tentative evidence is a dangerous game, but the explicitly Christian confidence of XXXVI does appear to be a significant advance beyond the speculations of XXXIV-V, and there is nothing comparable to it in the other sections which can be assigned with any assurance to this period. On the internal evidence of that confident expression, XXXVI seems to belong to a later stage in the poem's composition.

19. Quoted in Memoir, 2:464.

20. Tennyson to Emily Sellwood, 1839; quoted in Memoir, 1:170.

21. Quoted in Enoch Arden and In Memoriam, p. 265. Tennyson recognized that his preoccupation with the survival of personality was in conflict with the “kind of waking trance” described in section XCV (see Enoch Arden and In Memoriam, pp. 217-18). He did not resolve the conflict.

22. Quoted in Enoch Arden and In Memoriam, p. 209, n. 1.

23. See also sections LXXX and XXXVII.

SOURCE: Day, Aidan. “The Spirit of Fable: Arthur Hallam and Romantic Values in Tennyson's ‘Timbuctoo’.” The Tennyson Research Bulletin 4, no. 2 (November 1983): 59-71.

[In the following essay, Day analyzes Hallam's Timbuctoo and Tennyson's poem of the same name. Day concludes that Tennyson's poem is influenced considerably by Hallam's version.]

In attempts to identify external factors which may help account for the Romantic bias marking Tennyson's 1829 Cambridge Prize Poem “Timbuctoo” commentators tend to refer only to general influences: the broad currency of Romantic ideas at Cambridge in the late 1820s and the special enthusiasm for Romantic literature among members of the Society known as the Apostles. I shall suggest in the following discussion that in his conception of Romantic values in “Timbuctoo” Tennyson was indebted specifically to notions advanced by Arthur Hallam. Much has been made of the formative role played by Hallam in Tennyson's early intellectual and artistic development. “Timbuctoo” may be seen in some measure to confirm this view. But the poem also reveals a significant ambiguity in Tennyson's response to Romantic ideology. My further purpose in this essay will be to provide a detailed examination of this element of ambiguity and show that it furnishes us with an important insight into the limits of Hallam's influence over his friend's thought and imaginative concerns.

Hallam claimed to have exercised a very considerable influence over Tennyson's prize-winning poem. In a letter of 25 June 1825 J. M. Gaskell wrote:

I received a letter this morning from Hallam. He is delighted that Tennyson is successful. He says that Tennyson deserved it, but that he borrowed the pervading idea from him. …¹

Hallam's claim looks extravagant when we recall that Tennyson's “Timbuctoo” was largely made up out of an earlier work, “Armageddon,” the first version of which he had composed before going up to Cambridge and before meeting Hallam. Yet it seems likely that Hallam would have made his claim in full knowledge of this fact. On 16 September 1829 he replied to a letter sent him by John Frere:

I cannot agree with you bye the bye that Alfred's poem is not modelled upon [Shelley's] Alastor, nor by any means that it is a specimen of his best manner. The bursts of poetry in it are magnificent; but they were not written for Timbuctoo; and as a whole, the present poem is surely very imperfect.²

“Armaggedon” was first published by Sir Charles Tennyson in Unpublished Early Poems by Alfred Tennyson (London, 1931), pp. 6-15 (hereafter 1931). From the manuscript used by Sir Charles (now Harvard MS. Eng. 952.2) it had appeared that less than 50 lines had been incorporated from “Armaggedon” in “Timbuctoo.” But Christopher Ricks has noted that a different version of “Armaggedon” in a notebook at Trinity College, Cambridge (MS. 0.15.18; hereafter T.Nbk.18) shows that “Broadly, the whole central vision of ‘Timbuctoo,’ from l. 62 … to l. 190 … was present, with some trivial variants, in ‘Armaggedon.’”³ Clearly, the cannibalisation was massive and Tennyson's own comment that he “sent in an old poem” with a new beginning and ending⁴ and Hallam's assertion that Tennyson borrowed from him the “pervading idea” of “Timbuctoo” might well appear contradictory and mutually exclusive claims. But Tennyson's alterations of “Armaggedon” in the making of “Timbuctoo” were more significant than a simple count of the number of new lines in the new poem would reveal. These alterations may best be understood, and the nature and scope of Hallam's probable influence over Tennyson's work best appreciated, through, first, an examination of the basic features of Hallam's own submission for the 1829 Prize Poem competition, second, an examination of “Armaggedon,” and finally a consideration of the winning entry in the light of this preliminary discussion.

.....

Hallam's Timbuctoo is laboured and derivative. The poet acknowledges his models by means of his epigraph, taken from Wordsworth's “Yarrow Unvisited,” and through his extensive notes to the poem.⁵ Not all echoes are formally noticed but the principal influences discernible in the work are those of Wordsworth, Shelley, and Coleridge. Hallam's conversion of these influences into an almost systematised external authority in Timbuctoo marks a significant difference in imaginative effort between the poem and the Romantic texts which it invokes. Hallam reveals little of the confidence in self-derived authority and little of the innovative and exploratory impulse of his Romantic mentors. His composition reads like a versified treatise on the imagination and we should be hard pressed to recognise in it that “vital union” between language and figure⁶ which we take to be a distinguishing feature of the fully realised Romantic poem. Attempting to press an unsystematic body of literature into a systematised framework, Hallam betrays in Timbuctoo an eclectic reliance on his Romantic models and an apparent lack of awareness of differing individual attitudes and ideas which lead to amalgamations that are reductive to the point of cliché. Without dwelling on these negative aspects of the poem its overt conceptual and imaginative affiliation may be indicated.

Summarising the opening theme of his poem in lines 82-97, Hallam complains that his is an age witnessing a decline in the spiritual and imaginative energies of mankind. He observes that the “‘veiled maid’” (l. 84) and “every thing that makes us joy to be” (l. 87) have vanished, overwhelmed by “the world's o'ershadowing form” (l. 95). He recalls the Wordsworth of the “Immortality Ode” (l. 18) as he declares that “there hath passed away a glory of Youth / From this our world; and all is common now” (ll. 88-89). In a note on his reference to the disappearance of the “‘veiled maid’” in the text of Timbuctoo privately printed in 1829, Hallam explains that this is an allusion to “the exquisite personification of Ideal Beauty in Mr. Shelley's Alastor.” In an expanded note on the allusion in the text of the poem published in his edition of Poems, 1830, Hallam suggests that the critics may determine how far he has the right

to transfer the “veiled maid” to my own Poem, where she must stand for the embodiment of that love for the unseen, that voluntary concentration of our vague ideas of the Beauty that ought to be, on some one spot, or country yet undiscovered. …

This note directs us to the second movement of Hallam's argument in Timbuctoo, in which we learn that despite the signs of impoverishment, the spiritual dispossession of mankind is not quite complete: “there is one, one ray that lingers here, / To battle with the world's o'ershadowing form” (ll. 94-95). Hallam refers us to the fabulous City of Timbuctoo. We are told that in this “City divine” (l. 129) which “yet no mortal quest hath ever found” (l. 102), it is possible still to find “th' ideal aliment / Of Man's most subtle being” (ll. 107-108); in this territory of the mind may

                                                                                still be blent
Whate'er of heavenly beauty in form or sound
Illumes the Poet's heart with ravishment.

(109-11)

An imaginative projection of “Man's most subtle being,” the City expresses the fundamental identity of the human mind with “the Eternal Reason's perfectness” (l. 117). What Henry Hallam called “the Platonic spirit” of his son's “literary creed”⁷ shows itself in Hallam's adumbration of an idealistic epistemology in Timbuctoo. As might be expected, however, in a work which bears a specifically Romantic orientation, Hallam places special emphasis on the imagination as a cognitive organ which provides insights into an order of reality transcending the phenomenal world. Nor is it surprising, when Hallam describes those moments of “phantasy” (l. 144) in which he has a clear intuition of the inhabitants of Timbuctoo, that his account should in some measure substantiate Northrop Frye's observation that “the metaphorical structure of Romantic poetry tends to move inside and downward instead of outside and upward, hence the creative world is deep within, and so is heaven or the place of the presence of God.”⁸ This world at the deep centre is not a condition that is easily realisable or recoverable, but it is a state that stands over and against the demands of the world of time and space and the energy that is required for its attainment is something that may be represented in ideal terms. In lines 161-63 of Hallam's Timbuctoo we hear that the imagined inhabitants of the City gathered around “a good old man” (who is styled, Hallam informs us in a further note, on Coleridge) and drank

          The sweet, sad tones of Wisdom, which outran
The life-blood, coursing to the heart, and sank
          Inward from thought to thought, till they abode
          'Mid Being's dim foundations, rank by rank
With those transcendent truths arrayed by God
          In linked armor for untiring fight,
Whose victory is, where time hath never trod.

