Alfred Tennyson by Seamus Perry

Abstract

MLR, I02.2, 2007 491 on to Samuel Butler's Hudibras, Terry notes the importance in thegenre ofmocking language asmuch as behaviour (p. 4 ), and tracesButler's critical reception through to Byron. Terry's exposition of poetry inpart through eighteenth-century literarycri ticism is a great strength, sustained in the following chapter on Richard Blackmore's Arthurian epics and themanner inwhich their reception, inPope's Peri Bathous and elsewhere, elaborated distinctions between the true and false sublime. Terry moves from formal tomore social concerns in the following chapters. He suggests that Mandevillian economics and amock-heroic attitude surface in poems on luxury such as JamesArbuckle's 'Snuff' and Cowper's The Task (the concurrent treatmentof canonical and non-canonical texts isanother strengthofhis study).When he suggests, however, thatCowper's lines on thecucumber as a luxury 'accept as pro vidential theworkings of theeconomic system throughwhich theepicureanism of the few is satisfiedby the toilof the many' (p. I03), andmakes a similar point in relation to Pope's Epistle to Bathurst (p. I40), he perhaps comes too close toeliding an important distinction between believers inentirely self-regulating economy and believers in the civic duty of participating in regulation through stewardship and charity. Chapter 5 offers an excellent reading of the difficult subject ofwomen inmock heroic, arguing that mock-heroism was inherent inattitudes towomen evident inpe riodical literature.Terry exemplifies thispoint by identifying a gap between 'Pope's poised blandishments and the low estimation of female worth on which they are predicated [. . .] that isworked out in themore formalized irony of themock-epic' (P. 122). Chapter 6 argues that the relation ofvirtues and vices seen in theories such as Pope's 'ruling passion' is the same relation that subsists between beauties and faults in the blame game ofAugustan literarycriticism. Chapter 7 presents a valuable dis cussion ofCowper's mock-heroic as theproduct ofhis sense of human meanness and divine benevolence, supplemented by a survey of his mock-heroic poems on animals (although I am not sure I agree that there is mock in the Miltonic pastiche describing theSicilian earthquake inThe Task, II).The book concludes with a discussion of later eighteenth-centurymanuals of rhetoric thatpresentmock-heroic as sheer incongruity, a category of humour distinct fromHobbesian pleasure inothers' suffering. This is a very valuable book thatprovides a clear introduction to themock-heroic, its literary manifestations throughout theeighteenth century,and the formsof lifeand habits ofmind that go along with itand make it, as Terry's title states, a discourse as well as a genre. Terry might have mentioned Shaftesbury's 'Sensus Communis' as a precursor of benevolent theories of humour when discussing ridicule (p. 4 and Chapter 8); and James Noggle's The Skeptical Sublime: Aesthetic Ideology inPope and theTory Satirists (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 200I) might have provided interestingpoints of departure forhim. But Terry's book ismore a reconsideration of the primary material than a theoretical revaluation ofmock-heroic in relation to current scholarship. Its breadth and claritywill make ituseful for students in the early stages of grappling with the genre, and also for those students and academics developing a sense ofmock-heroic ineighteenth-century discourse ingeneral. UNIVERSITY OF ST ANDREWS TOM JONES Alfred Tennyson. By SEAMUS PERRY. Tavistock: Northcote House. 2005. xviii+ I9I pp. ?I I.99. ISBN 978-o-7463-09I9-3. The 'Writers and their Work' series, published by the British Council, has come a longway since those little soft-bound pamphlets of the I96os which sought to pack the essential information about Shakespeare or Yeats into about fifty pages. Seamus Perry's book attends closely to the question of 'how Tennyson's imagination dealt 492 Reviews with his lyric gift' (p. xv). 'Dealt with' might suggest that the giftwas unruly and untamed, but the body of this book demonstrates the opposite: that the 'gift'was amatter of tightlycontrolled linguistic virtuosity and metrical cunning. This study brings out the substantial and fruitful influence of Coleridge on the early poet, and reminds us (ifwe needed it) that the young Tennyson really does need to be under stood within the context of theRomantic movement, which is exactly the point of his friendArthur Hallam's brilliant review of him, published in I832. 'The musical and the...