Hallam, Tennyson, Homosexuality and the Critics

By Kolb, Jack Philological Quarterly, Summer 2000

Hallam, Tennyson, Homosexuality and the

Critics
Kolb, Jack, Philological Quarterly

In his introduction to Byron and Greek Love, Louis Crompton identifies a "central issue
confronting gay studies"--"the friendship problem":

If a novel, poem, or essay describes or expresses ardent feelings for a member of the same
sex, when are we to interpret these as homosexual and when are we to regard them merely
as reflections of what is usually called romantic friendship? ... In Byron's day there was a
popular cult of romantic friendship to which Byron as a boy had wholeheartedly respond-
ed. Many of his early poems were certainly inspired by it. But he also went beyond this by
falling in love with boys and (at least during part of his early life) by becoming a homosex-
ual lover in the physical sense (6).

Crompton persuasively argues that the tendency of some contemporary "interpreters" to

refuse to "find a homosexual meaning in poetry unless conclusive biographical evidence
has been forthcoming" (6-7) may be unnecessarily strict, given the general prejudice
against homosexuality. His evidence of Byron's homosexuality (perhaps a component of a
bisexuality) is irrefutable.

Yet Crompton also argues for a careful evaluation of the relationships between members
of the same sex in historical periods other than our own, and opposes an unduly inclusive
definition of homosexuality:
How, in reading the poems or letters or fiction of the past, are we to distinguish between
romantic friendship and homosexual love? Both may speak with intense devotion, both
reflect strong passion. Can we ever be sure the feeling has or has not an erotic side to it?
Modern "scientific" psychology is not always useful. By extending the term homosexual to
include all affective relations between men or between women, Freud has obfuscated
rather than clarified the issue. Usually friendship does not have an erotic basis. Occasion-
ally it does, and in the latter case the relationship belongs to gay history. (72-73)

Few relationships between men in the nineteenth century have been more subject to sexu-
al speculation than that between Alfred Tennyson and his close friend Arthur Henry Hal-
lam. Yet, were it not for Tennyson's In Memoriam A.H.H., perhaps only a Freudian critic
would have posited a homosexual connection between the two men. By far the longest,
most discursive and complex elegy in English, In Memoriam is also the most personal. In
no other memorial does the poet recount in such detail so many incidents from the dead
man's life. For no elegy in English, at least, celebrates a closer relationship. Beyond the
circumstances of their acquaintance, for example, little can be made of Milton's personal
relationship to Edward King; Shelley and Keats barely knew one another; and though
Arnold's and Clough's friendship endured longer, "Thyrsis" mostly commemorates their
estrangement. "Ave Atque Vale" is perhaps the extreme example of separation of poet and
subject: Swinburne never met Baudelaire and knew only his poetry; his elegy was prema-
ture, written in response to a false account of the French poet's death (Lang 519). But the
subject of In Memoriam was Tennyson's closest friend during the last four years of Hal-
lam's life. Moreover, had he lived, Hallam--engaged to Tennyson's sister Emily--would
surely have become a member of the Tennyson family.

Nor, given the language of In Memoriam, is modern speculation about its sexual genesis
surprising. From the "Prologue," which speaks of the poet's grief"for one removed, / Thy
creature, whom I found so fair" (37-38) to the "Dear friend" of section 129, who, in his
transfigured state, apparently becomes "Mine, mine, for ever, ever mine," Arthur Henry
Hallam, to judge by the elegy's expressions, seems to have been the object of Tennyson's
intense affection.
The critical reception of In Memoriam offers a brief chronicle of nineteenth- and twenti-
eth-century attitudes towards sexuality. During Tennyson's lifetime, there were few objec-
tions to the poem's "intimate" tone. Gladstone, who cherished Hallam's companionship
when they were at Eton and seems to have begrudged Hallam's closer friendships with
James Milnes Gaskell and Tennyson, praised In Memoriam as "a noble monument to one
for whom no monument could be too noble" (Letters 23-25; 34). After the death of Albert,
Queen Victoria found consolation in altering section 13 ("widow" for "widower"; "her
doubtful arms" for "his") in her copy of In Memoriam:

Tears of the widower, when he sees

A late-lost form that sleep reveals,
And moves his doubtful arms, and feels
Her place is empty, fall like these.

Clearly neither Queen nor Laureate saw anything inappropriate in the stanza's gender ref-
erences (Dyson and Tennyson 67-68). Tennyson himself was quoted as saying "if anybody
thinks I ever called him `dearest' in his life they are much mistaken, for I never even
called him `dear'" (Ricks, Tennyson 206; from Nineteenth Century 33 [1893]: 187).

Recent critics have asserted that implications of homosexuality were apparent in the No-
vember 1851 London Times review of In Memoriam ("The Poetry of Sorrow," almost cer-
tainly written by Manley Hopkins, Gerard's father); the review accused Tennyson's poem
of excessively feminine "amatory tenderness." Yet, as Edgar Shannon has noted (141-62),
this was the sole review to suggest that the elegist's sentiments might be unmanly. (1)
Since The Times review is cited by every one of the critics I discuss below, the passage
those critics cite is worth quoting:

A second defect, which has painfully come out as often as we take up the volume, is the
tone of--may we say so!--amatory tenderness. Surely this is a strange manner of address
to a man, even though he be dead:--
 So, dearest, now thy brows are cold,
I see thee what thou art, and know
Thy likeness to the wise below,
Thy kindred with the great of old.

But there is more than I can see,

And what I see I leave unsaid,
Nor speak it, knowing death has made
His darkness beautiful with thee.
[IM 74: 5-12]

Very sweet and plaintive these verses are; but who would not give them a feminine appli-
cation? Shakespeare may be considered the founder of this style in English. In classical
and Oriental poetry it is unpleasantly familiar. His mysterious sonnets present the star-
tling peculiarity of transferring every epithet of womanly endearment to a masculine
friend,--his master-mistress, as he calls him by a compound epithet, harsh as it is dis-
agreeable. We should never expect to hear a young lawyer calling a member of the same
inn "his rose," except in the Middle Temple of Ispahan, with Hafiz for a laureate. Equally
objectionable are the following lines in the 42nd sonnet:--

If I could write the beauty of your eyes,

And in fresh numbers number all your graces,
The age to come would say this poet lies;
Such heavenly touches ne'er touched earthly faces.

Is it Petrarch whispering to Laura? We really think that floating remembrances of Shake-

speare's sonnets have beguiled Mr. Tennyson. Many of these poems seem to be contrived,
like Goldsmith's chest of drawers, "a double debt to pay," and might be addressed with
perfect propriety, and every assurance of a favourable reception, to one of those young
ladies with melting blue eyes and a passion for novels whom we found Mr. Bennet so un-
gallantly denouncing in a recent letter to his children.
We object to a Cantab being styled a "rose" under any conditions; but do not suppose that
we would shut up nature, as a storehouse of imagery and consolation, from him who
laments a lost companion of his school, or college, or maturer days, with whom he took
sweet counsel and walked as a friend. Let Cowley weep for Harvey. Most exquisitely does
the poet of all joy and sorrow write--

So are you to my thoughts as food to life,

Or as sweet seasoned showers are to the ground.

The harvest of memory will come up abundantly, as the seed falls up and down life; the
shadow of the familiar form glides over the landscape; the old field-path recalls him; and
the warm homestead, the meadow stile, the windy sheepwalk, the gray church tower, the
wrangling daw in the quarry,--each is dear and each has a voice, as having been seen with
him and by him. But this source of interest requires to be opened with a sparing hand. It
easily and quickly is corrupted into sentiment. We can appreciate the meditative rapture
of Burns, who saw his "Jean" in the flower under the hedge; but the taste is displeased
when every expression of fondness is sighed out, and the only figure within our view is
Amaryllis of the Chancery Bar.

While this passage criticizes In Memoriam as too akin to Shakespeare's classicism and es-
pecially Orientalism, its chief objections are to the poem's aesthetic decorum--Tennyson
indulges in an inappropriate grief. Indeed, the Times' reviewer acknowledged, perhaps
reluctantly (in a passage seldom cited), the poet's artistic achievement:

The book of verses bearing the title of In Memoriam is a tribute to the genius and virtues
of a most accomplished son of Mr. Hallam, the historian. Let the acknowledgment be
made at once that the writer dedicated his thoughts to a most difficult task. He has written
200 pages upon one person--in other words he has painted 120 miniatures of the same
individual, with much happiness of expression, great bloom and freshness of landscape
illustration, and many touching scenes of busy and indoor life. English literature possess-
es no work which, in compass and unity, can be justly compared with In Memoriam. (28
November 1851, p. 8)
And the reviewer's apparent condemnation of Shakespeare's sonnets concludes with an
approving allusion to the sentiments of "the poet of all joy and sorrow" (sonnet 75). In any
case, the objections of the Times reviewer clearly didn't disturb Tennyson. Though he con-
stantly revised In Memoriam, he never changed a word in section 74, nor altered the
strong assertion of 61 that "I loved thee, Spirit, and love, nor can / The soul of Shake-
speare love thee more." (2)

For much of the Victorian age, In Memoriam served as a poetic alternative to the Bible,
for both believers and honest doubters, many of whom would have had strong objections
to insinuations of homosexuality. (3) By the end of the Wilde century (to employ Alan Sin-
field's term), however, all--seemingly--had changed. Hallam Tennyson, the Laureate's
designated biographer and model of cautious decorum, apparently became concerned
about the sexual potentialities in his father's poetical testament. Between the initial and
published versions of the Memoir, for example--fearing a homosexual construction--Ten-
nyson's son deleted part of Benjamin Jowett's comment on In Memoriam's affinities to
Shakespeare's sonnets (Ricks 2:313). And this was only one instance of his suppressions
and mispresentation of the material to be included in the Memoir (Elliott). Reticence, ap-
parently, was the rule of late Victorians, facing the inquiries of new men, strange faces,
and other minds. After the public humiliation of Wilde, no reputation was safe: even the
Laureate might be accused of "beastliness."

