In an Age of Science, Tennyson Grappled with an Unsettling New World
What was the formative sound of your childhood? Maybe it was the M train rattling the windows of your bedroom as it hurtled past your apartment six times an hour. Maybe it was the crunch of gravel in the driveway when your mother returned home from the night shift. Maybe it was your PlayStation starting up. Maybe it was your parents screaming at each other. Maybe it was the brassy, braggart shriek of roosters at four in the morning. Noise is like water: it will enter everywhere it can, by seep or by surge, and change the shape of things.
No one alive can say if this is true, but I like to think the sound that most shaped the poet Alfred Tennyson was the surf at Mablethorpe, then a barren stretch of beach on the remote eastern coast of England. Tennyson was born and raised on an estate a dozen miles inland, but his family had a cottage at Mablethorpe, and from a young age he would go there often, to walk along the strand and listen to the ceaseless rush and retreat of the North Sea. He especially loved it in wild weather, when the light fled from the water and the wind blew the dune grasses flat and the sound of the waves crashing onto the shore was less like liquid than like rockfall in a canyon.
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Tennyson spent the rest of his life returning to that desolate seascape, literally but also literarily. You can hear it, first of all, in his impeccable sense of rhythm. These days, he is widely regarded as having the finest facility with metrical forms of any poet of his generation—a grasp of prosody both perfect and unpredictable, as if the complex metronome of that turbulent coastline ticked on within him. Consider these lines from “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” perhaps his most famous poem:
Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them
Volley’d and thunder’d.
You don’t need to know anything about dactylic meter to feel in those lines the pulse that powers the poem, or to recognize in the boom and retort of the weapons their only auditory analogue in all the world—the storm-tossed breakers so beloved by the poet.
But the sea also surges through Tennyson’s poetry in a completely different way, although one equally constitutive of his genius. Again and again, Tennyson fills his beautifully wrought poems with enormous, unfathomable depths—sometimes cosmic, sometimes temporal, sometimes psychological, often oceanic. One gets the sense of a man perpetually drawn to the edge of the unknown, as the boy to the edge of the sea—to questions about our primordial origins, about the etiology and eschatology of our planet, about what erodes and what endures. Pitched in a humbler register, these are also a biographer’s questions, as relevant to him as to the vast mysteries he contemplates: What forces formed Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and whence came his formidable gift? If the sea shaped his sense of sound and scale, what made the rest of him?
The biographer Richard Holmes is both a master and a meta master of his craft: when he isn’t writing about a life (say, that of Samuel Johnson or Samuel Taylor Coleridge or Percy Bysshe Shelley), he is writing about life writing, in “Footsteps,” “Sidetracks,” and “This Long Pursuit,” all book-length contemplations of his chosen genre. Yet he is probably best known for his much lauded 2008 work, “The Age of Wonder,” which reaches beyond conventional biography to challenge the popular notion that the Romantic poets were consistently hostile to science and dismayed by its existential incursions. On the contrary, Holmes argued, those poets were deeply conversant in contemporaneous science, routinely drew inspiration from it, and in effect collaborated with the greatest scientific minds of the era—including the botanist Joseph Banks, the chemist Humphry Davy, and the astronomer William Herschel—in reimagining both the nature of scientific discovery and the nature of nature itself.
The Romantics were Tennyson’s immediate predecessors, so perhaps it is unsurprising that Holmes returns to the theme in his new book, “The Boundless Deep: Young Tennyson, Science and the Crisis of Belief” (Pantheon). The title suggests that Holmes, too, is interested in Tennyson’s fascination with unknowable immensities, but it is the subtitle that makes plain the book’s central claim: that the crucial factor in the poet’s formative years was the scientific advances of the nineteenth century and the challenge they posed to conventional Christian faith. This is a plausible assertion, given that, by the time Tennyson entered adulthood, the British intellectual class—and, for that matter, much of the rest of the world—had been turned on its head by scientific breakthroughs, above all in geology and astronomy.
The revolution in geology had to do with time. In Tennyson’s youth, geologists amassed evidence in support of the proposition, first floated in the previous century, that the age of the earth was not measurable in the familiar and Biblically sanctioned sum of thousands of years but, rather, in untold billions. That elongated sense of our planetary past helped make room for a new understanding of certain strange creatures that had begun rearing their fearsome fossilized heads and tails and teeth into the public consciousness when Tennyson was in his early teens—the Megalosaurus, named and described in 1824, and the Iguanodon, named and described in 1825. To contemporaneous European observers, the scariest thing about those dinosaurs was, ironically, the same thing small children find reassuring about them today: they no longer exist. For people accustomed to the idea that nature was eternal and unchanging, Holmes observes, the idea of extinction was profoundly troubling. The Flood was one thing, but what kind of God would destroy his own handiwork again and again? And what did that mean about the fate of human beings?
