In his own day,
the prestige of Alfred, Lord Tennyson was immense. He was the longest-serving Poet Laureate in
British history and to many embodied Victorian values in his very skillful,
high-minded, and stately works. A
reviewer spoke for a great many, critics as well as the general population,
when in the middle of the poet’s career he declared unreservedly “We have no
great living poet but Alfred Tennyson.” [1]
His reputation remained potent enough that my generation still read Idylls
of the King in junior high where a common curriculum made it many American
students’ first substantial poetic text (as well as, perhaps, for many their
last).
In the 1860s
Tennyson was clearly the most prominent of British poets, and Enoch Arden
was one of his most popular works, selling 17,000 copies on the day of
publication and over 60,000 the first year.
Fancy illustrated gift editions and translations then appeared, both
authorized and pirated. [2] A reviewer
hailed the poem as “the most popular poem since the days of Byron.” [3] The initial review in the New York Times
put the author’s name in all capitals, lauding “TENNYSON” as “the poet of the
age, whose song reflects faithfully the movement, the intellectual tendencies,
the moral conflict, and all that goes to make up the complex sum of our
civilization.” [4] a recent scholar
notes that in America editions of Enoch Arden ”were too numerous and
their sale too rapid for accurate recording.” [5]
The poem’s appeal
persisted. In 1897 Richard Strauss wrote
a piano composition to be performed along with a dramatic reading of the poem,
indicating the poem’s success among Continental readers. [6] Three stage versions and four silent movie
treatments were produced, including a 1922 version by D. W. Griffith.
Yet in the marketplace of literature Tennyson’s stock was falling. Already in 1926 a judicious critic noted “Tennyson pre-eminently represents Victorian literature, a privilege which to-day is in the eyes of many one of his shortcomings.” [6] Literary judgments of Tennyson’s reputation had dramatically slumped, with writers leading critics in revising their parents’ literary judgement. Joyce’s Stephen Daedalus, for instance, dismissed the poet, remarking, "Tennyson a poet? Why, he’s only a rhymester," [7] and in Ulysses he is called “Lawn Tennyson, gentleman poet.” [8] Hardy’s late (1922) poem “An Ancient to Ancients” describes the decay of the laureate’s appeal mercilessly yet with a powerful sense of longing, nostalgia, and loss, noting that "The bower we shrined to Tennyson" . . ."is roof-wrecked . . "damps there drip upon/ Sagged seats, the creeper-nails are rust,/ The spider is sole denizen."
The very reasons that made Enoch Arden so popular in its on day limited its long-term literary reputation. There is no question of Tennyson’s skill and craft. The greatest master of sound in English poetry since Pope, his melodies are regularly precise and satisfying. The opening of Enoch Arden has sharp and well-formulated images, with a painterly depiction of the scene.
a hazelwood,
By autumn nutters haunted, flourishes
Green in a cuplike hollow of the down.
This opening sketch concludes with the three principals as
children making sand castles on the shore, an effective symbolic premonition of
their ill-starred plans.
Soon, however, qualities emerge that might ultimately prove Tennyson’s aesthetic vulnerabilities. The vigorous Enoch sometimes bests Philip in a fight, causing his friend to declare, “I hate you, Enoch!”
at this
The little wife would weep for company,
And pray them not to quarrel for her sake,
And say she would be little wife to both. (33-36)
This is surely by most any
standards “twee.” The “little” before
“wife” insists on the already cloying cuteness even further. Tennyson may be salvaged by admirers who could
maintain that this prettiness is only a set-up for the cruel caricature that
life makes of the “wife to both” notion, [9] but through the rest of the poem
he consciously aims at highly-colored sentimental effects emphasizing the cute
and the pathetic.
The reader of the poem’s latter scenes may
think as Enoch wastes away in sickly virtue of Wilde’s well-known line “One
must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing.”
[10] Wilde went for aphoristic
reversals, but his play was rarely verbal alone. He justifies his witticism elsewhere, noting
“a sentimentalist is simply one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion
without paying for it.” [11]
From the start a taste for the sentimental found both ardent admirers and mockers. The earliest citation of the word in the OED is from a 1749 letter which indicates both the term’s novelty and ambiguity, yet also indicates its vogue. "What, in your opinion,” Lady Bradshagel asked Samuel Richardson whose novels were thought to contain fine feelings indeed, “is the meaning of the word sentimental, so much in vogue among the polite...Everything clever and agreeable is comprehended in that word...such a one is a sentimental man; we were a sentimental party; I have been taking a sentimental walk." [12] Not only “everything clever and agreeable,” that is to say, what is socially attractive, but aesthetic and moral excellence as well were implied by eighteenth century notions of sensibility. [13] A popular example, albeit using the term “sensibility” rather than “sentimentalism,” indicates the claims of the partisans of feeling.
Sweet Sensibility! Thou keen delight!
Thou hasty moral! Sudden sense of right!
Thou untaught goodness! Virtue's precious seed!
Thou sweet precursor of the gen'rous deed!
[14]
In his History of England
(1771) Oliver Goldsmith noted the “refinements” brought to Britain through
Roman occupation, but noted “They were only incapable of sentimental pleasure”
[15] as though that were the crowning attribute of a sophisticated
society.
