Note on Locksley Hall

Tennyson’s Locksley Hall is a monologue in three parts. First the speaker bewails his true love, who has married a dolt and abandoned him:

O my cousin, shallow-hearted! O my Amy, mine no more!
O the dreary, dreary moorland! O the barren, barren shore!
Falser than all fancy fathoms, falser than all songs have sung,
Puppet to a father’s threat, and servile to a shrewish tongue!
Is it well to wish thee happy?—having known me—to decline
On a range of lower feelings and a narrower heart than mine!

Yet it shall be; thou shalt lower to his level day by day,
What is fine within thee growing coarse to sympathize with clay.
As the husband is, the wife is: thou art mated with a clown,
And the grossness of his nature will have weight to drag thee down.
…
Cursed be the social wants that sin against the strength of youth!
Cursed be the social lies that warp us from the living truth!
Cursed be the sickly forms that err from honest Nature’s rule!
Cursed be the gold that gilds the straiten'd forehead of the fool!
Well—’t is well that I should bluster!—Hadst thou less unworthy proved—
Would to God—for I had loved thee more than ever wife was loved.

But then he is roused from his inept complaints:

Hark, my merry comrades call me, sounding on the bugle-horn,
They to whom my foolish passion were a target for their scorn:
Shall it not be scorn to me to harp on such a moulder’d string?
I am shamed thro’ all my nature to have loved so slight a thing.

And finally he consoles himself with an ecstatic vision of the future: 

Not in vain the distance beacons. Forward, forward let us range,
Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change.
Thro’ the shadow of the globe we sweep into the younger day;
Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay.
Mother-Age (for mine I knew not) help me as when life begun:
Rift the hills, and roll the waters, flash the lightnings, weigh the Sun.
O, I see the crescent promise of my spirit hath not set.
Ancient founts of inspiration well thro’ all my fancy yet.

It once seemed to me that this conclusion was a stupid non-sequitur. A public glory – the advance of industry, the ascent of man – is supposed to be sufficient consolation for a private grief. How can that be? What relationship can there be between the fortunes of a vast civilization, and the joys and sorrows of a single person? It might be that a person has both private and public obligations, and that he might sometimes be forced to choose between the two, and even to sacrifice his private happiness for the common good. But can the emotions of one’s inner life be not only manipulated, but totally replaced by public zeal? so that it is no longer a sacrifice, but a liberation to lose oneself to the great world? The narrator himself utters this misgiving, when in the middle of his monologue he says:

Yet I doubt not thro’ the ages one increasing purpose runs,
And the thoughts of men are widen’d with the process of the suns.
What is that to him that reaps not harvest of his youthful joys,
Tho’ the deep heart of existence beat for ever like a boy’s?

(Compare Shelly: ‘And the sunlight clasps the earth / And the moonbeams kiss the sea: / What is all this sweet work worth / If thou kiss not me?’)

Well, I think I agree: surely a human being needs comforts that are human-sized and friendly, not cosmic and grandiose. And yet the speaker rapidly dismisses this reflection, and ends by singing a hymn to onrushing progress.

I noticed last night that Locksley Hall is (in this respect) strongly reminiscent of one of Horace’s odes. A certain Valgius has lost someone called Mystes, and cannot master his grief. (It is incidentally unclear from the poem whether Mystes was Valgius’ child who died, or a lover who abandoned him.) Horace advises the following:

C. II.ix.9–24

Tu semper urges flebilibus modis
Mysten ademptum nec tibi Vespero
    Surgente decedunt amores
        Nec rapidum fugiente solem.

At non ter aevo functus amabilem
Ploravit omnis Antilochum senex
    Annos nec impubem parentes
        Troïlon aut Phrygiæ sorores

Flevere semper. desine mollium
Tandem querelarum, et potius nova
    Cantemus Augusti tropæa
        Cæsaris et rigidum Niphaten

Medumque flumen gentibus additum
Victis minores volvere vertices
    Intraque præscriptum Gelonos
        Exiguis equitare campis.

You are always going on in weepy songs about Mystes, who was taken away from you. Your love does not abate when the Evening Star rises, or when it flees before the swift sun. But Nestor, who lived enough years to fill three lifetimes, did not mourn his beloved Antilochus for all of them, and neither did Priam and Hecuba or his Trojan sisters weep eternally for young Troilus. Stop at last with your limp moaning. Let us rather sing of the victories of Augustus Caesar, and of the frozen mountains of Niphates; and of the river of Persia, which swirls in littler eddies now that it has been added to the conquered races; and of the Geloni, forced now to ride on cramped pastures within their pale. 

No one really likes this poem, for the reason that it’s almost comically callous. It states the same glib paradox as Tennyson, but even more bluntly. Do not weep for Mystes, says Horace: why not sing of Caesar’s glory instead? Perhaps your own life is chaotic and sad, so cease to mind it, and attach your hopes instead to a man who imposes order on the whole world; who in his godly might has subdued even the savagest horsemen of Scythia; and who just might do the same to your own restive soul. Some of Horace’s poems are about Caesar, and some are about love—but the best and most revealing are the poems that show love and Caesar to be nothing but different means to the same end. Caesar’s triumphs on behalf of Rome can drown out the tedious worries of the little citizen, and satisfy his controlling wish for feeling in itself. 

My first objection to Locksley Hall was that the poem told an untruth. It could not be that political enthusiasm can really banish and supplant one’s love and grief. But on reflection, my real complaint is not that these poems are false, or even that they are glib; but that they are scandals. Our free society is distinguished from the murderous tyrannies of last century by its clean demarcation between public and private. Here is the state, here is the church, and here is the citizen. The state (but not the church) is permitted to make certain demands on a citizen, but only for his own (at least ostensible) private benefit: and it is even said that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. Conversely, a citizen can expect these services from the political order, but nothing more. He cannot rely on it for excitement, or divine love, or for any passions that could ever be strong enough to displace his private cares.

It is therefore a heresy against freedom to allow the enthusiasms of the wide political world to constitute your innermost hopes. Progress and Caesar, after all, might just be capable after all of filling your mind with their own gigantic thoughts and wishes. The human imperative of our age is not to let them.