While the earth thus trembled, different and equally disruptive discoveries were happening in the sky. Thanks in part to improvements in telescope design, astronomers began identifying thousands of nebulae and star clusters, in essence making the universe suddenly larger in the same way that advances in geology had made the earth suddenly older. Meanwhile, some of those astronomers began speculating that, like our planet and its inhabitants, the very stars were subject to change, forming and growing and eventually dying. As on earth, so, too, in the heavens, it now seemed: there was more time than anyone had previously imagined—vast, inhuman stretches of it—but, paradoxically, less eternity.
These radical insights, Holmes argues, were fundamental to Tennyson’s maturation. To show us how, he aims, like the geologists he writes about, to reach further back in time than usual, albeit on the more modest scale of his subject’s life. “For generations,” he declares of the poet, “he has been enshrined in the national memory as an ancient Victorian bard with a tremendous beard.” But Holmes does not plan to dwell on Tennyson the Laureate or Tennyson the lord. His interest lies with the plain, untitled youth, and with how this newly disorienting, newly dazzling world helped to shape his greatness.
Alfred Tennyson was born in 1809, the same year as Charles Darwin, in the small English village of Somersby. His father, although the rector there, was not what you would call a godly man: alcoholic, volatile, and violent, he once threatened to kill his eldest son, Frederick—credibly, since at the time he was wielding both a knife and a loaded gun—and his rages routinely sent young Alfred fleeing to the church graveyard, where he would curl up beneath a headstone and pray to die. The future poet’s mother, meanwhile, was a Patient Griselda figure: beautiful, kindhearted, widely beloved, and resigned to bottomless quantities of domestic suffering.
Whatever else can be said about Alfred’s childhood, it wasn’t lonely. Eleven young Tennysons spilled out of the Somersby rectory—seven boys and four girls, with Alfred third from the top. Locally, the children were regarded as smart but strange: close to one another but standoffish with outsiders, distinctly bookish but known to run a little wild. Alfred was especially close to his two older brothers, Frederick and Charles, and to a younger sister, Emily, but the whole clan shared both a fellowship of misery and a fellowship of brilliance: all eleven grew up terrified of their father, and all eleven were dedicated writers, mostly of journals and poetry. Half of them were published in adulthood, with Frederick and Charles regarded as exceptionally promising poets until their talents were eclipsed not only by their younger brother but by their inner turmoil.
“We Tennysons are a black-blooded race,” Alfred once declared, and much of what happened to their considerable collective potential can be seen as a kind of tragic attrition. The four daughters fared best, in the sense that they seem to have avoided overt mental breakdowns, but one by one the sons succumbed to dysfunction. Frederick battled intermittent despair and sought solace in Swedenborgianism and other, stranger beliefs. Charles became an opium addict. Edward veered from the general Tennysonian torments into true mental illness while still a teen-ager, and he spent the rest of his life in an asylum. Arthur inherited his father’s alcoholism and propensity for violence, with such ruinous results that he was eventually institutionalized as well. Young Septimus, whom Alfred doted on, was crippled by depression from his early teens—“the most morbid of the Tennysons,” as he introduced himself to the poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti—and spent his fair share of time in an institution, too. Horatio, the baby of the family, fled as far as he possibly could, to Tasmania, only to fail there as a farmer.
It was not obvious, at first, that the one Tennyson who would emerge from this disastrous inheritance to find fame, financial success, and ultimately even something resembling happiness would be Alfred. True, he was passionate about poetry, shouting out stanzas while running through the fields of Somersby, writing a nearly six-thousand-verse epic poem at age twelve, and, two years later, fleeing into Holywell Wood to mourn the death of Lord Byron; but none of those behaviors distinguished him much from his siblings. Nor did his contributions particularly stand out when, in 1826, he and Charles, with a small assist from Frederick, assembled a hundred and three of their poems into a volume that was printed by a local Lincolnshire publisher as “Poems by Two Brothers.”
