From the dark and turbulent environments of the middle five rooms, “The Palace of Art” returns to the safety and tranquility of “an English home... / ... / — all things in order stored,/ A haunt of ancient Peace.” Conservative style and a welcoming tone facilitate the retreat to a scene that would be familiar to most of the contemporary audience. The seemingly idealistic and glowing environment proves dynamic, nonetheless, because it appears in such sharp contrast to the abstract foreboding and chaos of the preceding stanza and the dark themes of several others of the rooms.
The return home illustrates yet one more of the many uses of art by creating a mood that comforts, reassures and contains a modest beauty. Like the first scene set in the summer morning, the final room acknowledges art's ability to inspire calmness and order as well as uncertainty and trepidation. Idealization of the English home is not without its problems and controversy, however.
John Ruskin, in his “Traffic” lecture to a crowd in 1866 lambasts the complacency and acceptance of the status quo inherent in the public's longing for an idealized English estate: “Your ideal of human life then is, I think, that it should be passed in a pleasant undulating world, with iron and coal everywhere underneath it.” The mention of “iron and coal everywhere underneath” reflects the literary devices and narration that Tennyson uses in “The Palace of Art” to complicate the natural, pastoral environments that do not immediately reveal the influence of modernization and industrialization on the natural world.
For Ruskin's audience, the possibility of subterranean iron and coal deposits sounds like a boon. The excitement for that possibility is quickly deflated, however, as Ruskin sarcastically describes the “eight hundred to a thousand workers, who never drink, never strike, always go to church on Sunday, and always express themselves in respectful language” who would work in the estate's mill (“Traffic”). The tension lies in the unlikelihood of the social scenario Ruskin presents as the impossible dream. Promising as natural resources as iron and coal might be for societal advancement and modernization, Ruskin reminds the audience of the more complicated realities that undoubtedly would accompany such industrialization.
The sequence of rooms in “The Palace of Art” achieves a similar effect but in the reverse order; after a brief trip through a summer morning, Tennyson takes the reader on a tour through various stages of human civilization and their related and environmental consequences. The rhetorical purpose of the tour is to demonstrate the full range of moods and themes that the artist can convey to the reader through the poem's highly constrained rhyming-quatrain form. A pleasant-sounding English home in isolation does not necessarily carry any deep social messages or warnings, but it is safe to offer the audience a bit of relief after exposing the deeply rooted complications of artistic representation and the world art depicts. After experiencing immersive environments of chaos, the promise of “all things in order stored” can only be delivered as intentionally empty and indicative of the potential dangers of art for art's sake.