(165-71)

Hallam's Timbuctoo also bears witness to the importance of what Northrop Frye has termed the “Atlantis theme” in Romantic metaphors of depth and interiority.⁹ At the very opening of the poem we find that the legendary lost Atlantis, while “still an Eden, shut from sight” (l. 38), while retaining, that is, its integrity as a region of the mind, was simply a variant type of the “‘veiled maid’” as a traditional expression of the creative imagination:

There was a land, which, far from human sight,
          Old Ocean compassed with his numerous waves,
          In the lone West. Tenacious of her right,
Imagination decked those unknown caves,
          And vacant forests, and clear peaks of ice
          With a transcendent beauty …

(1-6)

The opening theme of Hallam's poem has been that this particular myth or poetic image has become unavailable to man. In describing the loss of Atlantis as a region of the mind, Hallam recalls Wordsworth's preoccupation, in The Excursion, with the demythologising influence of rational, scientific knowledge.¹⁰ In The Excursion the problem is explored both in terms of the private experience of the individual (the loss of the “visionary powers of eye and soul / In youth,” IV. 111-12), and in terms of mankind's loss of an aboriginal innocence; the loss of the world of the Chaldean Shepherds, for example, when “The imaginative faculty was lord / Of observations natural” (IV. 707-08). Against the minute and speculative inquiries of the sceptical intellect the Wanderer opens his famous protest, comparing modern habits of thought with the mythopoeic conceptions of the pagans of old time:

          ‘Now, shall our great Discoverers,’ he exclaimed,
Raising his voice triumphantly, ‘obtain
From sense and reason less than these obtained,
.....Enquire of ancient Wisdom; go, demand
Of mighty Nature, if 'twas ever meant
That we should pry far off yet be unraised;
That we should pore, and dwindle as we pore,
Viewing all objects unremittingly
In disconnexion dead and spiritless …’

(IV. 941-43, 957-62)

For Hallam, in Timbuctoo, the discovery of the Americas and the post-Columban reduction of “phantasmal” (l. 64) Atlantis into a literal and rationally exploitable new world stand as an image of the dissipation of the radiant forms of the imagination;—a vanishing, in Hallam's terms, of the “‘veiled maid.’” Hallam, however, does not follow Wordsworth's pattern of maintaining a clear distinction (though simultaneously exploring the analogies) between the personal loss of a period of imaginative integrity and the wider cultural loss that is associated with the disruption, through the emergence of a historical consciousness, of a mythical world view. In Timbuctoo we can at best only infer the private, individual experience of deprivation from Hallam's account of the failure of the myth of Atlantis. Hallam's construct does not allow for a detailed investigation, in the manner of Wordsworth, into the forces which threaten the successful working of the individual creative or mythopoeic imagination in a world that is separated by history from the resources of a living mythical tradition.

The structure of Hallam's poem endeavours, however, to enact a typically Romantic programme of spiritual decline and recovery. Assuming a Romantic position concerning the redemptive role of the imagination, Hallam identifies in its workings a principle of order which transcends and compensates for the breakdown of human continuities in the realm of natural process and ordinary historical time. Following the Wordsworth of the “Immortality Ode,” who finds that although the ecstasy may have passed, the “habitual sway” (l. 195) of nature and his own “primal sympathy” (l. 185) are not lost, and like the Wanderer of The Excursion who, taught by nature's “humbler power” (IV. 1190), finds still a leavening and a creative power in the “imaginative Will” (IV. 1128), Hallam anticipates the conclusion of his poem at its outset and sees the “transcendent beauty” associated with the working of the imagination as

                                                                                          that which saves
From the world's blight our primal sympathies,
          Still in man's heart …

(6-8)

Finding assurance in the thought that the undiscovered City of Timbuctoo bears witness to the abiding power of the imagination, Hallam ends his poem on a note of confidence. He quotes line 42 of “Tintern Abbey” and thus invokes that Wordsworthian mood in which “laid asleep / In body, and become a living soul: / … We see into the life of things” (“Tintern Abbey,” ll. 45-46, 49):

                                                                                Ever may the mood
“In which the affections gently lead us on”
Be as thy sphere of visible life.

(193-95)

.....

Christopher Ricks has described Tennyson's poem “Armageddon” as “a fragmentary vision of the last great battle, with a Miltonic angel as expositor.”¹¹ Certainly, Milton is the prevailing influence and we find that the seraph of the poem, identified in the opening lines with the Spirit of Prophecy, fulfils to some extent a conventional role within the terms of traditional vision poetry as the vehicle and symbol of a grace which is dispensed to man from without. Thus it appears that perception is cleansed in the “bright descent / Of a young seraph” (II. 1-2) whose words, addressed to the speaker of the poem, seem to imply a higher authority for visionary experience than the speaker himself (II. 10-16). There follows, however, a curious process of identification between speaker and Spirit which, at its furthest development, threatens to erase the distinction between a faculty that is divinely bestowed and one that is purely self-expressive:

                                                                                          I looked, but not
Upon his face, for it was wonderful
With its exceeding brightness, and the light
Of the great Angel Mind …
I felt my soul grow godlike, and my spirit
With supernatural excitation bound
Within me, and my mental eye grew large
.....Yea! in that hour I could have fallen down
Before my own strong soul and worshipped it.

(II. 16-19, 21-23, 49-50)

An overt scheme of transcendental reference based on metaphors of externality is maintained in “Armaggeddon” but is subverted by the manner in which the speaker's acknowledgement of the power of the Spirit of Prophecy tends always to move towards a celebration of his own prophetic spirit. It is hard to believe Tennyson was unaware that he was confusing orders of reality in a way which would not have been possible for Milton, yet the poem as a whole does not show a convincing sense of direction. It confuses and is confused. Tennyson certainly attempted to find an adequate rationale for the position of the speaker in “Armaggedon,” but he achieved only a shaky formulation when he had his Spirit of Prophecy declare:

‘O Everlasting God, and thou not less
The Everlasting Man (since that great spirit
Which permeates and informs thine inward sense,
Though limited in action, capable
Of the extreme of knowledge—whether joined
Unto thee in conception or confined
From former wanderings in other shapes
I know not—deathless as its God's own life,
Burns on with inextinguishable strength) …’

(III. 1-9)

The fact that neither of the extant manuscripts of “Armageddon” constitutes a complete poem is perhaps indicative of Tennyson's inability to resolve the conceptual confusions and difficulties inherent in the work.

.....

The large spiritual claims made for the human speaker in “Armageddon” provide, nevertheless, a clear basis for the assertions of “Timbuctoo.” In refashioning a vision of the battle of Armageddon—a subject necessarily invested with some of the ideas and values of the Biblical tradition from which it is drawn—into a vision of the City of Timbuctoo and in modifying the context of significance in which the vision is set by completely re-writing the opening and closing passages of the poem, Tennyson may be seen to be exploring a new language for the definition and expression of “mystical” or visionary experience. The speaker at the outset of “Armageddon” asserts the impossibility of painting in language the supernatural things seen by him. Not only is this “past the power of man” (I. 20), but also

                                                                      No fabled Muse
Could breathe into my soul such influence
Of her seraphic nature, as to express
Deeds inexpressible by loftiest rhyme.

(I. 20-23)

By contrast, in “Timbuctoo,” the seraph of the vision becomes a personification of man's expressive and creative capacities. In this poem it is precisely the Spirit of Fable, regarded as impotent in “Armageddon,” which makes possible the vision of the City, as these lines from the newly composed conclusion make clear:

          ‘There is no mightier Spirit than I to sway
The heart of man: and teach him to attain
By shadowing forth the Unattainable;
.....I play about his heart a thousand ways,
.....                                                                                … I am the Spirit,
The permeating life which courseth through
All the intricate and labyrinthine veins
Of the great vine of Fable, which, outspread
With growth of shadowing leaf and clusters rare,
Reacheth to every corner under Heaven,
Deep-rooted in the living soil of truth …’

(191-93, 201, 215-21)

In his conception of this organic tutelary Spirit Tennyson has moved towards an internalisation of the agency of transcendental insight in terms consonant with Romantic notions concerning the mythopoeic or poetic imagination. Within the newly formulated conceptual frame of the poem, the central vision undergoes a transformation in its nature, source and status, functioning explicitly as a testament to the capacity of the human imagination to apprehend and to generate metaphors for the infinite and the ideal.