Perhaps it was fitting that, during the early twentieth-century attempt to rehabilitate Vic-
torian values and sensibilities, Tennyson--and In Memoriam specifically--was a focal
point for homosexual critics. Harold Nicolson and W. H. Auden, whose estimations of the
Laureate were certainly qualified, both expressed admiration for the "those lonely, wistful,
frightened elegies" (Nicolson 297). Nicolson's 1923 hypothetical homosexual relationship
between Tennyson and Hallam draws upon general details from the Memoir; its specifics
are all imagined:

The way that Arthur would burst in when one was reading Paley, and talk so brilliantly, so
fluently, about the derivation of moral sentiments; the way that he would let his hand fall
gently upon one's shoulder; the way that on Sunday afternoons he would join one on the
Grantchester round. And his views, his helpful, optimistic, convincing views, about the
immortality of the soul. And the Valley of the Cauteretz; and the plans for the long vaca-
tion; and his reading Dante on the floor at Corpus Buildings; and the first day that he
came to Somersby; and the evenings on the lawn; and the cherries by the Drachenfels.

And oh! the way he would take one's arm, on summer evenings, under the limes! (4)

Auden, whose notorious quip about Tennyson--"the stupidest" English poet--needs to be

placed in his more appreciative context ("there was little about melancholia that he didn't
know" [Auden x]), gives few details of Tennyson's relationship with Hallam. Instead, he
focuses on the psychological impact of Hallam's death, comparing Tennyson's feelings in
In Memoriam to those expressed both by Augustine and Baudelaire:

But whatever the initiating cause, Tennyson became conscious in childhood of Hamlet's
problem, the religious significance of his own existence. Emotions of early childhood are
hard to express except accidentally because the original events associated with them are
not remembered. Hallam's death, a repetition of the abandonment experience, gave Ten-
nyson the symbolic event which mobilized what he had already suffered and gave his fear
a focus and a raison d'etre. (5)

For T. S. Eliot, whose own sexuality has been under debate, In Memoriam is a diary, not
of a relationship, but of a conflicted sensibility, "of a man confessing himself" (Hunt 132).
Eliot's appreciative essay never confronts the personal biographical basis of the poem--
perhaps, as some critics have suggested, because discussing Tennyson's friendship with
Hallam was too intimidating, too intimate. (6)

Later twentieth-century criticism of Tennyson would not be possible without the vast
amount of biographical and textual material that became available after World War II. Sir
Charles Tennyson's balanced 1949 biography of his grandfather first revealed the exis-
tence and significance of Tennyson family letters and other documents, while Jerome
Buckley's influential 1960 critical study drew upon the substantial unpublished Harvard
collection of Tennyson's notebooks and papers (Buckley 261). But most important for a
reassessment of In Memoriam was what Nicolson (297) yearned for nearly half a decade
before: the 1969 reconstruction of the elegy's genesis and process of composition by Ten-
nyson's greatest editor, Christopher Ricks. Ricks, whose revised 1987 edition of Ten-
nyson's Poems benefited from the release of the Trinity College manuscripts formerly in-
terdicted by Hallam Tennyson, presents the most authoritative text of In Memoriam (sup-
plemented but not supplanted by Shatto and Shaw's independent edition). Publication of
additional historical matter made possible substantial reinterpretations of Tennyson's life.
Far most significant is Lang and Shannon's three-volume collection of Tennyson's Letters,
though editions of letters and diaries of some of Tennyson's contemporaries provide addi-
tional information (e.g., FitzGerald's and Hallam's Letters, and Waller's A Circle of
Friends).

Such abundance of scholarship naturally generated new Tennyson biographies. Robert

Bernard Martin's 1980 Tennyson: The Unquiet Heart was the first to draw upon this mod-
ern documentation. Ricks distilled his learning and insights into a compact bio-critical
volume, Tennyson (1972; rev. ed. 1989). The two most recent full-length biographies (Levi
and Thorn) marked the centennial of the Laureate's death. None of Tennyson's modern
biographers could skirt the issue of homosexuality, and Martin and Ricks tackle it direct-
ly. Despite the language of In Memoriam, both scholars reject intimations of anything like
a physical homosexual relationship between Tennyson and Hallam. Martin, who, as I've
suggested elsewhere, has more than a little antipathy towards his subject, echoes
Crompton:

It has been the tendency in post-Freudian times to look at such matters in an increasingly
unsubtle fashion and to fasten categorical labels that are inexact at best. Love is described
as either homosexual or heterosexual with little awareness that it may consist of a good
deal that defies those categories. Sexual feelings may be the most common stimulus to
love, but even in relationships that are deeply sexual there are many other factors that
have little to do with sex. Sympathy, companionship, likeness of interests, and even habit-
ual proximity often form a great part of love, although they are not obviously sexual in
prompting. It was surely these feelings that were at the heart of Tennyson's friendship
with Hallam. (Martin 94)

Ricks, who asserts that "anyone who believes that Tennyson's feelings for Hallam were
not homosexual should try to say why" (206), argues that the domestic metaphors in In
Memoriam are based upon Tennyson's familial experience, and, more importantly, that
the poem's unselfconscious expressions of physical contact are clear evidence that Ten-
nyson had no thought of any possible homosexual construction. (7) Both Levi (58-60) and
Thorn (68ff) spend even less time dismissing the imputation.

In this heyday of queer studies and attention to sexualities, however, the weight of schol-
arship and carefully researched biographies has been dismissed by a number of recent
critics. Attacking the supposed naivete of earlier commentators, these critics assert an ex-
plicit homosexuality as In Memoriam's biographical basis. Perhaps swayed by the elegy's
personal, even intimate references, they treat the poem not as an imaginative construct,
but as a homosexual testament, recording Tennyson's true feelings for his friend.

My purpose here is not to offer another reading of In Memoriam. The degree to which this
complex, multileveled work of art reflects Tennyson's sexual feelings (and what those feel-
ings might be) has been subject to much speculation--the inevitable result of the function
of criticism at the present time. Instead, I simply want to examine the biographical and
historical bases of some recent critics' speculation about Tennyson and Hallam's
relationship.

Tennyson was raised in what today might be called a dysfunctional household. He was the
third of eleven surviving children (five sons, six daughters) of an alcoholic father--who felt
he had been ill-treated by his own father--and a loving mother. Dr. Tennyson seems sel-
dom if ever to have physically abused his children (and Tennyson never spoke ill of his
father), though the psychological toll--the "black blood" that beset the family--was proba-
bly heavy. Nevertheless, familial strains only strengthened the bonds between almost all
of the Tennyson children. Alfred was privately well-schooled by his father; he was a poet
at an early age, and by the time he met Hallam at Cambridge in the spring of 1829 had
published (together with his two brothers) a volume of verse (Poems by Two Brothers).
Dr. Tennyson's death in March 1831 ended Tennyson's collegiate career (his two older
brothers, Charles and Frederick, graduated in 1832); he returned home to become a reluc-
tant paterfamilias for several years. He began writing In Memoriam almost immediately
after hearing of Hallam's death early in October 1833.
Arthur Henry Hallam was the elder son, and one of four surviving children (both sisters
and his brother were born during his lifetime), of the most eminent Whig historian of his
age, Henry Hallam. Henry was a strong-willed but apparently loving father, who seemed
determined that Arthur should follow in his successful footsteps. After a comfortable
childhood, Arthur attended Eton (where he became friends with Gladstone and other only
somewhat less eminent Victorians-to-be) and was destined for Christ Church, Oxford, his
father's school. When admission to Christ Church proved impossible, however, Henry
Hallam chose the other preeminent English college, Trinity College, Cambridge. There
Arthur met Tennyson early in 1829 (Kolb, "Christ Church"). He became officially engaged
to Alfred's sister Emily in December 1830, received his B.A. early in 1832, and spent the
rest of his short life apprenticed in a conveyancer's office, while publishing a number of
reviews and short literary pieces. Hallam died in Vienna on 15 September 1833, after a
tour of east Europe with his father.

Alan Sinfield's 1986 Alfred Tennyson (in the "Rereading Literature" series) was the first
substantive critical work to resurrect speculation about a homosexual relationship be-
tween the poet and Hallam. Almost all subsequent critics seem to draw their inspiration
from Sinfield, perhaps because he had previously shown himself to be a textually sensitive
critic of Tennyson (Sinfield, Language).

