Tennyson as a Representative of His Age

Introduction:

Tennyson is, in the words of W. J. Long, "probably the most representative literary
man of the Victorian era." His work is an authentic epitome of all the important
features of his age. Whatever be our estimate regarding his greatness as a poet-and
most modern critics are convinced of his mediocrity-there can be no doubt about
the representative value of his work. He is as good a representative and chronicler
of his age as Chaucer, Spenser, and Pope were of their own respective ages.

Tennyson's career as a poet extended over more than half a century during which
period many changes occurred. In his poetry he kept pace with the changing
times. Stopford Brooke says: "For more than sixty years he lived close to the
present life of England, as far as he was capable of comprehending and
sympathising with its movements; and he inwove what he felt concerning it into his
poetry." It does not mean, however, that he had no individuality of his own: he did
have individuality, though it was not he alone but also the ethos of his age that
found utterance in his poetry. He was the Poet Laureate, but we can even call him
the national poet without any hesitation. He indeed fixed for the future generations
the essence and the spirit of his age. Tennyson did not concern himself much with
the externals of contemporary life, such as the international conflicts: except for the
Cremian War we will find little mention of contemporary upheavals and conflicts in
his poetry; but the deeper currents of contemporary thought and feeling run in his
poetic compositions and are worthy of examination by a student of the Victorian
ethos. In this sense he bears a curious resemblance to Chaucer, the unofficial
chronicler of the later fourteenth century.

A Champion of Order:

The victorian age was singularly unemotional and stood for balance, order, and
discipline. The radicalism, revolutionism, and even the individualism of the
romantics like Shelley had already become a thing of the past. All enthusiasm,
excitement, or prophetic fervour was eyed with suspicion by the sane Victorians
who were terribly afraid of disorder and anarchy. Even the Victorian "Chartists"
(those who stood for the extension of political power to the working-classes)
believed in constitutional means to effect political changes and would have been
offended at being dubbed "revolutionaries." Evolution not revolution, was the
slogan. England and the Continent had enough of excitement. What was needed
now was calm thinking and constructive action. The Victorians, as a critic puts it,
"had enough of tremendous thoughts in familiar shape. They now wanted familiar
thoughts in tremendous shape."

Now, Tennyson reflects adequately the Victorian respect for balance and order, and
the corresponding fear and contempt for lawlessness and disorder. Many a time he
expresses his love of England, which is partly generated by her political stability.
Order in England is not only a reason of Tennyson's pride in his country, but also his
love for it. At a place he says about England

It is the land that free men till,

That sober-suited freedom chose;
The land where girl with friends and foes,
A man may speak the thing he will.
A land of settled government;
A land of just and old renown.

Attention may be directed to the last but one line of the passage quoted above.
"Nothing is," proclaims Tennyson "that errs from law." According to Compton-Rickett,
the Victorian age witnessed a shift from individualism to collectivism. In other
words, individual impulses came increasingly under the discipline of social
conventions. Tennyson is an exponent of this shift in thought. His love of order is
reflected in the most quoted of his lines:

The old order changeth, yielding place to new,

And god fulfils Himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.

From the first line it must be noted what the old order changes yielding place to a
new order, not to disorder or chaos. Tennyson is not for stagnancy or the status
quo, but he is not for change that would hurl everything into chaos. In these beliefs
he represents his age.

The Rise of Democracy:

This moral terror of revolution and anarchy makes Tennyson, necessarily, a

reactionary, or, at least, a conventionalist. The Victorian age was, so to say, a
"middle-aged" period, wedded to a plethora of social conventions. Nevertheless, it
witnessed a gradual change from aristocracy to democracy. According to Compton-
Rickett, an important feature of the Victorian age was "the steady advance of
democratic ideals." Things moved surely though steadily towards the ultimate
Chartist goal of universal suffrage. How far does Tennyson reflect this change in his
poetry? It must be understood that Tennyson was not another Ruskin. He clung to
old order of aristocracy but when he found the swelling tide of democracy
impossible to be checked, he persuaded himself to strike a compromise between
aristocracy and democracy. He was an aristocrat by birth, upbringing and his ways
of thinking, but we cannot but admit that he had a genuinely sympathetic interest in
the common people and common things. If he wrote The Princess, Maud, and The
Idylls of the Kings, he also wrote such poems as Dora and Enoch Arden which are
concerned with poor people.

Female Suffrage and Education:

Tennyson's conservatism is also apparent from his views on female suffrage and
education, which, in the Victorian age, were burning topics. He did not associate
himself with the loud-mouthed suffragists of his age. Nor did he think highly of
formal education for the fair sex. He could have readily agreed with Addison that
"family is the proper sphere for a woman to shine in." Like Addison he was for
keeping a wedge between the two sexes either of which was supposedly designed
by God for a particular function and was endowed accordingly.

Man for the field and woman for the hearth,

Man for the sword and for the needle she,
Man to command and woman to obey,
All else confusion.

The last line should be considered with reference to Tennyson's love of order, which
we have detailed above.