Writing about the central vision section of “Timbuctoo,” Christopher Ricks has pointed out that “Armageddon” includes “some extra lines, so that the MSS. do not present us with the uninterrupted sequence of lines, ‘Timbuctoo’ ll. 62-190.”¹² Most noticeably, Tennyson omitted in “Timbuctoo” a number of lines from the vision section of “Armageddon” which had made absurdly grandiose claims for the scope and authority of individual human insight. Possibly Tennyson was content to let the new frame of the poem, which makes clear the interior, imaginative grounds of spiritual perception, do the work more discreetly. Thus, lines 40-50 in section II of “Armageddon” (beginning “I wondered with deep wonder at myself” and ending “I could have fallen down / Before my own strong soul and worshipped it”) do not appear in “Timbuctoo.” The “trivial variants” noted by Ricks between the vision sequence of “Armageddon” on the one hand, and that of “Timbuctoo” on the other, also show a desire on Tennyson's part to reduce, in his later poem, some of the more exaggerated postures of his earlier work. Lines 25-27 in section II of “Armageddon” had read:

                                        … I seemed to stand
Upon the outward verge and bound alone
Of God's omniscience.

In “Timbuctoo” (ll. 92-94) these lines were altered to: “… the outward verge and bound alone / Of full beatitude.” Similarly, the opening words of line 21 in section II of “Armageddon,” “I felt my soul grow godlike,” became in “Timbuctoo”: “I felt my soul grow mighty” (l. 88). These trivial modifications between “Armageddon” and “Timbuctoo” contribute to an important overall difference between the two poems. Through the excisions and alterations in the vision sequence as it stood in “Armageddon,” and by the entirely new opening and conclusion to the work, “Timbuctoo” becomes a poem in which the word “God” is never used. The difficult question, which had arisen for Tennyson in “Armageddon,” of how best to define the place of a cosmically expanded human mind in relation to a God who must retain at least some of His traditional attributes, is thus avoided in “Timbuctoo.”

The confusion in accommodating the vision in “Armageddon” to a mode of inward metaphorical structures does not entirely disappear in “Timbuctoo.” However, the very fact that Tennyson chose, in his later poem, to interpret the theme set by the Cambridge examiners as a vision of the City of Timbuctoo, where the vision constitutes an assertion of the power of the faculty of imagination, suggests an exploration of new modes. It certainly provides a striking parallel with Hallam's work.

The general argument of Hallam's poem is also paralleled in Tennyson's work. Tennyson's “Timbuctoo,” like Hallam's, begins with a reference to “Divinest Atalantis” (l. 22), which is presented as a place that had its “being in the heart of Man / As air is the life of flame” (ll. 19-20) but which, like the fabled Eldorado, is for the speaker an unavailable dream of “ancient Time” (l. 61). The same is true in the following lines (also from Tennyson's newly composed introduction to the poem) of the legendary Blessed Isles of the West:

                                                                                Where are ye
Thrones of the Western wave, fair Islands green?
.....Where are the infinite ways, which, Seraph-trod,
Wound through your great Elysian solitudes,
Whose lowest deeps were, as with visible love,
Filled with Divine effulgence, circumfused … ?

(40-41, 46-49)

Like Hallam, Tennyson then turns his attention to “the rumour of … Timbuctoo” (l. 60) as surviving evidence of that same apprehending sense manifest in ancient fable.

The parallels between the poems of Hallam and Tennyson are an indication that Tennyson's exploitation of an essentially Romantic mode and language in “Timbuctoo” may owe something to his friend's enthusiasm for the writers of that school, and may reflect discussions of aesthetic theory between them. I have noted Tennyson's apparent uncertainty of direction in “Armageddon.” It seems very possible that Hallam may have provided an interpretation of Romantic views of mind and imagination in which Tennyson was able to perceive conceptual or theoretical solutions to some of the problems which he had encountered in “Armageddon,” and which enabled him to establish in “Timbuctoo” an organising frame for material he had been unable to order satisfactorily in the earlier poem.

Tennyson's “Timbuctoo” does not contain the overt gestures towards a theoretical ground that are evident in Hallam's work. This fact seems to point to an important difference in sensibility between the two. Without going so far as to agree with Tennyson that his own “Timbuctoo” is “unmethodised,”¹³ we can perhaps say that while Tennyson may have been attracted to an area of theoretical consistency in Hallam, his imaginative responses would seem to have been merely conditioned rather than contained by any system of ideas propounded by his friend. For we find in Tennyson's poem an imaginative extension, exploration and complication of the theoretical simplicities manifest in Hallam's Timbuctoo. While Tennyson's Timbuctoo may be, like that of Hallam, a City of the imagination, there is a development in Tennyson's argument which has no equivalent in Hallam's ultimately comfortably circumscribed treatment of the same subject. The idea that literal discovery results in an impoverishment of imaginative power is introduced in Tennyson's work after the apparent affirmation of that power in the speaker's glimpse of Timbuctoo. As the Spirit of Fable finally calls attention to his “fair City” (l. 245) he foresees the “river” which winds through its streets “not enduring / To carry through the world those waves, which bore / The reflex” of the City “in their depths” (ll. 225, 233-35). He envisages the onset of a world that exists in “disconnexion dead and spiritless” (The Excursion, IV. 962) as the wasted imagination, in the face of Discovery, fails to maintain its idealising and unifying activity:

                                                                      ‘the time is well-nigh come
When I must render up this glorious home
To keen Discovery: soon yon brilliant towers
Shall darken with the waving of her wand;
Darken, and shrink and shiver into huts,
Black specks amid a waste of dreary sand …’

(238-43)

Forsaken by the Spirit of Fable at the very end of the poem, the speaker is enveloped by a darkness which seems to confirm the envisaged breakdown of imaginative correspondence between the “world” and the “Unattainable.”

Such a conclusion has, in fact, been a possibility fairly early in the poem in Tennyson's account of the shattering of a city by an earthquake (ll. 28-40). Christopher Ricks comments that these lines of “Timbuctoo” are “clearly a re-working (though without close verbal similarities) of passages which occur early in the Trinity MS. but not in 1931.”¹⁴ But the essential concern of “Timbuctoo” lines 28-40, a concern intimately related to the new theme of the new poem, is not anticipated in the passages in T.Nbk.18 referred to by Professor Ricks. Below are transcripts of these previously unpublished passages. In the first extract the first three lines and the last line of the passage correspond to lines 71-73 and 74 in section I of the 1931 text of “Armageddon”:

Nor did y(e) glittering of white wings escape
My notice far within y(e) East w(h) caught
Ruddy reflection from th' ensanguin'd West
(Where with wide interval y(e) long low moaning
Of inarticulate thunder like y(e) wail
Of some lost City in its evil day
Rose, mutter'd, deepen'd round y(e) verge of Heaven)
Nor ever & anon y(e) shrill clear sound

T.Nbk.18, f. 4^r

The lines of the second extract correspond to lines 96-101 in section I of the 1931 text of “Armageddon.” In the second line of the passage Tennyson has interlineated the word “like”:

                                                                                          In y(e) East
Broad rose y(e) Moon—first ∧ like ∧ y(e) rounded Dome
Of some huge Temple in whose twilight vault
Barbaric Priesthood meditate high things
To wondrous Idols on y(e) crusted wall
Then with dilated orb & mark'd with lines

T.Nbk.18, f. 5^r

There indeed seem to be no close verbal similarities between these passages and lines 28-40 of “Timbuctoo.” Nor do they give expression to the anxious thought that legends, myths, all poetic dreams, may be groundless fantasies containing no element of higher truth. In “Timbuctoo” we are told that men clung to the legend of Atlantis with a desperate hope as when, in a city shaken by earthquake,

At midnight, in the lone Acropolis,
Before the awful Genius of the place
Kneels the pale Priestess in deep faith, the while
Above her head the weak lamp dips and winks
Unto the fearful summoning without:
Nathless she ever clasps the marble knees,
Bathes the cold hand with tears, and gazeth on
Those eyes which wear no light but that wherewith
Her phantasy informs them.