Sinfield begins by alleging the homosexual basis of In Memoriam's presumed literary

models--Dante's Divine Comedy ("an authoritative translation of the ideal construction of
homosexual love, as it was received from the Greeks, into a more amenable heterosexual
form") and Shakespeare's sonnets. He asserts that In Memoriam was "cleaned up" mostly
by Tennyson's son, Hallam, and that the "general failure of twentieth-century criticism to
discuss [this] issue is a scandal." (8) Sinfield ranks Tennyson on Jeffrey Weeks' scale of
"four kinds of nineteenth-century `homosexual' (as we would call it) experience." The
Laureate becomes an example of "the highly individualized, the deeply emotional, some-
times even sexual, relation between two individuals who are otherwise not regarded, or do
not regard themselves, as `deviant.'" We can be only momentarily reassured that "there is
no reason to assume that Tennyson's `deeply emotional' attachment to Arthur Hallam
was `really' a suppressed or repressed instance of [`a total way of life ... involvement in an
identity and sub-culture which, with its own system of values and ideologies, is the obvi-
ous forerunner of that of the present day']." (131-32 and 131n28, referring to Weeks 33-
35).

At the same time, the fact that the relationship perhaps was not directly sexual, or per-
haps was just momentarily so (at Cauteretz?), does not mean that we can heave a sigh of
relief and relax because they were just good friends. Such intensity of male bonding was
situated ambiguously and provocatively in the complex field of nineteenth-century sexual-
ity. As in our own time, sex and gender were sites of struggle across which people contest-
ed opposing patterns of behaviour, within a context of changing class and power relations.
The emotions represented in In Memoriam should be understood as in uneasy relation to
the dominant notions of proper manly behaviour. (131-32)

When Sinfield finally offers biographical support for his contentions, his language is far
more qualified:

Tennyson commented on [In Memoriam] section 97: "The relation of one on earth to one
in the other and higher world. Not my relation to him here. He looked up to me as I
looked up to him" (Ricks, Poems [1969], 949). Nevertheless, it is my belief that what is
exposed through Tennyson's preoccupation with Arthur's superior and neglectful stance is
the continuation of a pattern of relations between the two young men which was estab-
lished while Arthur was alive. Their admiration may indeed have been mutual, but Ten-
nyson may have felt, even so, that he was dependent on the attention of his sophisticated,
charismatic and popular friend. There is more than a touch of condescension in this letter
from Arthur Hallam: "I feel to-night what I own has been too uncommon with me of late,
a strong desire to write to you. I do own I feel the want of you at some times more than at
others; a sort of yearning for dear old Alfred comes upon me, and that without any partic-
ularly apparent reason" (Memoir [1], p. 87). (148-49)

Apparently Sinfield (whose book was published five years after Hallam's Letters) didn't
feel the need further to document Hallam's "superior and neglectful stance." It would, I
think, have been rather difficult to do. Here, for example, is the continuation of Hallam's
31 July 1833 letter to Tennyson that Sinfield excerpts from the Memoir:
I missed you much at Somersby, not for want of additional excitement; I was very happy. I
had never been at Somersby before without you. However I hope you are not unpleasantly
employed in the land of cakes and broiled fish. I hear that you were charmed with the
amiability of the Gardens; I also hear in town that the old Monteiths have been here in-
stead of there. I trust you finished the "Gardener's daughter" and enriched her with a few
additional beauties drawn from the ancient countenance of Monteith's aunt. Have you en-
countered any Highland girl with "a shower for her dower"?

I should like much to hear your adventures but I daresay it will be difficult to persuade
you to write to Vienna whither I am going on Saturday with tolerable speed. At all events
if you have any traveller's tale to tell, do not tell it often enough to get tired of it before we
meet. I am going perhaps as far as Buda. I shall present your poetic respects to the
Danube and to certain parts of Tyrol. (Letters 767)

Notable in this fuller version of Hallam's letter are, first, a lack of condescension towards
Tennyson on Hallam's part; and second, Tennyson's clear independence--venturing up to
Scotland without even mentioning the trip to Hallam--from his friend. (9) Even without
access to Letters, Sinfield might have ascertained these same qualities from material ex-
cerpted in the Memoir. In June 1830, for example, Hallam wrote to Tennyson's mother,
enclosing Tennyson's Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, originally to be published with Hallam's pri-
vately printed Poems (1830).

... there are reasons which have obliged me to change my intention, and withdraw my own
share of the work from the Press. One of these was the growing conviction of the exceed-
ing crudeness of style which characterized all my earlier attempts.... I have little reason to
apprehend your wasting much time over that book, when I send you along with it such a
treasure in your son's poetry. He is a true and thorough poet, if ever there was one.... (10)

Though Hallam may have excessively disparaged his own work--it was his father who in-
sisted that his son's poetry be withdrawn from the joint publication--his estimation of
Tennyson's poetry remained consistent and undiminished. On 31 July 1831, having sent
off (without the poet's permission) Tennyson's sonnet, "Check Every Outflash," to be pub-
lished in Edward Moxon's new Englishman's Magazine, he wrote to Tennyson:
I have been expecting for some days an answer to my letter about Moxon; but I shall not
delay any longer my reply to your last, and before this is sent off yours may come. I, whose
imagination is to yours as Pisgah to Canaan, the point of distant prospect to the place of
actual possession, am not without some knowledge and experience of your passion for the
past. To this community of feeling between us, I probably owe your inestimable friend-
ship, and those blessed hopes which you have been the indirect occasion of awakening.
But what with you is universal and all-powerful, absorbing your whole existence, commu-
nicating to you that energy which is so glorious, in me is checked and counteracted by
many other impulses, tending to deaden the influence of the senses which were already
less vivacious by nature. (Memoir 1: 81; minor variants in Letters 446-47)

Around the beginning of November 1832, Hallam, who had supervised and spurred the
publication of Tennyson's Poems (1832), diplomatically tried to dissuade the poet from
publishing "To Christopher North," an ill-considered squib against John Wilson, who had
reviewed Poems, Chiefly Lyrical with less than unqualified praise:

Remember the maxim of the Persian sage: "[GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN
ASCII]." Your epigram to North is good, but I have scruples whether you should publish
it. Perhaps he may like the lines and you the better for them; but "[GREEK TEXT NOT
REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]." I think the "Lover's Tale" will be liked, as far as I can re-
member its old shape. (Memoir 1: 88; minor variants in Letters 678-79).

Soon after Hallam pleaded with Tennyson about another decision regarding the poet's
new book:

Dear Nal,

By all that is dear to thee--by our friendship--by sun moon & stars--by narwhales & sea-
horses--don't give up the Lover's Tale. Heath is mad to hear of your intention. I am mad-
der. You must be pointblank mad. It will please vast numbers of people. It pleases the
wise. You are free from all responsibility as to its faults, by the few lines of preface. Pray--
pray--pray--change your mind again. I have ordered Moxon to stop proceedings, till I hear
from you again. Therefore write instanter [this postscript to Hallam's 20 November 1832
letter to Emily Tennyson is only in Letters 688]).
In ultimately publishing "To Christopher North" and withdrawing The Lover's Tale from
his collection, Tennyson (perhaps unwisely) disregarded his friend's advice. But Tennyson
was always decisive about the terms of his publications, as Hallam's 11 October 1829 letter
to Richard Monckton Milnes illustrates:

You have my free vote for publishing along with Tennyson, and myself: but mine alone is
not enough, and as he refused his brother on the score of not wishing a third, some diffi-
culty may lie in your way. (Letters 334)

Even these brief excerpts can't begin to show what Hallam's surviving letters make abun-
dantly clear: there was never a pattern of dependency between Tennyson and Hallam.
Tennyson was just as sophisticated, self-assured and willful as his friend. Though bound
by familial ties and family problems to Somersby, the poet took every opportunity to es-
cape from home, where he pleased, when he could. On more than one occasion he caught
Hallam completely by surprise--for example by showing up unexpectedly in London in
June 1832, and then persuading his friend at the last moment to accompany him to Ger-
many (Letters 597ff). And perhaps the first allusion to Tennyson in Hallam's Letters (302;
see also 294-95) foretold a dissatisfaction Hallam would voice throughout their friend-
ship: "of Tennyson I am utterly ignorant: he never wrote to me." (11) Since Hallam was
usually separated from the Tennyson family, letters were crucial, "to keep pure and
limpid, the source of all generous emotions" (see Letters 19-20).