Yet from the time of its birth, the
eighteenth-century concept of the “sentimental” also attracted satirists. Whereas Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling
(1771) popularized a hero whose sensibilities and the sympathetic bonds with
others they inspire form the basis for both a model of a harmonious society and
a genuine individual moral virtue, Sterne’s Sentimental Journey (1768) is
decidedly more ambivalent. Yorick is often
absurd and misguided when he feels uplifted by lofty sentiments. In 1784 a poet pointedly associated
“mischief” with “your dying sentimentals,” [16] referring to the habit of
fainting by men and women of sensitivity in novels and, apparently, in
person. An anonymous Veronese painting
from 1750 depicts “A Lady Fainting During a Party.” So many fictional protagonists were prone to
such incidents that Jane Austen in her juvenile novel Love and Freindship
[sic] (1790), imitating but also reacting against Samuel Richardson, a
character prudently provides advice to another: “Beware of swoon, dear Laura .
. . Run mad as often as you chuse, but do not faint.”
In 1797 Coleridge published a set of
sonnets attributed to Nehemiah Higginbottom satirizing the vogue of sensibility,
what he called in Biographia Literaria “the spirit of doleful egotism.”
[17] The appeal of sentiment was not in
fact vanishing, though. It was probably
increasing, becoming perhaps less prominent among poets and the upper reaches
of the beau-monde but more popular among the less well-to-do and less
educated. As late as 1899 an article in
a popular magazine celebrated "The Decay of Sensibility" but
demonstrated its persistence as well by saying “the modern young woman does not
swoon promiscuously.” She no longer “at
the slightest shock shuts up into a pink, formless pulp.” [18]
Fainting, however, was just one of the more dramatic representations of vulnerability to feelings. Though in Enoch Arden no one faints, it seems to the modern taste far too sentimental. Sentimentality describes excessive emotion (clearly a matter subject to taste and judgement) or the unseemly enjoyment of the spectacle of a character’s emotions unjustified by sufficient artistic or thematic role.
But “excessive” and “unseemly” are value judgements from which the masses may dissent. Sentimentality has always been popular because of its simplicity. It is straightforward, unambiguous, luxurious, and easily understood. Charles Cary Rumsey’s sculpture of a “Dying Indian” is sentimental because it invites the viewer to feel a sweet sadness about the displacement of native Americans “free of charge” to use the imagery of Wilde and Joyce, that is, in a reductive and facile view. [19] Similarly Enoch Arden posits an unusual hero. While most heroes exemplify characteristics prized in their culture and inspire people to imitation, Enoch is specifically meant to elicit strong emotions in the sensitive reader by his passive submission. The reader’s pleasure is directly inspired by Enoch’s suffering.
Though all overdone pathos might be in
questionable taste, the poem’s climactic focus on death in the nearly
hagiographical Enoch Arden heightens Tennyson’s aesthetic risk, though
it clearly increases as well his demands on the reader’s sentiment. Such pleasures do not suit the modern
taste. Even those who relish the works
of Edgar Allen Poe are likely to hesitate before his celebrated dictum
declaring the death of a beautiful woman “the most poetical topic in the world.” “Beauty,” Poe continues, “of whatever kind,
in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears.”
The emotional appeal to the picturesque,
the sentimental, the easy laugh or tear is part of what allows a work to be
popular. It must be assimilable at first
scan, avoiding the complexities of character in works considered “high
art.” A parallel relation exists between
the themes of popular art and “high” art.
Popular works, including orally
transmitted material and commercial popular art of either “folk” or mass
culture provenance tend necessarily to reinforce received ideas, reassuring the
audience of the correctness of the community’s consensus, transmitting values
to the young, celebrating a culture’s (or subculture’s) values. In contrast, elite, academic, and learned art
is likely to point out the lapses or contradictions of social and intellectual
norms, to challenge readers’ expectations, and to develop innovative
forms. Such poetry foregrounds
ambiguities, ambivalences, contradictions, and mysteries, causing readers to
question what is accepted.
Tennyson wishes to approve the institution
of faithful marriage, yet the life of an honest and hard-working fisherman
would, however desirable in a citizen, have little to recommend it to a reader. A harmonious marriage, though it be a
practical and moral ideal, would make an uneventful love story. How many pop songs celebrate a happy
marriage? Tennyson seeks to regain the
excitement that he loses by being so proper by exaggerating his emotional
scenes and indulging in overdone pathos, in a word, by his practice of
sentimentalism.
He also, for all the Crabbe-like “realism”
of the setting [21], did not hesitate to include unlikely, all-but-fairytale
elements. Enoch’s prolonged disappearance as a castaway, his glimpse of the
domestic scene of Annie and Philip, and his subsequent wasting away, all the
while unknown to the happy couple need not be plausible. Their goal is to
render possible not the happy ending so common in popular art, but the more
intense option, a lugubrious one, lifted to sublimity by affording Enoch the
opportunity to act with wholly selfless great-heartedness. He pauses then
beyond the virtue of the monogamous spouse to the altruism of the saintly. This
extreme, while it exalts the hero, removes him safely from the realm of daily
lived experience.
The poem’s concluding lines have been a
subject of considerable discussion.
Had seldom seen a costlier funeral.
Unsurprisingly, some recent critics has
sought to rehabilitate “Enoch Arden,” not by the intriguing route of recovering
sentimentalism itself, but by pointing to the fissures and contradictions in
his text as evidence of irony in order to make the tale acceptable to moderns.
[22] Both approaches are likely
fruitful. Just as other genres from the
early Chinese novel to American comic strip art, once ignored by the literati,
have received fruitful attention, as we have become more accepting of outsider
art, the camp, and the kitsch, perhaps the sentimental is due for a
re-evaluation. Yet wherever one assigns
value, whatever one’s taste, the generic characteristics of the popular and the
sophisticated will remain distinct, each pursuing different goals by the most
appropriate methods. The very qualities
that made Enoch Arden a roaring success with some audiences have also
made it wholly ignored or disdained in others.
18. The Cornhill Magazine, July 1899.
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