(32-40)

The failure here to affirm the possibilities of “a soul / Imparted—to brute matter” (The Excursion, VIII. 203-04) contrasts sharply with the insistent, if shrill, idealism of Tennyson's Cambridge poems “To Poesy (O God, make this age great),” “The Poet,” and “The Poet's Mind.” In these works we see one aspect of Tennyson's response to the doctrine of Romantic genius advanced by F. D. Maurice and his associates among the Cambridge Apostles. This contrast directs us to Tennyson's lifelong preoccupation with the difficulty of achieving an apprehension of the integrity of the whole, a difficulty which may be considered in the light of what Robindra Kumar Biswas has termed “the disintegration [in the early-Victorian period] of the special object-subject synthesis achieved through Romantic … theories of imagination and poetic cognition.”¹⁵

The conclusion of “Timbuctoo” may be compared with the attitude Tennyson reveals towards his Romantic inheritance in a letter which he wrote in 1834, three years after leaving Trinity, to his Cambridge friend James Spedding. In the same year Sir Henry Taylor, in the Preface to his Philip Van Artevelde, had attacked the poetry of the younger Romantics, explaining that theirs was “a moving and enchanting art, acting upon the fancy, the affections, the passions, but scarcely connected with the exercise of the intellectual faculties.” In brief, they lacked “subject matter.”¹⁶ Shortly after the appearance of Taylor's work, Tennyson replied to a letter sent him by Spedding:

By a quaint coincidence I received your letter directed (I suppose) by Philip Van Artevelde with Philip himself (not the man but the book) and I wish to tell you that I think him a noble fellow. I close with him in most that he says of modern poetry though it may be that he does not take sufficiently into consideration the peculiar strength evolved by such writers as Byron and Shelley …

Tennyson's defence of these poets disparaged by Taylor becomes more complicated as he continues—

… the peculiar strength evolved by such writers as Byron and Shelley which however mistaken they may be did yet give the world another heart and new pulses—and so are we kept going. Blessed be those that grease the wheels of the old world, insomuch as to move on is better than to stand still.¹⁷

In these last lines Tennyson is re-wording Keats's account of the “mighty workings” of the great spirits—first among them, Wordsworth—of the Romantic Revival:

These, these will give the world another heart
          And other pulses. Hear ye not the hum
Of mighty workings?——
          Listen awhile ye nations, and be dumb.

(Second Sonnet to Haydon, ll. 11-14)

Yet, although the closeness between Keats and Tennyson is important, the difference is equally, if not more, significant. Keats's unquestioning exultation is countered in Tennyson by the grimly attenuated images of weary prolongation. Apart from that doubleness of response which appears in his simultaneous endorsement and qualification of Taylor's attack, there is evident, in Tennyson's assertion of the need to work within the achievements of his poetic predecessors, a tone of frustration, a sense that the new heart and pulses recently given to the world may in fact signify nothing more than a deeply ambiguous vitality, and that a fully vital new world is still waiting to be born.

Notes

1. Quoted in An Eton Boy … the Letters of James Milnes Gaskell … 1820-1830, ed. C. M. Gaskell (London, 1939), pp. 164-65. The subject for the Chancellor's English Poem was announced in the Times for 13 December, 1828 (p. 3, col. 4); entries were to be submitted by 31 March, 1829. In Alfred, Lord Tennyson, A Memoir by his Son, 2 vols (London, 1897), I, 45 (hereafter cited as Memoir), Hallam Tennyson writes that “On June 6th, 1829, the announcement was made that my father had won the prize. …” The exact date at which Tennyson met Arthur Hallam remains uncertain. Tennyson went up to Cambridge in November 1827 (see E. F. Shannon, Jr., “Alfred Tennyson's Admission to Cambridge,” TLS [Times Literary Supplement], 6 March, 1959, p. 136) and Hallam entered Trinity in October 1828 (E. F. Shannon, Jr., Tennyson and the Reviewers, Harvard, 1952, p. 22). If the latest submission date for entries in the Prize Poem competition was 31 March 1829, then my argument in this essay that Hallam had some influence over the composition of Tennyson's poem must imply the existence of a fairly developed relationship—if not actually a friendship—between the two men before that date. Hallam's “Timbuctoo” was completed by 15 February 1829, as is made clear in a letter of that date which he wrote to his father (cf. The Letters of Arthur Henry Hallam, ed. Jack Kolb, Ohio State University Press, 1981, p. 274).

2. Letters of Arthur Henry Hallam, p. 326.

3. “Tennyson: ‘Armageddon’ into ‘Timbuctoo,’” Modern Language Review, LXI (1966), p. 23. The MS. containing the draft of “Armageddon” printed by Sir Charles Tennyson is watermarked 1824. T.Nbk.18 is dated by Tennyson: “Jan 10 - 1828.” When Professor Ricks published his edition of The Poems of Tennyson, London, 1969 (the edition of Tennyson's poetry referred to throughout this essay) the Trinity MS. of “Armageddon” was still under interdiction and he was able to print only the 1931 text of the poem. The full text of the T.Nbk.18 version of “Armageddon” has never been published. In the present essay all quotations, except where otherwise noted, are taken from 1931 and all section and line numbers refer to that text. All lines from 1931 that are quoted in this essay have close counterparts in T.Nbk.18, except for 1931, III, 1-9, which do not appear in the Trinity draft.

4. Tennyson's comment, made in 1889, is reported in the MS. Journal of Andrew Hichens (now in the Tennyson Research Centre: MS. Materials, Vol. 10). Hallam Tennyson printed a version of Hichens's note in the Memoir, II, 355.

5. Cf. The writings of Arthur Hallam, ed. T. H. Vail Motter (London and New York, 1943), pp. 37-44.

6. W. Wordsworth, “Essay Upon Epitaphs, III,” in The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, 3 vols (Oxford, 1974), II, 82.

7. “Preface” to the Remains of Arthur Henry Hallam (privately-printed, London, 1834), pp. xxxii-xxxiii.

8. “The Drunken Boat: The Revolutionary Element in Romanticism,” in Romanticism Reconsidered, ed. N. Frye (New York and London, 1963), p. 16.

9. ibid., p. 17.

10. In a letter of 14 September 1829 to W. E. Gladstone Hallam said: “Let me quote … the words of my favourite poet” and went on to quote The Excursion, IV, 10-17 (Letters of Arthur Henry Hallam, pp. 317-18).

11. Tennyson (New York, 1972), p. 19.

12. Modern Language Review, LXI (1966), p. 23.

13. In a letter to Henry Hallam (14 February 1834) Tennyson wrote that Arthur's “Timbuctoo” “is everyway so much better than that wild and unmethodised performance of my own. …”; The Letters of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, ed. C. Y. Lang and E. F. Shannon, Jr. (Oxford, 1982-), I, 109.

14. Modern Language Review, LXI (1966), p. 24.

15. Arthur Hugh Clough: Towards a Reconsideration (Oxford, 1972), p. 203.

16. Philip Van Artevelde; A Dramatic Romance, 2 vols (London, 1834), I. xii.

17. Letters of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, I, 120.

BIOGRAPHIES

Kolb, Jack. “Arthur Hallam and Emily Tennyson.” The Review of English Studies 28, no. 109 (February 1977): 2-48.

Reconsiders the chronology of Hallam's romantic relationship with Emily Tennyson by examining letters and other writings.

Kolb, Jack. “Christ Church or Trinity: Arthur Henry Hallam's Matriculation.” ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes, and Reviews 12, no. 3 (summer 1999): 38-41.

Refutes the long-standing idea that Hallam's matriculation at Trinity College, Cambridge, reflected his father's first choice of schools.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Griffiths, Eric. “The Worth of Change: The Arthur Hallam Letters.” The Tennyson Research Bulletin 4, no. 2 (November 1983): 72-80.

Review of Jack Kolb's edited collection of The Letters of Arthur Henry Hallam.

CRITICISM

Antippas, Andy P. “Tennyson, Hallam, and The Palace of art.Victorian Poetry 5, no. 4 (winter 1967): 294-96.

Compares Hallam's “Long Hast Thou Wandered on the Happy Mountain” and Alfred Tennyson's The Palace of Art and their treatment of the poet's role in society.

Chandler, James. “Hallam, Tennyson, and the Poetry of Sensation: Aestheticist Allegories of a Counter-Public Sphere.” Studies in Romanticism 33, no. 4 (winter 1994): 527-37.

Claims Hallam's essay on modern poetry suggests possibilities for art as part of the public sphere.

Johnston, Eileen Tess. “Hallam's Review of Tennyson: Its Contexts and Significance.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 23, no. 1 (spring 1981): 1-26.

Examines “On Some of the Characteristics of Modern Poetry, and on the Lyrical Poems of Alfred Tennyson” in the broader context of the cultural setting of the nineteenth century, especially in terms of religion and morality.

Kolb, Jack. “‘They Were No Kings’: An Unrecorded Sonnet by Hallam.” Victorian Poetry 15, no. 4 (winter 1977): 373-76.

Claims an anonymous sonnet published in Fraser's Magazine for Town and Country was written by Hallam.

Kolb, Jack. “‘On First Looking into Pope's Iliad’: Hallam's Keatsian Sonnet.” Victorian Poetry 29, no. 1 (spring 1991): 89-92.