Sinfield continues his selective documentation of the Tennyson/Hallam relationship in

The Wilde Century (1994). Acknowledging, for instance, that it is "striking" that Tennyson
could use domestic metaphors employing intimate language in In Memoriam, he suggests
an underlying sexual tension, since Tennyson's models for his poem, the Latin elegy and
the Greek pastoral, "had often accommodated same-sex passion." According to Sinfield,
Hallam had "registered" a similar tension in his discussion of Platonic love in his 1832
"Essay on the Philosophical Writings of Cicero":

He derived the idea of intense friendship as an inspiration to virtue from Plato, but felt he
had to justify "that frequent commendation of a more lively sentiment than has existed in
other times between man and man, the misunderstanding of which has repelled several
from the deep tenderness and splendid imagination of the Phaedrus and the Symposium."
(Sinfield, Wilde 58-59)

But this short quotation from Hallam's essay doesn't suggest any "embarrassment" (Sin-
field's term). Moreover, the fuller context makes this point clearer. Hallam has identified
the "great principle" of "moral community" in Cicero's works:

To inspire men with this virtuous passion, which, however dispersed over particular affec-
tions, and perceptible in them, has, like conscience, from which it springs, too little hold
on sensation to act often from its own unaided resources, was the great aim of the Platonic
philosophy. Its mighty master, who "[GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]"
discerned far more of the cardinal points of our human position, than numbers, whose
more accurate perception of details has given them an inclination, but no right, to sneer at
his immortal compositions--Plato saw very early, that to communicate to our nature this
noblest kind of love, the love of a worthy object, would have the effect of a regeneration to
the soul, and would establish conscience in nearly the same intimacy with the world of our
senses, which she already maintains with our interior existence. Hence his constant pre-
sentation of morality under the aspect of beauty, a practice favoured by the language of
his country, where from an early period the same to [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRO-
DUCIBLE IN ASCII] had comprehended them both. Hence that frequent commendation
of a more lively sentiment than has existed in other times between man and man, the mis-
understanding of which has repelled several from the deep tenderness and splendid imag-
inations of the Phaedrus and the Symposium, but which was evidently resorted to by Pla-
to, on account of the social prejudices which at that time depressed woman below her nat-
ural station, and which, even had the philosopher himself entirely surmounted them,
would have rendered it perhaps impossible to persuade an Athenian audience that a fe-
male mind, especially if restrained within the limits of chastity and modest obedience,
could ever possess attractions at all worthy to fix the regard, much less exhaust the capaci-
ties of this highest and purest manly love.

The passage may not convey an accurate definition of Platonic love, but it is not "embar-
rassed" or defensive. Hallam ascribes Plato's homoerotic emphasis both to the status of
women within Athenian society and to its paganism: Christianity will subsequently pro-
vide the crucial link between human and divine love. Hallam does not fault Plato; he cred-
its the Greek philosopher with a prefiguring of the (Christian) truth to be revealed:

The soul of man was considered the best object of [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE
IN ASCII], because it partook most of the presumed nature of Divinity. (12) There are not
wanting in the Platonic writings clear traces of his having perceived the ulterior destiny of
this passion, and the grandeur of that object, which alone can absorb its rays for time and
for eternity. The doctrine of a personal God, himself essentially love, and requiring the
love of the creature as the completion of his being, often seems to tremble on the lips of
the master, but it was too strange for him, too like a fiction of wayward fancy, too liable to
metaphysical objections. (Writings 158-59)

Many of Sinfield's charges are repeated in Jeff Nunokawa's 1991 "In Memoriam and the
Extinction of the Homosexual." For example, Nunokawa sees Ricks's--and Gordon
Haight's--inability to acknowledge homosexuality in In Memoriam--and Tennyson's anxi-
ety about it--as a sign of the prejudices of their generation:

It is difficult for a contemporary audience to read [IM 93: 13-14: "Descend, and touch, and
enter; hear / The wish too strong for words to name"] without thinking that the wish too
strong for words to name is the love that dare not speak its name. Tennyson's critics have
often resisted such interpretations by reminding us that expressions of devotion must be
situated historically.... There is often more homophobia than history in the traditional ap-
peal to the differences between Victorian and contemporary discourses of desire.

Not surprisingly, he cites the same sources as Sinfield:

Tennyson's own trouble with ["the tone of amatory tenderness," from The Times review,
above] may be registered in his famous protest that while Hallam lived, he never called
him "dearest." (427)

Nunokawa's assertion about the different class relationship between Hallam and Ten-
nyson also derives from Sinfield's questionable notion of "dominant notions of proper
manly behaviour":
In Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
examines the ideological efficacy for the Victorian bourgeoisie of this evolutionary model
of male desire. Sedgwick suggests that the social distinctions within the class of Victorian
gentlemen were figured as different developmental stages within an individual psychic
career in order to promote "the illusion of equality ... within that class." We may begin to
sense that importance of such a softening of social distinctions for Tennyson in his rela-
tion to Arthur Hallam when we recall the difference between Tennyson's rather vexed and
confused class and financial circumstances, and Hallam's far more secure possession of
wealth and aristocratic position. The difference in their social circumstances, while per-
haps not dramatic to our eyes, was sufficiently significant that, in the words of Robert
Bernard Martin, "it is surprising that the most celebrated friendship of the century should
ever have begun at all."

Hence, according to Nunokawa,

In section 60 ... the terms that [Tennyson] employs here to measure the distance between
himself and Hallam describe his sense of loss as a sense of socioeconomic inferiority (429-
30).

One must assume that Nunokawa wrote about the "social distinctions" between Hallam
and Tennyson with only a superficial glance at Martin's biography. (13) Martin makes it
abundantly clear that Tennyson's grandfather ranked as one of the wealthier landowners
in England, and Tennyson was never "confused" about his class status. He only sought
what he considered his rightful inheritance to achieve it. Likewise, Hallam had no claim to
"aristocracy"; his mother was merely one daughter of Sir Abraham Elton of Clevedon
Court. Though Henry Hallam was certainly well-todo, his fortune came to him from a
widowed sister, and only after his son's death.

Moreover, uncertainty about his "socioeconomic status," especially during the futile finan-
cial negotiations with Tennyson's grandfather, plagued Hallam for the last two years of his
life. After he became engaged to Emily Tennyson, his letters are preoccupied with at-
tempting to obtain enough money to marry--according to the considerable expectations of
both his, and Emily's, family. On 10 September 1832, for example, Hallam wrote to Fred-
erick Tennyson, Emily's and Alfred's older brother, begging him to charge "his future es-
tate" with the amount that the two sides (represented by Henry Hallam and Emily's
grandfather) disagreed over (Letters 643).

Though Christopher Craft's chapter, "`Descend, and Touch, and Enter': Tennyson's
Strange Manner of Address" (44-70; originally published in 1988), is largely confined to a
reading of In Memoriam, it, too, draws upon Sinfield's biographical representation. For
instance, Craft argues that the 1851 Times review, expressing a "palpable gender anxiety"
about In Memoriam, is "hardly anomalous" (47). But Craft doesn't even allude to Shan-
non's discussion of other In Memoriam reviews; he offers only Charles Kingsley's 1850
Fraser's Magazine article as additional evidence of a critic acknowledging homosexual
predilections in In Memoriam. The context of Kingsley's treatment of Tennyson's rela-
tionship with Hallam, however, seems to be as free of "anxiety" as Hallam's treatment of
Platonic love in his essay on Cicero:

Within the unseen world which underlies and explains this mere time-shadow, which men
call Reality and Fact, he had been going down into the depths, and ascending into the
heights, led, like Dante of old, by the guiding of a mighty spirit. And in this volume, the
record of seventeen years, we have the result of those spiritual experiences in a form cal-
culated, as we believe, to be a priceless benefit to many an earnest seeker in this genera-
tion, and perhaps to stir up some who are priding themselves on a cold dilettantism and
barren epicurism, into something like a living faith and hope. Blessed and delightful it is
to find, that even in these new ages the creeds which so many fancy to be at their last gasp,
are still the final and highest succour, not merely of the peasant and the outcast, but of the
subtle artist and the daring speculator! Blessed it is to find the most cunning poet of our
day able to combine the complicated rhythm and melody of modern times with the old
truths which gave heart to martyrs at the stake, to see in the science and the history of the
nineteenth century new and living fulfilments of the words which we learnt at our moth-
ers' knee! Blessed, thrice blessed, to find that hero-worship is not yet passed away; that
the heart of man still beats young and fresh; that the old tales of David and Jonathan, Da-
mon and Pythias, Socrates and Alcibiades, Shakespeare and his nameless friend, of "love
passing the love of woman," ennobled by its own humility, deeper than death, and mighti-
er than the grave, can still blossom out if it be but in one heart here and there to show
men still how sooner or later "he that loveth knoweth God, for God is Love!"

All such male/male relationships are types of the relationship of man to his God. Kingsley
calls In Memoriam "in our eyes, the noblest English Christian poem which several cen-
turies have seen" (Fraser's Magazine 42: 252-55).

Like Nunokawa, Craft seems to suggest that Ricks's treatment of Kingsley's review reflects
a homophobic prejudice:

Christopher Ricks has charged Kingsley with "recklessness" and has balked at the allusion
to 2 Samuel, calling it "that perilous phrase." (Craft 48)

But Ricks's remarks simply voice the later nineteenth-century anxiety about Kingsley's
language.

Charles Kingsley, with some recklessness, exulted in finding a successor to "the old tales
of David and Jonathan, Damon and Pythias, Socrates and Alcibiades, Shakespeare and his
nameless friend, of `love passing the love of woman'"; he was drawn twice to this perilous
phrase, praising In Memoriam for "a depth and vehemence of affection `passing the love
of woman' ... altogether rivalling the sonnets of Shakespeare."