The Princess (1847), one of the major poems of Tennyson, deals with the
contemporary issue of female education which aroused an acrimonious strife
between its supporters and opponents. Of course, Tennyson ranged himself on the
side of its opponents. Higher education in his view was likely to kill the essential
feminity of women. In the poem just referred to he shows the apparent untenability
of the views of Princess Ida on female education. She establishes a university for
women and, very like a Victorian "suffragette", shrieks for the rights of women. She
even refuses to marry the prince to whom she was betrothed in her childhood. But
where does all this end? Ida's intransigence is gone and she marries the prince.
Tennyson implies that she is "reformed" as she gives up her cry for equality, loses
her obstreperousness, and agrees to be, what Coventry Patmore would call, "the
aneel in the house."

Love, Sex, and Social Taboos:

Tennyson is a representative Victorian in his attitude to love and sex. About these
things Victorians were indeed quite prudish. Even a trivial impropriety of dress (not
to speak of the modern "topless" and the "mini-skirt", which, in the opinion of the
house in the annual debate of the Oxford Union held in 1966, "does not go far
enough") would send the Victorian martinets into paroxysms of rage. They were
indeed very touchy about sex which they were prone to treat with a hush-hush
incommodiousness. Thackeray, Dickens, George Eliot, and others who were stark
realists in everything else did not dare lift the lid off the animality of their
characters. They approached the beast of sex gingerly, and with gloves on.
Tennyson is no exception. In his treatment of love and sex he has neither the frank
conviviality of Fielding, nor the voluptuousness of Marlowe or Spenser, nor the
ribaldry of Chaucer of the Miller's Tale. He does not think of love in terms of the
Platonic transcendentalism of Shelley; he does think of it as an earthly.
Passion, but refuses to excoriate it, not to speak of exploring its interior. Unbridled
passion he looks down upon, especially when it is non-conjugal. Such passion would
be destructive of social order and has to be viewed as a disintegrating and
mischievous force. Too often does he proffer the sermon of rising above one's
animality.

A rise and fly

The reeling faun, the sensual feast,
Move upward, working out the beast,
And let the ape and tiger die.

Tennyson's lovers are always full-dressed. They love each other like perfect
Victorians and are invariably married. A typical instance is provided by The Lady of
Shallot in which we are introduced to "two young lovers" walking together in the
moonlight. Before the reader should get scandalised, Tennyson reassures him that
these lovers were "lately wed. "Marriage and procreation are exalted by Tennyson as
the symbols of order and human immortality. But licentiousness is to be curbed as it
is symptomatic of disorder.

Religion, Science, and "the Victorian Compromise":

According to Compton-Rickett, the progress of scientific thought was one of the two
most important features of the Victorian era (the other one being, as already
pointed out, "the steady advance of democratic ideals"). The progress of science
tended to undermine the very foundations of the Christian faith by calling into
question many a scriptural "truth." Darwin's evolutionary doctrine, which traced the
descent of human beings from apes, gave a serious blow to Genesis and shook the
Christian belief in the immortality of the human soul, not to speak of a plethora of
minor points of the Christian doctrine. Needless to say, all this caused an
earthquake in the realm of contemporary thinking and brought many an adamant-
built edifice tumbling to the ground. All Victorian writers, in some way or other, give
expression to the doubts and the consequent spiritual disturbance generated by
scientific discoveries. Some of the Victorians clung to the old faith and aspersed
what they called the new-fangled opinions, others went over to the side of science
and turned agnostics, and still some others tried in panic to effect some sort of
compromise between the two conflicting forces (of science and belief). Tennyson, on
the whole, may be classed with the third group-the one which stood for what is
often called "the Victorian Compromise." He was too greatly affected by the
development of science to remain an orthodox Christian, but still he was not so
much affected as to turn an unqualified agnostic like, say, T. H. Huxley. In his poetry
we often meet with an evidence of his groping for a moral stance, though it is true
that he has fewer doubts than Arnold and he is much more of a facile optimist than
most of his sensitive1 and introspective contemporaries. "No poet," says a critic,
"was more exercised by religious problems than he; and no poet was more sensitive
to scientific thought than he. " But his attitude was an attitude of compromise and
he propounded a via media between materialistic science and dogmatic Christianity
He was not much of a sceptic, though he could say:

There remains more faith in honest doubt,

Believe me, than in half the creeds.

In Memoriam, no doubt, the ultimate questions of life, death, and immortality are
somewhat probed into. Likewise, in The Two Voices and elsewhere doubt and faith
are tentatively probed. But the whole thing ends in a reassuring note of faith in God:

The sun, the moon, the stars, the hills and the plains, Are not these,
O Soul, the vision of Him who reigns?

He believes

That nothing walks with aimless feet.

That not one life shall be destroyed.

And there are men who are not just ape-like but "Godlike"--obviously not the
descendants of apes.

Tho' world on world in myriad myriads roll

Round us, each with different powers,
And other forms of life than ours
What know we greater than the soul?
On God and Godlike men we build our trust.

Such "trust" may be pejoratively called facile optimism or smug complacency but it
is essentially Victorian, even more Victorian than the much-publicized "Victorian
Compromise."

Conclusion:

These fundamental aspects of Victorian thought (along with such minor elements as
militant patriotism and colonialism) entitle Tennyson to be considered a
representative Victorian. He was indeed a great poet, even though his
representative value may be much greater than his intrinsic value. "It will be right,"
to conclude with Lyall, "for the future historians to treat Tennyson as a
representative of the Victorian period and to draw inferences from his work as to the
general, intellectual and political tendencies of the nineteenth century."