Speculates on the similarities between an early sonnet by Hallam and “On First Looking into Chapman's Homer” by John Keats.

Mansell, Darrel. “Displacing Hallam's Tomb in Tennyson's In Memoriam.Victorian Poetry 36, no. 1 (spring 1998): 97-111.

Argues Alfred Tennyson deliberately erases the real figure of Hallam in the construction In Memoriam in order to demonstrate his own powers as a elegist.

Rosenberg, John D. “Tennyson and the Passing of Arthur.” Victorian Poetry 25, no. 3-4 (autumn-winter 1987): 141-50.

Explores the dual influences of Hallam and Arthurian legend on Alfred Tennyson's In Memoriam.

Additional coverage of Arthur Henry Hallam's life and career is contained in the following source published by the Gale Group: Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol. 32.

SOURCE: Dillon, Steven. “Canonical and Sensational: Arthur Hallam and Tennyson's 1830 Poems.” Victorian Poetry 30, no. 2 (Summer 1992): 95-108.

[In the following essay, Dillon critiques Hallam's “On Some of the Characteristics of Modern Poetry, and on the Lyrical Poems of Alfred Tennyson.” Dillon claims the essay establishes an artificial distinction between reflection and sensation in order to canonize Tennyson.]

In an important essay, Gerald Bruns suggests that the movement from Romanticism to Victorianism could be characterized as a paradigm shift from transcendence to immanence.¹ The vertical axis of imagination and epiphanic nature (“spots of time”) moves towards a horizontal axis of empirical perception and continuous history. The terms of Arthur Hallam's essay on Tennyson's 1830 Poems, Chiefly Lyrical seem to reproduce just this shift. Hallam skips over the complex language of transcendental faculty psychology to be found in Coleridge and Kant, and effectively goes back to the Enlightenment discourse of “sensation” and “reflection.” This is certainly to come down out of transcendental idealism to empirical perception. But in order to argue for the importance of Tennyson's volume, Hallam makes a further division. He celebrates the poems as “sensation” poems over against the “reflection” poems of Wordsworth.

In the broadest conceptual terms, this tendentious move collapses the transcendent still further. Now we seem to be, more or less, at a surface, the primary empirical surface of perception that always happens before reflection. This entire movement—from transcendence to empiricism, and within empiricism from reflection to sensation—recalls a general Victorian frame, with Carlyle and his images of depth on one side, and Wilde and his celebration of surface on the other. And in the history of physiology, for example, which is everywhere intertwined with philosophy and aesthetics, “sensationalism” reigns from 1830 to 1883, at which point a reaction sets in led by F. H. Bradley, William James, and Henri Bergson.² Sensation novels, such as Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White, and Pater's works, such as Marius the Epicurean: His Sensations and Ideas, take place in this context. But the reason that “sensation” can seem like such a viable category for so long is that it is capable of appearing in so many different ways. Sensation has depth, after all. These levels are what Hallam misses or chooses to miss in his canonizing essay.

My essay attempts to chronicle an episode in the history of taste, which is “an alternative project,” in the view of Barbara Herrnstein Smith.³ The project, as she sees it, is to “clarify the nature of literary—and, more broadly, aesthetic—value in conjunction with a more general rethinking of the concept of ‘value’” (p. 28). My primary text here is Arthur Hallam's essay on Tennyson's 1830 Poems. Although the essay has become canonical—Hallam “remains Tennyson's best critic” according to Harold Bloom—it has not particularly convinced anyone that these Tennyson poems are very good.⁴ My chronicle will move back and forth between the historical positioning of Hallam's essay and the evaluation of his rhetoric. Though his category division initially seems overly simplistic, Tennyson's Poems can, indeed, only be conceived as a poetry of sensation. Thus I will argue for the appropriateness of Hallam's description, but on the condition that “sensation” be fleshed out in its full physiological capacity. Specifically, however this may contradict the preeminence of beauty in Hallam's appreciative reading, I wish to emphasize the inherent violence that accrues with an aesthetics of sensation.

Consider, for instance, the poem “Oriana,” in which the heroine is killed by an arrow. It quite pierces Hallam with a “happy seizure”—as if he had been reading The Princess. “Oriana” exhibits “harmonious combination”; this is not a “painful story,” since we weep with “blissful tears.” Without for a moment suggesting that Tennyson is Artaud, we need to observe the continuity between aesthetic sensation and violent content. The poem is not sensationalistic, but, unless the speaker is satisfied with breezes, the poetry of sensation virtually premises itself on a delight in violence, directed both towards oneself and against others. Note the awkwardness of the speaker's position as the battle rages:

Oh! narrow, narrow was the space,
          Oriana.
Loud, loud rung out the bugle's brays,
          Oriana.
Oh! deathful stabs were dealt apace,
The battle deepened in its place,
          Oriana;
But I was down upon my face,
          Oriana.

The descriptions of battle and death are far from gruesome, but the effect nonetheless relies on a perverse pleasure taken in the death of the manyvoweled heroine. Just so, Idylls of the King consistently moves towards violence in its narrative of the death of beauty:

But, while he bowed to kiss the jewelled throat,
Out of the dark, just as the lips had touched,
Behind him rose a shadow and a shriek—
‘Mark's way,’ said Mark, and clove him through the brain.

(“The Last Tournament,” ll. 745-748)

The poetry of sensation will treat necrophilia in Swinburne, sexual coercion in D. G. Rossetti and Symons, or clearly envisioned violence in William Morris:

                                                                                          she saw him send
The thin steel down; the blow told well—
Right backward the knight Robert fell,
And moaned as dogs do, being half dead,
Unwitting, as I deem; so then
Godmar turned grinning to his men,
Who ran, some five or six, and beat
His head to pieces at their feet.

(“The Haystack in the Floods,” ll. 144-151)⁵

These potential, indeed inevitable, levels of sensation would have been very clear to Hallam, and I want to emphasize this range. Recall, for example, the flexible beginning of Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature:

All the perceptions of the human mind resolve themselves into two distinct kinds, which I shall call Impressions and Ideas. The difference betwixt these consists in the degrees of force and liveliness, with which they strike upon the mind, and make their way into our thought or consciousness. Those perceptions, which enter with most force and violence, we may name impressions; and under this name I comprehend all our sensations, passions and emotions, as they make their first appearance in the soul.⁶

Sensations can be musical or masochistic, breezy or cruel. In this light it follows that Keats (“Isabella”) and Shelley (“The Cenci”) are in some ways as responsible as Gautier and Baudelaire for the sadistic turn in the amatory poetry of Swinburne, D. G. Rossetti, and Arthur Symons.

The writers most important for Arthur Hallam, in addition to Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, and Shelley, are the philosophers Hume and Berkeley. The “sensational” school that is embodied by Condillac (Traité des Sensations, 1789) is condemned repeatedly in Victorian thinking, and Hallam readily partakes of the English snobbery towards the French.⁷ Condillac's “sensation” is seen by the English as “sensualism,” thinking in advance like Robert Buchanan in his The Fleshly School of Poetry (1872). Six months after composing the article, Hallam writes in a letter:

The more I reflect on these subjects myself (and to reflect on them is meat & drink to me) the more I incline to a conviction, that with regard to the Extent of Human Knowledge, no real advance has been made beyond Hume & Berkeley; with regard to its Modes, something has been done by Reid & Kant, & still more by Hartley, & something perhaps remains to do by following out the discoveries of this last philosopher.⁸

Hume and Berkeley, of course, write before the dialectics of Hegel and the later elimination of “pure” sensation by T. H. Green. Nonetheless, neither would posit a mind that exhibited a single faculty; reflection and sensation are caught up in one another. Hallam's language itself blends mind and body when reflecting becomes eating (“to reflect on them is meat and drink to me”), so that thought becomes instinct. What seems to be happening in Hallam's essay is that the wide range of philosophy with which he is familiar, and the various descriptions of mental and physical experience which that philosophy depicts, is sacrificed on the altar of canonizing rhetoric.

The earliest Cambridge Apostles found Coleridge's thought immensely invigorating, but Hallam's terms appear philosophically to be pre-Kantian.⁹ Kant writes that “aesthetical art, as the art of beauty, has for the standard the reflective judgment and not sensation,” while Coleridge writes emphatically, “No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher.”¹⁰ Hallam, however, is satisfied with the empiricist distinction between distanced reflection and immediate sensation, despite the complication enforced upon such categories by Kant and Coleridge. The odd result is that Hallam's values in general implicitly invoke Hume's “Of the Standard of Taste,” where taste is founded upon “sentiment” not “reason,” while he blinds himself willingly to the specific analyses of Wordsworth in Coleridge's Biographia, which reject in advance the reduced Lake poet presented by Hallam.