It is not only a post-Freudian world which finds some cause for anxiety here. Benjamin
Jowett remarked of Tennyson,
 Once again, perhaps in his weaker moments, he had thought of
Shakespeare as
happier in having the power to draw himself for his fellow men,
and used to
think Shakespeare greater in his sonnets than in his plays. But
he soon
returned to the thought which is indeed the thought of all the
world. He
would have seemed to me to be reverting for a moment to the
great sorrow of
his own mind. It would not have been manly or natural to have
lived in it
always. But in that peculiar phase of mind he found the sonnets
a deeper
expression of the never to be forgotten love which he felt more
than any of
the many moods of many minds which appear among the dramas. The
love of the
sonnets which he so strikingly expressed was a sort of sympathy
with
Hellenism. (Ricks, Tennyson 204)

As Ricks points out, this is the passage that Hallam Tennyson edited for presentation in
the Memoir, cutting Jowett's last sentence and that which begins "It would not have been
manly...."

Throughout his chapter, Craft draws upon Sinfield's connection (Tennyson 144; see also
Wilde) between the supposed homosexuality in In Memoriam, and the explicit homosexu-
ality documented in J. A. Symonds' Memoirs. This amounts to guilt by implication: Craft
implies--despite a feeble disclaimer--that because both men wrote about the contact of
hands, they must both have been homosexual (Craft 56-59).
The biographical evidence poses Craft and Nunokawa--no less than Sinfield--with an in-
terpretative conundrum. Anxiety results from discomfort; homosexual anxiety presum-
ably results from discomfort with one's homosexuality, or its exposure. No one would ar-
gue, I think, that Tennyson's biographical comments on Hallam, including In Memoriam,
deliberately document an explicit homosexual relationship; Tennyson would hardly write
about so taboo a subject so intimately to an audience largely unsympathetic to such an
orientation, in an age in which, as all gay historians have documented, open homosexuali-
ty faced dire consequences. But nowhere in the extant biographical genesis of the poem is
the coded language which, as Crompton shows, Byron regularly used to depict his homo-
sexual relationships. (14) Nor is there any evidence that Tennyson's generation saw any
evidence of homosexuality in his friendship with Hallam, a friendship whose dynamics
neither Tennyson or Hallam saw any reason to conceal, either from close or distant
friends, or from the public. (15) Hallam's analysis of Plato's sexuality refutes the deliber-
ately naive argument that somehow Tennyson and Hallam might be gay without knowing
what homosexuality entailed. Seemingly, then, either Tennyson and Hallam had a full
sexual relationship, or Tennyson wrote about his relationship with Hallam with no con-
sciousness of homosexual feelings--because there were no homosexual feelings.

Neither Sinfield nor Nunokawa nor Craft is quite willing to identify Tennyson and Hallam
as genital lovers. This proposition is central, however, to the first chapter of Richard Del-
lamora's Masculine Desire ("Tennyson, the Apostles, and In Memoriam"):

Since we now know that Tennyson was familiar with possibilities of sex between men, that
he joked about the subject, and that he even raised the possibility of sharing such adven-
tures with Arthur--though in a humorous and dismissive vein--we see that Tennyson
clearly was capable of perceiving that their strong emotional connection might have sexu-
al implications.

Indeed, Dellamora insists,

to argue the opposite view is more problematic. To infer blithe ignorance on Tennyson's
part in face of the complex realities of male friendship, love, and sexuality among mem-
bers of the Apostles at Cambridge and afterwards suggests an innocence so self-enclosed
as to appear to be self-deceptive in character. (19)

Dellamora doesn't offer any details in his "provocative" introduction: he simply notes that
"Sedgwick has written well on the topic of false innocence in relation to lesbian sexuality
in `Privilege of Unknowing'" (225n7).

Dellamora's suggestion about homosexuality, and specifically a homosexual relationship

between Tennyson and Hallam, depends to a large extent upon his evaluation of the Apos-
tles, the private Cambridge society in which Hallam actively participated throughout his
time at Trinity (but from which Tennyson resigned after his failure to read his unfinished
paper on ghosts [Martin 89-90]). According to Dellamora,

a sense of shared superiority ... might prompt the view, as it did in a later generation, that
members of the Apostles possessed a higher or different morality from that binding ordi-
nary men. Ideologically, the Apostles were liberals guided by the principle that one should
be able to enter sympathetically into a wide range of views, including unconventional or
unpopular ones. (19)

Here as elsewhere throughout his chapter, Dellamora refers to Peter Allen's 1978 Cam-
bridge Apostles, a book which fails to mention homosexuality as one of the "unconven-
tional or unpopular views" of the group. According to Dellamora, "there are signs ... that
some members of the Apostles--before, during and after Tennyson's days at Cambridge--
were attuned to the need to alter conventional gender norms" (19). These "signs" turn out
to be the Apostles' support of women's rights, an issue hardly the exclusive cause of ho-
mosexuals. Likewise, Dellamora's assertion (20) that Tennyson "affirms" an "androgy-
nous ideal of marriage" in Tennyson's Princess finds no support in the conclusion of the
poem:

For woman is not undevelopt man,

But diverse: could we make her as the man,
Sweet Love were slain: his dearest bond is this,
Not like to like, but like in difference.
Even after the idealized development of both sexes to grow "liker," the differences are
crucial:

Self-reverent each, and reverencing each,

Distinct in individualities,
But like each other even as those who love.

(Ricks 2:290-91)

Dellamora identifies a few Apostles, during the time of Tennyson's brief membership, as
gay, or at least bisexual. He suggests (19ff) that their presence meant the entire group was
subject to such temptations. (16)

Tennyson's circle at Cambridge fostered intimacy in ways that might lead to sexual experi-
mentation, even to sexual involvement between members of the same sex. One factor was
the group's closeness.... [Richard Monckton] Milnes's explorations of the Orient ... afford-
ed opportunity for sexual adventures.... While in the East, Milnes gathered stories about
pederasty. (19-20)

Dellamora argues that James Spedding, one of Tennyson's closest friends, and editor of
an edition of Sir Francis Bacon, "was strongly, perhaps sexually, attracted to other men."
(Dellamora's "evidence," drawn from Martin and Allen, is a letter to Spedding's brother,
complimenting Hallam's abilities; and a reference to Spedding responding, "with depths
of tenderness," to the death of a schoolfellow from Bury.) Likewise, Henry Lushington,
whose brother Edmund's marriage to Tennyson's sister Cecilia is celebrated in the epi-
logue to In Memoriam, "remained unmarried" and "shared quarters" with another former
Apostle, George Venables; for Dellamora this proximity becomes suspect. (17) On this "ev-
idence," Dellamora "readily" suggests that some Apostolic "Victorian `bachelors'" are, "if
one is to speak somewhat anachronistically ... `closeted homosexuals'" (21). Venables'
avuncular pose "appears to" result from his "sexual and emotional deprivation." Spedding
is naturally attracted to Bacon, "in view of Bacon's known sexual involvement with other
males and in view of his disdain for the superstitions on the basis of which same-sex activ-
ities were stigmatized." Hence, by association, Spedding must be gay. (18)
I've cited these instances at length to give a sample of Dellamora's argumentative method.
Granted, Dellamora doesn't suggest that Henry Lushington might have been intimate
with his close friend Tennyson. But he does attempt to link Hallam with homosexuality
through another Apostle, Arthur Buller. Allen characterizes Buller as a "handsome, flip-
pant fellow whose lively personality and numerous sexual exploits made him the affec-
tionately regarded clown of the group" (38), and mentions an explicitly homosexual letter
from Buller to Richard Monckton Milnes. In support of his assertion that Arthur Buller
seems to have had sexual relations with both men and women--and specifically with
Milnes--Dellamora can offer only this letter. (19)

Dellamora labels Buller as "Tennyson's fellow Apostle," implying that the two were close
friends, and that Tennyson would have been exposed to Bullet's sexual tastes. In fact,
there's little evidence that the two had anything more than the slightest acquaintance.
Buller was elected to the Apostles in February 1828 and, as usual, was made an honorary
member when he resigned in March 1830. Tennyson was elected in October 1829 and re-
signed on 13 February 1830 after failing to present what would have been his first paper.
The only Apostles' meeting at which Buller is recorded as giving a paper is that in which
both Hallam and Tennyson were elected, 31 Oct. 1829. The admittedly incomplete Apostle
records show no other meetings at which both Tennyson and Buller were present. (20)
There is no mention of Buller in any of Tennyson's letters. And the sole allusion to Arthur
Buller in Hallam's Letters (738-39) is in a list of Cambridge graduates, none close to Hal-
lam, who, like Hallam, apparently could not attend an 1832 Cambridge reunion sponsored
by John Mitchell Kemble. Even this reference is to the "Bullers," including Arthur's far
more eminent brother, Charles Buller. Moreover, among the other Apostles during Hal-
lam and Tennyson's membership were R. N. Barnes, Edward Horsman, and a Morrison,
none of whom plays a role in the lives of either figure. In short, that Buller was an Apostle
at the same time that Tennyson and Hallam were Apostles has little significance.

