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

The palace offers "both luxury and protection" (Kissane 47), gratifying the self-indulgent craving of the soul for a buffer, albeit transparent, from the world outside. The palace is "a worldly pleasure-house," echoing the "stately pleasure dome" of "Kubla Khan," offering aesthetic delight, delicious escape, and no notion that this beauty should aspire to truth; beauty means pleasure alone. Critics have suggested that the disproportionate structure of the poem, two-thirds elaborate description and one-third moral reflection and psychological probing, suggests that Tennyson's true sympathy is with aesthetic withdrawal after all. But this proportion is functional, demonstrating the very imbalance he critiques. The palace must arouse, be elaborately built and furnished, to demonstrate its power to entrap. The prefatory poem prepares us for the coming catastrophe from the start: "he that shuts love out, in turn shall be/Shut out from Love, and on her threshold lie/Howling in outer darkness" (14-16). We anticipate the sudden collapse of the soul's selfsufficiency in this allusion to the casting out of the presumptuous uninvited wedding guest of Matthew 22, thrust into outer darkness.

The soul intends to manipulate and control art on her own terms, holding it at a safe emotional and spiritual distance, avoiding possible personal engagement; art's power to challenge and provoke change is simply set aside. Lionel Trilling notes a parallel tendency in modern literary criticism: "It has taught us how to read certain books; it has not taught us how to engage them. . . . Attributing to literature virtually angelic powers, it has passed the word to the readers of literature that the one thing you do not do when you meet an angel is wrestle with him" (200). The "sinful soul possessed of many gifts" (prologue 3) expresses perfect self-confidence in its own power to "Cast a cold eye/On life, on death" and maintain its unshakable position: "Trust me, in bliss I shall abide/In this great mansion, that is built for me,/So royal-rich and wide" (18-20). This pride goes before destruction, this haughty spirit rises to fall. It is a telling observation that the faces of "the Great and Wise,/my gods, with whom I dwell" are silent. These mute idols can offer no corrective counsel because the soul is not listening to wisdom. The soul, anticipating Paterian asthestics, desires a religion of impression, of pleasant visions; it seeks to hold the form of religion but deny the power of it. Although the "riddle of the painful earth" flashes "full oft" through the soul in solitude (213-14), she refuses to find her place in that pain. In Trilling's analysis, the soul maintains critical distance and will not wrestle with this angel, refusing revelation and reality. Instead, exulting in her power, the soul sings her songs alone, enthroned between the oriel windows depicting Plato and Bacon, making a proud trio "of those who know." The irony that these men, among others, were "fountain-heads of change" is complete when the soul is seen complacent in stasis, refusing corrective insights, like Tennyson's Lotos Eaters disengaged in cool aestheticism.