Wordsworth himself would not have countenanced such a critical simplification. Hallam's admiration for Wordsworth is clear (“Wordsworth is the greatest of great men”),¹¹ but in a rhetorical, defensive, canonizing gesture he categorizes and then subverts the Lake School poet. When in 1815 Wordsworth divides his own work into sections, one title is Poems of Sentiment and Reflection, which assures that sentiment and reflection coexist, and taken together constitute a category equal to that of “Imagination” and “Place.”¹² The “principal object” of the Lyrical Ballads is to trace “the primary laws of our nature: chiefly as far as regards the manner in which we associate ideas in a state of excitement.”¹³ Wordsworth soon checks himself against the threat of sensationalism: “The human mind is capable of excitement without the application of gross and violent stimulants” (1:128). But mental excitement begins with “organic sensibility” and proceeds to “follow the fluxes and refluxes of the mind when agitated by the great and simple affections of our nature” (1:126). In order to set up Wordsworth as a poet of reflection, Hallam must reductively cut through the “also” in Wordsworth's famous formulation: “For all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: and though this be true, Poems to which any value can be attached were never produced on any variety of subjects but by a man who, being possessed of more than usual organic sensibility, had also thought long and deeply” (1:127). At the outset of his essay Hallam characterizes Wordsworth's Preface as “celebrated,” but then tacitly proceeds to ignore its critical tenets.

Tennyson has no “Preface,” but he organizes his volume in a way that is, in some ways, just as self-conscious and programmatic. The 1830 volume is framed at the outset by sensation and at the end by reflection, but each poem also immediately modifies such a description. “Claribel” is only the first of many examples in the volume which prove that Hallam's critical reduction is appropriate; melody, sense, and emotion all characterize a poetry of sensation without reflection:

Where Claribel low-lieth
          The breezes pause and die,
          Letting the rose-leaves fall:
But the solemn oak-tree sigheth,
          Thick-leaved, ambrosial,
          With an ancient melody
          Of an inward agony,
Where Claribel low-lieth.

(ll. 1-8)¹⁴

The melody that begins the volume is of “inward agony,” probably related to Keats's Isabella; the 1830 Poems begins with the agonizing sensation of death.¹⁵ The second stanza fills the air with anonymous sounds—with more apparent indifference even than “Mariana” or the third stanza of Keats's “To Autumn”—but the range of sensation cannot be reduced to euphemistic “harmony.” Indeed, as if to remind us of the complexity of Tennysonian sensation, the speaker of the next poem, “Lilian,” closes by threatening a murder:

                    Praying all I can,
If prayers will not hush thee,
                    Airy Lilian,
Like a rose-leaf I will crush thee,
                    Fairy Lilian.

(ll. 26-30)

In this volume Tennyson works out his meaning beyond individual poems in several ways: through pairs of poems (“The Merman,” “The Mermaid”; “Nothing Will Die,” “All Things Will Die”), through sequences of poems (in particular the series of “ladies”), and by framing the volume with significantly chosen poems (“Claribel,” “Oi reontes”). “Claribel” opens with a deathly cry, a cry which modulates into other sounds even in the second stanza, just as it modulates into the murderous speaker of “Lilian” and the admiring idealist of “Isabel.”

The fourth poem in the volume, “The ‘How’ and the ‘Why,’” stops the “ladies” in their tracks, with what appears to be a poem of reflection. Leigh Hunt was reminded of Wordsworth, a Wordsworth associated not with reflection but with babyism: “The uninitiated readers of Wordsworth's ‘Moods’ [might] think [it] puerile” (Ricks, 1:205). As readers of the volume, we are, I think, asked to compare the silliness of the questions here (“Why a church is with a steeple built; / And a house with a chimneypot?”) with the more sensible—because simple and sensate—question that concludes the previous poem, “Elegiacs”: “where is my sweet Rosalind?” This first poem of reflection is infantile in its speculation, and determinedly surrounded by Rosalind on one side and the sublime “Mariana” on the other. With a similar structural and thematic irony, then, Tennyson concludes the volume with “Oi reontes” (“All thoughts, all creeds”), which sets forth the world view of the “flowing philosophers,” such as Heraclitus: “For all things are as they seem to all, / And all things flow like a stream” (ll. 15-16). Most tellingly, Tennyson attaches a footnote that begins “Argal”—and this seems to be a joke (Ricks, 1:281). Where Poems began with an agonizing cry, it ends with philosophy. But it is the philosophy of dream not thought, of change not permanence, of sensation not reflection.

Hallam effectively blinds himself to the dialectical theory and practice of Wordsworth primarily in order to subvert contemporary reception of Wordsworth. Hallam moves with calculating ease between the way Wordsworth is read and admired (“It is not true, as his exclusive admirers would have it, that the highest species of poetry is the reflective”) to the idea that Wordsworth is in some sense accountable for the “charge” of reflection:

It would not be difficult to shew, by reference to the most admired poems of Wordsworth, that he is frequently chargeable with this error; and that much has been said by him which is good as philosophy, powerful as rhetoric, but false as poetry. Perhaps this very distortion of the truth did more in the peculiar juncture of our literary affairs to enlarge and liberalize the genius of our age, than could have been effected by a less sectarian temper.

(p. 185)

Note the way that Hallam has moved from the rhetoric of bias and partisanship (“exclusive admirers”) to poems understood generally to be his best (“the most admired poems”). The move is nothing if not rhetorical, and necessarily distorts the truth, particularly with respect to Wordsworth's own criticism. Now Wordsworth can be judged a poet of reflection, but without the sense that this formulation is overdetermined by the wrong-headed factionalism of his fans. Wordsworth is objectively, more or less, a poet of reflection.¹⁶

In order to argue for his opposing category, Hallam gestures towards making a distinction between Shelley and Keats. The distinction is hyperbolic rather than measured—in keeping with the emotion inherent in the canonizing process—and he suggests instead of differences an opposition: “Shelley and Keats were indeed of opposite genius; that of the one was vast, impetuous, and sublime, the other seemed to be ‘fed with honey-dew,’ and ‘to have drunk the milk of Paradise.’” Several times, as here, Hallam alludes to Coleridge in order to validate his criticism, with the conviction that this move will not beg more questions than it solves. Again the argument, the categories, are maintained in extremis, without mediation, and the critical difference, or rather the opposition, is a straw moment that comes before the real synthesis: “Yet in this formal opposition of character there is, it seems to us, a groundwork of similarity sufficient for purposes of classification, and constituting a remarkable point in the progress of literature. They are both poets of sensation rather than reflection.” The rhetoric is objective, because taxonomic, and pointedly positivistic—the movement from reflection to sensation is not decadence but “progress.” Yet at the same time that Hallam is arguing forcefully that reflection is “false,” there is the bewildering sense that his own philosophy is partisan and absolutist: “This powerful tendency of imagination to a life of immediate sympathy with the external universe, is not nearly so liable to false views of art as the opposite disposition of purely intellectual contemplation” (p. 186). “Purely intellectual contemplation” does not exist in philosophy, rhetoric, poetry, or Wordsworth, and surely Hallam knows this.

Can a poet of sensation write a “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”? Shelley's Defence of Poetry is not available to Hallam, but the prefaces to his individual poems provide a reserve of critical language. Hallam would be arguing thoughtlessly indeed, if he confuses “reflection” with “didacticism.” “Didacticism is my abhorrence,” writes Shelley in the preface to Prometheus Unbound, but reflecting need not be moralizing. A note to “Mont Blanc” describes the poem in terms very similar to Hallam's: “It was composed under the immediate impression of the deep and powerful feelings excited by the objects which it attempts to describe; and, as an undisciplined overflowing of the soul, rests its claim to approbation on an attempt to imitate the untamable wildness and inaccessible solemnity from which those feelings sprang.”¹⁷ Here Shelley tellingly invokes Wordsworthian diction—this poem is wild not “tranquil,” and “overflowing” without discipline—but the opposition is qualified by the self-deprecation. “Mont Blanc,” like Laon and Cythna, Prometheus Unbound, The Triumph of Life and even “The Sensitive Plant,” is surely too philosophical to fit Hallam's category; does not the poem move precisely toward rhetorical question and philosophical reflection?

And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea,
If to the human mind's imaginings
Silence and solitude were vacancy?

(ll. 142-144)

A poem like Shelley's “The Indian Serenade” indeed closely resembles the poetry of sensation in Tennyson's 1830 lyrics, but that is not a distinction Hallam makes. He does not limit the poetry of sensation to minimalist lyrics.