Nevertheless, Dellamora's argument persists: Arthur Buller, an active homosexual, was

friends with Richard Monckton Milnes (a probable bisexual), who was friends with Hal-
lam (ergo, another potential gay). Hence, according to Dellamora, Hallam was at least
susceptible to a homosexual relationship, and acknowledged his inclination in one of his
early letters to Milnes:
In a letter written to Milnes during the brief period of their close friendship in 1829, Hal-
lam avers: "Though I have been the creature of impulse, though the basest passions have
roused themselves in the deep caverns of my nature, and swept like storm-winds over me
... I will struggle yet, and have faith in God, that when I ask for bread, I shall not receive a
stone." The statement may be taken as a veiled confession of genital attraction to other
men.

According to Dellamora, when Apostles write about attraction to women, they employ a
light tone: "Hallam's phrasing is considerably darker." Moreover, "Hallam's words remind
one of possibly the best-known letter [sic] dealing with sexuality between men written in
England during the century," Symonds' confession of his homosexuality (22-23). Dellam-
ora ultimately abandons his suggestion that the situations of Hallam and Symonds are
comparable. But he does assert that Hallam's subsequent letters to Milnes represent a
withdrawal of (homosexual) affections, or at least enticements, earlier promised: "One
writes as Hallam wrote to Milnes in 1829 only to one with whom one exchanges confi-
dences" (26).

Richard Monckton Milnes was one of Hallam's earliest friends at Cambridge, at a time
when Hallam was despondent over his separation from his Eton friends (all of whom went
to Oxford). Milnes' letters testify to his admiration for his new acquaintance (see, for ex-
ample, Letters 242n2: "Hallam is reserved, deep, & quiet"--the antithesis of Milnes). (21)
It is not surprising, then, that Hallam might have confided intimate feelings to Milnes. Yet
the larger context of Hallam's correspondence rebuts a homosexual reading. Here, for ex-
ample, is more of the letter that Dellamora sees as Hallam's potential confession of "geni-
tal attraction":

My father found one day my little book of Poetry, and read several pieces that assuredly I
never dreamt he should see: on which we had a long, but unsatisfactory conversation, full
of kindness on his part, & exhortations to turn my mind vigorously from the high meta-
physical speculations, & poetic enthusiasm that were sapping its very foundations. It can-
not be: whither can I turn? Shall the river complain, that its channel is rocky? I must on-
ward, and Le bon Dieu nous aide! I am seeking Truth--with my whole heart, with my
whole being I pray God that he deny me not light. I am seeking Moral Strength too: and
though I have been the creature of impulse, though the basest passions have roused them-
selves in the dark caverns of my nature, & swept like storm-winds over me, lest the glory
of the majestic Imagination should make me free, I will struggle yet, and have faith in
God, that when I ask for bread I shall not receive a stone. My Anathema, as you term it, of
Metaphysics was but the whim of the moment: I thought more severely among the Scot-
tish hills, than anywhere ever, and am now employed in committing to paper the result of
my strivings in mind. I had many grapples with Atheism, but beat the monster back, tak-
ing my stand on strongholds of Reason. (Letters 312)

Clearly, Hallam is undergoing a spiritual, not a sexual, crisis. (22) As Hallam's subsequent
letters make clear, the flighty Milnes was scarcely the person in whom to confide this fun-
damental transformation of character, and Hallam quickly distanced himself from his
friend.

Dellamora's reading of Hallam's letters--as those of a spurning lover--are based upon two
misconstructions. First, Dellamora argues (26) that James Pope-Hennessy's (1955) biog-
raphy proves that a "special friendship" existed between Hallam and Milnes. Here is the
passage in Pope-Hennessy (1:13) that Dellamora apparently has in mind:

Hallam, who came up to Trinity in June 1828 (when Alfred Tennyson had been there five
months and Milnes nearly a year), was at first "unjust" and stand-offish with Milnes. They
later became friends; and for a few months of 1829 intimate friends. "I am sorry I ever
acted towards you with caprice," wrote Hallam in July 1831; "at the time I had reasons
which seemed to justify my conduct but I intend to forget them, or to apply them
differently."

And here is Pope-Hennessy's fuller discussion of the friendship:

Modern commentators on In Memoriam and students of the Cambridge phase of Ten-

nyson's life have written of the relationship with Arthur Hallam as though it were, in its
day, unique. This is mistaken. The unique quality of the friendship lay squarely in the fact
that one of the two friends was a major English poet, who has immortalised it in his finest
series of lyrics. Seen in the perspective of Cambridge at that day, and particularly of the
Trinity set to which they both belonged, the relationship falls into place as one among
many such close mutual affections. The letters which Richard Milnes kept from this peri-
od of his life are filled with references to such things: "Sir Jacob and I are inseparable, he
is one of the dearest creatures I have ever seen. You would I am sure approve of our
friendship, it is so unlike the routine of Cambridge arms-in-arms"; "Garden and Monteith
have not cooled at all": "Cavendish's brother is a charming creature and so well fitted for
Fitzroy." (Pope-Hennessy 1:17)

In other words, either homosexual relationships were rampant in Cambridge of the 1830s,
or Milnes's attachment to Hallam was typical among undergraduates in the 1830s. As his
1831 letter makes clear, Hallam has an acute sense of Milnes' superficiality, and responds
in kind:

Is your poem on "the wisdom of our ancestors," which you prefer calling "the Eld," about
to exercise the wit of the learned, and the patience of courteous readers? Or have you
thought better of it, and transferred that ingenious string of erudite fancies to [an] appro-
priate place in your forthcoming pamphlet on the Beer Bill? Pardon me, my dear Milnes--
"to scoff is human, to forgive divine!" I was much pleased with your behavior towards me
in London, for you had some right to complain, and yet you had tact enough, and good
temper enough to take the proper course. 1 am sorry I ever acted towards you with
caprice; at the time I had reasons which seemed to justify my conduct, but I intend to for-
get them, or to apply them differently. Pray have you been to Coleridge? ... What a hash of
"shocking bad" opinions you will have served up--with sauce a la monologue from the old
Gourmand, who was "fed with honeydew," & drunk the milk of Paradise! (Letters 443-44)

Second, Dellamora asserts that "[Peter] Allen informs me that Hallam, for his part, was
aware that Milnes was sexually involved with males." (24) According to Dellamora's note,
the information is based on "Private communication from Peter Allen, December 1987."
(226 n29) Since this communication about Hallam was news to me, I wrote to Professor
Allen. Here is part of his 17 October 1994 letter to me (printed with his permission):

So Milnes was bisexual (not hard to guess, from other hints that we have) and this may be
one reason that he lost Hallam's friendship (p. 146), but we certainly can't say what you
quote Dellamora as saying [above]. Much less attribute the idea to me, as he did.
As I've stated in my introduction to my edition of Hallam's Letters, Milnes' sexuality
seems less important than the contrasting degree of friendship between Milnes and Hal-
lam and Hallam and Tennyson:

To judge by Arthur's other relationships, Tennyson's independence may have been the
strength of their bond. For despite his need for friends, Arthur's character seems to have
invited closer and more intimate dependence than he desired, or knew how to handle.
There is almost a noli me tangere quality in his rejection of Fart, his response to Glad-
stone's 1830 letter, his apparent treatment of Tennant, his 1831 letters to Milnes and even,
initially, those to Brookfield. With Gaskell, Doyle, Frere, the Speddings, Kemble, and
Trench, all secure in their own intents and pursuits, he could establish firmer bonds of
mutual affection and trust. And Tennyson, perhaps because of the degree of self-interest
necessary to survive in such a chaotic and troubled family, seems to have been akin to this
second group. Whatever the idealized relation "of one on earth to one in the other & high-
er world" depicted in In Memoriam, their relationship here, as Alfred himself asserted,
was one of mutual respect: "he certainly looked up to me fully as much as I to him." (Let-
ters 32)

As I have noted above, all four critics discussed cite the Times 1851 review of In Memori-
am. But this is not their only repetition: Hallam Tennyson's censorship of Jowett's re-
marks, Hallam's "Essay on Cicero," the Memoirs of J. A. Symonds, and the excerpt from
Hallam's 31 July 1833 letter to Tennyson are sources that each draws upon. With the ex-
ception of Symonds, these are important historical data, but--as I've tried to demonstrate-
-they need to be placed in a larger context. And there are other pertinent data that these
critics seldom--if ever--mention: for example, Hallam's engagement to Emily Tennyson,
and his consistent attraction to women--beginning with Anna Wintour in 1828, during his
adolescence--and the passionate language (given the standards of the time) in his letters
to Emily Tennyson. These critics have also largely failed to distinguish between Ten-
nyson's attitude towards his friend Hallam, and Hallam as Tennyson's poetic creation in
In Memoriam. Perhaps most important, they have by and large failed to acknowledge the
significance of religion--religious beliefs, religious language, religious metaphors--in the
daily lives of these early nineteenth-century men. (23) These components are crucial to an
accurate estimation of the relationship between Tennyson and Hallam.
Questionable scholarship begets questionable interpretations. Brian Reade's confident
assertion of Tennyson's homosexuality--he prints sections of In Memoriam in his antholo-
gy of homosexual writings--is easy to dismiss. (24) But Thorn's presentation of one ac-
count of Hallam's death has led to groundless speculation:

