The Palace of Art

Published 1832, much revised 1842. Written by April 1832 (Mem. i 85). Hallam wrote to T., 10 April 1832: ‘All were anxious for the Palace of Art, etc., and fierce with me for not bringing more’ (AHH,p. 549). It was probably not begun before Oct. 1831, the date of Arthur Hallam’s Theodicaea Novissima (see l. 223n, but also I. 180n). T. reports: R. C. Trench ‘said, when we were at Trinity (Cambridge) together, “Tennyson, we cannot live in Art”. This poem is the embodiment of my own belief that the Godlike life is with man and for man.’ See the introductory poem, To —. (p. 49), which is to Trench. T. did not yet know Trench on 1 April 1830 (AHH,p. 539); J. Kolb suggests that the poem was begun ‘perhaps after T.’s visit to Cambridge (where Trench was also keeping a term) in November 1831’; he adds that Culler’s ‘earlier supposition … that Trench’s remark might have been relayed to T. through common friends — or the possibility that T. and Trench met in November 1831 — argues that Trench inspired the poem’ (AHH,p. 550); this (Culler in Nineteenth-Century Literary Perspectives, ed. C. de L. Ryals, 1974,p. 87) as against Culler’s later suggestion: ‘it seems possible that the introductory poem … was addressed not to Trench but to Hallam or Spedding’ (Culler,p. 260). Culler notes, of Trench’s remark, that ‘Trench had himself in mind much more than’ T. (p. 64). In a copy of 1830, T. inserted the titles of additional poems, presumably considering, before 1832, a revised edition of 1830. After The Poet (I 243), he wrote The Palace of Art. C. Sturman (TRB iv, 1984, 123–7) notes: ‘Whilst it is unwise to infer too much from the juxtaposition, on reading the two poems in sequence, The Palace of Art does appear — countrary to Culler’s protestation that it cannot be read simply as a recantation of earlier aestheticism — to some extent a palinode.’ T. had many sources or analogues. Ecclesiastes ii 1–17, ‘I said in mine heart, Go to now, I will prove thee with mirth, therefore enjoy pleasure…. I made me great works; I builded me houses…. I gathered me also silver and gold, and the peculiar treasure of kings…. And whatsoever mine eyes desired I kept not from them, I withheld not my heart from any joy…. Then I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought, and on the labour that I had labored to do: and, behold, all was vanity and vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun…. Therefore I hated life.’ Luke xii 19–20, ‘And I will say to my soul, Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years; take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry. But God said unto him, Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee.’ Herbert, The World: ‘Love built a stately house … / Then Pleasure came, who, liking not the fashion, / Began to make Balcones, Terraces, / Till she had weakned all by alteration … / But Love and Grace took Glorie by the hand, / And built a braver Palace than before.’ Shelley, Queen Mab ii 56–64: the Fairy ‘pointed to the gorgeous dome, / “This is a wondrous sight / And mocks all human grandeur; / But, were it virtue’s only meed, to dwell / In a celestial palace, all resigned / To pleasurable impulses, immured / Within the prison of itself, the will / Of changeless Nature would be unfulfilled. / Learn to make others happy”.’ (Noted by H. N. Fairchild, TLS, 11 Jan. 1947.) L. Stevenson (Critical Essays on Tennyson, ed. Killham, pp. 131–2) cites more examples from Shelley: the Elysian temple in The Revolt of Islam I li–Iiii, and the setting in The Witch of Atlas xviii–xxi. T. was probably influenced by Sir William Jones, a favourite of his when young. Jones’s works were at Somersby (Lincoln); his The Palace of Fortune has similar disillusionments. A few touches suggest the futile splendours of Milton’s Pandæmonium, PL i 710–30. There are also affinities with George Sandys’s account of Egyptian ‘Palaces’ in his Travels (the 1658 edition was at Somersby, Lincoln). Sandys moralizes the labyrinth: ‘The first entrance was of white marble, within thorowout adorned with marble columns, and diversity of figures. By this defigured they the perplexed life of man, combred and intangled with manifold mischiefs, one succeeding another’ (p. 88). Turner (pp. 63–4) suggests that ‘The thought and the basic image come from Bacon, to whom T. transfers Dante’s title for Aristotle: “The first of those who know” (I. 164). In The Advancement of Learning Bacon had said that one should not seek in knowledge “a tarrasse, for a wandering and variable mind to walk up and down with a fair prospect; or a tower of state, for a proud mind to raise itself upon”, but “a rich storehouse, for the glory of the Creator and the relief of man’s estate”.’ Culler (pp. 70–2) notes the likeness of the architecture to Cambridge and particularly to T.’s college, Trinity, and adds that ‘the pantheon of wise men whose busts adorn the Palace of Art is virtually that of the Apostles themselves. T. indicates that the description of “large-browed Verulam” was suggested by the bust of Bacon in the Trinity College Library’; ‘Of the twenty names mentioned in the 1832 version… all but four appear in [Shelley’s] Defence of Poetry.’ ‘With all these local thoughts, feelings, and associations The Palace of Art was peculiarly an “Apostolic” poem,’ while also having ‘reference to the great country houses of England’, which were then ‘the great art palaces of England’. The stanza was independently developed (T. approached it in The Poet, and cp. A Dream of Fair Women), but it is that of Vaughan’s They are all gone into the world of light.