Hallam at one point characterizes Tennyson as a Shelley—a “sensitive sceptic”—yet notice how his argument moves. According to Hallam, the speaker of “The ‘How’ and the ‘Why’” is the same as that in “Supposed Confessions of a Second-rate, Sensitive Mind”: “It is the same mind still: the sensitive sceptic” (p. 196). The implications of Hallam's connections and definitions are clear: skepticism as reflection is subverted by “sensitivity.” But Hallam does not do justice to the range of sensation that appears in the place of reflection. Hallam's essay moves from a description of the “Second-rate, Sensitive Mind” (“The distant glimpse of such an agony as is here brought out to view” [p. 196]) to the “‘How’ and ‘Why,’” which is characterized as admirably escapist: “It is exquisitely beautiful to see in this, as in the former portrait, how the feeling of art is kept ascendant in our minds over distressful realities, by constant reference to images of tranquil beauty” (p. 196). The critical tautology begs exploding (“it is exquisitely beautiful to see … images of tranquil beauty”), but the rhetoric is consistent with the mask of violence by beauty. The “Confessions” indeed oscillates between “extremest misery” (l. 8) and the contemplation of “constant beauty” (l. 150); that art as tranquillity is “ascendant,” however, is rendered dubious by the agonizing conclusion:

O weary life! O weary death!
O spirit and heart made desolate!
O damnèd vacillating state!

(ll. 188-190)

The “sensitive” mind may attempt reflection, as the bright limbs of Truth pass before its vivid fancy, but the impulses and impressions of life render thought unclear and even painful. The “mind” is revealed as “spirit and heart”; no wonder this “mind [is] not in unity with itself.” This weary, oppressive life is similar to that at the conclusion of “Mariana,” where the “wooing wind … did all confound / Her sense” (ll. 75-76). “Mariana” is a masterpiece of sensation, and at the end her hatred is extreme and outward (“but most she loathed the hour,” [l. 77]), and also inward and suicidal (“Oh God, that I were dead!”). On the other hand, if the poet can achieve a vision of clarity, if he manages to transcend the world's reality on the wings of truth, it is with impassioned hostility (“So keep where you are: you are foul with sin” [“The Poet's Mind,” l. 36]).

In certain contemporary critics, such as Harold Bloom and René Girard, singlemindedness is strength, and Hallam's critical categories may be felt as an extremely powerful reduction. He is, it is quite apparent, absorbed in the philosophical and literary discourse of the day, but he chooses to draw critical boundary lines, even against the theory and practice of the poets themselves. Hallam's essay even contradicts the earlier laudatory review of Tennyson's volume by W. J. Fox (January 1831), who writes, “There is an extraordinary combination of deep reflection, metaphysical analysis, picturesque description, dramatic transition, and strong emotion.”¹⁸ Fox is interested in the power of poets (“they can act with force, the extent of which it is difficult to estimate”), while Hallam provides a quarrel between poets. Sophisticated language of “mingling” and “variety” may not be consonant with the rhetoric of canonization, which needs to compare, contrast, and exclude.

In order to canonize Tennyson at this particular moment (“On Some of the Characteristics of Modern Poetry”), Hallam also wields an appropriately potted narrative of history. As Isobel Armstrong points out, the conception looks strikingly similar to Eliot's “dissociation of sensibility” (p. 19), though I suspect that this defensively personal history is just as distorting in Eliot as in Hallam. As we often do, Hallam envisages modernity in a particular state of crisis:

With the close of the last century came an era of painful struggle to bring our over-civilized condition of thought into union with the fresh productive spirit that brightened the morning of our literature. But repentance is unlike innocence; the laborious endeavour to restore has more complicated methods of action than the freedom of untainted nature. Those different powers of poetic disposition, the energies of Sensitive, of Reflective, of Passionate Emotion, which in former times were intermingled, and derived from mutual support an extensive empire over the feelings of men, were not restrained within separate spheres of agency. The whole system no longer worked harmoniously, and by intrinsic harmony acquired external freedom; but there arose a violent and unusual action in the several component functions, each for itself, all striving to reproduce the regular power which the whole had once enjoyed.

(p. 190)

Hallam's consciousness of mediated “intermingling” is clear here, even as the rhetoric speciously elides the extremism of its argument. Hallam writes “different powers,” when he usually means “opposite powers”; he suggests three categories, where everywhere else there are two (either “Passionate Emotion” confuses his categories or fits into “sensation” and is therefore redundant); as a footnote to “sensitive,” he suggests that it is not quite the right word (“sensuous” might be better) as if making exactly the right distinction were really important to his critical project.

What he has got exactly right, I submit, is the violence that accrues when the faculties are divided in this way. Violence attends upon the struggle to regain a lost harmony, a lost power. The logic here is compelling if abstract: the faculties have been cut off—the division is a wound—and regaining lost power is violent since it is vain. There is no going backwards to Arcadia, as Schiller tells us, no regaining of the Aristophanic other half, as envisioned in Plato's Symposium. Hallam, however, deviates necessarily from the problematic consequences of his history of division. His task is to praise Tennyson, to work sensation and modernity into appreciative terms, and not to turn their negative implications against the poetry. So that even though “harmony” is lost in present circumstances, the word and its equivalents (“the rich lyrical impression of the ballad”) continue to provide the main critical values. To regain “harmony” ought to be “complicated,” “unusual,” and “violent,” but these terms are not at all evident when Hallam comments on the individual poems.

The poem Hallam seems to love most is “Recollections of the Arabian Nights.” (“What a delightful, endearing title!”). A portion of his enthusiasm runs as follows:

Amidst all the varied luxuriance of the sensations described, we are never permitted to lose sight of the idea which gives unity to this variety, and by the recurrence of which, as a sort of mysterious influence, at the close of every stanza, the mind is wrought up, with consummate art, to the final disclosure. This poem is a perfect gallery of pictures; and the concise boldness, with which in a few words an object is clearly painted, is sometimes (see the 6th stanza) majestic as Milton, sometimes (see the 12th) sublime as Aeschylus.

(p. 193)

Hallam envisions unity through repetition, as the refrain (“Of good Haroun Alraschid”) eventually turns into the king himself (“I saw him—in his golden prime, / The Good Haroun Alraschid,” [ll. 153-154]). In our turn we might observe the disconnectedness of these “pictures”; nothing makes the collection “perfect” except an a priori aesthetic of harmony. The sublime “Aeschylean” stanza (“A million tapers flaring bright”) is disconnected from the stanza with “the Persian girl,” which itself gives way to the revelation of the king. Tennyson's personages are typically disconnected from their surroundings, as readers have long recognized, so that even though the poem is clearly not as suicidal as “Mariana,” the disconnected pictures, or eidola, work somewhat against the good king's “merriment.”

Hallam proceeds in his “rigid duty” as a critic to object to Tennyson's use of “redolent,” which “is no synonym for ‘fragrant.’” Hallam grounds his concern in Coleridge: “No adequate compensation can be made for the mischief a writer does by confounding the distinct senses of words.” Coleridge's act of “desynonymy” is of utmost importance in the Biographia Literaria; to distinguish between “imagination” and “fancy” will be a principal goal.¹⁹ Hallam flaunts his reductiveness for the sake of canonization when he quotes Coleridge. A few paragraphs before Coleridge introduces the idea of desynonymy, he characterizes Wordsworth with a fullness that Hallam denies:

It was the union of deep feeling with profound thought; the fine balance of truth in observing with the imaginative faculty in modifying the objects observed; and above all the original gift of spreading the tone, the atmosphere, and with it the depth and height of the ideal world around forms, incidents, and situations, of which, for the common view, custom had bedimmed all the lustre, had dried up the sparkle and the dew drops.

(1:80)

Hallam quotes Coleridge apparently in order to enact criticism as learned distinction, but since the reality of the essay is impassioned canonization, Hallam's move instead begs questions. We want, above all, to desynonymize “sensation.” Hallam's essay famously provided a starting point for Yeats, who needed to move beyond the world of sensation: “I sought some symbolic language reaching far into the past and associated with familiar names and conspicuous hills that I might not be alone amid the obscure impressions of the senses.”²⁰ For Yeats sensation simply was not thick enough; he needed to move to the depths of history and hills. But in Tennyson's hands—even if not very successfully at the outset—sensation is more than an obscure impression.

