"I SIT AS GOD": AESTHETICISM AND REPENTANCE IN TENNYSON'S "THE PALACE OF ART"

Renascence, Fall 2003 by Brunner, Larry

The soul's intention in all this wide-ranging splendor is simply selfish satisfaction, a room for every humor, Star Trek holodecks of aesthetic experience: summer morn for hunting, solitary tract of sand, windy waste, stormy plain with winding river, harvest scene, snowy mountains, English home on dewy pastures. If that were not enough - nothing could be -there is more: "Nor these alone, but every landscape fair/As fit for every mood of mind" (89-90). The palace is the '"locus classicus' of aesthetic escapism," a place to "realize the dreams of . . . imagination" (Richards 206). Sheer delight in imaginative power invests all - even the palace towers have self-moving bells giving "silver sound" (130). In its pleasure house the soul is "well-pleased," abiding "in bliss" amid rooms "fit for every mood" in which no caprice is denied. The soul offers herself "all things fair to sate my various eyes!/O shapes and hues that please me well!" (193-4). Even the gloom beneath is "grateful" (54).

As though to avoid incipient charges of hedonism, the soul venerates wisdom in the Palace of Art, but as images only, not working ideas -the sort of name-dropping portraiture mentioned earlier; but none of their hard-won insights into human experience come into play. Instead, we find gestures - "There was Milton," "Beside him Shakespeare," "And there . . . Dante" - casual pointing-out, the show of wisdom only. The soul, seeking to control these minds in art, pretending to absorb their insights, reveals the shallow dilettantism of the aesthete's approach to life and to art. After the narrator speaks of "truth designed," Christian faith is invoked as a series: "every legend fair" (125), issuing in the claim to "life designed." The palace here anticipates a Paterian religion of art, stirring the aesthetic impulse with no slight hint of self-sacrifice or obedience. The first such stanza reveals "the maid-mother by a crucifix" amid warm pasture beneath branches carved of sardonyx, "smiling babe in arm" (93-96). The odd anachronistic disjuncture of crucifix with mother-and-child indicates the lack of sensitive conviction about the subject; madonna-cumcrucifix will not trouble one who does not bother to ponder art's significance but only registers its impressions. Angels rise and descend, as on a Jacob's ladder (143-44), "with interchange of gift," but without the patriarch's realization that he found himself in the presence of God, at the gate of heaven - the palace offers decorative seraphs, bringing gifts but never judgments. In fact, all the Christian references among the several fair legends seem artifacts only, without a hint of responsive reverence or conviction; after madonna with crucifix, Saint Cecilia sleeps by her organ as an angel watches, followed immediately by Islamic houris, Arthurian myth, a Hindu god, Zeus and Europa, and flying Ganymede. The ordering - or disordering - indicates the casual non-referential quality of conviction in the Palace. A smorgasbord of "every legend fair" of the Caucasian mind is also included (intending all of European culture). This mixture of contradictory allegiances verges on the grotesque and completely undercuts serious responsive faith. As Goslee notes, the "maid mother by a crucifix" allows escape from "any challenge from Jesus's teachings in this conflation of his birth and death" (42).