The year after that collection came out, Alfred followed his elder brothers to Cambridge, where he studied at Trinity College. The most crucial event that befell him there was touching in its simplicity: he made a friend, a fellow-student by the name of Arthur Henry Hallam. Hallam was younger than Tennyson by two years, but worldlier, wealthier, and something of a golden child—handsome, charming, Eton-educated, the scion of a prominent family, and widely presumed to be destined, by both lineage and personal magnetism, for national prominence. Tennyson was immediately taken with him. Hallam had enjoyed a broad circle of friends at Eton and quickly made new ones at Cambridge, but for Tennyson it was quite possibly the first true friendship of his life.
That friendship thrived at Cambridge, and all the more so after Tennyson was invited to follow Hallam into the Apostles, the university’s prestigious, semi-secret discussion society, so named for its founding twelve members. In the club and outside it, the two men stayed up late discussing the merits of Shelley, confessing their doubts about the existence of God, and making plans to publish a joint collection of poetry. When Tennyson’s inconvenient father went away to Continental Europe for a spell, Alfred invited Hallam home with him to Somersby, where the rest of the family swiftly came to adore him—especially Emily, Alfred’s beloved younger sister.
It is unclear when it dawned on Tennyson that the feeling was mutual: his best friend had fallen in love with his sister. But if this romantic attachment to a different Tennyson complicated the friendship for Alfred, it did not dim it. When school wasn’t in session, he and Hallam went on vacation together, traipsing their way through France and Spain or travelling up the Rhine. Back at Cambridge, both men distinguished themselves: Tennyson was delighted when Hallam won the Trinity College essay prize, and Hallam was delighted when Tennyson won the Chancellor’s Gold Medal, awarded annually for the best poem on a given theme. That honor led Hallam to announce that his friend was fast becoming “the greatest poet of our generation, perhaps of our century,” and to privately push him to finish his first solo collection, “Poems, Chiefly Lyrical.” This was the volume originally intended as a joint venture, but Hallam, unfazed and ever the faithful champion of his friend’s work, helped arrange its publication and, after it came out, wrote a glowing review, positioning Tennyson as superior in some respects to Shelley and Keats without ever mentioning that this superlative young poet was one of his dearest friends.
The warm reception of that volume, the vibrant intellectual and social life of Cambridge, and above all the friendship with Hallam conspired to make Tennyson’s university years something of an idyll. The bitter despair to which he was prone never vanished—indeed, heartfelt talks with Hallam at Trinity helped shape his subsequent poem “The Two Voices,” a debate in verse form about the merits of suicide—but for a while its destructive powers abated, permitting real happiness to seep in.
But the respite proved a brief one. In 1831, Tennyson’s troubled and tyrannical father, having recently returned from his European travels, took ill and died—“not much lamented,” as Holmes writes. Two things changed as a result. The first was that, without his clerical salary, the family could no longer afford Alfred’s Cambridge tuition, and he withdrew without earning a degree. The second was that Somersby became a far more pleasant place, making it possible for Hallam to return again and again, including, Holmes notes, to celebrate Christmas, New Year’s, and his twenty-first birthday. By 1832, he and Emily were engaged, to the considerable dismay of Hallam’s father. In the end, however, it didn’t matter. During a visit to Vienna in September of the following year, Arthur Hallam suffered a stroke and died in his hotel room, alone, at the age of twenty-two.
It took seventeen years for Tennyson to turn his crushing grief into his greatest work. By then, he was already an established poet, although the road there had been a slow one. His second volume, “Poems,” was savaged in the press by John Wilson Croker, the same critic whose withering review of “Endymion” was half seriously said to have killed Keats; Tennyson survived, but he did not publish another book for nearly a decade. By then, he was in his thirties, adrift, unmarried—or “widowed,” as he startlingly described himself after Hallam’s death—and increasingly unkempt. In his bleaker moments, he would hole up at Mablethorpe, ignoring his friends and evading his publisher by claiming that the mail there was delivered only once a week, by the muffin man. But finally the faithful dragged forth from him a third book, “Poems, in Two Volumes,” and this time the critics approved.
Still, it wasn’t until “In Memoriam A.H.H.” that Tennyson fully spread his formidable wings. The book was published in 1850, when the poet was forty years old, but some of its poems had been written in the first weeks and months after Arthur Hallam’s death, when Tennyson was producing as much as an elegy a day, in a kind of “agonised diary,” Holmes writes. All told, “In Memoriam” consists of a hundred and thirty-three poems, all of them written in quatrains of iambic tetrameter and all of them rhyming in abba form, like something endlessly reversing itself: a death, a doubt, a faith, a sea where it meets the shore, forever retreating and returning.