At first reading, the cutting of Arthur's veins by the physician seems a most peculiar way
of establishing death. Making the cut in the wrist and the hand at once prompts the specu-
lating mind to wonder whether the cuts were already there, self-inflicted, and this part of
the story concocted to disguise the real cause of death--suicide. (116)

Of course Thorn goes on to point out how unlikely it was that such wounds were self-in-
flicted, and that such reports came from people not in Vienna, where Hallam died. But his
mere suggestion has led one critic to insinuate that Hallam might have killed himself--out
of frustrated love for Tennyson? (Spencer 259). Fortunately, Hallam's body was autop-
sied, and there was no evidence of suicide, or even the cutting of Arthur's veins. Rather,
the attending physician, as part of standard medical procedure, applied leeches to the
dead body:

In the bend of the left elbow and on the back of the left hand were found small wounds
caused by phlebotomy. (25)

Another example of unfounded assertion about Hallam's and Tennyson's homosexuality

appears in the last paragraph of Paul Hammond's discussion of Tennyson and Hallam in
Love Between Men in English Literature (1996):

Tennyson's strange ways of imagining union with Hallam found one still stranger expres-
sion. According to the diary of Sydney Waterlow, Edmund Gosse "professed to have heard
Tennyson tell how he had been to re-visit old scenes & had been moved by familiar sights
& associations. `And what do you think I saw,' he said in his booming voice; `I saw two
boys copulating on Arthur Hallam's grave';" Whether this was Gosse's imagination, or
Tennyson's, or sober truth, the anecdote seems to unfold the unrealized primal scene of
Tennyson's imagination. (158)
Only an extraordinary imagination could conceive this "primal scene," since, as any visitor
to Clevedon Church can ascertain, Hallam's body is interred in the wall of the Hallam
family vault.

As the body of this article has sought to demonstrate, no critic cited--Sinfield, Nunokawa,
Craft, nor Dellamora--has offered persuasive evidence that Tennyson and Hallam were
homosexual lovers, or even thought of a homosexual relationship. Taken by itself, this
shortcoming is inconsequential: their sexual nature should not affect our estimation of
Tennyson's and Hallam's friendship and mutual affection. But by misrepresenting bio-
graphical and related material, these critics harm the cause of gay studies as exemplified
by Crompton's book. Moreover, their potentially prejudiced and obviously flawed work
plays into the hands of the worst foes of homosexual criticism. (26)

NOTES

(1.) The Literary Gazette, 15 June 1850, was the only periodical to welcome "a female
hand" to "the Muses' banquet," though it had previously listed Tennyson as the author of
In Memoriam. Shannon (14143; 216n3)--who notes that the identities of Tennyson (au-
thor) and Hallam (subject) were well known before the poem was published--doubts that
the reviewer, probably William Jerdan, was joking, since the review was quite favorable.
And it was Hallam Tennyson's enshrining Memoir of his father which contains apparently
the only mention of "another [early review of In Memoriam that] referred to the poem as
follows: `These touching lines evidently come from the full heart of the widow of a mili-
tary man" (1: 298). No one has been able to trace this review.

Shannon--who notes that Manley Hopkins may well have written the 1848 Times' review
of Tennyson's work--suggests that the tone of the 1851 critique (largely devoted to Ten-
nyson's style) may reflect the reviewer's irritation that Tennyson hadn't followed his pre-
vious advice (106-7; 156-58)

(2.) To the 1839 assertion of Arthur's father, Henry Hallam, in his Introduction to the Lit-
erature of Europe, that "It is impossible not to wish that Shakespeare had never written
[his sonnets]," Tennyson responded, "Henry Hallam made a great mistake about them:
they are noble" (Ricks, Tennyson 205).
(3.) See, for example, Dyson and Tennyson 71; Hunt 13-16.

(4.) Nicolson 88; see Letters 17 for Nicolson's later view.

(5.) And even the latter comparison is qualified: "If Baudelaire became the greater poet, it
was not because his initial sensibility was any keener than Tennyson's, but because in ad-
dition he developed a first-rate critical intelligence which prevented him from writing an
epic about Roland or a tragedy about Joan of Arc to escape from his vision of the abyss.
On the other hand, it led him into an error which Tennyson escaped--the error of making
a religion of the aesthetic (Auden xvi-xix)."

(6.) Sendry 106; Miller 143; see also Kolb, "Laureate."

(7.) Ricks, Tennyson 2034)9. See also 64: "What Tennyson gratefully loved in Hallam was
not limited to the grandly platonic marriage of true minds, but included the shrewd and
generous practicalities with which Hallam furthered the publication and promotion of
Tennyson's poems. Moreover, what Hallam loved in Tennyson was partly the opportunity
which all this provided for some energetically disinterested and honourable activity such
as Hallam's life would otherwise have lacked."

(8.) 128. According to Sinfield, the Gay Liberation movement of the 1970s "made it more
difficult to ignore the issue" (129). Yet in an earlier passage, devoted to a different ap-
proach and employing the deconstructive methodology of de Man, Sinfield seems to agree
that all such speculation is pointless: "The proclaimed autobiography demonstrates that,
as all texts are autobiographies, so none of them can be: there is no self-knowledge--no
self--that can be reliably inferred from writing. (126)" In the same deconstructionist frame
of mind, perhaps, Sinfield sees Hallam's consistent heterosexual orientation, in his poetry
and prose, as somehow highlighting "the boldness of Tennyson's [supposedly homosexu-
al?] move" (128).

(9.) As Thorn (113-114) notes, Tennyson "would have needed a post-chaise drawn by the
Furies to reach London" for the putative final farewell meeting with his friend; see Letters
767-68n1.
(10.) Memoir 1:51; the fuller version in Letters (365-66) includes the phrase "and in parts
morbidness of feeling" after "exceeding crudeness of style."

(11.) For their mutuality, see Levi 66--"He and Hallam hero-worshipped one another"--
and Ricks, Tennyson 36: "So [Hallam] who declared in March 1830, "I am one of strong
passions, irresolute purposes, vacillating opinions," was far from being a bright counter-
charm to Tennyson's gloom. Tennyson's melancholia (with its relationship to what he had
seen of his father's melancholia) found in Hallam the deeper reassurance not of serenity
but of similar suffering, doubts, and morbidities which yet were not ignoble. Such morbid-
ity could thus be seen as something other than a uniquely personal weakness or shame;
moreover it could be alleviated and humanized by friendship. It is easy to be misled by
some of the metaphors which Tennyson was to use in mourning Hallam in In Memoriam,
into thinking that it was a relationship in which Hallam gave and Tennyson was more
blessed to receive. But Tennyson too was blessedly able to give. A draft of"Merlin and the
Gleam" (1889) was to speak of Hallam as "The friend who loved me, / And heard my
counsel." Whereas the despondency of Dr. Tennyson had apparently been inaccessible to
anything that his son might try to do for him, the despondency of Hallam could be
soothed and might even be healed by their deep friendship--and likewise Tennyson's de-
spondency in the loving mutuality."

(12.) When a general admiration for Plato revived with the revival of arts and learning, the
difference of social manners, which had been the gradual effect of Christianity, led men
naturally to fix the reverential and ideal affection on the female character. The expres-
sions of Petrarch and Dante have been accused as frigid and unnatural, because they flow
from a state of feeling which belonged to very peculiar circumstances of knowledge and
social position, and which are not easily comprehended by us who live at a different peri-
od. (Hallam's note; Writings 159n17)

(13.) The passage that Nunokawa alludes to in Martin's biography (69) discusses a num-
ber of apparent differences in the backgrounds of the two friends, including the degree of
their devotion to politics and their common acquaintances. See also Kolb, "Portraits."
(14.) Shuter provides some worthy caveats: "The critics undertaking [the exposure of Pa-
ter's sexuality in his writings] apply to Pater's writings the assumptions and methods as-
sociated with gender discourse. The explicit topic of their discourse is Pater's understand-
ing of his sexuality, and their method consists in reading Pater's texts as if they were writ-
ten in "a hidden language or code" [quoted from Linda Dowling, "Ruskin's Pied Beauty
and the Constitution of a `Homosexual' Code," The Victorian Newsletter 75 (1989): 1]. To
a careful explication of Pater's sexual meaning no reasonable objection can be raised. If,
however, we propose to accomplish this explication by breaking Pater's textual code, it
will be necessary to observe certain precautions. Above all, we will need to recall that it is
in the nature of a code to be able to transmit more than message and, therefore, that we
have not necessarily deciphered an encoded message merely because we have broken the
code in which it was written.... I do not wish to argue that Pater's texts are innocent of sex-
ual content, but only that any decoding of their sexual implications should be complete
and should employ a language capable of recording even messages that frustrate the de-
coder's expectations. As Dowling implies, such a language has still to be perfected by the
practitioners of gender discourse (491; 501)."

