Tennyson’s Originality and Uniqueness:
Love has always been the theme of poetry; love has inspired some of the greatest poetry of the world. In the English language, Shakespeare, Donne, Shelley, Byron, Browning, etc., are some of the greatest of love-poets. Tennyson is also a great love-poet, and his treatment of love is unique in many ways. He is primarily and mainly a poet of conjugal love. As Compton-Rickett points out, "Tennyson elected to treat of love, not with Byron as an elemental force, or with Shelley and Browning as a transcendental passion, or with Rossetti as a mystic mingling of sense and spirit, but as a domestic sentiment."
Domestic Love: Its Glorification:
In his treatment of love and sex-relationship Tennyson is a typical Victorian. The Victorians had to affect a compromise between the unprecedented licentiousness of the previous age, and the Christian ascetic ideal of the complete negation of sex. Sex was a fact and they could not shut their eyes to it. Moreover, it was necessary that the British race should be propagated, so they affected a compromise, elevated the biological necessity of propagation into a moral virtue, and evolved the ideal of domestic love and marriage. Tennyson in his poetry glorified domestic love; he cast over it the glow of romance. Writing about Tennyson's poem The Miller's Daughter, Stopford, A. Brooke says, "The Miller's Daughter is a simple story of true sweet hearting and married love but raised...into a steady and grave emotion worthy of a love built to last for life betwixt a man and woman. This was the sort of love for which Tennyson cared, for which Byron and Shelley did not care, which was not at all in the world where Keats lived."
Conception of Love: Spiritual and Not Physical:
It is married love which Tennyson extols; he has no use for passion which is not sublimated into conjugal love. Tennyson's treatment of love is not only manly; it is also eminently wholesome. He placed high value on law and order, on discipline and self-control, and his conception of love is but an expression of his emphasis on law and self-control. It may be that he himself was not exposed to physical temptation, or it may have been that he suppressed the animal within him. However it may have been, there is no denying the fact that Tennyson concentrates very firmly upon the advantages of spiritual as opposed to physical love. Again and again he advises his readers to,
“Arise and fly
The reeling Faun, the sensual beast;
Move upward, working out the beast,
And let the ape and tiger die.”
Emphasis on Domestic Virtues:
It was not only his abhorrence of physical passion, his immunity from, or his control over, the coarser instincts of the male, which rendered Tennyson so naturally and so pre-eminently the poet of the domestic virtues. He possessed another quality; he possessed an almost feminine sympathy for the tender delicacies of the home. It was painful for him to contemplate even the possibility of any relation between man and woman other than the conjugal. He insists on conjugal fidelity. The "shadows of the world," the reflection of which so distressed the Lady of Shalott, included, it is true, "two young lovers" walking together in the moonlight; but we are at once reassured by the statement that these two lovers were, "lately wed." The maiden who, in The Princess, is invited to find love in the valley, is guaranteed at the same time that she will be soothed on arrival by "the azure pillars of the hearth." More curious even is the ultimate fate of Oenone, who, although for sixty years she was allowed to wander as a gentle little pagan among the respectable English couples with whom Tennyson peopled his intervening poems, was in the end caught and married, somewhat posthumously, to Paris, who, whatever his subsequent extravagances, had, after all, been, "once her playmate on the hills".
Condemnation of Illicit Love:
Tennyson has no use for illicit love, however intense and true it may be. It is regarded as an evil, as a source of much mischief. In The Idylls of the King, it is the guilty love of Launcelot and Gunivere which results in the death of Arthur and the dissolution of the Round Table. Often domesticity becomes an obsession with Tennyson. Says Harold Nicolson, "It is curious, for instance, to observe how constantly, in his abhorrence of the illicit, he throws a domestic atmosphere even over the preconjugal relations of his characters." The young men and women of Tennyson's stories are rarely allowed even the legitimate adventure of selection: they are pledged to each other from their childhood. In almost every case they are either closely related or have played as man and wife together in the nursery. "When Harry and I were children, he call'd me his own little wife", such, more or less, is the prelude to nine out of ten of all Tennyson's love-poems "And for this purpose-for the purpose, that is, of giving a tender and wholly spiritual savour to his love-stories-the device works well enough".
Passion: Physical and Sensual:
However, Tennyson's idealisation of domestic love does not mean that passion and the ecstasy of passion are entirely absent from his poetry. There are poems in which passion leaps out with all its intensity. Thus in Fatima the expression of love is passionate, physical and sensual:
“Last night, when someone spoke his name,
From my swift blood that went and came
A thousand, little shafts of flame
Were shiver'd in my narrow frame.
O Love, O fire! Once he drew
With one long kiss my whole soul thro,
My lips, as sunlight drinketh dew.”
In The Gardener's Daughter, the lips of the girl are so red and warm that the sun doubles its warmth by dwelling upon them.
Sex and Marriage: Victorian Prudery:
Tennyson is a great love poet, he has left behind him love-poetry of significance, but he would have been even a greater love-poet, had he aimed at some adequate reality of the emotion, and had he not been hampered by the Victorian prudery on the question of sex and marriage. The whole of the woman's question is discussed by him in detail in The Princess, but he fails to give us any inspiring or original theory of marriage. He realises that the Victorian attitude towards womanhood and the relationship of the sexes is illogical and is based on fallacies, yet he subscribes to it and propagates it in The Princess and a host of other poems.
Attitude towards Womanhood:
His attitude towards womanhood is typically Victorian and conventional. The woman's place was the hearth; all outside interests and ambitions were ridiculous and, what was more, pretentious: nature had ordained otherwise:
“Man for the field and woman for the hearth;
Man for the sword and for the needle she;
Man with the head and woman with the heart;
Man to command and woman to obey;
All else confusion.”
It was a dishonest and selfish theory evolved by man for the greater comfort and satisfaction of his own sex. Marriage was the be-all and end-all of life for woman, and if she was ever inclined to question this arrangement she is advised to repeat to herself, "I cannot understand, I love".
Tennyson's Heroines:
Princess Ida in The Princess is a woman made of, "sterner stuff", she at last works out a plan for man's emancipation and tries to put it into practice. But she stands alone among Tennyson's women. His other women are weak and delicate, truly feminine according to Victorian standards.
Says Hugh Walker in this connection, "The delicately fanciful portraits of maidens in the early poems are all touched with romance of a somewhat dilettante sort. The very names, Claribel, Marina, Oriana, Madeline, Rosalind, Fatima, are redolent of romance. But these "airy fairy", "ever varying", "faintly smiling" or "rare pale" damsels are all shadowy and unreal; they are not "for human nature's daily food"; they themselves have not been nourished on such food, they have fed on honeydew and drunk the milk of Paradise. They would not stand the wear and tear of life. The only thing possible is to set them apart, like China ornaments on a bracket or in a cupboard. The women in his later poetry are equally dainty, equally the creatures of a world of romance, and equally unfit to face the harsh reality of life.”
The ideal Tennysonian heroine is high born, she is simple, and she is also meek, gentle and long suffering. The Lady of Shalott, for example, is high born and she suffers quietly the curse that is on her. For Tennyson, as for the Victorians,
“A simple maiden in her flower,
Is worth a hundred coats of arms.”
An ideal woman must be meek as is the wife of Lord Burleigh, who,
“Shaped her mind with woman's meekness,
To all duties of her rank;
And a gentle consort made he,
And her gentle mind was such,
That she grew a noble lady,
And the people loved her much.”
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