At first, these poems dwell in simple grief, exploring its many moods and variations. The narrator cries, rages, longs for the living body and the lively boy, and obsesses over painful details, especially the bleak journey by sea that brought the remains of his beloved friend back home. He dreads the betrayal of someday feeling less bereft—“O Sorrow, wilt thou live with me / No casual mistress, but a wife”—while elsewhere acknowledging that his enduring grief might seem, or even be, self-serving: “Another answers, ‘Let him be, / He loves to make parade of pain, / That with his piping he may gain / The praise that comes to constancy.’ ” He wonders if his love was as perfect as it appears in mournful memory, and worries that he should apply his energies to better things—for instance, to the scientific discoveries that once enthralled him.
And then, slyly, Tennyson does just that. What begins as an account of private grief becomes an extended meditation on the meaning of death during a time of drastic decline in the metaphysical status of human beings, from made in God’s image, granted dominion over all creation, and guaranteed eternal life to fleeting in the long seasons of the earth and minuscule in the immensity of the cosmos. It is here, in the latter parts of “In Memoriam,” that Holmes’s argument becomes most convincing, as the scientific influences he so assiduously traces crystallize into a lucid and exacting eloquence. Listen to this lovely time lapse of geologic history, from another poem in the series:
There rolls the deep where grew the tree.
O earth, what changes hast thou seen!
There where the long street roars, hath been
The stillness of the central sea.
The hills are shadows, and they flow
From form to form, and nothing stands;
They melt like mist, the solid lands,
Like clouds they shape themselves and go.
Nothing like this had been written, or could have been written, before the time of Tennyson. Entire eons pass by, palpably, in two quatrains, rendering the land, the sea, even the hills, those very markers of eternity (“as old as the hills”), no more enduring than young Arthur Hallam.
Just as startling to contemporaneous readers was a description, predating Darwin by almost a decade, of the omnipresence of violence in nature. If the world was ordered not by God’s plan but by vast impersonal cycles of creation and destruction, if everything alive was either predator or prey (the ancient word is “ravine”), what, then, of a man like Tennyson, who fought and suffered and loved, who felt the urgency of his own life,
Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation’s final law—
Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw,
With ravine, shriek’d against his creed—
That famous phrase is far too familiar now for us to feel its jolt, but for its earliest readers it was a chilling retort to complacent faith, leaping out of the poem like a jump scare. Is there any hope of ultimate compensation for the cruel indifference of nature, the final stanza asks, or is life really this “futile” and this “frail”? In the end, Tennyson refuses the consolation of an answer: “Behind the veil, behind the veil.”
Somewhat surprisingly, this grief-saturated and existentially disquieting volume was instantly and wildly popular. It sold extraordinarily well—though actual estimates vary dramatically, from the merely best-selling to the positively Byronic—and was ecstatically reviewed. John Forster, later renowned for his biography of Charles Dickens, compared Tennyson to Dante in his aptitude for “massive grandeur”; George Henry Lewes, George Eliot’s future partner, decreed “In Memoriam” superior to Milton’s “Lycidas” and called its author “our greatest living poet.” Fellow-writers doffed their hats—“The book has gone to my heart and soul,” Elizabeth Barrett Browning declared—and Queen Victoria was profoundly moved by it. By the end of the year, Alfred Tennyson, lately miserable, misanthropic, semi-broke, and semi-feral, had been made the Poet Laureate of England.
At that point in his life, Tennyson was in his early forties, but Holmes is far from done. “The Boundless Deep,” which starts out promising to focus on the poet in his youth, winds up being a standard one-foot-in-front-of-the-other biography, not quite cradle-to-grave but close; when we last see Tennyson, he is seventy-three years old. We don’t get his final decade (he lived to be eighty-three), and we don’t get a deathbed scene, but very little else seems to be left out.
Except, unfortunately, the poet’s inmost workings: even in this nearly comprehensive version of his life, Tennyson remains an elusive figure, his own depths signalled but unsounded. Like a lesser biographer than he is, Holmes returns again and again to physical description, as if the surface might reflect the psyche; it is almost comical how often we hear that Tennyson was tall (thirteen times), dark (eight times), and handsome (I lost count). But what was going on inside him? Whose approval was he seeking when, as he was wont to do, he spontaneously declaimed his own poems aloud, in performances his friends and acquaintances found alternately thrilling and embarrassing? In the privacy of his own mind, did he regard himself as a genius or believe himself worthless? Was some part of him always consumed by the addict’s skewed focus, thinking not of science or of verse but of the next bottle of wine? Did he ever feel his father’s temper surging up within him? Did he live fearfully in his God-hidden universe? If there are answers to these questions, or informed hypotheses, this biography does not provide them.
