To state briefly the cardinal Tennysonian idea, man must realize a WOMANLY MANLINESS, and woman a MANLY WOMANLINESS.
Tennyson presents to us his ideal man in the 109th section of ‘In Memoriam’. It is descriptive of his friend, Arthur Henry Hallam. All that is most characteristic of Tennyson, even his Englishness, is gathered up in this poem of six stanzas. It is interesting to meet with such a representative and comprehensive bit in a great poet.
“HEART-AFFLUENCE in discursive talk
From household fountains never dry;
The CRITIC CLEARNESS of an eye,
That saw through all the Muses’ walk;
SERAPHIC INTELLECT AND FORCE
TO SEIZE AND THROW THE DOUBTS OF MAN;
IMPASSIONED LOGIC, which outran
The bearer in its fiery course;
HIGH NATURE AMOROUS OF THE GOOD,
BUT TOUCH’D WITH NO ASCETIC GLOOM;
And passions pure in snowy bloom
Through all the years of April blood.”
The first two verses of this stanza also characterize the King Arthur of the ‘Idylls of the King’. *1* In the next stanza we have the poet’s institutional Englishness:—
“A love of freedom rarely felt,
Of freedom in her regal seat
Of England; not the school-boy heat,
The blind hysterics of the Celt;
And MANHOOD FUSED WITH FEMALE GRACE *2*
In such a sort, the child would twine
A trustful hand, unask’d, in thine,
And find his comfort in thy face;
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.”
— *1* See ‘The Holy Grail’, the concluding thirty-two verses, beginning: “And spake I not too truly, O my Knights”, and ending “ye have seen that ye have seen”.
*2* The idea of ‘The Princess’. —
Tennyson’s genius was early trained by the skeptical philosophy of the age. All his poetry shows this. The ‘In Memoriam’ may almost be said to be the poem of nineteenth century scepticism. To this scepticism he has applied an “all-subtilizing intellect”, and has translated it into the poetical “concrete”, with a rare artistic skill, and more than this, has subjected it to the spiritual instincts and apperceptions of the feminine side of his nature and made it vassal to a larger faith. But it is, after all, not the vital faith which Browning’s poetry exhibits, a faith PROCEEDING DIRECTLY FROM THE SPIRITUAL MAN. It is rather the faith expressed by Browning’s Bishop Blougram:—
“With me faith means perpetual unbelief
Kept quiet like the snake ‘neath Michael’s foot,
Who stands firm just because he feels it writhe.”
And Tennyson, in picturing to us in the Idylls, the passage of the soul “from the great deep to the great deep”, appears to have felt it necessary to the completion of that picture (or why did he do it?), that he should bring out that doubt at the last moment. The dying Arthur is made to say:—