Alfred Tennyson: Problems of Biography

Abstract

In Memoriam is central to a biographer's enquiry because it is at once a public monument and a passionate record of private bereavement. The poet's love for his dead friend Arthur Hallam has prompted responsible and continuing debate over Tennyson's sexuality. Michelangelo's and Shakespeare's sonnets, as well as Hallam's and Tennyson's engagement with Neoplatonism, can be usefully recruited to contribute to that debate. Further, In Memoriam's tensions between religion and science (or faith and doubt) and human and divine love are linked, the two antithetical systems illuminating each other. The poem demands to be read inclusively and in the entirety of its contexts. ********** In 1862, soon after the death of her beloved Prince Consort, Queen Victoria received Tennyson and said to him, 'Next to the Bible, In Memoriam is my comfort.' (1) This famous remark reminds us of what we are looking at when we read In Memoriam: a great national monument which spoke centrally to the age about faith, love, and bereavement. Critics and biographers ever since have worked to exhume less noble and more personal topics from this poem, but in so doing they--we--have been working against the spirit both of the poem's first audience and of the poet's deeply held convictions. Tennyson himself hated biographical investigation into the lives of poets. He thought that Richard Monckton Milnes's Life and Letters of John Keats (1848) (2) was an outrageous intrusion into the personal life of the poet, and that all such enterprises were improper. At the same time, Tennyson was a personal friend of Monckton Milnes (later Lord Houghton). The two men had been contemporaries and friends at Trinity College, Cambridge--and moreover, Milnes had written one of the warmest and most intelligent of the reviews of Tennyson's 1842 volume. Tennyson's son (and devoted secretary), Hallam, reported that his father 'was indignant that Keats' wild love letters should have been published', but that he did not want to identify publicly the book that had so annoyed him. (3) The poem therefore has the guarded title 'To After Reading A Life and Letters': For now the Poet cannot die, Nor leave his music as of old, But round him ere he scarce be cold Begins the scandal and the cry: 'Proclaim the faults he would not show: Break lock and seal: betray the trust: Keep nothing sacred: 'tis but just The many headed beast should know.' Ah shameless! for he did but sing A song that pleased us from its worth; No public life was his on earth, No blazoned statesman he, nor king. I am grateful to Professor Leon He gave the people of his best: His worst he kept, his best he gave. My Shakespeare's curse on clown and knave Who will not let his ashes rest! (II, 298) Julia Margaret Cameron, the celebrated photographer who was Tennyson's friend and neighbour at Freshwater in the Isle of Wight, quoted him in 1862 as saying that the lives of great men were like 'pigs to be ripped open for the public'. He himself, he said, would be 'ripped open like a pig' and he 'thanked God Almighty' that he knew nothing 'of Shakespeare but his writings', and that 'there were no letters preserved either of Shakespeare's or Jane Austen's, that they had not been ripped open like pigs'. (4) Tennyson's early life may have been something that he wanted to keep quiet about, although his biographers have all found rich and extraordinary material in it. He was the third of eleven children of the brilliant Dr George Tennyson, a depressed and angry Lincolnshire clergyman who died of drink in 1831 and may have suffered from epilepsy. Alfred certainly feared that he himself was epileptic. The trances and periods of absence suffered by some of the characters in his poetry--in The Princess, for example--may be based on this haunting fear of epilepsy and its symptoms. …