The violence within aesthetic evaluation awaits recovering. Pierre Bourdieu writes, for example, “What pure taste refuses is indeed the violence to which the popular spectator consents (one thinks of Adorno's description of popular music and its effects); it demands respect, the distance which allows it to keep its distance.”²¹ Here Bourdieu applies his sociological critique to Kantian “pure taste”: the “taste of reflection” and the “taste of sense” are class distinctions. But how often in the history of aesthetics is the dominant value placed upon a far more complicated, because less pure, combination of categories. Wordsworth desires to elevate “low and rustic life,” while Hallam argues heterodoxically on behalf of a poetry of sensation. The canonizing process is itself a critique in Bourdieu's sense, though each writer moves in the opposite direction by celebrating the “low.” As in René Girard's models of violence, the argument may distort by extremism, since the rivals desire to emphasize their polar opposition, when in fact they may be more nearly identical.²²

I have tried to place Hallam's essay in its particular Victorian niche, and those readers wishing further context, and an explanation of other aspects of Hallam's text, would do well to consult W. David Shaw's Lucid Veil. Despite its historical particularity, however, Hallam's essay has wider lessons for us contemporary non-Victorians. Criticism, which so often depends on distance, reflection, and mental complexity for its values, is lately trying to come to terms with categories of “experience” once again: the re-evaluation of the literal, the spontaneous, the oral, the journalistic, the corporeal. An argument on behalf of the Body, for example, may not look too much different from Hallam's; this argument would take place today in the wake of enormous philosophical sophistication (after Heidegger, et al.), but in order to make its case, it may seem obliged to simplify radically. But the simplification will be in appearance only. The literal, the spontaneous, or the sensational may well come to appear as “deep” and ultimately as important as metaphor or spirit. As Hallam understood, I think, but repressed in order to make the clearest argument, Tennyson worked from the “great deep” even when writing at the level of mere sensation.

Notes

1. Gerald Bruns, “The Formal Nature of Victorian Thinking,” PMLA [Publications of the Modern Language Association] 90 (1977): 404-418.

2. D. W. Hamlyn, Sensation and Perception: A History of the Philosophy of Perception (London, 1961), pp. 147-157.

3. Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1988), pp. 28-29.

4. Harold Bloom, “Tennyson, Hallam, and Romantic Tradition,” in The Ringers in the Tower: Studies in Romantic Tradition (Chicago, 1971), p. 146.

5. Pater's impressions of Morris and “aesthetic poetry” come to mind here. If Morris is medieval, it is with the following character: “A passion of which the outlets are sealed begets a tension of nerve, in which the sensible world comes to one with a reinforced brilliancy and relief—all redness is turned into blood, all water into tears. Hence a wild, convulsed sensuousness in the poetry of the Middle Age” (p. 523). “The English poet too has learned the secret” (p. 522). Or if Morris resembles more the “pagan,” Greek sensibility, it is insofar as it suggests “the shortness of life. This is contrasted with the bloom of the world, and gives new seduction to it—the sense of death and the desire of beauty: the desire of beauty quickened by the sense of death” (p. 528). Citations are to Walter Pater: Three Major Texts (The Renaissance, Appreciations, Imaginary Portraits), ed. William Buckler (New York, 1986).

6. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford, 1978), p. 1.

7. “It would be tedious to repeat the tale so often related of the French contagion and the heresies of the Popian school” (The Writings of Arthur Hallam, ed. T. H. Vail Motter [New York, 1943], pp. 189-190). Further references to Hallam's essay will be cited parenthetically. The connection between a disparagement of Pope and English nationalism is brought forward by James Chandler in “The Pope Controversy: Romantic Poetics and the English Canon,” in Canons, ed. Robert von Hallberg (Chicago, 1983), pp. 197-226. Chandler discusses what is “arguably the canonical canon controversy in English literary history,” and Hallam knowingly writes into the aftermath of this canonical heat.

8. The Letters of Arthur Henry Hallam, ed. Jack Kolb (Columbus, Ohio, 1981), p. 520.

9. On Coleridge's role see Peter Allen, The Cambridge Apostles: The Early Years (Cambridge, 1978). The chapter on Arthur Hallam is especially useful (pp. 138-159). Hallam is cited at one point sounding very Keatsian, though he could not have seen Keats's letters: “I feel day by day that it is only in the pure atmosphere of Feeling … I shall find ultimate peace of mind. What are thoughts and opinions?” (p. 140). But after a few weeks Hallam disparages this strain as “madness,” and reverts to seeking the “truth.” Such language in his correspondence suggests the extent to which Hallam's terms in the essay are rhetorical. It is also important to note that the situation of the Apostles is both establishment and liberal at once (p. 10), suggestive of the kind of canonical but also revolutionary values that Hallam wants to bequeath to Tennyson.

10. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York, 1951), p. 149; Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate (Princeton, 1983), 1:25-26.

11. “Essay on the Philosophical Writings of Cicero,” The Writings of Arthur Hallam, p. 157.

12. Keith G. Thomas sees “sentiment” as a “register somewhere between sensation and feeling,” Wordsworth and Philosophy: Empiricism and Transcendentalism in the Poetry (Ann Arbor, 1989), p. 59. Thomas' book splendidly details the variety of Wordsworthian perception and its philosophical genealogy. However, Wordsworthian usage may be more various than precise; as in Hume “sensation” and “feeling” can sometimes seem interchangeable (on Hume see Alasdair MacIntyre, introduction to Hume's Ethical Writings [Notre Dame, 1965], p. 16). On the mix-up of sensation and reflection in Hume, see further John J. Richetti, Philosophical Writing: Locke, Berkeley, Hume (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1983), pp. 185-237. On the use of the word “feeling” and its passing over into “sensation” in empiricist discourse, see Walter Jackson Bate, From Classic to Romantic: Premises of Taste in Eighteenth-Century England (New York, 1946), pp. 172ff.

13. Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800) in The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser (Oxford, 1974), 1:122-124.

14. The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks (Berkeley, 1987), vol. 1.

15. See Katherine Duncan-Jones, “A Note on Tennyson's ‘Claribel,’” VP [Victorian Poetry] 9 (1971): 348-350.

16. Hallam must also look into the range of poetic power at the outset of Wordsworth's 1815 preface (1. Observation and description; 2. Sensibility; 3. Reflection; 4. Imagination and fancy; 5. Invention) and cut away Coleridge's interest in Imagination in order to focus a competition on only two aspects of poetry. In the 1815 preface Wordsworth goes on to show how the imagination moves beyond “the phenomena of sensation” (The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, 3:30ff). Later R. H. Horne will repeat Hallam's reduction in “Wordsworth and Leigh Hunt,” the reflective and the “affectionate” poet respectively (A New Spirit of the Age [London, 1844], 1:36.) In his turn (in a review of the 1842 Poems) Leigh Hunt conceives of Tennyson in a “class of poetry” between Keats and Wordsworth, with more thought than Keats, more feelings than Wordsworth: “Mr. Tennyson is at present a kind of philosophic Keats” (Leigh Hunt's Literary Criticism, ed. L. H. Houtchens and C. W. Houtchens [New York, 1976], p. 526). For descriptions of the various schools (Lake, Satanic, Cockney) and the critical disposition to play them off each other, see John O. Hayden, The Romantic Reviewers 1802-1824 (Chicago, 1969).

17. Preface to History of a Six Weeks' Tour (1817), in The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (New York, 1965), 6:88.

18. Reprinted in Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Scrutinies: Reviews of Poetry 1830-1870 (London, 1972), p. 76. Armstrong describes very well the utilitarian psychology implicit in Fox's essay (pp. 14-18; James Mill's Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind appeared in 1829). She writes also, “Though Hallam shows himself to be aware of the significance of all the issues raised by Fox, the position he adopts is deliberately outside the usual ways of looking at poetry, and he is almost alone in his advocation of ‘picturesque’ poetry, the poetry of ‘sensation,’ until writers in the sixties began to think along the same lines” (p. 18). Armstrong is very good on Fox, helpfully surrounding him with context, but relatively unhelpful with Hallam.

19. On “desynonymy” see Paul Hamilton, Coleridge's Poetics (Stanford, 1983), pp. 62-87.

20. W. B. Yeats, “Art and Ideas,” in Essays and Introductions (New York, 1961), p. 349.

21. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1984), p. 488.

22. Girard's theory of mimetic desire is set out in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore, 1965), esp. chap. 1. It is not too much to imagine the text of canonization as a “scapegoat text,” in which the violence of social rivalry is cloaked in cultural ritual (see further, Violence and the Sacred [1977] and The Scapegoat [1986]). Girard's own sense of canon is annoyingly self-serving; he only deals with “great masterpieces,” that is, the works that display insight into mimetic desire and rivalries (To Double Business Bound: Essays on Literature, Mimesis, and Anthropology [Baltimore, 1978], pp. x-xi).