It is also almost mute on a particularly obvious question: Was Tennyson in love with Arthur Hallam? Holmes, perhaps understandably wary of such retroactive assessments, declines to explicitly raise the issue, despite that striking adjective “widowed” and a certain sexual permissiveness famously associated with the Apostles. At one point, he acknowledges that some of the “In Memoriam” entries “seem like lover’s poems,” but then he quickly attributes that fact to a youthful friendship which, “through the alchemy of memory . . . changed into something more intense, something more like a love affair.” How he determined that it was not a love affair all along is unclear, since most of the correspondence between the two men was destroyed—on the one side by Hallam’s father and on the other by Tennyson’s son.
A similar fog settles over Tennyson’s eventual marriage to Emily Sellwood, a neighbor he’d known since youth and a niece of the great polar explorer Sir John Franklin. We get the ticktock but not the heartbeat of their courtship, which began at the wedding of Alfred’s brother Charles to her younger sister Louisa, fizzled when her father frowned upon another marriage to a Tennyson (the first one having proved unpropitious), and resulted in nuptial vows only after the success of “In Memoriam” finally made Alfred seem like son-in-law material. The two were married for more than forty years, yet the relationship suffers in these pages from its own version of tall, dark, and handsome: we learn that she was serious, pious, and well read, and that Tennyson’s friends felt she was a good match for him, but almost never do we catch either husband or wife in the act of doing or saying anything that might illuminate their feelings for each other.
All this is strange and disappointing, because Holmes is a gifted biographer, not to mention a fluent translator of science and an astute reader of poetry. It is lovely to read him on Tennyson’s poems—as when, for instance, he lingers for a moment on the coinage “Aeonian” (“The sound of streams that swift or slow / Draw down Aeonian hills”), noticing inside it both that unit of geological time, the aeon, and two contrasting classical echoes: the sturdiness of “Ionian,” as in the columns, and the transience of “Aeolian,” as in something borne on or eroded by the wind. And he builds a convincing case that Tennyson was, as the biologist Thomas Henry Huxley observed, “the only modern poet, in fact I think the only poet since the time of Lucretius, who has taken the trouble to understand the work and tendency of the men of science.”
Still, one suspects that part of why Tennyson slips away from us in “The Boundless Deep” is that Holmes is a bit too beholden to his decision to focus on the scientific developments of the day. It is true that the poet followed those developments closely and deployed them in his poems not just metaphorically or allegorically, as the Romantics were prone to do, but with the gravity of fact and the sober certainty that they mattered to the experience of being human. But it is also true that science doesn’t particularly bear on great swaths of Tennyson’s work—on “The Lady of Shalott,” for instance, for a long time his most famous poem, taught in schools across England and learned by heart by countless readers, or on “Ulysses” or “The Lotos-Eaters” or “Mariana” or “Idylls of the King” or the more militaristic poems like “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” Whatever Tennyson’s interest in science, in other words, it doesn’t seem to have done more to shape him than classical poetry, British imperialism, or the nostalgic allure of the medieval era, to say nothing of childhood trauma, mental turmoil, and terrible grief.
“The Boundless Deep,” a book allegedly about a young man, takes its title from “Crossing the Bar,” one of the last poems Tennyson ever wrote. He was eighty by then, and it is a kind of elegy for himself, a perfect and strikingly peaceful farewell, in which he imagines death as a journey by sea:
Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea,
But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.
It is difficult to read this poem and not think of the boy on the beach at Mablethorpe, training his attention on the near edge of a vast mystery. Across his long career, Tennyson summoned countless and often conflicting visions of what lay concealed there: a godless indifference, in “In Memoriam,” or the beckoning God of this final work; profound serenity or abject terror; the thrill of a new world or the last alarming remnant of an ancient one, waiting out all of deep time for its discovery, like the bones of the Megalosaurus. None of these visions expunge the others or exhaust the endless possibilities of the unknown; all of them, in the moment that we read them, move us with and toward a sense of truth. In the end, the limitations of this biography only accentuate the gifts of its subject: to contemplate the visible surface and bring to life everything that lies beneath. ♦