(15.) See, for example, Hallam's language to William Bodham Donne, never a close friend:
"Friendship certainly plays sad pranks with one's judgement in these matters; yet I think
if I hated Alfred Tennyson as much as I love him, I could hardly help revering his imagi-
nation with just the same reverence" (letters 363). See also Tennyson's December 1861
letter--apparently unsent--to Princess Alice, on the death of her father, the Prince Con-
sort: "I wished to say to your R. H. that when I was some three or four years older than
yourself I suffered what seemed to me to shatter all my life so that I desired to die rather
than to live. And the record of my grief I put into a book; and {of this book} I continually
receive letters from those who suffer telling me how great a solace this book has been to
them" (Tennyson, Letters 2:290; passage in curled brackets cancelled in ms). Of course,
one must assume a certain degree of dramatic overstatement on the part of the Laureate
addressing the surrogate for his Queen.

(16.) Dellamora's argument seems to typify the worst form of homophobia: if you as-
sociate with homosexuals, you'll pick up their (nasty) habits.
(17.) Dellamora 20-22; 225n 16-17, referring to Allen 166; 214-15, and Martin 75. Allen,
whose documentation is always superb, suggests that Venables may have felt an unrequit-
ed love for Henry, but Dellamora acknowledges that another interpreter argues that "`the
sole wish specified in the journals ... was for more constant comradeship and a more equi-
tably reciprocated regard. The journals indicate a commitment to a conservative moral
code for both himself and others'" (21, quoting Waller 100).

(18.) Here is a sample of Dellamora's argument: "Spedding may deliberately have trans-
lated into scholarship the affective and sexual preferences that his society otherwise de-
nied licit expression" (22). Equally representative is his treatment of Tennyson's 7 Feb-
ruary 1833 letter to James Spedding (Tennyson letters' 1: 86-87). Tennyson--in a playful
mood--writes about beds at Somersby not shared with Hallam, and employs metaphors of
gestation, which, as Tennyson's editors note, was a witty repartee to Spedding. This letter
has indeed been censored, presumably by Hallam Tennyson, almost certainly in a clumsy
and unsuccessful attempt to conceal the increasing addiction to laudanum of Tennyson's
brother (]hades (Letters 1:87n4; see also Elliot 24). Dellamora's interpretation of Ten-
nyson's letter reflects his preoccupations: "The letter is characterized by tropes of liques-
cence and assault in which sexual fantasy seems to drift just below a surface of explicit
denial (Hallam does not sleep with me). The imagery suggests a far more sensate aware-
ness of male relation than Hallam's letters to Milnes evince. One needs to distinguish this
sort of rhetoric, however, from the rhetoric of Apostles who were far more knowing and
experienced than was Tennyson. Other members of the Apostles, for instance, see the
rhetoric of conception, with which Tennyson begins, to refer to both artistic creation by
men and to anal intercourse" (Dellamora 29-30).

(19.) Dellamora 29-30. Buller's admission of apparent anal intercourse with a Cambridge
fellow student--is couched in very playful language, almost as if Buller is testing Milnes'
tolerance of reports of such activity: "Let not your tender heart be shocked--by the disclo-
sure of female frailty & male vice--I am with child!! [i.e. presumably filled with semen]. I
often told my dear dicky-bird St. Aubyn--that if he continued his addresses so violently he
would seduce me to a state where I should be a burthen to my country to my God & to my
own belly. Alas! last night, this fatal prediction was fulfilled." He continues to describe the
physical sensations: "I was first seized with intermittent fits of the besoin de pisser--an
erection of the penis ensued--the scrotum communicated its sympathies to my anus--and
at the witching hour of midnight--my fundament developed its hollow beauties." The let-
ter concludes with a request for Milnes to kiss his penis. Dellamora admits such descrip-
tion "takes us into another realm from Tennyson's--or from Hallam's," yet he pursues this
guilt-by-association argument.

(20.) Tennyson seems to have been present at only the 21 and 28 November and 5 Decem-
ber 1829 meetings before resigning at the second meeting in 1830. Buller was absent from
the 21 November and 5 December 1829 meetings, and probably from the 28 November
1829 meeting as well. Tennyson was made an honorary member much later. See Martin
89-90 (I have also drawn upon private sources for information about the Apostles).

(21.) My introduction to Letters provides some biographical background: "As Pope-Hen-

nessy suggests, Arthur's correspondence with Monckton Milnes shows that their friend-
ship was probably doomed to failure. Milnes had been attracted to Arthur from their first
encounter, and Arthur, desperately lonely and depressed by his academic pursuits, re-
sponded to the light-humored disposition, kindly temperament, and extravagant wit of
one of the leading speakers in the Cambridge Union. Although they shared political views,
it was their literary and philosophical affinities and their dedication to poetry that drew
them together.

Yet Arthur's spiritual crisis in 1829 probably hastened the end of their friendship. The
same qualifies so initially attractive in Milnes may have seemed increasingly frivolous to
Arthur's soberer perspective; certainly Cousin's pupil appears to have received the out-
pouring of thought and emotion from Scotland and Malvern too lightly. As his friendship
with Alfred and love for Emily grew, Arthur had a clearer sense of the "exalted sentiment"
that he could not feel for Milnes. Their disagreement in 1832 about the nature of religion
confirmed that Milnes was too concerned with externals, too clearly the product of an era
when "the imagination craves a constant stimulus with a morbid appetite, sometimes
leading to delirium; when the prurient desire for novelties, arranged in system, is mistak-
en for the love of truth; and, because pleasure is the end of poetry, it is supposed indiffer-
ent what kind of pleasure a poem confers" (Letters 28).
(22.) Hallam's crisis of faith (as IM 96 testifies) makes him the essential spiritual compan-
ion to Tennyson:

one indeed I knew

In many a subtle question versed,
Who touched a jarring lyre at first,
But ever strove to make it true.

Perplext in faith, but pure in deeds,

At last he beat his music out.
There lives more faith in honest doubt,
Believe me, than in half the creeds.

He fought his doubts and gathered strength,

He would not make his judgment blind,
He faced the spectres of the mind
And laid them: thus he came at length

To find a stronger faith his own

(IM 96: 5-17).

(23.) See John Rosenberg's "Stopping for Death: Tennyson's In Memoriam," in my opin-
ion the best essay on the poem:

The recent discovery that In Memoriam is really a veiled tribute to homoerotic love
marks, as I see it, a new parochialism, a kind of inverted prudery that finds it hard to rec-
ognize the legitimacy of any interests other than its own....

In the most impassioned lines of In Memoriam, the poet cries out to Hallam's ghost:
 Descend, and touch, and enter; hear
The wish too strong for words to name;
That in this blindness of the frame
My ghost may feel that thine is near
(93.13-16)
... The modern reader cannot read the words "Descend, and
touch, and enter"
without sensing a plea for sexual penetration. Quite possibly
Tennyson's
fear of a homoerotic misconstruction now leads his reader to
such a
surmise. His first thought for the line was "Stoop soul & touch
me: wed me:
hear." "Wed me" must have awakened second thoughts, leading
Tennyson to
substitute, unintendedly, the more sexually charged "enter," a
charge all
the greater after his excision of the sanitizing "soul" in the
manuscript
version of line one. The late-twentieth-century reader,
believing that
reality wells up from within us, from the unconscious, feels
the sexual
force of the line and is struck by its explicitness. Tennyson's
contemporaries, in touch with a more ancient tradition, and
used to looking
up rather than down or within for the sources of the real,
would have been
more aware of the Christian iconographic, than the phallic,
allusion: the
impregnating power of the Holy Ghost descending as a ray of
light into the
ear of the attendant Virgin; or of the still more ancient
tradition,
classical and Hebraic, of the inspiring force of the Muse or
the Godhead
entering the soul or mouth of his prophet-poet. (304-07)

(24.) See Ricks, Tennyson 205: "[Reade], anxious to enlist or if necessary to pressgang
Tennyson, believes that "the fact that Tennyson evolved an emphatically heterosexual im-
age in later life does nothing to disqualify him as homosexual when he wrote In Memori-
am." Craft's interpretation of this rejection of Reade's statement speaks for itself: "Ricks's
anxiety registers itself as a barely suppressed metaphor of homosexual rape by an editor
`anxious to enlist or if necessary pressgang Tennyson' into a very dubious literary broth-
erhood. The rigors of such an enlistment are presumably unbearable, but for a poet laure-
ate to be ganged upon and then pressed--perhaps im-pressed as well as em-pressed--is to
suffer at editorial hands the additional indignity of a sodomitical intrusion. Better, obvi-
ously, to house In Memoriam in canonical--that is to say, heterosexual--anthologies" (51).

(25.) From the translation of Karl von Rokitansky's autopsy report by George Corner, to
be found in the papers of T. H. Vail Motter, Princeton University Library. See Kolb,
"Death" 50-52.

(26.) I am deeply indebted to a number of colleagues, friends and other cognoscenti for
their generous assistance with this article. These include Peter Thorslev, Jeff Loucks, Pe-
ter Mien, Gwin and Alma Dean Kolb, Elisa Vandernoot, Susan Sloan, Katie Andrews, and
especially Christopher Ricks. I'm also grateful to members of the VICTORIA online list for
their helpful input.

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JACK KOLB
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Questia, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning. www.questia.com

Publication information: Article title: Hallam, Tennyson, Homosexuality and the Critics. Contributors: Kolb, Jack - Author. Journal title: Philo‐
logical Quarterly. Volume: 79. Issue: 3 Publication date: Summer 2000. Page number: 365+. © University of Iowa. COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group.

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